This book is designed to fill a gap in the search world. While there have been many books on website analytics, search engine optimization (SEO), and paid search (and even some on site search), this book looks at bringing these disciplines together as search engine marketing (SEM), as originally conceived by Danny Sullivan (http://searchengineland.com/does-sem-seo-cpc-still-add-up-37297). Solid search programs are driven by data and analysis, and combine both SEO and paid search tactics. Site search is an oft-forgotten source of mineable data, and should be included as part of your overall SEM program.
Note
Nowadays, SEM has been co-opted to define paid search. When Danny Sullivan first coined the term, his intent was to illustrate that SEO was part of a search strategy and that the newly defined space of paid search was another part of a total search strategy. Search engine marketing referred to the overall search program.
My goal is to get you thinking about how to segment your data, as well as to show you how to use some of the available tools that can help you think of ways SEM can be used to improve revenue. We will also discuss how to measure the health of your current search programs: how to identify bottlenecks, whether you can compete against other sites, and what you need to consider if you do decide to compete.
The truth of the matter is that there are many websites and software options that enable search gurus to do what they do. The exciting thing about search analytics is that it’s still very much like the Wild West. There are many solutions, from self-service pieced-together options to enterprise-level solutions such as those offered by Covario and Adobe. Regardless of scale, the analytics and analysis side should be driven by human interpretation and thought. Avinash Kaushik, author of Web Analytics 2.0 (Sybex), is famous for stating that 90% of your investment should be in the people and 10% in the tools. While I don’t think this should be a hard and fast rule, its spirit holds true: action comes from insights, and those insights are derived by the people using the tools.
Lastly, this book leans a bit more to the SEO side of measuring marketing tactics, both due to the impact SEO can have on a site—SEO is responsible for 80% or more of search traffic to most sites today, with paid search responsible for the remaining 20%—and because the topic of measuring paid search has been highly covered in many other books. However, to have a true marketing presence, you must consider both SEO and SEM as tactics that work together to bring customers to your website and drive value to your business.
This book has three audiences in mind: the search specialist, the marketer, and the executive. For the search specialist, this book will provide the information needed to improve site traffic (in terms of quantity, quality, and goal completion) through the use of analytics tools and measurements. For the marketer and executive, this book will provide information on establishing what sort of market share an organization has, and evaluating how well that organization performs in a given market compared to competitors.
An online presence is an almost mandatory part of any business today. Search ensures that your business can be found online. This book is for anyone who is looking to understand how search can be used to drive incremental revenue and opportunity: you will learn how to measure the success of your search programs to allow for benchmarking against other online strategies, as well as how to derive insights to improve revenue and value through search marketing.
Because every company is different, each one will have different needs. Different companies may have disparate methods to generate revenue or reduce costs. Some examples include:
- Transactional sites
Users come to these websites to purchase a product. The company generates revenue by the products it sells.
- News and information sites
Typically, these sites generate revenue through display advertising, such as banners.
- Support sites
Revenue is realized by reducing costs through self-service forums and FAQs.
- Customer data sites
These sites tend to gather customer data, such as email addresses, mailing addresses, and other contact information, so that customers can be marketed to at a later date.
While this book provides different tactics and suggestions, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Instead, by the end of this book, you should be able to develop a framework of measurements and analytical thinking that will help you make decisions, as well as establish some ground in how best to approach problems you may see in search—or, more importantly, how to poke holes in the data and interpret what the results may mean or indicate.
There is a gap between many new search specialists and the senior managers who rely on the data they provide. The data your senior management—what Avinash Kaushik refers to as the HiPPO (highest paid person’s opinion)—needs is very different from the data that a search specialist would require. Typically, the HiPPOs will be senior marketers or executives who do not speak the language of title tags, URL formats, canonicalization, or other common terminology search experts use daily. What they do speak and understand is ROI, revenue growth, and time to profitability. Analytics and data help to bridge the gap that can make decision making easier for both the search expert and the executive.
In today’s market, search can be responsible for driving anywhere from 10% to 90% of traffic for websites. Google serves 34,000 searches per second, while Yahoo! and Bing serve 3,200 and 927 searches per second, respectively (http://searchengineland.com/by-the-numbers-twitter-vs-facebook-vs-google-buzz-36709). With Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, and MSN vying for the most visited site each month according to ComScore (http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/4/comScore_Media_Metrix_Ranks_Top_50_U.S._Web_Properties_for_March_2011) and Netcraft (http://toolbar.netcraft.com/stats/topsites), many user experiences will involve more than one search at some point each day.
