It’s easy to spend hours working on your store’s SEO. There are plenty of tasks to do, from fixing 404s or missing alt text to creating new pages and adding content. It can seem like a never-ending challenge!
But how can you measure your effectiveness? You need to use KPIs For Ecommerce SEO!
If you’re unsure what a KPI is, here’s a quick lesson! Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, are a way to outline what outcome you’re shooting for. You could set a KPI to monitor daily revenue, returns, or weekly profit. They are a quick way to monitor overall performance.
For example, you could need to make $2,000 per day to break even. So your KPI would be $2,000 in daily revenue. You can use the dashboard of your Shopify, WooCommerce, or whatever ecommerce CMS you’re using to check this figure daily.
Next, using a simple spreadsheet, you can record if you hit or miss the target. Over a month or two, you can see when you hit your target, the days you missed it, or if the target is too high or low. From there, you can adjust.
For me, KPIs help outline the big picture and allow us to know if we’re heading in the right direction. They shouldn’t be complex or take an hour to calculate. From there, you can dive into the data and look at trends in more detail to give you the insights you need to move forward.
If you’re not currently using KPIs For Ecommerce SEO but want to, here are 7 ideas to help you get started.
#1 Return on Investment (ROI)
ROI is easily the most controversial data point we can measure as it’s really hard to quantify. Plus, many founders/CMOs want to track improvements in different metrics, and sometimes these are at odds with what the SEO professional recommends.
There are some platforms that claim to solve attribution, such as Triple Whale. In theory, these make calculating the ROI easier for every marketing channel. However, it’s not as simple in reality as humans are irrational.
SEO takes time to work, and while we can complete more activities in a shorter space of time and try to move the needle that way, we’re still at the mercy of Google/Bing/etc.
We can use several data points to measure the ROI of SEO, including revenue, rankings, organic traffic, and impressions count.
I think revenue growth is the best measurement as we’re in business to make profitable sales. You can’t pay yourself with rankings improvements or organic traffic growth!
Most ecommerce CMS platforms track sales by traffic source. If you have sales tracking set up in your analytics, you should be able to pull similar data from there as well.
Don’t lose sleep wondering if these figures are 100% accurate or not. Instead, calculate the 12-month average and use that as your benchmark against you’ll measure performance.
Ideally, you’d measure a 30-day period against the benchmark and track if performance has improved or not (binary choice). Over time, you should be able to recalculate the benchmark to be higher and see if you can still exceed it!
#2 Organic User Lifetime Value
Our goal as marketers is to increase the Average Order Value (AOV) and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). Customers who return and spend more money are the people we need to stay in business! Of course, it depends a lot on what you sell as to which metric to focus on.
I’ve found many people struggle to calculate CLV as it can be impossible to know how long a customer will keep shopping with you! If you’re one of these people, you can use a 12-month window.
In your analytics package, segment traffic by source type and select only to include your organic traffic. From there, you can see the total revenue generated by organic users and the number of unique organic users acquired in the last 12 months.
To calculate LTV, divide Total Revenue by Unique Organic Users.
You now have a rough LTV figure that can be the basis of your KPI. You can refine it even more by calculating how often customers typically purchase. Next, multiply the annual LTV by the average purchase frequency.
For example, if the average purchase frequency is 1.5 (meaning someone buys 1.5 times a year from you), and the annual LTV is $100, the refined LTV would be $150 (100 * 1.5).
Knowing your CLV allows you to plan how much you can spend to profitably acquire a customer.
#3 Conversion Rate
Traffic is meaningless without converting users to customers. You can have all the eyeballs in the world viewing your website, but your business will die if no one gives you money for your items. So, focusing on your conversion rate is critical.
I’d argue along with revenue, Conversion Rate (CR) is the second most important metric to measure. If it’s not one of your current KPIs for ecommerce SEO, you should start tracking today!
So, how do we calculate your web store’s CR? Simple. Take the total number of purchases and divide it by the number of visitors you had during the same period. You can look at the data for 7 days, 30 days, 90 days, etc.
Without knowing your business, industry, or what stage you’re at, I can’t tell you what will be a good CR. It could be 1% or 20%.
You’ll need to crunch the numbers and figure out what is a good benchmark to start with. From there, you’ll need to plan how you’ll improve it, allowing you to increase the figure you’re optimizing for!
In my experience, a CR of 2% for B2C is a good figure to start with your KPI. If you’re in B2B, it might be higher. Again, you’ll need to run the maths yourself!
