– Good day my fellow link building enthusiasts. That’s like a total of none of us. This is chapter three and it’s – I’ve forgotten the title of it. The title is “Effective Campaign Metrics.” As said, by Eric Ward. Eric and I differ on this again. This is his side, that’s ya boy’s side. And Eric argues that there are two types of campaigns, two types of link building campaigns. Search engine impact and market engagement. I’m just gonna quickly explain what those are to you, and then I’ll talk about why I don’t do them. Not that they’re bad. Why I don’t do them personally. And then how I do shit. So, Eric says search engine impact, is these are things that directly effect traffic from SERPS. So, essentially raising your rankings, right? Market engagement is stuff that sends traffic through perceived authority and trust. So, basically raising your profile. If you wanna see how to do that, I did a video last week. So, check it out on YouTube. I’m gonna put a link somewhere. Don’t know where. Don’t know how it works yet. So, I’ll quickly read out what the, what the merits are of these things, and quickly what Eric says to measure. I was gonna write them down, but the lists are fucking huge. So, I don’t want to. And check out these things, they’re so cool, aren’t they? It’s like static white boards. Hey, I like ’em. Okay, so, search engine impact. Some of the benefits of that. Increased perceived trust and authority of your site to search engines and searches, more traffic and showing the prior research, this gives … If somebody searches something, and you come up in the first few results, they generally trust you a lot more. Excuse me. Perceived relevance of your site. So, links from … If you’re trying to change the market space that you’re working in, links from trusted authorities in that space are gonna help you merge into them. Direct SERP keyword impact through anchor text manipulation. So, essentially if you want to anchor for a specific keyword more anchor text of that exact thing from relevant or authoritative sites are gonna give you bumps in those things. Eric says to measure in these things. Excuse me, again. To measure, what to measure in a search engine impact campaign. So, search rankings for key terms, percentage of increase in converting traffic, percentage of increase in search traffic from geographic regions, increase in pages on domain that yield traffic, percentage increase in non branded search traffic, percentage fluctuation in engagement metrics, such as time on site, time on pages and bounce rate, number plus location of links from sites/people deemed authoritative, number plus location of links from sites/people deemed relevant. The market engagement type campaigns, this is sending traffic through referrals and stuff like that, it will obviously, it will build your organic rankings, as well, but you know, that’s just a nice side effect of all types. This is much closer to the way that I do things, but still way more work than I like to do. So, some of the benefits of this type of campaign are to build your company and personal brand, so trust and authority from sites linking to you. You know, you borrow a little bit of trust and authority from anyone who links to you. People trust them, they then trust you. Building your lead (inaudible links equal traffic, which equal sales and inquires, that type of thing. Engaging the expert community in guiding conversation. I did speak about this last week, in the Raising Your Profile video. So, this is more about finding the level of conversation, then matching that level, and then once you’ve matched it you can start to move it and change it. Eric does make sure that you say, “This is for the benefit of your market,” and not for the benefit of your individual company or site. Which I think is fair enough, because Eric’s like the most wholesome or was the most wholesome link builder I’ve ever spoken to. He says that in these type of campaigns, you should measure the percentage increase in targeted referral traffic, the percentage increase in referral traffic conversions, which is extremely important, percentage increase and engagement metrics, such as time on site, time on pages and bounce rate, note that this is percentage increase and not percentage fluctuation, as in the last type of campaign. I’m not sure of the relevance of why he’s changed those things, but I’m sure if you buy his book, you’ll get a more deeper understanding of it. Percentage increase in branded search terms, so this is stuff like, people searching for your business name. Where am I? Percentage increase of mentions in target media over competitors, which is hugely important. We just did a training on this type of stuff in DCWD last week. Number of blog posts and articles about your site or organisation. So that’s just sort of like organic, natural links without you having to do outreach for them. People just, they have an awareness of your company or site, and they just start writing about it. And you know, use you as sort of a hub of information, as in the last video. Number of customers indicating that media provoked their inquiry. I disagree with this one, because I don’t really think it’s our job to do other things in the organisation. That’s more of like the sales persons job, or whatever. Number of third party mentions and community pass alongs. Standard, just people giving you referrals. Number of positive responses in conversation thread exchanges. So, I guess that’s just when you’re talking on Twitter and