May 5th, 2010 by Richard Zwicky
Unfortunately for some, it can seem to be when you put your trust in the wrong hands. On Monday, (May 2, 2010), a well-known SEO - Rae Hoffman, also known as sugarrae, wrote an excellent piece demolishing a poorly informed “insights into SEO” type article about why Big Brands don’t Rank. I’m not going to dive into the details of that article; if you haven’t already done so, you can read it for yourself (and make sure to read Rae’s as well to understand how off base it was).
The point is bad SEO analysis and advice continues to plague online marketing, and unfortunately some of the bad advice sometimes comes from individuals or firms that could be considered authorities. Bad advice of the kind published in the Big Brands article on Monday immediately undermines credibility of quality SEO, and makes all businesses more skeptical and cautious about investing in this area of online marketing.
The reality is, proper SEO is not bullshit. It’s not witchcraft, and great SEO’s don’t really practice their dark art doing things to web pages and web sites that are beyond the scope of anyone without years of insights and training. I know tons of great SEO’s who don’t have years of experience, and some great SEO’s who have operated under the radar, unrecognized for years. There’s also some well known individuals associated with the industry who are not great SEO’s, but they are great marketers. The reality is:
- Great SEO’s don’t care about just driving traffic; they work to drive up conversions, or increase branding.
- Great SEO is not just about the html on the page, it’s also about off-page (links), and the on-page content which drives conversions or awareness.
- Great SEO is not an IT project; it’s customer acquisition, branding and sales. Why does marketing let it be shoved into the status of an IT project? That’s a warning sign of a company that doesn’t understand the value of marketing online.
- Great SEO is a component of Online Marketing. Just like PPC, social, links, display, email, and even your own web site.
- Most great SEO’s won’t provide a 5-minute analysis that will solve all your site’s issues. Your site is likely far too messed up for a 5-minute solution!
- Great SEO is not a one-off job. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is not credible.
- Many great SEO’s won’t be found on “Top Ten” lists. Not because they’re not qualified, but because they don’t market themselves that way, and generally, they are too busy. (Plus most top ten lists are just linkbait)
- A lot of great marketers write “Top Ten” lists: They want attention because it drives customer acquisition. Aaron Wall recently published a “Top Ten SEO’s” list, and lots of people blogged and tweeted about it, arguing about who was, and wasn’t on the list. The point was it drove lots of attention and traffic to Aaron’s site, which is what he set out to achieve. Great online marketing, and SEO for “Top Ten SEO’s”!
I could write out / share a lot of information and details around each of these points about great SEO, but there’s not much point. There are lots of great articles filled with very useful information published about SEO each day. Even better, there are great SEO’s out there who can provide you credible insights to act upon, and who can help your entire marketing strategy become much more effective.
Bad SEO, and poor quality advice is trouble. It’s trouble for everyone associated to online marketing, because bad advice and experiences makes companies gun-shy about investing again. When companies pull out of SEO they do so not because the channel doesn’t work, but because their implementation was badly done. When you pull out of SEO, you’re undermining yourself and marketing your business without a strong foundation. SEO is about more than just html, it’s about conversion optimization, site architecture, and optimizing the user experience: it’s sales and it’s marketing. Get rid of all that, and you’ve just thrown most of your business potential out the window.
You might wonder: what do I know? Well, After having spent over 10 years in this industry, I’ve had the chance to see, hear, and observe a heck of a lot. I’m lucky enough to be invited to speak at a lot of conferences worldwide, not because I’m always the most exciting speaker, but because I have relevant information and a lot of experience. I earned that experience doing online marketing for B2B sites with less than 100 search referrals / month (to start), and B2C ones with over 750,000 search referrals / day, and more importantly: thousands of conversions per day, (when I was done).
So what do I know? Maybe not much. But I do know this: SEO is NOT Bullshit.
Tags: business, conversion, conversions, customer acquisition, insight, links, marketer, marketers, Marketing, potential, ppc, Referral, search, search referrals, SEM, SEO, social links, traffic
Posted in Enquisite Search Metrics | 12 Comments »
January 9th, 2009 by Richard Zwicky
As you probably remember, we released the first full version of Enquisite back in August. After our initial release, we didn’t miss a beat-we got right to work on tweaking existing features and adding new ones. I’m happy to tell you today about the first of a series of new features, all centered around the concept of turning data into action.
The first new feature we’re going to discuss is the Potential Analysis. I’d like to thank Andrew Shotland for providing an original version of the formula upon which we ended up basing the math behind this analysis feature on.
The Potential Analysis is found within the Longtail report in Enquisite. It looks at search phrases and calculates a value based on the following variables;
- Referral rates - The number of referrals for a given term
- Conversion rates - The number of conversions a particular term generates
- Page views - Average page views/visits for the phrase
- Time - In seconds, the average time/visit for the phrase
- Bounce ratio for the phrase - The number of sessions driven by the phrase where the visitor left a page or site without visiting any other pages before a session timeout occurred or the total number of sessions driven by the phrase during an interval.
- Activity - in relation to the other terms, and outcomes
Two things worth pointing out:
- A bounce occurs when a website visitor leaves a page or a site without visiting any other pages before a session timeout occurs (we set this to 15 minutes).
- There’s a known issue when it comes to sample size. The larger the sample size, the higher the accuracy of the analysis. In other words, the more referrals, the more accurate the analysis.
Potential Analysis runs automatically and is displayed next to the appropriate column in your Longtail reports. By default, it’s turned on to show you the potential of your keywords. The way it works is simple. There are four levels of potential: High; Medium; Low; and None. A keyword with high potential has a good chance of keeping visitors on your site longer, looking at more pages. Keywords with no potential have virtually no chance of keeping a visitor’s interest.
But why does this matter? Well, for one thing, it helps you make better choices. If you’re interested in selling advertising on a page and are wanting to optimize that page to gain visitors, isn’t it good to know which terms are worth optimizing for? Think about it from a longtail perspective: If you have multiple variations of a phrase driving all traffic, the Potential Analysis will show you the phrase that will have the best ROI for you-in one simple box.
Now think of potential in relation to actions or conversions. Using Potential Analysis, you’ll be able to decide which phrases to optimize (or ignore) even if you have multiple converting phrases arriving on a particular web page from search referrals. This kind of analysis will help you take the guesswork out of the process and make quicker, more effective decisions.
Tags: Analytics, potential, ppc, search, Search Analytics, Search Engines, SEM, SEO
Posted in Google, Search Analytics, Search Metrics | 2 Comments »