Every SEO has to deal with proving out the value of SEO in the business. There’s a ton of commonly used metrics and KPIs that can help with this. There’s the obvious metrics such as traffic, rankings, and revenue, to the more obtuse such as content published. These are all valuable metrics to track and report on, but they don’t always cover something important, especially for your core revenue generating terms.
My all time favorite KPI for those really important keywords is Search Page Ownership, tracking the “first page” results for the core terms, and our total percentage ownership of that page. This means tracking more than just your one organic position, but it opens up a whole new world for SEO, and for clearer alignment between paid and organic search marketing.
What is Search Page Ownership
Search Page Ownership is literally tracking how much of the search engine results page promote your brand. There’s all kinds of results that can appear on the first page
- Paid search ads
- Organic results
- Video
- Image
- Shopping feeds
- Local Business
And more.
Traditionally marketers have focused on being number 1.
“I want the first paid result”
“I want to rank number one”
“I want my product to appear on the shopping feed”
As marketers we know that the higher position, the higher the traffic, and there’s nothing wrong with those above goals. On a general organic CTR curve we’ll see something like:
It seems obvious we’d want to be position 1, after all it’s 40% of the first page click throughs. But…
What if we got position 1, 2, and 3. Then we’re looking at over 60% of the traffic.
What if position 1 is simply unattainable, but could we get position 2, 3, and 4? The compounding value can be pretty immense.
The same can be said of the paid search positions. There’s a lot of value on a single high ranking ad, but two high ranking ads can be worth so much more.
How Do I improve Search Page Ownership
If you’ve read this far, and this is new to you, you’re have probably mentally asked the most obvious question here. How can you get more than one ranking, on paid or organic?
After all, Google pretty much limits you to a single result unless you’re really lucky. And you can only get one paid ad here.
In reality, it simply means you need to get creative, and I’m not talking about “hacking Google” or doing something black hat here, there’s plenty of legitimate ways to get ranked, or even have paid ads that support your brand, in fact, if you have a brand of any decent size, you probably already have multiple rankings.
Because while you want to get listed multiple times, the best way to do that is to have other websites ranking alongside you promote your brand first.
There’s multiple ways to do this.
For paid search, your top affiliates could be helping you own the top spots on the most profitable (and likely competitive) keywords for your business. If the top spots are too expensive for them (a common complaint for competitive terms) then you could build out a custom structure for them, with co-marketing budgets, or increased commissions.
For organic search there’s a ton of ways to achieve this, but whatever the method, the easiest way to achieve this is to find the current top ranking pages, and cut a deal with the owner for a sponsored spot on that page where you are the first mentioned, or most highly recommended company, on that page. Of course, you need to practice what you preach here, these websites are likely to recommend you as number one if you’re actually dead last, or have a terrible reputation.
A few of the opportunities that you can pursue, to get multiple organic rankings include:
- Review and comparison sites
- Organic listings, and paid partnerships can help promote your brand as the first choice
- Affiliates
- Owned third party media
- Social media
- Industry magazine/blog in your industry
- Podcast
- Industry site partnerships
- Sponsored blog posts
Is this Ethical?
What I’ve listed so far are all the positives, but there’s a question of ethical standards. Pushing your brand on natural review sites for example, to appear the best choice, could be done via unethical means. In terms of preserving the internet, and ensuring searchers see a variety of related results, this can appear unethical.
Saying that, there are ethical ways to achieve this.
If current listings are pay to play, then it’s essentially you, or a competitor, this removes the moral quandry.
If its your owned properties, you are fairly competing, and must create valuable content to rank
If you are winning on the ratings sites, be it through a sponsored position, or by simply being the best, you’re good to go.
However, with affiliates and sponsored posts, it does get a little murkier. You should ensure that any sponsored posts or mentions are done honestly.
How Do I Report on Search Engine Ownership?
The simplest way to report on Search Engine Ownership is by giving a percentage of visible results you own. This is best if you’re just getting started, or you’re using this on less important terms.
However as you get more advanced, and you’re focusing on high revenue keywords, you really do want to show the whole story. I like to do the following
- Give a weighting to the text based results, you can base this on your organic click through rate curve.
- Set aside percentages for other results, based on how impactful they are for your business. If you own an online fashion site for example you might be really interested in product listings, but not maps, this would reverse if you had a brick and mortar location. Frequently asked questions are likewise worth giving a protected percentage, with an even spread within those results.
- Give visuals to management, take a screenshot of the results and highlight areas you own, your partners own, and your affiliates own.
Last Thoughts
Search Page Ownership is one of my favorite ranking metrics, but it’s time consuming to track and report. Keep it simple, an focus only on the highest priority keywords, and you don’t need to start tracking this until you at least have some efforts already implemented to garner more search market share although you should take a “Before snapshot for later comparison). It’s also a great way for SEO’s to cross collaborate with other teams, and show cross-functional value on SEO to leadership, giving you a rare opportunity to call out your peers who are doing work to support SEO.