In my overviews of multiple seo tools, I repeatedly looked into tools that check or track keyword rankings. Hamlet Batista recently wrote a brilliant post encouraging us not to rely on ranking metric too much.
One of the points discussed in Hamlet’s post is that keyword position should not be the ultimate goal of SEO campaign and hence it shouldn’t be an SEO process success metric. That’s the point I’d like to further discuss here. I’ve outlined the pros and cons of most popular SEO measurement items below:
| SEO campaign measurement item | Advantage(s) | Disadvantage(s) |
| Keyword ranking | Easier to define, analyze and visualize in the form of an SEO report. (e.g. easier to explain to the customer)+ Easier to aim at. | High rankings don’t mean the site benefits from them (i.e. doesn’t mean conversions) – ranking should not be the end goal of any project. + Rankings can move up and down naturally (e.g. due to local variations) – this fluctuation might be hard to keep track of. |
| (Search) traffic rise | Again, this is the easiest aim to achieve and keep track of. | Traffic doesn’t mean more sales or customers (the quality of traffic is what really matters). |
| Conversions | In the end, each customers ultimate aim is to make sales or convert in any other way (subscriptions, clicks, etc). | This aim can only be achieved if you are delivering full service (SEO, PPC, usability tests, etc). |
And now please take part in the poll and share your thoughts in the post comments:
I definitely think that conversions (whether it is getting people to buy products/services, subscribe t0 a blog, etc.) are the ultimate goal of any SEO or online marketing campaign.
Furthermore – and this is one thing that I think many SEOs forget because they are so focused on ranking – defining exactly what a conversion is before you get started. Most of the time a conversion = money changing hands, but for bloggers it may be getting more subscribers or newsletter signups or something else.
Hi Ann,
Thanks for the shoutout :-)
Let’s say your customer is not selling something, but is more interested in search for branding purposes. In such case, I’d measure the success of the campaign by the additional search traffic my efforts are producing. The quality of such traffic can be measured by the bounce rate, avg. time on site, etc. My thinking is that rankings should not be the ultimate goal, but a means to an end.
Cheers
I would consider all the three points to measure success of seo campaign. But along with the keyword position i would also show the traffic a particular keyword has brought being in top position.
I feel that the measurement needs to ladder back into the over all campaign objectives. Furthermore, the measurement needs to be a combination of different elements. Its dangerous to rely on a single factor
Something like this:
1. Conversion/profit
2. CPC
3. Bounce Rate
4. Pages viewed
5. CTR
6. Impressions
Hands down the biggest challenge is to convince people that SEO success shouldnt be measured by rankings but by conversions, second challenge is to define successful conversions. On news sites this is particularly challenging. Id like to read something about conversions on news sites, just tossing up the idea for a future post.
For me, SEO means keyword ranking and search traffic rise. Conversions are a process of marketing and copywriting, not SEO. They should, however, work hand-in-hand. But they are complimentary processes – and not one in the same.
I used to work for an agency that sent monthly ranking reports to clients. The idea was to show clients “growth” in the form of increased page 1 rankings.
Problem: they were just grabbing keywords from the analytics, pasting them into rank check software and finding out that “hey, they’re on page one for “auto mechanic ny not rip off” – add one to the “page 1 rankings” tally.
The traffic and conversions didn’t increase at all. It was just that these long-tail phrases were showing up once in 3-4 months – and they happened to be on page one for them. The numbers, no matter what you’re doing, keep going up. Zero client benefit, but the illusion of growth was created.
A ranking, by itself, means absolutely nothing.
Great post Ann.
I also read Hamlets post which was excellent.
I personally use traffic and bounce rates as the main KPI as a lot of conversions for certain industries/niches can be difficult to track, especially if the conversion takes place off line.
At the end of the day the client will not give a damn if they are number one for all of their keywords if their visitors are not converting.
But then again, conversions, persuassion architecture and call to action etc, is a totally different ball game and is independant of SEO. An SEO’s job is to drive relevant traffic to a site. Once they get there job done!
My 2 sense. Success is subjective. But using my experience in large enterprise level e-commerce optimization campaigns conversions are out of the SEO’s control and thus should not be used as a bench mark by any means.
