SEO ROI: How To Ensure Performance Tracking Matches Goals Ep. 558

Hi, and welcome to the SEO podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, one of the owners of EWR Digital. And my name is Matt Bertram, your lead digital strategist for today. Welcome, just today. Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our podcast. This is, I don't know, podcast 560 or so. They're getting up there, right? Like, that feels good. 560 podcasts. Over 10 years, non-stop. Non-stop. We're going to be covering SEO ROI, how to ensure performance tracking matches goals. I think this is a really good article and really good about kind of fundamental practices. Because, you know, the data you look at is all that matters. Before we get into that, we do have a sponsor. Our sponsor is still SE Ranking. We really appreciate them and their great software. The summary of this is, just remember this. It's good and it's inexpensive. It's professional and it's easy to use. It has lots of tools, but each one of those tools is good enough to sell independently. You may not have heard it, of it, actually, it, but it has lots of industry awards and superb user rating. It's a phenomenal piece of software. Matt, take it away. Yeah, sure. So, in a lot of different masterminds and groups that I'm in, I've been talking about SE Ranking and how we're using it. And I've been getting really positive responses from people that have tried it out. It is a Ukrainian-based company. So, they are displaced. So, please support them. We do have a 30-day free trial. If you go to bestseopodcast.com forward slash SE Ranking, it will take you there. That's 30 free days. They have a lot of different tools. They just launched this content tool. They have an AR writing tool. I mean, this is really a tool to consider against Ahrefs or SEMrush or Majestic or any other of the tools that you're using. It's a phenomenal tool. They have great data. We use it a lot. So, I would encourage you to go check it out.

And Matt did mention you can get a 30-day trial. Standard trial is 14 days. We really do encourage you to use it for 30 days. And you can get that 30-day trial by going to bestseopodcast.com forward slash SE Ranking. Bestseopodcast.com forward slash SE Ranking. Patiff to those guys and their amazing software. Yes. We're going to just ask you to follow us, right? And just one platform. I'm going to mention YouTube. YouTube.com forward slash bestseopodcast. Connect with us there. We're trying to grow our YouTube. So, that would be awesome if you could follow us on YouTube. And if you want to not just hear this, but see it, you can see us on YouTube. When you get there, make sure you subscribe and then also click the notification bell so you can see us when we go live. I say we jump right into this article. Matt, do you think it? All right. S-E-O-R-O-I. I've obviously returned on investment. How to ensure performance tracking matches goals. This is by Roger Monti. Discover the reasons for disconnects between SEO metrics and goals while SEO professionals struggle with ROI and potential solutions. The state of SEO report. Do I need to get closer? No, no. I was being, you said matrix. Oh, that was the matrix? I thought you were voguing. That was my matrix. Yeah. The state of SEO report reveals some consensus as to which metrics are useful, but there are still as much disagreement. And we're going to jump into that. First and most importantly, there are three SEO metrics that are agreed upon across the board. So the relative importance of individual SEO metrics varies between in-house. And that's what I liked about this particular kind of study was they're comparing, hey, if you're an in-house SEO, what do you think is important? If you're an agency SEO-er, what do you think is important? And if you're a freelance SEO-er, what do you think is important? Obviously, all professional SEO-ers, what do they consider? The top three SEO campaign goals and KPIs from the

report are exactly the same. So they all say the most important metrics to be looking at as an SEO, whether you're in-house agency or freelancer, is rankings, page views, and conversions. I like that. That kind of makes sense. Are you surprised, Matt? Not surprised at all. Not at all. These SEO metrics are tracked via Google Analytics, Search Console, and third-party tools, making them useful for tracking the goals of an SEO campaign. And you won't be surprised. You can use a tool like SE Ranking. Why is measuring KPIs so difficult? Even when there's agreement on which KPIs are most important, there is still the issue of accurate measurement. Privacy laws are unsetting many forms of tracking that we used to use all the time. And one of the points that he brings in is that if you're tracking in a service-based industry, if you want to track down to the sales, there's often a high turnover of the receptionist. So if the receptionist isn't trained to kind of track this information, then you really can't get down to the sales data. So that's one. You need a champion, right? You need a champion on the inside to complete the full cycle to understand, did this lead close? Was this a good type of lead, like a lead scoring? And really having somebody on the inside to champion it is incredibly important for specifically, yes, service-based industries. E-commerce, you can do it all online. But service-based, we only have so much visibility, right, to the lead being generated, what's going on on the website. Maybe they have a tie-in to the CRM. You never know. Depending on the size of the company, if we're talking about freelancers and maybe smaller agency work, they might not have effectively tied it into a CRM, so you don't have a lot of visibility. And that's been an ongoing challenge for SEOs across the board. Yes, absolutely. In fact, Roger says he prefers to focus on tracking leads, not return on ad spend, ROAS, for service-based operations. For e-commerce, however, you

