SEO Analytics: Measuring Search Success
A quick scan of SEO-related queries reveals that people devote several hundred times more effort looking for “seo analysis” and “seo” than they do to find “seo analytics”, “measuring seo success”, and “seo return on investment”. Nonetheless, many SEO pundits realize the value in writing about how to measure your success as an optimizer. Google’s index is loaded with articles about “how to measure SEO success”.
I know who is writing these articles but I have to wonder who is reading them? And who are those three people looking for “zeal and looksmart search engine analysis”? Someone please tell me the paramedics have been called.
Another query I don’t find much activity for is “How do I find a good SEO?” and yet that is a fairly common question you see asked in the various forums. I suppose a standard reply is “you don’t find good SEOs, they make themselves visible” — but then, of course, some SEOs take pride in not competing for SEO-related SERPs.
I fell to thinking about these paradoxical issues as I was posting about Microsoft’s illusionary loss of market share over at Spider-Food earlier today.
All the usual SEO pundits are trumpeting the demise of Microsoft’s Live Search and, as usual, they are all pretty much wrong. Now, I’m not going to make any business model predictions. But it’s just professionally embarrassing that people in an industry which relies so much upon analysis don’t know any better than to accept numbers at face value without digging deeper into data they already have available.
This isn’t rocket science, folks. Or maybe it is. I’m beginning to wonder, since the SEO pundits can’t even agree on that much.
For good or ill, Microsoft rebranded its search service this year and grew that new domain’s dedicated traffic to 65 million monthly visitors — approximately 2/3 of Google’s total monthly visitors. So what if Google’s visitors are searching more? Does that mean they are finding more or struggling harder to find what they are seeking? The numbers don’t say, but the reported monthly unique visitors speak volumes. Microsoft’s network continues to outperform Google’s network.
Never judge the quality of a search service by the price of its stock. We’ve seen just how well Wall Street understands the tech arena. Anyone lose their life savings in the 2000 dot-com meltdown? Go ahead: rationalize the numbers for me. I’m laughing already.
So given that the SEO industry is incapable of looking at all the numbers available on the Internet about search service traffic, much less asking reasonable questions about how much those numbers in themselves mean, one has to wonder how reliable the SEO industry is in looking at its own numbers.
I’ve seen some darned good responses when people ask how you measure success with search engine optimization. After all, this isn’t rocket science. Oh, wait. Maybe it is.
Still, common sense should guide most people at least part of the way down the road. For example, you start out with X visitors today, Y conversions, and Z income. In one year, how much have those numbers changed? Is it really that hard to compute?
Not every site needs to make a sale, though. After all, there are informational pages whose sole purpose is just to inform. I write some of those pages. Many non-profit organizations and governmental agencies also write such pages. And some social-minded business entities also create content intended just to be informative.
Now, information may be meaningful and useful or it may be propaganda. Still, your conversions have to be measured differently from conversions for sales- or contact-oriented content. An informational page needs to achieve success through time spent on the page. Which isn’t to say that is a perfect measure. After all, people can print your page and read it later. Or they can email it, or they can save it to their hard drive. If you embed a tracking bug in your page, you’ll still get some data on how long the people spent reading your content, but you get no data on how much time is spent reading (or how many people read) a printed Web page.
Definition - For any Web page, a conversion is any desired action that is taken as a direct result of visiting the page.
People who create advertising spam pages, for example, want their visitors to leave as soon as possible — but only by clicking on ads. There is no passing of information, no initiation of contact, no sale. The page creator gets paid for grabbing some random surfer and sending them on to another page — which might, actually, just be another spam ad page.
Now, some people just want to build up the value in their real estate. Hence, their search engine optimization may only be to generate unique trackable visitors. “This domain receives 1 million visitors per month and may be purchased for $10,000.” It happens. Or maybe they feel their financial future depends on selling links so they want to boost their Toolbar PR. That means they need links, and search engine optimization really doesn’t help much with that — unless you have compelling content. Then maybe it makes sense to be found in search engines so that people will link to you. News Web sites do that and they support themselves by selling advertising (not necessarily by selling links, but it’s the same principle).
A lot of clients pick keywords and insist on branding for some of the most useless junk you can imagine. What do you do but go out and do the branding for them? After all, they’re willing to pay you money, right? But simply delivering the service you contract for may not produce the results the client wants. If repeat business and referrals mean nothing to you, then don’t adjust your business model when clients start to walk away.
You can measure your success as an SEO by counting the number of referrals you get after your first year. How successful are you if people aren’t passing your name around, even if it’s only in back rooms because you do the kind of SEO that we don’t like to talk about out here? Refarrals are as important off the Web as on the Web.
SEOs and Webmasters alike struggle to find good numbers to crunch. I pretty much gag every time I see someone swear by Google Analytics or any other 3rd party reporting tool. Do people care that they are not seeing all their visitors accurately reported? Apparently not, as many folks blindly put their faith in the most unreliable reporting mechanisms available.
Still, for all its faults and inadequacies — for all its vulnerability to a simple clearing of browser cookies (there go your “unique” visitor counts) — Google Analytics can at least give you the ability to compare one number to another. You can look at trends and, to be honest, I think trends are more useful than hard numbers. People complain about the lack of hard data from Google Trends — I’m sure I have complained, too. But they still show you what is most important.
SEO analysis is really about measuring trends. You need to know where the traffic is today versus last year and the year before. You need to guess (predict) where the traffic will be in a year. You need to see where hyperoptimization has set in so you can decide if you want to do some of that “long tail SEO” people have been yabbering about.
You need to understand if your Web site’s traffic is trending up, down, or flat. All three can be good things in the right circumstances.
You need to understand if your Web hosting bandwidth is trending toward the “you’ve exceeded your limit and we’re cutting off your service” threshold.
You need to see when you make a profit, when your profits allow you to make some investments in larger infrastructure or expanded advertising, and when your losses are tolerable.
Regardless of what you use for numbers, if you are not looking at trends, you’re wasting your time in analysis gone wrong. You should be able to say, “We were here 12 months ago and now we’re there.” Is there better than here or not? Are you better off than you were when you started your search engine optimization campaign?
It’s a simple question, but finding the answer is not so simple. That’s the real rocket science-like aspect to search engine optimization analysis. You can analyze SERPs all day long — odds are pretty good that if you’ve read any SEO books, tutorials, forums, or blogs you’ve already reached the foregone conclusion that it’s all being done through links. But regardless of whether you buy into that nonsense or not, no one can hand you the answer to the most important question: Are you better off now than you were before you started your search engine optimization campaign?
If the answer is no, then you have to get down to fundamentals. You know what the fundamentals are, right? Experiment, evaluate, adjust.
