Split Testing Keyword Lists – Zip Codes vs. Cities
One of the questions I received a lot in my former career as CTO of Angular Marketing was whether to use cities or zip-codes in site architecture. For example, imagine a client comes to me who runs tennis clinics across the North Carolina triangle (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill). Should they build their website like this… http://tenniscoaches/raleigh-nc/classes or like this… http://tenniscoaches/27519/classes Well, it turns out there is a really easy way to answer this question by split-testing with Moz Keyword Explorer lists.
GrepWords is Mine, All Mine, Muhahahahaha…. well, also Carters, but still, close enough.
So, it is rare that I make the foray into paid tools, but I finally decided to bite the bullet and jump in. About 4 months ago I was reached out to by the folks at GrepWords as I was working on a post on YouMoz and had put out a request over Twitter for any ideas on keyword tools. At the time, like many of you, I had never heard of GrepWords. They were a beta API at that point and only really offered 2 things. Lots of keyword data, fast. Interestingly enough, that is what I needed. That is what I have always needed. Unfortunately, they needed a lot of work. They couldn’t really do payment processing well because they were outside the U.S., they didn’t really have a nice design or any tools tied to it. They built up a decent group of beta users who...
Relevancy Modified MozRank: A Smarter Metric for Rank Analysis
We have been working for a while now on our own internal correlation study in partnership with Trident Marketing and Fuzzy Logix. In working on this project, time and time again it shocked me how crude our current ranking metrics are. We finally have good raw data from sources like SEOMoz and Majestic SEO but we have only begun to scratch the surface of how Google uses these types of data to organize and create search rankings. In the same way that SEOMoz identified a simple statistical modeling technique known as Latent Dirichlet Allocation as a likely candidate for how Google models topic relevancy, we have been looking for similar statistical techniques that Google is likely to use in turning raw link data into metrics more suitable for ranking pages. The...
Thoughts on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and Search
First off, kudos to the SEOMoz team, and specifically, Ben Hendrickson for their stunning study and continued focus on building a data and research-driven approach to SEO. That being said, I feel like some grains of salt need to be thrown into this recent study regarding the recent study regarding the relationship between LDA (topic modeling) and search rankings. To begin, let’s make it clear that it is generally accepted that a good portion of the search algorithm is textual relevance. Similarly, it would not be unreasonable to believe that Google uses just a few sophisticated mathematical tools to accomplish this relevance measurement, making it the easiest to discern and most singularly shocking. Whenever someone struck upon the meat of this part of the...
Controlled Experimentation + Correlation Data Gives Solid Evidence
I am always excited to hear that our internal testing using controlled experimentation matches up with that of those doing correlation studies, like the great work coming out of SEOMoz. Most recently, Rand Fishkin posted a great piece on correlations between numerous ranking factors and outcomes in both Google and Bing. One of the more “surprising” pieces of data revealed in this correlation study was the relationship between the .org extension vs. .net/com/gov/etc. It seems that in both Bing and Google, there is a slight bias towards the .org TLD. Interestingly, back in 2008 before SEOMoz had built such a great data set to perform correlation studies like this, we created a controlled experiment to look at potential Top Level Domain Analysis. We...
New SEO iPhone Link Juice App Released
Kudos to the team over at Link Juice for their release of a truly fantastic iPhone app. The app allows you to get access to a link data from SEOMoz, Majestic SEO and SEMRush in a useful, intuitive manner. Well done, this is truly an indispensible app for SEOs on-the-go.
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