So What Exactly Are Google Search Funnels?

Wednesday, April 28th, 2010

Ever kill a high-spend, low converting keyword and see the account take a dive? Ever curious how many of those brand conversions are actually brand conversions? Wondered if you should bid on “review” and “compare” terms? All are very valid questions with very complicated answers. Well, they still don’t have an easy answer, but Google’s Search Funnels certainly help.

Per Google’s Help Center, “Search Funnels are a set of new reports describing the Google.com search ad click and impression behavior leading up to a conversion.” Search Funnels are currently in beta and may not be available for your account (note: you need to have AdWords conversion tracking installed or Analytics linked to your account for Search Funnels to work). If they are enabled, you can find them by hovering over the Reporting tab and clicking on Conversions. On the left side, you should see a link to Search Funnels!

Now, what makes Search Funnels so special?? To this point, all of Google’s conversions were attributed to the last click before the conversion. However, there is a LOT that goes into any sales funnel; why would Google be any different? I’d be willing to bet a good percentage of your conversions don’t occur on the first click. Just like any other sales funnel, there is likely a discovery phase, research/evaluation phase and more before a searcher finally converts. With all buzzwords out of the way, let’s take a deeper dive into the reports that Google so kindly built for us.

I: Path Length report –

The Path Length report is a birds-eye view of the overall length of your Search Funnel in terms of impressions and clicks. Did you expect your customers to find what they want on the first search? The Path Length report will let you how many searches a customer conducts before completing a conversion.

II: Time Lag report -

Similar to the Path Length report, the Time Lag report shows how long it took your customers to convert. Do you have an expensive product that could affect an entire organization? Expect a long lag-time as a searcher is likely evaluating a number of different options. You could shorten up the lag time by offering a softer call to action (for example, a whitepaper download) instead of asking the customer to give away too much information at the outset. Do you offer a low-priced commodity product? Expect the conversion funnel to shorten up as a customer is likely just looking for convenience and a bargain.

The time lag report can be viewed from first impression (time since their first query) first click and last click.

III: Assisted Conversions report –

With the first two reports we’ve established there’s more to a conversion than meets the eye. The Assist Conversion report dives a bit deeper into the conversion funnel and provides us with the extremely important assist metric, helping us find the Steve Nash and Jason Kidd of the conversion funnel. Whenever a keyword is part of a conversion funnel but is not the last click before conversion, it is given an assist conversion (either click or impression based). Let’s say you have a site that sells baseball gear and a customer wants to buy a new bat. The customer proceeds through the following path:

Baseball bats (your ad shows, but they do not click)

Baseball bats (again, your ad shows and no click occurs)

Good baseball bats (click!)

Good baseball bats (another click!)

Louisville bats (your ad shows, but they do not click)

Louisville Slugger (click, purchase, $$$ for you)

The above path would give a click-assisted conversion to “Good Baseball Bats,” impression-assisted conversions to “Baseball Bats” and “Louisville Bats” and finally a last-click conversion to “Louisville Slugger.”

Last click conversions should match what you have in the AdWords interface and represents all conversions that came through your campaign, while assisted conversions will show you who everyone who helped out!. Google also provided us with a calculated field to show us which keywords helped out the most. In the example above, you may want to re-think deleting “baseball bats” because of a low ROI – odds are it has a very high assist-conversion ratio.

IV: Assist Clicks & Impressions report –

The Assist Clicks & Impressions report dives a bit deeper into our newly-beloved assist metric and shows us exactly how many clicks and impression it takes on each keyword to get the job done. It is important to note that in this report, the “assist” metric is not exclusive in this case meaning. In the previous baseball example, there were two clicks on “Good Baseball Bats” and two searches for “Baseball bats” in the conversion funnel – in this report they would receive two Assist Clicks and two Impression Clicks respectively.

V: First Click Analysis report –

This report is a fairly simple high-level view of conversions sorted by the first clicked campaign/ad group/keyword in a conversion funnel. Each time you click on a given element the report navigates to the next level on the hierarchy. If you click on a campaign, Google displays all the ad groups in that campaign. Same goes for a transition from ad groups to keywords. If you click on a specific keyword and get super granular, you’ll be taken to a report that shows a dashboard of all reports available for that particular keyword.

