Social and Search KPIs To Start Tracking Right Now

If you don’t measure what you’re doing in search and social media, how do you know if what you’re doing is working? How do you know if you’re helping or hurting your business—or having no effect whatsoever?

How do you know that all those hours and/or wages aren’t being wasted?

How do you know you’re getting positive results?

At the end of the day, how do you know what you’re doing is worth it?

Answer: you don’t!

Measuring your SEO/social media successes and failures are the only way to improve — and to confirm that your strategies are helping your business move forward.

And here’s where so many of you will answer: “But we are measuring! We do have goals! We’re getting more retweets with every tweet and our site hits are increasing every day. We’re improving!”

That’s great. Really. But at the end of the day, does it really matter if those 10,000 followers or site visitors aren’t doing anything of actual value for their business? Are they helping you increase revenue? Lower costs? Increase customer satisfaction?

If you answered yes… how do you know?

Again: you don’t. Unless you’ve got real data and a comprehensive plan — complete with concrete evidence as to how your strategies are helping you grow.

Getting more followers, fans, search engine traffic, retweets, and subscribers can be an important part of your strategy; but, to see the big picture — how all those things are supporting your business — you’ve got to widen your scope.

Everything You Do Should Reflect Your Company’s Overall Mission

As Angie Schottmuller points out in her excellent guide to defining a strategic social media strategy, you should start developing your goals based on your company’s overall vision and work down from there.

Everything you do in social media — and SEO, too — should fit under the umbrella of your business mission. Some examples of potential goals might be:

• Increase brand awareness
• Increase brand trust
• Increase brand loyalty
• Shorten the sales funnel
• Generate more leads/create a new lead generation channel
• Facilitate (or ease) customer support: either by reducing support-related emails or calls or to provide another outlet for support
• Increase customer satisfaction and/or interaction
• Understand user behavior
• Sell services/products

For more on developing overall goals, I highly recommend the aforementioned Social Media ROI: How to Define a Strategic Plan, as well as Lisa Barone’s A Call for Smarter Social Media Marketing.

Search/Social KPIs To Track

Now that you’ve developed your goals, it’s time to pick tactics that will help you achieve those Objective and Key Results (OKRs) — as well as finding Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to help you measure your successes.

Note: A lot of these KPIs are from Social Media Analytics by Marshall Sponder. When applicable, I’ve provided equations for finding more complicated percentages.

1.  Monitoring Search Engine Traffic

KPIs:

• Percentage of visits from search engines
• Percentage of conversions from search engine visitors

2.  Monitoring Visitor Engagement with Website

KPIs:

• Percentage of visitors that leave a comment
• Percentage of visitors that share/vote on social media
• Conversation rate:

(Number of comments)

÷

(Number of pieces of content)

• Percentage   of visitors that click to take action or click on CTA (Call to Action) link
• Average time on site per visit
• Average page depth ( the average amount of pages a visitor sees during a session on your site) per visit
• Number of engaged visits:

(Total number of engagements)

÷

(Total number of visits)

3.  Monitoring User Experience on Website

KPIs:

• Percentage of visits that bounce (single-page visits)
• Percentage of internal site searches that produce zero results
• Percentage of users waiting longer than 3 seconds for a page to load
• Bounce rate of a certain page (page X, in the following equation):

[Number of single page visits with zero actions (page X)]

÷

[Number of entry page visits (page X)] 

4.  Monitoring the Number of Visitors Donating/Purchasing

KPIs:

• Percentage of visitors donating/purchasing
• Percentage of visitors that visit a donation/purchase cart page

5.  Monitoring Brand Engagement

KPIs:

• Percentage of brand engagement:

(Number of visits with branded search times + Number of direct visits)

÷

(Number of visits from search engines + Number of direct visits)

6.  Monitoring Social Engagement

KPIs:

• Number of social actions per page:

(Total number of social actions)

÷

(Number of pages on site with buttons)

• Ratio of social actions to community size (Example: Number of page tweets per 1,000 followers; Number of shares per 1,000 Facebook fans, etc.)

