Far less covered — whether research, POVs or even “thinking-out-loud” blog posts — is content focused on other benefits of appearing in the search results, such as brand development.

For decades, marketers have invested in getting their brand in front of eyeballs in traditional media channels such as TV, billboards and radio. Yet today, in the digital age, few brands think about the brand development benefits of appearing in the search results. Even though getting their brand in front of the search listings could mean millions and even tens of millions of eyeballs, brands are only laser-focused on driving traffic and conversions.

Research On Brand Benefits In Search

I am going to explore the question of whether there are, in fact, brand benefits above and beyond traffic and conversions to appearing in the SERPs. My hope is to leave the search marketer with food for thought around the ancillary benefits of appearing in search that they may not have previously considered when engaged in budget and strategy considerations.

To explore the issue, we’ll take a look at research on the subject from a number of different sources.

Searchers Recall Brands In SERPS; Higher Recall For Clicked Vs. Non-Clicked

To start, we must determine if the searcher even recalls the brands they encounter in the SERPs. A Microsoft study that asked searchers to recall search listings hours after viewing them showed that searchers did, in fact, recall the brands they viewed. There was also a correlation between (1) the higher ranking in search listings for brands showing a higher likelihood of recall and (2) clicked listings being far more likely to be recalled than non-clicked.

*Note: The Microsoft study dates back several years, prior to the addition of many of the visual elements of the SERPs such as authorship, etc. Research shows that CTR can be significantly higher with visual SERP elements, and results that incorporate these elements are, therefore, also more likely to increase brand recall.

16% Lift For Brand Recall When Appearing In Search Results

Next, we look at a Google and Enquiro study that measured lift when a target brand appears in search results. The research found that there was a 16% lift in brand recall when a target brand appeared in the search results vs. control brands that did not.

When it came to purchase intent, they found purchase intent increased by 8% when the brand appears in the search listings vs. control brands.

Conductor Study: Up To 30% Brand Lift For Brands Appearing In Search Results

A study we recently published at Conductor shows a similar finding, with brands appearing above the fold in the natural search listings experiencing a 10% lift in brand awareness, quality and purchase consideration. The findings showed, when it comes to reaping brand development benefits, placement above vs. below the fold is particularly crucial. And, the study found the greatest brand benefit was from those brands appearing both above the fold and in universal results (images, video, etc.).

When it came to retailers, the study found a 20% lift in purchase intent for a target retailer when compared to control retailers for above the fold results. For below the fold retailer results, there was a 10% lift.

Search Impacts Brand Perception: Control Your Brand Messaging In The SERPs 

Analysis of the research around recall and impact to the brand suggests there is a definite brand impact to appearing in the search results, both in perception of brand and intent to purchase. Although marketers are not likely to drastically shift their focus from the primary goals of driving traffic and conversions from organic search, understanding the brand benefits in appearing in the search results may impact strategic approaches to marketing channels and could be used as an ancillary benefit cited when appealing to management for budget.

And, with the knowledge that exposure to a brand impacts perception of the brand in the mind of the searcher, paying close attention to how the brand is presenting itself in search snippets and leveraging visuals such as Google + authorship and digital assets in universal search becomes increasingly important.

Yet, Google is looking to change that. With the addition of the Knowledge Graph, Google has announced its intention to evolve from a ‘search engine’ to a ‘knowledge engine.’ Matt Cutts said as much at an industry conference late last year, explaining Google is so committed to this evolution they renamed Google’s ‘Search Quality’ team the ‘Knowledge Team.’

Although they have taken some steps forward, there are definitely elements holding them back from stepping fully into becoming a true knowledge engine. For the sake of clarity, we’ve grouped our view of the primary challenges into two categories:

• Business: Business issues sometimes get in the way of knowledge dispersion, and this is no exception. Google must be able to strike deals with knowledge owners to include their data in search results. As the on-again off-again marriage with Twitter shows, it can be a messy business.
• Technical: There are technical challenges in becoming a Knowledge Engine. When it comes to things like extracting insight from social data, sentiment analysis is hard. Machines must be able to understand context and meaning from small bits of data like a 140 character tweet, parse the nearly infinite ways people have in talking about things, and present it all in a comprehensible way. While the technology has made steps forward in this regard, it is still imperfect.

Thinking Beyond The Present-Day Google

The thing about using a product for a long period of time is that it can sometimes be hard for users to conceptualize what life might be like if constraints holding it back from evolving were lifted. For many, online search has always been a page of links, more recently evolving to include the Knowledge Graph; but with years of use, we have been conditioned to think about search within the confines of its limitations.

Here at Conductor, we thought it would be fun to set aside those limitations and think about what online search could be. In doing so, we set aside both the business limitations and those technical limitations we thought would be theoretically solvable in the near to mid-term that currently prevent it from becoming a true knowledge engine.

