Google Analytics Limitations and Workarounds

By Jeff Campbell, VP, Product Development

People always seem surprised that Google Analytics (GA) has some rather large limitations. Specifically the limited number of conversion events you can track (“goals”), lack of deep traffic segmentation by source, and ability to create custom funnels. There are plenty of reasons GA hasn’t dethroned the Omntiures and WebTrends of the world, and these limitations are a couple biggies. That said, I’ve found setting up additional GA Profiles with Include or Exclude filters is a simple and effective workaround.

We have very rarely inherited a GA account with more than the single profile – but then again, that’s why they’ve hired us. GA only allows you to set up four conversion events…per profile. Solution: create more profiles and combine where necessary. Google only lets you set up one Funnel…per profile. Solution: set up additional profiles with “Include Only” filters to show only designated traffic types. Solution 2: set up a different funnel process for a second profile with the same traffic. As a Paid Search optimizer, I certainly want to compare funnel conversion/fall-out rates to natural (organic) traffic. Second, I simply don’t want to go through several layers of drill down menus to segment my paid search traffic reports. As a site designer, I’d be interested in if New Visitors seem to exit/struggle with the ‘create an account’ page in the checkout process.

Convinced? Good. Lunametrics wrote up excellent instructions on how to set up new profiles and filters in February; it takes less than 2 minutes to set up a profile/filter. Once you are familiar with these basics, I urge you to dig deeper in the filtering capabilities in order to segment traffic or assign additional/specific goals to those segments. I’ll leave you with one important point: profiles start collecting data AFTER they’ve been set up, they do not back-populate. If you ever, ever think you’d want to see traffic segmented by Paid, Organic, Display, New Customers Only, etc., or to have different conversion goals or funnels from your main profile, take 10 minutes to set it up today!

Answers from the Front Lines

It’s almost summer! That time of year when a young boy's fancy turns to responding to natural search RFP's (okay, well for some of us at least). You see, I write this as we are in the midst of putting together a multitude of request for proposals for natural search.

The requests vary quite a bit. Some are very detail oriented and some cut right to the chase. My personal involvement in these over the years has always been to make sure the Strategic Partnership and Client Service teams have the necessary technical and case study background. At that point, it's in their capable hands to package and merchandise the RFP in a way that accurately portrays Resolution's service offerings without overselling or laying too much out up front.

I'll be totally honest, the extent of my sales background consists of selling refrigerators and laundry machines at Sears in my college days. In other words, while I have an absurd understanding of the inner-workings of an R134a based condenser (and those just sold themselves let me tell you), I lay no claim to having sales expertise :-)

However, the selling process in natural search RFP’s is intriguing to me. I usually only work with the technical aspects, but I know that’s only part of what goes into them. As an SEO professional, I can see how, on one hand, you want the client to understand your subject matter expertise. At the same time, you don't want to 'give away the farm' so to speak.

I wrote a blog that pontificated on this very subject. Then I read that blog back to myself on a flight from New York last week and saw how uninteresting it is to read as an outsider. So I went straight to the source via Lauren Mittleman, who is Manager of Strategic Partnerships here at RM. She is on the frontlines of hundreds of natural search RFP's (as well as paid) and deals with the balances I'm talking about daily. I asked Lauren three big questions on the subject, and here are her answers:

1. On average, how long does it take RM to get all the information together for a natural search RFP? What questions/items tend to take the longest to formulate a response to?

It absolutely varies based on the RFP and how much detail the questions are looking for. All RFPs need to address the company on an individual basis to take into consideration its specific challenges and needs. We need to take a deep dive into the client’s site, so the analysis can take anywhere from a day to a week to complete depending on the complexity of the site.

2. For natural search RFPs, do you think there is a juggling act between getting specific with responses and not ‘giving away too much up front’? If so, why? If not, why?

Whether it is an SEO or PPC RFP, you must always be considerate of this balance. You want to assure the client that your company has the expertise and proven success to provide unparalleled SEO service offerings, but you cannot reveal all the intricate strategies that go into managing these campaigns. To that point, it would be nearly impossible for us to relay all the information that our SEO experts impart on our client service teams to guide our clients to optimal natural rankings.

RFPs are tricky because you provide such detailed insight into campaign creation and management that if you reveal too much, you are essentially providing a step-by-step guide to the client to implement the strategies themselves or to pass along to another firm.

3. If you were going to put out an RFP for natural search, based on all the RFP’s you’ve seen come along, what would be the one question you absolutely WOULDN’T put in there? Why? On the flip side, what is something you’ve seen in an RFP that you’d absolutely make sure to ask and why?

To follow the path of my previous response, one question that is difficult is in regards to what our exact, step-by-step process entails. Like I said before, we want to show them what we will do, but not provide a detailed scope that could be made public. The balance must be maintained to convey our expertise and still keep our competitive advantage.