7.  Monitoring Users’ Site Search Experience

KPIs:

• Percentage of visits that use site search
• Average number of search results viewed per search
• Percentage of people exiting the site after viewing search results
• Percentage of people conducting multiple searches during their visit (excluding multiple searches for the same keyword)
• Average time on site for a visit following a search
• Average number of pages visitors view after performing a search

8.  Monitoring On-Site Videos

KPIs:

• Number of visitors who watched
• When visitors stop video (Find the code here:http://www.bluefountainmedia.com/blog/track-youtube-player-events-google-analytics/ )
• Percentage of page visitors that played video
• Percentage of page visitors that completed video play

9.  Other Partial KPIs to Track

• Number of site visits with over X page views
• Number of site visits over X minutes/seconds
• Number of visitors that reached donation/purchase/lead page

Other Analytics Tools

Google Analytics is still the greatest tool in your arsenal, but a few other sites and tools are worth looking into:

1. Social Media Metrics plugin for Greasemonkey: shows you a comprehensive list of all your social shares in Google Analytics
2. RetweetRank: shows how often you get retweeted
3. YouTube Insight: in-site analytics that tracks your videos’ popularity, views, and more
4. ShareThis: provides visitors with an easy way to share your content; also integrates with Google Analytics to show you which social channels are the most successful/popular with sharers on your site
5. Reachli (formerly Pinerly) and Pinpuff: shows analytics reports for your Pinterest account. Pinerly also lets you create “campaigns” with selected pins and then compare different campaigns over time

At the end of the day, you should not be on social media because, quote, “every business needsto have a social media presence.” You should not be focusing all your efforts on getting to #1 in the SERPs if none of your site visitors ever buy anything.

Put the pieces together. Look at the big picture; look at how each of your strategies benefit your business as a whole. Start measuring, and you’ll start connecting the dots.

At the very least, you’ll have something real to say when someone asks you why you do SEO/social media marketing–something besides “well, everyone else was doing it.”

Image from Shutterstock.com, used under license.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

The Author: Jordan Kasteler is the Online Marketing Strategist for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) as well as a speaker, author of A to Z: Social Media Marketing, and entrepreneur. You can follow him on @JordanKasteler. See more articles by Jordan Kasteler

Source : http://searchengineland.com

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How Your SEO Problems Impact Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) in Google AdWords SEM Campaigns

Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) in Google AdWords – How Your Technical SEO Problems Just Impacted Your SEM Campaigns

In October of 2011, Google began testing Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) in AdWords.  It was a bold move and signaled a change in how paid search could operate in the future.  Using dynamic search ads, advertisers could greatly expand their reach by enabling AdWords to match queries with content in Google’s organic index.  Instead of simply setting up keyword-based campaigns, you could dynamically provide relevant ads to users searching for content residing on your site.
Last week AdWords released Dynamic Search Ads to all users, so now everyone can expand their reach using DSA’s.  But before you run and set up your campaigns, there’s a catch you need to be aware of.  Your content must be indexed in Google’s organic search index in order for it to be eligible for dynamic search ads.  Yes, your SEO just impacted your SEM, and that’s what my post is about today.  Read on.
Targeting Dynamic Search Ads (DSA)Targeting-wise, you can set up dynamic ad targets based on the content that’s been indexed on your site.  For example, you can target all webpages on your site, categories of content, pages by URL, content by page title, or simply by content residing on a page.  Depending on the dynamic ad targets you set up, AdWords will match up queries with your content that’s been indexed.  I bolded those last few words, since thorough indexation can be a big problem for some companies.  More on that soon.
You can target DSA’s by Category, URL, Page Title, or Page Content:


Dynamic Search Ads ExampleImagine you sold shoes and had AdWords campaigns already set up for sneakers and boots.  I’m sure you would have more, but let’s keep this simple.  Now, let’s say you have 150 specific products that fall into these categories, but aren’t set up in your AdWords campaigns (you just have categories set up).  These products are essentially left out in the paid search cold… until now.  Using dynamic search ads, you could target those specific products that don’t have campaigns set up and let AdWords match up your content with targeted queries automatically (based on what’s indexed in Google’s organic index).  AdWords could dynamically build the ad title, include ad text written by you, and then determine the destination URL based on what’s indexed in Google.  Hence the “dynamic” part of Dynamic Search Ads.  :)
An example of creating a dynamic search ad in AdWords:

