The SEO KPIs That Actually Matter (And How to Track Them)

Proving the value of your SEO efforts can seem like an uphill battle.

What’s the cheat code to getting buy-in from stakeholders?

Tracking the right SEO KPIs. Not just the default ones in your dashboards. But the right metrics.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to choose and monitor SEO KPIs that actually mean something. I’ll show you:

• What makes an SEO metric a true KPI (and what doesn’t)
• Which SEO KPIs matter most and why
• Which emerging KPIs to track in the era of AI Overviews and LLM search
• How to select KPIs based on your goals and maturity stage

What Are SEO KPIs? (And What They’re Not)

SEO KPIs are key performance indicators that tie your optimization efforts directly to business outcomes. They measure whether or not your SEO strategy is achieving its overall purpose.

On the other hand, SEO metrics are more broad. They include all the available data you could monitor in SEO tools and analytics platforms.

But here’s the thing:

Just because you can measure a bunch of different metrics doesn’t mean you should treat them all as KPIs.

Why You Need to Measure the Right SEO KPIs

Measuring your SEO KPIs over time is how you prove your SEO work is moving the business in the right direction.

Tracking the right KPIs can help you:

• Uncover blockers early: If conversions are dipping even though your traffic is increasing, you may have a content or UX issue.
• Make better decisions: Knowing which actions moved the needle (and when) helps you repeat tactics that work and avoid the ones that don’t.
• Discover much-needed pivots: Monitoring KPI-linked performance data makes it easier to adjust content, targeting, and resource investment.

Let’s take a look at the KPIs that most effectively show how SEO is moving the business forward.

SEO KPIs That Prove You’re Doing Your Job

Which KPIs you choose to measure should reflect where your business is going and what SEO is expected to deliver along the way.

So, not all of the KPIs below are your KPIs. They depend on your specific business model, SEO maturity, and desired outcomes.

With that in mind, we created a free SEO KPI planner to help you build your own custom SEO KPI system.

This worksheet is a brainstorming tool. It will help you connect your SEO actions to the KPIs you need to monitor to hit your business goals.

It’ll also help you avoid common mistakes like:

• Overreporting vanity metrics (e.g., rankings without conversion context)
• Ignoring conversions altogether
• Treating all SEO metrics as your SEO KPIs
• Failing to communicate SEO gains in terms the business cares about

Conversion and Revenue KPIs

You should track conversion or revenue-related KPIs no matter what stage of SEO investment you’re in.

Why?

Because these are the metrics most clearly tied to your larger goals of lead generation and revenue impact. In other words: goals that drive business growth.

How to Track These KPIs

You’ll need to configure a tool like Google Analytics to track these types of SEO metrics based on your unique needs or goals.

For example, using the Attribution paths report to track organic-assisted conversions:

And the Key events feature to track conversions and signups:

A Note on Tying SEO KPIs to Revenue

There’s some debate in the SEO community about KPIs that tie into business revenue.

I’ve had this discussion with marketing leaders many times:

Should you consider revenue-based SEO KPIs when determining if SEO efforts are successful?

Just take a quick afternoon stroll in the r/SEO subreddit, and you’ll encounter wildly different opinions regarding the tie between revenue and SEO performance.

Some will tell you that revenue-based KPIs are the only ones that matter:

Others will tell you that all that matters is where you rank:

They’ll argue that KPIs based on revenue impact are unfair because an SEO team doesn’t control sales team outcomes, brand messaging, product improvements, or conversion rate optimization (CRO).

But:

You’re performing SEO to help the business gain online visibility and drive growth. As long as your KPIs are linked to these broad goals, they’re worth tracking.

Visibility and Awareness KPIs

SEO KPIs related to visibility and awareness are worth tracking if you’re trying to grow a brand.

But we’d argue they’re now essential for all brands to track — no matter the growth stage.

Why?

