In the second half of our roundup of marketing opinions, we’ll focus on how SEO is evolving when it comes to strategy, metrics and quantifying your success.

Meet the marketers

• Mike Arnesen: Blogger and senior SEO Analyst at SwellPath
• Phil Buckley: Blogger and director of SEO at Virante
• Jon Cooper: Blogger and link builder at Point Blank SEO
• Demian Farnworth: Direct response copywriter for Copyblogger
• David Harry: Founder, SEO Dojo, owner of Search News Central
• Jon Henshaw: Co-founder and chief marketing officer at Raven Tools
• David Iwanow: SEO manager at Australian SEO agency Amnesia Razorfish
• Danica Jones: Social media strategist for OakTree Software
• AJ Kohn: Head of the online marketing firm Blind Five Year Old
• Justin Mattison: Senior website wtrategist for Overit Media
• Megan Pritts: SEO & Social media specialist for JP Enterprises, Inc
• Adonna Pruette: Freelance book publicist and digital consultant for published authors.
• Chris Savage: In-house SEO for SelectBlinds
• Jonathan Schikowski: Germany based SEO and creator of Browseo
• Sebastian Wenzel: Affiliate marketer and author of Web Analytics Book
• Jesse Wojdylo: Social media fanatic and founder of Wojdylo Finance

Have you seen any SEO metrics change in importance? How do you communicate this evolution to stakeholders?

• Mike Arnesen: Ranking position is absolutely becoming less and less important every month. I remember when I first started my career in search and being able to report rankings that were the same on the West coast as they were on the East coast. Now, rankings vary from city to city, from data center to data center, from Google account to Google account. My task for the remainder of this year is to train clients to focus on metrics that truly matter. Another thing I used to have to look at when I first started out was the number of results using the site: search. We know now that those counts are completely unreliable. Glad I don’t have to do that anymore.
• Phil Buckley: One metric that is not nearly as easy to leverage as it was a couple of years ago is building targeted backlinks. The old methods for evaluating a backlink portfolio have changed, and as usual SEOs are adapting. SEO agencies went through their own steriod era, like Major League Baseball, and we are now dropping out of it. There is a move to a more holistic marketing type of approach. Content that is actually worthy of attention, linkable and helpful is winning every single day. Spun, useless content isn’t even worth the time it takes to produce anymore. Agencies that can’t move towards the light will be struggling to keep up in the next few years.
• Jon Cooper: I think rankings in general are becoming a little less important, but only because the amount of traffic one sees from, say, a #1 position on a competitive SERP is steadily decreasing because a lot of real estate on those pages is now being taken up by other Google properties.
• David Harry: I really think folks should try and tie in metrics with actual primary and secondary conversion points. Increases in brand awareness and search referrers are great, but we need to ultimately tie that into the goals of the site. How we get there keeps evolving, one can’t get locked into any one or two metrics.
  Less important:
  • PageRank
  • Keyword data in analytics (Thanks, Google!)
  • Rankings (Personalized and geo messed with it)
  More important:
  • Social referrer data
  • Search visibility (Inclusive of universal elements)
  • Localized related data (Mobile inclusive)
  • Non-search referrer data
  • Non-link citations (Entities et al)
  • Link data (Manual & Penguin issues)
  •Anything in Webmaster Tools
• 
• Jon Henshaw: Ranking results used to be important to us several years ago (and still are to many SEOs). When we were an agency, many years before Raven was created, a big part of our SEO service was based on getting a client to rank well for a select list of short-tail keywords on Google. In time, we abandoned focusing on that metric in our client reporting. Instead, we started to focus more on increased organic traffic and how it resulted in goal completions and conversions for our clients. At the end of the day, the only thing our clients really cared about was whether or not our SEO efforts were making them more money or not, not if they ranked well for their ideal terms.
• Danica Jones: I think what I’ve noticed is the way the Panda and Penguin changes have really taken the more “technical” trickery away and shifted the focus on the user-end experience. I believe the site architecture, semantics, metadata and the way you create relevance with those items still matters, but it is being read in a more authentic way, so the shift seems to be towards a more intuitive and authentic approach.
• AJ Kohn: Before (not provided) I enjoyed using the number of keywords and number of landing pages in conjunction with indexed pages to come up with some metrics that were useful to track over time. You can still get to the number of landing pages, which can be very interesting, but the lack of keywords makes the rest of the metrics far less valid.
• Justin Mattison: The one metric that I feel really mucks up the gears of SEO is rankings. Sure, this was the core of SEO three years ago, and it most definitely plays a role in achieving the goals of a campaign, but business owners can get overly concerned with how they’re ranking for particular phrases, to the point where it clouds their vision from the other benefits of their investment and the SEO factors they should be concerned with – like creating user personas, understanding on site behaviors and tailoring the right experience.
• Adonna Pruette: Anchor text has been becoming a lot less important for me. I just haven’t found that this seems to improve anything in regards to rankings in quite a while.
• Chris Savage: We have been trying to shift the focus away from strictly looking at ranking reports to a more overall view of organic traffic, conversions and revenue.
• Jonathan Schikowski: I stopped caring too much about keywords in external anchor text. We still get great results for clients, and they generally don’t mind if their link profile is clean. Social media and the like turned out to be immensely helpful for everyone promoting anything – and it’s easy to explain to stakeholders that building a brand is valuable.
• Sebastian Wenzel: In a universal, local, mobile and social search world, the SERPs are clearly getting diluted with a lot of good, but also a lot of bad stuff. If you focus too much on keyword rankings you are going to lose in the long-run. Communication is here obviously a bit difficult, especially since a lot of people still want to rank for one specific term and don’t care about anything else.
• Jesse Wojdylo: Total linkbacks is less important than quality linkbacks. Gaining natural, quality linkbacks just takes time.  Building powerful relationships through social media is the best way to get natural linkbacks.