Yes, it’s paid search less the keywords.  As you can imagine, this can have a major impact on how paid search is managed, optimized, and enhanced by AdWords advertisers.  But more importantly, now technical SEO issues can negatively impact your DSA’s, since they leverage Google’s organic search index.  That’s a good segue to the next section of my post.
DSA’s are based on Google’s Organic Search Index (Meet Your New SEO Problem)As I mentioned earlier, in order for dynamic search ads to work, your content needs to be indexed.  Although that sounds trivial, it’s not for some companies.  And that’s especially true for large-scale sites with hundreds of thousands of pages (or more).  And if you add CMS problems to the mix, a site could very well have tens of thousands of pages not getting indexed properly.  And that could be a serious problem for advertisers trying to leverage DSA’s to expand their reach.
If your site has a crawlability problem, or other technical SEO problems, then those problems can now affect your SEM campaigns.  In addition, if your competitors don’t have those SEO problems, then they are at a big advantage with regard to dynamic search ads.  If they set up their DSA campaigns intelligently, then they can potentially reach a much wider audience than you can, since they have a much deeper set of content indexed.

Uh Oh, The Holidays Are HereDid you just start to sweat?  Right, the holidays are just around the corner…  That’s perfect timing for some companies to boost sales, while others with technical SEO problems falter.  In the past, SEM was separate from SEO.  But now, SEO has crept into SEM.  Let’s take a look at some problems that could cause issues with your DSA campaigns.
7 SEO Problems That Could Affect Your DSA’s
1. Make it Clean and Crawlable, or No DSA’s For You
First, your content needs to be crawled and indexed.  I never thought I would be saying that in an SEM-focused post, but there’s a first for everything. :)  If your content cannot be easily crawled and indexed, you will be at a major disadvantage with dynamic search ads.  Again, AdWords will leverage Google’s organic search index to match content and queries, and then use that content to build dynamic ads.  If your content isn’t in the organic index, ads cannot be generated.  No DSA’s for you.
Ensure Googlebot can easily crawl your website:


2. Poor Navigation and Internal Linking StructureAn important aspect to getting all of your content crawled is having a strong internal linking structure.  There are still many sites that don’t provide a robust drilldown into their content using text links.  If you simply provide a top-level navigation and don’t provide additional links to deeper content, then you could easily run into a situation where that additional content isn’t crawled or indexed.
If that’s the case, then that additional content cannot be used for dynamic search ads.  I highly recommend reviewing your navigation and internal linking structure to ensure you are providing a descriptive drilldown into your categories, products, articles, blog posts, etc.
Provide a robust drilldown into your content versus hiding it:


3. Gremlins in Your Content Management System (CMS)In my experience, I’ve witnessed CMS packages hide content, provide serious crawlability issues, and create serious duplicate content problems.  And all of this won’t be good for your DSA efforts.  If your CMS hides content, then those pages will not be available for DSA’s.  If the CMS provides crawlability issues, then it can hide content from Googlebot, which means the content can’t be included in DSA campaigns.  And if your CMS generates massive duplicate content problems, then who knows what AdWords will match up with targeted queries (if it will match up any content at all).
Let’s face it, a great CMS can make your life a lot easier.  But a poor CMS can wreak havoc on both your SEO and SEM efforts.  And now with dynamic search ads, you can combine the two… I highly recommend having your CMS audited to ensure it’s not hampering your search campaigns.  I provide more recommendations later in the post.
Understand if your CMS is causing crawlability or indexation issues:


