SEO Performance Analytics

Video: Communicating the Value of SEO

In SEO, like in most specialities, your work isn't siloed. The success of your SEO efforts depends on other people in
your organization, such as marketing, content, engineering, and leadership.

Because changes you make to your website can take weeks or months to drive results in Google, it's important
that you're able to prove the ROI of SEO work to these groups — especially since SEO standards and guidelines
change rapidly. That's why being able to communicate the value of your SEO work to others who may not
understand search engines is crucial to your success.

Here are a few ways you can communicate the value of SEO to stakeholders around the business, or to clients.

First, start by conveying the idea that SEO is about users, not about outsmarting Google.

This is a common misconception about SEO that many people who aren't too familiar with the field have. If your
stakeholders have this mindset, they may ask you to do things you aren't comfortable with, like black hat SEO
tactics. Or, they might question your focus on the user experience and creating high-quality content.

To counteract this, make sure you keep the users at the center of everything you do in SEO. When you present
your work to stakeholders, keep the user top of mind. Remind everyone that your users are the ones searching for
answers on your website, reading your content, and hopefully becoming leads.

Next, make your work accessible. SEO uses a lot of jargon which may not make sense to people who don't work in
SEO.

Define terms when needed, and explain the impact rather than just the action.

For example, instead of saying, "We need to implement noindex tags," you might want to say, "We need to secure
the confidential content on our website that is publicly accessible right now."

Finally, tie everything back to business goals. How is this SEO play going to help the business bring in more
revenue?

Data is your friend here. Present the data on how much traffic is being attracted organically and how these users
are engaging with your website. What amount of revenue is generated by organic users?

Once you demonstrate the profitability of SEO as a channel, it's easy to get everyone, all the way up to the CEO,
bought-in to your work. Then, you can break into individual projects and how these projects impact the buyer's
journey.

These are tips that apply both if you're working with clients or if you're the comapny's in-house SEO specialist.
Your strategies for implementing them may be different but generally, these ideas will help you better
communicate the value of SEO.

Video: Keeping Track of Trends and Updates in SEO

As an SEO professional, it's your job to stay up to date on everything happening in the world of search. Whether
you work for a company or clients, people are going to look to you for answers when a change happens in
Google, or when they want to know what they should be focusing on in the future.

Copyright © 2022 HubSpot 1

 In addition to your day-to-day tasks of optimizing web pages and conducting keyword research, you also need to
keep track of trends and updates in SEO and in your market (or your client's market, depending on how you work).

First, let's talk about keeping track of what's going on with Google.

It's important to understand how Google algorithm updates have affected your site in the past and how they can
affect it in the future. This can help you understand the position of your website today, its progress over time, and
anticipate its progress in the future.

For example, how did major algorithm updates like Penguin and Panda affect your site in the past? What changes
did you (or your predecessors) make to adapt to these updates?

For a full list of Google algorithm changes over time, check out the resources section.

Keep a pulse on Google algorithm changes and other broad SEO trends by following blogs, newsletters, and
experts in the SEO field on social media.

Here's a list of some popular resources you can start following:

• Google Search Central YouTube channel

• Search Engine Journal

• Search Engine Land

• Search Engine Watch

• Moz blog (especially Whiteboard Fridays)

• Ahrefs blog

• Semrush blog

• Yoast blog

• Brian Dean

• Danny Sullivan

• Neil Patel

• Rand Fishkin

There are even more resources linked in the resources section.

Next, identify these same types of resources in your business's niche or your clients' niches and follow them as
well. Industry-specific publications and forums are also particularly useful here.

The specific resources you choose to follow and how you use them will depend on the industry you're working in,
but a little bit of online research should help you find some. If you're having trouble or work in a very specific field,
try asking your coworkers which resources they like to follow, or check in an industry-specific online forum.

It's important to stay in the know about major trends and changes so you can anticipate how they will affect your
site. You can also anticipate opportunities to capitalize on these changes to get more traffic to your site, build
search volume around a new topic, and so on.

Copyright © 2022 HubSpot 2

 For example, let's say you're a freelancing SEO specialist and you've just taken on a big new client in the real
estate industry. To stay up to date on what's going on in that market, you might follow major players in the industry
like Zillow on social media and subscribe to an industry publication like Real Estate Forum. Through these
channels, you notice that there's an emerging trend for eco-friendly building design. You discover that there isn't
much high-quality content on Google yet about this topic, so you advise your clients to incorporate it into their
content strategy.

