UK SEO Consultant | Just Search's Neil Walker

SEO is becoming more and more a part of people’s vocabulary. As an SEO in Manchester I find that explaining what I do for a living isn’t the easiest thing to do. Think about if your in a pub with someone who know nothing about online marketing what do you describe your job as?

I get website’s to the top of Google?

I help companies advertise online?

I specialize in online marketing? (What’s online marketing?)

Surprisingly you can find people who know what SEO is in the most unlikely places, whilst on a stag do (bachelor party) out in Vegas we were in a gentleman’s clubs and a young lady asked me “what do you do?” I replied “Internet marketing” she then replied “oh seo and ppc” to my amazement the girl was fully aware of what industry I worked in and this came as a bit of a shock!

However if your new to SEO and online marketing as a whole here are some resources which should help you to understand the industry a little better.

Google’s Information

How Search Works

How Search Ads work

Other Resources:

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization
• http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291
• http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en//webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf
• http://guides.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-optimization

There’s loads of other sources out there, but these are some real good insights into explaining some of the real basics of SEO.

At Just Search like any SEO Consultancy we get asked questions about clients link building and how many links they have etc. Unfortunately some clients have very little knowledge about SEO (initially anyway) and come up with a lot of assumptions:

Google says I only have 14 links

Yahoo Says I have 500 links

Google Webmaster tool says I have 314 links

The trouble with links is that no one tool can give you an accurate view of how many links you have, however some tools are better than others. Personally there are two tools I use when looking at “link intelligence” and they are of course:

• Majestic SEO www.majesticseo.com
• SEOMoz Linscape (Preferably Open site explorer) www.opensiteexplorer.org

Now I really like Open site explorer, they break links down into domain and page authority which has a ranking factor of 1-100 this ideal for creating link profile charts for you competitors (See Blogstorm)

But today I’m going to talk about Majestic SEO.

Majestic SEO

This is a great tool for finding out details about your own site or your competitors websites. One of the best things I like about it is the backlink history section, this give you a good visual of a site’s history of link building.

However this is where things can get a little confusing; Clients who are aware about Majestic SEO have often thrown question to me such as:

Looking a my links in majestic SEO it has shown that I have dropped links in the past two months

Majestic SEO shows I have a link spike!

I think I’ve lost links some where? Majestic SEO shows this!

So I though the best place to find the answer on information like this was by going straight to the horses Mouth – Dixon Jones

The big Question

In the historical back links section of majestic SEO it has three types of reports:

• Monthly View – default monthly view shows data points for any given month. Since our crawl rates increased considerably since 2006 it is advisable to either use normalized view and/or compare domains with each other ins order to get more comparable data.
  • Cumulative View – cumulative view shows ever increasing totals, this can help see clearer in some cases whether a particular site is catching up with competitor or not.
  • Normalized View – normalized view shows how frequently back links were found in every 1 million crawled pages. This allows to removes the effect of ever increasing crawl rates that may result in increased number of backlinks found every month, but actual share of those links might actually be falling indicating potential decline of interest in that domain. This data is only available for back Links based charts.

If I want to assume how many links have been built over time which view do I use?

For example www.justsearching.co.uk shows data of: 2,633,828 external back links with 2,553 unique IP’s.

The Monthly View shows:
- Is this the actual number of links the site has? (Showing a gradual decrease over the past 5 months)

The Cumulative View shows:
- Is this the actual number of links the site has? (this correlates with the 2,633,828 number)

The Answers

In truth, none of the charts are perfect, because they are headline numbers based on when we found the link, but include all URLs that were deleted when we recrawled – so the numbers include links that no longer exist. However, with this proviso, I would recommend using the referring DOMAINS (rather than backlinks) in cumulative view.

Here’s why:

Not So Good:

The top chart is an estimate of the total number of backlinks, but this can easily be misleading, because a sitewide link from one or more large sites greatly influence the numbers. If you just count each referring domain once, this tends to be a better representation… unless your objective is to JUST show as many links as possible.

- Dixon.

To Clarify this further I asked Dixon the following further questions:

• Is the monthly view a snapshot of links (or domains) each month which the Majestic SEO spiders, where as the cumulative view includes all links (or domains) found at any point?
  - I.e. what  would show a drop in links (Domains)?
  - Do links (domains) ever drop in cumulative view?

• In terms of new links found each month, does you system query the database so it can discount old links from the NEW links found?

Dixon’s Response

The monthly view is the NEW links found each month, which is why the graph goes up and down

The cumulative graph can only go up, as we keep deleted links in the index.

When we FIRST find a link, we make a note of the date. When we re-crawl a link, it will not change either graph one jot.

So in January we find 20 NEW links… both charts show 20 for January.

In February we find 17 NEW links… the monthly chart shows 17 links in January, and the cumulative shows 37 links.

