At the risk of putting myself in the firing line, I’m going to try to put my point across in defense of rankings reports. I’m blogging it here as it will take somewhat more than my 140 character tweet allowance…. Before you nail me in the comments, please read the full post J

Ranking Reports

These are reports provided by software programs like WebCEO which send automatic queries to Google and the other search engines to determine rankings on a range of keywords or phrases. They show increases or decreases in rankings of selected phrases, as well as total number of selected keywords ranking from a submitted universe.

My defense of ranking reports – a rebuttal of anti-ranking-report arguments over the past few days

Ranking reports are an easy sell. SMB clients (in general) have no understanding of log-files or analytics, let alone what a SERP is. They do however want to know that there will be reporting they can understand regarding the efficacy of the SEO efforts they are paying for.

Hang-on… Read me out

1. I am not saying that ranking reports are what you should focus your actual reporting on
2. I am not saying that ranking reports are always accurate, though in my experience they are not that far off despite different data centers
3. I am saying that it is counter-productive to baffle clients new to SEO with a long-winded attempt at education on the wonders of log-files, keyword analytics, keyword to conversion rates, relative estimated SERP position CTR rates, eye tracking heat maps, affect of images and news results in the blended search results on CTR and so on and so forth. I am going to expand on this point below…

New to SEO? Can I confound you and take your money please?

I know that’s an exaggeration, but SEO’s who live and breathe the subject tend to forget that there is a whole world out there who does not know what a META description is, why keyword research is important, or who Danny Sullivan is.

In many cases, though not all, the longer you have been in the industry, the less tolerant you are with practices you know to be old-hat, incomplete, or inaccurate in any way. That’s a good thing. But it’s important not to forget about the great multitudes of potential clients with sites who really have no clue.

No, they are not stupid. No, they are not ‘uniformed’. No, they are not gullible. But they are, in many cases uneducated, and they need their fears to be assuaged. The whole SEO, SEM, SMM, internet band-wagon in general seems to be a massive juggernaut out of control. They want to understand that they will have something tangible to show for ‘it’ that they understand even though at this stage they don’t really ‘get it’. It’s their hard-earned dollars designated for marketing for which they fight to get approval… Their spend options are pretty big.

They may have heard of search engine optimization. What they probably have heard is that people who ‘do’ SEO can make them rank number 1 in Google for their brand name and lots of other ‘important words’. What they have not been told is that ranking on ‘fake Nike trainers’ if you sell real Nike trainers is not a good idea, and they probably haven’t thought that far yet as the whole concept of ranking in the search engines without paying for it per-click (if they have even heard of that) is new to them.

How to deal with this and where ranking reports raise their ugly/helpful heads depending on your point of view:

1. It is important to set expectations. This does not take a half hour lesson in SEO basics. Assuming the SEO has checked out the site, knows there is no redesign budget, and hasn’t found anything totally dire with the coding, and assuming there are no analytics, it’s relatively easy to simply give the client an elevator speech that will not confound them entirely in the early stages; something along the lines of:

“In order to figure out how best to position your site in the search engines, we need to determine what keywords we want to optimize your site for. To do this we need to conduct online keyword research to determine what your target market is actually searching for online.

We do this by utilizing a number of specifically developed keyword research tools that provide us with the keyword use of your target market when they are looking online for the service you provide. These keywords are the actual keyword terms or phrases that people like you or I would type into the search box on the search engines when we are researching or looking for a product or service online (show them an example on your laptop).

We then figure out which keywords are going to provide your site with the greatest effective exposure in terms of potential ROI when we target them by applying SEO best practice. The Recommendations Document we provide will explain everything in detail, and we’ll follow up with consultation time to explain terms and concepts that are new to you prior to integrating the recommendations, based ofcourse on your approval.

We cannot guarantee or promise you the number one position in Google or any major search engine for any term or terms, though there is a very strong likelihood that your brand name will rank very well. What we can begin to show you once the optimization recommendations are implemented is how your rankings on key identified and selected terms for optimization are improving by utilizing what is called ‘ranking software’.

This software will show you how your rankings on the key terms identified for the purpose of increasing your exposure in the engines have improved once the SEO process has begun. These rankings may take from a few days to weeks to months to show any significant improvements due to a number of factors. This will also be explained in full in the recommendations.

The recommendations document will also contain information on a vital element of SEO called ‘web analytics’. This section will explain what your real key performance indicators (KPI) should be, how we measure them, and how we will report those to you.