Use the skills you learned in the video on communicating the value of SEO to present this type of information to
your key stakeholders, such as clients, company leadership, marketing teams, and so on.

Keeping track of trends may not be an immediately obvious part of the job of an SEO, but it's critical that you stay
in the know. This helps you not only develop your SEO expertise, but to become a valuable SEO resource in your
organization or to your clients.

Video: Building Key SEO Reports

Analyzing and reporting on SEO data is one of the most critical jobs of an SEO specialist. But how do you access
this data and how do you build the reports you need to ensure your website is successful in seach?

Let's hear from Kevin McReady, a senior SEO specialist at Continu and owner of his own consultancy McReady
Marketing, about the key SEO reports he uses, how to build them, and some pro tips for SEO analytics.

"Here are the essential SEO reports I generate for a majority of the websites I interact with.

The first report is Top Blog Pages from the last 28 Days compared to the previous period.

This report breaks down the top website pages within the blog subfolder (blog URLs) from organic users over the
last 28 days, compared to the previous 28 days. It gives me a good understanding of which pages are providing
the most traffic to our website, the keywords behind each page being searched, and the problems this content is
solving for our users. Based on the type of content, we can determine which stage in the funnel a majority of our
website visitors are at.

The next report is Goal Completions from the last 28 days compared to the previous period.

Because a majority of the websites I interact with are either SaaS or eCommerce, goal tracking is super valuable.
Once I determine the goals (based on the company, products, or services) and create them in Google Analytics,
the report displays which pages attribute to the most goal completions and their conversion rates. The goals can
be form submissions, pages visited, events triggered, and other important actions taken while on the website.

The next report is Content to Leads, and this is run on a quarterly basis. Goals can be quite general and not be
able to paint the whole picture of the user's journey from Google Analytics. This report is generated in HubSpot
where we can see which pages are either: First interaction, where the visitor entered the website Page before
conversion, basically the page that assisted in converting the visitor.

For a majority of organizations, marketing's main goal is to generate leads for sales to reach out to and turn into
customers. So this report is incredibly valuable in determining which are your main "money pages." Then, using
that information, put more emphasis on those converting pages or content very similar to them.

The next report is Content Quality from the last 28 Days compared to the previous period.

This report is mainly for the content writers and editors. It's a report filled with all of the on-page metrics that
qualify as a successful piece of content. The metrics I focus on are:

Copyright © 2022 HubSpot 3

 • Bounce rate

• Pages per session

• Average time on pages

• Percent exits

• Scroll depth

• Goal completions

When a visitor is on your page for a while and then clicks on another page from your site, that's a great ranking
sign for Google. However, when a visitor comes to your site, reads your content for only a few seconds than
leaves, it's considered pogo-sticking.

Pogo-sticking is a RankBrain metric that determines if your SERP listing should rank up or down on the SERP. If a
visitor lands on your page and leaves instantly, RankBrain sees that as a bad signal and that your page might not
have answered the user's query.

Content writers can use this report to find ways of creating or modifying content that is engaging and pushes
users to other pages or down the funnel.

The next report is Clicks to Impressions to CTR (queries) from the last 28 days compared to the previous period.

Google Analytics can only display data from the visitor after they've already landed on your site, but viewing what
brought them in can be insightful. I prefer to focus on the queries rather than the pages, mostly because Google
Analytics can already tell us which pages bring in the most traffic. The queries report from Google Search Console
"Search Results" allows you to spot trends or how visitors might search for or describe your products or services.
The pages version of this report is too generic as each page can have hundreds of keywords it ranks for. Using this
data. you can find which high impression / low click queries to improve upon with internal links or backlinks.

The final report is the Keyword Rank Tracker. This is also from the last 28 days compared to the previous period.

Generated through Ahrefs Rank Tracker tool, I select the main focus keywords of the websites I perform SEO for
and add them to the tracker. Now I can view the position fluctuations, improvements, declines, new, and lost
keyword movement. The visibility metric in Ahrefs Rank Tracker is a great indication of overall "web presence" for
those keywords, similar to their Domain Authority (or DA) score. Improving the visibility is usually correlated with
more keywords, traffic, and higher positions. Any low-performing keywords on this rank tracker receive some extra
attention, whether it's a content overhaul, backlinking campaign, or internal link from a higher authority page.

