Sitting beside my radio co-host Jim Hedger I have the pleasure of attending the “Meaningful SEO Metrics” session with June Li, Horst Joepen, and Chris Boggs are speaking with Richard Zwicky moderating.
This is a “as it happens” post so you’ll have to pardon if it’s disjointed – I’m going to be including the points as fast as I can. 
June Li started by discussing the importance of first determining what data is meaningful. CTR, conversions and all the conflicting opinions are relevant provided that you understand the purpose of the data or that data segment.
She agrees with moderator Richard Zwicky’s statement that if you filter what you don’t want you may miss opportunities you didn’t know existed. She then goes on to reinforce the importance of clearly defining what the goals are for each type of traffic and understand what you’re looking for in the data and the opportunities. She paints the right picture when she tells us to be a teenager again and ask, “So what?” What does the data mean and why should we care. These questions need to be re-asked periodically to determine what’s relevant as time passes.
She discusses how important it is to look at the big picture. The conversion funnel and seeing who is exiting will help shape future efforts be them to improve the experience for though not converting or shifting the focus away from them. The keyword/message/landing page combinations for the non-performing traffic may well provide new opportunities. The question may not be the phrases, it may be the ad or the site itself.
It’s important to look at technical sides of the site if you see high time on site but lower conversions you need to look at what those visitors are doing and see if there’s a technical issue stopping them such as a broken form.
She recommends the same book I did in this blog a few years ago – Waiting For Your Cat To Bark.
Horst Joepen is up next. I had the pleasure of interviewing him for Webcology just a couple weeks ago.
His company pulls massive data over broad numbers of phrases. He starts off discussing keyword metrics when determining targets. Watching phrases and search volumes over time, he believes, is a key to selecting good targets.
He uses a ranking score in their systems to rate the keywords based on search volumes, potential to to convert just to name a couple metric points.
He brings up graphs relative to the huge drops JC Penny took after the penalties. He didn’t discuss the issue itself but rather used it as an example of their software’s ability to measure and record data.
Chris Boggs is up last. He starts chatting about ROI models (and how to gain more budget for SEO). His talk is more geared to SEO’s and how we can measure and predict ROI to gain more marketing budget from clients.
Predicting ROI for SEO is complex but possible.
He believe we shouldn’t be caring about rankings but rather traffic. I personally agree and disagree but that’s a side point.
To predict ROI one needs to know conversion data and knowing the strategies underway and keyword volume, one can predict (loosely) what the traffic growth would be and thus, the ROI based on average conversion data. This assumes that the broad keywords for longtail phrases gaining traffic from content generation have roughly the same conversions and/or you have separate calculations for the traffic anticipated for these phrases.
He points out that it’s important to discuss with clients that it’s not a silver bullet and it can take month and that in the short term, traffic may actually drop depending on the changes necessary.
He went into the math of determining the ROI – I will link to that info when it is available online as there were graphs that would make a written post irrelevant.
Now for the Q&A:
Q – Justification of using PPC metrics for organic SEO?
A – Yes as long as you take into account quality score, etc.
Q – 3 most common error in analytics?
A – ignoring brand terms with modifiers. A little disagreement between Horst and Chris on whether you should bid your brand on PPC if you rank organically. Chris thinks you should always go for both if you have the budget.
Q – Bid value for PPC ?
A – Base bidding on the ROI not position. Determine what a phrase is worth and base the bids on what it’s ROI is, not just to rank. Also, considering the combined value (are searchers searching twice and click paid once and organic another?) The first time I heard this discussed was in 2006 with a whitepaper on just the topic.
I’ve had to summarize a LOT and I hope you found some value it this post. For more information you’ll just have to attend the next event.
SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 7:02 pm
Well – I had sent to me a couple AdWords credits and haven’t been able to use them. They expire today so better to give them away than waste them. We already have an AdWords account and they won’t let us apply our credit to an existing account. Darn them.
The credits are only good until the end of the day and they’re worth $75 Canadian. I’m not sure if the AdWords account has to be in Canada or not.
