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
-
SEO value of affiliate external links
There are websites that have linked to my site. Whenever I hover over link I see my direct website URL and I am not seeing "no follow" when viewing source code so I assume these are passing link juice. However when I click on link it directs briefly to shareasale (affiliate account) in web address bar, but then quickly directs back to my website URL as directed. I was curious if these good links I am acquiring truly pass juice or since they briefly pass through an affiliate site if that cancels or dilutes the link juice. Also I am noticing when inspecting element that after the HREF it says class="external-link" I am just not sure if my link building efforts are being ruined by having an affiliate account running.I did not tell them I had one. I guess they are searching to see that I have one and trying to make a few extra commission dollars.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nchachula0 -
Where do we focus from an SEO perspective?
I run a digital business development consulting company. Our core has always been centered around consulting with client to develop strategy and then working with a set of vendors in a variety of different services types to implement the strategy. I'm struggling right now to determine the best approach for our own SEO. Our website is http://phase2solutions.net. What suggestions would you have on the approach here? Feel free to share your service as well as the tactical end is something we are looking to outsource. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | phase2solutions0 -
Seo for international sites
Hello, I have a question for the group, our main US site- http://www.datacard.com is utilized to move content to other regional sites like http://www.datacard.co.uk/ and http://www.datacard.fr/ and http://www.datacard.com.br/. Anyhow, we essentially have some regional content on those sites, but for ease of maintaining and updating the content we have a company translate this for us and then undergo an in country review for local people in our company to review the content. That being said the meta descriptions, titles, code, everything gets translated to that language. I know there are issue for SEO for these purposes as we get much better rankings with http://www.datacard.com. The regional sites are newer so this could be part of it. We don't have an agency helping us with SEo and i get a lot of questions on what can be done internally for this for regional sites with our current structure. Any tips you have? It would be greatly appreciated! Laura
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lauramrobinson320 -
SEO benefit of tracked URLs
I've found a lot of mixed info on this topic so I thought I'd ask the experts (Moz community). If I'm adding tracking parameters to URLs to monitor organic traffic will this affect the rank/value of the original clean URL? If so, would best practice be to 301 redirect the tracked URL to the original:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IceIcebaby
i.e. redirect www.example.com/category/?DZID=Organic_G_NP/SQ&utm_source=Organic&utm_medium=Google TO www.example.com/category Thanks for your help!
-Reed0 -
Website Migration and SEO
Recently I migrated three websites from www.product.com to www.brandname.com/product. Two of these site are performing as normal when it comes to SEO but one of them lost half of its traffic and dropped in rankings significantly. All pages have been properly redirected, onsite SEO is intact and optimized, and all pages are indexed by Search engines. Has anyone had experience with this type of migration that could give some input on what a possible solution could be? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlexVelazquez0 -
Where to find a trusted, SEO strategist for real estate company web site?
I addition to running a small web development company and thus having some background to SEO/inbound marketing, I also own a real estate web site at www.nhfinehomes.com. Last year, I had the site recoded with many SEO improvements in mind. The result was a significant boost in traffic/leads and more pages being indexed. One of the challenge with real estate sites is that all my competitors have the same content (house listings) via the IDX feed so the challenge is to try to shape the pages to be a little different. My question is where do I go from here? I'm not sure where to best focus my efforts for maximum improvement. My biggest competitor has tons more links, some of which are just not realistic for a small firm like mine. Is content creation the next step to push out on a Wordpress blog with better internal linking? In Google Analytics, I see tons of keyword phrases that I have low rankings for and wonder if some optimized content could help boost those? What I would like to find is a TRUSTED, proven consultant with PROVEN real estate SEO experience that could take a look at my site, my competition and honestly tell me what it would take to improve so I can better determine how big a nut this is to crack. I am okay with doing most of the work and have my programmer who can help with some of the technical. I just don't want to take stabs in the dark and waste resources on ineffective or worst, potentially damaging results. So anyone here know where I can find such a strategist? Link
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LinkMoser0 -
Why is SEO Moz only crawling my homepage?
When I send the SEO Bot to crawl my website, it only crawls the homepage? Does anyone know why this is happening? Thanks, Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisCurdDesign0 -
Slooooow motion SEO impact
I could do with some help if anyone's got a minute. We've got this one client, no matter what we did (and we worked very hard on this site), nothing would really move. You'd get the usual fluctuations, and maybe some very small progress at times. This went on for an age... much, much longer than usual (and it wasn't even that competitive for keywords). Then suddenly, "Bam!" it shot up like a rocket for all it's main keywords and has stayed there since... more or less (and this was over a year ago). It was as if all the work we'd been doing was building up behind a door and then the door flew open so it could take affect. Anyway... it seems to be happening again, just to a different client with a different website (at least I hope that's what's happening or it might just stay non-affected by anything we do forever). We've checked everything. There's no crawling problems, again it's not all that competitive, the site already has some pretty good trust and authority, and it already ranks well for a bunch of stuff. The site and pages have plenty of age behind them too. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveOllington0