A new study, via eMarketer, shows that SEO professionals most highly value blog KPIs that, unsurprisingly, are most closely aligned with SEO tactics. So metrics like social shares, back links and more all rank very highly while total page views and comments are far down the list.
It’s not unusual for marketers – or anyone else for that matter- to focus on reporting numbers that most clearly show how their efforts are really important and provide value for the program. In fact it’s important for them to do so since other people aren’t going to have the insights that they do into how their speciality impacts the bigger picture.
The need, then, is for someone to be taking that bigger picture view. SEO is just one part of a blog marketing effort along with social media promotion, media production, content sourcing and more. There’s often both organic press and paid promotion involved as well. And each one is going to come to the table and say “Here’s why what I and my team did was so valuable in the last period.”
That program manager, though, is the one responsible for not only giving those teams marching orders that map to the strategy and goals of the program but also making sure the metrics being collected are representative of the whole. SEO is one component that should go alongside all those efforts so that the ongoing (or final) analysis of a program is representative of the whole. All the individual teams have a certain amount of tunnel vision, so someone needs to be the one to step and say, “yes, you did this but this other also did that and it all added up to the whole.” Otherwise you have many tails all trying to wag the same dog.
