From an SEO perspective, there are 2 types of businesses: those with significant brand awareness and most consumers include their name in the search keyword phrase and those with the right product but haven’t gained the popularity they deserve. Most businesses fall in the later category. You can verify the types of your business by looking at the top performing keywords. Please note that performance has to be based on conversion metrics (revenue or downloads), not just total referrals.

With this in mind, you can identify your key SEO objective. Is it building brand awareness or selling some products? Well, it is both! right? Let’s assume that your key search marketing objective is to go beyond and attract new potential customers who may not have you brand in mind. The most important KPI for your Search performance is what I call:
Share of Fortuitous Keyword Referrals

Here is how to calculate it:

1. For any given period, extract a report of your top performing keywords that covers 95% of the total search referrals. For most cases, the top 100 keywords should do it. (Unless are a big long-tail business)

2. Start excluding keyword phrases that include one or more brand-related words. This includes your brand name and any possible misspelled words. You might be surprised by the number of misspelled brand words.

TIP for Google Analytics users:
At the bottom of keywords report, you can use the keyword filter to exclude certain keywords. To exclude multiple keywords, use pipe (|) as a separator.

3. It may be hard to get all the brand-related keyword permutations but you can stop after excluding the top few.

4. Divide the total referrals by the over all search keyword referrals.

This is your Fortuitous Keyword Referral Share, a much better marketing performance indicator for SEO. For the SEO tactics, you will find this “adjusted” report to much more useful and actionable than your regular keywords report.

I am sure this is common sense and most if you intuitively use this thought-process but I have not seen a KPI defined for this. What do you think?

1. If your online business has not established specific key performance indicators beyond the basics (visits / total revenue).

2. If the decision-makers in your online business receive an auto-generated dashboard report but no analysis is done.

3. If you do not define specific KPIs for each campaign in the marketing brief before the campaign starts and try to measure success afterwards.

4. If you reach conclusions and make marketing decisions based on aggregate data and don’t break it down to understand segment behaviors.

5. If you have unexplained phenomena in one report but you assume that other reports would be reliable.

6. If your offline metrics go against the online metrics and there is no clear explanation.

7. If you believe your analytic team has everything figured out to an exact science.

Imagine if you have online product demonstration videos. If you use the click-throughs and even video engagement metrics to conduct Conjoint Analysis is simple regression, imagine how accurate you can get with the customer preferences for various product features. Compare that to a survey study you are used to conduct. Where would you put your bets?

And if it does not happen in the first visit, it ain’t happenin!

If you are the entrepreneur trying to make it work, focus on the getting down your one KPI – time to aha: start the stopwatch on click on the sign-up button and stop it as soon as the user realizes how simple this app is. That is, if the app is really “simple”.