Every time Google makes a change, my Twitter feed goes haywire and email lights up with “What should we do!” emails. With so much uncertainty in SEO, it makes sense and I understand, but jerking the wheel back and forth is no way to get where you’re going.

In this episode of Rank and File, I talk about how you should handle it when an algorithm update rolls out, what you should do and what you shouldn’t so you can recover your traffic.

Video Transcription:

Intro

Greetings and salutations, folks. Welcome back to another edition of Rank and File. I’m your host, Mike King, founder and managing director here at iPullRank. What I want to talk about today is how to react to an algorithm update. You know, there is of course, and I can say this anytime, this can be evergreen, this video right here, but there’s a lot of activity and a lot of discussion about, you know, Google may have rolled out a big algorithm update.

You’re seeing on all the different tools, like the thing that Sistrix provides. The thing that, you know, MozCast, things like that, showing high fluctuations and you know, average rankings and just showing more volatility in rankings and so on. And people are just like scrambling about what do we do? Well, here’s the reality. Nobody knows anything right away. So when Google rolls out something, we all kind of guessed, there are people that write blog posts right away and have all these conclusions and so on. But the reality is they don’t know. So don’t go jumping to act or react right away. There’s a series of things that I would recommend that you do.

What to do?

So the first thing to know is that unless you’re doing something that you know, it’s foul and you know that Google is actively trying to get rid of, I don’t need you to do anything right away. If you’re spamming or you’ve got, you know, duplicate content as a strategy or whatever. Those are things that I would recommend. Like, okay, why don’t we just like chop this off right away. But the reality of it is that if you watch your rankings over the course of like five days or so, you may see like, okay, this algorithm I update rolled out, I dropped pretty much right away. But if you don’t do anything, a lot of times you’ll pop right back up.

And why is that? Well, the way that development best practices work, apply to Google too. You know, there’s still engineers that are following the way that everyone in the world does development. Of course Google has rolled out things that everyone does, but nevertheless they are still rolling things out in like a step away. And then seeing how well it works and enrolling it back when it doesn’t work as well as they think.

Observe for 2 weeks

So Google is going to AB test, Google is going to, you know, try a feature and then see how people react to it and then make some decisions from there. And so when they roll out an algorithm update, of course that whole process is happening and they may think like, okay, this didn’t work as well as we thought it did based on the sandbox testing now that we rolled it out to project production.

And so maybe let’s roll it back. So if you start doing something right away, you may end up messing your site up more because Google may, you know, revert to a previous version of that scoring function. So what I would recommend that you is observe for two weeks. Again, don’t do anything yet. Just take a look at what’s going on. Look at the URLs at lost traffic. See what the commonalities are there. Look at the ones that gain traffic and see what the commonalities are there. And then also just look in the SERP and look at your competitors and see who else benefited. So taking a look at what features their content has and also their links have to see, you know, okay, maybe we’re seeing that a certain types of links are not as valuable or a certain type of content is not as valuable and basically just take note of those things.

Audit

Then, you know, if after those two weeks have gone by and you didn’t see yourself recover, I would say start to audit things. Take a look at the Google bot crawl activity. Every time that I’ve seen someone get actually penalized, I see a huge spike in crawl activity and then a huge drop off of that. And that’s not to say that’s the only reason you might see that spike, but that’s something I always see. And so then you can get a sense of what URLs Google may have reviewed and it gives you a sense of like, okay, these are where the problem areas might be. Helps you narrow down the pages that you need to look at.

And then also take a look at your link. So you know, use a tool like cognitive SEO or you know, a link research tools and take a look to see you know, which, which of these links might be spammy, and just get a sense of is this something that may be problematic? Do I have to think about disavowing and things like that.

Then audit your content. So again, if your strategy is built on duplicate content or a spun content or you know, just constantly, it just doesn’t have utility for users. Take a look at that. Take a look to see how content is performing, what your dwell times look like, your bounce rates look like and things like that. So you can get a sense of like, okay, what type of signals might I be sending back to indicate that this isn’t giving users high satisfaction?

And then also review your change log because it may not have been a result of an algorithm update. It may have been something that your engineering team had done on the website. Maybe they rolled something out forgot to remove no index tags. And because you’re hearing in our echo chamber that, Hey, there’s been this algorithm update, you’re assuming that that’s what you’ve gotten hit by and that may not be the case. So just take the look, take a look to see you know, what changes may have happened across your website as well.

