In the ever-evolving landscape of SEO, we've gathered insights from SEO experts and marketing directors to uncover metrics that offer a more holistic view of SEO success. From tracking organic traffic and conversion rates to maximizing the percentage of content indexed, discover the diverse range of eighteen valuable metrics these professionals use to gauge performance beyond traditional search engine rankings.
Track organic traffic and conversion rates
Beyond traditional search engine rankings, several other metrics are valuable in measuring SEO success. These metrics provide a more comprehensive understanding of overall performance and user engagement.
Here are three valuable SEO metrics beyond search engine rankings:
- Organic traffic: Measures the number of visitors coming from search engine results.
- Example: A spike in organic traffic after optimizing for long-tail keywords revealed increased user interest and engagement.
- Bounce rate: Indicates the percentage of visitors who leave the site after viewing only one page.
- Example: Lowering the bounce rate by improving on-page content led to longer user sessions and higher conversions.
- Conversion rate: Tracks the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action.
- Example: Increasing conversion rates after optimizing landing pages provided insight into the effectiveness of SEO strategies in driving business goals.
Boshra Ubin, SEO Team Lead, Xeven Solutions
Monitor average engagement time
Average Engagement Time is wildly underused. You can use this metric on a page-by-page basis or site-wide, and it will give you great feedback. First, it can tell us that pages are underwhelming or not what the person is looking for, which hurts conversions, but Google also tracks user experience. Work on improving pages with poor engagement time, and you will see your organic rankings, along with your conversions, increase.
Lance Grove, SEO Specialist/Project Manager, GoMarketing
Focus on quality traffic and local metrics
SEO is complex, and metrics should always be viewed as a means to enhance a core KPI, which is often revenue. However, for many organizations, it could also be new subscribers or sign-ups for webinars. Starting with these end goals and working backward is often the best way to make SEO successful. The quality of traffic is crucial, as it should come from the right territory and consist of people genuinely interested in the service offered.
Assessing traffic value can be challenging, especially for organic traffic, given the decreasing available data. However, we can still analyze aspects such as geography and keywords using tools like Google Search Console.
One area that has seen significant growth is local SEO. Within local SEO, metrics such as clicks for directions, click-to-call, and engagement are critical. These metrics, which demonstrate offline intention to purchase, are often overlooked by companies that focus solely on top-line traffic and revenue. For any business offering local services, these local engagement metrics should be considered core KPIs.
Gerry White, SEO Director, Mirador Local
Improve Core Web Vitals for SEO
One critical metric beyond traditional search engine rankings is Core Web Vitals (CWV). CWV includes Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), which collectively assess a site's load speed, interactivity, and visual stability. Improving these metrics can significantly enhance user experience and SEO performance.
For example, a site has numerous high-resolution images that significantly slowed down the LCP. By optimizing image sizes and implementing lazy loading, you can reduce the LCP from 4.5 seconds to 2.3 seconds. This improvement can lead to an increase in user engagement and as well as a boost in conversions, offering a more comprehensive understanding of your site's performance beyond rankings alone.
Rejoice Ojiaku, SEO Manager, Nelson Bostock UNLIMITED
Analyze Revenue Per Session
The most valuable metric for SEO success for Toast is Revenue Per Session (RPS). By instrumenting our analytics to show the revenue totals by SEO landing page, we can understand the value of certain traffic segments and topics. This is helpful because we can focus on the segments and pages that have the highest RPS, and use that as a strong signal for high intent and product-market fit.
By scaling traffic and keeping RPS flat, that means we can predictably scale revenue along with traffic growth. This establishes more credibility with senior members of the leadership team because they understand the leading indicators of success, and have confidence that traffic is an input with a predictable revenue output on the other end.
My advice to other SEO teams would be to try to implement a similar data structure, because it aligns your team better with the broader business success, and it also helps you refine your traffic strategy. It is much better for the business to prioritize keyword improvements to a high-RPS page with lower monthly traffic than keyword improvements to a page with high traffic totals but low RPS.
Jim McCormick, Principal, SEO, Toast
Increase qualified traffic and leads
Beyond traditional ranking metrics, the other metrics we measure are qualified traffic and the increase in the number of customers or leads.
Rankings alone are just not enough to show SEO performance if they are not generating any revenue.
I will take an example of one of our SaaS client's websites, which is in the CRM space. If we just show them the rankings on any random keywords that are not generating any sign-ups for them, it won't be helpful.
Instead, we worked on creating content based on three funnel stages: TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU. We created pillar pages on BOFU keywords and built high-quality backlinks for them. These BOFU keywords helped the visitors to land on the main landing pages. For a CRM company, the examples of BOFU keywords are “HubSpot Alternatives,” “10 Best CRM Softwares,” etc.
