7 KPIs in SEO

The Long Tail of Natural Search

To understand the KPIs and management techniques, lets examine what lies
beneath the surface. In a word, it is not an iceberg, but the long tail? a
colloquial term referring to a common statistical distribution featuring a tail-
shaped? curve. Thanks to Chris Andersens book, the long tail concept has
received much press recently, and carries many significant Internet business-based
implications. But there is also a long tail distribution that contains the promise of natural
search for large, dynamic e-commerce merchants.

Source Netconcepts, 2006
In fact, to appreciate the enormity of this potential, contrasting it against a known
quantity is helpful. According to research published recently by Netconcepts
(Chasing the Long Tail of Natural Search?, 2006) for every search that occurs
for the average merchants brand name, nearly 40 relevant searches occur for more
generic, brand-neutral keywords. For instance, if there are 100,000 searches for LL
Bean? this month, there are an estimated 4,000,000 searches for hundreds of
thousands of unbranded? keyword markets LL Bean pages could compete
within, ranging from furniture slipcovers? to womens flannel
pajamas? to mens reindeer sweater,? and more.
For these coveted and targeted keywords, LL Bean is likely to have matching category
or product pages somewhere on the website, that ideally could position the LL Bean
brand high enough in the search results to win these millions of click decisions (and
sales) on the cheap. And even if these pages do not convert 100% of these searches
into clicks, if well ranked, these pages still serve the purpose of building brand by
association with these millions of corresponding unbranded? searches, and by
extension, the searchers that used them.
This is the long tail of natural search the universe of diverse, unbranded keyword
markets that, while perhaps not as frequently searched on an individual basis,
cumulatively, add up to orders-of-magnitude greater (40x, in our research) search
potential than the brand search traffic that most merchants naturally receive. This is the
prize every savvy merchant seeks.
Since brand popularity is relative, a more objective way to think of this long tail potential
is as a function of your website size. In particular, our research suggests that for every
unique page that exists on a merchants website, nearly 100 unbranded searches
are conducted in an average month. If you have a 20,000 page website, your long tail
potential would be calculated as 2,000,000 unbranded searches, and so on. Tracking
your unique pages and their yield therefore is a critical measurement to understanding
the dynamics of your natural search channel performance.
Capturing the Elusive Tail
The long tail of unbranded keywords is a new entity for most marketers to grapple with.
What drives it? How do you quantify it? What is good performance? What is bad? How
do you capture it?
We set out to answer these questions in the research alluded to earlier. To this end, we
developed a theory we refer to as Page Yield Theory.? Page Yield Theory aims
to breakdown, quantify, and model the components of a merchants long tail into
manageable units, and was informed via natural search data gathered from a few dozen
top online merchant (clients utilizing our GravityStream natural search optimization
proxy technology). In the process, we developed a set of metrics to understand the
dynamics of the long tail. We have since applied these same ratios as key performance
indicators (KPIs) explained below, for growing natural search channel programs under
management.
KPI #1 Brand to Non-Brand Mix
What percentage of your natural search comes from brand keywords versus non-brand
keywords? What does it mean if your keyword curve is dominated by brand terms? If
you discover that most of your traffic is coming from searches for your brand, we view
this as symptomatic of a larger problem lying just beneath the surface that very few of
your pages are actually yielding traffic.
Many retailers find 95% of their search traffic comes for brand terms with, not
coincidentally, a very small percentage of their site powering that brand traffic. Whereas
what you may find, when you have done some search optimization, is a very different
distribution curve. You may find that 40% of your pages are yielding traffic, but that 60%
of that traffic is unbranded keyword traffic. This in fact, is the core hypothesis of Page
Yield Theory unbranded keyword traffic volume grows as the number of pages
yielding natural search traffic grows.
KPI #2 Unique Pages
Just how big is your website? How many pages are there? This is a critical metric for
establishing a yield management foundation. You may be tempted to approximate this
number using a product count. This will most likely significantly understate your actual
pages. Or you might want to use a search engines reported index. This too will
return mixed results, as each engine indexes dramatically different amounts of pages
for each website.
However, search engines are in the business of discovering pages. So we recommend
using the number of pages that bots (such as googlebot) are able to crawl over a 30
60 day period as the most useful proxy for how many unique pages are available on
your site. (This assumes your URLs are in a condition that permits bots to crawl deeply.
If they are not, you may need to resort to an approximation.)
