Title: Celtic Productions' Link Development Tool
Posted: Sun, 7th June 2009
Category: SEO
Recently, one of our clients asked us what sort of balance we
would expect between organic traffic from the top two search
engines, Google and Yahoo. Anecdotally, we had always used a
figure of 3:1 or 4:1 that is, you would expect to receive 3 or 4
times more organic traffic from Google than Yahoo. Various market
share reports seem to suggest that this is indeed the case for
some geographic pockets. Of course, it depends a whole lot on
your target market. If you're operating in China, Google and
Yahoo are clearly not the biggest search engines, Baidu takes
that honour and based on market share, you would expect to have
roughly two or threefold the traffic of Google.
Our client's main geographical target was the United States and
Europe and when they presented with us with a 3:2 ratio for their
organic traffic between Google and Yahoo, that is, for every 2
organic visits that Yahoo send, Google sends 3 organic visits, we
couldn't help but investigate further. The first task at hand was
to define what keyphrases our client was targeting. Fortunately,
having worked as part of their initial development team, we were
intimately familiar with their business and so defining the
"keyword cluster" was made a lot easier. Think of a "keyword
cluster" as a whole host of search phrases, usually closer to the
head than the tail, that constitutes the search market that a
given domain competes in.
Next, we needed to determine how well the client's domain was
performing on both of the search engines. Searches for phrases in
the keyword cluster on both Google and Yahoo certainly yielded
very disparate results. The domain performed exceptionally well
on Yahoo, having 2, maybe 3 results in the top 10 for nearly
every keyphrase that they were targeting. Not the case in Google,
the domain probably only graced the top 10 on a handful of
occasions out of perhaps 50 keyphrases in the cluster. Why?
Well, the client's business is exceptionally successful, they
turnover about €1 million a year. This is all based on
organic search results, hence the concern about their current
organic search results balance. They don't engage in paid
advertising, either online or offline. From a purely internal
perspective, their website is optimised to a very high degree; it
is incredibly easy to use, very intuitive, looks fantastic and
has some unique functionality in the industry that they compete
in.
Again, why the disparity between the search engines? Google's
success is built around the concept of "link = vote". Yahoo's
success isn't. Not that Yahoo doesn't consider inlinks in
determining what domains rank for what keyphrases, in much the
same way, Google of course considers on-page factors. The
difference is in what the individual search engines prioritise.
Therefore, we would expect inlinks to the domain to weigh heavily
in the former's algorithm, well maybe not feature so heavily in
the latter's.
This is exactly what was happening. The client's domain had a
huge number of pages, with fantastic keyphrase rich content but
it didn't have many inlinks. Yahoo looked at the site and it
said, "yeah, absolutely, very relevant stuff here on this page,
let's return it", while Google was more inclined to go, "yeah,
hmmm, not sure, it has relevant on page stuff but no inlinks so
it's good but not great". The client didn't have many inlinks
because 1) they were too busy running the business and 2) they
were a relatively recent market entrant.
Armed with the 'why', the client wanted to know some specifics,
and of course some resolutions. To what extent is the lack of
inlinks affecting them, how many inlinks do they need in order to
redress the balance, where do they get the inlinks? All valid
questions. It's one thing performing some anecdotal searches for
some keyphrases that the client is targeting and hypothesising
about reasons for success or failure on a particular SE but what
we decided to do was build a tool that would collate this
information in a very structured manner, perform some deductions
and present the client with the most valuable link-givers for
their keyword cluster, that is, the pages which link to the
domains that are successful, i.e. returned high up for
competitive keyphrases, for searches on both Google and Yahoo for
a given keyword cluster or market.
And so was born Celtic Productions' Link Development
Tool. The tool takes the domain in question, a list of
primary keywords, i.e. products and services, a list of secondary
keywords, i.e. locations and constructs a viable search matrix
and then works out what the most competitive keyphrases are in
Google and Yahoo, what are the top performing domains in each,
what are the top performing domains overall and what pages are
linking to these successful pages which are ultimately
contributing to their success.
After some tweaking of the configuration variables, we plugged in
our clients domain and a formalised list of their target
keywords, the result. Well, it was astonishing. The client was
indeed the number 1 domain for that keyword cluster on Yahoo! and
by a substantial margin, therefore, their on-page, internal
optimisations had served them well. The client's domain faired
less well in Google, coming in in the mid-70's. Not a tragic
result but not brilliant by any means. The tool was not only able
to articulate exactly how our domain performed for each of its
target keyphrases but it was able to mathematically adjudicate
the imbalance between the two major search engines. Moreover, it
was able to identify precisely who the competition was and most
importantly, who was linking to them and thus making them
successful.
With their Link Development Report in hand (consisting of the top
9,000 link givers for the keyword cluster), the client embarked
on a link development campaign (ran internally because they felt
that the personal touch was imperative). Six months into the
campaign, they have retained their number 1 spot in Yahoo! and
they have moved up to the mid-40's in Google. On initial
observation, you could be forgiven for thinking that this isn't
that impressive but, given Google's market share and the
intensity of the competition, their campaign has managed to shift
the balance back to a healthier 5:2, i.e. Google now sends two
and a half times the traffic that Yahoo sends as opposed to the
original 3:2 ratio. Their current balance is still slightly
offset when compared to the market share of the SE's but even
redressing it slightly has meant a significant increase in
traffic for the client. Not only that but because Google was
sending highly targeted traffic (more than Yahoo!), their
conversion ratio actually increased by 0.5%. Due to the scale of
our client's operations, these minute increases in performance
subsequently translated into monumental increases in the bottom
line.
As with all articles on Celtic Productions, this article is
protected by international copyright laws. It may be linked to
(we are of course most grateful of links to our articles),
however, it may never be reproduced without the prior express
permission of its owners, Celtic Productions.
 | |
| |