In the e-commerce world its rank and rank alone. If you get a product (or thousands of products) to rank #1 and the sales don’t explode there is something wrong and it is out of your control.
If you are able to attain a rank of #1 in a marketplace with 10 million results for any given product keyword search and your sales don’t go expand exponentially something is wrong. Either with UI, design, or a plethora of possibilities on the business side, cost/price, sales reps, business policies, the list goes on. So again in the world of competitive e-commerce optimization the metric is simply rank.
Keyword rankings are valid, provided you did research that showed they had sufficient query vloume. If the websites ranks well for such keywords, traffic will increase. When selecting keywords, you should consider each keyword in terms of what the a searcher’s intent would likely be. Unless you have PPC data, you will not know which key terms convert best, but common sense can help. The SEO should not be fully responsible for conversions, and there is some benefit to non-converting customers (branding, early in purchase cycle).
@Dave, did you read any of the comments at all? And your pretty much completely wrong about being completely responsible for conversions. If you drive 700% more traffic to the site and there is no improvement in conversions how in the world can you say that an SEO is responsible for that? There is sooo much more business side then I can discuss here, but in the future please don’t be so naive.
Yes, I do agree with Ann. The real success of SEO campaign depends mainly on the conversions rather than ranking and traffic.
I think this is not only a problem in SEO. This is a general problem in all the fields of marketing. It’s really hard to define the goals and follow the ROI. However, I think traffic rise could be a good start to get more business but it definitely should not end there.
I think having higher keyword placements and traffic stats is the idea way to measure your seo campaign. Conversions should increase with traffic as long as you have the correct onpage content to sell.
To add to conversions, I think another great metric to measure is call tracking. To give clients the ability to see that calls (leads) come directly from their SEO campaign gives them confidence in what they’re paying for.
If you are able to attain a rank of #1 in a marketplace with 10 million results for any given product keyword search and your sales don’t go expand exponentially something is wrong. Either with UI, design, or a plethora of possibilities on the business side, cost/price, sales reps, business policies, the list goes on. So again in the world of competitive e-commerce optimization the metric is simply rank.
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I missed this story when it was originally posted so I am commenting on it late. The very successful consultant Alan Weiss discusses the need to understand inputs and outputs. By his definition he says inputs are things like reports, surveys, focus groups, etc. They are essentially tasks that you do. Outputs he argues is the tangible results that a client wants, i.e. better customer service, higher sales, etc.
Using his thoughts on this post the final and really only important measurement is conversions. Ultimately this is what the client wants. They may think they want high page rankings or lots of traffic, but if they get that and it doesn’t increase conversions then it is really a pointless measurement. Inputs vs. outputs. I think the other measurements are useful information to get you to the final output, but not terribly useful goals in and by themselves.
For example, high bounce rates may tell you your copy is flawed or you have a flaw in the design, but simply lowering bounce rates isn’t necessarily improving the clients position. High page rankings are useful in that it tells you a client’s web site is getting exposure for a certain word, but again by itself doesn’t necessarily improve the position of the client. Therefore setting these things as goals probably should matter to the client. Again, they can be useful milestones to the final output which is increased conversions.
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While I am late to the commenting party here I would like to add my two cents…
It seems to me that there is a great big lack of common sense in the SEO world.
For example with regard to the current issue being discussed…yeah for sure conversions are the only thing that brings the bacon home and makes us money but how in the world can you get any conversions at all if you don’t have traffic to your site? You can’t!
And how can you get any degree of satisfactory traffic if you aren’t getting into the top ten positions for a given keyword phrase? You can’t!
Which leads me to the inevitable conclusion that rankings reports are very worthwhile with respect to helping us know how we are doing in getting into the top ten.
It’s not an either or. We don’t give up conversions to achieve high ranking and we don’t, or shouldn’t ignore where our sites rank while recognizing the all important value of converting our visitors. We need BOTH!
That’s just common sense….
As far as I am concerned I will focus on getting into the top ten positions for a given keyword phrase first then worry about improving my conversions later. If I can’t even get into the top ten positions for a keyword phrase I am targeting with my web site or client’s…fancy conversion discussions are fruitless and a waste of time.
Carlos