We also need to make very clear at this juncture that if all of our recommendations are not implemented, either by ourselves, or by your in-house team in close consultation with your provided lead SEO consultant, that any results will be negatively affected, and possibly entirely disaffected.

Note to SEO experts reading this post. Yes, I know there is a lot more to SEO. You know that too. The average SMB contact is probably already crossing their eyes. This is all new to many of them. But they probably need to be convinced of some kind of immediate ‘reporting’ structure that they can understand and feed on to other members of their team or corporate board. Ranking reports provide that initial toe-hold for them to get excited, involved, interested in learning more, and most vitally, which will convince them to proceed with the initiative.

2. Follow up this conversation will a full Recommendations Document, explaining everything; from definitions to visual examples of what a title tag is (for example) how the title tag is viewed in the SERPs, where it is seen in the browser, and so on and so forth. SnagIt is great for these grabs. Make this document usable  on a page-by-page basis showing what ‘is’ and what ‘should be’; e.g. current title vs. recommended; current META  description vs. recommended; etc, and if you do SEO copywriting, which I personally think is important, then show them old vs. recommended utilizing highlights to show difference and changes. Reassure them that their brand message is not being lost, and explain why each element you are recommending is included.

Attach a full keyword research document based on all keywords gathered in alphabetical order including search volume, KEI (with definition and explanation), and competing sites. I know KEI is not the be-all and end-all, but it does give guidance and support to your argument on review that perhaps trying to rank on ‘used cars’ will be a lot harder for them to realistically achieve when compared to ranking on ‘used dodge caravans orlando’. Don’t ‘prune’ the keyword document too much apart from totally irrelevant terms; e.g. a cancer foundation will not be interested in words around ‘cancer horoscope’ or ‘tropic of cancer’.

Through your client’s eyes…

At this stage the search engines are your new-to-seo-client’s ‘oyster’. None of their competitors, friends or business acquaintances has heard of it or implemented it, so they must really be ahead of the curve! This is the time to gently explain that SEO has been around for over a decade, and is a highly competitive and sometimes combative practice. Show them some examples without terrifying them and losing their will to continue. Support your initial statement that we can ‘improve your exposure, but not guarantee your rankings’. Assuming you’re white-hat. I probably should have started this post by saying ‘black-hats-ignore’ .

3. Run an initial benchmark (horrors!) ranking report along with ensuring that the chosen analytics program snippets are coded in.

Apply the recommended SEO changes to the site, start the backlink campaign, and run monthly ranking reports to support and supplement your real KPI analytics reporting.

As soon as your client ‘gets’ your real analytics reports with KPI data based on conversions, returns, interaction, registrations, whatever, you can wean them off the rankings reports in favor of the more detailed, accurate and insightful web-analytics.

In Closing

Ranking Reports are not perfect, not infallible, and not what you should by any means focus on in terms of reporting standards for your clients, but they do have their place. I think it would be a sad day for the industry if the possibility of utilizing them became defunct.

(Final comment; a friend ran a report for a client using WebCeo on the 7^th after speaking with the team at WebCEO, and it worked fine.)

