Content Marketing & SEO: The Bigger Picture

 Working to integrate your SEO and content marketing efforts? Columnist Trond Lyngbø discusses the benefits and challenges of marrying these two disciplines and explains how to succeed.

SEOs have long wondered how blog posts from Bufferapp consistently topped search engines and attracted huge audiences for free… until their content team drew back the curtains and revealed what went on behind the scenes.

Their SEO wasn’t just about traffic, conversions and revenue. Like every smart and successful marketing team, their success was based on content planning and content promotion.

In other words, by linking SEO to an effective content marketing strategy, a fairly new entrant into a hyper-competitive niche dominated search results and built a powerful brand. This report will show how you can achieve similar results in your industry.

SEO Is More Than Just Traffic, Conversions & Revenue

There are 4 key elements to an SEO plan developed around a content marketing strategy:

Find out what people want and give it to them.

Use retargeting lists to communicate with them, even after they leave your site.

Make special price offers on your product or service if prospects act now.

Evolve a smart content marketing plan to build content that pulls in your target customers.

If you look carefully, there’s nothing there which is “click/traffic” focused. All those tactical SEO elements exist, but grow really powerful when integrated into a bigger plan.

Content marketing is not paid content disguised as editorial content.

Everyone knows organic search is important to marketing strategy. Search marketers are aware of content marketing as a tactic to engage target audiences and improve search rankings. But still, in many cases, their marketing fails. Why?

What Leaders Must Know About Content Marketing & SEO

Content marketing is not paid content disguised as editorial content.

Done correctly, content marketing is an excellent way to build a relationship with customers. A well-implemented content strategy establishes trust and authority in the market. It positions your company in the middle of the research and buying cycle, so that you can take control of what they see, read, think and do.

Being found on organic search results and attracting traffic to your site makes it possible to engage people and convert them into fans and customers. And all those clicks and traffic from Google results are free.

The crucial concept behind effective content marketing, then, is to tell stories that people find interesting.

Your content should not be perceived as “marketing” or “selling.” You’ll sell more by NOT selling! While your content is designed to eventually develop awareness, close sales and create advocacy for your brand, it should stay focused on helping, creating value for customers, and meeting their needs.

This way more people will find your content, giving you wider reach and impact. Your content marketing strategy helps differentiate you from the crowd.

Content Marketing Lets You Dominate A Niche & Become The Market Leader

The business case for content marketing is clear: If you want to build your brand to become the market leader you must OWN the niches in your market.

You can achieve this goal by using keyword research and SEO analysis performed by an experienced consultant to tap into the holy grail of search behavior – a search user’s needs, questions and intent.

From current and historical data, you can find out what individuals…

.are concerned about (fears)

.are curious to know (interests)

.are seeking solutions for (problems)

.are dreaming about having (desires)

As discussed on a recent Moz Whiteboard Friday, “Know What Your Audience Wants Before Investing in Content Creation and Marketing,” it’s best to find out what your customer wants before investing in content.

Putting The Cart Before The Horse

Clients sometimes ask: “Why isn’t content marketing working for us?”

The answers are often obvious — and common across many companies and industries. Here are some of the reasons for content marketing being ineffective, and some simple ways to avoid those mistakes.

1. Weak Content Planning

Be smart about creating content. Planning your content is key. There’s nothing “new” about content marketing, even though it’s now a popular buzz word. SEO consultants have spoken about it for years, just calling it by other names. Whatever we call it, planning it is important.

2. Failing To Integrate Content Marketing Into Digital Channels

Many organizations fail to plan their digital channel marketing. Their process of ordering fresh content is seriously flawed. Investments should be greater in stories that people are actually interested in, and content that demonstrably converts better.

3. Not Realizing the Difference Between Advertising and Marketing/Content

Some organizations think content marketing is about

.producing a piece of content

.having people to see it

.booking orders from convinced prospects

            But really, content marketing is about

.connecting with your audience

.building trust

.becoming an authority

.being the one that they remember when it’s time to order

.gaining mindshare as the go-to-guy or company

If your current content marketing strategy revolves around writing and distributing content 

“advertorials,” then it’s time for a rethink. Creating a mashup of advertising and content will only result in a low-performing piece published under the alibi of “content marketing”. You’ll pay money for advertising to lead traffic to the content, which dies down in a few weeks when the campaign ends.

