The SEO Framework Part 1: Indexation, Ranking, Traffic, Actions

Here’s the most common complaint I’ve heard from SEOs over the last 20 years:

“I’ve made so many great SEO recommendations, but I can’t get any resources dedicated to implement them!”

– every young SEO

One of the big challenges in building an effective SEO program is getting buy-in from executives. They’ve got the resources you need – PROD and ENGR cycles, investment, etc.

To address this challenge, you need colleagues across your organization to understand, at the highest level, what the outcomes of a well-executed SEO campaign are.

What defines success?

The answer is IRTA:

• Indexation
• Ranking
• Traffic
• Actions

IRTA is the most high-level view of your site’s progress in organic search – the “stratosphere” view, above even the “10,000 foot” view.

The genius of IRTA is that it applies to any web site, in any industry, operating with any monetization structure. It’s a universally useful mental model for online businesses.

If your IRTA is good, your website marketing channel is performing well, no matter if you’re selling industrial equipment, or monetizing content via CPM advertising.

Once you dive beneath this “stratosphere” view, things get complex very quickly. Technical metrics (which are kryptonite to an executive-level audience) start popping up. You’re trying to build bridges with your executives, not put up roadblocks.

Focusing on IRTA avoids that complexity. IRTA  helps your team come away from a meeting feeling that they learned something substantive about your site’s progress in organic search. It avoids the pitfall of confronting your audience with a blinding spreadsheet full of metrics they don’t understand. 

If you can communicate the concepts behind IRTA to a C-suite audience, you’ve made progress toward achieving a meaningful level of understanding of SEO in your organization. Let’s take a closer look:

Indexation

Indexation is metric that tells you how many of your site’s URLs have been indexed by a search engine.

The goal is to get as many of your site’s valid, valuable URLs into the index as possible. E.g. if your site can render 100,000 valid content URLs, and you have 80,000 of them in Google’s index, that’s very good.

High Indexation numbers are important because organic search is like fishing with a drag net, where the size of your net is how many pages you have in the index – the bigger your net, the get more fish you’re likely to get.

Low indexation numbers also communicate critical information. Indexation levels are often closely tied to Information Architecture (IA). If you have a poor IA, or technical issues that are preventing engines from finding your pages, low indexation numbers are a canary in the coal mine telling you that your site requires technical SEO work.

Additionally, low indexation numbers can happen if your site has low authority (the “A” in Google’s EAT).

Engines may be able to find your content, but don’t consider it “important” enough to warrant the cost of keeping in their index. This is a strong indicator that points to a need for content marketing activity to increase your site’s authority.

Ranking

Once you have your pages in the index, you have to get them in front of human visitors – they have to rank. Ranking for a given query is a function of your page’s relevance for that query, in addition to how authoritative that page is.

If your site gets traffic from a very large number of keywords, that’s a very positive sign – it shows that you’re producing valuable, on-topic content (relevance), that is seen as trustworthy and important (authority).

There are lots of different ways to measure ranking, and only a few of them are likely to help you make meaningful progress toward your business goals. In a subsequent post, I’ll provide specific recommendations for metrics that you can use to track this at an aggregate level, and avoid the trap of focusing too much energy on a tiny handful of keyword rankings, when many thousands of keywords are driving traffic to your site.

Traffic

Once a URL is ranking for a visitor’s query, you need to entice the click.

Solid on-page SEO provides good relevance signals to engines, and also to potential visitors. You want to make sure that your title tags and meta descriptions contain important keywords, and are also readable and compelling. They’re marketing copy, and you need to use that space wisely.

In a subsequent post, I’ll outline some quick segments that you can use to slice traffic and determine where the opportunities are for your business.

Actions

Increasing organic search traffic year-over-year is a great sign that you’re doing some things right in SEO.

But traffic is not an end in and of itself. Actions are the name of the game. You want a visitor to download a whitepaper, sign up for a webinar, turn extra pages, share your blog post via social media, buy a product.

Focusing on actions makes you pay close attention not just to the amount of traffic that you’re getting, but to the quality of that traffic.

And if you’re getting highly relevant traffic, but still not seeing the business outcomes you expect, you need to start thinking critically about your site’s usability, and conversion rate optimization testing. Once you have a steady flow of qualified organic search visits to your pages, conversion rate optimization can be the difference to revenue numbers that are flat year-over-year, versus double digit growth.

Summary

Building effective SEO programs is hard, especially at the enterprise level.

As an enterprise SEO, you’re executing a complex task in a complex ecosystem. To create, manage and optimize the program, you have to create buy-in from multiple groups that you can only influence, not control: the C-suite, ENGR, PROD, QA etc. And as the old dev joke goes:

Software is easy, people are hard.

Your task is to get these complex teams educated, aligned and keep them working toward better organic search outcomes. The best way I’ve found to do that is give everyone a clear set of metrics to steer by.

By walking your team through these concepts, and explaining their importance, IRTA becomes that common language.

IRTA is an escape from the rabbit hole of a massive spreadsheet full of metrics that’s meaningful to you but incomprehensible to the broader team.

Every SEO will remember the first time that their CEO asks them “how’s our IRTA?” Finally, you’re all speaking the same language.

*Hat tip to Derrick Wheeler, the guy I learned IRTA from way back in the day.