Measuring SEO Impact Archives

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SEO for Copywriters: Tips on Measuring SEO Impact – Next Level

August 8, 2017 No Comments

Understanding how to write web content for SEO is important. But equally important is knowing how to measure the SEO impact of your content after it’s published. In this article I’ll describe how to use Google Analytics to create reports that evaluate the performance of articles or the writers creating those articles.

Let’s start with some definitions.

What is SEO content?

Search engine optimized content is the strategic process of researching and writing website copy with the goal of maximizing its impact in the SERPs. This requires having a keyword strategy, the ability to conduct competitive analyses, and knowledge of current ranking factors.

If you’re a copywriter, you’ve likely already been asked by your clients to create content “written for SEO.” Translating this into action often means the writer needs to have a greater role in both strategy and research. Words matter in SEO, and spending the time to get them right is a big part of creating content effectively. Adding SEO research and analysis to the process of researching content often fits nicely.

So the question is: How do I measure the effectiveness of my content team?

We go in greater depth on the research and reporting processes during the Moz seminar SEO for Content Writers, but I’ll explain a few useful concepts here.

What should I measure?

Well-defined goals are at the heart of any good digital marketing strategy, whether you’re doing SEO or PPC. Goals will differ by client and I’ve found that part of my role as a digital marketer is to help the client understand how to articulate the business goals into measurable actions taken by visitors on their site.

Ideally, goals have a few essential traits. They should:

Have measurable value (revenue, leads generated, event registrations)
Be identifiable on the site (PDF downloads, button clicks, confirmation page views)
Lead to business growth (part of an online campaign, useful to sales team, etc.)

Broad goals such as “increase organic sessions on site” are rarely specific enough for clients to want to invest in after the first 3–6 months of a relationship.

One tool you can use to measure goals is Google Analytics (GA). The nice part about GA is that almost everyone has an account (even if they don’t know how to use it) and it integrates nicely with almost all major SEO software platforms.

Lay the foundation for your SEO research by taking a free trial of Moz Pro. After you’ve researched your content strategy and competition with Keyword Explorer and Open Site Explorer, you can begin measuring the content you create in Google Analytics.

Let me show you how I set this up.

How to measure SEO content using Google Analytics

Step 1: Review conversion actions on site

As I mentioned before, your SEO goals should tie to a business outcome. We discuss setting up goals, including a worksheet that shows monthly performance, during the Reporting on SEO Bootcamp.

During the launch phase of a new project, locate the on-site actions that contribute to your client’s business and then consider how your content can drive traffic to those pages. Some articles have CTAs pointing to a whitepaper; others may suggest setting up a consultation.

When interviewing your client about these potential conversion locations (contact us page, whitepaper download, etc), ask them about the value of a new customer or lead. For nonprofits, maybe the objective is to increase awareness of events or increase donations. Regardless of the goal, it’s important that you define a value for each conversion before creating goals in Google Analytics.

Step 2: Navigate to the Admin panel in Google Analytics

Once you have goals identified and have settled on an acceptable value for that goal, open up Google Analytics and navigate to the admin panel. At the time of writing this, you can find the Admin panel by clicking on a little gear icon at the bottom-left corner of the screen.

Step 3: Create a goal (including dollar value)

There are three columns in the Admin view: Account, Property, and View. In the “View” column, you will see a section marked “Goals.”

Once you are in Goals, select “+New Goal.”

I usually select “Custom” rather than the pre-filled templates. It’s up to you. I’d give the Custom option a spin just to familiarize yourself with the selectors.

Now fill out the goal based on the analysis conducted in step #1. One goal should be filled out for each conversion action you’ve identified. The most important factor is filling out a value. This is the dollar amount for this goal.

The Google description of how to create goals is located here: Create or Edit Goals

Step 4: Create and apply a “Segment” for Organic Traffic

Once you have your goals set up, you’ll want to set up and automate reporting. Since we’re analyzing traffic from search engines, we want to isolate only traffic coming from the Organic Channel.

Organic traffic = people who arrive on your site after clicking on a link from a search engine results page.

An easy way to isolate traffic of a certain type or from a certain source is to create a segment.

Navigate to any Google Analytics page in the reports section. You will see some boxes near the top of the page, one of them labeled “All Users” (assuming segments haven’t been configured in the past).

Select the box that says “All Users” and it will open up a list with checkboxes.

Scroll down until you find the checkbox that says “Organic Traffic,” then select and apply that.

Now no matter what reports you look at In Google Analytics, you’ll only be viewing the traffic from search engines.

Step 5: Review the Google Analytics Landing Page Report

Now that we’ve isolated only traffic from search engines using a Google Analytics Segment, we can view our content performance and assess what is delivering the most favorable metrics. There are several reports you can use, but I prefer the “Landing Pages” report. It shows you the page where a visitor begins their session. If I want to measure blog writers, I want to know whose writing is generating the most traffic for me. The Landing Pages report will help do that.

To get to the Landing Pages report in Google Analytics, select this sequence of subheadings on the left sidebar:

Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages

This report will show you, for any period of time, which pages are delivering the most visits. I suggest going deeper and sorting the content by the columns “Pages per session” and “Session Duration.” Identify the articles that are generating the highest average page depth and longest average session duration. Google will see these behaviors and signal that you’re delivering value to your visitors. That is good for SEO.

Step 6: Review the conversion value of your writers

Remember those goals we created? In the far right columns of the Landing Pages report, you will find the value being delivered by each page on your site. This is where you can help answer the question, “Which article topics or writers are consistently delivering the most business value?”

