What’s in My SEO ToolboxMark Munroe

Director SEO, Trulia

mmunroe@trulia.com

@markemunroe

blog: www.seoradar.com

3/13/2014

#SMX

SEO: My Biggest problems

Great set of tools out there …

• Let’s dive into a few and try and squeeze out

some additional value

Some specific questions?

How is my site doing from a reputation perspective?

How is it doing vs. competitors?

How about my appearance in the SRP?

Rankings?

Impressions?

Where is my grow going to come from?

What is my competitor doing?

How can I find new content initiatives?

Am I providing a good search user experience?

Minimizing bounce back to Google?

OpenSiteExplorer

Who Uses Moz OpenSiteExplorer?

Why do we use it?

Getting stronger? Or weaker?

Monitoring link count over time

I know Moz link data is not exhaustive. What I want to see is trends

over time. I pay particular attention to:

Unique linking root domains

Unique Linking ‘C’ blocks

Total links (a bit on the fence on this one since run of site can muck

things up).

So lets take a look at a sample domain (fictionalized numbers):

August July JuneDA 77 77 77FollowedLinkingDomains 2319 2430 2300Linking'C"Blocks 1378 1456 1234TotalLinks 10,094,034 11,756,444 10,123,423

2 problems with self-gazing

1. Moz crawl and numbers

can fluctuate over time,

they might have had a

lighter crawl in August.

1. It doesn’t tell me how I am

doing vs. my competitive

set.

If I expand my analysis to make it comparative, I

solve both those problems.

Step 1: Accumulate the competitive data

SiteAAugust July June

DA 77 77 77FollowedLinkingDomains 2319 2430 2300

Linking'C'Blocks 1378 1456 1234TotalLinks 10,094,034 11,756,444 10,123,423

SiteBAugust July June

DA 72 73 73FollowedLinkingDomains 1483 1623 1508

Linking'C'Blocks 998 1114 1001TotalLinks 8,034,134 8,756,444 8,951,123

• Moz counts went down for both sites in August.

• Next, I compare the ratio or metrics vs. the competitor

and look at that trend.

• Finally, I complete this analysis for additional sites.

Step 2: Compare over time

SiteAvsSiteBAugDiff JulyDiff JuneDiff

FollowedLinkingDomains 0.36050022 0.35849802 34.43%LinkingCBlocks 0.27576197 0.23489011 18.88%TotalLinks 0.20407104 0.2551792 11.58%

• For both Domains and ‘C’ Blocks my percentage advantage

over my competitor has grown.

• In total links, my advantage has dropped, but I am not as

concerned with that metric because run-of-site links can

cause a lot of variations.

Growing Traffic

Get a bigger piece

of the pie!

But what else?

How about trying

some new pie?

New Content

Strategies!

Example Case

Let’s assume I am working on at travel site that is focused

completely on flights and flight related keywords.

After a strong growth period, traffic growth has slowed.

We are well indexed, rank well and have good on-page optimization.

For additional growth, I am investigating new areas of content.

Hotel

Car rental

Use generated/community, blogs

Analyze competitor content strategies

Typically, is not that difficult to analyze competitor content strategies as specific content type is usually aggregated under a folder or follows a pattern:

www.yetanothertravelsite.com/car_rentals/blah_blah

In this case, if I have an airline focused site, I can analyze a competitor to get an idea how successful they are with other content strategies.

SEMRush is my good friend! :)

Deep dive into competitor content strategies

What’s working for THEM ?

Specifically long-tail content strategies?

KeywordsFolder structure

Export the organic data

The more data the better for accuracy. You might want to expand

your SEM Rush account for more results when you do this type of

analysis.

Export the organic data report into Excel.

SEMRush Export

Examining the URLs reveals the patterns by content type

Analyze URL structure

For instance, in my competitive site I determine

All car rental content contains ‘car-rental’ in the URL

All hotel content contains ‘hotels’ in the URL

All community content contains ‘forum’

All airline content contains ‘flight’ in the URL.

Create Excel filters and voila:

Content Analysis of Travel Site – top 10,000 keywords

Hotels and Car Rental look promising

More search volume in hotels but far more competitive (based on average rank)

For this site, community is not working

Complete this for a couple of more site and you have great data to feed into a potential new content initiative.

Webmaster Tools

Good keyword data which you can use to create a good weekly

dashboard.

Use Top Queries and Top Pages report to monitor how the site is

doing.

Change the default date range to weekly (or whatever period you

report on).

Webmaster Tools Scorecard

Export Data to Excel

Calculate winner + Losers week over week

Clickthrough Data

WMT also provides click-through data

Recent changes give more detailed numbers

At an aggregate level, not overly meaningful, since CTR changes

via rank.

So, I calculate CTR by specific position (filtering out brand terms)

I do this at both keyword and top page level

Measure impact of meta-descriptions, title changes on CTR

Measure impact of brand

Position CTR

1 49%2 33%3 15%4 9.80%

KeywordClcktrhoughRatesbyKeyword

CTR Tip

• You should own your branded search terms and all

variations.

• If you are seeing low CTRs on branded terms, somebody is

buying/stealing your clicks (or you have serious SEO

problems).

Are you satisfying your search visitors?

Certainly, this is Google & Bings objective (remember the Panda

questions Google asked users).

The best way to answer that question is to ask your users!

I have used Qualaroo, Qualtrics and SurveyMonkey

Implementing Surveys

Qualaroo/Qualtrics – really easy to get results

Search only filters

1 tag for the entire site – surveys based on URL filters

Multiple options for popping up surveys

Configure percentages to receive the survey

Configure how the surveys shows up

Great for very short surveys

Survey specifics:

Pops up after 10 seconds

“Do you think this site has the information you were looking for?

Follow with questions specific to the page with the survey.

Use the responses to improve pages, fill in gaps.

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Summary

There are a lot of great SEO tools out there.

Drilling into the data and associating them with the problems you are

trying to solve can produce creative solutions!

Thank You!

Mark Munroe

Director SEO, Trulia

mmunroe@trulia.com

@markemunroe

blog: www.seoradar.com

3/12/2014