I find myself answering many of the same questions from new clients about ways to measure SEO. My answers generally fall into one of two categories:
Why basic/stock SEO metrics are not good KPIs and how to improve them. What (more advanced) metrics should we establish to determine real business impact.
This article will address the first category and show how to apply an advanced approach to making basic SEO KPIs much more effective indicators of success. The KPIs I will discuss include:
Traffic (Visits) RankingConversionsLinks
Let’s get started.
1. Traffic
Measuring week-to-week SEO traffic is as basic as it gets, and there are nuances missing that can be cleared up with a couple of tweaks.
First, use Search Console to split your traffic into Mark i not branded buckets
There is a simple reason for this: brand traffic is generally no an SEO feature. Instead, it is influenced by awareness campaigns such as billboards, CTV (or linear TV) ads, programmatic campaigns, PR and more. Brand search, in short, is a function of your overall marketing portfolio.
Unbranded search is where SEOs can shine, especially when you identify keywords at the most important stages of your funnel and prioritize them for potential impact. This often works as the intent level.
Educational keywords (eg “SEO best practices”) roughly equate to top of the funnel and more transactional keywords (eg “best SEO agency for B2B”) align with the bottom of the funnel.
Second, remember that seasonality affects SEO like any other channel.
For this reason, it is crucial to set up windows month-to-month, quarter-to-quarter and year-to-year. I prefer QoQ and YoY to shorter comparisons.
Large SEO changes, whether forced by an algorithm change or driven internally, require longer measurement cycles to demonstrate real change.
2. Ranking
Relying on point-in-time screenshots of your current keyword rankings will give you a limited idea of the overall success of your campaign.
Instead, consider these factors:
How are your target keywords ranking over time (MoM, QoQ, YoY)? How are individual pages ranked? Are you achieving real milestones? What are your trends?
Assessing rankings over time will show you progress in potential calendar events and seasonal changes.
Instead of looking at a combined portfolio that affects a keyword, which provides less useful information, look at individual pages using Google Search Console. This allows you to isolate which specific properties affect the ranking of a single keyword.
On the subject of milestones, not all rank changes are created equal. You can move up 50 spots from 61 to 11, but that may have less impact than moving up a single notch from the top spot on page 2 of the SERPs to the bottom spot on page 1.
Finally, drill down to see the actual impression and click deltas driving rank changes. This also incorporates external trends. For example, consider that you could have seen a huge increase in impressions and clicks for “video conferencing software” in March 2020 without any change in your ranking for that keyword.
The more activity around the keyword, the more competitive it will be, and the more potential impact it will have on your portfolio.
3. Conversions
The 1.0 way to measure acquisition is to aggregate last-click conversions from organic search. The addition of GA4, which uses a multi-channel, data-driven model with a 30-day lookback window for acquisition, will give you a more nuanced view of credit attributed for conversions.
We could add many more layers here, including measuring the effects of SEO on the acquisition costs of other channels.
For this post, which aims to help you get more meaning out of relatively basic KPIs, we talk about creating different conversion events that align with the intent level of the keywords you’re targeting (eg, “ download guide” for educational keywords or “book a demo” for transactional ones).
Your report might look like this:
Different conversion events, when used strategically with back-end CRM data, will have different values.
When you use a variety of conversion events that strategically align with your keywords, you should see an increase in your conversion rate i get a more accurate picture of the value these keywords generate.
4. Links
Links are important. They are still a ranking factor and can help measure the impact of your content.
That said, the amount of links is a shallow metric. Links are simply a means to an end.
The overall goal of SEO is to drive meaningful traffic and acquisition. Focusing on downstream KPIs without incorporating them into business impact (which is admittedly more complex) will do little to move the needle in significant ways.
If you focus on counting links, you incentivize yourself to pursue more links. the incentive it should be a real impact.
Counting will give you a quantitative bias and change the way you run your SEO program. If you focus on business drivers, you will be incentivized deliver value, not volume.
Volume is easy. Value is more difficult.
Prove the value of SEO with better metrics
For the most part, these are fairly easy adjustments to make and will help you paint a much clearer picture of the value you’re generating with your SEO program and how it’s trending over time.
In my next post, I’ll show how to take measurement to the next level by helping you understand how SEO affects your overall marketing efforts relative to other channels.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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About the author
Adam Tanguay is head of SEO and content at Jordan Digital Marketingwhich he joined in February 2019. Previously Head of Marketing at Webflow and Head of Organic Growth at Weebly, Adam has developed successful growth programs with a combination of content strategy, copywriting, technical expertise and analytical acumen in a variety of organic channels.
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