We are back from the A4UExpo and I have stumbled, wearily I hasten to add, into a new term. Step forward “EXPO LAG”, far, far worse than jet lag in my opinion and highly confusing considering the majority of the two days was spent sitting down listening to other people. Very peculiar.

I attribute it to not only the after party that happened on the last day of the expo but the constant churning of ideas circulating in your head about how the information you learnt in the sessions can benefit your clients, your company and also what a squirrel has got to do with the people at Conversion Rate Experts.  I should ring the R.S.P.C.A.

I must admit the expo was the best I have attended. I went to the expo as a blogger for Search Cowboys, so without them I wouldnt not have attended, so a massive thank you should rightly go to them and mainly Bas van den Beld. The organisation in particular was spot on; there was plenty of time in between sessions which allowed you to walk to the next room with plenty of time to spare. Not to mention great food and drinks all day.

Before I attended the expo I had reviewed the agenda and pencilled out the sessions I wanted to attend and thankfully managed to attend them all.  Not just search related either, as I chucked a couple of curves balls in by attending a few affiliate presentations and sessions on how to improve your conversion rates, an important aspect no matter what sector to operate in.  I came away from the conference feeling inspired and wanted to get stuck in to some work as soon as possible, after the obligatory drinks of course :0)

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It’s day 2 of A4Uexpo, so far it’s been a great conference, many new faces as this is an Affiliate conference and not just SEO. Today I spoke on the Web Analtyics panel with Will Crichlow from Distilled and Joanna Butler from Lattitude. My presentation focused on the very specifics on how to track Google Local Business Listings , which Verve Search has recently successfully implemented for our clients. Tracking Google Local Business listings within Google Analytics is something that doesn’t happen automatically within Google Analytics (although it should). Verve Search is one of the first in the UK to implement this tracking successfully in the UK! I also went through in detail how to implement Ecommerce tracking on a third party domain. All in the presentation below. Let me know what you think.

I promised I would share my presentations from A4U so here’s the first installment. On Day1 of A4U Expo I spoke on the panel “Beyond Linkbaiting” with Kelvin Newman from Site Visibility and Dixon Jones from Receptional (and MajesticSEO). I very much enjoyed speaking on link development as it’s a key area of SEO and one Verve Search takes very seriously. At Verve Search we do all our link development in-house and don’t outsource as we believe it’s crucial for success to have SEOs working closely with the clients.

The presentation gives an insight into the key areas of link development strategies:

- Content Syndication (referred to in this presentation as Contentlinkation)
- Link baiting (the process of creating content with the objective of recieving links)
- Site Seeding (the research you do beforehand including competitor backlink analysis)
- Relationship building
- Press releases
- Events and Offline activity
- Social Media

Just spoke at SEM Konferansen in Oslo today, a search conference organised by INMA (IAB Norway). It was the first time I have spoken at a Search conference in Norway, and i really really enjoyed it. I was suprisingly nervous, it’s my motherland after all. Today was day 1, and the line up has just been  fantastic, the audience was very engaging and suseptable. It was also staggering refreshing to have more than 15 min to speak, I had a 1 hour slot and for once felt I actually got to give an input that would have been useful to the audience. Allot of the time when I speak at a conference 10 min hardly gives you time to warm up and I would argue the audience doesn’t get enough quality content for such short presentations.

I promised I would make my presentation available, so here is my presentation about the Power of SEO where I go through the basics of SEO along with more in depth information about each SEO area (Technical, on page and off page SEO). If you were at the conference and still want to ask any questions or give any comments please feel free to do so Lastly I would like to say thank you to INMA Norway and especially Magne Uppman and Ola Hano for great organisation of this event.

To view the presentation just click the “play button” below in the slideshare window!

Did you know women talk more than 15% more than men every day? Men smiling at that figure now should stop as 8% of you never cleaned your teeth this morning.  Welcome to the wonderful world of statistics. They give us an insight and a clearer indication of how successful our marketing campaigns are and highlight areas of weakness that need to be addressed. As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle famously stated:

“I never guess. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”

Google Local is a relatively new channel for marketers to obtain traffic and however much we theorise and assume how valuable it is, nothing will give clearer data than tracking and monitoring. We track and monitor every other aspect of our organic and paid search so why wouldn’t we want to track other channels that generate site traffic?

From an analytical point of view Google Local could previously only be measured if a browser came through the Google Maps section to our site.  We were not naturally able to measure visits from a Local Business Listing (LBL) unless we implemented tracking codes.  Now there are a few posts around the web detailing how we should track Google Local, in particular from Martijn Beijk who specialises in Google Local. What I found interesting after reading these posts was that no one ever replied back, detailing whether implementing the analytic codes created any problems and if so, how they dealt with these issues.

We recently implemented tracking code to one of our clients’ local business listings. We experienced some issues along the way which inspired me to write this post about how to track Google Local.

Track URLs in Local Business Centre

One method that was recommended by a few people was implementing a tagged URL within your local business listing through the local business centre. This included giving each local business listing a URL with GA parameters. By doing this, theoretically it should then appear in GA under traffic sources – campaigns

In order to tag a URL you should use the Google Analytics URL builder tool, which you can find here: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578

You only need to fill in specific information in the tool. The campaign source (in this case; Google local), the campaign medium (local business listing) and also give it a campaign name to differentiate various listings, for example Search_Consultancy_London.

Just to clarify, if tracked correctly the statistics should appear within Traffic Sources – Medium – Local Business Listing

One aspect that you need to be aware of before you update the new tagged URL is to remove any “%2B” or “%20” symbols.  The symbol %2B is part of the URL encoding process and it merely means ‘+’, similarly to %20 which means space. In my experience and after discussing this with others these characters should be replaced with underscores. Hyphens are better from a search perspective but you are not trying to rank this page as it is merely a tagged URL.

Once you have inserted this tagged URL, the local business centre it states that it can take up to 48 hours for the change to be updated. We waited, and waited some more but the change never took place. Some people say you have to wait up to 2 weeks for Google to update their listings to include your utm source code within the URL. After 7 days the update still did not occur and we were not willing to wait any longer as a week without data was long enough. I still remain sceptical that this method works and would love to hear from anyone who implemented this -  was it successful and how long you had to wait? Are you still waiting?

Use Vanity URLs to track page views

Another option is to create separate landing page URLs for each listing that is within the Local Business Centre. The separate landing pages are essentially duplicate pages of the original URL but given a vanity URL name.

For Example:

Original URL:

http://www.example.com/location-service

Vanity URL:

http://www.example.com/localad-location-service

To avoid the duplicate content issue and to specify to Google the canonical URL we would simply input the canonical tag within the source code of the Vanity URL:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/location-service”/>

Once you have created this page, insert the vanity URL into the Google Local Business centre. The beauty of this method is that it appears in less than 48 hours and you can see instant results. Statistics would appear in content – top content – then type in “local” within the filter box.

However, there are some drawbacks to this method; the main factor is you are restricted to the amount of quantitative data you can analyse.

Since the URL of the local ad page has not been tagged it does not appear within the traffic sources as a ‘medium’. This prevents you from easily evaluating how much traffic this medium generated in comparison to other sources. Furthermore, site visits to the local ad page can only be determined through accessing the top landing pages within the content section of analytics which is not ideal.

Another negative aspect to tracking your local search this way is if you are running an ecommerce booking engine through your Google analytics you will not be able to analyse how much revenue was generated through Local search.

This can only be determined if you tag the URL, which brings me on to my last method.

Track Local campaign using 301 Redirects

This method may take a little bit more time in liaising with client programmers and web developers but it is the preferred and recommended method.

First you need to set up a vanity URL, but this time do not create a page, just a URL that will be 301 redirected to the original tagged URL which we spoke about in the beginning.

For Example:

http://www.example.com/localad-service-location

needs to be 301 redirected to the following URL

http://www.example.com/localad-service-location.htm/#utm_source=GoogleLocalutm_medium=local_business_listing&utm_campaign=london

This would then track all visitors and able us to see the TOTAL number of visits from Google Local Listings within the Traffic Source (separate to organic and everything else) under the medium local_business_listing (or whatever you decided to title your medium within the URL builder)

This will ensure reporting on monthly statistical data is far easier as you can compare the effectiveness of your campaign and evaluate individual segments.

The amount of data you can now analyse through this method is much greater than the previous method. Additionally to appearing under traffic sources – medium it will also appear as a tagged campaign under traffic sources – campaigns which will let you view each individual listings analytics.

It also provides you with further dimensions in which to breakdown the data, including:

•    keywords visitors typed into Google to trigger your listing
•    Visitor type (new vs. returning)
•    Visitor Country/territory/region

Most significantly, if you have e-commerce set up through analytics it allows you to view how successful your local ad is in terms of generating revenue.  Within traffic sources you can breakdown the following:

•    Overall Revenue
•    Transactions
•    Average Value
•    Conversion rate
•    Per visit value

We also found that by creating the Vanity URL and implementing this in the Local Business Centre it actually improved our local ranking.  We believe this is due to the added keywords within the Vanity URL so ensure you use appropriate and relevant keywords (without spamming) related to what you wish to appear in the local listings for.