Today’s post is inspired by a brilliant question that came up recently in Q&A. The question was based on targets and objective setting for SEO’s and it went something like this:
"What metrics should an SEO’s monthly objectives be based on?"
Having spent a good portion of my SEO career managing SEO teams in-house, this question really reminded me how interesting the topic of organisational SEO can be, and how underserved it is on all but a few SEO industry blogs. In this in-house SEO focused post, let’s take a look at general KPIs for people and teams who do SEO.
Search Engine Visibility (Rankings)
While the value of measuring individual search engine rankings is a topic under frequent debate in our community, achieving consistently high rankings for target keywords is ultimately the reason we’re all doing SEO. In competitive markets, particularly, there will be key phrases that SEO teams will be expected to show progress towards gaining rankings for. Making search engine visibility a targeted metric provides a way for the SEO team to focus on the overall performance of the site in question. There are, however, two problems to solve with search engine visibility as a metric, the measurement of rankings and choice of keywords to be monitored.
In my previous in-house role we developed a keyword selection methodology based on data from Hitwise UK, our own analytics platform and the Google Keyword Tool. As travel SEO’s, we knew that demand would change seasonally for certain destinations and their corresponding keywords. Using a little historical knowledge of our industry and plenty of data, we would always have a clear idea of seasonal demand for the top 200 industry terms.
Measuring rankings on a daily basis allowed us to calculate a percentage based visibility score. What was really fascinating about the whole process was that because the keyword selection methodology remained consistent over a long period of time, we were able to compare visibility scores in year on year increments. As the activities of the SEO team continued to succeed, overall visibility increased from around 60% to 85% over a few years.
If you’re interested in developing a similar methodology, you could consider using Advanced Web Ranking to capture rankings data and calculate the visibility score. The beauty of having a search engine visibility score as a KPI is that the metric acts as a key driver for all SEO based activity. Ultimately, as an SEO Manager you have to evaluate how all of your actions contribute to improved visibility, and therefore traffic.
Search Engine Traffic
Many companies in competitive niches will make use of models to predict traffic levels for the coming year. If you’re lucky, a business analyst will take care of the production of the model itself, leaning on your SEO expertise to help predict how forthcoming trends and planned initiatives may impact overall traffic levels on the site. Your role, as an SEO Manager or in-house SEO is to achieve those traffic levels through maintaining and growing search engine visibility, deploying technical SEO enhancements to grow all important traffic in the long tail and of course, building links!
Link Building
There’s no doubt that link building is critical to search engine visibility and traffic levels on your site, so it might make sense to create volume targets for a link builder. Unfortunately, deciding exactly how many links a link builder can build is a complex and frequently restrictive process because output depends on the person, the market and the method of link acquisition chosen.
In my last in-house role, I found that creating small, seasonal link building projects for my team based on a few key phrases per person worked extremely well. Giving your link builders the creative freedom to design their own strategies based on their own projects and the resources available to them can yield far more valuable results in the long term. The KPI, therefore, may be measured on our new friend search engine visibility on the terms selected by the link building project.
Conversion
Getting the opportunity to have an input on your site’s conversion rate is a wonderful opportunity to learn a new skill, or improve an existing one! A word of caution, though – only sign up for KPI’s that you can control or heavily influence. In the case of conversion you’ll need a lot of business wide buy in and commitment to conversion rate optimisation projects. If you don’t have the tools or support for that, conversion might not be a great primary KPI to be assigned.
Personal Development Goals
As a search engine optimisation practitioner, you’ll have spent a fair amount of time learning your trade and perfecting your skills. When you’re managing an SEO team, don’t forget that it’s a good thing to assign some personal development time for each of your staff. I used to set a target of one presentation a quarter on a subject of choice (SEO related, of course). I still think the personal development targets are the best KPI’s of all. If you’re learning, you’re having fun.
Of course, every organisation is slightly different and you may have different KPI’s to the ones above. Tell us about them in the comments below!
This is a post by Richard Baxter, Founder and SEO Consultant at SEOgadget.co.uk - a niche UK SEO Agency specialising in helping people and organisations succeed in search. Follow him on Twitter and Google Buzz.
Fantastic topic, and one that doesn't get discussed enough imo.
With regards to conversion rate, perhaps there is a case for SEOs to ensure the traffic they drive via the natural SERPs still convert at the benchmark level or better.
By this I mean that if we, as SEOs, are driving unqualified traffic from badly chosen target keywords, then we're not doing our job properly.
If conversion rate steadily declines on just natural search traffic, but not across other channels, then the keyword strategy probably needs revising.
On the other hand, if natural traffic CR% steadily increases, then we should definitely take the credit for understanding the client's customers and relevant keywords.
A couple more thoughts!...
Incremental traffic, orders and revenue should really be measured against seasonality in order to properly gauge performance.
Visibility - although just a mid-step to real KPIs - is often at the forefront of the client's mind simply because it's so... well... visible. Marketing departments need to be able to communicate their successes to the rest of the company, and visibility is usually the most demonstrable and quick way to do this.
