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SEOmoz | 8 Predictions for SEO in 2010
First off, apologies for my absence from the blog these past few days. It's been an incredibly busy time, trying to wrap things up before I leave for San Diego over the holidays. So much for a December lull... In this post, I'm going to try tackling a lot of the recent trends we've been observing from the engines and talk about my personal perception of what's to come over the next 12 months.
#1 - This Real-Time Search Thing is Outta Here
Microsoft initially beat Google to the punch in announcing their integration with Twitter data in their SERPs. And in response, last Monday, Google released what is, in my opinion, an early test version of Twitter integration that's nowhere near ready for prime-time. Google has a history of jumping the gun to prevent other companies from stealing the press narrative, but in this case, I think it's seriously damaging (and nearly everyone, consumer or search enthusiast, agrees) their usability and relevance.
As Danny Sullivan notes, it's like we're back to Infoseek in 1997. If you want to rank #1, don't worry about quality content, relevance or popularity, just be the last person to Tweet about a topic and you'll come out on top (at least, for a few seconds).
This is, in my estimation (and many others), the worst implementation of new results Google's ever implemented. I imagine the clickthrough and abandonment stats have their usability folks up in arms already, and it's only to preserve face from a PR perspective (as well as an increasingly prideful attitude of "Don't like it? So what are you gonna do about it?" that Aaron Wall describes in a gutting fashion here) that this has stayed in place as long as it has (1.5 weeks).
In 2010, I think this fades away. Perhaps not entirely, but we won't be seeing it for nearly as many queries with the prevalence we do today. Google may love real time, and it's certainly gotten them a lot of press (though very little of it is entirely positive), but they can't continue sacrificing quality for PR in this fashion. I think the engineers still run things over there, and the stats data is already making them balk. Although I don't have numbers, my impression is that we're already way down in the quantity of queries showing real time results compared to last week.
#2 - Twitter's "Link Graph" is the Real Deal
All that real-time integration bashing aside, I'm a firm believer in my original hypothesis that Twitter is cannibalizing the web's link graph. In fact, I think a rough history of "recommendation sources" looks something like:
Google has always strived to keep up with the latest ways that content is being recommended and suggested. It's how they determined popularity and relevance with PageRank and I think Twitter's data is merely the next evolution. Just yesterday, they launched their own URL shortening service (I think this was more to get data, but it's also possible it was a pre-emptive PR strike against bit.ly, who launched their PRO service just a day later).
Google's not going to just take raw number of tweets or re-tweets. I think we're already seeing the relevance and reputation calculations in their decisions of which tweets and sources to show in the real-time results, and I expect that algorithms/metrics like PageRank, TrustRank, etc. will find their way into how Google uses the real-time data. Today, SEOs want to turn tweets into links so they can get SEO benefit. My feeling is that tweets are going to carry their own weight in helping pages rank in the not-too-distant future.
#3 - Personalized Search is Here to Stay
Unlike real-time's temporal nature in the results, I think personalized search is here for the long haul. Google released their "permanent" personalization of results last week, and Bing released their own just this week. As usual, SearchEngineLand's coverage is impeccable, though one big question remains in my mind:
What metrics impact personalization?
Is it merely clickthroughs from the organic results? Does visit history play a role? Or clicks from other vertical search services Google offers? What about clicks from paid search ads - either in the SERPs or from AdSense/DoubleClick?
I'd love to see experimentation done on this front so marketers have a better idea what they're dealing with. If it's proven that you can get organic benefits by attracting PPC clickthrough, this may be the new "paid inclusion" for 2010, and could drive bid prices up massively as companies compete not only for paid listing clicks, but for the chance to earn "organic" positioning as well.
Personalization means a few things for SEOs, but it doesn't fundamentally change the game, IMO:
- The Rich Get Richer - It's now truer than ever. If you rank well, and earn solid traffic, you're going to be even harder to unseat. Startups and upstarts are going to have an even greater uphill battle to climb than before.
- Branding is More Important - you want your loyal visitors and fans scouring the SERPs for your listings, and clicking them more so than anything else. I expect some clever spammers are going to be manipulating this with everything from Mechanical Turk to virus infections that make their browser search for their brand and click those results. We'll see if Google has good protections in place to defend against this.
