Implementing Six Sigma Methods into #SEO Programs

Can Six Sigma Tools Be Applied To An SEO Strategy?

By Graham Ware
Connect with me on Google Plus at +Graham Ware

My company has recently tasked me with identifying new metrics and establishing more efficient standardized ways to improve SEO programs with our clients.  In doing so, naturally, I bring my BPRE background and am in the process of building an SEO 6S Scorecard that will be one of the first of its kind. It was originally created by Motorola as part of the Six Sigma method to quality management.

For those unaware or curious, Six Sigma is a methodology used to identify variation in processes and eliminate defects in effort to optimize improvements.  This business process re-engineering management strategy was originally founded by Motorola, in 1985 and popularly implemented by various industries including manufacturing, supply chain, IT, healthcare, telecommunications and even our US Military to name a few. Six Sigma provides a standard method of defining, measuring, analyzing, improving and controlling a problem (DMAIC). Many experts in the SEO industry (search engine optimization) familiar with Six Sigma toolkits are asking how it can be applied to metrics and specification limits using a similar approach.  Having this background can help give you a step above the rest, especially for those lean & black belts.

A Six Sigma process is one in which 99.99966% of the products/results manufactured are statistically expected to be free of defects (3.4 defects per million opportunities).

In the above screenshot, is an image that displays a process operating in “Six Sigma” as it shows the standard deviation: ~3 defect parts out of a million products produced and the specification limits of the process are on the Six Sigma limits (x-axis). 

However, the above curve is not applicable for online business and SEO. This is due to the fact that specifications are not well defined, as they are say in the electronics industry (for example, a resistor’s specifications should be 10±0.5 ohms, where 10.3 ohms is said to be conforming while 10.8 ohms is a defect). That does not mean that you cannot define your clients specification limits based on their business requirements, website statistics and industry influence. 

This post seeks to explorer whether the “Six Sigma” methodology and scorecard can be incorporated as part of an existing search engine optimization strategy, which is a key element of success in the online industry. The objective is to let you adopt a standard method of solving problems and coming up with solutions to improve the quality of your website, service and other measurable elements such as conversion rate, traffic, CTR, PPC etc.

Those in the SEO industry do not follow a set standard of methods to say "define an SEO problem," measure it, analyze and finally improve an SEO situation by implementing corrective actions that can increase customer/user satisfaction, increased sales, social media engagement and website traffic.  Let us evaluate the possibility of implementing a standard practice and methodology and the impacts doing so would have.

In “Six Sigma,” continuous improvement and thinking "out of the box" are the driving elements (in addition to how projects are executed/lead). This is why in the industrial sectors, things improve on a daily, monthly and yearly basis. Engineers set and formulate an “improvement plan” on a yearly basis, which is primarily a Six Sigma team-based project, trust me I know. The main objective of these continuous improvement projects is reducing cost and increasing profits/sales. 

The same principle should be applied to online businesses, ideally to be integrated with a search engine optimization strategies. One of the major mistakes made by many online business owners is the failure to accept SEO as a “continuous improvement process.” They hire an SEO to increase the rankings and after the SEO work has been done, many are unwilling to improve further with things such as; improving content, enhancing blogging, adjusting or re-targeting keywords, addressing website functionality changes, incorporating seasonal or strategic marketing incentives and so on. Then months later, when their SEO rankings fall, they’ve lost traffic and are standing with a dumb look on their face. All in the while their competitors’ websites are continually improving and moving up in SEO as they engage and look for continued SEO efforts/improvements. Seemingly, one could argue that Google’s algorithm seems to award more to websites that strive hard to improve.

If the website is crawled, improved or reviewed on a consistent basis ( <meta name = "robots" content = "index, follow, all"><meta name ="revisit-after" content="14 days"> ) then it will most likely increase its life cycle while brining in more profits. The Six Sigma principle will teach you how to do this methodically and systematically.

Another important governing principle in Six Sigma methodology is “determining facts by evaluating as objectively as possible but such facts must be quantified.” It is a widely accepted principle in Six Sigma that “you can't improve what you can't measure.” In the SEO industry, it is easy to gather numerical data with some degree of accuracy, such as website traffic, conversion rate, bounce rate, page views, social engagement etc.

