This document provides tips for getting an SEO analytics program beyond the "stone age" by focusing on opportunity, competition, and attribution. It recommends using analytics tools to find opportunities by analyzing popular pages, keywords, and competition. Proper attribution is important to understand what is truly driving conversions and avoid costly mistakes. Log files can provide a better picture of attribution by showing all customer visits and referrals before a conversion.

1. How to: Get your SEO Analytics program beyond the stone age.

2. First, a little fine print A lot of the techniques in here aren’t mine. They’re brilliant stuff by brilliant people. I provide links and credit where relevant. Also, analytics changes all the time, so by the time you read this, it may have all changed, blah blah etc. etc. Finally, this is based on a presentation I gave at SMX West 2010. I’d be a moron if I didn’t say ‘thanks’ to everyone at the conference who came and watched, invited me to speak, and didn’t fling rotten vegetables when I periodically fell on my face. Are you actually reading this? Seriously? There’s nothing to see here, I swear. Move on to the next page. All is well. This is what we call ‘greeking – text used to fill space when we don’t want to fill it with real writing. I’m just randomly writing down what comes to mind. And if you’ve read this far you REALLY NEED TO MOVE ALONG NOW OK?!

3. This is how most people respond to analytics: It scares them.

4. This is how most people respond to analytics: It scares them. But, as I like to say: If you bury your head in the sand, all you can do is talk out of your arse.

5. You’re better served pulling your head out of the sand and taking advantage of all that analytics can do for your SEO campaign.

6. You’re better served pulling your head out of the sand and taking advantage of all that analytics can do for your SEO campaign. Just focus on: Opportunity Competition Attribution

7. Opportunity is the gap between what you’re getting right now from organic search, and what you could have. Competition tells you how hard it’s going to be to close that gap. Attribution is what you use to determine exactly what generated sales or other conversions.

8. You have to remember those three principles!!!! Here’s a sentence. Read it three times and I guarantee you’ll never forget them:

9. The squirrels saw a great opportunity to eliminate competition by tearing up the garden – if Jane used incorrect attribution, she’d kill the raccoons.

10. Told ya.

11. Another way to look at it: Opportunity and competition are about optimization. Attribution is about keeping your job.

12. Here’s how you can use analytics for the optimization part:

13. Most folks, when they start an SEO campaign, toddle happily over to their favorite keyword tool, generate a huge list, and start optimizing.

14. That’s not the right way to do it. A monkey could do it…

15. …but monkeys know better.

16. I’m not saying keyword research is bad. But, if keyword research is the sole driver of your SEO campaign, you miss some of your biggest opportunity gaps.

17. As well as some huge competitive vacuums where you can easily beat your rivals. Competition

18. In about 9 steps, you can analyze opportunity and competition, and upgrade your SEO campaigns. Note: All of the techniques you’re about to see assume you have an analytics toolset that was written after 2001.

19. Step 1: Look at the most-visited pages on your site.

20. Step 2: Look at the keywords driving traffic to each of those pages.

21. Step 3: Choose a good optimization target. In my case, ‘google analytics tutorial’ is a no-brainer: Lots of traffic, solid time on page, and good goal conversion.

22. Step 4: Now I’ll go look at a keyword analysis tool, and compare my monthly traffic on that keyword to the monthly search volume. I’ve got a huge opportunity gap

23. Step 5: Figure out what’s driving that search traffic. In my case, it’s a little video search result that’s showing up at the bottom of a standard Google search results page. So, we’ve got an opportunity. But can we compete?

24. Step 6: Determine competition. SEOMOZ gives us a nice shortcut with their Keyword Difficulty Tool.

25. Step 6a: You can also use Aaron Wall’s excellent SEO for Firefox plugin, which shows you the link strength and other data for every ranking page in a search result.

26. Step 7: Optimize the ranking page. I should probably change the article title to ‘Google analytics tutorial 1’, removing ‘video’.

27. I can also link to newer content, to try to get the newer stuff ranking.

28. A few Google Analytics reports I find super-helpful when I’m doing opportunity gap and competition analysis:

29. Show where you ranked for a given phrase when the visitor clicked. Andre Scholten/Nikki Rae http://bit.ly/serpclicks

30. Show clicks from page 2 of the search results. That’s a fantastic way to find opportunities. If you’re getting traffic and you’re on page 2, imagine what you’ll get on page 1. Will Critchlow http://bit.ly/2ndpageclicks

31. And a report I came up with: Show page with no clicks from search. Ian Lurie (me) http://bit.ly/seoclickless

32. You can find all of this plus a bunch of other tips on my Google Analytics Cheatsheet: The Cheatsheet http://bit.ly/GACheat

33. Now you’re using analytics to find SEO opportunities. Woo-hoo! But you still have a problem: How do you know what’s driving conversions and what’s not?

34. That’s the single biggest problem in web marketing today: Attribution. Most analytics tools will track the first or last click before a sale. They ignore all of the clicks in between. Look at the scenario on the next page.

35. Many shoppers will come to a site several times, from several sources, before they purchase or otherwise convert. PPC click on ‘indoor trainers’ PPC click on ‘wattage trainers’ SEO click on ‘tacx trainers’ SEO click on ‘tacx flow’ Banner ad click Direct navigation Click from phredheaven.com SEO click on brand name Direct navigation $ In this case, Google Analytics would tell me direct navigation or PPC drove the sale. The visits in between are all lost.

36. This is the kind of problem that can create costly mistakes, or cost you your job. If I were using traditional analytics in the previous example, I’d assume my work to rank #4 for ‘tacx trainers’ was totally wasted. I might stop optimizing for it, break the conversion chain and lose valuable sales.

37. The answer: Learn to love your log files! They already have the data you need. With log files, you can get a solid attribution picture. No revolutionary technology needed.

38. You’re going to need access to your server log files to do the procedure in this section. You can usually download log files from your hosting provider’s ‘control panel’, or get ‘em from your IT team.

39. Step 1: Scrub the logs. You don’t need all the data they contain. Remove all records except real pages. Remove all records generated by bots. Then sort by cookie, IP address and date.

40. Step 2: Find your goal page. In my case, it’s the ‘colloquium’ page on my blog:

41. Step 3: Group records by IP address and/or cookie data. You can now see all of the visits by a particular customer – not just the first and last visits.

42. Step 4: Make a pretty graph for your boss.

43. There are lots of tools that can help you with this kind of analysis. With a log file of fewer than 20,000 lines, you can use Microsoft Excel. Splunk is a log file analyzer on steroids. Find it at Splunk.com. A scripting language like PERL or Ruby can do the trick, if you know the language. You can also import the data into SQL Server or MySQL and crunch the data there. Enquisite has a nifty logging tool built into Enquisite Optimizer that makes this a lot easier. Coremetrics has some great attribution features built in.

44. That’s it. One last reminder of those three essential words…

45. The squirrels saw a great opportunity to eliminate competition by tearing up the garden – if Jane used incorrect attribution, she’d kill the raccoons.

46. If you liked this, you might want to check out my blog, www.conversationmarketing.com. = @portentint = me

47. Or, if this seems important but made your head hurt, you can hire my company, Portent Interactive, to do it for you: www.portent.com. = @portentint = me

48. Find me ian@portent.com @portentint www.conversationmarketing.com www.portent.com The cheatsheet: bit.ly/gacheat