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New Websites Should Focus On The Tail

On April 21, 2010, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

The online space grows more competitive each and every day and the importance of finding niches and certain areas to be visible in is becoming even more evident and important. If you are targeting a space that clearly has a great deal of competition it will be very important to go after the long tail [...]

The online space grows more competitive each and every day and the importance of finding niches and certain areas to be visible in is becoming even more evident and important. If you are targeting a space that clearly has a great deal of competition it will be very important to go after the long tail keywords as well as the broad to be able to achieve some sort of rankings fairly quickly. Being a new website in a competitive environment requires a great deal of time, patience and experience. Don’t expect to rank quickly going after the broader search terms. Long tail keyword phrases will be your friend so you have to use them.

The most important advise that I can provide for a new website or new business owner is to spend the time doing your keyword research! Keyword research should be based on the existing content of each page of your website, so conduct the keyword research after you write your content. This is a big mistake that I see many people make that are new to the search world. They sometimes write content to rank well in the search engines, your content should always be written with your audience(s) and visitors in mind.

Continuing on and about the long tail track here…The mindset of many websites is to try and rank for the broad keyword phrases to pull in the largest amount of search volume. When first getting involved in search with a new website you have to be realistic. Don’t be in denial when you first launch your website because you could potentially short change your business. Try to go after some of the low hanging fruit in your industry to get some new business and sales. This will allow you to pull in some new clients and build some quick credibility in the industry for yourself by wowing some new clients. As you build your reputation in the industry your website will slowly grow in power naturally and start to climb for the much broader keywords in your industry. Don’t assume that you belong in the search results for the broad keywords right away. You have to earn those spots and that takes time.

Like any industry you have to slowly pay your dues to achieve visibility and respect to achieve the high rankings in search results. Once you have that than you will see your rankings climb for the top industry keywords.

Do Not Worry About PageRank

On February 22, 2010, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

For years people have always made an effort to really focus on increasing their Google pagerank as much as possible. I always ask people, what is it about Google pagerank that makes you want to increase it so badly? Many times they really didn’t know how to answer the question or at least answer [...]

For years people have always made an effort to really focus on increasing their Google pagerank as much as possible. I always ask people, what is it about Google pagerank that makes you want to increase it so badly? Many times they really didn’t know how to answer the question or at least answer it correctly.

For many years Google pagerank was the sought out factor for many people diving into search engine optimization. Over the years it has been severely abused as people seek out science project like marketing campaigns only to increase page rank. News flash, rankings alone don’t grow a business and the search engines are really starting to evolve and change the way that they rank websites. They are tweaking and modifying search engines to only reward those who take a natural approach to building their business. An approach that builds over time with heavy branding and marketing elements rather than pouncing on loop holes to achieve rankings in search engines. Internet marketing company HubSpot based out of Boston MA had this to say about Google page rank: “Page Rank has nothing to do with SEO rankings or results. I know of websites that have a Page Rank of 0, and yet they still get organic rankings and search traffic for competitive search terms.”

Basically what HubSpot is saying is that businesses and websites should be focusing on building their brand and their business and not worrying about what the Google pagerank of their website is. At the end of the day page rank does not offer any value. You can’t track where your page rank comes from or why it is even there. It has almost become a distraction for website owners that have lost focus on what it really means to market your business online. Even Google has removed any mention of pagerank from their guidelines.

A recent Q&A session on one of Google’s forums had this to say:
“Q: My site’s PageRank has gone up / gone down / not changed in months!
A: Don’t worry. In fact, don’t bother thinking about it. We only update the PageRank displayed in Google Toolbar a few times a year; this is our respectful hint for you to worry less about PageRank, which is just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked. PageRank is an easy metric to focus on, but just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s useful for you as a site owner. If you’re looking for metrics, we’d encourage you to check out Analytics, think about conversion rates, ROI (return on investment), relevancy, or other metrics that actually correlate to meaningful gains for your website or business.”

