3 important indicators when making marketing decisions

In the world of SEO, you can find articles talking about a variety of so-called KPIs, including bounce rate, engagement time, time on page, etc. These are popularity metrics that are not relevant to the main goals of marketing or business.

In reality, there are not many KPIs that will help you make the right decisions. And this is very important to understand.

In this article, we will tell you the ins and outs of three useful KPIs for SEO:

Presence in search results

Natural traffic conversions

Associated natural traffic conversions

Presence in search results

Search presence is the SEO version of one of the most important KPIs for marketing: share of voice (SOV). This metric measures how visible your brand is in the market.

This is important because there is a strong correlation between SOV and market share. As a rule, the higher your share of information presence, the larger your piece of the pie. And the fact is that this relative indicator is more informative than the growth of natural traffic.

You can get a very rough idea of your search presence by comparing your natural search traffic to your competitors' traffic.

Being listed in search results is a great indicator of business success because no matter what your business model, you will always have direct competitors.

Natural traffic conversions

This shouldn't be news to you. Natural traffic conversions are the only KPI on our list that most companies already measure. If you are one of them, great; But there are a few things to keep in mind when using conversion data:

Choose your primary conversion goals carefully

A typical example of a site goal or action that constitutes a conversion is the number of visitors who placed an order or subscribed to a service. That's fine, but that number doesn't reflect the real value to a business if people buy multiple things at once.

So if you work for an online store, a more optimal indicator would be to increase the average order amount in the natural traffic segment.

Or, if you want to be a little more advanced, you can track the average gross or net profit per visitor who visited the site after performing a search.

Make sure your analytics are set up correctly

A lot can go wrong when you set up Google Analytics or any other analytics software. We strongly advise anyone making marketing decisions based on analytics data to first understand how this information is collected and processed.

Be critical of these numbers

No matter how well your Google Analytics and data warehouse are set up, the information will still be skewed by things like ad blockers, the way Google handles attribution by default (more on this in the next KPI section), etc.

The positive point and the main conclusion here is that usually the data is not needed on its own, but in comparison with indicators for another period, which are distorted to the same extent. This means that the relative change in conversion must correspond to reality.

However, make sure you are comparing periods that make sense to compare at all. For example, if your company's sales are subject to seasonal fluctuations, it makes more sense to compare results year over year.

Associated natural traffic conversions

Only use this KPI if you are already using the previous one. Essentially, it is an auxiliary metric that helps deal with misattribution.

This is important because Google Analytics' default "last indirect click" attribution model has a clear flaw. The problem is assigning 100% of the credit to one channel. This is the same as praising only the team player who scored the goal for a victory. The goalkeeper and defenders would not be very happy about this.

What does this mean in terms of your site's conversion rate?

Your website likely attracts organic traffic at all stages of the buyer's journey. For example, a person might find your site on Google, read a dozen articles, and then convert that into a purchase by clicking on a search result or a redirect ad. In this case, you'd like to see that initial organic search contribution.

AVSEO is confident that these three indicators are sufficient for any channel. But this doesn't mean you shouldn't measure other parameters.

Tracking other relevant metrics that correlate with KPIs is a way to measure the results of your daily SEO efforts. For example, it would be nearly impossible to improve your SEO performance if search engines couldn't properly index your pages.

Because thanks to this, you receive useful information from Google Analytics, set thresholds that determine the success of link building campaigns, conduct an audit of technical optimization, etc.

And one more thing…