Niche Info Online Business

Studying the Center of Excellence approach
To determine the effectiveness of this approach, Covario conducted a study between March 1 and October 15, 2007 with approximately 300 global brands to measure how leveraging the Center of Excellence concept improves performance. More than 85 percent of the brands involved in the study belong to Fortune 500 companies with their websites operating in multiple languages and on many search engines.

The goal of the study was to assess whether the metrics that had been built to measure SEO health of the websites could be used to predict results in rank improvement on the major U.S. search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN). The study used changes in rank for the participating Fortune 500 brands as the metric of success. 

The results were impressive. To help educate the SEO knowledge workers in the brand and geo-marketing divisions, a proprietary technology titled Covario Organic Search Insight developed by my company, Covario, Inc., was used to identify what aspects of the sites were well optimized on 48 different criteria. 

Changes to these site factors were then statistically measured against changes to rank on the engines. During this study period, the average brand experienced an improvement in its average rank position for the keyword it was trying to optimize by 4.5 rankings.

To put this into context, on "cheap airfares," moving from position five to position one on the engines means a difference of $2.5 million in commerce per year, based on analysis of data from comScore Marketer Search Data.

Most importantly, the relationship between the changes made to the websites during the test period had a very strong statistical relationship to changes in rank on the search engines. This means that the statistical links discovered by Covario can be used to predict improvements that other sites may experience given similar changes. This is key as ROI on SEO for these organizations can be reasonably estimated, helping to justify the expense of the programs. 

What is more, the reactions of the engines were very different. Google was 15 times as sensitive to technical issues as Yahoo, and twice as sensitive as compared to MSN. Specifically, Google was far more reactive to link improvement strategies than Yahoo or Microsoft -- by eight to 10 times. Yahoo was much more reactive to changes in content than Google or MSN -- up to 50 percent more reactive than Google.

The reactions are part of the complexity that many large advertisers find hard to corral. However, with the right processes in place, insights like these can be used to determine which aspects of the site will provide the best ROI for brands and geo's by engine, by product, by site, etc. This is a great example of the development of the science of SEO, which presents large advertisers (and their vast, complicated web properties) a process-driven, data-based method to manage their brands' presence on the organic side of search engine marketing, and do so in a scalable and efficient way.

So how do this information and the Center of Excellence for SEO concept get actualized in a large company? Let's see.