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

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SE Roundtable Recap