It’s that time of year again when SES Chicago rolls into town. Typically, it doesn’t arrive until the dead of winter, but this year it’s been moved up a few months to October 18th-22nd. As I did last year, I’ve been given the opportunity to interview some of best minds in the search space. This time it’s Jim Yu, CEO of BrightEdge. Jim will be on a panel at SES Chicago entitled “Meaningful SEO Metrics: Going Beyond the Numbers”. Below are a few questions Jim was able to answer over email about going more in depth into SEO metrics and how marketers are changing the way they think about SEO as a marketing channel.
1. For many SEO marketers, the focus previously has been on ranking reports and page rank increases. What do you see as “the new metric” that many marketers are now focusing on?
We have definitively seen SEO marketers start measuring the effectiveness of their SEO campaigns with business metrics such as revenue, sign-ups, time on site, etc. We saw this trend in our enterprise customers start about one year ago, driven by the fact that SEO is becoming a top-tier online channel with C-level executive visibility. Recently, we release BrightEdge Connect which brings SEO into the CMO’s dashboard and have seen incredible adoption in the marketplace.
2. How does that metric vary by industry? Or does it?
The metric indeed vary by industry. E-commerce sites will be focused on purchases, finance and insurance on sign ups, internet and media on page views and time on site. There is usually one main key performance indicator that drives the entire business and that is the one to focus on for SEO.
3. Should B2B marketers evaluate SEO differently than B2C? Are the tactics any different?
We have found that the biggest differences are not B2B vs B2C but come from the current status of your SEO and what you have to achieve to become competitive. For example, here are different tactics for two companies both in B2C: you might be a financial services company going after a small set of head terms or you might be an e-commerce site with a large product catalog targeting the long tail. In all cases, the tactics are similar: start with a visibility baseline, develop a roadmap that moves the needle quickly using existing assets as well new ones, and then start growing your SEO footprint. The details vary company by company.
4. As an SEO marketer myself, I find one of the hardest things to predict or forecast is traffic modeling & forecasting, especially within an existing campaign. Do you have any recommendations for how folks can evaluate opportunity cost within SEO (i.e. if I move from position 12 to position 10, how much traffic can I expect?)
We work with our customers to build this capability over time. We found that forecasting improvements and click-throughs is highly dependent on the specific situation. It depends on the industry, the type of keyword – purchase vs research, competitive landscape, and even the number of paid ads. Our recommendation is to get a baseline, understand why and how fast your metrics change when you optimize for organic search, and then apply to a forecasting model.
5. Do you have any platforms you can recommend to folks that provide a holistic approach to SEO, incorporating ranking reports, traffic analytics, sales/leads/revenue all into one package or does one exist?
This is exactly what we offer at BrightEdge! We have developed the first SEO platform that combines all these metrics but also provide the dashboards, keyword research, recommendations, and workflow all in one place to execute on SEO. In a nutshell, we were the first to make SEO as easy to manage as PPC.
6. How do you think Google Instant will effect SEO or what do you think the future of SEO looks like?
There has been a lot of speculation on the effects of Google Instant on SEO. We expect changes in keyword volumes with some searches for longer multi-token keywords moving to the shorter keywords suggested by Google Instant. With only two weeks of data and the fact that many searches are not impacted by Google Instant, the effects have been marginal. We are monitoring the situation with our enterprise customers but right now the news is that there are no news.
At BrightEdge, we believe the future of SEO is brighter than ever. We are seeing an acceleration in demand for our SEO platform from companies across the board. You might have seen our recent announcements with MySpace, Symantec, VMware to name a few. Using SEO for driving relevance and authority is not going away any time soon, regardless of the changes at the point of search.
Many thanks for Jim Yu and Albert Gouyet for contributing to this article.
Disclosure: I’ve been given a press pass to attend and cover SES Chicago.