Archive for March, 2011
Posted on March 28, 2011 by Brian Honigman
Sometimes people have it out for each other with or without reason. The same thing can happen when it comes to one website in competition with another or when a customer is displeased with your company. Bad online reputations can occur for a number of reasons. You competition might have it out for you and may be seeding bad reviews for your site and could even create negatively biased sites aimed at outranking you. In the same vein, completely legitimate bad reviews and customer complaints can taint other customers’ experience with your services. Understanding how you can counteract these unwelcome blemishes and successfully manage your online reputation is important for the continued success of your website and brand as a whole.
Finding and Handling Customer Feedback, Sentiment and Complaints
1. Google Alerts: The best thing about Google Alerts is it’s free. Google Alerts can be used to monitor both legitimate customer feedback and competitors muddying the waters through dishonest practices. Monitoring mentions of your brand name is the first step towards recognizing when your irritated customers are negatively affecting your online rep. Set an alert that either monitors your brand name (for example LunaMetrics), negative keywords (for example LunaMetrics Complaints, LunaMetrics Issues, etc. etc.) or any other keywords you think would help bring issues to your attention through daily or weekly email updates. Google Alerts should be used to measure positive feedback about your website as well. It’s all about understanding the conversations going on about your brand in the online space, while trying to turn negative customer feedback into a positive experience.
2. Facebook & Twitter: In almost all cases, except with some companies working solely business to business, your company should have a presence on these two platforms to help ensure the conversations about your business are occurring in areas where you can have direct input. While most agree, myself included, that engaging your fans and updating your accounts is important, it’s still important that your brand is present on each of these social networks even if you don’t have the resources to devote to spending lots of time on them. Occasional upkeep can suffice if you’re pressed for time, especially for smaller companies and when few users engage you directly. Answer complaints, questions, comments and concerns to help correct any issues or shine light on an ongoing conversation. No matter what business you’re in, there are going to be occasionally unhappy customers. You can either ignore them or recognize this subset of customers and help turn them into an example of your brand’s outstanding customer service.
3. Social Media Monitoring Tools: When your company is either big or popular, you already have a huge following and high levels of brand loyalty. Regardless if you take part or not, conversations about your products are occurring on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. Simply existing on these networks in these cases may not be enough, but trying to keep up with all the interaction may seem overwhelming even for an experienced team of social media strategists. That’s where social media monitoring tools like Radian6, HootSuite and others come in handy for sifting through the masses. With these tools you can help keep positive impressions about your website, while answering any concerns that arise. This will leave your site looking better than if conversations were left unanswered and incorrect information unchallenged.
Dealing with Angry Customer or Competitor Websites
Occasionally there are competitors (or really, really angry customers — think Dell Hell) who will go all out and create entire web properties with the intent of defaming your brand. There are a variety of ways to deal with this kind of issue.
4.Respond To These Web Properties: If you’ve discovered through your various monitoring tools or regular web browsing a website defaming your brand for whatever reason, it’s time to react. These websites are often competitors trying to devalue your brand appeal or from upset customers, mad enough to create a website about it. If they begin to outrank you for certain search terms it could become a big problem for your business. Once you’ve discovered a website of this nature be sure to comment on their forums, comment on their blog, email one of the email address provided or let your voice be heard in any way possible.
Try to answer complaints and issues the website addresses to the best of your knowledge, providing actionable solutions to these customer’s perceived problems. Unfortunately, many of these website’s comment sections and forums have a moderation filter, which may block your input. There’s also the possibility that the people behind these websites may not be willing to listen to your side of the story, especially if they’ve gone far enough to build a website about their issues. So, it’s worth a try, but not a guaranteed way to solve the issue.
5.Extensive Search Engine Optimization: Many of the above tactics allow you to monitor the actions of others online and allow you to react accordingly. As long as a website is practicing honest SEO tactics, then it is very hard to remove them from searches related to your brand that they are ranking for through legitimate tactics. However, there is one thing you can do to fight back against customers and competitors that you’ve already tried to appease, further optimize your own site.
