5 tips for using SEO analysis tools

We use a number of different tools when it comes to measuring the SEO performance of the sites that we work on. Of course in the end the most important thing is the one that tells you how much revenue they have made through search engines, but that can always be broken down further (brand/non-brand, search engines, keywords, etc). What I've been looking at are some tools that give you insight as to how your site is performing on the web without looking at that inside the site data. I've been looking at SEOmoz and Linkdex.

Before we get there though, here are some starter posts I've written in the past: some SEO basics (looking at mostly technical stuff); General measuring of your SEO efforts (some tips on what to measure to see how successful what you've been doing is) Building and measuring keyword footprints (looking at what phrases you want to rank for and then measuring performance); and finally how you can use Hitwise to help you decide on your search strategy.

SEOmoz and Linkdex are tools that do similar things in similar ways. This post isn't an attempt to tell you which one to use - that will depend on your situation (although this post might highlight some of the features that you want to use and help you decide).

1. Ranking Positions

The number one thing people want to use SEOmoz and Linkdex for is ranking positions for phrases for key websites. Both SEOmoz and Linkdex do this:

You can use this information to show how well the site is performing against a given set of keywords (for a given set of pages). If you download this often enough (or you use the on page tools) you'll be able to tell if you are changing your rank for keywords which you are aiming to change.

I think this is the main use we have out of these reports on a regular basis. It actually fits very well into the post I wrote about keyword footprints, because you can put your keywords into these reports and monitor them.

Of course the number two thing that you can do with these reports is that you can use them to monitor your competitors. You can find out where they rank and whether they are going up and down.

That's not to say that you should ignore the data that comes out of your analytics system (remember that you'll be able to get a better handle on long tail keywords using that), you should still use that information in conjunction with this data.

2. Link Analysis

The most important thing when it comes to SEO is how many related websites link to you with good anchor text. You can rank well without bothering to do any of the technical stuff if you get good links. Obviously you'll be ranking better if you do all the technical stuff, but you need links.

Not just any links of course, you need quality links and really you want them to be recent, from website with good authority and related to the subject matter of your site.

What we get from the tools is a ranked version of the links on the site based on a rather arbitrary ranking system that each of the tool devises themselves.

This is a useful way of telling what is important to the site, but it probably won't help too much with your link building effort on its own. You may be able to ask organisations to change the anchor text to your pages, but only if you have a good relationship with them.

What you can do though is do a sneaky tactic of seeing what pages your competitors get links from. And then copy them! Seriously though this may give you some ideas where you haven't previously thought of getting links.

3.On Page Keyword Analysis

When you want to find out how well you are doing with your on page ranking for a particular keyword, what better way to do it than run a report out of your tool.

The SEOmoz version gives you all the information that you want about a particular keyword on a page regarding how often it is on the pages, where it is, how it has been optimised (or over optimised). The linkdex version gives a similar view, but probably a bit less in detail (you can see one in tip 5 below).

Remember that you might want a page to be optimised for more than one keyword, so you need to think about what your optimum keyword and how you make sure that you have that being the most prominent, with the others being arranged around it.

4. Get Crawl Errors

You'll never be able to replace your Google Webmaster tools with a report like this, but you might be able to find some interesting facts out about your site. It's where SEOmoz has an advantage over linkdex (at the moment).

Knowing when you have pages are throwing up errors is an important part of SEO. If the outside link points to a 404 error page, you lose most of the value of the link. Finding them through this method means you can redirect them to the appropriate pages.

It will also show you where you have duplicate content. Duplicating content means that Google may not apply all the links into your site as the same authority if the links are to the same content with a different url.

And with the risk of repeating myself, the beauty is that you can do the same analysis for your competitors as well. You can find out if they are doing things badly, or how they are doing things well, what pages are working well, etc.

5. Create Tasks

I suppose the USP that Linkdex has is that you can create tasks and assign them to different people. That sounds a little odd until you actually see it in action.

Here you can see one of the reports that Linkdex produces for a particular keyword on a page (in a similar manner to the SEOmoz one above). With this report you can see that you have the option of adding a task.

You can literally go through each of the reports and assign stuff to various different people. You can tell them how long you think it will take and when you think you'll get to do it.

This means that you can use the tool to manage what you need to do as well. This is something that we don't necessarily need as an SEO agency, but we can add the tasks in that the client needs to do and manage it on their behalf if necessary.

