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.
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