When marketing a web site, either commercially or just for fun, search engines play a big part in driving traffic to your site. Knowing how make search engines work for you is an art in itself, and consulting on the subject puts food on the tables of many an internet specialist.
Of course, it goes without saying that the most effective method of getting your site well listed is to publish the content people are looking for. Content-rich sites like weblogs perform extremely well in search engines. Not all sites are content-orientated, however. One of the main principals employed – especially with sites that perform a marketing rather than a content provision role – is to target set phrases that you think a user will search for, and try an optimize your ranking on those keywords or phrases. Having done this, you then monitor your server logs and see what phrases people are actually using to find your site, and readjust your approach accordingly. It’s incredibly useful to know the search terms visitors are using when they find your site.
However, all this tells you is what you’re already doing right – the users that clicked through found you – it’s like a virtual pat on the back. It doesn’t tell you what traffic you’re missing and who’s not clicking through.
I can see a clear market for companies such as Google to sell you a report (or subscription to a reporting service) that details the searches your site was listed in, but that the user didn’t click through on. Based on this Near Misses report, you could see that, for example, you were consistently showing up on page 6 of searches for certain keywords. Adjust your strategy accordingly, and you could move your site up to a position that will earn you more clickthroughs.
This would offer a totally different method of optimizing your site for the traffic you’re missing, not just the traffic you’re already getting.
Comments
New doors for such services may open up with all of the recent goings on:
Yahoo! dropping Google in favor of Inktomi.
MSN reving up.
Google going IPO.
There is tremendous revenue potential in PFI and PPC from the search engines, but I foresee third party firms stepping up to the plate for detailed position analysis.
Another area once scorned might be locally ran applications—or so I hear. :-)
The method you have outlined, Drew, of studying your logs to see how people are getting to you – is highly used, yet ultimately backwards in my opinion. Using widely available and free tools – it is quite simple to target search terms that are high traffic/high value.
It is using these tools that I, and others, target some of the most applicable search terms to a company or client’s business, copy write, and optimize for. After an optimization cycle has completed, me or my team carefully go through the logs to see what is working, and what hasn’t shown results. Using tools such as AWR for Mac OS X (one of the numerous reasons why I bought the iBook in the first place) we can verify our position on many of the major search engines. This, coupled with server logs, allows us to identify our non-successful target terms and thus try again.
Wonderful thoughts, and highly useful.
The only problem I can foresee – having dedicated most of 2001’s personal supply of blood, sweat and tears to SEO – is that it might be a little too “close to the bone” for companies like Google; how much of their underlying ranking algorithm would this expose to the masses, and (more to the point) how comfortable would companies like Google be with handing over this information – cash or no cash?
Not very comfortable at all – at a guess – but, from a user/developer/promoter POV a “Near Misses” report would be truly superb.
I don’t foresee a time when any search engine, except one very focused on search-engine optimization, would publish a report of search terms applicable to a site that the site is not optimized for. As far as I have been able to understand from years of work in e-marketing, Google wants marketeers to know as little as possible about its search algorithms and ranking methodology.
Something like the Keyword Equity Index offered by WordTracker (essentially a rating of how popular a keyword phrase is divided by how many competitors are targetting that phrase) in a Google context would never come to pass. On the other hand, if you’re looking to optimize a site for related keywords to the ones searchers are already using to find your site, then some of the functions available in the advanced search may help. Have you tried the tilde (~) modifier before a word? Have you tried to ‘related:’ function? Have you tried to find competitive sites and who links to them with the ‘link:’ function and the secret include function? (Here’s the secret: run a backlinks check on your site – link:www.allinthehead.com – and look at the number and content of results. Then run the secret link check on your site – www.allinthehead.+com – and look at the number and content of the results. Different?)
Of course the shoe of the Google business model that has yet to drop is selling behavious metrics back to marketing, PR, opinion and advertising companies based on the huge volume of searches performed every minute/hour/day/week. Essentially as on-the-fly barometre of what people are looking for online.
Oh, hey. After writing all this I realized that there is a function Google offers to find related search phrases to optimize your site for: AdWords. Go ahead and set up an AdWords account (http://adwords.google.com) and Google will suggest additional keyword phrases related to the ones you input. It will even estimate the traffic you should see from those phrases. Hey hey.