SEO
Copywriter
Writing Sample: Blog about developing a search
performance metric
[NOTE: I created the metric and wrote this blog.]
TASM: Measuring
website performance, Part 2
The issue is how to
measure search, to provide our clients with an objective
measure of their performance on the major search
engines. (Google, Yahoo and MSN count for over 80
percent of all search traffic.) This is becoming more
important as studies show that, in the
business-to-business market, over 75 percent of
purchasers searching for a new solution begin their
search on the web.
To describe our
solution, the Total Available Search Market metric, or
TASM, we need to take a step back and review what occurs
when somebody uses a search engine to find a solution.
Typically they open up a search engine, often Google
(almost 50 percent of b-to-b searches), input a search
phrase of two to four words and get a whole bunch of
search results back – often millions of listings
assembled ten at a time on separate pages. The searcher
then clicks on listings until they find what they are
looking for – to the searcher, the efficiency of a
search engine is probably measured by how few listings
they need to explore to find what they are looking for.
So how do we measure
this process? It is important to know that the number
of incidences of search phrases is carefully measured.
We use Overture and Wordtracker to evaluate our clients’
potential search phrases to find the best candidates,
usually using a 30-day window.
Also, there has been
considerable research on the “readership” of each page
of search results – 100 percent of searchers read the
first three listings, 90 percent read listings four
through ten, and 50 percent read the second page of
listings 11 through 20. After that, readership declines
at a rate of at least 10 percent per page.
So it is fairly easy to
see how our metric works: we make a list of our client’s
search phrases, measure the number of times that phrases
was used int eh course of a month, measure the client’s
position on a search listing for that phrase, and do the
math to measure out how many people read the client’s
listing when they input a particular search phrase.
For example, one of
Refreshweb’s keyword phrases is “b2b marketing agency,”
which gets 300 searches a month across all the major
search engines. At this writing, we are number
seven on the search listing for this phrase.
Ninety percent times 300 is 270 persons – that is how many people are
exposed to Refreshweb when they use a search engine to
find a “b2b marketing agency.”
The math is easy – what
is not immediately intuitive is the reality that
creating a useful metric means not trying to do too
much. What makes for good marketing intelligence is
actionability – a metric that is too reductive reduces
the ability of our clients to act on the data we are
giving them.
For practical purposes,
this means fighting the very human desire to appreciate
the “horse race” and aggregate the data (with a weighted
average) into a single “score” that rates the
performance of the client’s website. We need to keep
our eyes trained on the performance on the important
keyword phrases in order to have a sense that we are
attracting the “most, right” traffic to the website
(that comma between “most” and “right” is no accident).
There is an apt
metaphor in one time honored way to create a sculpture.
The sculptor will sometimes create a clay model of the
finished work and submerge it in water, progressively
removing the water to expose the next horizontal plane
that needs to be sculpted. The restricted view allows
the artist to focus on the next few strokes of the
chisel – very important when a single errant stroke
could destroy the entire project.
While the risks aren’t
the same when optimizing a website, that kind of focus –
keyword by keyword – is critical to developing an
effective natural search strategy. It is even more
important when adjusting and tweaking the website.
