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Gary Angel brings over twenty years of experience in decision support, CRM, and software development, to SEMphonic. Gary co-founded SEMphonic and is president and chief technology officer. He's responsible for leading SEMphonic's development of Web analytics and SEM decision making tools for web marketing professionals. In addition, he helps companies like WebMD, Intuit, American Express and Charles Schwab maximize their web channel marketing through intelligent use of Enterprise Web Analytics

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Shifting Search’s Black Sheep: How to Propel SEO to the Head of the Marketing Herd

Written on
January 12th 2007
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by Gary Angel  |
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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the black sheep in the online marketing herd. Its basic principles, its practice and its economics are all significantly different than pretty much any other marketing channel. One might almost compare it to Public Relations — since with SEO you are essentially competing for eyeballs in a free marketspace. But unlike PR, SEO is a heavily technical discipline — one where a deep understanding of the complex ranking algorithms used by engines like Google and MS Search are the essential ingredients.

One of the most frustrating aspects of SEO is that it is, in many respects, deeply stupid. When a user types “marketing” into Google (a query that will return something like one billion entries), it’s absurd to think that any search engine can possibly pick a “best fit.” Absurd because the task is inherently impossible — there is no best fit. And while the problem is most obvious for the broadest terms, it exists at every level of specificity. Take the key term in our (Semphonics) industry — web analytics.

When a user enters web analytics should they get the site of a web analytics software package, a web analytics consultancy, a web analytics association or a web analytics blog? And between software sites, all of which are essentially 100% about web analytics, how would it be possible to choose between WebSideStory, Omniture and Webtrends (or a half-dozen other vendors)?

It isn’t possible. But the static nature of the returned search page places an enormous value on being in the top position — more, for example, than in the phone book when the alphabetical listing places some premium on being named triple-A but not nearly as much as the top position in an engine.

I think this is going to change dramatically in the next couple of years. The Search Engines are going to have to deliver results in a much richer — Ajax driven fashion. When your search results can be instantly sorted, filtered and categorized, being number one on return is going to be mean much, much less. So I think in couple of years the practice of SEO is going to look more like the rest of marketing. It will be easy to get included in a germane result set. And marketers will have to focus on making their listing as attractive as possible. That should be an improvement in every respect.

But at the moment, the technical discipline of SEO is still very much with us. And since it’s with us, it’s important to do it as well as possible.

In Search Engine Marketing, doing something well is always ultimately about your ability to measure and tune your results. And in this respect, at least, our black sheep runs with the flock.

Yes, measurement. SEO and measurement haven’t exactly been soulmates. But SEO will reward disciplined measurement just as much — perhaps even more — than PPC.

Measure for Problems

So many people get lost in the nitty-gritty of SEO or intimidated by its intricacies that they miss the big picture staring them in the face. The first place to start when measuring your SEO traffic is to look at the overall organic traffic on your site by search engine. For most sites we work with (classic BtoC eCommerce), Google is going to be the dominant organic traffic source — typically sourcing anywhere from around fifty-percent to as much as seventy or eighty-percent of organic traffic. Yahoo is usually the next largest organic traffic source — typically pushing somewhere between 15-30% of traffic. MS Search is usually number three — with numbers ranging from nearly equivalent to Yahoo to percentages as small as 1-2%. Ask is the most common fourth source — typically with volumes about half of Microsoft.

I’ve expressed these as wide ranges because almost every site will show a different mix. But it’s useful to know the general expected ranges so that you can quickly place your site in comparison. That will give you a good idea of where you have opportunities by engine. If your Google results account for 95% of total organic volume, then you need to concentrate on optimizing for Yahoo, Microsoft and other engines. If Google is sending you less volume than Yahoo, then you’ve got a serious Google problem.

In the main, we find that companies discover issues with Yahoo and Microsoft. These engines aren’t as exhaustive in their coverage as Google, are less commonly optimized for, and are defeated by a wider variety of spidering issues. If you find that your site is under-represented in one or more engines, that provides you with direction both where to look and, in some cases, what kind of problems to look for.



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Reader Comments.

Interesting comments… measurement is certainly important, but this doesn’t seem very actionable.

Posted by drew | 2:15 pm on January 12, 2007.

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