As an SEO reseller, tracking the progress and success of your campaign is incredibly important. Being able to monitor how your site is performing will give you the insights needed to understand what is working and where improvements need to be made. Knowing which metrics to track and what they mean, however, can be the tricky part. If you're new to the game, it is crucial to do your research, but we are here to give you a head start. Watch today's Daily Brown Bag to learn what the five most important metrics for an SEO reseller to track are.
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TRANSCRIPTION:
Hello, and welcome to The Daily Brown Bag. Today, we're gonna be talking about five important SEO reseller metrics for 2016. I'm Chad Hill, and I'm joined by Adam Stetzer.
Yeah, good morning, Chad. Welcome to The Brown Bag. It is 2016. We're excited to be talking to you. There is still tons of interest in search engine optimization. Chad and I have been doing continual analysis, and the market opportunity here continues to be really strong, and so it makes sense that a lot of people are still looking for an SEO reseller to partner with. Maybe you're doing web design, you're a marketing consultant, you're an agency, you're doing PPC, and you're likely getting requests for search engine optimization, but you don't have a solid product, and that's when people turn to a white label SEO reseller, which we think it can work out very, very well.
Some of the problems that, particularly, people just starting out, Chad, reselling SEO hit, is they really don't understand the full process around rankings. Obviously they know they're selling search engine rankings, "Let me help get you to page one." They run into problems if that's about all they know and they don't have in-depth knowledge, and so training is really important up front. You start working with a white label provider. You really need to educate yourself. You might get through the sale, but if you really don't know what's going on, you'll have a real hard time with account management and retention. So today, we wanted to try to package up five great metrics that would start you on your path to educating yourself as an expert SEO salesperson and, even more importantly, as a very strong account manager to speak with authority on this topic. So Chad, let's take them through these five.
The 5 Most Important Metrics an SEO Reseller Should Track:
1) Rankings
The first one is, of course, rankings, which I think a lot of people would probably hear and say, "Well, are rankings really the thing to focus on?" And I think they still are because the reason that rankings are so important is that it is the best way of showing that you're making progress on a campaign. What we've found over the years, and we've tried all the metrics we're gonna talk about today as being the primary metric, is that the organic referrals, as Google's taken away information, maybe are a little bit fungible, and maybe the same thing with conversions. But, to be able to see those rankings moving - that you started off on page four for something and you're moving towards the top - that really is indisputable that the project and the deliverables that you've performed actually moved those rankings. So, the first one is rankings.
2) Total Organic Traffic
Number two, though, go beyond the rankings and look at the total organic traffic. So, a couple of places you can run into trouble, even if, number one - as Chad just talked about rankings - is working well. Well, what if you've picked really dopey keywords that aren't gonna really help that business? You might be able to move a very long tail, obscure keyword - in fact, you will be able to move that up towards page one - but it really won't have an impact. So, you have to look at what Chad just covered in number one - rankings - along with the bigger picture of your total organic traffic. If you've done good keyword research, these things will work in concert. We cover keyword research extensively in other videos, so check them out if you're confused about that. But number two, going beyond the rankings and the search, now, what's my overall organic traffic picture? Is it moving in the right direction? A good SEO obviously will make that happen; that's why there's such a great return on investment here.
You have to get more nuance too. You need to look at how long those people are staying on your site. So, what's their duration? How many pages per visit is the average user clocking? What's your bounce rate? You want to have some benchmarks. If you don't know about that, take a look at that, research that. Look at people who are returning, return visits. There's a whole host of metrics that will also help you understand the engagement, so several things here start to get more complicated. It's not just moving those rankings, but it's that there's also an associated increase in organic traffic, and the behavior of those folks when they come to your site is also really strong.
3) Number of Pages Receiving Organic Visits
The third one is number of pages receiving organic visits, and this is really all about the breadth of your website. So as you start - again, performing deliverables as part of the SEO reseller program, writing onsite content, tweaking different service pages on your website - what you're going to want to see happen is that there are more than just your homepage getting referrals from search engines, as you're building out these deeper, longer tailpieces of content. So, a very good indicator that things are going in the right way - again, as you move through the rankings, as you move through increased organic visits - is to see that the number of pages, so that's the count of pages that are actually getting referrals from a search engine, is increasing.
4) Domain Rating
Excellent. Number four, domain rating. Now, we get this metric from Ahrefs. Others like to look at Moz's Domain Authority. We did used to use that, but we are using Ahrefs now. Domain rating is a really good metric for you to understand, again, as your role as a consultant to that small business customer who has purchased SEO from you. And domain rating, Chad, I mean, this is particularly important if number one and number two and number three aren't working yet. Maybe the rankings aren't moving as fast as your customer wants, or maybe they've moved from page 80 to page 12, so you're seeing some good early movement, but this is a really nervous customer - somebody's that very price-sensitive - and they're 60 days in, and they're saying, "Why am I not on page one yet?" And of course, if you're not on page one, you don't have the total overall organic traffic to justify what's going on. You're not seeing all these hits in different parts of your website, and this is where you need to be able to have an expertise around domain rating and help educate them. Domain rating or domain authority, very interchangeable.
This is your overall site's credibility and it's a very good leading indicator that the SEO work you're doing is building credibility for your site, and it's building quality in the eyes of Google and the way page rank flows, and ultimately is attributed to your site. We call this a leading indicator of future rankings. You need to be able to show them that data, do some bench marking, and help them understand that, while they're not seeing the ranking or the traffic yet, we have these third-party tools that are showing us that we're changing the profile of this site in the search engine, and that is usually - again, don't guarantee - a very good early indicator that rankings will start to come later, if we continue to do this very high-quality work, good onsite optimization, excellent content marketing, PR, brand building, all the things that, of course, you're doing as a responsible SEO.
5) Conversions From Organic Traffic
The final one here is conversions from organic traffic, and of course, this is really where the rubber meets the road. Nine times out of ten, when we're talking to our resellers and ultimately to their end clients, the thing that small businesses and any business out there, really, is looking for is conversions. That's why they're making the investment in SEO in the first place. But, as we've talked about these four metrics we've already gone through up front, those are all the leading indicators to show that things are moving in the right direction, but at the end of the day, you do want to be able to show how many conversions. So, let's talk about what conversions are because a lot of people just assume conversions are sales, or they're leads. I think that we need to dig deeper than that and start looking for also what we call micro conversions. So, is there a newsletter signup? Did someone express an interest in joining a webinar or download an e-book? These are all conversions, again, that are gonna show that you're putting someone into a funnel, and it might not be right at the place where they're ready to buy, but it is important to see that those conversions are coming in from the organic sources.
Excellent. Well, Chad, there we have it, five important SEO reseller metrics for 2016. It's a new year. As I said at the start of the video, there's really no slowdown in this industry. If anything, there's acceleration. So, the opportunity for reselling SEO, joining up with a white label SEO partner, and offering this as a product, alongside with your web development, with your PPC, with your excellent marketing, consulting, with your PR activities is really strong and is only growing stronger. However, I know a lot of folks have a lot to learn. SEO, it's a very complicated topic, and you don't want to be out there without being armed with the right information that would lead to a bad sales process, where expectations are poorly set and which also leads later to really tough times in account management and customer retention, which can be very, very stressful.
Any of these five metrics, Chad, are excellent for people who are just getting started and really want to round out their knowledge. Go over these a couple of times; watch this video a couple of times, and if you have further questions, reach out to us. Jump in the forum, or come to our 4:00 p.m. session. As always, we want to thank you for watching our video. We hope you'll subscribe if this has been helpful, and we'll see you on the next Brown Bag.