A good question that, surprisingly, is not asked very often is what our philosophy/methodology is. Often, RFPs get so specific and so tactical that clients don’t really get a feeling for who the agency is and what we are all about, which really sets us apart from the competition. When questions like this are not asked, we try to pepper in those beliefs with direct answers that are founded in our holistic approach. This way we are able to tell the story of Resolution Media’s unique approach to the search landscape.

Posted by: Dave McAnally, Product Specialist, Natural Search

4 Tools You Absolutely Have to Be In the Habit of Using

While there are certainly things professional SEO's do and understand that provide value on par with what they are paid, there are some really obvious habits anybody can get into to discover what's going on with their site (and the search-sphere around it). The clients I've had that embrace these habits seem more 'in tune' with not only their industry, but how their projects stack up in it as well. The result is that they are more proactive in their involvement, which ultimately helps everyone accomplish their goals quicker. The best part? These things are free!

-Use Google News Alerts to monitor keywords and your brand.
News Alerts have to be one of the greatest things in the history of…things. I couldn't imagine doing my job without them. You can use Google to scour the internet for you and report back when your products, brands, names, or just big words are mentioned anywhere on the internet.

Set the frequency to whatever works best for you (fair warning, it WILL bombard your inbox if you set it to notify you whenever things come up). This is a great reputation management tool as well. Another really cool use I recently learned is to use the Google link operator to monitor new links coming into your site. Set that particular alert in real time if you're proactively building links and you'll see the links as soon as Google recognizes them. How 'bout that?!

-Give your site a once-through with a spider simulator when a new page launches or a site is redesigned.
Spider simulators are pretty common, and which one you use is a matter of personal preference really. They all essentially tell you the same thing. You will want to use these to make sure the content you can see on your site is in fact, being seen by the spider when it crawls. If it isn't, then you may need to look for other ways to get that content visible.

We have some internal proprietary tools that give us a much deeper analysis of a site, but you can get some at-a-glance high-level information about web pages on your site quickly. I still use Summit Media's spider out of habit from time to time. It's characterizations of the site in question aren't always 100% accurate, and I wouldn't give that "grade" much consideration in the grand scheme of things. However, the points it looks for on a page (image descriptions, use of header tags, etc.) are all pertinent and helpful in seeing some major issues on a page.

-Use Google Trends to see what the search economy in your industry is like.
This is another really great invention from Google I can't imagine living without. Ever wonder how much your top referrers stack up to the entire Google search? You can use this to see what kind of buzz is around your brand, if search volume around a term has seasonality, how offline promotions affect search buzz, etc. I think it’s a good idea for any 'client' to run the big keywords they are targeting through here at least every quarter. Just knowing how 'popular' a subject is may help anticipate lifts or drops.

-Use del.icio.us as a reference for popularity.
If you haven't used del.icio.us or set up an account yet, you really should. It's a social bookmark site where you can look at what articles/web pages other people in the network are linking to. You can learn a lot about 'buzz' around your brand, people, topics, keywords, and generally what's hot around the net. It’s also a great way to learn about the characteristics of content that draws people in. It's a big enough user base to get a decent sample space (and to compare across users) to get a sense of what's catching on and what isn't, and how people perceive it.

This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it’s a good place to dig in if you haven’t already. There are other tools out there that essentially do what I described above as well (some of that amounts to what your personal preferences are). But in the end, people who use tools like these as a force of habit in their routines will have a lot better view of what's going on with their site and the search space it resides in.

Posted by: Dave McAnally, Product Specialist, Natural Search

Some of Us Have Standards Already

This is a touchy subject for a lot of people in our industry, but it has to be discussed...

First, those of us who think of ourselves as white hat SEOs already have standards. We make sites more accessible to index more unique content, and we pay attention to on-page and off-page search engine ranking factors, but not at the expense of the user experience.

We work within search engine guidelines to ensure our content appears when it’s relevant to a query. There’s an art and a science to relevance, and there are many tactics used to achieve it. This is what white hats do; they enable relevance. This is also what search engines do, but their long-term success depends on the relevance of their results regardless of who provides it.

We focus marketing efforts on the long-term success. Because of this, our clients don’t have to scramble every time there’s a major algorithm update.

There are others in this industry who don’t operate this way. They have another name. White hats may respect their technical skill and their intelligence, but fundamentally disagree with their professional ethics. What separates us is relevance. We both work to create successful campaigns for our client, but white hats use search engines ourselves and understand when a result is helpful and when it’s not.

We appreciate it when SEO is used to help search engines find content that’s exactly what we’re looking for when we’re looking for it, and get upset when our time is wasted by companies who just care about getting traffic to their site and nothing else. We put relevance and community ahead of brute visibility, and we usually achieve long-term visibility because of it.

