SEO 101 – How to fix a fever without a thermometer

Here's a guest post from Birla - Asklaila's CTO. For your reading pleasure ...

How to fix a fever without a thermometer

Yes. You got it right. You can’t. We know that thermometer is no wonder drug to fix fever but an essential part of fixing it. In fact it is pretty much the starting point. I am assuming you are past the stage where you have realized how important SEO can be to you as an online business and have decided to do something about it. Let me help you to get started.

So first things is to measure where you are. There are few important metrics which need to be measured. Broadly you can classify the metric into three segments.

Users, Site and Search Engines.

In this post I will focus on talking about measuring Search Engines. Measuring SEs enable you to track your visibility to millions of audience for hom SEs are the starting points of their Internet experience.

Index Size
This gives you an idea of how many documents of your website are visible to search engines. You can easily find it by giving “site:domain-name.com” as query to your favourite search engine.

Index Size Breakup
It is not sufficient to just see overall index size but you should also break it up by the different type of pages you have in your site. Eg. If you are a retail site, you might have pages which show multiple products and you might have pages which show complete details of a single product. It is important for you to understand how search engines look at different type of pages on your site.

You might also have the type of pages broken up by geography or categories. You should also breakup your index size from those perspectives.

Inlinks
Election time and you need to track how many people have voted for you on the internet. Inlinks monitoring does that for you. You should also do some more analysis on the quality of sites which link to you. Sorting them by their Alexa rank can help you a little bit to understand the quality.

Cache
You should always look at how search engines view you by looking at their cached pages.

Automation
It is important that you automate the entire process of generating these metrics. It is simple and straightforward and any scripting language can help you write this in few days ( or may be hours if your programming skills are less rusty than mine )

Relative Grading
Being an IIT student, one thing I learned (unfortunately hard way) that it is not just sufficient to do well but also do well relative to your surroundings. This is like measuring the body temperature to 100 degree Farenheit but not knowing what the ideal body temperature should be. Obviously you are not going to get any idea of your fever just with measurement. It is important to measure regularly and measure your peers also. Since public APIs are available for tracking all this, you can track this for any site. A good idea is to figure out your competition and track all the parameters for all of them. Make sure that you store all the parameters in a database so that you can do long term analysis. Analyzing this for a large number of sites also ensures that you can also normalize anomalies which are very common in numbers reported by search engines.

So now you have all the keys to test drive your new car, enjoy the drive..... and do not forget to share your experiences.

Testing and monitoring your landing pages

Here are two nifty tools I highly recommend:

a) One perennial problem for folks in website design is trying to make their sites work across various versions of browsers. If you are a search marketeer, you probably create specific mini sites and landing pages - most people I know would just check it in IE and Firefox - whatever versions are available in their machines - and forget about it. You should realize that you may be potentially screwing up your landing pages in many browsers by doing this. Why not check screenshots of your landing page in 30+ browsers without having to set up the infrastructure yourself - http://browsershots.org
While this is not a recommended approach if you are a web products company (you would need to get your testing team to actually try out all their test cases in a reasonably large set of browsers - no shortcuts !) - this works particularly well if you are a marketeer with a mini-site or a single landing page for a search campaign. For FREE !


b) You dont want to land in a situation where your search clicks are piling up - and your mini-site is down - either you could set up your own site monitoring tool (which is not the best solution - lets say you are targetting UAE as one of your target countries in your ad campaigns, and because of some network issues, your mini-site is not reachable from UAE - you need to know immediately so you can pause your campaign and stop losing money.
Or your website could go down - or become slow with a lot of hits - or something else could go drastically wrong !

To prevent against this, I would strongly advise you sign up for an account with http://www.pingdom.com - although its a paid for service - its extremely worthwhile for both marketeers with mini-sites and web product companies. You can monitor a bunch of parameters about your website - including response times, uptimes - and get alerts on SMS whenever something goes down. Immensely useful - for a small cost.

Real time conversion tracking

One of my biggest gripes with Google is that it does not provide real time conversion tracking - usually you can expect Google's conversion tracking to reflect 24 hours after a lead has actually been generated. This is highly sub-optimal for any serious search marketeer. Although View tracking with a javascript tag can take quite some amount of time simply because of the amount of data that needs to be processed, conversion tracking in a thank you page after an action has been taken does not generate as much data - so I fail to understand why Google would introduce a time lag in this. The only reason I can think of is that Google does not want advertisers to become extremely efficient - and wants advertisers to leave money on the table by making suboptimal decisions ( I hope I am not starting a flame war here !)

My recommendation is to use an industry grade conversion tracking software, where you can see which of your clicks are converting, from which geos, for which keywords - in real time - so that your campaign managers can be always on the lookout for optimization opportunities - in near real-time!

