How much money are you losing on data you can’t see?
There’s an interesting pattern in SEO: people tend to read a partial, inaccurate picture of the data.
It’s called a “blind spot.”
SEO relies heavily on data analysis and analytics work. Without looking at the data you already have, it’s very hard to fine-tune your strategy over time and get results.
And yet, even when we have plenty of data at hand, we sometimes fall victim to a “blindspot”: something that keeps us from seeing and understanding the full picture.
So what exactly is a blindspot in SEO? What do I mean?
To put it simply, imagine that as part of your SEO process you created content meant to support your site’s rankings for your services or products.
You planned it, wrote a lot of content, published it on the site, waited patiently, and now you’re looking at how much organic traffic the site gets.
If that’s where it ends for you, and traffic volume is what decides whether the content succeeded or failed, you’ve run into a blindspot.
There are many other data points you want to look at, so you understand not only whether the content drives traffic and how much, but how it actually serves your business.
For example:
-Did all the content you wrote get indexed and credited by Google?
-Which keywords does your content rank for?
-Which pages get the credit for those keywords?
-Is there cannibalization (pages competing with each other for the same keywords)?
-What’s the overall engagement rate of users on the site?
-What’s the engagement rate on the specific pages that matter to you compared with the rest of the site?
-What’s the engagement path of the average user on each page? (Which pages do they usually move from and to, and are those the pages we want them to reach?)
-What’s the page’s bounce rate?
-What’s the final conversion rate (how many leads come in) out of the page’s total visits?
-And the million-dollar question: how much are the leads from your content worth to you? Are they qualified and relevant to the business, or do they show up confused and waste your time?
All of these questions, and more, are examples of what you as a site owner should ask yourself to cover as many blind spots as possible.
Measuring how much traffic comes in is one thing, but it’s fair to say that today it’s one of the things that matters least to a business owner who hires SEO services or does SEO in-house.
In the end, the question the business owner cares about most is:
How much money does my SEO generate, and what’s my ROI on it over the year?
To answer that question, you need to cover every possible blindspot.
We need the full picture that shows exactly how the SEO work serves the business and affects revenue, and we use it to steer the ship at all times.
At DigiAssets we built a measurement checklist that we’ve kept updating over the years. We keep trying to cover every possible blind spot in our measurement, so we get a full picture of our SEO results.
If you’re a site owner, whether ecommerce, lead generation or anything in between, a document like this can be very useful for building a complete picture of where you stand. In the end, it helps you answer the most important question of all: how much money does SEO actually make me?
Think this checklist will help you? Feel free to use it below.
DigiAssets’ Complete Checklist for Measuring SEO and Preventing Blindspots
1. Content Performance and Indexing
- Has all the published content been indexed by Google?
- What percentage of the site’s total pages are indexed?
- Are any important pages not indexed? Why?
- Is there duplicate or overly similar content that could cause indexing issues?
2. Rankings and Keywords
- Which keywords does the published content rank for?
- What are the rankings for the main keywords?
- Are rankings improving over time?
- Is there cannibalization between pages targeting the same keywords?
- What’s the ratio of branded to non-branded keywords?
3. Page Performance
- Which pages get the credit (traffic) for the ranking keywords?
- Which pages lead in organic visits?
- Are any important pages getting too little traffic?
- What’s the bounce rate on each important page?
- What’s the average time visitors spend on each page?
4. User Engagement
- What’s the overall user engagement rate on the site?
- What’s the engagement rate on the specific important pages compared with the rest of the pages?
- What’s the typical engagement path of the average user? (From which pages to which pages?)
- Do users reach the important pages as planned?
- What’s the average number of pages per visit?
5. Conversions and Leads
- What’s the overall conversion rate from organic traffic?
- What’s the conversion rate from specific content pages?
- How many leads or sales come from organic traffic?
- What’s the quality of leads from organic traffic? (Relevance to the business)
- What’s the average value of a lead or sale from organic traffic?
6. ROI and Financial Metrics
- What’s the total revenue from organic traffic?
- What’s the ROI of the SEO work?
- How does the ROI change over time?
- What’s the average financial value of each organic visit?
- How does SEO ROI compare with other marketing channels?
7. Technical Performance
- What’s the load speed of the main pages (mobile and desktop)?
- Are there technical issues affecting performance (server errors, crawl issues)?
- Does the site meet Core Web Vitals standards?
- Are there mobile compatibility issues?
- Are the URL structure and site architecture optimized for SEO?
8. Competitive Analysis
- How does our performance compare with our main competitors?
- Are there significant ranking gaps for important keywords?
- Do competitors rank for keywords we’re missing?
- What content strategies do successful competitors use?
- Are there SEO opportunities competitors are taking advantage of and we aren’t?
9. Trends and Performance Over Time
- Are there seasonal trends in SEO performance?
- How has performance changed compared with last year (YoY)?
- Have algorithm updates had a noticeable impact on performance?
- Is there consistent improvement in the volume and quality of organic traffic?
- How does the financial value of organic traffic change over time?
10. Content Quality and Relevance
- Does the content meet user needs (based on engagement metrics)?
- Are there significant content gaps to fill?
- Is the content up to date and relevant?
- Is there content that attracts traffic but doesn’t lead to conversions?
- Does the content cover every stage of the marketing funnel?
DigiAssets’ motto on measurement and covering “blind spots” in the data:
Measuring every parameter clears the blind spot, improves SEO performance and shows the real value SEO brings to the client’s business. Keep optimizing the checklist!
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