- There is No Normal Ranking - Or, at least, there's no "normal" ranking that's "average" in a personalized SERPs world. Rank tracking may still carry some value to understand how non-personalized searchers see your pages, but that data is going to be less useful in comparison to what your analytics report about search traffic and the trends. Win the "personalization" battle, and you may start to care less about the classic "rankings" battle.
Whenever we encounter these "paradigm changing" events in the SEO world, I like to go back to my philosophy about SEO fundamentals. From what I can see, it looks like things haven't changed enough yet to warrant panic. It's been a massively dynamic 3 months, but we're not on the precipice of anything that's going to shift SEO in the ways some previous "game-changers" have.
#4 - It's Going to Be a Two-Engine, 80/20 World
The latest figures suggest that Google continues to slowly gain market share in the US, while Bing & Yahoo! compete for share that will eventually belong to them both (once the regulatory hurdles clear, which I think they will). I believe that a year from now, most webmasters will be looking at a scenario where Comscore/Hitwise reports Binghoo! has ~25-28% market share, but those engines combine to send a little under 20% of all search traffic (remember that they count searches on all Microsoft and Yahoo! properties - even internal searches - while Google tends to send the vast majority of their search traffic externally to other sites).
#5 - Site Explorer & Linkdomain will Disappear
Tragically, everything I hear out of Yahoo! and Bing is that Site Explorer is off to the great beyond. The expense of maintaining a web index isn't something Yahoo!'s willing to invest in once they don't have to, and Bing's given no indication that they're going to re-open the portal to link information. The best we can hope for is an acceleration in the functionality offered by Bing Webmaster Tools, but even that's unlikely to offer competitive link intelligence.
I'm guessing other services will rise up to try to take Site Explorer's place, as the service had millions of monthly queries run against it.
#6 - SEO Spending Will Rise Dramatically
Forrester put out a great report on US Interactive Marketing Spend (a little pricey at $1749, but interesting). Two graphics struck me as particularly compelling:
SEO trails only social media and online video as places where marketers (not just search marketers, but ALL marketers) will be shifting dollars.
Meanwhile, SEO continues to outpace PPC in terms of CAGR. We've still got a long way to go before balance is established between the share of clicks SEO commands and the fraction of spend it receives, but the gap is slowly closing.
#7 - 2010 is the Year of Conversion Rate Optimization
If I were doing another startup today, it would focus on software for conversion rate optimization. I think this is still the most under-utilized and highest ROI activities in the marketing department, but more awareness is on its way. CRO isn't just about testing; it's about building a process for improving converion over time. Online businesses can generate so much revenue from this, yet few invest. I think 2010 is the year, simply because it's an inflexion point for companies to assess their spend and where they derive value. These guys are likely in for a blockbuster year; I wish I could invest :-)
This graphic comes via my post on choosing which Internet Marketing Channel to Pursue.
#8 - More Queries will Send Less Traffic
Google & Bing are both doing more to make their visitors stickier and get their queries answered without ever having to leave the engine. This is a good product practice for both companies, and I'm surprised Google's taken so long to move away from their "get people off Google" point-of-view, but it's definitely happening. Check out some recent examples:
Everything I need to know is right there - the last game score, the record, the opponent, their next match day and time. The only thing missing? What channel it's playing on in my area.
I don't even have to complete my query! Google's got that weather report sitting in the suggest box. They wrote about this feature here which launched last week. Google O/S had another good post on the topic.
Thankfully, I'm not actually headed to Kodiak, but those results are pretty spiffy, and are likely to prevent me from needing to visit Alaskaair.com and get that flight info.
The customer service number is something Bing's started to provide more and more (though there's one company even they don't have that data on). With Fedex, you don't even need to leave Bing to track a package (Google also offers similar functionality).
My perception is that the more the engines can apply "instant answers" to search queries, the more they will, and the less any other sites will see traffic from those queries. It's a better user experience this way, and I'm certain it's one of the biggest things that engenders loyalty and return queries - something both engines are desperately competing for.
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Could Microsoft-Yahoo Deal Give Google A Leg Up?
