What to consider when making marketing decisions

In the SEO world, you can find articles talking about a lot of so-called KPIs, including bounce rate, interaction time, time on page, etc. These are popularity metrics that have nothing to do with the main goals of marketing or business.

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

Presence in search results

Applies to: Any website

Related to: Market share

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 marketplace.

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

Grow your business online

You can get a very rough idea of your presence in search results by comparing your natural search traffic to that of your competitors. The data will be skewed because it includes traffic for branded keyword phrases and ones that are important to your competitors but have no value to you. For example, if one of your competitors offers social media marketing tools, search traffic on such topics will not be relevant to you and your market share.

To get a better idea of your presence in the search results, insert keyword phrases that are important to you into Rank Tracker. Keep in mind that these should be top keyword phrases that focus on what your target audience is searching for (there should be no "long tails" here).

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

Natural Traffic Conversions

Applicable to: Any online shop or lead generating website

Related to: Sales

This shouldn't be news to you. Natural traffic conversions are the only KPI on our list that most companies are already measuring. If you're among 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 website goal or action that makes up a conversion is the number of visitors who placed an order or subscribed to a service. That's fine, but such a number doesn't reflect the real value to the business if people buy multiple things at once.

So if you're working for an online shop, a better metric 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 revenue 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 analytics-based marketing decisions to first understand how this information is collected and processed. You can gain this knowledge by attending SEO optimisation courses from AVSEO's leading SEO experts.

Treat these numbers critically

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, etc.

The good point and the main takeaway here is that you usually don't need the data by itself, but in comparison to metrics from another period that are skewed to the same extent. This means that the relative change in conversions should match 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's wise to compare year-over-year results.

Associated natural traffic conversions

Applicable to: Any online shop or lead-generating website

Associated with: Sales

Only apply this KPI if you are already using the previous one. It's essentially an auxiliary metric that helps you deal with erroneous attribution.

This is important because the default "last indirect conversion" attribution model used in Google Analytics has a clear flaw. The problem is attributing 100% of the credit to a single channel. This is like praising for a win only the player on the team that scored the goal. The goalkeeper and defenders wouldn't be very happy about it.

What does this mean in context: website conversion?
Your website is likely to attract natural 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 through to the search results or a redirect ad. In this case, you would want to see that initial contribution from natural search.

We at AVSEO believe that these three metrics are sufficient for any channel. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't measure other metrics.

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

After all, thanks to this, you get useful information from Google Analytics, set up thresholds that determine the success of linkbuilding campaigns, conduct technical optimisation audits, etc.

Today's marketers rely heavily on the information they collect to do their work. But with quantitative data from Google Analytics and Google Search Console alone, it's difficult to understand why a particular phenomenon is happening. So it's important to remember that this data is no substitute for talking to customers, common sense and, in some cases, intuition.