vineri, 15 octombrie 2010

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Crafting an SEO Budget to Maximise ROI

Posted: 15 Oct 2010 05:36 AM PDT

Posted by rishil

I typically run a couple of a hundred queries a week around SEO long tails to try and capture SEO posts that may not be on my radar, but worth a read. The nature of these change from time to time based on my current interests – after all, I started out as a Small Business SEO and now work at advising Big Brands on SEO. As may be apparent, due to changing interests, many of these queries are around Big Business (or Enterprise) level key phrases. One of these being around budgeting and estimating Return on SEO Investment (aka SEO ROI).

Surprisingly, there aren’t many resources available to businesses to realistically budget their SEO spend, for many reasons, one of the bigger ones in my opinion the difficulty in calculating life time value of a position. After all, it’s not like SEO rankings are like PPC, where every click has a direct attributable and potentially a onetime cost (of coursed based solely on a last click metric. Under other models such as a weighted average model the PPC click has a higher lifetime value than the last click model). So imagine my surprise that that one of these keywords “SEO Budgeting” led me to an eHow article. Now for those of you who may not be familiar with the content farm nature of eHow, you may want to visit my post on content farms.

The article (which I refuse to link to) was written by a company that ,surprise surprise, offers Search Marketing services. Now I don’t want to blast that company – what they do is none of my business. But the information they supply to the general public is. So with the hope that SEOmoz ranks higher for this keyphrase, I would like to dissect their advice and point out some better resources for the SEO planner. 

Difficulty:

SEO Budgeting isnt EASY!!!

The level of difficulty indicated is Easy. I wouldn’t say it’s easy to decide how much money needs to be spent on SEO. There are so many assumptions that need to be made – take for example some of the top line questions you should be asking:

  • What is your sites SEO Swot Analysis?
  • What are you trying to rank for?
  • What is your average return on your current SEO?
  • What level of budget do you have available?

I would give difficulty level between Moderate and Difficult, depending on the size of the business to the breadth of keywords that the site is trying to rank for.  

Ways to Gauge Budget:

Once again, in my view this advice fails. The three things that have been advised are:

  • base your campaign on a past successful campaign. If you had a past successful campaign, you probably not going to be looking for SEO budgeting advice, considering that you have already run successful SEO.
  • “designate a target percentage of total sales you wish to achieve though SEO marketing and work backwards to make this figure a reality.” This is a feasible way to predict future budgeting ONLY if you have run a campaign previously. Ideally you should base your budgets on the opportunity available with reference to your available spend and ROI.

What portion of your budget should SEO be made up off:

Stupid SEO Advice

Sorry, but that is utter rubbish. Where did those figures come from? Very poor advice. SEO, like any other marketing strategy should be run by either branding decisions where you work with maximum exposure possible) or on measurable ROI.

To explain that a bit further – take for example you have an opportunity to rank for a pot of 4 keywords:

If you had to choose, you would probably go for Green and Yellow widgets, if traffic was your goal right?   Now look at the details below:

A Bit more depth – you have evaluated the cost of acquiring links, writing content etc for those specific keywords, and worked out the cost of ranking that keyword. Now if you had the full £9,500, you would probably go for all those keywords. However, budgets are finite, so you may not have the full £9,500 to spend. So what else do you need?   You need to work out the revenue on those keywords:

Remember, every keyword has its own revenue potential.  Just because a keyword has high volume, doesn’t mean that its value in proportion will be the same as a low volume keyword, in fact, the returns on volume are normally diminishing. Which is why you may want to add one more metric, ROI:

Isn’t that an interesting metric? The keyword with the highest volume has the lowest return, while the third lowest keyword has the highest return. Taking your keyword evaluations this far help you nail down the most profitable keywords that you should be aiming for, which in return gives you a view of getting the right budgets put together.

OK so the big questions are HOW do I work out those figures above?

To start with, you need to work out potential traffic, by estimating it.  Kate has done a brilliant job of showing you how to predict your traffic. I dont think I need to reguritate those examples here :). 

