The best ways to effectively measure SEO

Jason Shafton, Founder and CEO of Winston Francois, delves into SEO for growth marketing. Measuring SEO’s effectiveness can be a challenge for growth marketers. Unlike other marketing channels with clear-cut key performance indicators (KPIs), SEO's impact is multifaceted and its results often require patience and time to bear fruit. Today Jason discusses the best ways to effectively measure SEO.
About the speaker

Jason Shafton

Winston Francois

 is a little camera shy

Jason is Founder and CEO of Winston Francois

Show Notes

  • 01:45
    The SEO measurement landscape
    SEO is challenging to measure due to its indirect impact on conversions. While leadership assesses overall marketing effectiveness through customer acquisition cost (CAC), marketing focuses on primary and secondary engagement KPIs to gauge SEO and content performance.
  • 04:22
    Leading indicators in SEO measurement
    Leverage good technical SEO and tools like Google Search Console and Semrush to ensure new is indexed and ranking for your keywords. SERP rankings and engagement metrics serve as leading indicators of SEO and content marketing effectiveness.
  • 06:40
    Setting expectations for SEO results
    It's crucial to communicate the time required for investments to yield results upfront. This involves discussing timelines for making long-term investments in technical SEO infrastructure, content marketing, and thought leadership to build domain authority and brand awareness.
  • 09:34
    Prioritizing conversion metrics in SEO
    SEO must prioritize conversion metrics rather than relying on vanity metrics like crawl rate. Ultimately, SEO efforts must contribute to driving MQLs, signups, or registrations, and provide guidance to teams responsible for optimizing web pages for conversion.
  • 11:30
    Bridging the gap between SEO and business goals
    This involves understanding complementary and supporting functions in SEO and growth marketing and user-centricity. Through skill set expansion, understanding business KPIs, and user behavior, SEOs and content marketers can create content that drives results.
  • 13:28
    Leveraging AI in SEO and content marketing
    The introduction of AI in SEO accelerates content output and scalability. However, maintaining a balance between AI content and human editing is crucial to ensure quality and positive impact on metrics such as rankings, dwell time, bounce rates, and conversion events.

Quotes

  • "We must ensure everything we're building is indexed. Technical SEO and having that infrastructure in place ensures that everything gets indexed." - Jason Shafton

  • "When a team is making investments in SEO and in content marketing, it's important to stress the time that it will take for those investments to bear fruit." - Jason Shafton

  • "For SEO to have a seat at the table, we need to take accountability for the conversion metric. We should be ensuring that the site is optimized to drive marketing qualified leads, or signups and registrations." - Jason Shafton

  • "If you can combine AI with humans in a thoughtful, clever way, you can have content that ranks and drives to similar conversion events just as well and 100% human content." - Jason Shafton

  • "I think of AI as a tool, a companion. It can help us be more effective with our SEO practice. But, we shouldnt lean too heavily on it or expect it to do everything for us." - Jason Shafton

About the speaker

Jason Shafton

Winston Francois

 is a little camera shy

Jason is Founder and CEO of Winston Francois

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