One of the most important, and challenging aspects of leading SEO teams is determining what they should be working on to deliver objectives. Many plans I've seen over the years have a nice-sounding goal and a list of activities. A mental black box exists and then results are delivered. This is nonsense.
Recently SEOs have talked about not just publishing a long list of stuff to do, but prioritising them against what is the most important. But then the logic stops. There's no real measurement of activity and how well the team is progressing against the goals - other than perhaps traffic charts or some screenshots of errors in search console.
Clarity for me came in the form of Franklin Covey's second of their 4 Disciplines of Execution: Act on Lead Measures.
Essentially it says that organisations typically measure outputs rather than inputs. And it is those inputs that matter. It's almost like saying "you are what you eat" - if you're measuring your food intake and you count the number of slices of cake you have and then your strategy is to lose weight you may measure the count of healthy & unhealthy meals you have. You may also measure the number of miles you jog.
You could then decide which are the best lag measures to track. Would it be BMI it has flaws, or would it be vo2 max? That would be depend on what your goal is. Is it to look healthier or be aerobically fit?
I digress.
Franklin Covey give the account of when they worked for a children's shoe store and were asked to improve sales. They looked at all of the activities that happened in the shoe stores - all of the touchpoints with customers, all of what the team members did and found that if they measured the number of children that came into the store (they used a laser-like device on the doors) and then how many times they measured the feet of children then they sold more shoes. It was that relationship between potential customers and this particular interaction - the greater the count and ratio then this is the best predictor of sales.
So for SEO, its working out what the lead activity is that determines the lag SEO measure. Remembering that lag SEO measures should be a driver of organisational performance and contribution to the organisational goals.
The way I break it down is:
Lead SEO Measure -> Lag SEO Measure -> Lead Business Measure -> Business Lag Measure
Let's look at some examples.
If you've broken the SEO problem down into pillars. And you have some that aren't 'green' in terms of RAG then you should have this relationship between Lead SEO Measures to Lag SEO Measures defined as apriority, and documented for all the other pillars.
So for your link profile work you may have relationship defined such as:
Count of outreach contacts made -> followed links acquired with the specific quality metrics -> monthly change in volume of non-brand Organic clicks -> Business profit
Hence you would focus on getting more outreach contacts made - obviously this needs to have a quality element, so you may specify that you only count outreach contacts made against sites with specific metrics. You may also specify that you only count outreach made to news sites and category-specifc sites. That's for you to determine.
Outreach is fairly easy. If you look at the 'configurations' pillar. It may be:
Number of faceted category pages optimised for Title, H1 and copy -> Average rankings against target keywords -> monthly change in volume of non-brand Organic clicks -> Business profit
For the 'platform' pillar it may be something like -> Number of SEO tickets changed to 'in refinement with dev'. Product development / website engineering is full of caveats so this measure HAS to work with your situation. It has to be a lead measure. If you are challenged on delivery then just saying 'the number of new ideas added to JIRA' may not work if all they do is stay there. If you've got a highly efficient development process then that may be the best measure.
For the 'content' pillar it may be the number of buyers' guides fully briefed into the content team and accepted - again this is dependent on the efficiency of the organisation. It has a nod to quality but its not explicit.
I need to be clear here. The lead measures are dependent on departmental and organisational efficiencies and effectiveness. It's also very dependent on the nature of the team you have an their levels of experience and diversity of skills. It also depends on the nature of other whirlwind activities. You may have to do a lot more legwork to get into this state of flow.
The idea of this discipline of execution is that you become single-minded and focused on activities that drive departmental and organisational performance and that you don't focus on activities that make you busy fools.
But action without measurement is meaningless as you won't know if you should change your approach. So next we'll look at the other pillars: keeping an actionable scoreboard and a cadence of accountability.