Welcome back. In this lesson, we'll start in on common metrics to use. There are so many to consider in the world of SEO and online marketing that there's no single metric or one size fits all way to determine what to use. As you speak to different teams, that will also impact what metrics you use. There are ways to report to your clients which are different from what your peers may be interested in, or executives, or business owners. We will also touch on building a marketing dashboard and an executive summary presentation. In this lesson, you'll learn about the metrics that matter most for you, describe what a key performance indicator is and how to make use of it in your business, and which metrics can be used with stakeholders, clients, and with executives. Let's look at metrics data analysis or key performance indicators. The KPI Institute are thought leaders on key performance indicators for any type of business. I recommend them especially if data analysis is new to you. KPIs are a measurable expression of achievement or desired result level in an area relevant to a particular activity. The KPI Institute developed a basic framework of key performance indicator standards, falling into three types. Number 1, the value of something typically expressed in a revenue amount or currency. Number 2, a number of something. How many ranking keywords, index pages, or directives you compare progress against. Number 3, looking at percentages. Have we seen an increase in X by a certain Y percentage? This simple standards provide tremendous flexibility in how you might show what common metrics matter to your teams. Here's a checklist for determining metrics. Determine what your VIPs consider important. What does that most important person you work with say, is most important? This may be a CEO, a director of marketing, somebody in sales, or your boss. Ask that person what KPIs determine success. Ask other stake holders and teams. They may not be direct recipients of the SEO benefit, but understanding their perspective can help you see other ways you could show the data. Last, look at the data. What data can you access? How can you communicate your adherence and commitment to the shared strategy using that data? Let's consider the lean startup methodology. It says metric should be, Number 1, actionable. Can you take action to improve your work? Number 2, accessible. Can everyone understand and access the metric? Number 3, auditable. Does your analytics package enable you to audit and receive reliable data? Appealing. Does it demonstrate appeal by contributing to sales and revenue? For business to business, that may be a qualified lead, or webinar, or a web subscriber who's getting your email newsletter. For business to consumer, this is a customer or e-commerce purchase. For local, it might be an inquiry like a filled out form or a phone call. You can't track every marketing KPI but these are useful metrics for different types of businesses to consider. Determine useful metrics with a step-by-step approach. First, clarify objectives. Determine your primary KPI or metric most directly related to your goal. Then consider secondary performance indicators. Use these to determine what to report out on. It's vital to get buy-in on your primary and secondary metrics. Share with your client. Here's what I'm planning to report out on, will this data be of value to you? Then commit to monitor these on a regular basis. Then you can confidently use these metrics to make decisions or draw conclusions. In the digital marketing age, you want measurable metrics that are possible and available. You need to measure data that's most evidential for success. Every digital marketing tool has some means of measuring success made available for those metrics. These separate into: traffic generation, conversion, and revenue metrics. Let's walk through these in more detail. Traffic generation speaks for itself. This applies to any sort of digital marketing, not unique to SEO. You might consider overall site traffic, traffic sources, what's coming from mobile, what's the click-through rate. If you're working with paid, maybe cost-per-click as well. Consider metrics impacting SEO, but also paid search and website metrics. Consider conversion metrics, especially valuable in an e-commerce environment where you want to look at incoming traffic and how that converts to business leads or sales. You'd measure things related to conversion rates, cost per lead, bounce rate, average page views per visit, and average cost. If you're coming from a paid perspective, the average time on site or the cost-per-click can also be very valuable. Revenue metrics are important to show if a particular campaign is profitable, so you can make adjustments on how to improve. Here you want to look at return on investment. You base an SEO return on investment on labor, tools, the outlay of expenses. But in order to associate this with the cost of acquiring a customer, you must take into account all marketing, advertising, and salary costs. Then you associate that with how many new paying customers, or new leads are coming in. I see two types of ROI worth mentioning. Anticipated ROI; this is a forecast like when you're pitching a new client or working on a brand new initiative. It's involves taking an educated guess based on how you might imagine or forecast work leading to future results. The other is, actual ROI; current returns you're reporting on. Base actual ROI calculations of SEO on the expense relative to the value or income of revenues received. Then compare anticipated versus actual results. Our next lesson will continue this discussion of important metrics by covering five categories of natural search metrics. With SEO, there are categories for natural search metrics. One, indexation. Two, backlinks. Three, rankings. Four, traffic. Five, revenue. I'll walk through each of these in more detail. First, indexation metrics are a critical category. Everything on the web is vast. Search engines are crawling and indexing that vast amount of content but only a subset of the indexed and crawled content displays in search results. The more the pages of your domain