NO AI WAS USED IN THE CREATION OF THIS
Updated 4/2/2024
How does organic contribute towards our revenue?
How important is organic in our sales funnel?
Where are we over and under represented in search compared to our competitors?
I've been asked a million questions about measuring success for organic programs I've implemented, and it all starts with confidence in data.
While Google Search Console is a nice unbiased first-party data, it doesn't paint the whole picture of attribution or websites behavior.
With so man disparate data sources available to marketers today, people should take a breath and start with simply input metrics and output metrics, and draw the line between what you did and what the result was.
Often people get so wrapped up in keyword rankings, organic visits, page speed. All of that stuff is good, but what executives care about is understanding what is converting, what is not converting, and what is the person doing about it.
Developing fancy ROI formulas can be done if there is a high amount of confidence in the data, the organization understands that organic touches many aspects of the business, and there's a little bit of understanding that most data & analytics on websites are sampled. If your leadership team understands this, awesome.
The hardest part of measuring success in organic is the fact it takes a long time to see results, it comes through lots of different ways, like lagging indicators:
Keyword Rank
Site Speed
Quality backlinks
Organic-attributed conversions
Due to this, one way to remedy this is to measure important input goals with output metrics, like:
5 pieces of content this month, leading to +1,000 visits a month in 3 months (average historical) leading to more sales opportunities
10 natural backlinks from content marketing via LinkedIn + outreach, leading to 5 40+ DA backlinks, increasing authority to the website
Once you start to get more granular with "this is what we aim to do, and this is how we measure it" it's a lot easier to measure success in organic, because you have more control over what you're doing.
This is a great way to point to the scoreboard, and tell executives specific tactics you are doing, and what business impact you are getting from it.
Here are a few illustrations showing how I approach setting goals:
