For a year and a half I was responsible for the website and the content on the website at Paid Memberships Pro. And the most important traffic channel for PMPro was organic SEO – basically Google.
To improve our SEO there are two main things we had to do:
Better organize our content
Write new high quality content
PMPro had over 900 posts when I joined so one of my main goals was to organize those posts into useful categories called cornerstone content.
While organizing content, we also had to make new, high-quality content. Over 18 months the team was able to create and update 175 blog posts. That’s over 2 posts per week! 🤯
Today we’re going to review these posts, see which categories and post types performed well, and then discuss how to best adjust the content strategy.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of PMPro’s larger strategic focuses. We have hundreds of posts which generate a ton of SEO traffic, but we’re always looking to reach more potential customers. That means we have to increase the organic traffic we get from Google and other search engines.
Our newest tactic to improve SEO is using Cornerstone content. This will better organize our mountain of content, for both website visitors and search engine indexing.
But how do we even know if it’s working?
Unfortunately, SEO is a notoriously slow marketing channel. If you’re making progress, you won’t see it for months. But you don’t have to operate in the dark.
This is where Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) come in. KPIs measure a critical aspect of your business, to give you a better idea of how things are going. This could be sales calls per day, closed support tickets per week, or (in our case) organic traffic from Google each month.
Note: I changed the numbers to protect my employers data.
When I got the opportunity to create my own marketing team, I wanted to build a system of clear understanding. It would need to give me insight as the manager. But it would also need to give my team information on progress towards their primary goals.
I started with a pretty bare bones KPI sheet in January and kept tweaking every few weeks. Half way through the year this is where my KPI sheet ended up.
Output on the left & results on the right
Today, I'll explain:
How I built this sheet
What insights these KPIs give me
Why you should track both output & results focused KPIs
How you can use my template to build your own sheet
One of my favorite events every year is Denver Startup Week. Each year they get free space from mature startups in Denver and they seek out speakers with hands-on knowledge to help new startups grow. So not only do you get to learn cool new things, and meet ambitious people, but you get to tour the offices of successful startups.
This year I primarily focused on the Growth (marketing) track but I also attended a few sessions outside of that track.
I started my job as Brand Manager at Paid Memberships Pro just over a year ago. Between Kim and myself we did just about all of the marketing for the whole company. I wrote blog posts and newsletters, sent out tweets, reviewed Google Analytics, and analyzed our sales numbers.
As we worked, we slowly built our team. In October we hired a marketing specialist to help us with data entry, social media, and graphics. Then we hired a content manager in January. She's taken over the blog which has opened up my time so I can finally focus on strategy.
When I worked at Nexcess we had a 15-day performance challenge. You would submit your site & admin credentials. We’d take your site and optimize it for you on Nexcess servers and then show you the results. This was a fantastic program because we'd almost always convert the user into a customer. It also helped us understand our customers & where they often get stuck while speeding up their site.
In the WordPress world it’s common to hear that your theme should control the look & feel of your site and plugins should control the functionality.
That’s always been a best practice in WordPress. But it’s even more important when you start considering speed. You really want to make sure your theme is doing as little as possible outside of the look & feel.
Most people consider being lazy a vice – something that you have to overcome to do cool things. But in web development, lazy loading can be a powerful tool.
Lazy loading is a design pattern in computer science where you defer initialization of an object until the point at which it is needed.
In web development it’s pretty similar. Basically you don’t load an asset until you need it.
There are a ton of tools out there to deliver static files like JavaScript, CSS, & images like CDNs. But there are a few other types of media you might have on your site namely audio & video files.
And just like JS, CSS, & images which can be handled by CDNs we want to offload audio & video files to external services to reduce the load on your web server and to have locations around the world to serve these files from the closest location.
One common piece of advice you'll hear when you're trying to speed up your site is to “use a CDN”. A CDN stands for a content-delivery-network.
A content delivery network is similar to a web server but there are two key differences:
CDNs store static assets. Like images, CSS files, and Javascript files. They don’t process web pages
Most medium-size websites have a single web server. But they can have dozens or hundreds of CDN locations around the world. And CDNs use geolocation to send visitors to the closest CDN.
If you can optimize an aspect that controls 60% of your page load you'll very likely see some big gains. There are some simple things you should do & some things that even the pros forget.