What’s your “pet metric?” If you’ve got one, can you explain why you like it?

• Mike Arnesen: Don’t have one yet. Looking to develop some kind of meaningful “thematic ranking index”, but I haven’t had time to play with it yet.
• Phil Buckley: I’m a big believer in a single number to give people an idea of their current “health” status. As much as we bitch and moan about how simplistic Klout is, it’s easy to understand and easy to explain in 10 seconds to the executive team. When I build a chart I try to cap it with a single number that encapsulates where the client is. One I like to share with clients is the cost of the organic traffic if they were paying for it via PPC. Because there’s a dollar amount tied to it, it is very easy to communicate. Showing a rise in organic traffic and saying, “You saved $50,000″ is a powerful statement.
• David Harry: Search referrer data (as it relates to) conversions. Isn’t that what we’re after ultimately? More traffic and building brand-lift is great and all, but if the client doesn’t make money, then we don’t. Beyond that, I like SearchMetrics’ search visibility data for client and competitor ‘at-a-glance’ kind of stuff.
• Jon Henshaw: I’m most interested in results. In particular, results that only come from organic traffic. So I would say that my favorite metrics are events and goal completions related to organic traffic. If you set the tracking up correctly, you can gain a lot of insight into which content performs the best and then build off of that.
• David Iwanow: Social engagement – the cumulative number of shares each content pieces receives.
• AJ Kohn: I’m a big fan of rank indexes as long as you create them for the right query classe (e.g. – queries that are going to move your business.) Outside of that, I think it’s critical to track crawl by page type, indexation by page type and traffic/conversion by page type. I spend a lot of time getting clients to track the first two appropriately, and it always pays off.
• Adonna Pruette: Exit traffic. I just personally like to see where people are headed when they leave a site.
• Jesse Wojdylo: Total pageviews per article or website. This tells me how important this particular article is. I will check it daily and weekly to see what people are reading. It also gives me a better ideas as to what to write next.

What’s the last thing you read that made you rethink something about your SEO strategy?

