Analytics every SEO needs to know

Published by Ben | Filed under SEO, Events

Amplify Interactive’s notes from SMX Advanced Seattle 2008

This session delved into some of the deeper things that SEO’s can do to measure and improve their efforts beyond rankings & search referrals. This ended up being one of my favorite sessions at the conference due to the in-depth actual usable tips and methods.

Brian Klais - Netconcepts

“10 Essential Natural Search KPIs”

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

• Keywords: brand to non-brand ratio (we’ve been doing this for a while)
• Unique pages & pages crawled (each is a potential advertisement in search results, this is essentially your inventory of advertisements)
• Indexation rate (pages crawled vs pages indexed - work to increase your advertising inventory)
• Yielding pages (ratio for how many pages got click through from search? This is your effective advertising inventory)
• Search phrases per page
• Visitors per phrase
• Page placement (quantify value of page 1 placement, develop strategies for improving page 2 rankings)
• Engine Yield Rate (searchers delivered per page crawled by search engine, ie - google drove 3 visitors per page crawled vs yahoo vs msn etc - tells you which engines to focus on)
• ROI calculation
• Missed opportunity cost calculation (he demonstrated a method for working through the ratios above to generate a missed opportunity cost. Essentially, the method used the ratios in a logical order to figure out how much additional SEO might be worth and where to focus the attention)

Laura Lippay - Yahoo

“The Ultimate SEO Data Grid”

Laura presented a grid she uses to do SEO internally at Yahoo. Here are the 4 things you can do with the grid:

• Balance SEO, PPC & Paid Inclusion channels
• Find SEO referral gaps - where do we have content but not performing well
• Find SEO content opportunities - what search terms do we need content for?
• Make SEO traffic & value projections

It all looked great, but her she won’t make the grid / Excel spreadsheet available… hopefully the slides are so the grid can be examined a little more closely.

Jonah Stein - ItsTheROI

“Five Forgotten Metrics”

Customer Lifetime Value

• Use persistent cookies (like Google AdWords conversion tracking), as soon as you have an action take place, capture source, keyword & date… and you need a strategy for getting the info that’s mission

Prevent Stolen ROI

• Your brand terms claim your ROI because people find you via SEO but then later search for your brand name

Crawl Frequency - the New Page Rank

• Lets you know what pages a search engine consider more valuable… more so than toolbar page rank - pages that don’t get crawled have an issue (less than weekly/monthly)
• How to measure: crawl rate tracking for WordPress, SEOmeter.com, log file analyzer - javascript analytics packages can’t tell you this (Google etc)

Page Views to Conversion

• Good SEO gets user closer to conversion, so page views & time on site won’t necessarily increase PV & TOS, so know your funnel for each landing page

External Links

• Most important Total number of external links & # of links per page

Google Webmaster Central “All Query Stats”

• Shows your keyword ranking by directory … Apparently it’s unintelligible until you spend some time with it - so you should check out this tool to help you: http://www.cumbrowski.com/googlestatsconverter.asp

Richard Zwicky - Enquisite

Presented his own tool for measuring SEO efforts… the tool definitely warrants further investigation. I’m going to grab a free trial asap.

Related Links & Coverage

SMX on Twitter
SE Roundtable Recap