Because AI Overviews and other AI tools have changed the game. It’s no longer just about ranking at the top of Google. Being included in AI responses is going to become an increasingly important factor in your SEO success.

For example, here’s the SERP for “what’s the best crm”:

Notice how the “top” result is an AI Overview that immediately tells the user a few examples of CRMs.

Salesforce and HubSpot would never rank top for such a competitive term on their own. Appearing in an AI Overview gives them a new way to instantly appear as the right choice for a user searching for this term.

How do you increase your chances of appearing in these responses?

By boosting your brand visibility (among other things).

The specifics of how you can do that are a topic for another article. For now, here are some important SEO KPIs you can use to gauge your overall brand visibility:

How to Track These KPIs

You can use Google Search Console to monitor organic impressions:

You can also use it to track branded search visibility:

To monitor SERP feature ownership, you can use Semrush’s Position Tracking tool. It shows you which SERP features you appear in for your custom-tracked keywords.

Who Should Use These KPIs?

Visibility and awareness KPIs usually include metrics that measure larger goals of brand visibility and authority building. While they’re worth tracking for all brands, they’re particularly important for:

• Early-stage and growth-stage orgs that prioritize brand authority investment
• A small business that just started investing in SEO and marketing
• Established sites that have seen a noticeable decline in branded search

Engagement and Behavior KPIs

You’ll want to monitor engagement and behavior KPIs once you’re past the initial investment in SEO and into stages of SEO growth or maturity. You’re getting decent traffic, and now you want to optimize the site to better engage that traffic.

How to Track These KPIs

GA4 has a lot of built-in ways to monitor KPIs related to user behavior and engagement:

But you’ll need to use a specialized tool like Hotjar to monitor more granular page engagement:

Who Should Use These KPIs?

Your team should measure engagement and behavior KPIs to monitor progress toward goals related to lead generation, revenue impact, and authority building.

Here are a few example scenarios where you’d want to measure these KPIs:

• SEO teams that focus on driving up on-page engagement
• Businesses that need to determine which content topics are resonating with their audience
• Organizations that have built a content library but are noticing underperformance
• Any team facing low conversion rates with no obvious cause

Authority and Ranking Power KPIs

If topical authority or share of voice drives your strategy, track these ranking-power KPIs:

How to Track These KPIs

You’ll generally need more specialized tools to track these KPIs. Semrush’s Backlink Analytics shows lots of metrics about your site’s authority.

These include total numbers and trends of backlinks and referring domains:

Rank tracking tools like Semrush’s Position Tracking can help you work out the percentage of your key content that ranks in target positions. And you can even get at-a-glance data about your share of voice:

Finally, use Google Search Console to track your average ranking positions at the page or query level:

Who Should Use These KPIs?

Authority and ranking power KPIs are important for teams working toward brand visibility and authority building goals. Examples include:

• Organizations that prioritize backlink and digital PR investment
• Teams that are investing in growing their topical authority or increased topic ownership
• Established sites that have organic visibility but want to outpace competitors

Emerging SEO KPIs for the AI Era

So much has changed in SEO since the introduction of AI and LLM-based chat and search functions.

And with all this change comes the need to adjust how we monitor SEO success for our stakeholders, teams, and clients.

If you want to show up at key AI-powered search moments, start tracking these new KPIs for AI mentions and visibility:

How to Track These KPIs

Tracking AI mentions is still a bit tricky at the moment. You can see some referral traffic from sites like ChatGPT in your Google Analytics account:

But monitoring your brand’s inclusion in AI Overviews might be easier than you think.

Using Semrush’s Position Tracking tool, you can filter keywords by those for which you rank in the AI Overview:

How to Choose the Right SEO KPIs for Your Business

Now that you know what SEO KPIs you could track, you need to connect the dots between your business goals and the SEO metrics that matter most.

Use these four approaches (alone or combined) to zero in on the KPIs that matter most to your team.