Assess your roadmap

And then at this point I want you to assess primarily looking at your roadmap. So you may have already been thinking about doing some things to support your organic search. And I’m not saying that you should throw that roadmap entirely out because the reality is there aren’t going to be too many things that you didn’t already know about if you’re a good SEO that you know, Google making a change is gonna introduce for you. Like you’re not going to suddenly be like, Oh well, uh, you know, we should be doing content cause we weren’t doing content before. That was probably already on your radar and probably already on your roadmap.

So use that information that you’ve collected in this auditing and observation phase to basically readjust the priorities in your roadmap. I think it’s going to be a lot easier for you to get people on board with shifting things around rather than introducing brand new things that they need to do. Cause obviously there’s going to be a lot more work involved in that.

And then think about adding new opportunities. So if one of the opportunities is like, Hey, you know, we’ve getting, we’ve been getting all of our links from uh, message boards and forums and things. Perhaps you want to think about doing some bigger picture content marketing that will be more attractive to links that are going to be more valuable.

Act

And then at this point I want you to act after you’ve done all this analysis, you have an understanding, you’ve let enough time go by to verify that you have been affected by this algorithm update. I want you to step into the changes that you’ve been thinking about in this roadmap. I don’t want you to just like throw everything at the wall because you’re not necessarily going to know what actually made a difference.

And again, Google may roll back a things in the algorithm update. And so you, you know, making all these changes may not have been the reason why you recover your traffic. So the better that you get at stepping into those changes and if possible, if your site is big enough, AB testing into those changes, you’re going to get a better sense of what it was that made you lose your visibility and then ultimately your traffic. And finally, as you’re stepping through these things, you’re going to realize like these other things in my roadmap are more important than I thought. So for instance, if it has to do with like, you know, you have an issue across your internal linking structure and you had five different things in your roadmap, five different tickets in JIRA or something around internal links, while you’re gonna want to bring those to the top of the roadmap rather than waiting till a later date.

Conclusion

So the whole point here is I need y’all to stop, you know, bouncing off the walls when there’s an algorithm update. I think we need to get better at really observing and validating, verifying that it was the algorithm that impacted you. And then do those assessments, that observation, and then making the right decisions to move forward and step through things rather than just throwing everything at the wall and hoping that Google Gods give you your likes back. So hope that helps. And I’ll see y’all tomorrow.

Over to you, how do you handle algorithm updates?

The post Rank & File: How to React to Algorithm Updates appeared first on iPullRank.

For whatever reason, the debate over subdomains vs subdirectories just. won’t. die. However, I’m going to be the guy in the “prove me wrong” meme about this subject until I see some definitive evidence otherwise. I’ve been a part of too many projects where we have seen migrations in both directions and the subdomain -> subdirectory always yields better Organic Search performance.

More often than not, from an SEO perspective, the problem that companies are trying to solve with subdomains is better solved with a reverse proxy.

In this episode of Rank and File, I talk about how a reverse proxy can be a valuable solution to your subdomain problem and why.

 

Video Transcription:

Intro

Welcome back ladies and gentlemen to another edition of Rank and File. I’m your host, Mike King. I’m the founder and managing director here at iPullRank. So what I want to talk to you about today is why reverse proxies are still better than subdomains. Now the reality is, you know, there are people that consider a subdirectory versus the subdomain as a way to build out a website. And so anytime that I have gone from subdomain to subdirectory, I’ve seen organic search traffic go up. And anytime I’ve done the opposite, I’ve seen traffic go down. So what we’re talking about here is example.com/blog versus blog.example.com. So why do people do this? 

Why do people use subdomain?

Well, first of all, it is a perfectly valid way to build a website. Prior to Google coming along in this actually making a difference. Um, you know, a lot of the websites that I worked on back in the day when I built websites, we would structure them that way because we wanted to indicate that, you know, a, a subdomain was a different part of the website. And so let’s say you were on a hosting provider, you got your own subdomain and that represented your section of that site. And it was completely different from everything else that was on that website.