• Phil Buckley: I read a lot of SEO blogs every day but rarely see anything that really makes me rethink any core beliefs. That usually happens when I read something outside of the industry. Watching Mad Men has caused me to look at a problem differently. Sometimes reading one of Martin Smith’s rants at Scent Trail Marketing makes me stop and think.
• Demian Farnworth: Had to be Search Plus Your World. This turned SEO on its head, at least what metrics you paid attention to. But I think it was a good thing, because now you are forced to pay attention to the conversion metrics and not just the vanity ones.
• David Harry: I spend a great deal of time reading patents/papers to better understand how search engines work and the general evolution of Google. Nearly every time I do there will be a small change in my thinking and how I perceive the engines. This of course has a ripple affect into how I do things in SEO. And of course, anything written by ol’ Google itself has an effect. The rest is just educated guesses plus trial and error. We don’t change much because of what we read in the SEO blogoshpere.
• Jon Henshaw:Every time I read something by AJ Kohn or Bill Slawski, I always consider how it might affect my current approach to SEO. AJ provides incredible analysis into what Google is up to, especially with Google+, while Bill reports on Google’s patents and how they might affect Google’s algorithm. They always provide me with food for thought.
• Danica Jones: One of the better quick-read articles I’ve read recently – The New SEO = Social Engagement Optimization – touched on the way social engagement optimization has essentially become the new SEO – something I firmly believe. I didn’t necessarily rethink my social approach because I am an extremely early adopter that always believed in the power of social for visibility and ranking boost, but I DID completely ramp up the way I implement social optimization as it relates to website optimization and the content contained on all connected sites. I definitely encourage those hesitant about fully immersing in social to rethink their standpoint…especially when it comes to Google+ and Authorship. As soon as I started working on Authorship and rich snippets, the game really changed for many clients.
• AJ Kohn: I’m not sure it’s any one thing but I’m really thinking a lot about how and where people are searching. The human computer interfaces have and will continue to change which will change the way people search and what they expect to get back in return.
• Justin Mattison: Probably the most recent buzz going on that I’ve been trying to act on is the whole Schema/microdata movement. Now I’m always looking for ways to structure my data.
• Megan Pritts: I actually just finished reading Raven’s “28 SEO Metrics To Sell and Report to Clients” white paper. It was very helpful for me because I am a new SEO and it gave me insight into how to relay information to clients. I think I’ve been giving too little information and plan to expand my client reports.
• Jonathan Schikowski: David Harry’s post on our blog about Google Webmaster Tools query data  – it’s something that I haven’t given much thought to previously, but that can actually be very helpful. In that regard, I’m glad that Raven pulls so much data out of Google Webmaster Tools – a huge time saver!
• Sebastian Wenzel: I personally get influenced by small tips from speakers at shows or talks with friends, but the overall strategy stays pretty much the same. I especially don’t participate in the hype about new techniques, penalties or whatever is en vogue. Key for me is filtering the noise from quality information. The best advice I usually get is from a handful of good people.

What metrics matter most to you? Download our resource, 28 SEO Metrics That You Can Sell and Report to Clients , and get great tips on smart metrics and client communication.
 

The post Marketing voices, part two: The changing metrics of SEO appeared first on Raven Internet Marketing Tools.

Raven recently published a resource that looks at 28 SEO Metrics and how to use them to communicate the success of marketing campaigns – and thus, the value of your work – to clients.

Next, we wanted to get some different views on the topic. We asked 16 marketers from all industries and walks of life for their take on SEO, metrics and reporting.

Meet the marketers

• Mike Arnesen: Blogger and senior SEO Analyst at SwellPath
• Phil Buckley: Blogger and director of SEO at Virante
• Jon Cooper: Blogger and link builder at Point Blank SEO
• Demian Farnworth: Direct response copywriter for Copyblogger
• David Harry: Founder, SEO Training Dojo, owner of Search News Central
• Jon Henshaw: Co-founder and chief marketing officer at Raven Tools
• David Iwanow: SEO manager at Australian SEO agency Amnesia Razorfish
• Danica Jones: Social media strategist for OakTree Software
• AJ Kohn: Head of the online marketing firm Blind Five Year Old
• Justin Mattison: Senior website strategist for Overit Media
• Megan Pritts: SEO & Social media specialist for JP Enterprises, Inc
• Adonna Pruette: Freelance book publicist and digital consultant for published authors.
• Chris Savage: In-house SEO for SelectBlinds
• Jonathan Schikowski: German Language SEO and creator of Browseo
• Sebastian Wenzel: Affiliate marketer and author of Web Analytics Book
• Jesse Wojdylo: Social media fanatic and founder of Wojdylo Finance

Metrics that matter

Which SEO metrics do you pay attention to daily, weekly or monthly?

