Tag: measurement

Posted on

Measure What Matters in SEO

Excerpts from my latest article at NBC 5 Chicago’s Inc. Well: “How to Measure What Matters Most for SEO.”

What matters in SEO most when measuring the performance of an SEO program is the bottom line: conversions. All other data – including rankings, quality and quantity of backlinks, bounce rates – merely serves as tools to diagnose issues and opportunities in driving organic search conversions.

A lot of people become obsessed with rankings as a key performance indicator. I understand. It’s easy information to acquire after all, you just Google your favorite keyword and see where you rank. Unfortunately, using rankings as a key indicator has two primary issues.

First, all searches are personalized these days. That means that I may see my favorite keyword rank number one ranking on Google, but you may see it rank number seven. Depending on the location, log in status, cookies, search history and a number of other factors, the search engines customize the search results to each individual searcher. The days of saying with confidence that any one page ranks number one for all searchers is long gone. As such, rankings are an unreliable performance metric.

Second, even in the best circumstances ….

Read the article in full at NBC 5 Chicago’s Inc. Well >>

Web PieRat logo.

Originally posted on Web PieRat.

Posted on

Google Webmaster Tools: A Practical Guide

My latest on Practical Ecommerce: “Guide to Google Webmaster Tools“

Valuable search-engine-optimization tools that provide unique data tend to be expensive. Tools with limited data sets or limited capabilities tend to be free. Google Webmaster Tools bucks that trend by offering — for free — a unique data set and features that can’t be found in any other tool.

I’ve previously addressed reasons to register for Google Webmaster Tools, in “Top 5 Reasons to Use Google Webmaster Tools.” The purpose of this article is to explain how to use this amazing free tool set to improve your site’s search engine optimization.

Before Google opens the doors to its treasure chest, you have to prove you own the site by going through a verification process.

The best way to learn more about Google Webmaster Tools is to dive in and play with it. It’s free, relativelyeasyto verify, and packed with help topics and tips to speed you on your way.

Read the entire guide for tips and explanations on every tool and report » “Guide to Google Webmaster Tools“

Web PieRat logo.

Originally posted on Web PieRat.

Posted on

Migrating Your Site? SEO Checklist

Excerpts from my latest article at Practical eCommerce: “SEO Site Migration Checklist.”

Migrating a site to a new platform or domain, or implementing a major redesign, are some of the most stressful situations in search engine optimization. The potential for massively impacting organic search traffic and sales is higher during these launches than at any other time. With planning and priority on the SEO impact of the launch it’s possible to actually improve SEO performance after a major launch event.

However, most sites neglect to include an SEO professional in the planning, design, development and launch phases of the project, typically resulting in a loss of SEO performance post-launch. While an experienced SEO professional can certainly come in afterwards to guide the team through a strategy to revive the site’s SEO performance, this process typically takes three to six months of planning, rework from the design and development teams, and a loss of traffic and revenue in the interim.

Speaking from experience helping clients through many platform changes, redesigns, domain moves and other assorted SEO pitfalls, these are my best tips for arriving at the other end of the launch with your SEO safely intact.

Read the article in full for 2,000 words worth of SEO site migration tips at Practical eCommerce »

Migrating a site is always a complex process and should always include an SEO professional. Just as a marketing team wouldn’t dream of replatforming or redesigning without information architecture expertise, the same logic needs to apply to search engine optimization. The stakes are too high in terms of organic search traffic and revenue to risk cutting corners on SEO.

Web PieRat logo.

Originally posted on Web PieRat.

Posted on

Google Serves Even More Keyword “Not Available”

Fellow SEO fanatic and fiancé Brian Brown, director of product management at Covario, was the inspiration for this post. One of our many SEO over dinner conversations.

Excerpts from my latest article at Practical eCommerce: “Google’s Secure Search Squeezes SEO Planning and Reporting.”

Google’s secure SSL search protects users’ search results and the keywords they searched on. Unfortunately, it also poses a growing threat to data-driven search engine optimization. Firefox recently joined Google Chrome — and Google.com, for logged-in users — in defaulting to secure search. This has the side effect of increasing the number of “Not Available” or “Not Provided” search keywords in web analytics reports.

In the past, SSL search was too slow and cumbersome to use as a default. Web analytics programs could easily pick out most of the keywords that referred traffic to the site from Google.com. Today, with SSL search the default on Google.com for logged in users as well as the default on Chrome and Firefox browsers, a growing number of Google.com referral strings are coming into web analytics with no keyword information associated. Consequently, if a site optimizes a page for a certain keyword phrase, its ability to measure how many organic searches were referred from Google via that keyword phrase is diminished.

 

In 2011, Google reported that it handled 143.5 billion searches a month. Google represents 66.4 percent of the search engine market share, according to comScore’s February 2012 report. The Chrome and Firefox browsers together represent 39.8 percent of the browser market share, according to Net Market Share’s February 2012 reporting. Consequently, 26.4 percent — 66.4 x 39.8 — of all searches last month were conducted on Google in Chrome or Firefox. If this trend holds, 26.4 percent of all searches going forward will be stripped of their keyword data. And this doesn’t include the searches conducted by users logged in to Google properties and searching Google from any web browser.

Read the article in full at Practical eCommerce »

Web PieRat logo.

Originally posted on Web PieRat.

Posted on

Google Webmaster Tools: 5 Reasons to Start Using It Today

Excerpts from my latest article at Practical eCommerce, Top 5 Reasons to Use Google Webmaster Tools.

There’s a common misconception that registering with Google Webmaster Tools somehow enables Google more access to information about a site. In fact, just the opposite is true. Google Webmaster Tools provides site owners access to data available from no other source, data every ecommerce site needs to manage its organic search channel.

  1. Organic Impressions: A critical metric to paid search campaigns, impressions have been painfully absent for organic search programs. Google, however, gives search engine optimization professionals a glimpse into impressions in the “Search Queries” report under “Your Site on the Web.”
  2. Real Ranking Data: In the very same Search Queries reports for top queries and top pages, Google also provides average ranking data. This is a fantastic metric to have, with so many ranking tools falling prey to personalization biases.
  3. Complete Backlink Reporting: Reliable backlink data is becoming increasingly hard to find. With Yahoo! Site Explorer’s sad demise and Bing’s refusal to honor the link: query, Google has become the only major U.S. search engine to give any information on backlinks.
  4. +1 Metrics: Google offers a trio of Google +1 reports, including “Search Impact,” “Activity” and “Audience.” The search impact report details how many impressions were annotated with a friend’s +1, and how many clicks those +1 annotated search results drove.
  5. New Crawl Error Reports: Just this week Google expanded their crawl error reporting in an attempt to make it more actionable. This report has always been somewhat problematic because it lists errors that sometimes have a very valid reason for existing.

Read the article in full at Practical eCommerce with more detailed descriptions of the features and illustrations »

BONUS 6TH REASON: Robots.txt Testing: Test changes to your robots.txt files before posting them live and discovering you disallowed your key product lines. You can find this indispensible tool under “Site Configuration” and then “Crawler Access.” Never update a robots.txt file without testing it with this tool first.

Web PieRat logo.

Originally posted on Web PieRat.