Why is this practice so common, especially when it doesn’t work?

4. Lack of Knowledge About Digital Marketing

It’s easy for an agency or consultant to pander to a client’s demand for new buzzwords and services, without having to take the time and trouble to understand how the business really works.

I’m not accusing some agencies or consultants of intentionally trying to fool someone into investing in an inefficient model. But lacking the right knowledge and expertise still leads to failure, even if the actions are taken with the best purpose and intentions in mind.

Lack of knowledge about digital marketing is a problem. CMOs and strategy directors should know reasonably well how Google works, and understand intersections between organic search and other marketing in the organization’s overall strategy. Unfortunately, many are outdated when it comes to digital marketing.

This leads to their companies implementing strategies that an expert would quickly identify as useless or counter-productive. Silo-thinking condemns their content marketing strategy to mediocrity. All the while, their competitors are thriving and gaining market share.

To avoid this, you must:

Take research and planning seriously

Involve an experienced SEO consultant to uncover what people want

Get access to valuable historical search data

Ensure the content you’re creating takes you closer to your business goals.

5. Shortsightedness and Ad Hoc Work Patterns

Online digital content has a long shelf-life. But many organizations view their content marketing through a “campaign lens”.

Prioritizing and delegating are crucial skills for a CMO or strategy director. Busy with many other things, most take an ad hoc approach, focusing for a week on one thing, and on something else the week after. Whenever the going gets tough, or results are not as they hoped for, someone cracks the whip – and they become more confused and disorganized.

Instead, they should step off the hamster-wheel, review the situation and focus on whatever has worked for them already. Getting a content marketer and SEO consultant together to prioritize areas to focus on will make all activity more cost-efficient.

6. Content Overload

In the content glut of the World Wide Web, it’s tough to differentiate yourself. SEO is a great way to find more effective ways to reach your target audience and stand out from the crowd.

Content marketing is less about “content” and more about “marketing.”

If you take a shortcut and hire content writers to throw something together, and sprinkle some SEO “secret sauce” over the mess, you’ll only get a temporary quick-fix — and a bad one at that. Consulting experts at content marketing and SEO can help spot opportunities and craft content that’s interesting to customers.

Businesses should think about content marketing as inbound marketing, rather than push marketing. You must get involved, stay focused, and be consistent over time. Content marketing is a marathon, not a sprint.

7. “Campaign” Thinking

Content marketing can’t be a campaign that you launch whenever you want to sell more products. Ordering a batch of articles or advertorials just before the campaign goes live leaves little time for research and planning. Precious opportunities are lost.

Once the campaign ends, the content is forgotten — only to repeat the cycle next year. Content planning can keep your content relevant for longer, make it stronger over time, rank it better and beat your competitors on search results. That makes content marketing much more effective — and profitable.

8. Making Content The Goal

Too many organizations jump directly to production and churn out content without researching and planning it. As a result, they skip over the most important part: what the market and their prospective buyers actually want and need.

Doing this is naive and ignorant. Google has vast treasure troves of data about search volumes, trends, seasonal changes and popular search terms. Tapping this data to tailor and structure your content marketing is smart and helps you serve clients well.

Content marketing is not about what you want people to know– it’s about the needs and interests of the customer.

Your content marketing clock should tick on your customers’ schedule, not your own. Content marketing is about building and strengthening a relationship with your customers. So it shouldn’t be mistaken for advertising.

How To Find What People Want?

There are many tools to guide you.

Google Keyword Planner is a good starting point, where you can type in keywords and discover how popular they are.

Keywordtool.io is a logical second step, because it gives you more specific information about searcher intent through long tail keyword phrases.

SEMrush helps study what your competitors are doing. You might get ideas to expand and broaden your approach, or go deeper into sub-niches or find new ones to explore and research.

In Conclusion

I’ll leave you with some final takeaways:

Investing in content marketing without SEO is sub-optimal. You will limit your own success and end up publishing content that no one is interested in.

Effective content marketing will help build your brand and attract more qualified leads and paying customers.

Intersections of SEO and content marketing, where experts work together, will generate better outcomes.

