Digital Marketing - Study Notes:
The role of SEO objectives
In addition to your business and website objectives, SEO objectives for a website are typically centered around improving the site’s organic rankings.
Organic traffic
In GA4, organic search represents SEO, and the metric you will be looking at will be organic sessions per month. If your SEO strategy is successful, you should see more organic traffic being driven to the site.
User engagement
Next, the goal is to increase user engagement by ensuring users are spending more time on-site, visiting more pages, and consuming more on-site content, which may include videos.
To help monitor engagement, pay attention to the following GA4 metrics like monthly average engaged sessions in GA4. Google replaced the bounce rate metric in GA4 with engaged sessions because it better aligns with when a user is satisfied with the content they are reviewing.
Conversion rate
You also need to improve the most important metrics for your overall website that the total number of valuable actions or conversions from your channels like organic search. Conversion rate is a measure of the number of sales or on-site conversions, divided by the amount of traffic coming to the site. A high conversion rate is a good metric. It’s a sign that more focused and high-quality traffic is being driven to the site. The metrics to watch here on a daily, weekly and monthly basis in GA4 are Conversions, and E-commerce Revenue, and other GA4 monetization metrics.
Keyword ranking
The final SEO objectives to improve are your keyword rankings. Along with Google Search Console, there are various tools available to measure rankings, including premium SEO tools such as Ahrefs, Moz and SEMrush. There are also keyword ranking specific tools like AccuRanker, Advanced Keyword Ranking, Wincher, and Ubersuggest.
Novice SEOs often focus on measuring SEO progress solely on keyword rankings and can get obsessed with day-to-day fluctuations. But just like shares on the stock market will fluctuate daily, so will SEO progress. So it’s much better to take a long-term view. In other words, monthly and quarterly reviews are far more insightful for keyword rankings than daily or even weekly fluctuations.
That said, a rise in keyword rankings is usually the first sign of SEO progress, so it’s vital to track and it helps with motivation. Conversions and sales are the main reason we invest effort in SEO but tracking our SEO performance is often overlooked by many digital marketers.
Back to TopClark Boyd
Clark Boyd is CEO and founder of marketing simulations company Novela. He is also a digital strategy consultant, author, and trainer. Over the last 12 years, he has devised and implemented international marketing strategies for brands including American Express, Adidas, and General Motors.
Today, Clark works with business schools at the University of Cambridge, Imperial College London, and Columbia University to design and deliver their executive-education courses on data analytics and digital marketing.
Clark is a certified Google trainer and runs Google workshops across Europe and the Middle East. This year, he has delivered keynote speeches at leadership events in Latin America, Europe, and the US. You can find him on X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, and Slideshare. He writes regularly on Medium and you can subscribe to his email newsletter, hi, tech.
Neil Patel
Neil Patel is the co-founder of NP Digital. The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web, Forbes says he is one of the top 10 marketers, and Entrepreneur Magazine says he created one of the 100 most brilliant companies. Neil is a New York Times bestselling author and was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama and a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 35 by the United Nations.
Nikki Lam
Nikki Lam is Senior Director of SEO at Neil Patel Digital, where she oversees the Organic Search offering, leads a growing team of over 20 passionate Search strategists, and assists in award-winning SEO campaigns for NP’s growing roster of enterprise and Fortune 1000 clients.
Joe Williams
Joe Williams teaches search engine optimization at Joe Wills. He holds a degree in Computing Informatics, and he’s been an SEO specialist for over 15 years. He’s consulted and trained many large blue-chip companies including The Guardian, Cosmopolitan, and Sky. He's on a mission to make SEO easy, fun, and profitable. You can catch him on X and LinkedIn.
