SEO helps websites reach a wider audience and generate more revenue. But for large-scale sites, collecting data to improve SEO can get complicated fast.
Enterprise SEO metrics help tell a clear story with the data. With these analytics, you can track progress toward your goals, assess your site’s performance, and refine strategies as needed.
In this article, I’ll outline the most important enterprise SEO metrics to measure, from organic traffic to top pages. Choose the most relevant metrics for your business goals to knock your next SEO campaign out of the park.
What Is It You Want To Measure?
Use your company’s goals for the coming year to guide your enterprise SEO analytics. For example, if you want to build brand awareness, track search positions and impressions to monitor search visibility. If your aim is to pull users into the marketing funnel, look at click-throughs or session duration. To see how well you’re generating leads, monitor landing page conversions. Track purchases for ecommerce. You probably get the idea.
The data you collect should be meaningful and provide a big-picture view of SEO performance. They should also lend actionable insight into how well you’re meeting specific marketing objectives.
What Are Enterprise SEO Metrics?
Enterprise SEO metrics are key performance indicators (KPIs) used to measure the effectiveness of SEO campaigns for large-scale sites. These metrics help clearly prove the value of your SEO efforts.
Enterprise Metrics To Track
Over time, an enterprise SEO management and analytics plan will deliver a treasure trove of useful data. Here are ten of the most essential enterprise SEO metrics you can track to monitor your SEO strategy.
1. Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is a critical piece of the SEO puzzle — you need a steady flow of users to maintain or increase your conversions. Organic traffic shows you how many visitors find your site via organic search engine results. You can isolate traffic from specific campaigns to determine their effectiveness or compare monthly, quarterly, and annual traffic changes.
To see how well your pages are performing in search, monitor organic traffic to your site as a whole and to each of your business-critical pages. If any core pages are low performing, look at the other key metrics for that page to zero in on what’s not working.
2. Conversions From Organic Traffic
Conversion rate tells you how many people are performing a desired action on your site compared to the total number of visitors. To calculate your conversion rate, divide the total conversions or actions by the total visitors within a time period and multiply by 100. You can track the conversion rates for specific landing pages and your entire site.
- Conversion rate = (Total conversions / Total visitors) x 100
That said, you will probably never need to calculate it manually. Most analytics tools (like Google Analytics 4) will keep track of this metric for you in designated reports.
How you measure conversions depends on your goals. For a specific campaign, conversions could be the number of people who download an ebook. For an ecommerce site, conversions may be the number of people who make a purchase, join a mailing list for discounts, or add a product to a wish list.
Low conversions require some detective work. Perhaps you’re not attracting your target audience, or your content doesn’t match up with where users are in their buyer journey. Or maybe the culprit is a poor user experience that’s preventing customers from taking action. Maybe some page types are just more likely to result in a conversion than others. A/B testing can help you narrow down the culprit and improve your conversion rate.
3. Organic Revenue
Use organic revenue to track how much money organic search visitors are spending on your site. When you track revenue by traffic source, you can see which campaigns are most impactful and which channels generate the best results.
It may take time to hit your organic revenue targets, so continue to monitor other elements of your SEO strategy to gauge progress. As search visibility, traffic, engagement, and conversions increase, you should begin to see organic revenue trend upward as well.
4. SEO ROI
SEO return on investment (ROI) compares your investment in SEO activities to the revenue it generates. Use this metric to determine how effectively you’re spending money on SEO efforts. Big wins can help you make a case for increasing or reallocating your marketing spending.
To calculate SEO ROI, take the difference between organic revenue and SEO costs for a set period. Divide this number by the SEO costs.
- SEO ROI = (Organic revenue – SEO costs) / SEO costs
For example, if you spend $50,000 per month on search engine optimization and generate $200,000 in organic revenue per month, divide $150,000 by $50,000. Your SEO ROI is 3, which means every dollar you spend on SEO generates $3 in return.
A low SEO ROI may mean funds aren’t being allocated in the right way or that you should revisit the campaign to find areas for improvement. On the other hand, if your SEO ROI is higher than that of other marketing channels, you can capitalize on the success and boost your optimization efforts for an even greater return.
5. Search Visibility
Search visibility is how prominently your website appears in search results. Below are three important metrics for measuring search visibility.
Number of Keyword Rankings
Track the number of keywords your site ranks for — the more SERPs that display your site, the easier it is for users to learn about your business. If you aren’t gaining rankings over time, double down on keyword research to find additional relevant search phrases to target. Implement a pillar strategy for enterprise content creation and organize an editorial calendar to increase content rollout.
Keyword Position
For each keyword, track where your page link appears on the search engine results page (SERP). If your on-page optimization efforts are working, average search positions should rise. A dramatic drop in position could hint at technical problems or a change in Google’s algorithm that may require you to rework your content. Small changes for individual keywords can be distracting on a really large site, but it’s still worth checking on the biggest movements in keyword position monthly to see where there are decreases for important keywords to counter or increases in keyword position that you can capitalize on.
