Sorry for the hiatus in blog posts, but we’ve got a couple of good ones in the hopper for this month!

Last week, a post on the DoubleClick Advertisers blog revealed that Google is working to create new measurement metrics for AdWords beyond simple impressions and click-throughs.  The idea is formulated around brands who want to be able to measure the impact of their brand online, similar to the way they do it offline with Gross Ratings Points (GRP’s), which has been used since the 1950′s for measuring broadcast reach and frequency.  In Google’s case, they will refer to it as “Active GRP” because the advertiser will be able to react in real-time.

It seems like this is a move to appeal to the large brand advertisers, like Nike or Procter & Gamble, who are contributing billions to Google’s cash cow.  The marketers behind these brands are trying to correlate their broadcast big spending to their online spend, but it’s like comparing apples and oranges.  In broadcast, you can demographically segment where you want your ads to appear, and so you know if your creative resonated well with the 25-35 year-old females who earn $100K per year.  Online, we can’t do that very well.

Also, if you look at a large brand’s marketing budget, you’ll likely see that the lion share is allocated to broadcast, with expensive productions and air time costs, compared to a dwarfed online budget.  Even though the online is more “measurable”, they really don’t have any insights to things like brand recall, and if the ad copy or banner creative resonated with a particular audience.  So, in order for Google to convince these brands to allocate more dollars to online spend, they’re going to have to give them similar metrics for measurement.

What does this mean for small business?

I’m afraid not much.  This is obviously a ploy by Google to grab more advertising dollars from the large brands, and so introducing a new measurement metric to the SMB’s will be counter-intuitive.  Most of the SMB’s I talk to are still trying to grasp the concept of click-throughs and conversions.

Besides, I’m not so sure that 1950′s measurement technologies are the most useful anyway – after all, have you ever met a single person who had one of those Nielsen “black boxes” on their TV?  I didn’t think so.

Should Google Use Broadcast Measurement Metrics for AdWords? is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

Every now and then we have customers who want to cancel their service because the SEO effort has not generated an ROI in terms of sales through the website.  While this is certainly reasonable to assume, it’s almost an unfair proposition given the amount of external factors unrelated to SEO that can drive a “sale” on a website.

Consider that the first and foremost goal of search engine optimization is to raise the visibility of the website in the search engines, by increasing the organic rankings for a variety of keywords related to the business.

So the basic equation then, is that SEO leads to higher rankings, higher rankings lead to an increase in traffic, and the increase in traffic leads to an increase in sales.  Seems reasonable on the surface, right?

However, as we analyze this thought process, we see that the “increase in sales” goal, or directive,  is all the way at the end of the funnel.  When most SEO engagements start off, the conversation revolves around keywords of importance, content, links and maybe expected traffic increases — but almost never conversion rates.  You might be able to fairly assume that the existing conversion rate could be applied to the new traffic generated from the SEO effort, but the discussion really requires further investigation of the design, usability, and other factors that lead to a sale.  Now we’re not just talking about SEO; we’re also talking about conversion optimization, and A/B testing to get to the desired results–a service that the SEO firm may not be performing, involved with, or even have control over.

The second problem lies in the “keywords related to the business” statement.  I can tell you that most customers don’t know for certain which keywords drive sales.  If we did, we’d just focus on only those words and solve the sales problem.  But the answer is far more convoluted than you would think.  They may know what they’d like to be found for, but for the most part, those terms are not keywords with “buying intent.”  Also, what about click attribution?  When does PPC get the credit, versus SEO?

So I offer an attempt at a solution to this madness.

First, with customers who are “green” at the whole SEO or Internet marketing thing, you could propose a 3 or 4 month PPC campaign, target a variety of keywords, and measure which had the best conversion rate.  You could take this same performance logic and apply it to the SEO campaign, and hope for the same, or similar results.  In my opinion, visits through a paid channel should come with increased buying intent, as opposed to the organic channel, which could be more research-oriented visits — but I can’t say for sure.

Second, we could perhaps do a better job as SEO-ers in terms of classifying the keyword targets into the marketing/sales funnel.  The typical marketing or sales funnel has 3 sections:  Awareness, Consideration and Purchase.  Ideally, a keyword in the Awareness channel will create a lead for you to nurture, but not a hard sale, as might a keyword in the Purchase funnel.  In my illustration of a fictitious hosting company, you can see how you might bucket these keywords:

So as we get better as marketers about driving results, it’s clear that the most important step is to set the expectations correctly up front — not just in terms of rankings or traffic, but also about sales. Have that conversation up front and make sure everyone knows what they’re signing up for.  Because if you’re used to a sprint, you’ll need to start training for a marathon.

Is It Fair For SEO To Be Tied Directly to Website Sales? is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

If you’re online today, you’ve heard about SOPA and PIPA. Today there is no Wikipedia, Fark, or Reddit, as these sites work to raise awareness of these two terribly written pieces of legislation. We are not going to delve into the technicalities, since that has been done quite effectively elsewhere (like on the EFF, Reddit’s Blog, or a great infographic, courtesy of Google).

Rather, I would like to briefly discuss just a little bit about how Pear started, how we grew to become the company that we are today, and how that likely would not have been possible had these bills been voted into law. This is personal to us; Pear is made up of people active on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Reddit, and a myriad of other sites. Our whole business model revolves around a free and open Internet. Functioning under the guidelines introduced in SOPA and PIPA would do great damage to our business model, and would have essentially prevented us from reaching the point that we find ourselves at presently.

Various portions of PIPA and SOPA would negatively affect nearly any business with an online presence. For example, SOPA would require that we actively monitor every outbound link on our site, as well as our clients’ sites, to ensure that they are not linking to sites with copyrighted materials. As a small company, we simply do not have the extra staff to create the monitoring ‘department’ that we would probably need. The alternative would be to create a new service, where we could be hired on to actively monitor client sites. Sure, we might be able to make some additional income from such a service, but–being familiar with start-ups in general–creating an additional layer of compliance issues would stifle innovation and small business.

As written in SOPA, search engines would be required to actively monitor potentially infringing sites. This means taking resources away from improving search algorithms and shifting them to filter search results. A large part of our strategy involves improving the content of our clients’ sites. As such, we rely on the continually improving effectiveness of major search engines. Taking resources from their improvement efforts means that poorer results will show up in search, and our efforts would provide less effective results.

SOPA and PIPA would severely hamper the sort of entrepreneurship that was required to get Pear off the ground in the first place. If we had started Pear with SOPA in action, we would have had to invest in legal counsel to ensure we had protections in place to respond to any claims made under the umbrella of SOPA or PIPA. Under SOPA and PIPA, Pear and essentially any other company with an online presence could be placed in a position where a mere accusation would require considerable resources to counter, outside of due process. When accusations mean presumed guilt or increased costs, you create a truly non-viable business environment. Unethical competitors could make claims and start a process that would cause business to grind to a halt.

Search has become a standard means of gathering information. It has become an incredibly useful tool to check facts, to verify quotes, to gather statistics. Search is not just a tool for business, even though much of our business is built on top of search.  By hampering continual development and improvement of search, we are really doing harm to individuals world-wide. SOPA and PIPA could even go further than just hampering development, though. They could break much of what we already have. The free flow of information is a necessary ingredient in a free society, and when we start to infringe on that, we are truly heading down a dark path.

So what can YOU do? While there are plenty of online petitions, these tend to be less effective than handwritten letters and phone calls. So take the time and call your representative. Use this service from AmericanCensorship.org to call your representative. Visit the United States House of Representatives to find the congressman that represents YOU in the House. Find your senator. Call. Write. Take action, while you still can.

A Message from Pear about SOPA and PIPA is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

Wow, 2011 flew by, right?  We put together this quick chart to summarize how the year ended, and the hard work everyone’s been doing to help increase search engine visibility for our customers.