When Google comes out and says it than you better believe that it is true in every possible way. You can read more about Google’s view point on page rank on the Google webmaster forum. I given touched on the subject of Google PageRank sculpting as a waste of time a few months ago as well.

How To Get Past Last-Touch Attribution With Google Analytics

On January 13, 2010, In SEO, by willcritchlow

Posted by willcritchlow

In last week’s Whiteboard Friday "Kill the Head or Chase the Tail", Rand and I started by discussing how to gain true insight into what kind of keywords are leading people to discover your brand and ultimately driving conversions for your business (clue: it’s probably not branded search phrases, despite what your analytics reports are telling you). Today, I’m going to demonstrate one way of measuring this more accurately in Google Analytics.

The problem is well described by the ever-excellent Avinash Kaushik in his post entitled Measuring Upper Funnel Keywords (although nominally about paid search, his description applies perfectly well to natural search except you aren’t paying for traffic in the same way). It can be summarised by thinking about all those reports we have all seen showing branded search terms being the best-converting. While this is true in the sense that the individual finally converted after searching for the brand, it’s clearly not the way they found out about your services. For the purposes of setting strategy, you need to understand in better detail your "visitor acquisition" channels that eventually lead to conversions. Sam’s superb post on SEOmoz’s conversion rate lessons from 2009 touches on this in point 2.

Enter multi-touch analytics tracking.

Most analytics packages use last-touch attribution by default meaning that conversions are allocated to the most recent source of a visit for that visitor. We are interested here in first-touch attribution or even multi-touch attribution models to understand how visitors are influenced over time by repeated visits to the site. If you are interested in analytics packages that can track multiple touches ‘out of the box’, I recommend reading John Santangelo‘s YOUmoz post on Google Analytics alternatives.

First-touch tracking in Google Analytics

Patrick at Blogstorm has written about over-riding last click attribution (something I also discussed in my presentation Analytics Every SEO Should Know that Scott linked to from the Whiteboard Friday). But this method only works when you can specify the exact URL of the landing page including parameters as it relies on the utm_nooverride parameter. This works fine for email and PPC traffic, but doesn’t help with tracking organic search traffic.

For this, we need a slightly more involved method.

In my presentation, I touched on the function setVar and a custom function called superSetVar, but in the updates announced in October last year, the GA team released a new function called setCustomVar that is now the best functionality to use. For this purpose we want to track variables at the visitor level.

In your GA tracking code, you want to check for the presence of the __utma cookie which will be present only if the user is a returning visitor. If it is not present, use the JavaScript variable document.referrer to set a visitor-level custom variable (named something like "original referrer") and use location.pathname to set a second visitor-level custom variable (named something like "original landing page"). Take care not to re-use custom variable slots you are using elsewhere in your analytics.

You will probably then want to add a filter to your analytics profile to convert the raw referrer into referring keywords using a filter like this one for getting detailed PPC keyword information (obviously not filtering only PPC traffic). You might also want to pull out the original source (which you can work out from the referrer and landing page) into a separate variable.

With this all set up, you will be able to run conversion reports by original keyword for a given original source and see conversion information based on first click attribution. I would expect that you would see the long-tail contributing far more than it does in the standard reports and branded search much less (not zero of course – there will still be first-touch branded searches driven by PR, offline marketing etc.).

Multi-touch attribution modelling

If you are feeling especially hardcore, you can dig even deeper into this whole mess by attempting to capture multiple touch-points. The idea here is that you want to give attribution for conversions not only to first- and last-touches but also give so-called assists to touch-points along the way (e.g. a conversion path could look like long-tail keyword > head keyword > branded search > direct visit – under this scenario, you might want to give the head and branded searches some attribution for the conversion).

This becomes especially important if you have different departments contributing to the marketing – you would like to be able to give some credit to the departments that bring the visitor in, some to the channels that keep the visitor returning and to the channel that finally converts them.