The SEO of your own website is certainly a way of managing your online reputation without the input of outsiders. By optimizing your website with more high-quality content it will help make you the authority on the industry. Seeking links from related industry institutions and professionals will help build you a credible reputation within search engines and among other websites. Optimizing various on-page elements of your websites will help further raise existing pages on site to higher, more relevant searches. There’s no guarantee you’ll outrank your competition, but over time these efforts can continue to help you build trust in the online marketplace.
What tools and techniques do you use to monitor your online reputation?
View Comments (4 Responses) | Categories: Search Engine Optimization, Social Media
Posted on March 23, 2011 by Jordan Knox
Several days ago, I was asked to review a list of keywords for a site and created a nice little layout to provide gaps and opportunities for established keywords. Everyone thought it was nifty, here it is so that you can benefit, too.
Our Problem: Bob’s Beets.
Let’s say you’ll be reviewing a site about beets. Bob, the owner of Bob’s Beets, has a pretty nice layout of keywords. He had a previous SEO campaign done, but it’s been awhile and he really wants to make sure his website is doing as well as it could. Pretty cut and dry. Before you run off and get excited across the interwebs finding new keywords to throw at Bob and his beet goodness, you should fire up Excel. As you can see I like to open up with some basic things such as URL, Keywords, both national and local ranking, keyword difficulty, and exact match search volume.
Make Color Coding your Friend
I need everyone to know first that I love color coding things (see the start above). I find it easier if you can quickly scroll through huge Excel sheets and find highlighted problems with ease. You can go with any color you decide. I went with a manly pastel blue. For the sake of me writing less we are going to assume that Bob kept around a handy dandy list of previous targeted keywords, title, and Meta descriptions. Bob is a really awesome client.
Break up the Excel file by URL and subfolder
So we’ll break up each page and their subsections, in order, down through the keyword list. I like to break up each section with a color line for easier viewing. I include a short description of the page followed by the title for a header. This helps as a nice reference when looking at the ranking for the keywords selected for each specific page. Below is a sampling of the initial process to give you a general idea.
Think about difficulty and volume before rank
Once I’ve filled the fields to cover your desired area of the site, I tend to skip over ranking into grabbing data for the difficulty and search volume for each keyword. Why did I decide to jump over ranking? I find it much easier to look at the competitive field for specific keywords coupled with search volume, which will help to highlight specific keywords out of each section. I focus on the keywords that
1. I feel the site could compete for based on difficulty and
2. Have enough traffic to be worth working on.
Tools to help you find these gaps
There are several ways you can aggregate data to come up with a difficulty model for each keyword, I highly suggest trying out SEOmoz Pro Tools specifically for their keyword difficulty tool. If you’re not ready to commit to a paid tool set, I still suggest grabbing SEOmoz’s free SEO Toolbar which calculates a read out of each sites Page Authority and Domain Authority. If you wish to go the toolbar route it will be much more time intensive (albeit free), as you will have to physically visit each of the top 10 ranking sites for each keyword. Record each Page Authority and Domain Authority, add the numbers up and divide by two and multiply by .10 to receive a baseline difficulty score. You can use a number of tools for volume search such as WordTracker; pick one you’re most comfortable with.
As you can see from the above graph above, I’ve been able to find a sampling from my, totally made up, results. I use purple to distinguish a potential opportunity but with a higher competition for ranking; orange denotes a perfect blend of medium competition and high enough search traffic. The easiest way to find these opportunities is to use the sort feature for the volume row and cross reference that with the difficulty row. From there I check to see where each keyword ranks. If you’re pressed for time you could focus only on the highlighted words, but I suggest filling everything out to provide a fuller picture of the site’s performance.