These are standards that are put into practice at Resolution Media. There are a number of reasons why standards would benefit me, and the industry in general, including:

1) Solving the staffing crisis – You may have heard that our industry is suffering from a lack of qualified people to fix an abundance of inaccessible web sites that weren’t built with the user or search engines in mind. And there are currently no formalized training programs to help people understand what needs to be done and how.

Resolution Media has our own internal training program where we instill white hat values and ensure compliance throughout the optimization process, but it would be nice to have an industry pool to select qualified candidates from. Programs like SEMPO Institute are a start, but they don’t go far enough in emphasizing ethics and relevance, and thus fall short in my book.

2) Evolving the industry - Because white hats focus on long term success, we can start optimizing for the future today. This industry evolves at a breakneck pace and those who are busy moving the location of their servers in order to avoid detection don’t have a lot of time to look far into the future.

We focus on emerging media to keep ahead of the curve in terms of innovation. With Yahoo recently adopting semantic web standards, Google introducing Universal and personalized search, and the engines focusing on making content available to the mobile user, it’s clear this is not the same search marketing landscape that it was in 1998.

When we stop manipulating ranking algorithms, we can stop talking about paid links long enough to keep up with the search engines, and bring SEO into the twenty-first century. As it is, our community hasn’t quite evolved with the search engines. I, for one, think standards could help us catch up.

3) Increasing investment in search – Being involved in mobile SEO means I’m involved in two industries: mobile marketing and search engine marketing. The mobile marketers didn’t wait fifteen years to set standards for their industry because they recognized immediately that abuses by unethical marketers could cause “consumer backlash and additional regulatory scrutiny”.

To combat it they issued a code of conduct, consumer best practice guidelines and mobile advertising guidelines almost immediately. Of course, doing so doesn’t prevent me from getting Russian Viagra spam on my phone once in a while, but it at least lets potential advertisers know that mobile marketing is a legitimate channel in which to engage consumers, provided they do it correctly.

I’m not saying that such a code will be enough to take significant budgets away from broadcast or print media right away, but today mobile advertising is on the rise, and SEM budgets have room to grow. If we’re ever going to get to the point where search is a significant portion of the total advertising budget, let alone overtake all media spend in three short years, we have to do more to convince advertisers that it’s a legitimate medium. SEO is not somehow exempt from this reality.

No, not everyone in the industry is in favor of standards, but I am. I’m a white hat SEO. If you’re with me, stand up. If you’re not, I wish you best of luck in doing whatever it is that you do. It hasn’t stopped us from achieving long-term results doing what’s right in the past, and it’s not going to start today.

Chris Boggs and Lisa Barone, let’s go. Resolution Media operates by SEO standards and we welcome them in the industry. Please let me know how we can help.

Posted by: Bryson Meunier, Product Champion, Natural Search

Five Myths About Big Brand SEO

This post warrants theme music! It's Rush, so that means that sound you just heard is Bryson expressing his disdain. :-)

I encounter a lot of misinformation and false assumptions when working with companies that have huge brands. Some are the byproduct of the naiveté and some are even fueled by other SEO's. Wherever they come from, if you hold them as truths, you may be compromising the effectiveness of your project. It's absolutely true that a brand with a lot of publicity has a lot of traffic by its very nature. They also tend to experience a disproportionate amount of navigational queries. But I digress...

The following are myths I’ve encountered through blogs, mass media coverage, and other discussions that simply aren’t true for any brand regardless of its girth.

-The amount of money you spend on paid search can influence how you rank naturally

Google has been quite adamant about this one. It's a little fuzzy with Yahoo's YSSP, but ultimately, a natural algorithm is not measuring a site’s paid budget. Were an engine to factor in budgets, it would go directly against the business model of an engine (which is to provide the most relevant results possible). Google can draw interest in Adwords because of the sheer volume of users it has. Diluting the results would compromise that.

-Larger brands are able to work directly with Google to be 'placed' higher in rankings

I'm not sure where this originated, but more often than I’d like, I hear someone assume this is possible. While I've seen search engines bend over backwards to help bigger spenders in paid search maximize their return, there isn't a secret society of marketers' that are able to manipulate natural search results.

-There comes a point in a company's website life cycle where SEO engagement is no longer useful

I’m pretty sure every SEO professional could write a 1000 page diatribe on this one! The truncated version (and I mean REALLY truncated) is that search behavior is a constantly evolving thing. Google’s Udi Manber has stated that up to 25% of the queries they see each day are entirely new to them. How can there be an end game with that happening? Sure there comes a point where a site is as crawl-able as it can be. But at no point can a site (nor its content) be an end-all-be-all high-ranking juggernaut for your (potential) customers' query forever and ever. For that reason (and it certainly isn't the only one), optimization must be continuous in order to achieve continuous success. There are a host of technical arguments as to why SEO isn't a finite process as well, but I think this one is the most logical/obvious.