• Mike Arnesen: Overall organic, of course, but especially on non-branded search traffic, and we try to estimate for (not provided). We pay attention to rankings to a limited degree, but are migrating away from that since personalization and localization are starting to make it nearly irrelevant. We also look at organic CTR and rich snippet presentation/display and monitor top performing organic landing pages (in terms of goal completions, visit depth, bounce rate, and time on site).
• Phil Buckley: I try not to pay attention to very much week to week, mostly because there is a tremendous amount of flux that can cause you to go crazy. The main things I keep an eye on is if a core term drops off page 1. Monthly is where all the action is. I watch for new links to recently released content, old links falling away and make sure that core terms are continuing to trend in the upward direction. If the basket of terms has grown large, I start to watch long tail terms for better conversions.
• Jon Cooper: Mainly overall organic traffic. I do mostly authoritative link building without any concern of what the anchor text is, as well as what the page is the links are pointing to. The best way to measure this, I’ve found, is not through rankings but by overall organic traffic.
• David Harry: Outside of rankings, to the degree we can track, I’d have to say it is a lot of the stuff we see in Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics. And I’d break those into metrics that tell us where we stand (success metrics) and ones that are more preventative, on a forensic level. Some of the elements in Webmaster Tools we watch include:
  • Site links
  • Crawl errors
  • Crawl stats
  • Index status
  • Blocked URLs
  • Search queries
  • Internal and external links
  • HTML Improvements (TITLE and Meta-D)
  • Content keywords
  And in Google Analytics we watch search and non-search referrers, keyword data, (not provided) data, sales data (where applicable and tied to search terms) etc.
• Jon Henshaw: I mainly pay attention to content performance from organic traffic, and conversions from organic traffic.
• David Iwanow:I look at trends on a cumulative basis but spot check 1-2 keywords on a daily basis.
• Danica Jones: Daily, Google Analytics across the board – especially engagement so I know what I need to anticipate as far as content development goes. Weekly: social, primarily. I try not to look at the metrics for social each and every day and prefer to see a week-end review so I can see what worked and what didn’t and focus on noting any timing trends or customer interaction trends so I can better provide content for the social followers. Monthly, I run reports comparing various periods to one another, and run reports on a variety of metrics for my team.
• AJ Kohn: I’m looking at organic traffic on a daily basis, in particular productive organic traffic and how it is trending and comparing to other time periods. On a weekly basis I’m looking at rank indexes and Googlebot crawl patterns. Monthly, I’m looking at all of above as well as indexation rates and link profile changes.There are other metrics I’ll look at depending on the client, such as mentions and branded growth as well as structured data adoption rates. I’m a bit of an information junkie. But these are the ones I go to most often.
• Justin Mattison: It’s very much client-specific.  We manage a wide variety of clients with a small team, so checking metrics daily isn’t something we really do. We have daily alerts set up in Google Analytics that will notify us if there are noticeable declines in visitors or goal completions. One of the more important numbers we do look at throughout the course of a month is the traffic coming to the site from non-branded organic search phrases.
• Megan Pritts: Daily: Mostly social metrics, when my clients’ and my own posts are getting the most feedback and what information generates feedback, ad keywords, site traffic. Weekly: Backlinks, keyword shifts. Monthly: Crawled pages, page speed, competitors.
• Adonna Pruette: Niche keyword rankings – initially daily/weekly, then as SEO efforts are coming online monthly is usually sufficient. Brand name traffic results first. Then 3- and 4-word keyword traffic. As a site sees results from brand traffic, I usually only keep a quarterly eye on it after that. Backlink numbers and locations. Variance in root linking domains – monthly checks, usually. Trafic spikes – massive spikes usually indicate hacker activity. Traffic activity from various social media locations to see which ones are being used effectively or need help. Weekly to monthly checks here depending on what outreach I’ve been doing.
• 
• Chris Savage: Daily, I use custom Google Dashboards for non-branded organic traffic and revenue, overall revenue, and social media revenue. Weekly: Keyword ranking and traffic teports. Monthly: Social media reports (traffic, revenue, fan growth).
• Jonathan Schikowski: Traffic via search, and how that traffic converts. What people coming via search do on a site can be interesting as well.
• Sebastian Wenzel: On a daily basis I mostly look at traffic and conversions and check on-page issues/alerts. Over the course of a week or month I am mostly interested in trends and other more analytical KPIs to understand visitor behavior.
  Also the overall number of rankings in the SERPs, CTRs, backlink velocity, citations and mentions are important to me. Overall I am trying to stay away from getting lost in too many details and rather work on the big picture.
• Jesse Wojdylo: Daily, it’s organic search visitors. Not so much concerned about time on site with these visitors. With social visitors, though, I am very concerned with time on site. I want them reading my entire article/content.

