Onboarding a New Search Marketing Client

February 8th, 2010

by Laura Thieme

Tomorrow morning, I am meeting with an in-state company that focuses on providing managed care solutions for worker’s compensation and no-fault injury benefits recipients. I have a lot to learn about their business, how they market, how they attract qualified clients. I’m excited to kick-off this account. It’s the first strong local contract I’ve landed since having my daughter just over a year ago.

What brought about this client? A little of the following not in this particular order:

1) Networking - re-networking - getting to meetings despite balancing motherhood, and working mommy challenges

2) Email marketing - using Constant Contact - a professional design template - person who referred me is on our email list. We have a professional design template, and have started email marketing again, about once a month.

3) Bizwatch Search Analytics Platform - we had the more sophisticated tools to increase our chances of getting the contract.

4) Running sample reports with prospective client’s data in it - I think really helped.

5) Technical knowledge applied during the prospecting phase - we caught a significant error on the redesigned website. Their design firm had forgotten to ensure that the WWW version and Non-WWW version were the same website. The non-WWW version unfortunately still resolved to the old website, and was in the search engines. The old pages on the non-WWW, including the contact form, were showing 404 pages not found. We caught the error on the initial prospect call, and followed up after that, to ensure it had been fixed correctly.

6) A good relationship opportunity with this company - you can’t force a relationship of any kind. Some people you click with, others you don’t. I’m happy to say that I feel I click with the leader of this team. I know her leader, and am very proud to be doing business with this company. And, FYI - I always like to work on a contract and produce initial results before I put out a “press release” or announce who the company is. Little superstition.

7) Follow - up and follow - through. In the client’s words - this was important to her. I had my challenges with this one, don’t get me wrong. I am a single working mom. It’s not easy. My daughter had been, and still is sick now for almost two weeks. I got sick too. It took half a box of puffs plus to complete the last phone call, but I did it. We did it. We’re glad to be on board with this company. We have a lot of work to do. Now, let’s get started.

8) Compromise - They initially contacted me regarding an SEO Plan for 2010. I suggested they would hear from other companies that would talk the traditional SEO Charlie Brown wah - wah - wah - wah - wah wah. Keyword research, traffic projections, metatags/metadata, content, and sit back, and wait for results. They might get a ranking report or something like that. I suggested an entirely different way of looking at this. I’d include SEO, but it would not be the first thing I’d do for them.

The client has indicated they are search marketing newbies. My goal tonight is to look through my materials on what makes a successful search marketing campaign. I’ve written a lot about what works, what doesn’t. I’ll link to these articles and blog entries below.

I’ve blogged about SEO, and what not to do. I’m going to refer back to those materials and update them. SEO, PPC, Analytics - they transform from year to year.

Here are the links:
Why SEO Doesn’t Work - Part 1 of 5
Part 2 of 5 - How Much Should You Spend on SEO
Part 3 of 5 - SEO Basics - and Proving Value
Part 4 of 5
Part 5 of 5

I’ll pull from an old search analytics blog when I taught at OSU a couple of years ago.

I’ll refer to a new blog on why you use paid search to do keyword research. I’ll link to each of these from here.

It’s a tough economy. Times are harder than they’ve been before. But this contract gives me hope. It’s encouraging to see a company on-board search with the right budget, and prepare to tackle it the right way.

Posted in Search Analytics, Search Optimization (SEO). No Comments »

 

Big Brands & Search Engine Optimization (SEO) at Google SERPs

April 7th, 2009

by Laura Thieme

I’ve seen a number of people write about big brands complaining that their sites aren’t doing well in Google SERPs (search engine results pages). I’ve worked with a number of big brands in the past 12 years. Let me tell you the most common reasons that big brands don’t do well in Google’s SERPs:

1) Their sites are not search engine friendly
Case in point - I worked on a major retail site that had their URLs controlled by the FAST site search engine. The search engine URLs were not getting indexed in Google. Do not expect Google to remedy this situation. It’s up to you to have a search engine friendly website, and to ensure your URLs are indexed.

2) Do not assume that the sitemap.xml or .php page is going to get your entire website indexed. Another common myth about big brands is that if a sitemap exists, surely Google will index all of your pages. Does not always happen this way.

3) Don’t know about Google Webmaster Central Tools - love this ever-growing, web-based console for webmasters to learn how Google is accepting a site’s content and any errors they might find. Suggest big brands verify their sites using Google Webmaster Central, then monitor messages in the console.

4) Because people can’t control Google SERPs, although they may try and occasionally succeed, big brands often don’t invest even 10% in SEO compared to their paid search campaigns. Because they can’t control SEO results, they often don’t invest in SEO nearly as much. I’ve seen about 10% of paid search budget allocated for SEO. It’s also over-scrutinized compared to paid search, which is ironically on auto-pilot most of the time.

5) Big brands don’t add new content enough - many sites do not add new content enough, or post content in select sections of the website. Thus, large parts of a corporate website may not get updated frequently enough. This can create stale content, and search engines may give preference to updated sites who continuously post content.

6) Blogs often get people to link to content pages - and corporate sites could learn to use social media to their benefit. I blogged a lot about the Explorer II (now known as Minerva) ship after the Explorer I ship sank in November 2007. I had Abercrombie & Kent’s PR person in frequent communication, as well as the family who owend the Explorer I ship that sank before selling the ship 3-5 years before it sank. I was impressed by the level of communication both companies extended me, as a simple blogger, who was talking about their brand. But here’s the thing (as the new female judge would say on American Idol), a blogger can write something about a given brand and show up within minutes on the Web, as if it were a news headline. So, if a blogger can figure this out, and begin to control its influence on the Google SERPs real estate, certainly big brands with millions in advertising budgets can. It’s an issue of priority - it’s also an issue of mindset. It gets little of both.

7) People identify free with something that is not valuable, nor trusted. If something is free, then you can’t trust it, right? Google Analytics often gets little respect despite being a robust search analytics application. Sadly, it’s because it’s free, or considered free, but really Google Analytics is a result of participation in Google Adwords paid search advertising program. Of course, people can have Analytics running without Adwords running, but that is why it was originally available - to track your paid search program better. However, the search analytics program is extremely valuable, and is the first program people should be investing in before investing in more sophisticated programs such as Omniture. Same with Organic - SEO - it’s free - or so people think. But to get a site listed in Google SERPs, with concentrated efforts, is not free. It takes time, strategy, and there are no guarantees it will work. There are tricks, games, and frustration - lots of it with SEO - if you want to rank in Google’s SERPs for popular terms. SEO is not free, and should not be treated as such.

8) Big brand corporates sites often have complex dynamic data-driven websites that can’t be indexed by Google. Unrelated to the situation above with the FAST site search engine controlling URLs and not getting indexed, sometimes sites are unable to be indexed for a variety of reasons. However, in many cases, some large brand sites are simply not easily optimized. They either have URLs that can’t get indexed (want to know if your site is fully indexed? - go to google.com and type in “site:yourdomain.com” without the quotes), or can’t easily optimize page titles, content, due to the content management system. They might have little content on the page. They might not be able to make the headings H1 tags. They might not be able to easily update the content quickly due to regulations, or other things that large brands deal with - like health regs, or pharmaceutical regs. This slows down the ability to affect change on a website, and thus the ability to impact Google SERPs.

9) Google doesn’t owe anything to large brands in its SERPs. That’s what paid search is for - you want to control SERPs - well, paid search is to the right and above the organic listings.

10) Corporate large brands can learn alot from bloggers - and how their sites and what they say gets distributed across the Web quickly. It’s the survival tactic of the small guy, evening out the playing field. The ability to be quicker, nimbler - but here’s the good news - if a corporate brand site invests in SEO, and has a high page rank of 5 - 7 or higher, a little SEO goes a very long way - really! I can speak from experience. Optimize your page titles, headings, and make sure your pages are getting indexed. Ensure your content is updated using cross-selling tactics. Have a corporate blog that many share responsibility in updating. Use social media to drive other users to your content. SEO can work, if done correctly. Watch your Google Webmaster Central account to make sure you aren’t blacklisted, or worse. SEO and paid search should work together. Neither should surpass the other.