can barely closely track ROAS. It's important to know that SEO is an investment, and like going to the gym, it's going to take time to optimize everything. If you just look at yourself in the mirror after two weeks in the gym, which you should do, if you don't notice anything, then you might drop it. It's going to take some more time. Yeah, it takes a while, and it doesn't happen overnight, and it's a good analogy for people to understand. That's why we typically recommend six months to a year for investment. If you're spending a month, well, you could be cleaning up some technical issues, but like ongoing SEO, you really need some time, and it really depends on where those keywords are ranked first. Like to move from the second page to the first page takes a lot less to move from not ranked at all to first page or top positions. So, you know, unfortunately, it's like depends is the question, and also the keyword difficulty, and, you know, what foundation do you have on your site and with content to be able to really leverage and amplify what cleaning up some SEO does. So, there's a lot of different factors, but overall, absolutely, you can pour a lot of hours into websites, even on page, to get them to rank. Like everything is very customized. It's somewhat of an art. There are big targets to go after, but how you reach that target, there's so many different algorithms that optimize. It's something that to figure that out of how the website you're working on impacts the algorithm takes some time. It's kind of like you get in a car for the first time, Chris, and you're driving it, right? And you push on the gas, and then like it kind of jerks a little bit. It's not like normal of how the car that you're used to is. Right. So, there's some calibration that happens, and then there's some, you got to get the ball rolling. You got to get some work happening

on it. So, that's a great analogy, and it's very common to consider it that way. Yep. And he says, typically because revenue is generally tracked outside of in-house SEO, it's, oh, I'm sorry. I skipped ahead. We're talking about the fourth most important SEO metric, according to those three, in-house, freelancer, and agency. So, they all agreed on the first three. The fourth is where we start seeing some discrepancy. It says, both agency and freelance SEOs ranked revenue as the fourth most important SEO metric. In-house SEOs ranked marketing qualified leads as the fourth most important. So, again, in-house leads agency and freelancers actual revenue. So, I have some thoughts on this. So, I think that if you have an in-house SEO guy and you have an in-house marketing team, you're probably a bigger company, and your KPIs internally are different. If you're agency or maybe freelancer, it may be, and not in all cases, but it may be a smaller client, and what they're spending on SEO or marketing in general is coming out of their pocket as the business owner. And so, they're a lot more responsive to revenue. And typically, you can actually get more information on the smaller companies if you do have that in-house marketing person. Sometimes, the bigger in-house SEOs don't even have that data. And it's sometimes like pulling teeth to get that. So, I think that that's where this question is coming from as far as why they value that. And I think agency and freelance SEOs understand if we're not providing ROI, the client is going to stop spending, right? On a big company, an enterprise company, SEO might be one media channel on a multifaceted campaign or a supporting business line item that supports what they might be doing with paid and other things. So, it makes sense that they're looking at different things. They're really looking at organic leads that are coming in and trying to qualify them, lead score. Yeah, he points out like typically, revenue is generally tracked outside for an in-house SEO. It's the

