If it Works and it Shouldn't...

Sometimes the best course of action in Search Marketing is to just let it ride. It sounds lazy, but sometimes it's the smartest thing you could do. I realize this might not always be a popular option, but there are cases in which doing nothing is the best thing you can do for your site.

We manage Adwords for a client that had an incredibly successful organic position for their number one keyword while at the same time doing everything wrong from an SEO perspective. This is a very old site that earned its authority and trust ranking a long time ago. We do not work on the SEO, but we do manage the analytics and report on overall traffic so it was hard to miss this one. In spite of big mistakes like the home page being titled "Home," it ranked first for the business's major keywords. The site has tons of links and authority that helped push it into this position despite it lacking the basics of SEO. Google thought so much of this site that it actually changed the title of the page to be more relevant and even re-titled the site links on the expanded listing.

When we first started working with this client our guidance was to leave these core pages alone! When you already rank 1st for a major keyword with an expanded listing, there's nowhere else to go so just let it ride... especially if you really shouldn't be ranking as high as you are. If it ever breaks that's when you'll need to go in and fix it, but in the meantime it works beautifully even though it shouldn't.

Recently someone decided to ignore this advice and re-titled the pages, and... well you can see the aftermath...


This site's strongest keyword dropped from ranking 1st to ranking between 3rd and 6th, and it switched from the Google generated headline to the newly written title. This new title didn't even have the main keyword in it! Not good! This caused a roughly 66% drop in visits. Chances are if they would have left it alone we'd still be seeing that same stream of visitors that have been coming in via that word for years.

Is there a chance the site will fight its way to the top? Yes. But will it have been worth it to lose thousands of visitors just in order to get back to the same spot it already had? Probably not. Remember whenever you're assessing a situation "do nothing" can be a valid answer in certain circumstances!

Confessions of a Data Junkie

I am a Web Traffic Data junkie. The seminal event of my addiction was in October 1994 when I first gazed in wonderment upon a web log and so began my quest to connect traffic to sales. The trip has had several side trips with work in SEO, text to data mapping research, web design, programming, and direct sales. During this time I never lost sight of my objective of transforming the mountains of data into actionable business information. So is the life of a Data Junkie!

For years the web log was the standard for understanding web traffic and it was one of those situations where you were buried in data and starving for information. The next generation was a layer of software that summarized the log data to create meaningful information. The next major event was the creation of tag based analytics and in this class the largest installed base is by far Google Analytics. This differs from log based systems in that it only tracks what you code with the Google Analytics Tracking Code. The fact that it tracks only what you code is both an advantage and disadvantage. In log based systems you get everything at a painfully detailed level, but in a tagged system you only get activity that runs the JavaScript on the page. Tagged systems, like Google Analytics, brought the data up to a page level making it easier to understand for most people. In a log system there could be 50 entries just to indicate that one person loaded one page. Tagged systems have their own problems including a higher likelihood of errors of omission.

All of this brings me to June 2009 almost 15 years since the start of my data addiction. This experience gives me a perspective on this field of study and every month I work with data from over 50 clients to help them understand what their data are trying to tell them. Our job is understand the data and help our clients use that knowledge to guide their business. This month was one of those months where there was a disturbance in the data. When you work with marketing data you have to realize several things like; there are no facts only clues, marketing data is an estimate, and factual data is not causation.

As we started our monthly account review we started to notice that there was an unmistakable shift in the data. This conclusion did not come from one event or even one client but by clue after clue as we progressed through over 55 sets of data the change became clear. There was a major move in quality scores and organic position patterns. Google had reshuffled the deck; Clients with historically strong keywords were suddenly in different positions. Quality score went through data shift. Some moved up and some moved down but the reshuffling was clear and to be fair from an overall perspective it appears that the calculations got more accurate. The people that moved down will not like the results but the reality is that most of the moves we saw were fair. What we think is happening is that Google is pushing the formula of relevancy forward and we think it is evolving into a calculation of themes, trust, and authority. If we are right about this it will require rethinking web design, advertizing, and search engine optimization.

