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| Why Clients Have the Same Issues/Questions - It's Not About SEO... But About the People! Posted: 13 Jun 2011 06:31 AM PDT Posted by aleyda This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. I really enjoyed the recent Whiteboard Friday about Top 5 SEO Questions from SEOmoz customers and I was surprised by mainly two things: 1. Most of the questions were basic As Cyrus commented in the video some of the questions were basic and focused on the "technical" (non-content) fundamentals of SEO. I think that this doesn't mean by any means that the SEOmoz community is not technically savvy: during my SEO consulting experience I have found that even with large organizations that have a strong Web development and system administration team these same "basic" errors -that cause the questions- still happen. Sometimes it is because SEO recommendations are seen as a set of activities that should only be performed once (when you provide them and afterwards are forgotten), instead of guidelines that should be integrated into the overall development process to validate any new web work. 2. The same questions are asked in other very different countries, languages and markets I used to work with clients focused on the travel, education and online gaming sectors, with SEO processes mainly in Spanish (for Spain and Latin American countries) and in English (for the UK and USA). Now I work for the local business market in Spain. And still, the SEO questions that are asked are pretty much the same. No matter which sector, language or country. I felt totally identified with the questions of that Whiteboard Friday because the day-to-day support I have given usually cover those same issues. It was definitely interesting to find out how the members of one of the strongest online SEO communities usually ask the exact same basic questions that I have been asked by my SEO clients –something that I wouldn’t expect-. Then a couple of days ago Dana Lookadoo tweeted a SEO “suggestion” that I related with these kind of issues:
More and more Web developers, Web designers and even "traditional" marketers are getting interested on SEO, which is great, but instead of doing what you recommend they start following any SEO advice they find online... that even if it is about a generally effective technique (don't even mention when it's a black hat or smoke selling stuff), its implementation can ruin your SEO efforts simply because it doesn't fit into your specific process. So I commented to her how sad it was for me to find out that SEO consultants from the other side of the world find the same "basic" issues and Dana, wisely answered me:
I think her answer shows a fundamental truth in our work: The usual problems we find are not caused by the complexity of the own SEO process, but by a human behavior related issue. It has to do more with the way we think and make decisions and this is why these issues are found in any sector, language or country. Moreover, the fact that our clients usually don’t see this principle can explain why it seems that even very experienced, business savvy marketers or business owners –those who make the decision to hire you as a SEO consultant and start a SEO process- have problems to consistently “relate” their “offline” business strategy with the SEO one. This happens because they fail to clearly see that SEO is much more than a set of technical and content “tricks” that you can use to rank well on search engines. They don’t see that SEO should “reflect” and work along well with their “offline” marketing strategy and correspond to their customer trends and behavior, since at the end of the day, it is about the people (their target market) that the website should be looking to attract and convert. Because of this, at the end of the day, the marketing manager of a large company and the local business owner usually end up asking the same basic SEO strategy related questions. Some of them are questions that have to do more with the business and less with SEO, that I would have never thought of being asked.
For example, some of them are: 1. I'm starting a new business: Could you please suggest some SEO friendly names? Issue Background: A client was going to start a new business –I’m not talking about buying a new site, but to create a whole company- and in order to select the name of its new business wanted me to perform a keyword research to suggest him SEO friendly names. Solution: I asked the client if he really wanted to name his new business prioritizing SEO instead of branding principles he could be recognized with. I explained that if his brand (and domain) didn’t include highly relevant keywords, it didn’t mean the site wouldn’t be able to rank well: through an effective website architecture along with well organized, relevant content and many other on-page optimization techniques I could make sure the site is relevant and attractive not only to search engines but to the users. Additionally, I commented how it seems that Google is going to stop putting so much weight to the keywords on the domain and that the best was to base the SEO strategy in long-term principles. 2. I don't want to be related with a type of business but I want to rank with its keywords. Issue Background: A very niche but highly profitable line of business of the company started to get bad reputation because of fraudulent activities of the competition with that service. This service was practically known by a very specific term. Other companies stopped using that term to refer to this service they also provided to prevent being related with the well-known fraudulent activities of the competition. My client did the same in the “offline” world –eliminated any reference to that line of business using the term that had bad reputation- but asked me if he could still ranking in the search engines with it… even if he wanted to eliminate any reference to it from the website. Solution: I asked him to extrapolate the situation to the “offline” world. If he didn’t specifically add that term in the company advertising materials there wouldn’t be any possibility that his target market would know he provided it and get any benefit from it. The same happened in the online world. If he eliminated the term completely from the website, search engines and users wouldn’t have any means to identify that it’s relevant for that term. He asked me if there was any “technical trick” that could prevent that to happen and I answered that if he wanted to add to its reputation problem a search engine penalization one and possibly lose the site’s rankings there was always a way… but not a business consistent one, since even if he didn’t mind to be penalized, if visitors would reach its site with a term that was not shown in the content at all they possibly would feel deceived and leave the page. I suggested that he could keep an internal but visible and well optimized, quality page on its site describing that he had previously given that type of service, using the term he wanted to rank with, providing proof and warranties of his services, explaining how his business was different from the competition and why visitors should trust his business. 