responsibility of another department. That's kind of what you pointed out. In some cases, particularly large companies, they don't even have access at all to the revenue numbers. And in general, I kind of jotted down a note that says that's kind of a bad idea unless you've got a mechanism. So, they like to silo, hey, this is actually how much revenue we're making. This is how profitable particular parts of the product lines are or services are. And they like to segment those. As long as you've got some sort of mechanism to say like, these were great leads, these were mediocre leads, these were horrible leads, then great. They've got to have some sort of feedback mechanism to make sure that that works. And I would say also with lead scoring or attribution, it's really, really hard too. Like you can use things like call rail and other things to get a better indicator on it. But say you're running radio, right, and maybe you're going, okay, branded search provides X amount of uplift, but they're coming in as organic leads or branded leads. How do you value that towards radio versus SEO? So, you know, it gets more complex the more variables you add. And so, you want to get in alignment with your in-house marketing team or the in-house SEO that you might be consulting or working with to make sure that you're looking at the same metrics. I can tell you that is super important. And they usually have internally goals that they're trying to hit, right? And they're trying to work towards or meet those goals. And you need to be cognizant of that. And Roger, as an SEO agency, says qualified leads are more of what he would say is best metric for success. What the client does with this is up to them. And I 100% agree with you, Matt, in terms of that smaller business. If they're paying you, you know, four grand a month and you're driving all these leads and they're dropping the ball on the leads, when

we've dealt with smaller companies, we've gotten involved in that next process of like, how do you handle them? What is the follow-up process? How can you do that better? Because eventually they're going to drop us if they can't figure out how to close their leads, if we can't help them figure out how to convert their leads. Yeah, this might be a good time to add. Really, SEO is becoming online marketing, right? Like SEO, there's YouTube SEO, there's social media SEO. So it's like visibility, optimization online, what's your online strategy? SEO, you have to understand so many different verticals. And I would tell you that if you're looking at, I had a really great thing here and I teed it up too much. But what I would say, I guess, is if you're looking at the revenue, say what you said again. I'm going to try it a little more time. So what a client does after that is up to them. We've gotten involved with smaller companies in, hey, what do you do with those leads and how do you make sure that you follow up with them appropriately? Oh, okay, perfect. So following up with leads, I think that most companies think they do online marketing. And online marketing's job is to package up the lead with a bow on it, hand it to someone, and they can go pick up that lead whenever they want. And it's a deal that's ready to close. That is something that I've seen consistently with industries that are running maybe paid ads as well as SEO. They get to the online leads because it's maybe more, it's newer for them, right? Digital marketing used to be called modern marketing. It's probably the staple now. But I would say they think that their salespeople are just order taking, right, when coal leads are generated. And some of the data points I've seen with online schools, for example, if you put in a form fill, someone's calling you within seven minutes. The data really says when they're in the

mindset of buying, you want to continue that conversation and move it as far as possible then, right? So as soon as the lead comes in, follow up with them. And I think that service-based businesses, because they're used to dealing with referrals, which referrals usually close, very high likelihood of closing. They're looking at, well, this is a lead that's just been given to me. They're looking at the same way as referrals and they're not. And I think that that delineation is really, really important and there needs to be a real process to follow up those leads. One of the big things that we've seen with multi-location businesses, like you said, is getting involved in their sales component. The people answering the phone, the sales guys, if they can listen to that, they hear the lead. They think it's a good lead and then the people on the phone are not doing it the way that the manager or business owner would like for them to. And it's really eye-opening and then things get fixed and then there's improvement. But again, if we're just going, here's the lead, whatever you do with it, whatever, they're not just paying for that. They're paying for that plus actually closing the lead and getting the revenue. And that's why I think revenue is so important for in-house or sorry, for agency and freelance, because if the client's not making money and they don't see the value of the investment, they will stop investing. It just has to stop for a good business owner. All right. So now we're going to talk, right? We've got our top three are in complete agreement. The next one, okay, is it revenue or is it actually qualified leads? And now we got five through 10 and how do these lay out with each other? So all three SEO demographics diverge entirely about the next top ranking. So I'm going to go through these. I'll list these. Bear with us. Agencies believe that five through 10 are marketing qualified leads, number five, bounce rates, number

