Life in a Not Provided World at SMX West 2012 by Micah Fisher-Kirshner

Living in a Post-Keyword WorldMicah Fisher-Kirshner | Senior SEO Manager

www.become.comMarch 1st 2012

Quick Stance – Ally Bank’s Ad

Quick Questions – Did You Know?

1. Who dislikes the change?2. Of those, who uses Google Analytics?3. Did you know last-click attribution differs for

direct traffic?**Exception for Multi-Channel Funnel report

No right to complain then

Google Revenue Inefficiencies Not everything is a conspiracy! Keyword learnings in SEO can no longer be used as often for

PPC• Optimization around page relevancy• Long-tail visits• Seeing where SEO does better than PPC

Certain industries utilize SEO to fund PPC

Note how this will hurt their stock;imagine trying to convince newmarketers that SEO and PPC together create a shared lift

On The Plus Side…What you gain for analysis:

• Logged-in users• Google+ users• Personalized results

Test how +1’s affect traffic by landing page

The Power Of SegmentationSegmentation Importance Increases

• Before & After: Assuming no seasonality, what was the data percentage lost across keywords?

• Keyword Categorizations: What keyword groups do you generally do well with?

• Relevancy Matching: How well do the keywords match your landing page?

Start of Not Provided

Start of Not Provided

Spike of Not Provided

Spike of Not Provided

Costumes

On The Plus One Side…Future of Google+:

• A bullish view means all keyword solutions presented today are short-term solutions

• As time passes, margin of error on keyword accuracy increases

• Importance of searchvolume and keyword rankings increases

The Long-Term Solution

Treat SEO like you do PPC

Standard SEM MetricsSearch VolumeImpressionsCTRVisitsTransactions/ConversionsCPCCPARevenueROI

Additional SEM Metrics“Quality Score”“A/B Testing”

Testing, Testing, Testing Pre-Click:

• Just as in PPC and like Matt Cutts suggests, test your Titles and Meta Descriptions to improve your CTR (and implicitly rankings)

• Google Webmaster Tools is too simplistic, use SERP Turkey or others like it

On-Click: • Determine the value for every SEO implementation through the

basis of controls and tests

Post-Click: • What’s the value of putting content above the fold for better

rankings versus the loss in conversions you get for pushing down imagery?

Takeaway: Test Like PPCConversion Rate Winner

Runner-up

Thanks!

Want to up your SEO career? We’re hiring!

www.linkedin.com/in/micahfk