Archive for the ‘Search Engine Optimization’ Category
Posted on December 20, 2011 by Travis Loncar
Local businesses have long doubted the possibility, if not the potential, of ranking favorably for geo-modified keyword phrases in the organic search results. In markets where competition is stiff and ahead of the curve, spending thousands of dollars for results that are anything less than guaranteed is reasonably unjustifiable. Likewise, PPC costs in these markets can be through the roof, costing small businesses upwards of $10-15 a click – a rate that bodes well for too few industries. While websites that are well optimized for conversions can turn these high-cost clicks into profit, it is often difficult for small businesses to stomach the costs of redesign and analytics that it takes to mold such sites. All things considered, it can be a trying, expensive endeavor for a small business to gain traction in the paid or traditional organic search results.
Enter Google Places, Google’s online local directory – an avenue through which all local business owners can (and should) pursue organic traffic for their websites. Know a local business owner? Own a business yourself? Great! The following post will walk you through the steps of setting up your Google Places listing, complete with tips for optimizing your listing for Google’s local search results. If you’re already familiar with the setup (and curious about the optimization exclusively), you’re welcome to skip ahead to Step 3.
1. Create a Google account for your local business/website.
Believe it or not, this is one of the most important steps in the process. Not only does your Google account enable you to claim your listing, but it also is the account that you’ll need to access if you wish to make any changes/updates to your Places page. Whether you’re the business owner or not, I recommend creating an account that’s specific to your business, rather than using a personal account. If the responsibilities of maintaining the listing or the business itself should ever change hands, you’ll not want to grant the new employee or owner access to your personal account. Trust aside, it’s just not something that’s preferable – for managerial, organizational, and personal reasons. Keep the login simple – something that’s easy to remember, but also sufficiently secure. I’d go with mybusinessname@gmail.com. That’s simplicity! Also, when creating your account, you have the option to specify an “other email address.” Be sure to specify an address that uses your businesses domain name, for example joe@mybusinessname.com. This is one more signal that helps Google trust the information you’ll provide in the following steps.
2. Claim your Google Places listing.
Once you have your account set up, it’s time to claim your listing. Go to the Google Places homepage, where you’ll see two options. For our purposes, we’ll be choosing the option on the right – Claim your business listing on Google – for free.
After you click “Get started”, you may be asked to log into your account once more. Kindly oblige to this additional step towards security and continue on. If this is your first time listing a business under the new account (which it likely will be), you should be directed to a page that prompts you to search for your business by telephone number. Enter your business land line (formatted like the one below), select your country, and click “Find business information”. Be mindful that, due to its integration with Google Maps, Google Places must be provided with a land line to associate or pair with a physical address. You should not use your personal or company cell number when completing this step. I’ll explain more about this later.
If Google was unable to find your business information (which is fine), you can move onto the next step. If it does, that’s generally fine, as well. In most cases, you’ll be able to edit and claim your existing listing (which may simply consist of basic information pulled from the various sources like InfoUSA, Yellowpages, etc.). In the rare case that someone else has already claimed your listing, you can either determine who has claimed it (if, perhaps, it was claimed internally) or claim it again.
3. Edit your Google Places listing.
This is where the bulk of the work gets done. First, I’ll address how to go about editing an existing listing (should that be the case). If your business is found, you should arrive at a screen like the one below, where you’ll see your business name, land line, and physical address. To edit your listing, simply click “Edit” on the right hand side. Don’t worry about verifying anything just yet; we’ll get to that in the next step.
Alright. Now it’s time to do the legwork that will serve as the foundation for our Google Places listings. Appropriately enough, this section will be a little longer than those before it; so hold on tight. This is like that 30-minute, touristy train ride at the beginning of the National Park that all the kids want to replace with “exploration”. You can go on and explore or stick around, learn, then explore. I’ll let you be the judge of which is more beneficial. Anyways, let’s get to it. While most of the sections of the listing are pretty self explanatory, I’ll outline the two that I find to be most pertinent to our listing’s ability to rank.
Basic Information
In this section, you’ll fill out some of the basic information about your business, including country, company name, street address, city, zip, etc. If you have a website, this is where you’ll enter the URL. One thing to keep in mind in this section (and throughout all of your online listings) is consistency. Consistency across multiple listings and seed channels is often considered to be one of the key determinants of search engine visibility for Google Places listings.
For instance, when filling out the Address field, something as simple as using the shorthand “Mulberry St.” , rather than the written form “Mulberry Street” is something that you should monitor for the sake of consistency. An integral component of a given listing’s ranking potential is the availability of information with which Google is able to triangulate validity. When moving from one seed site to the next (be it Yelp, Citysearch, Hotfrog, what have you), be mindful of any discrepancies between inputs – however minute they may be. Remember, when it comes to the inputs that are indicative of your physical location or contact information, the more consistent your listings, the better.
When typing up the description, you have 200 characters to describe your business. Use these 200 characters efficiently and effectively, maintaining a healthy balance of your targeted geo-modified keywords and usability. Do your best to include partial match keywords in your category selections, as well. You can choose to list up to five different categories (many of which are predefined).
