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Search Engine Optimization – Driving Targeted Visitors to your Web Sites through Search Engines!

* Majority of visitor traffic is driven from Search Engines to web sites.
* Search is the second largest activity on web, after email.
* Paid Search contributes to 40% of internet advertising spend.
* Search Engines like Google, Yahoo and Live.com drive qualified traffic through their Organic Results.

The process of optimizing a web site with the purpose of getting the site listed on top 10 results for relevant search query is called Search Engine Optimization.

Optimizing for search improves the chances of site’s pages and content to be easily accessible by search engine spiders. This makes users to acquire relevant information via minimal search queries.

Successful Search Engine Optimization process allows website content to be compatible with search engines understanding on actual content based on search queries.

3 Simple Steps to Usability Centric Search Engine Optimization:

1. Keyword Research – what keywords are used for widgets.com website to appear in the search results? For example, business is trying to showcase “widgets solutions”, users are likely to search with keywords like “widget solution providers”, “buy widget” than just “widgets” or “how widgets work”.

Keyword research covers understanding of various keywords that are likely to be used to find the content offered on the website. A good starting point to keyword research is Google’s FREE Keyword Research Tool and WordTracker tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal; http://www.wordtracker.com

2. Usability:

a. Content Relevancy: Upon understanding of keywords usage, next step would be to identify what content users are expecting on the website by using these keywords. Content on website needs to be created with this correlation. For example, if the keyword used is “widgets support” and if your business doesn’t support widget problems, it would be recommended to drop this keyword from keyword research list. Writing content on user needs would dramatically increase the relevancy for search query usage.

b. Design Usability: Making the content immediately obvious on the webpage will increase the page stickiness.   If content is written on “Support on Widget Problems” and is not easily visible on the landing page, users would very likely exit and search on other websites.  In such cases, search engines would think that “your” content is not relevant to the query and rank them lower next time.

c. Website Accessibility: Quality of the website is determined by its accessibility. Simple way to improve accessibility of a website is by making it available 24/7 and compatible across all major internet browsers by following the w3c standards (http://www.w3.org/).

Creating a website which is more usable with unique content allows the users and search engines to rank the site in top 10 of search results.

3. Popularity: Making content pertinent on the web page would directly reflect on the rankings by appearing in the top 10 search results. This can be achieved through PR campaigns, have people write reviews on their sites, and boosting viral marketing strategies.

When I was attending HFI classes in India back in April, I was the only one with marketing background (though I had worked on usability projects very before) when rest of the group were purely graphic designers and usability professionals.  One thing I was very surprised is that, except one or two in the class, almost all of them were first time hearing “Web Analytics”. And, very interestingly HFI was also saying “Web Analytics is not for Marketing and Usability”.   I think it is true when we want to study Cognitive Psychology of the users in real-time.  I believe a combination of qualitative data from usability tests and quantitative data from web analytics would give really great insights.

In this web analytics blog post, I would like to explore how Web Analytics is used or can be used in Usability Practice.

Website Usability is all about matching the users intentions and goals with website or business goals. If we have to match these user intended behaviors on the website, first we must understand what exactly these visitor behaviors are.  Web Analytics Data is a quick and easy way to understand these user goals and intentions.

Usability Quote: “If we try to create sites for everyone, it can not be used by anyone”

Web pages are so much cluttered with lots of links when we need only one piece of data or link.   Web masters often try to create websites targeting every one whom they think are potential for their business.  When we as the visitors have so many options and links on the web page, now it is our turn to play the  game “hide and seek”.  But, how many of the visitors have patience to play this game before they get what they want?

The content needs of users are widely varied.  So far I have seen, people have no patience in finding what they need.  I think that is one of the best reasons why Search has become so much imperative for everyone on the web. Though there is a different study on this specific factor that says “creating friction in the user experience would convert to a lead” , I believe it is more applicable when we have a unique product like iphone or an answer to a very niche problem.  Bottom line is “Give What Users Want Upfront”, it only creates a positive brand perception and builds trust (studies found that “Trust” is the single most influencing factor when users buy online, if you are a small web master it is even more important).