Over the course of a quarter or year, what kinds of benchmarks, milestones and goals do you set for yourself and/or your team?

• Mike Arnesen: For client-specific goals, it varies. We set out pretty aggressive goals for non-branded search traffic per quarter, but that goal (percentage gain year-over-year) varies from client to client based on their business, website history, resources, etc. We also work with our digital analytics and CRO team to make sure that the traffic we’re driving through search and social actual impacts our clients’ business goals.
• Phil Buckley: Longer term goals are almost always tied to two main metrics. First is client expectations around rankings. Clients are still very much tied to “first page rankings,” which is totally understandable. We look at rankings as a leading indicator of a more important goal: conversions. Because we can’t force better conversion optimization on a client, we try to load up with event tracking and micro-conversions to track what’s happening as more traffic arrives at the site. Benchmarks are going to be different depending on what a “conversion” is for each client. We usually want to track time on site, bounce rate and paid versus organic traffic as three metrics that give us feedback on if we’re doing our job. In a perfect world we would like traffic to be part social, part organic and part paid.
• Demian Farnworth: My personal goal is to write a blog post that gets the most social shares (simple gets more traction in social) but I also have to balance that with the segment of our audience who wants more detailed, advanced stuff. So I’m constantly trying to create something that is useful for the smarter crowd … and popular.
• David Harry: Increase targeted organic traffic or die. I guess that’s about the only measure that’s consistent. We do a lot of forensic consulting and audits. As such, many times it is just getting things back to normal (post-penalty or Panda/Penguin) that becomes the goal. Our goal is generally to solve client issues and move along. We don’t measure in terms of client acquisition growth.
• Jon Henshaw: I have a general goal and expectation for an overall increase in organic traffic, because that always correlates with increased brand exposure and conversions.
• David Iwanow: Organic traffic growth, improvement in average industry rank, uplift in conversions.
• AJ Kohn: It really depends on the client. Startups generally require higher growth curves, while more mature clients may have less aggressive growth overall but more precise goals around new or highly valuable traffic.
• Justin Mattison: Everything we track is, at the end state, tied to conversion. We understand that clients are looking to be able to show increased revenue year-over-year. It doesn’t matter if traffic is up, if users are more engaged – if they’re not ultimately converting, it is a waste of our client’s money. So that is what we track and that is what we prove.
• Adonna Pruette: I like to see an increase in incoming root domain links, consistent social media traffic, as well as which web pages are being served up the most to guide my content efforts.
• Chris Savage: We have quarterly and annual revenue, conversion rate and traffic goals for all sites.
• Jesse Wojdylo: Since Wojdylo Finance is so new, I like to see a double in overall search traffic each month. Social traffic is not as important for milestones as it depends on the virality of the articles I or my guest authors produce.

Communicating value through metrics

How do you explain to stakeholders what work you’re doing, and why it matters?

• Phil Buckley: I try to keep my client relationships as honest as I can. I’m often sharing information that will make them defensive, so I need them to know I’m not bullshitting them. I explain to them that their site is sick and I’m a physician that has a special set of skills. I can’t cure everything, but I can point out almost everything that is causing them pain. We are very up-front with new clients explaining that SEO isn’t something that happens over a weekend, it takes some time. Long term stability comes from long term planning and execution.
• Demian Farnworth: “Just trying to earn my keep,” which is shorthand for “I’m going to over-deliver.” Meaning I’m going to work hard, fast, and often, on things that are meaningful, which can include networking on social media or my blog. As a semi-visible face for the company, I view all I do as an investment in the promotion of the company.
• David Harry: There are many analogies we use. For example, when trying to explain how a search engine deals with topicality of a page we often use the ‘jaguar’ example. Is it a big cat? Am (American) football team? An operating system? A browser?
• Jon Henshaw: In our case, we’re all Internet marketers, so we all speak the same language. That’s the good part of having an in-house marketing department for a company that makes online marketing software.
• David Iwanow: Industry rank – how is their industry performing compared to them?
• Adonna Pruette: I like to compare their website to a boat in the ocean. They can have 10 fishing lines and no bites (really bad SEO), 1,000 fishing lines and a few bites (moderate SEO work), or 1,000 pages and lots of bites with people and traffic coming and going. Great SEO is a process, not just a project. They often think that SEO is a one time thing. Set it and forget it. That’s a terrible mistake that your web page competition just loves!