Impressions
Impressions show how often your link appeared in search results. In most cases, an impression tells you how many times users could potentially see your link. For example, if your page is the last search result on page one of the SERP, but the user only scrolls to the second result, that still counts as an impression. A low number of impressions may suggest your content doesn’t satisfy search intent or Google E-E-A-T guidelines and isn’t being prioritized in SERP results.
6. Click-Through Rate
Click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of people who click your link in SERPs compared to the number of impressions. If you have a low CTR to an important page, write a compelling page title and meta description that accurately reflect the page’s content and grab the attention of casual scrollers. Make your snippet more visually appealing by adding structured data to create a rich result with an image, star rating, and other eye-catching information.
7. Backlink Profile Growth
Backlinks are incoming links from external sites and are a search engine ranking factor. Google considers links from trusted, high-quality sites as an endorsement of the value of your content. The more quality backlinks a page has, the more likely it ranks highly.
An effective SEO strategy should include link building to establish your site’s authority and generate referral traffic. You don’t need backlinks to all of your pages — instead, aim for links to important conversion and engagement pages. Monitor your backlinks for growth over time. If there’s little organic increase in the number of quality backlinks, focus your efforts on creating inbound links with a link building service.
Referring Domains
As part of your backlink analysis, check out how many individual websites are linking to your pages. Aim to increase the number of referring domains. An inbound link from a new, authoritative domain tends to carry more weight than a link from a domain that’s already linked to you.
8. Page Speed & Core Web Vitals
Internet users can be impatient — we’re all more likely to bounce when a page seems to take forever to load. To ensure users have a positive experience when clicking top results, Google considers site speed as a ranking factor for desktop and mobile searches.
Track your site’s technical performance with the Core Web Vitals report on Google Search Console. Google has recommended thresholds for web vitals to optimize user engagement — and visitors are 24% less likely to abandon a page when these thresholds are met.
Incorporate these core web vitals into your enterprise SEO metrics:
- Largest contentful paint (LCP): LCP is the load time for the largest visual element on the page to render, whether it’s an image, video, or text. Aim to keep LCP under 2.5 seconds for 75% of page loads.
- Cumulative layout shift (CLS): CLS is the time it takes a page to become visually stable. For most pages, you’ll want a CLS of less than 0.1.
- First input delay (FID): FID is the time it takes a user to see the results of an action on the page. Google recommends keeping FID under 100 milliseconds.
How many websites meet these recommendations, though? According to SEO statistics we’ve gathered, only 33% of websites pass the Core Web Vitals threshold (Ahrefs, 2022). For this reason, it’s a good idea to pull some of these metrics for your top competitors (you can do this using Lighthouse in Chrome Dev Tools or PageSpeed Insights). Then you can see how your site compares and determine how well you need to score to do better than your competitors.
9. User Engagement
Once users land on a web page, guide them along the buyer journey with exciting content. Here are a few enterprise SEO analytics to evaluate how well your site engages visitors.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of users who visit just one page and leave without exploring more. A high bounce rate can indicate a poor user experience due to hard-to-read text, slow loading time, or distracting ads and pop-ups. You may also need to strengthen your call to action (CTA) or add value to your content to hold readers’ attention. Alternatively, a high bounce rate could mean that visitors are finding the information they need and then leaving your site. Include links to related content to encourage them to check out more of your website.
Pages Per Visit
Pages per visit is the average number of pages visitors explore in a single session on your site. Calculate this metric by dividing total page views by total number of sessions.
- Pages per visit = Total page views / Total number of sessions
The higher the number of pages per visit, the more visitors are using different parts of your site. A low pages per visit metric might mean your content isn’t interesting or relevant to the user, or that you need more internal links to guide users.
Time Spent on Site
Time spent on site measures the average duration of a user session. This metric is especially insightful when compared with pages per visit. If you have a high number of pages per visit but low time spent on site, users may be giving up after clicking through to a few pages because they can’t find what they need. Revisit your site organization and make sure your navigation is intuitive.
Exit Page & Exit Rate
The exit page is the last page users visit before leaving a site. Sometimes, this can be a natural place to exit, like a page with contact information or business hours. Users find what they need and are ready to go. However, if a core page has a high exit rate, check if something is creating a poor user experience and causing you to lose potential customers. For example, is there an opportunity to improve the information on the page? Is it easy to navigate? Does it take too long to load? Pinpoint issues and troubleshoot them to reduce your exit rate.
10. Top Pages
The top pages metric tells you which pages of your site are most popular. Assess these pages to discover what visitors are interested in and use those insights to boost conversions and engagement.
For example, if visitors are drawn to a certain topic, publish additional relevant content to keep them on your site longer. If a popular page provides general information for users at the top of the funnel, create related content to pull them further into the funnel. Or if users are in the decision-making stage, offer a discount or incentive to try to convert them.
Measure What Matters
A comprehensive SEO strategy has many moving parts, but our enterprise SEO services can help you structure campaigns customized to your business needs. Schedule a free SEO consultation and discover how we align your SEO strategy with your goals, attract your target customers, and generate meaningful results.