Microsoft and Yahoo could ink their Web search and ad agreement announced in late July by the end of the week. So says All Things Digital's Kara Swisher, citing sources close to the partnership. But as the deal gets closer to reality, it appears that red flags have begun to wave. Ad industry executives had expected Microsoft and Yahoo to seal the deal in October. But when that date passed, industry insiders began to scrutinize the structure of the agreement and whether the real winner would become Google. The deal, however, remains subject to U.S. and European antitrust regulations. Yahoo has several search syndication deals expiring now and during the next year, according to Didit CEO Kevin Lee. "With both Yahoo and its syndication partners being powered by Bing for paid and organic results, within the pending partnership, the real hurdle for Yahoo in this is how Yahoo can continue to deliver value as an extra layer for search syndication partnerships," he says. "Microsoft has good reason to try to establish those partnerships directly with publishers, without the Yahoo middleman."
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Google Dashboard: Now You Know What Google Knows About You
There’s no two ways about it: if you use a lot of Google services, then Google knows a lot about you. Google has received a solid amount of criticism because of this, and they’ve decided to alleviate the issue by launching Privacy Dashboard; a one-stop-shop with all the information that Google knows about you and your online habits collected in one place. Dashboard covers more than 20 products and services, including Gmail (Gmail), Calendar, Docs, Web History, Orkut (Orkut), YouTube (YouTube), Picasa (Picasa), Talk, Reader, Alerts, Latitude and others. It’s quite a scary list; personally, I’m using all of these, and I was quite interested to see what exactly I’ve told Google (Google) about myself without even knowing. Google calls the “scale and level of detail of the Dashboard unprecedented,” but I was a bit disappointed. The dashboard is nothing more than a selected list of privacy-related settings from the services listed above. You can find some interesting tidbits of info about your various Google account that you may have forgotten. For example, you can see which calendars you’ve shared with other people. But all of this info was already available in the Calendar settings. Sure, it’s nice to have all these in one place, should you ever want to review all your private information stored at Google at once, but there’s nothing really new about this list; you could even call it a privacy-related compilation. Unfortunately, it’s also an unpleasant reminder of just how much data you’re giving out to Google (and other online services). You can find the dashboard over at google.com/dashboard, or by login into your Google account, clicking on Settings, choosing “Google Account Settings” from the dropdown, and then clicking on the link next to “Dashboard”.
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Search Drives Significantly Higher EBITDA Margins For Google Vs Yahoo (CHART)
The Business Insider 126 days ago | Comment
Google has won the search war and now claims about 70% of the worldwide search market (versus about 16% for Yahoo). The result? A lot more EBITDA generated the past 5-10 years. Currently Google's EBITDA margins approach 60% versus a little less than 40% for Yahoo.
Join the conversation about this story »
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Google's 'Insights' Focuses on Growing Display Ads
When Google reported surprisingly strong revenue growth last week, executives said it was thanks to the resilience of search marketing. The company hopes to have the same results with the display ad business. This week, Google plans to roll out a new tool for large advertisers to gauge the success of their display buys beyond the most common metrics of impressions and clicks. The tool crunches data from thousands of users to figure out how many searches a campaign caused post-viewing, as well as how many visits to the marketer's Web site. It then compares this with a control set of users not exposed to the display ads. By comparing the two samples, Google believes it can isolate how much of search and site traffic increases can be directly attributed to banner ads as opposed to other marketing efforts. The tool, Campaign Insights, is part of Google's twin approach to growing the overall display ad business and its chunk of it. Part of Google's overall strategy is to make it easier to buy banners. The linchpin of this is DoubleClick Ad Exchange, rolled out last month. Another focus is in measurement, as Google tries to come up with a way to make display as accountable as search when just .1 percent of display ads generate clicks. A recent comScore study found the number of ad clickers is in sharp decline. "Helping advertisers get performance they can measure is a big part of the strategy," said Brad Bender, product management director, display, Google Content Network. Google is rolling out the free Campaign Insights only to advertisers running campaigns on the Google Content Network of thousands of sites. It said it has no plans to offer it through its DoubleClick ad-serving unit. Studies have shown that display ads greatly impact search behavior. Google rival Microsoft last year released Engagement Mapping, a tool that assigns different value for search clicks, giving more weight to advertising a user saw before clicking a search ad rather than attributing all the value to the last click. Google is using data it collects in its ad network and installations of the Google toolbar to make its calculations, according to Bender. Campaign Insights is available to large advertising clients in the U.S. and U.K.
