Explanation and Details

DISC's submission process entails checking and if needed revising your major directory listings, and checking that the major spiders index your site within the first few weeks after completion of SEO. These days, the top search engines rarely need prompting to spider and index your site, unless the site has a new domain name or serious SEO-technical problems (DISC's SEO Technical Reports ensure that you remove any such problems).

About three weeks after submission, DISC issues an SEO Results Report, which includes all you need to assess results. We follow up once or twice over the next six weeks. If you want more extensive reporting over time, please see our ROI Planning section of this web site. After registration, results tend to improve within a few months, without further tweaking. Done properly, SEO and search engine submissions need very little follow-up work per year - a few hours at most. However, many DISC clients, pleased with our results for them, have DISC do additional SEO or other web marketing.

It is practically impossible to assess the results of SEO by doing manual tests in the search engines (and this applies to your evaluating the clients of prospective SEO vendors). Even the specialized testing software used by SEO firms, which would take days to replicate manually, samples only a small, representative sub-set of all the phrases that your best prospects type into the search engines. The acid test of successful SEO is server statistics that show non-paid search engine referrals. Using these data, DISC's SEO Results Reports will show precisely how successful our SEO efforts are and where additional SEO would earn additional positive ROI.

Excerpts from DISC's SEO Results Report

USING SERVER STATISTICS TO ASSESS YOUR SEO

DISC’s standard SEO Results Reports do not assess client server statistics, even though they are the best measure of SEO. The reason we don’t is that these days almost all clients are keenly attuned to their server statistics’ reports of search engine positions, and we do not want to charge for work that clients do themselves. Instead, we guide you in the fundamentals of using server statistics to assess the results of your SEO.

First of all, as your SEO Technical Report mentioned, it is crucial to have server statistics that distinguish organic vs. PPC referrals from the search engines.

The following two formulas will help you to assess the value of SEO. The first is for non-ecommerce sites selling services or few, big-ticket items. The second is for ecommerce sites with good tracking and known conversion rates.

PPC-based market valuation of SEO results (best for non-ecommerce sites selling services or few, big-ticket items):

• increases in monthly organic search engine traffic, multiplied by
• average PPC bid prices in your industry, multiplied by
• 12 months (for one year ROI), minus
• total SEO costs (including valuation of your team’s time in the SEO job)
• equals PPC-based market valuation of your SEO results.

Conversion rate-based valuation of SEO results (best for ecommerce sites with good tracking and known conversion rates):

• increases in monthly organic search engine traffic, multiplied by
• search engine traffic conversion rates, multiplied by
• average order, multiplied by
• gross profit percentage (say 50%), multiplied by
• 12 months (for one year ROI), minus
• total SEO costs (including valuation of your team’s time in the SEO job)
• equals conversion rate-based valuation of SEO results.

These are general, not precise formulas, but they are good enough to assess past SEO, and to assess the value of future SEO.

ABOUT SOFTWARE THAT CHECKS SEARCH ENGINE POSITIONS

Software that checks search engine positions tests a small fraction of the variety of actual searches that people use to find your site We attempt to make the sample representative; however, our years of experience in this field, particularly in examining robust and detailed server statistics, have shown that the majority of search engine referrals come from phrase combinations of keywords that include what our SEO research showed are the most productive words but often in different combinations than we optimized for or are tested. In fact, published research argues that between 33% and 50% of searches are unique - never done before, which suggests that one should not focus myopically on even a large handful of phrases. We have also found that many words and phrases that did not make the cut in our research rank well and deliver substantial traffic. The acid test of SEO is always server statistics that show quantity and kind of search engine referrals, though search engine position reports are a good indicator as well.

It's also crucial to remember that results can vary significantly based on the particular search engine data center accessed, increasing personalization of search engines, geographically influenced results, and glitches in search engine position software itself. For these reasons, we emphasize that your server statistics are by far the best measure of results, though ranking reports are a good adjunct test. Of course the number of searches for a term relevant to your market can change due to seasonality or general market demand, which means that even your server statistics are not a perfect measure of your SEO results: increases or decreases in search engine referrals may be due to increases or decreases in searches, which is one reason that ranking software remains an important part of SEO results reporting.

For more reasons that can be summarized here, once results show good improvement in early reports, the results usually continue to improve over the coming months and even years (assuming that nobody messes up the SEO or SEO coding in the web site and that all of the SEO Technical Report's problems have been solved). This ongoing improvement tends to range between 10% and 35% beyond the first two months of reports.

Though we test several search engines, the only ones that really matter these days are Google, Yahoo Web Results (not the Yahoo Directory), and Bing. ASK and AOLsearch are worth keeping an eye on. We test other search engines mainly DISC's own diagnostic purposes. The following 5/07 chart illustrates the relative market share of the top search engines:

comScore Core Search Report* August 2008 vs. July 2008 Total U.S. ? Home/Work/University Locations Source: comScore qSearch 2.0
Core Search Entity	Share of Searches (%) Jul-08	Share of Searches (%) Aug-08	Point Change Aug-08 vs. Jul-08
Total Core Search	100.0%	100.0%	NA
Google Sites	61.9%	63.0%	1.1
Yahoo! Sites	20.5%	19.6%	-0.9
Microsoft Sites	8.9%	8.3%	-0.6
Ask Network	4.5%	4.8%	0.3
AOL LLC	4.2%	4.3%	0.1

Other Useful Statistics
Regarding page one vs. page two and three listings in the search engines, one study by iProspect.com shows that 41% of searchers don't look beyond page one, which means that 59% of searches move past page one. 26% look throughout page two. 15% wait to click to a web site until after they have viewed the first three search engine results pages. So, while page one ranking is important, there is substantial value in attaining page two and three positions. However, iProspect is an SEM firm, and a bias in favor of page two and three listings would not be surprising in a study commissioned by iProspect. In his 2006 book, the usability guru Jakob Nielsen reports that only 7% visit the second page, and only 5% click in that second page. However, the sample size behind Nielsen's report is not statistically significant, even though it is more intuitively plausible. Jakob reports that of page one clicks, 51% are from position #1, 16% 2, 6% 3 and 4 each, descending about a percent each to position 9, with bounce back up to 5% coming from the last position.

Though there are wide variations by industry, on average 75% of clicks come from organic listing rather than PPC listings. A 2005 Marketing Sherpa study showed that organic referrals convert at 4.2%, vs. 3.6% for PPC, though here again wide variations are to be expected among different industries and between B2B and B2C.

Trusted Feeds and Webmaster Services are related to search engine submission, but are distinct enough to merit their own descriptions in this web site.