Our Four Categories Of Google Search Changes

We used the Google SERP for the movie ‘Wreck It Ralph’ as a starting point for our newly designed search results page, both because it has a Knowledge Graph entry and because it is a query that is timely. The changes we made fall into one of four categories:

• Social Sentiment: We’ll dive into more details on the specifics below, but one key aspect we added to the SERP was deep insight into what and how people are talking about the query. We created a mechanism for searchers to get both a broad view of social sentiment, and a more detailed view of actual commentary on the query.
• Social Discussions: We also added a section that highlights the most talked-about links relevant to the query and a view of what people across all major social networks are saying about it.
• Email Search Integration: Google has previously demonstrated a willingness to add email to their search results, and we thought if they were going to evolve into a knowledge, rather than search engine it makes sense to include email as one data source. Users who prefer not to include it, could, of course, easily turn it off.
• User Interface: While the focus of our thought experiment was geared more toward re-imagining Google without the limitations described above, than a complete visual redesign that would be better left to professional design firms, we made some user interface adjustments such as moving Knowledge Graph elements from the right column to the top.

(click to enlarge)

Social Sentiment Meter

One of the key improvements in our new SERP is the addition of social sentiment insight into the query. For example, in this case, we want to see on the SERP itself what people thought of the movie. We want to know more than just ‘like-dislike’, we want insight into the wide range of responses people might have to a movie such as ‘Loved-it,’ ‘Hated-it,’ ‘Laughed,’ ‘Cried,’ etc. (the categories would be dynamic based on the query type). And, we want the analysis to be platform agnostic, mined from all social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Google +, and even LinkedIn when applicable to the query.

Social Share On The URL Level

We also want to know what is being said on the social networks about the links on the search page. For example, in the callout below, clicking on the tweets icon under Disney’s trailer site will show the most popular tweets that include that URL.

Social Conversations Featuring External Data Sources

The social conversations section of the SERP will give us the most-talked-about conversations about the query in question. Google could leverage the major social networks, but also other sources such as Reddit, Quora and others.

In an example that leverages an outside data partner, the “Most Talked About Links” could be the links from a reliable data source such as bitly’s realtime project that aggregates the most-talked-about links about the search term.

The Future of Search Might Be Closer Than We Think

Now, we know not every innovation will work out for every query type. But hopefully, this article will spark some thinking around what online search could be if many of the business and technical hurdles are overcome.

(It may not be as far off as we might imagine. Technology is making progress and many business issues are surmountable, given the right motivation. There was a time when nobody believed Steve Jobs could get the music industry to shift to selling their music electronically.)

This may be the tip of the iceberg of what Google could be as they evolve into a knowledge engine and if they are successful in not just thinking outside the box, but throwing the box out entirely.

Imagine if we thought about the search results with no restriction on data partnerships. What would transactional query SERPs look like? How about navigational? Taking it a step further (while it’s understandable that, at the end of the day, Google is a business, and they are interested in emphasizing their own properties when possible), what if they treated all data sources in the SERPs — whether social networks, shopping sources, etc. — as equals and just asked ‘what is uncompromisingly the best experience for the user?’ How would the SERPs change?

Why Not Bing?

A final thought.

Until now, we have been mostly talking about how Google could take some mighty steps forward to evolve more fully into a knowledge engine. But, a Slate article on Microsoft’s recent ‘Scroogled’ campaign makes some cogent points about why Bing has been stuck at 16% market share, making little headway against the incumbent Google:

“The problem with Microsoft’s online service offerings isn’t that their TV campaigns are lame. It’s not even that the products are bad. But they’re not wildly better than Google’s search and email and so forth. Most people are just incredibly lazy. It’s easy to forget, but it took Google Search and Gmail a remarkably long time to rise to dominance during a period when they wiped the floor with the competition on the merits. Now, Google has that change-aversion and laziness working in its favor. To beat them, you have to crush them on quality. And Microsoft’s not doing that. No ad campaign can overcome the basic reality of human inertia.”

And John Gruber’s comments on this over on Daring Fireball:

“That’s the core problem with a lot of Microsoft’s products, like Windows Phone and Surface. They’re good products, but there’s no holy sh%$! in them. When you’re an upstart in any market, you need a disruptive product. That’s what happened with the iPhone and iPad for Apple, and with web search and Gmail for Google.”

If Microsoft is, indeed, serious about giving searchers a reason to shift to Bing maybe they should be the one to craft their own data partnerships, make headway on the tech limitations, build their own true knowledge engine and create their own holy sh&*! moment. They are up against a competitor whose brand has become a verb for searching the Web; so, the argument that they will need just such a motivator to induce switch would seem to have merit.

Dreams Are The Starting Point For Innovation

At the end of the day, it’s easy to play armchair Product Manager. And, I know that ultimately, Google, Microsoft and any potential data partners are businesses with an end goal of revenue growth and shareholders to satisfy; but, a guy can dream.  :)

Let us know in the comments what you think of some of the changes we proposed, awesome data partnerships you would love to see Google or Microsoft forge, or other ways you’d like to see them evolve toward becoming a Knowledge Engine.

