Search for guides about measuring the success of your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy and you’ll be met with an array of what are, in effect, glossaries—lists of metrics and accompanying definitions. Unfortunately, there’s very little information about organizing those metrics into an effective plan. 

In order to track your SEO activities in a valuable and sustainable way, you need to organize metrics into a broader long-term plan. What’s more, it’s crucial to leverage the right digital tools, preferably in a platform that allows you to manage data effectively and scale your strategy.

This post will show you how to craft a high-level SEO measurement strategy. We’ll also demonstrate how SEO tools strengthen reporting processes, with examples from BrightEdge, a software solution that provides dozens of features in a comprehensive enterprise SEO platform. 

1. Choose Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

A relevant selection of SEO metrics forms the foundation of a strategy that drives ongoing improvements to rankings.

However, it’s essential to remember that your chosen metrics should reflect the broader consensus about which outcomes are important within your business. Linking SEO targets to more general digital and organizational goals ensures they support the bigger picture.

When choosing KPIs, metric “glossaries” are helpful. Determine which metrics are meaningful in the context of your search strategy and high-level goals and use them as the basis for your reporting. If you’re in a growth phase and want to reach more audiences, focus on methods that reflect that. If you’re currently trying to improve the conversion process on your site, perhaps focus on site engagement through organic search and apply resources towards on-page.

Typically, the following metrics will be applicable: rankings, search traffic, organic conversions, engagement, and to a lesser extent, backlinks. That said, every company will have its own mix that mirrors its unique goals. 

Example: BrightEdge Keyword Reporting and Instant

Keyword Reporting and Instant are BrightEdge’s main rank-tracking tools. They generate reports over specified periods of weeks and months and on a daily basis.

Rank tracking is the bread and butter of SEO measurement, and fuels content creation and optimization of existing pages, among other things. 

Keyword Reporting and Instant provide the following functionality: 

• Keyword Reporting is an example of a dedicated feature that provides insights into keyword-focused ranking improvements and fluctuations. Reports are generated for specified periods and filtered based on device, location, search engine, and more. 
• Keyword Reporting also provides data related to organic impressions, clicks and traffic. 
• Instant provides real-time information about mobile and desktop rankings, across multiple locations and languages, thus giving an up-to-date picture of a site’s current keyword status. Instant also incorporates ranking information from search engines like YouTube and Amazon in addition to Google. 

 

2. Establish Metric-Based Targets

Once you have identified which metrics are important within your organization, use them to create tangible goals. 

Setting goals is tricky. In SEO, many variables can’t be fully manipulated. These include competitor activity, market share, and available resources for off-page optimization. Therefore, building a degree of flexibility into targets in these areas is essential. 

On the other hand, some aspects of SEO can be controlled. These include website optimization, indexation in search engines, and content creation. Goals relating to these activities can be more definite. 

Having clear goals is also beneficial from a strategic standpoint. Highlighting a single central metric—or a small handful of metrics—that adequately encompasses the bulk of your SEO efforts provides a tangible performance barometer for stakeholders.

Often, high-level individuals will not be interested in the minutiae of their organization’s SEO strategy, and you might find eyes glazing over if you start elaborating on the formulas underpinning custom KPIs. Simplifying your important metrics makes show-and-telling the SEO story easier.

Example: BrightEdge SEO Dashboards

BrightEdge’s Storybuilder is our data visualization tool for dashboarding, and is used for generating insights, presenting search-related activity, and making forecasts. 

It has the following core features:

• StoryBuilder enables SEOs to present search improvements in an understandable way, often by amalgamating various metrics. This provides flexibility in reporting and allows users to include the data that matters most to their organization, which is very important.
• Progress can be framed in terms of specific questions like “Are we getting more organic visits?” and “Are conversions increasing?”. This helps stakeholders visualize complex data sets, particularly in the context of traffic, conversions and sales.

3. Set a Viable Reporting Cadence 

There are two categories of SEO metrics: those tracked within an SEO department for managing daily tasks and those used to brief stakeholders. 

Be clear about how often in-depth reports will be published and distributed within your organization. This may also apply to briefs about what’s happening in the search landscape. 

Equally, it’s important to clarify which metrics you require to monitor day-to-day tasks. For example, SEOs often check Google Search Console daily for information about crawlability and indexability on their websites. Additionally, weekly technical crawls during off-peak hours is a good way to stay up to date with website health.

