Your Search Advisor, LLC » SEO

SEO Attitude Adjustment?

Andrew Miller — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 14:43:45 +0000

My friends at RedShift and I started an email dialogue about a MediaPost article that proposes that SEO consultants need an attitude adjustment. I gathered my thoughts in a blog post to avoid a long email thread, so here goes.

From the article:

Mike Moran, chief strategist at Converseon, rallied the troops at the Search Insider Summit in Captiva, Fla. Friday to not only become transparent, but focus on serving consumers rather than getting backlinks or appearing on the top spot on the first page in Google search results. Don’t forget the PageRank, but think more about answering consumer questions.

Half full or half empty?

I had seen the article and completely agree. Search Engine Optimization is increasingly focused on content marketing and promotion (as it should be) to serve consumer needs and help them accomplish their desired tasks online.

But let’s not ignore the reason SEO exists in the first place. There still needs to be plenty of attention paid to the basic blocking and tackling of SEO. Social media, PR and content marketing folks parading as SEO’s frequently miss the point and blur the lines between two distinct yet complementary skillsets.

Search Engine Optimization (in my mind) is a more technical specialty that includes some very geeky “behind the scenes” tactics that are often overlooked or ignored by people focused solely on creating content, including:

Proper server configurations
Transitions to new domains
Site redesigns
URL and duplicate content issues
Search crawler accessibility
File structures and site architecture
Information architecture
Link building

Again, content creation and on-site SEO go hand-in-hand and should never be separated. I’m just wary of people pretending the technical components of SEO are no longer necessary or important just because they haven’t taken the time to learn them.

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The Types of Results I Like to See

Andrew Miller — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 16:19:03 +0000

Most companies are not sure what kind of ROI to expect from SEO efforts. Some want a guarantee, others trust that the results will come with proper implementation and support from a qualified consultant.

I thought I’d share a quick glimpse into the results I achieved for one of my favorite clients in Ann Arbor in early 2009. We are not talking about huge traffic numbers, but when you sell a niche service in a small market, even a few hundred extra visits a month can be the difference between a good month and a GREAT month!

Organic, Non-Branded Traffic (click to expand)

For those not intimately familiar with Google Analytics, here’s what we’re looking at:

A comparison of March 2010 (blue line) to March 2009 (green line)
Organic (non-paid) visits from search engines
Non-branded keywords that do not include the company name (important!)

The results speak for themselves:

Visits more than doubled (+103%)
Visitors are spending more time on the site and viewing more pages
More visitors click through beyond the page they land on instead of abandoning the site without clicking deeper (bounce rate)

The results for other clients have been as dramatic (or better in a lot of cases), but this a simple way to measure the success of any SEO effort.

Perhaps even simpler, the client has mentioned he is overwhelmed with new customers and has to hire more help to fill the need. Those are the types of results I like to see!

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Location-Based Domain Splitting: Bad Idea?

Andrew Miller — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 13:09:17 +0000

Imagine being able to lease space on a high-value domain name like Attorney.com with the exclusive rights to your geographic area.

RootOrange is making it happen by showing different websites on a generic URL based on the browser’s IP address. Basically, if I browse to Attorney.com from Richmond I’ll see a local attorney’s website, while if you visit the site from Seattle you’ll see a Seattle-based attorney’s website instead.

In geek-speak, the different sites are served in an i-frame and targeted based on the browser’s IP geo-location.

Is This a Bad Idea?

From an SEO standpoint, I can think of many reasons this is a bad idea for local businesses concerned about SEO and long-term sustainability:

No Ownership or Equity in the Domain – Businesses essentially lease the domain name from RootOrange. At the end of the lease (or when lease rates become unsustainable), the businesses are left with nothing of value. No domain name, no website, no way to tell repeat visitors where to find them in the future.
No Visibility in Search Engines – Maybe RootOrange has concocted a solution, but currently search engines either ignore content in i-frames or attribute the content to the site that serves it, not the site that hosts the i-frame. The proposed implementation would seem to indicate that the generic domain (i.e. Attorney.com) would have no unique content of its own. Currently it is a parked domain with ads on it and no apparent content strategy to rank well in the organic search results.
Potential Cloaking Issues - Cloaking occurs when human visitors are shown different content than search engine crawlers in an attempt to manipulate search results. Again, maybe RootOrange has figured this out but I can foresee issues when these previously high-ranking domains are penalized for serving different content to humans and bots.

Is This a Good Idea?