Evergreen content lasts for years. Traffic, leads and sales will not stop when a campaign is over, but continue for many years.

Content planning and content promotion can help you leverage the incredible power and longevity of content marketing and SEO.

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Responsive Web Design Is Essential In 2015

Today, smartphones and tablets, are taking over web surfing. In early 2014, Internet usage on mobile devices officially exceeded PC traffic. That’s why it is imperative to have a mobile-friendly, multiple device-compatible website to accommodate this new digital landscape. To meet this demand, responsive design has rapidly become the new standard in web design and development.

Much More Than A Mobile Site

Responsive design is an approach to web development using fluid, proportion-based grids, flexible images, and CSS3 media queries to deliver an optimized user experience across all devices. Responsive design has significantly more advantages for most businesses than simply having a separate mobile site. The design allows your entire website to fully adjust to all devices, delivering a single set of content and code that seamlessly caters to target screen sizes and resolutions. And unlike a mobile site, a responsive website provides the full, information-rich web experience today’s consumers expect from a business.

Viewers Expect More

A couple of years ago, it was okay to have only the bare essentials of information on your mobile site. Now, 85 percent of web users believe a company’s mobile website should be just as good as or better than their desktop site. This means that your visitors want the full experience of your desktop site on their mobile device. This includes easy navigation, access to tools, such as the search bar and shopping cart, and the ability to perform the intended action for each page, like purchasing or submitting a form. Since many visitors are going to view your same site on multiple platforms – perhaps first on their desktop at work, then on their smartphone during lunch, then at home on their tablet – it will be frustrating if your site looks and responds differently each time. A responsive design makes it easy for customers to find, understand, and share your content, which makes for an overall better user experience and improved brand impression.

Reduction In Bounce Rate And Loading Time

If your website doesn’t work properly on mobile devices and users are leaving your page after a few clicks, your bounce rate will be high. When Google detects a high bounce rate, it will give your site a lower quality score and therefore rank your site lower, which will ultimately decrease your site traffic. A responsive design helps to reduce bounce rate because the view of your site is adapted and consistent with every device. Also, a responsive design does not use queries to redirect users to another URL like a mobile-only site does, so this reduces the load time of a page which can also increase your site’s search ranking.

Google Says So

Recently, Google has made a couple adjustments in terms of favoring mobile-friendly websites overall. Last November, Google incorporated mobile-friendly labels as part of search result descriptions in an effort to communicate to searchers on a mobile device the sites that are mobile-friendly. Furthermore, starting April 21, 2015, Google announced through their Webmaster platform that they will use mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal and boost rankings for mobile-friendly sites. It is true that both mobile-only sites and responsive sites will pass these tests. However, Google openly recommends using responsive web design versus a mobile-only site. Specifically, Google recommends that “webmasters follow the industry best practice of using web design, namely serving the same HTML for all devices, using media queries to decide rendering on each device.” This statement is key for marketers. As the backbone of responsive design, media queries allow websites to adapt to any screen size.

It is quite obvious why Google thinks responsive design should be “industry best practice.” When Google ranks websites, one of the factors looked at is site traffic, since more traffic equals more credibility. With a separate site for mobile and desktop, traffic is split between different sites, and credibility is thereby divided. As a result, Google theoretically won’t rank your site as high since it is looking at two sites instead of one. Also, having one core domain means one set of pages and files, which makes it easier for Google and other search engines to crawl and index your content. This added benefit of responsive design is great for organic search rankings as well, making responsive design ideal for search engine optimization (SEO).

Easier Tracking

Having several versions of your site makes it harder for marketers to evaluate your site’s statistics and make educated, accurate business decisions. However, having a single, responsive website affords you the option to track visitors and traffic based on the clicks received without having the data divided among a number of website versions. This will give you a more accurate representation of goal conversions, amount of visits, source of visits and more.

Cost Effective And Efficient

If you are in the market for a website build or redesign, you might have noticed building a fully-responsive website may cost more upfront than building a desktop-only site or a separate mobile site. However, a responsive site will save you money in the long run. Since building a responsive site involves separate design templates for each device or browser size, there is one single set of files and one set of content. This means that future content updates can be done in one place, cutting down on maintenance time and eliminating version control issues.