The fact that Google is headed in the direction of themes, trust, and authority is hardly a revelation. Google has been working on this for years and in their own development style they are rolling this out, receiving feedback, and then continuing the adjustments to the calculation. Google is in a continual improvement develop loop and this month was just one more installment. We have seen this before and we will see it again. This month I had the privilege to meet some of the developers at the Googleplex in Mountain View so I can tell you they have some very smart people working on their systems. If any company can improve the search quality it is Google.
If you believe like I do that Google is headed in the Themes, Trust, and Authority direction then we need to start thinking like that in our design, advertising, and optimization. Let's start with a discussion of what these words mean in the context of web traffic.

Themes are the natural evolution of keyword relevancy. Instead of a simple keyword match on a page a theme is looking for a group of words across a collection of pages. A collection of pages could be a section of a web site, the full web site, or even multiple web sites. Defining the collection includes an analysis of what pages point to other pages and where they fit in the hierarchy of the site. In the past optimizing meant selecting your keywords and making sure they are reasonably represented in the content. Themes are looking for the root keyword plus support from other associated words including things like inferred references in the text. Google has known for a long time that simple keyword relevancy was too simple to solve the search challenge and that it was way too easy to game the system. Themes makes it tougher and at some point it will force people to give up on gaming the system because creating great content will be easier than trying to beat the system.
Trust is exactly what it sounds like; how much does the system trust the content source. Themes told us what the content is about but how much do we trust the source? This is a critical question in search and it is also a complex question in our society in general. Why do you trust your friends? How did you get to a trusting relationship with them? Just like in personal relationships trust is built over time and it is built on your actions. Google is working on trying to figure out who they should trust. Certainly things like how long the site has been around and who refers to that site are critical but that is far from the only thing they can consider. I believe they are asking questions like: Has the site, or their inbound links, been caught gaming the system? Has the site been blacklisted for spam? Have the inbound links grown over time?

Authority addresses the question of the authority of this source relative to the theme? Authority is theme specific because a site might be trusted but not an authority on a specific theme. Just because Google is a trusted authority on search does not make them an authority on Microbiology. Authority is associated with trust but it is not exactly the same. Building authority takes time and it is just like building authority in the real world. You have to publish and let people comment on your work just like a peer review in the academic world.

So after this entire esoteric dialog what does this mean to your business? Great question. What it means is that we all have to start rethinking our web strategies to develop a plan on how to be the trusted authority on the themes that are important to our businesses. This is easy to say, but tough to do. However when you get down to it, this is exactly what businesses have been doing for all of history. They develop their messaging (theme) then work to become the trusted authority on that theme. Businesses do this because people do business with those they trust; and they trust those that help them understand. Your web site is a tool that can help you educate your suspects, prospects, customers, and clients on your value to them. Build solid themes and become the trusted authority on those themes and you will discover that Google is really your best friend and they are looking for you.

Till next month...

Is Organic Traffic Better than PPC?

There is probably nothing that gets a good flame war going between SEO Experts and PPC Advocates quite like the debate over the quality and quantity of traffic from these two sources. We have worked on both sides of this issue and we tell clients all the time that they have to compete on both sides of the search engine results page. A good SEO strategy will improve your PPC performance because of the Quality Score connection and PPC intel can improve your SEO targeting, measurement, and performance. The reality is they are both on the search engine result page and both hold a great deal of value.

Before I get flamed by some SEO-is-the-center-of-the-universe advocate I fully acknowledge that every account is different and this blog post is the results from a limited number of accounts. I believe that SEO is an important field of study and an important part of the marketing strategy. What I dislike about SEO is that there are very few facts and lots of opinions. The SEO industry seems to run on rumors and there seems to be very little visible effort to actually prove anything.

The SEO world often proposes that PPC is a waste of money but to date I have yet to see what their costs and results look like. The reason I believe I have never seen this is that to compare it you would have to operate both and track the cost of SEO. Contrary to the sales claims of some in the SEO industry we propose that SEO, like PPC, must be done continually. You can't optimize a web site in an afternoon and just be done. If you stop, your SEO efforts the traffic will slowly grind to a halt and we have seen this many times.

