(Part VII of a Series on Web Analytics for Search Engine Marketing)
New York was great, of course. And, coming from San Francisco, I thought it was scorching hot. At least until I got back and found out it was even hotter back here! But I’m a terrible homebody and it’s always nice to be back.
A quick note here, CRM Buyer just ran the first part of an article I wrote on implementing a tagged web analytics solution. It’s called "Implementing a Web Analytics Solution: Perils, Pitfalls and Practical-Advice." I think the title is pretty self-explanatory - so if you’re interested here is the link:
I’m getting near the end of this series on SEM measurement, but I still have a couple more topics to cover. Today I thought I’d switch away from this litany of measurement failures to something that qualifies more as an opportunity – the identification of SEO holes on a site.
What are SEO holes? They’re places in your site that are relatively poorly indexed or scored by one or more of the major search engines. In some cases, whole sites are SEO holes – black holes that for one reason or another seem to swallow search spiders and give back no or very poor rankings. These black hole sites aren’t very interesting from a measurement perspective – they usually just need basic SEO revamping.
However, we’ve found that for large sites even fairly ambitious SEO efforts often concentrate on limited areas of the site and are quite frequently very Google specific. This can leave large holes on the site – where content is poorly indexed on all the search engines or, even more common, poorly indexed on one or more specific engines but well indexed on others. These holes are often completely unnoticed – since the SEO effort is typically measured only by the total volume of organic traffic. If that goes up significantly everyone is happy and no one thinks to look for new opportunities.
In addition, many sites engage an SEO organization on a retainer basis but don’t have a very good way to providing them with direction. That often means that they get good value during the start-up phase of an engagement but this declines as the SEO consultants just seek to maintain a new (improved) status quo.
Web Analytics can help here by providing a fairly simple analysis of SEO holes. There are two basic techniques here: compare the % of Search Sourced Entries for a content (or page) to the average for the site or for that class of page on the site. This first technique can identify content areas that haven’t been well indexed. Pointing your SEO experts at this virgin territory can help keep an engagement productive and can provide pretty dramatic returns for such a simple analysis. The second technique is to compare the ratio of referrals for Entries to a page or Content Area by search engine. This technique allows you identify content areas that are well indexed on one SE but not on another. This kind of analysis can often pinpoint content that one or more engines are struggling with. And, once again, these are high return places for an SEO expert to target.
For large sites, it’s surprising how often SEO experts miss big holes and are satisfied with a one-time improvement in overall organic volume. By measuring for SEO holes, you’ll get the most out of your SEO engagement and you may be able to significantly improve your overall organic traffic!
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