As a comparison, the average merchant in our research had roughly 73,000 uniquely
crawled pages.
Note: Most analytical packages do not track page crawl metrics because they rely on
Javascript to track user actions. Since search engine bots do not have Javascript
enabled, their crawl activity goes unregistered leaving marketers blind to the
dynamics of their search conversion funnel.
KPI #3 Pages Yielding Traffic
What percentage of those pages yield search traffic?
Is it 10%? 90%? This ratio essentially dictates the
length (the X axis) of your unbranded keyword long
tail, and suggests remaining potential.
With this KPI in hand, you understand your missed
opportunity cost, and monitor your progress
throughout your NSO engagement.
If you do not know your amount of unique pages or
yielding pages, the above matrix can be consulted
for an estimate. It was developed using data from the average merchant in our research
and illustrates the inverse relationship between Page Yield and Brand / Non-Brand
Traffic. Simply seek your current level of brand and non-brand traffic to estimate how
many pages are accounting for that traffic.
The average merchant in our study had 14% of pages yielding traffic.
KPI #4 Keywords per Page Yield
Now that you have an idea of your Page Yield rate, how many keywords does each of
those producing pages yield over the course of a month 2 keywords? 10? This is
the fourth KPI: keyword yield. This KPI is responsible for creating scale. That is, the
more keywords each yielding page attracts or targets, the longer your tail.
The average merchant in our study found 2.4 keywords produced per yielding page.
KPI #5 Visitor per Keyword Yield
This fifth KPI Visitor per Keyword Yield is basically determined by how highly a
page ranks for a keyword, and tells you how much traffic each keyword drives. This
metric determine the height or thickness of your long tail.
The average merchant in our study experienced 1.9 visitors per keyword.
KPI #6 Index-to-Crawl Ratios
The first step in the search conversion funnel is converting a crawled page to an
indexed page. While we do not put significant stock in the reported engine indexes, this
KPI can illustrate engine differences or potential trouble-spots.
For instance, the average merchant in our study saw a 3:1 index-to-crawl ratio in
Google. That is, for every page that was crawled, there were 3 in the index, as strange
as it sounds. If a merchant finds the index shrinking to say, only 50% of the crawled
pages, that may be a signal of crawl pattern changes, or perhaps pages are being
shifted into the supplemental index.
KPI #7 Engine Yield
A final KPI to monitor is engine yield. Each engine has different audience sizes. How do
you fairly compare the referral traffic you get from each? Simply calculate how much
referral traffic each sends for every page it crawls or consumes. Compare engine by
engine. What we have found is that MSN and Yahoo! tend to crawl a lot more pages,
but the yield per crawled page from Google is typically significantly higher.
Reconstructing the Tail
Once known, these KPIs can be reassembled to create a vivid picture of your
performance and empower smarter decisions. For instance, brand and non-brand traffic
composition (KPI #1) provide a baseline on the effectiveness of your channel yield. This
can be contrasted against your total available pages (KPI #2) and actual yielding pages
(KPI #3) to understand the gap between current and potential performance. The rate at
which these pages yield keywords (KPI #4), times the visitor driven by each of those
keywords (KPI #5) form the length, and height, of your tail, and can each be optimized
individually. Meanwhile your index-to-crawl ratio (KPI #6) and engine yield (KPI #7) help
quantify your sites effectiveness at converting web pages into units of search
produce.?
For instance, if the number of pages yielding traffic is low (under 10%), it may be time
for some basic, scalable, URL rewriting to maximize the flow of link juice through your
internal link text. On the other hand, if 80% of pages are yielding traffic at a rate of one
keyword per page and one visitor per keyword, it may be time to conduct some auto-
generated title tag tests to scalably lift rankings of thousands of pages, by incorporating
more relevant keywords per page. And perhaps a pinch of organic link building via RSS
may be in order to power-up the link juice that flows through the inbound link text. Each
situation is unique and requires a custom approach to optimization.
The secret to capturing the long tail of natural search is this: Fully maximize the page
yield of your website. That is, develop a metrics-driven optimization process that
empowers each page to be viewed as the authority on the subject be it for
furniture slipcovers,? mens reindeer sweater,? 18 volt Makita
power drill? or other. This is not without challenge; empowering thousands of pages
to yield natural search traffic may seem daunting, but it can be achieved by focusing on
these new KPIs, managing your NSO channel effort against these yield metrics, and
committing to an iterative NSO testing program.
Increasingly, the natural search game revolves around getting your brand associated
with unbranded terms. While these new KPIs do not change the basics of NSO, they
can provide the context and management discipline that enable marketers to make
more informed decisions how to best spend time and budget optimizing your long tail.

Documents by Vietnam Seo Clubs 2011 www.vietseo.vn