Arts Analytics: backlinks

Links to your site from other websites (what we call backlinks) are a good thing. It’s not just that people might click on them and come to your site. The more backlinks you have, the more chance people will find your website when using search engines.

If you’re not sure why, here’s a quick primer. Search engines see a link to a page as a vote of confidence, the rationale being ’someone linked to it therefore it must be good’.  Search engines will take the number of links to a given page into account when calculating search results - pages with more links are more likely to show up higher in search results.

With this in mind, I wondered how many backlinks the organisations in my sample group of UK arts organisations have gathered.

Findings

I used MajesticSEO’s historical index to look at the number of backlinks for each of the websites in my sample group. The spreadsheet below shows the number of backlinks for each organisation.

So what does this tell us? Well, not a huge amount – it’s a limited picture, as I’ll explain below. However, it gives us some context when looking at an individual site. You might expect the large venues that promote a large number shows and sell their own tickets to garner lots of links and that’s shown to some extent. Organisations that tour to other venues are likely to get fewer (all else being equal).

You might expect a correlation between the size of a website and the number of links (more pages = more content to link to) but, using the data from my last Arts Analytics post on indexed pages (and excluding some of the outliers) that doesn’t seem to be the case.

indexed pages and backlinks correlation

Ah well. Of course, attempts to draw correlations like that will be skewed by the fact that too many arts organisations treat their websites in backlink-unfriendly ways. I’ll get on to that.

Going further

The figures here are really just a starting point. If we were doing some proper analysis then there are other things we’d want to dive into:

  • The quality and relevance of the sites sending those links.
  • The types of anchor text used.
  • Which particular pages tend to attract a higher percentage of links.
  • How those links have accumulated over time.

That last one is particularly interesting if you’ve got a particular competitor you’re matching yourself against. For instance, the graph below shows how Battersea Arts Centre have gathered backlinks over the past few years. I wonder what was happening there in the summer of 2012?

BAC backlinks from 2007 to 2013

A few more thoughts about backlinks

As a website owner, ideally you want links from a variety of relevant, authoritative websites pointing to a variety of pages on your site. Compared to many other sites out there, prominent arts organisations don’t tend to have much difficulty attracting links. People want to talk about them online and often their website is the place to send people to buy tickets.

From the research I’ve done in the past, you tend to find that the bulk of those links naturally gather around the homepage and event/production pages. There might then be the occasional blog post, educational resource or collection item that attracts a lot of attention (but there are much fewer of these).

Arts organisations are devils for producing blogs and microsites that sit on different domain names, away from their main site. These things often attract links (especially if a microsite is part of a marketing campaign) that could otherwise be further strengthening the prominence of their main website in search rankings.

A quick note about anchor text. The text that constitutes a clickable link is also noted by search engines. As a result, example 1 below is much preferable to example 2:

  1. Click this link to go to the Southbank Centre website.
  2. Click this link to go to the Southbank Centre website.

There are other reasons for paying attention to anchor text, but the general message is you should never (ever) let me catch you linking somewhere with something as generic as ‘click here’.

I could go on about links. I think I’ll stop there.

Recommendations

  • Don’t delete pages from your website if you can help it – you’ll break all the links that were pointing there. NB: ‘But the event has passed’ is not a good reason for deleting a page, it’s a good reason for flagging a page as ‘archived’ like the Royal Court do (they’re a client).
  • Don’t churn out blogs, minisites and landing pages on random domain names away from your main website unless you really have to (and even then…).
  • Use permalinks rather than dynamically-generated URLs.
  • Take a look at how many backlinks your competition or peers have. Who’s linking to them? Are they linking to you too? If not, why not?
  • Look at which pages people tend to link to on your own site. Why are some pages more popular than others. If nobody’s linking to revenue-driving pages (ie venue hire) then maybe it’d be useful to do something about that.
  • Have people been linking to you more or less over time? What are you doing to encourage (or dissuade) that sort of thing?

This post is part of a series called Arts Analytics where I’m using digital metrics to see what a group of arts organisations are doing online. For some tasty extras, sign up to the free Arts Analytics newsletter.