Stating and formulating a "factual" statement is extremely important as compared to making “inferences” when you are going to use Six Sigma methodologies. Instead of saying “Our website has a poor conversion rate" or one that I hear very often "We had no new sales this month..." as a Lean Six Sigma professional a professional statement would be more along the lines of: "Our website averaged a 0.1% conversion rate in the last three months and our average profit per month is only $172. With a monthly operating cost of around $210, which shows we are losing money.”
Speak with numbers, gather data and quantify them as accurately as possible, and you can easily deal with and improve them.

Implementing DMAIC into an SEO Scorecard

Conducting SEO projects involves working in a constantly changing environment, an environment where one of the major search engines rolls out hundreds of changes to it's algorithm every single year. On top of that we need to make sure we are offering a good ROI (return on investment) for our clients while managing our own costs to ensure we stay in a job.

DMAIC offers you a unique way to solve these problems.

The Business Case: This is where you explain the importance of the project to your client or management. You should detail costs incurred overall because of the problem and describe what will happen if no action is taken. You should also relate the problem back to business goals and specify the positive impact of the project in monetary value.

The Problem Statement: This part of the project charter clearly states the problem. It provides details of the problem's impact and why it is detrimental to fix. "My website traffic has decreased over the last 6 months impacting my business sales by 4%."

The Goal Statement: Right after you clearly state the problem, you now have to define a clear goal. Our goal is to increase traffic by 24% in the next month and 8% every month thereafter. This is where you project the expected results after the problem is resolved (based on Google trends and using Analytics data).

One of the most popular Six Sigma methods is the DMAIC method. Its search engine optimization and online business improvement applications it is illustrated as follows:

Definition phase: The first step of any improvement process is to clearly define the problem. In this step, it is extremely important to be objective and quantify the problem (refer to the previous example in the earlier section). Here is an example of a problem statement in the definition phase:

• Our Google AdWords revenue averages $5.73 dollars per day at an average traffic rate of 2000 visitors per month. This example implies that the website’s problem is revenue related to ads. There is some traffic; however the revenue is low, and below visitors expectations.
  
• The average website sales per month is $172, however the average running cost to run the website per month is $210. The net profit is negative -$38. The ROI is failing.
  
• The total number of downloads per month averages around 11. Competitor websites selling similar products average around 29.

Measurement phase: After the problem has been clearly defined objectively and quantitatively, the measurement phase deals exclusively with “data gathering.” One of the objectives in this phase is to find “tools” as “accurate as possible” that will be used to gather data. Bear in mind that the conclusions and recommendations only depend on your data and analysis. Misleading or wrongly gathered data can lead to wrong conclusions and recommendations. Thus an ineffective improvement plan will not solve the problem and does not provide results.

We'll collect baseline data (from Analytics) and summarize all of the collected data as we make the process map. This will provide a visual representation of what's currently going on with the process when under investigation.

Analysis phase: After the data has been gathered, you can proceed to the analysis phase. This is the most important phase of the Six Sigma project. Several analysis tools will be employed. These include tools that handle the analysis of variance, regression analysis, correlation, etc.

Improvement phase: The result of the analysis will indicate what actions must be taken to solve the problem. In this phase, corrective actions will be implemented.
For example, say that the analysis reveals that 50% of the website’s pages are not indexed by Google due to poor internal linking, and that this is one of the reasons the whole website is not getting long tail traffic from Google. Then one of the corrective actions will be to improve the internal link structure by providing consistent HTML-based navigation.

Control phase: To ensure correct implementations of the corrective actions is the main objective of the control phase. In this phase, data are continually monitored to reflect the improvement and are compared with the numbers for the same areas before the improvement has was implemented.
Statistical process control is helpful also. For example, after improvement, say average unique daily visitors are around 200±30. A chart can be made to monitor the traffic fluctuations as well as to detect special problems. A good tool to use is Google Analytics.

Any data gathered will be used in the next periodic review of the Six Sigma project, which then constitutes the “definition phase."

Once you've completed all of these tasks, you have to transfer the ownership of the new process over to the original owner of the process. The team may also need to talk to the facilitator about the new project ideas that came up during the course of improving the process.

If you were successful, it's time to celebrate. It should always be celebrated when you complete an improvement project successfully. It builds rapport and provides recognition for a team's efforts. Employee morale will come in handy the next time that you have an improvement project.

About the Author: Graham Ware is a recognized #SEO expert with over 8 years of digital marketing experience. Naturally this article is connected to Grahams Google+ profile. It also links to Twitter but that has nothing to do with authorship.