2011 Wrapup: A Year in Numbers is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

Many of the local directory websites are now selling “SEO” services to their customers, but they employ questionable tactics. After submitting a free local listing to Local.com to help bolster our customer’s local search results by adding more citations for his website, their sales staff bombarded our customer (David Magill of Ultimate Construction who does things like bobcat services) with phone call after phone call, “guaranteeing” placement in the search results. I wondered what “guarantees” they were making, and asked David to just have them call us next time.

Note: I don’t really worry about other SEO companies calling my customers – especially ones like these. We’ve never lost

I transcribed most of the phone call I had with the Local.com rep as accurately as I could (I did not record it, although I wish I had) so you can see how they sell you, and what to look out for.

———————————————————————————————————————

(Call transcribed as of December 14, 2011 at around 3pm). RJ=sales rep from Local.com, RK=Ryan Kelly from Pear Analytics.

RJ: Hey Ryan, this is [name here] and I’m calling you because David Magill gave me your number, and I wanted to see if we can work with you guys because we can guarantee a first page placement in Google, or we work for free until we do…

RK: (cutting him off) Hi [name] — who are you with?

RJ: Oh sorry, I’m with a company called Local.com.

RK: OK, gotcha. So how is it that you “guarantee” a first page placement? Are you talking about a listing on Local.com, or optimizations you’re going to do to his website? Like how does this work?

RJ: The way we do it is that we go through and research the keywords that will make money, and then we buy those domain names and we monitor them 24/7 to make sure you get to the first page pretty fast.

RK: So wait, are you talking about getting exact match domain names, and then trying to rank those? Where do you get the content from?

RJ: Exact match?? Yes, that’s what it is. Because we are one of Google’s Top 10 customers, spending about $3.1 million with them, we’re able to get you ranked faster than if you were to do this on your own. We look at the quality score of the keywords and assess them to see which will drive more revenue for you.

RK: Quality score? That’s a term used in Google AdWords. Are you talking about doing PPC? I thought we were talking about SEO here?

RJ: Let me see here…. (scrambling though papers)

RK: And what do you mean by “$3.1M” — is that per year, per month, per day?

RJ: Yes sir, that’s $3.1 million per month.

RK: OK, so I don’t understand how your advertising spend with Google has anything to do with ranking David for some exact match domains you guys would manage for him.

(This is where the conversation starts to take a dive, as the rep struggles to articulate what he is trying to sell and the benefits of it, and is clearly working off a bunch of pre-written scripts and rebuttals.)

RJ: Well, look, I’m doing a search for “contractors in San Antonio” and I see Zachary, Bartlett Cocke, ……(mumbles some other websites) — but I don’t see you guys.

RK: I know, but we don’t care about that word. We’re going after “bobcat services San Antonio”

RJ: OK let me write that down. Let me see… Well, you guys are all the way down at the bottom of the page for that term. Nobody gets any calls down there.

RK: Sure, but you just said you guarantee a “first page” position — isn’t that what we have here? Not only that, but a) we just started the campaign less than 2 months ago; b) you’re calling me from Las Vegas, so I bet your search results are slightly different than mine here in San Antonio; and c) we have placement in the paid section all the way at the TOP of the page so we can measure conversions to see if it is ultimately a good candidate for SEO.

RJ: Well look, I’m not trying to educate you here, but we’re a publicly traded company on the NASDAQ. Are you publicly traded?

RK: (laughing) No, do I have to be?

RJ: I don’t know, but you know, you’re dealing with the “big boys”

RK: Fantastic! Now I know who I need to call when what we’re doing doesn’t work anymore.

————————————————————————————————————————

The Local.com sales rep later phoned my customer and continued to berate him, and even removed his free listing from Local.com.

Flaws with the sales pitch

First, the sales rep tried to confuse me with paid advertisement versus organic listings. He used the word “quality score” which is a term used only in Google AdWords, and that’s not what he was selling — he was trying to sell organic search engine optimization services.

