How to Write SEO KPIs that Deliver Real ROI in 2023

By Samantha Lyon

2023 is set to be a challenging year for many businesses – with a global recession and financial concerns abound, customers and clients are being more cautious about spending. Businesses might also find themselves having to tighten their belts and make some difficult decisions to protect their bottom line, but one way to future-proof your business is to invest heavily in digital marketing – more specifically, search engine optimization (SEO). 

SEO can offer some real return on investment at a time when you need it most. It can help you rank for valuable keywords and increase organic traffic to your website, but, the issue is, knowing how to do SEO effectively isn’t always straightforward or simple. In no small part, this is due to the fact that best practices change all the time. What was effective five years ago simply won’t work this year, which begs the question – how can you get ahead of the competition in 2023? How can you create SEO KPIs to help deliver real ROI this year?

While there are many SEO metrics we recommend tracking (far more than we can explore in this article), we have listed the five most pressing we recommend you focus on to keep the leads coming in.

1. Reducing your bounce rate

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of bounce rate – it’s essentially the percentage of your website’s visitors who click away from your site after viewing only one page. You will never get a bounce rate of 0%, and in fact, an average bounce rate is somewhere between 25% and 70%, with the optimal range being between 25% and 40%. Landing a bounce rate under 20% is incredible, but generally unlikely.

You want our bounce rate as low as feasibly possible – this is an indicator that your website is performing well and that it has quality content which is capturing the attention of your visitors, while encouraging them to click through to other pages. 

Low click through rates are also positively correlated to increased conversions. So if you have a high bounce rate, this year, you should be working on lowering it. Begin with an SEO audit and a user experience audit. Is the site speed good? Is the layout intuitive? Do you have clear calls to action? Does the page rank for the appropriate keywords and is the content informative and compelling? These are all questions to think about when looking at bounce rate.

2. Increasing your engagement time

Engagement time, the flip side of bounce rate, is the actual time visitors spend looking at a particular web page and engaging with the content. In terms of engagement time, you want it to be as high as possible – although obvious anomalies can really skew your statistics. Generally, the higher the engagement time, the more engaging your content. 

Blogs with high engagement time indicate that your visitors are reading the blog in its entirety and are gaining a lot of value from it. Low engagement time could indicate that your visitors are landing on a given page, realizing that the content doesn’t actually fit what they were looking for, and navigating away. This can have a negative impact on your overall rankings, so it’s something to be mindful of in 2023.

3. Bringing in more organic traffic

If you run search campaigns, you will be familiar with the value of paid traffic. Organic traffic can be seen as the ‘unpaid’ route – it’s traffic obtained from your position in the search engine results. So, for example, if you sell baby shoes and a customer types in ‘comfortable baby shoes’ and clicks through to your website, this will count as organic traffic. They have set out to find a product like yours, they have found your website, and they were compelled enough by your meta description and page title to click through.

You want to see a gradual increase in organic traffic over time. This is an indicator that your content, SEO efforts and website design are all working positively and effectively together. While of course, for certain industries, there will be natural seasonal fluctuations, generally you can rely on year-on-year data to determine whether or not your organic traffic is trending in the right direction. 

4. Increasing your overall visibility

In terms of SEO, visibility is simply an indication of how visible your website is in the organic search results. In 2023, you should make it a goal to increase visibility for certain valuable keywords – otherwise, you’re not being seen. And if you’re not being seen, you’re not bringing in organic traffic. And if you’re not bringing in organic traffic, you are seriously hindering your odds of landing sales. 

As with bounce rate and engagement time, visibility and organic traffic also go hand-in-hand. By increasing your visibility, you inevitably increase your organic traffic. It should all start with keyword research and an attempt to truly understand what keywords you want to rank for, what your customers are searching for and whether your content is serving those keywords.

5. Tracking customer lifetime value

We’ve all heard the statistic that it’s cheaper, and more lucrative, to retain a customer than to go out and actively acquire a new one, but how do you track this using SEO? Businesses can do this by tracking their customer lifetime value. This metric looks at how much revenue each customer supplies over a certain period of time. A high customer lifetime value indicates that you have loyal customers who are happy with your product or service, which speaks volumes about your business, making it a key SEO KPI to track in 2023.

SEO can be a tricky business – especially when you have your own business to run and a million different decisions to make a day. While it is certainly possible to take care of SEO in-house, many businesses are choosing to hire an SEO agency to keep track of trends, algorithms and updates, while meticulously tracking and improving on SEO KPIs. 

Whichever route you choose, be sure to keep the KPIs above in mind and always try to tie it back to your target audience. Thinking about them, their mindset, their pain points and their needs will help to guide everything, from your approach to keywords to the content you write and the layout of your website.

About the Author

Samantha Lyon is a Senior Digital PR Account Manager at The Brains, a digital marketing agency driven to helping brands gain more exposure and more leads.