Many moons later, I was introduced to Google Analytics and had a classic “Eureka” moment. If only I had known about this before! Not only did I realise what content was converting, but I could make adjustments quickly and effectively, gradually building a steady stream of traffic.

As the world of online business has developed and become ever more competitive, it’s not only vital that we monitor our traffic, but also that we make necessary changes as quickly as possible. It’s not enough to make changes as and when you add new pages, products or features. You have to be first to spot the gaps. But until now, we could only use Google Analytics to make changes based on information we had about the past. There’s only so fast you can be when you are reacting to something which happened a few hours ago, yesterday or last week!

With the new Google Analytics Real Time Reporting, we can monitor our traffic as-it-happens. It’s a live view at what’s going on RIGHT NOW. The old adage “Knowledge is King” still applies but now it’s about who can get it quickest.

Application of Real Time Google Analytics

I’m sure it won’t take long for SEOs and Digital Marketers to find tons of different ways to use the new real time data and you can’t help but get excited about the potential of this update.

Here are a few ideas that I’ve come up with but please be sure to leave a comment with some of your most elaborate ways to apply this powerful tool.

If you are launching a product discount, perhaps for one day only, you can monitor your promotional activity in real time. As soon as you see traffic tail off, you can see exactly when to “ re-engage” and get promoting again, without fear of overkill. You can also see what promotion techniques are actually driving traffic to the product and which are a waste of your time.

If you see searches are particularly high for a certain product/service, due perhaps to an unforeseen trend or news story, you can maximise your sales by promoting that particular product or service while the demand for it is still “hot”. Be the first to see the demand, be the first to supply it.
It’s hard to gauge how much immediate traffic a new blog post is generating, at least it has been until now. With Google Real Time Analytics you can see the traffic your new post is bringing your site, as it happens. You can also use it to see when your tweets have stopped bringing traffic to the blog post and re-engage again. Real Time Social Monitoring!

Real Time Google Analytics is available now, although you may have to select it via the “New Version” button, in the “Home” tab. Enjoy but be warned, it is highly addictive!

It's likely you will land on the "Standard Reporting" version. To see "Real Time", click on the "Home" tab

Here you can select how you want to sort the real time data.

The Benefits of Google Analytics Real Time Reporting is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency

Ben is  a natural born entrepreneur having started his own coffee shop straight after university, but after working in the cafe trade for 3 years he decided to take a ‘year out” and moved to Spain to work as a language teacher. He then got “bitten” by the SEO bug in Barcelona whilst just minding his own business walking down the street. No not quite like that, he started working for a an online relocation company and was set the task of improving their organic and social media visibility. Ben then moved back to the UK this year where we quickly scooped him up after interviewing him a little while back. Ben will be working across our client portfolio on both SEO & Social projects and is currently a Jedi in training.

We asked him a few well thought out questions to help you get to know Ben, here’s what he said:

What’s your favourite movie?
I have watched “Catch Me If You Can” a thousand times and am still amazed that it’s based on a true story! I’ve read the book and the reality is even stranger than fiction.

Have you seen Star Wars (if not you’re fired) and which was your favourite?
YES! The first Star Wars film scared the hell out of me and I loved it!

Han Solo or Luke?
Yoda!

What is it about SEO that captures you?
It’s a dynamic and creative role which combines people, communication and technology. There’s always something new to learn and always something exciting going on.

City or Countryside?
Monday to Friday City. Weekend Countryside.

What’s the last song you listened to on your iPod?
I’ve never been able to listen to a song the whole way through until I discovered Gotye, check out “Hearts a Mess”.

Twitter or Facebook?
FACEBOOK! I don’t think I could have lived abroad for so long without it. Although I’m slowly but surely being sucked into “Tweetland”!

If you were stranded on a desert Island, hm I mean deserted Island (not a jelly or ice cream one) what would be the 3 gadgets you would need for geek survival?
1. A guitar. I know it’s neither a gadget nor geeky but I never travel without one!
2.  My iPod: 80GB of pure joy. It’s a bit outdated now but the content gets better with age!
3. A Skype equipped laptop: my friends are dotted all over the place!

Welcome Jedi Ben, let the SEO games begin.

You can find Ben on Twitter here!

Welcome to the team Ben Holbrook! is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency

The lovely Richard Gregory (CEO of Lattitude) presented the category and gave me my award (below), I had to concentrate to keep my mouth closed and not look like a gaping nutter.