VI: Last Click Analysis –

See section V; replace all instances of “first” with “last.”

VII: Top Paths report –

Think your brand conversions are responsible for all your conversions? The Top Paths report will likely prove otherwise, showing every click or impression along the conversion funnel. Thanks to the other reports, we know all the keywords that had an influence on the report, but we haven’t yet had a chance to see what order they work in.

Our Google reps let us know a few things that may give you a bit of a ‘scare’ this report, so I may as well call them out now…

1: There will only be a few clear cut leading paths, followed by an extremely long tail.

2: There will be a ton of instances of (filtered path data) showing up in the impression-based reports. Just like the ever-frustrating “x other unique queries” label in Search Query reports, the (filtered path data) metric shows when Google simply doesn’t have enough information to populate the report.

As you can see from this novella-length post, there is a TON available in Google Search Funnels. I hope this brief introduction gave you a good starting point to explore! Oh, and sorry for all the sports references…

How do YOU plan on using search funnels to help your campaigns? Share your ideas in the comments section below.

Tags: Search Funnels
Posted in google, PPC, tools | 1 Comment »

My Rankings are Gone. Troubleshooting 101

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

It happens. Someone or some technology changed something & now your rankings are gone or had a significant drop. SEO is a puzzle and instead of finding out a solution, troubleshooting & crossing out potential issues is the best way we go about finding why the drop happened.

There are hundreds of things you can check. Today, our list goes to 11.

1. Get webmaster tools installed & keep them there

I’m a fan of Google WMT, Bing, & Yahoo in that order. These are key to finding out why those search engine bullies dropped your rankings.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/
http://www.bing.com/webmaster
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

2. Robots.txt

Did you recently make changes to yoursite.com/robots.txt? Check whether you disallowed your entire site or significant group of pages. Need info on robots.txt? Find everything you need to know at http://www.robotstxt.org.

3. Redirects

Two big questions: Did you use a 301 redirect and is the redirect pointing to the correct page? If we’re in the copywriting business, one missing letter equals a misspelled word among thousands. One missing letter in a redirect means your linkjuice & history from that old site are left in limbo. You’ll use a 301 redirect 100% of the time when you want to pass value on to another domain. Now just make sure the url is is pointing to is correct.

Open Site Explorer can show you most of the 301 redirects to a site. If thre’s only one or two you’re worried about, try one of the redirect checkers below.

http://www.seologic.com/webmaster-tools/url-redirect.php
http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/

4. Who are you linking to?

Bing has an exportable list of outbound links from your site. Do any of your links have less than 5 bars? If so, it could be a bad neighborhood and you’ll probably want to remove it. In the same theme, are any of your links broken? Use the Link Checker plugin to find out if you are linking to dead sites. One or two poor outbound links probably won’t drop your rankings significantly, but keeping it clean is always good.

5. Search for your site

If you’re New Standard Corporation, you’d expect to show up in the first result or two for your three word brand name. Showing up? Great! The issue is probably less severe/complicated than you thought.

Not showing up? Do a site:newstandard.com search to see if Google still has your pages indexed. You can also find total number of pages indexed in Google WMT.

No pages indexed? Definitely not good. You’ll have to find out the issue, fix it, then submit a reinclusion request to the engines. This can be done at:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration
http://add.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/ysearch/cgi_urlstatus
https://support.discoverbing.com/eform.aspx?productKey=bingcontentremoval&ct=eformts&scrx=1

6. Check Your Other Domains

Do you own other domains that were 301 redirecting to your current site? It’s possible the redirect no longer exists or the domain was not renewed. This is especially crucial if your company changed domains a few years ago, purchased competitors & had those domains 301 redirected over, or had a contest site that 301 redirected to your current domain.

7. Did you recently do a site redesign?

Use the WebDeveloper toolbar to verify your links & dropdowns are active when javascript is disabled. I would also check two different spider simulators to make sure these are indexing all of your content & links. All these links are below:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60
http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/spider-simulator/

Another item to check is site speed. Did your redesign implement Flash, tons of pictures to load, or something else that’s going to slow your site down? Listen to what Google WMT is saying about this in their Labs Site Speed section.

