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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
Jan 12, 2007 
Author
Gary Angel  |
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Shifting Search’s Black Sheep: How to Propel SEO to the Head of the Marketing Herd

Measure for Opportunities

Looking at the ratio of organic traffic by engine can yield SEO directions, and so, too, can looking at the organic entry rate for pages and content areas on your site. Most web analytic tools will let you track the number of page views, the number of entries (sessions that started on that page) and the number of entries by source — in particular, we’re interested in organic search traffic. Pages that are heavily trafficked on a site but that receive a very small percentage of entries may represent SEO holes — places that search engines have a hard time reaching.

Common reasons for SEO holes include Search-based and Database-driven content, complex URL structures and unusual access paths (via Flash for example). It’s often extremely useful to look at groups of pages (content areas) on your site instead of single pages. Particularly when you focus on pages accessed via database lookup or search, each single page may have too little volume to register. But the pages in sum may account for a very large number of page views. And if you can open up access to this content via Search Engines, you can often get a very big, very easy win.

Measure for Success

It may not always be a common practice in PPC, but it is at least common wisdom that you should measure for success not traffic. Alas, SEO as a discipline has yet to see the light. Many organizations don’t even track SEO by traffic. Instead, they focus entirely on artificial measurements like the number of search terms on the first page.

This type of analysis is pernicious — and invariably results in severe mis-allocation of effort. Yes, it is true that the job of the SEO firm is improve the placement of your search listings. But the key question is which terms and where. It’s usually your job to tell the SEO experts what to optimize for — so make sure you’ve thought through what you are telling them. It isn’t unusual to find that having top ten placement on a hundred low-traffic words is worth much less than having #1 placement on a really important search term. If your SEO firm is allowed to measure their success by the number of search terms on page #1 from a big list of terms, then you’ll almost certainly be encouraging them to focus on the wrong terms.

But even measuring organic traffic as the ultimate measure of success is a bad idea. Like PPC terms, SEO terms will vary widely in their level of pre-qualification. Not all traffic is equal. In fact, we’ve frequently measured pre-qualification at one or even two orders of magnitude difference between search terms. That means that a term can be sending 50 times less traffic than another term and still be more valuable!

Where appropriate, you should measure SEO traffic all the way to conversion. Unfortunately, that isn’t always either possible or appropriate. Volumes on many search terms are too low to measure versus Conversion with any level of statistical confidence. And, of course, many sites don’t even have clear conversions on their site. The solution is one I’ve talked about before — using conversion proxies to measure level of engagement. You can measure how deeply visitors engaged with your site based on the search term they entered from — and use that measure to help tune your SEO efforts.

Measure for Competitive Advantage

Measurement is all about context. How good should your organic placements be? That’s a difficult question to answer in the abstract. And in the real world, it’s simply impossible for many companies to be #1 on key listings. So it’s important to be able to compare how you fare when stacked up against the competition. Tools like WebPosition Gold and CampaignTracker and services like Hitwise and CTSE make it possible for you to track how your placement compares to the competition — both at one single time and over a period of months.

These tools will tell you which words your competitors are highly placed on — and which words they aren’t. They’ll also let you track across a wide range of words how many times you and your key competitors are highly ranked.

By monitoring this across category and over time, you have an excellent way to benchmark yourself and your SEO effort versus the competition. Remember, this isn’t a replacement for measuring vs. success. It may be that your competition is creaming you on words that you’ve found out don’t really matter! But measuring your overall placements versus the competition is a great way to help you figure out much upside you have in your SEO program and also to spot potential optimization points you might have missed.

Measure for Discipline

Organizations have struggled to understand SEO. They’ve struggled to deploy it. And they’ve struggled mightily to integrate it into their ongoing business processes. That’s a shame, because however irrational current SEO requirements are, SEO is also an essential ingredient in capturing prospects on the web. Integrating measurement into your SEO program can help an organization get a much better handle on how to drive an engagement and how to think about the potential and upside of SEO. SEO may still be the black sheep in the online marketing world — but with careful measurement — it can be a mighty valuable member of the herd





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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