I did however do an acceptance speech (don’t know why its called that, it’s not like I would go: no thanks not accepted). As I wasn’t prepared for it, I accidentally swore, snort laughed (I do that when I’m nervous) and bla bla’d like it was no ones business. All around classy speech basically. Although I have had a few weird remarks about my “personality” I would like to point out I don’t think ‘Search Personality of the Year’ doesn’t literally refer to someones personality, I would never have won based on that (I refer back to snort laughing and bla bla).

The official description of the category ‘Search Personality of the Year’ on the Search Awards website is: “Recognition of a talented and inspiring practitioner who has revolutionized the UK search industry” and not “Recognition for getting people laughing at conferences and seminars near you”, although that would be pretty good too, like an ‘SEO Stand Up’. Although I do seem to recall the only people ever laughing at my jokes are Beccy Weeks and Sam (Ciaran isn’t there yet) so maybe a future in SEO Stand Up is not for me.

I did however (finally) get my hands on the entry that Sam wrote for entering me into the awards and that got me all “Halle Berry”. I would like to share parts of the entry with you (seriously Sam deserves a prize for the entry):

“Lisa’s main objective within and outside of the SEO Industry has always had a focus of transparency, leading by example she shares her knowledge willingly and without hesitation. She is passionate about SEO and works hard towards the objective of improving the SEO industry. SEO is not an exact science and there are a lot of opinions within the industry so separating what is good honest SEO advice to bad practise and potentially harmful to a business is key for Lisa. Having started her own agency, Lisa faced the difficulty of being taken seriously and gaining respect from prospective clients because of their previous experiences with SEO agencies that didn’t deliver. She overcame this by educating and building a relationship based on trust, honesty and transparency. Lisa is passionate about the industry not being smeared by the dodgy tactics that some agencies still employ. As a mother of 2 (of which one was born last year) she juggles, parenting, running an agency, blogging and still have the energy to fight for the industry she feels so passionate about.

I first met Lisa in 2007 and she has always been an advocate of demystifying the clouded and negative image a lot of individuals and organisations have about the SEO industry.  Lisa has worked hard to create transparency in the industry and has contributed to numerous best practise publications including B2B Marketing and e-Consultancy (2010 and 2011 respectively) as well as training course and speaking at conferences. Lisa is a firm believer in sharing her knowledge and does not hold back, as she often says “sharing doesn’t give me less clients it proves I know what I’m talking about”. Lisa is a firm believer in karma within business so often goes out of her way to help clients or individuals. A recent example is setting up the Google Places account for her favourite local coffee shop which is struggling for business. Lisa at heart is an educator and trainer and not only have I learnt a lot from her, she also inspires a lot of individuals inside and outside of search, most recently she has become an ambassador at her local university entrepreneurship society where she helps mentor young students.”

I’m genuinely honoured and lucky to be recognised and respected for my efforts within this fabulous industry and most of all very grateful to have such talented people working with me, not only within Verve Search but the blogging teams at State of Search and SEO Chicks and elsewhere on the “tinternet”.

Cheese fest over. Sam: thank you for entering me and writing such a fantastic bio and entry! SEO Industry: thanks for putting up with my stupid humour and slightly overtly direct nature. Cling cling (that’s a Champagne glass btw). Cheers!

Search Personality of the Year at the UK Search Awards 2011 is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency

Here’s a very happy Winning Verve Search Team with the category presenter Christian Olson from Crystone giving us our award (in hindsight I should not have been in the middle between these two guys, I look like a hobbit, ha! But who cares, we won!):

In proper “Hollywood” fashion we would like to ‘give out’ some thanks. First of all we would like to thank the client, Yale Door, for being such a fantastic client. I truly believe that half the battle with SEO is getting the clients to implement and carry out your recommended changes. In my experience it can takes months just to convince a client to carry out extensive changes to a site in order to be optimised properly. But Yale Door came into this working relationship ready to take on board all our recommendations and trusting us from the word go. Secondly, I would like to thank the amazing team here at Verve Search, all of whom has worked on the Yale Door account; Sam, Nick and Ciaran have all helped making this a winning SEO campaign. As a result of this great working relationship and our SEO knowledge we generated a 713% increase in Organic traffic for Yale Door in a 12 month period. And maybe more importantly and true to our ethos of ‘generating traffic that generates business’ the Yale Door campaign achieved a ROI of 899%.

It’s truly an honor to win such recognition for our work, go team!

For a full list of the WINNERS at the Uk Search Awards last week check out the State of Search winners announcement

Verve Search WINS ‘Best SEO Campaign’ at the UK Search Awards is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency

There was an introduction to the whole event by Neil Morgan, (Senior Director Digital Marketing, Adobe EMEA) and he explained the morning had been devoted to clients and the afternoon session was devoted to agencies.