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Links for March 2013

I’ve not seen the show before but I liked Portlandia’s take on conceptual art:

And who controls the global monopoly on those little cards?

Arts / digital links

Watershed in Bristol are ditching their monthly print brochure in favour of their website, email lists and social media, saying “we have finally reached the point where the brochure has become a luxury none of us can afford”. Not the first organisation to do this (although I can’t think of another venue) and maybe a few others will pluck up the courage to follow their lead.

The Arts Council/NESTA/AHRC have announced the first funded projects for the Digital R&D programme. Everything seems to be a variation on a location-based app/game using social streams and encouraging participation in the form of crowd/co-curation. Presumably they all have ambitions to be sustainable and reusable by other arts organisations, with some vague potential to lead to new revenue streams. Sigh.

The next Art of Digital London get-together will be all about Cultural APIs.

Presentations by MoMA, Tate and SMK at Social Media Week Copenhagen, discussing the art museum on social media. While we’re on the subject, Tate’s Elena Villaespesa has analysed how Twitter was used for communications, visitor interaction and audience research over the course of their Art in Action festival. 

City of London Sinfonia using JustGiving for crowdfunding. I’ve not seen folks using it in that way much. The approach here seems a bit unclear though – it says the work’s been commissioned and it sounds like the tour’s already happening. So why is £6k needed. Also, ‘get crowd funding!’? That’s a CTA?

And some other stuff:

Other links

A couple of good pieces from Dance/USA. The first is about San Francisco Ballet’s not inconsiderable merchandising operation which, across the Ballet Shop, online store and touring mini-shops, brought in $590,968 in 2012. That accounted for 2.7% of their revenue.

Then we have 2013: Reimagining the Post-Apocalypse Dance Company. Which might not be the best title, but still

In an attempt to define a single characteristic that will indicate whether or not a company will stand out from or keep pace with its peer group, one question arises above all the rest: Does the dance company create and distribute work beyond the live stage?

The point being that there’s a (weirdly unhurried) virtual/digital landgrab going on at the moment, with only a few international players involved. The author’s got a vested interest in pointing to the importance of live and filmed, art but I think it goes wider than that. I might write a bit more about this.

Speaking of things I intend to write about, there are a few reports that have come out recently but I’ve been busy and abroad, so they’re on the backburner. In that list:

Otherwise:

Apps, services, etc

Finally…

The following video contains, in the space of nine seconds, everything you need to know about fighting games.

If that leaves you none the wiser then you may well need the (much lengthier) accompanying article by Paul Miller, titled The Educated Gentleperson’s Fighting Game Primer. As he says: “you ought to know something about competitive fighting games as a matter of basic literacy”.

Arts Analytics: indexed pages

Generally speaking, bigger websites are better. A large website means more pages to be picked up by search engines and presented in organic search results, hopefully resulting in more traffic.

Of course, if care isn’t taken to produce and organise content effectively, larger websites can become unwieldy, sprawling and directionless, filled with with poor quality, stale or duplicate content. That’s not so good.

I’ve been wondering – how big do arts organisations’ websites tend to be? Without access to their databases or content management systems, it can be hard to tell. However, it’s pretty easy to find out how many pages Google thinks a website has. I’ll explain how below.

Findings

So, of the arts organisations that I’m looking at in this series, who has the most pages indexed by search engines? Let’s have a look.

(Data captured on 6 February 2013).

What does this tell us?

Not a great deal, to be honest. Not at an overall level at least, because I think there’s something wrong here. It’s nice to have the context this data gives us but I think something’s going on to create those massive outliers. I’ll get on to that.

I’d have liked to have been able to prove a hypothesis that larger venues such as the Barbican and Southbank Centre would be near the top of the list, given the number of productions they have every year (they’re up there but not topping the list). Or maybe organisations that have digital/new media teams that produce large amounts of content might perform well. Or perhaps those who know how to deal with old/archived information properly (rather than deleting entirely from their site – a capital crime in my eyes).

What if there’s something skewing this data then? It might be worth taking a closer look at the pages that are being indexed for those larger sites to see if the numbers are being inflated somehow. Well, at a quick glance I can see that:

So maybe there’s something to that theory. Bear in mind that if your site is, in the eyes of the search engines, substantially made up of duplicate or poor quality content then Google, et al may well decide that they should send less traffic to your website. Maybe they’re doing this already.