Now, you may say: -

1.  we are serving a large audience with varied needs

2.  our targeted audience are thru out the country or globe

3.  we offer a vast number of products, services or content

4. majority of our site visitors are entering the site at the home page

How can we compose a web page content to address eveyone needs?

Let me talk about the answer in 3 easy examples -

1.  Let’s assume you use “EzDSL Broadband services” and their website is www.ezdsl.com, as a user, you visit ezDSL.com in mostly 3 situations : -

a. Pay the monthly charge

b.  Change the package

c.  Talking to Support

Now, ezDSL also has three business goals in respective of your goals:

a.  Make it easy to you to pay the fee, so that you don’t hesitate to pay the bill next time. (every time I have to pay my credit card bill, I had to travel 5km to drop the check, or request my friends to help me,   I used to miss the due data and end-up paying late fee, ultimately I am switching to another bank Bottom line “Make it easy to pay you”

b. Provide competitive offers to retain you as their client.

c. Increase their Support Satisfaction Score.

Now, ezDSL can create a different pages for each of the above goals, since users can not remember all the URLs of the site, they come to your site’s home page to find the link or they go to Google

ezDSL also have people visting their website for buying the service or new installation of the modem, or talking to sales person etc.,   And, these people also have different goals.

How can ezDSL.com can personalize content speific to me as their existing client and avoid content that is less interest to my need?

If you are using ezDSL broadband while browsing ezDSL.com, they can identify you on your ISP Host name and deliver content majorly targeting the above three of your goals. Which means you no longer see those sky-scrapper ads asking you to buy again or they are placed in less prominent places on the home page.  With this kind of targeting Web Page’s real estate has been saved for the users who  need them.

Similarly, you could be having different user segments – Work on how you can identify them using Cookies or other PII methodologies such as “login ids”and target the content to the user.  Pls. drop me the message if you think I could be any helpful for you.

Example 2,  IP Delivery is widely used these days for advertising targeting. Everytime users access the website, their Network IP provided by the ISP is published back to the Internet. Web masters generally do a riverse look-up against the IP-Geographic database generally compiled by ISPs.

For example, if you want to increase your sales of a given product in Bangalore, India and increase sales for a different product in New York. You can offer different content to two different citys by serving the content on the users IP address.

You are browsing from the below location, and I can target offers and content relevent to people in this geograhic location:

<Google Map Code – not embedded>

Latitude: 12.967

Longitude: 77.583

Example 3, Referrer Delivery – If you are a small/mid webmaster, it is very likely that the majority of the traffic comes to  your website from Search Engines like Google or other web resources like Digg, facebook, or even from an email.  Now, you can serve content on from where users coming to the sites. For example, if the users are coming from Google by typing “discounted widgets”.  You would know users with this keyword more likely to convert and serve them more targeted offer or content.

Understanding your website visitor behavioral data for a historical period would give better idea on whom to target with what kind of content and offers.  And also, tells you when to serve the content in the conversion cycle.

What are the “website cookies” we are talking about?

Cookies are the small temporary files (less than a kb in size generally) stored in the user’s browser without his or her notice by the websites they are visiting. These cookies typically contain data to identify an individual, which is used to calculate specifically metrics like Unique Visitors in Web Analytics. And, Online Marketers use this to deliver more targeted content and advertising by tracking their repeat visits and behavior. Webmasters use these cookies to authenticate the users upon login.

Cookie Deletion Rate: Based on several reports over the last few years from comScore and Netratings – 30% to 40% users delete the cookies in their browsers in any given month. What does that mean is marketers are not able to directly get the insights for their repeat visits and leverage the data from there. People delete cookies from their browsers as they don’t want to be identified on the internet and/or feel they slow down the system/internet speed.

Visitors Privacy Problem: Well, it is the fact that people want privacy which I don’t think anybody disagrees and on the internet it is even more important as more often users relate privacy to the information security on the web.

Tracking mechanisms like cookie tracking using a small client side javascript were built and started extensively using now in the industry. These kind of systems were built in those days and majorly relied on when many of the web users were not aware of the cookies or even didn’t know that their behavior on the web is being tracked elsewhere. Now increasingly people are getting educated and know how to and what to delete from their browsers. There are also paid tools that helps users to browse privately.