Service Areas and Location Settings
In this section, you’ll specify whether your business operates out of one location or offers business/service to customers at their homes. If you choose the first option – “No, all customers come to the business location” – you’re essentially guaranteeing that the primary root location of all of your geo-modified key phrases will be the city/town in which your business is located. In selecting the second option – “Yes, this business serves customers at their locations” – you’re (perhaps) indicating that all towns within your scope should be given equal weight when tacked onto your key phrases as geo-modifiers. Makes sense, right?
As far as determining your coverage area goes (for those of you who select the second option), you have two choices. The first – Distance from one location – allows you to specify a location and a radius (measured in miles). All areas within the circumference of the resulting circle are considered to be part of the coverage area. The other option – List of areas served – allows you to list specific cities/towns in which your business or service operates at the customer’s home. This is handy for those of you who don’t necessarily work within or without the confines of a given circumference with a defined center. It’s also useful for showcasing for Google the towns for which you’d like your listing to rank locally. In my mind, there’s a time and a place for each of these different options. Do your best to discern which will work most effectively for your type of business.
Other Information
It should be clear at this point that the Google Places listing requests a pretty comprehensive set of inputs and information. If I were to offer you one word to help you make your listing the very best that it can be, it would be ‘completeness’. Not only does completeness give your listing a better chance of ranking, but it also provides for the best user experience. Have pictures of your storefront? Upload them. Have a product review video or a 30-second television spot? Upload it. You get the idea. Substance is optimal. Make sure you have something for every field.
Once you’ve assured that your Places listing is both consistent with other online listings and ripe with completeness, you can proceed to Step 4.
4. Verify your Google Places listing.
Verification is a necessary step of listing your business on Google Places, and there are two methods for doing so. When you’re done editing your listing, click “Submit” at the bottom of the page. If everything is status quo, you’ll be taken to the verification screen, where you’ll be asked, “How would you like to validate your listing?”.
In most cases, you can choose from either phone or postcard verification. If you choose to verify by phone, moments after you click “Finish”, you will receive a phone call from Google’s automated machine at your business’s land line. When you answer the phone, the Google “bot” will read a 5-digit verification PIN, which you’ll need to write down. Simply input this 5-digit PIN under its respective business within your Places account, and voila – your listing is live. Verification by postcard replaces the phone call to your business address with the mailing of a postcard to your business address. The postcard (from Google) should arrive within two to three weeks of clicking “Finish” and contains the 5-digit PIN that you’ll need for verification. The downside to this method is obviously the time that it takes to get your listing live. While phone verification is almost always preferable (as it is instant), it is not always provided as an option.
5. Manage, maintain, & market your Google Places listing.
We’re at the end of the road . . . or are we? Once your listing goes live, it’s up to you whether or not you want to devote time and resources to managing, maintaining, and marketing it. Let me limit your options, here. DO IT. Take a few minutes every now and then to monitor your page.
If you have Google Analytics set up on your business website, consider tracking traffic and conversions from users finding your listing through the local pin drop results. Encourage happy customers to leave reviews on your Places page. Post semi-frequent updates – including special offers and coupons. Build your online reputation by creating listings with other notable local directories, keeping consistency in mind throughout. The honest pursuit of these tasks, when coupled with an underlying quality of business or service, provide for a socially engaging listing that’s fit to rank well in location-specific results.
And so ends in brevity this guide to Google Places for local businesses. If you’re looking to learn more about specific ranking factors for local SEO, have a look at David Mihm’s Local Search Ranking Factors. That should give you some further insights into what it takes to rank for local queries. If you have any questions, comments, or tales of the Google Places you’ve been, don’t hesitate to share! In the mean time, have a safe, tremendous holiday.
View Comments (6 Responses) | Categories: Search Engine Optimization
Posted on December 6, 2011 by Leslie Anderson
Search Engine Optimization can be a mysterious field. Every other SEO guru has a different opinion about what tips, tricks or incantations cause your website to rank highly and cause conversions. These tips and tricks can be incredibly useful, and can certainly cause serious increases in your website’s traffic. What these lists don’t mention, however, is that SEO tricks alone do not make a website perform well. SEO tips, tricks and
techniques should be icing on the cake.
The backbone of SEO is a well designed and well written website. A well designed website is intuitive and easy to use, and is fashioned to allow search engines to easily spider your site. This means that no pages are forgotten about or lost in space, and visitors to your site can easily navigate to their intended destination. No amount of SEO is going to help your conversion rate if people can’t find what they’re looking for.
Well written copy also performs two basic functions: it provides important keywords, specifically keywords that help make long tail keywords, and it’s the primary source of communicating to your customers. Well written copy is a wealth of information for both search engines and visitors to your site. It allows search engines to determine what your site is all about, while giving important information about your company and your services to visitors.
This might seem a straightforward topic, but often times companies will pour money into SEO projects only to see drastic increases in website traffic that never converts, often due to web designers knowing little about SEO. Without a solid foundation, SEO will unlikely be able to help you reach your goals. Luckily, SEO specialists understand this. If you see phenomenal website traffic for qualified keywords, but not the conversion rates you’d like, it might be worth contacting an SEO company that conducts usability testing. They can help determine why your site is underperforming and can suggest ways to improve your website that dovetail with your current SEO strategies.