Search optimization, be it organic or paid, is as much about delivering traffic as it is about what the traffic does once it gets to your website. In fact, I personally feel that the most important search optimization activity is often simply to understand what users are actually doing when they come to your site. Often, when they see large volumes of traffic going to their sites, many organizations believe they should continue to focus on increasing site traffic, as opposed to improving the experience of the site. With this in mind, I will focus a great deal on not just measuring the traffic that gets to your site, but what users do once they are there. My approach is to optimize the user experience, while maintaining an open and friendly site for search engines.
Search is a developing field that is growing rapidly and at a highly competitive pace. Companies are taking note and investing in search, be it paid, organic, or site search. As companies invest in search, they will expect to see results. The easiest way to show results is by defining and measuring what are often referred to as key performance indicators (KPIs).
A recent study from Conductor (http://www.conductor.com/news/unoptimized-seo) shows that those who practice SEO can spend 4 out of every 10 hours on tasks that involve measuring, monitoring, and analyzing results and content. This information should not be all that surprising, as the best way to optimize is through measurement and monitoring.
Understanding how to utilize resources to automate, capture, and track these elements can increase the time allotted to link building, content creation, and improving your customer experience.
Ask yourself how well you are doing in the search market. Can people find you? What volume of traffic is SEO driving to your site? When people get to your site from a search, do they stay or leave right away? When people look for your brand in a search engine, what is that experience like? Do you run paid search campaigns? Do you spend more per word than you recover in sales for your paid words? How frequently are people using your own site’s search? How many sales does your site search contribute to? How much is all this work costing your company, and how much revenue is it pulling back in? A company’s online success is powered by findability and relevance. The goal of most search engines is to provide the most relevant piece of information in response to a query that is put into a little box like the one in Figure 1.
This book expects that if you are a search specialist, you understand the basics of SEO, SEM, and site search (meaning you understand how to set up a paid search campaign, you understand that organic search cannot be bought, and you understand how your site search operates and works).
This book will try to use the lowest-cost tools available to ensure accessibility to as many people as possible. Most examples for clickstream analytics will use Google Analytics, although Adobe SiteCatalyst or any other clickstream tool will work just as well. When there are major differences between the enterprise-level analytics packages, I will try to explain them. The most common tools used will be Google Analytics and spreadsheets, but there are many options and many software choices available to you. Feel free to try any number of them. Good tools are measured not by how expensive they are but by how effectively you, the analyst, wield them. This holds true regardless of business size. Many free tools provide the same insights you would find with “enterprise-level” software. Find the tools that are right for you.
While tools are important, this book’s focuse is mostly on getting you to think strategically about search—to get you to think about how and why you should make a decision. Tools provide data, but you provide the insights, interpretations, and recommendations. This means there will be some discussion about how to set up certain tools, and examples of how to do so, but the primary reason for reading this book should be to improve your strategizing and decision making.
To maintain accessibility, I have done my best to simplify any mathematics required so that you can perform the calculations quickly on paper or with a basic calculator or spreadsheet. The scale of your business will influence how complicated some of these calculations may become. However, in the spirit of KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid), I have done my best to provide the simplest formulas possible.
Anyone who is involved in paid search will also know that today this is a very process-and tool-driven SEM tactic. There are many great books on paid search, and they go through these tool sets very deeply. Also, the use of paid search to measure many data points has historically been well documented. The purpose of this book is not to show you how to measure everything, but to show you how to measure the effectiveness of your search campaigns and how to use this data to coordinate and improve those campaigns.
For anyone looking for deeper insight on SEO, SEM, site search, or statistics in general, I highly recommend the following books:
- For SEO:
Eric Enge et al., The Art of SEO: Mastering Search Engine Optimization. O’Reilly, 2009.
- For SEM:
- For site search:
Peter Morville and Jeffery Callender, Search Patterns. O’Reilly, 2010.
- For statistics:
Sarab Boslaugh and Paul A. Watters, Statistics In a Nutshell. O’Reilly, 2009.
When we look at search engines, for the most part we will be looking at Google to keep things simple. Where there is greater variance between the major engines, I’ll call that out.
Each chapter will cover different sets of metrics and questions that all tie back to search. In some cases, we will look at how to monitor offsite metrics, such as rankings and presentation in search results, while in other cases, we will be looking at measuring the effectiveness of the search page once a user is delivered to it. Improving the search experience should not simply be about delivering people to a site, but ensuring they are delivered the optimal experience.
