|
|
Measuring the difficulty and merit of SE positioning results
The SEO (search engine optimizing) business has emerged as a
major player in the Internet business marketplace. Webmasters
and website owners always arrive to a stage where they wonder
why their business fail in making money, despite catchy domain
name, excellent design and amazing Flash animation in the home
page. The first one to blame is the webmaster, which is always
at hand because he only has to deal with servers, hosting
features, market analysis, programming languages, HTML design,
art, copywriting, customer support and related tasks.
When the webmaster realizes the need for visibility and SE free
traffic, usually looks for SEO services. Selecting a SEO company
is not easy, because their methods are secret, and their results
difficult to compare. It is common to detect SEOs that are not
available because they are busy selling their own stuff and
enjoying the results, and SEOs ready to sell services in order
to collect some money while learning how to do the job.
Most of the SEOs charge a fixed fee, which can depend on the
number of pages, number of keywords, languages in case of
bilingual sites, and maybe words, in extensive websites.
Internal links are another pricing factor, because linking
usually goes together with complexity.
If we need to make a SEO quote we also assess the current SEO
status, because is easier to work with a new site, where any
result will be welcome, than optimizing an established website,
with decent PageRank, many incoming links and a structure that
needs to be respected to avoid loss of existing traffic. It is
also likely that someone had started doing SEO work, and the
obvious steps are already taken, forcing us to concentrate on
subtle, controversial or hard-to-implement changes. We made a
first attempt to an online SEO cost calculator based on number
of pages and keywords, but we still use a lot of guessing and
risking for our budgets.
The client very often wants us SEO to work on a
SE-positioning-results basis. So, if we do not get results, we
do not collect any payment. Inexperienced site owners are an
easy prey. I can offer them a first screen in Google under Joe
Average Butcher store, and get away with it. However, when
clients demand a first screen under sex site or mp3 CD we are in
some trouble.
Measuring the difficulty and/or merit of a given positioning
status can be useful for:
- charging SEO customers on a results basis - establishing the
value of a SEO technique, tool or company - appraising domains
or developed websites - choosing keywords before starting a SEO
campaign, in order to pick up reachable targets (not to easy,
not to difficult)
The existing competition for a keyword has two meanings in this
context. One is the probable difficulty of ranking, because it
is likely that good SEOs have entered that market. The other is
the possible value for the client once we manage to rank at the
top, since a lot of searchers will probably mean a lot of
traffic as a prize for any good ranking.
Contrasting with the strategic value of SE Positioning, there is
no published index or method for measuring SE positioning
results. We did not find any such measure, while searching for
these and related terms:
measure SE positioning 'SE positioning measure' 'SE positioning
results' 'SE positioning index'
So, if someone created some wise SEO Rate or Index, he did not
know enough SEO to make it appear in Google... Bad sign.
(I might be including relevant keywords in this article for
indexation sake... sorry for that ;))
SEO companies do not share a standard, and when they need to
compete, they run positioning contests with a fixed, arbitrary
keyword. So, if you search under mangeur de cigogne (stork
eater) you will be surprised to see 153,000 results, mostly
arising from a well known SEO contest. The real world SEO
contest is the word SEO, which is the top prize for most SEO
companies, and has 28 million Google SERPs. Getting to the 20th
post of those is much harder than being on top of the 10
million
that search for optimized page, as we are. Or getting first out
of the 2 million that search in Spanish for promocion de sitios
(site promotion), which was comparably a piece of cake.
As you see, I am using the number of Google indexed pages as a
measure of popularity. If you are 1st among one million that is
good. But, is it better to be 2nd among 2,000,000? How about
10th among 20,000,000?
What we all know is that being 20th among 100,000 beats being
50th among 1000 million, just because nobody ever cares to
search for a 50th positioned website.
So, we first suggested:
Keyword SEPI - Search Engine Positioning Index = Total page
number / Position ^ 2)
The Google Positioning Index for my page positioned 1st under
Google First Place would be:
185 / 1 ^2 = 185
This is a usable index, but it is still incomplete.
It happens that being first under improve womanhood (240,000
results) seems to be quite easy for experienced SEOs, while
improve manhood (500,000 results) seems almost impossible. Why?
Because the first 100 results under Womanhood are there by pure
chance, while the first 100 under Manhood are there because
savvy SEOs trying to sell Viagra made a hard-to-beat effort to
be there.
For a quality estimation of positioning difficulty we need to
analyze the first 10 sites in the SERP, look for PageRank,
backlinks and optimization status, among other factors.
To detect if a keyword is very competitive and searched for we
have several methods. We can count the number of AdWords, which
reflect the interest of webmasters for that keyword. Also, when
SEOs fail positioning a site in the organic (free) SE results,
they pay a PPC campaign such as Adwords. We also use the
Overture Keyword Selection Tool, which provides statistics on
monthly searches.
The market variables are a different story. If our client wants
to be first among 'stork eater' we will have a very hard job
getting him there, although there is not commercial value on
that keyword whatsoever.
The best estimating of Keyword Difficulty is a complex formula
deviced by the authors of seomoz.org . It is free, and it takes
into account many the factors, like:
# of results in Google, Yahoo and others # of results with and
without quotes # of paid ads Alexa ranking
Keyword Difficulty goes from 0 to 100%, although I never found
any keyword higher than 0.5. Sex, hosting and Brittney all are
around 0.45. Very weird keywords are usually 0.2 or so.
Thus, Total Results and Keyword Difficulty are used to
calculate our new index. These factors influencing positioning
difficulty were chosen because they are relatively easy to
calculate. However, I wish I knew all what it takes to be always
first in SERP. Of course, that is a valuable commercial secret.
A good Search Engine Positioning Index should be:
- Reproducible - Consistent - Non-manipulable - Easy to
calculate - Accepted - Non-proprietary - Free (or cheap)
Then, I propose:
Keyword SEPI = Total page results for the keyword searched
between quotes in Google * Seomoz.org Keyword Difficulty ^2(to
the square) / (Position ^2)
Keyword SEPI is: Keyword Search Engine Positioning Index
To analyze multi-keyword results, such as those coming from a
campaign, a tool or a SEO company, we consider the sumatory of
the partial SEPIs.
We believe SEPI will be a useful index for the webmaster
community. A free SEPI calculator is located in our website:
http://www.domaingrower.com/domain-valuation.htm
About the author:
John Tello works for a company that produces SEO Tools, like
Great Gateway Generator and Synonymizer. He always obtains
unbeatable positioning results in Google and Yahoo, as measured
by indexes that he himself invents. His own results on web
positioning are listed in
http://www.gatewaygenerator.com/goodpositioning.htm , while a
SEPI calculator is available at
http://www.domaingrower.com/rankingcalculator.htm
|
|
|
|