search engines

A basic form of web currency that gets discussed more and more frequently is Google Juice.

Say the words “Google Juice” and people are likely to nod their head knowingly. Getting Google Juice is a dark art, easy to understand and hard to execute. People hear Google Juice and they think, Page 1.

As we’ve driven our business at NCI more and more into a Web 2.0 world, the concept of Google Juice becomes the axis point for many discussions. Too often the dialogue settles into a pattern of defining Google Juice as an outcome of highly-specific tactics designed to influence Google’s behavior.

These conversations are flawed. Google Juice is an ongoing by-product of a consistent content strategy that connects with a specific audience. As my colleague Todd Dubner points out, when you try to game Google, you end up gaming yourself. But when you try to serve a market with consistent content, even with a marketing emphasis, you’ll accrue a natural level of Google Juice that will differentiate you from the market.

Last week I spent a couple of hours with our top management team taking them through a case study in Google Juice.

The subject of the study was this blog.

As regular readers know, the purpose of the blog is to provide an outlet for structured thinking and analysis about business issues that I face in my professional life. The blog is not about the company I work for. It isn’t designed to advance any brand goals. It has no commercial bent — I don’t run ads, I don’t sell consulting. It is primarily a strategy and business information workspace.

As a result, I cover an eclectic number of topics somewhat consistently. I write about that loose focus here. I am not focusing at all on optimizing against specific topics or categories.

But I am consistent in creating content. That makes the way that my blog behaves in search engines a direct by-product of the consistency of the content that I create and its relevance to the audience that has developed around it. Dan McCarthy’s ViralHousingFix is a good study in how powerful Google Juice can be.

More than one-third of the traffic to this blog each month comes from search. Let’s see how that breaks down.

First, some basics about the blog.

It was launched on December 2008. I set it up on Blue Host and built it in WordPress. I use the Thesis theme and a number of different plugins. The five that are most relevant to the blog’s Google performance is the All-in-One SEO plug-in, the Google XML site maps plug-in, Calais’ Tagaroo semantic tag plug-in and plug-ins that integrate Wordpress with Twitter and Facebook Connect.

Over the past year, I’ve published 361 posts, about 1 per day. The level of engagement on the site is low: there have been 431 comments.

The site has a digital footprint of about 7000 or so individuals. I get 3000 to 5000 unique visits a month. I have 580 fans to the ViralHousingFix Facebook page, which is used a content distribution point. I have another 650 friends on my Facebook profile; I redistribute about half of the content to my personal profile. My personal Twitter account has 1230 followers; I do 7 to 10 Tweets per day. These are mostly focused on sharing content, either from the blog or from other sources that I find interesting. I’ve got another 1000 connections across various site.

Each time I publish a blog post, I distribute it across my digital footprint. I’m not an active commenter nor am I an active solicitor of links across multiple sites. Generally, I’ve focused on initiating and maintaining my digital links to my Community of Interest, a topic I’ve written a fair amount about in the last couple of months.

This activity generates a lot of link activity: Google identified more than 2300 links coming into ViralHousingFix. A disproportionate percentage of those links come from a couple of blogs, like The Kelsey Group blog and WineZag, that update their content frequently and that list ViralHousingFix in their blog rolls.

The sum of this activity is that ViralHousingFix has a high visibility in some intuitive Google searches that help consistently drive traffic to the site. As Google has indexed the site, it has identified a handful of keywords that help it direct search results. These are show in the chart to the right.

“Media” and “social” are the two primary terms, an accurate reflection of one topic I write about frequently.

The next chart shows the 14 top search queries that drove users to ViralHousingFix in December. (Again, these figures are from Google’s Webmaster tools.)

The table shows the percentage of unique visitors from search to the site that were driven by the term. For instance, 14% of unique users from searches to the site typed in “viral housing fix.” The third column the text of the query and the last column shows where on the search page the ViralHousingFix link showed up.

For instance, 11% of visitors from search in December typed in the words “current state of the economy.” The results that were served up had a ViralHousingFix post in the 6th position on the search page.

This is the essence of Google Juice. When someone searches to learn about State Farm’s social media program, they see ViralHousingFix in the second position. Type in the words “Comscore rental” and you’ll see a post from this blog at number 4. Search for results around “multi-platform marketing” and you’ll see this blog at number 1.

The impact of this becomes more tangible when you look at specific search results. Here are examples of six searches that drove traffic to ViralHousingFix last week.

The first is a query about GDP.

The second is a query about State Farm. My post from last April is the third result on the page.

The third is a query about the current state of the economy. Google served up a post from October.

The fourth is a query about social media case studies in real estate.

The fifth is a query about print advertising leads.

The last is a query about Print or Web advertising in real estate. I find this one interesting. This question is a galvanizing topic in real estate, and one about which we have a very strong point of view at NCI. Search for this on Google and four results come up that are highly relevant to the question: a realtor who advocates cutting back print, a question and answer sequence on Google Answers, and a post from ViralHousingFix speaking to the impact print advertising has on web traffic.

The fact that this post, which is not specific to the real estate industry, shows up so high in the results speaks to the power of the Google Juice that this blog has developed. Google associates a high level of relevance and credibility to the blog around real estate, marketing, advertising, media and marketing. The confluence of these categories of relevance, combined with the incidence of words in my post that are consistent with the search terms, brings the ViralHousingFix post high up in the sequence.

The cumulative impact of this Google Juice is that ViralHousingFix has a degree of brand authority that makes its reach much larger than its actual traffic. The table below shows the Compete traffic results for ViralHousingFix.com over the past year. Contrast that audience of a few thousand with the visibility of ViralHousingFix in relatively general searches online for information about the economy, marketing, social media and advertising.

This is the tangible impact of a social media marketing program. When I speak to groups around the country, I use this example to help them understand how developing a smart content program, and creating a consistent distribution network, will give them increased engagement with their Community of Interest and increased relevance within Google. Over time, they will be rewarded with more visibility on Google.

The difference in a marketing program is that the topics are designed to be more consistent with your business goals. We talked about this during the management workshop. The single most effective way to generate increased visibility and Google Juice is to find out what people are asking about that is relevant to your business goals.

The quickest way to do that is to begin typing a search into Google. I demonstrated this for the management team.

We sell advertising services in The Real Estate Book. We maintain a brand-specific blog at blog.therealestatebook.com. We know that there are some basic topics that we want to cover: The continued value of print advertising integrated with internet advertising to real estate agents who want to have a visible footprint in their market; the importance of advertising even in a down market; and the ways that real estate agents can take advantage of social media to build their business.

If we wanted to improve our ability to intersect with people who are searching for information about real estate advertising, we would begin to share our point of view about the most popular searches. What are great real estate advertising slogans? What are new real estate advertising ideas? What are some key tips to successful real estate advertising?

There is nuance required. If we were to slavishly write about these topics, we would lose the relevance that we’ve established with our current audience, our Community of Interest. But, using Google can help focus what is on the mind of the broader audience and help a brand drive a content strategy that gives it even more Google Juice.

Looking over the search logs made me aware of one thing: I owe the people who are coming to this blog an update on State Farm’s social media strategy. It’s been too long since I’ve looked at it and the post that is served up in search is stale.

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