Current Wisdom

If you are working with clients, the most important thing about an SEO project is tracking results. Its not a easy thing to do with SEO, as, other than rankings, there is little to track.

Most inexperienced SEOs will focus on rankings as the sole measure of success. The problem with rankings is that they can fluctuate and there is little ability to understand how many sales, leads or traffic is generated by the rankings.

So, along comes web analytics. With a good web analytics program you can track traffic from specific keywords. By tying that to success metrics (X% conversion rate on Y clicks means Z number of conversions), you can really get a feel for whether your SEO efforts are successful or not.

Another measure that we use quite a bit is search volume. With PPC if search volume dips then the clicks generated by PPC and the resulting number of conversions should also dip. PPC tends to mirror seasonal trends. Organic results, because they usually come from a wider range of keywords should not fluctuate as much as PPC.

Focus on the metrics that determine real return on investment. Conversions, Traffic, Conversion Rates, Click Through Rates, etc. These can all be tied to revenue, and therefore become interesting and valuable.

Some Tasks for Reporting and Analytics:

• Use a suitable analytics program
• Discuss what you will be reporting on and how often
• Create a baseline report

Now you have completed the SEO Discovery Phase. At this point, you should have:

• A Discovery document which includes:
  • 10-15 word keyword list
  • Ranking reports client and competitors for above keywords
  • Analysis results for competitive analysis, market analysis, general SWOT analysis and Google Analytics Analysis
  • A baseline report

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Now you have taken the time to understand what the competition looks like for your site or your clients site. This should give you a clear picture of how hard it may be for you to increase your overall search engine visibility, but its an incomplete picture without understanding which keywords are the most important to you or your client.

Here are the basic steps to Keyword Development:

Develop Keyword Universe

Don’t be shy with the keyword universe. This should be a brain storming session. Write down every keyword you can possibly think of regardless of how contextual. It might make it easier to break it down into the following categories:

• Primary / General - These should be the easy to figure out words.
• Geo-specific - Many products or services have a geo component to them.
• Life Events - Think of the moments in life when your product/service would be used. Life events include things like the birth of a new child, moving, going to college.
• Activity Based - Does your product/service need (or is used) in conjunction with an activity?
• Brand - Not just your brand, but the brands of all your competitiors
• Past Product - Do you have products or services people are still looking for? Has your industry moved from an older format to a newer format?
• Buy/Sell - Easy enough, add the words “buy” and “sell” in front of your product or service. Also think through what terms people use in conjunction with “buy” or “sell.” For example, often “buy a house” is searched more than “buy a home,” and “sell a home” is searched more than “sell a house.” Why? Because its just a house until you buy it and live in it.
• Misspellings - Are there common misspellings to your products and/or services?
• Tertiary / Out of Box - This is the fun category. Throw all caution to the wind, and add any and all keywords that have the slightest connection to your product or service. Provide a full-service? List keyword focused on self-service.

Combine Preliminary List With Client/Personal List

You like, every client, has a list of keywords that you would love to rank. In some cases, these keywords are obvious, and are on your keyword universe list. Most likely though, these keywords are words like your name, your bosses name, your wife’s name (see a pattern here?) or other vanity/ego keywords that may have little to do with driving business. Are these bad? Of course not. Most businesses have some person that they are associated with, so why not try to rank for that term?

Create Preliminary List of Tracking Keywords

Pretty straight forward, of your list of keywords, which ones do you think will be the best to track? This step is important, because as you begin to do the keyword research, you will want to see how correct your “gut” is in determining important keywords.

Determine Keyword Value

Keyword Value is determined not by a single measure. There are four major measures of value: volume, competition, ranking and conversion rate. Within each measure there are various weights and sub-measures that you can apply, but these really must be determined by your goals and optimization style.

There are three main tools that I use to help determine Keyword Value:

Keyword Discovery - Determine Annual Search Volume and Trending

Yahoo! Search Marketing - Determine Prior Month Search Volume on Yahoo! Network

Word Tracker - Estimate of Daily Search Volume Based on a 90 Day Trailing

So, how do we use these tools? We need to help understand the four important metrics for keyword value.

