There’s a number of reasons a webmaster might want to markup structured content in a way that can render a data-type more clearly to search engines. Whilst this doesn’t have a causal effect on rank improvements, that more of your content can be “understood” more clearly, must be a positive right?  Whilst there is some concern that marking-up your page content with Microdata, Microformats or RDFa may in some cases permit search engines to know enough about your page content and comparative data elements to bypass your page entirely; serving comparative results in-SERP, in most cases this seems somewhat alarmist when there are significant benefits to be had. This isn’t a how-to post, as I wanted to focus more on quantifying the CTR benefits and also the difficulties inherent in trying to do so.

That said, if you are new to why and how to mark-up structured data, there’s plenty of resources available. Here’s an overview introduction from Google, which includes a video; then there’s Schema.org which is a single vocabulary syntax that all search engines support, meaning that going forward implementing Schema will render your rich snippets in search results for all the major search engines. (Prior to that there was some differentiation from engine to engine as to which format would render.) In addition, there’s a shed-load of walk-thru’s and implementation tips on SEO Gadget.

Microformats & CTR

That successfully implementing microformats that render in your search snippets increases CTR is largely common sense. It’s pretty much innate knowledge that anyone with any experience in SEO understands; make your search result more relevant and attractive versus in-SERP competition and you’re bound to attract more clicks. Making a solid case to a client however, can be very difficult based on experience and anecdotal references, particularly when working with large e-commerce sites with heavy development schedules and a hundred and one other things to work on. Sure visits may go up, post implementation but then there’s so many additional factors that contribute to visits and CTR increase it can be very difficult to quantify success at a granular level. There are some case studies around (some good examples collated here), but many of them are from enormous online retailers, sharing macro data (overall increase in search share). Finding tangible term-level data is almost impossible, probably least of all because when it comes to measuring CTR the only real primary data source is Webmaster Tools, which for obvious reasons doesn’t give exact values.

Whinging aside, we recently tried to quantify CTR uplift post implementation of hReview and thought it might be worth sharing for anyone that needs persuading. First off, let’s define CTR and and factors known to effect.

Click-through Rate

The rate at which searchers click your result when it appears in search results (a search impression), expressed as a percentage. So if my page is seen in the search results 5000 times in a month, and receives 100 clicks 100/5000X100 = 2%.

Many factors can positively or negatively impact CTR most clearly obvious being aggregate rank, or we wouldn’t have jobs right? In addition the relative attractiveness of your listing can be improved by optimising meta-title and description should that be the data the search engine is displaying in the listing. Then there are factors outside our control, such as brand recognition and trust of our listing and that of proximal competitors.

Step One

We implemented Thing>Creative Work>Review Schema on product level pages on an online bathroom retailer website, which showed up on all pages by December 25th. OOOOh, shiny!

Step Two

We took an export of the search query data for the month preceding and up to December 25th, and here’s where it gets tricky. First off, we all know that Webmaster Tools Data is inexact. Impression data is clearly rounded (off, up, down, sideways – who knows?) Then of course to calculate CTR as in the example above, you need a significant (relatively) volume of queries on a term in order to feature with enough impression data, to then get enough clicks, to then have a CTR value displayed. Most of the time (and dependent on query/sector) you need to be ranking on average around page one or top of two, to get enough data.

This is where is gets tricky with microdata, reason being you’re implementing such on product or detail level pages triggered by mid to long-tail queries. This meant that in our case, though we implemented on around a thousand product level pages, only a few hundred were at the impression level to generate enough reliable (or rather comparable) data.  Surprising there aren’t thousands of people searching for ceramic disc valves. Whodathunk?

Step Three

A full month post-implementation we took another export of data, compared all terms with the required data to the previous month and then of course, there’s another thing to rule out. A large amount of these had increased in “Average Position” (which is a relief, given it’s our job), however this meant these terms had to be discounted; as you can’t claim a CTR victory for microdata when there’s an increase in “Average Position”. Of course “Average Position” is in itself nice and vague, as this takes into account the average of the position(s) in which your result may appear.

Once we had stripped out all the rule-outs, we were left with only five terms that has stayed the same or decreased in average position month on month.

*Post Imp CTR = post implementation CTR and takes the month average CTR for the month after December 25th.

Results

So though there’s just a handful of results that still qualify for any meaningful month on month comparison the actual percentage increase in each case is quite substantial. Even on the term that decreased in position by 14 positions, CTR stayed at 2%, which is pretty darn strong. It’s worth pointing out that their primary listing for this term stayed in the same page one position, but a second result for the query fell, dragging down the average.)

Other Vagueries

In addition to the data constraints and additional factors affecting CTR there’s also seasonal impact to consider. Whilst seasonality (particularly when comparing December to January) will almost certainly impact intent-to-purchase, it shouldn’t impact too significantly on intent-to-research and therefore positively or negatively impact CTR too significantly.

In conclusion, all we can say is that this is imperfect research, with a handful of qualifying test-case terms; however CTR uplift on said handful of terms is extremely significant when other main driver of CTR are the same or decreased. Better than a poke in the eye with a shitty stick.

I’ve been feeling a little SEOfatigued of late. Sick of hearing the same old regurgitated advice and seeing the same old presentation. I’ve found myself withdrawing from Twitter and retreating to smaller communities where the discussion is much more specific and emerges from real, in-the-field observations and results. And you know what? I’m learning more, much faster, and in a shorter amount of time. So, this isn’t a Twitter-diss; but more a natural evolution of my own approach to (constantly) learning SEO. I was pleasantly surprised and pleased when this book landed in my inbox reason being the content is very much of the insider-perspective, using situational examples as opposed to any grand SEO theory.

About the Author, Editor and Book

“SEO ROI: Advanced SEOs’ 7 Curiously Obvious Rules and 30 Singular Tactics That Illustrate Them” is authored by Gabriel Goldenberg an SEO and CRO consultant of considerable experience, with a range of industry speaking experience.

SEO ROI is edited by Richard Kershaw, who again has considerable experience of many areas of online marketing from both blue-chip and affiliate perspectives and is currently running the successful gift experience website Wish.co.uk

Download a free chapter of the book.

Style

Divided into two sections, the first looking at overarching guiding principles, “the Rules”, which include sound advice such as “Teach Yourself” (rule 2); and the second section (30 singular tactics) looks at very specific, situational dilemmas and challenges any SEO or marketer in-the-field may face, with advanced solutions that solve or circumvent the issue with an ROI-positive solution. Each of the 30 tactics is premised on adherence to “the rules”.

As an example Rule 2 starts with useful points on how and where to seek knowledge within the industry; from blogs to books to good ole’ fashioned networking in the real world.

I particularly enjoyed the section on testing – classic A/B split-test methods looking at the object, existing theories, independent and dependent variables and how to measure the effects on the dependent variable. Included is a great step by step walk-thru in testing; from Step 1 “create a hypothesis, to Step 5 “Measure and Analyze”. There’s also a great deal of emphasis placed on critical thinking, as a mindset or effective approach for SEO practise, observation and test; and this is espoused throughout, including detailing some fundamental steps to thinking critically. Something that resonated quite clearly for me was Rule 5 “Define the Problem”. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve seen clients and staff react in something of a panic, making all kinds of plans and solutions prior to refining and defining exactly what a perceived issue may be.

Sensibly, Rule 6, recommends challenging assumptions; something I wholeheartedly agree with. Without those that dare to challenge there’s no progress surely? I was particularly pleased to see a section devoted to Inductive Validity “Inductive validity is another way of measuring the truth of an argument. Instead of setting the threshold as truth in 100% of the cases, inductive validity looks for a claim to be probably true.”

Here’s the thing…
DO NOT SKIP “The Rules” and head straight to the paydirt! Whilst the later sections of the book may be naturally more absorbing and resonating for a practising SEO I can assure you that this structure and the content therein is extremely valid.

Best Bits

I don’t want to give away too much of the excellent content detailed in the 30 tactics, but to highlight a few tactics that were fresh thinking for me: Writing Conditional  CSS for Higher Conversion – details a range of four solutions, including the ethics of each method, Link Prospecting Using Demographic Matching – with guidance on how to; and in particular a tactic Gab has described as “Message Matching”, which is an awesome tactic and unfortunately something I can’t really describe without giving away the crown jewels.

Room for Improvement?

I couldn’t find fault with this. And I’m picky.

Overall

A truly advanced book for experienced practitioners that are in a position to evaluate solutions based on wider business objectives and ethical frameworks.

Don’t just take my word for it – get your free chapter and see for yourself.

I keep hearing horror stories about SEO companies ripping off the very people they are meant to help. While there are some excellent search companies out there dedicated to helping customers and going above and beyond, there are others who, like cowboy builders, want to take the cash and run. This can often leave the client out of pocket but also unsure of who to turn to for help when something of this nature happens.

When I attended SES London some six or so years ago, I remember hearing the story of a charity who had paid an SEO firm five-figures and gotten nothing for it. Whether this was their perception or reality is always difficult to know but it left them thinking the whole industry was crooked. I continued to hear of agencies charging for Google Analytics (free), purporting to run PPC with no proof of any spend and continued hearing of SEO companies taking money and doing nothing at all.

If this wasn’t bad enough, the shoddy work produced by some led to sites being dropped down the rankings or worse – banned. Link buying is one example of a practice that can harm the client as well as the agency and as recently as March 2011 I have heard of companies continuing to buy links in competitive, but not extremely so, verticals. JC Penny and Overstock are just two examples of companies harmed by blatant link manipulation.

How do you know if you choosing a good agency? With no industry body and anyone able to set themselves up as an SEO, how do you know that they are acting in your best interest and in a professional way? I gave a talk on just that (and how to survive the zombie apocalypse) at the London Affiliate Conference.

Habitat UK, Skittles, Nestle, Asus, and more are all tales of woe and warning for anyone going in to social media. Getting it wrong seems easier than getting it right at times. This is often because of lack of planning as opposed to level of difficulty.

As important as it is for SEO, planning your social media strategy is important to ensure minimal brand damage from mistakes. Social media, with its low barriers to entry, may seem easy to do. Many think ‘how hard can it be to tweet and update Facebook’? Well, as Nestle learned when the tit-for-tat between an angry consumer and one of its marketing team on Nestle’s public wall got paraded out by some media and social media experts as a premium example of what not to do, a lot can go wrong.

While some may see Skittles allowing all Twitter search results to be published to its home page as innovative, it became a place where users tried to out-gross each other. My screen-shot from the time has to be blanked due to the nature of the tweets showing. Making a blog of Facebook the homepage of your company may seem cutting edge but a blog can also be seen as unprofessional and Facebook is nota space wholly owned by the brand.

Getting the strategy right to both move in to social media and use it for SEO is not just important – it is essential. There are several things to plan but first and foremost is an inderstanding of the why. Understand why it is your business feels it should be in social media. There are a number of successstories from companies like ABN Amro, IBM, Vodafone and others regarding their forays into social media however they were success stories because a picture of success was planned from the outset.

After understanding your reasons and goals from being in social media, select the best outlet for that strategy. Twitter is not a broadcast medium and no matter what anyone says, Facebook is invisible unless you promote it to existing contacts. Understand the different social media platforms and what type of engagement they are useful for. MySpace may not be mainstream anymore but it is still perfect for music and Orkut is the only way you’ll get a Facebook-like platform in Brazil.

Next plan out what you are going to say and do in this platform. Having a strategy includes not just why and where but also what, how, when and who. Important in here is who will be the voice of the company and if that ‘voice’ leaves will the social media contact go with them or will they be restricted to the brand. Also how do you identify who the person is behind the brand if it is the brand tweeting. Vodafone handles this by having all tweets identified by initials. You have to trust the voice of your company and empower them to tweet according to the schedule and when necessary off schedule.

Connections and outreach should be part of your social media strategy. Understand and research who the influencers are in your vertical and reach out to them. Do not try and make demands of them and do not try and buy space on their blog/facebook page/etc. If done to manipulate rankings, purchased blog posts or links can harm both the place the link/blog is posted and the company purchasing the link/post can be penalised.

When all this is in place and your ‘who’ is in place knowing ‘what’ they are saying ‘where’ and ‘when’ they are interacting, by what method (how), then you will be ready to launch your social media strategy and succeed where others have floundered or failed.

One of the things I think is most difficult to get right and yet is the most important factor for SEO is keyword research. The research that is done for SEO is quite different from the type done for PPC even though both are for search engines. This means while your PPC agency may have done some ‘keyword research’ it needs to be focused and refined for your SEO efforts.

Good keyword research is important because of the number of other critical SEO elements it affects (as well as PPC). The on-page targeting for non-cannibalised keywords is important. That is, don’t target the same keyword on lots of pages. The link building anchor text is important. Internal links and breadcrumb trails also use keywords. The titles, descriptions and URLs are also all affected by keyword research. Keyword research supporting a well optimised page can also reduce paid search costs. This one element of anything I believe has to be done right in order for everything else to flow properly from it.

In order to do good keyword research, the first step is to be open to new ideas. While seemingly fundamental, if a word or phrase sits at the core of branding and yet few use it, it would be more advisable to use the more popular word. If you provide “cookies” and yet insist on calling them “buttery flour chips” there will be issues with non-brand search exposures to your product. Google is good at understanding semantic relationships but even it needs some direction.

Write down groups of words relating to your product or service that you use internally. Next, expand that list to include what the industry you work in calls your product/service (a little spying on the competition). Expand that to how the media talks about your product or service. If you still have a small list, use this list set as a PPC keyword campaign and set the campaign to “broad match”. Keep it tight as a short term, low cost PPC campaign in Google. Crafting a compelling and relevant ad can be tricky but the insight gained from the keywords used to find your ad will expand your understanding of the keywords.

This should give you a core group of terms. Now, use the free online tools available to expand that list, refine it, measure the type of search traffic these terms generate and create a full comprehensive list of keywords that you think are relevant. The tools you can use for free are the Google AdWords Tool, SEOBook tool, and Wordtracker has some free data.

Next thing to do is map the strength of the competition and how much there is. If there are a lot of people competing for a term, or the top 10 are all very strong competitors, it may not be reasonable to target that word. Also be sure to check relevance. If a term has a high search volume but the search results are not relevant and the competition is strong then it may not be the right target.

By mapping the competitiveness of a word against the number of people looking for that term, you will get a very accurate measure of whether you should target that word. This is more complicated than slapping words into Google AdWords and dumping a spreadsheet of search terms and volumes which is what I’ve seen far too many agencies do. This adds real intelligence to your research and keyword selection. This will give you, and your business, a competitive edge.

One of the things I frequently get in trouble for is giving away too much information. I think that giving away too much insider information is what I am about to do below. My argument for sharing is that knowledge is power and by giving companies the skills and ability to understand what I do and how I do it, not only will they will better understand, appreciate and purchase services.

One of the things I get asked most often, next to “how do you choose an agency” is “how do you know if what they are measuring means anything”? Understanding what is being measured, how it is measured and how you can double check the measurements yourself if you choose to is an important part of understanding what your agency, or in-house SEO guru, is doing and how it is positively impacting your bottom line.

The below SEO ROI measurements can be used with different types of businesses. They are not restricted to one industry nor one type of measurement package. Where possible I’ve chosen measures which can be done easily and/or for free in order to keep costs low and understanding high.

In order for any measurement to have meaning, there needs to be a benchmark. Take the measurement you are going to track, record it and date it. If you then take the measure again, you have a point in time to compare it against. Always record your measurements at least monthly. For some sites weekly will be too frequently but less frequently than monthly may mean you miss something going wrong.

Visits from Organic Search Results – Measuring the number of visits in to your site purely from organic search results. To measure this, an on-site analytics package will give the most accurate representation of this number. Google Analytics is free and Omniture is my favourite but there are others available.

Number of Visitors from natural search Per Keyword – A breakdown of the number of visits from organic sources driven to the site via different keywords. The key here is that we’re breakingthis down by keyword and not just overall traffic. No other traffic such as direct or referred (from sites other than search engines or paid search) should be included. To measure, analytics must be installed and tracking incoming referrals. Most, if not all, analytics packages will break down incoming visits from search engines to give a per keyword value for visitors.