Lastweek, Microsoft has released the first beta version of the Internet Explorer 8 with a couple of privacy features “InPrivate Browsing and InPrivate Blocking”. And, they are just a click away for the users to activate it.

When users launch an InPrivate Browsing session, all traces of their browsing session disappear when they close that instance of the browser. Cookies, temporary Internet files, browsing history, form information, and usernames and passwords — all of them just vanish. In addition to InPrivate Browsing, InPrivate Blocking would stop websites sharing the users browsing behavior with the other websites. Though there are several Privacy Adons for FireFox, it is said to be developing similar features in built in the coming versions.

Source: W3Schools.com

With these advancements in the browsers, the majority of the users would soon be able to control their privacy on the web. Though it is a positive indicator to the web industry as a whole, web marketers would need to look at the alternative ways of measuring the metrics more accurately. I hope ISP and Panel data collection methods would get a boost. I think we should start thinking about new ways to calculate Unique Visitors Metric and life time value metrics.

Targeted Advertising and Real time advertising is going to be down in next couple of years as with the introduction of private browsing in Internet Explorer and hoping the other browser providers would follow the same.

——-Updated on google chrome browser on September 2nd 2008——-

Here is the Google Chrome’s Privacy Feature “incognito” – It opens separate window to browse and this is what Google is saying on the feature briefly “all new cookies are deleted after you close the incognito window” . That means it is going to add up to the cookie deletion rate we are talking above.

Google Chrome’s inCognito Window:

Driving Traffic from Search Engine’s Organic Results is the most cost effective and a only traffic driving channel for majority of the content websites and ecommerce portals. There are different SEO KPIs to look at different levels in the SEO process.

I got inspired from some ppt I viewed sometime back but don’t recall the name to give the credit.

Users “Search” to “Find” what they want. “Search” – What users are searching for? “Find” - What users are finding for what they are searching? Search starts with the Search Engines like Google but ends when they find the information they need on a document on web. The process of measuring how effective a SEO program at your company depends on these two important steps.

….pls. subscribe to the rss feed for updates to this post, will try to complete it by weekend

Search Engine Optimization…..Optimization??? then there is something web analysts can be helpful here?

Search Engine Optimization is a process of optimizing a website with an intention of (I think I should say “with a hoping of” : ) getting the site listed in the top 10 results for relevent search query for the business.  There is a reason why I said “hoping of” – if you are a search engine optimizer I am sure you would know, else you will know by end of the reading this blog post.

I think it is important that we should know where we started on this.  Before Google, there were search engines like altavista, lycos etc., were widely used eventhough there were only a few documents on the web.  As the web growing rapidly the importance of search engine has grown with the similar trend.   Now, let’s briefly understand how traditional search engines used to rank pages compared to the modern ones like Google, Yahoo, Live.com.

Internet Search Engines used to look at the meta data (data bout data) that is embedded in the html tags or meta tags to understand what a specific document is about.  One of  the  Meta Tags is Keyword tag, it stores “keywords” relevant to the page – it had utmost importance in such that the Search Engines were looking specifically in this area and  rank the pages if the user performs a search with these keywords.   Webmasters were realized that they get lot of traffic from search engines compared to any other channel and most people started misusing this meta-tags in such a way that their website gets lot of traffic.  And, SPAMERS became champions in this   Search Engines had to find new ways to understand the web document so that they can list it in the top 10 results for the searcher query.  Imagine you go to a search engine and do a search for “web analytics articles” and it gives totally irrelevant results because of the SPAMMY documents, would you take them as relevant to what you need?  and continue love that search engine.  So, it is important for the search engines to continue in the business they consistently need to provide the relevant results to the searchers needs.

Then, our beloved Google entered the industry with the refreshing look and feel web page, selling speed and relevance as the USP.  Google came up with a patented page-ranking technology which gives ranking score to each page in the website based on internal linking and external linking.  This kind of system was very much viable in the begenning since poeple post links to the other sites as they feel they are useful for others and absolutely for non-commerical benefits.  But, again most webmasters and marketers started misusing this by buying and sellings links, exchanging links and creating programs exclusively to get inbound links to their websites.