So it’s a perfectly valid structure for how the web was built. But the main reason why people do that is because their main site adds some sort of constraint to it that keeps them from executing on something that they want to do. So they may want to build, you know, a certain functionality, but the way the main site is built, they don’t have the capability or the access to do so. So they move things to a subdomain so that they don’t have those constraints. And oftentimes what you’ll see is that these websites, while at the same design as the root domain, and you can’t really tell the difference unless you’re looking at that a directory structure.

And so there’s also a good reason around Site segmentation. So again, if you want to segment content, content is so different from the root domain or from the WWW, there’s a reason to do that also by location or language. There’s a reason for that just to make it clear that this section of the site is, you know, the Canadian version versus, you know, the French Canadian version versus the, you know, France version of the site. There’s a variety of different languages in locations that you can, you know, account for. And there’s a variety of ways you can do it, but a subdomain is a good way to do it.

And then also additional software. So let’s say, for instance, you’re setting up like Unbounce landing pages or your Marketo landing pages. It makes sense for that to be on a subdomain because perhaps you want that entire subdomain to be no index or you don’t want it to be found for whatever reason. And it’s very easy to just segment that away from what’s going on with the core site.

What’s a reverse proxy?

So what’s a reverse proxy? Well, a reverse proxy is effectively an intermediary server that you send and receive requests from that server to other servers. And so most of the websites that you’re working on may be set up this way. If you think about google.com itself, think about all the different products, whether it’s photos or Gmail or all these other different sections of Google. It’s not all on one server. That would be completely ridiculous. And so the main server then you know, goes out and finds where calendar is and then does that request and brings you back. And in some cases there are actually redirects in place. Like, for instance, if you do type in, you know, google.com/mail or something like that, it does take you to mail.google.com but in the case of calendar it may be different.

Um, nevertheless, the whole point here is that you know, the reverse proxy acts to route you to other sections of the site and then return that content once it finds it. So as an example, imagine you’re the client, your web browser is here and then you’re pinging site.com. That reverse proxy then goes out to different servers for the different things that you want to see on that domain. So for instance, uh, you know, one server may have WordPress on it. So that’s the /blog path and the reverse proxy is then going out to that server, making that request for you, and then bringing that content back and showing it to you at /blog.

Same thing for a Magento server. So for instance, let’s say there’s a /store on site.com. Wow. It’s going to go out to that second server, get all the data in the content and bring it back and show it to you on a /store your URL. Same thing for community. Imagine you have Zendesk and I dunno if this index actually supports reverse proxy, but let’s just assume it does. And so you had that living at /community and then it goes out to that server, brings that content back and then shows it on a /community URL.

Service side configuration

So this really comes down to server configuration. You know, if you’ve got an engine X server, it’s as simple as these three lines of code. You set up a location which is /blog. If you want the trailing slash that’s fine. If you don’t, you don’t have to have it. I recommend having it. And then you do proxy pass to the actual URL that it lives at. On Apache it’s pretty much the same except you don’t put the location, you just put proxy pass and then you put the sub-directory and then where do you want it to go to get that data?

Main thing you need to know is like you got to figure out how to handle those requests. So if you don’t do anything beyond this configuration I showed you, there’s a series of other options as you can add in either server, you gotta make sure that you’re forwarding the IP address and then also the application and server that you’re sending it to knows how to handle that. Otherwise, every connection will be the IP of the proxy server rather than the actual user. So that’s going to be a problem for analytics, going to be a problem for user management. And you know, let’s say you’re thinking of a message board community server, you know how it often has the IP of the user. Every single user would have the same IP address. And these are some of the reasons why, you know, some of the tools out there don’t support reverse proxy.

So for instance, Unbounce no longer does. I know HubSpot doesn’t. Shopify doesn’t. Um, and so because of that, you know, you want to make sure that whatever you’re using or you’re trying to do this with, you actually have that capability or that they support it.

Security concerns

And then the final thing which will likely come up with your clients and also internally is that there can be a series of security concerns with this. So it can be anything from, you know, uh, how requests are managed, can be hacked. You can potentially add, you know, cross-site scripting payloads to a URL which the, you know, server may process. Because the thing is this, the reverse proxy introduces a series of processes to the requests that sent and then it forwards that request on. So based on how it handles that request or, and then also how the backend server handles that request. You can then have issues with security where things get broken or people get access to things that they shouldn’t.

So make sure that you are dialing in the configuration very well, working with your security teams, working with your dev-ops teams. But once you handle all these issues, you know, this is a great opportunity to not have to use those subdomains and see those losses from your organic search traffic.