Second, he tried to make a correlation between how much they spend with Google each month, and the results of their organic listings for customers. Study after study proves this to be wrong, and it misleads the potential buyer. Just because Local.com is writing big checks to Google every month doesn’t mean their exact match domains are being pumped up in the SERP’s.

Third, the rep tries to associate some kind of “24/7 monitoring” with rankings, as if that busy activity is going to somehow rank the site higher. Who writes and posts the content? Is it spun, or is a professional writer going to interview me first? How are links built and maintained? With Pear’s products, these are all tasks that must be carefully constructed and deployed, or it could result in a disaster for the customer.

Fourth, he uses the term “guarantee” — a word I don’t like because it means that they can choose absolute junk keywords, and then say “see, we got you to the first page of Google for ‘quality construction services in San Antonio’” or something like that.

The Exact-Match Domain Theory

What Local.com is selling is a strategy in which they determine several keywords the customer should rank for, purchase those domains for the customer, put up a website such as “bobcatservicessanantonio.com”, and hope they can get it to the first page of results in a fairly short amount of time. How they initially determine the “right” keywords is not only questionable, but many in the SEO community are just waiting for the day in which Google cracks down on these types of websites.

In a sense, Google overcompensates for exact match domains because with many searches, like “ny times” or “southwest” they typically serve up the exact match domain because it’s highly likely that it was exactly what you were looking for.

Here is a great article on SEOmoz theorizing that their time is limited.

So, what Local.com will do is choose several “easy” keywords that they can create quick websites for, and get ranked on the first page of results, thereby fulfilling their contractual obligation.

At Pear, we prefer to build value to the main website, not some shell website for lead generation that might not exist a year from now. In fact, after only about 42 days of working with David, we’ve got him on the first page (position #8) for “bobcat services San Antonio” — a word HE wanted to rank for because he gets a lot of business from that service. We still have a lot of work to do, but so far everything is progressing, and it’s building trust and value for HIS website –not some knock-off site with crap content on it.

Why You Should Avoid Local.com’s SEO Services is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

In the past 6 months, Pear has nearly tripled revenue without any formal sales or marketing. We made buying Internet marketing services easy and affordable by bundling them together – much like how your cable company will bundle cable, phone and Internet. Nice, right? So we found marketers don’t really want to buy organic search, paid search and conversion optimization in 3 different places either.

Well, we think it’s a homerun, and we’re looking for a rockstar salesperson to help prime the pump even more. We’re looking for someone to create operational chaos. It’s a ground-level opportunity with a huge upside. We’ve also moved into this kick-ass office, so who wouldn’t want to work here?

In order to find this rockstar salesperson, we’re willing to pay a $10,000 bounty to anyone who sends us such an individual.

With the holidays right around the corner, who couldn’t use an extra few bucks in their pocket, right? It’s simple, and here’s how it works:

1. You send us an email to ALL the people you think would qualify, and who you will encourage to apply to the position. That way we know who referred who. Email your ideal candidates to rockstar@pearanalytics.com

2. Have the candidate fill out this form. We interview every candidate for the position. It’s a rigorous process….first me, then if they make it to the next level – a board member interview, and then if they pass Round 2, a third and final interview with another board member.

3. I’ll let each referrer know who’s dropped out of the race, and who’s still in it.

4. Once a final candidate is chosen and hired, the referrer (YOU) will get $2,000 immediately.

5. Once the rockstar salesperson sells their 5th deals (no matter what plan or price), you get another $3,000.

6. And finally, once the salesperson sells their 10th deal, you’ll get the final $5,000.

What are we looking for?

