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Sorry I have been lagging on the search cycle series of articles (the Webinar is focused on measuring and optimizing around the search cycle), but work has been unbelievably busy. I hope to start again next week. In the mean time, please mark your calendars for May 5th and my free SEO Webinar from BusinessOnLine.

Catfish

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1. The importance of measuring the right data from each step in the “search cycle” and then,…
2. Taking action based on that data.

Many people get caught up in metrics and measuring all kinds of things that don’t drive any tactical optimization activities. In an ongoing SEO campaign, resources for continued optimization need to be prioritized based on analytics data, so as to maximize ROI. Therefore, we need to measure the right data in each step of the “search cycle” in order to understand the proper allocation of those resources.

The “search cycle” is a five step process that illustrates how potential customers become customers through search:

Each of the steps in this process have certain metrics that can be leveraged to drive SEO strategy. Because of time constraints I was only able to discuss rankings and traffic at my presentation. For today’s blog post, I will be discussing Search Rankings and Wednesday I will write about Search Traffic.

Search Rankings:

In the search rankings phase of the cycle, its obvious that the primary metric of concern is the ranking of a phrase. But it’s important to note that where the phrase is ranked is not always consistent between users. Between localization, personalization, universal search results and ranking fluctuations between data centers, ranking #1 for a particular phrase in Google, Yahoo or MSN, isn’t as clear cut as it once was. That isn’t to say that top listings for competitive keyword phrases aren’t important, they certainly are. But they are getting harder to measure accurately.

It’s also worth noting that typically, an enterprise level Web site that gets thousands of search visitors a month, is not able to check rankings for every keyword permutation that they are interested in. Therefore they chose a smaller set of “fat head” keywords that are competitive and will in theory, generate the highest revenue or at least search traffic. But in reality, if you optimize a site for a three word phrase, you are likely also optimizing it for dozens if not hundreds more related long tail keyword phrases. And the resulting taffic from these long tail keywords for sites that target high traffic niches can be significant.

The main takeaway here is that rankings in and of themselves don’t tell the whole story about your SEO campaign. So its important not to rely solely on rankings as the primary metric of success. It’s certainly a key indicator, but the rest of the search cycle must be considered in order to both understand and improve your ROI from search.

So with that in mind, I gave some tips on how to use search rankings to drive SEO strategy:

1. You should create a “keyword map” in Excel that lists all of the keyword phrases that you are targeting as well as which URL you would like ranked for that URL. The keyword map serves a number of purposes.One, it is a permanent record of which pages have been optimized for which keywords. This is very helpful in both internal and external link development on an ongoing basis.Two, in the event that a different page on your site is listed for a particular keyword, it allows you to see the differences in what content you think is most relevant for that phrase versus which content Google thinks is most relevant. Often times this will provide excellent clues on how to improve your optimization.

   Additionally, you can then ensure that the messaging on the page that is ranked, is consistent with the page you thought was going to be ranked, thereby improving your conversion rate. In other words, if you sell a product and you have a blog post about the product, and the blog post gets more links and gets ranked higher than the product page, make sure you have a “buy now” button on the blog post.

2. The second way rankings can drive strategy is understanding that rankings in the top 10 are the only rankings that really matter, because they are the only rankings that consistently produce traffic. Therefore, it makes sense to monitor your top keywords to see which in are the top 30 or so that are not in the top 10. These rankings illustrate an immediate opportunity where a few small improvements can make a big difference.
3. Additionally, it pays to look at long tail keywords that convert well and add them to your optimization. Often times it doesn’t take much optimization to really improve your ranking for a long tail keyword. And the difference in traffic between a #8 listing and a #3 listing can be substancial.

In summary, any ranking not in the top 10 represents an opportunity for continued optimization. There are usually more opportunities for more SEO (content, internal links, external links, etc) than there are resources. In that event, it is useful to prioritize based on which terms convert better, which terms drive the most profitable sales and which terms are in markets where the company has a competitive advantage. It is advantageous to have a keyword map that serves as a master gameplan for your optimization. This will allow you to understand if your visitors are going where you want them to and that they see messaging that will result in the highest possible conversions. Adding long tail keyword phrases to your map that convert well according to your analytics and then optimizing for those phrases can significantly increase rankings for those phrases.

