There is a short list of difficult-to-answer and, indeed, often unanswered questions that relate to a company’s SEO and business strategy.
We keep a complete and updated list of these questions for our clients but one that I can share is very simple: how do you know that you are hitting your goals in SEO?
This spawns a whole new set of questions, such as:
- What are my goals?
- How do I measure my goals?
- Given high-level goals, how do I break these down into management chunks?
- Once I have these chunks, how do I quantify whether I am hitting sub-goals?
- What measurement is needed for this?
- Do I have the right data streams in place to answer these questions?
And on and on.
SEO represents, by very nature of the search engine market, represents a quasi-measurable fitness landscape. Meaning that, due to factors such as click through rate (CTR) and its relationship to overall visibility, you can determine pretty easily whether or not you’re hitting your goal for a single or small set of keywords.
But once your site is of decent size and you are managing thousands or even hundreds of thousands of keywords, things become much more difficult to measure. This is due to the complexity of the SERP itself and it’s the reason we focus so heavily on SERP monitoring instead of simple rank tracking.
You have to understand the whole shape of the SERP but this is difficult to do at scale. I’ll explain the reasons why in greater detail in a future post.
For this reason, we’ve built a new metric that allows customers to get instant feedback across any number of keywords and keyword groups about the success toward visibility goals in SEO.
This takes our customers past antiquated views of SEO success such as simple rankings, or even more complex and modern metrics such as pixel-derived visibility (which also has merits and is something we also support).
If you’re looking for a scalable and reliable way to measure actual success in a simple and intuitive fashion, schedule some time to speak with our team and we’ll tell you more.