As you can see, context is good but this kind of information’s really more useful when applied at the individual level. If my organisation was at either the high or low end of that table, or my number of indexed pages seemed off then I might want to do some investigating.

Why you should check your indexed pages

One of the first things you do as part of a search engine optimisation audit is to find out how many of the pages that make up a given website are being listed (or indexed) by search engines.

  • Too few: It could be that you’re blocking search engines from crawling your website, or it could be that your site has been delisted for some reason.
  • Too many: You could have an issue with duplicate content or URLs being indexed that shouldn’t be.

In either case, you’ll want to remedy the situation to prevent being penalised by the search engines.

How to check your indexed pages for yourself

Google have a very handy thing called Webmaster Tools which is easy to set up and gives you all sorts of ways to check the health of your website. Under ‘Sitemaps’ you’ll be able to compare the number of URLs in your website’s sitemap with the number that have been indexed by Google.

For instance, for my website you can see in the screenshot below that 1,192 pages are included in the sitemap and 1,107 have been indexed. I’m also told that I have 91 warnings. I know that those all relate to URLs that I’m hiding from search engines on purpose (it’s a WordPress thing), so that’s all healthy.

Webmaster Tools screenshot

By the way, you can and should hook up your Webmaster Tools account to your Google Analytics account. It only takes a second and is worthwhile doing.

How to check someone else’s indexed pages

I don’t have access to information from Webmaster Tools for all of these sites, so how did I get my data?

I’ve used two methods. To find the number of pages indexed by Google I just Googled ‘site:URL’ for each organisation and looked at how many results were returned. For instance, try clicking site:bsolive.com. At the time of writing, the figure is ‘about 634,000′.

In the fourth column in the table above I’ve also included data from a company called Majestic SEO. They’ve built a search engine which crawls the web and builds up an index of pages and the links between them. They then make this information available to others.

The data from Majestic SEO doesn’t seem to match up with Google’s all that often here but I wonder if that might point to the kind of issues I outlined above. Or maybe it’s a difference between indexed pages and URLs on a site (where URLs may include images, etc). Either way, I’ve included the data because it was easy enough to do. I’ll be using other data from Majestic SEO in later posts.

Recommendations

  • Use Webmaster Tools to compare the number of pages in your sitemap with the number of pages indexed by Google
  • If you spot a problem, take action to fix it – look for duplicate content and pointless pages (like every day in your calendar) being indexed
  • Connect Webmaster Tools to your Google Analytics account.
  • Commission a website/search engine optimisation audit to pick up anything that might be affecting your website’s performance.

The problem with Royal & Derngate

You may have noticed that, according to my research, Royal & Derngate in Northampton only have two pages indexed by Google. A visit to their site shows that they have plenty more pages than that, so there must surely be some mistake. Unfortunately not.

Royal & Derngate are blocking search engines from indexing their site.

This is a very bad thing. They’re using a robots.txt file (http://www.royalandderngate.co.uk/robots.txt)to tell search engines not to visit the site. You can find out more about how this works at robotstxt.org. Here’s what it looks like:

Royal and Derngate robots file

Now this must’ve been done by mistake. There are reasons for hiding websites from search engines but I can’t see how any of them would apply here. Mistakes happen and that’s fair enough, but I’m going to stick my neck out and assume a few things here:

  • Nobody’s hooked up Webmaster Tools on this site, otherwise this would’ve been flagged straight away.
  • They’ve never commissioned a website or search engine optimisation audit, or this surely would’ve been caught.
  • Nobody’s looking at their Google Analytics, otherwise they’d have noticed a total lack of organic search traffic.
  • Or maybe someone is looking at their GA stats, but they don’t know what a ‘normal’ level of organic search traffic looks like.

Thing is, who does know what a normal level of organic search traffic looks like for a theatre? Well, me, but then I have access to lots of theatres’ stats. My point is, it’s not info that’s shared around very much.

Just to underline what an important issue this is, I’ve just checked some stats for some clients and found that 47-58% of their online sales come via organic search. I really should be charging someone for flagging this up.