All of my SEO reports are generated for only organic users within Google Analytics. I also focus on a monthly basis
since SEO changes take time to be in effect, that way I have enough data to compare before and after a change
was implemented.

To sum up my SEO reports, I mainly focus on:

• Monthly or quarterly data

• Strictly from the organic channel

• How visitors become leads

• Low-performing queries and keywords to improve

Copyright © 2022 HubSpot 4

 • Content that's not helping with lead-gen

In order to generate the above mentioned reports, I typically use:

• Google Analytics

• Google Data Studio

• Ahrefs

• Tableau (which is BI, or Business Intelligence, tool)

Google Data Studio is a great free tool to combine all the SEO data you need into distilled, easy to understand,
and clean-looking reports. If your organization has a BI tool, then that's usually the best place to host them. Then,
you'll be able to generate a powerful report on how organic search is actually affecting your pipeline when
connecting multiple tools like Google Analytics, HubSpot, or Salesforce.

Once I've generated these reports, and have cleared out my other quick-wins, high-priority tasks, and technical
fixes, I can then focus on using this data to create a roadmap of fixes, changes, or optimizations. For example,
using the Keyword Rank Tracker report, I can see which keywords are falling (or even lost) and implement a
solution. Whether that's fixing keyword cannibalization, stale or outdated content, or a more serious technical
issue. These reports directly impact my day-to-day work as an SEO. We want all of our URLs, keywords, and
landing pages to perform well. These reports tell me which areas of a website to focus on AND what needs to be
done in order to achieve the intended results.

Besides my work, the SEO reports I create are also valuable to other departments and stakeholders. The sales
team can see which pages a visitor took to become a lead and have more talking points when following up, or
stakeholders can determine how influential the marketing department (specifically SEO) is in generating revenue
for the company.

When it comes to generating necessary SEO reports, it's important to get feedback from others that would use
your data. What metrics, events, or goals should be tracked in order to show how marketing is affecting your
organization, especially organic search. Do you need to combine multiple sources of data from different tools?
Which report style is best to display this data? Which reporting tool will you use to generate the report?
Remember, SEO isn't simply how many visitors come to your website, there's a ton of ranking factors to consider."

Video: Performing SEO Competitive Analysis

Imagine this: You've finally achieved the holy grail for any business, getting your content to rank number one in
Google search results. You're so proud that all of your hard work has paid off, and your company leadership is
equally excited.

But after a month, you check back in and something devastating has happened - your content has been bumped
down to the number two spot! One of your competitors has edged out your content and now owns the top
position.

How did this happen? And more importantly, how can you avoid this scenario?

A big piece of the puzzle is competitive analysis.

SEO competitive analysis is the process of identifying the strengths and weaknesses of your and your competitors'
SEO.

Copyright © 2022 HubSpot 5

 Like typical competitive analysis for marketing strategy, you're looking for any gaps between you and your
competitors when it comes to SEO strategy.

So, why is running an SEO competitive analysis important?

According to Semrush, "Running a competitive analysis allows you to review your overall market, competitors, and
how the current search landscape works for important keywords."

Even if you're already ranking at the top of the search results for important keywords, you need to constantly
monitor your SEO performance and continuously optimize and keep an eye out for your competitors. Otherwise,
they might overtake your rank.
When doing a competitive analysis, here are the goals you want to achieve:

• Benchmark your current SEO performance

• Identify areas of improvement in your SEO strategy

• Reveal any competitor gaps or weaknesses

• Discover your competitors' winning strategies

Now that you understand what an SEO competitive analysis is and why it's important, let's go through the steps of
conducting an analysis of your own.

The first step is to build a list of your competitors.

These may or may not be the same as your usual business competitors. According to Search Engine Journal, "Your
SEO competitors are the ones who rank on the first search page of the keywords you're targeting, regardless of
whether they're your business competitors."

Here's an example: let's say you're running an ecommerce website that sells sneakers. Your business competitors
will be companies like Zappos, New Balance, Nike, and Amazon. If you're trying to rank for a keyword like "new
balance 550 sneakers," then those similar ecommerce sites will be your competition. However, if you're trying to
rank for a keyword like "how to choose running shoes for flat feet," you may have different competitors in the
health space like [Link] or [Link], and competitors in the running business like
[Link].

Luckily, finding your competitors on Google is straightfoward: search for your top keywords and write down the
domain names of your main competitors. If you have a very large website ranking for thousands of keywords, I
recommend investing in a tool like Moz that can automate this manual work for you. There's a link for a free
version in the resources section.

An important part of identifying your competitors is deciding who you're not going to compete with. For example,
it's generally not worth your time to try to outrank sites like Wikipedia who have enormous domain authority and
tons of content.

Instead, focus on competitors that impact your traffic the most. If you're a small fish in a big pond, focus your
energy on specific long-tail keywords and beating your competitiors there.

The next step is to find your keyword gaps.

These are the phrases that your competitors are ranking for, but you aren't. Where are you falling behind your
competition? Take special note of keywords where you're ranking just a spot or two behind a competitor. Also, try
to focus only on keywords that are actually valuable to your business - there's not much use trying to rank for a

Copyright © 2022 HubSpot 6

 keyword that isn't going to bring you any ROI.

You can use one of the popular SEO tools like Moz, Ahrefs, or Semrush to pull this data. If you don't have access to
one of those tools, you can do it the old-fashioned way: by hand. Put together a spreadsheet with all your top
keywords. Then, search each one in Google and take note of who's filling out the SERPs.

Once you identify your keyword gaps, you can work on closing or taking advantage of them.
With your data in hand, ask yourself these questions:

• Why is your competitor ranking and you're not?

• What does their content have that yours doesn't?

• What do you need to do in order to overtake them?

The next step is to identify your strengths and weaknesses.

What are the differences in strengths and weaknesses between you and your top competitors? Where do they
excel that you don't? Your goal is to capitalize on your competitors' weaknesses by using them to your advantage,
optimize the strengths of your own website, and work on improving your weak areas.
Analyze the following areas:

• Authority: How authoritative is your site compared to your competitors?

• Content: How high-quality is your content compared to your competitors' content?

• Technical SEO: Do you have any technical issues hindering your site performance?

• Mobile: How does your site perform on mobile compared to your competitors' sites?

Each of these areas will illuminate different places that you can excel against your competition, and places that you
need to put in some extra work.

The next phase of your competitive analysis process is to analyze your content on a page-by-page basis,
comparing your pages to your competitors' pages that are outranking you.

This part can take a while and be a little tedious depending on how large your website is. But, it's essential work to
gain a full understanding of how you stack up against your competition and identify specific areas for
improvement.

Focus on your top-performing pages and pages that target your most important keywords. This will help you
prioritize where your efforts can make the greatest impact.
Here are the items you should examine for each page:

• Title: Is your title descriptive and engaging compared to your competitors?

• H1, H2, and H3 headings: Are you using properly formatted headings that Google can parse?

• Meta description: Does your meta description entice searchers to click through to the page?

• URL structure: Is your URL structure strong and without technical issues?

• Content and keywords: How are you utilizing keywords in your content compared to your
competitors? How does the quality of the content compare?

Copyright © 2022 HubSpot 7

 Finally, it's time to review your backlinks.

Analyzing backlinks is an important piece of competitive analysis. If a competitor has a lot of high-quality backlinks
from authoritative websites, you'll have a hard time competing against them without a similar backlink profile.

I mentioned high-quality backlinks in particular, and this is because it's important to distinguish between high-
quality and low-quality backlinks. Low-quality links from unreputable sources aren't helping you or your
competitors' content (they can even hurt you). When it comes to backlinks, it's quality over quantity 100% of the
time.

Please note: Backlink analysis does require a robust SEO tool like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz. You can get free trials
of these tools to test them out and find what works best for you.
Examine your competitors' backlink profiles and ask yourself:

• Have your competitors received any press from major news sources? If yes, can you get similar
coverage?

• Are any of your competitors recommended on reputable websites in your industry? If yes, can
you get your business recommended as well?

• Are there any pages or sites that link to multiple of your competitors but not you? If yes, ask
the site owner to link to your website as well.
To learn more about how to scale your backlink strategy, check out the SEO Certification.
Let's recap the steps you should follow to conduct an SEO competitive analysis:

• Build a list of your competitors

• Find keyword gaps

• Identify strengths and weaknesses

• Analyze page-by-page

• Review backlinks

Keep in mind that this is not a comprehensive list of all the actions you could take when doing competitive
analysis. There are other elements you could look into, such as site structure, UX, and featured snippet
opportunities. However, by following the above steps, you'll be able to get a good idea for any type of website
what the competitive landscape looks like and identify opportunities to excel over your competition.

Copyright © 2022 HubSpot 8