SMX Advanced 2008 Show Recap – Analytics Every SEO Needs to Know

Moderator: Rand Fishkin, Co-Founder, and CEO, SEOmoz

Speakers

Brian Klais, Executive Vice President, Search, Netconcepts
Laura Lippay, Group Program Manager, Search Strategy, Yahoo
Jonah Stein, Founder, ItsTheROI
Richard Zwicky, President, Enquisite

Find the dead weight

Brian Klais, Executive Vice President, Search, Netconcepts
10 Essential Natural Search KPIs.

There’s more to search success than measuring ego term hits and rankings.

• How do we evaluate channel performance?
• What’s the missed opportunity cost?
• How do you identify pages and markets to focus on?
• How to prioritize further investment
• etc.

The Metrics Include:

• Brand to non-brand ratio
• Unique pages
• Missed opportunity cost
• ROI and brand reach
• Page placement
• Yielding pages
• Visitors per phase
• Indexation rate
• More

Case study data of an anonymous merchant that gets 73% of traffic from Google, 12% from Yahoo, 4% from Google Images, etc.

Brand to nonbrand ratio – a lot of people get traffic from their own brand name. They’re happy with that, but he says that you should really focus on the long tail instead.

• Long-tail search = 40x brand search
• There’s a remaining opportunity
• The nonbrand queries dominate

How big is your site?

• You can’t answer that if your site is database driven
• Look at how many pages the bots see
• Non-duplicate pages crawled by your favorite bot.
• Look at the size of your site
• That forms the top of the funnel
• Think: email sent
• It gives color to…

Indexation rate:

• Pages crawled vs. indexed
• Your advertising inventory
• Why aren’t some pages that are crawled not in the index?

Yielding pages is a critical concept. Of all pages in the index, how many drive traffic? How many aren’t?
Identify those “freeloading pages” – title tags, etc.

If you know what pages drive traffic, at what rate are they not driving traffic? How many visitors do they not get? Visitors per phrase roll up into a metric.

Page placement – inequality equals opportunity. Identify those opportunities to get them from page 2 to page 1 because you can get a 3x increase in traffic (in this particular situation)

Engine Yield Rate – ROI of the engine’s crawl.

• Google is returning 3.6 visitors for every page that it crawls.
• Yahoo returns 0.3 visitors for every page
• MSN live is 0.1 visitors.

ROI and brand reach are critical metrics but it’s difficult to calculate the cost of this especially internally – labor cost, expertise, etc. He advocates focusing on brand, doesn’t discount it. You’re winning unbranded keyword searchers to your site – how do you measure that?

Missed Opportunity Cost?

How you calculate it – there are 50,000 pages on this site. 20% are generating traffic at a rate of 11 visitors per page. Every order is a 2.8% conversion. It’s $34 per page. Think, though: what more can I get? What if the market size is 5x more? 50000 unique pages x $34 per page – $1.6m/month = $15m/year

Laura Lippay, Group Program Manager, Search Strategy, Yahoo

The Ultimate SEO Data Grid

• Keyword-based data
• Balance SEO/PPC and paid inclusion -0 what channels perform best
• Referral Gap – where do we have content but aren’t performing well
• SEO content opportunities – what search terms do we not have content for?
• Make SEO traffic and value projections – if we ranked #10, what is the dollar amount?

What do you need?

Use a graph for all these projections.

• Gather keywords
• Add keyword data for performance comparisons
• Just see the performance of one channel
• With search volume and CTR by position, make projections.
• On a big set of terms, when you have this, you can see the worth of it if you put effort into it.
• What is the worth of a #5 ranking, or a #2 ranking? You still need to be realistic.
• Showcase your skills: add demographic data, ranking data, and use those to create reports.

Jonah Stein, Founder, ItsTheROI

Five forgotten metrics:

1. Customer Lifetime Value
2. Crawl Frequency – The New PageRank
3. Page Views To Conversion
4. External Links
5. Webmaster Central All Query Stats

Customer lifetime value. Most people don’t track this. We spend time looking at analytics packages but we forget to look at the big picture. About a year ago, Eric Enge and he did an analytics study and they realized that the AdWords conversion tracker was getting more data than ever – because of cookies even if ROI is stolen from your SEO campaign.

Stolen ROI:

• keyword revolution – brand claims ROI

1. Short-tail
2. Long-tail
3. Brand

• Campaigns Steal ROI

1. Email Blast
2. Coupons
3. Internal Promotions

Customer Relationship Manager – Real ROI and LTV

• Write a permanent cookie on the first touch – capture source, keyword, and date
• Write first touch data to CRM on Conversion Event
• Capture missing data at every touchpoint

Order surveys

Support interactions

§chat, phone, and email, etc.

More accurate LTV and ROI

• Captures cancellations, adjustments, and reorders
• Better Across Multiple Computers and Browsers
• Better for Cookie Deletion, New Email Address, Etc.

Crawl frequency tracker from blogstorm.co.uk – he gets about 100k visitors a month. He shows how many times he’s visited by each spider.

Crawl Frequency is Meaningful

• Toolbar PageRank is deliberately misleading – Google doesn’t want us to know.
• Crawl frequency is a product of the Search Engines’ true score of your page.
• Obfuscating crawl frequency will lower index quality.
• Relative Crawl Frequency is great for diagnostics
• Shows canonical URL
• Replaces supplemental index

What governs crawl frequency?

• Number and quality of inbound links
• Sitemap settings
• Server performance
• Content update frequency

Crawl Frequency Metrics

• How often crawler visits
• Crawl Depth
• Crawl Saturation
• Crawl Frequency Rank by Page – Infrequent = Supplemental
• Pages that don’t get crawled have issues
  • Robots.txt
  • Broken Links
  • Session ID & Parameters

How to Measure

• Crawl Rate Tracker WordPress plug-in from Patrick Altoft
• Seometer.com – ASP/SaaS solution
• Logfile analysis
• Custom solutions

It’s really a simple PHP script to see when spiders arrive. If you have developer resources, do it yourself.

Pageviews to conversion

• Good SEO gets user closer to conversion
• Decreased page views can be good or bad
• Decreased time on the page can be good or bad
• Decreased time on site can be good or bad
• Know Funnel for each landing page
• Measure success to the funnel

External Links

• Total number of external links
• External links per page