How to measure the value of SEO in three simple steps
If you are accomplishing sustainable and successful digital marketing results, justifying the vital role that SEO plays shouldn’t be difficult and doesn’t require a repertoire of smoke and mirrors. There are many reasons why failure occurs, however, the most common pitfalls are easily avoided. Read all about how to sidestep these issues and you will be standing out from the crowd in no time.
Issue 1 – Losing focus on what matters
Incomprehensible data tables, meaningless metrics, delivered under the guise of reporting or even worse, “insights”, are at the very heart of this problem. It’s all too easy to get lost in the complexity and granularity of SEO and the tools and platforms available to us, even for those working client side.
SEO is primarily a marketing lever that exists to drive positive change for the business it supports. Ranking tasks according to their impact on business objectives not only takes care of prioritisation, but also positively impacts performance.
Issue 2 – Bamboozling, buzzwords and bullshit aren’t the answer
C-level execs and budget owners don’t have the time to fully understand the ins and outs of the organic landscape, bust this week’s jargon, or trawl through hundreds of keyword rankings. If your reporting fails to tell a concise and meaningful story that clearly correlates efforts with business objectives, you’re going to have a tough time justifying your existence to yourself, never mind senior management.
Issue 3 – Failing to project what success looks like
The bigger and shinier a campaign, the easier it is to lose focus of what you are trying to achieve and the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that matter. Ensuring success metrics are defined at the inception stage is a great way to catch or tweak “awesome” ideas that are likely to deliver not so awesome results that no amount of polishing or rolling in glitter will ever recover.
Issue 4 – Living in the past
Obsessing over rankings, position spreads, links, PageRank, Domain Authority, single click attribution – to name but a few – is an unhealthy and dangerous approach to SEO. Ranking number one for your favourite keyword isn’t a KPI, never was and never will be. If keeping ahead of the curve is the name of the game, looking for it in the past isn’t the solution.
How to kill 4 metaphoric birds with 3 data driven stones
Step 1: Build your measurement framework
Senior stakeholders should be interviewed in order to understand the high level business objectives. Next, determine the goals that will help contribute towards objectives. Move on to define the KPIs and targets that will represent what success looks like against these goals. Finally, document all relevant supporting metrics that need to be tracked to effectively optimise and track granular campaign performance. Ban activities that don’t positively impact the framework and drop metrics that don’t map to business objectives.
Step2: Assess your maturity level
Reviewing the maturity of a business for the purposes of SEO ensures that the appropriate strategy and tactics are implemented at the right time. This enables businesses to work towards reaching optimum performance.
Maturity should be evaluated based on a number of critical SEO components and compared with competitors, or predefined maturity levels, to establish a benchmark. Communicating the routes to the next level of maturity, the benefits of getting there and the tactics involved should now form a structured and focused strategy discussion.
Step 3: Report effectively & generate actionable insight
Effective reporting should demonstrate value concisely, create accountability, provide actionable insight and tell a meaningful story. Fail to prepare your reports in this way and prepare to fail! Aligning reporting and analytics implementation with your measurement framework not only ensures you are collecting the critical data points, but also tells a data story; illustrate how your business objectives are progressing, measure success against your KPIs and display correlation trends with supporting metrics.
We work in a complex and ever changing industry, where it’s easy to fall foul of hundreds of pitfalls. However, keeping things simple, adhering to process and ensuring business objectives are at the heart of everything you do should help you on the quest for digital enlightenment.
Nick Barratt, Head of Insight, Caliber
Tel: 0207 841 9100
Email: hello@caliberi.com
Web: www.caliberi.com
Twitter: @caliberi