If you cant afford a paid solution, you can try out http://www.tracking202.com - a free alternative. The best part about this tool is the "Spy View" which you can use to constantly monitor which of your clicks are converting - with very little lag.
If you dont want the SAAS solution, you can even install your own version of the software from http://www.prosper202.com - just make sure that if you are expecting volumes of more than 5000 clicks per day, you use a dedicated server and MySQL5.1 and above.

Tracking202 is really meant for affiliate marketeers - but can be used by search marketeers helping direct clients with their search marketing efforts too - by using a subset of the features available.

Not only does it support the usual 1x1 pixel based conversion tracking, but it also supports Postback URLs through which your tracking IDs (SubIDs) can be posted back to the tracker when a conversion happens - this is supported by most affiliate/CPA networks you may sign up with ( Experienced affiliate marketeers would know what I am talking about - if you are a newbie please learn more about SubIDs here with an example - http://zacjohnson.com/how-to-setup-subid-tracking-urls/ )

Learning Digital Marketing

Lots of folks pinged me asking me about good resources to learn digital marketing on your own. While there's no substitute to hands on experimentation - I have compiled a list of a bunch of Books and CDs which I believe could be a great starting point for accelerating your digital marketing learning. Unfortunately, most of these arent available in bookstores in India, so you may have to order them online from US. You can find and order these titles online from my amazon store

If any of you know some other titles which are useful - do drop me a note.

A great resource for the absolute beginner is this free emarketing textbook published by the good guys at Quirk. Download it, and digest it over a weekend - its a fairly easy and crisp read.

AdaptiveAds acquired !

AdaptiveAds, an ad network which focusses on the personalization piece of the spectrum,and built out of Pune, has been acquired by Glam Media. Although the sum is undisclosed, I hope this has been a successful exit - we need some successful exits in the Indian startup domain, for folks to really get excited about working with startups.

The other interesting thing about AdaptiveAds is that they had actually started out by focussing on personalization technology for ad creatives only, and used to be called personiva. Then they rebranded themselves and went ahead to launch an ad network.

http://www.adaptiveads.com

*Coverage* in Paid Search Campaigns

Assuming you are keeping an eye on the usual suspects like cost per acquisition, CTRs, avg CPCs etc, **coverage** could be the single most important metric that you are missing out on. Most beginning search marketeers ( and a lot of professional agencies in India !) dont track this very important metric at all. Before diving on, one caveat - the discussion that follows, is mostly relevant to highly competitive keyword landscapes only.

Let's begin by defining "coverage" - its a metric that's applicable to each of the keywords you are targetting.

Coverage = (no of times your ad appears on your target keyword)/(total no of searches on your target keyword)

Usually coverage is expressed as a percentage, and a simple way of conceptualizing it is thus : think of coverage as the number of times your ad appeared if hundred users searched for the target keyword. If your ad appeared every single time when users search for that keyword - the coverage is 100%

Two questions arise at this point -
a) Since we dont know the total number of searches on the target keyword, how will we measure coverage?
b) Once we measure coverage, how do we use it?


Let' take the first question - a) To measure coverage, we need to simulate the situation by actively firing the query against the search engine you are monitoring, for the geography you are monitoring. Let's say you are trying to measure coverage for the keyword "home loans" - you could fire the keyword "home loans" against google in india 1000 times, check how many times your ad was shown up and arrive at a fairly accurate estimate of the coverage percentage of "home loans". You would, of course, want to use an automated solution to do this !


Lets say, you see that the coverage percentage of "home loans" in your campaign, is 15% in Google. What do you do next?

Well - a broad thumb rule to follow is this : Maximize your coverage !

A very important step, once you have calculated the coverage, is to plot a graph with coverage % on one axis, and average ad position on the other axis. Once you have plotted yourself on the chart, plot your competitors for this keyword on the chart.

And then, ANALYZE !

If you do this exercise, you may realize and understand one of the biggest things many people don't seem to understand about search marketing -

Bidding higher can get you into a higher position, but does not mean you will get a larger number of clicks

For example, lets say you are bidding 50 INR for "home loans" - your average rank for this is 1 - and your coverage is 15%. Your CTR is 1.5%

What this means possibly, is that a lot of other competitors are bidding for rank number 1 - and the impressions are getting distributed across all these competitors - which is why you have a low coverage.


What should you do if you see a situation like the example above
You should reduce your bids ! So that you get to a lower position where there is less competition. Lets say, you lower your bid to 25 INR - your average rank comes down to 3, and your coverage is 60%. Your CTR is 1.25% ( CTRs are usually lower in lower ad positions )

Under such a situation, since your coverage increase overcompensates for any drop in CTR, you are going to get a lot more clicks when you reduced your bid as compared to when your bid was higher !! And moreover, you are paying less for each visitor !!