I haven’t set this up with the new GA functions, but the basic process would involve something similar to the superSetVar function for the new setCustomVar. The idea here would be to stuff repeat visit information into the custom variables. This information is almost certainly unusable via the interface and you will likely need to export to Excel and play there (most likely with Pivot Tables – you all know how much I love them – it’s a little while since we ran a conference call (that link is to a recording of the one I did on Excel) but I’m planning the next one so go and sign up if you aren’t already on that mailing list).

If you’re hardcore enough to really want this information, you can probably work out the details! If anyone has done it and wants to write up detailed instructions, I’ll happily update this post with a link to your explanation.

View-through conversions

The missing piece of the puzzle if you are doing multi-touch attribution modelling is giving ‘assists’ to branding events such as the viewing of a display advert (without a clickthrough). Rich, our PPC guru at Distilled, wrote an introduction to Google’s viewthrough conversion metric.

There are all kinds of privacy concerns in extending this further – but the data is out there to gather this kind of data across whole platforms (e.g. understanding search funnels that led to your site in the end). The signs are there that we are going to get ever more information like this – particularly out of Google who are obviously always looking for ways to persuade their customers to spend in areas outside (the generally cheaper) branded search!

I love analytics and statistics, so I’d love to hear your favourite tips and tricks in the comments.

I’m sure future conference calls in my schedule will involve analytics tips and tricks so go ahead and sign up if you’d like to hear when they are running. You also might be interested in a post I wrote about integrating Google Website Optimizer with Google Analytics on SearchEngineLand.

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Posted by willcritchlow

In last week’s Whiteboard Friday "Kill the Head or Chase the Tail", Rand and I started by discussing how to gain true insight into what kind of keywords are leading people to discover your brand and ultimately driving conversions for your business (clue: it’s probably not branded search phrases, despite what your analytics reports are telling you). Today, I’m going to demonstrate one way of measuring this more accurately in Google Analytics.

The problem is well described by the ever-excellent Avinash Kaushik in his post entitled Measuring Upper Funnel Keywords (although nominally about paid search, his description applies perfectly well to natural search except you aren’t paying for traffic in the same way). It can be summarised by thinking about all those reports we have all seen showing branded search terms being the best-converting. While this is true in the sense that the individual finally converted after searching for the brand, it’s clearly not the way they found out about your services. For the purposes of setting strategy, you need to understand in better detail your "visitor acquisition" channels that eventually lead to conversions. Sam’s superb post on SEOmoz’s conversion rate lessons from 2009 touches on this in point 2.

Enter multi-touch analytics tracking.

Most analytics packages use last-touch attribution by default meaning that conversions are allocated to the most recent source of a visit for that visitor. We are interested here in first-touch attribution or even multi-touch attribution models to understand how visitors are influenced over time by repeated visits to the site. If you are interested in analytics packages that can track multiple touches ‘out of the box’, I recommend reading John Santangelo‘s YOUmoz post on Google Analytics alternatives.

First-touch tracking in Google Analytics

Patrick at Blogstorm has written about over-riding last click attribution (something I also discussed in my presentation Analytics Every SEO Should Know that Scott linked to from the Whiteboard Friday). But this method only works when you can specify the exact URL of the landing page including parameters as it relies on the utm_nooverride parameter. This works fine for email and PPC traffic, but doesn’t help with tracking organic search traffic.

For this, we need a slightly more involved method.

In my presentation, I touched on the function setVar and a custom function called superSetVar, but in the updates announced in October last year, the GA team released a new function called setCustomVar that is now the best functionality to use. For this purpose we want to track variables at the visitor level.

In your GA tracking code, you want to check for the presence of the __utma cookie which will be present only if the user is a returning visitor. If it is not present, use the JavaScript variable document.referrer to set a visitor-level custom variable (named something like "original referrer") and use location.pathname to set a second visitor-level custom variable (named something like "original landing page"). Take care not to re-use custom variable slots you are using elsewhere in your analytics.

You will probably then want to add a filter to your analytics profile to convert the raw referrer into referring keywords using a filter like this one for getting detailed PPC keyword information (obviously not filtering only PPC traffic). You might also want to pull out the original source (which you can work out from the referrer and landing page) into a separate variable.

With this all set up, you will be able to run conversion reports by original keyword for a given original source and see conversion information based on first click attribution. I would expect that you would see the long-tail contributing far more than it does in the standard reports and branded search much less (not zero of course – there will still be first-touch branded searches driven by PR, offline marketing etc.).

Multi-touch attribution modelling

If you are feeling especially hardcore, you can dig even deeper into this whole mess by attempting to capture multiple touch-points. The idea here is that you want to give attribution for conversions not only to first- and last-touches but also give so-called assists to touch-points along the way (e.g. a conversion path could look like long-tail keyword > head keyword > branded search > direct visit – under this scenario, you might want to give the head and branded searches some attribution for the conversion).

This becomes especially important if you have different departments contributing to the marketing – you would like to be able to give some credit to the departments that bring the visitor in, some to the channels that keep the visitor returning and to the channel that finally converts them.

I haven’t set this up with the new GA functions, but the basic process would involve something similar to the superSetVar function for the new setCustomVar. The idea here would be to stuff repeat visit information into the custom variables. This information is almost certainly unusable via the interface and you will likely need to export to Excel and play there (most likely with Pivot Tables – you all know how much I love them – it’s a little while since we ran a conference call (that link is to a recording of the one I did on Excel) but I’m planning the next one so go and sign up if you aren’t already on that mailing list).

If you’re hardcore enough to really want this information, you can probably work out the details! If anyone has done it and wants to write up detailed instructions, I’ll happily update this post with a link to your explanation.

View-through conversions

The missing piece of the puzzle if you are doing multi-touch attribution modelling is giving ‘assists’ to branding events such as the viewing of a display advert (without a clickthrough). Rich, our PPC guru at Distilled, wrote an introduction to Google’s viewthrough conversion metric.

There are all kinds of privacy concerns in extending this further – but the data is out there to gather this kind of data across whole platforms (e.g. understanding search funnels that led to your site in the end). The signs are there that we are going to get ever more information like this – particularly out of Google who are obviously always looking for ways to persuade their customers to spend in areas outside (the generally cheaper) branded search!

I love analytics and statistics, so I’d love to hear your favourite tips and tricks in the comments.

I’m sure future conference calls in my schedule will involve analytics tips and tricks so go ahead and sign up if you’d like to hear when they are running. You also might be interested in a post I wrote about integrating Google Website Optimizer with Google Analytics on SearchEngineLand.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Should You Purchase Other TLDs?

On December 29, 2009, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

Your domain name is very important. It is a brandable item and should be used with great care and forethought. Your domain name should align directly with your company and business goals. It is used more than for search engine optimization, it is your entire brand online. There are times when you might [...]

Your domain name is very important. It is a brandable item and should be used with great care and forethought. Your domain name should align directly with your company and business goals. It is used more than for search engine optimization, it is your entire brand online. There are times when you might want to purchase domain names that cross over into multiple TLDs and then there are times when you shouldn’t bother.

Let’s say that you are starting a new business in the UK and you purchase the domain name newbusiness.com. Should you also purchase newbusiness.co.uk?

There are plenty of reasons why you should. If you know that your business will operate primarily in the UK then having the regional TLD will benefit you. You could redirect one of the domains to the other or build two websites and increase your chances of ranking in the search engines for your search terms – just don’t use duplicate content!

The dot com TLD has a lot of potential to rank worldwide for your search terms, but it may be easier to go for the regional rankings instead. In fact, one strategy is to build two sites – one that targets your region and the other that is focused globally. When you start to rank in your local region for your important keywords then you can take advantage of those rankings by capitalizing on them. When your business grows to an extent that the business you get from outside your region matches that from within your region then you can redirect your regional TLD to the dot com site and keep on trucking.

That’s just one strategy. Here’s another:

You are starting a business in the U.S. that will have a global outreach, but you know your business will remain a small business forever. Should you snag up every newbusiness dot TLD on the planet? Probably not. That could get costly. But a multinational corporation with a presence on every continent might want to do just that.