8. Is your content being copied?

While there is no duplicate content penalty, if you own a blog and a larger, more valuable site decides it likes your latest post & publishes it on their site, they could outrank you. They’ll be crawled more often, Google will find the content faster on the more valuable site & you might be listed further down or in the omitted results.

You can either drop a chunk of content from your site into quotes in Google to see who else is using it or try http://www.copyscape.com/ that pretty much does the same thing.

9. The Obvious Offenses

Cloaking, keyword stuffing, white text white background, etc. Fire those who suggest it. The end.

10. Bing most valuable pages

Bing lets you see the most valuable pages, or so it thinks, for your site. It will list out the top 5. Some issues can be thwarted here like affiliate homepage links showing up ahead of your actual homepage or jacked up cms created links like example.com/dept_id?=13098. Check into here to see what Bing thinks is important.

11. Keep it clean

Just like your car, desk, or house, keeping a clean website helps prevent future issues. Some items to keep especially clean are:

a. Be consistent in your linking – stick with either http://example.com or the www version.
b. URL capitalization – keep all letters small or all caps.
c. Keep sitemaps up to date – make sure your sitemaps are updated when new pages are launched or removed.

Another 3 posts could be written about troubleshooting when rankings drop (and it might happen) but go ahead & comment with your best troubleshooting ideas.

Posted in SEO | 10 Comments »

Promoted Tweets- Are They Worth The Money?

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

Twitter recently announced that they now have their version of paid search which they are calling “Promoted Tweets”. I am sure most people have read about these by now so I won’t bore you with details on how they work.  (But, if you’d like to read more check out this post on Social Media B2B.

At first I was really excited about Promoted Tweets and tried to think of which clients we have that could benefit from this. And then it hit me – does anyone actually use the search feature?

I began reading more about how the Promoted Tweets would only show on a search results page and will ultimately disappear if users do not interact with the Tweet.  Interesting concept- but will it work?

(Disclaimer: I don’t research Twitter for a living and I don’t know the stats of who does what when they are Tweeting away – so this is all just my opinion.)

I evaluated how real people actually use Twitter.com (Important to note this was a VERY small audience I evaluated in lieu of timing, mainly myself and a few close Tweeps). I’m 99% positive that in the past year or so that I have had a Twitter account, that I have never used the search future to find information, other than today, which was solely for the purpose of this blog. I have used it however when I want to mention someone I am following in my tweet and I forget what their @ name is. Plus – don’t most people update their Tweets from their phone and third party apps (I personally prefer the Twitter Gadget on my iGoogle-which doesn’t allow you to search)?

So I decided to do a little test and think like a consumer on Twitter. One company that is testing the Promoted Tweets is Starbucks and I know that today they are giving away free coffee to anyone that brings in a reusable mug (go green) for “Tax Day Freebies:”. I know this because I love coffee, I am a fan of them on Facebook and I follow them on Twitter (no judgments necessary).

My Theory:

The common Tweep/Twit/Twitterer/Tweeter/Micro-blogger does not use the Twitter search feature to search for products, etc. So as this “Promoted Tweets” is a good idea – I ultimately think it will fail to bring any actual value to the advertiser.

My Test- Starbucks:

I thought about terms that a consumer of Starbucks and Coffee in general would search for and entered these keywords in the Search bar on my Twitter.com page. Since today is free coffee day my focus is on those types of keywords

Search #1:

I went for the obvious “Starbucks” and discovered my first Promoted Tweet! Wahoo! Success.

Search #2:

My next search was for “Free Coffee.” No Promoted Tweet here- but plenty of free WOM advertising going on! Success? Maybe not for Starbucks – wouldn’t this be opportune time to promote their “Free Coffee” day?

Search #3:

Keyword: “Coffee.” Promoted Tweet- Success, kinda. Most “natural” Tweets were about people spilling their coffee or needing more coffee to get through the day- so Starbucks paying to show up here is a little silly, right?

