Defining Search Metrics: Search Engine Presence

In an earlier post, I mentioned (without explicitly defining) the term of "search engine presence". This came from the dissatisfaction I felt when talking to clients about the health of their search engine optimization/ marketing campaigns. All too often, I would hear the same mantra..."I want to be number 1 for the term X" or "Why aren't I number 1 for the term X?"

This felt inherently wrong to me. However, I couldn't really answer their question, nor could I give them a sure-fire way to attain that position. I sometimes felt that I should be glib and say "If I knew that answer, I'd be working at Google as one of their engineers, right?"

At the same time, everyone who's been in search marketing for more than a week knows that it's best to rank well on a variety of keywords, while remaining true to the core goals of the site. After looking at some WebPosition Gold ranking reports, something struck me as odd about them, they gave the ranking reports, but the data it gave seemed too myopic. This is when I started thinking about "presence" as a metric for measuring the health of the search marketing campaign.

I went to Adam Schultz, and I proposed to him a creation of a simple program that we would later called the Competitive Analysis Baseline Reporting tool. This program would take the core, top level keywords from the client's input... adjusted and perfected by some keyword research and take a look at which sites ranked for those keywords. We wanted to get a good look at the entire search spectrum, so we took the top 15 results in Google, the top 10 in MSN and the top 10 in Yahoo!. This way we would get an overview of what I later called the search engine marketspace. It's a capture of data at a specific time of what the marketspace is.

For a practical example, lets take a few keywords... "iphone, apple iphone, ipod phone" for this example, we don't need a lot of keywords because I'm looking at defining, in a practical sense, "presence".

So, with 3 keywords and (15 Google + 10 MSN + 10 Yahoo) we can expect to have a sample size of 105 potential slots for search engine results to appear. When the same company, like Apple shows up across the search engines and at different positions, their presence is counted as 1. Each presence is counted and sorted for the total presence. In this case, the top 1o results is as follows:

	1/10/2007
Domains	SE Presence
www.apple.com	7
www.thinksecret.com	7
www.engadget.com	7
www.gizmodo.com	6
www.appleinsider.com	5
www.mobilewhack.com	5
www.everythingiphone.com	5
gizmodo.com	4
en.wikipedia.org	4
news.bbc.co.uk	4
www.businessweek.com	3

For those terms, Apple.com shows up in Google, MSN and Yahoo 7 times, as does Thinksecret.com and Engadget.com. Gizmodo shows up 6 times, and so on. The idea here is not to diminish the actual position, or rank of the site, but emphasize the presence in the overall search marketspace. When your company relies on capturing qualified traffic from search, it's obviously better to have several keywords working for you, rather than focusing on only one keyword. Unfortunately, all too often, SEO/ SEM companies attract the client by either telling the prospect what they want to hear, or implying that ranking on their top keyword is paramount to success.

What we see here is a lack of education and a hype of expectations. When the client is properly educated on the strategies of SEO and SEM, they're more likely to abandon the expectation of the single keyword on top hope and adopt a more gestalt view of the search engines as an environment that changes, evolves and fluctuates. Once they see that, they'll recognize the value of having several keywords that work for them and not just one.