← Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
The best ways to effectively measure SEO
00:16:58
Loading summary
Transcript20 lines
- [00:00]
Podcast Announcer
The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast. A member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts. Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search Podcast, Jordan Cooney.
- [00:43]
Jordan Cooney
Hello SEOs. My name is Jordan Cooney from Pre Visible and this week we're going to discuss SEO for Growth Marketing. Joining me is Jason Shafton, who is the founder and CEO of Winston Francois, which is a growth consulting firm working with brands to provide strategic guidance across product growth, market marketing and organizational design to support sustainable value creation. Today, Jason and I are going to discuss the best ways to effectively measure SEO.
- [01:12]
Podcast Announcer
This podcast is also sponsored by Ahrefs. What if I told you that you could monitor your website's SEO, health backlinks and organic rankings at no costs? Sounds too good to be true. Well, it's not, because my friends at Ahrefs just launched Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. Ahrefs new Webmaster Tools product quickly helps you improve your site's visibility by pointing solutions to over 100 technical issues that might be holding your search performance down. Plus, AWT monitors for backlinks so you'll know the most linked to pages and how those links are affecting your rankings. And AWT shares what keywords your website ranks for and compares how you stack up against competitors for key metrics like search volume, keyword difficulty, and traffic value. Look, monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools, and now, thanks to Ahrefs, that's not the case anymore because AWT will help you monitor your SEO, health, backlinks and keywords for free. And no, it's not one of those 14 day free trial offers. It's a powerful site audit tool that will keep working for you for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster tools@ahrefs.comAWT that's a H R E F S.comAWT okay.
- [02:31]
Jordan Cooney
Here'S my conversation with Jason Shafton, the founder and CEO of Winston Francois. Jason, welcome back to the Voice of Search Podcast.
- [02:39]
Jason Shafton
Great to be back, Jordan. Thanks for having me.
- [02:41]
Jordan Cooney
Awesome. So yesterday we had a really exciting conversation between Growth Marketing and SEO. What are some of the key aspects that every growth marketing SEO should understand and then also just a little bit of the nuances of how to really leverage those two disciplines or sets of skills to help a company grow and scale organic traffic. And today we're going to dive into the best ways to measure SEO. And I think, Jason, one of the things that's really challenging about measuring SEO is that unlike other marketing channels, there isn't a single KPI. At least there isn't traditionally a single KPI that makes it very easy to measure. And so I'd love to get your just general perspective of the SEO measurement landscape, what it looks like, what it means, especially coming from a growth perspective. Maybe your viewpoint on it.
- [03:38]
Jason Shafton
Absolutely. So just starting with the zoomed out view that the leadership team, the executive team at a company is going to take, which is they're going to evaluate the marketing function and channels as a whole. So SEO just gets folded into that. I've been in organizations that, that look at a, you know, a financial blended customer acquisition cost or CAC that will take into account all the different channels paid in organic and just, you know, spit out a number at the bottom. So we spent this much on our marketing, including all of our people and our ad spend and our, you know, vendors and production and tools and services and this is how many customers we got. So we'll, we'll do some basic arithmetic, some division, and that's the cac. That is how like, you know, a senior leadership team is probably going to look at things. When you go a level deeper than that into the marketing organization, the chief marketing officer or head of marketing, head of growth will be looking at individual channels and start to measure performance. SEO and content marketing are challenging to measure because they're often not tied to some direct attribution or event that can say, oh well, we paid this much money to run a Google search ad and then this many new customers came from that channel. We can attribute that. So there's, there's primary and secondary engagement metrics, pursuing primary and secondary KPIs that I look at and I'm happy to take you through those. And then there's, you know, there's a lot of things that we talked about in our other conversation about how long it takes for the performance to show up when it comes to SEO and content marketing and the necessary patience that it requires. So I'm happy to touch on that again as well.
