Using KPIs within Technical SEO
Written by Edd Wilson, Technical SEO Consultant at Impression
Understanding the return on investment from SEO has been an ongoing topic since I entered the industry ten years ago. However, move forward to 2020, we’re now in a better position than ever when it comes to proving its value.
This could come in various forms - whether that’s understanding revenue through organic search, the quality of leads or the role that organic search plays in part of a conversion journey.
And, while there may be more trust in SEO in terms providing ROI in recent years, it will always face the same hesitation that any other marketing channel faces when requesting or signing off budget, and rightly so. In order to determine if a project is successful, key performance indicators such as revenue/conversions and organic traffic are critical metrics to present to stakeholders. However, there is so much more to look at when you dive a little deeper.
As a Technical SEO consultant, I need to ensure that my changes are helping to meet and exceed these KPIs but I also know not all structural changes will deliver performance improvements overnight. Those with a basic understanding of SEO will know it’s not an investment that delivers results instantly, but I believe within Technical SEO that we can understand if the changes made are helping a site move in the right direction.
Conversions and traffic should always be the end goal, but I would like to introduce KPIs and metrics within Technical SEO that could help provide visibility and assurance on how progress is being made.
Before I run through some the KPIs within Technical SEO, I would like to highlight initial objectives that should help with getting easier sign off.
User Centric Technical SEO
From a Technical SEO perspective, most of the focus will be on ensuring search engine robots are able to crawl and index the website efficiently. While that's an important aspect, a huge focus should also be on structuring and implementing changes that directly impact the user.
User centric Technical SEO can include anything from the understanding of how many users are landing on 404s, to delivering thin results or content to the user which is impacting conversion rate. Highlighting Technical SEO flaws that impact user experience will help support your ideas and requests for sign off but also to provide more value to the website in the long term. You can view more examples of this approach by watching my talk for BrightonSEO in June 2020.
Indexed Pages & Excluded Pages
Referring to Google’s Search Console is usually the best way to understand your website’s coverage. This allows you to understand your indexed pages whilst also viewing pages that are excluded due to directives or potential issues.
Using the Indexed pages and Excluded pages can also be a great way to ensure implementation of Technical SEO tasks are going to be making a positive impact, for example;
For a website suffering with the index coverage vs the actual website size, you could potentially be looking into improving the internal linking structure of the website to ensure Googlebot and search engines are able to crawl and index these pages. This will then hopefully lead to improving the amount of indexed pages your website has.
With excluded pages, you may have identified canonical issues or Google choosing not to index certain pages due to them being thin/low quality. You might look to either block these pages which would increase the excluded coverage or improve upon the signals of these pages which would look to reduce the excluded and improve the indexed.
Whilst highlighting the potential impact for traffic for the new pages being discovered or fixing low quality issues, I would highlight the initial KPIs of the project which should focus on improving the amount of indexed or excluded pages. Once these numbers start to shift, your client or internal contact can be confident that the project is moving in the right direction.
Crawling focus
Understanding how search engine robots crawl your website is a great way to analyse how efficient they are being. This can be done by obtaining a website’s server logs and using a log file analyser to identify crawling behaviours.
Log file analysis can often highlight areas across your website that aren’t being crawled often which have regularly updated information or areas that are crawled often which aren’t important user facing pages. This analysis can usually lead to making technical changes across your website which would improve the amount of bot hits to a certain page or area of your website.
If your website was faced with a relevant issue related to crawl efficiency, an initial KPI for this area would be to improve the amount of search engine robot events on pages/areas that are important whilst decreasing the events on pages which aren’t.
Website Structure - Highlighting Technical SEO improvements
Using crawling software is a great way to understand how websites are structured and identify issues that need to be addressed. We also use crawling software to understand how progress is being made through changes being implemented, whilst progress can be reported internally on these tools. Google Data Studio is a great way to visualise your efforts and progress whilst being easily accessible for stakeholders.
Below I have created two great examples of Google Data Studio dashboards for crawling software
How to build a Technical SEO dashboard (for Deepcrawl) by Petar Jovetic at Impression
Screaming Frog Analyzer - by @Datastudiohacks
Depending on your choice of crawling software, these are two great examples of showcasing your current crawling/indexing data whilst aiming to highlight the progress being made across these data points.
Summary
Our Technical SEO objectives will always be to ensure that our changes are geared to improving traffic and conversions, however, I believe we need to showcase and educate stakeholders on short term KPIs and owned goals within Technical SEO which can highlight improvements being made that will eventually lead to those major KPIs.