Then again, domain leasing could be the equivalent of leasing a prominent office location on your town’s Main Street. Type-in traffic (web users typing in attorney.com) would be equivalent to drive-by visibility or window shoppers that notice your business just because it’s there.

It also may be a cost-effective alternative to the industrial-strength SEO required to compete on generic, high-volume keywords.

But to the sophisticated marketer that knows the value of “the long tail” of search queries, location-based domain splitting may just be a short-term distraction that delays the inevitable leap of faith into SEO that gives your competitors a few more months or years head start.

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WIRED: Inside Google’s Algorithm

Andrew Miller — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 15:32:06 +0000

Want to know what goes on behind the scenes at Google to determine how pages are ranked?

WIRED magazine (one of my favorites) published an in-depth look at Google’s home-grown algorithm in the March 2010 issue. (note: The issue is not online yet but I will include a link to the article when it publishes)

The most telling passages include some insight into the complex and always-changing ways that Google’s massive server cloud interprets human thoughts, desires and intentions:

“We discovered a very nifty thing early on,” [Google search engineer Amit] Singhal says. “People change words in their queries. So someone would say, ‘pictures of dogs,’ and then they’d say, ‘pictures of puppies.’ So that told us that maybe ‘dogs’ and ‘puppies’ were interchangeable. We also learned that when you boil water, it’s hot water.” Google’s synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy.

The search quality team fixed these semantic slip-ups by adding contextual and keyword proximity data from their billions of archived searches.

Although other search engines (Yahoo, Bing, etc.) all claim to have their own advantages, none even come close to Google’s mastery of algorithms:

Singhal led his team on

“a multiyear quest to improve the way the system deals with names – which account for 8 percent of all searches. To crack it, he had to master the black art of ‘bi-gram breakage’ – that is, separating multiple words into discrete units. For instance, ‘new york’ represents two words that go together (a bi-gram). But so would the three words in ‘new york times,’ which clearly indicates a different type of search. And everything changes when the query is ‘new york times square.’ Humans can make these distinctions instantly, but Google does not have a Brazil-like back room with hundreds of thousands of cubicle jockeys. It relies on algorithms.”

Most of these developments are common knowledge and widely reported within the SEO community but to most people it’s still voodoo. The more we know about how pages are ranked, the better we can be at providing the types of content that people and search engines are looking for.

As evidenced by the 550+ updates to the algorithm expected in 2010, they are not done innovating yet. “The holy grail of search is to understand what the user wants,” Singhal says. “Then you are not matching words; you are actually trying to match meaning.”

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Finally, Some Useful SERP Click Statistics

Andrew Miller — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 19:52:02 +0000

There’s a lot of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) surrounding click statistics and metrics for search results pages. Reliable data is hard to come by when trying to answer questions like these:

What percent of searchers click on a result on page 1 of a search result? Page 2?
Is there any value to having organic search rankings on page 2 or page 3?

Enter iCrossing. A recent study (PDF) concluded that 95% of website traffic from organic, non-branded queries on Google, Yahoo and Bing originated on page 1 of the results.

Click Distribution on Search Results Pages

This is big. It means that unless you rank on the first page for non-branded (not your company name) queries, you are fighting for scraps while your competition enjoys access to 95% of your prospective customers.

Trends and Previous Findings

Naturally, the search engines don’t (normally) release this data and there are few search marketing agencies large enough to perform a statistically significant study on their clients’ data. However, there are two previous reports that we can refer to for benchmarking:

AOL’s 2006 data release, while widely criticized for violating personal privacy, indicated that 90% of organic, non-branded clicks were on page 1.
iProspect’s 2008 study found that 68% of searches resulted in a click on page 1 of the results (up from 62% in 2006, 60% in 2004, and 48% in 2002). However, no differentiation is made for branded vs. non-branded terms in this study.

Even with different study methodologies and data sets it becomes clear that there are two forces at work:

Search engines are getting better at providing relevant results, minimizing the need to click past the first page of results.
Searchers are getting better at defining what they want and using more targeted queries to find it. This is reinforced by other studies that show the average length of a search query continues to grow over time.

So What?

I don’t intend to sell you on the benefits of SEO. Instead, we’ll talk about supply and demand. It is becoming increasingly clear that demand is far exceeding the supply of available links on a search results page. Therefore, the value of high organic search rankings for non-branded keywords will continue to skyrocket as more companies line up to compete for limited space.

Now What?

Take some time to identify the gaps in your keyword strategy. Use some free or cheap rank checking software to get a glimpse of your current rankings (but don’t get hung up on them because rankings change constantly). Now, check your web analytics package to identify the best-converting keywords that you know you are missing out on.

