Blank stares ensue for many people when the words data, statistics, analytics, web and traffic are mentioned.

As a lover of data, this makes me sad. SEO has changed over the years, and our roles have changed with it.

No longer are we simply charged with optimizing sites or doing keyword analysis. Now we must have an in-depth understanding of our clients' business objectives.  

This is all good stuff, though, and with tools like Google Analytics, we’re in a very good position to help our customers become data-driven organizations.

Understand your objectives

However, if you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.

Clients have a goal in mind. They want to accomplish stuff. Setting clear objectives for your SEO campaign together with your clients will make it easier to create an initial strategy. Setting objectives will also make it easier to measure, improve and work on a campaign or project over time.

This might sound painfully obvious, but what do we actually mean by an objective? 

The objective is what you want to achieve with your campaign. It answers the big "why" questions. It’s the real answer to why you've been hired as an SEO. Not all clients will think in terms of objectives, though, which can make this a tad challenging. Objectives vary widely, depending on the project/client/campaign, but examples of objectives could be:

• To create awareness around our oceans and their fragile eco-systems
• To create awareness of London’s independent art galleries and increase physical visitor numbers
• Help people discover the benefits of vegetarian food through tasty recipes

If you work with e-commerce clients, like I do, you often have one objective: Sell more stuff. This is a valid objective, but don’t stop there. Ask your clients to explain a bit more about it. If you know why they want to sell more, what the brand has set out to achieve and what they believe in, it will help you design your tactics for the SEO campaign.

However, objectives must be doable, understandable, measurable and beneficial (DUMB). Avinash Kaushik (my favorite analytics blog) explains this perfectly by saying businesses often fail because they are data rich but information poor. It’s common for companies to seek to measure exactly everything. But unless the data you gain is DUMB, you are likely wasting your time. 

The thinking must be to measure what matters. If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.

When you’ve decided on an objective, document it.

Design your strategy

Once you know the main objective(s) of the campaign, the interesting work starts. It’s now time to outline the strategy that will guide you in reaching the objectives of the campaign. 

If, for example, your objective is to create awareness around our oceans and their fragile eco-system, your strategy might be to...

• Get visitors to watch an information video on the campaign site
• Get visitors to sign up for a monthly newsletter
• Get visitors to sign an online petition

Once you’re clear on the strategy that should enable you to reach your objective, put them together.

Define the strategy with KPIs

If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.

The strategy defines the objectives, whereas the key performance indicators (KPIs) measure the strategy's success. Basically, the KPIs are metrics that will let you know how well you are doing at reaching your objectives. 

In the below table, I’ve added the KPIs that will be used to define the success of the strategy.

The best thing about this approach is it can be used for just about any campaign.

The key thing is to monitor the KPIs over time. There is no point in looking at your KPIs once a campaign is over to see that you failed or succeeded. The KPIs are there to inform your next move—not to sum up the campaign. Or, in the words of Jim Sterne, the founding director of the Web Analytics Association:

“Most people are using web analytics as a benchmark: how did we do yesterday, and how are we doing today? Smart people are actually analysing to optimise their website. The advanced people are using Web data to optimise all of their marketing”

If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.

How to use KPIs

If you see that a KPI is going south, it’s time to do something about it. In the example above, one of the main KPIs is number of signups for the newsletter. If we see this number drop, it’s an alert that we should look into it. The solution to fixing it might be a technical fix, a usability tweak, content improvement, or change of keyword focus.

You must become an active monitor of each of your KPIs.

Define your target

We’ve got our objectives, strategy and KPIs, but how do we know if the KPI results are good or bad? This is where targets come in. Each KPI should have a target next to it. Clients usually have a target in mind, but it’s your job to make sure that they get added.

One of our KPIs is the number of signups for the newsletter/month. What would be a good target for that? If your client doesn’t know, then check if there are any existing statistics for the newsletter signups and base your target on that plus the estimated effect of your SEO efforts.

Then add the targets to the table.

Segment and measure

With the above structure in place, you can quickly see how well you are doing at reaching your objectives. 

Let’s pretend you haven’t reached the set target for the number of newsletter signups. You aimed for 100 but only have 50 so far. 

By segmenting the traffic for users who've signed up to for the newsletter, we understand a bit more about where things are going right, and where they're going wrong. The table below is an example of how you can segment your visitors. I’ve used the number of newsletter signups as an example.

Though the segments are clearly limited, we can still see that the largest single group of visitors comes from social channels. We can also see that the PPC campaign isn’t working as effectively as we need it to, nor are our organic efforts. It’s up to you to interpret these details, but a couple of questions we should ask in this scenario include: 

• Should we spend more on social?
• Which social channels are working best?
• Are our keywords relevant?
• Which PPC ads are not working?

I work a lot with Google Analytics, and the more web analytics reports I do for our clients, the more I appreciate the power of segmentation. The more you understand about the visitors to your site, the easier it is to come up with improvements that will help you achieve your objectives.

Summary

The simple example used in this article has worked really well for us. It can be tweaked for your own needs.

Another approach is to skip one step and put the objectives together with the strategy. In this approach, we talk  less about the objectives. Instead, we formulate the strategy to include why we’re using it (e.g., get visitors to sign up for our newsletter to increase awareness about our oceans). We like to use this approach for smaller sites.

With DUMB, it’s tempting to create 100 different objectives, then try to measure everything. This is a mistake. Only measure the most important data. If you can’t think of a good reason for including an objective and its corresponding KPIs, it's probably not worth measuring.