 Hello, Mod's gone. I'm very thankful to be back here with all of you today. This is one of my favorite events, because it's the only place I know where we can get this many nerds together in the same room. So I'm really happy to be back here. Today, we're going to be talking about something I call key performance factors. And it's something that I've been using a lot within the last couple of years to make better decisions over developing strategy and implementing audits. And so basically, to get started with, I wanted to tell a story because the last time I was here at Moscon, the biggest criticism I got from my talk was that I didn't give enough examples. And so this presentation is kind of based around two examples, really. I don't want to make that same mistake again. I'll make new mistakes this year, though, probably. So basically, let's start off with a story. Our first case study was a large e-commerce website. And they had around 75,000 product pages. They had already done SEO for quite a while. And they kind of knew what they were doing already. They had executed a lot of best practices. And a lot of their technical SEO was already pretty good. Their performance was not bad either. A lot of the product listing pages were ranking pretty well, product category pages as well. But they really wanted to more emphasis on the product pages themselves because they thought that that was one area that they were missing out on inorganic search. And so they came to me and they asked for an SEO audit and a new strategy. And so I did what I normally do. I did this huge audit for them. It had about 50 or 60 recommendations within the report. And each recommendation was prioritized high, medium, low, which is typical for most SEO reports. And then after I was done with the report, I sent it to them. And we did a meeting. And I reviewed the report with them entirely with their management team and technical team leaders. And they said to me, OK, this looks great, Joe. We understand why we need to be doing this. This looks good. But we're going to need to take some time to develop a project plan to implement the audit. And they said, would you be willing to answer some more questions after we do that? And I said, yeah, absolutely. Just email me. And so I got this email from them about a week later. And they said to me, Joe, we put together this project plan, we think, but we're still kind of at lost at which items on your audit should we work on first. And I said, well, the high priority items, obviously, right, like they're the most important. So do the high priority ones first. And they said, well, it's a little more complicated than that, and you're going to need to give us a little more direction on that. And so I said, OK, let's meet. And we had a meeting. And they pull up these particular items out of the report. And I had about, I don't know, maybe 10 high priority items. But these three right here were the three that they were really concerned about. And they said, which one do we do? And I said, all of them. Because why am I putting them in the report if I want you to ignore them, right? Optimization is something that we want our clients to be fully optimized, not halfway optimized or 75% optimized, with it all the way, right? I'm not satisfied until all the work is done. And they said, OK, we understand that. And we understand why we need to do each three of these things. But they said, you want us to create unique content for product pages. We have 75,000 product pages. And by the way, when I say create unique content, I mean they needed content. Like the only thing they had on the product pages was like the product title and the product image and the price. That's it. There was no product description, no specifications, no unique features, nothing. And I said, you need content on these product pages. And they said, OK, well, that's 75,000 product pages. We can do it. And we will spend the money to do it. But if we do that, we won't have anything left in the budget to execute the other three items on this list. And I said, OK, well, let's look at the other two then to see if we can do something easier with those. And they said, what about improved page speed? I mean, they had some pretty bad page speed scores. They had a very old legacy e-commerce system that hadn't been updated in quite a while. And I mean, that is always a difficult task to work on that task. But it's not unheard of that you can make headway in it. And they said, well, we took your recommendations on how to improve page speed to our tech team. And they told us that basically in order to get the performance levels that I was asking for, they would need to recode the entire website. And unfortunately, as a developer, that made sense to me. I thought, well, that's right. They need to recode it or get a completely different content management system. And that would take another chunk of money and maybe even a year of work time to execute that recommendation. And so they said to me the same thing they said last time. They said, we will do it. If you say to do this, we will do it. But it can be the only one on this list here. And I said, OK, all right, let's calm down, OK? This last item here is improve internal linking. That's not hard. It's just links, right? Just put some links on the page. You're fine, right? And they said, it sounds easy, but I gave them four different recommendations on how they could do this, OK? They said, if we put internal links specifically on product pages or other pages of the site, the points of product pages, we need to interface with our design team. We need to discuss it with our back end engineers to develop the right logic that should be applied to those links so that we're not duplicating links across 75,000 pages. And we need to get verification through our conversion rate optimizers as well. Because