six, backlinks, seven, page speed, eight, customer acquisition, nine, and social, 10. One, in-house, and we'll kind of go back and touch on these, but in-house says branded versus non-branded traffic, backlinks, revenue, page speed, bounce rates, and then time on page. And finally, freelancers, their number five is actually split across three evenly, bounce rates, backlinks, and social engagement, marketing qualified leads, customer acquisition, and paid speed split between those evenly, branded versus non-branded traffic, email subscriptions, and finally, customer lifetime value. It's interesting that the freelancer is the only one who mentions customer lifetime value. I think that's important. He points out, Roger points out, that page speed is the only metric that all three of these groups agree on that are included in five through 10. And page speed is a known ranking factor. The survey results confirm that everyone, what everyone knows, that page speed is a valuable metric to track, but it's not important as a ranking factor. That's an interesting thing we can have. Here, I'm going to actually share my screen here, Chris, to see these and the percentages. I would tell you that it's interesting what the in-house are saying, right? So, agency, market qualified lead, I think that that would have been an in-house metric, but interestingly, it's the number five for agency. Bounce rates, 5.4%. I think bounce rates are super important as a leading indicator. Producing backlinks and backlinks that have good on-page and good content and everything else will help create more signals for Google. Page speed, of course, customer acquisition. I think tracking backlinks is more about tracking the effort that's been done, right? Like, it's an easy way for us to say, oh, I know that the team is doing this and here's what has happened. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. That's what in-house 6.1% is looking at, too, if you can see this on YouTube. Yeah, I can see it. And where we're broadcasting it. Branded versus non-branded is something, get a lot in-house. Revenue, they have access to it. Do you have any thoughts on

brand versus non-branded on in-house? Because I've got a thought or two. Well, you know, if you're running other media channels and you're monitoring social and you're trying to figure out brand presence in certain areas. And I think that there's certainly a debate around running paid traffic to branded versus non-branded. And that's a whole other can of worms. But I think that understanding brand strength or brand presence and if you're looking at also the attribution, a lot of times they might click on a branded link or they might convert on a branded link, right? And so I think it's really important to understand, is your brand helping them convert or is the content or the landing page or, you know, whatever else on the pages non-branded working? And then I would just say, you know, some of the bounce rate and on pages, you know, okay, we're targeting this page. This page is ranking. We need to speed up the site. We need to do the backlinks. We need to understand brand versus non-branded, which again, another can of worms. Revenue, maybe. Like, I don't know. I'm surprised by this report. I'm trying to process it in my head. Also, from the agency side of things, I get it. I'm wondering what customer acquisition as number nine for agency is. Certainly social links are important. And then you come down here to freelance. You know, customer lifetime value, I think, is really important for clients to understand it's not just this deal. But again, SEO is that benefit over the long haul. And so it is an investment. So I think that you're, you know, positioning the investment really well. And then bounce rates, backlinks, social engagement is something you, is a good deliverable, is something you can physically see. I mean, this is just really interesting. I mean, the top ones, again, there's agreement there. But these, you know, these other kind of five through ten, it's super interesting to me to look at these and try to understand why people select these in this

order. Yeah, I think if you go back to the in-house and branded versus non-branded being number five, right? So that, in the case of in-house, is going to be right under leads, right? So not tied to revenue, because we kind of already discussed that, is, hey, I'm running, like you said, multiple marketing campaigns. You could easily say that radio and TV and whatever else, podcast advertising is more of a branding play. And I'm actually trying to assess whether this SEO department is delivering value and what can happen from it. And that is kind of determined, or at least a great indicator of that is branded versus non-branded. Whereas the agency isn't necessarily trying to prove, using that to prove it. So, yeah, I would also just add last thing, the marketing qualified lead, because I was thinking that should go in-house. But maybe it's not in-house, because I would tell you in-house, they're looking at, looking at like work, like you said, like looking at, okay, how many backlinks did you created? What is substantial improvements on bounce rates, on time page, like revenue? They're really, really specific things. And a marketing qualified lead might be even a softer metric and how do they, who decides that and what's the value of that? You don't really know until it all closes. So, it's almost a volume game. Remember, that was in-house. And number four for in-house is the marketing qualified leads. Oh. Right. Right. So, that's number four, which is why it's not listed here on five through 10. Right. For the. I want to see the whole list. For, yeah, for the freelancer and the agency, that's where the debate between marketing and qualified, marketing qualified lead and revenue is. Yeah. Okay. No, no, no. I guess I was trying to place that. I was trying to justify why, why it's not on the list. Yeah. And that makes sense. It is. Yeah. It would make sense to have the whole list at this point, but that's just a little comment for Roger there.