What do you report to your stakeholders, in terms of specific metrics?

• David Harry: What seems to be of the most importance is crafting reports that are informational and actionable. I was often guilty in years past of delivering reports that were far too detailed and convoluted. Oftentimes the actionable elements were buried and, well… not acted upon. A lot of folks should really try to avoid massive reports just to make it look like the spend was justified. I live by the ‘less-is-more’ credo now.
• Jon Henshaw: For us it’s about campaign performance. How well was the content, microsite or email message received, and did it result in new customers?
• Danica Jones: I use my Raven Tools reports to build out social media “overviews” that also couple with Google Analytics metrics like traffic sources, referral sources and engagement on a monthly basis, comparing to the previous period. I’m also watching daily to check for changes and shifts, and I will send out individual reports on site performance, keywords, competitor stats compared to our own, and any metrics that jump along with an analysis of why I think the jump occurred so my team understands.
• Megan Pritts: Keyword density, quality of website in terms of back-end design and page speed, searchability, social status and reach are all part of the reports I give my clients.

How often do you send out reports?

• Mike Arnesen: We send out reports to clients every month. For a few paid search clients, we do weekly reports and for a few “maintenance” clients with small budgets, we do quarterly site reports.
• Phil Buckley: Not as often as clients want. We would rather get on the phone with our clients and go over the metrics with them to discuss what’s happening and why. Sending out a PDF that never actually gets looked at is a waste of everyones time.
• Jon Henshaw: Since we use Raven, we can run them anytime we want, but we generally schedule them with our Report Wizard and send them out monthly.
• David Iwanow: They get weekly updates to dashboards but they can log in whenever they need to view data.
• Danica Jones: Steadily, monthly. For newer accounts, every couple weeks following the site launch for 60 days. For particular metrics I’m interested in showcasing for the client to open up discussion about marketing tactics, sometimes weekly, sometimes daily.
• Adonna Pruette: Monthly, when heavy SEO work is being done. Usually after that, quarterly is enough unless something big is going on.
• Chris Savage: Weekly, monthly, quarterly.
• Jonathan Schikowski: I teach clients to access the most important metrics themselves in their analytics software, so we normally don’t do ranking or traffic reports. But of course we want to be accountable for the work we do, so whatever we do gets reported, usually when a certain milestone has been reached.

Do you run reports for your own use? How do you use or view them differently?

• Phil Buckley: We track all of our clients’ sites and keywords on a daily basis looking for anomalies. That is internal and only flags us if/when something needs to be looked at. We tweak the “look at this” level for those reports as often as necessary. We try to keep the “look at this” report to a minimum so that it is actually looked at when it shows up in our inbox.
• David Iwanow: Our internal reports are custom. Depending on what data we need: backlinks, social signals, pages indexed, specific ranking reports for groups of keywords, link toxicity reports.
• Danica Jones: I run my own Raven reports all the time for my own records. Sometimes I am comparing metrics from before I got hired just for my own reference, sometimes I am looking at more drilled-down metrics from the Google analytics tools so I can see more about demographics, traffic flow and bounce rates for various groups, as well as conversions for some goals I have set up.
• AJ Kohn: I run my own reports and analysis all the time. I don’t share or send all of them because many of them don’t contain material insight. There’s movement and I can tease out progress but that’s generally the nuts and bolts instead of the finished product. The reports I share are ones that tell a story at a glance.
• Megan Pritts: I run all of the reports I can for my own use to better my clients ranking. I might show my clients ¼ of the information I have. I was always told to give enough, but not too much, information.
• Adonna Pruette: All of the time! I love to drill down and look deep into the details. I’m always looking for correlations in the data. I do have to be careful there as I could easily spend an entire day just looking over the reports of my clients data. It’s addictive! I get a lot of enjoyment out of figuring out exactly what is working.
• Jonathan Schikowski: Yes, on competitors’ link acquisition activities, for example. I also occasionally check rankings, even though I don’t include them in client reports.
• Sebastian Wenzel: I am focusing a lot on web analytics, social metrics and on-page data. Less and less on classic SEO KPIs since I just don’t have the time available.

