Optimize your Search Program through Research

What do I Need or Want to know?
1. How are we doing and how to benchmark?
2. How and what is my competition doing?
3. What opportunities am I missing?
4. Key SEO diagnostics to monitor your search health

Benchmarking Current State
1. What are my business goals?
a. What do we want from our search program?
b. What products and keywords do we need to perform?
c. What would be a considered a success?

2. How are we doing today?
a. How much traffic and for what keywords?
b. What share of search am I getting?
c. What are my most valuable words?

3. Where can I get improvements?

Create a Traffic Baseline
Select a subset of important keywords related to your business & average traffic

Baseline Options:

• Average of 3, 6, 12 months
• Average of seasonal variations – busy, slow, average
• Average of advertising cycles – high advertising, low advertising
and/or no advertising

Demonstrate Change over Baseline
Show the % Change (Δ) over baseline for all important keywords

Change Formula - (Current month divided by baseline) -1

Show overall improvement in your SEO traffic over some baseline period.

Cost of Poor Performing SEO
Show the incremental PPC budget to make of for organic search traffic

Helps demonstrate to management why additional
resources should be spent on SEO activities to capture a
larger share of traffic that does not have a cost per click.

Who is your competition?
• Named Competitors
– Typically companies management really cares about that compete
with you on sales and market share.
– Who are your biggest direct competitors IBM vs. HP
– The larger the company typically the poorer they do in SEO

• Search Results Competitors
– These are the companies that rank in the top positions of search
engines and may not be a direct competitor – like Wikipedia or a
Trade Journal
– Need to understand “why they are ranking” and if you can leverage
their ranking via advertising or links

What do you want to know?
• PPC Advertising Spend
– Insight on what your competition is spending on paid search
– What keywords do they seem be be performing well for?
– What ad messages are they using?

• Keyword Lists
– What keywords are they using in PPC and/or ranking well for in SEO
– How are they performing for various keywords ?
– What pages are ranking well – home page or deep pages

• Inbound Links
– What quality and relevant sites are linking to them?

SEM Rush – www.semrush.com $

10

Keyword Spy – keywordspy.com $

11

PPC Ad Performance Monitoring

See which competitor ads are being clicked and converting and which are not!

12

Compete – compete.com $

15

Open Site Explorer –
opensiteexplorer.org $

16

SEOmoz Link Research –
seomoz.com $

17

Building the Business Case via
Opportunity Research

Why Calculate Your Opportunity?
Calculating opportunity from the start helps…
• Make the business case and justify the investment
• Focus your activities and identify content gaps
• Set expectations – Keeping it real
• Prioritize resources to focus on the most value and greatest return

6 Parts of the Opportunity Matrix TM

1. Identify your important target keywords (gold words)
– These are the words that are critical to your business

2. Determine demand for your gold words
– Get data from Keyword Discovery, WordTracker or Google AdWords Suggestion

3. Determine current gold word performance (rank
and/or traffic share)
4. Estimate a share of search clicks for your brand
5. Estimate the value ($$) of a visitor to your site
6. Estimate the incremental sales or leads from SEO

Gold Word Demand
Select a subset of important keywords related to your business

Est. Projected Visits
Current
Searches Current
Keyw ord Percent Rank at Monthly Added Monthly Added
per SE Traffic Est 1 Est 2
Google Visits Visits Visits Visits
Month
camera phone 149,378 5,453 3.65% 3 5% 7,469 2,016 10% 14,938 9,485
camera cell phone 50,175 0 0.00% none 2,509 2,509 5,018 5,018
camera phone pic 20,094 0 0.00% none 1,005 1,005 2,009 2,009
mp3 phone 18,350 0 0.00% none 918 918 1,835 1,835
camera phone picture 17,356 0 0.00% none 868 868 1,736 1,736
mp3 cell phone 16,294 0 0.00% none 815 815 1,629 1,629
camera cellular phone 12,156 0 0.00% none 608 608 1,216 1,216
free camera phone 11,856 0 0.00% none 593 593 1,186 1,186
camera flip phone 6,269 0 0.00% none 313 313 627 627
cell phone w ith mp3 player 6,088 0 0.00% none 304 304 609 609
mp3 player phone 2,356 0 0.00% none 118 118 236 236
mp3 mobile phone 1,631 0 0.00% none 82 82 163 163
mp3 cell phone ringtone 1,331 0 0.00% none 67 67 133 133
Total 313,334 5,453 1.74% 15,667 10,214 31,333 25,880
Value of a Visit $1.00
SE Visits
for Monthly Annual Potential
% Increase
Words Revenue Revenue Increase
Listed
Current SE Traffic 5,453.00 $5,453.00 $65,436.00
5% 15,666.69 $15,666.69 $188,000.25 $122,564.25 187.30%
10% 31,333.38 $31,333.38 $376,000.50 $310,564.50 474.61%
Highlighted fields are variables that can be manipulated to create other scenarios.