All right. So, now let's talk about mismatched goals and metrics. So, aside from page speed, there is no agreement on which metrics are important. This is talking about five through 10. Another curious result is that freelancers were evenly split among virtually all the metrics. So, 6.3% of freelance SEOs agreed that bounce rate, backlinks, and social engagement were critical. That put it at the number five position. And then the number 10 ranked SEO metric, customer lifetime value, was rated at 5.1%. That's a difference of only 1.2% between the 5th and 10th. So, basically, freelancers are all over the place in terms of what's actually important. And he goes on to say, well, this is probably because you've got different types of freelancers, right? Are they focused on content? Are they focused on link building? Are they focused on, you know, on-page, site auditing, local search, affiliate work? Like, whatever it is they're focused on, that's going to determine what is most important to them. Absolutely. Yeah. And then, finally, we've got the disconnect between, well, that's not finally. We've got next is the disconnect between campaign goals and KPI tracking. All three demographics agree on three metrics that are each a measurement of SEO success, right? Rankings, page views, and conversions. Those three measurements are result-based KPIs of success. Where the three SEO demographics strongly disagree is on metrics that are understood to be contributors to SEO success and healthy traffic. Again, bounce rate, backlinks, social engagement, time on page, and page speed. There may be uncertainty as to which of the above plays a role in Google algorithms and to what extent, right? So, that's just some confusion of what's going on in this kind of next phase. So, this points to the limitations of these metrics. The reason for this limitation or this uncertainty is that Google's ranking algorithm is just a black box. We don't actually know. The inability to see how the algorithm works doesn't mean that social engagement or time on page or any of the other metrics should not be

tracked. It just means that one has to be aware of the limitations of these kinds of metrics, right? So, don't get too focused on one. And so, this kind of broad spread is probably the smart approach. Now, let's talk about effects on tracking SEO ROI. There are many articles about tracking the ROI of SEO. Again, ROI is return on investment. But the truth is that it cannot be accurately tracked. It can only be estimated. For example, and I think this is even true. You mentioned e-commerce. There's a lot more specificity. You can get a lot more granular and track it a lot better, which is still true. And it's still an estimate at the end of the day. For example, we don't know if backlinks played a role in rankings. Sometimes there are no changes in rankings until months later. And you're left wondering, hey, was that because those backlinks finally kicked in? Or was it just some sort of coincidence with, especially if you're doing ongoing work? Even if one could, one could still not accurately confirm that those links played a role in ranking because Google's ranking process is still just a black box. Make sense? Yeah. Yeah. All right. So finally, ensure KPIs support campaign goals. The state of SEO results makes it clear that choosing the best metrics is vital to your situation. And I put two question marks here, and I'm trying to think of why the state of SEO, that's the report, makes it clear that choosing the best metrics is vital to your situation. I think what I'm saying is I'm not sure the state of SEO does make it clear that choosing the best metric is important to your situation. What it says is your situation might define what metrics you find the most important, right? Whether you're in-house, whether you're a freelancer, whether you're an agency. Sometimes the data is not available, such as revenue or sales figures, but there are always other data, such as leads or conversion rates, that are important. Differentiate between actual