4. XML SitemapsDuring SEO audits, I still find sites that aren’t providing xml sitemaps that contain all of their content.  For example, I recently audited a site with 300K+ pages, but its xml sitemaps only contained 10K.  XML sitemaps are a great supplement to a traditional web crawl.  You don’t want to rely on them for getting all of your content indexed, but they can help Google identify new content and understand the canonical URL’s for your content.  In addition, you can view sitemap errors in Google Webmaster Tools, which can help you understand problems Google is having trying to access or index your content.
For dynamic search ads, XML sitemaps can help more of your content get crawled and indexed by Google.  And that can help you target more content via DSA’s.  Again, you shouldn’t rely on XML sitemaps to fix crawlability and indexation problems, but it’s a smart move to set them up.
Monitor xml sitemap errors in Google Webmaster Tools:


5. Poor URL StructureAs mentioned above, you can target content by all web pages, category, URL, page title, or page content.  If you want to logically launch DSA’s by URL, then your URL structure needs to be strong.  For example, you can target any page with /category/sneakers to target sneakers or /category/boots to target boots.  If you have something like /?nid=2343jieejd&sot=23jjdjdj  and you are going to try and find some common thread, good luck.  Chances are you won’t be able to target by URL.  Try and use clean and descriptive URL’s if possible.  Stay away from complex URL’s with a lot of querystring parameters.
Complex URL’s can cause crawlability, canonical, and indexation issues:

6. Canonical URL Tag IssuesWhen used properly, the canonical URL tag can be a great way to address duplicate content issues.  You can tell the search engines which pages are the canonical url’s for the content at hand.  But when used improperly, it can be extremely destructive to your SEO efforts.  I wrote about this in my Search Engine Journal column titled, “Two Examples of How One Line of Code Could Kill Your SEO.”  You should read the post when you get a chance.  It’s fitting that I’m referencing that post on Halloween, since it’s horrifying.  :)
So, if you implemented the canonical URL tag incorrectly across your site, Google may only have a small percentage of your content indexed and available for DSA’s.  In a worst case scenario, you could be using the canonical URL tag to attribute all search power to just one page on your site.  Don’t laugh, I’ve seen this happen several times.  If that’s the case, then you might only have one page available for DSA’s.  And you might be looking at your AdWords reporting wondering why there are no impressions or clicks.
7. Poor On-Page OptimizationIf you choose to target by page title, then you need to ensure pages are well-optimized.  I’ve completed SEO Audits on some larger sites that have thousands of pages with the same exact title tag.  If that’s the case, then AdWords might not be able to figure out what the page is about, and might not be able to match the content up with targeted queries.  If this is the case, then make sure you uniquely optimize each page, based on the content at hand.  If you do, then you can target DSA’s by page title and be in good shape.
Ensure all of your content is uniquely optimized:


What Can You Do?  3 Things You Can Do Now to Help Your DSA’sIf you are reading this post and determine that you might have some of the SEO problems I listed above, then here’s what you can do now.
1. SEO AuditsFirst, and this is something I have advocated for a long time, have a technical SEO audit conducted.  Audits provide the most bang for your SEO buck.  They can be completed relatively quickly and provide a remediation plan based on the findings.  If you can implement the changes relatively quickly, then you very well could see some improvements in a short period of time.  That obviously depends on your specific situation, but some changes will yield strong results in a short amount of time.
And with the holiday season upon us, time is of the essence.  If you want dynamic search ads to help you this holiday season, then you need to make sure your content is being indexed, and that it’s optimized correctly.
2. Index Status in Google Webmaster ToolsSecond, analyze Index Status in Google Webmaster Tools, which can help you identify the number of pages Google has indexed, as well as how many it counts as “not selected”.  Index Status won’t give you the answers, but can let you know how well your site is being indexed.  For example, if you have 10K pages on your site, but only 2K are indexed, you’ve got a problem.  If you have 5K pages on your site, but Index Status shows 75K as “not selected”, then you also have a problem.  I highly recommend reading my post about Index Status and analyzing your current situation.