-Certain big name companies and large-search firms are able to gain access/inside knowledge to Google's Algorithm

I don't know why I pick on Google because this rings true for any search engine. I guess Google selling off Performics made me think of this. I hear this implied from clients and colleagues from time to time, but the fact of the matter is that it just ain't so. Nobody has a replete list of all the things Google is looking at to determine rankings. That's simply not public information. Not even employees of the engines can tell you. Matt Cutts wouldn't know all the factors (as he's more or less implied over the years). Alex Trebeck doesn't even know (and from what I can tell, he knows everything). The ability to practice SEO with data driven recommendations, meticulous research and reverse engineering are what drives success.

-Big brands do not get 'banned' from indexes regardless of their SEO practices

Well I wouldn't say it is common, but it certainly happens. I would say that in my experience, when we encounter something on a site that could lead to a penalty, it's almost never because the tactic is being used to intentionally 'game' the engines. Mostly it's because something or other was overlooked, there's legacy content/code on the site or a functionality independent of SEO was considered.

Regardless, there is no free pass to spam or trick spiders. This is why one of the first things we do with a new client is go through their entire site (or sites) and ensure nothing is occurring that could potentially raise a red flag.

There's a lot of inherent advantages a company with big name recognition has in search. But those don’t include any of the factors above.

Posted by: Dave McAnally, Product Specialist, Natural Search

Mobile in Minutes: the Cautious Company’s Guide to Mobile SEO

As much as I think that relevant, digital, query-driven mobile search marketing is both the wave of the future and an opportunity for today, I hear you Alice Z. Cuneo of AdAge and the eMarketer Report that supports “Why ‘08 isn’t Mobile’s Year—Again”. 2008 may not be mobile’s year.

As David Berkowitz pointed out, mobile may not have a year, per se, but a series of years in which the medium becomes what we all knew it could be. However, if we’re all waiting for others to have that “Hallelujah” moment, without experimenting and receiving success for ourselves, progress in this field will never be made, and mobile marketing will always be hype.

With that in mind, I present five simple ways to enter mobile marketing today that don’t require many resources or much of an understanding of the complexities of the medium. Because I’m pretty sure Mobile SEO for Dummies is taken, this is the cautious company’s guide to mobile SEO…

1) iPhone Optimization
The iPhone is currently only 2% of the handset market, but recent studies indicate that its users are affluent, young and rabid users of the mobile Internet and mobile search. The way to reach this audience properly would be to build an iPhone specific web site, do iPhone specific keyword research and build an iPhone app of your relevant web content; but if you are a cautious company or a time-starved small business owner you can get more iPhone traffic by simply using progressive enhancement if you use Flash or forgoing it altogether. At this point, even the iPhone can’t display Flash, and using it without text alternatives will not help you reach users on mobile devices, visually-impaired users or search engine spiders. Watch your iPhone traffic rise in traditional web analytics. No mess, no fuss.

2) Handheld Style Sheets
No, handheld style sheets do not fully address the mobile user experience, and they can’t be processed by every mobile device. They’re not an ideal solution for mobile marketers or developers, but they are a quick one. They also work for getting mobile content indexed in most search engines.

3) Mobilized Content
There are many things that I don’t like about mobilizers these days, and I wouldn’t recommend them for creating optimized content generally. But they do create fast mobile content. If your options are limited, mobilize a site in minutes with something like Winksite or moFuse Grow. You may have to customize it later in order to make it more accessible, but at least mobile users will have something to find when they’re looking for your brand.

4) Mobile Specific Keyword Research
When doing keyword research for your site, make sure you consider the mobile user. As I mentioned in an earlier post, mobile users search differently, and might be looking for different content in different ways than your desktop users. It’s not necessary to do a great deal of mobile keyword research when optimizing your desktop site, but it doesn’t take long to filter those pages on your site mobile users might be looking for with data from the JumpTap mobile keyword tool, Yahoo! Mobile Search Assist or Google iPhone/iPod Touch Suggest.

5) Mobile Analytics
Track your success. As I mentioned in an earlier post, if you’re using Google Analytics or another popular web analytics package to track your mobile users, you’re probably only seeing part of the picture. Add Mobilytics or another mobile analytics package to your desktop site to get a better sense of your mobile traffic. It may actually be the year of mobile for you, but JavaScript support issues in mobile devices prevent you from seeing your success.

Posted by: Bryson Meunier, Product Champion, Natural Search

Building Links with Big Brand Websites, Part 2

As promised in Part 1, today I’ll relay some things I see larger brands do (or not do in some cases) that have a direct effect on their relationships and linking with their core audience:

· Engage your PR department/agency and Search agency – This seems like a no-brainer, but you'd be surprised! It's a matter of the right hand knowing what the left hand is doing really. Press release distribution schedules need to be in sync with optimization efforts as they are very much related. The buzz analysis and general research an SEO performs can greatly improve the impact of a press release. It should also be mentioned that optimizing the press release itself should always be part of the plan :-)

· Take an inventory of digital assets with your search agency – Video, social media profiles, domain names, mobile technology and more should all be leveraged, as they all affect your visibility. With the advent of universal search, this is even more important. Make sure your search agency is aware of what you have available, as the ability to optimize these assets can produce huge dividends.

