Why SEO results are frustratingly hard to measure and how to deal with it
Measuring SEO in familiar business terms like ROI is hard. There are stubbornly objective reasons for that, like lag between the work and the rankings. On top of that, the interests of business owners and SEOs are constantly clashing. Businesses want sales. SEOs want to get paid for their work.
Businesses rightfully hate spending blindly. SEOs rightfully hate being accountable for things they do not control, like a client’s developers carelessly busting a delicate redirect map.
It is no wonder that we still have no universal transparent framework for measuring SEO. Should we mourn this imperfect world and continue to treat SEO budget as casino money? No, because you can quickly solve half of the problem in two steps:
Realize that SEO is not a traditional advertisement channel with a single interface. It is a messy bunch of practices that serve two different goals.
Assign separate budgets and KPIs for each of these goals.
The two sides of SEO
1. SEO-housekeeping
Many people think SEO is a constant fierce battle for the TOP-1 spot. In reality, before we can even start dreaming about TOP-1, we have to do plenty of mundane stuff, where we need to fight only with own sloppiness1.
When we are done with implementing a fresh SEO checklist and Google Search Essentials, the site will reach the level of basic SEO hygiene. If the competition in your niche is not off the charts, you should reliably occupy the TOP-1 position for searches with your brand name and appear at least in TOP-30 for the queries that match your offers.
You also should from time to time appear in TOP-5 for long and specific keywords, if your page is objectively the best match.
In short, basic level of optimization gives you:
Basic visibility: a trickle of potential clients from Google and (possibly) from chatbots.
Brand protection: when the people you influenced via other channels google your brand, they see your site on the TOP-1 position, not your competitor.
2. SEO-hunting
After making sure we are done with housekeeping, we can start being more aggressive and target specific keyword clusters to reach the top of the search results. It is time to do link building, advanced text optimization, finding non-obvious queries and creating content for them, optimizing for click factors. Whatever it takes to get more leads.
Budgeting and measurement, finally!
When an SEO does the basics they work like a lawyer who ensures compliance. Their work does not directly bring clients. And it is perfectly normal. Problems begin when we try to tie this work to sales, mixing hunting and housekeeping. But when we separate them, everything become clear:
Housekeeping: focus on processes. Assess the amount of required work → allocate a budget for this work → control execution and quality2.
Hunting: focus on the results. Assess additional traffic from your target keywords → allocate budget → set Google Analytics to assess how many leads and revenue you got from this traffic → control CAC and ROI based on this budget.
Splitting these two streams of work helps you to make more grounded decisions and manage SEO contractors better (which is the real goal behind the measuring!):
A separate budget for SEO-hunting makes it comparable with other marketing channels, so you can better decide how much you want to spend and set educated expectations for CAC. Everything becomes more familiar and intuitive.
Basic optimization is more important at the launch, but to keep the site alive and well you need constant attention. Assigning separate (even if small) budget helps not to forget about it.
Housekeeping is relatively straightforward; hunting requires higher skill. You can hire different people/agencies for both parts, making sure expensive hunters don’t bill you at their elite hourly rates for pressing a couple of buttons.
Of course it is not that simple. There are tons of details and nuances (where exactly does the line between housekeeping and hunting lie? what attribution model is better? how to filter brand traffic? how to deal with the inevitable lag in results? what to do with the overlap between SEO and GEO efforts?). I will publish separate articles about these nuances.
You can also schedule a call with me and I’ll help you make sense of these nuances in your particular case.
For a start:
Our site is accessible for search engine robots.
We got the right geographical and language settings.
Our pages look ok on mobile and desktop and have decent loading speed.
We got content clearly describing all our offers and pages for main bottom of the funnel keywords.
All pages which potentially can drive traffic are indexed. There are no unnecessary pages indexed.
The actual list is pretty long. Just google any fresh (so it accounts for AI search) SEO checklist to get the full impression.
The scope of this control might be different for different websites. For the majority of sites it is enough to:
submit your site to Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, Yandex Webmaster, make sure all the errors and notifications get the attention of your SEO team. Not all of them would require action, but some of them might be critical.
assign a checklist and track % of implemented tasks.