3. Bypass DSA’s and Build Out More Campaigns ManuallyThird, if you have indexation issues, but still want to gain additional targeted traffic via Paid Search, then you can focus your attention on fleshing out more campaigns and ad groups based on your own category and niche.  Perform thorough keyword research, understand which keywords you need to target, analyze the competitive landscape, and then build out more campaigns and ad groups.  Sure, this will take a lot of time and effort, but it provides the most control.
Summary – The End of Keywords in SEM?Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) can help advertisers reach a broader audience by automatically matching up advertiser content and targeted queries.  Paid search without keywords could very well be the future of SEM, so it’s important to understand how DSA’s work now.  But as I explained throughout this post, your content needs to be crawled and indexed in order to be eligible for dynamic search ads.  And that means SEM will require strong SEO.  

Source : http://www.hmtweb.com

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Design Elements of a Landing Page

The following elements are always need to be on a page to create an effective landing page. However, there are several elements that are essential to your success.

1. Logo: The visitor needs some way to identify who they are potentially doing business with. A logo won’t make your sale, but a poor one can lose your sale. A professionally designed logo always helps establish some bit of credibility. Most sites have this in the upper left hand part of the page; some have it on the upper right.
2. UVP or UCP: Once the visitor knows who you are, they need to figure out why they should do business with you. You should communicate this in a simple statement that explains your value proposition (UVP) or your campaign proposition (UCP).
3. Headline: The landing page headline should reinforce the scent from the ad that delivered your visitor to the page; that’s persuasive momentum. Your headline can either be designed in a text format or graphical format; it doesn’t really matter. Many marketers use a dynamic system to personalize their landing pages for the ad or keyphrase that attracted the visitor in the first place, to have better continuity (scent) from ad to landing page. Dynamic tools work, but beware.
4. Offer: Direct marketers know that the offer is one of the most critical elements of a well-designed campaign. That is why they spend a lot of time testing their offers. Offers must be clear and concise. A maxim of direct mail is that a confused mind always says “no.” The offer is the deal you’re presenting to your visitor. Don’t get this confused with a “call to action,” which is the action you want the person to take. Sometimes the offer is actually delivered successfully as the headline.
5. Descriptive copy: What supporting copy do you need to explain what you do, what you offer, and how it will benefit your visitor? This is often a list of key features and/or benefits. Don’t overlook formatting. Will the copy be delivered in block text, bullet point, or some combination of the two?
6. Product/service presentation: This is the imagery you use to support your copy and style for your page. This often takes the form of a product image, a product or service tour (photos or video), screen shots, or lifestyle images. A good picture can be worth a thousand words if you can use it to engage your visitor and give them a sense of what owning your product or service will be like. Likewise, poor quality graphics or presentations can confuse or turn visitors away. A great image won’t make your sale, but a poor one can help lose your sale.
7. Calls to action: I break out calls to action into three types: hyperlinks, buttons, or forms. The objective of many landing pages is to get visitors to complete a form. If that is the case, make the form easy to complete on the landing page, and avoid requiring the visitor to take an extra step – and going to a form page – if possible. Other than your offer, this is an important piece to keep testing. Calls to action should stand out (think contrast) and be obvious from the moment a visitor lands on your page. The visitor should always know what is the next step they should take.
8. Confidence building: A visitor will not convert if he doesn’t have confidence or trust in you. There are dozens of factors that affect trust or confidence in your visitors on your pages, and dozens of things you can do to negatively impact trust and credibility. I’ll cover only a few types of things you can add to boost confidence. Basic confidence boosting elements can be the effective use of testimonials or customer reviews, leveraging examples of previous customers, using third-party validators (such as media mentions or reviews, as seen in references, or trust marks), and using point-of-action assurances near your call to action.
9. Link to more information: Many experts believe your landing pages shouldn’t have any additional links other than your main call to action. I believe it depends on several factors, including the complexity of what you sell and the buying stage of your prospect (early stage buyers tend to be in information gathering mode not action taking mode – so let them gather information). Don’t blindly follow “best practices;” use your judgment and test alternatives.
10. Template elements: These elements are usually found in the header or footer of a template. They may be your copyright notice, phone number, live chat, address, privacy or other policies, etc. These are usually not elements of the persuasion process, but many can be supportive. All pages should have easy contact information and privacy policies.

