Dreaming of Better Organic Search Numbers
By Craig Danuloff
Why is organic search the bastard stepchild of search marketing? I think there are two main reasons:
- Paid search is predictable, organic search is not. In paid search you control the keywords for which your listings appear, the copy that is displayed, the target landing page, and the date when listings first appear. With organic optimization you can attempt to influence each of these but the results are quite unpredictable and essentially uncontrollable.
- Paid search is measurable, organic search is very difficult to measure. The paid networks including Adwords and Yahoo Search provide easy access to impressions, click-through rates, average positions, costs, and conversion rates/values. Analytics packages will tell you how many organic clicks you got and provide conversion rates/values, but getting any more takes work or is just plain impossible.
Imagine if we had a clear picture of the current and potential value of organic search position rankings. Here’s a rough idea of what I’d like to see:
- Each referring URL from an organic engine should provide the position number along with the keyword that drove the click.
- Analytics software should be able to later look up (from each engine) the distribution pattern of clicks for each keyword (ie position 1 got 23.3% of the clicks, position 2 go 7.3% of the clicks, etc.).
- Using these two numbers it would be possible to get a report of the potential traffic for each keyword if you achieved various positions in the search results. Summary reports should show how much traffic if you achieved #1 for every term, and then a bunch of other target distributions (20% of terms in the top 5 slots, 30% of terms in the next 5 slots, 20% on page two, etc.)
- Using your actual conversion rates and gross / net revenue numbers, produce the same tables showing the revenue potential of various combinations of organic search success. In other words, tell me that I’m now in position #12 for ‘professional table saw’ but that if I earned position #3 it would be worth a 650% increase in volume and a 12% increase in conversion for a total economic value of {whatever the hell it would be}.
This all just one quick example. Nothing wished for here would be hard if the engines would provide a little data and the analytics companies would do a little work. The recently leaked AOL data, combined with some other publicly available info and a cool new tool from Black Hat SEO offers a sliver of this dream.
BTW, while I’m fantasizing about SEO tools we could have if the engines acted as if it were our pages that were enabling them to create fortunes and the analytics providers wanted to actually help us improve our businesses, here’s some ideas for how a keyword research component, which would act as sort of the front end of the process that leads to the conversion/revenue tracking piece wished for above:
- Push a button and the tool reads the copy on your current site, delivers a list of recommended and related keywords.
- A list of other URLS that gain a lot of clicks from those keywords is provided, and additional keywords that drive traffic to those sites are added to your list.
- Your master keyword list shows the page(s) on your site where each word or phrase appears, with marks to indicate an exact sequence or proximity-only match. Words on the list that don’t’ appear anywhere on the site are flagged.
- The keyword list also displays your current SERP position (where you rank) on the major engines and a with pop-up window displays the historical trend.
- Apply the same ‘what if I was #1’ reporting from above to the full ‘wish list’ of keywords (as opposed to just those which are actually driving traffic). In effect show me the maximum potential revenue of my business (based on current relevant keywords, conversion rates, and revenue/margins).
If these kinds of numbers and level of visibility were available, maybe organic search would get the respect and budgets it requires and deserves. The problem seems to be that the engines only earn their money indirectly off of the organic listings, so they’ve been very slow to provide tools and data. It may be that the only way to get the data we need is to demand more organic data in return for spending big $$ on the paid side.
In any case, it's amazing the impact the AOL data leak is having on organic search. Google will soon be releasing some data (hopefully without the negative aspects), and I'm sure that will stir things up even further.
