Posted by Cyrus-Shepard
We all look at keyword rankings, but are they still a useful metric to report? In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus Shepard discusses how changes in search have made individual keyword rankings a shaky metric at best, and he presents 10 needle-moving numbers to measure and report instead.
For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!
Video Transcription
The problem with keyword ranking reports
Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Cyrus Shepard. Today we're going to be talking about the death of keyword ranking reports.
Now, we all do keyword ranking reports. We've been doing them for several years. I do them. I still do them today. But I'm talking to a lot of agencies, a lot of big time agencies. They're actually starting to turn the corner and stop delivering those keyword ranking reports to clients. There are a lot of reasons for that, and a lot of them have to do with recent changes with Google. But a lot go back to just the deficiencies that keyword ranking reports have always had.
So we've all got these emails in our inbox, every single one of us, that promise number one rankings for a number of really obscure keywords. That goes to the point that these keyword ranking reports may not be reflecting metrics that are important to either your SEO campaign or your business objectives.
The big problem is anytime you rank a keyword, you don't know if that keyword is sending you traffic. Back in the days, when we actually had keyword data in Google Analytics, you could see that the keywords you were tracking only comprised a small portion of the keywords that you were actually ranking in your keyword ranking report. You were actually missing out on 50% to 80% of that data. So no matter how good your keyword ranking report is, it's always going to be missing a lot of that essential traffic, and it completely misses the long tail, which is another problem, because generally when you do keyword ranking reports, you're generally choosing those high traffic or you're trying to choose those high traffic terms. Again, you're missing out on a huge portion of that traffic that's sending you those numbers.
Hummingbird, big changes this year in Google, where what you type in, the keyword that users type in may be actually sort of rewritten in certain ways by Google. We're seeing more and more instances of Google returning results that don't actually contain all of the keywords you type in. It will be pretty close. But if you're tracking this keyword and it's being sort of rewritten or triggering different results by Google, it makes it slightly less valuable to be reporting on every week.
Also, changes in SERPs. Google, if you look at Dr. Pete's recent post, the Mega SERP, you can see all these different SERP features that Google is introducing that sort of make positions irrelevant in the traditional keyword ranking. If you're ranking number one, that guaranteed like 18%,
19% of your traffic. But then if the SERP has a lot ads, it has a lot of photos in it, the ads on the side, a number one or two ranking might be less meaningful. Then, again, if you have something like an author photo, Google did a study, one of their own studies, showing how that can greatly impact click through, and a number four ranking, a number five, six, seven can have a higher click-through result than a number one ranking.
So, for this reason and a lot of other reasons, keyword ranking reports are just simply dying. Now, it's still important to track those keywords, but what we do with that information is changing. So I'm going to talk about some different things that we should be reporting to our clients, reporting to our bosses, and reporting to ourselves for better SEO results.
Keywords
1. Rank Indexes
The first thing, this idea was introduced to me first by A.J. Kohn. I'll link to his post in the transcription below. It's the idea of a keyword index. You can do this with lots of different tools. You can do it with Moz. You can do it with Advanced Web Ranking. You can do this with most good keyword ranking tools.
That is you can create keyword groups. So let's say these were my keywords here -- iPhone case, iPhone speaker. I would create a group of keywords, checking all the boxes, where I'm tracking just the words with iPhone in them. Then I can get a metric. I can pull them out into a spreadsheet and just get one number that shows me if I'm moving up and down for keywords that contain iPhone.
Now the huge advantages of this system is it gets the long tail, because I know if my keyword index is going up for iPhone, that those long-tail keywords that I'm not tracking are likely going up and down too. It's not going to be a one-to-one relationship. They're not all going to go up and down at the same time. But I know, in general, that I'm capturing a much broader sense of where my keywords are performing.
It also simplifies it, because instead of tracking 50 keywords, I'm just tracking 1 index. That's the number I'm reporting. My iPhone visibility in the SERPs is increasing or decreasing. Now, that's something that the client is going to care about.
Reach
2. Organic Traffic
3. Referral Traffic
4. Social Traffic
5. Total Traffic
A better metric to report to clients -- reach. Now a lot of us already report organic search traffic. We do it in our weekly reports, and that's traditionally been the SEO's realm. Organic search traffic, we report it. But this is really a lot more important than this. Something I'm going to encourage you to start doing, that something a lot SEOs are uncomfortable with, is also reporting a lot of other traffic, such as referral traffic, because if you think about it, if your content is earning links, if it's getting shares and mentions, that means it's going to be coming through those referral links and not through Google, Bing, or that organic traffic. Not that you have to take credit for all that referral traffic, but you certainly influence it. It's important to the client. It's important to the boss. So you should be reporting it.
The same with social traffic. Even if you have a social department in your company or business or there are other social people that are responsible for those metrics, you should be reporting it too because everybody contributes together. If you're doing your job as an SEO and your content becomes more popular, of course it's going to be shared more, and it's a synergistic relationship between all those departments working together. But it's definitely something you want to report, because, again, it's something that's important to the client, and it's something that you had a part in. In general, what everybody really cares about is that totality of traffic. If you can relate that to your efforts, then you're going to be much more highly rewarded, and you're going to have a better experience.
Endorsements
6. Classic Links
7. Mentions
8. Press
9. Social Endorsements
So after reach, endorsements, and endorsements is a broad word that we use for what Google is looking for. We say Google is looking for links, but that's not really true if you think about Penguin and the way they discount links. What they're really looking for is editorial endorsements, and this can take different ways of links, mentions, local citations, press mentions, social authority. If you can report these, it's sort of like you're reporting on your good marketing skills.
You can use a lot of different tools to do this. Every week we use Fresh Web Explorer. It's a paid tool here at MOZ. But there are different other tools that you can use, such as Mentions.net. We actually rank all the new links that we've seen during that week through Fresh Web Explorer. You can do it through Open Site Explorer, any of your favorite link building tools
-- Majestic, Ahrefs.
The benefit of reporting endorsements is not only does your boss or client like it, but for you, it actually makes you a little better at your job because it creates an SEO feedback loop. When you see your new links and your new mentions coming in, through these various tools, that gives you an opportunity to either reach out to the people and form a relationship or leave a comment or find new link building opportunities, find new social authorities, and it strengthens the whole thing, and it actually improves you visibility overall.
KPIs
10. Business Objectives
Finally, the most important thing you can report are your KPIs, because this is what the boss, the client, and you care about the most, your business objectives. In Google Analytics, maybe it's your goals, your conversions, and your assisted conversions. We're often scared to report these, as SEOs, as inbound marketers, because we feel like we only had a small part to do with those metrics. There's an entire sales team, there's an entire website, there's a development team.
But these are the most important things. This is what we are trying to achieve, and we shouldn't be scared of reporting them. If you can show how your efforts resulted in achieving these KPIs, those are the SEOs, those are the inbound marketers that make more money and get raises. It's not about claiming all the credit. It's about sharing the credit and taking claim for your part in those actions and showing the client, showing your boss how you helped achieve those things.
So keep measuring those keywords, but let's say goodbye to those individual keyword reports. That's all everybody. Thank you very much.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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