Let Your Inbound Marketing Agency Do the Metrics

Learn how a B2B inbound marketing agency can steer you through the minefield of getting your content found on the web for organic searches.

Picture of Paul Marshall Paul Marshall

Published: 03 Apr 2018

2 minutes read

Let Your Inbound Marketing Agency Do the Metrics

How do you actually know what people are searching for online? It's the classic conundrum that faces B2B businesses. Your website is beautifully written and designed, but will anyone actually find it? You can negate this to an extent by using the multitude of social media platforms to promote and share your content, as well as link building, but from an organic perspective, ensuring people find your content can be a bit of a minefield. This is where the help of an inbound marketing agency comes in.

In days gone by, Google very kindly passed across a lot of information to a website about the search terms a visitor used to find that page. In an apparent attempt to make search more secure and protect user privacy, this data, with a few exceptions here and there, is pretty much unavailable now. With it, actual metrics on search terms as a whole have gone too. Defining the number of times a query is searched for now relies on AdWords data, which gives a pretty generic and often, in our experience, overly ambitious figure against a search term. There's probably justification for it somewhere and there's certainly cost-per-click (CPC) profit in it, that much we do know.  So now we're completely in the dark right?

Not exactly. We use Ahrefs, we get an aggregated view of keyword phrase data from Google Keyword Planner which is then paired with clickstream data to give as accurate a search volume for most keywords. Keywords Everywhere is also a useful resource as it works as a browser extension and displays search volume, CPC and competition data for keywords for multiple sites.


The ultimate guide to hiring a B2B inbound marketing agency


If your site is established, tools like Google and Bing webmaster tools can provide insight on the keyword phrases people are using to find sites like yours, even if you're not really ranking very well for them. These are free services and it takes a small amount of work to sign up and connect them to your site, usually just implementing a meta tag in your homepage to verify your ownership of the site. This stops your competitors from sneaking a peek at the data as well.

The accuracy of the data you receive from these tools can be invaluable. You get to see the volume of searches for hundreds of different keywords, as well as how far down the results you're appearing for those search phrases. Obviously local search can be a massive swing factor in terms of where you appear, so everything is caveated when you take geography into account, but it's still one of the clearest pictures you can get.

Google's webmaster tools allow you to take a worldwide look at the keyword searches, as well as drilling down into certain territories, so you should be able to tailor your content dependent on your target audience. In addition, Google's tools give you an indication of change in those search terms, so you can see whether you're chasing an increasingly searched for phrase or if it's on the decline.

You can also do this with the Google trends tool, where you enter multiple phrases and can view by territory the increase or decrease in the term's popularity, along with some average numbers for the level of interest in those search phrases. A useful feature of trends is the list of related searches, which gives you an opportunity to expand your content to encompass those as well, making it more likely that Google will be convinced of the expertise, authority and trust in the content you've produced. This is really important considering Google's determination to prove it can semantically connect searches to results, so there's a bigger picture to consider when you write to ensure your content doesn't get ignored and lost in the wilderness.

Trying to get exposure on the web for your site can seem like a daunting task, whatever your starting point. But if you're prepared to put the work in, or find someone with the skills and experience to do it for you, there's a myriad of tools and services out there that can lend a helping hand.

If you find you really don't have the resources to keep on top of your search engine optimisation, then download our free guide to learn how to find the perfect B2B inbound marketing agency for your business that can help you achieve the results you want.

This blog was originally published in 2014 and has been updated in 2018 for correctness and quality.

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