Beyond Search Volume: Evaluating SEO Priorities Through a Business-Centric Lens
Reviewing a market or industry for opportunities can and should be a lot more than reviewing your favourite tool’s keyword gap report. Prioritising SEO work for a website can and should include:
Alignment with the business plan for the upcoming 3-5 years
Comparative performance when prioritising technical work
Use of proof of concepts when and where possible
Broader market opportunity analysis through total addressable market (TAM)/ serviceable addressable market (SAM) calculations
A note about assumptions
One thing you’ll no doubt notice in this article is that I’ll be making a number of assumptions in my calculations or my logic. I’m not trying to be exact. I’m trying to be clear. The assumptions I’m making are simple and easy to explain to a business leader. I’m not here making a convoluted, complex calculation to get as close as I possibly can to forecasted impression data or the highest we could rank for a given keyword.
And that’s the key. We want any assumptions we make to be easy to understand by someone with a business background, not obscured by a level of technical understanding to complex to explain in a sentence.
Follow the leaders
Imagine you work at a video subscription company like Netflix and you start researching an SEO strategy. Obviously, because you work at a video subscription company you start researching what kinds of genres, actors and sub-types of shows which are becoming popular. You take your recommendations to the CMO, and find yourself summarily dismissed. Why?
Well, turns out your video subscription company is about to start building a new offering that they’re putting big bets on: video games.
Whomp whomp. You’ve missed a big part of your company’s future, a shift in focus. Asking a few questions before starting in on any strategy could remedy that.
So for any strategy, the first thing I recommend SEO’s do, whether in-house or agency, is get at least a sense of the business’ plan for the next 3-5 years: any new product rollouts, anything they’re closing or reducing attention to, countries they’re moving into or exiting from, legislation or patterns they’re worried about and actively working to adapt to—to start.
Benchmark yourself
“It depends” is a default SEO response for a reason: it really does depend. But as we get more experienced in the field, we start to understand the ways in which we can answer the “it depends” for our clients and managers.
For example, when it comes to prioritising technical work, there are a few metrics I benchmark the website against to understand how I want to rank it in priority, which I generally calculate as percentages:
How much of the website overall does it affect?
How many of the star products or offerings does it affect?
How does the metric compare against competitors?
The answer to each of those questions helps me prioritise: the less of a % of the website it affects, the lower priority the issue is—unless the only pages it affects are our star products, and if we sit better than our competitors, it’s less of a priority. If we’re worse off than our competitors in things like site speed or accessibility, it becomes a higher priority.
The comparative element here—is it a small problem on the site? How does it affect our priority products? How does it compare to the rest of the market? —allow us to move from ‘it depends’ to something more concrete based on relative performance and impact.
Prove out the idea first
Most business leaders will be skeptical, and rightfully so, of industry case studies and best practices. This is because they know just because it worked for one business, or even where it works for most businesses, does not mean it will work for this business.
So rather than spending hours searching through archives of case studies from SEO agencies and experts, put that time to use in a way that’s probably more productive: create a proof of concept with your own business.
Sometimes the hypothesis we’re trying to prove out is one we can directly control - meta titles, page description, sometimes even product content. But if it’s something that needs help from other teams (usually developers) - have that conversation. Any actual work for the proof of concept shouldn’t take more than…a day. From a developer, or a designer, or even yourself. This is meant to be a relatively quick and dirty test to see whether or not the concept has legs and the potential to really impact your business.
While it is quick and dirty, we do want to pay attention to a few things:
Where you’re making the change has no other active change occurring on it
It ideally has year-on-year organic data to compare incrementality
The page or product line is the 3rd or 4th leading revenue or lead driver for the business - not big enough that a bad test knocks everything out of line, but big enough to make an impact
When you make the change
If you don’t have an SEO A/B testing platform like Search Pilot that can give you an estimate of how long the test needs to run, a good rule of thumb is at least two weeks, no more than twelve.
Beyond Keywords - TAM and SAM
If you really want me to start rambling, stand me a beer and ask me about keywords. For a long time I’ve really disliked the fact we still use them as both a measure of success and a method of communicating “SEO” to copywriters and other stakeholders. Google intrinsically moved its understanding of a topic away from strict, lexical keyword matching as early as 2013 with Hummingbird, with the start of the shift to vector-based search, knowledge graph and entities and everything that entails. And yet, here we are over ten years later still obsessing over whether or not our ranking for [best running shoes for men] moved up a single position on page one.
But…that’s a conversation for another day.
Lexical, exact reporting is the world we live in, so we need to work within it. But there are ways to at least somewhat represent topics.
It will need to be an approximation, but it can be done. How I do that for my clients is relatively straightforward:
Pull reams of keywords related to a seed keyword/s
Use formulas to identify the most popular sub-topics by the number of times a word is repeated (excluding stop words and other common words)
Calculate the estimated search volume for the topic as a whole: this becomes the TAM (Total Addressable Market - how much interest there is as a whole for a particular thing)
The TAM and SAM (Serviceable Addressable Market - how much interest of a topic the brand could likely capture) of subtopics are already captured in the overall topic; subtopic TAM and SAM calculations will help you prioritise what you should be focussing on throughout the website.
Approximate and assume SAM based on the average keyword difficulty for that topic and grade highest position bracket by CTR (AWR is a great tool for this because you can drill down CTR to industry, if you don’t want to do the semi back-breaking work of calculating website specific CTR using Google Search Console data…)
If you wanted to add a level of detail to the calculation you could find the average rank for that topic for your website and then make the keyword difficulty/CTR calculation incremental; e.g. “if the keyword difficulty is 40-50, the topic ranking will move up an average of 20 positions”
While it may seem obvious, evaluating SEO through a business lens means actually grounding your decisions in the business. Know what the business wants to look like in five years. Understand your target market. Ground your decisions in reality rather than the hypothetical ‘best practice’ whenever you can. Learn the kinds of metrics that matter to decision makers within the company, and learn how to speak that language yourself. Centre yourself to the business rather than your discipline and you’re on the right path to making an impact within your speciality, SEO or otherwise.
Article by
Amanda King
Amanda King has been in the SEO industry for fifteen years, has worked across countries and industries, and offers strategic consulting through her business, FLOQ, alongside her business-led course. Throughout her career, King has been focused on the product, the user, and the business. Along with a passion for solving puzzles, she's incorporated data & analytics, user experience and CRO alongside SEO. Always happy to trade war stories, find her on LinkedIn for intermittently shared advice and thoughts on the industry.
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