Measure SEO impact beyond basic traffic and keyword ranking. Learn how your efforts are driving actual business outcomes with these metrics.
In this article, I’m going to take it up a notch to introduce four new methods of gauging the value of your SEO campaigns. They are:
- Brand vs. non-brand clicks.
- SEO’s impact on other channels.
- SEO CAC (customer acquisition cost).
- SEO keyword performance (we’re bringing it back!).
While some of these are more directional than others, I’ve found each to be a highly effective way of quantifying the impact of my team’s SEO efforts for our clients. (If you’re in-house, they play well with executives looking to gauge your team’s value.)
1. Brand vs. non-brand clicks
Why is this segmentation important? A couple of reasons.
First, brand traffic indicates a level of awareness and intent that means these users aren’t net-new.
They may have become aware of your brand through earlier SEO searches, but you won’t have a chance to connect those dots without segmenting the data.
There’s obviously value in brand traffic, particularly when you start getting traffic on {brand + product} or {brand + service} queries.
But the exact value may differ from bringing net-new users into your system, particularly if you’re using first-touch attribution.
The other reason is that in certain industries (particularly SaaS), a decent chunk of brand traffic comes from customers using Google to find your site so they can log back in. This absolutely affects the aggregate value of brand searches.
All that said, I use Google Search Console to get insight into brand vs. non-brand searches.
You could use Ahrefs or Semrush to do the same thing, but I prefer GSC (although the UI isn’t as snazzy) because all the data is coming directly from Google.
Even though it’s only a data sample, I contend that it’s more accurate than third-party tools, and the best organic measurement tries to reduce ambiguity as much as possible.
Of course, because it’s just giving you a sample, GSC isn’t perfect, and I’m clear with my clients about that.
When we’re all on the same page about it being the best option for measuring brand vs. non-brand traffic, I:
- Export the keyword data (a subset of the total traffic) from GSC within a date range.
- Remove/filter any keywords that mention the brand.
- Calculate the percentage of non-brand vs. brand keyword data.
Here’s what that looks like: