Search Marketing Insights (Search Done Smarter)
Site Speed: The Latest Addition to Google’s Algorithm
By: Jamie Keaney, Senior Search Strategist
Last year Google began hinting that site load time may become a part of the algorithm, and last week those hints became fact. Google has officially announced that site speed is indeed a part of the algorithm, as it is important to user satisfaction with a Web site.
The Update
This should come as no surprise, as the update has been swirling around the Webmaster rumor mills for months and Google itself plans to go live with their “caffeine” update to make their own results appear faster to users.
While this is a new addition to the algorithm, it is a small factor. Before you go rebuilding your Web site to make it lightning fast consider what remain the major factors in Googles algorithm: relevancy of content to the query, the number and relevance of in-bound links, reputation, and unique, valuable content still carry more weight in the algorithm than site speed.
According to Google, “fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com.” Let’s put that into perspective. If there are nearly 3 billion queries each month on Google.com and 91 million per day, less than 1 million queries per day will be affected by this change.
Also, load time itself is not a constant in the algorithm; rather, the algorithm incorporates load time specific to each query as a comparison of all the Web sites that appear in the results for that query.
Three Obstacles to SEO Success: They’re Not What You Think!
By: Carol Brenneisen, Director, Product Management
This article was originally published in Visibility Magazine, Spring 2010
Getting the Data
If justifying SEO means showing the return on investment, aggregating conversion data is key. But often, even if an analytics package is in place, there are huge challenges to getting the data out of it. Either the reports are not set up correctly, or no one in-house knows how to pull them (and there is no budget to pay someone else to pull them). Or in some cases, when an SEO vendor is involved, there is so much red tape involved in sharing the data that it never makes it into an ROI report. SEO efforts may have been wildly successful, and it may even be obvious from the rankings, but not being able to show the bottom line return can mean reduced budgets or canceled programs.
In some cases, the data acquisition can be impossible or cost-prohibitive. If so, unavailability of data should not delay SEO implementation. On the other hand, if getting the data is a matter of identifying and engaging the appropriate parties in your organization, then it makes sense to coordinate with those individuals prior to or in tandem with your SEO efforts. You may even consider donating a portion of the SEO budget to whatever data resources will be necessary, if it means being able to show the true value of SEO and justify additional budget in the future.
Getting to Meaningful Insights Requires Getting Organized Around Attribution and Multi-Action Tracking
By: Matt Naeger, Executive Vice President of Strategy for IMPAQT
Building a plan for your Internet marketing program is often as complex as picking the next hot tech stock to invest in so that you can retire early from your day job. In both cases, the more you know, the better you are able to determine how to spend your money. However, the question that not enough people ask themselves is: “How are we certain that what we know is ‘the whole story’?”
The ‘whole story’ begins with understanding what factors attribute to your conversions. You can’t invest your money wisely if you don’t understand what drives people to take action within your web site. Conversion attribution factors can make a sizable difference in how you plan your Internet marketing budgets. And some conversion factors are in areas you may not initially suspect.
Writing for Readers, Not Just Buyers or Cynics
By: Bryce Walat, Content Development Specialist, IMPAQT
In the SEO Book.com article Writing for Buyers vs. Writing for Cynics, one of the comments stated that:
“It’s easy to say that you should write about what you love or you’ll get bored, but the big money is always in things that no one loves, like mortgages and loans, etc…”
What do you do when you have to write about something you don’t love, or don’t know that much about, and have to write it for SEO?
Reframing SEO Writing
At its most basic, search is about questions and answers, and problems and solutions. When searchers search, they’re ultimately looking for answers to questions or solutions to problems. They’re looking for a way to compare mortgages and pick the best option, or get help with payment problems, for example.
With that in mind, SEO writing is more about answering a question or solving a problem than writing content to promote a product or service. Therefore, when writing for SEO, it’s a good idea to reframe the task from writing to promote a product or service to writing to answer a question or solve a problem.