View Comments (2 Responses) | Categories: Search Engine Optimization
Posted on November 29, 2011 by Reid Bandremer
Link building is tough. You wander through hundreds of websites, carefully dodging bad neighborhoods and figuring out to get past the gate and into the high profile communities. You try to make new friends, but the webmasters and gatekeepers won’t give you the time of day. If only you already had a large group of friends in high places – folks who would be more than happy to vouch for you via link, folks whose hyper-linking votes of confidence really boosts your credibility to the search engines that be.
Well, chances are that you have more friends than you realize. They can and will help your SEO endeavors, and you’ve probably been ignoring many of them. Your web friends are your entire group of stakeholders – every person, group, or organization who has a stake in your organizations success.
At LunaMetrics, we’ve found that the relationships our clients have built over the years produce great backlinks. Stakeholder backlinks typically are often hard to duplicate, carry solid authority, exist in neighborhoods with small numbers of external links, and are genuine votes of confidence. We’ve also found that these relationships aren’t always translated online into links, but they often do with just a little help.
Introducing… the Stakeholder Backlink Audit
Helping current relationships bear linkable fruit online has become such an important part of our link-building methodology that we’ve formalized the process into a method we’ve dubbed the Stakeholder Backlink Audit.
The Stakeholder Backlink Audit is a tool for ensuring your website is receiving as many links as possible from those parties who may have an interest in your organization’s success, and may be willing to link to your site. It is a systematic and thorough method of maximizing link love from all the relationships your organization has built.
The Stakeholder Backlink Audit has 3 steps: 1) List stakeholders 2) Review their websites 3) Request links. We’ll walk you through the process using a make believe company – a restaurant chain called Pittsburgh Premier Pizza. We’ll also show you how to make a mean audit form.
Stakeholder Backlink Audit Step 1 – List stakeholders
First we need to take inventory. We recommend that you list on a spreadsheet every person or organization your organization has built a relationship with that you’d want as a referral source. This requires some help from your client or coworkers. Leave out any organizations you wouldn’t want to ask for a link from, and leave out any business relationships you want to keep private. Don’t worry yet about adding a bunch of details, checking the website, or checking for links. This step is simply all about building a nice long list of names, and being as thorough as possible. We’ll pare it down later.
You’ll want to build a sheet and pass it around the office. Your coworkers may have relationships you are totally unaware. We use an Excel form for this. We find it helpful to break down the stakeholders into categories, as it makes the process more manageable and makes it easier to think of names.
The various stakeholder groups you’ll encounter in your link building efforts include business partners, customers, associations, sponsorees, and alma maters. Let’s take a closer look at these stakeholder groups:
Business Partners – Includes suppliers, subcontractors, distributors, resellers and other partners.
- Tips: Leave out any business relationships you want to keep private! This is often a huge category, and you may want to break it down into subcategories.
- Some ways they link – Company’s often show where their products can be found or boast of reputable clients or brand names. They may name drop during case studies, testimonials, blog articles, or out of goodwill. Perhaps you are the best homebuilder in Pittsburgh, and your partners are more than happy to link to you because you’re so awesome (but maybe they just need a little reminder).
- Examples: McDonald’s Mushroom Farm; Pittsburgh Printing Press; SolarStats SEO
Customers
- Tip: This is also a good way to identify raving happy customers that may also write a review or testimonial.
- Ways they link – Businesses might list suppliers or recommend other businesses; some consumers blog about everything.
- Examples: Gourmet Gil the restaurant reviewer; Carnegie Mellon Mel, who writes for his university’s newspaper
Associations – Includes any association, organization, or business community you are a member of.
- Some ways they link – Member directories; news; pages covering events/exhibitions you participate in.
- Examples: Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce; Western PA BBBs; PA Restaurant Association; Association of Pittsburgh Pizza Makers
Sponsorees – Any nonprofits and organizations you support and/or donate to.
- Tip: Time is money – so if you volunteer, that counts too.
- Some ways they link – “Sponsored by ______”; list of donors; Press Releases; donation announcements; event announcements.
- Examples: Southside Little League; Pittsburgh Food Bank
Alma Maters – Schools your organizations employees graduated from.
I like to give each category of stakeholders a worksheet in the Excel workbook. Then I ask the client to provide stakeholder names and a very short description, and pass the workbook around the office until it is as full as possible.
Stakeholder Backlink Audit Step 2 – Review their websites
Now that we’ve built our list, it’s time to figure out which stakeholders we need to get in touch with and where the backlinks can go.
First you’ll need to see if you have a backlink. There are several methods of doing this, and I personally haven’t found a method I’m fully satisfied with. I’ll check domains in an Excel report of current backlinks and then I might do a Google Advanced Search for a client’s brand names in certain stakeholder sites. I pull the client backlink reports using Majestic SEO (via Raven Tools) and SeoMoz (Open Site Explorer) – these aren’t complete but will find majority of links and most of the important ones.
If there is a backlink, see if it would make sense to try to get more links or improve the current link with better placement or anchor text.
If there is no backlink, decide if it’s worth going for (expect many stakeholders not to link out as policy – sometimes you may not want to bother). If so, how are you going to make the link request and who is responsible for it? Often it’s best that the link request is made by the individual with the closest relationship to the stakeholder. Also, like with all link-building, it’s common that you may have to work for the link, so note how.
When you’ve finished reviewing websites, your Excel audit form will look something like this:
Stakeholder Backlink Audit Step 3 – Request those links
By now, you’ve checked all the stakeholders sites for backlinks and you have an idea of how you’re going to go about getting those links. Again, like with all-link building there is going to be rejection, you will have plenty of waiting, and you may have to perform additional work for the links. You may need to write testimonials, fill out submission forms, hunt down webmasters, submit specially formatted logos, guest blog, write news snippets, and who knows what else.
Being as organized and systematic as possible will lower your work load – you could use the Excel form with comments to track and organize your requests or you can you a backlink manager tool (I use Raven Tools which has a neat browser tool). And always remember the golden rule – treat your stakeholders well if you want them to do the same to you.
It is work, but when you complete your Stakeholder Backlink Audit you will have added some quality, hard-to-duplicate, natural backlinks to your growing link profile.
We recommend that every website perform this backlink audit at least once. Let us know how it works out for you or if you have any comments!
View Comments (No Responses) | Categories: Search Engine Optimization
Posted on November 17, 2011 by Christina Keffer
Playing the saddest song in the world...
Over the past few weeks since Google implemented SSL encrypted search results pages that block keyword data for users signed into their Google accounts, SEOs have been pulling their hair and gnashing their teeth. It’s true, and it’s warranted. One of the best SEO KPIs is reporting on the quantity of organic search traffic generated by highly qualified keywords. Now that between 9 and 20% of this data is generic, it’s harder for us to prove our worth and progress. So we’re justifiably upset.
However, as objectively as I can be, I would say that removing data for organic searches has far wider reaching consequences than depriving SEOs of one of their prime KPIs.
One of my friends who owns a great hip hop dance video eCommerce store and I got into a debate last weekend about how it’s not just SEOs who are affected by this change. My argument, which I could not deliver with any eloquence that night, (Friday at 10pm after happy hour and wine at dinner — you do the math.) I will now present here.
Why The (Not Provided) Keyword Hurts the Web
Let me begin by asking a question: Why do webmasters care about rankings? Because rankings=traffic and traffic=some benefit (either monetary or otherwise.) The only thing that webmasters want to do is get their site ranking for relevant terms that drive qualified traffic. To do so, they optimize their sites for those terms.
It is in the webmasters’ best interests to focus on keywords that drive qualified traffic, and to make their site as relevant as possible for this valuable traffic. But how, you may ask, do webmasters know whether they are optimizing for the right things?
What if someone searching for “vice grips” typically wants to buy and someone searching for “locking wrench” typically wants to find out more about the applications for that tool? Both of those words could apply to the same tool, so webmasters look at their conversion data and engagement metrics to find out how to make their site fit the wants and needs of the searcher.
By doing so, they inadvertently give the search engines exactly what they need and want: a page that matches user intent and is valuable to the searcher — who will then use that search engine again because the results were exactly what they were looking for.
The decision to try to rank a product page for vice grips vs. locking wrench has to be informed by keyword data since Google doesn’t provide exact clickthrough data — even through webmasters tools. This data should be statistically significant.
I would hazard a guess, however, that most sites out there don’t have statistically significant traffic over the short term. So even if the site really IS the best result for a specific search, they are already at a disadvantage. Now, however, about 10 – 20% of their already slim keyword data is generalized.
So, the webmaster makes a decision based on personal preference or the opinions of peers in his industry and optimizes his sales page for vice grips. He manages to rank pretty highly for that and can’t understand why people are bouncing so much.
Google, in turn is ranking him appropriately to his level of optimization, but for the wrong keyword and the result is not what the user was looking for so they loose too.
*sigh*
So, why is Google denying analytics users this important information? There is a lot of speculation that it is in an effort to push site owners to depend more on paid search data… up their paid search traffic since they can’t get accurate data through the organic channel anymore.
If this is the case, it seems really short sited to me. The only reason why most people search Google is to get the organic results. Clicking on a paid result is a bonus. If the organic results decline because webmasters don’t have the right information to make education decisions about their site, then Google looses money because people will start using other engines.
If they really are trying to stave off a privacy issue, either present or future, then why is the data still available for paid search? Have people that click on paid links entered into some type of implicit agreement that their search data is less private than those who click on organic results?
Regardless of their motives, the change will detrimentally affect the web in general, search results specifically, and the ability webmasters to make good decisions.
As an SEO, I admit that I’m personally put out by these changes because they make my job harder and who likes that? (See above image.) However, I really and truly believe that the web as a whole will be drastically and negatively affected, especially if more and more people sign in to a Google account while searching.
View Comments (12 Responses) | Categories: Google Analytics, Search Engine Optimization, Web Analytics
Posted on November 10, 2011 by Jim Gianoglio
Now that Google’s SSL search for signed-in users has been in place for a while (since October 18), I thought I’d take a look at how things have been affected so far. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, first crawl out from under your rock. Then, go read Christina’s post (Google Analytics Keyword Not Provided) from a few weeks ago. I’d also highly recommend this insightful piece from Danny Sullivan, which dives into Google’s real reason for doing this.
Google only started rolling the SSL search out to users on October 18. From the graph below (which others have also seen for their own sites) you can see that the first two weeks didn’t see much action. Most sites were in the 1-3% of Google organic search visits being affected, and I actually let myself begin to believe that maybe it wasn’t going to be so bad after all. Then reality kicked me in the teeth. On Monday October 31, the number of logged-in users who got the default https search page started to sharply increase, finally plateauing on Thursday of the same week. It’s held steady there for the past 8 days.