We started by looking at some of the best performing clients that we have and all of them have a relationship with an SEO expert, no surprise there. Some clients have a person on staff doing this work but most outsource it.

We examined several situations and found the same pattern over and over and we limited our study to the major keywords with clients that fully fund their PPC and professional manage their SEO. Full funding means that their budgets are high enough that their account never shuts down for lack of budget. This also means that the impression levels in the Adwords data is the best thing you can find to the actual number of searches conducted. The only data we know of that would be better would come directly from Google and they don't give reliable statistics in this area. By using the impressions from the keyword and the organic traffic for that keyword we can estimate the CTR for organic traffic. Is it perfect - NO - but it is much better than the complete darkness you have with an SEO only situation.

We divided major keywords into Generic Terms and Client Specific Terms. The generic terms are just that, common searches where the person is looking for the product or service. The Client Specific Terms are things like the company name or their brand names. The results for these types of words were radically different.

Generic Terms

With generic terms what we found was that PPC traffic was greater than organic. This is contrary to what many in the SEO field claim, but client after client had the same result. The split is approximately 35% organic and 65% PPC and this is on words that had very strong SEO positions. Many of these words had multiple organic positions on the front page.

Client Specific Terms

With Client Specific Terms the results were quite different and this very much supports SEO claims of dominance. SEO commands over 75% of the traffic with PPC at about 25%. All of these terms had strong SEO positions and were clearly favored by the searcher. This includes results where the PPC is in the T1-T3 position and if the ads fall into the side positions the PPC results become even weaker approaching 10%.

What about Response Rates?

Clicks are one part of this discussion but goals or conversions is where the rubber really hits the road and here we found some interesting results. PPC converts at a higher rate than organic on generic searches and the difference is large with the clients we studied the differences were 11% for organic and 18% on PPC. While conversion percentages varied by client the ratio between organic and PPC remained steady.

Are Organic and PPC related?

Google swears that there is no relationship between organic and PPC and I believe them. However in the same breath I will tell you that almost every time we start or stop advertising for a client the organic responds in kind. This does not happen once in a while it happens almost every time. I believe that organic scoring and PPC quality score are largely the same thing and that as systems have developed the relationship is becoming more visible. I believe Google in that there is no direct connection between organic and PPC, but PPC creates traffic and organic is sensitive to traffic so I think there is lots of evidence of an indirect relationship. PPC exposes your business to new people resulting in more return traffic in both direct, referral, and organic. I can imagine a common situation where the first search is a generic terms resulting in PPC traffic followed by a later search for your business name with a response through the organic listing. There is also the positive reinforcement of seeing an ad and an organic listing on a SERP that can result in a click because of a higher level of trust and visibility. This is how we believe organic and PPC are related.

So what does this mean?

Getting from data to causation is at best difficult so our comments here are one possible explanation not THE reason. We know that depending on the type of search people adjust the parts of the screen they focus on. When a person is in research mode we propose that they focus more on the organic results. When they are looking to buy or find a source for a product or service we propose that they are more inclined to look at the ad space. There is no way to know if this is true but the logic passes the smell test.

We propose that a searcher who is searching for a Client Specific Term knows who they are looking for and they expect Google to give them that in the Organic reading zone. They are less likely, in our opinion, to be a new prospect for your business. They are much more likely to be a customer or an advanced stage prospect after all they know something very specific about your business.

What is your Organic Cost Per Click?

Wait a minute... organic traffic is free, right? Not really. Organic traffic is just paid for differently than PPC. SEO is a lot of labor and labor is not free. First let's talk about how we get to the organic cost per click because it is not as simple as you might think. First we look at all the traffic from search engines that is not paid for. From this we subtract searches that are off-topic. Meaning searches that given the opportunity we would not have purchased. This process by the way is a great source of new Adwords so here is a case of SEO and PPC helping each other. Next we take out the searches that are what we would call phonebook searches. These are where the searcher is looking specifically for your business. The reason we remove this from both sides is that this is traffic that already knows who you are and they are looking for you. Organic or paid, this traffic is not a prospect - they are customers and we are studying marketing not customer service. The result we found in our study was mixed with some clients getting much better cost per click in PPC and others in SEO. One clear pattern is that the more expensive your PPC traffic is the more cost effective your SEO is likely to be. Clients with expensive PPC traffic clearly benefited from their SEO investments. It is very easy in SEO to not see the real cost per click.