Volume - Determine Estimated Annual Search Volume. (KD / YSM / WT)

Competition - This is not only the competition on keywords, but the total number of competitors (KD / WT)

Rankings - Determine your and your competitors current rankings. We will discuss ranking tools in Part 3.

Conversion - Determine which words are currently driving business. We will discuss conversion tools in Part 3.

Another Keyword Value measure is the Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) - The higher the KEI, the more volume a keyword has coupled with lower competition. The most common formula for KEI is the square of the popularity of the keyword divided by its competitiveness. This measure is often inaccurate for long tail terms, and it doesnt take conversion rates into account.

Keyword Ranking Index

At the end of this analysis, you should no have a Keyword Ranking Index, which is basically your Keyword Universe hard prioritized based on the four measures: Volume, Competition, Ranking and Conversion. From this list, pick 10-15 keywords that you want to use as tracking keywords. The Tracking Keywords should be a sample that reflects the general progress of the account as a whole, and allows you to hand check results and not have to rely on any ranking software.

Now, you have a competitive, market and SWOT analysis and your Keyword Ranking Index. Next we need to determine Reporting and Analytics.

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The Discovery Phase is really broken down into three components. The Market, Competitive, SWOT Analysis component is usually first, followed by Keyword Development and finally, Reporting/Analytics Review.

Lets start with the task list for the Market, Competitive, SWOT analysis:

Answer Goal Questions

It is important to understand what the goals are for your site. List them. Include in this, every URL that you are going to optimize, URLs that you are not going to optimize. Get a complete list of URLs so you can review how they (if they) redirect into the main URL. Once this sheet is completed, refer to it through out the search engine optimization process.

Identify Main Competitors

There are several ways to do this. Mostly, do searches online. Are your target keywords full of affiliate type sites or large organizations? There is always some competitor that you want to rank higher than, or is doing better than you in the search engine results pages (SERPs), and you are not sure why.

Competitive Analysis

Create a matrix, where you review competitors based on search engine visibility, pricing, offers, basically anything that could affect your SEO efforts.

Market Analysis

1. Review industry size and important segments using the identified competitors
2. Verify that no major industry segments are missing on client site
3. Analyze three competitor sites for major industry segments that may be missing on client site.

General SWOT Analysis - Objectives, Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats

• Objectives - Identify (or talk to client) about desired end states, plans, policies, goals, objectives, strategies, tactics and actions.

1. Rank these objectives as a Top Rank, Second Rank, Third Rank, and so on
2. Build objective hierarchy
3. Review hierarchy (with client)
4. Finalize hierarchy

• Strengths - Identify how we can use each strength to benefit the site.

1. Identify specific strengths
2. Identify how to benefit from each of the sites strengths
3. Review list of strengths and how to benefit from each
4. Finalize Strengths Report

• Weakness - Identify potential weaknesses in the site and how to stop each weakness.

1. Identify specific weaknesses
2. Identify how to stop each weakness
3. Review list of weaknesses and how to combat them
4. Finalize Weakness Report

• Opportunity - identify how to exploit each opportunity.

1. Identify Opportunities
2. Identify how to exploit each opportunity
3. Review list of opportunities
4. Finalize Opportunity Report

• Threats - identify how to defend against each threat.

1. Identify threats
2. Identify how to can defend against each threat.
3. Review list of threats
4. Finalize Threat Report

Once the competitive, market and SWOT Analysis are complete, the next part of the phase is Keyword Development.

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I planned to post more often and havent lived up to that promise as yet. My plan is to post once or twice a week moving forward. So, whats the first thing I do when I start an SEO project? Research. That is really what the discovery phase is all about. At the conclusion of the Discovery Phase you should know a far amount about your client’s (or your website’s) market, competition and potential. There are two documents one should have at the end of the process. The first is a completed Discovery Document, which includes a goal statement, competitive analysis, a market analysis, and a SWOT analysis. This document serves two purposes.

1. It helps you understand how much effort will be necessary to achieve your (or your client’s) goals.
2. Have a reference to refer back to as you go through the process. This document should be static.