As you can see from the graph above, things are looking a bit grim for LunaMetrics’ organic keywords report. We’re currently missing about 25% of the keywords from people who get to us from a Google organic search result. However, our numbers are bound to be higher than average, right? After all, you (our valued reader) are most likely signed in to a Google account right now (you probably even have your Google Analytics up on your second monitor, don’t you?).
To get a more complete and less biased look at the overall effect of Google’s SSL search, I took a look at a number of sites in a wide range of industries. Here are the details:
Timeframe: Nov. 2 – 9, 2011 (this is the past 8 days, which have seen relatively stable numbers)
# of Web Properties: 117
Total Google Organic Search Visits: 13,564,118
Encrypted Google Organic Search Visits (keyword not provided): 1,238,297
Average % of (not provided) keywords: 9.13%
Highest % of (not provided) keywords: 28.33%
Lowest % of (not provided) keywords: 3.82%
The graph below shows the distribution of how the 117 sites I looked at were affected (click to enlarge):
So Matt Cutts’ estimation that SSL search would only affect single-digit percentages of searchers is still holding true (in aggregate). But as you can see from the numbers above, the number of signed-in Google users that reach your site will vary greatly depending on your industry. The silver lining in this is at least we’re able to easily measure the effects of SSL search using Google Analytics and a couple of advanced segments.
View Comments (3 Responses) | Categories: Google Analytics, Search Engine Optimization, Web Analytics
Posted on November 8, 2011 by Leslie Anderson
It often seems Search Engine Optimization boils down to a battle royale over keyword. Websites stake out their high search volume, high competition keyword; battle lines are drawn. From social media strategies to rapidly updated blogs to link building campaigns, websites maneuver to have greater search engine equity. Unfortunately, websites often win the battle only to find the victory hollow. The keyword wrested from the hands of their enemies don’t equal the legions of new customers or hoards of adoring fans that they expected. Their hard work has earned them but an empty title. There are two lessons to be learned here: high powered keywords are not always to be coveted and finely tuned research is never a waste of time.
Source: http://www.gabehoggarth.com
Everyone wants to rank highly for the big keywords. There’s nothing more gratifying than finding your website sitting pretty on that first page. This prominent placement, however, is not a golden ticket to successfully driving targeted traffic. Head keywords comprise only a small portion of overall searches.
A study Bill Tancer did in 2008 helps illustrate the importance of long tail keyphrases. He did a study on 14 million searches and found that the top 10,000 keywords in his sample only brought in 18.5% of the searches. The remaining keywords, called “long tail keywords”, made up the remaining 81.5%. Clearly, this means placing endless resources into cornering the market on a small handful of keywords is not an effective strategy.
That’s not to say that keyword research is to be ignored. It’s fairly safe to say that head keywords are indicative of where public interest lies. If many people search for “sprockets” each month, you can be sure people are searching for related long tail keywords that include the word “sprocket”. Similarly, if your research shows that only a handful of people search for “gizmo” a month, you’ll likely see minimal long tail keywords surrounding that topic.
This keyword research can then be used with great success to determine a category, or even the terminology, best used to garner long tail queries. For example, when using a tool such as Google Adwords to search for key phrase “spaghetti”, the related results show that “spaghetti noodle” has a much higher search volume than “spaghetti pasta.” As spaghetti noodles have a high search volume, there are bound to be many long tail keywords surrounding the phrase. Writing well informed copy that touches on a variety of spaghetti related subjects is likely to bring in more searches than trying to claw your way to the front page for “spaghetti noodles”.
Effective SEO is always an exercise in moderation. If your website is trying to sell sprockets, writing a dissertation on the history, popular opinion, and news coverage of sprockets will likely do very little to actually sell sprockets. Your copy should gear towards long tail keywords that will actively help with your goal. For selling sprockets, the copy might discuss why sprockets are a better choice than widgets, how buying a sprocket can help save you money, and why your sprockets are superior to other sprockets.
By adding relevant content, you are likely to pull more qualified customers by narrowing down customer intent. Landing on the first page for “nails” isn’t helpful if your company sells nails, as user intent could be for hardware or a nail salon. By creating broad content about selling nails, you’re more likely to show up on the first page of a variety of long tail queries about buying nails, instead of stuffed between nail salon information.
When aiming for long tail keywords, SEO basics are still in effect. Optimize header and title tags. Write keyword rich meta descriptions. Use appropriate anchor text for internal linking. The biggest difference in optimization when targeting long tail keywords is going with big picture ideas when possible. Actively optimizing header and title tags for long tail keywords isn’t possible. As such, supply headers and titles with big picture keywords, and let the copy supply the data for long tail keywords. Instead of optimizing headers and titles with “sprocket installation tips” use “sprocket installation”. This shorter title gives the page greater flexibility without losing its intended direction.
The push for page ranking for a handful of keywords is the classic problem of not seeing the forest for the trees. What you have to understand is that behind those big keywords are literally tens of thousands of long tail key phrases. By generating broad but relevant content, and using keyword research to help shape your decisions, you can tap into these long tail keywords and bring in a wealth of customers, without the hassle of the battle royale.