when you add more links into an e-commerce site, it can throw off your conversion rates and you're not careful. And they explained to me that's three different teams of people that they have to allocate resources for. And again, that is more money and more time. And they said, like they did before, we will do it if you say so. But that's the only thing we can do out of this list. And at this moment, I felt like I was a part of one of those cheesy Facebook memes where they say, pick one breakfast food, and you can't have any of the others. And I was kind of just frustrated at this whole process. And I said, well, I'm going to need some time to think about this. Let me do some analysis and get back to you on which one of these three I think you should go with. Later in this talk, I'm going to show you that analysis and show you how I made the decision of which one they should go with. We're going to move on to, oh, the big lesson from this, though, for me. And this is something I always knew, but I constantly forget this as a consultant. It's that SEO is fundamentally easy to understand. I could sit down with a client in an hour and explain the fundamentals of SEO and they understand why they need to do each thing and how it connects to the bigger picture, right? Execution is a lot, lot harder. And as a consultant and sometimes agency people, we forget that. We forget how incredibly difficult it is to execute the recommendations that we make. In-house people, you guys know it because that's your life, right? But we forget that a lot. And so I think that this talk, hopefully, will help us understand easier ways to make better recommendations for execution. The next case study, though, was a large law firm. This is a big law firm. They had locations in several states and they were targeting local and national terms. So they had, like, a lot of the similar terms that you might imagine a law firm would have, personal injury terms, things like that. But they also did a lot of integration law. So they were actually able to do immigration law nationwide. And so they were attracting, you know, clients from all over the country to do immigration law as well. They only have about a few hundred pages, but quite honestly, a lot of their competitors didn't have much more than that either, so that wasn't really a big deal. They had worked with a local SEO agency for about a year. But they came to me because they started to suspect that there was something wrong with their SEO work, right? Because after a year of working with this local SEO agency, they weren't getting any results. And they understood that SEO took time, but they weren't really sure how much time it should take, you know? And so I looked over what they had done and in the first year of working with this local agency, they had new content development. They built a bunch of new landing pages related to their service offerings, their practice areas. They had fixed a lot of page speed issues. They were using WordPress. And so WordPress can be kind of hit and miss with page speed, but there are a lot of quick fixes for WordPress page speed issues. So they had done a lot of that work already. And they had done link building too. And they still had not seen much results with that. This client had went through the typical road map to results. I call this the typical road map to results. This is the kind of thing that pretty much every company goes through when they're attempting SEO. You know, they usually start off in that first month by doing an SEO audit or a strategy. That's usually where I come into play. I do that usually. And then they work on implementation. So that usually takes around two to three months to do. And then hopefully, if everything's been done correctly, they should start to see results in four to five months, maybe later. Of course, every company is different. Every business that works for the company is different. But generally speaking, it's this three-step process that a company has to go through to start to see results. Here's the thing though. Like, results are the main thing, right? And if they're not getting results out of this process, then it can get really problematic for everyone involved. And a lot of times, when I am in this position where I have to tell clients that it takes time to see results, I'm reminded of that old saying that SEO is a marathon and not a sprint. All right? And that is so true. SEO is a marathon, but not a sprint. The only thing is, the thing that SEO has never mentioned when they say this, is that even marathons have a finish line. And also, every race, whether it's a sprint or a marathon, you're supposed to be competing against someone. So if SEO is a marathon, who are you racing against, right? And the cold, hard truth is that you're racing against other channels. And I mean, I'm gonna be just clear about this. I've had lots of managers when I worked in agencies and other places tell me, no, Joe, you're not competing with Page Search, okay? Like, you're supposed to work with Page Search. And I love people that work with Page Search. By the way, raise your hand if you worked in Page Search. Okay? Here's a secret. Don't tell anyone. I'm super jealous of you guys. Okay? Because you guys get results so much quicker, right? I'm in month three or four and the clients ask me, where are the results? Why have our rankings not changed? What's going on? Page Search is out there improving their conversions, improving their ROI. You guys are rocking the house and I'm still over here trying to build links. Okay? Like, come on, man. How many outreach emails do I have to send before I can get rankings to change, right? So, it's really kind of frustrating. It's frustrating for me, but it's also frustrating for business owners, right? Because if we've convinced them that SEO is a marathon, I don't care how much they believe that. In four or five months, they're gonna be looking at the other channels and say, well, it might be a marathon, but the other channels are winning. And the longer that SEO takes to get results, the harder it is to execute, okay? Because if we're not delivering results in a timely fashion, the momentum is lost. That's for a small group of work. Clients are excited and they're jazzed, right? Month four or five, if they're not getting results, they start to lose interest and they start to lose confidence in the process. And so, adding to that last lesson that I learned, SEO process can be hard to execute and always urgent to succeed. We always have this urgency to show results. And if you've worked in an agency before, you know this. You know that every month, you guys have to send reports to the client, maybe weekly, that show ranking reports. And it's almost like a nail-biting situation where you have to show positive results in some way or another. Because you wanna keep that momentum going. You wanna keep them interested and engaged in the process in order for you to do good work for them, right? But here's the good news. We can use data to make execution easier and results faster. And that's what I'm gonna talk about today, one way that we can do that. So let's go back to those recommendations because we're gonna use these recommendations as an example of how I solve this problem for the client and how I think you guys can use that same type of analysis in the future. So I had to, I went back to the drawing board and I thought to myself, where did I go wrong with this audit, right? Because in my opinion, these are all high priority items and they should be new in all of them. But here's the problem that I had and this has kind of changed the way I do things a little bit, is that I added these to the audit because I knew that they were important, right? But what's important for SEO isn't always impactful, all right? And what we need to be focused on as SEOs and just no matter where you're at, consultant, agency or in-house, we need to be focused on what is impactful and what is gonna provide the biggest impact because if we can nail down what is most impactful, then results come quicker, we can prioritize our strategies faster and the client will see results more timely. So the mistake that we make is not like any fault of our own. This is kind of like how we're trained to think, right? Because when we think about what's important for SEO, here's what typical SEOs usually look for. They look at things like raking factor studies, right? We look at things like algorithm analysis, which is like looking at the algorithm changes and the data that is impacted from those. We look at things like what search engines say. I mean, good Lord, you guys watch every time a search engine spokesperson says something, the SEO community goes nuts, you know? And then we also look at what SEOs say, right? Because we have a community of people that like to share information and ideas. And this is all great, like all of this stuff is super important and we can learn a lot of important information from this and we should not lose sight of any of these things. But the problem is that modern search engines today analyze each domain in a much more subjective manner, right? So all those things I looked at on that last slide, these things right here, this is sort of like information that's sort of like a one size fits all, right? But nowadays search engines are much more subjective. They have things like artificial intelligence, machine learning, knowledge graph, query intent, you know, location, entities, all of these things will make the analysis of each domain different. So they don't judge every domain in the same way anymore. And so going, you know, if you wanna make smart decisions with your SEO, if you want to create smart strategies, then you really need to focus on understanding your SEO thumbprint. Because every domain has a unique characteristics about it that the search engine understands in a unique context. And so we can do that by using key performance indicators and key performance factors. And that's what I'm gonna show you right now. So we all kind of know what key performance indicators are. These are metrics that measure a type of performance and they evaluate the success of a particular activity or effort. Most every company has their own sets of KPIs that they like to use. These are some just examples of different KPIs that are typically used for SEO. And I get clients all the time that are new to SEO and they ask me, what KPIs should we use? And I'm like, whatever makes sense for your business, right? You just need to focus on the ones that are closely aligned with the business objectives. But for this example, for this presentation, we're mostly gonna talk about impressions and average positions. You can get these from Google Search Console and that's where I got them for this talk. The next thing we're gonna talk about though is something I call key performance factors. And this is something that I've been working with. I coined the term, I think. I was gonna call it key performance enhancers, but performance enhancers are steroids and steroids are drugs and drugs do not help your SEO. They might make you feel better about your SEO. But they will not drive results. So this is key performance factors. These are things that you can measure that influence your KPIs, right? And so things like number of backlinks, word count on the page, your internal link scores, your page speed scores, percentage of duplicate content and crawl errors. And so for this presentation, we're gonna look at these three right here, word count, internal link score and page speed score. You're probably asking yourself, well, why did I pick these three KPIs? Well, the way that you wanna decide which KPIs to use is to really think