What’s the moral? Analyze your business goals. If you are a regional business that you see may expand into a global outreach some day, buy up the dot com and the regional TLD for your site’s name and focus on regional sales until you deem it is prudent to go global. If you are starting out globally but staying small then don’t bother with regional TLDs unless you think you may run into copyright or trademark issues.

How To Monitor & Track Google’s Real-time Search

On December 13, 2009, In SEO, by Tom_C

Posted by Tom_C

This past week saw the launch of Google’s real-time search and quite frankly everyone flipped out. And justifiably so, it’s not often that our SERPs get torn up so much in a new way like this.

Questions I’d love to see the answer to are things like:

What triggers real-time one-boxes?
How long do they last?
Are they tied to a geographic location?
Are they tied to a language?

Unfortuantely I think it’s a bit early to have answers to questions like this, so rather than tackle these questions I’m just going to talk a little bit about how you can go about tracking the impacts of real-time search results on your industry.

Does real-time search affect my industry?

The answer is probably yes. For search terms that have hardly any tweet-volume I’ve already seen examples where literally one or two tweets can generate a real-time one-box. Sometimes even for the brand name term. That means that more or less any breaking news in your industry will generate some level of real-time results.

But what about other industries? After all many of us will be working on sites that target keyphrases that people DO tweet about. For us, the focus is on trending search terms. The key thing is to identify the types of keyphrase that might feature real-time search results. The most useful way of doing this that I’ve found is to monitor twitter volume and in particular monitor peaks and troughs in volume. Trendistic will do this nicely for you. The first neat thing from Trendistic is that you can see a long list of hot topics by day in the archive:

Browsing through the archives we see that there are certain topics which come up again and again such as TV, film, sports, celebrity etc. These search terms are alwasy going to be affected most by real-time search and SEOs working in this field are likely to already be used to working with QDF search results and various other one-boxes like News.

How Do I Track Real-Time Traffic?

The second nice thing from Trendistic is the ability to query individual terms and see when peaks and troughs occured over time, for example here’s a snapshot of the [eagles] term (nice win Eagles!):

By using a service like this you can query the historic search volume and take an educated guess at when real-time search might have been triggered. By doing this for your main search terms you can start to understand things like strange traffic drops or spikes that might have been caused by real-time one boxes hanging out in your SERPs.

What about if you’re actively engaging in twitter though? If you feel like you might have gained a portion of your search traffic from tweets that were appearing in real-time search results then you should think about tracking those clicks.

Tracking real-time search volume and one-box traffic is a difficult problem however and one that isn’t completely solved. That said, here’s a few things that might be of use. Firstly, for anyone seeing #-based Google URLs you can actually track clicks from different parts of the page. Looking at the following real-time search for [nexus one]:

I clicked on two different results, the first one was a ‘real’ result that appeared in the real-time box, that is a page that’s been crawled recently and shows up via Google rather than showing up because Google found the result on Facebook or Twitter etc. With the # URLs at Google in action I saw the following full referral path:

http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&oi=blog_result&ct=result&cd=11&ved=0CBcQmAEwCg&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ccortez.com%2Fhtc-nexus-one-blessed-by-the-fcc-updated%2F&rct=j&q=nexus+one&ei=gComS7LCDZehjAeDwdTOBw&usg=AFQjCNF2939x_yuKVTzL9UlN6m23cw0Kog

Note the "&oi=blog_result" in the referring URL (bolded added, obviously). This let’s you see any real-time traffic that has come via a crawled blog post. After that I clicked on a twittered URL and got the following:

http://www.google.co.uk/url?url=http://bit.ly/7315xj&rct=j&ei=2yomS4y7NYvNjAfQ3qXfBw&sa=X&oi=microblog_result&resnum=9&ct=result&cd=1&ved=0CD8QoAQoADAI&q=nexus+one&usg=AFQjCNGWb9DkQaPZd2NGuOg6Th7lWd9hsg

Note both the url=http://bit.ly/7315xj and &oi=microblog_result (again, bolded). This allows you to see both where the click came from (a real-time microblog result, i.e. from a site like twitter or facebook) but also the URL that was twittered (in this case the bit.ly link).