SEO performance metrics, that would be like ranking and traffic, metrics and metrics that pertain to website experience, so page speed, time on page, bounce rate, and also SEO improvements like backlinks to get a total picture of how well the different parts of an SEO campaign are working together. So he's just kind of wrapping up and saying, there's lots of things to measure that impact SEO, but don't necessarily impact the value SEO is bringing to the business, right? So yeah, how many links do I have? Yeah. So shout out to Joseph Scott. He's wrote a bunch of stuff. Oh yeah, look at that. Yeah, so he said, SEO rankings key, he's repurposing content. Um, qualified organic traffic, uh, true store, like let's check out all his comments. So thank you, um, Joseph for being so engaged. And he's kind of connected on LinkedIn. So patiff to you, Joseph, that's, that's awesome, uh, to be connected with him. All right. So that really wraps it up. Like understand that some of the metrics you're going to be looking at are about what am I doing or what as an, as an in-house freelancer or agency, am I doing? That's impacting SEO. And then some of the other metrics are about what impact is the SEO that we are doing, having on the business, more of a return on investment, or if you're in house, more of a, of what kind of qualified leads that you're, that you're providing. Um, so patiff to Roger, this is a great article, how to ensure performance tracking matches goals for SEO and ROI. I thought this was a great article, Chris, for a lot of people that are looking at how to value the ROI. If they're a business going through digital transformation, uh, they're really looking at getting serious about online marketing. I've talked to a lot of businesses that I guess since COVID or, um, whatnot, they've really shifted towards digital and changing their business model. Maybe it's people retiring, maybe it's, uh, referral base is changing, but, but

online marketing in strategy is becoming more and more. They're a staple in, um, in what enterprise brands are doing. And it's been something that small businesses have been doing for a long time, uh, because it really is one of the best ROIs you can get, Chris, like SEO over so many years, every campaign we run multi-channel, different services. It all goes back to the websites that are doing the best are the ones that invested in SEO early and did SEO, right. Um, they get a really nice, uh, wind in their sales as far as, um, lead generation, as far as visibility, like there's brand awareness, there's all kinds of great benefits from SEO. And it's, it's, it's something that I'm seeing more and more companies invest in along with content and other things. So, yeah, I think just to comment on, on some of the results here, it may be, so the in-house kind of surprised me a little bit. It's, you know, number four was, um, really not revenue. They had revenue down to seven, uh, but number four for them was the actual links. And I would think what's also important, and maybe they just lumped it in, in their head was the quality of not links. I'm sorry, the leads, the quality of the leads. Like, I feel like that's a different metric. So one of the metrics is how many leads. And then the other metric is what was the quality of the leads. And, and I think that they, they probably just lumped it together, but that's, that's how you ultimately kind of back into the revenue as long as your kind of financial department is saying, Hey, these were good leads. These were, you know, mediocre leads. These were bad leads. Um, but at the end of the day, you know, we are always focused, uh, on, on the results, right. And the results ultimately for any business are going to be revenue. Like that's, yes. And if you're not focused on the revenue, then you're probably not maintaining

that client, um, for, for very long. So Chris, if you're wanting to grow your business with the largest, strongest, most robust network in the world, the internet. Call E call EWR, uh, for increased revenue in your business. Uh, basically you just go to what were you, I would encourage you to go to, uh, EWR digital.com. And then there's a free consultation button at the top. And, you know, typically we'll do a discovery call with you on to understand your needs. We'll probably give you a tip or two, um, that may help you solve a burning issue within 20 minutes. If you need more time, uh, we move into a strategy session, um, that strategy session will be applied against your services. And you, if you don't find value in it, we'll give your money back. So it's a risky way of engaging with us at a low price point versus, um, you know, a full on year of SEO or digital marketing services. We also have a variety of audits and workshops that I encourage you to check out as well. Very cool. Well, um, we are still asking for reviews, go to EWR digital.com forward slash review. Uh, and that's in the show notes too. It's in the show notes. That'll take you right there. Uh, make it easy to leave us a review. Uh, you're already following us on YouTube. If you followed the instructions at the beginning of this podcast. Uh, so also make sure you check us out at Instagram.com forward slash the best SEO podcast, and then on tick tock.com forward slash the at symbol. So at best SEO podcast. Yeah, we have some, we have some great shorts where we cut it up. If you don't have time to listen to the full session. Uh, also another shout out to SE ranking, uh, in the show notes as well. There's a link to that offer, uh, just best SEO podcast on YouTube and the links in the show notes. So, uh, check it out. 30 day free trial, best

SEO podcast.com. Forward slash SE ranking, uh, until the next podcast. My name is Chris Burris. My name is Matt Bertram. Bye-bye for now.