Posted in Uncategorized. No Comments »

 

Links in a Link Farm - Using Google Webmaster Tools to Locate the Bad Inbound Links to Your Site

February 7th, 2009

It’s again 11:30 at night - I’m having a hard time keeping my 40-year old Mommy eyes open - but I’m on the scent of some bad links using Google Webmaster Tools. I’m continuing to work on a Google blacklisting, or apparent penalty for a client’s organic visibility.

Here are a few of the sites that I’m investigating - check them out to see how the bad link farm code is being utilized - and here’s where to look

Scroll to the bottom of the home page if that is the URL I’ve provided below - see the small font, or invisible code by reviewing Source Code under the View menu bar

http://www.omproducciones.com/2007/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4&Itemid=2

http://zeffiro.org/ - this one is invisible - you have to View Source to see the “phentermine” type links - there are hundreds if not thousands of those links buried in the home page’s source code. Sad irony or intended irony? First line of the site - Behind the message is the thought - well, behind this website is a mess of a link farm either intentional or unbeknowst to the owner.

http://www.berensononcology.com/index.html - buried source code at the bottom of the home page - you can see this one a little easier than some of the others - you can tell some thing is there - just highlight the opaque content at the bottom of the page. You can see that some of the links (if not all) go to a Spanish (.es) domain, and then redirect to www.topmeds10.com - so are all of these sites in a known link farm, and participating in such services, or are they unaware and innocent victims that are getting penalized by Google?

So, here is another bad link noted by Google Webmaster Tools:

www.jeremyfoster.com - note the code at the bottom of the page

Here’s what my client’s web pages would look like:

Files that were posted to a hidden subdirectory containing keyword embedded URLs such as the one below:
/phentermine-same-day-shipping.html

It’s interesting to note that many of these sites in the link farm, which Google Webmaster Tools has identified for us, are from Korea, such as those below:

http://www.bitl.co.kr/

http://www.skad.co.kr/board/board_1.ph…de=tb_free&page=&v_number=23538 Jan 25, 2009
http://www.farmmilk.co.kr/bbs/zboard.p…=on&select_arrange=hit&desc=asc Jan 24, 2009
http://www.farmmilk.co.kr/bbs/zboard.p…amp;select_arrange=headnum&desc=asc Jan 24, 2009
http://disk.co.kr/

So, my question is for Matt Cutts and Google - once you’ve identified these sites - and you know that your site was hacked and these links have at least been removed from your site- how do you get back in Google’s good graces?

I’d be really appreciative if Matt Cutts would comment on this blog entry and offer some advice as to how to fix. Here’s what we’ve done thus far:

1) Removed hack attack folder from client website
2) Added folder to Google Webmaster Tools to block - accepted this past week
3) Added folder to robots.txt - Google Webmaster accepted this past week
4) Noted that 68% of our organic terms have fallen out of Google since hack attack and months that followed shortly thereafter
5) Reviewed Google Webmaster tools for other link problems - noted a few others that aren’t very good links - cleaning up now; requesting removal

Any other suggestions?

Posted in Link Building & Link Farms, Search Optimization (SEO). No Comments »

 

Using Google Webmaster Tools to Troubleshoot Your SEO Rankings & Penalties

by Laura Thieme

Have you ever wondered if your site could be banned by Google? Wouldn’t it be nice if Google told you this, specifically in big black bold letters at the top of your log-in screen?

If you are using Google Webmaster Tools, they’ll tell you how often they visited your site (sort of - nothing compared to the detail NetTracker gives you in the robot analysis), keywords used to visit your site (partial list), and technical errors they experienced in crawling your site. The type of information has grown over the past couple of years and become quite a useful tool in troubleshooting your organic SEO search engine rankings.

It gives you how many pages are indexed (google search site:yourdomainname.com), as well as sites that are related to yours, which is interesting to note (related:yoursite.com). Of course, it tells you the links coming into your site, which is where it gets interesting.

I have been working on a client site for several months now. They are under a penalty, or so it would seem. There is no black and white box that informs you of this status, it’s just that you begin to determine this if you are not improving for select keyword phrases, or certain terms have fallen out all together in Google. We are ranking well in Yahoo & MSN for the terms, and in fact have improved in those search engines for many of these terms. But in Google - most of the terms that we would like to have - have not done well, or not improved much. So, why is that?

We knew the client’s website was hacked last spring in 2008. What we didn’t know was that 30,000 pages had been appended to their site, and despite being once cleaned up, they resurfaced several months later. A colleague of mine reviewed the way the pages were excluded and redirected. We learned that we were not telling Google what to do with the hacked section of the site, and thus needed to update the robots.txt file, as well as do a 404 error. The previous SEO consultant had placed a 302 redirect on the website pages, which told Google that these files were temporarily moved as opposed to permanently moved or deleted. We updated the files with a 404 (file not to be found) message, and the robots.txt file excluding that directory from Google’s index. We followed Google’s recommendations for “if your site has been hacked”, or if you “need to remove a directory from Google’s index”.

The good news - within one business day - the site has had the requested subdirectory removed, as well as individual pages we’ve requested removed.

The bad news and the million dollar question - we’re no longer ranked for core terms for this client - so how long will it take to restore their search engine rankings?

More to come on this topic as new information to report is available.

Posted in Search Optimization (SEO). No Comments »

 

Three Blog Posts That I Have to Write About SEO & Paid Search Auto Pilot

August 27th, 2008

by Laura Thieme

So there are at least three topics that I need to write about - paid search ad campaigns on broad match and auto pilot and no tracked conversions, keyword variations in Google Adwords, rankings and WebPositionGold issues, and the fourth topic (okay, so there are four) - when site optimization is not enough.

Which one first, you say?

I’ll cover site optimization tonight in one post - although it’s likely to become a link building SEO topic series. The others - another night - but all are hot topics in search right now.

So what do you do when site optimization doesn’t work? Well, when it doesn’t do enough to improve target terms that I might add are highly competitive terms, such as nutritional and herbal supplements. If a site such as this, has a page rank of 3, and internal page ranks of 2-3, and sometimes worse, how well do you think it ranks in Google for “herbal supplements” or “nutritional supplements”, after several months of optimization?

Let’s see who competes for “nutritional supplements” and “herbal supplements” in Google. If you noted Google’s new search feature that shows you related searches and the number of results for each of these keywords, you probably noted Google has over 4M (yep, that’s MILLION) results for nutritional supplements.

Let’s see who leads the top ten organic natural search listings and what their page ranks are:

The first site is Nutritionalsupplements.com - which only has a page rank of 4, and has a bunch of links - that’s it.
Wiki’s page entry on nutritional supplements has a page rank of 6, and is quite relevant and useful.
Wholesalesupplementstore.com has a minimal page rank of 3, and has a bunch of links on its Yahoo store template.
Supplementstogo.com - another ecommerce store - page rank of 6.
Nutrasanus.com - page rank of 4 - educational yet leads to ecommerce products
Mitamins.com - also has page rank of 4 - educational association but clearly commercial affiliation
Planetarynutrition.com - also page rank of 4.

Okay, so my client has a page rank of 3 - which isn’t great - but neither are the leaders above, right? My client has “nutritional supplements” in his page title just like these guys above do.

Okay, so what about numbers of pages indexed? How deep are their sites?

first one mentioned above - 4,290 pages indexed in Google from their site
second - 4300 pages indexed
third - over 6,000 pages indexed
fourth - over 5400 pages indexed
fifth - wow - a whopping 58,000 super size whopper
sixth - only 740 pages indexed in Drugfreesport.com - another one listed in top ten - but NCAA affiliation - may not need as much content??

last one - nutritional-supplements-health-guide.com - only has page rank of 3 and 248 pages indexed

Okay, so there is some shallow stuff on “nutritional supplements” - so I see we have real potential here on our page rank of 3 - although I’d surely like a page rank of 5 to make it easier to compete with the other dogs.