15 Strategic Opportunities Identified by Effective Measurement of Web Based Income

1. Concentrate more efforts on online and offline marketing which utilize the converting keywords in tag lines and copy.
2. Pay strict attention to the landing pages associated with each of these keywords and make them more usable, more relevant and more motivating.
3. Target the converting landing pages via other search marketing efforts and ensure they are as optimized for usability as possible.
4. It is unlikely that you have too many landing pages that are not useful to your business, but if they are not converting then work with marketing, SEO, copy and design to make them more appealing to the visitors who are looking for the information they contain. If they are simply information pages for support, or which provide other contact or about us information, discount them from your area of concern. If they are old, update them. If they are no longer relevant, .301 them to the most relevant page that is converting and work the driving keywords into the copy of that page if it is relevant to do so.
5. When you identify specific visitor paths that are converting, focus on them and make them more appealing, more usable, and more optimized for the human users via relevant content, ease of navigation and appropriate calls to action.
6. If you identify specific visitor paths that are not converting, reassess the path based on the analytics data and work with marketing, content, development, design and SEO to provide a better user experience throughout the path. Provide alternate paths if that seems to make the most sense based on what you know of the conversion paths that are working.
7. When you have determined what landing pages have a high bounce rate, analyze the keywords that are driving the traffic to those landing pages. A few simple content and design tweaks can enhance the user experience on those landing pages and get the visitor into one of the optimal conversion paths.
8. If you have specific product or service portal pages that are not working, attempt to understand why based on the knowledge you have on performing keywords, landing pages and paths. Again, a few tweaks to the pages can make an enormous difference.
9. For product and service portal pages that are converting, review and enhance usability and relevance.
10. If you have individual product or service pages that are doing very well in terms of driving revenue, enhance and consider appropriate online offers.
11. For individual product or service pages that are not performing, assess, refine, tweak and view them in conjunction with what you know about keyword search frequency as well as converting keyword data. If they are underperforming as a proportion of converting hits when compared to more popular products, consider offering online coupons, discounts and other motivating basic sales tactics. If they are underperforming in terms of gross numbers, but are proportionally inline with the more popular products and services, then it’s up to you if you want them to be ‘more popular’ and if their actual (not related) performance is appropriate.
12. If you have geographic areas that are converting well, consider targeting them via paid search marketing including the best converting landing pages.
13. If you have geographic areas that are underperforming assess if they are areas you are actively targeting. If they are, then the design and development of more geographically targeted landing pages and investment in associated geotargeted paid search might be a great option.
14. The issue of new visitors vs. returning visitors is a two-sided coin. You want new visitors to be driving revenue as it illustrates increased online brand exposure. You also want to ensure that you have a good level of customer loyalty. A few months worth of data should give you a feel for what is happening on your site, and where you should focus your efforts.
15. Looking at the length of time on your site for users who do not convert is an interesting study determining the optimal level of user engagement for your site. You may find that users looking for a specific product spend less time than someone coming in via a more generic based term, or vice versa. Again, a few months worth of data will highlight where there are possible opportunities, and where you are doing well and need to consolidate your web presence.

When taken as a whole, this web analytics data can provide you with a wealth of insight regarding the level of user engagement your site enjoys, and the level of user engagement your users themselves experience during a conversion.

There is also a lot of information that I have excluded that needs to be considered including shipping cost management, customer acquisition cost in relation to new design and development costs and paid search costs (remember, we made all previously done web work a fixed cost ate beginning of this illustration). We have tantalizingly touched on how web analytics data can provide you with new R&D or product line opportunities, new pricing strategies, and alternative promotion strategies. We’ll leave it as it is for now and move on to how you can get the best web analytics program for you.

How you can get this data.
All web analytics programs require the entry of some source code to the web pages. You will need to ensure that either you can handle that code entry in house, or that your web development provider of choice can do it for you. Most code insertions are very easy. The sophistication of each package can usually be determined by the cost of the package itself. In some cases the same can be said for the difficulty level of the integration of the software to your web site.

The Best Analytics Program for You?

In a nut shell, Google Analytics is a great tool, and it’s free and easy to utilize. It provides data on:

Visitors including:

• Total visits
• New visitors
• Returning visitors
• Page views
• Bounce rates

Traffic sources including:

• Search engines
• Direct referrals
• Referring sites
• Keywords
• Landing pages
• Geographic areas

…and much more. It can also track offline initiatives.

For more advanced or revenue based web analytics data there are so many web site packages out there that offer great data. Not all provide keyword based revenue data. One of my personal favorites that provides data for every analytics requirement I mentioned in my illustration is Omniture. If it is financially feasible for you to integrate it, it comes highly recommended.

Ballard Vale has a list of web analytics programs that is a bit outdated, but will give you an indication of how many options there are. Research each one carefully, and then check for reviews on blogs and forums in your industry. User generated content (UGC) is, most definitely, a great break-though in so many ways.

How do I integrate my chosen web analytics package?

• Speak to your in-house team and assess their level of understanding of web analytics in general.
• If they do not appear to be entirely capable of providing you with the set-up and required levels of data gathering and interpretation you need, you have four options:

1. Hire-in a consultant
2. Hire-in permanent
3. Outsource
4. Rely on the support of your chosen web analytics provider

In the first case, check out their credentials carefully, and tell them exactly what you expect your team to be able to accomplish at the end of their tenure. Ensure you get post in-house consultative follow-up time for issues or concerns.

In the second case, make very sure you know what you need. You may need to hire a consultant to ensure you get the best bang for your buck in terms of hiring.