- [05:10]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah, in one of the things that, when it comes to KPIs, that's really, I think, messy with respect to SEO is that for most Marketing leadership. There's this very transparent landscape of, hey, there's certain input variables that we're going to put into play. We're going to spend $10,000 on Google paid ads. We're going to spend $100,000 on TV ads. It's a very clear input variable. But with SEO, those input variables are kind of funky, right? You've got an input variable of like, I need to build a thousand pages and I need to have them crawled and indexed before anything happens. Those. That's a totally different viewpoint than a budget and a channel and like a decision to go forward with a marketing spend. I'd love to see your lens on that and how you communicate these variables that are often like a barrier before you can really mature or create SEO and SEO outputs.
- [06:17]
Jason Shafton
Yeah, makes sense. So, I mean, hopefully you're using tools like Google Search Console to ensure that, you know, the site is fully indexed. And as we, as we launch new content and pages and blog articles and anything that's, that's intended to be indexed and ensured that it shows up that it, that it's getting done. So I'm glad that you brought it up because it, for me, it's like, it's par for the course. Like, that's a, that's a given. We have to make sure that everything we're building is indexed and you know, underneath that, and we didn't really get to talk, to talk to this in our last conversation, but technical SEO and having that infrastructure in place ensures that everything gets indexed right. So having the right setup on page and ensuring that you're using all the latest tools, you know, whether it's Semrush or Screaming Frog and you're researching their keywords you want to use and then ensuring that your, that your site is actually ranking for those keywords, I think are things that hopefully the folks listening are already doing. But when it comes to measuring that performance of the content that's being created, the way I think about it is, and you kind of touched on this, or there's the secondary or leading indicators. So there's the SERP rankings, which is, is it ranked on page 1? Total number of keywords that you have ranked. Are we driving traffic? Right. What are the organic or SEO sessions that we're seeing, the page views, users, new users, and then the engagement metrics, the time on the page, the page use recession, the bounce rate, the exit percentage, Those are what I consider secondary metrics that are leading indicators that, hey, the things that we're doing in SEO and content Marketing are working, no question.
- [07:41]
Jordan Cooney
I mean, I think that there's that balance between the core KPIs that help ensure that Google's seeing what they need and then those preliminary KPIs and secondary KPIs that we're all trying to aspire to achieve in SEO. And one of the things that I think growth marketers and SEOs really try to establish is, is a good foundation as to where those baselines or those KPI should be at. Right. How long should it take our website to get indexed? How long should it take these pages to be showing up in Google search console? Right. And those are good signals as to the maturity in the progress that your website might be making when it comes to setting these baselines up. How do you recommend or what is your recommended approach to that conversation? The conversation with stakeholders, maybe other teams or departments in an organization, or even better yet, like you and I, between a consultant, agency and their client.
- [08:42]
Jason Shafton
Yeah, I think it's really important to set expectations at the front end. So when a team is making investments in SEO and in content marketing, it's important to stress the time that it will take for those investments to bear fruit. So for us, Winston Francois, when we're talking to a potential client or a current client and we're helping them, them develop their growth and marketing strategy, of which SEO and content marketing is a component, you know, we'll say, look, we're gonna, we're gonna help you build your performance marketing strategy and campaigns and those are gonna, those are gonna drive some immediate results. But long term, to build the kind of domain authority and brand awareness and kind of presence that you wanna have online, we need to make these investments in thought leadership and content marketing and technical SEO infrastructure. And typically the way that I approach that conversation that the team does is say, look, it's gonna take three to six months before we're going to start to see results from our content marketing efforts because that's just how long it takes for these types of things to go. Now if you're in a, you know, top 100 or even top 1,000 site that gets tons of traffic and is indexed basically constantly, you know, that's a different conversation than if you're a, you know, early to mid stage startup, which is a lot of companies we work with and they're, you're just trying to break through and get attention on, you know, potentially keywords that are competitive and high traffic. But for other brands and businesses that, you know, you haven't been able to break into yet and that's where we say, look, it's going to take time and we need to make a lot of great high quality content that's going to drive those eyeballs and users and send good signals to the search engines to rank that content.
