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What is a C-level Executive? and Other Keyword Searches
By Meg Guiseppi | September 4, 2009
My Google Analytics tells me that one of the most popular key word phrases people search that lands them here on my blog/website is “what is a c level executive?”. For anyone seeking the answer to that question, let me take care of you first:
C-level (or Chief-level) executives are top-rung corporate executives, including such business titles as:
- Chief Executive Officer or Chief Experience Officer – CEO or CXO
- Chief Operating Officer – COO
- Chief Information Officer or Chief Investment Officer – CIO
- Chief Marketing Officer – CMO
- Chief Brand (or Banking) Officer – CBO
- Chief Compliance Officer – CCO
- Chief Technology (or Technical) Officer – CTO
- Chief Finance (or Financial) Officer – CFO
- Chief Learning (or Legal) Officer – CLO
Some say I’m obsessed with Google Analytics, monitoring my website metrics daily, but I learn so much from them.
Although I’ve learned some tricks to boost searchability and get search engines to like my blog, I mostly rely on posting good content leveraging relevant key words and phrases for my niche.
Here’s what most interests me about my Analytics:
- Traffic sources – Did a Google search using keywords lead them to me or did they follow a backlink from another site to mine?
- Keywords people search leading them to my site.
- Bounce Rate – Did they find what they were looking for or jump right off my site?
- Content – Which posts and pages got the most visits?
- Number of visitors through each keyword and web page, average time on site, and number of pages per visit.
Looking at traffic sources tells me a number of things:
- What sites lead people to my site (so I can concentrate efforts on the best places to get valuable backlinks to my site).
- Backlinks I’ve picked up that I didn’t know about (so I can see who’s talking about me and my site and what they’re saying).
- (sometimes) Whether someone’s scraping (stealing) content from my blog.
Tracking which of my blog posts and pages get the most visits helps me decide which topics are hot and which fall flat.
My favorite thing to do with Google Analytics is check the key word phrases people search that lead them to my site. Among other things, this information gives me new topics to write about or reminds me it’s time to write about something again.
It’s no surprise that the following terms bring a lot of people to my site, because I purposefully stoke my post titles and content with them:
- c-level executive
- senior-level executive
- executive branding
- executive resume
- executive job search
- executive career biography
- personal branding
- online identity
But some of the keywords are unexpected and curious. When seemingly unrelated ones show up in Analytics, I have to wonder first, what is this person actually looking for and second, what was the corresponding page or post on my site that prompted Google to point them in my direction. By Googling the keywords myself, I can usually figure it out:
• “brad pitt’s resume” was a match with my post Even Brad Pitt Didn’t Become a Famous Personal Brand Overnight.
• “telling your friends you are moving + finding words” landed the searcher on my post Baby Boomer Career Reinvention: Moving Toward Working Your Passion.
• The person who searched “why is it that executives can’t write good” landed on my post 6 Big Reasons You Can’t Write Your Own Great C-Level Executive Resume.
Some people are persistent. Someone has been searching the phrase “if you are authentic do you need branding” and visiting my site every day for the past 5 weeks and counting.
I can’t help but marvel at how hard Google works to match relevant web pages with search phrases, even when they’re misspelled, as with “writing an executive roll resume” and “bmaking your passion a carreer”,
Here are some curious phrases that led people here in August:
- allthe tag linesof cocacola in india
- how to bluff your way into exceutive job
- how to know if your friend is authentic
- I hate relying on people to make money
- I’ve already send my resume today
- laid off and friends don’t call
- megan white senior executive google
- must I include contact information on a resume?
- nj state fair-rooster contest
- paul newman project manager
- photography be right for this job along with your resume.
- pimp my twitter avatar
- ways to make best dates – did they mean dates as in the fruit, or dates as in the activity?
Not surprising, these visitors had high bounce rates – people didn’t find what they were looking for and quickly moved away from my site.
Thanks to Jennifer McClure at CincyRecruiter for the inspiration for this post – Who Is The Best Recruiter In The World? (And Other Stuff People Ask Me).
Related posts:
Why Google Alerts Is One of My Favorite Personal Branding Tools
15 Best of Online Brand Identity and Social Media
Topics: Entrepreneurial Blogging Scene, Online Identity, Social Media | No Comments »
September 7th, 2009 at 2:07 pm
Thanks for the link Meg! I enjoy reading the analytics info for my blog and am working on trying to better understand it/use it to improve both my content and results. I agree – it’s amazing to see how Google works and fun to try to figure out how to maximize it! Keep up the good work here!
September 8th, 2009 at 9:48 am
Thanks for commenting, Jennifer, and providing the inspiration for the post. It was a great excuse for me to dig even deeper into Google Analytics and spend even more time noodling around with it!
-Meg