The ideal salesperson for Pear would have some sales experience, first of all. No need for 15 or 20 years, but a few would be nice. A person who has a “rolodex” of potential customers would certainly be helpful – this person is going to have to generate their own leads. Knowledge on the technology and things we sell is a plus, but most rockstar salespeople can sell without the intimate knowledge. This person would be very good on the phone, as our customers are in 6 countries and 3 continents. This person would need to come up with sales projections, as well as develop the sales model that we can use for future funding, if necessary. (i.e. every lead from channel X results in Y kind of thing). The downsides are: this can be a difficult product to sell; we have no sales process; we have little marketing materials; and we don’t have much of a marketing budget (gee, I’m starting to sound like the last half of a Viagra ad!). The upside is that you get to define the whole process and take all the credit for it!

What else are we offering?

The rockstar salesperson will get a base, plus commission, plus bonuses for going over target. The commissions are recurring, and are based on the plan purchased by the customer. We also have a competitive healthcare plan, unlimited vacation, ping-pong, and all the coffee you can drink.

Candidates, please fill out this form!

The $10,000 Giveaway for a Rockstar Salesperson is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

Google is getting real aggressive on their ploys to get small businesses to start using AdWords to drive increased sales to their business.  You may have seen an email come through your inbox recently which looks really similar to this:

Sounds enticing, right?  Well, unbeknownst to the small business owner, this program is called “Google AdWords Express” which is a service designed by Google where they will set up your campaign for you, and give you a $500 credit if you spend at least that on your first month.  They’re like the “drug dealers” Jason Fried talks about in his book “Rework”, where they get you a taste for free, knowing you’ll be back for more with cash in hand.

Well, there are a couple of problems with this program.

1) I’m not sure I trust Google setting up my campaign for me.  If the end-all goal is to please shareholders, and that means increasing revenue through the cash cow, which is most certainly AdWords, then what incentive do they really have to optimize my campaign as a small business to get the highest amount of leads for the lowest cost?  If you’ve seen the AdWords interface lately, you might notice that a lot of the tools and campaign optimization techniques are all really designed to get you to increase your budget.  OK, fair enough.  Except:

2) The AdWords Express program doesn’t allow for conversion tracking!  What the f@!%  That’s right….the AdWords Express is pretty much all automated with very limited analytics and tracking.  Store owners are going to have to rely on the old unreliable question of “where did you hear about us?”

I guess the one benefit the AdWords Express program does have is that many of the cost-per-clicks (CPC’s) on keywords are less than what you would be paying in the traditional AdWords program.   That means for words you may be paying $2-$3 per click already, could cost as low as $0.80 in some cases.  In others, like more competitive terms, the rates are about the same.

One company reportedly canceled their subscription because they found Google was bidding on their own brand name.  In other cases, Google was able to get better performance by splitting ads into separate groups, like one for “dog washing” and one for “dog sitting” – something a small business owner trying to manage an AdWords account wouldn’t know to do otherwise.

At the end of the day, if a small business is spending $50/day or more on AdWords, you need a certified professional to help navigate the waters for you.  If you’re spending less than that, then give AdWords Express a shot.

Why Small Businesses May Want to Avoid AdWords Express is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

As marketers, we would love to know how all of our leads originated.  Far too often, PPC gets the boot with poor cost per lead (CPL) figures, and can be mostly blamed on attribution issues.  Attribution is simply defined as assigning credit to the source which generated the initial (or final) action.  So for example, let’s say you’re running a paid search campaign and you get 100 new visitors to your website.  However, only 2 of them make a purchase.  Unbeknownst to you, an additional 5 purchases came in over the next 7-10 days, but the source was either “direct” or from some organic search term.  In this case, the marketer might attribute 2 sales to PPC, and 5 to SEO, and SEO might win in terms of lower cost per lead.  So what’s the solution?

Multi-Channel Analytics & Funnel Analysis

Google recently launched a new feature which attempts to solve this attribution problem, and show improved ROI on AdWords.  Of course, Google is always interested in finding ways to show PPC really does work, and in this case, rightly so.  But check this out.  If you’ve properly tied your AdWords account to your GA account, and setup goals, you will see this Venn diagram.  You’ll find it under the Conversions section.