View Comments (5 Responses) | Categories: Search Engine Optimization
Posted on October 25, 2011 by Travis Loncar
I think you’ll agree that an ever-changing search algorithm is dynamic in its engineers’ consistent efforts towards development, refinement, and ultimately, improvement. The end goal of any algorithm update, however large or small, is certainly not detraction from quality. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. An update is made, we can assume, to improve upon the quality of the results – no matter how insignificant-seeming the percentage of results affected. When I search “all about poodles,” I want to learn all about poodles – not play minesweeper with pop up and banner ads. Mind you, overall improvement does not necessarily translate to individual ranking increases; we know this all too well. With positive change comes almost certain hardship for those that are oppositely negative. Fortune favors the brave – yes. Similarly, though, misfortune handpicks the irresponsibly audacious. Just ask BMW or J.C. Penney – both of which have suffered the unrelenting punitive blows of Google’s “manual action.”
An algorithm update, in some sense, is the addition of an automation process to carry out an action that was previously executable only by handpicking or “manual action.” As you can imagine, penalizing (or rewarding) sites on a case to case basis is both laughably uneconomical and far too permissive of subjective, human analysis. It’s fairly intuitive, then, that the more frequently a particular rule needs applied, the more likely it is that that rule will become an integral part of the algorithm. For instance, when I search to learn more about our fluffy, white friends, the results at the top of the SERPs are largely informative and (more importantly) exactly what I’m looking for. Before Panda (which came with harsh penalties for websites with thin content), I might not have been so lucky. Anyways, that’s for another day. For now, we’ll focus on sentiment in search. Where is it going? Where has it been? And can its analysis be translated effectively and efficiently into the current search algorithm? Let’s have at it!
The Current State of Sentiment in Search
First off, let’s define the “sentiment” of an online vote (be it a link, review, service testimonial, etc.) as the connotation (positive, negative, or neutral) with which said vote is casted. While the link is traditionally recognized as the primary vote metric, developments in social technology and online listing review systems have broadened the user’s ability to convey relative, measurable sentiment within minutes (or even seconds). If you liked Christina’s recent blog post on ‘keyword not provided‘ or tweeted about Jim’s take on flow visualization in GA, you’ve engaged socially in conveying positive sentiment, or casting a positive vote for the respective post. On the other hand, if you found such disfavor in the stale-tasting coffee at the local donut shoppe that you felt obligated to share that negative experience with potential customers online (perhaps through a Google Places listing review), you’ve conveyed negative sentiment, or casted a negative vote for that business.
While we can’t be sure how these signals are weighted in the current algorithm, we can certainly infer that the integration process is well under way. With Google’s release of the +1 button and specific markup for reviews and rich snippets, it’s a reasonable assumption to make that the link is no longer the lone indicator of online sentiment. Notice, though, that the majority of these indicators are geared towards users sharing positive experiences (perhaps with exception to negative reviews). Although many custom blog platforms allow users to cast a negative vote for a given post with a thumbs-down, major social platforms (from which search engines actually collect data) like Facebook have yet to implement such an option. How, then, without clear-cut social signals, do we derive negative sentiment from a given comment or review? And perhaps more importantly, how do we go about deriving negative sentiment from the original vote metric – the link?
Sentiment Analysis – A Work in Progress
To preface this section, I’d like to recommend some light reading – a New York Times article (which Robbin suggested to me) that inspired this post (as it probably has many of the more recent debates on sentiment in search). The article details the much-chagrined success story (and subsequent fall) of an online eye glasses vendor who utilized the power of negative votes (provided by intentionally provoked customers) to leverage his company’s organic search presence. I’d like to spare you another poodle analogy, but honestly, I can’t resist. This should paint a fairly representative picture of the article (for those of you who are saving it for a rainy day).
If a fictitious John from John’s Poodle Emporium trains his dogs to be utterly disobedient to their renters, there’s a good chance that John’s business is going to receive plenty of negative reviews online. With no sentiment analysis, though, a review is a review and a link is a link. Online poodle forums and blogs are abuzz with horror stories about John’s Poodle Emporium (occasionally even linking to his site). Little do they know, they’re fueling the very fire that they seek to put out – sending link juice from relevant websites onto John’s site. John punks his Poodle-loving patrons and moves onto the next group of clients the town over (who haven’t bothered to check out some online reviews). All the while, his rankings are shooting through the roof, providing him with a healthy influx of new customers to mistreat intentionally.
Okay, back to reality. That was bad, but you get the idea. While Google affirms that the the real vendor’s rankings should be attributed to link juice from high authority news outlets (like the New York Times), citing the presence of the rel=”nofollow” link attribute on many of the negative review sites, the causation is there, nonetheless. Be it direct or indirect, in this case, negative sentiment yielded positive results.
How Do We Combat This?
Needless to say, the article prompted almost immediate action from Google. After doing their due diligence, they found that cases similar to that in the New York Times article were not as uncommon as they had originally thought. As we discussed earlier, a high volume of problematic, penalty-deserving websites can often complicate manual action. However, when all of these websites are linked by a common infraction, the likelihood that the penalties can be distributed algorithmically is much higher. In this case, the search engineers at Google were able to implement a quick, algorithm-intensive fix that penalizes online vendors who treat their customers poorly or unfairly. While we can’t be sure that this solution is completely free of sentiment consideration, we can be sure that sentiment analysis is not the foundation of the underlying framework. In fact, Google has admitted that although they have a “world-class sentiment analysis system,” they’ve yet to find a way to effectively implement that system within the current algorithm.