It’s also crucial to manage stakeholder expectations. Agree on goals and KPIs from the very beginning, so when you report on them in the future you’re all on the same journey. And recognize that SEO metrics should be differentiated from marketing metrics when they incorporate financial data. Typically, stakeholders are interested in the bottom line, as opposed to indicators like share of voice, keyword rankings, quality of backlinks, and so on. And SEOs may not be able to provide this information directly, because organic search often has a big footprint in most attribution models.

Example: BrightEdge Daily Pulse and Data Cube

Daily Pulse and Data Cube provide up-to-date SEO health metrics that can be organized into understandable visual presentations for stakeholders. 

The tools provide the following features: 

• Pulse provides a daily overview of SEO activity. Metrics include an average keyword ranking, organic traffic, and ranking fluctuations. This information is helpful for both SEO departments and stakeholders in an organization looking for a digestible up-to-date snapshot. 
• Data Cube provides a long-term overview of content performance in terms of aggregate scores like total pages ranked in the top ten results on Google. Identifying trends usually takes a long time, and clear visualizations are essential for forecasting potential changes. 

4. Tie Rankings to Conversions and Return on Investment (ROI)

Tying rankings to conversions, and reporting on these regularly, is the best way to determine your SEO strategy's overall success

Ultimately, SEO is undertaken with a view to generating leads and driving revenue. All SEO activities, and the role of corresponding performance metrics, are geared towards this end, even if indirectly (there are corner cases where the goal isn’t revenue, like visibility or brand awareness).

The overall success of an SEO program is dependent on being able to attribute results to individual strategies. To do this, you need to correlate search ranking changes with engagement, conversions, sales, and revenue.

This might be hard to do using different softwares and trying to stitch together a story. A fully integrated software suite will enable you to connect organic traffic with conversions and compare the effectiveness of different marketing channels. 

Example: BrightEdge Site Report

Site Report is one of BrightEdge’s central reporting dashboards and is used to link SEO to various bottom-line metrics.

Site Report provides the following features:

• Tracking of revenue and sales from organic channels. 
• Ranking overviews of indexed pages and keyword groups compared to competitors. 
• Reports of clicks and impressions from organic site visitors. 
• Comparisons of the performance of different digital channels, like social media and paid ads. 

5. Monitor Competitor Activity

Measuring the activity of competitors is one of the best ways to determine the relative effectiveness of your SEO strategy. It will also ensure that you remain aware of tactics and practices that have been overlooked, particularly when adjusting to account for missing keywords and newly introduced on-page techniques. 

It is easy for SEOs to fall into the trap of assuming that they have covered all the bases, especially if they own a large share of the market, and become apathetic as a consequence. Monitoring competitors helps maintain humility within SEO departments and protects against overconfidence. There are a lot of competitive SEO tools that help identify who is who, but we’ll use one of our products in our platform to show you how we do it.

Example: BrightEdge Share of Voice

Share of Voice is BrightEdge’s tool for monitoring overall market share and presence. Share of Voice is a valuable aggregate metric for tracking comparative performance.

Share of Voice provides the following functionality:

• Tracking of competitor performance for keyword groups and measurement of your site’s share of voice. 
• Insights about competitor SEO activity like backlink strategies and on-page optimization. 
• Tracking of goals related to market presence. For example, if you own 10% of all keywords relevant to a certain product, you may set a goal to increase your share to 15%. Your progress can be measured using Share of Voice features. 

Conclusion

SEO measurement is about more than picking a handful of metrics and publishing monthly reports. It should tie in with your overall marketing and business goals. SEO that exists in a silo cannot be sustained over the long term, and to have an effective strategy you need to collaborate with other functions of the business including content, UX, engineering and more.

Similarly, it is vital to measure both positive and negative changes. Doing so allows you to identify where to allocate resources. SEOs often have a tendency to report exclusively on the good things, but in reality it’s the shortcomings that help you outline “what’s next?”.

Moreover, tools are critical when putting together an infrastructure that enables you to track all your SEO processes. And as discussed throughout this article, there are pain points in point solutions that can be overcome by using an enterprise SEO platform to help manage and govern your strategy.

With all that in mind, it’s probably time to start thinking about those all-important KPIs. Perhaps a cup of coffee first, though? 