Now what?

If you test this on your own data and your results match ours then it might change the way you allocate your budget resources between PPC and SEO. Each of these areas operates very differently and both require a long term strategy to produce results. Finding the right balance requires that we examine all the costs and not just the out of pocket.

Join SMS's CEO at the Central Coast Code Camp

The Central Coast Code Camp has invited me to speak at their event on September 27-28. This is an annual event that last year attracted 120+ attendees to listen and learn from some of the region's best technical minds. We are honored to be speaking on "SEO versus PPC a technical discussion." Last year the event drew 40 speakers for the two day event. Speakers last year came from all over California and included technology leaders like Amazon and several other leading names. The event is supported by the San Luis Obispo .Net User Group and Softec the leading technology trade association in the region.

The event includes the now famous "Geek" Dinner, Saturday Night, September 27th, 6:30 pm at the Embassy Suites.

The original Code Camp was a conglomeration of ideas by many different people across the development community. The idea was simple provide an off hour forum for the development community to speak and share ideas for them to come and enjoy. The results have been astounding with many events at many different cities across the nation.

But I want to be first on Google!!!

You and me both! For a new webmaster, trying to run your own SEO campaign can be a daunting task. What words do I pick? Where should I put them? I should use them an unnatural amount and have at least 50 Meta keywords right...? (no, by the way) There are a lot of questions and very few answers out there (plenty of speculation however). Sure someone from Google like Matt Cutts might let a little something slip and send the SEO community into a frenzy every once and a while, but that is like giving you one piece of a 500 piece puzzle and saying "Go!" So where do you start? With a solid footing in the common sense basics because they can do a lot of good for you and your web site.

Pick a Keyword

Don't come up with a list of 50 keywords and phrases and decide you're going to own all of them... with 1 page of content. If that's what you want to do save yourself a lot of trouble and sign up for Adwords and forget about SEO completely. In fact you should sign up for Adwords anyways (SEO & Adwords are part of a balanced breakfast), because you can use the data collected from it to see how popular your keywords are. Remember just because you're first on Google for something it doesn't mean anybody searches for it.

Title Your Page Appropriately

A good title makes both the search engine and the searcher happy. Don't stuff it full of keywords to create an unintelligible string of garbage. A short focused appropriate title will do the trick.

Support Your Title

When you are formulating headings and writing copy make sure it relates to the title you made earlier. Don't go crazy repeating your keyword over and over and over, that's not going to do you any favors. But if it is a natural appropriate spot drop it in. A well optimized page shouldn't look optimized. Remember you don't want to make them read unintelligent sounding keyword stuffed copy.

Write Good Content

This seems to be the part that everyone wants to get out of. Creating content is hard work, no doubt, but it is worth it to you for a few different reasons:

1. Search Engines love good content
2. People love good content
3. Good content gets links

Good Links to Your Site are More Important Than the Code on Your Site

If you meet someone that is going to magically send you to the top of Google by only manipulating the code on your site, the desired result is unlikely. To really boost your rankings you need to gain authority in the form of links. Not all links are worth the same, a link from a site with a high authority will have more positive impact on your site. In general the more good links you have to your site the better. However Google will not give you credit for purchased links and when they catch you it's going to hurt!

To see who is currently linking to you go to Yahoo and do a search that looks like this:
linkdomain:yourwebsite.com -domain:yourwebsite.com

Wow, Is It Really That Easy?

Nope. It's fair to say there is a lot more to it; these are just some common sense basics. But by employing a strong set of fundamentals you can practice by gaining rankings for lower traffic words, and eventually you can take what you've learned and chase the high traffic words and phrases. Also I would like to stress that taking a more holistic approach to Search Engine Marketing using PPC, SEO, Social Media, Print, etc will drive more traffic over time than picking just one tactic.