· Integrate online and offline efforts – We've seen huge (and measurable) successes with clients that use their website in conjunction with offline efforts. More specifically, we've measured how these offline efforts can directly impact the types of links coming into a site, which helps search engines perceive what subjects/themes your site is relevant to. The residual effects of these integrated campaigns go far beyond increased brand engagement; they can help mobilize your loyal customers. Along these lines, also be sure you are integrating your online efforts. Even today we see very popular brands that aren't integrating their social network profiles with their website and vice versa.

· Build content around customer segments and disseminate accordingly – It's becoming more and more obvious that different user demographics access content in different ways. At Resolution, we see how some clients have users accessing web content via mobile browsers, whereas others may see a lot of activity in social networks and so forth. It's important to understand this information and build your web presence based around your users.

· Define goals and ensure your analytics are functioning properly – As analytics packages are swapped in and out, and tags are increasingly complex, we see a lot of instances where data is not accurate. When we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of visitors, multiple conversion goals and a host of other metrics, larger sites have all sorts of chances for things to go awry. Test, test, and test again.

Make sure all pertinent analytics are working properly. This is not only important for gauging referrals, entry pages, and the success of a linking/outreach campaign, but crucial for gauging success on a website in general. It may create some headaches up front, but it’s a lot better than finding out 6 months into a project a tag wasn’t implemented properly and you now have six months of inaccurate data to decipher. Jeff went into some greater detail on how the use of analytics is so crucial to optimization.

By no means is this an exhaustive list, and I certainly don't mean to imply that link-building should be a cornerstone of your marketing strategy. However, with larger brands, the degree to which they are engaged with their core audience is absolutely shaped by how well their content resonates with that audience.

Posted by: Dave McAnally, Product Specialist, Natural Search

Building Links with Big Brand Websites, Part 1

One of the most discussed, yet vague, topics in search optimization is link building. Nobody seems to agree on how to go about building links into a site, yet everyone agrees that your linking relationships are crucial to how your site ranks (or doesn't rank as the case may be).

Search engines themselves have become increasingly efficient in determining what are legitimate links vs. links inflated for the purpose of ranking. As a result, many tactics that may have worked back in the day are no longer valid.

What I find interesting is that other bloggers discuss link building almost exclusively in relation to new or smaller sites. What about when you're managing linking relationships with a large brand? How about a large brand that already has a page rank of 8 or higher with a few million links pointing to it?

While the general linking theories hold true for a site of any size or reputation, things change quite a bit on a tactical level. Let's be honest, I'm not going to go about driving links to a startup Sarrusophone enthusiast site the same way I would Wal-Mart's website.

In a situation where the very nature of the brand engenders lots of inbound links, we need to be more concerned with where those links are coming from, and how the brand stacks up with influencers and authoritative sites in their industry. In fact when discussing linking relationships with a site like Wal-Mart’s, I would submit that it's actually part of a larger conversation on audience engagement. But we'll factor out the larger component and focus on the tactical level of engaging the core audience through search (well the 20,000 foot view of it anyway).

With large popular sites, we become less concerned about how links build trust with an engine, and more concerned with building relationships with the right core audience so engines better understand who that core audience is (which should get interesting with the advent of the semantic web). There are some obvious advantages a ubiquitous brand has over a startup or lesser known brand (offline presence, sponsorships, etc). But beyond that, a large company with a lot of resources to mobilize has awesome opportunities to really achieve successes without doing a WHOLE lot of things different than they already are.

In tomorrow’s segment, I’ll discuss some of the things I have observed larger brands do (or not do, in some cases) that have a direct effect on their linking and relationships with their core audience.

Posted by: Dave McAnally, Product Specialist, Natural Search

Proving SEO ROI for E-Commerce is Simple

How do you prove ROI with SEO? This question is causing a debate in the blogosphere…if only they were to Find Resolution here. The current answer out there is SEO ROI can’t and shouldn’t be tracked to ROI. I totally disagree.

ROI must be tracked if an agency or 3rd party wants to win and retain business (SEO, PPC, or web dev). In fact, I’d be skeptical of any agency that didn’t show ROI performance or question any e-commerce business that didn’t want to see the monetary value generated from a major investment such as this.

Increased Sales from SEO Efforts / SEO Cost = ROI

In my opinion, tracking SEO ROI is simple. Using web analytics (WA) data, add the sales increases of targeted keywords achieving higher positions to sales generated from targeted referral domains and divide by what was paid in employee hours or agency fees for research, implementation, and data analysis.

So why are people overcomplicating this or disagreeing that you can put an ROI on SEO? Here are a few arguments followed by my responses:

- Looking at monthly SEO ROI is too short of a period as ranking results can take 6+ months to achieve.