Search #4”

Keyword: “Coffee Deals,” Promoted Tweet- Success. Again, Why not tailor the message to promote the “Free Coffee” Day?

My Conclusion: Out of the 4 terms I tested the only ones I believe people (if anyone would do a search like this on Twitter) would actually search for are “free coffee” and “coffee deals”- So, Starbucks gets a 50% for the day from me (I’ll ignore the fact that the Promoted Tweets showing failed to mention the “Free coffee”).

The Promoted Tweet thing may work or it may not- only time can tell. In my opinion- it’s a waste of advertising dollars in a space where most of the chatter about your brand is free (and hopefully positive), and if the people really want to know about what you have to say they are:

1. Already following you on Twitter or

2. They will find you in the trending topics along with Justin Bieber and what’s #nowplaying.

Again this is purely my opinion, so what do you think?

Has anyone tested this, got results and it has generated a positive ROI for the advertiser?

Posted in PPC, social media | 7 Comments »

Knowing When To Pull The Plug

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

Several months ago SEER Interactive had an idea to create a Return on Investment (ROI) Calculator to show our clients that an investment of “X dollars” in Search Engine Optimization returned a profit of “Y dollars”. Our hope being that as a campaign proceeded the cost per search visitor and cost per search conversion would decrease, eventually showing that the investment in SEO was a profitable one.

In order to create the ROI Calculator we first needed to know how much each successful conversion was worth to a client. For example if a conversion was worth $10 dollars to a client and SEER got our client 100 conversions, SEER could then say these conversions we were responsible for profited the client $1,000 dollars. Using the number of search conversions along with their value, and the client’s contract information we could calculate the actual ROI for investment in SEO.

At first this seemed like a fantastic idea, after all who wouldn’t be happy with a report that says your investment was a profitable one. However during the implementation of the Calculator a number of issues were discovered which made it’s creation far more difficult. Below are the two major problems in the creation of our ROI Calculator.

Existing Search Traffic

When SEER begins a project with a client we create a Google Analytics profile which captures only organic search traffic. The ROI Calculator then used the Google Analytics API to get the number of organic search conversions (excluding the company’s brand name) and used that number to calculate the ROI. However it was quickly discovered that this would only work for clients that had little to no search traffic to begin with. If a client already had search traffic, there is no way to separate which search visits were a result of SEO efforts, compared to which search visits would have reached the client without SEO, therefore attributing conversions would be near impossible.

This meant any client which already had search traffic would need to have an average search revenue calculated before the ROI calculator could be applied. Not only does this add a significant level of complexity to the calculator itself, but calculating average search revenue is often very difficult. What if the client recently changed domains, or launched a new website? What if the client is seasonal? Calculating an average search revenue before SEO efforts can be very difficult, or even impossible and without that information the ROI Calculator would be very inaccurate.

Lifetime Value of a Customer

The other difficulty in the creation of the calculator was the difficult concept of “Lifetime Value (LTV) of a customer.” Often times once a visitor has found a website and completed a conversion, they will come back in the future and do it again. Therefore you can’t simply say, “This conversion was worth $10,” since that person could return and complete the same transaction 5 times, making that new customer worth $50 instead of $10.

The first problem with this concept is that it is somewhat difficult to understand or explain. This resulted in a large amount of confusion and time spent explaining what we were looking for and why. The second and much more significant problem with this concept is that this number is almost always an approximation, as the data necessary to calculate an exact value is almost always unavailable.

Realizing it was time to pull the plug

Here at SEER Interactive we evaluate ongoing and new programming projects every couple of weeks to determine their priority. SEER takes into account the estimated time needed to complete the project, the value to customers, and how much help it will be to SEER employees.

After a careful analysis of the ROI Calculator’s obstacles we realized: The initial time estimates of the project skyrocketed after these problems were discovered, our calculations were going to be based on approximations, and the project was causing a significant amount of confusion, taking up a lot of our client’s time.

Knowing the cost of the project was far higher than originally anticipated we wanted to make sure the project was still of value to our clients. However since these issues resulted in several approximated values, and the ROI Calculator relied on these approximated values, our ROI calculation would compound the inaccuracies of these approximations making the final result even less accurate. Therefore SEER decided that it would be better to spend our time improving our client’s ROI even more, rather than creating a report that shows them an approximated dollar value of returns.

After Pulling the Plug

Once it was decided that the project was no longer of value to clients and it needed to be scraped, the question became what next? We have some of this data already, is there anything we can do with it? After all, we didn’t want to see the project become a total waste.

Our answer: Use the goal values already built into the Google Analytics system. While it won’t allow us to calculate an ROI due to several of the same issues, it will give us additional information for analytics purposes and will require almost zero setup time and maintenance. Furthermore clients will no longer have to compute LTV since we will be using the conversion values to optimize the site and analyze trends rather than compute an actual monetary result.

Do you have any projects which are causing more problems than they are solving? Would you know if you did?

Any comments or feedback is more than welcome!

Posted in SEO | 1 Comment »

Need Links? Make Up For Your Competitors’ Shortcomings

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

Now that I have my first blog post under my belt, I am starting to feel a little more confident. So much so, I decided to take my small amount of industry knowledge and start up my own coconut water company. Okay, I’m only joking, but let’s just say I wasn’t. Let’s say I was so into coconut water that I wanted to start up my own company and I wanted to gain exposure. My site has already been created and my products are all ready to be shipped. There’s only one problem – nobody (and by nobody, I mean the search engines) knows that I exist. Without saying one word to anybody about my business, how do I get people to come to my site and buy my coconut water? The answer is linkbuilding.

Here is a (simplified) overview of how linkbuilding works

• I have a site
• I promote it
• People see it as a valuable resource and then link to it
• The more quality links I get, the more the search engines like my site
• The more the engines like my site, the higher I should rank
• The higher my site ranks, the more traffic/conversions I should get

Okay, so now I have my site, my tasty products and the above information that the SEO fairy whispered in my ear. Now, all I have to do is get some quality links, but where do I start? I don’t know any bloggers that I can reach out to. I don’t know any directories where I can submit my site. All I know is that I want to compete in the coconut water industry and that I have access to some cool SEOmoz tools.

The first thing that I do is type in “coconut water” in Google to get a list of competitors. I’m pretty familiar with the industry so I know that Zico, VitaCoco and O.N.E are the big boys/girls in the space. So, let’s see what they are (or are not) doing that I may be able to learn from. Running each of these competitors through the top pages tool, I can see that I caught each of these competitors sleeping a little bit.

VitaCoCo 404 Pages

Zico 404 Pages

O.N.E 404 Pages

• VitaCoCo is not getting credit for (at least) 3 links since the linked to pages return 404 status code
• Zico isn’t receiving credit for (at least) 5 links
• O.N.E isn’t receiving credit for (at least) 16 links
• I use “at least” here because there were more examples of these types of pages for each one, but I couldn’t screenshot multiple pages

So, the easy part is done. I know that my competitors have links pointing to pages that don’t exist, but how do I take advantage of that? I know if I had a website and I was linking to a page that didn’t exist, my readers would be upset with me and may not read anything else on my site. So, are you thinking what I’m thinking? What if I contacted the sites that are linking to these pages as a “courtesy” and said something like, “Hey blogger, I noticed that you were linking to a page about coconut water that doesn’t exist. Since you will already be editing that post anyway, I wanted to let you know that I also have a company that sells coconut water and the product is delicious and nutritious. Would you mind linking to my site instead?” Now this won’t work all the time, but it sure beats the heck out of “hey blogger, can you link to me, I’m neat-o?”

So, you are probably saying to yourself, “that’s a cool idea, but how do I know which pages are linking to these 404’ed ones.” For that, I will be using OpenSiteExplorer (OSE). Let’s take the O.N.E example since the most links are pointing to that one:

• I copy the link location of the 404’ed page that has received 8 external links
• I drop that into OSE to find out which sites are linking to it
• I filter the results to only include the followed external links pointing to this page only
• I take the top result and I end up on this page

Coconut Porridge Recipe

It looks like this blogger has included a link to O.N.E’s coconut water site as part of a recipe. Think about how upset I would be as a reader if I was making a Coconut Date Porridge for my in-laws and I couldn’t access the page to see which coconut water I should buy. I would be devastated. So, I would shoot an email to this blogger and say “hey, you’re readers can’t view that page because it no longer exists. You should update it and, oh, by the way, I sell coconut water and it’s freakin’ sweet. Would you mind linking to mine instead?” I would recommend going down the top pages list and compiling a spreadsheet of all of the 404 pages for each competitor. Once you have that, you can start digging. Even if you don’t get all of them, you will still get a few and you will at least make the web a better place.