#4 Organic Traffic
Taking a step back, before you can convert users into customers, you need people looking at your online shop! I’m sure you’ve talked to SEO professionals who aren’t very commercially minded. They only care about driving tons of users, not ones who are able and willing to buy.
Yes, you need traffic, and you can set a KPI, but you need to view it within the bigger picture of how it’ll help you drive sales.
If you want to set a traffic KPI, you should tie it to your revenue goals and CR. Again, it’s more maths!
Let’s say you want to hit $10k per month in revenue. Your current CR is 2%, and your AOV is $100. So you need 100 orders per month to hit your target. You therefore need 5,000 visitors each month.
You can use a tool like Google Analytics to track how many people visit your ecommerce store and where they came from.
#5 Page Rankings
Without targeting keyword phrases people are searching for and keeping an eye on what position you rank, you’ll only have a trickle of traffic. To build a sustainable business, you need a steady flow of targeted visitors.
Again, don’t get too bogged down in the tiniest detail of your web store’s rankings, as it’ll drive you crazy and distract you from the most important task of all: driving profitable revenue!
It’s fine for you to run a monthly rankings report and take some time to analyze the data. There are plenty of SEO tools available for keyword research, my favorite is Rank Tracker by SEO Powersuite.
Aim to get 50% or more of your keywords in the top 3 slots, as this should give you a good amount of traffic and customers. Any figure over this amount is great and should help to grow your sales.
#6 Backlinks
Backlinks are still vital to promoting a webstore as they act as a trust signal. The good news for most online shops, is you don’t need a ton of them. However, you should be actively growing the number of links you have.
You can easily track who links to you and the amount of backlinks your website has by using an SEO tool such as SpyGlass by SEO Powersuite or Ahrefs. Google Search Console also shows you a portion of who links to you.
Ideally, you should focus on earning a few high-quality links per month from relevant websites. You could give away free products, submit articles to niche publications, participate in industry research or a conference, or another of the 100 or so white hat link-building tactics.
#7 Bounce Rate
I often talk about stickiness, this is the idea that you want a user to love your content so much they stick around for a long time. The easiest way to measure if users are enjoying your online store or not is to look at the bounce rate.
If you’re using GA4, you’ll notice that Google shows the average engagement time per active user rather than bounce rate. While I’d argue this is just bounce rate relabelled, it does help you focus on whether your content is resonating with your target market or not.
If you have a high bounce rate or low engagement time per user, you’re not attracting the right people to your website or they don’t have enough reason to stick around.
Ideally, you want users to be on your website for at least 3 minutes. This figure is one of the most important KPIs For Ecommerce SEO to track.
If you’re not hitting this number there are plenty of things you can do. You can simplify your navigation to make it easier to find products and categories. You can add subheadings on product pages and add more unique content.
One way to improve the time on page and lower the bounce rate is to get reviews from customers. Not only do they improve the time a user spends on a page but also builds trust. There are plenty of ways to get more reviews.
BONUS #8 Core Web Vitals
Even as internet speeds improve, the merchants that win will be obsessed with website speed. So when setting your KPIs for ecommerce SEO, consider how good or bad your Core Web Vitals are.
If you’re not 100% sure what Core Web Vitals (CWV) are, don’t worry. They are a set of metrics from Google that measure how fast and user-friendly your website is. You can check CWV using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.
If a user enjoys using your website as it loads quickly and is easy to navigate, you’ll notice a higher conversion rate. So it’s worth caring about your CWV as it’ll make you more money!
You can improve your CWVs in a few simple ways. Ensure images are correctly sized for the location and aren’t massive or in a bloated file format.
Simplify the amount of code you’re using to load a page. Also, look carefully at your CSS and JS files and see if you can use fewer. Next, use a minify plugin to reduce your HTML, CSS, and JS files.
Finally, use a caching plugin and a CDN to speed up page loading times. Both of these options help save vital milliseconds when a user loads a page, and so improve your Core Web Vitals.
KPIs For Ecommerce SEO
To grow your business, you need to track key metrics and these include setting KPIs. Hopefully, you have some new ideas and a better understanding of what to track and how.
You don’t need to track all of the KPIs For Ecommerce SEO in this post. Instead, I’d suggest starting with Revenue, ROI, and Conversion Rate. As you build your team, if it makes sense, you can expand the list of KPIs and more effectively measure each of your marketing channels.
There’s always room to improve your SEO. It’s a never-ending job that starts by tracking the right metrics and optimizing from there. So setting KPIs is critical!
Want an actionable plan to grow your online sales and reach your business goals? Let's build one together. Book Your Get To Know You Call
