[With all the techie-blather and woo-woo marketspeak going around, it’s easy to get caught up in measurements like “I got 87,000 tweets!” and overlook basics like, “Are sales improved?” This article from Forbes, by CEO Joshua Steimle, brings the Search Engine Optimization discussion back to the basics that energize your company’s financial health.]
“SEO: Focus On The Only Metric That Matters”
A potential client recently expressed concern that the stats for my SEO firm’s website were trending lower on SEMrush, an online tool that provides insightful data related to search engine optimization. This seems like an opportune time to write about a topic I’ve been researching ever since I started doing SEO 10 years ago–which metrics matter and why.
Measuring Seo Profitability Can Be Tricky
Rankings
Let’s slay this dragon first. Search engine rank is the metric focused on more widely than any other, and yet in only rare cases is it the metric that matters most. There is certainly something emotionally appealing about ranking #1 for your most desired keyword, but a #1 ranking by itself doesn’t pay employees or contribute to your retirement fund. Rankings are certainly a valuable metric, but they are worthless unless they lead directly to other metrics that truly matter. And that leads us to …
Backlinks
Backlinks, also known as incoming links, are a valuable metric, inasmuch as it’s an important part of Google’s algorithm for ranking websites. A website with higher quality incoming links will rank higher than a website with lower quality incoming links. But incoming links are a means to an end, not the ultimate goal. And quality trumps quantity. A single link from a site like Forbes.com, can be worth hundreds of links from smaller, lesser known sites.
Note: The one time backlinks should attract almost undivided attention is when your website has bad backlinks that need to be cleaned up, as I covered in my last post.
Traffic
The number of visitors coming to your website is another valuable metric, but like rankings can sometimes draw more attention than it should.
Analyzing the total number of visitors can be especially misleading. However, analyzing traffic can be valuable as you see what keywords are bringing in traffic, what pages are bringing in traffic, and delve into other details.
Bounce rate
When someone comes to your website and then quickly leaves, that’s called a bounce. It’s sort of like when you call the wrong phone number and only realize it after you ask to talk to Jim Bob and the person on the other end of the line tells you there’s no one there by that name. The number of visitors who bounce from your website vs. the number who stay for longer is your bounce rate.
Many people think a low bounce rate is good, but this isn’t always the case. If someone comes to your website and is able to quickly find what they want, rather than spending a lot of time searching on your site for the information they want, then a bounce in this case would be a good thing. What we don’t want is people bouncing because they think, based on what they see in the search engine results, that they’re going to find something on your site that they ultimately cannot find.
Conversions
When a visitor comes to your website and does what you want them to do, that’s a conversion.
If you run an ecommerce site, the moment a visitor buys something that’s a conversion. If you run a website for a law firm a conversion wouldn’t be an online sale, but might rather be getting a visitor to fill out an online form requesting more information. If you’re an architect it might be getting a visitor to your website to pick up the phone and call the number they found on your site.
Conversions are a much more valuable metric than rankings, backlinks, and traffic, and your website should be designed in such a way as to encourage conversions.
Profit
Even conversions don’t tell the whole story when it comes to metrics, but money does, and especially money defined as profit. What if by focusing my website and SEO efforts on treadmills I can only sell 10 treadmills per month, but I can sell 1,000 pairs of shoes if I focus on those? The point of such questions is to show that rankings, backlinks, traffic, and even conversions don’t matter, unless they lead to increased profits. For my imaginary triathlon store I might be ok losing rankings related to running shoes if this happens because I’m focusing on high-end treadmills, and thereby increasing my overall profits as a result.
If you’re a business owner working with an SEO firm, what does this mean? It means you should be making every effort to tie your SEO efforts to profits. If you can’t tell if your SEO efforts are generating more profits than you would have otherwise had, how do you know if what you’re spending on SEO is worth it?
Sometimes this kind of analysis is easy. If you hire an SEO firm and over the next six months your sales volume quadruples, and you’re not doing anything else that can explain the jump in sales, then you might conclude without too much effort that SEO is what made the difference. But for most businesses it’s more difficult to track the results of SEO. This is why it can be tempting to fall back on rankings or traffic as effective metrics. But if those are the metrics you choose to focus on, make sure it’s only after you find you have no other option.
[The full and unedited article has more factoids and illustrations, and for those interested, you’ll find it here — “SEO: Focus on the Only Metric that Matters“]