Current Gold Word Performance
Find the current traffic for those phrases from your Web Analytics tools

Current
Searches Current
Month
camera phone 149,378 5,453 3.65% 3 5% 7,469 2,016 10% 14,938 9,485
mp3 phone 18,350 0 0.00% none 918 918 1,835 1,835
Total 313,334 5,453 1.74% 15,667 10,214 31,333 25,880
SE Visits
% Increase
Listed
5% 15,666.69 $15,666.69 $188,000.25 $122,564.25 187.30%
10% 31,333.38 $31,333.38 $376,000.50 $310,564.50 474.61%

Ranking of Gold Words
Use a SEO Rank Checking tool to see where you are currently
ranking for these phrases.*

Current
Searches Current
Month
camera phone 149,378 5,453 3.65% 3 5% 7,469 2,016 10% 14,938 9,485
mp3 phone 18,350 0 0.00% none 918 918 1,835 1,835
Total 313,334 5,453 1.74% 15,667 10,214 31,333 25,880
SE Visits
% Increase
Listed
5% 15,666.69 $15,666.69 $188,000.25 $122,564.25 187.30%
10% 31,333.38 $31,333.38 $376,000.50 $310,564.50 474.61%
You can skip this step if you don’t believe in rank checking. But realize, 90% of searchers click something on page 1.

Projecting Visits
How many more search referrals can you REASONABLY obtain?
A top ranking can deliver 3-10% of demand for non-branded searches

Current
Searches Current
Create general projections by Percent
Keyw ord
per SE Traffic
Rank at
Est 1
Monthly Added
Est 2
Monthly Added
changing the % of demand Month
camera phone 149,378 5,453 3.65% 3 5% 7,469 2,016 10% 14,938 9,485
> Broad projections
mp3 phone 18,350 0 0.00% none 918 918 1,835 1,835
or
> Create projections by keywords
Total 313,334 5,453 1.74% 15,667 10,214 31,333 25,880
SE Visits
% Increase
Listed
5% 15,666.69 $15,666.69 $188,000.25 $122,564.25 187.30%
10% 31,333.38 $31,333.38 $376,000.50 $310,564.50 474.61%

The Value of a Visit
Unfortunately, not every visit results in the BIG CONVERSION….
But every visit does have a value!
Current
Introducing $$$ is far more Percent
Keyw ord
Searches Current
per SE Traffic
Rank at
Est 1
Monthly Added
Est 2
Monthly Added

powerful than “we have a #1 Month

ranking for this” or “x amount of 3.65%
camera phone
camera cell phone
149,378
50,175
0.00%
5,453
0
3
none
5% 7,469
2,509
2,016
2,509
10% 14,938
5,018
9,485
5,018
traffic from that”
camera phone pic 20,094
0.00% 0 none 1,005 1,005 2,009 2,009
mp3 phone 18,350 0 0.00% none 918 918 1,835 1,835
Total 313,334 5,453 1.74% 15,667 10,214 31,333 25,880
SE Visits
% Increase
Words Revenue Revenue Increase Projection
Listed
Summary
5% 15,666.69 $15,666.69 $188,000.25 $122,564.25 187.30%
10% 31,333.38 $31,333.38 $376,000.50 $310,564.50 474.61%

Search Influenced Revenue
We may not be able to tie to exact sales but we have “influenced” the sale by
brining traffic and matching to needs of searcher.
Set time periods
Start Current Projected Realized
% of % of
Global SE SE Added Added Opp.
Keyw ord Global Global Est % Visits % Gain
Dem and Visits Visits Visits Visits Realized
Dem and Dem and
free m obile softw are 15,508 0 0.00% 53 0.34% 3% 465 465 53 -89% 100.00%

nokia m obile softw are 3,195 18 0.56% 66 2.07% 7% 224 206 48 -77% 72.73%
free nokia softw are dow nload 1,850 0 0.00% 102 5.51% 8% 148 148 102 -31% 100.00%

free nokia n70 softw are 1,448 0 0.00% 63 4.35% 10% 145 145 63 -56% 100.00%
m obile search 1,320 4 0.30% 175 13.26% 3% 40 36 171 380% 97.71%
Total 23,321 22 0.09% 459 1.97% 4.38% 1,021 999 437 -56%
SE Visits May not be very exciting
for
Words
Monthly Annual Gain % Gain but it does show an
Listed improvement that will
Beginning 22 $22 $264
focus efforts and
Projected 1,021 $1,021 $12,255 $11,991 4542.16%
Current 459 $459 $5,508 $5,244 1986.36% attention.

Blekko – Duplicate Content

29

SEO Research Key Takeaways
1. Understand your Business goals for search

2. Baseline your current state and desired outcomes

3. Monitor performance against baseline good or bad
4. Develop “Cost of Not Ranking” analysis to motivate SEO
investments
5. Develop Missed Opportunity to demonstrate potential for
SEO investments return
6. Use multiple tools to “Monitor” competition but don’t
obsess over it
7. Spend time diagnosing site performance

30

Optimize your Search Program through Research

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