Imagine Google doesn’t have strong algorithms so that SEO’s and webmasters would easily get good ranks in Google….The users include ourselves would end up with frustration as we all are completely dependent on search engines like Google.

Google and other today’s search engines are also studying many other factors to understand what the document is all about.  They are studying the actual text on the web document, its font size, colors, backgrounds, images, alignment, theme of a section/site and much more.  Though most ethical SEO’s would optimize the sites in an ethical manner still there are people stuff the keywords here too to make search engines understand the document is relevant to something that actually it is not.

Marketers should realize more relevent traffic means more revenue but not just any traffic to the site.

The Approach I am proposing “A Data Driven Approach to Usability Centric Search Engine Optimization” would talk about using Web Analytics and Usability Principles to create an SEO strategy for your site.  Moving from the perception of “SEO is SPAM” to “SEO is Good Design”

Join Web Analytics Virtual Room to meet and discuss on latest for the community. Lively is a new virtual meeting service like secondlife from Google, launched today.  (I was wondering why Google suddenly started loving Flash  for indexing : - )

I have created a permanent page for Web Analytics Lively at:
http://www.vijayweb.com/lively/

Why forecasting is so important in Web Analytics.  Web Analytics Forecasting is important for a variety of reasons including for technology planning, customer support needs, stocks and resource planning and more.

What is the difference between forecasting and prediction.  What are the various methodolgies… pls. view these excellent videos from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi for such an outstanding lectures and Kudos to Ministry of HRD, India for funding this excellent initiative.

View them as you imagine you are forecasting for one of your web anlaytics projects.

Forecasting:

Time Series Analysis:

Google has joined Alexa and Compete.com today by introducing a FREE service on Website trends (http://trends.google.com/websites) for competitive benchmarking studies. Find now thru Google, how your website is trending over a period of time and compare with your competition. Not only that, but also we can break-down the trends by region/country and correlate the data with search keywords and the visits to other websites by your website visitors.

Trends are important because trend is everything for the businesses to monitor on a regular basis. In the above screen shot, we would know that it is normal to have a spike on the year-end as it is a holiday season and rest of the months the trends are consistent.

Not only that, it is also important as the market sizes for your products/services are increasing or new markets are created for your products, you would need to know how well you are growing or declaining against your closest competition. In the below graph, facebook in India growing big while myspace is still consistent which may not be a positive indicator for myspace.com considering the businesses want to capture the international market too.

Google       Website Trends also provide top 10 search keywords that drove traffic from the search engines and again a comparative trend with the competition.

Though marketers know which keywords drove traffic to their websites, they may not know how much traffic was sent to the competition for the same keywords. In this example, 30% people searching for bestbuy have also landed at walmart.com

Google says the data is collected from a variety of sources, such as aggregated Google search data, aggregated opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. Funny thing is Google itself opted out from this data so we can’t see how Google, Youtube, Orkut doing

Pls. note that we can get actual numbers to the graph by signing into Google.

Another Service from Google on the way for complete Market Research Data, luckily I got a beta login to try it out, here are the screen shots: http://www.google.com/adplanner

In addition to what is provided in Google Website Trends, here we also get Country Reach metric which I had also talked about a quicker solution to calculate country reach last year.  Ad Planner has ways to drill-down the sites by demographics.  This is a great tool to select sites to advertise on and even to know the demographics of our own site.

User Demographics and other metrics from Google Website Trends:

All KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are metrics but not all metrics are KPIs. Though it is important for the business to measure all metrics but it is not necessary to everyone to monitor or report these metrics on a day to day basis. Rather, a set of Web Analytics KPI’s that would allow you to act and help you optimize the function you handle would adequately good. Pls. note that no one person requires to look and analyze one hundred metrics at any time : ) KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) should be relevent, controllable, actionable, simple and credible. I am trying to list-down various Web Analytics KPIs for each function of ebusiness whether you handle SEO, SEM, Usability or a subfunction of any of these.