about the problem that you're trying to solve. And so in this example, we're trying to solve these art recommendations. Now, these are the same art recommendations from that first case study. I wanna find out the impact that each one of these will have on our KPIs. And so what I did was, I looked at each one of these recommendations and I thought which KPF is gonna align most closely with that recommendation, right? So that first one is create unique content for product pages. That would be your word count, improve performance and page speed. That's your page speed score and improve internal linking. That's an internal link score. The internal link score that I'm using for this is coming from a screaming frog, but if you are a user of Moz, I think the closest thing would be your page authority metric. Page authority uses a lot of other things, other than internal links, but I think it would work well in this instance if you wanted to replicate this. So basically, these are our metrics for the example. I'm gonna show you. Our KPIs are impressions and average positions and our performance factors are word count, page speed score and internal link score. After you identify your KPIs and your performance factors, you need to put together your data set. And so this is the data set that I use. This is obviously an example data set, but that first column has all of the URLs or pages that we're analyzing. The next two columns are our KPIs, impressions and average positions. And then the next three columns after that are our performance factors, which is our page speed scores, word count and internal linking scores. You can really easily pull all this data together using a screaming frog, one of my favorite tools and integrate it with various APIs that integrate well into the tool. Okay, so I need to provide a warning before we go any further, all right? On this next slide, I'm gonna talk about correlations. And if you've ever spent any time in the SEO industry or the SEO community, you know that one of the favorite things that SEOs like to say is that correlation is not causation, okay? I am well aware of that, all right? Please do not harass me on Twitter about it later, okay? Let me tell you what correlations are for a moment. Correlations are not causation, but they also do not rule causation out. And in fact, they are probably the most likely case for causation, okay? So the reason that SEOs hate correlation studies is because the original intent behind them in SEO was to try to find ranking factors, and that is causation. So legitimately, yes, they should have been kind of skeptical of that. In this scenario, we are not assuming that these KPFs are causation, but instead we wanna look at the relationship between the KPIs and the KPFs. And we're gonna show you how to do that right here. So let's say that I wanna know the correlation between internal link score and impressions. And all I've gotta do is take my gas set that I've just assembled here, and this is in Google Sheets. And I've got a key in this formula for correlation. And that first metric there is the B column, and that's the impressions. You see it's B2 through B1000. And then that second one is the internal link score, so that's F2 through F1000 right there. And what this is gonna do is it's gonna give us the correlation between those two metrics. And so we can do that for each of our KPIs and each of our KPFs. And if we do that, we'll get something like this. This shows us the correlation data between each of those things. So like you can see here, I've organized this chart by impressions, so we can see the highest correlation for impressions for this client was internal link score, the word count and page speed was last. Average position, the highest correlation was word count, and then it went to internal link score and then page speed score. So what this tells me is that we're not doing page speed. We're not gonna advise them to do page speed because for both of these metrics, page speed is the lowest correlation, right? We can take a look here, which one should I choose? Well, if they care about impressions, the winner is improved internal linking because that internal link score has the highest correlations to impressions. If they care about average position, the winner is to create unique content for product pages. So this is a good example of how you can use this type of analysis to make smarter decisions over the recommendations you give and the impact of those recommendations will have on the client's success. Some other examples, though, about how you can use this for other things. Title tags, if you're optimizing title tags, your KPIs might be clicker rate and average position. The performance factors could be title tag length, but is the title tag same as H1 or split test format? Those last two KPFs would be simply marked in the spreadsheet as like a binary number, like a yes or no, so it'd be like one and zero kind of thing, and that would get the correlation for you. Another example would be page speed. KPIs could be conversion rates. So maybe you don't care about page speed for SEO, you care about it for conversions and UX, but you can look at conversion rates or bounce rates for your KPIs. You can look at your speech insight score, core web vitals or JavaScript execution time for performance factors. Another example would be for links. So you want to look at like your KPIs could be average position, impressions, number of ranking terms. Your performance factors could be number of backlinks, number of internal links, page authority, if you're using loss. So the closing thoughts here is that key performance factors can help you better understand the most important elements to your SEO process. But if for nothing else, I hope they inspire you to have a greater understanding of each domain's unique SEO thumbprint. Thank you very much.