Instead, Royal & Derngate: please make fixing this a priority. UPDATE: I’m pleased to say the folks there have been in touch to say they’re fixing this (and I did drop them an email about it to let them know).

This post is part of a series called Arts Analytics where I’m using digital metrics to see what a group of arts organisations are doing online. If that’s your sort of thing then sign up for the free Arts Analytics newsletter for more of the same.

If this was useful then I’d be really grateful if you shared it with others.

Links for February 2013

I’m in the video above, but I’m not posting it for purely narcissistic reasons (after all, I have a fair claim to be the least awesome person in it). I noticed that it was posted on the YouTube channel of the band Hadouken. Then I saw this on Reddit:

I play guitar in hadouken so I use our tracks for these videos as a way of introducing the band to new people :)

So essentially this is a band ripping off footage to make a YouTube-friendly ‘music video’. I find that fascinating. What’s more, 22m views and counting says that it could be a worthwhile tactic.

Arts / digital links

The other month I mentioned something about some presentations I’d bookmarked. I’d recommend taking a look at:

iSay is a two-year network funded by AHRC under the Digital Transformations in the Arts and Humanities theme. It’s looking at visitor-generated content in heritage institutions. And on a digital humanities tip, a meet-up in New York for folks interested in Data Visualization for Performing Arts & Cinema. Oh, and Bamboo DiRT.

Devoted & Disgruntled 8 happened, with write-ups from the sessions now on the website. of those, What is the best use of new technology on the stage? includes some nice examples and  Paying 3 times asked whether crowdfunding is an offensive idea (I’d say ‘no, not at all’, but it’s an interesting idea).

VirtualArtsTV have announced WiredArts Fest, a live-streamed theatre, dance and music festival on 19 Feb with the promise of live chat discussions (via Twitter and Facebook) while the performance is happening.

Speaking of which, I’ve nothing against the idea or artists live-streaming their shows, but I really hope the #couchtour phrase/hashtag used in this article doesn’t catch on.

And Diablo Ballet are doing a Web Ballet which they’re billing as “the first dance work developed from suggestions made on the internet”. It’ll premiere in March.

There was a piece on crowdfunding by French cultural institutions in the New York Times that threw up some interesting links. The Louvre are crowdfunding a future acquisition via a website that makes me all sorts of angry. The first stage of renovating The Pantheon’s roof has been crowdfunded too, this time using a Kickstarter clone called My Major Company.

In cultural app land:

I’m not sure why I always highlight these kinds of apps. I always forget about them 5mins after downloading them. Morbid fascination, maybe.

There’s a Cultural PR Conference at the Tower of London on 14 Feb 2013. Bar the @CulturalPRconf Twitter account, I can’t find much info about it anywhere. I find that odd.

Other links

There were a couple of late entries for worthwhile end-of-year posts. Best of Quora 2010-2012 contains some interestingness and Ashley Friedlein’s digital marketing and ecommerce trends for 2013 was better than most. Lots around finding/retaining talent with some good stuff on advertising, analytics, content marketing and the importance of email and SEO.

I like The Setup a lot but this one from a coding chef really stood out.

There’s probably something in this list of Dropbox tips and resources that you’ll find useful. Here are some more quick links:

I was fascinated by a post on Econsultancy with Pitney Bowes talking about segmentation, trends, and data. Not for the meat of the article, but for the intro:

Competitors like Kodak went bust and Xerox nearly filed Chapter 11, but Pitney Bowes sought to evolve with the times by adding a robust suite of digital marketing products for B2B clientele intent on reaching audiences through email, social, and mobile channels.

Which made me think that although I can think of plenty of organisations that have  adapted to new forms of digital distribution, I can’t think of many that have revamped their core product offering to such an extent.

Internet Users Demand Less Interactivity:

We Just Want To Visit Websites And Look At Them,’ Users Say

Thank you, The Onion.

Apps, services, etc

Finally…

I really like Radiolab and the video below is like meta-Radiolab. It’s host/creator Jad Abumrad talking about how the show came about and how it feels to try doing something that takes you far out of your comfort zone.