Chapter 1, Introduction to Search Analytics, is an introduction to why search analytics is different from traditional web metrics; we’ll also look at some of the more popular programs and software in use today. You should, by the end of this chapter, have an understanding of some basic analytics concepts, and it will prepare you for the journey ahead by introducing you to a variety of sources for data collection.
Chapter 2, Establishing ROI, gets at what everyone who runs a business would like to know: what is the return on investment (ROI)? It will also dispel some myths about the ROI of SEM versus SEO. At the end of this chapter, you should have the knowledge needed to provide justification for your search programs.
Chapter 3, Tracking and Optimizing SEO and Paid Search Traffic, explores traffic from search. You will learn how to measure, analyze, capture conversions, and establish values for tasks your customers may perform that may not be easily identified as resulting in monetary gains.
Chapter 4, Tracking Words—SEO and Paid Search, dives into exploring how to track words and establishing plans for both SEO and SEM to improve and modify your keywords, as well as understand words that may have issues or be virtually impossible to rank on.
Chapter 5, Coordinating SEO and Paid Search, explains how to tie your SEO and SEM programs together and how to look for opportunities in each of your search strategies to improve the other. You will also learn how to test out theories and ideas in either program, and how to determine which of the two (i.e., SEO or SEM) is the better choice for your site. You will learn how to coordinate the data you are seeing to improve both programs.
Chapter 6, Site Search Analytics, will show you how to capture the value of your own site search and how to look for ways to improve it.
Chapter 7, Correlating SEO/Paid Search and Site Search, will bring all three search disciplines together: SEO, SEM, and site search. You will learn how to look for patterns that can indicate issues or disconnects between programs, as well as getting some ideas on how to improve the customer experience by using the data your customers are already providing you on the fly.
Chapter 8, Competitor Research and Competitor Tracking, looks at techniques you can use to track and monitor what your competitors are doing. You will learn how to monitor and understand their campaigns, as well as how effective they may be in relation to yours.
Chapter 9, Tracking Off-Site Trends, explores all the offsite indicators for SEO and SEM. It looks at how to explore what may cause bumps and spikes in the data you see, as well as how to track external influences on your rankings and positions.
Chapter 10, Tracking Mobile Search, focuses on mobile search, a relatively new area of search that is generating lots of discussion in the field. You will learn how to track and understand the differences between mobile and desktop users, and we will explore where mobile search may go.
Chapter 11, Social Media and Search, looks at how social media is impacting search rankings and results. This chapter explores some basic KPIs you can leverage to measure how socially engaged your website is.
Chapter 12, Webmaster Tools—Data Direct from the Engines, zeros in on search spiders, discussing tracking and measuring what they are doing, what they see, and how to make sure your site is as indexable as possible.
Chapter 13, An SEO Audit (On-Page Factors), explains how to audit your site for issues that may cause problems for spiders or users. You will learn how to establish some key performance indicators (KPIs) to watch for on your site to ensure proper site health.
Chapter 14, Dashboards and Reports, starts to tie everything together, as you are shown how to create dashboards and expanded reports using all the data points you have learned along the way.
Chapter 15, Building Your Own Audit Tools and Enabling Others, provides information on some auditing tools you may want to create on your own, as well as how to enable others, build out timelines, and scale your search analytics program.
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A special thanks goes to Philip Wong, Georgia Sievwright, Mike Sandhu, Joanne Doucette, Jassie Aujla, and Mark Scholz for the support in my career and for opening up doors for me, as well as to all the other fine folks at Hewlett-Packard. Thanks also to:
Mike Loukides, Mary Treseler, and the rest of the O’Reilly folks for their support throughout the writing of this book, as well as their wisdom, guidance, editing, and patience
Rachel Head for the skill and depth she brought to editing, and providing clarity when clarity was needed
Rand Fishkin for his kind insights and the team at SEOmoz for answering all my questions
David Fahey and the folks at AdGooroo for taking the time to talk and provide some deeper insights into their products
Justin Cutroni for providing some last-minute insights and updates
Bill Barnes of Mediative for providing updated user experience information with Google Instant
AJ Kohn for the GA hack on tracking SERPs
Finally, a very special thanks to the technical reviewers:
Jill Kocher for the details in the review, and for keeping me on the straight and narrow path for SEO
Sean Power for helping me find clarity and some great insider tips, as well as for the background on some updates to recent analytics tools
Alex Cohen for making sure every “i” and “t” was crossed, and for the paid search insights
Chris Knoch for the push to get more social
Daryl Acumen for offering up his time, and for being a super smart analytics guy
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