More Resources

• The SEO Metrics That Matter Most
• Backlink Strategies
• 11 SEO Myths That Will Damage Your Rankings in 2022

 

SEO research is a multifaceted, long-term process. An effective strategy has numerous components, from initial keyword research and competitor analysis, to ongoing tracking and maintenance of rankings.

SEO tools are essential when it comes to effective strategizing. Without them, it’s impossible to perform even the most basic SEO research tasks. Improving your research process will positively affect organic performance, helping drive and retain traffic and bolstering growth for your website. However, one problem with using tools is you are often siloing your data or exports in different areas like personal computers or the cloud, working against clean governance. Having decentralized data often requires you to peice it together somewhere else to get a holistic view to draw actionable insights. By leveraging an enterprise SEO solution like the BrightEdge platform, you can access a host of features that help draw a complete picture, from a central data source, with the added benefit of integrated workflows. No more having to glue together exports from free or paid softwares and toolbar extensions!

In this post, we’ll cover five essential pillars of SEO research in 2022. We’ll also use examples from the BrightEdge platform to demonstrate how the processes we outline work in practice.

1. Establish Clear, Metric-Driven Content Ideation Processes

Content ideation—generating topics for blog posts, articles and marketing materials for your site—is often seen as being synonymous with keyword research.

But it’s crucial to keep in mind that ideation encompasses multiple activities. It’s about more than just generating a list of potential keyword-related topics and ranking them in terms of volume.

Keyword research is vital. But trend monitoring, website traffic analysis to uncover interests, competitor research, brainstorming, and more are all key aspects of the initial stages of the research process.

Furthermore, all content ideas should be passed through a data-based filtering process. After you have generated an extensive list of topics and associated keywords that align with your business goals, tools enable you to prioritize entries according to three key metrics: volume, competition, and value.

Example: Data Cube, BrightEdge’s Keyword Research Tool

BrightEdge offers the following features in its keyword research tool, Data Cube, as part of our enterprise SEO platform to help with keyword discovery and prioritization:

• Keyword ideas - Data Cube provides sets of semantically and topically related terms based on core keywords, building and developing on the initial research process.
• Long-tail keyword discovery - The long-tail keyword tab in Data Cube provides high-value, low-competition keywords that represent immediate ranking opportunities.
• Search volume, value and competitiveness - Filters can be applied to keyword lists to pinpoint the most promising instances and identify the best places to pursue rankings—regular listings, carousels, answer boxes, etc.

 

2. Perform Data Research on Existing Content

Many SEOs assume that their job is done once they’ve ranked a piece of content. But defending existing rankings is just as important as achieving new ones. What’s more, optimization opportunities can be leveraged on pages that are ranking well but have the potential to do even better.

Defending pages essentially consists of tracking top-performing content and remaining alert to any drops in SERPs. Remedial action, such as fixing technical issues and improving the quality of content, can be taken to restore rankings.

Existing content is also a useful guide for determining which topics are likely to do well, particularly when seen through the lens of competition metrics. Essentially, this involves creating pages covering subjects similar to those you already do well with. However, it’s important not to cannibalize content, which can detrimentally affect rankings.

Example From Intent Signal, Bright Edge’s On-Site Optimization Engine

Intent Signal is BrightEdge’s feature for identifying ranking opportunities in existing content. It enables SEOs to undertake the following tasks:

• Identify pages with high ranking potential - Pages that rank below the fold on the first page of Google have the potential to draw large amounts of traffic if they can be optimized.
• Monitor existing pages that rank above the fold - Tracking content above the fold is essential for maintaining rankings. This Intent Signal feature monitors so-called “Defend” keywords and alerts users to any drops in rankings.
• Identify opportunities based on existing content - Intent Signal helps SEOs identify keywords related to high-performing pages that represent low-competition ranking opportunities without cannibalizing content.

3. Identify On-Page Opportunities

On-page analysis is about identifying opportunities for improvement that can bolster rankings. Potential areas for consideration include link issues, HTTP errors, page load times, and so on.

Tools are best used in conjunction with well-known platforms like Google PageSpeed Insights, and offer additional information. They also provide ongoing automated reports, which are useful for monitoring purposes.

In particular, browser extensions make identifying problems easy. You can use them when naturally viewing your site, which is sometimes the fastest way to find issues on high-priority pages.