What Neil explained was that Adobe is well know for the creative suite of software about 15 at the moment, but since it bought Omniture in 2009 for an eye watering $1.8 Billion they have moved firmly into the search and analytics markets. The combination of creating content and delivering then measuring the results seems to be their current mission. The brands that currently use Omniture reads like a who’s who of the biggest companies in the world, BBC, Oracle, Nike to name a few.

Neil went on to introduce Jeremy Spiller (MD of white hat media and senior trainer for Econsultancy) who gave a wide overview of the way in which data is being used currently and what we should expect in the future. Jeremy’s voice sounds a bit like Barry White so his words seemed to carry even more weight in the confines of the cinema.  It was a great insight into the ideas that data and then action is an old way of reacting to events, the whole process has to have information gleaned from the ‘data’and intelligence focused on the information to then employ intelligent actions. One slide I particularly enjoyed read:

“Data is not information, information is not intelligence, information is not always useful”

I suppose we can all take away the idea that without making the data useful and informative it’s very hard to utilise it in an intelligent way. The mass of information that we are bombarded with on a daliy basis can be overwhelming to say the least.

Jeremy went on to explain that the way that people arrive at a purchase can be a very varied road, buyers making numerous ‘touch points’ on their search.  One might start with a Google search but then ask a question on Twitter and then watch a video of the product on Youtube and so for a marketer it’s hard to know which site to attribute the sale to?  Jeremy also explained that the way that we search is changing as well, that people are inputting txt speak into search engines to save on space on their smart phones.

Attribution is going to be an area that is ever expanding, how do your customers get to you and on which devices do they arrive?  It’s seems to be invertible that the desktop PC won’t be the number one point of access to the internet in the future. Jeremy had a slide predicting that devices (tablets and Smart Phones) would over take desktops by as early as 2013, although these are estimates.

The talk then moved onto the relationship between Paid search and organic search and where these two sources working in synergy or where they cannibalistic to each others objectives? A few simple examples where thrown up for us to see the way a SERPS page was displaying for keywords such as ‘Apple’ and ‘windows’. Below is the results you get from entering ‘windows’ into Google  (you too can try this at home!)

You can see that all the organic results relate to Microsoft Windows and all the paid results relate to window companies like Zenith. It’s interesting to see the overlap of products and the confusion that can arise. Apparently users stay on a SERPS page for about 7 seconds and either go back and refine their search or move forward from the results.

Jeremy went on to tell an anicdote about a client in a Telecoms company that had 19 different brand managers all wanting to target the same key phrases and how this showed the disjointed approach that some companies had it graphically highlighted that one part of the company can end up competing against another part of the same company.

One of the key points I took away was to be a futurist and learn from the past, obviously there is the data of the past to work from and plan for the future. An interesting statistic was that only 24% of business websites were optimised for devices leaving the majority unprepared for what’s around the corner.

Jeremy finished with some predictions that were soon to be upon us, like the convergance of the internet onto TV and the steady march of geo location technology. We all move about and depend on our smart phones more and more and will see the rise of the QR codes maybe playing videos of products you scan in the store? He also mentioned the mobile technology that allows you to pay using your smartphone wirelessly. It all seems to be coming to a shop near you anytime soon.

The final part of the seminar was dedicated to Search metrics and was presented by Dr Horst Joepen CEO of Search Metrics, a very smartly dressed man who gave an insightful and enlightening overview of his analytics product and how it interfaces with the Adobe Omniture software to give quite stunning insights into both paid and organic keyword performance.

I must now raise my hands and admit that things got quite technical quite quickly and although I understood the principles involved it’s hard to judge the software without trying it, which I will do in the near future. The basic overview is that using this software can give you insights into where your competitors are bidding on the same keywords that you are and where you overlap. There are a multitude of other features that you can dig into but I will leave you to search out and try these.

We were given a demonstration of the software and how you can manage both your paid and organic campaigns under one roof. The ability to really gauge what your competitors are doing in terms of keywords is what really shone through.

“90% of clicks go into organic results and 90% of budget goes into paid search”

I suppose what I really took away from the whole afternoon is that the raw data the we have at our finger tips is ever expanding and it’s knowing how to use and formulate that data into actions that see results is the key. The world of search is ever changing and it’s moving onto devices at a quickening rate. So if your clients haven’t thought about how this will effect their business they should do sharpish because if they don’t you can be sure that their competitors are.