You're spot on with:
"If conversion rate steadily declines on just natural search traffic, but not across other channels, then the keyword strategy probably needs revising."
Couldn't agree more on that!
yap,I Agree it !
Yes! The best part is to see what comes out of personal development.
All of our employees have their own blogs, and it's great to see their voices come through there. They also seem to come up with brilliant link building strategies when they are doing it for things they believe in.
Richard i love it just for the fact that the final point is personal development! If you ever want to move on and also improve the standards of search within an organisation you need to look at personal development.
Is there a metric around % of time wasted on generating reports that did not have a purpose and won't ever be read :)
Sure - if you're writing an SEO KPI's / Objectives document for one of your team, definitely allow some personal development time. Just make sure you get the presentation delivered on time :-)
Nice Post.
I do have 1 comment though. If you monitor google.com results through caphyon when you are in UK (or any other country outside USA) it will give completely wrong results as it shows you results for google.com for people based in the UK and not in the USA...
Therefore i do not trust results from installed programs like caphyon when checking results for keywords outside your origin country...
Better check this differently :)
The problem is not the Advanced Web Ranking software, it the localized data centers. The data centers provide different results depending on the geographic location. This problem can be fixed in Advanced Web Ranking in two ways:
1) Using the Google AdWords Preview tool. With this tool you can define a location (anywhere around the globe), and then Advanced Web Ranking uses that profile to retrieve results from Google Adwords Preview page, which are practically the same results users see from that location.
2) You can use a local proxy server(localized in the geographic area you are targeting) that Advanced Web Ranking can connect trough, and receive results from the regular Google search engine.
Either way, you'll be able to get accurate results from any location, for any location around the world.
Hello Philip,
For point 1, does it mean that you set up as a search engine "Google Adwords (USA)" instead of Google in AWR settings?
Thanks!
While our goals are to drive relevant traffic I agree that using conversions as a KPI is a little unfair unless you have control over the landing page optimization. However, while it maybe unfair to judge your efforts based on conversions you still need to be aware of your conversion rates. If you're driving relevant traffic to a website and the traffic is spending a high time on page but not converting its time to speak up about landing page optimization or work with the people who make those decisions.
In addition I like to use a marketing opportunity calculation to determine how effective our SEO efforts are thus the less opportunity to drive more traffic to the website because you're already in position #1 the better job your doing. So if your average position for 15 of your top keywords on Google is say 20 then you have lots of opportunity if its 3 the opportunity is less.
Love the quarterly presentation idea; I am not sure how something so simple was never thought of by our management team. THANKS!
Nice summary Richard. Really nicely done article :)
It's an interesting question. We report things like SERPS, social media metrics, traffic and anything else that we think is noteworthy in a monthly report, but our focus is on the bottom line in any project.
The client is paying you, and expecting a return. We therefore try hard to measure and report ROI. Of course there are challenges in this, particularly with new projects where, for example, sales naturally increase seasonally and this needs to be factored out of your ROI calculation.
However, we like to work over the long term with a small number of clients, and so can make better assessments of ROI, and in some cases work for a percentage of sales. This creates a healthy focus on a tangible metric!
Nice article richard. Nice recap of the important Metrics :)
I believe everything lies beneath conversion. Everything you do in optimization is to get some good conversion rate :)
Conversion rate as KPI is definately the Holy Grail of SEO. If you can pull it off you're pretty much golden, but sometimes trying to make it work can drive you batty.
Excellent post Rich :)
I'd add in a little something on conversion - aside from CRO (which is obviously great to get involved in and really important); I think it's also important use conversions (either volume or % rates) via organic search as a metric - just to ensure efforts are being spent on those keywords that convert.
Hey Hannh - yes very good point. SEO channel conversion it is.
Conversion's a tough one. Rather than a specific target (eg: 40%), setting an objective around demonstrating an overall increase can sometimes work too.
Nice Post! Especially when I've just had my KPI's reviewed for the next FY!
One KPI I think that could be added is the actual defining of a keyword strategy, a lot of the time that is left up to me as an SEO, as management doesn't always think outside of their "my keyword = my business name" box.
If you choose keywords that actually convert to more traffic, then surely you should be measured on those?
This is of course if you are the one defining the keyword strategy in the first place.
Great post! It's always good to realize there are goals to pursue and paths to follow during our day-to-day work.
I usually tend opting for the conversion goals, since they generally have a whole bunch of variables in them, but after reading this post I guess it might make sense to split that out a little more, also to see where a process hits the rocks!
Hi
This blog is very good for seo realated pursons .It gives a great overview in seo field.
It's an interesting topic for sure, and I hope there will be more posts like this in the future!
Thanks for giving good knowledage
Search engine visibility is a tough one. It's pretty much a default but due to getting different search results for so many reasons (location, personalisation, different data center, etc etc), can be less than reliable. Clients really need to be educated on data such as search engine referrals, conversion rate, link building and so on...
Thanks for the post Richard - it's fairly similar to the way we do things at our agency as well.
I'm a big fan of using bullet graphs for displaying goal vs. target, as it's really easy for the client to visually understand what's going on with their campaign - assuming you've met with them beforehand and planned out their goals properly.
This gives a great overview and SEO basics lesson. I really like your last part about personal development goals. As a person who has only been in the industry for about a year this last part is very true for improving your SEO skills.
- Casey Removed Link
Great post! A couple of others that I can think of for SEO KPI are the on page stuff such as content creation/generation and site performance. Two such examples could be...
On the content side, you could look at:
X amount of new content / time
On the site performance side you could look at:
Pages Indexed / Frequency of crawl
-ld
personal growth is important as there's always something new or changing and having a stage to share it with your co-workers in an open presentation / discussion can be enlightening.
Nice Post.
With regards to the Search Engine Visibility part, how were you taking into account the different data centers and/or regions of the world? Or were you just focusing on the UK portion?
My thought would be that each region/area would need to be assessed individually and then a cumulative average be made about overall visibility compared to geographically specific visibility.
In that particular example, visibility was tracked inside the target region via a local office / proxy.
We never worked out a cumulative average although that's an interesting idea!
Really interesting and insightful post. I personally love the Personal Development section as well. At times we get so caught up focusing on traffic, CRO and link building we forget to focus on 'Me' and further development. And that part about quarterly SEO presentations, I think that is a great idea.
I think another KPI one could use is Social Media and Brand Awareness. I guess it also depends on the type of niche though. If it is a relatively common niche then I believe Social Media and Blogging would be a good measure for the KPI. It would take into consideration time spent on the blog, number of followers, subscribers and things like that. But like I said, I think this type of KPI would only be applicable for certain companies.
Thank you for sharing some of your experiences, Richard.
Although conversion rate is the final step it's usually hard to use that as a KPI for an SEO team. The SEO team often think its an unfair metric as they don't tweak the site themselves and, thus, feel it is too arbitrary a metric.
I often used keyword visibility on keywords selected by senior management. They do a lot of keyword monitoring already, and see SEO as a quest for better rankings. This is the metric everyone not too SEO-savvy use anyway so the SEO team can as well.
It might be the lazy KPI, but it's often easier to use this than it is to try to educte everyone else... Kinda sad when I come to think about it...
Right, conversion is more challenging in the agency model where you don't control other aspects.
Certainly not an ideal and it would be micro-level, but if you were in a situation where a client was pushing to use that as a key metric, I might want to factor in something around time-on-page in addition.
Logic here is that if the traffic is correctly aligned enough to be interested, they'll spend more time on the page than purely irrelevant traffic that just spikes the traffic numbers.
At least this way there is more to consider than pure conversion, which could be good in the cases where the client's product/service is on target with the traffic but is mispriced, not compelling enough to close, or perhaps there are technical issues with the conversion process (lead gen form failures, cart abandonment, etc.).
Definitely a fantastic source of information.
Thanks for pointing out Advanced Web Ranking! I'm using another solution to track my rankings at the moment, but I may consider using this software, when I look at all its features.
I can just dream of the day I'll get some linkbuilders under my supervision...! :)
Meanwhile, thanks Richard!
I like to mix personal development with expanding a client's campaign. Sometimes it's tricky finding the pairing of a new method you want to try out and a client that will benefit from it / agree to it, but if you do find a good match it can really pay off.
Thank you for addressing this issue of managing in house SEO teams. I too manage an SEO team, and it's certainly a challenge setting and maintaining a balance with measurable KPIs and results. I appreciated how you mentioned letting each person work to their strengths and with the resources they have at their disposal as opposed to setting restrictive quotas for link building.
It's an interesting topic for sure, and I hope there will be more posts like this in the future!
Good to hear your perspective.
Before making any radical changes to your campaign make sure you are getting the full picture from your data - if using Analytics make sure your have customised it to attribute conversions to the initial click that brought users to your website.
Is it worth extending the prof development to a YouMoz post a month?
A youMoz post per month - that's a great idea. I actually had one of my team build a blog and present back on how to optimise it - that worked really well.
Hello,
I have a newbie question.
I have sent emails inviting people to create a link to my site, however they add the Anchor text and link the way they want, while I am trying to improve some specific keywords.
In this case I will be asked to improve the rank for those keywords but I won´t be able to deliver as the webmasters decide by themselves what to do.
So I´ll have lots of links to my homepage using my brand name as Anchor text. And in the future as people will learn about my site , they will even give me direct traffic, no more from the webmaster website.
So how can they define my monthly objective metric?
PS.: Sorry for my poor english :)
Great post Richard. Always enjoy your perspective.
While you make convincing points about KPI's, my favorite take away from this is what you mentioned in the end. To wit "I used to set a target of one presentation a quarter on a subject of choice (SEO related, of course)."
Your people must have really missed you when you left the agency.
I hope they do... Guys?
Hi Richard, such a great topic you'r chossen & a Fantastic way of expleation thanks...! [link removed]