The Way of the Future?
It seems simple, doesn’t it? Just introduce an algorithm update that mandates that all crawls take into account the sentiment of the text surrounding a given link. If the connotation of the “context clues” is primarily positive, treat the link as a positive vote. If negative, weight the link with a negative value. Simple enough, right? Actually . . . not so much. We could pick the simplicity of this solution apart all day, so I’ll spare you the countless refutations in place of one (for which I’ll pose a rhetorical question). Aren’t some of the most important modern issues also the most polarizing issues? And, in our context, should a website pertaining to one of these issues be devalued because the negative sentiment nearly washes the positive? Hardly, in my opinion. A vote, whether positive or negative, is still an indication of care. As long as people care about a given issue or web page (and are willing to pay testament to their sentiments), as things stand, the results that they see will be based on sheer popularity.
With all that we’ve considered, many points remain mute. Incorporating user sentiment in search, whether socially, through review aggregators, or by sentiment analysis, is a tricky little game. Considering the tremendously impactful implications that a major sentiment-related algorithm change could have, it’s a game that needs to be played with the utmost tact and care. That said, I’m rather confident that user reviews, testimonials, social votes, context clues surrounding links, and even the sentiment of anchor text will continue to play larger roles in both organic and local rankings. Undoubtedly, the technology behind these metrics (and consequently, their popularity among users) will continue to develop in the future. This puts further onus on coinciding algorithmic development targeting search sentiment. Again, the end goal is better results for the user – or better information about poodles for curious dog lovers. If, by implementing a functional, discriminatory sentiment analysis system in the search algorithm, we’re able to achieve this, then I’m all for it. Personalized search is the way of the future. Sentiment analysis is just another step in the right direction . . . well, at least on the timeline.
What are your thoughts on sentiment in search? Are all votes created equal, or should positive and negative sentiment play a role in valuing a link? Have you observed any noticeable ranking changes since you’ve enabled social “voting” on your pages? Share your thoughts and experiences!
View Comments (No Responses) | Categories: Miscellaneous, Search Engine Optimization, Usability
Posted on October 20, 2011 by Christina Keffer
Keyword (Not Provided) In GA Keywords Report
You may or may not have noticed something fishy in your Google Analytics Keywords report recently. If you haven’t noticed, go into Google Analytics and do the following:
- Use the Non-Paid Search Traffic Advanced Segment
- Change the Date Range to 10/17 – 10-19
- Go to Traffic Sources > Sources> Organic
- Observe the top three or four keyowrds
Do you see it? If it’s not at the top, it’s in there somewhere. It’s a keyword called (Not Provided.)
Now, if you were training at an SEO event like I was on the 17th and then was out of the office (and largely offline) on the 18th or if you live under a rock somewhere, you might not have heard Google’s official announcement that they will no longer be providing keyword data for organic search results if the user is signed into their Google account.
It’s not just Google Analytics that will be denied this data. By “enhancing” their default user experience for signed in users, Google will be redirecting signed in users to https://www.google.com, thus encrypting the search results page. In analytics, you’ll still be able to see that these signed in users came from the organic search results, but instead of being able to see the actual keywords that they used, you’ll see all that data aggregated under (Not Provided.)
If you’re an SEO who uses the keywords report to prove the validity and efficacy of your work, you’re screaming and gnashing your teeth by this point. If you’re a causal analytics user, you may be asking the question “why do this?”
Well, obviously, it’s to protect the user: “As search becomes an increasingly customized experience, we recognize the growing importance of protecting the personalized search results we deliver.” (excerpt from Google’s official statement)
In what way does hiding the queries that signed in users use to get to your site infringe upon their privacy since all the data is anonymous anyway? That’s a legitimate question by the way. Feel free to answer it in the comments! I’m curious what you all thing. And why, oh WHY are PAID search keywords not affected by this change.
That’s right. You can still see every single keyword that sent traffic through paid search, whether the user is signed in or not — just not organic search. Are users who click on paid search results less safe than users that click on organic results?
*Breathes Deeply*
Long Lasting Repercussions of Keyword (Not Provided)
Google claims that this change will affect only a small percentage of data, since only those who are signed into their Google account when searching will be “protected.” Well, I’m throwing down the benchmark here and now.
So far, since this change launched, LunaMetrics has seen 1% of our keywords clumped into (Not Provided.) A client with substantially larger organic search volume has already seen almost 2% of their organic keywords represented as Not Provided. We shall see how far-reaching these changes actually are in a few weeks when they’re rolled out completely.
Additionally, Google’s placation that only a small percentage of data will be affected because of the amount of people who search while NOT signed is cold comfort to me when they’re trying so very very hard to push the adoption of Google+ on the masses. If they have their way everyone would always be signed into their Google account when online.
I would love to hear the thoughts and concerns, and views of everyone else! Thanks!
View Comments (23 Responses) | Categories: Announcements, Google Analytics, Search Engine Optimization, Web Analytics
Posted on October 6, 2011 by Leslie Anderson
Internal Link Building Campaigns
Internal linking is often overlooked during the search engine optimization arms race. Despite this, it is an easy way to help optimize your site. While not every website will see dramatic results from internal linking, others will be shocked to see forgotten about articles gain significant traffic, or see their pages ranking for new keywords.
