Search engine optimization (“SEO”) is one the most important types of digital marketing. Many studies have proven that consistently ranking on the first page—or even better, within the top three—for the most important, highly trafficked keywords can exponentially increase organic—ahem, unpaid!—traffic to your site. This traffic, in turn, relies on proper site content and architecture to convert to leads and revenue—but the fact remains that the ability to drive organic traffic to your site will always be among your top digital marketing goals. However, while you have a clear understanding of why you need ever-increasing organic traffic, do you really have a clear understanding of what to measure and how to analyze it? In short—can you benchmark your SEO in a way that can translate to clear, simple understandings and meaningful recommendations? For the vast majority of digital marketers out there, the answer to this becomes a bit murky. Yes, ultimately you can line up organic traffic with conversions—but is that the only metric you should be benchmarking against? Are there others that help round out the full picture of your SEO efforts? And are there some that simply serve to confuse or muddy the picture when it comes to SEO? Knowing what matters—and what doesn’t—is the key for understanding how to benchmark your SEO for today’s analysis as well as setting the stage for future goals. Bounce Rates, Unique Visits, Conversions… Oh My! Whether you use Google Analytics, Adobe, Piwik or any of a host of other free or paid web analytics programs, you likely have a lot of data at your fingertips. Assuming you have setup your tracking codes correctly (quick—are you tracking ALL of your pages the right way? Are your goals set up? ALL of them?) then you have likely already been confronted with the challenge of making sense of your default dashboards and a plethora of data. While all data is relevant to one measured metric or another, if you’re just starting out you need to be able to focus in on the most important pieces of data. Keeping in mind that the main goal of interpreting data is to analyze information and create actionable understandings to guide future efforts, you can start by eliminating data and focuses that don’t directly acknowledge these metrics. Fix Your SEO Segmentation First and foremost, not every visitor is a prospective customer. And while you likely care very much how you rank for certain terms, you should care more which types of visitors are searching and entering your website under which terms. Sometimes, your visitors are viewing your site for research purposes. Others may be looking for career opportunities and yet others may be looking for customer service information. When benchmarking your SEO for incoming organic search do you really want to take into account all of these various non-customer personas? Not sure? Well, if they will never, ever convert as a customer—then you shouldn’t be including them in your metrics as they will throw off your conversion data and cause you to measure your SEO effectiveness incorrectly. Setting up your goals and landing page tracking is crucial for helping determine which of your traffic should be tagged as a potential customer and which fall into other buckets. The ability to home in on customer intent is paramount to understanding the effectiveness of your SEO efforts—and relies on your ability to benchmark the ranking, traffic and effectiveness to relevant, customer-focused pages. Instead of benchmarking total organic traffic, aggregate bounce rate and aggregate conversion rates, start by segmenting out by landing page. This won’t be your only metric but establishing which of your landing pages is intended to create and convert potential customers and then tracking its ability to drive organic traffic is a good beginning to your SEO benchmarking. Understanding—and Targeting—Customer Intent Of course, your SEO is only as good as its ability to help your content get found by prospective customers. You don’t care about whether anyone else finds your content—and you don’t want your data to include anyone that cannot be a potential customer. Therefore setting up your SEO measurement to exclude certain traffic sources, IP addresses and landing pages will help eliminate your non-customers from your data (if they’re landing on your order status page or careers tab you may want to consider elimination!). Once your data set is narrowed to as close to 100% prospective customer as possible you will want to benchmark against several attributes. While keyword insights are becoming more limited every day (though some paid tools such as Moz can help you get around this), knowing what drove your prospective customers to your content and specific landing pages is the beginning of your benchmarks. Is all of your segmented organic traffic ending up on a single page? Perhaps your SEO isn’t supporting enough content pages to attract more prospective customers. Unless you sell a single, narrowly-focused product, you likely have many pages that you want optimized for organic traffic. If certain pages have bounce rates soaring through the roof and others are converting like champs, you’re either attracting the wrong organic traffic or you need to reconsider whether your content matches your traffic’s interests. Elements that help you benchmark this include the number of pages your organic customers viewed in a single session, the bounce rate on optimized landing pages, the funnel completion rate and the presence of organic traffic visits in multi-channel attributions models, especially towards the beginning of the time frame you are viewing. You can set your benchmarks to track daily, weekly, or monthly as long as you are consistent with your tracking. Does the Ends Justify The Means? Many may argue that simply increased conversions and revenue will show whether your SEO efforts are working. Of course, if you are experiencing increased conversions and revenue from organic traffic, you may just not care to analyze how it is working. But if you do not start your benchmarking now, whether times are good or not, you will not have the right data to analyze and compare against when things go awry. And unfortunately for SEO, things going “awry” happens quite often—especially when no one is tracking the regular ebb and flow of organic traffic to ensure that things, in fact, are running smoothly. By establishing the appropriate benchmarks on the traffic you actually care to analyze, you can help benchmark your SEO data to make informed decisions and guide your future efforts.