SEO KPIs for CMO’s from the operators perspective– Tyson Stockton // Searchmetrics

Quotes

• “The first piece that I would say before you look for recommendations to the CMO, one recommendation to the SEOs is to do your homework and understand what CMOs are already receiving and looking at across other branches.” -Tyson

• “Understanding what the existing kind of reporting, language, and terminology is being used is going to be an important first step because you want to have some sort of consistency with what they are already looking at.” -Tyson

• “The first recommendation I would have for the CMO level is, think about it more of like a KPI funnel. This is really important because as we know with SEOs, is not an immediate marketing channel as your paid campaigns are.” -Tyson

• “Make sure that the KPIs that you are watching are covering each stage of this KPI funnel so then you see those early indicators, convert tier, ranking and traffic and later into conversion. You want to have this nice leading funnel so you know that even if there was no change in the revenue, you can see if you are making progress.” -Tyson

• “You have to have an understanding of the time it takes to mature a channel. When you are starting a new content strategy, it would take three to six months before you see really meaningful impacts. The investment needs to be constant but it also grows over time.” -Ben

• “Its going to vary on the type of initiatives but I usually like to start the funnel with how Google is crawling and covering your pages. From that, Ill be looking crawl activity at Search Console, the crawllog files, where within the site is Google spending its time.” -Tyson

• “Understanding or having the KPI that helps bring one of side into how Google is interacting with your website is going to be the starting baseline for having that really wide net.” -Tyson

• “Going into next KPI, thats when you are going to be looking at either ranking data or SEO visibility and this is where the level of sophistication the organization has come in.” -Tyson

• “Once you get past crawling some sort of ranking type KPI is going to be key.” -Tyson

• “You mentioned that the nomenclature is very important because CMOs traditionally dont necessarily talk SEO and so really what we are talking about is, can we get Google the information that we want them to share or are they going to index our website and the second is, is that information showing where we want it to.” -Ben

• “Ranking is pretty binary. It means which keywords are ranking on which URLs, which positions, you could use things like weighted averages, and you can use some things like the number of keywords ranking at these is probablythe most basic piece.” -Tyson

• “SEO visibility, in the reason why this is the better KPI to use is that it brings in these elements. If you are using SEO visibility, you are going to be looking at the number ranking keywords on a domain, what the search fall of those keywords are, what position you are for those keywords, and then what other SERP elements are present on the page that would impact your click-through rate.” -Tyson

• “For really dramatic increases in SEO visibility, that could present right away for traffic if its more, hey we moved a lot of keywords from Page 4 to Page 2, so that means we still need to implement more items. The lag as far as visibility to traffic is going to be a little bit more as far as whats the type of initiative, are there subsequent future rollouts that are going to continue that.” -Tyson

• “A lot of times that you are putting in place an initiative, you might put in on some pages whether it is content or enhancement to the pages, and you are going to keep implementing and having some iterations on that.” -Tyson

• “Seeing business impact from SEO as a channel is going to vary drastically depending on the nature of the business. E-commerce is typically the more immediate one but if you have an e-commerce with a high-ticket value it will have a longer timeline. So this one is less specific on SEO and more dependent on the actual business and how they are monetizing on the actual traffic.” -Tyson