For webmasters trying to rank in Google organic results, it can often feel like you are all on your own with little help and guidance. There are the published Google guidelines and of course the great amounts of SEO blogs where writers can share their knowledge and opinions, but other than that companies and website owners are mostly on their own.

It can be a fine line between optimizing your site correctly, and doing something that you thought would be OK but ultimately Google didn’t like and penalized you for.

Fortunately, there is one medium for communication where webmasters can view data on their website, as seen by Google, and receive notifications to any possible issues on their site. This area is Google Webmaster Tools, and if you are reading this and haven’t yet set up and verified your site, I suggest you go and do this immediately. I’ll wait.

With that now set up, you can see lots of data on your website from links to crawling errors and site performance, but what I am most interested in for this blog post is keywords. There are a couple of areas in Webmaster Tools that can help with your keyword research and onsite optimization, both of which can be found under “Your site on the web” on the left hand navigation.

Keywords

The first of these sections is aptly named “keywords” and shows you the keywords that Google thinks are important to your website based on the content of your pages.

The first page of data you are shown isn’t necessarily the most accurate; the first term for Vertical Measures is “market”, but you can click down to greater detail for related terms such as “marketing” which is more relevant to our site.

So how can this report help you? Well using this information you can see the words that are repeated most on your website, and how this correlates with the terms you are targeting with SEO. If your most important keyword is hard to find on your site, then you might wish to think about rewriting your website content to make it more prevalent (without keyword stuffing).

Looking at verticalmeasures.com we can see the following top 10 list of words on the site. Obviously market/marketing is important for our business, as is building/link building and SEO. However, more important from this list is what isn’t listed, for example our content marketing or local search services don’t crack the top 20, so we could rewrite our important pages accordingly.

You can then drill down this information to see which pages are using these keywords the most, and check that these pages are those you are targeting with that keyword, and again rewrite your content accordingly if it isn’t.

This tool could also prove useful for ensuring that you are using other related terms suitably throughout your website. By checking that other related terms, such as synonyms or related products, are also being used various times on your pages you can ensure that you can rank for other searches and long tail queries.

Search Queries

The other area in Webmaster Tools that can help you find and target keywords is the “Search queries” report. On this report you can see the keywords that Google is returning your website for in search results (impressions) and when these searches are actually resulting in visitors to your site (clicks).

This data is worth evaluating in closer detail to see exactly what it is telling you, and how this should be used. Firstly we can see that almost all of the impressions for “Google Images” took place on one day, when we were ranking on the second page, as shown below:

If we use the AdWords tool to try and see the approximate search volume of this keyword, we can see the following data for broad, phrase and exact matches:

Reducing this figures to a single day, this still leaves us on broad match with either 111,666 a day or 50,000 local, or 91,000 queries on phrase and exact or 40,000 local. Either way these figures differ greatly from those in Webmaster Tools, so it is possible that they are in fact more accurate. However, that does not mean that we were necessarily exposed to 60,000 searchers yet received less than 10 visits. If we use SEOBooks approximation that only 10% of searchers look at second page, it is likely that this figure is closer to 6,000 impressions (in reality given the search term itself, I suspect it is far fewer than this).

The bottom line for website owners is that this impression number is likely to be far higher than reality, unless you are ranking in the top three positions, and even then the AdWords Keyword tool is known to be inaccurate.

However, the piece of data that you can verify in Analytics is the clicks you get from various keywords.  Looking at our own data for these keywords these numbers appear to be mostly accurate, with Webmaster Tools reporting 150 clicks and Analytics reporting 144 visits. I was also able to look at the position Webmaster Tools gives for a keyword in the SERPs with a separate ranking tool where the information was again validated, so we know that this too is accurate.

So knowing this information, what can a website owner learn from this report and how can they change their keyword strategy accordingly? Firstly, this report can be useful for highlighting keywords that you are already ranking for without targeting, and you can then focus on these more directly for better rankings.

You can also look at these reports to see those keywords with low click though rates to troubleshoot any potential issues (without trusting the impressions figure too greatly). This information can then help you understand the intent behind certain keywords, what they are looking for, and how you can better attract clicks once you are ranking, for example by tweaking your Page Title and meta description.

Summary

This is just a small amount of the information that is available in Webmaster Tools, and I highly recommend that every business owner use the information Google gives you as much as possible. It is the one area where the Almighty G gives you some kind of feedback, and by combining it with other tools you can find mistakes your website is making, and fix them to achieve improved results.

In addition, following several announcements by Google over the past month regarding Webmaster Tools it in an area that I believe they are focusing on at the moment and expect to grow in functionality and information available – use it wisely.

James Constable

James is a Campaign Manager at Vertical Measures, looking at client’s Internet Marketing from a strategic viewpoint to get them the best possible results for their business needs and budget. His blog posts revolve around strategy, analytics and keyword selection.

With universal search, and new elements being continually added to Google, many business understand the importance of ranking not only in web search, but also the advantages of ranking in Google for images, news and maps in addition. Not only can being listed highly in these areas be beneficial for when they are included on the first page of Google results in universal search, but many users will skip directly to these areas to find what they want (e.g. to easily see the product they wish to buy), and it is another great way to drive traffic to your website.

However, tracking this information and monitoring the results of your efforts in these areas in Google Analytics can be difficult, and it can be increasingly complex trying to understand where your different visitors are coming from, beyond what Analytics is actually saying.

As a starting point, data in Google Analytics from traffic sources can take the form of any of the following;

• Organic – visitors from unpaid search (SEO)
• CPC – visitors from paid search results (PPC)
• Referal – visitors following links from other sites to your website
• Direct – visitors directly entering your URL into their browser

However, 3 of these 4 forms are able to come from Google alone (excluding only direct traffic):

While ‘organic’ and ‘cpc’ work fine for measuring traffic from web search, and bring with them suitable data such as the keyword that was searched, it is the ‘google.com /referral’ traffic that can be more confusing.

Referral Traffic from Google

So what exactly is referral traffic from Google? Surely by definition any traffic from Google is search traffic that is either paid or unpaid? Well, no. There are other pages on Google, such as their blogs, where links can occasionally be placed and traffic can come through correctly as referals.

However, if you look in the ‘Referring Sites’ report in analytics and drill down to the google.com domain, you are able to see more precisely where this traffic did come from. This data is likley to look like the below;

As we can see, traffic can come directly from the homepage (‘/’) where users are using iGoogle to personalize their homepage, and a lot of this traffic is likley to also be coming from Google Reader (‘/reader’) from visitors reading either your blog, or someone elses blog linking to you, through RSS.

However, the ‘/imgres’ subdomain is in fact traffic that comes from Google Image searches, and because it is being tracked as a referal and not as search, it does not carry with it any data on keywords. This means that any reports you are running are going to be underestimating traffic from such SEO efforts, and also missing keyword data showing where the most valuable traffic is coming from.

Finally, it also appears that any searchers who click ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ (who does do that by the way?!) will also appear as referral traffic from the homepage, as opposed to being tracked as organic search with a keyword.

What about Google Maps and News?

Google Images seems to be the odd one out of the Google searches in that it uses a subdirectory and is tracked as a referral, whereas traffic from Maps and News is tracked a search traffic, and does retain the keyword data. However, they do use subdomains (maps.google.com and news.google.com) and due to Google Analytics’ oblivion for these, they are not reported and it is all shown as ‘google / organic’ as opposed to ‘maps.google.com / organic’.

Therefore, you are able to see keywords being sent from news and maps, but you are not able to idenity these as coming from these separate enties. This means that a business or blog cannot work out the value of them being listed regularly in news results separate to their other SEO efforts.