In large corporations, the top management would be more interested in market shares than how a particular program would be doing.  In small and mid-sized companies, the top mangement would also be interested on ROI’s of a specific online investment that was made.  The program teams that run various ebusiness functions for the business would be more interested in how their programs are doing and more detail to the grain.  These are the people who would go back and optimize to increase the ROI and customer satisfaction on the website.  These are the  people who just don’t need numbers but actions that they can take based on the numbers.   Keeping them in view, I am attempting to list down varioius web analytics KPI’s by each function and the most likely action that one can take from them.

Email Marketing: For an email marketer the ultimate goal is to increase the engagement  with the emails resulting the positive returns from list.  There are various elements that would need to be looked at individually and compare with other metrics to optimize the complete email marketing program and/or a specific email marketing campaign.  The below email marketing metrics would act as  kpis for each step in the email campaign process.

Though the Email Lists are built thru the permission based subscriptions, there is some percent of the people would always unsubscribe to the list.  People generally unsubscribe when they think the content or offers provided in the email is not relevant to them or not effective.  Another reason why people unsubscribe is, too frequent mailing, again this is to be balanced with how exciting offers/content you provide that is relevent to the user.

Unsubscription rate would be studied along with the email open-rate, click-thru rate for a historical period. The higher-percent unsubscription would be casued when list relevence and email offer relevence doesn’t match.  Unsubscription rate would tell the marketer how relevent is the list.

Bounce Rate: Bounce Rate would tell the quality of the list. There are two kinds of bounce rates that are generally measured.

1. Soft-Bounces, are resulted from no response from receiver’s ISP or the receivers mail-box is full.  These email-ids can be re-utilized later some-point of time as the problems are temporary here.

2. Hard-Bounces, are resulted from a non-existent email id.  This is a permanent problem, marketer can not send an email to this list.  It is important to the marketer that he tracks the Hard-bounces and remove them from the list that reduces the cost being paid to email vendor.

The effectiveness of subject-line depends on many factors and they get saturated more quickly.  It is kind of funny to say that the subject lines gets saturated?  Marketers always try to entice the receiver with creative subject lines to persuade users to open the email.  Earlier, name in the email used to have higher open rate, then it was moved to keeping “RE:” as the reply in the subject line, then, if you observe the current one that has “hi <first name>, where are  you?”.   Over a period of time people would know that these kind of subject lines are associated with mass-mailings which would gradually reduce the effectiveness of these subject lines.

Email Marketers should know the open rate and associate it with the email subject line effectiveness.  But, the most important point here is… it is not higher open rate is the success but we would need to compare with the final campaign goals such as conversion rate or ROI. For example, assume, with 80% open rate a marketer has 4% conversion rate but with 55% open rate a marketer has 8% conversion rate. Which subject line would you recommend?

The best practice is to test varioius subject lines with sample lists before sending to the complete list.

We can not convert the user into a lead or sale in the email itself in a normal ecommerce context.  We want list users to visit the site and explore the products on the site.  The content and offers we provide in the email should be relevent and enticing for the users to visit the site.

The Email Content Effectiveness depends on the relevency of the content to the email list.  Here, we are measuring effectiveness by looking at peoples interest in the content and offers provided in the email.  This is tracked using click-thru rate.

Email Content Effectiveness can also be measured by segmenting the email list and content links in the email copy which tells which section in the email copy is more effective.

Landing Page Effectiveness has the utmost importance as the others.  The conversion generally doesn’t happen on the landing page itself as most landing pages are the gateway pages which drives the visitors to other parts of the site.

Marketers measures number of people exiting the landing page immediately after they land at the campaign landing page from an email campaign.  The more people commiting their visit by clicking the intended links towards the conversion the better the landing page.

The important point here is to keep the scent in consistent with the email copy.

Email Campaign Effectiveness is measured thru ROI.  However, it has to be compared with other metrics like Customer Satisfaction Score and other Email Marketing Metrics.

For Example, assume you had 300% ROI with 20% open rate, 15% click-thru rate…can you say the campaign is effective?  do you see the missing gap…? Need to go back to Email List Effectiveness, Email Subject Line Effectiveness.

Web Analytis KPIs – (Part II): SEO KPIs