Self Induced Content Inspiration

One of the hardest things about running a web site is keeping it fresh. If you have new interesting content on your site at a daily or near daily frequency, visitors have a reason to come back often. More visitors usually mean more money, so this is a good thing. Plus on a side note, this is great for SEO. The only problem is where do you find the inspiration to do all this writing?

Content development can be difficult and time consuming, especially if you have no idea what to write about. As it turns out, if you are running any kind of analytics program or PPC account you have a tons of possible ideas just waiting for you. The stats in these accounts will tell you what words and themes are most popular on your site and on the web. This is great inspiration because it allows you to see real searches, not just what you think would be popular.

The first place to look for content inspiration is your analytics account. If you don't have one in place, Google Analytics is a free and easily implemented option. What you want to do in Analytics is find your traffic sources, and then search engines. You should be able to access a list of keywords used to visit your website. There will be a lot of words that make sense to you in there, some relevant surprises, and some that are completely out of left field. One of my clients that does general contracting and clean up had a number of searches on how to clean egg off of windows, cars, and driveways. It's on the very edge of what they do, but it might be worth writing about seeing as a good number of people are interested. However if a phrase or keyword doesn't make any sense just disregard it.

Now start really looking at this list. Are there predominant words, phrases, and ideas? And are these themes relevant to your business? If there are, you've just found some great possible content development ideas. Make sure you scour this list for any potential topics, you have a lot of content to create and every relevant little bit helps.

Now your other content goldmine is your PPC account. This is a collection of words and phrases you want people to use to get to your site. The best part about this is you can see the total number of searches done even if they didn't result in a visit to your site. So say you sell fruit and you get 40 visits a day for 'apples.' 'Oranges' only gets 4. If you're only looking at analytics 'apples' is clearly more popular and content development should be focused there. But before you start your research into the wild world of applesauce, check out your PPC account. There's a chance that 'oranges' is searched far more often than 'apples,' you're just not getting a proportional piece of the traffic. Always keep an eye on which words get the most impressions.

Now that you have a better idea of what you should write about, make a plan. As I get ideas I write them all down in the same place. Then I try to figure out what topics have priority and how to best space them out. You don't necessarily want to ride one topic at a time. If you run 2 weeks of articles on the same topic and you have some regular readers that like your site but not the current topic you're riding at the moment, you might break their daily reader habit.

So in short, keep it fresh, keep it interesting, keep it relevant, and don't forget all the inspiration you need is right under your nose!

Upcoming SMS Speaking Engagements

Systems & Marketing Solutions likes to stay active in the local community, and I am often asked to speak on Search Engine marketing topics or be a part of a panel of experts.

September 22nd and 23rd at the Embassy Suites in San Luis Obispo will hold its first ever Code Camp. The Code Camp is organized by Rob Hope CEO of San Luis Tech Consultants and an SMS client. The date and the time haven't been set yet, but I will be giving a talk on Designing for SEO and Adwords. The Code Camp is free, and you can register for the event online at www.centralcoastcodecamp.com .

I will also be speaking at the Santa Maria Manufacturer's Association meeting on September 25th. The SMMA holds a meeting on the fourth Tuesday of each month at 7:30 and is open to anyone interested in the advancement of manufacturing on the central coast. The meeting I will be speaking at is going to be hosted by Hardy Diagnostics (also an SMS client). My talk is going to be on Internet Marketing and how to get the most from Google Adwords.

If you have the opportunity, I encourage you to check out both groups and come meet some new people!

It Starts with the Query not the Page

I am constantly amazed by the search engine optimization (SEO) dialog that centers on page content. Statements like, "I want my page to come up first on the search engine" or "My page is first on Google" are signs that the person just does not understand the challenge. Search engine results start not with the page but with the user query, and that is what we have to understand and manage in order to develop a customer-centric Web strategy.