Possible Solutions

In working on this blog post and researching the area, I have come across various possible solutions, none of which have been able to work (please see posts such as this, this and this to name a few). However, none of these have been able to work, perhaps due to updates in the Analytics code or changes to Google Images and its changing use of subdirectories versus subdomains.

Even if these were able to be implemented quickly and work correcly, I don’t think this is particularly the point, especially for small business owners who likley make up the large majority of Google Analytics users. As an out of the box solution, made by Google, I don’t think it is too much to expect for it to work fully with the other Google properties such as Images, News and Maps and bring in all of the available data.

With the increasing importance of ranking highly in these different areas to drive addiitonal website traffic , it is also important to be able to measure the effectiveness and value of any efforts in this area, and I hope that this is added to any future updates made by Google to Analytics. Until then, all businesses can do it understand that these limiations exist and take this into consideration when making any relevant decisions.

If you know of another possible solutions to either of these issues, please comment below and let me know, I will glady try them out and see if any can work quickly and easily! Similarly, if you have seen any other discrepancies in Analytics around traffic being reported incorrectly, please post it below too.

James Constable

James is a Campaign Manager at Vertical Measures, looking at client’s Internet Marketing from a strategic viewpoint to get them the best possible results for their business needs and budget. His blog posts revolve around strategy, analytics and keyword selection.

Last week, three members of the Vertical Measures team attended PubCon, a yearly event where all the latest news on SEO, Social Media and Online Marketing is shared and discussed. Below are some of the more interesting or controversial things that were said by speakers across the various events, and while we may not agree with everything, it might get you thinking about your campaign and where you want to take it.

SEO

• Utilize video and images to target universal search and get more page 1 real estate. Submit both image and video sitemaps to search engines.
• When your rankings jump onto page one for a couple of days, this is the audition period – ensure you have good CTR and low bounce rates.
• End user data, gathered via the Google toolbar or query data, is considered in the ranking algorithm, so ensure good user experience.
• A short URL in the SERPs will get twice as many clicks, which a long URL leads to 2.5 times more clicks for the link below.
• Don’t chase algorithums, but ask ‘What would I do if it were my search engine’?
• Don’t target single word keywords. Aside from the low ROI they are used less frequently due to their ambiguous nature. As more words are included the volume decreases, but conversions increase.
• People search in plural keywords, but buy in singular.
• Put misspellings of keywords in your meta keywords so they are still included on a page without making your brand seem unprofessional.
• The .mobi TLD provides no advantage in ranking for mobile searches, but user detection to serve a different website design is best practice.
• Blackhat tactics are like drugs, you might be able to get a quick boost, but in the long term it will only cause problems.
• The long tail is bogus – search is being used more for navigation with brand queries of short length.
• Don’t limit yourself to link reclamation for your own site, but competitors’ sites too. Keep an eye on any bankrupt companies in the industry also.
• Videos and photos posted to your listings can help give your local listing a boost.
• Many have seen it, but this is a great video on the power of social media.

