Search traffic is often more likely to convert to signups than paid traffic, yet only 11% of companies invest in content marketing.
The good news is that it’s always possible to start paying attention to your SEO. You’ll want to ensure you’re tracking the right metrics when you do.
This article will discuss the five most important SaaS SEO metrics to track. By paying attention to these metrics, you can ensure that your website performs at its best and attracts the most organic traffic possible.
Top 5 SaaS SEO Metrics to Track for Consistent Growth
As a SaaS company, your ultimate goal is to drive signups and earn paying subscribers that are unlikely to churn. The most straightforward path to this is focusing on acquiring new customers and retaining the ones you already have. Since conversions from search traffic are more likely to lead to higher LTV and lower churn, SEO is a winning growth channel for budding SaaS companies.
It’s important to track your SEO success, no matter how early or late into the game you are. Here are the 5 most important SaaS SEO metrics you should be paying attention to.
Conversions
Conversions are the most important SaaS SEO metric to track. Unlike vanity metrics, conversions are the lifeblood of your SaaS. A conversion is when a visitor takes a desired action on your site, such as signing up for a free trial or making a purchase.
Tracking conversions will give you an idea of how well your site generates leads and customers.
There are a few things you can do to increase your conversion rate:
- Use effective calls to action
- Offer a free trial or discount
- Make it easy to purchase your product
Organic Site Traffic (Clicks)
Working down from conversions, organic search traffic is the second important SaaS SEO metric. After all, you must get visitors to your site to generate leads or customers. Clicks refers to the number of times a website or page is clicked on in search results and should be charted on an at least monthly basis.
Google Search Console provides detailed statistics about clicks, including where they originated from (which queries, which countries) and how far down the list of search results visitors had to scroll before finding your link. It also provides information about the average click-through rate (CTR), which measures how often users actually click on a listing compared to how many times it was shown in the search engine results pages.
This metric can be helpful in determining whether changes made to your SEO efforts have been successful.
Search Impressions
Search impressions are the number of times a page appears in Google search results. While you might think this is the amount of traffic your site is getting, it’s actually just the number of times the page was seen in search results. Search impressions are a strong indicator of SEO progress, since you need search impressions to get clicks to your website.
Search impressions are our favorite way to chart and report the impact of SEO early into a campaign. If a website is seeing consistent search impression growth, it will likely scale in clicks (organic site traffic) as well.
Rankings
Rankings are another important metric to track. After all, if your site is not ranking well for relevant keywords, you will get little organic traffic.
Nailing down keywords is essential for SaaS companies. You want to target keywords relevant to your product or service and have a good amount of search volume.
You can track your rankings using tools like Google Search Console, SEMrush, Ahrefs and Katlinks.
You also want to track the CTR for each keyword granularly. The CTR is the percentage of people who click on your site after seeing it in the SERP. A high CTR is a good sign that your site is relevant to the keyword.
Backlinks
The final metric you want to track is backlinks. Backlinks are links from other websites to yours. They act as a vote of confidence and can help improve your SERP rankings.
You can consider investing in guest blogging and broken link building to get backlinks.
Guest blogging is when you write an article for another website in your industry. This is a great way to get your name and website in front of a new audience.
Broken link building is when you find websites linking to a broken page on your site. You then contact the website and ask them to update the link to your working page. This is a great way to get high-quality backlinks.
The factors to consider when tracking backlinks are:
- The number of backlinks your site has
- The quality of those backlinks
The number of backlinks is important, but there are other things you should be looking at. The quality of those backlinks is also important. A high-quality backlink is from a website that is relevant to your industry, has real traffic, strong topical authority and demonstrates E-E-A-T.
Key Takeaways
SEO for SaaS companies can be tricky, but it’s essential for driving organic growth. Keeping an eye on the right SaaS SEO metrics will help ensure your SEO efforts are paying off.
To recap:
- The most important metric to track is conversions This will give you an idea of how well your site generates leads and customers.
- Organic traffic is also essential to track. This will give you an idea of how well your site performs in ranking for relevant keywords and generating traffic.
- Search impressions will give you an idea of how well your SEO efforts are impacting a website, even early into an SEO campaign.
- Keeping an eye on your site’s ranking for specific keywords is also essential. The higher your site ranks, the more likely people will find it.
- Backlinks are also important to track. The more high-quality backlinks you have, the better your site will perform in SERP rankings.
