by Christopher Yee on May 19, 2012
I love optimizing websites for search engines so much I regularly do consulting work on the side. But what I love more than THAT is showing clients the amazing year-over-year results of a successful SEO campaign.
The data from the images below come from an eCommerce website in an extremely competitive niche. When I first started in April 2011, they received an average of 80 visits per day; that number jumped to ~200 visits per day – a 150% increase!
Here’s how their weekly organic traffic (excludes branded terms and not provided) looks like for the past year:
And here’s the month over month comparison:
It goes without saying that looking at overall traffic doesn’t tell you much so I segmented by their product category pages (excludes branded terms and not provided):
And the month over month comparison:
And yes, I know the user engagement rates are pretty terrible but there was nothing I could do about it since getting any UX/Design changes done was like walking through a (political) mine field.
What did I do to get all this free traffic? Nothing you probably couldn’t find reading the various blogs out there. If you’re looking for specifics, here’s a quick hit list in the order the projects were executed:
- Keyword Research – they just weren’t targeting the right keywords.
- Source Code Optimization – involved many crucial on-page elements such as the title, h1 and body text.
- Technical Infrastructure Optimization - dealt with cleaning up the domain by addressing canonicalization issues, HTTP responses and robots exclusion.
- Internal Link Building - cross linked their various category and product pages to improve crawler access.
- Content Creation – managed a team of two outsourced content writers for the company blog.
- External Link Building – hired, trained and managed a team of three link builders for website outreach.
- Digital Asset Optimization - focused primarily on image optimization.
Other things that helped was a healthy dose of optimism, perseverance to succeed and a little algorithm change from Google.
Now that I’ve shared my example, how about you leave yours in the comments below?
by Christopher Yee on May 13, 2012
I discovered the Search Commander’s URL tool awhile back when I needed a scalable solution to check the HTTP status for a large list of URLs. It worked as intended but when I tried it with 1k+ URLs I pretty much broke the checker and took down the page along with it. Thus, in my pursuit to learn programming I said to myself, “how come I can’t build my own?”
If you’re a Mac user you can use this right away since cURL is already built into your Terminal. For Windows users you’ll first need to download Cygwin with the cURL package.
Without further delay, here is the string for the command line with INPUT_LIST.TXT being your list of target URLs to check:
xargs curl -sw “%{url_effective}\t %{http_code}\t %{redirect_url}\\n” < INPUT_LIST.TXT
Once you hit enter you should see something like this (but with your own data):
The first column is your target URL, the second is the HTTP status and the third is the destination of the link if there was a redirect. Want to save your results? Just add “> OUTPUT_LIST.TXT” to the end of the string.
The only caveat is if the page returns a HTTP 200 OK response, it’ll print the URLs source code on your screen. The solution around this is entering the following code after every website in your INPUT_LIST.TXT file:
http://www.website.com -o /dev/null
This should be pretty easy to do with a simple =CONCATENATE function in Excel. Although if you know of a way to programmatically insert this please let me know.
Now go ahead and give it a whirl – leave any questions, suggestions or concerns in the comments section below!
by Christopher Yee on April 30, 2012
I don’t have anything major to share this month besides the fact that I will be attending Distilled’s SearchLove conference in San Francisco (not an affiliate link). I am super excited about it and can’t believe it’s less than 1.5 months away! If you plan to attend please let me know and we’ll meet up.
Date: June 18th-19th, 2012
Location: David Brower Center, Berkeley, CA
Price: $849
Speakers (I look forward to): Tom Critchlow, Rand Fishkin, Wil Reynolds, Annie Cushing, Justin Briggs, Kate Morris
Sessions (I look forward to): Advanced link building strategies, latest ways to measure and action your metrics, link building in the age of social media, integrating social media into your SEO activities
The only gripe I have with their marketing scheme is the fact that BERKELEY IS NOT SAN FRANCISCO. It is a 30-45 minute drive away from The City….what an insult to us San Franciscans so get it right ya bloody blokes!
by Christopher Yee on March 10, 2012
After delaying the Google Analytics Individual Qualification exam for an entire year, I finally decided to get it over with and I passed! Here’s a screenshot of the certification PDF they sent me.
Below is my score card for the GAIQ test results.
In retrospect, I should’ve used the remaining 45 minutes to double check my answers and boost up my score but my over-confidence convinced me otherwise. At least now I know I should read up on E-commerce Tracking – probably got dinged for the technical Javascript implementation questions.
I thought the exam was pretty easy but my exposure to Google Analytics may greatly differ from your own experiences. For example, I’ve been using Google’s web analytics platform nearly everyday for the past 2 years (including weekends) so I was already familiar with the core concepts. The only sections where I really had to focus on getting things right was properly installing the tracking code in its various forms and the advanced administrative functions.
I pretty much crammed everything the night before but here are the steps I took to pass the test:
- Watch all the Conversion University videos once.
- Anything I didn’t understand I would watch them a second time.
- Took notes about how metrics are calculated, definitions and the benefits & shortcomings the training modules listed.
- When I was ready to take the test, I had one of my GA accounts open, my written notes, the GAIQ videos and the Analytics Help articles.
- I breezed through all the questions I was 100% positive about and wrote down the topical questions that required me to think more than 30 seconds.
- By the time I had finished all the easy answers, there was still an hour left to research the answers to the remaining questions.
- Win.
Best of luck to you but trust me – you won’t even have to break a sweat. =]
