I’d long noticed on sites with multiple analytics setups, that traffic levels could differ even on unfiltered views. In this post, I tried to dig into the patterns in that data.
Category: Posts
Digital Marketing Data Analysis Pitfalls
A bit of a rant about some of my biggest pet peeves in interpreting analytics, rank tracking or ranking factor study data.
SEO Above the Funnel: Getting More Traffic When You Can’t Rank Any Higher
Sometimes, you can’t have any more pie. Perhaps the pie is infinitesimally small. Or perhaps the rest is already taken. Or perhaps you already have the entire pie. In these cases, to progress, you must make the pie itself larger.
The 30-Minute Information Architecture Audit
Information architecture is a broad topic, which arguably includes almost everything that we traditionally call technical SEO, and a lot of UX. In this post, I’m going to focus more narrowly on quickly identifying simple changes to a site’s internal navigation that can boost the performance of your key landing pages. At its most basic, this is a process you could execute in half an hour.
The State of Links: Yesterday’s Ranking Factor?
Back in Google’s early days, people navigated the web using links, and this made PageRank an excellent proxy for popularity and authority. The web is moving away from primarily link-based surfing, and Google no longer needs a proxy — so what, in 2017, is the point in links?
(Spoilers: We’re not done with them yet…)
Getting Started with Measuring Brand Awareness
This article originally appeared over at https://www.distilled.net/measuring-brand-awareness/. That URL 404s at the time of writing, hence the new location here.
Few people dispute that brand awareness is an important consideration for companies of all sizes – there’s a half-trillion dollar global advertising industry built largely on that premise, after all. In the SEO industry, however, we’re probably not as aware of it as we should be. I recently published a study on Moz showing that branded search volume is better correlated with organic search ranking in Google than Domain Authority, and as Google gets smarter and links become increasingly unrepresentative of how the web works, we can only expect this relationship to deepen.
Continue reading “Getting Started with Measuring Brand Awareness”Rankings Correlation Study: Domain Authority vs. Branded Search Volume – Moz Post
Which is the better predictor of rankings – branded search volume, or Domain Authority?
A deep dive into one of the pieces of research that went into my SearchLove San Diego presentation.
Competing for Local Queries With No Physical Premises – Moz Post
If you don’t have a physical presence, there are some situations where you can still rank for local queries. Learn whether you should, how to identify queries to compete for, and recommendations on how to optimize for them.
How to Diagnose and Fix a Self-Referral in Google Analytics – Distilled Post
A self-referral in Google Analytics is a session where the source is your own site. This is often ignored or considered innocuous, but it represents something very wrong with the sessions it represents.
A Guide to Sampling in Google Analytics – Moz Post
Don’t let data sampling lead you astray. Learn when sampling happens in GA, how accurate it is, and what you can do about it.