But, any marketer digesting the ongoing Big Data commentary over the last 12 months or so could be forgiven for drawing the conclusion that when it comes to Big Data, the only requirement for a marketer’s extricating valuable insight from the mountain of data is… data, and lots of it. That is… all that is required to produce actionable insight that will positively impact a site’s traffic and revenue is gobs and gobs of data… or so the thinking goes.

However, this kind of thinking — large quantities of data without context and container — results in a marketer who is data rich but insight poor. We’re going to use this article to demonstrate one way in which a marketer — without changing data quantity or sources — can make small adjustments to how her data fits together, and vastly increase her insight into her online traffic.

For illustrative purposes, we’ll use the example of ‘Ann,’ the SEO Manager for Acme Co., a medium-sized clothing retailer with both a brick and mortar and online presence.

The Typical Non-Integrated View Of SEO Metrics

As the SEO Manager for her company, Ann is responsible for both the SEO practices that will guide their tactical approach, and measurement of the metrics that will identify the impact the strategy is having on natural search visibility and, ultimately, traffic and online sales.

She tracks search rankings weekly for her most important keywords, and monitors traffic and conversions in Web analytics software. She manages a small team consisting of an analyst and two SEO tacticians.

When it comes to measuring the impact her SEO activities are having, while she is able to mostly track natural search visibility changes as a result of activities, and, separately, is able to measure changes in traffic and conversions, she has difficulty tying the two together.

She has a sneaking suspicion that in visualizing the two (rank data and traffic/conversions) independently, rather than in one cohesive screen, there might be insight she is missing that could tell a different story about the true impact of her SEO activities.

Put another way, she has all the data at her disposal, but realizes she may not be bringing it all together to gain the insight she needs.

Building An Integrated SEO Metrics View

To test the hypothesis, that there is insight she is missing by not having her KPI’s together in one place, she exported traffic, conversions and revenue data for two months and charted rank-data on top of it.

Next, she annotated major activities that she anticipated would have had an impact on natural search visibility and a corresponding impact of varying degrees on traffic, conversions and revenue.

When she finished, she sat back and saw that the exercise had clearly revealed what had previously not been obvious. She learned that while ‘SEO actions A’ had resulted in a strong rankings improvement, it had led to a smaller than expected corresponding growth in traffic, conversions and revenue.

Conversely, activities in ‘SEO actions B’ had resulted in smaller rank improvement than the actions following ‘A,’ but had resulted in considerably more growth in both traffic and conversions/revenue.

When Ann dug into it further, she saw that in ‘SEO actions A,’ her team had focused intently on on-page optimization and link building activities. These activities propelled the keywords up the search rankings in only a few weeks’ time.

However, they did not result in the traffic and conversion/revenue growth she would have expected based on the keywords’ search volumes, rank and corresponding click-through rates based on their rise in ranking position.

Upon closer examination of ‘SEO Actions B,’ Ann saw that her team had stumbled across the discovery that the snippets on the search pages for many of the keywords were poor, resulting in a much lower click-through rate, thus accounting for lower traffic than expected.

Further analysis showed that the team had also discovered that the landing pages for the keywords were poorly optimized, geared to generic brand searches rather than to conversion for the specific purchase queries.

After optimizing the landing pages to line up better with the specific optimized keywords, conversions and revenue improved, hence the post ‘SEO actions B’ increase in traffic, conversions and revenue she was seeing on her chart.

Integration Of Data Sources Reveals New Insight

After completing the analysis, as Ann sat back to think about what she learned from this exercise, she recognized that, in some ways, she was lucky her team had stumbled across the snippets and conversion issues that had curtailed her keyword’s traffic and revenue.

She realized that, going forward, if she could combine the data together into one view, she could be better assured of these kinds of issues not slipping through the cracks undiagnosed and impacting her company’s bottom line.

She also resolved to explore other ways in which she might bring diverse data sources together for increased insight and began researching technology solutions that might automate the process and also introduce new ways to leverage her data for actionable insight.

Use The Data You Already Have To Gain Insight

The length and breadth of data search professionals collect and analyze can vary greatly based on their maturity level. No matter your maturity level, however, there are likely to be instances whereby making a small change in how you view your data substantially increases your insight into what is and is not working — in manners both similar and dissimilar to the example scenario described above.

Ultimately, you may find that this newfound insight can have a real impact on your bottom line.

Likewise, in terms of scope, the Penguin algorithm update was relatively miniscule, affecting only 3.1% of queries. Its impact on the industry, however, was far greater, as the de-emphasis of thin content in the SERPs drove SEO professionals to place a renewed emphasis on creating — and marketing — quality content.

