Finally, the most important metrics are the primary ones. These are non-brand revenue, traffic at a category level, and overall ROI.
To quickly understand your non-brand split, you can filter out brand terms in GSC to get a percentage split of brand non-brand. This is the simplest way to get the split; it’s not super robust, but it gives you insight and a metric to benchmark.
The dream split is close to 50/50, which shows you have a healthy brand to compete with non-brand terms. A split of 10:90 to a brand means your non-brand sucks, and you need SEO investment to grow it (unless you are a huge brand. In that case, this blog won’t be relevant for you). If it’s split the other way, 90:10 towards non-brand, you need someone protecting or monitoring your SEO; otherwise, there’s a high chance a mistake will have a huge impact on your bottom line.
You can also break up GA traffic by category and subcategory to understand the correlation between keyword rankings and traffic.
The main reason we split it out like this is the high seasonality eCommerce brands experience. Therefore, if you see a drop in traffic or revenue, you can use secondary metrics to determine if this is an actual performance issue or seasonality.
For example, if you rank number 1 for a term but traffic is declining, and you are still number 1, then it’s seasonality and demand, not performance. You can apply this logic across all of the keywords and categories.
Visibility is just a good way to aggregate the performance of multiple keywords in one overly simplified metric.
Remember rankings fluctuate. If you see a drop, you should wait at least 2-3 weeks to understand if it’s more permanent. The same goes for gains. Don’t celebrate too early in the world of SEO, but hopefully, after implementing what you’ve read in this blog, you will actually know when these increases/decreases are happening and not just react when it’s too late.