Now, this strategy won’t work every time, of course, but when thinking about where to start your linkbuilding, it’s always a good idea to take a look at what the competition is or isn’t doing. You just may learn something. Do you have any other ways that you use competitors for linkbuilding? Feel free to tell us about it in the comments section!

Posted in linkbuilding, SEO | 8 Comments »

Need Links? Make Up For Your Competitors’ Shortcomings

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

Now that I have my first blog post under my belt, I am starting to feel a little more confident. So much so, I decided to take my small amount of industry knowledge and start up my own coconut water company. Okay, I’m only joking, but let’s just say I wasn’t. Let’s say I was so into coconut water that I wanted to start up my own company and I wanted to gain exposure. My site has already been created and my products are all ready to be shipped. There’s only one problem – nobody (and by nobody, I mean the search engines) knows that I exist. Without saying one word to anybody about my business, how do I get people to come to my site and buy my coconut water? The answer is linkbuilding.

Here is a (simplified) overview of how linkbuilding works

• I have a site
• I promote it
• People see it as a valuable resource and then link to it
• The more quality links I get, the more the search engines like my site
• The more the engines like my site, the higher I should rank
• The higher my site ranks, the more traffic/conversions I should get

Okay, so now I have my site, my tasty products and the above information that the SEO fairy whispered in my ear. Now, all I have to do is get some quality links, but where do I start? I don’t know any bloggers that I can reach out to. I don’t know any directories where I can submit my site. All I know is that I want to compete in the coconut water industry and that I have access to some cool SEOmoz tools.

The first thing that I do is type in “coconut water” in Google to get a list of competitors. I’m pretty familiar with the industry so I know that Zico, VitaCoco and O.N.E are the big boys/girls in the space. So, let’s see what they are (or are not) doing that I may be able to learn from. Running each of these competitors through the top pages tool, I can see that I caught each of these competitors sleeping a little bit.

VitaCoCo 404 Pages

Zico 404 Pages

O.N.E 404 Pages

• VitaCoCo is not getting credit for (at least) 3 links since the linked to pages return 404 status code
• Zico isn’t receiving credit for (at least) 5 links
• O.N.E isn’t receiving credit for (at least) 16 links
• I use “at least” here because there were more examples of these types of pages for each one, but I couldn’t screenshot multiple pages

So, the easy part is done. I know that my competitors have links pointing to pages that don’t exist, but how do I take advantage of that? I know if I had a website and I was linking to a page that didn’t exist, my readers would be upset with me and may not read anything else on my site. So, are you thinking what I’m thinking? What if I contacted the sites that are linking to these pages as a “courtesy” and said something like, “Hey blogger, I noticed that you were linking to a page about coconut water that doesn’t exist. Since you will already be editing that post anyway, I wanted to let you know that I also have a company that sells coconut water and the product is delicious and nutritious. Would you mind linking to my site instead?” Now this won’t work all the time, but it sure beats the heck out of “hey blogger, can you link to me, I’m neat-o?”

So, you are probably saying to yourself, “that’s a cool idea, but how do I know which pages are linking to these 404’ed ones.” For that, I will be using OpenSiteExplorer (OSE). Let’s take the O.N.E example since the most links are pointing to that one:

• I copy the link location of the 404’ed page that has received 8 external links
• I drop that into OSE to find out which sites are linking to it
• I filter the results to only include the followed external links pointing to this page only
• I take the top result and I end up on this page

Coconut Porridge Recipe

It looks like this blogger has included a link to O.N.E’s coconut water site as part of a recipe. Think about how upset I would be as a reader if I was making a Coconut Date Porridge for my in-laws and I couldn’t access the page to see which coconut water I should buy. I would be devastated. So, I would shoot an email to this blogger and say “hey, you’re readers can’t view that page because it no longer exists. You should update it and, oh, by the way, I sell coconut water and it’s freakin’ sweet. Would you mind linking to mine instead?” I would recommend going down the top pages list and compiling a spreadsheet of all of the 404 pages for each competitor. Once you have that, you can start digging. Even if you don’t get all of them, you will still get a few and you will at least make the web a better place.

Now, this strategy won’t work every time, of course, but when thinking about where to start your linkbuilding, it’s always a good idea to take a look at what the competition is or isn’t doing. You just may learn something. Do you have any other ways that you use competitors for linkbuilding? Feel free to tell us about it in the comments section!

Posted in linkbuilding, SEO | 8 Comments »

301 Redirect Test: How Much Link Juice are YOU Losing?

Friday, April 9th, 2010

In a recent interview conducted by Eric Enge, Matt Cutts indicated that while 301 redirects are still the preferred method for migrating between pages and sites, a certain percentage of PageRank is lost through the redirect.  This disclosure has stirred the pot in the SEO community – whereas before it was assumed that a 301 would pass all of the link juice, now many are asking ‘how much is lost?’ and ‘what else can we do?’.

Given that no definitive answer has been provided about the exact percentage lost, we decided that the only way to determine the true value of a 301 was to analyze a site that had recently changed domains.  Fortunately, one of our clients moved domains in the beginning of 2010 and had implemented a 301 on their old site.  We managed this account before and after the switch, so data from both the old and the new sites was available for analysis.  The following case quickly outlines what we’ve seen with these domains in particular, and how the 301 is functioning.

In the first graphic we can see the Open Site Explorer data for both sites.  This was where we started our research because we wanted to see how an independent tool was evaluating the two domains and what type of link juice was being passed through.

While it is clear that the 301 appeared to be passing significant value through this analysis, the most important factor was how the engines were treating the redirect.

This next graphic shows the total amount of organic search traffic to the two sites – before and after the switch was made.  As you can see, total traffic normalized fairly quickly once the switch was made.

It is important to note two things about the above graphic.  First, the same number of keywords were tracked for each site – keeping the KWs as a controlled variable.  Second, the site being analyzed experienced a fairly significant jump in traffic around the holidays.  So while this data is not ideal given the peaks in the graph, it does help demonstrate the overall results since the switch and the relative speed with which traffic stabilized.

The next graphs show the organic search traffic in Google, Yahoo!, and Bing for this site’s top keyword.  For reference, this word gets approximately 550k searches on exact match per month.

Clearly Google is passing value from the 301, and traffic numbers have actually improved since the switch.  Yahoo! showed an initial spike, however traffic dropped significantly and has not returned to previous levels.  Bing does not appear to be passing any significant value and traffic levels remain low.

…So what does this all mean?  With this quick analysis we were able to reach the following conclusions:

• It is safe to say that 301 redirects do pass value – Our OSE analysis shows that the new domain has picked up a significant portion of the linking domains, as well as relative authority.
• In addition, we saw through our KW traffic analysis that the 301 seems to be working quite well in Google.  We have not seen any substantial drop since the domain switch – and in fact, traffic has steadily increased.  Whether or not there has been a measurable drop, or PageRank decay, is hard to say at this point.  Our data indicates that the 301 is passing value, and our traffic numbers say the same thing – if there is some value being lost, it is not affecting the bottom line.
• The same cannot be said for Yahoo! and Bing.  Our data showed that Yahoo! and Bing are not passing adequate value from the redirect and that total traffic numbers may be impacted by this drop.  Although Bing has said that it can take two or three re-crawls for value to register, it does not look like the full value has been passed with the redirect.   When analyzing the impact of 301s in your future campaigns keep this test in mind and be sure to check how each engine’s traffic is affected.

If you have any questions about the information provided above, please leave them below in the comments section.  In addition, a great review of the entire interview with Matt Cutts (complete with helpful illustrations) can be found on the SEOMoz Blog.

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