Look at your landing pages and your competitors’ to see if you can identify these essential elements.

5 Dimensions of Landing Page Element Success

• Relevance
• Quality
• Location
• Proximity
• Prominence

Relevance

Everything else about your page can suck (the technical term we use in Brooklyn), as long as you manage to understand your visitor’s intent and meet it with a page that is relevant to their needs, matches their expectations, and explains things in terms they understand for where they are in their buying process.

First: If your visitor came from an advertisement, be sure tomaintain scent between the landing page and the advertisement. If it is a search or PPC (define) ad, then your ad and landing page should match the query the visitor used. And, the offer used should match from ad to landing page. If it is a display ad, the offer, imagery, colors, etc., should match from the ad to landing page.

Each of the 10 landing page elements should be relevant to the visitor’s goal while ensuring they complete the action you want them to. Remove anything on the page that is not relevant to their buying process and anything that does not help them convert. This will also ensure the message’s clarity.

Your message must also speak to the correct persona for their preferred way of gathering information, making decisions, and stage of the buying process.

Quality

The better each of your elements are crafted, the better your results. Your copy should be engaging and easy to read, both from a relevance and visual appeal. Your copy should be skimmable and scannable – visitors won’t waste time reading until they scan the page and make sure it is relevant to them. Your landing page and any graphical elements you use should look professional; that doesn’t necessarily mean it needs to look pretty. Often times, ugly but professional pages convert better; don’t let your graphic designer kill your conversion rate. Even the quality of a voiceover in a demo can make a conversion difference.

Location

Where elements on the page are located can make a huge difference. Try to get the most relevant information and calls to action above the fold. If you have a multiple column page, what elements appear in what column also matter. The order of your elements matters too; this is often the case in copy where I have found that if I take the last paragraph of copy that is on the page and make it the first paragraph, it will usually increase conversion rates.

Proximity

Be conscious of what elements lay next to each other. An example I use is Overstock.com. A graphic next to the internal search box reads “Kids Titles for Learning and Fun” on its movie page. When the two elements are looked at together, visitors think they are related. They ended up thinking that the search box was for searching kids’ movies. As soon as we swapped the graphic to “search over 24,000 movies,” it accounted for a 5 percent increase in revenue. It was that big of a deal. Or as my friends from WiderFunnel will tell you: be careful of adding trust seals next to calls to action; sometimes the visual distraction causes visitors to not take any action.

Prominence

Stand 6 to 10 feet back from your page – what stands out? Is your call to action obvious? Can your visitor tell who you are, why they should trust you, and how you are relevant to their need in just a matter of seconds? Make good use of color, layout, and white space so key elements jump off the page and make the visitor’s eyes flow from one element to the next. Attention heatmaps, like AttentionWizardfrom fellow ClickZ columnist, Tim Ash, can be used to simulate visitor visual processing and attention to judge element visual prominence, but it can’t account for visitor motivation and your relevance.

 by BRYAN EISENBERG

Source : http://www.bryaneisenberg.com-

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How to Build Awesome SEO Keyword List - Keyword Research Tips for a Standard Website

How do you build a keyword list for a relatively normal site with limited amounts of template content? In these engagements you build a keyword list and then optimize individual pages for individual terms. Brand websites are a good candidate for this kind of keyword research.

But First, a Note on Search Volume

Search volume data from the Google keyword tool is bullshit. You know it, I know it, the whole industry knows it. You look up the search volume for a term, then log in to the tool and do the same thing again – the search volume is completely different!

The simple truth is: you shouldn’t rely on individual datapoints coming out of Google's keyword tool. It’s really there for illustrative purposes only.

On the other hand, it’s the only real source of data on any keyword; Analytics is only going to give you data on stuff you already rank for. So you’re stuck with the Google keyword tool as your comprehensive and easily-accessible data source.