That’s not all from our team of marketers. In Part Two, we discuss the changing face of SEO and how metrics are evolving along with it.

What do you think so far? Weigh in on any of our questions with your own thoughts in the comments.

And don’t forget to download our resource, 28 SEO Metrics to Sell and Report to Clients .

The post 16 marketers on the metrics that matter appeared first on Raven Internet Marketing Tools.

But SEO isn’t anywhere close to death.

Those stories simply perpetuate rumors in pursuit of the cheapest form of linkbait. Adding insult to injury, they seldom even result in interesting content. The panic-stricken titles usually lead into a tepid article about why panicking is a bad idea and how Internet marketing will live on.

What all these Chicken Littles are ignoring is what it really means to do SEO.

As with many acronyms, the term “SEO” has become an industry standard we rarely think about. When you do consider the term itself, search engines are what come to mind, with the optimization part falling by the wayside as self-explanatory.

But optimization is where the good stuff is – that’s the actual action of what we do.

What is optimization, anyway?

Perhaps we should look at the word more closely. It’s defined as an act, process, or methodology of making something:

as fully perfect, functional, or effective as possible.

When applied to search, this means that we are trying to make a website the best it can possibly be when it comes to being found by the right customers.

Maybe you think “perfect” for you and your client would be ranking No. 1 for all of your desired keywords.

But when optimizing for search engines, we have to think deeper than “What do robots detect?” Instead, we must think about who the search engines serve: humans.

If you need proof, note how good Google is at keeping the human principle in mind. Look at the many ways it tries to answer our questions faster: Fixing our grammar and spelling. Auto-finishing our questions. Using its Knowledge Graph tool to anticipate basic information we might be looking for in some cases we may not even have to click through to a page to get what we’re looking for.

In fact, with the new dominance of mobile devices, “search engines” as we know them are being omitted altogether in some searches. If someone is using their phone to search for a restaurant, they might use Yelp, Foursquare or another app that calculates their location and suggests options accordingly.

Optimization is immortal

Now, don’t panic just because you’ve spent a lot of time and money on SEO. All this means is that the focus on the “optimization” part of SEO is more important than ever – maybe even more important than the “search engine” part.

If you’re buying links in bulk, then that’s not going to help you in the search engines or on any other medium. But if you’re truly optimizing, then you haven’t been wasting your time.

Search is always evolving. As we expand into focusing on review sites like Yelp and Citysearch and location apps like Foursquare, we’re still optimizing. We’re thinking about the users who will be searching within our niche and providing information they’ll appreciate in the easiest way possible.

As long as you’re thinking about your audience, your optimization practices will easily transfer to however people are finding resources and recommendations. That’s why optimization can’t die.

Optimization is for humans

Here are some questions to ask yourself to make sure that your site is user-optimized, rather than just trying to game the search engine algorithms.

Content:

• What separates your content from the millions of other sites out there?
• Are you updating frequently?
• Does your content answer questions?
• Are you providing information people want to read?

Social media:

• Is your audience using the same social media platforms you are?
• Why would someone want to get social updates from you?
• Does your social presence draw people to your website?
• What makes your social media different from the info on your website?
• Are people engaging with you on social media?

Design:

• Is your site easy to navigate?
• Is your site pleasant to look at?
• Does your site convert well to mobile?
• Is it easy to find information on your site?

Reaching true SEO perfection

When we look at optimization, we must think philosophically. We must think like humans first and spiders second, always keeping our eye on what’s coming down the pike for both.

True SEO perfection is more than rankings – it’s a site where search engines and visitors find what they’re looking for. It’s a site with strong social signals and content worth sharing. Most importantly, it’s being able to prove and report a real effect on your client’s business.

It’s not about robots anymore – it never should have been. Instead of thinking about how to rise to the top of Google’s pages, make your site as perfect as possible in the eyes of your audience. Now that’s optimization.

The post On the ‘optimization’ part of SEO appeared first on Raven Internet Marketing Tools.

But how do you measure the impact your social efforts are having on SEO?

