About the author Supplychainer Ehsan Ehsani, researcher and technology author, has 4 years of experience as system development expert, project coordinator, project team member and consultant in the areas of OM, WMS, BPR, Strategy Implementation and of course, SCM. As …

Posted by RobOusbey

This is a graph of organic traffic for a theoretical site – they might be in an industry such as print advertising, construction equipment or VHS rental. The decline in traffic is pronounced and serious.

A critical distinction when looking at a graph like this is whether the site’s performance is increasingly worse than the competitors, or whether the whole industry is in decline. In this post I want to recommend some metrics that can be tracked to benchmark your site against competitors (independent of market behaviour) and to check the health of the industry. I’ll then make suggestions for finding opportunities to slow or reverse the trend of dropping traffic.

For the benefit of the time-poor, the post ends with a three point checklist / summary.

Competitors and Benchmarking

There are a couple of different metrics you can use track, which will demonstrate the more direct outputs of your SEO work, and expose your performance amongst competitors.

This chart tracks the Site Authority of the target domain (and some competitors) through time.

To date, trying to chart Linkscape metrics as been a bit misleading: the rapid increase in the reach of Linkscape and modifications of the tool’s algorithms have meant that month-by-month reporting of a site’s Authority wasn’t always a fair comparison. However, Nick tells me that the team are currently putting effort into tackling the challenge of tracking this data. Though you’ll have more confidence in drawing a trend chart such as this one soon, I’d still recommend collecting numbers right now to get a snapshot of where your site is amongst the competition.

Obviously, this assessment of site strength is query independent; differences in site architecture, on-page term targeting and the anchor text of external links will have a significant effect on each site’s performance and number of keywords.

In many ways, the next graph address this. The line for the target site is an ‘average ranking position’ – I’d recommend creating this by taking around twenty non-branded, representative keyphrases (eg: ten which you’re specifically targeting and ten which send a significant amount of traffic) and finding the mean of the site’s ranking for each phrase.

The competitor lines should be calculated by finding the mean ranking position of that site, for each of these keywords where the site ranks in the top 20. (We do this so that the mean isn’t artificially dragged down by keyphrases which the site isn’t trying to compete for, and where it ranks very poorly.)

Even a single month’s data points on these two graphs will provide a snapshot of your site’s position amongst the industry’s other players. Tracking the data each month will demonstrate how your standing has changed, and can directly show the impact of your SEO work – both on-site and off-site.

Industry Assessment

If you have been collecting ranking data in the past, then it can be useful to identify a term for which you’ve had a relatively static ranking over the last year or so. If your traffic from this term has declined over the same period then this provides a useful example of how market behaviour outside of your control is having an effect on the business.

If you don’t have historic ranking data, but suspect that your industry is in decline, you should compare search volume trends to organic traffic sent by some specific terms. In the example below, the site sees a decline in traffic for the single keyphrase ‘football tickets‘ but comparing this to the search volume for the term shows that the site’s performance has actually improved – they are increasing their share of that traffic.

If the industry really is declining and search volumes for all the typically valuable phrases are unlikely to return, then there can be a serious consideration about even continuing to operate in the market. If your core business was VHS rental, consider offering Blu-Ray; if you rank well for house and holiday insurance but are suffering from the decline in these markets then consider adding pet insurance  – a steady / growing market. (Check out this Google Insights data for UK insurance markets.)

Of course, these are extreme examples – and if you’re in these particular industries then you shouldn’t need a blog post to make these suggestions – but they remind us that there are some markets where a time comes to look for business from elsewhere.

Actions

As we did in the graph above, you must begin by looking at the organic traffic trend for keyphrases individually. A lot of information is lost when data is aggregated (such as in total organic traffic.) Go back and look at your highest volume keyphrases from a year or two ago, and compare these to your current highest volume keyphrases, by charting the monthly volume of traffic they sent over that period. It may quickly become clear that whilst your keyword portfolio has been dragged down by some dogs, there are some stars (or problem children) that are contributing a great deal to the overall traffic.

If you last did keyword research 12 or 18 months ago, user behaviour may have changed significantly – even for people looking for exactly the same product. Whilst the metrics mentioned above may bring you to the gloomy conclusion that search volume in your industry is substantially down, it’s possible to overlook the fact that there’s simply been a change in searcher behaviour.

Examples of such changes that have happened in different geographic regions:

• searchers are using more direct queries (’cinema‘ & ‘film tickets‘ are steady or down, ‘film times‘ is way up)
• searchers are moving from long tail to head terms (’internet marketing‘ & ‘website promotion‘ are declining but ‘SEO‘ and ‘SEM‘ are up)
• searchers are moving from head to long tail terms (’currency exchange‘ is down but specific terms such as ‘dollars to pounds‘ are up)

The message here: don’t miss out on opportunities to compete on the emerging keyword groups.

I promised you a checklist.

Please take away these three points:

1. If your organic traffic is down, either for particular keywords or as a whole, be clear whether this is because your site is under-performing, or because the search volume for a keyword / in an industry is descending.
2. Benchmark yourself against competitors by regularly recording the Authority and/or rankings position for relevant keyphrases of your site and theirs
3. Revisit your keyword research – a year is a long time on the internet, particularly given the current state of flux that so many industries are experiencing.