You can use a simple equation to try and reduce our reliance on individual data points that come from the Google keyword tool; we call it “relative search volume”.

relative search volume = individual keyword search volume / total search volume for all keywords

By dividing the search volume for the individual term by the total volume, you get down to focusing on the proportion of the total audience rather than the raw number of searches. It allows us to place the search volume in context, which is crucial for properly judging how important it is to target a keyword.

How to Undertake Keyword Discovery – aka Building Your Big-Ass Keyword List

Please note, in both forms of keyword research, it's assumed that you have already been through the keyword discovery phase; as stated previously there are tons of good resources on this topic – check them out! Discovery can generally be broken down into discovery through the client or discovery through tools.

Discovery Through Your Account Manager/Client

Who better than the client themselves to help kick off the keyword research process? Just as we know our SEO, clients know their websites and the products and services they offer. They also know their brand and hopefully their customers and what they’re looking for when they visit the site.

In a discovery session you could cover these potential topics to aid keyword research:

• High margin products/services.
• Offline media initiative keywords/phrases
• Previous SEO/keywords for pages

Discovery Through Tools

You know the form here, we’re talking about the usual sources: Google Instant searches, Google Adwords Keyword Tool, paid search data, paid-for discovery tools (e.g. SearchMetrics Essentials).

Once we have the big-ass list we can get to work refining our keyword list to a useful size, with a priority order built in.

Standard Keyword Research

Standard keyword research is all about subjecting your long list of keywords to a series of tests based on keyword metrics. Tests have various scoring systems, the scoring of which can be weighted to reflect your opinion of how important a factor is.

When coming up with keyword metrics there is one golden rule: you have to be able to get all the necessary data for all your keywords in one sheet. If you have to query each keyword in turn to generate the data then it’s not a suitable keyword metric. 

For instance, “difficulty of ranking on page 1” would be a great metric, available from several sources, the most well-known being SEOmoz. Unfortunately this data can only be fetched by querying each keyword in turn. This disqualifies this metric on the grounds of it being too manual, until such time that a tool is developed for getting this data for keywords in bulk (hint hint, developers!)

Here are some examples of tests we can run. Does the client:

• Rank for the keyword?
• Rank in a position where there is opportunity for rapid traffic growth?
• Have links with anchor text matching this term?
• Enjoy a significant number of conversions from the keyword?
• Make a large margin on the product / service described by the keyword?

And finally, does the keyword in question make up a large proportion of the total search audience?

The beauty of running several tests on your keywords is that it if a keyword isn’t suitable from one point of view, it can be from another – but everything is done in a consistent manner so you don’t need to argue with your team or your client over which keywords you're going to target; they just rise to the top of the list naturally.

Even better, the structure of the table doesn’t need to change if you believe the system isn’t working, you can simply change the scoring system.

Methodology

• Paste your long keyword list in alphabetical order. Always work with the list in alphabetical order until the final stage.
• Create a column for each test to the right. The formulas which work out the score for each test should sit in these columns, referencing the data on other sheets. Explanations for how you can run the tests in the table follow.
• Run as many of the tests below as possible. I’ve tried to be exhaustive, but it isn't hard to extrapolate this methodology to create test for keywords metrics not covered here.

Ranking and Opportunity Based on Ranking

Setup: In a seperate tab paste your alphabetical keyword list in Column A, and the corresponding rank in Column B. If it’s not ranking, make sure the rank = 0.

If you’re ranking for a term, that’s a good thing! It means your site has a page that’s relevant for the term – so you don’t need to spend time creating something from scratch, and you may well be able to improve ranking through some simple optimization.

In this test we reward terms that rank. This is done through a simple if statement. If ranking > 0, score 1, if not, score 0.

We also run another test on this data – how much of an opportunity is there to get major traffic? We know traffic from a keyword increases exponentially as ranking approaches the top positions above the fold – spots 1, 2 and 3.

Therefore, we should prioritize keywords ranking just outside these spots; a small ranking improvement here could generate a big traffic increase. Using nested if statements, you can score keywords; 5 points for ranking 4 - 10, 4 for 11 - 15, 3 for 16 - 20, 2 for 21-30 and 1 for beyond position 30. All other positions get 0 points - including those in positions 1 - 3, as we feel there isn't a huge opportunity to move the needle on these terms; either it’s too competitive to change rank or there are bigger gains to be made from getting above the fold for other terms.