Keeping up to date with the ever ending advances in the way that we search seems half the battle, but it’s what I love about this industry, you adapt and develop, “always be in beta” as Jeremy said. Just keep on testing people!

Adobe Seminar September 29 2011 is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency

Having worked with Yale Door since the start of the website 1 1/2 years ago, we are very happy to see our efforts recognised on this shortlist. They have achieved top 5 rankings in Google for their most compeitive terms including “Composite Doors” and a considerable increase in organic and referring traffic.

Looking forward to the awards cermony on the 3rd of November at the Emirates Stadium.

UK Search Awards 2011 – Verve Search Shortlisted in “Best SEO Campaign” Category is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency

Why work for Verve?
Not in despite of, but because we are a small agency you will be exposed to the SEO industry at a top level. At Verve Search we make a point out of raising our employee’s profiles, as we believe a positive personal profile equals a positive company reputation. Lisa Myers, the CEO/Director of Verve Search is heavily involved in the SEO industry and speaks regularly at Search and Social Media conferences in the UK and worldwide, thus attending conferences (such as SES, SMX, A4U etc) is a regular in the calendar for ALL our employees. Verve Search also encourages blogging and twittering as part of the working day and regularly contributes to industry press both on and offline. In the past year Verve Search employees have contributed to several SEO best practise reports and white-papers (including eConsultancy SEO BP report 2011 and B2B Marketing’s SEO BP Guide 2010).

At Verve we are flexible, no ’2 page application’ for a holiday, or a long email to excuse the fact that you need to visit the dentist. Verve is built on trust and if we hire you, we trust you. In addition to 28 days holiday you also get 1 duvet day and your birthday off. (duvet day = when you just drank too much at Aunt Edna’s party).

Job Description & Details
Job Title: SEO Consutlant/SEO Jedi
Salary: up to 30k (depending on experience)
Extras: Company Bonus Scheme + possibility of earning shares in the company

Minimum’ish Requirements

You don’t need a degree but it would be a benefit if you have the following:

-    Proof of success in the SERPs (previous work)
-    People Management experience would be great
-    Min 2 years in Search
-    Knowledge in: HTML, WordPress and Excel (don’t underestimate the power of Excel).
-    Knowledge in using SEO tools like: Raven Tools, SEOmoz, SEO quake etc
-    Excellent communication and organisational skills

+ sense of humour is a MUST.

Key Responsibilities:

Management of Team: Day to day management of workload including weekly workload meetings and updates, making sure project timelines is being held by employees.

Client Services: Account management, including liaising and meeting with clients.

New Business: Being involved in proposals and pitch process including attending meetings and speaking engagements on behalf of Verve Search.

SEO Services: Keywords and competitor research, Technical, On Page and Off Page Optimisation. Also universal search optimisation including; Google Places, Google Products and Video SEO.

PPC Management: PPC set up including ad writing, keyword research and bidding strategy. Monthly management and reporting.

Social media: Developing Social media strategies, actioning strategies and social networking.

Google Analytics and Monthly reporting: Setting up and implementation of tracking codes including e commerce and conversion tracking. Assisting with monthly reporting and analysis of web traffic metrics for all clients.

Sharing the Awesomeness: Blogging, twittering and general evangelising the Verve Search gospel.

If Verve Search sound like the kind of place you want to work? Please apply by sending your CV along with an email (we prefer casual to serious/formal) to: jobs[AT]vervesearch.com

NB! NO Agencies PLEASE

Note: you MUST be able to work in the UK (i.e have a Visa if you are outside the EU/EEA) + you need to be FLUENT in English

———————————————————————————————————————————

UPDATE 7th NOVEMBER 2011: THIS POSITION HAS NOW BEEN FILLED! BUT if you are interested in working with Verve Search please feel free to email us your CV.

———————————————————————————————————————————

Have you got the SEO Force? is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency

The speaker line-up is as if SMX has created it’s very own Audioslave or Velvet revolver, bringing together the very best local search minds out there… It’s all set to be a cracker!

I thought it also worth noting that if you want an audio Google Local treat; David Mihm, Martijn Beijk and Lisa Myers were on a webmaster radio show on which they discussed in detail some of the points below and more… Listen to it right here (well, from Webmaster Radio really), right now.

Philippe Huysmans – Director, Microsoft

Philippe starts of and immediately it sounds like an interesting and insightful plan. He gives us an insight into how Microsoft looks at local; when they discuss local they are talking about both PC & mobile. Even more interesting is how Philippe & Microsoft look at local search as if it’s a dating cycle:

-          1^st date – tentative searches

-          Dating – refine query

-          Marriage – found your product, make a decision

I personally love the association with romance, nothing better than a feel good local search eh. When you are on your 1^st date, you are influenced heavily by outside influences.