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Top Keyword Price Nears $100 Per Click
The highest-priced keyword in the United States last month sold on Google for $99.44 per click, according to the AdGooroo Search Engine Advertising Update: Q309. The report released Wednesday pegs Mesothelioma as the highest-selling keyword in September. The same word sold on Yahoo in the No. 1 spot for $60.68 per click. The phrase "auto insurance comparison" took top honors on Bing, bringing in $55.20 per click. It's the first time that AdGooroo's quarterly report has analyzed the price for keywords, according to Rich Stokes, founder and CEO of AdGooroo. He couldn't tell Online Media Daily how many times the top keywords were clicked on during the month. As for the word "mesothelioma," it seems lawyers have ramped up paid-search ads based on lawsuits related to the asbestos-causing lung cancer. The paid search ads direct people to lawyers affected by the death sentence. "If I was a law firm specializing in mesothelioma lawsuits I would put the paid-search ads on Bing," he says. "The word hasn't caught up demand on Bing as it has on the other two search engines."
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A Conversation with Sergey Brin...
Sergey Brin is holding an audience this morning with a roomful of journalists in New York City. Below are my live notes.
Sergey Brin: We have had a number of interesting activities. A bunch of you saw the verizon announcement, android, software platform, more enhancements in terms of faster software, better software. A number of devices are coming out as a trickle, many more we expect. Google Books, a hearing today, but generally that is something I am very proud of, to make the world’s books accessible. Have written a little piece I hope comes out as an op-ed.
Eric Schmidt: It seems like Sergey has jumped the gun. We should focus mostly on search, and some of the ideas Sergey has. We are having our global sales meeting here, we brought senior sales executives. The mood was very, very positive. We told them that the worst is behind us and we are clearly seeing aspects pf recovery, what is notable is we are seeing aspects of recovery I not just US but in Europe. I thought it was going to be US first, Europe second, Asia we never saw a hit. We are increasing our hiring rate and investment rate in anticipation of a recovery.
Sergey: There are a bunch of things that have come out recently, you can now get more commercial results or less commercial results. There are other controls that are coming down the pike. I will highlight now, today you can restrict things by date, but that is based on dates mentioned in the text, cannot restrict based on the date the text was authored.
Steven Levy: You have more activity from your competitor in redmond, rolled out a branded search engine. Historically when one competitor steps up it opens up innovation. Do you feel this increased competition will ramp up your innovation, or is it just business usual?
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Revealing a competitor’s long tail SEO success
Michael 155 days ago
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Revealing a competitor’s long tail SEO success
by Dixon Jones on October 7, 2009
One of the many misconceptions of “Page Rank” is that it refers to a website. In fact it refers to a single page. It is entirely possible for an inner page to rank for a big term, but it was much harder to get decent back-link data for an internal URL until the birth of the Link Intelligence industry. Now those barriers to understanding are starting to fall. This post is about analyzing back links of inner pages.
How do you find out what PAGES are pulling rank on competitor’s website?
If you know what phrase you are chasing in the search engines, then it is easy to see who you are trying to beat. But how do you find out what nuggets your competitor has found, that you did not even know existed? Typically, these golden long tail terms are sending traffic to an inner page.
Any analysis of the home page will miss out on this understanding. I thought I would use my first Blogstorm article to show you just how easy it is to see what pages are getting to the top of Google and under search conditions. Let’s take Blogstorm.co.uk itself. Of course, the strongest link text will be it’s brand. But when we use Majesticseo’s Link Intelligence Tool to look at the top anchors for the whole domain, I see some interesting anchor text from referring domains:
(Above: Blogstorm’s strongest External Link Anchor text. Source: majesticseo)Here from the MajesticSEO summary panel I can see that Patrick once wrote an article on how to launch a website. A quick check on Google confirms that Blogstorm is number 1 on Google for the phrase “launching a website”.
What’s more – the link is to an inner page which is highly targeted. Of course, being written by Patrick Altoft, it links to his web design and development company.
So – before I started this article, I knew very little about Blogstorm. Now I know that they are number 1 on Google for a term that is highly targeted to their business.
The article was strong enough to get external backlinks with good anchor text. If I wanted more data, I could go through several thousand anchors, building up a good picture as to how and where Blogstorm was scoring on organic traffic.