Future Flexibility

Speaking of saving moola, responsive design also implements a forward-thinking strategy that is flexible enough to adapt to future devices, which is a drawback of a mobile-only site. With a responsive website, when new devices are continually introduced, your site will be as future-proof as it can be.

CMS Compatible

If you are evaluating which content management system (CMS) to use for your website project, be sure to check whether it supports responsive design. Many of the top CMS platforms, including Sitefinity, Kentico, Sitecore, and others have built-in features to support responsive design. This will allow for more cost-effective responsive site development but also enable future template development and site changes to work seamlessly across devices.

Responsive Sites – The New Must-Have

With the increasing use of smartphone and tablets, a business is expected to have a website that is not only mobile-friendly but consistent and user friendly across all devices. Having a responsive website will help provide a better user experience, support search engine optimization goals, save your business time and money long-term, and will give your website a competitive advantage over businesses that haven’t yet invested in this technology.

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7 Under-the-Hood Optimization Techniques That Will Rock Your SEO

Whether you’re an SEO at the top of your game, or a site owner looking to do more with your SEO, this article is for you.

Most SEO advice is pretty straightforward (and worn out): Optimize your title tags! Content is king! Use a sitemap!

I get all that. And that’s fine advice. And you should do it. But sometimes we need a little bit more — those under-the-hood optimizations that can move the needle even further for SEO. I’m about to give you seven of my secret weapons for doing just that.

Just so you don’t get your hopes up too high, I’m not providing any home run hacks that are going to boost you to the top of the SERPs by tomorrow morning. SEO doesn’t work that way. These seven techniques are reputable, slow-but-steady, and hard work.But they do work.

1. Make Your Site Secure

Google has tipped its hand regarding one of their newest ranking factors: Site security.
In the summer of 2014, Google declared that HTTPS is now a ranking signal. Although its immediate impact on the search landscape is marginal, we can expect this signal to grow stronger as time goes on.
Security, with all its massive disruptions of late, is a big deal for users, and therefore for Google. We as SEOs need to understand this. Although we crave data — especially the data that gets snatched away from us (not provided) — we still need to respect the limits of privacy.
If you have the ability and/or resources, add encryption to your site. In addition to being a ranking signal, it is also a user signal. Sites with encryption are recognized in the SERPs with an “https://” preceding the URL, unlike non-secured sites.

This little change in the SERPs alerts conscientious users to the presence or absence of a security layer on a given site, which may in turn affect click-throughs, bounce rates, and dwell time.

2. Add Above-the-Fold Images or Videos With Full Optimization

We all know images and videos can improve a site’s ability to engage users. What we may not realize, however, is that such images can improve a site’s ranking in Image or Universal Search.
The click-through rates for no-image pages are, on average, lower than pages that contain images. Although the first position results gain higher CTRs (20% vs. 10%) for no-image pages, the tables turn in the third through tenth SERP positions. For these results, users show a preference for pages that contain images.
Here is research from Jim Yu in his discussion from Search Engine Land. The chart indicates CTRs for image vs. no-image SERP entries.

To make your images as SERP-supported as possible, you need to optimize them. Here are the most important features for optimization:

• Make the size of the image appropriate to the necessary resolution. Get the file as small as possible to improve page load times.
• Add alt text.
• Title the image appropriately, using keywords if at all possible.
• Use a good quality image. It’s for the users, remember.
• Add supporting Schema for the image.

You can use videos, too, with similar results in the SERPs. The additional effort of adding above-the-fold images and video is that it improves SERP rankings while also adding value for the user. Value for the user means your site visitors will click through more frequently, bounce less, stay longer, and thereby improve your rankings.

3. Create an Image Sitemap

Every search engine professional understands the importance of an HTML sitemap and an XML sitemap. I’m suggesting that you create an image sitemap.
So, what’s an image sitemap? And how many sites even have one?
Not many sites have an image sitemap. That’s why we’re under the hood right now. This optimization will boost your rankings particularly in Google’s Image Search.
To create an image sitemap, simply add extra information about images on the page to your existing XML sitemap.

