Meaningful SEO Metrics: Going Beyond the Numbers

Below is live coverage of the Meaningful SEO Metrics: Going Beyond the Numbers from the SES San Jose 2009 conference.

This coverage is provided by Gaurav Sharma of Think Mantra.

We are using a live blogging tool to provide the real time coverage. You can interact with us and while we are live blogging, so feel free to ask us questions as we blog. We will publish the archive below after the session is completed.

(08/11/2009)

3:03

Gaurav Sharma: Meaningful SEO Metrics: Going Beyond the Numbers

Moderator:

Jim Sterne, Chairman, Web Analytics Association

Speakers:

Richard Zwicky, Founder & CEO, Enquisite

Jeff Ferguson, SES Advisory Board & Senior Director, Online Marketing, Local.com

Marc Engelsman, VP, Client Programs and Services, Digital Brand Expressions

Jamie Smith, CEO, Engine Ready

Ray "Catfish" Comstock, Senior Search Strategist, BusinessOnLine

3:04	Gaurav Sharma: All panelist introducing themselves.

3:05

3:11	Gaurav Sharma: With 5 panelists - the format of the talk will be Q&A heavy. Specific real life questions and hopefully real life actionable answers.

3:12	Gaurav Sharma: C-Level execs think SEO is black magic because there are not much strong metrics to tie up with the ROI/profit.

3:13	Gaurav Sharma: The discussion should be Paid Vs. Organic - which yields better results.

3:15	Gaurav Sharma: BusinessOnLine working on creating technology to calculate ROI for Social Media.

3:17	Gaurav Sharma: How many Fortune 500 companies are tracking SEO, SEM and other campaigns and acting upon them? - Panelists believe it is only a small fraction.

3:18	Gaurav Sharma: A client paid BusinessOnLine 6 figures and took 6 months to change noindex,nofollow for 3 product pages!

3:19	Gaurav Sharma: Smaller companies beat Fortune 500 in SEO because they are faster to implement.

3:21

3:28	Gaurav Sharma: How to measure how much an SEO campaign should cost? One of the answer is depends on the goals.

3:33	Gaurav Sharma: Should SEO companies charge based on performance? No one answered it in a clear way.

3:38	Gaurav Sharma: Understanding at layman's level - How to levarage long tail? Get data from the customer's analysts. Segment keywords by brand or non-branded. Add up the number of long tail keywords and the visits and track them monthly.

3:41	Gaurav Sharma: Have we created a problem by selling "rankings" for years? Panelists agree.

3:42	Gaurav Sharma: Work on the bottom line - don't care about the rankings.

3:42	Gaurav Sharma: Tell clients things that are not possible and it takes long time. Set the expectations right.

3:45	Gaurav Sharma: How do seperate out different changes that you make during SEO and still complete the job in a timely manner - Ray Comstock says there is not really any way to do it.

3:47	Gaurav Sharma: For SEO - If it's not broken, don't fix it.

3:48	Gaurav Sharma: Use a common calendar on what happend when and track it back to the analytics.

3:53	Gaurav Sharma: How to optimize for different search engines - Google, Yahoo, Bing...? Optimize for Google, be happy with you get from whatever other search engines send you.