I firmly believe in sharing the overall performance of SEO. In short, strategies and tactics should always be aimed at improving the visibility of all URL and keyword searches. This is a drawback of detailed search engine optimizations that focus on very specific keyword and URL optimizations.

Overall, I don’t think the use of location tracking is a useful KPI as it doesn’t match the company’s overall performance unless it succeeds in monetizing visibility on Google without the user clicking. Google’s situation may indicate SEO performance, but it’s not a KPI in itself. Keyword-level SEO can leave you unaware of your company’s growth opportunities.

Location tracking

They may not work well with the keywords they wanted to see, but they don’t know how well they do and even better with other phrases. Due to their tunnel vision, they inevitably miss opportunities for improvement where they are already doing a good job. Looking at SEO performance at the overall level, it means that all traffic is good and worth the metric.

However, one area I strongly believe that needs to be measured at the keyword level is segmentation of branded and irrelevant traffic. Brand traffic is organic clicks that result from search queries that include brand names or misspelled trademarks. Unbranded traffic is one that does not include a brand name.

Whether to measure the mark or not

If the brand is not labeled with the brand name, it is a big red flag. Due to Google’s worst penalties, websites frequently drop into search results for their brand name. A friend of mine who worked for the Google Search Quality Team told me it was internally called a “black penalty”. Assuming there are no criminal issues, trademarks that are not classified by their own name indicate that technical issues need to be addressed. Once this issue is resolved, it is unlikely that the brand will grow further beyond the natural growth of the brand itself.

Branded traffic is great, but it’s not really SEO. That traffic is the result of branding efforts such as public relations and word-of-mouth. Unbranded traffic is SEO. This is the ultimate result of your strategy, tactics, and effort. In most cases, this batch of traffic is the ROI of your SEO investment.

To see the actual unbranded traffic, you need to filter all the branded traffic. This includes brand name variations, so you can narrow your search for brand keywords to the lowest common denominator. For example, while at SurveyMonkey, my brand filter searched for the keyword “mon”. This is because I found a misspelling of “survey money” and, of course, the more general terms “surveymonkey” and “surveymonkey”. ..

After working on SEO campaigns for many mega-branded and unbranded startups, I think the ratio of branded to unbranded should be 40-60%. It’s a wide range, but the main driving force is how big the brand is for the space. However, even for a very popular brand, if the brand’s traffic is 80% north, the table will have a lot of traffic.

When I first came to SurveyMonkey in 2012, global brand traffic was over 90%. During my tenure, the brand’s traffic itself doubled year by year, but I was able to reach the ideal scale.

When I start working on a new SEO project, the first thing I do is get used to the traffic between branded and unbranded. If most of the queries that lead to these impressions are ranked, millions of impressions per month do not refer to a good SEO strategy. I’m not just an impression because people have to click on those URLs to make the traffic meaningful. If the percentage of branded and unbranded is significantly different when trimming with a click, brand visibility can be the wrong type of query to attract users.