From Rank to returns: Qualitative & Quantitative Earned Media

As the world of search evolves and the SEO industry matures, marketers face both a ranking confront and a revenue opening.Not only have the search engine algorithms altered, but the consumer – and the digital and marketing mindset – has shifted.

The division of SERP results and convergence of search, social, and content marketing means marketers must become adaptive to new ways of measuring SEO and earned media performance.
Privacy and personalization have further fueled change. While search rankings still matter in relation to driving traffic to your website, it is essential to shift focus from not just rank but also to proceeds in order to adapt to new CMO imperatives – rank and revenue.

Rank

Anyone who uses SEO techniques to increase their whole search engine visibility and traffic should be measuring their results. However, there is a huge difference between what you measure (rank) and how you measure (revenue).

Every searcher uses different search queries to find what they're looking for. Since August last year, for some keywords Google has been helping SERPs with seven organic listings instead of the usual 10 listings.
In 2013, as Google rewards quality and relevancy to address better customer knowledge, there are many opportunities to rank across multiple search types, and in various formats to dominate the new Google SERP results across image, video, places, news, social and mobile results.

However, this disintegration of search results means that the consistency and certainty of measuring rankings becomes a huge challenge in itself as the efficacy of measuring rankings alone reduces. Personalized search has also meant that rankings are different from state to state and person to person with search results based on your ISP, search history and location. Take mobile as an example, rankings change via location, personalization, and type of device.

Personalized search results are also inclined by social signals. Bing integrates with Facebook, Google+ results show in SERP, Twitter activity informs search decisions and all these social indicators are heavily influencing search results.

Add to this the fast adoption and renewed interest in content, part cause and part consequence, of Google changes (Panda and Penguin). It is clear that SEO tactics, tools, and business processes have changed dramatically.

The SERP results are no longer soloed. People no longer consume media in silos and marketers can no longer run campaigns in silo have and rely on the inevitability of ranking alone.

Revenue and Earned Media

Marketers now also have an rising number of channels to understand and influence customers. Earned media initiatives can reach further than ever, enabling you to drive consciousness, demand, and revenue.
Rank, although an important metric – Google has over 200 "signals" or ranking factors rank – can become a puzzling and seemingly meaningless metric for the CMO who also needs to see revenue related to rank.
According to Forrester Research's report, "Mix Art and Science for Marketing Success" from January:

Marketing savings will be based on business outcomes rather than habits and power plays. Marketing spending has long been based on user use of media – or worse yet, simply on how budgets were allocated last year and the year before that. But unimaginable access to data and powerful technology make this old model obsolete.

The growth and meaning of enterprise SEO, and the fusion of search, content, and social media brings a great opportunity to scale our earned media and integrated marketed efforts.

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Is There Importance In Your SEO Rankings?

If you are asking yourself this question they you are maybe thinking about selling your website. Or you want to know what your website is worth so you can make the choice to sell it or not.

Let’s be clear here. The parameters of this argument are a valuation based on what a buyer would be willing to recompense you for your website. And those parameters are defined by sites that are owned as businesses or investments, not client’s websites.

Now traditionally the value of your search engine rankings has been considered by the traffic amount x the adwords CPC. Market Samurai calls this their SEOV (SEO value) metric.

A simple method would look something like this:
Traffic x CPC = SEO Value

And example might be for Boston Injury Lawyer.

2000 x $40 = $8,000 per month.

Why Traditional SEO assessment is wrong

In the context of selling a website the traditional assessment of traffic x CPC is not relevant. Value is derived specially from profit generated by your website. All the assets combined generate profit and it is that profit that has value. In simple terms, your domain + traffic + content + your income do not equal your websites value.

Let’s state you had a website called howtomakemoneyonline.com and it was ranking number one for “how to make money online”

SEO assessment

Hypothetically. Let’s imagine there are 40,000 exact match searches for “how to make money online” at a CPC of $4.00 and that is the only keyword that you rank for. Assuming you are getting 40% of that traffic ranking number one in Google. Using traditional SEO value the website is worth $64,000 per month in SEO worth traffic value.

Website valuation method

Let’s say that the similar website generated $100,000 per year in profit from advertising and affiliate profits.

If you applied a multiple of say 2.5 times to that website the assessment would come back as $250,000.

One would argue that the website is worth $64,000 per month because of the traffic value. The details are that from a website buyers perspective the profit that site can make is what determines value. So they value the website at $250,000.

Tips When allowing for Selling Your Website

By definition, you should really be viewing your website as a business because that is what it is, an profits generating asset that generates income and profits.

So if you are thinking of selling your website then let’s canvas some website selling factors.

1. Make Your Traffic Defensible

Buyers want to reduce their risk when investing. Their main goal is to get a return on asset. The more risk an asset class the lower they are going to pay. Hence why government bonds are seen as the safest investment (lowest return). Generally buyers look for diverse income and traffic. That is why your traffic must be valid. This is summed up well by Matt McGee. As Matt points out having defensible traffic means having a range of sources including search, PPC, social media, direct traffic. This is a big challenge for search based sites that rely heavily on search engine traffic. Especially with the recent Google updates sites that had great value a few years ago have been completely wiped off the map and have no value today.

2. Establish a Selling Price

Do you really know what your website is worth? I’m sure you have some idea but there is usually a big difference between what you ‘want’ to get for your website and what you will ‘actually’ get for your website.