Looking at the finished example sheet there are several areas Bob’s keywords are severely behind in the SERP’s. Ouch. Still, by providing this data, we can really dig into these areas and go over what is wrong to correct these problems. Bob could definitely do better for beet cake, beet lover, and beet juice. Personally, I would focus on the faltering areas in the orange and think about more intensive strategies for trying to enter a purple zone. I realize that organizing a sheet like this may be inconvenient for some, but this provides a quick numerical guide of how your site is performing in relation to your targeted keywords, which I think is invaluable. Let me know if you have a different way or suggestions for the improvement of my methods in the comments below.
View Comments (4 Responses) | Categories: Search Engine Optimization
Posted on March 17, 2011 by Jonathan Weber
The little elves in the Google Analytics factory are always making improvements, but this is a biggie. They’ve been working on this under wraps for a long time, and today Google Analytics finally pulled back the sheet on a new version. It introduces a new interface and builds a platform for further improvements going forward.
What’s New
There are lots of new things, and we’ll be covering many of the features in detail over the coming few weeks. Here’s a run-down of some of the highlights:
- Dashboard with improved customizability.
Even though I just wrote a couple of weeks ago how the GA dashboard might be better than you thought, now it’s even better. You get to choose the format of widgets (charts, tables, single metrics) and you get to title them yourself with something meaningful. And, you can create multiple dashboards and use them for different profiles. So far conspicuously missing: the ability to export or email the dashboard.
- Improved organization of reports.
The report navigation is re-organized to make a little more sense, grouping together similar reports and making similar data accessible right within a single report instead of multiple similar reports.
- New report design. It does all the same kinds of things as before, but with a streamlined interface. It also has some little nuggets of improvements we’ll cover later.
- Pet peeve yay! When you navigate around and switch accounts or profiles, GA remembers better where you are — which report, which date range, even which advanced segments. There are exceptions, though — Robbin found that when you switch from custom reports to regular reports, your advanced segments get turned off.
- Speaking of advanced segments, Pet peeve 2 yay! You can now apply multiple advanced segments (still up to 4 at a time) but you no longer have to select “All Visits” as one of the four.
- New, improved custom reports. The ability to save a filter with a custom report, among other improvements. Currently, my “old” custom reports aren’t showing up here, so not sure what the migration plan for those is.
- Rejiggered management interface. Probably the least sexy but most important part of this all. The account management interface is re-arranged to make a bit more sense of account, web properties, and profiles and allows for better management of shared items between users (like advanced segments and custom alerts). Although it’s not very exciting (and it’s not all there yet), this lays the foundation for better account management features and sharing of customizations between users.
More screenshots:
Don’t Panic
With all the changes, you might be worried that everything you know about Google Analytics is going out the window and you’ll have to learn it all over. Don’t fret: almost everything you already know is still here. In some cases it’s a little rearranged or streamlined, but your favorite reports are still available and all the same data is still there. There’s even a report finder to help you find your old reports in the new version.
I Want It!
You may or may not be able to see this now. Google is rolling out beta access in waves over the coming weeks. When you get the option, a link will appear at the top of your GA reports that says “New Version”, like this:
For some time, while this is still a beta, you’ll have the ability to switch back and forth between the new and old versions — so just in case there’s something you used to know how to do but haven’t figured out yet in the new interface, don’t worry, you can still do it.
Most importantly, remember that it’s a beta. Although the Google Analytics team, Google Analytics Certified Partners, and others have used and given feedback on this interface, the GA team will be closely monitoring how a broad spectrum of users make use of this new version, and the feedback they give, to continue to make enhancements and correct issues.
View Comments (2 Responses) | Categories: Google Analytics
Posted on March 8, 2011 by Christina Keffer
One of the most challenging aspects of being a consultant is being able to convey your progress to your clients (and occasionally, boss) in an easily-digestible, understandable manner. This usually involves paring down reports to their barest essentials — stripping away the extraneous in order to reach a core of actual insightful data. It involves keeping everyone focused on overall trends instead of micro-analyzing on a weekly or even daily basis. After all, most website changes, especially SEO-related changes take time to really come to fruition.
