Local search engine optimization, or local SEO, involves optimizing your business’ online presence to make it easier for your targeted audience to find you. It’s essential for local digital marketing strategy. To do it properly, the local SEO processes should be measured to track progress and success.

Local SEO KPIs (key performance indicators) are key SEO metrics that are directly tied to business growth. KPIs are what determine your actions, so it is important to choose the right KPIs.

We’ll look at the 7 most common local SEO KPIs that are worth tracking. First, let’s look at what tools we use to gather insights on digital marketing performance. There are three main tools: Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Google Business Profile Insights.

Google Analytics

One of the best way to track your conversions is by using Google Analytics 4. While Google Analytics 4 is not difficult, there is a learning curve. It does not require any programming knowledge.

Google Analytics tracks website performance and collects visitor insights. It helps businesses track their top visitor traffic sources, the success of their marketing campaigns, and goal completions. It also provides insights on traffic patterns, trends in user engagement and visitor demographics. All this data can be used to improve digital marketing campaigns, drive website traffic and increase sales.

Google Search Console

All clicks from search engines that are not paid for are organic traffic. Google Search Console (GSC) provides data about where that traffic goes on your website so that you can gauge how your web pages are performing.

According to Google: “Search Console tools and reports help you measure your site’s Search traffic and performance, fix issues, and make your site shine in Google Search results.”

Google Search Console & Google Analytics work hand-in-hand together to provide small business owners with analytics regarding their website’s performance and local search performance.

What To Measure?

Local businesses want to measure what yields revenue, such as:

• What keywords are driving traffic to my website?
• What digital assets are driving traffic to my website?
• Which of my digital assets converts to sales best?
• Is my Google Business Profile driving traffic to my website?
• Are people calling me from my website or landing pages?
• Are people calling me from my Google Business Profile?
• Are people interacting with my Google Business Profile that is leading to inquiries, appointments and sales?

1. Search visibility

Search Visibility is the measure of how visible your business brand appears in the search results. It’s also known as your online visibility. The score is a percentage of online visibility up to 100%.

Search Visibility is one the most universally useful SEO KPIs. It’s the only non-conversion indicator that can be directly tied to business growth. The rule of thumb is that the greater your online visibility, the greater your revenue.

Your Search Visibility score provides an idea of how well you’re doing in local search results and how much you can improve. According to Moz, “Your Search Visibility score is calculated by: Taking all of your rankings for all of your keywords. Applying an estimated click-through-rate (CTR) based on each ranking position.” 

Google Search Console provides a simplified way to check your local SEO visibility scores for specific keywords. For a more total view, you can calculate your local search visibility using a paid tool like SEMrush, as in the example below. Here we see that SEO Quake has about 4% of search visibility for SEO tools.

2. Organic Traffic

Organic traffic is traffic that comes to your website from the unpaid sources like Google, Bing and Yahoo after making a search and clicking on an organic search result. Compared to all other kinds of website traffic, organic traffic is by far the most valuable to local businesses. This is why it is crucial to measure as part of your digital marketing strategy.

Why Is Organic Traffic So Important?

Paid ads are leased digital realty that require quite a bit of money to work for only a limited period. Moreover, the traffic you get is not targeted. Organic traffic, on the other hand, is owned digital realty. Organic traffic targets the local traffic you want and provides evergreen results by working for years until a competitor does a better job than you. 

Organic traffic is highly beneficial to small businesses because it provides evergreen lead flow, helps your business extend it’s online reach, increases your business credibility and authority and, most importantly, it brings visitors with relevant and specific intent to your site for the services that you provide.

How To Track Organic Traffic

Through both Google Analytics and Google Search Console, you can track your organic traffic performance. As part of your local SEO campaign, you’ll want to track your search results at least on a monthly basis for your overall website performance as well as individual pages.  You will also want to measure quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year performance.

In the Google Analytics example below, you can see that this business’ organic search was 30 visitors over a 3-month period.

You can also measure your organic search results in your Google Business Profile Insights. The Insights show your organic traffic both on your Google Business Profile and Google Maps.

3. Organic traffic conversions

Conversions refer to important actions that visitors take on your website such as signing up, checking out, or subscribing. Most businesses track conversions for all traffic sources, organic and otherwise.