In this small e-commerce website, we can see that 4.65% of the conversions occurred when a visitor clicked on a paid ad, and THEN came in later by typing in the domain name directly.  Without this, the marketer may be quick to assume that the 2 sales from the direct path were not in any way influenced by paid search.  Now, this is neat.  I can also see what my “lag time” is between first click attribution, and the actual point of purchase.  Why do you care about this?  Well, if you have enough sales happening too far after first click, you may want to try to run a promotion to those visitors who are “on the fence” about your product or service.

First Click Attribution vs. Last Click Attribution

Marketers often debate whether to give the “first click” credit for the sale, or the “last click”.  Some might argue that even though the PPC ad created the interest and got the visitor into the funnel, it was the “last click” that finally sold them, and so that should get the credit.  This is certainly a valid point, but you have to look at a few more things, such as: a) was there a coupon or discount that may have led to the final decision?; b) was the PPC landing page set up as a lead generation, or a hard sale (i.e. “Buy Now”)?; c) was there a pricing matrix or downloadable whitepaper that may have led to the purchase decision?  In other words, did the last click lead to a decision-making point?  If so, maybe then you assign the credit to the last click, and measure PPC in terms of “cost per lead” only.

Click Attribution Issues With SEO and PPC is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

A while back, we wrote a post suggesting that Google serves up its own products over other brands in organic search.  It’s pretty obvious – just type in words like “voice”, “images”, “maps”  or even “plus” and Google assumes you’re looking for their products.  How convenient.

Well, they’re at it again.

A story reported by TechCrunch’s Eric Schonfeld yesterday identified a “classy” move by Google, whereby they bid on the keyword “yelp” to serve up an ad which takes you to Zagat.  On the surface, no big deal, right?  Companies bid on other competitors’ names ALL THE TIME.  The only rule is that you are not supposed to use a trademarked name in the actual ad itself (like it is here).

courtesy of Mashable.com

In fact, here is the official statement from Google, which says in part:

“Google recognizes the importance of trademarks. Our AdWords Terms and Conditions prohibit intellectual property infringement by advertisers. Advertisers are responsible for the keywords they choose to generate advertisements and the text that they choose to use in those advertisements.”

So how did this get through the Google AdWords filter?  Clearly, this misleads the person searching for Yelp.  If you’ve run a PPC campaign lately, it’s not all that hard to get a “your ad has been declined” message, prompting you to dig a little deeper to make sure you’re not using any trademarked words, or among other errors, doing any kind of “bait and switch” tactics.

Ah, well it gets better.  It turns out Google actually purchased Zagat last month (Sept. 2011) for some $151 million.  How convenient that this ad wasn’t “disapproved” by the Google catch-all filter.  It is for this exact reason Google also had to take the stand in front of Congress last month.

Google Violates Its Own Policy (Again) is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

The adage “Content is King” is repeated over and over again in the SEO community, as well as among advertising agencies and web developers. Google wants to see that your site has great content too; convincing search engine crawlers that you have something worth reading or seeing is really the whole purpose of an SEO campaign. When it boils down to it, though, there are really only two ways to accomplish that: 1) tricking the search engine into thinking that your site has great content, or 2) actually having great content.

There are some ways to enhance the reach of your site’s content, but if you start with something sub-par, whatever inbound links you are able to create are going to come at a cost. That cost is generally going to be either your own time or the time of someone you’re paying to help generate inbound links to a mediocre message. Then when visitors DO arrive at your site, they end up underwhelmed by what they find.

We think that there is a better way. Our philosophy is to optimize a client’s site, not by artificial means, but by doing things that actually make the site more usable from a human perspective. Sure, we pay close attention to every technical detail. We experiment with and analyze a large dataset that we’ve acquired through tens of thousands of analyses done through our free website analysis tool, and we follow and contribute to the thought leadership within the SEO community, but the conclusion that we always end up arriving at is that to rank really well, the information on our client’s site needs to be excellent.

