3 SEO Lessons from the Presidential Election

As we approach the end of the presidential race, it’s time to reflect on what we’ve learned.  More specifically, what are the key takeaways that we can apply to our digital marketing?

 

That’s right, while you were watching the debates you were subconsciously learning about marketing. :)

 

In this article, I’ll walk through 3 of the SEO lessons you picked up along the way…

 

1. The Wisdom of the Crowd

We’re all familiar with how our presidents are elected in the United States.  On Election Day, we go to the polls and cast our vote.  Those votes are tallied up and the candidate with the most votes wins.

 

While this is not a perfect example, it does loosely follow the phenomenon known as the “wisdom of the crowd.”

 

Studies have shown that when you average the guesses, or votes, of a crowd you’ll end up very close to the correct answer.  The classic example is when a crowd of people try to guess the weight of a cow.  It turns out that the average of the weights guessed will be remarkably close to the actual weight.  You can learn more about this by reading The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki.

 

This is important to understand because Google uses this phenomenon to rank websites in their search engine.  Every time you use Google and click on the search results you’re casting a vote.  You’re either telling Google you like what you see on the first page or you don’t like what you see.  Over time, Google uses that data to ensure the best webpages show up at the top of the results.

 

Think about that for a minute.  You have the power to influence Google’s search results just like you have the power to influence the election!

 

2. The Skeletons In Your Closet

In politics, your past will certainly haunt you.  We’ve seen this time and time again during this election.  Every other day there’s a new audio recording of a candidate flip flopping on a key topic or a video revealing unsavory behavior.  I don’t even have to mention a specific example because we can all quickly think of a handful on our own.

 

Depending on the size of the skeleton in the closet, candidates can easily lose elections because of something they did or said in the past.

 

The same is true with SEO.  Just because you’re ranking well now doesn’t mean Google won’t eventually find a skeleton in your website’s closet.  For example, Google may discover that you paid for other websites to link to you.  Or maybe you created several websites that are using nearly identical website copy.  These tactics may go unnoticed for a while, but once Google finds out, your SEO candidacy can come to an end.

 

3. Reputation By Association

In politics, you need to be extra careful about who you hang out with and who you do business with.  Trump received a lot of backlash when he praised Putin and gave an impression that he and Putin were friends.  Then Hilary found herself under fire for receiving money from Morocco.

 

Both examples hurt the respective candidate’s reputation, and in turn, hurt their campaign.

 

Guess what, this can also happen with your SEO.  Google reviews the websites that are linking to you (and that you’re linking to) because those are your “online friends.”  If a lot of low quality (aka spammy) websites are linking to you, then that can hurt your website’s reputation, which in turn, will hurt your Google rankings!

How Recent Organic Search Changes Will Affect Paid Search

Search marketers were pitched not one but two curveballs recently which have forever reshaped the landscape of search engine optimization (SEO).

The industry saw the first one coming a mile away as Google began encrypting organic search queries two years ago. Now, there’s almost zero visibility into the organic keywords which drive visitors to websites (other than what is offered in Google Webmaster Tools).
Understanding the granular relationship between a website and its organic keyword traffic has been the core of modern SEO. Without this deep level of insight, it becomes clear that organic search marketers will have to adjust their approach.
The other major change crept up on the SEO community as the Hummingbird algorithm was live for a month and was a virtual secret until Google announced it in September. This is rather unusual as SEOs have been quick to notice previous, major algorithmic changes the moment they have been introduced. For example, when Google released the Panda update a few years ago, some sites immediately experienced a major drop in traffic and publicized their woes.
Hummingbird focuses on better understanding the concepts within a query rather than relying strictly on the alphanumeric characters and matching them up.
Google provided fairly transparent rationale for both changes. Consumer privacy concerns were at the root of organic search keyword encryption and prompted a larger discussion over what kind of data Web publishers should share outside of their own walls. With Hummingbird, Google hopes to improve search engine results by better discerning the concepts behind a search than ever before. It reportedly works much better with mobile search where consumers using voice search generally input longer queries than typed searches.

