The SEO Metrics That Matter Most to Marketing Leaders in 2023

As a marketing leader, a strong SEO strategy is critical for reaching new audiences, generating leads and growing your business. But with the complexity of modern SEO and the volume of data available, it can be challenging to determine which SEO metrics actually make a difference.

While your SEO team may obsess over rankings or page speed scores, as an executive you need to focus on the SEO KPIs that impact your company‘s bottom line. I spoke with Olga Andrienko, VP of Brand Marketing at Semrush, to get her insights on the SEO metrics marketing leaders should pay attention to in 2023.

Start with Business Goals, Then Align SEO Metrics

Before diving into specific SEO metrics, Andrienko advises marketing leaders to clearly define the business outcomes and goals they expect SEO to support. With those targets in mind, you can then identify the most relevant KPIs.

"It‘s critical to align SEO metrics with overall business objectives," says Andrienko. "Different companies will have different goals – for ecommerce it may be sales, for B2B it‘s often leads and revenue. Figure out what outcomes you care about first, then determine how SEO can be measured against those."

This goal-first approach is used by SEO leaders at major brands:

• Home Depot focuses on product sales and revenue as their primary SEO metrics
• HubSpot measures organic traffic and leads as key SEO success metrics
• The New York Times prioritizes organic subscription sign-ups driven by SEO

Once you‘ve identified your core business goals, you can zero in on the corresponding SEO metrics that best reflect the performance and impact of your organic search program.

Revenue Metrics: Traffic, Leads, Conversions

For most businesses, the ultimate measure of SEO success will be its contribution to revenue. That means focusing on bottom-line metrics.

"When it comes to our SEO performance, the metrics my team reports on are primarily around organic traffic and conversion – the number of visitors from organic search, what percentage convert to leads, and how much new revenue that drives for the business," explains Andrienko.

Depending on your monetization model, the specific metrics may include:

• Organic traffic growth
• Leads generated from organic traffic
• Ecommerce revenue attributable to organic search
• Free trial signups driven by SEO
• Pipeline and closed/won revenue originating from organic

The key is having analytics and CRM tracking in place to measure from initial organic visit through to revenue outcomes. Platforms like Google Analytics, Salesforce and HubSpot make it possible to track these full-funnel SEO metrics.

SEO can have a major impact on a company‘s bottom line. For example:

• SEO drives over 39% of all global ecommerce traffic, outpacing paid search (Semrush)
• 78% of marketers say SEO generates more quality leads than other channels (HubSpot)
• SEO delivers a 5.3x higher average conversion rate compared to paid search (Terakeet)

Brand Metrics Matter Too

While lead and revenue metrics are key measures of SEO success, Andrienko also advises tracking SEO‘s impact on building brand awareness.

A key metric here is branded organic search volume – how many searches there are for your company name and how that trends over time. Growth in this metric can show the impact of branding and demand gen work.

"For me as a brand marketing leader, branded search volume is vital because it indicates the strength and growth of our brand awareness," says Andrienko. "It helps me gauge how well our brand building investments are paying off."

For new companies or smaller brands, tracking non-branded organic search growth and share of voice for key topics relative to competitors can also be important brand awareness metrics.

Search Visibility & Ranking Metrics

While not as important as conversion metrics, search visibility and ranking KPIs still deserve tracking as leading indicators of SEO performance and competitiveness.

Some metrics to monitor:

• Ranking positions and visibility for high-priority keywords
• Share of voice for strategic topics relative to competitors
• Clickthrough rates from search results
• Number of keywords ranking in top 3, top 5, top 10 positions

"I wouldn‘t focus on rankings as primary metrics, but they are important to track to understand how you perform in search relative to competitors and if you are showing up for the right terms," advises Andrienko.

Growth in share of voice or rankings for strategic keywords can predict traffic increases:

• Moving into the #1 spot in search can deliver a clickthrough rate over 35%
• The top 3 Google positions for commercial queries get over 50% of all clicks

User Engagement Metrics

On-site engagement metrics can reveal how well your content resonates with organic search visitors and their level of interaction.

"For any SEO program, having relevant, high-quality content is essential, and engagement metrics are one of the best ways to gauge that," says Andrienko. "If organic visitors are immediately bouncing, not spending much time or visiting multiple pages, that indicates your content isn‘t holding their attention."

Important engagement metrics include:

• Bounce rate
• Average time on page
• Pages per session
• Scroll depth
• Conversion rate

Improving these engagement metrics has been shown to boost SEO performance:

• Pages with higher avg time on page tend to rank higher in Google search results (SEMrush)
• Reducing bounce rate can increase conversions by up to 50% (Terakeet)
• Increasing pages per visit from 1 to 2 doubles the chance of conversion (SEO Hacker)

Technical SEO Metrics

Rounding out the key SEO metrics are technical KPIs related to site health and crawlability. While often seen as the domain of hands-on SEO practitioners, marketing leaders should monitor technical SEO issues that can impact rankings and traffic.

Important technical SEO metrics include:

• Page speed and Core Web Vitals scores
• Number of pages indexed
• Crawl errors and warnings
• Number of broken links
• Duplicate content

"Site speed in particular has become a major Google ranking factor," notes Andrienko. "If your pages are slow, all your other SEO efforts may be for naught."

Consider these technical SEO statistics:

• 1 in 4 visitors would abandon a website that takes more than 4 seconds to load (HostingTribunal)
• 88% of online shoppers say they wouldn‘t return to a website after having a bad user experience (Amazon Web Services)
• Over 60% of consumers say they‘re more likely to purchase from mobile sites that load in 3 seconds or less

Putting SEO Metrics Into Practice

With the right SEO metrics identified, the key to success is to draw insights from them and use them to inform your strategy.

Some best practices:

• Have an executive SEO dashboard tracking key metrics over time
• Benchmark against competitors and industry averages
• Set quarterly targets for primary SEO KPIs
• Investigate the "why" behind metric changes to identify optimization opportunities
• Conduct regular site audits to surface technical SEO issues
• Use SEO data in content planning and creation

"Avoid vanity metrics that don‘t connect to objectives. Focus on metrics you can directly tie to business outcomes and that give you a lever to pull to improve performance," recommends Andrienko.

The Future of SEO Metrics

As search evolves, so do SEO metrics. Some emerging KPIs for marketing leaders to watch include:

• Video and image search metrics as visual search grows in popularity
• Voice search metrics as adoption of virtual assistants increases
• Local search metrics as Google gets more localized
• Core Web Vitals metrics which now impact Google rankings

"SEO never stays still for long, so marketing leaders must constantly look ahead to see where metrics are going, not just where they are today," says Andrienko.

Choose the Right SEO Metrics

The specific SEO metrics marketing leaders focus on will depend on their unique business goals. But tracking a balanced mix of bottom-line revenue, brand impact, competitive benchmarks, engagement, and technical health will provide a holistic view of SEO performance.

The key is to focus on metrics that are actionable and clearly tied to business outcomes.

"The beauty of SEO today is the wealth of data available," says Andrienko. "But not all of it matters equally. As a marketing leader, your job is to separate the signal from the noise and focus on the SEO metrics that make a material difference to the business."

By doing that consistently, marketing leaders can unlock the full potential of SEO as a powerful growth channel for their brands in 2023 and beyond.