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Congress is looking at ways to plug a hole that increasingly is letting hackers gain access to a company’s data. A bill, passed in the House and awaiting action in the Senate, would require software companies to inform Internet users of privacy and security risks associated with file-sharing programs.

The software, known as peer-to-peer programs, or P2P, is often used to download music and movies and is the largest portion of Internet traffic. But it can also lead to the inadvertent sharing of documents, a problem linked to plenty of data breaches lately.

The bill would require software developers to clearly tell users when their files are made available to other users over the Internet. It would require file-sharing software to display a pop-up box alerting Internet users when they encounter such programs. The bill would also let consumers and employers block or disable file-sharing programs.

The Federal Trade Commission is on a campaign to make people aware of P2P vulnerabilities. The agency says drivers license numbers, social security numbers and other personal data has been compromised many times in recent months.

“This bill will let people know-in a way that they can understand-that their personal files are being shared with complete strangers,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn), one of the co-sponsors of the P2P legislation.

For more on P2P legislation:
- see TheHill.com blog
- see this Computerworld article

Related Articles:
Soldiers’ data stolen, exploiting P2P tech 
P2P breach hits Congress

Creating a top 5 seems to be getting more difficult week after week. Not only does the quality of the blog articles increase, the amount of blogs listed on PlanetV12n and the amount of articles also increase steadily. I hope I can keep up with you guys, or I might just need to get a cute assistant to help me out with this…. Hmmm, that's actually not a bad idea. Anyway, here's the list!

• Eric Gray – Taking snapshots of VMware ESX 4 running in a VM
  Clearly, the capability introduced with VMware vSphere 4 that allows VMware ESX 4 to virtualize itself is a real crowd-pleaser.

  However, one limitation that some have discovered while using this lab-testing technique is the lack of ability to use snapshots with virtual ESX systems. In fact, after taking a snapshot of a virtual ESX VM, you will see the system boot into the recovery shell.

• Kenneth van Ditmarsch – Using LeftHand Snapshot techniques within a VMware Environment
  Well, currently no integration exists between the LeftHand Snapshot
  technique and vCenter. If the LeftHand Snapshot process is started, vCenter isn’t alerted to quiesce the VM’s and therefore the VM’s are able to continue processing while a LeftHand
  Snapshot is made, which leads to inconsistent VM states. Last year the LeftHand roadmap indicated that vCenter application integration would be available in the new SAN/iQ 8.5. SAN/iQ 8.5 is currently shipped with the HP/LeftHand P4000 G2 nodes and will be available for download on 29th of March for existing P4000 user. For some reasons however vCenter application integration is shoved back to Q4 2010 or later.
• Steve Kaplan – The multi-hypervisor fallacy
  Implicit in multi-hypervisor advocacy is an undertone of virtualizing
  servers rather than the data center. This myopic perspective
  limits both savings and synergies. Cisco studies, for example, show a
  lack of vNetwork capability results in 30% fewer servers that can be
  virtualized along with 30% higher administrative requirements. Network
  administrators have no way to monitor traffic over a vSwitch for
  compliance, auditing and troubleshooting purposes, and they cannot
  apply network and security policies that follow a VM as it
  live-migrates. Since only vSphere enables vNetwork capabilities,
  multiple hypervisors leave at least a portion of the data center
  running less efficiently and less secure.
• Steve Chambers – IT Departments and the Collapse of the Silos
  Today I had the opportunity to present at the National Computing Center Think Tank. The NCC have a fantastic remit to bring together practitioners from the private and public sector to explore the current realities. Add to this the vendor invitations where folks like me can share our observations with no axe to sell, and it makes for a really great discussion. Awesome stuff. Prior to this invitation I prepared two documents. First I wrote a blunt paper based on my observations and feedback via Twitter. Second I wrote a Prezi for that to share the findings in ten pieces.
• Craig Risinger – The Resource Pool Priority-Pie Paradox
  We run into this on a daily basis; Misunderstanding of the “shares”
  concept in combination with resource pools. To start with a bold
  statement: A few VMs in a Low-shares Resource Pool can outperform each
  of many VMs in a High-shares Resource Pool. How is this possible you
  might ask. Resources are divided at the Resource Pool level first. Each
  Resource Pool is like a pie whose size determines amount of resources
  usable (during contention). Then that pie is subdivided among the VMs
  in the pool. A Resource Pool applies to all its VMs collectively. Thus
  a smaller pie divided among fewer VMs can yield more resources per VM
  than a larger pie divided by even more VMs.

Last week we had a little issue with mounting directories from a new Solaris 10 server. It was noted the nfs service was not running on it. We had to import and then enable the service. After that, we were able to mount the required directories from the server.

# svcs -a | grep nfs
# cd /var/svc/manifest/network
# svccfg -v import nfs/server.xml
# svcadm enable nfs/server

or

# svccfg -v import /var/svc/manifest/network/nfs/server.xml
# svcadm enable nfs/server

If you want to disable and delete a service, see below.

# svcadm disable network/nfs/server
# svccfg delete network/nfs/server