Competitor Ranking

Setup: exactly the same as for your own ranking data above.

In this scenario, we look at the competitor’s ranking and apply a negative score if a competitor is present on the first page of results. This is because we consider a keyword more of an opportunity if a direct competitor doesn’t rank on the first page. We usually choose the most visible site in the client’s sector as the competitor, so you know that in general you’re going to have more of a struggle on your hands if they’re on the first page.

In this scenario, if competitor rank > 0, we score the keyword -1, if not we score it 0.

Existing Anchor Text

Setup: paste a list of all the anchor text phrases used in external links to your site into a column in a separate sheet.

If someone is already linking to you using the exact same anchor text as the keyword you’re assessing, that’s a great signal that your site is relevant for that term, and that as a result it will be relatively easy to get more links with that keyword as the anchor text. Use a match formula to check if the keyword you’re assessing is an existing anchor text phrase. If it is, award 3 points, if not, the keyword gets 0 points.

vs. On-Site Search Terms or Paid Search Conversions

Setup: Same as for anchor text – grab the top terms which people searched within your site, or the terms from your paid account that drive conversions (you made need to exclude really low values) and paste them into new sheets.

If a user searches for a term once they have arrived at your site using internal search, that’s a pretty good indication the term is relevant. If one of our potential keywords appears in the top internal search terms, we award it 1 point.

It’s vitally important keywords that drive conversion are prioritized – if any of our long list keywords also appear in the top converting terms from paid search (exact match basis) we award 3 points. You could improve this further by penalising terms with a -1 score if the conversion rate for that term is low, as this would indicate the user’s searching for the keyword are not particularly relevant.

vs. Time on Site

Setup: Enable the non-paid search segment in your analytics. Download the top 500 keywords driving visits, and make a note of average time on site for the non-paid segment.

If the average time spent on site for a keyword is above the site-wide average for organic traffic, we score the keyword 1 point.

To find if the keyword you are testing exists within your user behaviour data and return the corresponding time on site or bounce rate figure use a vlookup formula, then in an adjacent column use an if statement to determine the keyword’s score based on its value relative to the average values you noted earlier.

If the keyword isn’t present in the user behaviour data, we score the keyword 0.

• Test vs CPC from paid search: Paste all your paid search keywords & CPCs into a worksheet. In your title sheet use vlookup to return the CPCs for the keywords you are testing. The CPC test is negative: the larger the CPC for the keyword, the less relevant you are, the less you want to prioritise the term. Make sure your CPC is pasted as a number, e.g. 1.21 for $1.21.
• Create relative search volume for each keyword. You do this by dividing each terms search volume into the total search volume of all your keywords.
• Combine the total of all your previous tests with the CPC and the relative search volume. This is always the final test before we work out the total score per keyword. Our formula to work out the total keyword score follows:

total keyword score = ((sum of scores from tests)-CPC from paid search)*relative search volume

By multiplying all the previous by the relative search volume you ensure that the most important factor in your keyword refinement algorithm is audience size. The great thing is though, you’re not focussing on absolute number of searches, but on the proportion of your total audience that will search the term in question.

The final step in producing your table should be to order all of the data by total score, and there you have it; a prioritized keyword list for your client. You can proudly state to your client that the reason you want to focus on the terms at the top of your list is because they are:

• Relevant.
• Popular amongst your potential audience.
• Representative of quick-win opportunities.

Even better, you can point to a robust methodology to back this up.

If you need to do a keyword list refresh after a few months, another benefit of this process appears: all you need to do is fetch fresh keyword metric data and rerun the formulas in your mastersheet – you’ll find the order of terms in your list has changed naturally as your algorithm reflects the fact that you have managed to get some terms into a great position.

Don't forget to download that Excel template to get started on your awesome keyword research!

By : Richard Kirk
Source : Search Engine Watch (#SEW)

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