are indexed, the more valuable it will be in the search engine result pages. If you don't index your pages, you will have zero chance of ranking in the engines. However, more indexation isn't necessarily better. That could indicate duplicate content or identical pages. Therefore, you must understand your indexation metrics and learn how to show those to stakeholders. Not every client or business objective will tie to indexation metrics. Next is backlink metrics. Measuring backlinks shows the number of links pointing to various pages across a site. Generally, the more external links pointing to your site, the higher it will rank in natural search. You measure backlinks with various tools depending on the platform you're using and what you're trying to show. This is where backlink metrics become tricky because they are sometimes difficult to influence. So you should think about backlink metrics in the context of everything else you're trying to do. Social metrics can be part of this, like Facebook likes, Twitter shares, but remain cognizant that backlink metrics may not be as actionable as other metrics. Next is ranking. I generally recommend staying away from ranking metrics if possible. But there are many circumstances in which clients want to see them. Why stay away from them? Number 1, because they're personalized. Each individual will see slightly different results. Number 2, you may have a blended search result that affects the individual rankings. Therefore, no two people are likely to get the same ranking result even if they're working in the same vicinity and do similar searches. Three, because with Google, keyword visibility for ranking is harder to access due to the Google Map provided changed from a few years back. These are available in the Google Search Console and many of the dashboards available but at times ranking metrics are hard to get at. Most importantly though, if you put ranking metrics as your first KPI, gives the wrong signal to the business. It indicates that you're focused on increasing rank, above those goals that matter most for your VIPs like revenue. Instead, communicate value further down the objectives by reporting on metrics that tie to increased revenue. The closer you can tie traffic and SEO performance to revenue the better. In the B2B world, it might be a lead. In the local space, it might be a phone inquiry, or eCommerce purchase. Look also for micro metrics or intermediate metrics leading up to the top goal of revenue. For example, a lead isn't direct revenue but it's an indication you're moving in the right direction. That's how you can get as close to the revenue line with the data you share even if you may not be able to capture the direct impact on revenue from SEO. Here are a few more metrics to consider. Using Search Console, you would look at top keywords driving traffic across visits or conversions. You could then provide ranking data and show keywords that drive traffic to visits or conversions. Number 2, you can look at the search engine share of referring visits. Ask what percentage SEO is driving relative to overall site performance. If you were at seven percent last year but 10 percent this year and your overall website access has stated a similar pattern, this shows that SEO performance is increasing. Look at how many pages are actually receiving visits from search engines. You may find that much of your content receives very few or zero pages from search visits over a week interval. By looking at it this way, you can better understand what emphasis you want to put on that content. Number 4, look at conversion rate by search query term. Where are you most efficient? Obviously, brand terms for your particular company should convert at the highest conversion rate. However, using data to show where your most efficient and keyword alignment can emphasize those keywords you want to optimize. Here's another way to think about this. If you pulled data that shows only 20 percent of your keywords convert at a conversion rate above a certain threshold, you should put more emphasis on those keywords to make sure those pages convert well. However, when you rank keywords that don't convert onto the site, you have significant work to do. That's when you need to do conversion optimization work to ensure that those particular URLs are performing as well as possible. Number 5, you may also want to look at the number of pages receiving at least one visit from search engines and those that are not consider whether there's still value in having them on your site. Let's think about metrics in one other way. Who is receiving it? When you're sharing metrics with executives, your sharing data, you're probably interested in your competitive visibility score. Use some of the platforms covered earlier to demonstrate how you compare to competitors and show search visibility, executives may be interested in seasonality. Hey, we did this campaign. What's the impact on how we're doing now based on a summer or holiday time period? What are our top pages? What is obvious or not obvious? VIPs may look at data and think they understand it when you can provide key insights to reveal something that is not as obvious as they thought. This is where you might present SEO data to help inform a larger business strategies such as translating additional pages for a particular country. One level down from executives you may not regular interface with comes those who do the work. Those teams you depend on to implement your SEO recommendations. They'll have different interests such as brand versus non-brand. How many non-brand terms are we ranking for or do we have visibility for? What are the top pages that drive the most traffic? Maybe the top 10 or 20 pages for a particular product that are most visible. In the IT or web production space they might consider 404 or site errors or where you have issues in the search engine results themselves. For example, duplicate title tags or data you could pull from the Google Search Console. Thinking about different types of metrics you share with various teams is a good way to ensure that your data becomes meaningful and insightful to different audiences.
