Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'The Death of Keyword Ranking
Reports? 10 Superior SEO Stats - Whiteboard Friday'
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.
Death of Keyword Ranking Reports - Whiteboard Friday
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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