My client - has 339 pages indexed for the record.

So, next, we’ll look at inlinks, and how much that can improve rankings, as opposed to on-site SEO factors. How much can inlinks to your site help build SEO listings, as well as page rank? Tune in soon - or subscribe so you can stay up to date.

Posted in Blogging, Search Optimization (SEO). 1 Comment »

 

Search Marketing 101: The Beginning

July 6th, 2008

by Laura Thieme

In 11 years+ of business, I’ve learned so much. If it hadn’t been for eating poppy seed bread in 1996, and losing my job as a result, I probably would not have started a company to provide international market research a year later. Many of you know that story, however, here’s a quick recap.

I was working for American Electric Power (AEP), www.aep.com, in 1995. I started as an Internet research assistant, and spent hours creating databases for the economic development department. I often visited the North Market, a nearby farmers’ market, where I frequently purchased Highlands bread, which would later cause me to lose my job at AEP. I did get my job back, after a week of meetings and other events, and learned that not everything in black and white was believable or correctly interpreted. I learned a lot about human nature. I learned the value of fighting for what you believed in. While I got my job back, my reputation was pretty much ruined. I lost my job again in less than a year. I had also suffered a torn ACL from a skiing accident at the end of 1996, which was the beginning of an eight-month recovery ordeal. I would have physical therapy three times a week, which is brutal to say the least. Your body does wierd things under that much stress. An incident occurred one night late at work, around 8 or 9 at night. I was working - no one was there - as was often the case. The days before you had the luxury of a laptop to take home. Something happened to my body that I couldn’t explain. I knew something was wrong. I was soon tested for Multiple Sclerosis (MS), thankfully which turned out to be negative. I’ve since been tested again, which was negative thankfully. Nasty disease. Fast forward to June 1997, less than a month after a very successful public speaking engagement at the Ohio Development Association (ODA) annual meeting, I lost my job again. I had consulting job offers. I had a teaching position offer. Everything seemed to be going great. I was even asked to go to India, with AEP’s dereg group. But then things started to take a turn quickly - within a couple of weeks. No matter what I did to prove my value - I could see that someone in particular wanted me gone at AEP. I anticipated it - I saw the warning signs - but I was determined to do the right thing, and show my value to the last minute with a smile. I was just not meant to be at AEP. I started my company on June 4, 1997. I landed my first research project in September 1997.

In November of 1997, I offered a seminar showing local business owners how to use the Internet search engines for research. I had put together a very simple website over a weekend, and metatagged it, and submitted it to the search engines. Within days, I had top rankings for keywords related to my services. I wanted to demonstrate to the business owners how marketers can affect the way we do research. Attendees were far more interested in how I got my website to the top of the search engines. Within six months, in May of 1998, I was offering the search marketing service to business owners.

The days of metatags and search engine submission services as a form of search engine marketing are long over. In fact, not since 2000, has that been a viable search marketing service on its own. In that year, I noticed that retailers were becoming more interested in return on investment, notably small businesses. I began to find that search marketing tools, called web analytics tools, were as valuable if not moreso than tracking a site’s keyword visibility. If you could prove traffic resulted from visibility, that was a measure of success. If you could prove sales resulted, that was another form of success. If you could prove that acquisition costs were acceptable, as well as customer lifetime value (CLV), that was the ultimate success.

Imagine that when I began in this industry, Google did not even exist. There is not a day that I pick up the NYT, or WSJ (which is not everyday mind you), that Google is not in the news. It’s recent story headline - about how much employees have to pay for daycare/childcare. 19,000 or more employees. There is a Google campus, much like you might find at major corporations. 19,000 - AEP had 22,000 when I worked for them downtown. Imagine that type of growth in just 10 years. Imagine the management challenges…. whew!

This industry as matured greatly in the past 11 years. It’s been referred to as a cottage industry, with jargon such as SEO, search engine optimization, website marketing, search marketing, PPC or CPC bid management, web analytics and voodoo amongst many other words.
However, one thing is for sure, if you know search marketing, you remain valuable and it could get you through a tough economy. It got me through 9/11, the dot-com failures, and today’s current economy. Major companies have risen to the top of the industry, many of whom have been acquired. Few search marketing companies have failed, that were notable to begin with. Search engines have failed faster. But companies that know how to utilize search for marketing purposes have not failed as easily.

I’ll be compiling the basics to the advanced of today’s search marketing in the coming weeks here online. If you want to subscribe, to the feed, click on the RSS feed link to the right. I’ll be focusing on what you really need to know when it comes to all those search marketing and analytics tools. I’ll be focusing on the executive perspective, above all else, because we all know your time is limited. What is you really need to know?

How to increase sales at a profit? What information should you be paying attention to? That’s what I’ll be writing about in the coming weeks and months.

Posted in Uncategorized. No Comments »

 

For me, SEO…not so

May 27th, 2008

 

For me, SEO…not so

Hattie Dietrich, OSU Mktg 754 Student, Guest Post 

When the time came to choose a marketing elective for my last quarter at OSU, I knew I wanted something different; something more intellectually stimulating than retail management or international business (the other options offered). So, on a whim I enrolled in search engine marketing 754. I was in for a big surprise. Sure enough, the class has proved to be a challenge. The first day I was overwhelmed with new terminology and internet marketing lingo. I had always considered myself computer savvy, but it was clear this class was going to be a learning experience.

          SEO confusion

  The first surprise of the class was finding out how much work was put into advertising on Google and other search engines. Having not really given much thought to the topic, I‘d always assumed that companies paid Google and BAM! - their ad appeared on my computer screen. I was completely ignorant of the bidding process and the campaign settings that effected the advertisements. I also found it amazing how Google’s engineers can develop such complex programs and algorithms that lead the searcher where they want to go.

One frustrating thing about the class so far has been getting through several very dry reading assignments. The text at times is somewhat hard to read and uninteresting. Another frustration is that I consider myself a very active thinker and creative person. A lot of the work surrounding SEO seems very formulaic and is trial and error based. Overall, I’ve realized that as much as SEO and SEO campaign management is a crucial part of any company, I’d prefer not to be the one in charge of it. It’s obvious the importance and impact internet marketing has on the company, however I don’t think I would excel in a career based on managing search engine marketing. However, I am sure that the knowledge I’m gaining from the class will be an asset no matter what field I enter.

Posted in Ohio State University Fisher College of Business. No Comments »

 

The Keys to Successful SEO - Part 5 of a 5 Part Series

March 25th, 2008

The Keys to Successful SEO - Part 5 of a 5 Part Series on Why SEO Doesn’t & Won’t Work
by Laura Thieme

It’s nearly 4 a.m. on a Tuesday morning. I can’t sleep. Monroe, my tuxedo cat, woke me up, and quite frankly I’m not sure I mind - I was dreaming about ghosts in the basement and watering the vegetable garden - see what happens when you watch “Medium” at 10 p.m. at night. I’m going to have to boycott that show.

Misha who is purring in my ear now, is petitioning for a “midnight” snack. I’m not sure what I’m more afraid of, not being able to return to sleep before it’s “time to get up” or waking the dog. Once I get up, then the cats have to be fed, the dog wants to be let outside, and then it’s all over. No chance of getting back to sleep, but do I care? My mind is active on many fronts - and I suspect it has a lot to do with my class at OSU starting today. But the mind also wandered into web analytics, which is a large part of what I’m teaching my class on at Ohio State. In fact, I’ve redone several parts of the syllabus to put more emphasis on web analytics.

