Just logged into my faviourite competitor backlink analysis tool, Open Site Explorer and noticed that the SEOMoz team have radically changed how it works.
…and it SUCKS!
I used to steam through loads of reports by downloading the CSV of raw link data for each competitor. Now this once speedy solution has been reduced to “Your report will be emailed to you in the next 5-10 minutes”.
So what was once a fast zippy service is now delay-ware
AARRGGHH!!!!
I’ve been wracking my brains for over a month now with a persistent problem cooked up by the sales team… how to (as accurately as possible) calculate the ROI for an SEO campaign over time.
I completely understand that from a clients point of view ROI is all that matters however with a shifting landscape that is SEO this is not as easy as A+B=C.
What i have devised is a series of charts that when combined provide a reasonably solid foundation for an ROI calculation:
Chart 1 shows click through rates for keywords within the top 20 results (you can find these anywhere or buy accurate ones from the excellent hitwise team).
Chart 2 uses data from the Google Adwords keyword tool to depict seasonality.
Chart 3 shows compression of traffic advancement. Basically the movement up the SERPS gets smaller as the placement gets higher.
Chart 4 is the actual combined chart.
To give this more weight get real enquiry to sale information and an average cost per order from the client and bobs your mothers brother… you have an SEO ROI calculator for your client!
I would publish our spreadsheet that does this but its a trade secret and i’d have to kill you lolz.
Have SEO ROI Calculated For Your Campaign
If you’d like us to calculate ROI for your SEO campaign then please give me a call on 0845 688 4491 or email markrush@gmail.com. We will need to take some sensitive data like your websites conversion rate, average basket value, keyword focus, budget and current rankings to give you the best prediction.
Thanks to James O – Maths wiz extrordinare for making my dream a reality ;)
I’ve been a long time fan of software like Xenu and the Microsoft IIS SEO Tool which make constructing on-page audits easy as pie. What was a few weeks work is now reduced to a couple of clicks and some filtering in Excel which is amazing in anyones books. Today I discovered care of Aaron on SEOBook.com the Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool which performs similar analysis to the Microsoft SEO Tool however some filters and a nifty tabbed interface allow you to quickly identify problem areas and make some great reports.
So heres the top 10 things i live about the Screaming Frog tool.
1. It’s free. As a Yorkshire-man, my favourite price is free so this goes without saying :)
2. It works in my 64bit version of windows 7 – you’d be surprised how much software I have to keep on my Windows XP netbook
3. It’s Fast – analysing sites seems to be really quick, certainly faster than the Microsoft tool
4. The tabs – The tabbed menu makes it easy to find pages where there’s no H1 (for example)
5. The filters – one of my major issues with the Microsoft tool is that it picks up images, CSS and Javascript and reports that these files dont have meta data etc. The Screaming Frog SEO Spider enables you to filter out anything thats not HTML
6. It identifies Outbound links – taking control of your websites outbound links is critical to onpage SEO and all of this data is available under one tab… Brilliant!
7. It shows you your Internal anchor text use – It has a built in first link checker… nuff said
8. Drill in page by page – being able to pick a page for deeper study is great
9. Works via uploads. Yoou can upload a list file and have the URL’s you supply analysed
10. Did I mention that it’s free! (for up to 500 URL’s)
Disclaimer – I am in no way affiliated with Screaming Frog!
I’m a big fan of tools that give me the ability to take large scale snapshots of custom search queries. Its a great way of cataloging potential link partners, monitoring news and producing lists of search results.
Sick Marketing, the authors of the automated SEO Toolset Sick Submitter have released a beta of their new scraper tool designed to rival things like the infamouse grey/black hat tool Scrapebox.
The tool works simply. Just enter your custom query i.e.
intitle:”seo blog” inurl:uk
and the tool will search the search engine of your choice and pull out a list of sites that match your criteria. Then simply run them through the built in PageRank checker and export the list for use in a spreadsheet or other tool.
It works brilliantly and is promised to be free forever (if forum posts can be believed)
Check it (links to downloadable exe file).
Recently i’ve been working on a review of an SEO campaign for a major high street retailer, reviewing the keywords and measuring them against conversion data from Google Analytics and the awesome Hitwise data that can not only show you what terms people are using to find your sites, but also what term was used 2,3,4,and 5 times before the tracked first click that Analytics records. The results are startling. Some massive ‘clothing’ terms drive huge traffic to the site but they dont convert. Even tracking these terms as repeat visitors using brand terms down the line yields pretty poor traffic volumes for example the biggest term converting to a brand term is less than 0.2%. What this means for SEO’s is that you shouldnt chase and invest your time and clients cash into these red herring keywords as they do nothing but waste your time. The only problem is that to discover a red herring term you need back-data which is where Hitwize comes in.
So my advice is to either seriously scrutinise and review your campaign keywords at say every 3 months throughout the contract or, for sites that already have achieved some success, speak to the Hitwise team and get the reporting done. It may cost you a couple of grand but it will save you and your client that and more in next to no time.
Im all for trying new tools and when IMT, creators of a tool i use a lot to get new domains indexed, emailed me about their new RSS submission tool i thought I’d give it a try. The tool states that it submits your RSS feeds via various aggregation services resulting in 50 or so back links created…
Now I’m very skeptical of automated SEO tools having tried quite a few and finding that generally they don’t perform as well as manual link building however i will be monitoring my traffic to see if this new tool is worth the effort.
Give it a try: IMT RSS Submission Tool (requires registration)
So SEOMoz has put out some more tools, further cementing their reputation as quality tool creators and catching them a boat load of links from high authority SEO sites too no doubt.
The new On Page SEO Report tool is pretty nice. And it goes a long way to highlight some issues with on-page factors.
Just discovered this great little tool called indexping.com that monitors your new domain launches and emails you when they’ve finally been added to the index.
When used in conjunction with the free link building tools i blogged about earlier its a great way of getting new domains in the google index trouble free and answers that annoying question – how long does it take to index a new domain.
Just discovered a nice feature of the Blekko search engine. It gives you a really nice report on links etc for SEO when you do a search for your domain with a trailing /seo tag i.e.
Which looks like:
It gives a link quality score for your inbound links, anchor text usage, links per domain and a host of additional info… its really nice!
Its widely believed that Google only follows and attributes the anchor text from the first link on a page. I.e. if you have 3 links on a page to the same target URL with varying anchor text, Google will, in most cases, only look at the anchor of the first link (think about your ‘home’ links!!!).
Jim has discovered this great little tool that parses your pages and reporting on the first link use. It also highlights nofollow links and has a few other usefull indicators that you might find useful.
So if like me you’re mad on organising internal link structures give it a go.
www.firstlinkchecker.com
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