Site crawlers, typically provided by SEO research platforms, find on-page opportunities at scale. As a result, they identify all the issues on a website instead of finding one-off problems.

Example: ContentIQ, BrightEdge’s SEO Audit Tool

ContentIQ is BrightEdge’s enterprise-level site audit tool. It has the capacity to monitor millions of pages and has the following functionality:

• Report features - ContentIQ tracks a range of on-page signals. These include HTTP errors, site speed, broken links, and more.
• Automated “health” reports - ContentIQ generates automated performance reports, allowing organizations to track site health. An overall score is included in the report, along with more granular crawl information, which helps identify specific problems and areas that require attention.

4. Ensure Ongoing Landscape Analysis

One of the most effective ways of generating new content ideas while at the same time ensuring you don’t fall behind your competitors is by monitoring the market.

Market analysis involves:

• Tracking demand around specific topics.
• Monitoring keywords in light of increasing volume.
• Generating intent data (data that measures the likelihood that potential customers will make a purchase) around keywords with commercial intent.
• Pinpointing areas where your content mix might have gaps, especially in relation to high-growth keywords.

It’s also good practice to incorporate insights from industry publications into your research strategy, as they are typically very good at identifying fast-moving trends. For example, only a few years ago, voice search was one of the main innovations in SEO. Today, chatter focuses on all of the technologies that comprise Web 3.0. Staying up to date with major shifts in SEO enables you to shape your voice and communication channels effectively.

Example: BrightEdge Market Insights

Market Insights is BrightEdge’s comprehensive analysis tool. It’s an out-of-the-box solution and is capable of handling large amounts of search data to provide actionable SEO and market insights.

Here’s a brief overview of its main features:

• Demand analysis by topic and subtopic - Demand analysis by category, subcategory, topic, and subtopic enables SEOs to stay abreast of market changes and monopolize on seasonal and emerging keyword opportunities.
• Market opportunities and intent data - Intent reports allow organizations to track intent data around keywords, which is helpful when allocating resources and increasing the ROI of spending on SEO.
• Missing content - This feature identifies potential high-converting keywords that would fit within a site’s existing content structure. Market Insights also uses search data to pinpoint underperforming content which should be prioritized for improvement.

5. Conduct Competitor Research

Competitor research fulfills several important objectives and helps identify possible strategic directions to take.

Competitor research achieves the following objectives:

• Allows businesses to identify keyword opportunities, especially when sites with comparatively low authority rank highly for certain terms.
• Provides insights into on-page SEO practices that can be replicated.
• Alerts SEOs to industry trends and aggressively targeted high-converting terms.

Ongoing research is also a fantastic catalyst for productivity within an SEO department. It energizes and motivates teams by creating a sense of urgency and positive competition.

Example: Share of Voice, BrightEdge’s Competitor Research Tool

Share of Voice is BrightEdge’s competitor analysis tool. It provides data and insights in the following areas:

• Competitor presence for keyword groups - This feature enables SEOs to track companies’ share of voice for keyword groups, providing a full overview of competitor activity, keyword targeting, content priorities, and potential partnerships (with non-competing sites).
• URL analysis - Specific URLs can be analyzed to glean information about content strategy, on-page SEO, and backlinks.

Conclusion

Forming a holistic SEO strategy is the most important part of organic success for your organization. Execution and reporting come later, but creating a bulletproof, process-driven plan of action that matches your overall marketing goals is imperative for achieving core SEO key performance indicators (KPIs).

Using enterprise SEO platforms such as BrightEdge that combine multiple point solutions will strengthen your organic performance while combating competitive advantages by identifying their top-performing areas.

Enterprise SEO platforms such as BrightEdge combine dozens of features that help craft, execute, and report on your SEO strategy, which simple point solutions cannot compete with. Having multiple tools is tough to manage in a tech stack, and generally leads to inefficiencies such as storage of data, taxation of your webinar, or lack of interconnectivity in your teams. Enterprise organizations lean on platforms like BrightEdge when they want a myriad of tools, governance, scalability and workflow all-in-one to really drive performance.

Tools are an essential aspect of search engine optimization, especially if you are an enterprise company and you care about governance and having a platform to keep them all in. Pick yours carefully and learn how to use them effectively.

Other Resources

A Beginner's Guide: Understanding SEO Keywords 101

If You Care About User Experience, Invest in SEO

BrightEdge SEO Solution Overview