Where is the Real Value in SEO?
-
Interesting topic and would love to hear some thoughts. How do you justify SEO, measure results, etc etc
-
Measuring SEO effectiveness can be done a number of ways, but it largely depends on the scale of the change that is being targeted. If you are looking for a 5% increase in traffic, it's often hard to attribute such change to a particular SEO effort. However, if you are looking for a 10X increase, it is usually pretty clear whether your efforts hit the mark, or missed it in a big way.
-
John Pring hit the nail square on the head. If you don't increase sales who really cares if you increased rankings. Many SEO companies use Rankings as a measure of success. While it is one factor if that is how they want to be paid......run! An hide!
-
Just answered a similar question on Quora:
SEO is marketing.
SEO is the practice of making things built by humans more accessible and more consumable by other humans and by robots.
As long as search engines exist and are_ the most common way people search for what they want and need_, search engine optimization will absolutely be worth the investment and_ will probably be worth substantially more than the investment._
Measuring the Results
_"The most important figures that one needs for management are unknown or unknowable, but successful management must nevertheless take account of them." _ http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/social-roi-control.html
Most of the time, I measure everything and only report a small percentage of it to a client (what the client is interested in and should absolutely know about). Reporting is usually relevant to what things make a web site's visitors achieve the goals of the site owner(s); and whether or not campaigns were successful.
-
SEO is simply the process of improving search engine rankings for keyphrases related to a business - ranking a site well for strong keyphrases will almost certainly increase relevant traffic to a website, but if you're only focused on rankings then you're not necessarily going to improve sales and conversions, which is the ultimate goal.
The real value lies in complete internet marketing campaigns, which encompasses a more holistic approach to growing a business online. If you're only focused on rankings (which far too many SEO companies are), then you're missing the bigger picture, and not only that but if you're focusing all your business solely on referrals from Google, then you can quickly find yourself losing your entire business overnight on the basis of an algorithm update.
The value should come from the combination of lots of internet marketing disciplines, including search engine optimisation, branding, conversion rate optimisation, analytics and insight, usability testing, web design, high quality linkbuilding, social media marketing, online customer services and brand management. A high quality company will look to improve your rankings, increase your referral traffic and improve online brand awareness and consideration amongst online shoppers. Then once the number of people to your website is consistently increasing, the focus will shift to ensuring usability and customer services are of a high quality and utilising CRO (conversion rate optimisation) to improve sales and profit.
Success should be measured ultimately by ROI (return on investment) and sales, but other metrics including traffic, links, domain authority, number of referring sites, bounce rate, conversion rates and search engine rankings will be tracked in order to inform campaign progress and impact, as well as informing future decisions.
-
This is a good question.
Before answering, I would be good to know which perspective your are thinking of.
That of the SEO business/person or that of the customer?
-
winning......
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
-
Best Practices for SEO 2021
What are the best way to do on page and off page seo in 2021?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SaraClay0 -
Menus, Ecommerce & SEO
Hi Our Dev team have updated our website with a new menu structure, they have given us 2 options to choose from. 1st option I think is better for SEO - this will be showing top 8 categories and then subcategories once you hover over category 1. Not much change from our current structure, just a slightly different layout. (I have added an image example of what option1 will look like) 2nd option - is preferred by management - shows all 24 categories & no subcategories. My question is, will removing the current subcategories from the main menu make them lose rankings & make them harder to rank in future? I'm guessing everything will move down a level in the structure and lost page authority... Does anyone have any articles/case studies to prove this point? Any help is much appreciated 🙂 Becky DKzgD
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Social Impacts on SEO? How to Do this?
I'm new in SEO and heard by one of my friend that social signals are important for SEO of a website. If people have shared a website's url on their twitter, then it will automatically get rank in google. Is that true and how google sees this social sharing? and how can I do this for my website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hammadrafique0 -
Joomla SEO
With so many articles on the web talking about how difficult Joomla is to work with in regards to SEO, I'm curious as to what techniques / changes you guys make when using Joomla with your SEO / inbound practices? Any extensions that you love? An extensions that you hate?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DougHoltOnline0 -
SEO Ecommerce Keywords
Hi guys got a question regarding ecommerce seo do you think its a better idea to target more long tail terms and try get links directly to product pages, brand pages and categories. Rather than focus on short keywords that do bring in good traffic but are very broad, i will prob do both, but i would like a second opinion please about other users strategies thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Will_Craig0 -
Glossary SEO Tactics
A B2B client has a glossary of about 300 terms on its Website. It was done to enhance SEO value. The pages are rarely viewed and the text is often short. What are the best (and wackiest!) ideas to leverage this content for SEO. Here are some: Add videos, images Cross link to content pages Open up comments and get students in this sector to review terms and add their own What else do you suggest?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HarrAuto0 -
What are the bing only SEO tactics?
Recently we realised that our client's SERPs were almost always lower on Bing.com and Bing (canada) when comparing with Google.com and Google.ca We want to know if there's different ranking or blocking factors for Bing and if someone had similar expriences. It would also be appreciated if you have releavent and trusted information on this topic, from blog posts, forums, etc. What are your thoughts on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RichardPicard0 -
Navigation - Balancing UX & SEO
I'm currently evaluating our navigation in the course of a site relaunch. From reading a number of articles and posts on seoMOZ, here are the elements I've found important to consider: Use CSS (not Javascript) for the primary drop-down navigation menu Get rid of two design elements from our earlier days: The 30 something site-wide category links in the footer, and many no-followed internal links (in an attempt to sculpt PR) Keep all pages within 3 clicks of the homepage, and have ample cross-links within internal pages. The one major problem I'm facing is how to balance UX and SEO in the primary navigation bar. To illustrate, let's assume I sell Tennis equipment. If one of the top-level categories on my navigation bar was "Rackets", if I was designing purely with SEO in mind the category names would be: Tennis Rackets -> Wilson Tennis Rackets Head Tennis Rackets Prince Tennis Rackets ....as the full, three word anchor text will be most specific and valuable to pass reputation to the category pages. However, from a UX perspective, writing "Tennis Rackets" after each category is unnecessary, and it would look MUCH cleaner to instead have: Tennis Rackets -> Wilson Head Prince ....but this would obviously be less beneficial from a SEO standpoint for each individual, manufacturer racquet page as the entire search term ("Wilson Tennis Rackets") is not in the anchor text. As these links will be on every page of the site, I'm struggling with which to choose - clean navigation or improved SEO. My Questions: I would love to hear the communities thoughts on how to weigh the balance of these two - clean UX navigation vs. SEO-rich specific anchor text - in navigation. Also, I'd appreciate hearing if any of my original 3 assumptions for the re-design are off-base or incorrect. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndrewY0