inter:digital strategies

Everytime anything changes in Google’s search results, forums come abuzz with the alarmed cries of webmasters who monitor their search engine results pages fanatically.

This is how I generally first learn of these changes. I don’t monitor my SERPs pages. This may come as a surprise, given the business which inter:digital strategies is in – but, to be honest, I consider SERPs to be a minor part of what I do. There are many more important things to monitor and react to.

Instead, I monitor my server logs and statistics. I look very carefully at referrals, referral patterns, and visitor’s habits. I examine what pages are popular and what pages aren’t. I examine conversions. I try and understand why some pages frequently send users buying and others send them flying.

I never worry about a one day phenomenon. Trends are frightening – if traffic drops for a week straight, that’s alarming. If traffic drops ONE DAY – that may well be statistically erased later. Your first priority should always be to your actual visitors. Visitors should always want to stay and return.

What is really important is your visitors and their behaviors on your site. The most important statistic I’ll look at is conversion rate. Ideally, your conversion rate is one of your most testable and controllable elements. Moving sales pitches and advertisements around on the page may have little impact on your traffic, but could have huge impact on your sales.

The second is usually pages viewed per visit. If most visitors are only looking at one page on the site, this is failure. You have not captivated your audience. Ideally, you should be able to differentiate between return visitors and first time visitors when analyzing this statistic – the expected (and desired) behaviors for repeat customers can be very different from that of new visitors. You want new visitors to explore – you want them to be inspired by your site enough to visit several pages.

Third is referrals. Know where your traffic is coming from. Even better; find out which traffic is converting at the highest rates. Try and refine your landing pages for that kind of traffic – if search engine traffic primarily goes to two or three pages, spend your efforts refining those pages and trying to build conversions. Not all pages are created equal.

SERPs are nice – if you can pull your desired search engine results up, then all the best to you. But consider this: your site receives hits every day from thousands of unique search terms. It is rare that more than 10 percent of these hits will come from only two or three unique searches. If those terms drop in search engine’s results for you, other terms may rise.

Monitoring search engine results is only something I’ll do for a particular site to scan its ranking strength. I may pick a single phrase to search and monitor it’s rise and fall. Search engine fluctuations can happen over the course of weeks; I only look at trends over periods of months. Narrower statistical bands are not much more than meaningless.

In addition, SERPs can be useful in monitoring the competitive edge of certain "power terms". In every industry, there are certain terms which are searched far more frequently than others. These terms are worth monitoring; but they may not be the terms which convert the best. Usually, the most searched terms are very general in nature. These are searches by people who aren’t certain what they’re looking for – they may be looking to browse, but not to buy.

In a general sense, SERPs are important. It is important that your site rises to the top for the immense variety of terms which are relevant to its content – but monitoring a few of these terms on a daily basis is not likely to do a lot of good. You can follow these statistics; but shouldn’t obsess about them.

The six degrees of separation meme theorizes that anyone on earth can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of acquaintainces containing at most five intermediaries.

Does this theory also apply to websites?

There are a number of problems in determining how to apply this kind of theory. When dealing with people, it’s clear that people know a relatively small and finite group of acquaintances. With websites, there are certain sites (directories and search engines, for example) who are linked to enormous numbers of sites. Thus, it is ineffective to treat the six degrees meme in web terms at the site level – instead, it must be treated at the page level. A link to Google.com’s index now means only a link to a handful of other Google properties.

This idea occurred to me as a means of identifying your proximity to any given spam website resource. It would be intriguing to analyze particular pages and trace the number of connections necessary to get from your page to a known spam or banned website.

There are a number of technological barriers to this, of course. Google contains all the information one would need to do this – but is it possible to access it? I’m not sure it is – you’d need to be able to determine whether Google had flagged a site and you’d need to be able to identify the tracks of Google’s crawler to determine the site path. It’s certainly possible to program your own, as well – but well beyond my puny programming skills!

Is the good link/bad link dichotomy accurate? I wouldn’t think so. The scale of link quality, in my opinion, is really made up of shades of gray – one link may be the darkest pits of Hades, but another may be more like a slightly off-color joke. Not something you’d say in front of your parents, but only really inappropriate in certain company.

The six degrees meme could be one way of determining the potential quality of a linking site, or of identifying the existence of Googlebowling (if such a thing is indeed possible.) It could perhaps also be a way of determining the risk of a site becoming associated with questionable sites – if a site has a number of pages which are currently only 2 degrees separated from highly questionable sites, this suggests that their existing link partners are making poor choices, which may come to reflect on the site itself.

If you engage in link exchange – be careful. You never know who else your link partners might be exchanging with. (I guess this could apply to many other things, as well!)

Although they’re not willing to give their own information to the US government, Google can certainly provide you with all the information you need from the government. Today, Google announced their specialized Google search for United States government sites at the federal, state, and local level.

With the inevitably sprawling nature of government, this has potential to be a really handy service. I’ve certainly occasionally found myself searching for a piece of government information having only a vague idea of what agency I might be needing to look at. Hopefully, this will make that kind of search a bit easier.

I’m particularly intrigued by the option to create personalized feeds of information from government agencies – so few agencies have jumped on board the syndication bandwagon, and it’s very challenging to keep up on their activities.

A little uncertain whether I want to sign in to personalize
my Google government search, however. On the offhand chance that Google does someday have to give up their search data, how do you feel about the government having a catalog of your searches on the government?

Hmmmmm…..