4. Regularly Review and Request Removals From Your Link Profile

Behind every site lurks a powerful and sometimes ominous force. It’s your link profile.
You have limited control over what sites link or don’t link to your site. You could become the victim of a negative SEO attack, or you could be rewarded by links from a high-authority government (.gov) or education (.edu) site.
But you do have some control. You should exercise this control in three ways:

• Monitor your link profile. Every now and then, scan through the list of sites that are linking to you. This data is available in Google Webmaster Tools. You can also purchase services that will scan your link profile for possible risk.
• Request low authority or spam sites remove their links to yours. A polite removal request is the best solution to spam links. Simply email the webmaster, informing them of the links and ask that they be removed.
• Submit a disavow file. Regardless of the SEO brouhaha over the issue, Google has provided a tool that allows you to disavow any links that you deem undesirable.

5. Create Keyword-Specific URLs

Aren’t ranking for a specific keyword? Check your URLs.
Exact match domains (EMD) are an SEO spam technique of yesteryear, but there is no question that Google still considers the URL to be a significant indication of a page’s relevance, and therefore a ranking factor.
Notice how each of these sites, top-ranked domains for a competitive keyword, have URL pages that use the exact query.

6. Use Your Target Keywords Across The Entire Site

One of the lesser-utilized SEO techniques is employing a target keyword throughout the site as a whole. Many SEOs believe (mistakenly) that they can rank for a given keyword by churning out a few blog articles surrounding the keyword. They target a keyword by developing content on one or two pages, but they neglect its presence on the rest of the site.
In reality, Google prefers to see an entire domain that supports the keyword and its semantic variations.
Here’s how you can check this:

• Do a Google search for inurl:domain plus the selected keyword in quotation marks.
• Look at how many results Google provides.
• Compare this to as many domains or competitors as would be helpful.

Let me show you an example. In the screenshot above, I showed you how the website Accreditation is outranking Experian.com for the keyword “what is a good credit score.”
I recently analyzed the SERPs for this keyword, and found that the top organic result has the highest site wide saturation for the given keyword. I tested several other semantic variations and found it to be consistently true. The site with the highest site wide occurrence of a given keyword ranked higher.


CreditKarma.com has 3,500% more occurrences of the keyword than Experience. Even though CreditKarma’s domain authority, page authority, and domain wide link quantity are lower, they still rank higher for that keyword.

My informal survey doesn't prove that top results will always be backed by the highest occurrence of a keyword throughout the site, but it does suggest it is an important factor in Google’s ranking system. Sites that contain semantic variations and/or keywords throughout have a higher chance of ranking in the SERPs for any given keyword in that semantic domain.

7. Optimize Your Brand’s Social Profiles

Google’s Knowledge Graph is a significant aspect of SEO that we can’t ignore. Google recently began displaying the social profiles for brands directly in the Knowledge Graph.
It’s not apparent how this will roll out for small to mid-sized businesses. Most of the results I've seen are for large corporate brands.
My sense is that Google will continue to refine KG settings to bring up a full array of information for most brands that have optimized social profiles. It’s worth giving some optimization effort to your social accounts.

8. Add Schema Everywhere

According to a study by Search metrics, Schema markup shows up in more than a third of all Google’s search results. With this huge SERP preference for Schema, you’d think that sites would be flocking to implement Schema snippets wherever they could.
Well, apparently not. A mere 0.3% of Internet domains are using Schema integration.

This definitely falls into an under-the-hood optimization technique. Learning schema isn't that difficult, and it will certainly look familiar if you have any coding background or awareness of structured data.
Google has even given you some help with their Structured Data Markup Helper.

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Understanding & Explaining A Realistic SEO Timeline

How long should it take to see SEO results? Columnist Stephan Spencer says there's no simple answer to this question, but explains some of the factors which may impact an SEO timeline.

Is your site is in deep water in the search engines? Perhaps you got hit with a manual penalty. Perhaps competition is simply outperforming you in results and in sales. Maybe you’re the consultant or in-house SEO who has been assigned to a tough case….

For site owners or marketing managers, it’s often difficult to understand why your rankings or conversion rates are not improving – are perhaps even declining – after implementing huge site changes at the advice of your SEO practitioner. If you’re the SEO in that situation, you might have a tough time explaining exactly why you can’t just “SEO it faster.”