Your advertising price is usually based on the following:

    Your individual website and it’s unique assets

    What parallel websites have sold for before

    What the market is currently bearing for web businesses

3. Produce A Selling Document

Commonly referred to as an information memorandum or “the book”. This document is prepared to help sell your website. It includes such things as:

    An summary of the website

    The fiscal history

    Traffic history

    Synopsis on how it generates income

    Summary of operations (what is required to run it)

    Profit and Loss statements

    Client Interview (general FAQ’s buyers will have)

4. Locating Qualified Buyers

The number one confront webmasters have when trying to sell their website is locating qualified buyers.

There are a few options that you can consider:

•         Sell it yourself
•         confidential network
•         Business classified sites (e.g. businessforsale.com)
•         Forums
•         Flippa.com
•         Internet investment companies (like internetbrands.com)
•         Use a broker
•         Their list of buyers

5. Don’t Drop The Ball

Don’t underestimate the importance of this fact. Stop looking after your website for a month and you may lose 5-20% of your selling price. Let’s use this example:

6. Buyers Want the Lowest Price: Don’t Let Them Get It

Most business and financial buyers have bought many websites in their profession, while most webmasters have never sold a website.

Get yourself up on the terms used by a buyer. And be ready to keep strong on your asking price. There are a lot more buyers than sellers in the market in general; particularly with the market awareness from flippa.com the market is being educated on the prospect of investing in websites. Educate yourself on the process of valuation and look for multiple offers.

7. How to Keep Your Sale Confidential

If you try to sell your website by yourself you are maybe going to have to advertise it for sale. There is no stopping the fact that customers, employees, suppliers and competitors might find out. If you go around emailing people that your website is for sale, unless you are really sneaky, there is a small possibility that you will be able to keep your identity hidden.

To protect confidentiality, if that is important to you, the normal process is to develop a generic, non-revealing advertisement to send out asking for potentially interested parties to contact you for more in order. As the seller you have the right to screen all those enquiries, so if there is someone that you don’t want rummaging into your business financials and info you can refuse them receiving any further information from the broker.

How Google Looks at Back links nowadays to Rank Your Site

I talked concerning link value last year but I thought I’d go a few steps additional and add to that, covering how Google values links nowadays when link building isn't the center of awareness or the entire game that it once was.

Total Number: First and foremost, Google considers the total amount of links which you have. This isn't a mainly influential factor considering one good one from a high ranking, established, trustworthy site (more on this later) will be more important than thousands of spammy, low quality site links.

Number of Domains/Source: If you have thousands of links from the same site then it’s not really going to be helping you. For instance, if the greater part of your links were all coming from the same article directory, Google is going to reduce the influence of most of those links. Some people disagree that Google discounts influence after the first link from an exacting site. Therefore, link diversity is tremendously important, so you should be getting links from all types of sites from directories to blogs to video sites and so on.

Google can recognize where your links are coming from not just from the sites themselves but through varied IP addresses, so you certainly want your links coming from different IP addresses around the globe as this suggests you’re getting links from different people.

Anchor Text: I’ve talked a lot about anchor text lately in terms of how significant it is to vary up the anchor text which you use when creating links to your site. This works to keep your link profile diverse and natural looking because you have to think that if someone was linking to your site from his site, he likely wouldn't use the keyword you’re targeting on that page when pointing to your site.

Age: While some people consider that older links – links you've had for years pointing to your site – are more expensive and powerful than newer links you receive, when I refer to “age” here I’m referring to the age of the sites you’re receiving links from. Older, more established site links will be more powerful whereas links from newer sites won’t make as much of an impact. This goes with the idea that older sites have more authority and page rank and Google trusts them more.

Variation: I’ll take in “variation” here to once more drive home the point that diversity is significant in terms of anchor text and source of links. It doesn't stop there, however; variation is significant in terms of image versus text, placement of them on a choice of sites linking to you (high up in the content is best as opposed to sidebars or menu bars which are signs of link buying or exchanges), and dofollow versus nofollow links, as well.

Years ago, Google said that only DoFollow links would pass influence. After hearing that, everyone began concentrating completely on DoFollow and discounting going after NoFollow links in total. While a lot of webmasters still focus completely on DoFollow, a lot of SEOers believe that NoFollow links pass more power than before because Google will do what is necessary to reduce the success of those who are trying to game or play to Google’s algorithm and reward those who are not.

Quality: Quality is still a factor as I mentioned in opening. Receiving one link from a highly ranked and trusted site is far more precious than thousands of links from spammy blogs. If you are going to spend your time trying to get links, you want to spotlight on getting links from highly trusted and established sites which it’s hard to receive links from because they’re more conventional in whom they link to. In this case, it’s less about “getting” links and more about “earning” links through techniques like creating and sharing link bait or guest blogging for them.

Another sign of quality is significance, in that you want links from sites which are applicable to your site. If you’re getting one from a site about cars when your site is all about puppies, Google is likely going to discount the influence that it has as it is very likely that you created that link yourself because naturally a webmaster of a car site would not link to your puppy themed site on their own. In keeping with the variation point, it’s all right to have a few links from unrelated sites, but generally you’ll be staying in your niche.

Bad Links: On the other hand, the opposed of quality links, bad links will detract from and have an unpleasant effect on your ranking, so do what you can to limit the number of bad links pointing to your site.

Velocity: Link velocity refers to the rate and plan at which you’re building links to your site. The key here is to make your link velocity look natural or, in other words, you shouldn't get 10,000 links one month and 100 the next month. There shouldn't be a lot of curves in your velocity. You should continue to build more links each month than the one before it.