Conversions on Organic Traffic – This is a measure of the number of conversions made after a user clicked through from a natural search listing. More complex to measure as this does require the interaction between analytics and cookies. To measure, track user conversions where the last click is from natural search and leads to a sale or whatever you deem a conversion to be. To expand, measure where natural search is responsible for sending 2 or more visits by the same user to the site but where natural search is not necessarily the last click. Conversion rates = (conversions /visits)*100

Rankings for Keywords A ranking is where a particular site ranks for a particular keyword within a neutral set of search results. Neutral search results are where personalization and search history is not a factor in rankings – ie you must log out of Google and delete all cookies, close, reopen. Keywords are single or multiple words which are being targeted on page on the website being measured. To measure this, a neutral tool like Advanced Web Ranking which is able to gather non-personalised results. Failing the use of a tool, in Internet Explorer delete all cookies and history, close and reopen the browser and search for the term. This must be done prior to each search and if possible, a country-specific anonymiser should be used. Record that date this measurement was taken and link to the measured data.

These measurements, once you know what you are doing and have an action plan of execution, will help you see whether the changes are having an effect. Don’t worry if some changes take longer to show a difference – it can take up to 3 months for changes to be picked up by search engines.

As a child, it used to piss me off no end when my parents would answer my frequent requests for quantification, with the above question.

“How long till we get there?” “When does it stop?” “What time does it get dark?” “How deep is water?” “How much do apples cost?” “How long do Goldfish live?” All such questions would be met with the question “How long is a piece of string?” It’s a colloquial saying which I think is fairly common in the UK, though for sake of clarity means, “It depends.”

Whilst of course it wouldn’t take much for a parent to guess the sort of parameters the childish mind is working within; fill in the necessary missing data points (origin, destination, average case etc.) and give a straight answer, however kids can fire off a phenomenal amount of unquantified questions per second. I find after ten or so in a row, I’ve lost all patience and then it’s time for a game of “Who can lick their own ear?” (Two minutes of silence, guaranteed. Bliss.)

Never getting a straight answer is annoying. As adults we can’t help but feel we’re being fobbed off, or worse; deceived in some way. So I can sympathise with many of the online marketing professionals that I meet, that complain that SEO professionals never seem to be able to give a straight answer; however when it comes to Search Engine Optimisation, I would argue that most good practitioners will decline to offer an immediate answer to questions like…

“How many links do I need?”

“How long till I get to page one?”

“What changes need to be made?”

“Why is my content not indexed?”

“How come [competitor] is number one?”

Given the sheer number of factors and dependencies, research and analysis is required to even begin to answer questions such as these. Even then, it would be foolhardy to give a guaranteed answer. However, I’m getting a bit sick of hearing myself say “It depends…” in response to every initial question in a first meeting (or words to that effect.) To the uninitiated it must seem at times as if SEO professionals have adopted the same tactics as the bad mechanic. This response is the SEO equivalent of raises bonnet, sharp intake of breath, tuts and shakes head.

Of course this isn’t really the case, and there are numerous, extremely valid reasons why any good SEO professional is unable to offer immediate answers to questions about quantification.

Multi-dimensional Attributes

Search engine algorithms are complex and comprise hundreds of componants, such componants being weighted and such weights varying frequently. Number of links is immaterial, without frame – in terms of quality, variety, position, type, relvancy, and a load of other weighted considerations assessed.

Factors Outside of One’s Control

We may be able to legislate for our own activities, however a great deal of dependencies are outside of our control – such as competitor activity, significant algorithmic updates, macro socio-economic factors.

Sector Relativity

Even when it comes to perceived wisdom, what is required and valid for one client, may be completely unsuitable for another client. As an example it is generally inadvisable to pursue site-wide footer links, such links being generally low quality, out of context and often unnatural; however in the IT hosting sector, the leading host companies (in business and SERPs) all have a huge majority of sitewide footer links in their backlin profiles. In this sector it is perfectly natural and valid for host company clients to have a “hosted by” footer link, to either the host URL or TOS page. Many high-trafficked and e-commerce brands link to their host as good quality hosting companies have extensive terms of service, codes of practise and sophistocated disaster recovery set-ups.