Conclusion

So really, before you consider going into subdomain direction from a directory, give this a look first. Take a look at, you know, how you can do a reverse proxy on your server. Every type of service supports it. And, um, yeah, I hope that helps. Don’t want to see you lose your traffic. See you tomorrow.

Over to you, how have you effectively solved the subdomain vs subdirectory problem?

 

 

The post Rank & File: Why a Reverse Proxy is Better than a Subdomain appeared first on iPullRank.

Video Transcription:

Intro

Welcome back ladies and gentlemen to another edition of Rank and File. I’m your host, Mike King, founder and managing director here at iPullRank. So today I want to talk about something that’s near and dear to my heart. The idea that there is no such thing as SEO content anymore. And so we’ve got to start with the contentious relationship, no pun intended, that content has with SEO.

For so many years it was all about shoving a keyword into a page 50 times. And as long as you did that more times than another page, you are number one for that keyword. And even as searches have gotten more sophisticated, many people’s approach has been that, you know, back in the day you used to be able to like bold keywords and put italics on them and things. And that meant that the keyword was more relevant to the page.

But frankly Google is far more sophisticated than that. And you know, back in the day we also had a lot of different sites that existed just to create content specifically for a keyword but not content that anyone ever wanted to read. And you know, we’ve seen companies like Demand Media pretty much go away on the back of that type of stuff because Google rolled out something called Panda.

What is Panda?

Panda was the algorithm that basically looked for content and determine whether or not that content actually had utility for users. They use user signals, they use a variety of different data points to determine that. And ultimately it made it difficult to rank well for content that was written with the same word over and over and clearly just wasn’t valuable to a user. And so what you should be doing isn’t thinking about that. You should be thinking about, okay, what is it that my brand wants to say? What is it that people want to know? And then what is it that search engines expect? And what I mean by that is you can look at the SERP and see what type of content is being considered valuable by these algorithms and then making a better version of that.

What should you focus on?

So basically you want to be here in this Venn diagram, you want to basically encapsulate all ideas, like what did my brand want to say? What is it that people want to know and then what is it that these search engines would expect? And so any content that you create should speak to a target audience. You know, if you’re identifying your personas, your market segments, make sure that this content aligns with their expectations and their needs and their desires and so on. It should also fit in the content that it’s meant or it’s gonna be the channel that is meant for.

So you wouldn’t make a rectangular video and then try to put it on Instagram. You know, that is a clear constraint of that channel. So you shouldn’t make a page without a meta description or a page title expecting it to perform an organic search. Same sort of idea, understand the constraints of the channel, and then work around those for creating your content.

Each piece of content needs to meet a need state. So what’s the stage in the user journey that your user is in when they’re meant to consume this content? At that point, they should be able to consume this content and have a question answered or have something that they didn’t know. You know, come to them and be valuable and basically push them, nudge them further through their user journey.

Content has to have utility. It shouldn’t be a page that no one wants to read. You know, it should be delightful to that user. It should be something that they’re compelled to share or link to, or something they want to bookmark because it’s going to be a resource that they can use later on. It shouldn’t be a page that they’re like, okay, I’m here, but where’s what I’m actually looking for. Which is what a lot of those experiences that were SEO content actually were.

And so the other thing is that you want the content to be well-designed, and that’s not an absolute requirement for organic search. You know, there’s plenty of stuff out there that ranks well that looks terrible, but it’s a good way to check the boxes for some of these other things and then yield links and so on so that you can have content that performs in organic search.

Bottom line here is that organic search is the entry point and it’s fueled by content. But that doesn’t mean that that content can’t really speak to the expectations of users. It’s not just about shoving keywords in or co-occurring words and things like that. You have to balance all these things to create a piece of content that speaks to users and also meets those expectations so that it ranks.

Conclusion

So when someone says like, Hey, we got to make some SEO content, or those guys just make SEO content. No, there’s no such thing. If you’re still doing that, you’re not going to be effective in organic search. And if you are effective right now, you’re not going to be effective long term. So I would encourage you to start incorporating actual content strategy into what you’re doing, you know, doing your content audits, building out content plans, building out system for the creation, sourcing and maintenance of effective content, and also sprinkling in a bit of those expectations of organic search so that you can be more effective in driving traffic from this channel. Hope that helps. And I’ll see you tomorrow.