We’re starting the class this year with five sessions on web analytics, instead of ending the class with web analytics. The focus won’t be on visibility first, it’s going to be on web analytics first, because it’s all about continuously proving value to your client (internal or external) on your web marketing budget. Today, I was on a prospective client call. It was our second call into the “relationship”. The company said something that I really liked hearing. They said, “some companies won’t even work with us if we don’t use web analytics”. Isn’t that great???? I loved it!!! I don’t use exclamation marks very often either :-)

I had asked the company in my first call if they had any form of web analytics? Did they have Google Adwords? Did they have Google Analytics? They had neither. And before you SEO and analytics experts scoff, these people understand the value of investing in meaningful data - they just need a little education on the process. In fact, they are moving forward on making a few minor changes to their website and installing Google Analytics before we proceed, regardless of whether “we” get the deal. So why do I care so much about web analytics, and why am I willing to write about it at 4:10 a.m. in the morning?

If you don’t have a robust web analytics package installed, you’re not able to intelligently answer “what’s wrong and what’s right with my website?” Granted, with web analytics, you will indeed have to make some inferences regarding what’s wrong, what’s right. And in fact, you won’t really know the specific experience analysis (see Avinash Kaushik’s book on Web Analytics, An Hour a Day, Chapter 1), unless you survey your customers. You can only make observations based on the web analytics data.

However, it’s the time that goes into the web analytics process that can be daunting - mindless at times - and like looking for meaning in your life while walking on the beach and looking out at the ocean (not that you or I have ever experienced the latter). What can make web analytics painful, and at times useless? It’s the tool, baby! Well, that and a little methodology or lack thereof.

So, how do you get a good web analytics tool? And how can it help you with your SEO efforts, which is what this series is all about? Do I need a part 6 of this 5-part series? Let’s start with Google Analytics because that’s what at a minimum, most of us should have this application installed (javascript code on your website) if we’re doing SEO and paid search (which is what you should all be doing). And why do you need web analytics again? Because you’re going to learn which keyword phrase(s) send you the lead, make your phone “ring, ring”, and your cash machine ka-ching, ka-ching! (Sorry, it’s 4 a.m.) Start with Google Analytics because it’s relatively painless, and it’s free - go figure!

With Google Analytics you can get alot of info about what’s working and what’s not with your online advertising campaign, or your website in general. It’s not perfect, the data may not reconcile, and quite frankly, if it’s not installed correctly, it could be relatively useless. But in general, Google Analytics makes my life as an SEO expert, and a search marketing guru, much easier to show the client value in which keyword converts to a lead or an online sale.

Now having said this, it’s knowing where in Google Analytics you need to go to figure the answer out to “what’s working, what’s not”. I am guilty of long posts, so I’m going to start another page in the event you want to “read on about web analytics!”.

Posted in Ohio State University Fisher College of Business, Search Optimization (SEO), Web Analytics. 1 Comment »

 

Why SEO Doesn’t Work - Part 4 of 5 Part Series

February 22nd, 2008

by Laura Thieme

What are the magic ingredients to a successful SEO campaign? Wonder why yours isn’t working? Do they lack any of these ingredients?

Part 4 of 5 Part Series

Need links to the rest of our 5-part series on SEO?

Part One - Top Ten Reasons SEO Doesn’t Work

Part Two - How Much Should You Spend on SEO

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Posted in Search Optimization (SEO). No Comments »

 

ClickTracks Training - Key Observations

November 16th, 2007

ClickTracks Training - Key Observations
by Gilbert Velasquez

We’re sitting in on a live ClickTracks training seminar with a new client who sells health related products. We find it important to work closely with our new search marketing clients on web analytics and the tools they are going to use.

Agenda: Discussing business goals, mapping them to web goals and KPIs and segmentation with labels.

We began with a series of questions that focus on why it is that we have a site and what our site’s goals are. After a few minutes, we learned the client has many different goals, not just in sales but in moving toward providing content to the user.

As we moved past the questions and started looking at ClickTracks, we begin to see how it works to track our client’s goals. We started with the search report to see how people were getting into the website in the first place. In a single view we were able to see what major keywords people were coming in on and through what search engine. The navigation report allowed us to see what people are doing on a page level basis when visiting the site. This is great information to see what elements in the navigation the visitors find useful and what they never use.

The campaign tracking report was up next. A great feature we came across in this report was the ability to input your Google AdWords information so that ClickTracks would automatically pull that information into their reports. The what’s changed report followed and displayed significant changes that occurred between two user-defined time frames. The funnel report and the click fraud reports were not yet configured, but they did show promise.