Resources

Although much of the technical and analytical resource required for SEO is provided by the SEO professional, when it comes to content marketing and sophistocated linkbuilding campaigns, much of this is dependent on the available resources and collatoral provided by the client.

Working with PR and marketing teams to leverage content and brand messaging is a much more efficient and effective strategy at times.

If you are buying or assessing SEO services, please do consider the above points and indeed there are many more reasons not detailed here as to why prospective agencies will not be able to provide on-the-spot answers and guaranteed parameters. In fact, if a prospective service provider does offer immediate quantified guarantees on aspects of your SEO objectives I’d be inclined to question their knowledge and proposed strategy in detail.

As always – DYOR!

For too many people for too long, SEO has seemed like occult sciences. Part research, part technical, part magic, search, and specifically SEO, has seemed something you had to trust someone else to do. Understanding more about how search works means not only being able to ensure it is executed in-house properly, it also means a better working relationship between you and your agency if you utilise one.

Setting up a search strategy may seem impossible if you come from a point of not understanding even the fundamentals of search, but information about the core of SEO – those elements which are most important to ranking – are published and freely available. What regrettably isn’t free is the expertise that comes from years of executing those theories.

To create and execute a search strategy, whether with an agency or in-house you’ll need an internal champion (not the search professional but a senior team member), a set of realistic goals, an understanding of keyword targets, the pages those keywords are associated with, a benchmark for everything – including search results and a gameplan for ownership of as much of the search results for your chosen keywords as possible.

The most important starting point is going to be identifying and establishing an internal search champion. Whether you get your search solution delivered in-house by a team or by an agency externally, there needs to be someone internal to your organisation who will bang the drum of optimisation, visibility and search awareness. Your champion can also manage the agency relationship or keep the internal team up to date with what is happening around the business to ensure everything stays co-ordinated. Lack of an internal champion (or champions) can doom even the best search strategy to failure as without that drive to keep everyone search-aware, it is easy to slip.

Once identified, everyone needs to understand what the goals are. These targets need to be realistic, relevant, achievable, and specific. There are a number of common criteria which can be measured provided the correct tools are in place. Measurements that go beyond followers, likes and fans are useful as they take the focus away from popularity measures and into measures of things which could increase ROI more directly.

The below SEO ROI measurements can be used with different types of businesses: Visits from Organic Search Results – Measuring the number of visits in to site purely from organic search result; Number of Visitors from natural search Per Keyword; Conversions on Organic Traffic; Rankings for Keywords.

Create a list of what you know needs to happen then establish an order in which they can be done as well as what has to happen first. They key elements of ensuring your site is on target are: Keyword research, technical audit & fixes, content audit and optimisation, link building, link bait & non-local content, social engagement.

One of the most difficult and time-consuming things to do, but the one thing which will last longest, is the keyword research. A well executed keyword research piece will last years. This can also be used to map the non-branded keywords chosen to appropriate landing pages. This mapping not only ensures the focus for the page is always clear, it is used in link building. Once benchmarking and the keywords and mapping has been done, other work such as technical audits, gap analysis and optimisation can happen. Keyword research is foundational.

As a search and social media “expert” (boy did I fool them!), I speak at a number of conferences through the year. I talk about the techniques behind ranking well but I rarely speak about the fundamentals and with the changes in Google’s algorithm this is more important than ever. Starting from a solid foundation will mean the difference between ranking well and failing. Starting with a solid foundation and following all the rules means you are also less likely to get hit by negative algorithm updates.

Businesses are experiencing increases in online transactions and more than ever, consumers are using search to drive both online and offline purchasing. Here are some tips about what you could do to help:

Have a strategy and a set of goals to ensure you understand what targets you are aiming for. It may seem overly basic but I have encountered countless businesses who have demanded a social media or search strategy without knowing themselves what success would look like. If your business has a target of being on Twitter, understand how it works and what the point of being there is for you. I can recount dozens of disaster stories for businesses on Twitter and speak about them as well.

