Search for Sony

I’ve had a task stuck in my milk can for a while now “Create additional SEO metrics to measure for organic growth”. It’s been there because I haven’t been able to figure out how to really break the paid organic traffic out from the rest of the organic traffic.

I had plenty of referring domain reports for our various properties that showed me how Google was doing. I also have no shortage of reporting on PPC from the engines and our web analytics tool, Omniture. I was a bit stuck on how to progress. Luckily I had a discussion with Director of Online for Sony, Jean-Christophe Alibert, and he had a simple suggestion that made me think duh!. It was one of those obvious things that once you see it you can’t believe you missed it.

Omniture has a simple report called the Search Keywords – Natural Report under Traffic Sources. I think one of the main reasons that I didn’t think of using this report was mainly because, like many reports in Omniture, I don’t trust the numbers. I’ve cross-checked the numbers for Sony Direct and as that site has not historically had a lot of Google love I could tell the numbers were off. The Traffic Sources Menu also has a report called Search Keywords – Paid Report, which is horribly wrong. When I try to compare it to my PPC reports or my tracking codes on my PPC campaigns it’s wrong. Back before we dumped Search Centre it was also way off of those reports. When you can’t even keep your own figures aligned you have a problem. Of course, Omniture always has reason why this and that don’t match, but reasons don’t make the numbers line up.

Well, as these reports are all I have for the moment they’ll have to do. The basic set up is to two way. First, watch the keywords that your SEO agency is targeting. These will have two phases. The first phase is rapid growth, which is when the agency first starts working on a term with the content team. The second phase is is jostling up. This is the steady growth or decline of a term depending on the little tweaks that are done.

The other way to watch the keyword growth is looking at the movers. Looking at the weekly trends you can see which words are gaining the most ground and try to see why they are moving. If it’s the agencies doing, then giving kudos, if it’s just automagic, then kudos to Google.

It’s a simple solution, which I should have been looking at long ago, but that’s learning for you.