From 2010-2011 I was very fortunate to work with Aaron Wester who at the time was Director over Web Analytics for DDM and knee-deep in understanding the tremendous success and areas of growth for KSL.com and DeseretNews.com.
I had developed an SEO ranking document that took the best SEO practices at the time and had a column for development effort. With this I even printed the source code of each main web view of the websites DDM ran, and highlighted each area with the recommended changes. It's funny to think that I once did that.
This was before version control like GitHub was a thing. Oh those were messy days. Besides I was very early in my career at this time and no sane person trusted me with production credentials quite yet.
A screenshot of the seo matrix doc
With this, I also created a "Share of Voice" tracking system. This would analyze the prominence and placement of our content for certain key terms on search engines and would rank each location and provide an overall score in comparison to other news media outlets. This would provide an easy way to view how successful we were being at targeting certain topics in comparison to local competition.
A screenshot of the share of voice system I developed
We were able to see incredible gains of search engine referrals to our web properties, with the Deseret News seeing an increase in search referrals of 156%.
An old Omniture graph of search referrals YoY
You can view the full deck that was presented below.
Or download a PDF of the original deck.