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The 3 best tools for measuring page rank … and other more important and invaluable site metrics!

Posted by Bibi on Thursday, 22 December 2011 in Digital Marketing 0 Comments

It’s an all too common obsession… site owners are concerned with the concept of page rank and obtaining a “high” ranking. This is despite the fact that page rank and online marketing success are far from synonymous. This focus on page rank -- misbegotten though it may be – has give rise to a small industry of third party developers and search optimization consultants with special tools to analyze and boost "page rank".

Guess what. It’s not that complicated to measure page rank, and page rank is not the metric site owners should be most concerned with -- the proper tools can reveal a treasure trove of more valuable, actionable information.

(Google itself, via its official Webmasters Blog, says that the three most important site metrics to be concerned with are conversion rate; bounce rate and clickthrough rate (CTR).)

The first tool that web site owners and online marketers can use to check on page rank (called “average position") can turn to is Google’s webmaster tools. Webmaster tools, though similar to the Google Analytics interface, gives a “Google’s eye view" of a site -- raw, unrefined search data:

Here we see a screen shot from Webmaster tools. What’s not so is interesting is the “Average Position” column… It is the queries (grayed out in this sample), the number of impressions, the click through (CTR) information, and trendlines.

A particularly insightful and potentially invaluable bit of information to watch for would be queries with low impressions but high click-through rates: This would suggest that users are searching for your site in unexpected ways. This information can then be incorporated into future SEO efforts.

Two other tools for analyzing this information are available within the new Google Analytics interface which was released earlier in 2011.

This report available under the Traffic Sources/SEO Optimization/Queries selection of the new interface only (it is possible to switch back and forth between the two interfaces):

As with data supplied from the Webmaster tools report, the “Average Position” column is quite possibly the least valuable data on the report -- so don’t let this become a primary concern of yours. What’s more interesting is information on impressions and CTR -- this is data that can be used to more effectively target SEO and paid search efforts.

A third option for looking at page rank and keywords is available by taking advantage of an advanced variation of the Traffic Sources/SEO Optimization/Queries report, only instead of selecting on traffic, select on Query/Site Usage/Average Position and then “Less Than 10”:

This report shows what keywords are on the mythical ‘first page’ of search results. But again, it’s not the page rank that’s so important -- the truly important information is the keywords and how they fit in with your existing SEO efforts.

For a further debunking of the idea of page rank, see Why PageRank Doesn’t Matter Anymore by Ana Hoffman.

2nd Vermont Web Marketing Summit - My Takeaways

Posted by Bibi on Tuesday, 15 November 2011 in Web Marketing Conference 0 Comments

A little over 2 years ago, I started putting together the Vermont Web Marketing Summit, somewhat out of sheer frustration and with no expectations. The digital marketing world had started to explode for the rest of the country but for Vermont, it was still very fragmented. My initial thought was to have a scaled down version of SMX or SES, the larger Search Marketing conferences around the country. But as the first VT web marketing summit started taking shape, I realized that it had to be something more complete than just search. Having always believed that the different pieces of marketing should constantly be communicating with each other, all along my effort has been to keep every channel included, both traditional & new media.

What particularly struck me at this year’s event was how diverse the attendees were - larger firms like Dealer.com, Seventh Generation, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, MyWebGrocer and Burton shared experiences, platforms and lunch tables with smaller, actually much smaller Vermont business entities. I guess that’s just Vermont defined!

The growth and increased profile of the web marketing summit in only its second year is very professionally gratifying to me as we start planning for the 2012 summit.

Here are my key take away from this year’s conference:

Fundamentals stay same - Just scale it.
It was interesting to see how the fundamental principles of digital marketing are broadly applicable; there’s never one set of tools and strategies for large companies and another set of tools for smaller firms. There are differences of scale, of course, but more similarities than differences.

You are a media company - regardless
Seventh Generation is typically thought of as a green products company, and so the murmur was prominent when the Summit’s keynote speaker, Robin Kamen described Seventh Generation as “a media company” and said “we are all inventing media.” It’s apparent that no matter what your market segment -- diapers, cleaning products, web sites for car dealers, coffee -- it’s a media-rich environment with a multitude of competing channels fighting for marketers’ attention and their creative and analytical energies.

Conversation - the new (qualified) metric for success
In this new digital marketing environment, it’s not what you say, it’s what others are saying about you and your brand. How you respond is what differentiates your brand from others in the social arena. And yet it’s important not to lose sight of the bottom line. Conversation is not an end in itself . Without goal achievement, conversation and engagement have little value.

Multi Touch Points
Resonance is marketing - strengthening your brand presence and reiterating your customer trust. Building every campaign, every messaging, and every conversation to resonate across media channels is what differentiates success from failures.

There’s no place like home
Lessons learned locally have value even for very large organizations that serve national and even international markets. Digital marketing, based on technologies that can stream data unobstructed around world for free, sometimes loses this perspective. Local audience can be your ultimate testing ground. The insights gained from local customers can be particularly invaluable. Scale your strategies but start local for testing new ones.