Visualizing data has been a great way to provide content that improves the quality of our clients’ sites. The process involved requires a considerable amount of work, both on the research side and on the production side, but the end product is something that truly adds value to a site. That value translates to increased natural inbound linking.

Identifying a Strong Infographic Candidate

Of course, not every client is a natural fit for data visualization. Most do not have access to proprietary industry data, which often comes at a considerable cost. Surprisingly, though, through brainstorming sessions and out-of-the-box thinking, data sources can be sought out and identified across a fairly wide variety of subjects. For our discussion, we will focus on two case studies–two actual examples of infographics we developed for our clients.

Infographic Construction: Drupal Module Expansion

To develop a data representation around Duo Consulting’s target audience, we had to dive into the world of Drupal. Now, we are quite comfortable finding our way around a Drupal install, and we provide consultation services for and implement changes to a variety of Drupal sites–but creating a successful infographic that highlighted some of the growth in the Drupal world proved to be a challenge. Determining how many sites rely on Drupal is nearly impossible, and comparing Drupal to, say, WordPress or Joomla in terms of compatible data points likewise provided little in the way of reliable data.

We returned to the drawing board a number of times with this project, going back and forth with our client to find both a dataset that worked well with the direction of their company and one that would translate well into a graphical format.

In the end, we finalized the dataset with the number of Drupal modules developed through the past years, along with a comparison of which areas were most well-represented. That finished step one, but we had taken on more than we realized!

In creating a visualization of the Drupal data, we ran into some difficulty. Doing a breakdown by year of the number of modules, along with an overview of the general growth of the platform presented an issue with scalability of the design. When we worked to include the detail, the image became too large and unusable, when we attempted to provide more of an overview, the design lacked the depth we had hoped for.

In presenting to our client, we ran into the age-old problem of the graphic not making immediate sense to them; we had been looking at, digesting, and dissecting the data for too long, and what seemed intuitive to us was lost on new viewers–definitely a problem for any data visualization.

So it went back to the drawing board again, and with the help of a dedicated team, we revisited the entire design. The end result was simple, and illustrated exactly what we had intended to convey. The creation process required more hours than we had anticipated, but in the end we had created a design that helped people see the exponential growth of the Drupal community quickly and succinctly.

The original design can be seen on Duo Consulting’s blog, here: Robust Functionality Found In Growth And Variety Of New Drupal Modules.

We learned a lot from this creation process: the importance of identifying the right topic to address; the “fudge-factor” we needed to account for in budgeting the time allotted to a project like this; and probably most importantly, how easy it is to be too close to the project at hand. Client input is an absolute must!

Coal Seam Gas Polling

Another data visualization project we undertook revolved around Coal Seam Gas. In this instance, the client had already compiled the data, and we recognized an opportunity to help them increase the likelihood of inbound links to their blog post by visually representing the data. This was a straight-forward project on our end, and we were able to deliver the final project with minimal revisions.

Even though our visualization was not incredibly complex in this instance, and the data was basically handed to us, the addition of a visualization of their data made their poll numbers come to life much more readily than the numbers by themselves.

This design can be viewed on Reachtel.com.au’s blog: Coal-Seam Gas polling in Queensland.

The most important thing, though, is that in both cases we were able to either provide original content, or improve the existing content of a client’s site. With each client, we were able to secure several immediate inbound links from a variety of sites with high domain authority and potentially grab additional, natural links from the wild.

On top of that, at the end of the day both sites ended up with visually appealing, graphical representations of subjects related to their industries. They ended up with content that will appeal to their human visitors, not just to search engine crawlers.

Infographics are going to continue to be a part of SEO strategies we implement for a variety of our clients, and I think that it is a trend that will stick around for quite some time.

We will have more to say about infographic value, design, and implementation in future posts–it is an exciting product that we are very happy to be able to offer!

Bringing Content to Life with Data Visualization is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.