Arts organisations and branded AdWords

For the second post in my Arts Analytics series I wondered how many of my group of 100 arts organisations are using Google AdWords.

I’m sure you’ll come across AdWords before. You create adverts and choose keywords. When people search on Google using one of your keywords, the ad you made may appear next to the search results (as in the screenshot below). You only pay when a person clicks on your advert.

Google AdWords - Google Search

However, finding which organisations are using AdWords might’ve been a little tricky, so I decided to be more specific.

I looked at which organisations are buying branded keywords – that is, keywords matching their organisation’s name. It’s easier for me to research (I just have to Google the organisation’s name) and it has some additional significance, which I’ll explain below.

Findings

Of the 100 arts organisations in my sample group, at least 16 are buying branded AdWords.

I say ‘at least’ because there’s no guarantee I’ll see them all, for reasons I’ll explain below. Here’s the full list of ones I found:

I Googled each organisation’s name at around 10pm on 30 January 2013.

Why buy branded AdWords?

So why would you do this? Surely if anyone searches for the name of your organisation you’re more than likely to be top of the search results already, right? Are the organisations that buy branded AdWords just throwing their money away? Well, no. Or at least probably not.

There are a few reasons why you might buy AdWords keywords for your organisation’s name:

  • Because it delivers extra traffic. Google recently published research that backs up what many in the PPC industry already knew – buying keywords adds to your traffic, rather than cannibalising organic search traffic.
  • Because with Google Grants you might as well. You’ve applied to Google’s programme that gives charities you $10,000/month in AdWords credit for free, right? RIGHT?
  • Because someone else might. You don’t want to be trumped by a competitor, do you?

Of course, that last one is more of a defensive play, better suited to the cutthroat commercial world of online betting, pharmaceuticals and so on. Or so you might’ve thought…

It’s noticeable that the London-based opera companies in my sample group all seem pretty up on their AdWords. What’s more, English Touring Opera, English National Opera and the Royal Opera House don’t just advertise against their own names but often against each other too. They branch out too – when I did a search for English National Ballet, this is what came up… (click to enlarge)

Google - English National Ballet

There’s no rule against doing this, by the way. All’s fair in digital marketing.

Or I could be wide of the mark and it’s not deliberate, it’s just down to some broad keyword matching. Still, it made me chuckle.

Why not buy branded AdWords?

Now, I’m not saying that the other organisations on the list don’t know what they’re doing – I really can’t tell that from my quick bit of research. There are actually some very good reasons why I may not have seen other organisations buying branded AdWords:

  • Maybe they’ve found that other keywords produce better results and so are prioritising those.
  • I could be excluded from seeing their ads by regional targeting.
  • Maybe their ad inventory had been used up by the time in the evening I came to do my searching.
  • High demand may have pushed the price of the keyword out of the range of their bidding (it happens where there’s a strong secondary market for an organisation’s tickets, for example)

Maybe I’ll look a bit closer at that last point in the next Arts Analytics post.

How to measure the effect of your branded keywords

You could just log into AdWords and see how often the ad is clicked on but that’s a bit… well, average.

Want to do better? Here’s one way. Firstly, this only works if you’ve set up ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics and also hooked up your Google Analytics linked to your AdWords account.

As long as that’s all sorted, log into your Analytics account then come back and click this link: End to End Paid Search Report.

It’ll generate a custom report that will show, per keyword, how much you’re paying for the traffic you’re getting and how much revenue is generated as a result of it. Have a dig around and read more about the report and how to use it over on Avinash Kaushik’s website (he’s the one who made that custom report).

Recommendations

  • If you’re eligible, apply for the Google Grants programme
  • Connect your AdWords account to your Google Analytics for greater insights
  • Buy AdWords for your organisation’s name (and any variations)
  • Measure the effect (see if that traffic converts according to your website’s goals)

If any of this sounds too difficult or time-consuming, you could always pay someone to set up your account properly and manage things for a bit. After a while, you could decide whether to carry on with an agency or take over management of your AdWords account yourself. Just a thought.

If this post was useful then please consider sharing it with others. Sign up for the free Arts Analytics newsletter too, it’ll be great.

More from the Arts Analytics series.