If you want to share this report with your team to help increase transparency, I recommend navigating up to the top of the page and, just beneath the name of the report, you’ll see a link called “Email.”

Automate your reporting by setting up an email that delivers either a .csv file or PDF on a monthly basis. It’s super easy and will save you a ton of time.

Want to learn more SEO content tips?

If you find this kind of step-by-step process helpful, consider joining Moz for our online training course focused on SEO for copywriters. You can find the upcoming class schedule here:

See upcoming schedule

By: Brian Childs

After co-founding a digital marketing agency called The Growth Co., Brian joined Moz’s customer success team in April, 2016, and is a key player in ensuring our customers get the most out of their subscriptions.

Sourced from MOZ

In News

Four SEO Hacks Designed with Human Behaviour in Mind

August 4, 2017 No Comments

Here are four SEO tactics that optimise your site for real people.

When it comes to SEO, one mistake that many marketers tend to make is missing the forest for the trees.

What am I talking about? I’m referring to the tendency of many SEOs to get bogged down by analytics data, clickthrough rates, bounce rates, conversions, and all this technical mumbo jumbo that should not be the be-all and end-all of search engine optimisation.

Like any digital marketing strategy or school of thought, SEO is about marketing and promoting your brand to people – people.

Keeping track of hard data is one thing, but focusing only on numbers and stats won’t mean a thing if you don’t understand how your target audience thinks and behaves.

Why do people visit your site?
More importantly, why should they?
What kind of information appeals to them the most?
How can you help solve their problems?

These are just a few of the questions you need to ask yourself before you even optimise your site for search engines.

As you’re figuring out the answers to these questions, here are a few more hacks to help you create an SEO plan based on your customers’ behaviour.

Figure Out Who You Should Reach Out To

If you don’t know who your customers are or what factors will turn ordinary people into your customers, you won’t get anywhere with any kind of marketing campaign.

As a business owner, you should be able to figure this out quickly. Otherwise, you need to sit down and think hard about just who will benefit from your brand’s products and services. Very rarely will any business have just one kind of target customer.

This is where buyer personas come in.

This HubSpot write-up offers a succinct definition of what a buyer persona is: “A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.”

The best way to start is to simply talk to your current customers. What do they like about your brand? Your products and services? What problems do your products and services solve?

But how is this relevant to SEO? By understanding who your customers are, it becomes easier to adjust your content and keywords to their specific needs and motivators, which in turn helps speed up the conversion process.

Check What Your Competitors Are Doing

Another common practice among almost all consumers is the habit of comparing brands and products before making a purchase decision.

This in itself should give you enough reason to check out what your competition is doing, what tactics they’re employing, and what strategies seem to yield the best return on investment.

How does their on-site SEO look like?
What keywords are they using on their landing pages?
Are they running any PPC ads? Check their copy for keywords and calls to action.
Do your competitors have a blog? How often do they update it, if at all?

Moz.com’s Open Site Explorer is a powerful tool that helps you determine how well your site is doing compared to others and vice versa.

What Do Your Customers Want?

Once you’ve created your buyer personas, you then need to make sure your SEO campaign reaches out to customers across the different buying stages.

As search engine algorithms continue to evolve in sophistication, gone are the days of simply relying on keyword research to identify potential search terms and phrases your audience would probably use when making search engine queries, and ‘sprinkling’ these keywords across your landing pages and content assets.

For the most part, this helped users find search results they actually found useful. Still, it was far from perfect.

Thankfully, search engines have become smarter and more efficient at determining what search users want – in other words, what their buying intent is. Besides keywords, Google now takes into account the following:

Device the search query comes from
The time of day the query is made
The location of the search user

The goal, of course, is to deliver the most relevant search results possible to users. And this is where your market research and buyer personas come in, helping you optimise your content for users in the different stages of the buying process, also known as a funnel.

For example, you may have someone who has committed to making a purchase, but is still weighing their options about where to best spend their money. Considering this information, you can optimise your content to reflect a bargain for customers that buy from you – it can be a discount, free shipping, or future deals on repeat purchases.

Know What Challenges Your Customers Face

Modern SEO has gone from simply cramming in keywords into landing pages and content assets, evolving into a process of solving people’s problems.

More than anything else, customers want information – your job is to give it to them. But you can’t just give them any kind of information. It has to be something that actually solves their problems and concerns, something that’s obviously related to your products and services, of course.

Notice how I keep going back to problems and concerns.

Part of developing buyer personas is knowing what your customers’ pain points are.

These are the issues, concerns, challenges, problems, and desires your customers face – or don’t even know that they’re facing. Once you’ve identified these pain points, you can then work your way towards presenting your products and services (through SEO and content) as having the power to overcome these pain points.

For example, let’s say your business sells used tyres.

One group of customers may be concerned about the quality of used tyres– you can work on creating content that promises a warranty or some other strategy to allay their concerns about this issue.

Yet another group may be concerned about shipping costs – you can perhaps weigh the cost-benefit ratio of offering free shipping, adjusting your content and PPC ad copy as needed.

To put it simply, the goal here is to optimise your content to address the different pain points of your buyer personas.

Conclusion

As mentioned earlier, these SEO tactics all revolve around a common factor: optimising for people instead of search engines. If you optimise your site and your content with the goal of helping your potential customers, your rankings should improve in time.

Focus on helping your customers and providing them with the information they need. If you’re successful, you not only help solve their problems through your products and services, you also enjoy enhanced visibility on the Google search engine results pages (SERPs).

Qamar Zaman Chief Visionary at One SEO Company.