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PPC Integration: Integrating PPC with SEO, Part 2 - Search Engine Watch (SEW)
Michael 156 days ago
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PPC Integration: Integrating PPC with SEO, Part 2
By Melissa Mackey, Search Engine Watch, Sep 3, 2009
The number of companies performing SEM in silos is still surprising. They'll hire one agency to do PPC and another to do SEO. Or they'll have an in-house marketer doing PPC, while SEO is delegated to their IT department.
These scenarios aren't inherently bad. They can work very well -- if there's communication between the two. In Part 1, we outlined ways to integrate PPC with e-mail marketing. Today we'll talk about the key information that should be shared when integrating PPC with SEO.
Step 1: Develop a Master Keyword List
In school, we knew we had to do our homework if we wanted to get good grades. It's no different in search marketing.
While the execution of a SEO campaign is very different from the execution of a PPC campaign, keywords are the basis for both. Work with your agency or in-house SEM team to develop a list of key phrases that describe your product or service and are critical to your business.
If you specialize in one or two products or services, the list may be very short. For many e-commerce Web sites, the list will be extremely long. That's OK. If it's important to your business, make sure it's on the master list.
Step 2: Prioritize the List
Now it's time for some down-and-dirty keyword research. There are many free or low-cost keyword tools you can use, including the Google AdWords keyword tool. Pick one and go with it.
The first goal of keyword research is obtaining search volume estimates. You want to make sure you're expending your efforts on the most leveraged terms. Usually these are the terms with the most searches.
The second goal is finding additional variations on the key phrases you've selected. Sometimes the first phrase that comes to your mind isn't the first one to come to the searcher's mind, especially if you're selling a technical product or one that involves insider jargon that the layperson wouldn't know.
Once you have all major keyword variations, and search volume for each, start prioritizing. Sort your list by volume and keyword groups.
For instance, you might want to prioritize keywords around your top-selling product lines. Or you may want to prioritize your most profitable product line, or a new product line. Decide what's most important to your business and put that at the top of the list.
Step 3: Launch your PPC Campaigns
Now, the fun begins. It's time to put that research into practice. You should launch PPC first.
This is quick and relatively easy to do: all you need is your keyword list, ad copy, and a credit card, and ads can be live within a day or two. Also, you'll have greater control over your PPC campaign than you will over a SEO campaign.
While a good SEO can definitely control many facets, ultimately you're at the mercy of the search engines when it comes to ranking, description, PageRank, etc. With PPC, you can control your keywords, bids, ad copy, time of day your ad shows, and many other aspects -- and you can turn the whole thing off with the click of a mouse.
Step 4: Observe and Optimize
Keep close tabs on key PPC metrics such as CTR and conversion rate by keyword, as well as quality score. Tweak your campaign by dialing down losers and boosting winners. The goal here isn't only to gather data, but ideally to get conversions as well!
While your PPC campaign is running, get started on your SEO research. A good place to start is Eric Enge's 60 minute site audit. But don't make any site changes yet. Once you have about 30 days worth of PPC data (the time frame will vary depending on how much traffic your site gets), use this information to determine where to begin SEO. Some options might be:
- Keywords that convert well in PPC for which you'd like to dominate the page by also ranking well in SEO.
- High-volume keywords that are expensive to buy in PPC, but would drive high numbers of conversions from organic traffic.
- Keywords that you'd ultimately like to stop bidding on in PPC and generate traffic solely from organic sources.
- Keywords or groups of keywords that are relevant to your business, but that have a low PPC quality score. Optimizing the landing pages (along with improving PPC campaign structure and ad copy) can often improve your quality score in the process.
- Terms for which competitors outrank you.
There are many other options. The point is, don't guess at this stuff.
Even if your Web site only has 10 pages, SEO can be a daunting task if you don't know where to begin. Use PPC to determine where you can get the biggest impact, and start there.
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Track SEO rankings and Sitelinks with Google Analytics II
Michael 156 days ago
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Track SEO rankings and Sitelinks with Google Analytics II2 September, 2009 André Scholten 88 comments, leave your own!
Earlier this year I did a guest post on this site to show you how to track your SEO rankings with Google Analytics. It was quite some news for a lot of people, just take a look at the 300+ comments. And now it's time for the follow-up.