In its aftermath, the industry has struggled somewhat to define what an SEO has become. Is he/she now a content-creating machine? What about the practice’s well-rooted origins in data analysis? Has that taken a backseat to content creation?  The upheaval in the industry has left many SEOs with something of an existential crisis, scratching their heads asking, “What am I?”

The SEO Lives At The Intersection Of Liberal Arts & Technology

Now, aside from more cat pictures, certainly the last thing the Internet needs is more comparisons to Steve Jobs and Apple. But, in searching for the best way to get across what I think an SEO has become, I’m going to commit a cardinal sin of lame article writing and make just such a comparison.

At Apple’s WWDC event in 2010, Jobs famously said that, “[Apple] has always tried to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts.” By that, I think he meant that Apple products are born from both creative-based and science-based thinking.

I think this is the place that SEO has arrived at. For many, pre-Penguin SEO practices were tipped in favor of the technology and data side, heavily focusing on tactics like link-building while content took a back seat. In a post-penguin world, the practices have become more evenly balanced, with a focus on both content and the data/tactics.

What Does this Mean for You?

There are many theories about how the brain operates, but a persistent one is the logical vs. creative schema. Ehrenwald’s Anatomy of Genius: Split Brains and Global Minds describes most people’s mind styles as either dominantly rational/logical or intuitive/artistic.

Intuitively, this makes sense when we consider the people we know and when we think about how our own brains operate — we can probably classify most as dominantly thinking in either a logical, data focused manner or with a creative bent.

Given that people tend to tack to the approaches they feel most comfortable with, there is a possibility that as an SEO, you or your team may be giving the most time and attention to either data/tactics or content, depending on your dominant mental schema.

If you buy the argument that the most successful SEOs now live at the intersection of technology (data) and liberal arts, any singular-focused approach may be detrimental to your natural search success. (And, given that much of our mental programming operates outside of our conscious awareness, careful consideration may cause some to discover that this mental ‘work-with-what-I-am-most-comfortable-with’ schema has been operating outside the confines of their awareness).

So, if you buy the post-Penguin “liberal arts-technology intersection” argument, the implications for success are that you (individual or collective) must be giving sufficient mindshare to both liberal arts and technology. In many ways, the two are separate — building content people want to link to and share and optimize on page factors, etc.

In other ways, the data side is supportive of the liberal arts side such as tracking how the content is resonating, discovering new opportunities for content creation, assessing the competitive landscape etc.  In this regard, it is a true intersection, the place where the liberal arts and the technology come together.

What An SEO Professional Has Become

To come full circle, and answer our original question, “what is an SEO?” now, post-Penguin, the modern-day SEO is an organic search professional positioned at the intersection of liberal arts (content) and technology (data). This means you, as a practitioner or organization, must be aware if you are tacking too far to one side.

It may no longer be enough to outsource the liberal-arts side to content creators, internal or otherwise. Now, it is too critical to your natural search visibility that you have to get involved and start driving the creation of excellent content. (And, please don’t say that you don’t have the budget — see this excellent piece on creating content with no budget by John Doherty –Producing Great Content with No Budget.)

On the flip side, it may not be enough to put content out there without both support of on- and off-page tactics and without sufficient visibility into how content is driving links and shares, as it would ultimately impact your natural search visibility.

As we enter the new year, make it a resolution to at least evaluate where your SEO practice is relative to the liberal arts-technology intersection; what you discover may alter your practice for the better.

At Conductor, we spent a bunch of time sorting through the many changes we’ve all seen in the SEO industry this year. Below, we call out trends in search we think are on the rise and also those we think are trending down. Wherever possible, we backed our viewpoint with empirical evidence, but of course your view may vary, so please tell us in the comments where you disagree or think we left something deserving off the list.

A thorough assessment of changes in any industry must include evaluation of both core and ancillary elements taking place in the industry, so our evaluation extends beyond just the SERPs. One place to look for change is within in the organization.

Close analysis of how the perception of SEO has changed in the organization includes how budget allocation, headcount, and technology adoption serve as indicators for how recognition of the opportunity in SEO has changed in 2012.

Consider the following statistics:

• 66% of marketers’ budgets grew in the last 12 months (a quarter of those by more than 25%)
• 6 out of 10 marketers intend to grow SEO headcount in 2013
• 16% of organizations now have Search in its own dedicated department
• SEO jobs advertised online increased by 24% in 2012, and the number of professionals on Linked-In increased by 112% (source)

All of these changes are downstream from increased recognition of the opportunity in natural search.

Driven in part by this years’ algorithm updates that de-emphasized exact match anchor text links, and also by the general maturation of the industry away from its primitive ‘focus-on-a-few-core-high-volume-keywords’ roots, emphasis on exact match anchor text has declined over the year.

A Q4 survey of 616 Marketers showed their second biggest goal in the coming year is scaling keywords:

In terms of scope in 2012, the Penguin algorithm update was relatively miniscule, affecting only 3.1% of queries. Its impact on the industry, however, was far greater, as the de-emphasis of thin content in the SERPs drove SEO professionals to place a renewed emphasis on creating — and marketing — quality content.

