Three new ways to visualise your SEO performance – part one

SEO practitioners don’t usually share operational secrets and insights. In part one of a two part article, Andreas Pouros of multi-award winning digital marketing agency Greenlight breaks ranks to present the first of three interesting ways to display SEO data and information.

Search agencies gain competitive advantage by hoarding methods and techniques for just long enough to benefit from them, and then sharing them to get some love and respect as a bonus. This extends to methods for displaying SEO data and visualising performance. For instance, we tend never willingly to allow our reports to be seen by competitors.

But I’d like to break rank somewhat to present three interesting ways to display SEO data and information – methods that I’ve not seen others use, but that are increasingly becoming standard within my own group of companies. Part one is presented here. Part two will feature in the next issue of Monthly Briefing.

The SEO TreeMap

The SEO TreeMap is a method of visualising a site’s SEO performance from 30,000 feet, making it immediately obvious which search terms or search term categories you excel on within natural search and where you perhaps need to work harder.

The visualisation is built up from a comprehensive taxonomy, whereby all relevant search terms are first hierarchically categorised. For instance, the keyword ‘flights to Spain’ is added to a category called ‘Spain’, within which we would also put ‘flight to Madrid’, ‘flights to Barcelona’ and all other relevant terms and their variations. The keyword ‘Cyprus flight deals’ would be placed in the ‘Cyprus’ category, and so on, with increasing complexity as you delve deeper and deeper into your search term universe.

Once you have a fairly comprehensive taxonomy, you can then use search volume data from Google (or any other method of search term quantification) to build an SEO TreeMap chart like the one shown. The entire rectangle represents ‘audience size’, i.e. the total number of searches made per month against your keyword universe within the major search engines. In the example provided this adds up to 2.2 million searches each month for keywords relevant to the website in question, i.e. the total rectangle represents 2.2 million searches.

The many rectangles within the overall rectangle, i.e. the nested rectangles, then break down this number of searches into categories and sub-categories. The categories and subcategories house continent, country and city destination search terms. Drilling into these rectangles would reveal the keywords that each group is actually composed of.

Now for the clever bit. The colour of each nested rectangle shows you how well you rank (in aggregate) for the keywords within each category. Red means your rankings are poor, green means your rankings are great, and of course coloured gradations in between identify gradations of performance between those extremes. In practice, therefore, you’d look for the biggest red rectangle to identify where you really need to work much harder because your rankings are very poor, practically making you invisible for those keywords.

In our example this would be keywords in the ‘Qatar’ group. The fact that this keyword group performs far worse than any other might suggest that there are technical problems with the Qatar page/s.

A big orange or yellowy-green rectangle would represent a great candidate group of keywords to undergo some quick-wins work, as it would identify a voluminous opportunity that isn’t far from being in money-making ranking positions

The example shown therefore uses relative rectangle sizes to represent opportunity sizes (number of physical searches that are made) with the colours showing how well you rank against that audience. This gives you immediate and easily consumable insight into your performance. Furthermore, with the right data inputs you could change the SEO TreeMap to show even more meaningful information.

For example, the size of each rectangle could represent commercial opportunity (e.g. how much each keyword and category of keyword is worth to you in actual monetary terms) with the colours again showing how well you perform. Alternatively, the rectangles could represent the size of the opportunity for each search term category and the colour could show link weight, which would immediately show you which parts of the site are getting more or less than their fair share of link juice from your link-building campaigns.

A quarterly review of performance which compares a three month old SEO TreeMap with a current one is an effective way of determining quickly how your SEO performance has changed during that period.

To build a SEO TreeMap you need to engage a tiling algorithm. It isn’t something you can just create in Excel unfortunately. Type ‘treemapping software’ into Google for some options, or engage with the One platform from Hydra, where SEO TreeMaps are a standard and automatable reporting template.

Next issue

The SEO Scatter and Race Line.

 

 

Andreas Pouros is COO at Greenlight and a guest blogger on Econsultancy. Hydra is a Greenlight company. This article was first published on Econsultancy.

 

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