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This is a guest post from Andreas Voniatis, Managing Director of MathSite and Founder of SEO consultancy Alchemy Viral. You can connect with Andreas on twitter @alchemyviral.
Server Log Analysis is one of the most overlooked areas of SEO, despite the fact that it tells you how each search engine processes your website, and most importantly, whether you’re maximising your PageRank or not (which in turn affects your event’s search rankings and where you’ll show up in search engines).
Your PageRank is the site’s potential to rank in the search engines so its crucial to look at this if you want to be found by attendees on Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. (and you do!) Your site will have a PageRank of between 0 and 10, which 0 being bad and 10 being fantastic.
While this article is a little technical, you should be able to do it yourself. However you might also want to enlist the help of a technical marketing manager, or even a professional SEO if needs be.
If you think it sounds complicated or hard to do, then that’s great because your competitors probably won’t bother, and this gives you a clear competitive advantage if you do take the time and effort to follow the steps below. The result? You’ll outrank your competitors, be found by more attendees, sell more tickets and generate more revenue!
First check
The first thing you’ll want to do in understanding if your event search rankings are performing as well as they should – or could – be on the major search engines is to compare how many pages of your site are indexed in Google vs Bing.
If we look at StylePilot.com, using the site: command we can see there are:
134,000 pages indexed in Google
1,940 pages indexed in Bing
The ratios indicate that there is a problem because Bing is not dedicating resource to crawl the website , which likely means the site has crawl issues, and is not working as hard as it could be for you on at least one of the major search engines.
Next Step: Get Server Logs
Now that you’ve determined a possible crawl issue, I’d now go to your server control panel and download server logs. This is where you might need some technical help from whoever manages your website infrastructure. If you’re not sure how to do this, it’s best to ask!
Deciding on the data period you want to download information for depends on how often Google crawls your site.
If your site is a PageRank 5, one days worth of data will be sufficient. If your site is a PageRank 3 then download a weeks worth of data. For sites of a lower PageRank than 3, download a month’s worth of data so you can start figuring out what is going wrong!
Step Three: Analyse
Once the data is downloaded, start analysing data.
Monitor your status response codes
There may be pages that are generating a number of server errors. For example you may have important blog posts or event landing pages that are generating errors or outages.
Server Log Analysis will help you find out on a high level how your event search rankings is performing over time in terms of what proportions of your pages are loading normally (200 server status), with errors (Not found 404) or redirecting (301 or 302).
If you see a disproportionate amount of redirects or errors, then you can drill down to investigate and devise a solution and improve the interaction of your content with the search engines.
Check your page types
Are there pages on your site that shouldn’t be crawled such as PPC landing pages? You may find that certain pages you don’t want ranking in Google are being accessed by Google on a daily basis. Analysing which types of pages get crawled will help you re-allocate your PageRank from unwanted pages to the pages that really matter from an event search rankings perspective.
Check how often your site is crawled
There may be pages that haven’t been crawled in over 60 days.
These typically would be your oldest events or content marketing posts. Getting on top of this will allow you to be aware of content not getting Google love and prompt you to change the menu navigation or internal linking to get those pages visited by Google more often.
Remember, if that content gets visited more often than your competitors, you’re chances of ranking higher are stronger.
This analysis may be repeated for Bing and other search engines you care about.
Impact
Using the analysis means you can now get on top of any issues identified in the above analysis and supercharge your event search rankings. Typical solutions may include:
Restricting access to unwanted pages via robots.txt
Improving internal linking – be it a combination of better HTML sitemaps, menu navigation and links to deeper pages
Predict the time required to overcome a search engine penalty – If you’ve been penalised, you’ll want to know how long it will take to recover your traffic and get your site pages reindexed once you’ve made changes.
Ultimately, the process of server log analysis provides you both a high level view of how your site will perform in the major search engines (important to help your event attendees find you); and a fine-grained understanding of how you can quickly and effectively improve your chances of ranking higher – a huge advantage in today’s marketing world.
Don’t forget, it may sound difficult, but this will stop your competitors from doing it, and provide you the competitive advantage to outrank other events, be found by more attendees, sell more tickets and generate more revenue!
