Building relationships and opening up communication with the general public isn’t always the easiest thing to do. There are so many pitfalls for PR today making it almost impossible to tell whether your content just isn’t relevant or if it hasn’t got the anticipated exposure needed. KPIs can help to highlight what you’re doing right and pinpoint SEO-inspired improvements.
KPI stands for key performance indicator and can be used to inform your latest PR strategies or adapt them based on previous interactions. Tracking these are essential if you want to better your business and make your work as effective as possible, without doubling the workload. Although there are many different KPIs you could be tracking, these nine KPIs are the basics that everyone should be keeping an eye on.
1. Organic traffic
This is, essentially, how many people are coming across your website and its pages. Use website analytics and take particular note of how many views per visitor, the traffic on your landing pages, and the number of visitors your site gains. With better SEO, integrated links, signposting, and further techniques, you should see an increase in traffic compared to previous periods. If not, you might need to have a bit of a rethink.
2. Engagement
More than simply arriving at your site, engagement requires some sort of active participation or interaction with your content from visitors. Data showing how many pages visitors generally look at, the amount of time they spend on a page, as well as the number of clicks, can all signify engaged visitors. This shows your content effectiveness and relevance to what your visitors search for, which, in a nutshell, is the aim of the game.
3. Conversions
Keeping track of conversions is particularly handy in demonstrating the effects of a promotion or campaign. A successful campaign increases conversions, whereas one with few positive results isn’t worth investing too much in. Of course, these things can take time to boost conversions and some strategies are more focused on the long-term conversions rather than those in the space of a couple of weeks or months, leading to more incremental increases.
4. Target keywords
To get the ROI of search engine optimization through your website, you need to be using the right words. If your main target keywords aren’t doing so well in SERP rankings, then maybe it’s time to reevaluate your vocabulary and reword some headings. It’s a small touch that makes a big difference.
Learn what keywords your landing pages will rank under using an SEO analytics report. These often highlight a whole host of additional keywords you weren’t aware of that your page was showing up in the searches for. Make sure these words are accurate representations of what your pages are about and you can only continue to improve your rankings.
5. Trends
Metrics and statistics can, at first glance, seem completely random and impossible to draw any real patterns from. It’s true—algorithms and search terms are constantly changing, leading to a certain level of flux in your metrics. However, by identifying where there are trends when your pages are most viewed, which ones encourage the most engagement, and what keywords are constantly boosting your SEO, you can adapt your content approach to make the most of these.
6. Bounce rate
Tracking bounce rate will signal areas of your website that aren’t captivating visitors. This might mean changing a misleading heading that doesn’t match that of your meta title, including different formats. Bounce rate is also influenced by the presentation of your content including typographical choices and color schemes.
Most website analytics can show where this is most common, giving you an indicator as to what creates the most bounce. These are easy opportunities to make quick changes to benefit your website and keep viewers on-site, however, if you’re not tracking this KPI, you might not even realize there is an issue.
7. Page speed
In the age of dial-up, waiting around for a website was something we all had a lot more patience for. Since then, internet speeds have increased massively and we now expect websites to load on demand. If your page takes longer than three seconds to load, expect to lose 11% of your page visitors. Your website may have everything a visitor could want, but if they’re not hanging around to see it, it’s all wasted.
8. Crawl errors
One of the lesser-known KPIs—crawl errors is where search engines are unable to cache your website properly, basically making it inaccessible. Naturally, this is going to put a damper on your reach as your website ranking by search engines will be negatively influenced to a great extent. Monitor this to fix any errors as they arise and make sure that as much traffic finds you as it can. A singular bad link is easily fixed and not worth losing visitors over.
9. Backlinking
The more links to your pages, the more likely visitors are going to find your site. Integrate these in blog posts, social media marketing, to direct people to where your content is. By using media monitoring to track the number of mentions of your website, how often links are used, and where they are found can give you a good idea of the traffic you’re likely to get and how to customize your PR accordingly to accommodate these visitors.
What KPIs are you tracking?
KPIs are essential for success in PR. They’re the most valuable feedback you can get on the customer response to your business, campaigns, promotions, events, content, or anything else they interact with. Using these KPIs effectively can improve your overall SEO by improving your website and making it more accessible and relevant to visitors.
If you don’t know what the customer is engaging with, it can be difficult to gauge how to draw people in. But you don’t have to make wild guesses – these KPIs give you the power to make informed decisions and track the effects on them. Different KPIs will be more useful in particular areas of your PR strategy, but each has its distinct merit and should be monitored regularly.