Social SEO reporting can be difficult. There are so many potential performance indicators to measure, and sometimes you can’t completely predict where the win will be observable. You’ve got to choose the right metrics for your goals, figure out how to measure and see how you did, and then determine what it means for traffic.

But the diversity and flexibility of social media are what make it the perfect supplement to any SEO campaign. Social SEO can be tailored to nearly any objective. In this post I’m going to discuss four metrics to consider for social SEO reporting, along with how to measure and report them.

Organic traffic

Social signals such as tweets, +1’s and likes can help you become more visible in search and get your content indexed quickly. In this way, social activity can increase organic search traffic to your site.

To measure this, you’ll first define your most shareable content. This will vary by industry, but could be content like landing pages or product pages. What content on your website is likely to be shared by users via social media, and what content would you want to be shared?

Look specifically at this content to find out if your efforts to promote it socially are also paying off in organic search.

The (not provided) keyword can help here. Google +1’s are most likely to have a direct effect on your rankings, but the search traffic will show up as (not provided) in Google Analytics because users can only “+1″ when they’re signed in.

As more and more people search while signed in, this percentage will likely increase. Compare this increase across your landing pages. The ones with more +1’s should be outpacing the natural growth of (not provided).

For example, the traffic in the graph above is to a particular landing page that has had some regular social success. The spikes in the bottom graph, Visits via Social Referral, let us know what social efforts were effective on their own – meaning the page reached an audience that was engaged and was shared with influencers.

You’ll notice a large spike in November. This was twice as much social referral traffic than any usual promotion effort. While we see that organic traffic (top graph) has been improving, supported by the smaller social referral spikes throughout the year, it more than doubles following the big social win in November.

Looking specifically at the (not provided) traffic, in the middle, we can see how this organic boost came primarily from signed-in searches. That means personalized search! When you find a correlation like this, include it in your reporting and do some analysis to explain what’s happening and why it’s happening.

You can get fancy with math, tracking your (not provided) numbers to see how they change on specific landing pages compared to overall change. This can tell you that you’re succeeding in personalized results or that the query is susceptible to personalized searches.

Number of owned or positive results

Social SEO is particularly useful for online reputation management. You can use social media to promote and improve the position of positive content and help keep negative results down, should any exist.

To measure this one, decide on your keywords to watch. This will typically involve your brand name and high level variations such as “brand name videos” or “brand name twitter”. You may have good reasons to throw in some non-branded keywords, but this list will generally be more focused than an overall keyword strategy.

A web search for these terms should return owned results, such as your website, your Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc., along with positive and neutral results.

Track the number of owned and positive results on the first page or two of search engines once a week and chart progress. This metric should change significantly – say, from 2/20 to 15/20, over the course of an effective social SEO campaign.

Don’t forget that image and video search are important here, too.

Shares per post

The clearest indicator that you’re doing the social part of social SEO right is how engaged people are with your content. A steadily increasing number of likes, tweets, +1’s and comments indicates:

• Your content is good and interesting
• Your website is well-optimized for social sharing
• You’re promoting to an engaged, quality audience

I use an internal tool to store these metrics, but a tool like SharedCount can help anyone analyze and report this.

This data will give you insight into where your target demographic is, who they are and what they want. Maybe people on Google+ respond well to your content, yet you’ve been focusing primarily on Facebook!

If your numbers aren’t growing, it could be a sign that you need greater social media visibility or a better content distribution plan.

Social referrals

A final way to see the impact of your social SEO strategy is to look at social referral traffic.

As you promote content through social media, you increase social signals to your site. A tweet by an influential user will bring more traffic to your website, and search engines are learning to give more weight to those kinds of social signals.

So your overall social referral traffic will be indicative of your social SEO success. Keep a close eye on it to make sure it increases throughout your campaign.

Whatever the goal, measure

You may have different priorities or metrics in mind. That’s OK, as long as they align with your goals. The important thing is to report on the metrics you’ve chosen.

Too often companies implement something “social” without a plan in place for tracking its performance. Line up clear goals early on – before your first tweet, before you set up your Google+ profile. Know why you’re doing what you’re doing, and know how you will measure its success or failure.

Reporting is the key to an effective social SEO strategy because it allows you to analyze and adjust. Pay attention to the data. It will tell you what to do.

Photo Credit: CarbonNYC via Compfight cc