Keyword Metrics for SEO (And Driving Actions from Data) - Whiteboard Friday

Key Takeaways

howas fans welcome to another edition of whiteboard Friday this week we're talking about some keyword metrics for SEO and how you can drive action from the data that you collect now some of this data is in the SEO M platform a lot of it is stuff that you know we haven't added in that you might be calculating manually yourself certainly all of it is available from your web Analytics tool uh Google analytics or omniture web Trends whatever you're using and from doing some specific analysis yourself maybe in Excel or something like that and what I want to help you do here is take all of this information all of this these data points that you're collecting about the keywords that are driving traffic to your site and be able to use them to take smart actions because collecting metrics is fine it's good to have analytics good to have data but it's useless unless you do something with it right I mean why bother looking at the uh you know number of or the percentage of market share of search engines unless you're going to actually take action based on those things so let's dive in here take a look real quick so the first one that I want to talk about is search engines versus market share so this is things like okay I'm getting 84% of my traffic from Google 8% from being 6% from Yahoo this is fine and it's something you might want to measure over time and over time if you see that your Shares are increasing or decreasing might take some action but the thing that you really want to do is compare it against the market averages and so I would uh I'll actually I'll I'll have Aaron put in the Whiteboard Friday post a link to uh I think it's stack counter who's got some great metrics around what these average market shares are for most websites and referring traffic key important point do not do not use comcore data okay if you use comcore data what you will see is something like you know Google has 65% market share Bing has like 14% market share Yahoo has like 20% market share no right everyone's website shows that they're getting between you know let's say 80 and 90% uh of their search traffic from Google right so if Google's market share is 65% how is this possible well the reason is because remember that comore is counting all searches on the Microsoft networks and on Yahoo's networks Yahoo has a huge content Network Microsoft has billions of web pages any searches performed internally on those sites count towards the search share versus Google who basically has very few actual web properties media properties content properties so all the searches go offsite to somewhere else right very few of those searches stay on Google versus being in Yahoo where a large percent of the searches that are performed end up back on Microsoft or Yahoo properties the action that you take once you drive once you see one of these is if your market share numbers are way off and and you think they're way off for your sector right so you could use uh you know some scoring against some competition uh you could use something like a hitwise to determine that you would want to say oh you know what we are low on Bing we're going to expend extra effort to try and get traffic from Bing and the other thing that I'd highly recommend that you put in here along with this column is so search engine market share you versus uh you know the the average market shares and then you also want to have something like a conversions data and throughout this talk throughout this this quick whiteboard Friday you know so conversions I got three here I got six there I got nine I got 10 whatever it is I want to say that I know conversions is one of those metrics that's that's tough to gauge especially for a lot of B2B folks or folks who are uh driving tra to their site then they have offline conversions conversions via phone all these kind of things and so driving at what is the actual conversion value these kinds of things is very tough for you if if you're in a pinch and you want a metric that suggests infers conversion infers value I really love using browse rate so browse rate come over here for a sec browse rate is essentially a symol metric that'll say something like you know 1.7 which means that on average when somebody visited a web page of yours right visit one of my web pages they browse to you know let's say uh 1.7 other Pages uh or or OR7 other Pages meaning that you know if um 100 visits come I will probably get 170 page views from those 100 visits that land on this page that come from that search search engine that come from that source so do you get what I'm saying basically what's nice about browse rate is it exists for every source that you could possibly think of and it's there by default you don't need to add a conversion action and it strongly suggests strongly infers usually that you will get more value from that visitor so browse rate is a great sort of substitute if for some reason you can't get conversions if you can't get conversions by all means put them in add action tracking you should have that in your web analytics but if for some reason you can't browse rate is a good substitute uh and it's a great way to substitute if you're looking at you know traffic sources that aren't conversion heavy but you still want to compare the value against them let's look at keyword distribution a lot of people like to break out keyword distribution in a number of formats so keyword distribution is a is a common metric right so folks will say oh uh how much traffic how many keywords are sending me head are coming from the head of the demand curve middle of the demand curve tail of the demand curve or long tail I actually like using four breakouts and so what I do is like head is more than 500 searches per month in terms of volume middle would be like 50 to 499 searches tail would be less than 50 and then long tail would be like there's no volume reported right Google AdWords tool or or whatever your data is pulling says boy you know what this there's nothing from here again this is a frustrating these are frustrating mrics to get if you need to get them what I would recommend is use a combination of your rank right so if you're tracking with SEO or you're using the SEO book rank tracker you're using uh you know some professional Enterprise level thing like a conductor or bright Edge or a Kario a rank above a search metrics those kinds of things you want your rank and then you want the number of visits right so and essentially you get if you put these together is you can get a sense of oh you know what this drove quite a bit of traffic but my ranking wasn't that high therefore I'm inferring that this is a head term or oh you know what my my visits were quite low even though my ranking was quite High there therefore I'm inferring this as a tail term um and hopefully in the future there'll be I don't know someone will make some spiffy software to do that when you think about that uh so once you have these distributions right you can see the number of keywords that those send right the number of keywords that are in each of these buckets the number of visits that they send the average ranking of those keywords so again you could calculate that you know inside your Ma's web app or a number of these other apps uh and conversion actions that you drive from these and what's great about this is this really lets you see like hey hang on a second you know what I I spend all my time