Everyone loves metrics! Even more so, everyone loves taking action! After all, that’s why we have Action Man, international man of…. well, action. This week, Rand helps you become an action man or woman yourself – that’s right, we’re talking about you! In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand discusses two metrics that you may not be using in your current campaign; if you’re not, then you’ve got a lot of action to catch up on!
So, one of the things that I’ve seen recently is a lot of sites who have seen either precipitous drops in their traffic or they’ve seen rises in their traffic, and they’re not always sure how to attribute those to know where the gains and losses are coming from. It is because the partitioning of the data that they are looking at isn’t as ideal as it could be. That’s exactly why I’m presenting these two sort of very actionable SEO metrics that you should be tracking and keeping track of for your site. Hopefully, not even necessarily just for your site, but on sort of a folder by folder or different content by different content level basis. So, I might want to track these things not just for SEOmoz as a whole but for the blog, the tools section, the Q&A section, all the individual sections. I would urge you to do the same thing.
When you see something like, oh, my search traffic has gone up, that can come from a number of things. It could be, number one, your existing pages are rising in the rankings. There’s not more keyword demand. You haven’t done anything to gain or lose new pages in the search engine’s index. It’s just that pages that were in there have risen. Maybe you’ve gotten links to them. Maybe competitors have fallen. Maybe Google has rejiggered how they rank pages and you’ve benefited from that. And then there’s also changes like you’ve gotten more pages into the index and now those pages are performing whereas before they didn’t. And so, you’ve got new traffic opportunities, new keywords that are sending you traffic. But if you are not measuring these two things, you’re not going to be able to see them. So, let me walk you through exactly what they are, how to get them, and how you can apply this now.
First off, the number of pages receiving at least one, right, at least one visit from search engines. What this means is that it’s an individual page on my site, and the search engine, you know, Google, Bing, Yahoo, or whatever it is, has sent a visitor — look at that nice friendly visitor — over to my page. It doesn’t have to be more than one. If they send you one visit to that page, you know that it at least is in the search engine’s index and is earning some form of traffic. So you’re just looking for that raw count of pages. You can get this directly from Google Analytics just by looking at Google and seeing the count of the quantity of URLs that have generated a Google search visit from organic traffic.
Now, when you’re tracking this over time, I’m going to recommend doing a week-by-week analysis, but I think you should also do a month-by-month and possibly a quarter-by-quarter, because breaking these out into longer views will mean that pages that are rarely receiving search traffic but are in the index and do sometimes get a visit will appear in there. It could be that you have an extremely long tail targeted page and it doesn’t get visits every week, but it does get them at least once a month or at least once a quarter. Once a quarter is rarer. I think once a month is probably the limit.
In any case, if you are tracking these you can see things like, huh, if the number of pages on my website is increasing, I’m adding new content, and this is not increasing, then I know something’s going wrong. Essentially, maybe Google is losing traffic at those pages or I am having pages that are falling out of the index because maybe they no longer exist on my site. Have they 404’d? Am I redirecting old things? Is Google not crawling as deeply anymore? What’s going on with those? Actionable item to let you investigate and figure out what’s happened with that traffic drop. The problem is if you are not monitoring this, you might see your traffic rise and think everything is just fine when, in fact, you’re losing existing opportunity that could be easily captured.
All right. So if I see that this rises dramatically, and I know that I haven’t done anything specific, then I can assume that Google is now crawling deeper on my site. Maybe links have existed, links now exist to subcategory pages or deep in my site or my XML sitemap is finally being respected or, you know, some of those kinds of things. And as you do these things, as you submit an XML sitemap or you optimize that feed or as you are creating an HTML sitemap or you’re changing your navigation structure, you should be monitoring these so you know whether you are having a positive impact there. Since search numbers can fluctuate so much, search demand fluctuates, rankings fluctuate, keywords fluctuate, this can give you a good sense of how those pages, whether I am actually getting all those pages into the engine and those are helping me bring at least some traffic back. If this is going down, I know I, generally speaking, have indexation or site crawl problems.
The second one is the number of keywords sending at least one visit from search engines. And you need to monitor these independently. I marked on here that this needs to be Google and down here it’s going to be Bing. I would want to monitor this for all of the engines that I care about because indexation and search traffic is going to be independent on those different engines. The number of keywords sending more than one visit tells me, aha, I ranked somewhere for that keyword. I was in the top maybe 10, maybe 20, maybe 30, if people are digging all around way down into the 30s and 40s for some of these keywords. If those numbers are rising and falling in relation to your number of pages, there should be sort of an appropriate correlation between those two numbers. If there is not, you know something weird is going on.
For example, if the number of pages that are sending you traffic is shrinking but your number of keywords sending you traffic stays the same or even rises, you might presume that, oh, maybe that page fell out of the index but some other one that I had gained those rankings back or is now ranking in its stead. This is really good information to have because it can help tell you want the cause for and what the action should be when traffic falls or doesn’t rise as much as you expect. If you’ve been adding pages, you know, sort of long tail content pages and they’ve been generally generating, you know, we added ten pages, we have ten more pages that earned us traffic this month. But wait a minute, last time we got seven keywords that sent us traffic, and this time we only got three new keywords that sent us traffic. Maybe those pages, that content wasn’t as keyword rich. Maybe it didn’t have the types of content that people are looking for as much. So, we can chose writers and content and editorial subject matter to cover that is going to be the most helpful in earning us traffic. We can rate ourselves and know the right things to do.
Along with the classic thing that you are measuring, which is sort of, you know, just visits over time, which is a key metric that obviously you should be reporting, this gives you that one level deeper into things that you should be grabbing. Both of these are available in standard analytics packages like Google Analytics.
In fact, I’m sort of excited to preannounce, you’ll be able to get these in our web app, in the SEOmoz web app, as well. These numbers will be in there on a week-by-week basis along with your crawl and rankings data if and when you integrate with Google Analytics. That feature should be coming, oh, in the next few weeks let’s say. So, we’re excited about that.
But by all means, do be monitoring this stuff. Do measure it. Tell us how it goes. I look forward to the comments. Take care everyone.
If you have any tips or tricks that you’ve learned along the way, we’d love to hear about it in the comments below. Post your comment and be heard!