The idea is to avoid the possibility of the client freaking out when traffic drops 30% after a bout of 301 redirects to new search engine friendly URLs. The rankings (and traffic) will come back in a few weeks if everything is allowed to shake down adequately, but it won’t work if the process is reversed due to yanking out the new urls and going back to the status quo because the party in charge was obsession over daily or weekly traffic levels instead of looking at the bigger, overall picture.
In this post, I’ll talk about data presentation and the most important success metrics (as I see them) for SEO. The examples I’ll use are real, albeit sanitized for client confidentiality.
SEO Success Metrics
Usually, when a client comes to us, they’re utterly obsessed with rankings. They have a shortlist of about 3 or 4 keywords or phrases, usually highly competitive head terms, and those terms are all they care about. They are preconditioned to judge the efficacy of SEO efforts by this one metric. It takes a long time to wean them of their dependably on keyword rank tracking.
It’s not that rankings are not important. Far from it. In order to achieve the REAL goal, rankings have to be achieved and upheld. But the 30,000 foot view model of reporting doesn’t jive with multiple reports and goals. In order to distill insight from the data puke that is GA reports, it’s important to pick one, or at most two metrics for success to report on. So lets cut out the middle man (rankings) and focus on what really matters to clients — even if they don’t know it: Traffic and Conversions.
The overall goal of optimizing ones site for the search engines is to get higher quantities of good quality, converting traffic from the organic search engine results page. Once you understand that, figuring out how to set up your reporting is easy. You look at traffic, you look at organic traffic, and you look at conversions and you focus on trends.
Google Analytics Data Presentation vs. Excel
Google Analytics is pretty awesome. To those of us who use it every day, it is intuitive, well organized and offers some pretty awesome ways to slice and dice data. It’s really easy to forget that our clients, who in many cases are not as tech-savvy or comfortable with browser based programs as we are can be overwhelmed by the choices and actually dislike the visualizations that we find so incredibly useful.
I’ve been delivering monthly reports to clients for years in every format you can think of. I’ve created reports on the GA dashboard, exported them into pdfs, ccvs, excel sheets… you name it, I’ve done it. All in an effort to find the best way to show them what they NEED to know without distracting them by what they don’t really want to know. The report that I have the most success with is actually the simplest excel report imaginable. It’s a month to month comparison of overall traffic, un-paid search engine traffic, unbranded search engine traffic and the quantity of goal completions due to search engine traffic. These are the resulting charts I send out monthly:
This graph represents all traffic from all channels on the website. I include it to give clients context for the organic traffic and also because it’s something they invariably want to and should see. It’s important, however to make it clear that this graph does not represent SEO efforts specifically, rather overall performance.
This graph represents organic traffic and unbranded traffic. The importance of organic traffic as a metric for success is pretty obvious. However, I think that the true measure of success for SEO is unbranded organic traffic. After all, a site that’s not ranking for its own brand name, with some notable exceptions, has some pretty big problems. I find it hard to take credit for branded traffic.
This last graph is an example of goal completion broken out by month over time. The spec download was this client’s most important goal. Using GA annotations, it’s easy for me to explain the sudden jump: we created a landing page for the download and optimized it for the appropriate keywords. I don’t have to include the ranking performance of the specific keywords for this report because the results are obvious.
Date Ranges
You’ll notice that I’m using entire months instead of, say, 30 day chunks of time starting on the same day of the week. Does this skew the data slightly? Yes. However, since it’s my goal to focus on traffic and conversion trends rather than specifics, I find this acceptable. There are cases when the difference in traffic from weekdays to weekends is so drastic that I’ll change this methodology, but those cases are rare.
The 30,000 foot view is a great way to spot trouble areas and places where success is really evident (always a great thing to point out to clients and your boss.)
View Comments (5 Responses) | Categories: Search Engine Optimization, Web Analytics
Subscribe to this blog's feed
