It’s been a while since I put together a Small Business SEO post. I thought it’s high time I tackled another key issue facing small businesses – deciding whether their SEO activity is progressing or not.  SEO, and indeed SEM, is a unique marketing channel. It is quantifiable, responsive and flexible to an extent which I would argue other channels aren’t. However, that is my personal opinion. And the way in which I rate SEM successes is different, not unique certainly, but definitely different.

The first thing clients say to me when requesting SEO is invariably centered around rankings. “I want to be position so and so, for such and such a keyword.” And I am certain that this is a situation familiar to many of you providing SEO services. However, search isn’t always about ranking.  And rankings aren’t an overnight success story – they take time to achieve. In the meantime there need to be other indicators of success. There are a range of metrics possible to use to act as such indicators, many of which are key to gauging small business SEM success. Ranking high for “xyz” may deliver huge volume of visitors, but not sales. On the other hand, capturing niche rankings for “uvwxyz” and “abcdefg” may deliver less traffic, but actually better sales, not to mention may be easier to achieve in a shorter lead time.  

What I want to do is demonstrate a couple of interim success metrics that I use, that are different, and how I explain them to clients using my current playground, designer watches. Let’s break down some simple metrics that I use as indicators of success (Unique Success Indicators – USIs):

1. Keyword Coverage
2. Keyword Variance
3. Call to Actions

Keyword Variance and Keyword Coverage are slightly interlinked.  In a previous post, Keyword Discovery for Small Businesses, I explored a range of keyword development routes, branching from a series of questions. The first part of the section dealt with expanding to long tail keywords from a series of parent keywords, for example:

Parent: Designer Watches

Long Tails: Designer Watches London, Cheap Designer Watches, Designer watches for Sale, Designer Watches bargains in UK. (Not an exact series, but I hope you get the gist.)

The second part of the post covered expanding the root in relation to other phrases, for example in this case: Gucci Designer Watches, Armani Designer Watches, Gucci Men’s Watch, Men’s Rolex Wrist Watches. What I usually start with is splitting these keywords into a series of “roots,” where, although “Designer Watches” is my top level keyword, I have other equally important keyword combinations, which in the example used would be the different watch brands.  

So what is Variance and what’s the difference to Coverage?  Variance is simply the “variety of root terms,” i.e., what are the most common top level keyword sets that the site attracts traffic for. In this case the Variety would be around the different Brands – Gucci, Armani, etc. Success metric – do I get a sufficient variety of root keywords in my referrer traffic?

Coverage in that case equates to the long tales of these root key phrases. For example, Cheap Gucci Watches UK, Gucci watches for men, Gucci designer watches, etc. Success Metric – do I cover a large proportion of long tail extensions of the roots in my referrer traffic?

The Calls to Actions metric is probably one I don’t like being on this list. This because I feel that it’s the SEM’s job to deliver traffic, and the site's job to guide that traffic in to carrying out an action. However, I still use it as a metric because it IS the SEM’s job to deliver TARGETED traffic. If you deliver an extra 2000 visitors a day who don’t buy, don’t fill in a questionnaire, don’t spend more than a few seconds on the site, don’t make an enquiry, don’t call the business, then you are definitely failing to deliver the right traffic.  There is only so much you can blame on a poor site – and to be honest, if you feel that the site just won’t convert, stand up and say so.

Let’s take the example of my site (designer watches). It’s a poor site. The search functionality is rubbish, there isn’t a contact form, the call to action is pretty blunt, and there isn’t a way to shift and filter between offers. But that’s OK. My site's current aim is to target purely long tail traffic delivered via Google’s QDF algorithm. So I expect high bounce rates and low click through rates. However, my success metric for the present is Keyword Variance and Coverage. But that doesn’t mean that I should have no sales!

In this roundabout way, I hope I have demonstrated a different way to look at interim metrics. What I haven’t done is to explain how to relate these to a client's site.

It’s not a simple exercise, unfortunately. However, if you do follow certain processes while working on a client’s site (or even your own), I am assuming you would carry out some sort of an audit. I normally advise on an SEO SWOT analysis. This audit helps in identifying what’s wrong with a site, and what its position is in relation to its competitor and industry.  The ideal scenario would be to split the metric indicator decision into two parts:

1. What needs to be done on the site? (e.g., link building, site cleanup, increased content, etc)
2. What are the client's metrics for success? (e.g., sales, visibility, ad impressions, brand building, enquiries, etc)

Once you have identified the above, you can then proceed to identify the quick wins against the long term goals. Splitting them into the two categories allows you to put together a range of success metrics that are achievable within your predicted timescales, given that the SEO/M work you carry out works for the site.

In my case above, I have given first priority to Coverage and Variance, which will then move on to rankings in the long run. In order to achieve rankings, I need links and content – so for the metric of High Rankings, I have two identifiable and quantifiable actions.  Which highlights another point – short term metrics vary significantly to long term metrics.

Let me end with examples of other interim metrics I have used:

• Quantity of indexed pages
• Increase in backlinks
• Universal search visibility
• Local search visibility
• Increase in indexing frequency
• Ranking for targeted landing pages
• Cross search engine visibility

I do have to apologise in the circular nature of this post - I felt that it’s strange ground to cover unless I put the whole thing together in a conversational tone in order to explain myself better.

If you would like to know more about Small Business SEM processes that I use, please feel free to read my take on SEO Swot Analysis,  as well as:

• Small Business SEO: Content Strategies
• Small Business Link Building: Part B - Grabbing the Bull By the Horns
• Small Business Link Building: Part A - Analysing Opportunities  
• Building Bricks: Keyword Discovery Process for Small Businesses
• Small Business SEO: It's About Education and Empowerment

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