3. My business has diversified. I have internal sections in my site featuring the different areas where I provide my services but I want to keep ranking for a specific set of them with my home page. Issue Background: The client business had started providing a specific service in one city, so the home page featured it –since it was all what the company had-. After sometime the home page started to rank for those specific terms. A couple of years later the company had diversified and provided the same service for a dozen of cities. They enabled specific sections of the site for each one of them. The problem was that for the initial city they still were ranking with the Home Page. They had also enabled an internal section for it with unique content, so they had a content cannibalization problem. Sometimes they were ranking for that city related terms with the Home Page, others with the internal page. When asked to optimize the Home Page for more general business terms –and avoid the cannibalization problem- the client refused since he didn’t want to lose the Home Page rankings for the specific city related terms. Solution: I showed the client how the city internal page that was ranking for a very similar keyword than the home page had much better conversion rate since it gave much more information and arguments and optimized conversion channels to visitors. I also mentioned the client how the fact that the home page was optimized for that city specific terms instead of more general (but very relevant) ones, was preventing the possibility to rank with them which represented a very good (and feasible) SEO opportunity. Finally I commented how we could gradually optimize the Home Page for those general keywords and give more “signals” to search engines (from inside and outside the site) indicating how the most relevant page for the city related keywords was the internal one that would start gaining more popularity and ranking instead of the home page. If my assumptions are right some of you should have received similar questions from your clients! Have you? If so, have you suggested other ways to fix these same problems? Which other “fundamental” SEO strategy related questions that you would like to share have you been asked? Image under Creative Commons license taken from Flickr. |
| 11 Analytics Metrics That Are Actionable Posted: 12 Jun 2011 01:58 PM PDT Posted by Paddy_Moogan Last month I spoke at SAScon in the UK on the topic of getting actions from analytics. It's something that I feel quite strongly about so I wanted to write a post on here to talk about it a little and expand upon what I talked about at SAScon. The key question I want to answer is - "What key metrics should I be tracking?" I can break the answer down pretty quickly by saying the following -
Whilst I love diving into data and getting into the how and why trends appear in analytics, I have to remember that my time is limited, in particular when looking at a clients analytics account. I need to understand as much as I can, but ultimately I need to focus on the metrics that make a difference. Also if you are a bit of a newbie in SEO or analytics, the amount of data available to you can be very overwhelming. Far too many people make the mistake of focusing on the wrong metrics which can be costly to a project. It can sometimes look like you are doing a bad job if you are measuring the wrong metrics. Metrics that are actionable If a metric isn't actionable, then its just fluff that fills up space in a report and doesn't mean very much. Whilst metrics can be interesting, there is a difference between a metric that is interesting and one that is actionable. Below I've listed a number of metrics that I define as actionable. 1. Beat Panda - Measure Content Whilst the Google Panda updates of 2011 have looked to address a number of quality issues, one of the key ones in my opinion was the amount of good, quality content on a page. Many pages of thin or duplicate content across your site could potentially cause your entire site to fall foul of Panda. One way to assess this on your own site is to use custom variables to measure the content on your page. This works very well if you have an ecommerce site or any site where you collate reviews:
Action to take -
If you want to learn more about using Google Analytics custom variables, checkout this tutorial video. 2. % Visitors who view product pages The reason this is important is quite simple, no view of a product page = no product sale. This is one that is usually taken for granted by many ecommerce sites. They assume that because they have lots of product pages, that visitors will automatically find them. However there can be barriers to a visitor getting to your product pages, for example poorly designed navigation, poor internal site search, unclear category names etc. Also lets now forget that many ecommerce sites have other sections of their site such as a blog, a news section, buyers guides, videos and help pages, so a visitor can easily get distracted by one of these and end up leaving your site without ever seeing a product page. Actions to take -
Pro tip - make sure your internal site search works for both plural and singular product names. A classic mistake I've seen over the years is exact matching of queries to product names which means either singular or plural returns no results. 3. % of people who search your site then exit If a visitor has made the effort to type in what they are searching for on your site and still left without buying, then you should take a closer look into why. So many internal site searches are not only badly designed, but also return bad results. If your website is like this, then you are losing sales. Actively improve your search results pages to make them more relevant and useful. it still amazes me that SEOs obsess over Google SERPs, yet neglect to take a look at the quality of their own despite having control over them! Actions to take -
If you haven't got it setup on your site yet, check out this information on setting up site search for Google Analytics. 4. Page load speed If it isn't already clear to you, Google is obsessed with speed. I can see why, a faster web is better for everyone and we all get frustrated if a page takes longer than a few seconds to load. Google have confirmed that site speed is part of the algorithm, albeit a small part. They've also made it measurable in Webmaster Tools and more recently they made it available in Google Analytics. Now that we can measure load speed in analytics, it becomes much easier to see the results of the actions you take. Its also easier to see which pages of your site are slower than others, which allows you to try and work out why and fix the issues.
