SEOmoz Beginners Guide Ch 10 Pt 1 Review

Metrics and Tracking

This last chapter is one of the most important and tells you what you need to know in order to track and measure you website success.

It starts off with five different metrics to track.

Search Engine Share of Referring Visits

You want to know the traffic sources to your website

• Direct Navigation

• Referred Traffic

• Search Traffic

Visits Referred by Specific Search Engines

You want to know specifically which search engine is sending you the most traffic and what the nature of that traffic is.

Visits Referred By Specific Search Engine Terms and Phrases

You want to know what keywords and keyword phrases are used to find your site.

Conversion Rate By Search Term and Phrase

You want to know what keywords and keyword phrases are converting your users to a sale or some action you want them to take.

Number of Pages Receiving At Least One Visit

You want to know which pages on your site are getting at least one visit.

You want to get rid of those pages that get no visits. That will help your overall site get ranking and authority.

 Not Provided

The last part of this section explains what the “not provided” keyword classification is and means.

Basically Google only shows all the keyword data to people who advertise on Adwords.

They have a more technical explanation about not showing data from those users logged into their Google accounts.

That’s all very nice but the bottom line is those who advertise and use Adwords get the data and those who do not don’t.

Take in the video and read this part of the chapter and you will get all the details behind what I have just outlined.

As always if you find the information useful, please “like”, “tweet”, “Google+”, “”Pin”, or “Stumble” it. Many thanks for your support.

For those who want it all in print. Read on, there is a transcript of the video.

Hey, Claude Pelanne here, Affiliate Starting Line, welcome. This is a continuation of the SEOmoz Beginner’s Guide to SEO video review series and we’re on the last chapter, Chapter 10, which is about measuring and tracking success. It’s a very important chapter. Probably I would say the most important if not close to it, along with Chapter 4 of this whole guide, and it takes a little while to get through this.

This first video will be about this first section here which is recommended metrics to traffic. So they tell you that there’s certain metrics you want to follow and learn about in order to measure what’s going on with your website. They also give you three links here to three different articles that will explain a lot of different metrics to you. But the first one they give you here is search engine share of referring visits.

And what this means is these are three different ways that people find your website; direct navigation by typing in directly, referral traffic by coming through a link from other websites. It could come through YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook. Search traffic, people typing in search queries and finding your website. So you want to know both the percentage and the exact numbers to help you identify weaknesses and serve as comparisons over time. Yes.

So, for example, in this training website, if I come up here to sources for traffic and take a look at the overview, it will give me a picture of where my traffic comes from; close to 7 percent from search, 6 percent from referral and 66 percent from direct. So these are out of whack. I would have to work at trying to get better search traffic and more referrals in relations to direct, and this is what this data tells you. And then you can break it down into more specific detail.

For example, if I come down here to organic search, it’s going to show me what keywords. Now this is a training site that doesn’t have much, so you would see a list of keywords down here. And then you can see on here, it says not provided. We’ll talk about that shortly. And if I want to find out where the referrals came from, I can see here they came from Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube, etc. So, you want to use Google analytics to understand where your traffic is coming from. That’s basically what that says.

Visits referred by specific search engines. So you’re going to find that the majority of your traffic is probably going come from Google and maybe up to 60 percent, 70 percent, maybe 80 percent and in some cases in Europe it’s 90 percent, and then the rest from it will come from Yahoo and Bing.

And when that happens, there are other concepts you need to understand. You want to compare performance versus market share. So you want to track these search engines broadly, but you also want to get in granular. You want to see where your traffic is coming from, neither by country, and you want to know how each one of these factors in contributing to your site. They tell you that technology and Internet tend to be Google strengths, because most of Google’s traffic is younger and tech-savvy, whereas lifestyle referrals will come from Yahoo and Bing. People tend to go there because they are portals and they emphasize that.

Visibility and potential drops. What that means is you might find that you have a site that disappears from Google, let’s say, but it’s still ranking in Yahoo and Bing, and then you want to take steps accordingly to see what factors are creating that. That’s exactly my problem. I have a site that has disappeared from Google. It’s still ranking on Yahoo and Bing. It ranks on Google on the first page in exact match, but in broad match, nowhere to be found and my analytics are showing straight lines. I got to figure out what’s causing that.

Uncover strategic values. So here you want to undertake SEO, you want to see which aspect of SEO is creating the best results. You want to figure out which on-page tactics work better like keyword inclusion and targeting. What it basically says is keywords targeting works better with Yahoo and Bing, anchor text links work stronger on Google, and you kind of want to understand which mix of SEO works better depending on the search engine.

Visits referred by specific search engine at terms and phrases. This is what we just saw. You want to figure out which keywords are driving traffic to your site, and Google has made this more difficult because right now, when you are logged in to your Google account or anybody has logged in to their Google account from Gmail, from Google plus, from whatever, the data that they’re creating, the keywords that they’re using to visit sites are not going to be reported to those site owners. That’s just a policy that Google instituted a few months ago.

The only way that you’ll get that kind of data is if you have Google AdWords campaign running. If you’re paying Google AdWords campaign dollars, they’ll show you all the data. If you’re not, you will not see, and you’ll see on your line, just like we saw before, a keyword and it’ll say not provided. Unfortunately, for people, sometimes that data represents 10 percent, up to 40 percent of their keyword referrals, and there are ways around that, and that’ll be subject for another video.

Conversion rate by search term query. So you want to figure out which keywords are converting and at what rate. So in this example, they say SEO tools for SEOmoz converted at 5.8 percent, and then they went to check and see where they ranked for that keyword. They were in position number four, so they want to go and optimize, do some things and see if they can move up from four to three or two or one, and they’re going to see their conversion rate go way up.

Number of pages visited at least once. So you want to know which pages on your website. Again, through Google analytics, you can see that, which pages are getting what number of visits and you need at least one visit from a search engine to make it worthwhile. If you have pages on your website that gets zero visits, then maybe you should get rid of them, and that’ll improve your overall quality profile with the search engines.

And then they come down here and explain this not provided concept which is what I just explained before. Google will not show keywords of people who are logged in to their accounts at Gmail or at Google Plus or logged in to their Google accounts. And that’s a problem because they used to provide that information and it represents anywhere from 20 percent to 40 percent of some people’s keyword queries. So they’ve cut back and there is a way around it. They give you a blog post here, which you should read, and it explains what it is, what that phenomenon is, and what you can try to do to work around it. And that’s it.

So that’s the first part of Chapter 10. And the second part, we’re going to go take a look at analytic software, the kind of tools that you can access to actually get that data. You saw a little bit of that when I showed you Google analytics.

And that’s it. I hope this video has been helpful. This is Claude Pelanne, Affiliate Starting Line. Stay with it, stay well, and we’ll talk to you soon.

About Claude Pelanne

Claude Pelanne is an internet marketer and consultant who comes out of television broadcast. He works with start ups and small business to optimize their online business.