Once you have a strategy and have mapped out the goals for a year (yes, 12 months. less is pointless unless we’re talking PPC) and understand what success looks like, map out the steps you are taking to get there and understand the time scales involved. Once you have optimised a website it can take up to three months to get those changes picked up in search. While we do have techniques in the industry to speed that up, misusing those techniques will get a site banned. Get a specialist in where necessary to map things out and deploy a task force of staff who will deliver the work needed to make sure your search or social media strategy can achieve success.

Do not treat social media sites as campaign platforms. Launching strongly in Facebook or on Twitter is fantastic but a long-term strategy is needed for these platforms unlike with a paid search campaign. Once a campaign has ended, if the Facebook page remains live it can become littered with spam and customer complaints. Failing to address these complaints can cause a long-lasting reputation issue that can cause customers to turn away.

Map out everything including keywords to pages, links that exist going to your site and your competitor’s site, your social media profile, the average competitors’ social media profile and your publishing table for the year ahead. Doing this will make search and social media campaigns much more successful. Failing to do this will mean you are not only left behind but a hap-hazard approach to publishing content may leave you with a gap at key holiday times. Failing to understand what most of your competitors are doing in the social media space can lead to unpleasant surprises and a perception of being ‘old fashioned’ or ‘behind the times’. Failing to map keywords to pages will leave both your SEO and PPC strategies lacking and your link building strategy will suffer for it as will rankings.

By starting with the basics now and mapping everything out for the next 12 months, not only will this help your site rank better but also help your link building go more smoothly, your content be seen by more people and your sales increase. Trying to make fast SEO changes risks disaster to make sure your plan covers a full 12 months.

Majestic SEO have today launched a new product (in stealth beta), which I got a little demo of on Tuesday at SMX.

Majestic Million shows data points for the worlds top 1 million websites as determined by link popularity, such data points being number of backlinks, number of linking domains (and gains/losses on the numbers since last crawl). You can request a single site, groups of sites (by  name entry – not yet any classification by industry or type) and sites by TLD. A request for a comparative group of sites generates a URL that you can use to access the same data sources over time.

Potential Data Observations

From a high level viewpoint this data has the (theoretical) potential to reveal very interesting trends about media types, popularity and content consumption.Yes, we know that link graphs can and are often manipulated, but when we’re talking about the global top 1 million websites the percentage of links that could be manipulated do nothing to dent the statistical significance of the percentage contribution to total that will be composed of natural links. In our demo Dixon Jones showed us the data for the BBC, which by Majestic Million criteria, is number 1 position (above New York Times) for large media sites. Interestingly though Dixon pointed out that “The two right hand columns show the number of domains found linking to the site over the last 30 days of crawling and the combined links from within those domains found within 30 days respectively. The fact that so many are red could signify one of two things, either that in general the world’s largest sites are slowly losing prominence on the web to other upstarts further down the food chain, or that the crawlers were more aggressive on the day that just dropped out of the 30 day index.” So it’s kind of a little early to make any socio-cultural observations from data shifts outside of our expectations, but given the volume of data available, I’d say there’s extremely interesting potential here.

Immediate Data Applications

Of course there are a number of data applications that could have immediate validity, most obviously competitor comparison. In addition this data could be cross referenced with rank data per sector and used to take the temperature of “what goes on” per sector. As an example if I spit out the top 10 ranking sites for the term “car insurance” and run them through Majestic Million, I can get an immediate picture of the level of domain diversity and total backlink volume for that sector. I can then compare to other sectors to get a feel for “playing fields”, though of course sectors that do not naturally attract links at volume and are not subject to (ahem) manual intervention, then we’re not going to find them in the Majestic Million. Assuming you do have data sets featuring in the Million, it would also be an interesting exercise to do some correlative analysis looking at rank order, against #referring domains, against #backlinks – which could be done per term, per industry sector. (Yeah, yeah, correlation is not causation, but even if such analysis shows a marked lack of relationship to link graph and rank for a term analysed, isn’t that a massively useful ten minutes?)

Broader Industry Appeal

Despite Majestic having a link-data graph that is arguably bigger than Google’, there isn’t a great deal of outside industry appeal or application. Majestic Million potentially bridges this gap, with the addition of badges that can be added to Million “member” site homepages. Such a feature could be a useful value-add for sites wishing to demonstrate validity and authority even where traffic volumes may not be phenomenal.