Optimizing the content for these keywords, along with top-notch backlinks, not just helped in qualified traffic but also increased the sign-ups by 20-30 percent. And this is what a SaaS business looks for.
Renu Sharma, Co-Founder at Tanot Solutions, Tanot Solutions
Align SEO with money metrics
Ultimately, there is only one metric that truly matters for SEO, as it does for most everything a company does: money. The specific SEO-related money metric differs from company to company, depending on their strategy. A growth company might be looking to increase its overall revenue (for SEO: organic traffic revenue and revenue growth percentage), while a stable, larger company might be looking at increasing its gross profit (organic traffic ROI and gross profit margin).
Having a money metric as the key metric for SEO not only allows an SEO professional to focus on work that has a true business impact and better align with the company's goals, but also creates a common language with management. This, in turn, helps SEOs communicate the impact of their work and solidify their role in the company.
Otso Karvinen, Digital Marketing Strategist, Quru Oy
Generate new leads from organic traffic
SEO traffic and rankings are good, but it's new lead generation that really makes SEO ROI positive for a business. Set up a tracking system to see new email subscribers and leads that sign up from organic SEO traffic. This helps you better understand how your SEO efforts are converting into sales and revenue for your business—a key metric to watch if you want to invest in SEO over the long run.
Nathan Hirsch, Founder, Trioseo
Leverage Net Promoter Score for SEO
One metric I find incredibly valuable, beyond traditional SEO metrics, is the Net Promoter Score (NPS). NPS measures how likely users are to recommend your site on a scale from 0 to 10, giving us great insight into customer loyalty and satisfaction. In a recent project with an e-commerce client, we used NPS surveys to get direct feedback from customers after their purchase. This feedback pointed out specific issues with the product pages and checkout process.
After we made improvements in these areas, we saw a significant increase in positive feedback and a reduction in cart abandonment rates. Focusing on NPS gave us actionable insights that really boosted user satisfaction, ultimately enhancing our SEO and UX efforts by ensuring visitors had a more engaging and positive experience on the site.
Sara Fernández Carmona, International SEO Consultant, sara-fernandez.com
Measure specific page clicks
Google Search Console clicks are the one metric I measure in every SEO project. And I go beyond the aggregated domain-level clicks: I measure clicks per specific pages or a subset of pages. This way, I can weed out accidental click fluctuations and filter out the generic traffic, like branded or blog clicks, and focus on the actual results that make the most business impact. This is especially important when the changes are made on a template level, as I get to attribute the impact of those changes with high accuracy. I also find that the GSC clicks are the one metric that clients understand best, which is an added bonus. Win-win-win!
Natalia Witczyk, International SEO Consultant, Mosquita Digital
Combine clicks with keyword rankings
Strictly focusing on search engine rankings won't necessarily give you a comprehensive picture of the tangible impacts that organic search has had on your website. For this reason, I like to combine keyword rankings with their respective clicks and impressions within a specified period. This will provide a more accurate representation of which keyword rankings were more significant for driving traffic. That's with the assumption that we're only looking at traffic here, not necessarily the actions (conversions, leads, sales) associated with this traffic.
However, in terms of looking at organic metrics that are relevant for the SERPs, combining these metrics is a fantastic way to get more insights into where you should focus more attention based on the traffic generated by certain keywords and their respective rankings in your target market(s).
Itamar Blauer, Senior SEO Director, StudioHawk
Consider conversion rate from organic traffic
When measuring SEO success, it's essential to go beyond traditional search engine rankings and consider metrics that provide a broader view of performance and user engagement. We often look at the conversion rate from organic traffic. This measures how well your organic traffic leads to desired actions, like sales, sign-ups, or any other key performance indicators relevant to the business. Most of the time, when you're working on SEO, there are improvements you make that impact more than just SEO. For example, you'll likely improve site speed and content quality, thus it isn't a big reach to expect an improved conversion rate from organic traffic.
Joshua Kimmes, CEO, Bear North Digital
Track Pages Per Session for engagement
One unusual SEO metric you should track is Pages Per Session.
This tracks how many pages someone checks out during a single visit to your site. It's great for seeing how engaged your visitors are and how well you're linking related content.
After upgrading internal linking for a specific blog post for a client, we saw a significant jump in pages per session from 1.5 to 3.2. This also led to a slight bump in conversions from that specific post, as well as an improvement in rankings (likely due to improved engagement metrics).
Nick Zviadadze, Founder, MintSEO
Utilize Google Analytics 4 events
Google Analytics 4 events are a hidden hack for SEO. Not many people use them, so let me show you how they can help you understand your SEO performance, especially in eCommerce.
