It’s 2007, so it’s out with the OLD and in with the NEW.
What’s old, in terms of SEO? Obsessively watching indexation numbers and rankings on “trophy” keywords (like the one you know the CEO always checks first thing in the morning). Worrying yourself sick over “duplicate content penalties”. Relying on Sitemaps XML files to fix your indexation problems (news flash: your rankings will still suck!). Exchanging links.
What’s “in” in SEO for 2007? Truly understanding and leveraging the power of Long Tail dynamics. Becoming a trusted contributor within Wikipedia, Digg, StumbleUpon, Netscape, Reddit. Building your network in MySpace, Flickr, LinkedIn, YouTube, Bebo, MyBlogRoll, and the blogosphere in general and then reaping the rewards of “network effects.” Building custom search engines and rallying your community to help improve it. Link baiting.
So how the heck do you measure the impact of this sort of stuff?
These new paradigms call for some new KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Addressing Long Tail SEO specifically, we at Netconcepts came up with the following KPIs (props to my colleague Brian Klais for coming up with a lot of this!):
- Brand-to-Nonbrand Mix
- Unique Pages
- Pages Yielding Traffic
- Keywords per Page Yield
- Visitor per Keyword Yield
- Index-to-Crawl Ratios
- Engine Yield
For definitions and explanations of these seven new metrics, have a read of Brian’s article Beneath the Surface of Search, hot off the presses at Multichannel Merchant.
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I’m with you on this particular topic. No doubt that social networking, though its traffic is not considered so good for conversions, will be a major factor in 2007.
We need to come up with certain unique strategies to make optimal utilization of any kind of traffic coming on our site.I know it is quite challenging but not impossible job.I’m currently working on it and if there are some positive results from it I will definitely
Share that with you.
It’s rare to see SEO companies relying on KPI different than the rankings’one indeed.
Those measuring KPI’s and those who are always looking which metrics they should measure are the ones that will survive in the SEO industry. Without research, metrics, testing, and kpi’s, I don’t see how a company can pretend to be doing SEO in 2007.
I read your article “Beneath the Surface of Search” because I was specifically interested in KPIs related to Search. I’m curious how to actually go about calculating the KPIs. There wasn’t a lot of detail in the article. Do you have more information on these?
Some random “my avatars” thing hijacked my comment. So here it is again:
I read your article “Beneath the Surface of Search� because I was specifically interested in KPIs related to Search. I’m curious how to actually go about calculating the KPIs. There wasn’t a lot of detail in the article. Do you have more information on these?