The Impact On Paid Search

A complex relationship has existed between paid and organic search ever since the rise of search engine marketing in the late 1990s. The most successful brands have found ways to integrate the two disciplines and connect them as one holistic search engine marketing program. These elite marketers operate with an understanding that when one lever is pushed, it pulls on the other.
One of the initial assumptions discussed in the SEM blogosphere was that these recent natural search changes may drive some SEO budgets to pay-per-click (PPC) search. Well-known search marketer, Eric Enge, CEO of Stone Temple Consulting, hasn’t yet noticed this shift. “While some people may do more PPC as a result of the recent Google changes, we have not seen any mass movement in that direction among our clients,” says Enge.
Advice Interactive Group’s VP of Media, Shelley Ellis, feels there may have been some business motivations behind some of these moves. “Shortly after the first time SEO encryption was announced around May of 2010, I predicted that part of Google’s reasoning behind that decision might have something to do with the future of search remarketing on Google AdWords,” Ellis explains. “I found it interesting that Google’s recent announcement or update on this element of SEO coincided with Google’s search remarketing coming out of beta (now available to all advertisers).”

Will Budgets Migrate?

Only time will tell if some portion of SEO budgets will migrate to paid search campaigns. For now, SEOs seem to be contemplating how their approach needs to change in order to roll with the punches. One of the action items is to get more integrated with PPC counterparts to supplement the data loss from encrypted search.
“It used to be that SEO pushed keyword information to PPC but, with SEO keyword encryption, now the SEO teams are asking for information from the paid media teams,” says Ellis. “Through analytics and matched search queries, we can now break down the types of keyword searches that brought a searcher to specific PPC landing pages.”
Paid search marketers may find their approach evolving as well. With Google now matching search queries slightly differently than before, there could be some useful insights from organic search on how to best to target and message consumers.
“Hummingbird’s push toward better understanding a user’s intent during a search may cause publishers to focus more themselves on building pages and PPC campaigns around user intent, as well,” says Enge. “That won’t happen overnight, but I can see it happening over time.”
There’s no doubt it’s key to tap into Google’s deep understanding of what consumers really want from their searches. Before Hummingbird, it was all about matching alphanumeric strings, so many paid search marketers may not have paid much attention to user intent. Now, as Google applies its Knowledge Graph for better organic search results, paid marketers can leverage these insights as valuable market research.
Paid and organic search are the yin and yang to the bigger puzzle that is search engine marketing. Whatever impacts one, may impact the other. Although the long-term effect that these recent organic changes will have on both may not be known for some time, search marketers can only act in the short term and hope for the best. It would make sense for each side of the lake to stay connected – there’s a good chance that the ripples and waves from one will certainly be felt by the other.

The PPC Experiment You Never Dare Run

A question that PPC account managers frequently have to deal with is, “Why are we paying for this traffic? Aren’t we going to get that traffic anyway?”
It’s a fair question, even if it is completely annoying to hear for the twentieth time by the twentieth new accounting manager you’ve had to break in. No matter what data you present, no matter how perfectly your charts demonstrate perfect, positive correlation between ad spend, revenues and profits, they never seem satisfied with your answer.
“Fine,” you say. “Let’s try an experiment. We call it the PPC nuclear option.”
“The nuclear option?” the accountant gasps. ”What’s that?”
“Well,” you continue obligingly, “We take all our PPC ad campaigns offline for a few months, and see what the true impact on our bottom line looks like. I just need you to sign off on it here….”
That usually ends the discussion — at least until next month’s AdWords and Bing Ads bills come due.

The PPC Nuclear Option — For Real!

I won’t bore you with the juicy details of how it came about (unless you promise to buy me a drink next time we meet), but the long and short of it is that I am now in the middle of a real-life PPC nuclear option experiment.
Campaigns that had been running for a few years were taken offline abruptly three months ago, and we are just about to put them back online. The website is now relying completely on referral and organic search traffic. The website itself and all downstream processes have remained virtually unchanged.
I thought it would be interesting to make a few simple observations at this point in the experiment. I’ll save deeper analysis for a later date, after we’ve put the campaigns back online.
Observation #1: Greater Than Expected Decline In Keyword Conversion Performance

Keyword conversion performance  before and after the “PPC Nuclear Option” was detonated.

Before we detonated the nuclear option, we were aware we’d lose substantial traffic to the site because about 70% of our traffic was coming from paid traffic sources. What we didn’t know was how our brand keywords or our highest ranking keywords (which were also part of the URL) would fare.
In the chart above, I’ve summarized the before and after conversion volumes for most important keywords that have driven conversions and was surprised by some of the results. We looked at our brand keywords, keywords that were prominent on the site and which appeared in our website URL, as well as our most productive non-brand keywords.
Branded Keywords - Our client’s brand is not a household name and there’s not a lot of search volume associated with it, so our brand keywords have never been our largest source of search conversions. They do, however, rank highly and so we were surprised to see conversion volume on them drop by 28%. We figured, based on earlier studies on brand keyword cannibalization, that we’d see only 10-15% drop in conversion volume for our high-ranking brand terms.
What would account for a greater than expected decline in brand term performance? I have a hunch that our Google GDN display ad campaigns may have been providing a lift while they were running, but since we are not a famous brand, that halo effect only lasted while our display ad campaigns were running. If my theory is correct, we should expect to observe an uplift once we start advertising again. Stay tuned.
URL Keywords – Our next best performers were keywords that literally described our products and which appeared in our website URL. These keywords have generally been at or near the top of the organic search listings, and they perform more like brand terms than generic keywords. We were most surprised that these would have dropped by a whopping 59%.
Non-Brand Keywords – We were also astounded at how deeply the PPC nuclear option demolished the performance of our best non-brand keywords, which dropped pretty near to zero.
Clearly, this client is too dependent on paid search on its most important terms.
Observation #2: Organic Traffic Needs To Contribute More Search Volume

After taking PPC campaigns offline, online organic and referral traffic remain.

This Google Analytics graph shows all search traffic from 2009 through 2013, and to my last point, demonstrates a highly unbalanced mix of online traffic sources, since 75% of their visitor traffic dropped when the nuclear option was detonated. I don’t know what the perfect ratios should be for organic to paid search traffic, but in general, I think most of us would agree that, over time, the mix should start to skew toward more unpaid sources of traffic and rely less on paid traffic.
Of course, figuring this out didn’t require taking the nuclear option because the data has been there the whole time. It does certainly lay bare the situation unambiguously, however. The accounting manager will love this data, and so will the SEO team (that doesn’t exist at the moment) because it shows how even modest investments in SEO can be justified financially.
Observation #3: Friendly “Ghost Clicks”

Google Analytics reports a small amount of PPC ad “ghost clicks” even after taking campaigns offline.

Even two months after taking the campaigns offline, we are still getting visitors from “ghost clicks.” Most ghost clicks happen when a visitor types your URL into their browser after first clicking on your ad. When they start typing the URL, their browser cache types ahead for them, showing them your URL along with your original URL tracking variables. We observed about 4% of our visitors coming in this way, but they represent only about 1% of the original ad click volume.
I don’t know what a good “ghost click” ratio might be, but I’d like it to be higher because that means that our site was so memorable that people typed it into their browser rather than doing a new search.
Observation #4: Unfriendly “Ghost Clicks”
I’ve observed that not all PPC Ad ghost clicks are friendly. In some cases, they may be competitors doing deep dives on your site for whatever nefarious purposes they have in mind. Here’s my evidence of unfriendly ghost clicks:

Hmmm… Lots of visits all of a sudden from PPC ad ghost clicks. Does not look like a friendly ghost to me.

Why would we, all of a sudden, get hundreds of PPC ad ghost clicks when our campaigns are clearly turned off? My first guess was that someone accidentally turned them on; but no, that wasn’t it. I dug one level deeper in Google Analytics and found that all the clicks were coming, on different days, from different locations.

Who clicks from Beverly Hills, Little Ferry and Trinidad? Jet setter, perhaps?

Using my best TV detective deduction skills to develop a profile of the perp, I see that the clicks come from Beverly Hills, CA and Little Ferry, NJ. Both are pretty affluent suburbs. I also see clicks from Trinidad. Could this be a rich jet-setting venture capitalist trying to discover our secret sauce? If so, I’ll bet they are also reading my column; so to you I say, “I know who you are, and I saw what you did.”
Observation #5: Google Analytics’ Accounting For Paid Search Clicks Is Excellent
I had a weird observation when looking at my paid search clicks versus my analytics data. Google Analytics was reporting 7% more clicks than we actually paid for from all our paid traffic sources. I know that Analytics and AdWords account for clicks differently and that Google Analytics reports clicks (suspicious or otherwise), but I never took notice of how great the difference was.
I ran an AdWords invalid clicks report and subtracted those from my Google Analytics total, and found that the number of clicks from our paid search campaigns matched up almost perfectly (99.1% match) with the clicks Google Analytics reported receiving.
An added surprise was my discovery that Google AdWords continues to credit invalid clicks to the account even after turning off all spend. It wasn’t a large amount, but it was a very pleasant surprise nonetheless to see additions to our account balances.

Questions About The PPC Nuclear Option?

I’ve touched on just a few of my own casual observations from this unplanned PPC nuclear option experiment, but there are so many other observations to be made as we bring this campaign back to life. If you are curious about any part of our experiment, and have questions of your own, please leave a comment below, and I’ll see if we can get an answer for you.