This is not to say that page design is not important, but to design the page well, you must understand what the user query will be. Without this knowledge, you are designing in the dark and guessing at the answer without even knowing the question. Coming up first on a term that customers do not use has zero business value. It might feed your ego but it will not feed your business. What does have value is to come up when there is an indicator that the person is interested in your product or service. Over the years I have heard many claim that they came up #1 on Google only to find out that according to the best research available, nobody ever searches for the term they are so proud of. The objective of all search engines is to provide quality links based on the user's query, and this objective serves your marketing. You do not need to beat the search engines-you need to become one with them. Professional advertisers have known for generations that message and timing are essential in effective advertising, and the Web has not changed this rule. The objective is not to come up first; it is to come up first at the right time.

One of the first things you realize as you look at the SEO challenge from this perspective is that SEO is not a cross-industry skill, but rather an industry-focused skill. One size does not fit all and the SEO expert must understand the customers, product benefits, and the industry culture. These are the driving force behind the formation of the query in the mind of the customer, which is the single most important place in marketing. Businesses struggle in expressing benefits rather than features, because they are all wound up on developing or producing the product. For example, the benefit of training is learning. Customers want to "learn" Spanish, not "train" Spanish. "Train" and "learn" are the same concept from different perspectives. "Learn" is what customers want and seek to do, but "train" is what the business does and how it thinks. Therein is the conflict that SEO experts have to deal with every day.

Everyone wants a simple solution, and we can have it just as soon as people start to be simple. The truth is that people are complex, and if you take 100 customers looking for the same thing, you will likely get at least 10 different queries. If you do not believe me, just watch "Family Feud," a game show is based on people thinking differently. This game is similar in many ways to the problems that SEO experts face. As an SEO designer, you have to assemble these queries, research their business value, then develop and optimize a web strategy based on that knowledge. The business value of a specific search depends how many people form queries like that, how many click through, and how well they convert to customers. Each phase of this sales pipeline must be considered and managed to get business value from SEO.

So how do people form queries? The answer is, of course, "differently," with the "80/20 Rule" in full force, with 20% of the queries representing 80% of the volume. But volume is not the only business-value metric in play. For example, in the training business, the term "tutorial" has huge volume but it is of marginal value due to the poor response when searching with this term. When a person is looking for a tutorial, they are expecting to find a free tutorial posted on the Web relative to the "subject" that they appended to the term "tutorial." That is their mindset, and customer minds are nearly impossible to change. So, while "tutorial" is a high-volume word, the traffic it attracts does not match the product; hence its value is marginalized by poor conversion. Another aspect of this is that broad keywords such as "tutorial" are of limited value for the same reason: poor conversion. In this age, your objectives need to be specific terms that clearly indicate a relationship to your product or service. The volume of traffic is much lower, but it is quality traffic.

Once we have boiled the queries down to our target list, we will need to test our assumptions. This is where Google AdWords can become your best friend. Google gives you more than just traffic. They give you real-world business intelligence. In 15 minutes you can be running a structured marketing test of your theories with real people in the real market. This is market research that 10 years ago would have cost thousands of dollars to conduct and would have taken months to test and compile. Using multiple ads groups, you can test the various search terms for volume and response in just a few weeks. The ad Google presents is not much different than the free listing in the rankings, with both having a hyperlink and a small amount of supporting text. My guess is that AdWords and ranked pages will perform in the same relative response ranges. While this statement cannot yet be proven, it does make common sense that people will respond in similar fashion when the environment is nearly identical, with the exception of the reading zone. You will get different populations in different reading zones, but the response should be consistent on a percentage basis. If you cannot get a reasonable response from Google AdWords, then even if your page does come up, your response rate will be poor. Coming up in the search and earning a Web site visitor are two very different things. There is a conversion factor in play here that you must understand and manage toward.

With properly tested concepts and a base strategy, we can turn our attention to page design and all the complexity that is so common in the SEO discourse. The difference is that with professional research, we know what the objectives are and how to measure them. Page design still has to balance the search engine requirements with the conversion of visitors into customers, but that is an art form discussion for a future article. To finish the loop, the SEO expert must either master those skills or find an expert partner in advertising or public relations to join their team.