23 SaaS SEO KPIs every SaaS Marketer needs to know (+ How to)

By tracking the right KPIs, you can gain valuable insights into the performance of your website and make informed decisions about how to allocate your resources and optimize your efforts. In this article, we will discuss the importance of having a set of SEO KPIs for your SaaS brand and provide tips on how to select and track the most relevant and impactful ones.

Do you know that 60% of marketers say that inbound SEO is their highest-quality source of leads? This statistic is especially true when it comes to SEO For SaaS. With a closing rate of almost 16.4%, SEO has become a huge part of any organic campaign. 

Every SaaS brand is improving its SEO efforts to capture the first search result. But as a SaaS Marketer, you know better than anyone that just optimizing your site for SEO, alone won’t help you get the best results. Understanding what SaaS SEO KPIs to track also plays a huge role in making more sales. 

The main motive of SEO is to get more leads for your business. So, knowing the SEO KPIs will help you keep a track of your SEO Marketing efforts. 

In this blog, today I’ll share the 23 SaaS SEO KPIs that you, as a SaaS Marketer, need to keep in mind to track your progress.  

Ready? Let’s go!

23 SaaS SEO KPIs that you need to measure (+How To)

1. Conversions (Sales and Leads)

No goals or metrics are important if you can’t make any sales. Sales and Conversions are the very essences and the most crucial part of any SaaS SEO campaign. As Marketers, you need to keep track of how your content or SEO efforts are performing.  One more benefit of tracking your conversion and sales rate is to see how much of the traffic you’re generating every day/month are you able to convert. So, if you’re generating 5K visitors every day on your blog, how many of them are you able to convert into leads or sales with your content or lead magnet? There’s no meaning to generating traffic to your site if it’s not targeted and doesn’t convert. 

A good conversion rate for B2B SaaS brands is considered to be 5%. 

You can measure your sales and conversion metrics by integrating Mixpanel and setting up a funnel. You can use Mixpanel to track your efforts and check your conversion rate. You can set up a complete funnel to track conversions and user behavior.

2. Keyword Rankings

Tracking your keywords, and the amount of traffic they bring, will help you analyze what you’re doing bright, and the gaps you need to fill. Tracking all your keywords will allow you to check if you’re doing SEO the right way. It will help you realize the keywords you want to rank for, and the intent behind them, and will help you create more content pieces to fill in any gaps. As most online searchers don’t ever go to the second page of Google, most of the traffic goes to the websites in the top 3. And if you want to build authority and get high traffic to your site, then you need to have a strategic keyword list to rank for. But before you do that, you need to analyze your keyword ranking metric for all the previous content you published. 

To check all the keywords you’re ranking for, you need to go to Ahrefs (our favorite saas SEO tool). Do login and add projects, you can add your website or your competitor’s website. You will find a screen like this,

On the right, you find the tracked keywords tab, you can add and remove all the keywords you want to keep eye on. Ahrefs will crawl those keyword positions regularly and keep you updated with email notifications as well.

If you open tracked keywords, it will display like this,

You can see visibility, average position, traffic, and keyword position movements. Also, you can see the keyword and their position and the change that happened to that keyword position compared to the last crawl.

3. Organic Traffic

Organic Traffic is the amount of traffic you get to your site without paying for any Ads. You can generate traffic to your pages by optimizing your website, creating content relevant to the keywords you want to rank for, and doing SEO. As SEO is of three types, Technical SEO, On-page SEO, and Off-page SEO. You need to work on all three aspects to rank on Google and get organic traffic. Organic traffic will help you attract new visitors daily, and create more awareness of your brand.

You can use Ahrefs to find out your organic traffic as well. You can login to Ahrefs, click on site explorer and enter the website to check traffic.

4. Branded and Non-Branded Keyword Traffic

When Branded Search leads to visitors on your website, it’s because they’ve entered your brand name or brand name + service (i.e: time doctor time tracking). Branded keywords are important because they show how your efforts regarding increasing brand awareness are performing.

How to check brand volume with the help of Ahrefs:

• Open Ahrefs Site Explorer
• Enter Domain Name
• Click on organic keywords
• In the include add “brand name”

– In the drop-down any target selects the Keywords.

Branded Keywords:

Non-Branded keywords are the ones where your brand name is not searched directly. You should track your non-branded keywords to check how many visitors stumble upon your blog by searching for terms that are not related to your brand name. 

You can check for non-branded keywords in the same way as above while excluding your brand’s name. 

Non-branded Keywords:

5. Referral Domains

Referral Domains is used to give you an overview of all the sites that’re linking to your site. Using this metric, you can see how many unique links you’ve from different domains. Link Building is a huge success contributor to your SaaS SEO, so analyzing it is the best way to go forward. When it comes to backlinks, it’s the unique links that boost your rankings not the number of links. 

You can check referring domains with the help of Ahrefs.

6. Number of Organic Keywords

In addition to tracking rankings for individual pages on your site, MAXBURST’s Andrew Ruditser says “it’s important to keep track of the number of keywords your site ranks for in Google.”

“Referencing the number of keywords a site ranks for and watching how that is trending provides a good snapshot of site health at a high level,” says Kim Atkinson of Ontario SEO.

“If there are any changes on the site or in algorithms that negatively impact the site, that’s often the first place you’ll notice the problem—even before organic traffic is affected in many cases.”

“There are many reasons why the total keywords a site ranks for may decline—not all of which are bad—but it’s worth investigating if a drop of more than 10% over a month occurs,” Atkinson says.

Also covered by filling keyword gaps you can increase the number of keywords ranking for a page.

7. Revenue

Revenue is the end goal of any SaaS SEO campaign. You want to make sure that your efforts are bearing results. Tracking and evaluating your revenue is an important SaaS metric to keep an eye on. When it comes to SaaS SEO, tracking your main source of revenue can be difficult as you can never know if your freemium version of SaaS is generating the revenue or your sales email campaign. 

To track your Revenue, you need to set a goal and a metric you will track. Your goal can be more traffic to your landing page, in that case, you will measure your organic traffic. If your goal is to increase your freemium trails, then you’d track PQL. So, the first step is to decide on revenue goals and then select a metric to track them. 

You can use Google Analytics for the same purpose. Google Analytics will show you how your SEO efforts are converting, in the form of-

• New Signups for your SaaS
• Traffic generated by each page\
• Total Time spent on the website 

8. Monthly Recurring Revenue: 

Generating income or sales is the main motive behind any SaaS strategy, and SEO is no different. If your SEO efforts don’t bring in conversions, then you’re doing something wrong. Monthly Recurring Revenue or MRR is one such way of calculating your monthly revenue stream. MRR is the total projected revenue that brands generate using all their marketing and SEO efforts. 

You can calculate your MRR, by multiplying the number of active subscriptions of your SaaS by the average revenue per user (ARPU).

9. SEO ROI 

To measure your ROI levels, you need to take into account Technical SEO, off-page SEO, and On-page SEO. To find the Roi generated by your SEO efforts, you first need to decide on your conversion metric. Here are some questions, that will help you get started-

• What’s your PQL and SQL rate from SEO every month/quarter/year?
• What’s the Customer Lifetime Value(CLV) of your target audience?
• What’s your customer conversion rate, and how does it affect your CLV?

ROI on SaaS SEO is one of the most crucial metrics you need to keep track of. 

SEO ROI: Net Profit from SEO Channel / Cost (Salaries, Freelancing Pay, cost of tools)

10. Bounce Rate

Measuring how many visitors left your website after viewing a single page without taking any action will tell you how many leads you’re losing. When visitors leave your website, you lose a lot of potential revenue. The lower your bounce rate is, the better conversions you will have. A higher bounce rate can negatively impact your search engine rankings, as search engines view bounce rate as a sign of your page not being valuable. 

You can measure your bounce rate by pages or by segmenting your audience. The benefit of segmenting audiences with their age, demographics, etc will tell you about the kind of traffic you’re attracting. You can do this by checking your Site Bounce Rate on Google Analytics. 

11. Average Time on Page

Understanding the amount of time a visitor spends on a single page of your website, tells a lot about what’s working and not working for you. For example, if a visitor stays for 10 seconds on your blog, you change how you create content or redesign your page to make the visitor stay for a long time. The average Time Spent on each page will tell you why they stay or leave. It’s important to measure this metric because if visitors don’t stay-

You won’t rank on Google, and you won’t convert your visitors if your site isn’t navigable. 

You can check the average time spent on your page in Google analytics.

12. Coverage Issue: 

Your website coverage shows how well Google has indexed your website and found changes. Google indexes all the websites published online, and when it finds an issue with the URLs, and other errors like crawl errors it informs the owner of the site. Your website optimization plays a huge role in your SEO plan. Your pages, URLs, and website content directly affects your conversions. 

Using the Google search console, you can check if your site has any coverage issues, and make sure you fix them before you lose out on sales or ranking opportunities. 

13. Organic CTR: 

Measuring organic clicks shows you how optimized your page is for humans, aka your visitors. The Click-through rate is the percentage of people who click on one of your site’s pages after they find you on a search result. To evaluate your Organic CTR, you need to keep in mind two things- Organic SEO to help you rank on a search result, and your Content optimization to make people click. These two terms are interrelated. 

You can’t rank on Google if your visitors don’t click on your site. Google considers CTRs as an important SEO factor. But, even if you end up ranking for a search there’s no benefit if your content can’t make your visitors click on your page and convert. 

You can measure your organic CTR by going on to Google Search Console. Google search console allows you to look at your CTR for the keywords that appear in the SERPs. 

14. Search Impressions: 

Search Impressions are the number of visitors who saw your site organically through search engine queries. For example, if your site appears in the search result for the keyword, “Vegetarian Diet Chart”, then your search impressions will show all the people who noticed your site. This metric comes very much in handy when you’re ranking on the first page. If your organic search impressions increase, it shows that your SEO and Ranking efforts are also increasing.

You can check your Search Impressions on Google Search Console. You can also filter out the total search impressions by organic and paid data, and get an insight into both. 

15. Cost per click

Cost per Click shows you how much your target customers are paying for each click. CPC is a great metric to track as it shows you the commercial value of the keywords you’re targeting. Recognizing the intent behind each keyword is important so that you can create the right kind of content and make sales. CPC leads to you making sales, and content needs to be created so that you can explain the benefit of your SaaS to your audience and convert them better. 

You can calculate CPC 

16. Page Load Speed Score: Page Speed Insight/ GT Metrics

You might be wondering, what page speed has to do with SEO? Well, it has a huge relationship with SEO. If your page doesn’t load quickly on both P.C. and Mobile, visitors will leave your page even before checking out what you’ve to say. According to Potent, the first five seconds of page-load time have the highest impact on conversion rates. While 70% of consumers say that page speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online retailer. 

You can measure your page speed by, 

17. Website Health Score: 

Ahrefs

18. Total Backlinks

Total backlinks include links that other websites add to their content from your website. They link their content to yours, and that acts as a boosting factor for your SERP rankings. Google views more backlinks as the site being authoritative, and useful to the readers. The more backlinks you have, the higher your chances of ranking on Google are. While backlinks matter, what matters more is that the backlinks are coming from an authoritative, and credible site with good domain authority. 

You can track your total backlinks by going on to Ahrefs and checking for the number of websites linking back to you. Enter your website URL into the Ahrefs dashboard, and it will show you an overview of all the backlinks you’ve earned. 

19. Website Traffic Value

Your website traffic value is the amount of traffic generated using both paid, and organic methods. Both PPC and CPC are required for growth in the long term, but organic traffic always compounds over time. That’s the reason why most SEO is focused on growing your organic efforts. 

You can track your conversion rate from paid and organic methods to see your website traffic value. 

20. New Backlinks

New Backlinks are important, as you can start building more links to more relevant sites. You can measure these backlinks by going to Ahrefs, checking for all the backlink opportunities you might have, and gaining information if any new site has linked back to you lately. 

21. Backlink Relevancy: 

If you want to get the best out of your link-building strategies, Backlink relevance is an important metric to track. Niche relevance of the site linking to you will prove useful to your visitors, as they can just click on a link and go to another blog or the primary source of the statistic that you provide. This shows that your facts and figures are true, and belong to a credible website.

You can check the backlink relevance by going to Ahrefs backlink dashboard, and clicking on the top pages and top keywords option to see all the relevant links. 

22. Domain Rating

Domain Rating, also known as Domain Authority is a number between 1-100 that shows your authority on the search engine. Higher DR also leads to a higher ranking on Google. You should track your DR, and increase it by publishing content, building links, and doing customer-oriented marketing. 

You can measure the domain rating of your site by going to ahrefs.com

23. Backlink Quality

To check the backlink quality, you need to take a look at the linking websites’ Domain Rating, the Organic Traffic it generates, Niche Relevancy, and the links from actual brands. SaaS brands often find themselves a victim of spammy and non-relevant backlinks, which can damage their authority in the industry as well as their rankings. You need to keep a close eye on how’s linking back to your site.

If you want to get more backlinks from websites that are credible, have high DR, and are relevant to your niche. Then make sure you give SaaSlinko a try. SaaSlinko helps you build high-quality backlinks that skyrocket your ranking efforts. Talk to our experts now for free!

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the 3 SEO KPIs you should be tracking?

Revenue, ROI, and organic traffic are the three most important KPIs to track. Make sure to check out the whole list of KPIs, so that you know which ones to follow and how to track them. 

What are the best SEO KPIs for someone just starting?

If you’re just starting with content and SEO, then all the 23 KPIs mentioned above will help you! You can start by creating and publishing content for your website, and then tracking your organic visibility, traffic, and conversion rate. 

What are the SEO KPIs You Should Focus On?

Some SEO KPIs for you to focus on-

• Organic traffic
• Search Visibility
• Organic CTR
• Branded traffic
• Bounce rate.
• Backlinks
• Branded traffic
• Bounce rate

What are the four most important KPIs running your SAAS company?

Some of the most important KPIs not related to SEO are SaaS Churn Rate, Lifetime Value (LTV), Monthly Recurring Revenue, and Revenue Churn rate.

What are the best SEO KPIs that one should follow for monthly & annual achievement plans?

To calculate your monthly and annual traffic and conversion, you need to 

My 2 Cents 

The best SaaS SEO campaigns are a mix of the right content strategy, and the metrics to track. Focus on creating high-quality content that boosts your SEO efforts, and gets you ranking as well as customers. 

If you want more such tips on how to grow your SaaS with the help of SEO and content, then make sure you sign up for our newsletter!

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