Google’s recent Search Off the Record podcast discussed the important details of SEO, including a thought provoking segment about how SEOs can benefit from realign their thoughts about traffic with other possibly more important goals.
Traffic As A Measure Of Success?
One of the most misinformed things that search marketers do is measure their success by citing traffic statistics. We’ve all seen the posts on Facebook or the articles on blogs, where a search marketer relates how they did X for a client and traffic exploded exponentially within months.
Link builders use traffic as a metric of success, content writers do it, SEOs do it.
The question that goes through my mind when I see that is, well, what effect did that have on sales or ad clicks?
Because if earnings remain flat then the traffic increase probably doesn’t matter and probably neither did the SEO work done for that traffic.
Ask any Pay Per Click expert or any affiliate marketer about the importance of conversions versus traffic and the response is clear: conversions are everything, not traffic.
Adam J Humphreys, CEO of search marketing and design consultancy Making 8 (LinkedIn profile) said this about success metrics:
“I focused on analytics early on and learned the language of business which is ROAS. This is all executives care about other than awareness.
Our job is to grow their business first as well as awareness second.