Over to you, how are you approaching content that performs in Organic Search?

The post Rank & File: Why “SEO Content” Is Not a Thing appeared first on iPullRank.

In this episode of Rank and File, I walk through Automated Testing and how it can help put safeguards in place for your SEO.

Video Transcription:

Intro

Welcome back ladies and gentlemen to another edition of Rank and File. I’m your host, Mike King, founder and managing director here at iPullRank. So what I want to talk about today is how and why you should do automated testing for SEO.

What is automated testing?

So first, what is automated testing? Well, it’s a way to put some safeguards in place so that if anything new in your code is rolled out, it doesn’t break something that previously existed in the code, like some previous functionality or something to that effect.

And so you might already be thinking like, hey, that might be cool for SEO. So it’s a key part of what’s called test driven development. You build a test for some condition, that you’re expecting to actually work in your code and then you write your code after that so that when you run that code, it continues to follow through on that test condition. And you’re making sure that things work in very modular ways based on, you know, that test that you set up.

And so this is really important for what’s called continuous deployment or continuous integration. So basically this is the idea that development teams are working in a silo by themselves and continuing to roll out new features and new functionality irrespective of what other development teams are doing. And so because you may be working on one big application, this is a way to make sure that you don’t break other people’s functionality by having a series of tests in place that as your code is being deployed, it has to run through to make sure that you haven’t broken that functionality.

Types of tests

And so there’s a series of different test types as UI tests, and that’s when you’re testing basically the complete application or a website. And so it’s the same as what we’re doing when we’re doing like a headless crawl in SEO. And then there’s integration tests that’s making sure all the different systems are working together. So that could be making sure that you’re testing things for, you know, pulling from databases and APIs and all the things that happened at that layer with the application comes together. And then there’s unit tests which tend to be on a specific level. So it could be a specific function or a specific page template or something like that where you’re testing a couple things that function on that level.

So who does these tests? Typically it’s a developer and a QA engineer that tend to be the people that are developing tests and deploying them. And again, like I said, they do test driven development wherein you start from the test first and then you write that actual functionality and make sure that it works. So effectively they sit down and they design a test and then they work through it and make sure that whatever is being made will adhere to the specifications of how that test was supposed to operate.

How do you test?

So how do you test, again, you’re working with different tools. So one of the ones that I come across the most, it’s called Jenkins. And so, you know, you can use that as part of your CI pipeline basically. And then you know, your tests are running as you’re deploying your code and then you get messages to indicate whether or not those tests passed or failed. And so, you know, typically these run, you can run them as you’re developing on your side, on your own machine or you can run them on your, your staging server. And of course you run them before things go into production. So you make sure that things don’t break.

What is the SEO value?

And so what’s the SEO value here? Well, basically you can set up tests for different conditions for SEO and we’ll talk about some specific examples. But imagine that you could put safeguards in place that a developer could not put out new code unless they adhered to those previous fixes that you did for organic search.

How do you make tests happen?

And so how do you make them happen? Well, really that’s where we come to the examples cause you as an SEO, you can’t actually write a test unless you’re a developer as well. There’s some great SEOs that are developers, shout out to all of them. But nevertheless you are more likely going to be in a test planning capacity. So you may work with a product manager, you may work with a QA engineer, you may work directly with a developer to develop test cases. And so I’ve laid some out here in shorthand so you can get an example of what those look like.

So typically when you want to lay out test cases, you’ll have an ID for the test. So we might call this one SEO 001. And so the scenario is that we’re looking for the presence of a meta-description and a unit test. So on the template level we want to make sure that meta-descriptions are firing into this template. And um, the way you do it  is basically check that HTML after it’s being run in that code. And so the data in this case is the template itself.

And then the expected result is that the meta-description would be present. And, an example here we may see that actually that meta-description is missing, but nevertheless we would still recommend that would pass rather than fail the build. And so that’s a key thing to talk about here. You can have a test case cause a build to fail. And so what that means is you cannot deploy code until you, as a developer that made that module or function or whatever you want to call it actually pass that test.

So again, it’s a safeguard so that you can make sure developers are always deploying things that will work from an SEO perspective. And so in the second example, we may check for the presence of internal links that are viable so that they’re returning 200 response codes rather than 404’s or 301’s or what have you. And so we would want this to be an integration test because it’s not just on the template level, it’s once the data is being populated in the template, when the page is being rendered.