Now, survey data shows “improving content development strategy” is the #1 goal SEOs have for 2013.

On the flip side, while quality became the new standard for content in 2012, the kind of thin content that used to drive publishers up the search rankings became verboten. Consistent Panda updates every month or so were coupled with the Penguin update that slammed bad linking practices and keyword stuffing.

There were, however, numerous complaints from legitimate site owners (including SEER Interactive who was banned from Google for a short while) who felt they were unfairly caught in the new update.  Either way, the 2012 algorithm updates went a long way toward making thin content a ‘cold’ trend this year.

As the industry has evolved and search marketers have become increasingly sophisticated, the sophistication with how they use data and the insights they seek from that data has evolved with them.

Much has been written this year about the arrival in the industry of ‘Big Data,’ and along with new and robust data sources comes a shift in search marketers’ expectations about how they will be able to leverage insight from disparate data sources together in one place.

Now, marketers want Natural search visibility data together with Web traffic data, PPC data and social insight to provide them with a more complete view of their inbound marketing funnel.

In late 2011, as Google began rolling out encrypted search, the keyword [Not Provided] began appearing in Web analytics, growing to ultimately replace up to 24% of total organic search traffic. The aftermath left industry participants up in arms about losing valuable keyword data, and it was a topic of frequent conversation at industry events.

Over the course of the year, the industry pulled together to develop work-arounds that would recover at least a portion of the lost data and gradually learned to live with it. By late 2012, the topic was far less discussed, both at industry events and in leading industry publications.

Rand Fishkin talks about how link acquisition has changed by referring to ‘the death of link building and the rebirth of link earning.’ By that, I think he means that while link building used to be a process involving an active ‘going-out-and-building’ process, it has evolved to become one where links are earned more ‘by merit,’ where the best content earns the links.

The evolution of the traditional link-building process in 2012 also brought with it a new concept: link cleanup. With the launch of link-disavow tools from both Google and Bing  (if you listened closely you could practically hear the industry cheer at their launch), SEOs could now clean up their link graph, a foreign concept before the algorithm changes of 2012.

While ‘link-earning’ is hot, ‘link-building’ — the traditional process of actively building links via comments, directories, outreach and other active methods is less so. What began as an active ‘go-out-and-get’ process has largely evolved into a passive ‘sit-back-and-earn’ process.

Over the course of 2012, the SERPs themselves changed perhaps more than any other year since Internet search became a reality.  From social in the search results to reviews alongside local queries to Google authorship to the Knowledge Graph, a great deal changed in the SERPs this past year.

For the SEO professional, there are (at least) two important takeaways from the extent of SERP changes that took place this year. First, while the changes are rife with threats to your search visibility, they are equally filled with opportunity.

Changes in how you seed content on social networks, leveraging the rel=author tag to add a visual component to content creators on your site, and more, are all opportunities disguised as threats to the marketer that understands the changes and chooses to take advantage of them. (And, don’t forget to go beyond globally understanding the changes by understanding the specifics of how they impact your vertical for your specific keywords in the SERPs.)

The second takeaway is more of a passive and forward-thinking one. That is, the extent of the changes Google introduced this year says a great deal about their willingness to introduce changes into the SERPs – the space that still generates 97% of their annual revenue.

Whether it’s social in the SERPs, author profiles tied to content, local query review information or generic user  interface changes, Google has sent a message loud and clear this past year that they are more than willing to introduce changes — even big changes — to the look and function of their search results page. If, in the coming year, you are not prepared with a mechanism for evaluating how ongoing changes impact the search results for your keywords, you might be left at a competitive disadvantage.

We’re going to take a bit of a controversial position here and say that, despite the industry attention around it, we’re going to position mobile in the ‘cold’ bucket, at least for the present. Now, before you fire up your Comment Flamer 5000, we’re not saying that mobile as it relates to a growing driver of Web traffic is insignificant, nor are we saying that there are not definitive multi-platform user experience considerations for the site owner to act on.

But, we do want to position the hype and point out that, by our analysis (12 million visits across 25 sites in a one month period), mobile search traffic (smartphone+tablet) is today still only 11% of all organic search traffic.

For some context, that is less than the 12% market share that Yahoo still has, and we don’t find SEOs specifically spending time optimizing for Yahoo above and beyond the normal optimization that they do.

To us, that means that an SEO’s precious time would be better spent, say, developing excellent content, or mining data for competitive insight, than it would trying to specifically optimize for what is still a small percentage of organic search traffic.

Conclusion: In The Coming Year, Focus On Results, Not Hype

If there is an overarching theme that emerges from our year-end analysis, it’s that the industry is maturing and moving toward a ‘long-term tactics’ schema, away from the old ‘follow-the-hype’ paradigm. Link building has become link earning, focus on singular keywords has become deep content development, and the scope and synergy of how data is leveraged has never been greater.

So, in the coming year, in keeping with the shift the industry itself is experiencing, make a new year’s resolution to closely focus on the tactics and strategy that will produce results in the long-term. Leave the hype and the algo chasing in 2012.

Either way, best wishes for a healthy and prosperous 2013!

Other, battle-scarred veterans will not be nearly as surprised.

Whatever your perspective, the reluctance by senior management to take the leap and make an initial substantial investment in SEO, while theoretically understandable, often leaves the SEO professional lobbying for budget in a chicken and egg, catch-22 situation. “Show me you can move the needle before I am willing to invest,” they are told; but, without the resources, technology, and budget, it can be difficult to demonstrate substantial ROI in a short period of time.

Getting past this hurdle can mean the difference between having a fully-staffed SEO team wielding the latest advanced technology, and being Milton in the basement wielding his SEO stapler; so, it’s critical that you put your best foot forward.

While no plan offers a foolproof guarantee to ensure management buy-in, I’d like to propose a three-part strategy to give you the best chance of success.

Before we dive into the specifics, I want to caution readers that the critical component required for each step along the way is that you engage your inner empath. That is, you need to view things through your budget-holder’s eyes. This means considering what they do and don’t know about the unique nature of SEO and how it differs from other marketing practices, determining the metrics that they care most about and considering the ancillary benefits to SEO beyond capturing traffic that might help to influence their investment.

1. Set Expectations By Defining The Unique Nature Of SEO

Although it may be abundantly clear to you that making headway in natural search is very much a marathon rather than a sprint and that the exact return and rate of return is difficult to define precisely, your marketing executive may be used to a discipline like email marketing where return on investment quickly becomes apparent after an action, or offline channels where the same holds true.

Put another way, it is necessary to start by explaining why the request Show Me Success Before I’ll Invest in SEO is, in fact, a bit of a Catch-22. Time, resources, and the right technology are needed to demonstrate the return the budget-holder is looking for. Do this even if you have messaged this idea to management before — it will help frame the rest of the conversation.

2. Define The Opportunity Using Metrics The Budget Holder Cares About

Now that you’ve set the environment, define the size of the potential search opportunity by calculating website traffic gains from incremental rank improvements for your keywords. There are a number of Excel tools out there that help you calculate potential search opportunity by inputting keywords and search volumes, tweaking rank improvements, and determining traffic increases.

By making use of these tools, you can calculate the size of the organic search opportunity possible in your space.

For example, in the image below, you can see a sample company’s current share of search and the percentage of untapped opportunity available. By fully investing in SEO, this company can theoretically access the 88% of traffic still out of reach and translate this traffic to over $85 million in potential new revenue.

Translating this market opportunity assessment methodology to your individual industry will let you show your budget holder the size of the opportunity in SEO in your industry and will set the table for the next step in the process.

I’m going to take this a step further than many of the articles you may have seen in the making-a-case-to-management-for-SEO investment genre that typically stop at show management the size of the huge opportunity in natural search.

The truth is, (again, engaging our inner empath) from management’s point of view, seeing the size of the potential search opportunity, while well-intentioned, is little more than a promise, and these are often met with I’ll believe it when I see it skepticism (whether explicitly expressed or not).

To take it a step further, after establishing the size of the global opportunity, I’m going to suggest that you actually define what you will accomplish in a 90-day window. Yes, I know that it’s risky to stick your neck out there, especially when at the mercy of the algorithm, but it’s arguably just as risky to talk to management about potential without something to show for it.

To mitigate the risk, while still showing value that would be interesting to the budget holder, first determine the growth you think you can achieve in a 90-day period, again, expressed in metrics the budget-holder cares about, but expressed as a range to mitigate risk (e.g., ‘$10,000-$12,000 sales increase’).

In your projections, it probably makes sense to be conservative and focus on long-tail, high-converting keywords for this initial exercise. Projected rankings can even be below-the-fold or in striking distance positions, as depending on the search volume, moving into non hyper-traffic (1-3) positions can still show significant revenue growth.

3. Execute, Execute, Execute

Once you get sign-off on the 90-day plan, the rubber hits the road. Focus on doing whatever you can to show the growth you projected. You might consider even doing things you might not normally do, such as writing some content yourself, doing some link-building, or optimizing pages for conversion.

At the end of the 90 days, convert your analytics metrics into business metrics and show the budget-holder what you have accomplished. Then, to attain the investment you are looking for in budget, headcount, and technology, create a projection that shows what you could achieve in 6, 9 and 12 months.

The line to walk here is a projection aggressive enough that it remains interesting to your budget-holder but conservative enough that you can achieve or come close to achieving the projections you are putting out there.