These referring URLs will show up in your server logs but unfortunately won’t show up in Google Analytics (since Google treats these all as search queries and so will just dump them in the same place and only let you see the keyword searched for). To get them to show up in Google Analytics you need to set up a profile to show the full referring URL, such as the filter detailed in part 2 of this post.

Not all users see these # Google URLs however, most are still seeing the old style search?q= Google URLs. From looking at the traffic for sites where we have the appropriate filter set up I’d say somewhere between 5 and 10% of users are seeing these URLs. This means that if you can get this kind of data for a small proportion of your traffic and extrapolate for the other 90% of users. (Btw, does anyone have any more accurate stats on the % of users seeing which search result type? I’ve not seen anything concrete anywhere…)

Of course, looking at the example above we see that a fair amount of traffic from micro blogging servicies actually goes through URL shorteners such as bit.ly. In that case there’s another method you can use to track your traffic. Take a look at the following referral list for this bit.ly URL:

This allows you to see which of your bit.ly links have appeared on Google search results pages – we can see from this example that 2 have come from new # style Google search results pages and one has come from the old-school format.

I’m sure over the coming weeks more and more will get said about real-time search but hopefully this has been food for thought!

If you haven’t yet grabbed your copy of our new Advanced SEO Training Series: Tips, Tricks & Tactics DVD series, there’s good news! SEOmoz extended the special launch pricing of 20% off plus free shipping until December 18th. Order your copy now before the offer is gone!

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Posted by Tom_C

This past week saw the launch of Google’s real-time search and quite frankly everyone flipped out. And justifiably so, it’s not often that our SERPs get torn up so much in a new way like this.

Questions I’d love to see the answer to are things like:

What triggers real-time one-boxes?
How long do they last?
Are they tied to a geographic location?
Are they tied to a language?

Unfortuantely I think it’s a bit early to have answers to questions like this, so rather than tackle these questions I’m just going to talk a little bit about how you can go about tracking the impacts of real-time search results on your industry.

Does real-time search affect my industry?

The answer is probably yes. For search terms that have hardly any tweet-volume I’ve already seen examples where literally one or two tweets can generate a real-time one-box. Sometimes even for the brand name term. That means that more or less any breaking news in your industry will generate some level of real-time results.

But what about other industries? After all many of us will be working on sites that target keyphrases that people DO tweet about. For us, the focus is on trending search terms. The key thing is to identify the types of keyphrase that might feature real-time search results. The most useful way of doing this that I’ve found is to monitor twitter volume and in particular monitor peaks and troughs in volume. Trendistic will do this nicely for you. The first neat thing from Trendistic is that you can see a long list of hot topics by day in the archive:

Browsing through the archives we see that there are certain topics which come up again and again such as TV, film, sports, celebrity etc. These search terms are alwasy going to be affected most by real-time search and SEOs working in this field are likely to already be used to working with QDF search results and various other one-boxes like News.

How Do I Track Real-Time Traffic?

The second nice thing from Trendistic is the ability to query individual terms and see when peaks and troughs occured over time, for example here’s a snapshot of the [eagles] term (nice win Eagles!):

By using a service like this you can query the historic search volume and take an educated guess at when real-time search might have been triggered. By doing this for your main search terms you can start to understand things like strange traffic drops or spikes that might have been caused by real-time one boxes hanging out in your SERPs.

What about if you’re actively engaging in twitter though? If you feel like you might have gained a portion of your search traffic from tweets that were appearing in real-time search results then you should think about tracking those clicks.

Tracking real-time search volume and one-box traffic is a difficult problem however and one that isn’t completely solved. That said, here’s a few things that might be of use. Firstly, for anyone seeing #-based Google URLs you can actually track clicks from different parts of the page. Looking at the following real-time search for [nexus one]: