Clicksharp Marketing

Organic keyword research provides a variety of insights essential to your marketing campaigns. One is that you shouldn’t put too much effort chasing rankings for your own company/brand names.

Welcome to Website Analytics 001, where we cover the painfully obvious affirmations that are essential to success in Website Analytics 101. There’s a reason we cover them — they’re all too frequently overlooked.

(For now, we’ll go into detail on #1.)

1. It’s not hard to get a top search engine ranking for your company and brand name.
2. Your traffic from pay-per-click ad campaigns will be different in nature than in organic search engine results — but the insights are transferable.
3. Your customers may articulate their needs better than you predicted.

In all discussions of analytics software, we’ll default to Google Analytics, since it is far and away the best free analytics tool on the market, and an obvious choice for small businesses.

In Google Analytics, if you run a keyword report (or look at the default dashboard), you’ll see all your keywords bundled into one list. Only by clicking on “Paid” or “Non-Paid” can you separate the clicks coming from AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, or any of those paid campaigns from raw, natural, organic search (or whatever synonym you like… “raw” really speaks to me.)

Once you’ve narrowed to just your organic keywords, you can really drag a comb over the results. Here’s a small recent sample of organic keyword data for the Clicksharp blog:

Sometimes a little organic keyword research indicates you’re not always comparing apples to apples. (Click the graph to enlarge.)

The “clicksharp” keyword is pretty easy for us to rank for. But look at the “long tail” keyword, which likely points to a variety of posts about long tail economics… it’s highly unlikely we’re ranked terribly high for this term (not in the top 50 at last check) — but the click volumes are high enough to generate way more traffic. And for good measure, look at Pages Per Visit, which is significantly higher than the “clicksharp” keyword… and more than triple our best keyword for the date range, which is “digital marketing push and pull.”

The bottom line: is search engine optimization (SEO) about vanity, or is it about results? A #1 ranking for a term of your choice is attainable, but what if it doesn’t drive the kind of traffic you expected? You’re much better off casting a wide net — and increasing the number of touch points with which you can engage an interested party.

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Paul Burani
Clicksharp Marketing
New York, NY

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This entry was posted on Saturday, June 7th, 2008 @ 7:33 am on the category SEO, Web Analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.


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