stuff, and in forums. Number of key influences known to actively suggest your products or services to those who trust them. That’s a fucking huge one, which I love. Some of the big dogs, they’ll sort of back you, and say, “Yes this person knows what they’re talking about,” and you get a chunk of their authority then. People just trust them so they then trust you. Same as we spoke about earlier. Number of positive goal-focused emails exchanged. Again, I don’t think that’s the job of an SEO, but whatever. Number of newsletters/RSS subscription increases. Does anyone really care about those type of things now? Newsletters? Yeah, fair enough. It’s gettin’ people on your sales list. But again, not really the job of the SEO. More of like a marketing manager’s type job. So, now I’m gonna quickly tell you the way I do things. So, the reason that all of this is not the way that I do stuff is just simply because it takes a lot of time. It’s way more effort and time. And I would say that it’s more suitable for sort of the owner of a business or, you know, if you’re like a one man band. Or a deeply invested in-house staff member. So, if you’re like a founder member, you know, you have a percentage of the profits and stuff like that. Because this is fully engaged. Like I kind of imagine running either of these types of campaigns the way that Eric does and being able to have more than one client at a time. Just my way of thinking. It’s not fitting with my sort of minimal or productized way of offering services. I will be doing a video about this next week, which is gonna be a fucking mammoth one. Cause that’s my new positioning for myself. The way that I do things, is that i want to sell one thing and one thing only. But that doesn’t mean that all of the stuff that Eric just mentioned we can’t use some of those to build links. So if we’re selling link building as a service some of the shit that Eric just said, we can absolutely use those. And this is how I do things. It’s way, way, way more of a traffic focused strategy. And we’re gonna call it the Dan Ray Way, because, you know, everyone loves a fucking huge ego. It’s gonna be very close to this one, but much, much less effort in my opinion. So, I track four things and four things only with clients. The rise in organic clicks. So this is the number of people who are clicking on your results in search engine. The rise in organic impressions. So, that’s the number of times that your site shows up when somebody searches something. It’s the amount of times that your domain shows up in the search results. Three: the links placed. Which is, you know, pretty standard link reporting. This is how many links we’ve got, and here’s where they are. You know, you can have metrics and stuff like that. I don’t. And four: the referral traffic increases. So, this is for all of these links placed, how many people click on those links and come through to your site? This is my primary goal. This is the traffic that I want to get. This is just a nice like side effect of doing this sort of link building. We can monitor these things using a mixture of Google Search Console. I was going to say Webmaster Tools then. Google Search Console for this and this. And we keep this one in a spreadsheet, just on Google Docs. And this one here, Google Analytics. Pretty simple, straightforward. I don’t really think this is, it’s not super relevant to this video, but I think it was worth having done anyway. So, a lot of you guys come to me, and I see a lot of your offerings. You know, you send me your website. I check it out. Describe it. Tell you how to do better. That’s just the Dan Ray way. But you sell based on either keywords or rankings. So, selling on keywords is sort of like when people go you know, I’ll rank five keywords on page one for, you know, I’ve written four x’s there. A lot of you guys are mute for three, which is fucking useless. Selling based on rankings is sort of tracking specific keywords and getting paid for like where they are. So, it’s like, you know, I’ll rank this keyword number one for you, and you’ll pay me when it hits number one. Not on the traffic that it drives. I disagree with both of these types, because you don’t get credit for sort of long-tail keywords, referrals, etcetera. Rankings for me, they’ve very, very important, but not as a metric themselves. They’re mainly just a path to traffic. Traffic is the goal, always. Increasing your keyword rankings do help that, but I think to sell based on them is fucking useless. Because what if you can … I’ve had sites where you absolutely cannot rank for the number one keyword. Whatever it is, you can’t rank for it. So, the strategy is more to rank for long-tail. And when you’re trying to do that you happen to just rank for thousands of other keywords. To not get credit for that is fucking stupid. So, if you go and look at the video I made on the core content strategy, that’s how I do things. Because I just think it’s a very systemized thing. You say you’re doing this, this, and this and this. Here are the expected results of that thing. You’re traffic will go up. You’ll make sales. It’s a much, much better value concept than you know, I’ll rank five keywords, or let’s track this one keyword for you. That’s mine. This is Eric’s. This is mine. And I’ll see you tomorrow. Which, I don’t know the title of the video, so. Oh, I think it’s linkable assets. So, a fun one. This might go across a few videos, so, enjoy it. It’s gonna be probably be the most interesting one to you.