Conclusion: Take Bold Steps To Win The Budget You Need

Successfully navigating the chicken-and-egg conundrum (show me you can move the needle before I am willing to invest) can mean the difference in a long-term successful SEO program that generates continued growth in online visits, conversions, and sales, and one that is not funded.

Showing the budget holder the size of the overall opportunity is important, but arguably, many requests for budget are rejected because the budget holder was not sufficiently convinced with a concrete showing of return.

While it carries a bit more risk, committing to a growth range you will achieve in a 90-day period — and then executing on that commitment — will show the budget holder concrete evidence of what can be achieved with an investment in natural search, and hopefully, win you the budget you need.

In the same survey, we asked the 150 respondents about their social network login behavior when using a search engine.  Specifically, we wanted to know the frequency users are logged-in to the search engine’s featured social network (Google and Google+; Bing and Facebook) when searching on the engine.

The data showed that 61% of Google searchers are logged into a Google service when using the search engine, compared to 22% of Bing users.

Here, Google is showing their clear advantage in owning a unified user login across all their products and services; a user that is logged-in to any of their services is also logged-in on their search engine and social network.

In looking at this further, we were reminded of a research study we did earlier this year on [Not Provided], where we asked respondents to indicate their primary email program.

Interestingly, the results seem to support the Google unified login impacting the percentage of users logged-in while searching:  almost the same percentage of respondents who reported being logged in while searching (61%) reported using Gmail as their primary e-mail on the Web (57%).

It’s About More Than Users Being Logged-In When Searching

So what does this all mean?  The major search engines have been continuously working towards formulating a cohesive response to searcher queries that extends beyond the web index and to do this, they need to take into account semantic social network content and behaviors and alternative data sources.

Creepiness factor aside, this means that Google has a substantial advantage over Bing in collecting user information like social data and behaviors due to the greater rate at which searchers are logged-in to Google’s services vs. connecting Facebook and Bing.

It’s not yet clear the extent to which searchers actually want social data integrated into search results or how good of a job the engines have done in integrating the two thus far.  But the extent to which users are logged-in when searching on Google vs. Bing suggests that if social and search continue to merge together, Google will be at a significant advantage.

From the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, to digging through analytics, to leveraging sites like Soovle that discover ‘suggest’ keywords across multiple search engines, keyword discovery options abound.

Building a pool of potential keywords to optimize for, however, is only half the battle.

For those websites driving visitors to a ‘conversion event’ (e-commerce, asset download, form completion, etc.), different keywords will convert at different rates. Not all keywords are created equal and your website might be optimized to convert better for some keywords versus others.

Finding out a keyword converts poorly after spending the effort to work your way up the organic search rankings can be a time consuming and frustrating process, but there is a way to shortcut the process and discover high converting keywords: Paid Search (PPC) data.

With PPC data, you can focus time and resources on driving keywords that convert well up the organic search listings.

Set Up Paid Search Ads To Generate Conversion Rates

By utilizing the full scope of data available in paid search, SEOs can make actionable decisions during the initial stages of building a keyword list.

Those with existing PPC campaigns can extract the information and translate it into SEO opportunities, while those without PPC data can set up test beds for keywords that have the best chance of converting. It is often recommended that ads run for at least four weeks before continuing with the next step.

Once sufficient ad data has been collected, look through Google Adwords to determine the keywords with the highest conversion rate.  You can sort by the ‘Conv. Rate’ column in the Adwords tool to discover the best performers:

To dive deeper, export your converting keyword list to Excel and segment the keywords into thirds: top-converting keywords, medium-converting keywords, and low-converting keywords.

An SEO roadmap can be generated using this list, where strategic planning and optimization can begin for top-converting keywords followed by middle-converting ones. Once the keyword list has been exhausted, repeat the process to generate a high-performing SEO keyword list.

Increase Your Odds By Leveraging PPC

In SEO, deciding which keywords to focus on is one of the first decisions you make, but it is also one of the most important and can genuinely impact your bottom line.

As a medium, PPC offers the ability to gather quick, actionable keyword conversion data that can be leveraged to provide insightful and strategic planning for those in the preliminary stages of SEO development or those looking to refresh their keyword list.

In the end, any insight that increases your odds of conversion can impact your revenue, so consider leveraging PPC as an SEO tool to discover high-performing keywords.

There are, however, definite benefits to becoming more savvy in how you look at your natural search programs. Visibility trends can inform strategy, competitive insight can impact a tactical approach, and gradual increases in your sophistication can start you down a road of looking at your SEO from a holistic perspective rather than a limited one-off view.

If you’ve been considering becoming more advanced in how you approach your natural search metrics, here are three ways you can dip a toe in the water and ramp up your sophistication.

In each example, we’ll describe ‘how’ to advance your SEO metrics and we’ll also elaborate on the insight you might gain from your newfound prowess. We’ll use ‘Ann’, the SEO Manager for Acme Co., a medium-sized online clothing retailer, as an example with a ‘before’ and ‘after’ to highlight the changes. For visualization purposes, I have accelerated the rate at which some of the trends may have occurred.

