Measuring Search Engine Phrase Performance

Having lots of search traffic is great. But not every visit is of equal value. I mentioned search intent a quite few times last month. Let's look at the real impact of matching search intent by examining our phrase performance.

Topping the list of popular phrases are variants of our company name. That's not surprising since many people use Google as a navigation tool as well as a search engine. Rather than typing newfangled.com into their browser, they type newfangled into Google and get to us that way. These occurrences do reflect the level of engagement we have with people that already know about us.

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But for measuring the impact of search engine optimization, I'm more interested in new discoveries of our site than I am those who already know about us and find us by name. All these other phrases are the words that bring potential new clients to our site.

I should be able to go to Google and find our site in the search results for each of the phrases in this list. Let's try it for "power of words." Yup, here we are, tenth in Google. We wrote a newsletter way back in 2004 about how words are a powerful commodity on the web. This page performs very well and has delivered over a thousand visits to our site in the past year. This is good but take a look at something else. See the phrase's bounce rate? 70% of the time when people go to this page from Google they don't go any further into our site.

And this makes sense. This newsletter is relevant to that phrase, but someone searching for information on "the power of words" is not likely also looking to hire a website development company. While that article may have met their search intent, the rest of the site is not relevant to them, so they read and go.

But look this phrase, "ajax websites." The bounce rate is much lower. That's because ajax is a technical approach to building certain kinds of websites. Someone searching on this phrase may very well be looking for a website developer with this capability. And since we have this capability (as implied by our newsletter "Ajax Website Applications"), the page fulfills the expectation of the searcher, so the visit is much more productive--even though the total number of visits that came from this phrase is lower. Rare phrases often out perform popular phrases.