I don’t normally allow for comments in our blog (mainly because I don’t have time to moderate them) but if whoever uses the credit can post that they did (we’re allowing comments on this post) then I’ll post up the second. And please – don’t be greedy. If you use one of them don’t use the other – the spirit of the codes is to let people try out Google AdWords. So let them.
These credits are a GREAT way to test out Google PPC while minimizing up-front risk. You can also use AdWords to test keywords for your organic campaigns.
To redeem the code you’ll have to go to www.google.ca/ads/offer.
The code is – 8MZC-BUQM-LEX9-PLJE-XR2
Enjoy.
Note: Code One used.
SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 5:20 pm
Inspired by a combination of an excellent research paper from Richard Stokes of AdGooroo, Google’s Q2 earnings report and the recent happenings in the now getting tiring story of Yahoo! and Microsoft – the most recent article by Beanstalk’s Dave Davies is out today. Titled, “The Search Landscape Reflected In Paid Results” it discussed some of the recent changes, how they’re affecting the search engines themselves and what we can expect to see in the paid and organic results because of this.
I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 8:15 pm
Google Keywords
Google has just started showing the estimated monthly search numbers in their keyword suggestion tool. For the first time in a long while we’re now able to see the estimated search numbers on the engine who’s results we most want to see the results of.
As a word of warning, after using it and comparing the numbers with the click through volume for a number of phrases, the number appear to be a bit high – that’s because it defaults to Broad Match but you can select Exact Match from the drop-down and get the the numbers you’re looking for.
You’ll find this new feature added to the Google tool here.
A Test Of Links
Also, there was an interesting test run by Johannes Beusand published on the MarketingFan.com site regarding the value of multiple links to a single page on residing on a single page of a website. He basically strives to answer the question, if there are two or more links on a single page of a site and they point to a single page on another site – how are they treated?
I’m not going to be mean and note everything from the site here and steal their traffic. You’ll find the link to this interesting test here.
Webmaster Radio
And today on Webmaster Radio Jim Hedger and I had the pleasure of interviewing Kevin Ryan – the man behind SES. Kevin discussed the show, the organizing of it, and some of the great sessions that’ll be held in San Jose.
After that (and some ranting by both Jim and myself about the stupid fees we Canadians are charged for cell phones and specifically web usage on them) we had on Dave Szetela from Clix Marketing discussing the recent changes Google has made to the quality scores for it’s AdWords advertisers.
Again, I could repeat the discussion but it was based on a couple posts covered elsewhere here and here.
SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 3:09 pm
Google Keywords
Google has just started showing the estimated monthly search numbers in their keyword suggestion tool. For the first time in a long while we’re now able to see the estimated search numbers on the engine who’s results we most want to see the results of.
As a word of warning, after using it and comparing the numbers with the click through volume for a number of phrases, the number appear to be a bit high – that’s because it defaults to Broad Match but you can select Exact Match from the drop-down and get the the numbers you’re looking for.
You’ll find this new feature added to the Google tool here.
A Test Of Links
Also, there was an interesting test run by Johannes Beusand published on the MarketingFan.com site regarding the value of multiple links to a single page on residing on a single page of a website. He basically strives to answer the question, if there are two or more links on a single page of a site and they point to a single page on another site – how are they treated?
I’m not going to be mean and note everything from the site here and steal their traffic. You’ll find the link to this interesting test here.
Webmaster Radio
And today on Webmaster Radio Jim Hedger and I had the pleasure of interviewing Kevin Ryan – the man behind SES. Kevin discussed the show, the organizing of it, and some of the great sessions that’ll be held in San Jose.
After that (and some ranting by both Jim and myself about the stupid fees we Canadians are charged for cell phones and specifically web usage on them) we had on Dave Szetela from Clix Marketing discussing the recent changes Google has made to the quality scores for it’s AdWords advertisers.
Again, I could repeat the discussion but it was based on a couple posts covered elsewhere here and here.
SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 3:09 pm