-          37% of those exposed to outdoor ads will turn to mobile search.

-          38% of those submitted to T.V. ads will move to mobile search.

Don’t know about you, but I think those are pretty decent percentage figures!! I guess figures like these definitely give a holistic marketing approach a pat on the back.

Bing business portal – launched last month in US. Free of charge, a definite must for anyone with Local profiles & definitely one to watch in terms of market share when it’s launched in Europe…

On to the dating phase, a good phase in any relationship I might add. In this phase you are communicating with your friends, which has resulted in a 50% increase in consumers trusting their social network for product recommendations… Don’t recommend anything bad peeps, I just might buy it. A couple of great percentage points followed:

PC & Mobile Query intent – 70% of consumers on pc will complete their purchase in 1 month

Mobile – 70% complete a purchase within an hour!

Thought – Does this mean considered purchases aren’t made on mobile devices? Or is it that mobile customers are more promiscuous?

78% of customers want deals or promotions. Not only then should you always have a promotion running; but this also works well with the promotions section on your Google Local profile & I would guess the Bing Business Portal (speculative).

-          Beta – Store logos are in the process of being added to Bing Maps. Giving you another search angle.

Marriage – time to put up or shut up. A lot of interesting figures came out of this part of the relationship, the notable ones being:

-          90% of smart phone users utilise mobile search

-          84% use search as part of their shopping activity

-          46% of smart phone users compare prices in stores – meaning that mobile customers like off-line ones have doubt/commitment issues.

I guess this compounds the importance of being price competitive, including reviews and importantly offers!

Philippe leaves us with the underlying message that local and mobile are intertwined and that in the foreseeable future this is going to be the case. He and Bing are going to be focusing on it and I think Google will too.

David Mihm – Getlisted

A lot of anticipation surrounds David’s discussions on local and for very good reason indeed. If I may also add that David does go through slides like they are going out of fashion, hence the shorthand nature of this recap.

New to local

-          Local listings

-          Places reviews

-          Local PPC

-          Facebook

-          Twitter

-          QR code

-          Mobile apps

David suggest that the USA does Google local better than those in the UK. From the information I have read I would definitely agree with that. But why is this? David asks. He also answers:

-          The ability to convert pre-website

-          Data accuracy

-          Date completeness

He goes into more detail about some of the cool advancements which have happened to Google Places lately such as;

-          Google Products results being localised

-          Being able to book or order items directly from the page

-          The addition of sentiment snippets underneath photos

In general it seems that Google are really trying to up the functionality of Google Places.

David also believes that Google are seriously looking at user behaviour data in their Places ranking algorithm. These could range from CTRs to number of comments (not sure sentiment is being analysed though).

A VERY COOL TIP – using Insights for search – allows you to drill down by geography, allows you to get local volume and find out what people are talking about.

David re-iterated what he has seemingly always said that; citations continue to be the essential factor for ranking well – it’s the local equivalent of a link!!

Local search ecosystem is a mad looking load of different citation sources. It is extremely important that you submit to the relevant citation hubs for your business. In the UK geographic citation links are more valuable from anywhere else.

Look on competitors places page – figure out which are ranking well and use this information to your advantage.

Tool – use the Whitespark!

David also suggests looking at the sites which are ranking organically for your search term, and try to focus building citations from them. Look for high authority sites, the .govs etc if they reference citations

A great list of best practise tips:

-          Create a unique indexable page for each location

-          Make sure the address is coded in HTML

-          Use HCard to send super signals

-          Use geographic terminology in sitemap and internal links

-          Use the location page as the page you submit to Google Places

-          If you have multiple locations try to keep the IA as flat as possible

-          Cross-link nearby locations

-          Submit a KML sitemap – uses latitude and longitude information!!

Martijn Beijk

Wow, this is a full service local session. Martijn is going to be talking about how to track the tips which David suggested you apply to your Google Places page.

Martijn breaks it down into a hierarchy or information from Local information. He says that all those using Google Places should continually refine and optimise their listing. Martijn discussed the fact that data can be pulled from the Google dashboard – could be some really interesting angles to work there.

He explains that the traditional tracking method requires using 301 redirects with a campaign tracking URL appended to the redirect.

He goes on to explain that blended search has resulted in some links dropping the tracking code, making us all ponder what source to trust. Consensus is they are added to ‘organic’ traffic.