Something I wanted to point out here too is that you shouldn't be worrying about site speed because it forms a small part of the Google Algorithm. You should be worrying about it because it is important to your visitors, they will not come back to your website if they are left hanging around waiting for the page to load. Actions to take -
If you want to learn more about what you can actually to do speed up your site, take a look at Craig Bradford's site speed for dummies part one and part two on the Distilled blog. 5. Average Order Value This metric is all about squeezing as much revenue as you can from each order. Quite often, an SEO will start a project and the first thing they do is assume they make more revenue for the client by getting more traffic. Whilst this can be true, the quickest wins can often come from taking a good look at ways to get more value from the existing traffic.
There are actions you can take though if you are looking to drive traffic that will increase your order value. Actions to take -
6. Measure SEO Variables Similar to point one above, you can also use custom variables to track various SEO variables of your website such as -
Action to take -
7. Completion of Tasks This one falls outside Google Analytics but I still wanted to measure it as it can be a great way of getting quick feedback about your site. I'd recommend taking a look at 4Q survey for this one, they offer a free trial so you can give it a test drive and see what you think. Avinash wrote a pretty in depth review of it on his blog if you want to read a bit more into it. Quick sidenote, if you are into Analytics and not following Avinash on Twitter or reading his blog, you should be! He is also speaking at Mozcon in July and I've heard great things about his presentations. Actions to take -
8. Share of Search Landscape I really like this metric. The main reason I like it is that it is a metric that anyone can understand, even people who don't get SEO will understand this. This is because its very similar to a traditional marketing metric of market share, so it can be used when demonstrating SEO growth and targets to your clients. Here is an example of how this may look (dummy data!):
9. Form Field Tracking This is such an easy one to action and can make a big difference to your conversions. If you are able to identify fields that are consistently confusing customers and perhaps making them abandon the form, then you are able to look into why and remove these barriers to conversion. You can even take a step back and ask yourself if that field is even required at all. Action to take -
Pro Tip - you can use Google Analytics events to track which form fields are causing problems. Here is a good thread over on the Analytics help forum which points you in the right direction for setting this up. 10. Branded vs Non-branded Search Traffic If you are an SEO, or you employ an SEO agency, you should be measuring this metric. The great thing about measuring non-branded traffic is that pretty much 100% of the credit can be given to SEO efforts. Whilst credit for branded search increases can be credited to a number of marketing channels such as PR, offline advertising or online display advertising. Action to take -
11. Conversion Rate I'm pretty sure you are all looking at this metric, but I bet that some of you are not using it properly. By not measuring it properly I mean that you are probably looking at this overall figure:
You can't take any actions from this figure. In order to take actions, you need to segment by relevant dimensions such as traffic source, type of visitor, location, keyword etc. Action to take -
Metrics that help you get stuff done The following metrics are focusing more towards helping you get stuff done. You should really make sure you use all available data to fight internal battles and give the business case to effect change at your clients company. Make sure that you backup your recommendations with solid data, however be careful not to confuse key stakeholders with complicated stats or fancy graphs. Just give them the data they need and visualise them in a meaningful way. I'm going to give a couple of client examples here, whilst I can't give away the client themselves, hopefully these examples will demonstrate the power of data in getting things done. 1. Client didn't appreciate the value of content A client of mine launched a microsite which had lots of good content on it about their upcoming releases and products. When their main site went live, they took down a lot of this content. This was despite our best efforts to stop them! We saw traffic drop slightly and growth wasn't as fast as it had been in previous months. After a few months (yes I know!) we finally got the content put back up and we pretty much instantly saw an increase in traffic. So the next chance I got, I did a short presentation to one of the company directors who had the power to make things happen at the client. He wasn't involved much in day-to-day SEO but still had the power to influence the rest of the company's attitude towards SEO. I showed him a simple bar chart showing the traffic drop and the subsequent increase. It worked a treat and he now understands the power of content and how it effects organic traffic. This means that future tasks that involve content won't be buried deep at the bottom of the developers list and will be slightly closer to the top. Influencing change ftw. 2. Developers didn't like SEO tasks One client of mine has a team of developers who are probably the smartest I've ever worked with. However they'd previously worked with SEO companies who had got them doing work which didn't make any difference to traffic or revenue. These guys are super busy and didn't want to spend their valuable time on tasks which didn't make a difference. This made them a little resistant to future SEO tasks. So when we had a situation where it was possible for Google to crawl literally billions of pages on their site, most of which we didn't really want Google spending their time crawling. After some work, we managed to make some changes with the help of the developers to solve this problem and make Google focus on the important pages and spend more time crawling those. A month or so later, we saw some very good results both in terms of increased traffic and could also see through server logs that Google were doing exactly what we wanted them to do. With the help of the client, these results were shown to the developers and they were given credit for the increased traffic. They were able to see the results of their work which makes it much easier now to get them to work on SEO tasks. |
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