Now - a practical point - we obviously cant do this analysis for each and every keyword. However, if you have grouped your keywords into logical keyword groups, you should be able to do this analysis on each of your keyword groups, and modify your strategy at the keyword group level. OR, you could use a bid management tool you build or buy, which takes into account coverage as a metric to do this for you.

To cut a long story short, just remember this - bidding higher does *not* mean more clicks !

A community for digital marketeers in India

If you are interested in connecting with other folks interested in digital marketing in India - do give http://indiadigital.ning.com a dekko

Distribution Strategies for internet startups

So you have a web application, lots of content and functionality. Its been 3 months since you launched, and the pageviews are climbing gradually. But you are looking for that big spike which will you take you the next level.

How do you do that without poking a big hole in your wallet?

There are a ton of things that you can do - but today, we will talk about just one aspect - distribution.

Here are a few things you could do -

a. Do a content syndication deal with a Rediff, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Indiatimes etc.
There are many ways of doing that, and it depends on how you negotiate with the biggies. You could do a syndication deal where articles and content from your site would be taken as is, and displayed on these sites, in an appropriate section. Ideally, you should negotiate and make sure there is backlink from the publisher article on the partner site to you. However, in some cases it may not be possible. In that case, you could try to get at least a note of recognition on the partner site by displaying your logo etc in the credit section after the article.

The other way to do a content syndication deal is to power a complete section of the site with your content. Typically, if you are a provider who has specialty content which your partner doesnt have - and especially if your partner is a portal - you may want to tell them you will power their complete section and help them launch an additional sticky feature to their site. For example, if you are a specialty content site on cars and automobiles, you may want to do a partnership with a portal who doesnt have an "auto" section, and tell them you would power all their content in the auto section. In such deals, you could do a revenue share arrangement for all the ad inventory generated due to this section. If the prospective partner isnt ready to share ad revenues, you may want to evaluate the benefits of getting backlinks from each of those articles in the section or a "powered by xyz.com" presence.

Who should you talk to get this done? If the prospective partner has a strategic alliance team - they should be the first ones to talk to. If not, talk to their marketing department. And finally, talk to the editorial team.


b. Do a functionality syndication deal with these sites. There are two major ways of doing this.

1. You could create a widget which provides some functionalty and content to your partner sites. The advantage of creating a widget is that it's really easy to implement and test out by the partner. Just make sure that when you go to make a presentation to your likely partners - take with you a widget which is sized according to their page layout - and be ready to show them where they could place this widget on their site. You are the hungry one - so you need to be doing all the thinking, and they need to just do all the signing ;-)

You could have ad supported widgets, where ads get served within the widget itself - and you could do a revenue share deal. Or, you could create a widget which will drive traffic to your site by exposing only a part of the functionality inside the widget - and for service completion, the user really needs to get to your site. In this latter case, you can again do an ad revenue sharing deal where you and your partner split the revenue on the widget landing page.

If you do a widget, make sure to put a static link under the widget - search engines won't be able to reward you for any links to your site from within the javascript.

2. The other way of syndicating functionality to your partner, is by creating a white-labelled version of your app - which gets hosted either in the partner's domain OR on your domain, but with a partner sub-domain ( for example, you could host a white-labelled instance on msn.mywebapp.com or you could agree to hosting the white labelled version on www.msn.co.in/mywebapp ) The advantage of going for a msn.mywebapp.com is that all the traffic gets counted as yours by audience measurement systems like alexa etc, along with the pagerank impact of having a link from the partner site onto a subdomain of yours

In this white-labelled version, you can follow monetization strategies other than ad revenue sharing - you may even price it on a CPM or per unique basis for the value you are providing to your partner - and let them take all the ad revenue they can get on it.

Check out http://classifieds.sify.com which is powered by Sulekha via the white labelling route. While I am not aware of the exact deal mechanics, I guess sify would get paid by Sulekha, a percentage of revenue from all the paid classified ads that get posted into Sulekha via this white labelled interface.

In this post, we have talked primarily about monetization driven by ad revenue sharing - but remember, if your business model is transaction or subscriptions oriented, you could actually make this into an affiliate program by paying your partner a price for every lead they drive to your site via this.
If you are an ecommerce site, think of doing something like the very successful Amazon Astore http://astore.amazon.com. We will talk about some of the best practices while running affiliate programs, in a later post.

What we will talk about

Internet marketing and other forms of digital marketing are still in a nascent stage in India. Compared to the market in emerged economies like US or UK, digital marketing is still a miniscule percentage of the overall spends on advertising and marketing in India.

Over the last couple of years though, there has been a strong interest across all sections of the business community in harnessing these new mediums to generate business value.

To do this, we need to understand and update our knowledge of the digital marketing domain - and we couldn't find any blogs which cater specifically to digital marketing, from an Indian marketeer's perspective.

Hence this blog.


As we start this conversation, we hope we will be able to share our experience in this domain, and learn from YOU.

Here's to the brave new world of digital marketing in India. Cheers !