Now, if you notice your site ranking on page 2 or page 3 for some of your high value keywords, you’re most of the way there. Give those keywords some extra attention on your site, build a few links, and watch your rankings jump up to the first page.

Rinse and repeat for different sets of keywords.

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How Much More Traffic Will I Get From SEO?

Andrew Miller — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 21:58:36 +0000

Note: This is the first in a series of “Free Advice” posts that I will start publishing in response to Twitter requests. Want your SEO or PPC question answered? Ask me on Twitter.

“How much more traffic will I get to my website if I optimize it for keyword X?”

It’s a very common question from prospective clients and was posed by Rick Whittington on Twitter. The answer should help build value for the SEO engagement by demonstrating the potential gains and how to measure them. In this example, we’ll focus on ACME, Inc., a Richmond-based widget reseller with operations throughout Virginia.

Step 1: Determine Your Current Search Traffic Segments

Segmentation is the key to deriving value from your website analytics package. In this case, I am talking about segments of keywords related to a particular theme. For ACME, the keyword segments can be defined as:

“Branded” – Company name, brand names, etc. (including common misspellings)
“Virginia” – Containing “VA” or “Virginia”
“Richmond” – Containing “Richmond” and surrounding towns
“Widgets” – Containing “widget” or “widgets”, i.e. “blue widgets” or “widget for sale”
“Doo Dads” – Other names for widgets and keywords consumers are also likely to use

In your Google Analytics Keywords Report, select only the keywords from each segment. For example, to select only “Virginia” OR “VA” keywords, use the | separator in the Filter Keyword box at the bottom:

Do this for each segment, noting the total traffic volume and number of unique keywords for non-paid search traffic:

Plot all of your keyword segments on a chart and you’ll end up with something like this:

Now we know how many unique keywords we have and much traffic we are getting from each segment. Hold on to this chart for a minute.

Step 2: Gather Search Volume Estimates

Use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to calculate rough estimates of search volume for particular keywords. To find it, click on the “Opportunities” tab in AdWords, then “Keyword Tool” in the Tools section on the left.

Type in your keyword segment seed keywords and make a table of the estimate local (U.S.) search volume for Phrase Match to include all combinations of your keywords. DO NOT use Broad Match, it will give you the wrong results for this analysis. You’ll end up with something like this:

Step 3: Look for Patterns and Gaps

Notice the pattern in the search volume data? “widgets” keywords (and many of the most popular variations) are searched more frequently than the same variations of “doo dads”, by anywhere from 25-100%. Example: “virginia widgets” and “virginia doo dads”.

Now, look back at your chart from step 1. ACME’s site is drawing a fair amount of traffic from a wide variety of “widgets”-related keywords but almost no traffic from “doo dads” keywords.

This is certainly not in proportion to the search volume that we KNOW exists for “doo dads” keywords. Hence, a gap in the SEO strategy and an opportunity to optimize the site for “doo dads” keywords (without taking your eye off of the “widgets”) keywords.

Step 4: Take it One Step Further

Want to be a true analysis ninja and really impress the client? Perform the same analysis but instead of looking at JUST organic search visits in Step 1, substitute conversion rates or conversion counts (leads, sales, revenue, or whatever) by keyword segment and demonstrate a tangible benefit to their business.

But This Doesn’t Answer the Question!

Before you say that this analysis doesn’t tell the client exactly how many more visits their site will receive, keep in mind that that is an unknowable number and no legitimate SEO consultant will guarantee particular rankings or traffic volumes. Clients that are only focused on traffic volume are usually focused on the wrong metrics. It’s all about finding the RIGHT traffic, not just the MOST traffic.

It’s not a perfect answer, but it’s an honest, fact-based assessment of how to improve the client’s business by segmenting data and looking for patterns and gaps. That should make any client happy. I know mine are.

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Interesting But Disturbing Google Insights

Andrew Miller — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 18:16:40 +0000

Google Insights for Search can give you some interesting data when looking for trends in search patterns and keyword usage. Sometimes the data is disturbing or disappointing.

Case in point, I am dismayed to hear that searches for “dui lawyer” or “dui attorney” are steadily increasing over time. This could mean that more people are driving under the influence and/or police are doing a better job catching those that are. Either way, I will be more careful when driving around at night.

(This post has an embedded Google chart. You may not be able to see it in the RSS feed.)

Driver Beware

If search volume indexes are any indicator of drunk driving activity in particular cities, you should be extra careful around San Diego, Phoenix and Miami:

Search Volume Index (click to enlarge)

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