What’s your goal? To be successful? How will you know you’re successful? Is it the amount of money in your bank account? Is it the number of customers you’ve helped? Is it the number of vacations you’ve taken? The definition of “success”, needs to be defined.
Choosing Key Performance Indicators For An SEO Contract
If you’re an agency or a freelance consultant, then it’s important for you and your customer to agree to speak the same language when it comes to your success or failure to deliver results from your contracted seo work. Anyone can provide a detailed list of actions they’ve taken that they SAY will lead your business to “success”, but that’s pretty far from showing the impact of your work.
From the broad range of potential SEO related metrics that are available through Google Search Console, Google Analytics and whatever combination of CRM or spreadsheets your client is using for their managing their business you have to choose what numbers are going to define your success. As SEO consultant Eli Schwartz asked earlier today, what do you want to be held to?
What’s A KPI Vs A Metric?
What is a KPI? It is a “key performance indicator”, usually a numerical value that’s observed over a period of time and is the number that’s understood to reflect the success or failure of the project. The biggest difference between a “metric” and a “KPI” is that a metric is a numerical value that could be for any number of facets of your digital marketing campaign and may not actually reflect a value that directly impacts the business in a meaningful way.
A good example of this would be the metric of a “Bounce rate” which you COULD use as a metric, because the it has a numerical value and you could take actions that could change that metric, say improving the quality of the writing and images on a page or reducing load speed.
However, it’s a poor KPI because as much as you might change your bounce rate for a particular page, or even your aggregate bounce rate for all of your pages that’s not neccesarily a change that’s going to have a causative impact on a business’s fundamental success.
What Are the Metrics I Should Choose For KPIs for SEO?
- Revenue from organic traffic
- Sales rate from organic leads(conversions) – AKA how many leads/conversions actually purchased. (Or how many transactions came from organic “Add to cart”
- Lead conversions
- Soft conversions – eBook, Downloadable, new
- Number of pages with organic traffic
- Increases in organic traffic to groups of related content
- % increase in unique queries for groups of related content