• First, ROI is not the only KPI (Key Performance Indicator) to be tracked. And I agree, in the first few months it’s about eliminating technical hurdles, and getting pages indexed. Set short term goals with different KPIs or set expectations on a short-term negative ROI, but the cost portion of the initial months can’t be overlooked in quarterly or annual ROI reports.
  

- Factors other than SERP Rank effect revenue, such as seasonality, product changes, price, or promotion.

• Yes, account for those factors in your ROI forecast; adjust that forecast as necessary. Rarely have I encountered a company without months or years of past data, even if it can only be used directionally. Further, ask for the advertising calendar to anticipate lift from a Super Bowl ad or radio push.

- Increase in traffic/clicks, rather than revenue, is a better determinate for success.

• There is something to be said for the numbers game, but ultimately why waste optimization efforts or bandwidth on visitors whose intent does not match that of the website’s (sales). It’s not too difficult to get traffic; it’s difficult to get converting traffic. Selecting the right keywords to match the desired behavior is an important process with SEO.

- What about a non-e-commerce website or branding intentions?

• I wouldn’t accept a penny from any client without first establishing and gaining agreement on quantitative goals and KPIs. Be it time on site, clicks, or page views, I can set a monetary value to that success and measure that ROI with the above method and benchmark against past data.

- What if the engine algorithms change?

• They absolutely will change; “improve” is a better descriptor. If SEO efforts are in the name of providing a good/relevant user experience, providing accessible content, and steering clear from shady practices, the site, and its ROI, should not be in jeopardy.

- What if the site has a poor conversion rate or poor checkout process that hinders revenue?

• The client should be focused first on converting the quality traffic they are already getting. Every visitor is a potential sale. That said, your benchmark data should reflect the poor conversion rate and it becomes a constant.

Bottom line(s): 1) never optimize anything (or pay for optimization via a 3rd party) without an initial hypothesis on what you plan to achieve, and 2) gain agreement on all quantitative methods and timeframes to track the progress/achievement of that goal. Go forth and measure your success!

Posted by: Jeff Campbell, VP Product Development & Innovation

Putting Momentum Behind Enterprise SEO

As search engine marketing matures, more and more enterprise SEOs find themselves entrenched in projects with complex technology infrastructures and diverse constituents. On top of the strategic analysis and execution of an enterprise SEO program, search marketers are challenged to understand a range of departmental perspectives.

Executing against natural search requirements can involve buy-in and support from marketers, business analysts, analytics specialists, I.T., legal, copywriters, media managers and often, public relations and corporate communications representatives.

Other major challenges that undoubtedly face the enterprise SEO are legacy content management systems, analytics tools, ecommerce platforms and a host of proprietary solutions that all play crucial roles in making and executing on Web decisions. An enterprise SEO must understand how legacy systems play a role in long-term business objectives and the human resources that are tied to them.

Assuming an SEO has gathered relevant information about the technology and business objectives at hand, they should look to their own communication skills—not their SEO blogs and keyword tools for inspiration.

An enterprise SEO needs to educate cross-departmental groups to create an environment that fosters long-term natural search success. Best practices should be customized and respectful of legacy systems, to balance natural search impact with resource requirements and implementation time.

If an SEO can motivate and empower designers to cast-off JavaScript for keyword-rich content, convince a server administrator to implement a 301 redirect solution, and encourage a copywriter to consider the ways they are using keywords on the page, long-term SEO success becomes a reality and not an ideality.

An SEO shouldn’t be an agent of marketing or of eCommerce, but instead, someone who focuses on understanding the unique needs of each part of the organization to build a solution that maximizes marketing impact while minimizing strain on corporate resources. An enterprise SEO is an ambassador and a leader, relying on communication skills and passion just as much as title tags and link popularity.

One of the presenters at SES Chicago 2007 made an insightful comparison between an enterprise SEO and the Buddha… He/she subscribes to a doctrine of non-attachment, bringing people together and rallying them around a central idea.

Posted by: Dan Kuthy, Account Strategist

More on Content Management

I talked a few weeks ago about how important it is to consider your network capacities when moving to a new CMS. For unrelated reasons, we've been in a lot of talks with clients this year about considerations for content management systems which has me thinking more about this. Don't get me wrong, the scope of what goes into selecting a CMS for an enterprise website goes far beyond just how SEO-friendly it is (or isn’t as the case often is). But we're fortunate enough with our clients that these decisions are being made with natural search in mind. Some professional CMS tools are very search friendly, and even marketed as such. Some are not – focusing their efforts on other user-experience/content-delivery assets.

Perhaps I’m overly optimistic, but I’m generally of the belief anything can be optimized, so long as you are willing to take the necessary steps to do so. Based on what I've been seeing recently (albeit less often recently), I made the following list of things that your CMS system can do that produce positive and negative effects for SEO and rated the scope to fix the issue (your mileage on that may vary, however, depending on the infrastructure, IT expertise, etc.).