Rankings are really just the tip of the iceberg as it relates to what you need to measure to maximize your ROI for your organic search campaign. In my next blog post, I will talk about traffic metrics, what’s important, what isn’t, and how that data should drive your ongoing optimization.

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Do you love web analytics? If you do, we might have something just for you.

Job Opening: Web Analytics Analyst

A mid-level position in the field of website analytics those with a minimum of 2 years of experience in configuring website analytics platforms, developing custom reports and providing analysis on website statistics.

If you are interested, we expect you to come into the position with some form of experience working with previous analytics platforms and providing analysis of reports. Aside from that, you must continue learning and keep up-to-date with new and developing platforms and strategies within the space. We will expect you to rise to these and other challenges that might surface and thrive on change, innovation, critical thinking, humor, results, and success.

At BusinessOnLine, our people drive our process, our process drives our solutions, our solutions drive client satisfaction, and client satisfaction drives us.

If you believe you are a perfect fit for this position, read more about it, download more information here. And contact us through the contact information in that document.

If you do not find this useful since you are not applying for this position, well you can use the image above as a cool wallpaper? What do you think?

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Released as beta a version to testers, Google Analytics can now tag certain events that happen on a page that are normally not tracked by default on many other analytics platforms. This is common on websites that use AJAX and Flash, which are two technologies based on the current trends will just see more and more of these technologies used. Thus there is a great demand for tracking the events on sites like these.

Often web analytics platforms track many server and browser variables once an HTML rendered page loads. Problem today is many page elements powered by AJAX and Flash does not reload a new page. Thus an AJAX or Flash heavy site may be having a lot of user activity but are not effectively tracked as common web analytics software are not being able to track these events without a page loading.

Google Analytics new feature released to beta testers now has Event Tracking. This allows you to tag Objects on your site. Picture an object as selected elements of your page you with to track its activity. This can be ideal on AJAX and Flash elements; you can place this on an AJAX step by step process, a file download, streaming webcast video, tutorial videos, etc. With these objects you assign Actions that are done on you defined objects. These can be: play, pause, stop in videos and you can even set video playing percent timelines. This can give analytics a whole new insight into user behavior data that can be translated into improvement of a better user experience, better site conversion.

The Limitations of Web Analytics

A common limitation with many free analytics packages is they can only track all numbers as the page loads, either reading server logs or using page tagging often with JavaScript but can also be done with small pixel images.

Each tracking technique has their own advantages and limitations, server logs have the limitations of recording various people using the same IP address like in a corporate network. Several people may be visiting a site but it may appear on the server logs to be one person. JavaScript tagging can take advantage of browser cookies thus being able to determine if a visit is unique based on the unique browser cookie even if the IP addresses are all the same. Although many anti-spyware, anti-adware software have also cookie cleaners that can clean out cookies and skew other analytics reports. This is unavoidable but can be minimized as much as possible. Many modern day analytics platforms use a combination of all tracking techniques.

Hits to a website give you limited knowledge of other activities, with the new Event Tracking, this will bring a new light into the interpretation of data.

Other Advanced Analytics Platforms

I still remember HitBox that became HBX that was then purchased by Visual Sciences and became one of the biggest competitors of Omniture. Then, Omniture bought Visual Sciences and that acquisition was finalized earlier this year. So far Omniture is known to be one of the most advanced analytics platforms being able to track almost anything on a page.

But as Google’s free Analytics platform that had its beginnings from starting with the purchase of Urchin, and just kept getting better might be able to put Omniture out of business don’t you think? Maybe some people might think of that. But personally, for a big company like Omniture, I doubt Google Analytics will kill Omniture, it might kill their platform, but the business can still exist as many website owners cannot understand the numbers right away and may need from help from a specialist to digest the information into usable data for important business decisions.

Yahoo Bought IndexTools and Microsoft Bought Gatineau

And of course if Google is improving, Yahoo and Microsoft are also improving. Yahoo has purchased IndexTools which is not only a web analytics platform, but also a bid management tool as well. Currently their site looks is closed for new customers right after Yahoo announced the purchase and you cannot signup anywhere so we really don’t know if this will be a paid service or dive into the free analytics world like what Google does. I do envision this to be rebranded with Yahoo colors and probably implement the unified Yahoo account login just like all other Yahoo properties. And Microsoft has purchased Gatineau and is now called Microsoft AdCenter Analytics. This is accessible through Microsoft’s AdCenter thus you just have to sign up an account with them and you’re good to go.

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