Major KPIs to Gauge Return On Investment for eCommerce SEO

One of the easiest ways to grow your online brand over the long term is with search engine optimization (SEO). However, this is not exactly a so-called set it and forget it process. Rather, you should consistently pay attention to your results to see where you’ve made gains, where changes are necessary, and how close you are to reaching your goals.

To make this process a little less confusing, we put together a solid list of the most important aspects to track. Here are thirteen major key performance indicators (KPIs) to gauge return on investment for eCommerce SEO.

13 Essential eCommerce SEO KPIs

1. Organic Traffic

Perhaps the most important aspect of monitoring your eCommerce SEO data is overall organic traffic. After all, your main goal in optimizing your online store is to bring in more traffic from search engines, so it is important to know if your efforts are actually working.

Getting a lot of visitors to your website and increasing eCommerce sales are two entirely different things. That’s why it is important to pay attention to who is coming to your website, where they are coming from, and why they aren’t making purchases.

2. Referral Traffic

In addition to organic traffic from search engines, you should also pay close attention to your referral traffic. These are visitors that don’t come from just organic search, but other aspects like paid advertising, social media, email marketing, and more.

This is such an important part of your eCommerce SEO strategy because you want to be able to compare the numbers. By understanding where new customers are coming from, you can decide where it makes the most sense to spend more money to scale up your marketing.

3. Organic Goal Conversion

Not every person that comes to your eCommerce website is going to be a paying customer. Rather, a focus on at least getting them into the sales funnel by any other means is still a valuable conversion goal that needs tracking.

For some online brands, this is getting someone to sign up to receive a coupon and join a mailing list. Others might consider a conversion something like sharing a post on social media, posting a comment on a blog post, or whatever makes the most sense for their overall goals. Decide on a factor for your website and track the KPI to see if it is effective.

4. Organic Conversion Rate

Then there’s the number of eCommerce website visitors that actually turn into paying customers. As you probably already know, this is one of the most crucial KPIs you need to track, as it affects your entire digital marketing plan.

A higher conversion rate means that your website is doing a fantastic job taking that incoming traffic and turning those people into buyers. A low conversion rate means that you likely need more fine-tuning for user experience or other factors and should concentrate on this before increasing overall traffic. In most cases, a low conversion rate might mean significant changes, so it could be ideal to bring on an eCommerce SEO agency to help out.

5. Keyword Rankings

A huge part of any eCommerce strategy is keywords. After all, you want to optimize your online store so that people can find you when they are looking for a particular item or type of item. Tracking and optimizing for certain keywords is a great way to boost search ranking and overall traffic.

In addition, Google and Bing sometimes rank you for keywords that you weren’t necessarily trying for. By keeping track of these, you can see where you need to add more content centered around a particular topic or if you should include certain terms in product descriptions, category pages, etc.

6. Backlinks

One of the most critical ranking factors for an eCommerce website is backlinks. If people are linking to your website, you need to know what these links are and whether they are helping or hurting your page rank. If you have toxic links, disavowing them with Google is critical.

From an eCommerce perspective, tracking your backlinks is also crucial if you have implemented an affiliate program. You want to make sure the content your affiliate team is putting out meets your criteria and the only way to do this is by religiously checking backlinks.

7. Page Speed

For a long time, Google has said that the speed of your page is essential to how well you rank. Unfortunately, some eCommerce site owners sometimes lose track of this as they start to add more and more slow loading features to their page, which eventually hurts rankings and causes a lower user experience.

Checking page speed at least monthly ensures that any small tasks or fine-tuning you need to do is handled quickly before it harms your SERPs. There are tons of great tools on the market, many of which are built into platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce.

8. Number of Words

You know your keywords are important to your SEO traffic. However, so is the number of words you add to a page. Keeping track of this KPI is especially crucial if you’re consistently adding new content, such as expanding product page descriptions or adding category text.

By knowing whether longer pages are converting better than shorter ones, you can start to gauge where you want to expand your copy. Plus, you can decide individually which products need more attention for a higher ROI on sales.