- Dynamic or static URL structure – If the URLs passed by the CMS have session IDs, database queries, etc, they may be difficult to crawl. In these instances, URL rewriting will be necessary. How flexible the CMS is in allowing this can be a major issue as well as the technical expertise on hand. PROJECT: MODERATE/HEAVY LIFTING (depends on how many URLs we’re talking about)

- Rendering content via AJAX or on a single URL – This can be very problematic if your site's content can't be indexed based on URLs. In addition, this can have adverse effects on the user-experience if your site receives traffic from browsers that aren't capable of using this technology PROJECT: EASY FIX

- Pages are W3c compliant – This isn't as vital to crawl-ability as it once was, but there's no doubt fully compliant pages shouldn't pose problems for spiders to crawl. PROJECT: EASY TO HEAVY LIFTING (varies based on how ‘non-compliant’ the pages rendered are)

- RSS/Syndication capability – This tends to be more prevalent in blog-oriented systems, but the degree to which your users can access your information on their terms can directly improve your traffic. Plus syndication is important in improving keyword relevance and attracting links PROJECT: MODERATE (when not present)

- Video/multimedia integration – This sort of plays in line with what's above. But the degree to which your CMS can integrate video and tag them properly/optimally is important in gaining traction in video engines. It will also be interesting to watch how the current crop of CMS tools integrates with the YouTube API :-) PROJECT: EASY/MODERATE

- Uses temporary redirects on permanent pages – For some reason, there are still some tools out there that temporarily redirect pages by default. I'm not exactly sure why that is (and I'm sure there's an entirely valid reason), but anything that is temporarily redirected won't pass page rank and link popularity. This can be a major problem in winning on highly competitive queries. PROJECT: EASY

- Is not installed on the root – This is a pretty easy fix (in most cases I can think of) and not as common with higher end CMS tools, but there are still systems that create their own directory and then base the structure of the site within there. It's just one more level from the root that doesn't necessarily have to be there. Certainly not the ideal scenario for a new launch. PROJECT: EASY/MODERATE (depends on the server type/structure)

- Does not allow for unique title writing – I'll be honest I'm not personally aware of any systems that still do this straight out of the box, but I've certainly seen sites that appear to have generic title tags over-written (or written by default) by the CMS. This can wreak havoc on optimization efforts. PROJECT: MODERATE/HEAVY LIFTING

This is by no means a comprehensive list, but these seem to be things that crop up. Like all software, there are pros and cons to each system, and with a CMS it’s a great idea to weigh how search engine friendly they will present content.

Posted by: Dave McAnally, Product Specialist, Natural Search

Picture the Future: Mobile Visual Search

I’ve never really been one to ask many questions at search conferences, but during SES Chicago in December of 2006 I asked what I thought was an obvious one to the panel of mobile search optimization experts present: “How do you think voice search will change mobile SEO?” I don’t think the panelists were ready for the question, as the answer that I got was that voice recognition doesn’t really work.

In the next panel on Meet the Mobile Search Engines someone from the audience of the previous session asked a version of my question to the mobile search engines, and the Google rep replied that they did, in fact, have something in the works.

A few months later, Google introduced Goog-411, which allowed users to access Google’s local information through voice search. And yesterday, Greg Sterling of Search Engine Land called Mobile 411 the “mass-market entry point for mobile search”.

I’d have to be a visionary to be vindicated, and I’m making no such claim. It’s just hard to ignore that most people prefer talking in their phones to typing on them, and a mobile search engine that made voice search possible might have an easier time finding an audience.

This is about the same point that Sterling makes in his post on Mobile 411: “The appeal of mobile DA/voice search is its simplicity, familiarity, and convenience for callers.” I couldn’t agree more, and it’s for this reason that I think mobile visual search could be as big as or bigger than voice search.

Mobile visual search is search without keywords—without words at all, in fact. A searcher initiates a query simply by snapping a photo of something with their phone, which the mobile search engine then processes with algorithms and returns relevant digital content based on its interpretation of the user’s visual query.

It may seem like science fiction to some, but mobile visual search is a thing of the present. Vodafone made headlines today by introducing its own mobile visual search engine, Otello; and startups like SnapNow and Mobot have actually been doing this for a few years. Google has their own Mobile Visual Search engine in Neven Vision, which I suspect had something to do with their recent patent filing for reading text in images and video.

Of course, the audience for mobile visual search is currently not so large as to warrant an optimization strategy for most brands just yet, but, as with mobile voice search (and mobile search in general, to some degree), it might be just a matter of time.

The next question becomes, who is best positioned to help marketers leverage mobile visual and voice search? Is it the mobile marketing agencies? Or the search agencies? Or is it a function of the carriers and search engines?

