Conversions and SEO tracking go far beyond a direct sale or a lead in your pipeline.
They can be:
Newsletter and SMS subscribers that convert to sales. Recovery campaigns where customers have not yet purchased or rediscovered you. Driving job seekers to job listing pages, which lowers the costs of recruiting new employees.
If you only focus on direct conversions, you’re missing the whole picture of your impact on the business.
Here are some examples of metrics you may not be using, but could be a great way to show your true value as an SEO to your organization.
1. CPM Income
If you’ve worked on news sites, are a blogger, or have produced video content, then you know how important CPM and CPC revenue is.
While it’s important to get your eyes on the site or channel, there could be bigger wins. Increasing pageviews per visitor is the first.
And that’s an easy win for SEOs that makes your job easier if you don’t have to go after the big phrases that are harder to compete with.
Here is an example. Let’s say there is one phrase that brings 1,000 visitors to your site and another that brings 600.
The ad team will want that higher number because that’s more eyeballs and that means more CPM money. But this could be the wrong step.
If the 1,000 visitor term has a pageview rate of 1.25, and the 600 has 2.5 page views and the CPMs are the same, the 600 phrase is the best because it is more profitable.
The phrase term of 1,000 visitors generated 1,250 page views, while the phrase term of 600 generated 1,500.
And if the phrase is less competitive because there is less traffic, it may make your job easier to rank. And don’t stop there. See actual CPMs.
If they both averaged 1.5 page views per visit, look at what the CPM rates are. Maybe the 1,000 phrase has a CPM of $5, but the 600 phrase has a CPM of $8.
That extra $3 adds up. And it can go one level further.
Does your post use affiliate links?
Look to see what the user’s intent is on the page.
Let’s assume the CPMs are equal, giving the 1,000 phrase the edge.
Maybe sentence 1,000 is entertaining or a fun article to read. This may be why CPM is the big revenue driver.
If the 600 sentence traffic is a “how to” or a shopping guide, or something where the user will need a product or service, there is likely affiliate income on top of it.
Instead of making the decision based on traffic, pageviews and CPMs, talk to your affiliate relationship manager and ask what income comes from affiliate links.
A $5 CPM is nothing when you add eight $20 commissions or 20 $200 commissions. The smaller phrase has more appeal as you earn both CPM and affiliate commission income.
And we can go five layers deeper, but you get the point. This is something we help affiliates in the programs we manage so that both they and our customers can grow.
If publishers are looking at pageviews and CPMs to sell ads and make money, they’re looking for important phrases and not the big picture.
There is much more to do. And don’t forget that visitors to these pages could be converted into email and SMS subscribers for long-term revenue.
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2. Acquisition of candidates
Recruiting talent is expensive and competitive. The job posting needs to get to the right eyes and stand out on the job boards.
But what if you could remove some of the roadblocks and bring candidates directly to the HR team or hiring manager? This is another metric that SEOs overlook.
Look at the Professional Offers page on your website and set up a conversion in your analytics package for requests and submissions.
Then start optimizing the website section. It should be fairly easy to include location-based information if the job is regional, a job posting scheme, and category-based content about your hiring industry.
You can write about marketing jobs in the marketing part of the careers section.
Mention local meetups or communities to be involved with and how your company sponsors and supports employees who actively learn through this.
Increase copy and give candidates a reason to apply as the company supports their career growth.
Tip: If your company is an active member of any of these groups, ask them for a link to the careers section for members looking for jobs.
Now, see how traffic increases or decreases with optimizations and what types of work start to fill more submissions.
Ask recruiters, hiring managers, or the HR team to let you know the quality, then work to fine-tune the pages for more qualified candidates.
Finally, ask hiring teams to check the database of who made it for an interview and how many candidates were hired.
Present this quarterly to your boss or the organization and show how you’ve saved the company money and time so those resources can be focused elsewhere.
By bringing candidates directly to the website, HR doesn’t have to spend as much on job boards.
And by helping HR build a backlog of resumes, it’s easier to find passive candidates once a job opens. This also saves them time and money.
3. Recovery campaigns
As an SEO, we regularly update the content of the web pages and have access to the data. This includes customer service records and product managers.
And as an SEO, you’re part of marketing, which gives you a huge advantage over other employees.
You can combine your product and customer service data, then create an integrated marketing plan for your email ad and social media teams to drive returns more effectively.
Do this:
Talk to customer service and find ways for customers to use the products or when customer service lets them know that the product can be used for more than they thought. Please check with your product managers that these uses can be said publicly. If you get the deal, go to your product pages and spec sheets and add features or functions that customers didn’t know your company offers. Share how often people ask about it with social media announcements and email teams.
Have them try to run recovery campaigns for customers who match the demographics of people who ask and answer, but who haven’t yet converted.
This can also apply to people who haven’t bought in a few years and didn’t know that the product or service has advanced.
If you have exit surveys, see if usage was one of the reasons they left your brand.
And these talking points can be used as “bait emails” to try to get someone who started shopping but never converted.
As a bonus, if these features and services are in demand, you may find a higher conversion rate on your product detail pages.
This can happen when you share relevant uses for your product or service that the consumer might have wanted and didn’t know you offered.
You can then create blog posts and a new content silo to build topic authority and drive traditional SEO conversions.
The conversions that are being overlooked here are the email and bounce sales that came from the SEO work you did and the potential conversion rate increases from the product pages and spec sheets you updated.
Looking at the bigger picture
SEO conversions are more than sales, leads and traffic for CPMs.
Think about how your skill sets can benefit the rest of the company and start measuring the full impact of your role as an SEO.
You may find yourself with more budget for tooling and engineering allocation if you get it right.
The views 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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