It was AdTech’s last forum, last hour, and they were the last two speakers. But they ended strong. Richard Zwicky, president and founder of Enquisite, gave an impassioned plea for accountability in the SEO space for metrics, focus and budgets. Sharing the message was co-panelist Ryan DeShazer of GyroHSR.
Speaking at today’s optional Friday “Feed Your Brain’ Session on Web Analytics, the duo pointed out that 95% of all referrals come from organic search, yet a typical company’s organic search teams and budgets receives on average less than 3% of a company’s spend. Put another way, they said, organic drives 11.5 times the traffic of SEM, but paid search gets 33 times the budget.
That lopsidedness is natural because SEM spends are measurable, adjustable and produce instant results for better or worse, because of the strong analytics reports that come with spends. So why not have same the same metrics for SEO?
The issue, they said is that SEO metrics are basically left to traffic and “page rank” reports. DeShazer went as far as to say that 18 months ago, he realized that page rank reports are basically meaningless because they don’t go into the depth of SEM reports and tracking on conversion, user intent, and keyword-specific efficacy.
For example, we can tell an organic search listing send a visitor to a site and that it converted. But what position was that link on the search result on the page at the time of click? They refer to it as “Return on Rank: What is the financial impact of working and investing in SEO to get the the fifth position as opposed to the 8th? We can track all that with SEM, not so much with SEO.
I used to work with a guy who had a sign in his office: In God We Trust, All Others Bring Data.” Let’s look for more SEO data and conversion analytics that mirror the detail in SEM campaigns.
The best practice, they said is to have a strong SEO organization whose goal is that 90 percent of its traffic comes from non-branded search terms — those deep in the tail.
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