The final report was the data dissection report. It allowed us to look at various different aspects of the site. We have access to both quality and quantity metrics. On this report we also took some time to look at the graph options. We were able to choose from various metrics, such as unique page visits, and different time displays, such as daily or monthly. On the same graph we were able to chart up to four different KPIs, such as number of visitors, unique visitors, etc. These KPIs were related to a particular label, such as ‘All Visitors’. These labels can be created to segment particular visitors so that you can watch these KPIs on a segmented basis.

How to create a quick label:

In opening the label wizard, an array of options comes up to let you begin choosing what kind of label you want, such as ‘Compare Search Engines’, ‘New vs Returning Visitors’, ‘Ad Campaign Tracking’ or ‘Search vs Content Targeted’. If you’re in ClickTracks and you forget what the labels mean, there is a nice windows below the options that explains what they are used for.

We went with a Page Goal label. The label applies to any user who reached the page specified by the user. So the first step in creation was to click on the label’s button. We then saw a list of pages from which to select to choose as the page goal. Once we chose the page, we clicked ok, clicked go and that was it. The label was created and we were able to use that label throughout the whole analytics package immediately.

An issue that came up was that our goal page was listed multiple times with different parameters. As a solution, we could use parameter masking to allow us to view all those pages with parameters as one page in the reports. There was a distinction made between page-defining and non page-defining parameters to allow a page where the parameters actual define the content to appear as two separate pages. So it masks parameters, but in a smarter way to allow 2 different pages to remain that way in the reports even with the same file name.

Advanced Labels:

This is where the ClickTracks really shines. Advanced labeling gives you much more granularity than the quick label. You can label based on a page visited, if the user has a specific cookie, by the ad campaign the user entered on, date visited, user’s ip address, how long the user stayed, search engine keyword, certain time of day, the country the user is from, if the user generated a certain amount of revenue, and many, many more. Up to 50 different labels can be created. So one can create a label for all people from the U.S. who stayed for over 2 minutes and viewed a particular product page. Then use that label to group those users together and view data specific to that group throughout all reports in the ClickTracks system.

We created a label for visitors who stayed for over ten minutes, then another label for users who stayed short term. It was a simple process of choosing a label for length of time, input the desired time, the reports we wanted the label to appear in, and gave the labels a name. As soon as ClickTracks was done calculating, which was all of twenty seconds, the metrics were available in our reports. It was almost instantaneous.

We were then able to compare the two labels by keyword. So on one side we saw the keywords that brought our long term visitors in, and on the right a list of keywords that brought the short term visitors in. It was great to see that quickly what keywords were able to keep people on the site and which ones were only keeping them around for a few seconds.

We then created another label for those users who came in on a keyword that contained a particular string. Afterwards we went to the search report and were able to see all the keywords that contained the string and how many users came to the site and from what engine they came from. This would be very useful to create labels that track users who come in on all your branded terms. Then you can view, in one report, all users who came in on branded terms, how long they were on the site, how much they bought, and all other KPIs that ClickTracks offers.

Labels can also be shared across different users with different accounts in ClickTracks. When editing a label, you can just hit a button that says share and it puts the label on the server and not just in the account. Then everyone can use it. If you want to allow just a specific user to use the label, you can export it to your computer, email it to that person and then they can upload it to their ClickTracks.

The label feature in ClickTracks is a huge asset. The ability to group users together to see their data as a whole at once is huge. You can group all kinds of things together. You could take a set of keywords that may represent a larger category and put them together in one label. Then you could view metrics on what is happening to that category as a whole and not to just one individual keyword. ClickTracks seems like a great system that has a lot of value added. It does more that just show you raw data, it allows you to manipulate it in such a way that makes it much more valuable. You don’t have to spend time putting data together manually because the label will segment and group the data for you. And the labels seem varied and flexible enough to meet all kinds of demands. If you’re really looking for that just data, more of an in-depth analysis of you site, ClickTracks may be for you.

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