Here at Resolution Media, we define what we do and don’t within the framework of Query Marketingsm. Basically, if a platform is query-based, digital, and non-interruptive, then we consider it part of the Query Marketingsm landscape and, therefore, a service we are well-positioned to deliver based on our experience stimulating consumer response in this environment.

In this case, as opposed to the traditional keyword, the query comes in the form of a picture or voice prompt. But it’s a consumer-initiated query nonetheless. And it’s certainly a digital proposition. So as long as the advertising and content-placement opportunities within mobile visual and voice search remain non-interruptive, then it makes sense for us to incorporate it into our solution set.

Posted by: Bryson Meunier, Product Champion, Natural Search

SEO By Any Other Name...

SEO, DAO, DCO… what’s in an acronym?

Outrider’s Chris Copeland shared his POV (sorry, that’s the last one I’ll use for a while) on Friday, introducing the concept of Digital Asset Optimization as the next step in the evolution of Search Engine Optimization (ok, can I start acronymizing again? Typing these words out is getting cumbersome.)

As Chris observes, “It seems like the trend is shifting from optimizing for a slow, dumb engine, and is moving towards a more sophisticated integration of elements, be it image, video, consumer reviews, or social networks.”

While I couldn’t agree more, I do feel compelled to point out that shifting the focus away from SEO to a more holistic and inclusive process is something Resolution Media has been actively promoting in the marketplace since December of 2006, when we first launched the QueryMatrix.



Core to the QueryMatrix methodology were the principles of Consumer-Initiated Advertising and Digital Content Optimization. The former was our wide-lens view of the PPC landscape today and tomorrow. And the latter bears a strong resemblance to Copeland’s vision for DAO.

Our goal when we coined theses phrase (and their corresponding acronyms) was to get the search community talking about how the strategies and tactics we employed were part of the larger marketing ecosystem. We thought this would help CMOs understand that what we did went far beyond the SERP and were really just extensions of marketing principles they were familiar with and had been executing for years.

Guess what? We were wrong. The C-level suite was not ready for more geeky acronyms. It had taken them years just to understand SEM, SEO, and PPC. And they didn’t want to hear how we did what we did. Rather, they wanted to know how what we did would help them.

So we canned the acronyms and began talking less about the work we deliver to our clients and more about what the work will deliver for our clients’ brands. We also framed our expertise into the context of 2 basic platforms that everyone in marketing can relate to -- advertising and content. Our re-release of the QueryMatrix in July 2007 reflects this repositioning.



7 months later, these subtle tweaks are making a big difference. More and more Omnicom clients have awoken to the power of paid and natural search. We’ve found that breaking down a complex marketing specialty into concepts CMOs can understand and outcomes they can expect has allowed them to embrace the channel on their terms. This has led to a willingness to take ownership and accountability for its implementation. And this has translated to increased commitment and, in turn, budget allocation.

Bottom line -- the key to driving success in search lies less in defining (and redefining) what we do and more in defining (and redefining) the results we can achieve.

Posted by: Aaron Goldman, VP Marketing & Strategic Partnerships

Be the Ruler of Your Domain

An issue that’s arisen for clients over the years got me thinking about things to consider when registering domains. Almost any larger firm’s legal department will insist the company owns as many permutations of their domain name as possible. The reason for this is because there is no shortage of people willing to register these and use them for malicious purposes. This could include creating affiliate marketers, masking the site as official and selling knock-off products, making disparaging comments about your company, and so on. The most obvious effect for natural search is that if they succeed in generating rankings for queries around your brand, that’s one less place you are visible.

Ultimately, the case we try to make is that if our clients have a highly visible brand, then they need to be proactive in owning domains that could be used to harm its reputation. We aren’t even primarily concerned about what they do with the domain, but that they are keeping other people from getting a hold of it. I’m not just talking about making sure you own .org, .biz, .net or country specific top levels either. As cheap as domain registration is now, it isn’t all that big of an undertaking to go through a massive registration. Think in the hundreds (if not thousands) of permutations. It’s something I believe any modern large brand needs to take seriously. In that spirit, I made a list of ten other domain types that large brands should be proactively registering that aren’t always obvious…

1. Product model numbers and names – I’m being granular here. Get those long tail digits registered…at the very least the .com and .net iterations.
2. Anything with collector, enthusiast, or hobbyist tie-ins. These domains may be taken by genuine fans. But they may also be registered by people looking to capitalize on your customer base in less-than-reputable ways. Things like http://www.brand-collector.com/
3. Derogatory domains – Like it or not, we can’t always be everyone’s cup of tea. Protect yourself from vocal detractors by making sure they can’t register things like http://www.brand-sucks.com/ and be thorough (there’s more ways to say something ‘sucks’ than just that). Register anti-brand, bad-brand, against-brand and so on.
4. Misspellings – Affiliate marketers love to register these and create deceptive websites around misspellings.
5. Purchase intent domains – Speaking of affiliates, domains like purchase-‘brand’.