When and How to Use Maturity Analysis for SEO?
- Petra Kis-Herczegh
- Oct 3, 2024
- 3 min read
Updated: Oct 5, 2024
There can be a number of reasons why you'd want to understand your organisation's maturity level when it comes to SEO. Some of the examples when you might want to understand maturity better could be;
To set goals and scope a future growth plan for SEO growth.
To understand current challenges within the business and to better prioritise the SEO strategy and roadmap.
To create a success metric for maturity and build it into the strategy as a core KPI.
Organisational Maturity Graph (OMG) for SEO is a maturity analysis tool that helps to evaluate the SEO maturity of your or your client's business.
A huge thank you to the brilliant Tory Gray (CEO, Principal SEO Consultant of Gray Dot Company) and Miracle Inameti-Archibong (Head of Search, John Lewis Finance) who collaborated on this project with me, and dedicated their time and knowledge, to make sure this tool helps provide guidance to businesses across all industries. Further shoutout to the brilliant SEOs who peer-reviewed this resource and provided feedback in any way.
The OMG for SEO resource contains three sheets;
Info and credits
Scoring sheet
Results
You'll notice that the results sheet is currently an empty graph. This is because the scores come directly from the scoring sheet, which means you won't need to change anything on the results sheet, this is simply used to populate your own maturity graph.
You can leave the Results sheet as it is for now and head back to the scoring sheet to start. In order to use OMG for SEO, I'll recommend the following steps;
1. Make a copy
In order to use this tool, you'll first of all need a google account to create a copy of the spreadsheet so you can customise your own graph.
2. Name and explore the Scoring Sheet
When you click on 'Make a copy' you'll be prompted to name your own sheet. You can use something like your business name, current year, or quarter to easily remember when the scoring was done for your business. You can enter your business name in the cell where it says 'Enter Business Name', which will create a title for your Results sheet. After you've done this, you can start exploring the scoring sheet.
Open the first section 'Technology' and notice how it is divided into two subsections. 'Data Quality' and 'Reporting, Testing and QA'. Each section (Technology, Culture, Strategy, Efficiency) has a maximum of 100 points you can achieve. This is the total of the points you can get for each subsection . Please note that 'Efficiency' is automatically scored based on your answers in other sections.
You can open each section to review the subsections to start with. If you open any subsections you will see the criteria to use to score your current status and the goal you want to get to.
Once you're familiar enough with the spreadsheet, you can start scoring!
3. Score your current performance and where you want to get to.
From here, scoring should be fairly straightforward. Under 'Max score' you will see the worth of each item which is there for general guidance to help with the scores. You'll see in the sections that scores are worth either 0, 5 or 10 points to simplify the process.
You can score by using the checkmarks, selecting the answer that best suit your business and your future goals.
4. Review your Results
Once you filled in the full chart, it is time to head over to the results section where you'll see your own personal OMG for SEO. You can now use this visual graph to better understand your goals and help drive prioritisation for you SEO strategy. To make the most use of this, I highly recommend to redo this exercise on a regular basis and ad-hoc as and when you need to redefine it to reflect business changes.
I hope you'll find this tool helpful, please don't hesitate to reach out on LinkedIn with any questions or feedback.