Martijn says we need to dig deeper, and I agree. You need to look at GA visitors and segment them via a number of angles:

-          Segment via customVar

-          Segment via those which have visited local pages

-          Visited store locator pages

-          Detect behavioural differences – mobile users?

Martijn advocates the use of advocating tools; I am in fact an advocate for advocating the use of advocating tools! He recommends you find a way of qualifying the visits. Maybe create a survey and find out for definite how they got there.

Darrin Clement – Maponics

OOoooh a term I haven’t heard before… Geofencing. Ears prick up.

Darrin explains that a geofence is a virtual polygon fence which when entered results in an actions happening.

Apparently there are 3 types of geofence:

-          Static – geofence does not change

-          Dynamic – when data range is changing – i.e. Car parking space available

-          Peer  to peer – social networking platform, i.e. you want to know if your mates are in the fence

You can cross into a geofence, you can be there or you can leave after a certain time. Thus you get the check-in, check-out model – which will be re-invigorated as companies figure out how to market with it.

Darrin shows a map of Chicago – which doesn’t look as cold as I was told it would. The concept of geofencing has been around for decades, but data has only been made available for the last couple of years.

One way of looking at it is – Imagine you set up a bubble around a shop, every time a customer comes into that fence they are prompted with an offer (or some action).

Potential downsides:

-          How do you know customers will be receptive

-          How do you know how big it needs to be – too small already there – to big don’t care.

The method of combating these negatives is to set- up a pre-defined Geofence – using actual geographic areas to target. For example; a shopping district or known shopping area. If you use a radius you might be targeting areas which doesn’t contain potential customers!

Q&A

Tracking as completely as possible? In store surveys, requesting emails, making them purchase from in the store. Coupons are also a great way to incentivise and track local ads. By the sounds of it though it is all about ensuring the business strategy encourages the tracking.

Use of 0800 numbers – Must have a local number and potentially use as an additional one, but never the primary version.

How to claim all your local places– David states getlisted.org, where you can enter your details and theoretically claim multiple site variations.

Mobile SEO best practises – make it immediate focused, but use the same theory as you would for local. Be xhtml compliant and have as usual a focus on user experience.

Geofences – in order to set up campaigns use a company like Placecast, it’s not something which can be set-up on a whim.

Final thoughts – Search is not often explicit in mobile devices it is applied by what they are doing and where they are.

Final Thoughts – Clean up data & make sure your data reflects the information on your locations page.

Whats new in local & mobile search– SMX 2011 is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency

This is the second group of presentations I attended on day 2 of SMX London breaks down keyword research, to a degree which most of you should find very interesting. Watch for the tips, they are worth a takeaway or two.

Richard Baxter – SEO Gadget

How does anyone make the data they get actionable? How does one get from a data set to a design and more importantly into SEO. The key with research is finding a way of grouping the findings, creating plans and actioning it.

You need to look at long tail keywords to figure out how users are searching for other products. By grouping and identifying segments of a long tail keyword you can quickly create groups and segment again based on these. An example is:

Black Audi A3 Greater London

Most of our most important traffic comes from the longest tail traffic 70th percentile.

- Datasets allow you to filter and categorise keywords
- Allow you to work out and create an order for how people search
- Allows you to make decisions about how your pages and on-page information is categorised.

Richard goes through awesome excel set of excel queries:

- Find
- Iserror
- Not

Man I love excel, and am always so impressed by the stuff that comes out of SEO gadget. It seems array formulas are the key for dissecting a number of queries. There is definitely a skill to learning excel in a presentations, a great number of people are scrambling around trying to get those cogs turning.

So Richard goes on to explain that once you have your methodology down, it’s time to increase the volume of data – more data = better decisions. Agree, agree, and agree.

Deep dive through the Google suggest API and turn 1000 keyword into 10000, categorise and segment these and drill down again. It could help you find an ‘uncategorised’ group which you aren’t even targeting!!!

Tools
All of Richards tools are listed here, enjoy – http://bit.ly/jai89j

Christine Churchill – KeyRelevance

Always love an overload of macros… which is what just happened here. For all you tool lovers Christine’s presentation is going to get you excited.

We all know about the main SEO tools in the market but I hope that Christine shouts about some new ones. Christine explains that last September’s Google keyword tool change is because Google stopped pulling the data from its partner sites… sneaky.

We all love [exact] match and Christine does too. Christine also suggests using the advanced filtering tool with special focus being on the mobile devices – worth considering if you are optimising in a segment for which mobile searches are prominent.

