The document discusses natural search advertising and how to optimize websites for natural or organic search results. It provides metrics and tactics for improving click-through rates, keyword coverage, landing page placement and yield. These include techniques like URL rewriting, optimizing titles and meta tags, and link building. The document emphasizes treating natural search as an advertising channel and using metrics to iterate tactics and measure performance.

1. Natural Search Advertising:
Winning Resources … Winning the Game
Brian Klais,
EVP Search, COO, Principal, Netconcepts | brian@netconcepts.com

2. Natural Search: The New Advertising
• Search: Growing from $12B to $25B by 2011 (SEMPO)
• Google: CPC costs up +15% last year
• Consumers: Click natural listings 85% over paid (Forrester)
• Marketers: Budget natural search 15% of paid (Marketing Sherpa)
• 56% of Google queries serve 0 paid ads (Comscore)
• Natural search: bigger, more profitable, opportunity
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3. The Battle Zone: Page-One Supremacy
Click-Through Rates:
– Page One: 44%
– Page Two: 11%
– Page Three: 9%
– Page Four: 5%
(Marketing Sherpa)
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4. CMS
100,0000+
pages
Brand
Analytics
IT Product
Reviews
Multivariate
Marketing SEO
Testing
Design /
Copywriting Navigation
AJAX
Platform &
Merchandizing
Architecture
Usability
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5. Tactical SEO Best Practices
• URL rewriting

• Titles and meta tags
• H1s and body copy
• Link building
Basic Metrics
• Unique Visitors
• Click-through Rate
• Conversion Rate
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6. Market
Opportunity
Click-Through
ROAS
Natural Search
Acquisition
Incremental
Advertiser Costs
Traffic
Metrics
Keyword
Page Yield
Coverage
Page
Placement
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7. Market Opportunity
• Create keyword list
– Export your non-brand phrases from analytics
– Or spider site to extract relevant onpage keywords
• Estimate market demand
– Feed into Google Adwords Keyword tool
– Use ‘exact match’ on comparable time period
– Don’t use WT or KD for this
• Model opportunity using CTR
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9. Click-Through Rate
• Calculate your CTR as a benchmark
– Divide keyword market size by keyword traffic
• Compare CTR by SERP placement
– P1 CTR averages 10%
• Model traffic/sales growth potential
– Good tactics will increase CTR
– Monitor YoY or MoM
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11. Traffic Acquisition Cost
• Compare PPC cost vs natural
– Use Google’s average CPC for each phrase
– Factor in your human cost or resource time
– $0.75 per click vs …?
• Focus on reduced acquisition cost
– Increases transaction profitability
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12. Keyword Coverage
• Measures breadth of presence + brand reach
– Focus on non-brand phrases
• Keyword traffic volume
– YoY, MoM
• Keyword yield trends:
– Visitors per keyword
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14. Landing Page Placement
• Engine rankings for your trafficked pages
– Measure incremental value across thousands of pages/markets
– Monitor MoM or YoY
• Examine P1, P2, P3 pages for optimization targets
– P1 = 1st Page of Search Results, etc
– Use Opportunity metrics to calculate CTR
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16. Landing Page Yield
• Determine available landing pages
– Pages crawled by important bots
• Pages yielding search traffic
– # and % of unique pages
– Identify non-performing pages
– YoY, MoM delta
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17. Crawl Requests
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18. Incremental Traffic & Revenue
• More than just ‘current’ minus ‘previous’
– Can’t presume non-brand rankings stay constant
• Calculation should consider delta in
– Keyword coverage
– Keyword placement
– Traffic volume by Keyword
– Sales by Keyword
• Proper attribution
– ‘Last click’ likely to be credited to PPC
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19. Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
• Key to getting resources allocated
• Incremental revenue over incremental cost
– Cost includes resource time, project management, tools
– Also consider lost opportunity cost
• Don’t ignore
– Conversion rate variance
– New-to-file customers
– Searcher lifetime value
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20. Market
Opportunity
Click-Through
ROAS
Natural Search
Acquisition
Incremental
Advertiser Costs
Traffic
Metrics
Keyword
Page Yield
Coverage
Page
Placement
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22. Keys for Advertisers & Agencies
• Treat as advertising channel
• Talk metrics - before tactics
• Quickly iterate tactics
Technology
Metrics help
• Measure performance deploys
win
tactics
resources
• Repeat process
Data-driven
process
repeated
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23. Brian Klais
EVP Search, COO, Principal
Netconcepts
brian@netconcepts.com | 608.285.6600 | netconcepts.com
twitter.com/brianklais