- Implement the most critical data-layer events, for example, “add to cart,” “view collection page,” “view item,” “add to cart,” etc. Try to implement the entire user/buyer journey.
- Go to the GA4 (Google Analytics 4) event overview (Engagement > Events) and study the event stats.
- Each eCommerce event counts as a “conversion,” and you can easily see where visitors “fall” the most.
- Identify weak events and make improvements in the user experience. For example, improve the mobile layout, the color of the button, the breadcrumbs' visibility, the checkout page, etc.
Often, poor SEO ROI is not due to the SEO strategy but because of an ineffective user journey. By measuring the entire journey with GA4 events, you can improve it and achieve better ROIs.
Jairo David Guerrero Vasquez, Founder & SEO Freak, Phanum
Focus on trials and demos generation
A valuable metric that we track is the number of new trials and/or demos generated by our SEO/PPC campaigns.
The goal of driving more trials and demos for our clients keeps us focused on the most important areas. For example, when we start working with a client, we first look at the following areas:
- Opportunities to extract more organic traffic and conversions from existing product/feature/solution pages already ranking in positions 4-15. We focus on higher-intent pages that drive direct conversions.
- Identify organic-PPC gaps, i.e., where they are targeting high-value software terms organically, but don't have any Google Ads support, and vice versa. This analysis helps quickly plug visibility gaps—paid and content—around conversion keywords.
- Opportunities to leverage other platforms for high-intent traffic. Reddit is a big one here. Often, Subreddits with a large number of indexed threads rank for thousands of software terms. We want to make sure our clients are part of those conversations either by organic engagement or targeted ads.
By focusing on the demo/trial metric, it helps keep us focused on the channels that will drive the biggest impact. This often requires a blended search approach that incorporates paid, organic, video, and other sites like Reddit, G2, Capterra, etc.
Robbie Richards, Marketing Director, Virayo
Prioritize year-over-year traffic growth
First, today's Google rankings aren't static. Google bounces its listings around as part of its algorithm to test which best meet the searcher's intent. So a rank report may say you rank #2 for a keyword, but when you check, you might see yourself at #8 or not even on Page 1. That's why rank reports are no longer enough to judge SEO success.
The most important SEO metric is year-over-year traffic growth. This is best measured via Google Search Console (GSC). GSC can tell you which pages and keywords are driving the most growth. It can also pinpoint which pages/keywords are losing traffic and need attention.
Beyond traffic, it's important to track the year-over-year growth in website conversions (sales, leads, phone calls). Too often we see SEOs pursuing a blogging strategy that drives empty traffic. For example, a veterinary clinic in Los Angeles may rank for a blog post on dog health. But most of the traffic that post sees will be out of the area, and so it drives very few visits to that vet. Focusing on conversions avoids that trap and keeps you focused on a meaningful SEO strategy.
Tom Dahm, President, BridgePose Digital LLC
Boost organic click-through rate
Beyond rankings, I prioritize organic click-through rate (CTR) as a critical SEO metric. It's not enough to simply rank high; you need to entice users to click. In the iGaming sector, compelling offers can significantly boost CTR. I once focused on improving the visibility of a unique welcome bonus in search results by refining the page's title tag and meta description. I saw a 25% increase in organic CTR without any significant ranking changes. This surge in qualified traffic directly translated to more conversions, proving that CTR is a powerful indicator of content relevance and user engagement, ultimately driving real business results.
Liam Fallen, CMO, Liam.
Maximize percentage of content indexed
One metric I like to track for gauging SEO success is the percentage of content indexed. You want as much of your relevant content indexed as possible, not showing as "crawled—currently not indexed" on Google Search Console—meaning Google crawled that page and decided for whatever reason it wasn't good enough to index.
You want search engines to be indexing as much of your relevant content as possible to avoid diluting your crawl budget.
A low percentage of content indexed is usually a sign of low-quality content that Google doesn't want to index. For me, keeping track of this metric is crucial in understanding how Google is assessing your content quality.
This issue usually comes from:
- Thin or duplicate (or very similar) content
- Bad UX
- Orphan pages (no internal links)
One way to solve this is to publish only high-quality, unique content and follow SEO and UX best practices.
This problem frequently happens with programmatic SEO pages that are close duplicates of other pieces, such as when you have thousands of programmatically generated location pages.
I recently encountered this issue on a large job listing website that overused programmatic SEO. It had thousands of programmatically generated pages for each location and category that were crawled but not indexed.
We decided to delete all pages that had no job listings in the last three months, while optimizing internal linking and adding as much unique content as possible.
The results? URLs "crawled—currently not indexed" on GSC dropped by 63% in the last two and a half months.
Samy Ben Sadok, Brand Ambassador & Product Advisor, Sitechecker