Christine also likes Google Insights and Keyword discovery, which I whole heartedly agree with. I think a big take away at this stage in the presentation is to never get too comfortable with the toolset you use. New tools are out there, the functionality of which often solve the problems which appear in the gaps left by your existing set. Other tool info worth a mention is:

- YouTube suggest – untapped predictive text tool. Worth an extra special mention for those of you optimising video.
- Google Wonder Wheel – a tool which I personally haven’t used but will definitely worth a look.
- Microsoft’s ad centre – pulls live data… live is better than dead.

Lasse Clarke Storgaard – MediaCom

Searchonomics, a combination of my job and favourite A-level class, a great start! Plus Lasse looks like he fell out of a very cool Indy band, hopefully there is song.

He suggests slowing down; nobody cares about how quickly you do it. It’s all about the keywords that work in the end. He explains that he thinks of consumers as having 3 mindsets; one shelf, on which they look high and low. They are not looking for your product:

- Want to buy – 8%
- Consider – 10-15%
- Research 60-80% – not going to buy, but just want to know about it all.

The main concept is about creating a funnel and massaging a consumer down it – everyone loves a massage.

PPPI – Pay Per Purchase Intent
- Which is a set of concentric marketing segmentation circles around an onion. Making me hungry… but on with the ‘search philosophy’.

I think this presentation again highlights how much general CRM and marketing strategies are finding their way into ‘core’ search presentations. Which again highlight’s how there is an underlying shift towards focusing on content and the consumer… Ponder…

Another segmentation slide from Lasse. I read a text book about this in 2001; it was a good read though.

Kevin Gibbons – SEOptimise

Most searches are long tail, 94% of them in fact, I love long tail. There is more to love about these of a longer tail – they convert better and there is less bounce rate.

Idea – focus on the long tail, focus on it again, and then focus more.

Focusing on the long tail needs to be applied from an entire website perspective; you need to totally submerge the site with a long tail mentality.

For content ideas utilise Google Instant, dig deep into analytics and spot trends within – which can then be applied to KW research. Kev suggests creating bespoke segmentation throughout analytics (removing brand is a must) and creating a PPC campaign solely for keyword research something which we wholeheartedly agree with.

Top tip – Use impression share to figure out full search volume!
Top tip – Wikipedia traffic tool – USE IT
Hitwise – another tool which will help you figure out where to target. One which supports a big budget, but the general consensus is; you get back what you pay and then some in data.

It’s worth using as many references and tools as possible to create an average for metrics such as CTR & bounce rates. We recommend this for ecommerce sites in regards to predicting changes in demand and sales.

Kev also suggests dropping that data into excel and making predictions based on traffic volumes. Why not go one step further and apply CPC AdWords data and try to combine conversion data to make the info even more valuable.

Another take away from Kev – go long tail, but don’t go too far. How far is too far? Turning yourself into a fox!

Top takeaways from the Q&A session:

- Adwords API is a lot more granular than other Google data tools. Be very careful with GKT as it pulls in last month which could be very seasonal.
- Defensive ideas – look to the future, get an idea and make sure you get it up ASAP. Logical really, dragging your heels never helps anyone.
- NSFG – Scraping Google – distribute load via multiple IP’s I guess via a proxy of some kind.
- NSFG – Break load API tool – means you never set alarm bells ringing.

Keyword Research Ninja Tactics – SMX London 2011 is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency

Lisa has been gently coercing me for about a year now to finally put down on paper my experiences with optimising Google Products (base, shopping etc) feeds. So I suppose this post is aimed at providing an introduction into the set-up, and I hope, more insightfully, some techniques and ideas I apply to increasing ranking positions within Google Product results.

Why worry about Google Products

If you do the amount of keyword and competitor research that I do, in fact if you have been paying any attention to search results over the past year; you will have noticed universal search’s hostile SERP invasion. OneBox product results are seemingly constantly being associated with new products and product groups.

As an SEO, the BIG idea here is that of an alternate route to first page visibility. Now I am not saying you should drop everything and spend all your time editing and re-editing your product feed but every SEO worth their socks will approach ranking challenges from different angles, and Google Products provides that angle. If your keyword research shows product feeds are triggered, why not allocate a bit of time to creating an XML feed?

Google Product optimisation, a grey area

Unlike other elements of SEO, optimisation for Google Products is seemingly not a hugely written about subject. I appreciate that when talking about Google and algorithms, the word ‘speculation’ cannot be used enough. Therefor I must add; the suggestions I make are solely due to me having had success from these techniques and are importantly based on real clients, real experiences and real XML feeds.

Keyword research

The foundation for most SEO disciplines, Google Products is no different. Obviously search volume should be a concern, but importantly whether the keyword triggers OneBox.

