Analytics

You're only as good as what you can measure, especially if you're a search marketing agency trying to prove ROI to your client. There are a number of high end Analytics solutions in the marketplace including Omniture. On the SEO side, it's important to be able to know exactly where you stand today, how your users behave on your website, and what changes to make next. Unlike SEM, SEO requires a significant investment of time and money, and it can take several months to see an impact. That said, hope is not a strategy, and you need to adapt in order to drive incremental traffic to your site. The best free offering is Google Analytics. Google gives this information away with the hope that you will spend money on AdWords to drive traffic to your site. Paid search works, and the more you can measure, the better off both of you will be. Implementing analytics software is not a simple process, and it has created a big market for analytics consulting. It is important to do this job right, because if your analytics is wrong, you're making decisions off of bad data. A good place to start learning is the Google Analytics Blog.

Search and Toolbars

HP and Microsoft announced a deal today to install the Microsoft Live Search toolbar on all 2009 PCs sold in the U.S. and Canada. In my previous role at Comcast, I launched the Comcast Toolbar, a browser based tool that includes a search box. People like to search where it's convenient, whether that is on their home page, from a toolbar, or in the built-in search box in IE7, Firefox, or Safari. Toolbars often have useful built-in features like links to e-mail, anti-spyware, and weather. Essentially the search engines give away toolbars in exchange for the future stream of search revenue. Many casual Internet users do not even know what toolbar they have installed or that it's even a separate downloadable application, but it makes a major difference to the search engines, for whom each point of market share is worth millions of dollars. It's also a good place for search engines to test new features to a portion of their audience without affecting the search experience for the general audience. Prior to working at Comcast, I was a big fan of the Yahoo! Toolbar, which includes anti-spyware, server-based bookmarks, and customizable buttons. Today it's hard not to have a toolbar, since they are often bundled with other downloadable applications like Adobe Acrobat Reader. If you don't have one on your PC, I recommend downloading one and testing it out. Here are links to Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft's toolbars.