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evergreen content that will be on the web for years rather than creating newsy content that will be consumed and outdated in a week - but similar shorter term metric could be used there.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
-
White branded website & SEO
Hi guys, We might have as a new project to create a white branded website for a big portal in our local market (which have a strongest domain than ours): the goal will be to reach their big mass of users and if possible, place this new site BEHIND us on the SERPs. Since the content of the new website will basically be the same, we are considering 2 solutions: to "noindex" the site on search engines, which is a "secure" way to not create ourself a competitor to allow the site to be indexed on search engines but using the "rel=canonical" strategy to not be affected by duplicate content penalties (For example, we plan to add rel='canonical' href='http://www.ourdomain.com/category1/product2' /> on their page http://newsubdomain.theirdomain.com/category1/product2) The main question is: can the white branded website rank better than our site even with the "canonical" strategy? (Of course we could "lower" the quality of the white-branded website pages to avoid that risk... but if somebody has better advices, we would be glad to hear them 😉 )
Competitive Research | | Kuantokusta0 -
Choosing an SEO agency
Is this the place to find an SEO agency?
Competitive Research | | Johnnyh
We are a car leasing company based in the UK and need an SEO agency to help us rank in a very competitive market. We have a relatively small budget of £2500 - £4000 per month. I appreciate this not a massive budget but that is where we are at. Any input would be much appreciated. Regards
John0 -
Would sharing the same IP address with competitors in the same market hurt SEO?
I work for the Chevy dealership in New York who is trying to rank against other Chevy dealerships in the same area. All the dealerships, including my client, are using the same Chevy endorsed CMS (Cobalt). I just noticed that all of these competitors, including my client, are using the SAME IP address. Would it be beneficial to SEO if we were to ditch the Cobalt platform and choose another one that gave us a unique IP address? Have any of you run into this before? Any help would be appreciated.
Competitive Research | | tjkirgin0 -
SEO's done, 301s in place, old site STILL outranks new site. What to do?
Since Sep 2010 I have had a site up with minimal SEO optimization (www.chrisbrushmusic.com). Oct 29, 2012, I launched a new site on a new domain (www.chrisbrushdrums.com) with more content and tons of SEO work behind it. The content of the new site is significantly different from the old site, and I wish to keep the old site around. I have 301's in place for specific URLs on the old site that point to the new site. I have submitted xml sitemaps for the new site. As of now, the old site still outranks the new site (i.e. Google search for "nashville session drummer" and my old site is #9 - my new site is nowhere). What should I do? Thanks.
Competitive Research | | cbrush0 -
Raise your hand if you're doing SEO for manufacturers please.
When you're working for a manufacturer it's not exactly the same as working for a company that is flat-out informing people with content and links and revealing a lot of information (relatively speaking). Please tell me what you do when you're working with a client that is not willing to reveal too much because competition = fear of the unknown (like if you take a chance and post something online that your competition may use against you). I would appreciate less speculative and more informed answers from people who have actually done this kind of work - as opposed to those who think theoretically they may know the best way to go because they work for other types of businesses that are not as proprietary as manufacturing is. Thank you.
Competitive Research | | karlseidel0 -
Wondering why my site ranks well for one page and not another.
Customers mainly find our site from searching very specific part numbers on google. My site is launch3telecom.com. Take for example these two parts:
Competitive Research | | launch3
MT500A-81015 MR050-81045 Search only those parts in google - we rank 3rd for one of them and don't rank at all for another. Is there any way to check backlinks pointing to those pages? We even show up before big sites like ebay and such on one of them. Can anyone help me understand this?0 -
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 -
What is the difference between "external backlinks" & "referring domains" on Majestic SEO?
According to Majestic SEO's glossary, a "Referring domain, also known as "ref domain", is a domain from which a backlink is pointing to a page or link." Given this definition, I'm not sure what an external backlink is?
Competitive Research | | nicole.healthline0