The second document is  your keyword analysis. The keyword analysis is comprised of a keyword universe, which is every word that could possibly be important to the success of the site. Once the universe is developed (it can potentially be thousands and thousands of words), then you need to order your keyword list based on which terms are the best for the site. Volume is not the only measure. We will go further into keyword development in a later post. The keyword analysis should provide three things:

1. A semi-complete list of any and all keywords that matter. Don’t be afraid to overdo it with building out the keyword universe. Its better to start large and reduce, then miss important keywords. MOst importantly, have no bias when selecting keywords.
2. A hard ordered list of keywords based on importance. The factors of importance should cover: volume, competition,  current positioning, and conversion rates.
3. A shorter list of 15-20 keywords that you want to use for tracking. I usually split this list into three groups: easy, medium and hard. Keywords get placed into their respective category based on how difficult I think they will be to effectively rank.

The keyword analysis is an organic document that should be refined over time.

Once these two documents are completed, you now have a road map for the following phases: Technical, Content and Expansion.

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So you have a site that you have been either asked to optimize, or you own the site and search engine optimization is top of mine. What is your first steps?

Plan.

That’s it. Plan your steps.

So, what should go into your plan? Well, a plan is only as good as the tasks that comprise that plan, so break the plan up into four parts:

Discovery: During this part of your plan, you want to learn as much about the company you are optimizing. What do they do? Who are their competitors? What does their space look like? The goal of the discovery phase is to come up with a list of keywords that are the best keywords to optimize the site for. The best keywords are not always the ones with the most volume, or the least competition, or ones you DONT rank for, or even ones that convert well. Its the combination that matters.

Technical: After coming up with your list of keywords you are going to optimize, it is imperative that the site can be seen and indexed by the search engines. You can write the best content, have the best keyword list, but if you dont have a solid technical structure, its like pissing in the wind — all work and no glory (and a bit messy.) During this phase, you review the code itself, navigation paths, URL and file structures.

Content: Once you are confident that your site can been seen and indexed by the search engines, the next step to review all the content. At this point, go back to the keyword list you created in the Discovery phase. Match each keyword to a URL. Remember the key to successfully optimizing your content for search engines is to focus each URL on a keyword or keyword phrase. Determine how focused each URL is, and whether it matches the keyword you assigned it. If it doesnt, mark that page for refinement.

Expansion: According to most search engines, good design plus focus content will drive rankings. “Trust the algorithm,” all the search engines proclaim. Well, this is not the end of search engine optimization, rather the beginning. The next steps include, continued content creation, link development, code refinements, and even refinement to your target keyword list. It is at this point that you have developed a long-term search engine optimization strategy.

In the coming weeks, I will flesh out each phase and the tasks assigned to each. We will begin to get down to the minute points of search engine optimization planning and implementation. I will include the tools, both paid and free, that I use, and welcome comments from everyone.

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Who am I? Why am I doing this? Will it be valuable?

My name is Micah Baldwin. I owned a full service search marketing agency, called Current Wisdom. I sold the agency in early 2007 to the Indigio Group, a full service interactive agency, and now that I have the time to reflect on my time at Current Wisdom, and the industry at large, I realized that a simple, specialized practice has blown out of proportion. Everyone now does search engine optimization. Find me a marketing company or a web development shop that doesnt list SEO as a service.

Our industry is at a point where it has gotten too difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. There are so many questions that just lead to more questions. I have been involved in a couple of books, Search Engine Optimization for Dummies (the first edition), SEO in an Hour a Day, and the SEO Bible. Each one tried to break down the practice of SEO into simple terms that would allow anyone to optimize their site. The problem is that most people read these books as how-to manuals rather than starting points to truly optimize a website.

This blog is here to do one thing. Explore each aspect of search engine optimization and determine its value. We will look at all tactics, white and black hat, and will do it with no bias. We will look at blogs, websites and other optimizable media, and help to open up the practice of SEO to everyone.

What we wont do:

1. I put in some basic optimization techniques on this blog, but beyond that, this blog will not be optimized. It will rank one day based on its value, which is the goal any good search engine optimizer should strive for.
2. I wont shill products that I havent used.
3. I wont try to hide information or tactics.

Mostly, the success of this blog will be based on interaction. Please post questions, comments or concerns and we will answer them all. But hopefully, most of all, you will learn something that will help you achieve your goals.

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