The second step is to work out conversion / return – now there isn’t an easy way to do this, but you have three routes – either grab your current conversion by “generic” keywords, and use an estimation (this will probably NOT give you’re the variant ROI’s as in my example above) or segment those generic keywords into behavior patterns. By this I mean you could breakdown your current generic keywords into the type of keyword, and then break that down a step further into the length of the query – rule of thumb experience says that the longer the tail, the closer the user is to the purchase journey. This means you could apply a higher average conversion rate to longer tail – but using your data segmented into keyword type and then into tail, will allow you to get a rough estimate how that mechanic works currently for our site. You can use those figures to estimate the sales.

However the two examples above require you to have some history. What would you do if you didn’t have any history? I would use an isolated PPC test to judge the conversion value of any pot of keywords.  The isolated tests will probably provide you with usable variants of values that you can use for conversion.  Rand covered this idea way back as part of his Head Smacking tips - Using PPC as an indicator of Success. 

How do you work out the cost of ranking for any single keyword? This is probably one of the more difficult questions to answer. However, some of the key indicators of cost of any given keyword can be derived from working backwards from your Competitor audits. I think the biggest variable outlay for any SEO ranking is the cost of acquiring anchor based text links for the given keyword. The second variable is content rewrite or content enhancement, which probably is lower than the link cost. To these variable costs, I would proportion other SEO “fixed” costs such as any related fees, overall other developments impacting SEO, time of staff spent on SEO improvements etc. If anyone has any real good ideas to estimate the cost of ranking, please share!

Summary

Unfortunately, if you kept up with my ramblings so far, you will notice that there isn’t a fixed art of estimating the budget, but there are some arbitrary estimates that you can use to work out the portioning of spend to SEO. The key thing in my opinion, is to invest in ROI while staying within your allocated budgets.  

Disclaimer

This is my methodology or route to working our SEO Budgets, please make sure that whatever decision you make is best catered for your individual example. Also, the examples given are very simple views of setting keyword base targets - carrying out this exercise for 1000's of keywords isnt exactly easy, but it is worth the time and effort.

Resources:  


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Image SEO Basics - Whiteboard Friday

Posted: 14 Oct 2010 02:05 PM PDT

Posted by Aaron Wheeler

A few weeks ago Danny showed us some of the basics for video SEO, a medium that may not initially seem valuable for SEO purposes. Well, Danny dispelled that illusion swiftly, with a little help from his friend Doc Brown. This week, Danny's out there alone but still manages to show us that words aren't all they're cracked up to be; videos can yield some great SEO value, too. Besides giving us proven and actionable suggestions, Danny also postulates on some experimental and potential ways to optimize images that may prove useful now and in the future.

Embed video
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Video Transcription

Hello, everybody. My name is Danny Dover. I work here at SEOmoz as the lead SEO. On today's Whiteboard Friday, I'm going to tell you about the basics of image SEO. We found, when we were doing correlation analysis, that images and specifically the alt text that's inside of them are a remarkably well-correlated metric for SEO. Besides just being useful for people, images are also, it turns out, useful for search engines. I think part of the reason behind that is that pages that are well developed tend to also have images on them because it helps portray information in a way that textual based content can't do.

Let me go over some of the important factors with image SEO. Number one, I already mentioned this a little bit, is alt text. Alt text is the text that you provide for an image in case it can't be displayed. Maybe the image is gone or maybe someone is using a program that can't display images. This is the text that takes it place. So it makes a lot of sense from an SEO perspective that this metric is going to be important because it's the information you tell the search engines and other technologies what the image represents. With these, I recommend keeping them below about 140 characters. It's a rough rule of thumb. Also, have them be descriptive and in line with what you're trying to target for that page.

Number two is the file name. This works off the exact same principles. The file name is also information you give directly to the search engines and to other technologies to identify what the information is about. I would gander, if you will, that the file name is probably a rougher signal than the alt text. Alt text, from my experience, when it's there, which is not all the time, in fact, alt text is not included many times which is bad for SEO. But when it is included, it tends to be a clearer signal than a file name which a lot of times is just algorithmically generated by the timestamp, so it's just a bunch of numbers.