1.  Group Keywords Into Visibility Zones & Track Trends Over Time

Ann currently tracks the rankings for a group of high-value keywords on a monthly basis. She does not track visibility trends from one period to the next.

By grouping keyword ranks into visibility zones, natural search trends can start to emerge that may help inform strategic or tactical approaches to her SEO.

For example, the illustration below shows how grouping keywords by visibility zone reveals an increase in striking distance keywords (page 2) from June to July which means she can focus on tactics to move keywords from page two to page one of the search results.

2.  Analyze Search Visibility By Keyword Segment

Now that Ann has become comfortable grouping her keywords into visibility zones, she is ready to take it to the next level and start segmenting her keywords by business line. Before, she was limited to seeing her keyword’s visibility on an aggregate basis.

By segmenting her keywords by business lines she can discover trends that would otherwise be missed such as the stark differences in visibility in keywords for women’s vs. men’s clothing in the example below.

3.  Track & Discover Competitors

Ann then turns her attention to competitive discovery. Before, she scanned the search results for her core keywords to get a rough sense of the competitive landscape, and did not track trends over time.

Now, she aggregates and plots the top ten appearances for competitor domains of her keywords month over month. Doing so exposes shifts in the competitive landscape and allows for actionable response to positive or negative changes.

For example, in the illustration below, Ann calculates the number of times competitors appear in the top 10 search results across her keyword set and tracks it over time. She is then able to determine that the Gap has been taking share from Acme from July to August. With that knowledge, Ann can analyze the tactics Gap utilized and develop a strategic response.

Conclusion: Embrace Advanced SEO Metrics for Better Insight

While it may initially seem like a daunting task, advancing the sophistication of your SEO metrics can lead to insight that can have real, measurable traffic and revenue benefits. Tools and technology that can help run up and down the cost and functionality spectrum, ranging from the basic rank tracker/Excel combination to the fully automated enterprise SEO platform.

Whatever your technology choice, if you are still in the early stages of how you look at your natural search visibility, consider adding some sophistication to how you look at your natural search metrics.

Specifically, we showed how they can target striking distance keywords—keywords ranking on page 2—to obtain some quick traffic wins while simultaneously building link equity for longer term targets.

This month, I want to advance the conversation and dive deeper into the topic, by providing specific examples of how keyword segmentation can provide insight that will shape your SEO strategy.

We’ll look at one specific way of segmenting keywords–by geography—and the insight it can bring, but of course there are many different ways of analyzing and segmenting keywords to gain insight from your keyword set.

Hopefully by the time we are done, if you have been thinking about advancing the way you do SEO to include keyword segmentation, you will have decided to do so.

Broad View Of Keywords Hides Insight

Let’s say Acme Widget Co. is a widget making company that sells their widgets in cities all over the United States. They recently decided to become serious about natural search as a traffic and sales channel and began tracking core keywords’ search rankings.

They also began to take a more serious look at their web analytics to determine where their search traffic is coming from.

After some analysis, they noticed they were getting traffic from searchers looking for Acme’s widgets by geographic region (e.g. ‘Chicago widgets, ‘buy widgets in Chicago’…). When they aggregated the keywords by search ranking position, no discernible trends jumped out:

(Note: The segmentation shown is via Conductor’s Searchlight enterprise SEO platform, [disclaimer: I work for Conductor] but similar segmentation could be done with a bit of focused effort via a rank tracker and some fancy Excel footwork.)

Next, they segmented keywords into geographic regions and again, aggregated rank data by ranking position.

Now, several obvious trends emerged in several regions. In Chicago, for example, they noticed a disproportionate percentage of keywords ranking in prime striking distance position—on page 2 of the search listings.

In Detroit, a large percentage of keywords were in the ‘Developmental’ visibility zone, ranking on page 4 or higher:

Further research showed that Acme’s standing in the search listings varied widely by region because the competitive landscape differs from one region to another.

For example, they found there were many more local widget retailers vying for the same search listings in Detroit than in Chicago. And, their own regional link graph, region specific content, and anchor text strategy will also impact visibility from one region to the next.

The most important result of the segmentation Acme did was helping them build a region specific go-forward plan as they developed strategies appropriate for their visibility in each region.

For example, in Chicago they developed a plan to grab the low-hanging fruit from the large number of keywords on page 2 while in Detroit they built a long-term plan to develop and seed content to start moving low ranking keywords up the search listings.

Keyword Segmentation Can Reveal Valuable Insight

Our example focuses on keyword segmentation by geography, but segmentation within your analytics can provide similar insight in other scenarios such as branded vs. non-branded keywords, by product line, or by any other segment that makes sense in your vertical or individual business.

Acme took a valuable lesson away from the exercise: While a broad view of your natural search visibility is important in your SEO practice, it can easily hide trends within unique keyword segments.