So the steps here, you want to render the page and crawl it so you can see what’s on there. And then the data is the crawl data that you get back from, you know, crawling those pages. And so the expectation is that it would all be 200’s, but there may be 404’s. So in that case we would want to fail the build because something has been done such that that content being served is not generating viable internal links.

And then another example could be a page speed example. So the expectation is that the page would load in less than two seconds cause that’s one of the aggressive expectations that Google has in the mobile environment and so on. And so that’ll be a UI test because we need the entirety of the page to load. So you need a headless browser to run as part of this test. And so you want to render it and then get that speed test. And then the data is that rendered crawl data or it could just be the speed test data as well. So the expectation is that it would load in less than two seconds. In this case, it actually loads great in three seconds, but nevertheless we would still pass the build because of the fact that there can be network conditions that throw things off when you’re doing that deployment. So it may or may not be a good test to determine whether or not you should fail the build.

And then finally, let’s say where the scenarios that we expect a canonical HTTP header to be on a given page or a series of pages. And so again, this is an integration test because it can’t just be on the template level. Pages actually have to be constructed in return on HTTP response for us to determine this. So the steps are to check that HTTP response after crawling a series of URLs, the data’s the crawl data and the expectation is that that HTTP header for the canonical tag would be, or not canonical tag, the canonical HTTP header, will be present in that HTTP header or response. And the actual is that it’s missing. And so that is enough to fail the build because we know that can create duplicate content issues.

Conclusion

So the whole idea here is that, you know, you have the ability to safeguard what developers will roll out, but of course they’ve got to agree with it and you’ve got to work with them to make it happen. And another thing that you can do is set up an alert system. So you know, going back to the idea of Jenkins, you can have the logs of what happens through Jenkins, you know, piped out to Slack for alerts or piped out to MySQL so you can generate a data visualization of it over time. And this way you’re able to be in the loop and not having to wait until you do your scheduled crawl or something to that effect. So this allows you to be proactive about things that can go wrong in the development pipeline rather than having to be reactive and get people to go back to code that they had recently deployed.

This way you get those alerts in real time or close to real time and you can reach out directly to the developer and say, Hey, you know, I saw that there was an issue. Is there anything that I can do to help and so on. So I hope that helps. I hope that introduces you to a new idea as you can, you know, work better together with developers and you know, they tend to be very open to these ideas because of the fact that, you know, they are thinking in a test driven way and it’s easy to, you know, really work with them and say, Hey guys, like I think that if we try this out, it’s going to save you a lot of time in the future. So hope that helps. See you tomorrow.

Over to you, what are some other ways that you get ahead of the issues that may arise from development deployments?

The post Rank & File: How and Why You Should do Automated Testing for SEO appeared first on iPullRank.

In this episode of Rank and File, I walk through a process to understanding the KPIs of others and aligning your work with them so they can understand your value.

Video Transcription:

Intro

Greetings and salutations folks. Welcome back to another edition of Rank and File. I’m your host, Mike King, managing director and founder here at iPullRank. Today what I want to talk to you about is proving SEO performance value to non SEOs. Now I know you’ve been in this situation, otherwise you wouldn’t have clicked on this video. You’re sitting across the table from somebody from another team or CMO, VP of marketing, someone like that who doesn’t understand the value of SEO or what you’ve done and how that’s brought value to the business. What are we going to talk about today is how you reframe that discussion using the right KPIs so that they can see your value.

What are things to know?

But a couple of things to know first. So one, metrics only matter when contextualize, even if we’re talking about a conversion goal of some sort, that doesn’t matter to anyone until you understand what that represents. So if you look at something like, you know, you get somebody analytics, you see all these conversion goals, you don’t know what they mean. They’re just numbers to you.

By that same token until someone explains it to you, you know, you don’t understand what SEO metrics mean. You don’t know when a domain authority can mean for a page or a website, as far as its performance. So that’s the first part of it that you need to, you know, wrap your head around

Two, you need to expect to have multilevel reporting for any engagement that you’re working on, whether that’s internal or external, cause you’re always dealing with a series of stakeholders, not just your one stakeholder, even if it’s your main point of contact, they’re rolling that report up to someone else. And so you’ve got to make sure that you’re speaking to all the key people that your work is impacting and the way that it resonates with them.