This is the most important SEO KPI. Conversion tracking is the easiest way to link your marketing efforts to revenue.

You’ll want to determine your digital marketing goals around which you’ll create a measurement framework which can be set up in Google Analytics for tracking. The following are examples of Google Analytics goals that can be tracked and measured:

• Specific offers and specials.
• Appointments scheduled online
• Contact Us form submissions.
• Newsletter sign-ups.
• Whitepaper or other freemium downloads.
• Appointment Bookings.
• Click to email.
• Click to call.

Whatever the tracked action, local marketers will look at how these activities lead to conversions.

4. Keyword rankings

Keyword rankings are a measure of a website’s organic ranking in search results for specific keywords. It’s important to properly track your most commercial keywords to see which ones are converting.

In Google Search Console, you can zero in on keywords , web pages and obtain crucial data such as the number of times your web pages show up in local search results for your keywords, the click-through-rate, what pages led visitors to a particular page, where they went after they visited that page, etc.

Additionally, Google Search Console also provides information on related keywords for which they show your web page. If these terms are potentially valuable, you can further modify your web page content to capture this additional traffic.

5. Google Business Profile: Website Click-Through

Google Business Profile has been designed to become a click-less search. The idea is that if all the essential information is in the Google Business Profile, then there’s no reason to click through to the website or even the Google Business Profile itself.

The Google Business Profile’s interface allow searchers to do many things within the search engine results pages (SERP) without having to click through to the business website which includes functionality such as:

• Contacting the business.
• Reading reviews.
• Viewing the business’ images.
• Browsing through the business’ products and services.
• Asking the business owner questions.
• Sending direct messages to the business
• Booking reservations or services.

Businesses can, and absolutely should, include direct links to their website to encourage click throughs from the Google Business Profile to the business’ website. These links include links to the the website, appointment links, product links, and Google posts.

All of this activity on the Google Business Profile, can be measured through Google Business Profile Insights. Google Business Profile Insights provides data on website clicks. Your Profile data will show you how many people visited your website through the website link on your business profile.
 
Additionally, you can track Google Business Profile to your website activity through Google Analytics. Google Analytics provides additional data if you include UTM tags on your Google Business Profile links.

6. Phone Calls

Phone calls are an essential KPI for small businesses. You will get calls from all your digital assets but primarily from Google Business Profile and your website. Thankfully, both can be tracked through click-to-call technology.

Google Business Profile Insights also provides call data which shows how many people have clicked on the “call” button in their Google Business Profile. 

We are also want to know about visitors who are referred by our Google Business Profile to our websites and then go on to “click to call” our business via a hyperlink on our website.

Google Analytics can provide call data if you have UTM tags set up on the relevant goals and events. In Google Analytics we can set up tracking click-to-call on our website as well as also tracking the Google Business Profile traffic as our campaign data source.

A call tracking system provider is alternative method for tracking phone calls to your business. You can add additional metrics to your business if you are working with one that uses third-party call tracking platforms.

7. Communication & Scheduling Functions From Google Business Profile

Google Business Profile provides direct messaging from prospect to businesses on desktop for business management. Additionally, you can set up bookings through a third-party Google partner.

Google Business Profile performance for messaging and booking can then be tracked on your business profile. An increase of messaging and bookings provides valuable business data regarding your local SEO performance. The more local SEO drives traffic to your website and Google Business Profile, the more messaging and bookings your business will see.  

Local SEO ROI (return-on-investment) is a measure of the business value of SEO activities compared to their costs. Here’s the formula:

Local SEO ROI =   Local SEO Profit minus Local SEO Expense/100

To put it another way, divide the SEO profit and the associated SEO expenses by 100. This will give you the ROI percentage.

You can measure the ROI for in total for all local search improvements. Additionally, you can measure specific ranking pages for specific keywords by checking Google Analytics to see that the organic web pages that drive conversions.

Additionally, you can use this formula to determine your ROI for your Google Business Profile optimization to determine your increase in leads and sales.

These 7 KPIs are common for Local SEO. They provide a good overview of your digital marketing progress and ROI.

These 7 KPIs should be in place at the beginning of your local SEO marketing campaign to benchmark your local marketing campaign performance. Tracking the right KPIs helps to make informed decisions by interpreting, analyzing and tracking your data for better outcomes.