Google's new technology
Since a while Google is testing a new AJAX version of their search engine. I'm not sure who's seeing the AJAX version and who isn't, but in Holland most of the Firefox users do see it. You can see if you're one the new one by looking at the url of a result page:
The great thing about this new version is that it makes Google Analytics capable of tracking the clicked position. Yes you heard what I say: the position. Where the 'old' Google only allowed us to track the page a keyword was on, the new Google allows us to track the exact position.
The new filters
You can use the first 2 filters mentioned in the old article, be before you do that: create a new profile where you can apply these filters to (tip: watch the video where Joost explains this all):
Filter name: "Ranking 1" Filter type: "Custom filter - Include" Filter field: "Campaign Medium" Filter pattern: "organic"
Filter name: "Ranking 2" Filter type: "Custom filter - Include" Filter field: "Campaign Source" Filter pattern: "google"
And this is the new filter that is capable of tracking positions:
And the copy/paste version:
Filter name: "Ranking 3" Filter type: "Custom filter - Advanced" Field A - Extract A: "Campaign term", "(.*)" Field B - Extract B: "Referral", "(\?|&)cd=([^&]*)" Output To - User Defined: "$A1 (position: $B2)"
The new reports
If you have implemented everything correct you should see this in the "Visitors - User Defined" report:
A list of keywords with the position the keyword was on when a visitor clicked it. Now you're able to see the exact positions, more precise than any ranking tool that is out there. There's 1 minor drawback: business listings next to the little maps are counted as a position also:
The blue result is counted as the 11th result, and not as the first organic result. But when you're analyzing your positions you can easily separate the geo-related keywords from the rest.
Sitelinks
Very interesting: the sitelinks positions are also tracked, and in a more intelligent way than the maps results. If you click on a sitelink, the actual position of that sitelink is passed on. For example, this sitelink has position 4:
If you want to get better insights about your sitelinks you should create an extra profile with the first 3 filters mentioned above. Then add this extra filter to only track those keywords where people clicked on the (full or oneline) sitelinks:
Filter name: "Ranking 5" Filter type: "Custom filter - Include" Filter field: "Referral" Filter pattern: "oi=(oneline_sitelinks|smap)"
The positions you will see are pure sitelinks positions, and you will get an idea about which sitelink is popular and which isn't.
Extra tip
While we are dissecting the referring url from the Google Search engine we could take a look at the "meta" parameter (my dutch blogpost about this). It's used when people use one of these options:
The selected country or language is in the "meta" parameter (not applicable for Google.com) and can be made visible with the following filter:
Filter name: "Language / Country" Filter type: "Custom filter - Advanced" Field A - Extract A: "Referral", "(?|&)meta=([^&]*)" Output To - User Defined: "$A2"
And remember: do this on a new profile so you don't mess up existing profiles. The selected language(s) or country is visible in the "Visitors - User Defined" report.
I had this filter for quite a while on a lot of Dutch sites and saw that the three options where used like this:
- The internet: 96,69%
- Pages in Dutch: 3,28%
- Pages from Holland: 0,03%
Well, that was the update, hope you liked it.
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Best SEO Blog » Blog Archive » SEO Report Example – What Makes A Good SEO Report
Michael 156 days ago
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SEO Report Example – What Makes A Good SEO Report
What makes a good SEO report? Have you ever thought about that? Most people rely on automated rank checking reports, which I feel provide some value (if you track the rankings as trend lines on a graph) but they don’t really get into the meat of what I would want reported to me, were I to farm out my SEO reporting to someone else.
There are a number of things that I look at when doing traditional SEO, particularly for my own sites where I am developing content and seeking new traffic that appeals to me. The SEO community is beginning to focus more on conversions than on rankings and referrals but informational conversions (what I usually seek for myself) are not always appealing.
For that matter, transactional conversions (sales) may not always be appealing, either. You may get a lot of customers who abuse your return policy, for example. Some companies have actually been targeted for what I would deem return policy abuse by a few blogs and Web sites.
Transformational conversions (signups or registrations) may also be unappealing if they are made for bogus reasons. In my science fiction and fantasy forums, for example, we constantly have to delete accounts that were created by spambots and low-life “link building” SEOs who create forum profiles in volume. I would prefer not to have to deal with those kinds of people.