worrying about my rankings for these you know 45 keywords the ones that are in my head that are driving most of my traffic my average rank number eight so I still have a lot of room to move but if I look at my conversion actions across these I think that the biggest opportunity might actually be you know maybe it's here in the tail right or even in the very long tail and then I would think to myself boy I need to SP stop spending a bunch of time worry about these few keywords that I manage and try and get rankings up on the vanity keywords and I need to think a lot more about the value of tail because you know for every uh keyword that I can capture here the number of conversion actions I can get from that is dramatically higher and when you see metrics like this in your analytics this really drives you to be a different kind of marketer to think to yourself all right how do I get more user generated content how can I produce more editorial content can I license content from somewhere could I Syndicate out my content from places and get more people contributing back to me content is clearly driving a ton of value and I need to do more content marketing likewise I I highly urge I think this is actually coming really soon in the Moz web app but I highly urge you to segment branded versus unbranded keyword terms this is incredibly important because if branded is driving all of your value then SEO is not really working for you other than to capture keywords that you would almost certainly otherwise capture with when unbranded is uh capturing a lot of value that's really your sort of SEO where capturing people early in the funnel in the discovery process before they know about your brand and so breaking out branded from under anded really lets you see how well the efforts of you know your your managed SEO efforts are going and likewise branded does let you see how well efforts like branding and market share and mind share among consumers or mind share among businesses if your B2B is going and if you see these metrics trending up or down particularly if you see branded trending down you might think to yourself boy we we need to get out there more we need to get more exposure you know people are losing excitement or interest in our brand and if you see unbranded going down you might be thinking to yourself well you know what either losing out in competitive rankings or we're losing out in uh the longtail and then you can look up here into the keyword distribution curve and figure out where that's happening and what why you're losing or gaining uh and so this is very important from an analytic standpoint it's also important from an action driving standpoint it can can tell you what to do what to concentrate on what to worry about and not where actions where where uh campaigns are going well and not right so you know your brand is going badly you might want to talk to whoever's running your uh brand advertising because that's that's probably in their wheelhouse the next thing I like to look at top keywords right from a keyword metric standpoint so you've got your top keywords here and I have you know you probably would have a big list of keywords in in the MOs web app you know I I don't know I keep track of around 75 80 I could have up to 300 in there but I I do you know searches uh and you could do this you know you can do this just using your your Google analytics right which is free uh so I might look at the number of searches that were generated this is going to have to come from AdWords which is frustrating um but if you can do it for your managed keywords is very nice to have that number in there I might look at visits conversions average Rank and if you want uh I would add one more here and look at I like adding keyword difficulty and looking at that and the reason is I can really get a sense of which keywords are going to be easiest for me so if I see you know this keyword has got four conversions two conversions one conversion but if I see something like oh there's only 15 searches I'm ranking number one there's not a lot of opportunity there but I see here well I got a 1% conversion rate if I work on conversion here you know and let's say the difficulty I don't know this is 55 and this is 48 and this is uh you know 72 right so 72 oh that's going to be super hard that's going to be very challenging right to increase this there's not a ton of search volume I'm already capturing some of this one this one looks really good to me right that looks like where I would focus some more actual effort on a single keyword and that's exactly what this list is designed to let you do to look at conversions against visits and search volume and difficulty and say hey I have opportunity you know what I rank a little better if I can push that up to number three even 3.5 gonna g to really help my business I'm going to capture more customers and the last place I look from a from a keyword metric it's technically not a keyword metric but I think it's very very important because of how it captures keywords and encapsulates this data is top content right so this is essentially like ah all right this is you know here's my homepage maybe that's my my landing page for you know product a and this is product B I can see how many visits from search that I'm getting on these I can calculate the number of conversions on those I look at the number of keywords uh that are sending visits these pages and this really helps to tell me the content that I've produced in the past how successful is that and going forward it informs me what content should I keep creating right so you know for product stuff great but when you're doing content marketing if you're running a Blog you're doing video You're producing articles you're syndicating or licensing stuff you're having guest writers post things for you you're doing user generated content finding out the value of that stuff is amazing right being able to know which content drove the right kinds of actions and is driving you know lots of different keywords longtail stuff head stuff whatever it is lots of conversions uh lots of visits from search you might want to M uh segment by the way so that this is conversion specifically search conversions so that you're not getting for example something mixed up where these are people coming from other sources to these pages and then converting you actually want to know for the visitors from search how many conversions you get on these and having this information is going to be great for uh analyzing previous content knowing what types of content to produce so what's great about the the analytics process is it makes you know an SEO a much more datadriven marketer I uh you know I look out in the world and I'm sure you do this too and you see boy you know uh there's the ad team over there or there's the the paid marketing team over there and they're doing you know sponsorships of events and they're doing uh uh you know branding plays they're doing television advertising and radio and print you know magazines and newspapers they're not held to kind of these strict standards right like a lot of that stuff is uncapturable the beautiful thing about SEO is how measurable this process is and how much you can do to improve it when you when you start to get these metrics up and running and you start doing this an analytics process oh man huge super win just awesome all right everyone take care hope you have a great week we'll see you again for another edition of whiteboard Friday