1. Align KPIs to Your Business Model

The way your business operates has a direct impact on which metrics signal success.

For example, a local HVAC service provider and a global SaaS company won’t measure SEO wins the same way.

Here are a few examples of how you might prioritize SEO KPIs based on different business models:

• Small ecommerce site: Focus on revenue per organic visit, product page visibility in SERPs, and even top-of-the-funnel indicators like newsletter opt-ins or coupon searches.
• Startup SaaS platform: Track branded search growth, demo or free trial signups from organic visits, and the performance of long-tail, solution-focused keywords.
• Service-based businesses: Monitor metrics tied to future conversions, like free consultation forms, quote requests, and engagement indicators like page views per session.
• Local businesses: Prioritize local visibility KPIs like Map Pack presence, Google reviews, and organic visits from users in your service regions.

2. Map Your Audience’s Search Journey

To fuel real growth, map out how your audience moves through their search-to-buy journey. Then, focus on the KPIs that matter most to monitoring the goals you want to achieve.

Think through the following questions:

• Where does your audience search at different points of the journey? Are they using Google, TikTok, Instagram, ChatGPT?
• How does your target audience search for your product or service? Are they typing in problem-based queries or searching by brand?
• Are they using Google’s AI Overviews (AIOs) to make decisions, or do they largely ignore them?

Once you have the answers to these questions, you can map out where your brand needs to be seen by your target audience.

Let’s say you have a complex product and your audience has a long sales journey, and they do a lot of research before they make their final decision via several channels.

Impressions across different search platforms, branded search increases, and on-page engagement would be better KPIs than immediate organic conversions or form opt-ins.

Alternatively, imagine your audience is high-intent, they don’t use LLMs as part of their search journey, and your site focuses on providing only bottom-of-funnel content. In this case, you’d want to focus on CTR and organic conversion metrics.

3. Define Strategic Business Outcomes

Your KPIs should reflect business outcomes you expect your strategy to influence.

I like to think of this in four major types of strategic SEO goals:

1. Brand visibility
2. Lead generation
3. Revenue impact
4. Authority building

4. Match KPIs to Your Site’s SEO Maturity

You’ll also need to consider your KPIs based on your site’s SEO maturity stage.

If you’re in the early stage of SEO investment, you’ll want to zero in on:

• Content production goals: Report on the number of new blog posts or landing pages published per month.
• Keyword rankings: Track how many of your target keywords break into the top 20 search results.
• Visibility growth: Monitor the overall increase in impressions and clicks.

But if you’re further along in your SEO strategy?

Shift your focus from visibility to impact and trust.

If you’re in the advanced stages of SEO investment, rather than just asking “What’s improving?” ask yourself things like:

1. How many pages rank in the top 10 from our entire content library?For example, if only 10% of your pages rank on page 1, you’ll want to monitor the topic clusters where you’re weakest and set a KPI to improve those over time.
2. Which pages or topics convert best and why?Let’s say you have a post that drives five demo signups per month, but another page in a different topic cluster drives zero. As you work to better optimize your pages, track demo signup growth by topic to gauge improvement.
3. Where do we see the least engagement?For example, if you’re experiencing high impressions but low average time on page in one particular topic cluster, your content may be missing the mark. Set a goal to optimize those pages and ensure you’re tracking on-page engagement as a KPI to determine which actions move the needle.

Track the Right SEO KPIs to Get Real Results

Now that you know what KPIs to track (and which metrics to ignore), you’ll want to do the following:

• Do a KPI audit: Are you tracking what really matters? Use the SEO KPIs planner to help you decide on the right ones for your business or client.
• Set a review cadence: Monitor your KPIs weekly, monthly, or quarterly based on your goals.
• Evolve as you grow: Your KPI mix should mature with your SEO strategy. You’ll measure different KPIs in year one of your SEO efforts vs. year three.

This will help you drive real SEO results. Results that grow your business and show your clients the impact of your SEO efforts.