What One SEO Metric Would You Choose?
-
If you had to choose one SEO metric to measure a site's SEO performance what would it be? I know you shouldn't use one metric, but lets say you had 10 seconds to assess how well a site was probably doing from an SEO perspective. What metric would it be?
*I also asked this question on the inbound forms.
-
Cool thanks, I didn't catch that one. Apparently my title wasn't that original
-
There was an article on Moz not that long ago that attempted to answer this same question:
http://moz.com/blog/one-metric
It's a good read - probably too complex to use in an agency/bulk setting but pretty useful overall.
-
I author articles for Adsense revenue and my metric is
income from the article / cost of article production
Cost of article production includes my time, webmaster, photography, graphics, etc.
This metric begins at zero and when it gets to 1 then you have broken even. The metric will improve as long as the article is on the web and being viewed.
If you want a slightly different metric that is probably more valuable then ....
cost of article production / average monthly income from the article over past 12 months
... because it gives you an estimate of how many months it will take at current income rate to recover your cost.
I think that it is more valuable to measure your performance article-by-article because then you know what types of content are performing the best - and that can inform future content development.
This type of metric is based upon the assumption that you are creating evergreen content that will be on the web for years rather than creating newsy content that will be consumed and outdated in a week - but similar shorter term metric could be used there.
I also have retail sites and write lots of product-related content. This content is written to drive traffic to sales pages and to display adsense. I keep an eye on how many sales each of these articles are producing and that also informs the development of future content.
-
Hard to say, my first reaction would be the amount of traffic generated organically. I am tempted to say the number of key terms on page one, however, you can have 100 words on page one and get no clicks if your SEO is bad. You need good snippets, HTML data and engaging data. If your site is generating organic traffic in high percentages, and generating traffic consistently organically, I would say that can be a very top level metric.
-
Quality UGC - comments, threads, reviews, etc.
This means that the site 1) gets REAL traffic (cause its hard to fake) 2) impresses visitors enough so that they take the time to engage with the content (which means the site is high quality).
Everything else can be faked and you wouldn't catch it in 10 seconds.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to understand if a certain company doing SEO or not?
Hi guys, I am wondering how we can tell that the certain company doing SEO or not?
Competitive Research | | ahmetkul0 -
What's the best SEO way to benefit from your competitor's shutting down?
Hi ! Our main competitor is shutting down (website will be offline) at the end of the month and we are negotiating with them to buy their domain name: the idea would be to take advantage of their good rankings in the SERPs to redirect traffic to our pages (we're planning to crawl their site or get their sitemap and redirect th category / product pages to ours). The question is: for how long this strategy will be useful: days / weeks / months? (= for how long their pages will continue to appear in the SERPs from the day we enable the 301 redirections to our site?) Thanks in advance for your help! And if you have better suggestions, we're up to hear them of course.. 😉 Cheers
Competitive Research | | Kuantokusta0 -
Ecommerce seo - competitors are using spammy links to rank HELP
After setting up SEO Moz and whilst waiting for it to crawl my site i have checked out my competitors who are ranking for the keywords i am going after. It appears from what i can see in OSE that they are ranking with back links from spammy looking sites and lots of exact match anchor text. I have tried to match a few links with what they have currently without getting myself into anything too spammy but i really don't want to follow how they have done it exactly. The niche i am in is pretty boring but the rewards are great but i am finding creating content and distributing it correctly difficult which is why i need some help. My site is roughly 9 months old and the product descriptions are hand written trying to give as much info as possible with a hint of personality so no cookie cutter back of the box descriptions. i have matched a few of the links from competitors which weren't too spammy and as relevant as i could get to my niche, i have also created articles for some article directories - all of which isn't really getting me very far and i am running out of ideas on how to create new content & the types of new content to help me get back links naturally. If any of you friendly guys could offer me some assistance in setting up a basic seo campaign which would help me target my keywords i would be very much in your debt
Competitive Research | | GarethEJones0 -
Can i see the keywords my competitors are optimizing seo for?
Ideally, I would get a list of the keywords my competitors are targeting.
Competitive Research | | sajalsahay0 -
Subdomain Metrics
Hi All, I have been looking in the forums but could not quite find an appropriate answer to my question. I have a site that has no subdomains, in my htaccess non www redirects to www. So I would think that the subdomain metrics in seomoz would be the exact same for root and subdomain. However, it appears that I get almost all the Ticks for my site over my competition on the root domain, but do poorly in the sub domain area compared to competition. Also, it shows that I only have 2 links for everything in the sub domain section. Any I reading something wrong, or is this correct? Thanks in advance
Competitive Research | | cchhita1 -
What do the following metrics in the SEOMoz toolbar stand for: PA, mR, MT & DA?
I just downloaded the SEOmoz toolbar and found out several metrics that I need help to understand: PA mR mT DA Can anyone help with this?
Competitive Research | | amtnezschez0 -
Free SEO tools appearing in SERPS for a site
Hi there, I've just taken over a site and it doesn't have a huge amount of shelfspace on the SERPs for it's brand name. Looking at the results that are there are a lot of free SEO tools that are coming up. They haven't had an SEO before so it's not coming from their side. There's such a lot of them I was wondering if anyone had come across this before - is it simply a competitor looking at the seo, could it be one of the seo analytics packages using free sites or is there anything else to be aware of. I can start knocking the sites down the SERPs but just wondering if anyone has a good solution for this. thanks Shiv
Competitive Research | | Shivvyt0 -
International SEO
My client just launched a german version of their site: English Version:
Competitive Research | | kchandler
www.domain.com/en/.... Germain Version:
www.domain.com/de/.... Is there a best practice to get the new section of the site indexed in www.google.de? Are you able to submit a different sitemap to each Google domain? How do you go about doing keyword research, its got to be different search trends than google.com, right? A am complete beginner when it comes to international SEO so any advice would be greatly appreciated! Regards - Kyle1