Website Design and Conversion Optimization

• More people scroll to the bottom of websites than a few years ago (up to 15% from 2%), as scroll wheels have become more common. But 76% of clicks are still above the fold, so put a CTA at the top and bottom of each page.
• Flash slide shows show your business cannot prioritize the best service or message to get across for each page. They are also a distraction and take up too much prime real estate.
• From left to right across your navigation, take visitors through an Engagement Continuum, who you are and why they should buy from you.
• A user can keep 7 things in their short-term memory, design navigation with this in mind and don’t give too many options. Use the 80:20 rule to promote only the top 20% of categories.
• Make your message more obvious, don’t hide it in text, or bury it in the page. Everyone has A.D.D. online and no one reads paragraph text.
• Keep your numbers specific – e.g ‘2 million users’, not ‘millions of users’ to appear more real and tangible.
• Borrow trust from other sources by listing any publications or associations you have with well-known brands. The right hand column is ideal for these trust indicators.
• Test your pages using both qualitative and quantities data, using both Analytics and feedback from user experiences.
• Never let your IT department write copy, keep an eye on error pages, 404s, thank you pages and search result pages.
• Every page can be a landing page, so needs to be designed for conversions. Find the non-converting, high traffic pages and start from there.
• You have 50 milliseconds to give a first impression of your site, which is crucial in the buying decision, so your site needs to look professional. Layout will have a greater affect on conversions than content.
• Too many homepages have too many options, keep it to one CTA with easy navigation. Too many options mean users make no choice at all.
• Page speed is important for users and search engines alike, 49% of rural city visitors are still on dial up connections and page speed is going to become more and more important in future algorithms.
• Conversion rates mean nothing without a traffic source.
• HIPPO = Highest paid persons opinion. Don’t let the boss pick the design – test it!
• Don’t just test, but have a strategic plan and hypothesis based on your target audience and their buying behavior to ensure marketing insight from the results.
• Websites are made to sell, not win design awards – ‘slick isn’t sticky’.
• Automate your analytics to focus on strategy, not tactics. Ignore any averages, as well as pageviews or bounce rates – you want people to find information quickly!

Social Media

• It doesn’t matter if you want to do social media, people are talking about you anyway! Listening to passive conversations about you is the most honest feedback you will ever get
• Companies think they are giving up control by encouraging social media participation, but the illusion of control was just ignorance by large brands.
• When tweeting you ARE the company, there are no departments.
• Use social media to work above Google and keep people away from search. If they know you and trust you, they won’t search for others.
• When Google crawls Social Media data, they are listening to your customers, and what they say about you.
• Forums are unsexy social media, but still important and have large audiences.
• People want to give feedback – make it easy for them.

Future of Search

• Mobile search is the largest growing sector of search, and HTML5 is set to replace mobile applications.
• PC search and 10 blue links will diminish in importance in the coming years.
• If search is the past, prediction and suggestion will be the future.
• Don’t optimize pages for algorithms, but optimize the brand itself for search. Give your customers what they want and make your business stand out, to help your site stand out in the rankings.
• Microformats are going to become more important to provide information to searchers before they visit your site.
• HTML5 will help crawlers better under websites and their layout of content and navigation. Ensure your website is compliant.

James Constable

James is a Campaign Manager at Vertical Measures, looking at client’s Internet Marketing from a strategic viewpoint to get them the best possible results for their business needs and budget. His blog posts revolve around strategy, analytics and keyword selection.

In this series of blog posts I have talked a lot about the importance of setting up goals, and goal values, in Google Analytics so that you can get an accurate idea of which traffic sources, keywords and website pages are doing the most for your bottom line.

Setting up goals in Analytics is a simple task, in the ‘Edit’ section of a profile, you are able to choose between three types of goals: a URL, time on site or pageviews per visit. The last two goal options are determined by being more or less than a given amount, and can be useful for customer service websites where you either want to provide information as quickly as possible. This can also be useful for entertainment sites that want to engage with their target audience for a long time, for either long time on site, or many pageviews.

However, for most businesses and websites, the goal that they will want to track will be a URL, such as a “Thank You” page after a sale or completing a contact form.

However, there are many other websites that exist for a purpose other than to make sales via ecommerce, receive sales leads, provide information quickly or even engage an audience. Websites set up to make affiliate sales might be one such example, as would many blogs, including my co-worker’s Phoenix Suns blog, which I shall use as an example later in this post.

Many blogs of this nature make their money from advertising, which is often done based on the number of impressions and visitors, so in some ways getting people to visit the website is success in itself. However, getting people to return to the website regularly could be said to be the purpose of the website, so the goal of the page might be to attract subscribers to the RSS feed or followers on twitter.

Unfortunately Google Analytics is only able to measure what takes place on the website itself, so as soon as any visitor clicks to Feedburner or Facebook, they leave the site and it is no longer traceable. To get around this problem, website owners can utilize Event Tracking or Virtual Pageviews to monitor clicks on these external links.

Event Tracking

Event Tracking is a relatively new feature to Google Analytics that superseded Virtual Pageviews, apart from one very important aspect as we shall see later. It is essentially a piece of code that can be added to any link, or website feature, that can then monitor if a visitor clicks on that part of the page during the visit.

For example, at the bottom and side of this page we suggest that you “follow us” on social media sites or RSS, and if you look at the page source code you will see the following;

This highlighted code in the href essentially monitors each click and then categorizes the category, action, label and value, the last two of which are optional (we did not use a value). This code is useful for tracking not only which external links your visitors are clicking, but can also be used with interactive features of a website such as games and videos.

This data can then be broken down in Analytics to see which activities are being performed on your website, where people are clicking, what documents are being downloaded, and so on. You could then use this information to get a better understanding of how visitors use your website, and then use this information to better design your website towards these events.

An Event Tracking report is available in Analytics within the “Content” drop down and shows information such as the number of events, when they happened, and which kinds of events took place;

Returning to the example we have in place on this page, and looking at the ‘Category’ report in Analytics, we can see that the social media links in the sidebar are clicked about twice as often as those in the footer;

However, while you can give an Event a ‘value’ these are not to be confused with goal values, and event tracking cannot be used with goal tracking in analytics, despite there being strong demand for it . This is a great disadvantage of Event Tracking, when compared to Virtual Pageviews.

Virtual Pageviews

As mentioned previously, Virtual Pageviews were superseded by Event Tracking as they create fake page views which can inflate website numbers. However, as Events can’t be tracked as goals by Analytics, but URLs can, Virtual Pageviews enable you to track links that go to other websites as a goal, and are therefore still very useful.

Returning to the example of a blog, if you go to valleyofthesuns.com and look at the page source, for the social media links in the right hand side of the page, which are the website goal to increase return visitors, you will see the following;

The highlighted code essentially tricks Analytics into thinking a pageview for www.valleyofthesuns.com/follow/rss took page when the link is clicked (a page that in reality doesn’t exist). By then setting up this goal as a URL destination goal and giving it a goal value, we can then monitor which visitors, traffic sources and keywords were most likely to subscribe, and then experiment with different website designs to lead to higher conversion rates.

Virtual Pageviews vs. Event Tracking

Therefore, there are advantages to both methods, and as a general rule I would say that if it is not your primary goal use Event Tracking, otherwise use Virtual Pageviews to set a URL destination goal. For example, on this page our primary goal is for you to contact us to see how we can help you, so we use event tracking to record offsite links. However, for blogs or affiliate sites where the offsite link is the primary goal, then there is no other option than to use Virtual Pageviews.

James Constable

James is a Campaign Manager at Vertical Measures, looking at client’s Internet Marketing from a strategic viewpoint to get them the best possible results for their business needs and budget. His blog posts revolve around strategy, analytics and keyword selection.

In my previous blog posts on Google Analytics, I have tried to show some of the simple ways that business owners can use the information available to see what is most relevant to them. How they can calculate their ROI on internet marketing, use site search to better understand their customers ,and evaluate the performance of their website content to make sales .

Unfortunately, all of these previous articles have relied heavily on tables and number crunching to understand your website, which perhaps isn’t everyone’s favorite subject. These rows upon rows of numbers and percentages may be scaring you away from getting highly actionable data to improve your website and marketing efforts.

However, there is a solution, and its name is ‘Motion Charts!’ Motion Charts are a very powerful tool within Google Analytics but unfortunately are pretty well hidden, so t hey don’t get the attention they deserve.

I admit that I don’t use Motion Charts as much as I should do, and tend to just look at the numbers, as this is quickest and easiest for me personally. However, because of the way the charts display their information, even if you are happy with tables of numbers, they can help make new connections between data and spark new ideas for improvements for a website. When people in the office suddenly became interested in what I was doing when they saw Motion Charts on my screen, I knew it was something powerful that could help many business owners.

Like I say, Motion Charts are pretty well hidden inside Analytics, and as the majority of people work their way through the left hand navigation through Visitors, Traffic Sources and Content, so they never even know they are there. Motion Charts aren’t so much a report, but instead a way to display the data. On any report that you are looking at you are given the option at the top of the page to ‘Visualize.’

Once you click to visualize you will be taken to a new screen that looks something like the following. I think you’ll agree it’s already more interesting than endless rows of numbers…

To improve this visualization further, click Play or drag the time slide-bar and you can really see the data come to life!

But what does this all mean and why is it useful? The graph is actually showing you 5 different pieces of data at any one time, all of which are completely customizable. In addition to the time slider and the x and y axis, you also have the color and size of each dot, which in the above example represent bounce rates and new visits respectively.

Being able to see all five pieces of data in one glance can help you see different connections and easily compare one dot to the next in terms of size, color and location on the graph.

So long as you set up the motion charts correctly and know what you’re looking at, these charts can take a lot of the pain out of understanding your Analytics. Depending on what each chart displays, you may be able to quickly diagnose problem areas or keywords of your website without ever having to see a table of numbers.

However, the key is in setting up the motion charts to display the information that is most important, which can be an art in itself. Obviously every website and business is different, but the following are some of the motion chart set ups that I find most useful, as well as what they show and how you can use this information:

Keywords

X axis; Pages / Visit

Y axis; Visits

Color: Goal Conversion Rate

Size; Bounce Rate

With this motion chart you should be easily able to see which keywords are performing best and worst for your website in terms of bringing sales and visitors to your pages. Small dots will have the lowest bounce rates and are likely to see more pages per visit, so should be located to the right hand side of the graph. Cold blue dots represent those keywords that are not converting to goal completions, whereas the warmer red the dots will be your higher converting, and most valuable keywords. Combine this information with each dots’ vertical placement on the graph and you can get a very good idea of how much good traffic leading to sales each keyword brings.

Top Content

X axis; Unique Pageviews

Y axis; Pageviews

Color: $ Index

Size; Bounce Rate

Much like the previous motion chart, this set up will show you which pieces of content are leading to conversions, and which have high bounce rates, obviously not enticing visitors to spend time on your website. The most viewed pieces of content will in the top right corner of the chart, and less popular content will be in the lower left hand corner. Again, warm and small dots are good, and large blue circles will signal underperforming content. If your business is able to get many small red dots in the top right hand corner of the chart, you know you are onto a very good thing!

All Traffic Sources

X axis; Pages/Visit

Y axis; Visits

Color: Per Visit Goal Value

Size; Bounce Rate

To keep everything logical, I try to leave the colors as representing the value of visitors and the size of each circle being the bounce rate for each motion chart, so you should again be able to find your most value traffic by small red dots on the graph. However, the flexibility of motion charts means that you are by no means restricted to this, I just prefer to keep things organized in this way, as this is the information I find most relevant in improving website conversions.

In addition to this, the Y axis in this example is most important as it shows the number of visits, i.e. the sample size, for the data being represented. A small red dot at the bottom of the graph may show just one visit that converted, but a small red dot at the top of the graph represents high numbers of very good traffic. As with everything in Google Analytics, the information that’s most important and what to look at for each website changes greatly for every business. However, with the visualize button and motion charts, even if you aren’t the best with tables and numbers, you should be able to grasp a better understanding of your traffic and what provides the most value to your bottom line. You can then use this information to know which activities to increase, and which areas or keywords to focus on to maximize profits.

James Constable

James is a Campaign Manager at Vertical Measures, looking at client’s Internet Marketing from a strategic viewpoint to get them the best possible results for their business needs and budget. His blog posts revolve around strategy, analytics and keyword selection.