Category: SEO Metrics

There are two economic principles every Web marketer should be keenly sensitive to. Goodhart’s Law says that “when a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure”. In other words, people will game any metric that is intended to measure performance. One historical example of this was the American Securities and Exchange…

Oscillation is a regular movement (back and forth, up and down, etc.) in a pattern or wave function. You’re most likely to see oscillation in your seasonal traffic spikes and dips. If you can predict about how much traffic a site will get based on the time of year then it’s probably oscillating. That’s neither…

Too many Web marketers treat Google as the only [meaningful] source of traffic for their sites. Your inability to earn traffic from other sources is an opportunity to improve your marketing. Your decision to ignore other sources of traffic should be supported by reliable information (not “data” – information). The more I discuss analytics with…

Rank Sculpting has become the new obsession among Web marketers. I’m not talking about PageRank Sculpting, which is the misinformed practice of using “nofollow” link attributes on your internal links to try to squeeze more PageRank toward certain pages. No, Rank Sculpting is the practice of seeking out “the best rank trackers”. I see requests for opinions…

The post Why You Should Track Traffic, Not Rankings first appeared on SEO Theory.

Web marketers are locked in a death embrace spiral with 3rd party analytics tools like Ahrefs, Majestic, Moz, and others. Every year I see more people sharing screen reports of traffic estimates from these tools when asking for helping or bragging abou…

If there is a single “staple” function or service offered by the search engine optimization industry, it has to be the Website audit.  Everything begins there.  When a company takes on a new SEO provider, the first thing the provider…

Read more →

Every time a major Google algorithm update is announced people start looking at search visibility reports and compiling lists of winners and losers. Search visibility has its place in Web marketing but it is a terrible metric to use for…

Read more →

In mid-2012 I decided I was fed up with Google Analytics’ bogus data and horrible interface. I replaced the free tool with my own self-served installation of Piwik. Unfortunately I run enough Websites that Piwik put a considerable load on my server. It didn’t help that constant robot probing from hackers and spammers kept knocking the server offline. In late November 2012 I decided to try the “less is more” approach to analytics reporting. Rather than spending hours every day poring over the minutiae of what people were doing on my sites, I decided to try just looking at the high-level data that might be reported by a simpler tool. As many of my sites are now built on WordPress the Jetpack module/plugin came to mind. So I installed Jetpack, connected my sites to a couple of WordPress.com accounts, and proceeded to depend on that dashboard for my personal analytics solution. To say that Jetpack offers fewer details and reporting options than Google Analytics should suffice. People who feel compelled to bury themselves in data every day (even if the data is nonsense) have no reason to look at Jetpack. It was designed for folks who want to focus on […]

If you ever want to see a group of grumpy old SEOs griping and stamping their feet, bring them all together in a bar and tell them they just lost their favorite tool. Or show them some random news article from Search Engine Land about Google converting all searches to use a secure protocol (thus stripping out your keyword referral data). Oh my, someone done forgot to take their chill pill, today. I have been writing about keyword research for years but rarely have I recommended browsing your search referral data for keyword ideas. In fact, I first advocated scouring Web logs for keyword ideas back in the late 1990s. I was hardly the first person to suggest doing so but at the time a lot of people were talking about (wait for it — you’re not gonna believe this) … scanning competitors’ “keywords” meta tags. At the time I thought that was ridiculous. We already knew some people were embedding fake keywords in their meta tags just to send their competitors off chasing the wrong queries, but people kept checking each others’ meta tags to figure out which queries they should optimize for. Let’s call that CAVE MAN KEYWORD […]

Link audits have become the bread and butter service for many SEO companies these days, and they all have their favorite tools. Add to that the constant fear and confusion over which links are hurting Websites and you have a lot of angry, frustrated clients who want results. People occasionally ask me why certain links don’t appear in their favorite auditing tools. For example, suppose you acquire a link from a Website that gets a lot of traffic but when you check Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs, Majestic SEO, et. al. you don’t see the link. Should the link be counted in reports for clients? The very fact this question is asked at all shows that a lot of people have really misfired on link auditing. The problem is not with the tools, my Padawans, it is with your expectations and the expectations you set for your clients. Link Auditing Tools Can Never See the Whole Picture This isn’t a situation where “good enough” matters. When you’re dealing with expectations (your own or someone else’s), you have to understand and accept that no tool is ever going to provide you with all the information you need. A typical SEO response is, […]

Dr. Pete Meyers, arguably one of the cooler number-crunchers in search engine market analysis, is taking some heat over his “early look at Google’s June 25″ “algorithmic update” (I would prefer to call it “Google’s Bizarre Mult-week Rollout Update” because — except for the word “update” — that is how Mister Matt Cutts described it on Twitter. Well, you know, I see some churn but I see that every week. S*** Happens, as we say in the biz, right? The MozCast tool is actually a cool use of Deep Web Interferometric Analysis. I’m not endorsing the tool, mind you (despite the fact I linked to it without “rel=’nofollow’”). I just think the concept is pretty cool. It’s a far sight better use of some number crunchers’ time and talent than, say, “RANKING FACTORS” analyses. I have (as usual) ruffled a few feathers with comments on some recent news reports about “RANKING FACTORS”. Hold on to your hats, kids, ’cause I’m about to unload a broadside against these “RANKING FACTORS” correlation studies. Meanwhile, Back in the SERPs, Link Spam Continues But before we do that, let’s take a look at this crazy ‘outing’ from David Naylor’s blog (technically speaking it’s a […]

Most SEOs long ago abandoned optimizing for search in favor of chasing imaginary numbers. We play the metrics game because clients and vice presidents expect to see reports loaded with numbers. The numbers convey nonsense paradigms from an illogical world constructed from a fabric of chaotic blog posts and conference presentations. Each idea that is presented to the online marketing community is synthesized into a piece of a larger puzzle that was never complete and will never achieve any scientific coherence. Search, Driven by Numbers If ever there was a time when we agreed on which numbers should be tracked and reported that was a brief golden moment in the history of nonsensical Web marketing. Numbers taken out of context provide no real value. People still talk about rankings because at the gut level we “know” that “a number 1 ranking for any keyword will produce more traffic than a number 2 ranking for that keyword”. This is completely false. Yes, you can talk about click-through analyses all day long but there are many, many queries where the 1st listing is not the one that attracts the most click-throughs. Why? Because search engines don’t always get it right. More importantly, […]