Number three is the surrounding text. I think a lot of people don't think about this when they're thinking about image SEO. The text around an image tells a lot about the image itself. This makes sense, right? You'll see a lot of times where images will be on a blog post and you'll have a caption describing the image. This is just another signal telling the search engine and other people and technologies what it is this image is about. The surrounding text, and that can either be a caption, like you've seen traditionally, or it can just be the paragraphs around the image. A lot of times an image will be used to supplement what the textual information is talking about. So the surrounding text is very important.

Fourth, as with all SEO, inbound links are important. It wouldn't necessarily be inbound links to the image URL, although it could be, but what I mean in this context is links going to the page that has the image embedded on it. Just like in normal SEO, the anchor text of those inbound links and where they're coming from and how many of them are all really important factors for image SEO and then SEO in general.

Last is number five which is human categorization. The search engines, especially at the beginning when they were developing this image recognition software, used humans. They would hire people and they'd say, "Label this." Google was semi-famous for creating this game, Google Image Labeler, which I think you can still find online, where it would show you an image of, say, an apple. They would ask you in Family Feud style, which is a game show here in the States, to list words that are associated with that object. You'd say something like apple, and you'd earn points if someone else also said apple. Maybe it's red, Fuji, or Grandma Smith, or whatever it is. So other words that are associated with the image. And that way they could train their software to start to understand what general shapes and ideas mean within images.

On the other side here, I have some more theoretical things that search engines may be using, while the things on this side are the things that we know they're using. We've heard search engineers talk about this. We've seen direct evidence. These are things that I think you should pay attention to but probably just going forward. It's more just for your knowledge rather than for you to use on your day to day.

The first one is OCR. OCR stands for optical character recognition. It's a very established software. It comes in a lot of Adobe products. You can get it in lots of places. What it does is it scans an image and can identify characters in it, characters like letters or numbers or spaces or whatever. From that, you can take actual text out of images. Again, this is a very popular software. It seems very likely to me that search engines are using this at least to some degree. It would be very costly for them from a resource perspective to use on every image on the Internet, but it would certainly make sense if they were using it on some or at least playing around with the technology.

Number two is color analysis. It's very easy from a development perspective to identify at least one color, maybe the primary color, within an image. You pick a pixel and you see what the hex code or whatever it is that you're measuring that on, it will be based on file type. It's pretty easy to get a general idea of what the color of an image is. This is helpful from a design standpoint if you're looking for certain color themes that go with each other or color patterns. Now we've seen this actually in the SERPs, so if you go to Google image search, you can see now, and Bing actually had this first, you can go to the image SERPs and you can actually pick to see only images that are of a certain color. Black and white is the obvious one, but then other colors as well.

Number three is file size and type. This one, I think, is more all about the extreme. If the image is ridiculously big, it's probably not going to get indexed just because the search engines don't want to spend the resources on that. The exception to that would be if it's ridiculously well linked to also. It's about finding these outliers. You probably don't want to have an image that's really, really big. It's probably not going to get indexed. Again, I think what it really comes down to is this is hurtful for users also because they're going to have to spend time downloading that. If bandwidth is a concern, they're probably going to click away to begin with. Image size and along with image type, the standard image things are all probably fine for Google.

I've heard just a rough rumor here that JPEG is preferred, but honestly GIFs and PNGs and all those other things are probably fine. I would not worry about those aspects. Only worry about it if you're using obscure file formats, which you shouldn't be doing to begin with.

The last one on here is the other images on the page. This is twofold. The first part being the other images on the page are likely related to the given image and that's because they're on the same page. Right? The other part, and I see this happen a lot especially with bigger clients, is when you put lots and lots of images on one page, like an image gallery, those pages tend to be very hard to get indexed. The reason for that is there's not a lot unique textual content. A lot of times it's just overwhelming to users. It doesn't provide a lot of benefit in a search result.

That's all the time I got today. I appreciate you listening to this. Please feel free to ask questions in the comments below. Thank you.

Video transcription by SpeechPad.com

Follow Danny on Twitter! Even more to your benefit, follow SEOmoz!

Also, you can follow me, Aaron.

If you have any tips or advice that you've learned along the way we'd love to hear about it in the comments below. Post your comment and be heard!


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