In the third, make sure you are outsourcing to an agency that specializes in ether web analytics itself, or in search marketing. Check their credentials and case studies. Ask them for actual examples, and make sure you clearly explain what you need and expect verbally and in writing.

If you choose the fourth and final option, you are pretty covered in terms of expense incurred, but if you are not entirely sure of their support, I would suggest extreme caution. Most programs that you pay for offer pretty good support.

That is one problem with Google Analytics. There is very little training as it is assumed that folks will understand exactly what they can do on every screen. That is not true. A bit of fiddling, practice and work on the forums can set you straight, but it would be better to get a Google Analytics expert to walk you through what you can do, how to do it and how to interpret it. If you do, you’re running from the gate.

Don’t leap into web analytics. It’s not that easy, it does require expertise, and it can result in utter confusion if you don’t get what you want the way you want it.

[End note: I was actually looking for a list of web analytics programs on - in my opinion - the best web analytics blog on the planet when I got totally side tracked by their online video analytics post… Check it out – this site is a must for web analytic nuts!]

• Some simply don’t understand the importance of web analytics.
• Some understand the importance of web analytics but struggle with selecting the right program.
• Some have the right program but have great difficulty interpreting the continuous stream of data and providing strategic action plans based on the wealth of information provided.

So we’ll take it right back to basics.

What is the purpose of your web site?
Starting at the beginning, sit down with your executive team including marketing, finance, HR and the ultimate decision maker and decide what the purpose of your web site is. That sounds so obvious, but it is something many businesses do not determine in their haste to get on the internet band-wagon, to improve their site, to make it prettier, faster, more navigable, more accessible… somewhere along the line the primary business purpose of the web site is forgotten.

There are a number of objectives to take into consideration. Do you want your web site to:

• Disseminate information and require no further interaction
• Disseminate information and engage the user into an action (such as a download)
• Generate leads (eg, via query form submission)
• Generate sales (ecommerce)
• Provide customer support
• Support specific offline marketing campaigns
• Support specific emarketing campaigns
• Be a test market for offline marketing campaigns
• Engage internet users for research purposes
• Engage users to generate buzz

…The list is not comprehensive, but it’s a good indication of the types of business goals you might want to consider when having the discussion with the exec team to determine what you want to measure to facilitate the integration of effective analytics.

How do you best determine whether your online business objectives have been met?

We’re heading into the realm of web analytics here. It’s really not that bad. We’re going to use the example of an online web site whose primary objective is to maximize online sales via organic listings. We’ll assume all design and associated development costs in getting the web site online are fixed or sunk costs. We’ll assume that the site has been effectively designed for usability, developed for search engine exposure due to content relevance, and is an attractive navigable site.

So, what do you want to measure?

That’s easy enough. You want to measure your direct and indirect web source income.

The second part of that is a little trickier, so we’ll leave that for now and focus on direct web based income. It gets really fun from this point onwards. This is not a full analytics tutorial, it is basically Web Analytics Possibilities 101, and as such we will mention key points.

Measuring web based income

You can measure your web based income simply from actual sales revenue. That’s a no-brainer as you get that data from your ecommerce package. What you want to assess via your web analytics is what is driving that income.

• What search keywords are driving the revenue
• What is the percentage of keywords that drive the revenue to overall keywords resulting in a visit
• What landing pages are driving the revenue
• Which [conversion] paths are driving the revenue
• Which product or service portal pages are driving the revenue
• Which individual product or service pages are driving the revenue
• What geographic areas are driving the revenue
• What is the proportion of new visitors to the site that are driving the income
• What is the proportion of returning visitors that is driving the income
• What is the average length of time spent on the site by people who convert

Conversely, you want to understand

• What is the percentage of keywords that are not driving revenue
• What landing pages are not converting
• Whether these pages have a high bounce rate
• Are the keywords that do not drive revenue associated with the bounce pages and non-converting pages
• What visitor paths are losing visitors via bleed-out
• Which are the common pages in these paths that have high bounce rates
• What are the commonalities between path bleed-out and bounce rates
• Which product or service portal pages are not driving revenue
• Which individual product or service pages are not driving revenue
• What geographic areas are failing to result in online sales
• What is the proportion of new visitors to the site that are not driving revenue
• What is the proportion of returning visitors that are not driving revenue
• What is the average length of time spent on the site by visitors who don’t convert

In the next post we’ll consider what this data reveals in terms of strategic opportunity, how you can get the data, which analytics programs might suit you best, and analytics integration options.