There is no harm speculatively creating feeds on the off chance that said keyword will trigger shopping results in the future. Although, if you are optimising for the now; then don’t spend time on terms which won’t trigger product listings in the search results.

XML vs CMS

Most CMS ecommerce solutions such as Magento have Google Product feed functionality built in; and requires you to map out attributes and assign values (more information can be found here) Unfortunately the ones we have worked with use product database attributes to populate the Google Products feed. So, whilst being an extremely efficient way of creating a product feed, what you gain in efficiency you lose in customisation.

For this post I am assuming you are creating a standalone XML or text/tab delimited feed.

Google Merchant account

You will need one of these. If you haven’t set one up already, what are you waiting for…

The Tips

1. Use an example

Let’s be honest; the prospect of setting up an XML RSS 2.0 feed is a little daunting, especially from scratch. Luckily Google does provide you with an example, which from a coding perspective makes a lot more sense if you ‘view source’.

2. Attributes, attributes, attributes

Google uses a number of product ‘attributes’ to determine firstly for what search terms a product should be visible and secondly to generate supporting information; be that price, dimensions, or the fact that each tin of cat food contains 4 grams of organic chick peas. Sorry.

Google uses a number of product ‘attributes’ to determine firstly for what search terms a product should be visible and secondly to generate supporting information; be that price, dimensions, or the fact that each tin of cat food contains 4 grams of organic chick peas. Sorry.

There are essentially three different types of attributes:

Required, Recommended & Custom

Required attributes, as the name suggests are attributes which must be included in order for your feed to be successfully uploaded. Recommended attributes are those which Google suggests you add to your feed in order to better it match your products to search queries. Check out the full list of required and recommended attributes for more info.

Custom attributes allow you to add an unlimited number of additional product attributes.

My tip is to add as much product information as possible. Firstly, because if Google has to choose between multiple similar products it will it seems pick the one with the most comprehensive description. Secondly by adding as much product detail as you can, you give that product a greater chance of ranking for more long tail terms.

3. Use the 70 title characters

In my experience the item’s title is one of the biggest ranking determinants. You are allowed to add up to 70 characters, so if you can (without being spammy) put as much product detail in as possible.

4. Keep an eye on the attribute list

Things move fast in the world of Google Products, and from my experience unless you keep one eye on the Google webmaster development blog you often miss things. For example Google often update their ‘recommended attribute’ lists or create market specific feed examples. I tend to dedicate about an hour per week to researching recent changes and working out if there are any workable angles for my client feeds.

5. Use Google checkout if you can

Now who would ever suggest that Google would favour products which utilise Google’s own checkout system… If you can set-up a Google checkout account, make sure you do. I know that some more bespoke ecommerce systems find it difficult to integrate, but if you are able to; make it a priority.

6. Product reviews – which sites to get them from

It is no surprise that customer reviews in a similar way to Google Places, are one of the biggest ranking factors for Google Products. If you have a Google Checkout account you will hopefully already be receiving reviews. But in my opinion; the larger the variety of review sites your product is referenced by the better, so go out and submit your product (and company if it isn’t already).

But where do I find the review sites to submit too?

Fair enough, I asked the same question. Google doesn’t pull reviews from every review site out there, and from my experience references different review sites for different markets and products. There is an easy way to find out which review sites are being referenced for your competitors:

1. Search products for the search term you wish to rank for
2. Find a product listing with reviews
3. Click on the ‘seller ratings’ link – which will take you to a page containing all reviews for that product
4. In the top right (usually) there will be the list of all the review sites from which Google is pulling data from – which are thus the site which you should set-up an account with.

7. Add tracking code

I know the majority of you reading this (hopefully) would rather go noodling for catfish than consider not adding tracking code to the online marketing material you control.  But sometimes things get forgotten, and there is a lot to remember when setting up a feed. Spend a minute, build a tracking URL or prepare to speculate… a lot.

8. Update your feed

I usually try to update my product feed at least once a month, usually correlating feed updates and my monthly feed change research. It seems that Google holds updated products in a brighter light than those which aren’t updated very frequently. If due to the sectors you work in and the products you are selling your feed needs to change daily; you are in a good position. If however your product details simply won’t change in time, consider holding some attributes back.

I tend to make a list of all the potential attributes I can associate with a product, then try to determine which I will need to include initially in order to rank competitively (if the market is saturated you will need to add more etc etc). The rest I divide up and gradually add to my product listing over time, ensuring Google always associates new information with each product.

How to optimise for Google Products is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency