Is Organic Search Visibility Measurement Insane?

Is Search Visibility

Measurement Insane

– during a redesign

and after?

eMetrics Boston 2014

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What to Expect Today.

!  Keywords? Where do they come from..

!  Redesign and measurement – careful

!  Tools, tools – forensic examples

!  Ignorance is Bliss

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The Origin of Keywords

! What words/phrases do potential customers use to find services/products like yours.

!  Review: !  Industry words in press/twitter/blogs – ie.

Content !  Internal sales and customer support materials !  Competitive Review !  Ispionage !  SEMrush

!  Keyword Discovery Tools !  Google Adwords

!  Search Results

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Top Reasons for Redesign

! New SEO Company = Tactical changes too many to mention in this small box

! New CEO/CMO = New brand agency, new web design

! Repositioning of Company/products = New content, new keywords

! Company name change /acquisition = Domain name change, every URL Changes

5 Prepare for Redesign (1)

! Keyword discovery research – what keywords define the company

! Which content drives traffic into site (review landing pages) and set content/SEO strategy to maintain that content

! Look at Page Authority (moz.com) and don’t kill pages with high page authority

6 Prepare for Redesign (2) The Tedious Part

! WebMaster Tools – Queries, Keywords, Clicks - TAKE SCREENSHOTS! The data only lasts for 90 days and you can only to ‘change’ comparisons for the most recent 30 days. !  Download the data that you are able to download.

! What do search results look like today! TAKE SCREENSHOTS!

! As much as I hate to say it – run ranking reports

! Set up redirect file for .htaccess

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Little Things

!  Error Page in place?

!  301 redirects for all renamed URLs

!  Turned on the tracking code (since it was probably off on the beta site)?

!  Filtered out the design/development team (Search company too) from the analytics?

!  Connected Google analytics and Google Webmaster tools and have the same person looking at both

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Right about Now

! Spot check for redirect errors – click on organic search results

! Home page change? 3 hours

! Sitelinks? 1-3 days

! Old and new URLs at same time – yup – some overlap

! DNS propagation – 4-5 days across world

! Major ranking changes – 2 weeks

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What can you compare from previous site?

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Organic Search Traffic Comparing Pre-Post Launch Traditional Analytics ! Site Wide

! Visits

! Unique Visitors

! Time on site

! Bounce rate

! Rankings for Top Keywords

! Traffic to pages where URL has NOT changed

! Questionable

! Number of Pages Viewed/visit ! Form completions

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Organic Search Traffic Comparing Pre-Post Launch !  Queries, Keywords, Clicks (WebMaster Tools)

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What CAN’T you compare from previous site?

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Organic Search Traffic What you CAN’T Compare

! Content by page (unless you kept the URLs the same) (ie. Visits to company/mgt/ceo would need to be mapped to company/management/ceo)

! # of Pages visited

! Path through site

! Top content

! Landing pages

! Questionable

! Consumption of resources (whitepapers, etc)

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Visual Search

Turns Up Lots of Things

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The Misconception that keywords are ‘not provided’ ! Enter WebMaster Tools!!!

Google WebMaster Tools providing Referring Keywords

for a given Landing Page.

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Google WebMaster Tools providing Landing Pages for a

given Referring Keyword

Search Visibility Forensics eMetrics Boston 2014

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Example #1 - The Drop!

Moz.Com

Google Analytics

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Review Rankings Moz.com

Rank 1-3 Shows Increase

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Review Queries In Google WebMaster Tools

Shows Drop in Queries

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Review Landing Pages in Google WebMaster Tools

!  Key Page (top product page) is showing change in queries and click-throughs

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Review of Pages that Changed

!  Discover page goes to Error!!!!!

!  Review error page traffic – accounts of lost traffic

!  Page redirect put in place

!  Queries go up

!  Traffic recovers

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•  http://www.liveops.com/ddd

•  http://www.hp.com/ddd

•  http://www.opentable.com/ddd

•  http://www.vmware.com/ddd

•  http://www.cisco.com/ddd

Bad Error Pages

Good Error Pages

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Example #2 - Follow the Increased Traffic Trail to Unexpected Results

Incr

ease

in o

rgan

ic t

raff

ic

Increase in search visits from Google

Mar

keti

ng

has

no

idea

A few marketing programs run but not enough to justify increase

Mar

keti

ng

take

s cr

edit

With limited conversion metrics in place WebMama turns forensic scientist

Marketing took credit ☺

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Tracking rankings over time. Looked to see if there had been a substantial ranking increase for top branded keywords. Nope.

They hadn’t changed anything in the way they tracked Google Paid Search – no tag changes, no drop in their conversions/traffic that would lead to increase in non-paid traffic.

Checked with Demand Generation Team

Checked MOZ.COM

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Google WebMaster Tools Next

Looked at Queries to see if there was an increase in queries and/or clicks that could account for traffic.

Looked at landing page traffic to see if any one page (like a press release) traffic had increased to account for the increase in traffic.

Nothing…..

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Back to Google Analytics

Looked at landing page traffic to see if any one page (like a press release) traffic had increased to account for the increase in traffic.

Nothing…..

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Talked to Engineering/IT

! New Product Release

!  Traffic was flowing directly to Login Page but it was on the engineering/product side of things so it just looked like a bounce traffic off the home page

!  Login Traffic was not subtracted from corporate site traffic

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Top 15 TakeAways

1. Use 301 Redirects

2. Put tracking code on Error pages

3.  Filter out development team, web producers, agencies, etc.

4. Keep Google WebMaster Tools connected into Google Analytics

5. Don’t silo WebMaster Tools to IT and Google Analytics to Marketing (or the analytics team)

6.  Turn your analytics on at launch not on beta site

7. Make sure your beta site is not visible to search engines a)  Bonus – don’t leave the noindex tag or robots.txt disallow from beta site

on the live site when you switch

8.  If you do change URLs for pages, remember that you will lose the ability to do page-page comparison

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Top 15 Take-Aways - Continued

9. Question US-centric/CEO-centric decisions on tracking (ie US marketing taking all credit for .com traffic)

10. User multiple tools which may not be connected to validate data

11. Understand Google Analytics limitations with respect to on-page click analytics – use CrazyEgg instead

12. Rankings will look different for you, the CEO, your Mom and your colleagues

13. Spot check 404s reported by spider (Moz, Google webmaster tools). Don’t obsess on fixing all of them.

14. Carefully review home page bounce rate by looking at repeat visitors vs new visitors. They may be heading straight to a login page after searching for your brand

15. Good luck.

Barbara Coll

CEO

WebMama.com Inc.