Digital Marketing Insider (146): 4-19-24

Hey Digital Marketing Insiders!

Ready to embark on an exciting SEO adventure?

Our latest newsletter is your personalized roadmap to mastering SEO! We'll guide you through the diverse spectrum of SEO maturity, helping you set success metrics that truly resonate with your goals.

Dive into the fascinating world of domain authority, content optimization, and more, all with a friendly tone that makes learning enjoyable.

Let's journey together and uncover actionable insights that'll turbocharge your digital presence. This article is brought to you by our SEO guru Stacey Heubeck, enjoy.

Get ready to explore, learn, and succeed in the dynamic realm of SEO!

Developing Along the SEO Maturity Spectrum

Improving your organic search presence hinges on understanding your SEO maturity level. Once you know what your SEO maturity is you’ll be better equipped to identify the most impactful SEO initiatives given that maturity and be able to set appropriate success metrics.

What is SEO Maturity?

SEO maturity measures the current state of a company's organic search presence compared to its competitors. There’s no set formula to measure SEO maturity, and it’s dependent on many factors including industry, organic competition, past SEO efforts, and your competitors’ current SEO investment. 

Typically speaking, the lower a company’s SEO maturity is, the longer it will take to see the impact of SEO efforts. However, the growth potential can be huge.

If you’re the leader in your space — and you’re the most SEO mature compared to your competitors, your growth will look like small swings as you continue to develop content around niche topic areas. 

Understanding your company's SEO maturity will become a guiding light when determining which SEO activities to prioritize, and what the measures of success should look like for those activities.

A simple SEO Maturity model

If you do a quick Google search, you’ll find many versions of the SEO Maturity model, but they tend to be overcomplicated. To keep things simple, we’ll break down SEO Maturity into three buckets:

1. Low SEO Maturity

2. Moderate SEO Maturity

3. High SEO Maturity

Visually, imagine these on a spectrum, with Moderate sitting in the middle.

WebMechanix SEO Maturity Spectrum

Where you fall on the maturity spectrum depends on many factors, including, but not limited to

• How Google perceives your site relative to your organic competitors

• How much effort you and your competitors are spending on existing content

• How much effort you and your competitors are spending on new content creation

How to measure your SEO Maturity

There is no set way to measure SEO maturity, but, for this exercise, plot yourself in the middle of the spectrum. Depending on the analysis of the following key factors, you’ll end up sliding up or down the maturity scale.

How Google perceives your site relative to your organic competitors

First, you need to understand how Google perceives your site relative to your organic competitors. This involves analyzing your website's visibility, relevance, and authority in the eyes of Google's algorithms.

Number of Ranking Non-Branded Keywords

This may seem obvious, but the state of your current SEO will impact how successful future SEO efforts will be. Using tools like Search Console for your own site’s analysis and SEMRush to check out competitor rankings will give you an idea of exactly how many non-branded keywords you’re currently ranking for. The bigger the difference between you and your competitors the more SEO immature you are. 

Domain authority

Use a tool like SEMRush to get an approximate idea of your site’s Domain Authority (DA); a compound metric that grades the overall quality of a website or a webpage.

How to interpret it: 

Look up your Domain Authority and the Domain Authority of your top organic competitors — you can find those competitors by Googling the non-branded high-intent keywords you want to rank for. 

Then, compare. 

If your score is the same as your competitors (within a few points) that means Google sees you as roughly the same authority in the space. Said another way, if you both did exactly the same SEO activities you would likely both see a similar impact. 

If your score is lower than your competitors by ~10 points or more, anticipate a steeper hill to climb. Slide yourself down the scale towards the “Low Maturity” end. 

If your score is higher than your competitors by ~10 points or more, you’ve got a good head start. If you start investing in SEO activities you’ll be able to secure and grow that head start faster than your competitors. Slide yourself you the scale towards “High Maturity”

The bigger the gap between you and your competitors, the more you’ll slide yourself up or down the SEO maturity spectrum.

Referring Domains

Next, look at the number of your referring domains. You can also use an SEO tool like SEMRush to find that metric.

How to interpret it:

Simply put, the more quality (no spam backlinks!) referring domains you have linked back to your site, the better. Google wants to display authoritative and engaging content, and that’s just the kind of thing other people like to link back to. 

Like domain authority, the bigger the gap between you and your competitor’s referring domains, the more drastic your jump up or down the spectrum will be. 

To read the rest of this article and to get Tracey’s full thoughts on SEO go check out our WebMechanix Blog. See you there!

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