So here are a few items I would want included on a good SEO report. Your mileage may vary.
Search Results Rankings – I do monitor some keywords, but what I would really like is a report that monitors query spaces. A query space consists of all the keywords and relevant content that would be served for those keywords that pertain to a particular topic. So I don’t just want to rank well for “itemized blue widget topicality”, I also want to rank well for “topicality relating to itemized blue widgets”, “blue widget topical itemization”, and “topic-specific itemized blue widgets”.
Furthermore, as I noted above I would want to see these rankings graphed into trend lines. Ideally I would want to see a 2-year rolling window. Since a query space could theoretically entail thousands of keywords and since many of those variations would produce virtually identical results, I would want to arbitrarily limit my query space analysis to about 5 keywords per query space.
So show me a graph by limited query space that includes up to 5 keywords with rankings for the past 2 years — by search engine (Ask, Bing, Google, and Yahoo! would be sufficient). I would also want to track a few meta search engines (including Ixquick, Dogpile, and 1 or 2 others). And then I would want to include a 3-month or 6-month window for new or smaller search engines.
A typical site with 100 pages of content should be tracking about 500 query spaces (approximately 2500 keywords across 10-15 search engines and meta search engines).
Furthermore, I would want to see aggregate rankings broken out by category: major search engines, meta search engines, and new search engines. Even though the query spaces are unrelated to each other, such aggregate rankings reports would give you a snapshot or birds’ eye view of your ranking depth.
Referral String Data – I would want to see which queries people are using to find my content. I would want to know month-by-month for about 2 years which strings are the most popular (the top 100 would be okay). However, I would want to see this data broken out by referer — don’t bother figuring out which one is a search engine, just tell me who the referers are that include a query string.
I would want to see queries flagged as seasonal if they occur in a cyclic pattern. I would want to see queries flagged as “never seen before”. I would want to see queries flagged as “stable”. And I would want to see queries flagged as “declining”.
You need trend graphs to do this kind of analysis and it can all be automated but no one does it to this level of detail.
Search Referral Demographics – So take that referral data report you just put together and find out what you can about who the referrers are — are they indeed search engines, or are they just sites with search boxes powered by search engines, or are they search engine partners? Are there any new names in the mix?
The sooner I identify new resources, the sooner I can get another advantage over my competitors. The same is true for query string analysis. If you’re suddenly getting traffic for a query you haven’t targeted, maybe you should optimize for that query space and see where that strategy takes you.
Competitors’ Analysis Report – Who my competitors are is not determined so much by who ranks for what keyword as how many query spaces the same sites appear in. You can divide competitors into “sites like mine that pursue all these query spaces” and “sites unlike mine that appear in these few query spaces”.
Some of your Class A competitors will be larger than you. Some will be newer than you.
Some of your Class B competitors will be so huge you are not even a blip on their radars. They don’t care about your query spaces — they just happen to show up here and there.
If your site sells shoes to American customers, your competitors will be other sites that sell shoes to American customers. The occasional CNN article about shoes will appear in your query spaces but CNN is not your competitor even if it outranks you.
Most competitive analysis reports lack sense and coherence. They look at nonsense like backlink profiles, comparative rankings, and on-page keywords. You’ll learn more about a competitor by comparing how many query spaces you both appear in without really looking at comparative rankings.
What makes a site a Class A competitor? You’ll know it when you see it. It’s the site that, if you were running it, you would try to push into all the query spaces you care about. Size and age really have nothing to do with it.
Backlink Profile Stability – I should think that if someone were doing SEO for me then they should know enough about link theory to be able to report to me which linking resources are performing well for my needs.
No, I’m not going to provide you with any criteria, but rest assured there are no link analysis tools out there that tell you want I would want to see in a report.
Every month I receive numerous offers from “SEO firms” wanting to help me with my rankings and link building. Friends, before I would give my money to you, I would want to know you could deliver the reporting by which I would hold you accountable. This ain’t your daddy’s ranking report — not by a mile.
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Search Marketing: Microsoft Improves Bing with Pictures - Advertising Age - Digital
Are pictures really worth a thousand words? Microsoft hopes so. Today, the Seattle-based software behemoth took the stage at TechCrunch50 to unveil visual search, the newest feature for its new search-engine, Bing.
