Natalie Myers

Great Idea for Tracking Organic Search Results

April 23rd, 2009

When speaking with Erick Barney, VP of Marketing, at Motorcycle Superstore, about how his team saves precious marketing dollars for the company I couldn’t help overhearing a really innovative way they track organic search rankings.

The team creates thousands of web pages for key search terms to improve the site’s SEO. To make sure SEO efforts are effective they produce a monthly “Keyword Visibility Report.” It’s basically a report of how well the company’s top 100 keywords are performing.

“We have a scoring system to assign any movement,” Barney says. “Anything that’s 30 or above we just put an N/A. We track anything that’s got a position from 1 to 30 and we’ll plot it each month and as it moves around we’ll assign a new rank.”

The report makes it easy for them to see if their SEO efforts are paying off. In addition, Barney has an incentive program tied to the report, giving the team a reason to push the bar even further. How cool is that?

Natalie Myers

About Natalie Myers

Natalie Myers writes for MarketingSherpa’s Great Minds and Content Biz newsletters. She covers a broad array of topics for Great Minds, regularly interviewing thought leaders and experienced marketers about innovative or highly successful marketing strategies. For Content Biz she focuses specifically on online subscriptions models, including anything you pay for to read, listen to, watch, rent (as in Software as a Service models), etc.

She writes blog posts about topics relating to her beats, including useful information from interviews that doesn’t make it into an article.

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  1. thewalker
    April 23rd, 2009 at 17:42 | #1

    Sounds dangerously close to black hat SEO to me, which will end up having the opposite effect to that desired. google isn’t that stupid!

  2. ben
    April 26th, 2009 at 06:20 | #2

    What’s that incentive program look like!?

  3. walker
    May 1st, 2009 at 20:24 | #3

    hmmm, deleted my query regarding black hat techniques?

    If i am wrong i would appreciate at least a note allowing me to learn from the example.

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