Internal linking is any link within your website that links to somewhere else on your website. Logically, these links fall into two basic camps: structural and contextual.
Structural links are generally created while designing the website. They include any navigation bars, site maps, footers, and headers. Without well planned structural links, it’s possible to have pages completely unattached to the rest of your website. In this scenario, the only way to access these pages would be to type in their URL. For this reason, structural links are designed to ensure no pages go missing.
Unfortunately, many people see structural links as the be-all-end-all of internal linking. This isn’t true. Your website has a wealth of knowledge and countless opportunities to help boost its own search engine rank through contextual internal linking.
A contextual link is simply a link within the content of your website. By using them properly, you can help pages rank higher for specific key phrases and increase the usability of your website. Studies have shown that website users are more likely to click on contextual links. They cite contextual links as feeling more “natural” than search bars or navigation columns. This makes sense. If as you introduce new products, services or ideas you incorporate contextual links to pages further exploring these facets, the flow from one page to another feels seamless.
The best way to begin a contextual link building campaign is to review your website and determine your goals. Do you have high-quality pages that are rarely viewed? Is an important aspect of your company getting drowned out by other pages and key phrases? Do you want an evenly distributed web of links that keep people on your site longer? These kinds of questions will help shape how you approach your campaign.
The basis of contextual links is using key phrases from your content (otherwise known as anchor text) as your link. These key phrases infer the content of the page it links to. Search engines use this information to help rank pages for key phrases used in the anchor text. As such, anchor text should be keywords with high search volume and should be directly related to the page it links to.
For example, I might write: “Due to the ever changing nature of search engines, there is always demand for search engine optimization consultants.” In this example, the anchor text “search engine optimization consultants” has a high search volume, and it leads back to the LunaMetrics webpage, as LunaMetrics is a SEO consultant company.
Once you understand the simple mechanics of contextual link building, the process of adding links to your website becomes intuitive. Page by page you need to go through your website adding links that will help you reach your goal. If you’re trying to boost the visibility of some overlooked pages, you might link to them from a high-traffic page. If you’d like to keep people clicking through your site, you might add links when new ideas are introduced. For a page of great importance, you may link several pages to it to increase visibility. If a page is ranking poorly for an important keyword, use that keyword as anchor text when linking to that page.
As with everything in life, there can be too much of a good thing. Stuffing your website with links can negatively affect your search engine rank and will certainly annoy any users that visit your site. As a rule of thumb, only add links where they make sense and increase website usability.
To some, this SEO technique seems too good to be true. While it won’t singlehandedly cause your website to rank on the first page, it is an effective tool in your SEO arsenal. The benefits range from small bumps in traffic to pages ranking highly for completely new key phrases. With search engine optimization being a constant arms race, taking advantage of every small step is vital to landing that coveted first page slot.
View Comments (5 Responses) | Categories: Search Engine Optimization
Posted on September 19, 2011 by Michael Harrison
Testing a paid search ad is easy. You create two ad creatives, set your ad network to split traffic evenly between the two, and sit back and let the data collect. This isn’t tough to do because you have full control over what is displayed on the results page when a user searches. Once you’ve got enough data collected, you know what works and what doesn’t, and you can go in and change the ad creative appropriately.
The organic results pages are different, though. You can’t just tell Google to split between your two creatives. You can modify your titles and meta descriptions, but you have no idea when Google is going to crawl your site and update its index. And changes to your page titles can severely affect that page’s ranking.
Fortunately, Google freely admits that meta descriptions don’t impact your ranking on the SERPs. So you can change them to your heart’s content and they won’t cause any issues.
So theoretically, if you were to modify your page’s meta description, and then find out when Google started running with the new description, you could check your data in Google Analytics and start analyzing which version was better at getting people to your site.
You can get a pretty good idea of when the Googlebot crawls your site with Google Webmaster Tools, but determining when the SERPs are updated with your site description is something you’ll need to do manually. One easy way to find out when Google updated your page in its index is by viewing the cached version.
Just do a search that will include your page in the results, and then click the “Cached” link to the right of the URL:
You’ll see a box at the top of this page that tells you when this snapshot occurred:
This is the most recent date and time that Google cached your site, which will allow you to annotate your Google Analytics data with the start of your “Version B” site description.
Now the fun begins. After a few weeks, do some date comparisons from before the new version went live versus after. Look at traffic from Google and analyze the effect that your new SEO “creative” has had on visits. Are they higher or lower quality visitors? Check out the keywords they’re using to find your site. Are there any queries that have had big jumps in traffic? Drastic declines?
Sure, a dedicated split-testing tool built into Google Webmaster Tools would be pretty sweet. But until then, we can hack it a bit and get a lot of insight into what draws searchers to our sites. Give it a try and see what you find out!
(Update: I have been corrected. This is not actually a split test, because it is run over two different periods of time. I’ve updated the article to reflect this. Regardless, I still think there’s some insight to be gained from running experiments like this, and until Google starts letting people do actual A/B tests, it’s one way to do it.)
(Coke/Pepsi photo by kreg.steppe)
View Comments (3 Responses) | Categories: A/B and MVT, Google Analytics, Search Engine Optimization, Web Analytics
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