• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, March 20, 2015

Load time, lifetime value, average revenue per user, retention rate, and session length are among the most important key performance indicators (KPIs) for a mobile Web site. Measuring the search visibility and performance of mobile Web sites continues to become just as important as measuring desktop Web sites. Some KPIs, more than others, will become invaluable. It's important to find your company's to judge the success of search marketing and advertising efforts.

While testing remains one of the best ways to determine KPIs, Searchmetrics introduced an alternative method earlier this week, adding to its metric called the SEO Visibility score, an index of the level of visibility a domain appears in search results based on a database of millions of keywords. The score for mobile search performance allows brands and agencies to compare their scores to get an indication of how the site performs in mobile vs. desktop search, and monitor the weekly trend for each KPI.

There is also a new percentage overlap metric that indicates the percentage of keyword search results for which a site appears in exactly the same position in both mobile and desktop search results. It allows users to see at a glance how the performance differs depending on the device.

While brands and agencies can set targets for the mobile and desktop visibility scores they want to achieve, the tool also enables users to see how a Web site performs in mobile search results for specific keywords, including local results for more than 800 city-search engine-user agent combinations worldwide. It help to identify problems and potential areas for optimization and can use the software to set and track progress against search performance goals such as rankings for specific keywords and also conversions by integrating analytics.

Searchmetrics' search visibility measures the paid and organic ranking of millions of keywords weekly. It calculates the desktop and mobile scores among others based on the number of times a domain appears in the search engine results pages (SERPs) across the keyword set within desktop and mobile searches. Its prominence within those SERPs, a higher ranking equates to a higher visibility score. The competitiveness of the keyword higher search volumes equate to a higher visibility score, per the company.