Now, it could be that your strategy isn’t working; however, it’s more likely that there is simply a disconnect between the SEO practitioner and the rest of the team about the nature of a “realistic SEO timeline.” How do we solve the information gap?

Here are some ideas that are great for starting the discussion:

SEO Is Site Fitness

Optimize Worldwide’s Matt Morgan wrote a great article back in May comparing SEO to taking antibiotics. While this is a fine analogy, it doesn’t tell the whole story.

SEO is about fixing current problems as much as it is about preventative measures and continual improvement. Once your “treatment” of short-term SEO tasks is done, your site should never stop practicing SEO.

Perhaps a better analogy would be to say that SEO works similarly to a fitness routine. If you start skipping your routine — or stop doing it all together — you’re not going to achieve or maintain optimal results.

Of course, before starting that fitness routine, it is always important to check in with your doctor, who will make recommendations as to what can be feasibly done without damaging your body. This is the SEO’s first job: looking at your site to diagnose what problems are going on, and providing guidance on how you can build strong, reputable authority and rankings over time.

Going too fast and expecting extreme results will often end up resulting in some sort of “over correction” that could damage your site further, just like an extreme diet can work in the short term, but ultimately put you right back where you started — or worse, do damage to your body.

SEO Is Complex And Requires Long-Term Thinking

A lot of the technical side of SEO is troubleshooting. The fact is, it isn’t always evident why your rankings are fluctuating. For example, is it possible that an SEO tactic used in the past is now being recognized as spam, meaning that its value has been discounted within Google’s ranking algorithm. That could lead to a huge drop in rankings, and an SEO consultant’s efforts that have been making slow, positive progress might be obscured or blamed for this.

It’s important to understand that there are many variables going on with your SEO. The consultant or in-house SEO is working with all the SEO, design, code, etc., decisions made in the long past, the recent past, the present, and the future. That’s why it is incredibly important to start out an SEO relationship with an audit of the site. This is going to uncover those problems that wouldn’t normally show up on your radar screen and expose the damage that they may be doing to your site.

Once you have a solid foundation, develop an action plan to move forward in bolstering your site’s reputation and reach. Sometimes, when fixing a site from some major foul play, you’ll see worse results before you see eventual and steady improvement.

For example, in a recent conversation with forensic SEO consultant Alan Bleiweiss, he described to me a case with one of his clients which illustrates the need to take the long view on SEO projects.

Alan related to me:

I did the audit in January of 2013, and the client began implementing changes immediately. The organic traffic continued to slide through July 2013, and then only began to slowly come back at that point. As you can see, from that point forward, it was a bump up, decline, bump up, decline process repeatedly until finally, a year later, it’s breaking through.

This site was a combination of issues across various algorithms, mostly Panda. That’s the most difficult reality – Panda has continued over the past couple years to mostly get stricter, with some “easing” thrown in along the way. That makes it very difficult for a site to reach sustainability.

Another critical consideration is that work can’t be done once and left. These sites need ongoing applied pressure of stronger quality signals on-site as well as brand authority and trust reinforcement.

You can see from the graph of the web traffic that this site actually required major changes which, with the additional complication of algorithm changes by Google, actually caused organic traffic to drop for a significant period of time.

However, by taking the long view, being patient, and doing all the right things to create sustainable SEO success, the traffic has rebounded and indeed surpassed previous levels. Had Alan not prepared the client for the fact that this may likely be the case, he and the internal team members responsible for SEO could well have faced some very difficult conversations with the management team.

SEO Requires A Team Effort

There are a myriad of factors that impact SEO success — and many are dependent upon cooperation from other teams or departments.

With larger clients, we’re often looking at tens of thousands (or hundreds of thousands, or millions) of website pages and large, sometimes geographically distributed, teams to work with. There’s also the bureaucracy of getting changes approved and enacted. A lot of the time can be spent waiting in the wings on obtaining approval, deciding on preferred courses of action, or simply getting SEO work into the site development queue.

That’s why the cooperation of other teams — especially the IT department and the social media team – is crucial to SEO success. The SEO is managing not just a bunch of keywords, but an entire movement for the direction of your site. Don’t underestimate the amount of work this takes, especially when factoring in the time needed to get buy-in from these other departments or executives.

Timing Is Often A Game Of Chance

An effective SEO tactic used to be putting up 50 new blog content pieces and promoting the heck out of them in hopes that a small number would be seen by a lot of people, and perhaps earn social shares and link authority for the site.

The thing is, virality is incredibly hard to predict, even by the experts. It is often about placing content in the right place at the right time; however, that right moment can happen at any moment.

You can make an effort to predict what content your audience will want by using seasonality (basketball-related content during March Madness, etc.), leveraging a current event (this gets tricky, since if it is done too late, it is passé), or simply trying to put out awesome content and ideas that people want to share, and hoping it strikes a chord.

ROI Gets Complicated

Google’s Hummingbird algorithm and the loss of keyword referral data (“not provided”) have made things a heck of a lot harder for SEOs aiming to measure precise ROI of their actions.

No longer is it an option to measure the exact amount of traffic a singular keyword is getting you. Furthermore, Hummingbird makes it so you can’t always directly control which variations of a word your site will rank for. Sometimes, this can even direct irrelevant traffic to your site.

Instead, look for KPIs that add more value to your overall goals. Is the ultimate goal of your SEO overhaul to receive more positive online press? Is it to facilitate brand loyalty? Is it to improve conversion rates? What metrics have value is ultimately determined by your business’ specific goals; useful info for one site could be utterly unhelpful for another.

One metric that I always recommend is “task completion” – this cuts to the core of understanding why people use your site, which helps inform strategies for increasing conversions. This methodology recognizes that not everyone is going to come to your site to buy — that’s just not the way it works. Instead, it asks, “Did the visitor complete what (s)he set out to do on the site?”

For example, some users will use the site to research a type of product for interest in a purchase later down the road. To help them receive the best possible experience, have a great and clean review system with clear ratings that you keep free of spam, and use in-depth, original content for your product descriptions. You could even create a forum where users ask questions, then keep a log of these questions and flesh out pages on the site by answering them. Track the time a user spends on the product page or on pages providing more in-depth info on the product.

It may be useful to collect some data on task completion rates in the audit portion of your SEO plan. To do so, set up a short survey that asks just a yes or no question, such as “did you complete what you wanted to get done?”, “are you satisfied with your visit?” or even a short multiple choice question that asks users if they are visiting for research, for entertainment, or to buy. You can use this metric later to review the efficacy of the SEO plan in creating a better customer experience.

What This Means When You’re Hiring/Working With An SEO

• Never trust an SEO professional who claims to guarantee a number #1 spot in 6 months or less. Often times, the benefits of a well-executed SEO strategy won’t manifest themselves for at least a year, especially when the website being optimized has a lot of issues. Tactics which might get your rankings to spike in the short term can come back to haunt you in the long term.
• Ask for a timeline of expectations at the beginning, and then another timeline after the audit is done.
• Look for someone who, instead of focusing on rankings, focuses on your business goals. Rather than rankings, look for growth in KPIs such as organic traffic, sales, tasks completed, etc.
• As with your own personal fitness, often it is best to focus on small, achievable goals that are right in front of you. Doing so allows progress to happen, less inhibited by the constant worry of where you are in comparison to the mountain of work ahead of you. Instead of trying to succeed at SEO with a single herculean effort, you can create something great, measure its performance, and then create another starting point from which to continue improving.
• Ask them not what is going to give the fastest results, but what will lead to the results that can be sustained over time.
• Try a timeline that is segmented into actions: 2-4 weeks for a comprehensive site audit, 1-2 months for technical changes, 2 months for content revamp, 3-4 months for link acquisition efforts, etc.
• Ask for reports that explain clearly what is being done and how this will improve your overall growth; de-emphasize pure ranking metrics.

This article should not be seen as validating poorly-done SEO that does not show you the fastest possible results. There are some situations in which great SEO can indeed show very fast results – such as eliminating hidden spammy links from hackers, fixing critical crawling or site architecture issues, or manual penalty recovery.

What you should take from this article is that before beginning any SEO efforts, you should take time to assess the situation, plan both short- and long term-strategies, approach SEO as an ongoing process, and communicate realistic goals and timelines for improvement to the larger team and executives.

Many SEO efforts fail due to unrealistic expectations about the time and investment required. Don’t let yours be one of them

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