And so AB testing is the only true way to attribute something that you’ve done in organic search. And this is a core reality because of the fact that, you know, you never know what happened on the landscape, whether that was an algorithmic change, whether it was an algorithmic rollback, whether it was competitors getting penalize or any number of things could have impacted why you perform better or worse. And so AB testing is the only true way to have something as close to being in a vacuum as possible to determine whether or not your implementations had a specific impact.

What can you do?

So knowing all that, let’s talk about what you can actually do. One, you want to identify the KPIs that your stakeholders actually care about. So whether that’s the, you know, different channels have different KPIs, how do you show that your KPIs impacted theirs or your channel impacted theirs? Or how do you align with KPIs that they already understand?

So, you know, people understand the concept of share of voice that may be something that you want to put in front of them rather than talking links and so on. But whatever it is, you have to identify that based on who you’re talking about, who you’re talking to, and what they care about. And then you want to align your recommendations to those KPIs. So once you figure out like, Oh, they care a lot about page speed, well any new recommendation that you do, make sure you highlight the ones that go with page speed. And if there are previous recommendations that were rolled out, make sure you highlight the ones that go with page speed.

And so then you want to show those implementations on a timeline against their KPIs. So again, if you’ve got previous recommendations that have been rolled out already, go back and pull that KPI against the timeline of that recommendation and then you can show where you had impact. At this point, you should have buy in by going back in the way they’re thinking rather than just showing SEO, SEO, SEO. So at this point you can then educate them on the KPIs that should matter to them about SEO.

What are some examples?

Developers

Now let’s get into a couple of examples just to make this a little bit more concrete. So if you’re talking to developers, again, pace speed is a KPI they care about. It’s also one that you would likely share because as an SEO you know that Google cares about speed. So you can you know, highlight specifically that recommendation or those series of recommendations that impacted their direct KPI. Whether it’s like time to first bite or you know, a time to a first interactive or whichever those metrics you are actually working on. And then show how that impacted crawl activity, which then can also impact the number of pages index and that shows you like, hey, the things that we did actually yielded more activity from Google and then ultimately could impact visibility as well.

Paid Media

If you’re talking to someone that does paid media, there are a series of metrics that you share, so they use them or they calculate them differently because of a different channel, but it is a series of metrics that you both can use. So going to Google search console, you can get click through rate, you can get impressions, you can get clicks and you know any paid media channel is going to report those numbers. And so if we’re talking about paid search specifically while then you’ve got the metric return on ad spend, which organic search can directly impact. And so you’d have to do some digging to really understand if you did or not.

But you can see situations where if they didn’t already rank organically and then you did something to make them rank organically for a given keyword, that return on ad spend can actually go up because more people are clicking on the organic search result that aren’t actually looking to convert yet. And then the people that are looking to actually convert may click on that paid result. And so you’re basically distributing, uh, the traffic based on where users are in their user journey differently and then they can get more a return in that channel from what you did in organic search.

C Level

Now if you’re dealing with C level people or VPs of marketing, they’re going to care a lot more about the top level result. What was the conversion lift that they saw from organic search? You know, they may be doing incremental testing and a variety of other things to see like, okay, did we see an impact between these channels and so on. And so if you’ve just got direct impact on conversions, we’re probably not talking right now. You just show like, hey, conversions went up from what we did. But you likely don’t have that.

And so what I would recommend you check out is the assistant convergence. And this is something that we tell people that are doing content marketing as well because oftentimes you roll out a bunch of content and you can’t show a direct impact. But if you look at the assisted conversions, users may have come from social or come from email or come from referral channels on that content and then ultimately they converted later in a different channel.

Same is true of organic search. So user may come to you first time in organic search, not convert directly, but then later on in that 90 day window they may come back through another channel and then convert. And so you have a lot at your disposal to really get in there. And say, hey, um, we’re actually showing a lot of value across everything that’s going on in this marketing mix, and here’s how we show it in the ways that you actually care about it.

Conclusion

So I hope that helps. I hope you don’t run into too many situations where you know people are doubting your value, but if you are, you’re now armed to show them that you’re actually killing it. See you tomorrow.

What are some other things that you do prove to non-SEOs that your work is valuable?

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