- [10:09]
Podcast Announcer
Time for a one minute break to hear from our sponsor, Pre Visible. So you're looking for SEO help and you got a couple of options. You could start replying to spam from agencies that claim they can get you to rank number one on Google. You can pay an hourly rate for a consultant who will inevitably nickel and dime you with hourly charges. Or you can work with a cookie cutter agency to quickly launch a strategy less project with low success rate. None of those sound very good now do they? Well, that's where Pre Visible's integrated consulting model comes in. Pre Visible draws From a collective 40 years of SEO and digital marketing experience to unlock your organic growth opportunities. They build custom solutions that combine strategy, technical expertise, content and reporting to effectively operationalize SEO for your business. Pre Physical's four stage approach ensures that your SEO programs thrive by starting off with a strategy first approach. Then they support you in your efforts to create quality content, help you identify technical issues, and most importantly, they'll work with your cross functional teams to integrate your SEO strategies to make sure that your SEO budget actually drives results, not just your agency's bottom line. So join brands like Yelp, eBay, Canva, Atlassian Square, all who rely on the SEO consultants at Pre Visible. For more information go to Previsible IO. That's Pre Visible. P R E V I S I B L E I O.
- [11:37]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah, no doubt. And you know it's a conversation that never stops, right? It's something that you start at one place and you're constantly educating, you're informing the organization, you're working with those partners to evolve their understanding of not only the SEO measurement, but how it's changing in the current SEO landscape. This brings me to a really interesting topic or question for you Jason, which is when it comes to the best ways to measure SEO, there is this lack of understanding. At least being an SEO myself, there's this lack of understanding in the SEO community between what are SEO metrics and KPIs and the core business metrics and KPIs. And when I'm talking about core business metrics, KPIs, you mentioned one earlier, like CAC or for say app based platforms, it might be monthly active users. For software type companies or B2B companies, it might be leads or lead based type KPIs or metrics. Obviously for commerce and E commerce, we're talking revenue or we're talking about total gross sales that they might be driving through their platform. Those are business metrics that finance teams and all these other departments are looking at on a regular basis. And then there's the SEO over here saying that our crawl rate decreased by 5%. How do you get these two things to come together and work together between an organization?
- [13:05]
Jason Shafton
Yeah, so look, I think, and this may be controversial, but for SEO to be have a seat at the table, we need to take accountability for the, for the least. And this is what I believe is the primary conversion metric. Primary KPI is conversion. So we should be responsible and ensuring that the site is optimized such that we're driving marketing qualified leads, MQLs or signups, registrations like while crawl rate and number of pages, index and keywords that we're ranking for all great. To some extent they're SEO vanity metrics. Because if those, if those performance indicators are not driving actual results for the business, the investment in our, our function of SEO is going to, is going to be minimized. Like we're going to see less, less support, less investment in terms of headcount or external support or vendors or tooling. And so it's, so it's critical from my perspective that we're driving to a conversion event and there's something wrong with the things that we don't control. As the SEO or content marketing person, we need to provide some amount of guidance and influence on the teams that are responsible for hey, this, this page is not optimized well and here are the reasons. Let's get this implemented. Working with the engineering team or internal developers who are responsible for the web pages so that the content that we've built is able to sing and shine brightly and drive to conversion.
- [14:23]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah, there's no doubt. And I think that that connection between SEO and ensuring that there's a clear education and understanding of what the core business driving metrics are is so critical. As a growth marketer, as an SEO, how do we do that? How do we educate? How do we teach and train our SEOs, our content marketers, our social media marketers, how to connect to those business KPIs.
- [14:50]
Jason Shafton
Yeah. So I think everyone can benefit from taking time to read and learn about the complementary and supporting functions. So if you're an SEO and you know a lot about your practice, but you're not particularly advanced in product design or conversion rate optimization or performance marketing or lifecycle marketing, like these are all things that will just make you better at your, your core job and make you a more empathetic and understanding partner to these other functions within the marketing team. And I think similarly, like coming in with the perspective of and representing the user is essential. So I think a lot of people, we get in our own heads and we play inside baseball and we're just thinking about what it means to, to throw up a webpage or try to rank or drive traffic, when what we really need to think about is like, what is the user going to experience here? What are they searching for, what are they trying to find when they show up on that website? Are we giving that to them and then what's the next action we want them to take? So I think this is where growth marketing, I think is special in that we can actually expand the discipline and the skillset, whether you're an SEO or a content marketer, to understand these other aspects of how users behave and how products and services are designed so that people can get the most out of that experience and that you as an SEO or content marketer are creating the best in class experiences for those folks that are going to show up on your site.
- [16:13]
Jordan Cooney
Absolutely. You know, Jason, there's a lot changing right now. There's a lot changing for SEOs, growth marketers. And without a doubt in our conversation here so far, connecting to the core business KPIs understanding the user is really critical. But as AI becomes a far more prevalent tool in how we manage these channels and how we market our websites, how are the KPIs changing? How are the metrics to a business evolving with the introduction of AI?
- [16:42]
Jason Shafton
Yeah, I think AI makes it even more important for us to be able to do things that machines can't. And that means. So the way that I think about AI and helping our SEO practice at Winston Francois is it can supercharge the efforts of people. So we can say these are the topics we care about. We can generate a bunch of content is kind of poorly written. AI generated content for those topics. And then we can throw human editors and human copywriters at them to make the content good enough. So it gives us some amount of scale, but it doesn't obviate the need for people. And then the metrics that matter might be we wanted to get 1,000 articles out over the course of the next three months. And that might have taken 10 or 20 writers working around the clock writing all these articles from scratch. And now AI allows us to do that much more quickly. So the output of the team can be accelerated and we can do more. But I think of AI as a tool, a companion. You know, Copilot is a brand out there, but it's something that can help us be more effective with, with our SEO practice. And at the same time, if we lean too heavily on it or we expect it to do everything for us, we're going to get kind of it's like garbage in, garbage out. And so one of the things we'll be able to see is measuring. And I've done this with some campaigns we've run for some of our clients is looking at things that were written entirely by people versus things that were written by AI. What we found is if you can combine AI with humans in a in a thoughtful, clever way and in a novel way, you can have content that ranks just as well, has the same amount or better dwell time and bounce rates, and drives similar conversion events. So I would be comparing, if you're using AI and SEO and content marketing, comparing the results side by side with other articles that were written entirely by people.
- [18:23]
Jordan Cooney
I love it. And that's a great place to wrap up this episode of the Voices of Search podcast. Thank you to Jason Shafton, founder and CEO WinstonFrancois, for joining us. If you'd like to contact Jason, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can also contact him on Twitter where his handle is JasonShafton, or visit his company website, WinstonFrancois.com okay, thanks to.
- [18:47]
Podcast Announcer
Jordan Cooney, the founder of Pre Visible. If you'd like to get in touch with Jordan, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can contact him on Twitter. His handle is J.T. cooney. That's J.T. k o e N E. Or you can visit his company's website, which is Previsible IO that's P R E V I S I B L E I O. And a special thanks to Ahrefs for sponsoring this podcast. Monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools, but that's not the case anymore. Thanks to Ahrefs because they just launched their Ahrefs Webmaster Tools product which monitors your SEO health, helps you keep track of your backlinks, and gives you the insight into what keywords are performing for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster tools@ahrefs.comAWT that's Ahrefs a h r e f s.comAWT just one more link in our show notes I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voicesofsearch.com, where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter and you can even send us your topic suggestions or your marketing questions which which will answer live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is voicesofsearch on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is Ben Jschab B E N J S H A B and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day during the work week. So hit that subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, remember the answers are always in the data.