How to use the Products Variable in SiteCatalyst

I've been writing a bit about SiteCatalyst in the last couple of months, so I thought I'd continue that trend by doing a bit of demystifying of the Product variable in SiteCatalyst. This is a variable that can be used in hundreds of different ways, but would be best described as an eVar with an expiration period of the page view.

Products more importantly allow you to set your event variables to have a value of something other than one. This is important because you don't always want your events to be equal to one. Most importantly you don't want them to equal one in situations where they represent revenue, but there are many other situations as well (eg when you are selling something and you ask the user how many they want of them).

So lets break down how they work in some simple steps:

1. Set the event(s) at the same time as the Products

Because Products are like eVars that expire after a page view, you have to set your events that you want related to your products in the same part of the call as your Products. If you set them at a different point, then they won't be associated with the Products and it will be a bit of a waste. This means that if you set them in a normal page view then you put one above the other, but if you put them in a call in an onclick event then you need to make sure they go in there together as well:

s.events = "event1,event2"
s.products = "; ; ; ;"

So if you just want to set one of your events to be a value of more than one, then you need to do the following:

s.events = "event1,event2"
s.products = "; ; ; ; event1=10 | event2=-3.3"

This convenient example above sets event1 to be 10 and event2 to be -3.3. Of course the other part of this is that in your admin section you also need to set your events to be numeric or currency based so that they'll work properly.

Where would you use this? Well it is most importantly used when it comes to revenue (more of than later). It allows you to tell SiteCatalyst how much the product the user has just bought is worth. So if you have products with different revenues, you can get a total revenue without having to set the value in SiteCatalyst. It's also important for situations where you have 'units' (although more of this later) and you want to specify how many of the units the user wanted.

This 'units' option can be applied to various different situations of course. Did your user sign up to two different newsletters in one page? Did they choose to have four different brochures sent to them, did they apply for a coupon that was worth £15 off, etc, etc.

Of course the next advantage of this is that you can use one of your events as a counter ('orders' if you want) that goes up one at a time, alongside your numeric or currency based event. This will allow you to create a calculated event of average revenue per order or units per order.

2. Set your Products

The products themselves seem like they should be easy. You just set them in the same way that you would do with your custom conversion variables, right?

Well not quite, as you can see by the above. To allow for this, Products uniquely have a number of different variables that you have to set within them, each separated with a semi colon:

s.products = "[category] ; [products] ; [quantity] ; [total Cost] ; [incrementor] ; [merchandising]"

We've already looked at the incrementor variable above, by making use of the event variables to set a value of more than one.

The other variables are the more important ones though. I say the other variables are the important one, but actually the first of them, the category value is something that has been obsoleted by the introduction of SAINT classifications. Being able to classify your products in the user interface means that setting the categories in the code becomes a coding nightmare that is difficult to maintain.

This brings us nicely along to the products variable. This, obviously, is where you want to put the thing that the user is buying or that you want your events to convert against. Given that you can use SAINT classifications it is often easier to user product codes in the coding and then convert these to friendly names later in the process.

Conveniently for you, SiteCatalyst has a number of out-of-the-box conversion variables: Orders, Revenue and Units. To activate these 'events' you just need to specify that you are using the 'purchase' event and then let the products do the rest. This will automatically mean that for a particular products value you will have one order, you will have quantity turned into units and you will have total cost turned into revenue.

This means that if you don't want to use the standard variables, you need to use your incrementor variable to set the units and revenue.

The merchandiser variable is an interesting way of setting custom conversion variables that are pinned to the specific product (more of this in a second).

3. Set Multiple Products

The advantage of products is that you can set many of them on the same page. All you need to do is separate them with a comma.

This makes it easy to split things up when a user has lots of different things in an order.

Why do I mention this? Well, it comes in quite handy when thinking about the merchandising section. If you have an order where some of the things are next day delivery and some are 7 day delivery then you can specify each of these by using the values in the merchandising section.

s.products = " ; freshfish ; 1 ; 10 ; event2=1 ; evar1=nextday , ; shoes ; 1 ; 40 ; event2=1 ; evar1=7days"

In my fictional example above we have someone who has ordered fresh fish and shoes. The fresh fish is due for next day delivery (we don't want it going off!) and the shoes come in seven days time. We've put this information into an eVar so that we can tell which is going for which. You can then break down your orders that are due the next day by which product they want.

An alternative situation would be where you get the user to enter responses to a number of questions to get a recommendation. You could use your product as each of the quizzes and set the responses in an evar. You can then break down one by the other to find out what answers people are giving to each of the quizzes.

So there you have it. Many ways which you can use the products variable.