Makes sense? We don’t need to discount old links… the cumulative graph is just the monthly graph of new links discovered totaled up

- Dixon Jones

Part way Conclusion

So basically Majestic SEO spiders the web and where it finds a link to a website it notes it, the monthly graph shows you how many NEW links it has found each month, this could be a link which has pointed to your site for the past 4 year but never been spiderd and this would be a new link. The cumulative view simply adds up the new links found each month to give a running total.

Disadvantge - The main problem with this is that it can give out of date information i.e. you can think you have more links than you do. But to be fair this is still more accurate than tools such as Yahoo site explorer and with Majestic SEO you get a tonne of other tool s to help analyze links further. In my opinion if you want to look a link numbers then www.opensiteexplorer.org will give you a better idea of how many links a website has at a particular given point, however there of course advantages to recording the information of where you used to have links!

Are you missing the links?

The best part about Majestic SEO is that you can see your old links, simply gothrough the links you have and see if they still exist, if they don’t try and re-establish them.

When I originally bought the domain name www.seomad.com i drop caught it, this was because I wanted to gain a domain with some age, some previous links and I simply liked the fact it said “SEO mad” and though that described me perfectly

Going through my links on Majestic SEO I have found links on sites that have removed the old pages, I have since contacted them talked about why they shouldn’t remove old pages or at least redirect them, consequently this rekindled relationship gained me another backlink

Moral of the story

Simply no one link intelligence tool is a holy grail in SEO, they all require interpretation in order to use them in the best way, above is just one useful way of using majestic SEO’s data – Enjoy!

I read an interesting post on Dave Naylor’s blog on Wednesday by David Whitehouse on using Google Analytics to segment short and long tail keywords using regular expressions. This post was then to be discovered as something initially developed by Ben Gott over at search engine land.

Background

Well I’m really bad with regular expressions, but i am good with Excel, I also love data so I thought about all the post’s I read about Search journeys and how the common conception is that the longer the search query the smaller the search volume but larger the conversion rate.

The image below shows the common conception of keyword type by search volume.

Anyway I want to know, “Does a longer keyword actually give a better Conversion rate?”

It’s a big question so I thought how can Google Analytics and some real data help me.

Setting up the test

OK well the good thing about working for a large Internet marketing company is that I get access to hundreds of Analytics accounts, so I took 13 Analytics accounts who have either e-commerce tracking or goals set up and set out about exporting the data.

Creating a custom report in Analytics
The next part of the post is just a quick overview of how to create a custom Google Analytics report which can pull out the number of conversions per keyword.

Ecommerce Conversion Rate

• Custom Reporting
• Create a new custom report
• Metrics –> Site Usage Visits
• Metrics –> Ecommerce Transactions
• Metrics –> Total Goal Completions
• Dimensions –> Traffic Sources –> Source
• Dimensions –> Traffic Sources –> Keyword
• View Report Google –> Organic
• Take 1 years worth of data
• Add &limit=50000 to top URL
• Advanced Filter –> keyword Excluding –> Company name
• Export –> Data as a CSV

Overview of Data

So we now have the data all pasted into an Excel sheet detailing:

• Keyword
• Visits
• Transactions / Goals Complete

We then put a little Excel trickery into the mix adding a column with the code of:

=IF(LEN(TRIM(A2))=0,0,LEN(TRIM(A2))-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A2,” “,””))+1)

This adds a column with Query Length i.e. how many word made up the search term i.e. Identifying what are short and long tail keywords.

Finally I created another column dividing the No. of Transactions / Goals Complete by the number of visits, hence giving us a Conversion rate.

Finalizing the Data

Now I have all the information in an Excel table, the simple thing is to create a pivot table of the information.
For my first example I have chosen to pivot Query Length as the row and then No. of Visits and Conversion rate as columns. I have chosen to display the average results in columns to give the overall picture.

seomad.com/SEOBlog/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/long-tail-exel-pivot-table.jpg”>

The Results

The graph below shows the average conversion rate versus the average number of visitors by query length.

Now I used 13 clients data over a total of 166,699 keywords.

We can see a clear picture that from a 1 phrase visit up to a 5 phrase visit the conversion rate is over double.

It’s not as uniform from 5 phrase visits to 10 phrase visits but I think this may shows that people using 5 phrases and above are still unsure about finding the right product or service.

Although the overall trend does show that conversion rate does increase as the search query increases.

Extending the results

The beauty of having data in excel is that it can be manipulated in any way, so I took the data above and filtered the results by removing keywords which had “0″ / “Zero” conversions, just to see what the affect was.

Apart from the obvious of average Conversion rate in the data increasing massively and the same for Average number of visits this does correlate with the overall data but shows a more uniform conversion rate by query length.

Conclusion

From the data presented it does show clear support that the long tail theory in SEO still exists and it is still right to assume niche keywords will drive a higher conversion although they have a lower search volume.

If you have any questions on the data please leave a comment.