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Top SEO Tip: Use Google Analytics to discover what people are searching your site for
(One for the slightly more technical SEO jockeys)
Google Analytics is great for reporting
but is more versatile than many people think. Did you know for instance that you can set up a filter to find out what things people are using the search box on your site to search for?
(To find out, the search box must pass data via the use of url parameters. If your search box doesn’t do this it won’t work)
Assuming your search box passes data as above simply create a custom filter in Analytics using the following settings:
The custom filter is summarized below:
1) Field A is the url of the search page with parameters and we are using a regular expression to look up a certain search term. The value is a search parameter regular expression. The xsq in our case is the search string.
2) The output goes to the page title as this makes it easy to view information on searches using analytics. $A1 is the data from Field A.
To view Reports
- Log into your Google Analytics account after 24 hours.
- View your report.
- Click 'Content'.
- Click 'Content by Title'.
- Scroll down to 'Find Page Title Containing' and enter 'search2'.
- Voila. You'll see a list of phrases entered into your onsite search tool
Great information that can help you serve the right content to users. . .
By Manoj Shah.
Manoj– is the CosModus technical guru and Googlemeister. If you would like to discuss your search marketing issues with him please email: manoj@cosmodus.co.uk
Paid Search results beat Organic
“Stop your Pay Per Click advertising when you get to page one of Google”. Right or wrong? Well we have been repeating this received mantra since we have been in the business. It seems to make sense – why pay to get on to page one of a search engine when you’ve got there for free?
Got there at last!
Well a recent analysis of a client’s organic search optimisation and Pay Per Click advertising gave us a surprising result. Tracking a key search term in the organic results, we were all delighted to see that the client was now in the number two position on Google – the results of eighteen months of effort. Eighteen months ago they were #100, one year ago #20, and this week from #3 to #2 (number 1 was held by the manufacturer of the product they sold, who had a Google PageRank of 7, so probably as good as it was going to get).
So let’s save some money
So was it time to stop advertising against that search term? We checked how many click-throughs the ad had generated so far this month – it was 444 (the ad’s average position was 2.3). Then we checked the click-throughs from the same search term in the organic results (we selected all the terms that would also have served the ad as it was on “broad match”). To our surprise the organic click-throughs were lower: 128 to be precise. So the #2 ad was generating more click-throughs than the #2 organic result on the same first page of Google; at a ratio of 3.5:1.
Two good results are better than one
So the learning for us was that even a top-scoring Google result shouldn’t mean that you would immediately cancel your PPC ad. What this experience suggests is that perceived wisdom – that you cancel your ad when your organic result is good enough - is wrong, and that like News, all good search engine results are good for your business. It’s also worth bearing in mind that although you should have a lot of control over the contents of an organic result (through the page description meta field) – you don’t have complete control like you do in a PPC ad.
In fact you could argue that two entries - one sponsored, one "above the fold" - on Google is the perfect position to be in; at the end of the day "real estate" has always counted in advertising.
Organic result or PPC – which has the best conversion rate?
Google Analytics is currently being coded into this site, so we will be able to answer the next question soon: which result – organic or paid for – gets the best conversion rate for the same key phrase? Watch this space!
"What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet” -2nd September 2007
- But you wouldn’t find it on Google. In the world of search, what you call your product does matter (unlike Shakespeare’s Juliet, who didn’t mind what her lover was called).
The danger of being different
We were working with a client recently who weren’t happy with their visibility on the search engines. Or rather the visibility of one of their products. Like many companies, they had worked hard to create a differentiated product and were keen to emphasise their difference with a unique product name.
Call a spade a spade
Let’s say for example they were making spades. They decided to call their new spade a “Forkblade”. So far so good. But now let’s say they wanted people to find their new product on the Internet. But on their website, while there were plenty of references to “Forkblade”, there was nothing to indicate that - however different their product was from the norm it was still – well a spade.
“You’ll find that with the spades. . .”
And even more importantly, all those people who have yet to hear about Forkblade are never going to search for a Forkblade. As far as they are concerned they are looking for a spade.
So whatever you call your product, or however creatively you choose to talk about it. If you want your targets to find it, use the words that they would use to describe it to look for one – or even look for an alternative. And make sure that this key phrase appears the right number of times on the page, and is also included in the meta data.
"Goodness, I'm an online marketer" - 29th July 2007
Confessions from a Marketing Manager who has seen her job transformed in just a few short years.
I started off like many marketing executives
designing and booking adverts to appear in industry magazines, writing press releases and trying to get them printed. We even used ‘response cards’ and printed directories, but the response rate didn’t seem to justify the expense of using them.
They’ve stolen our brand!
When thinking about the Internet, I thought websites were for online giants like Amazon.com. However, our competitors had a strong on-line presence, and even unauthorised distributors of our products came up on page one of Google for our product name and key search phrases.
I concluded that we needed a new website- and fast!
My first challenge was to convince my boss that we needed a new website, despite not having allowed for it in the budget. My argument was that the website is the company’s 24 hour salesman. It's a shop window, always on display to everyone round the world, 365 days a year. When you think about it like that, a few thousand pounds investment seems like a bargain.
But what should I buy?
There were three different types of website available to me. One - an off the peg template-type solution, two - a professional, fully finished (and locked down) website, and three - a professionally designed website with a content editor system. I decided to go for the third option so that I could benefit from professional design, but amend and add pages myself.
I have built it but will they come?!
In the meantime, I researched the best website practice, and deployed as far as I was able, best practice in terms of usability, functionality and web copy. Finally the website was finished. It looked fantastic, but no one could find it! It was time to teach myself how to optimise my website for search engines!
I didn’t know what an Online Marketing Manager was, now I is one!
From then on, I was an ‘online’ marketing executive. All my activities revolved around driving visitors to the website - and making sure they stayed there. Monitoring my web-stats every day, I tweaked my ‘meta data’, and wrote more compelling copy. When booking adverts in magazines, I did deals with them to get our website included in their online directories- building the number of links going to my website.
What’s your PageRank?
After about 6 months, my persistence finally paid off. We finally appeared in the first position of the organic search rankings for all three of our key search phrases. I felt like I had finally graduated and become a fully fledged ‘online marketing executive’. This was crowned by a Google PageRank of 3 for my site, and a new obsession was born. Life as a Marketing Manager would never be the same.
Emma B.
Emma was responsible for the creation, launch and management of www.torqueleader.com before moving to a new marketing position in the pharmaceutical industry
Positioning Yourself - 18th April 2007
Welcome to the re-launched CosModus website, and thanks for having a look at our first ever blog. An Admission straight away: We didn’t follow the same process that we take our clients through to work on company positioning, site architecture, and key messages for our own new site. Why? Because we didn't have the luxury of someone facilitating a workshop on these things for us!
Write bites
What always strikes me when we run positioning and key message workshops for clients is this: How come the lucid things they say at these workshops aren't what got into the copy on their site? When we run these workshops, there are always some magic moments when our clients talk with passion and enthusiasm about their business, and out come these well rehearsed but compelling sound bites – which we make sure are used on their new or made-over websites. These work, because they come from the heart, they have been refined through practice, and are in plain English.
Builders block
Why, I always think, did these wonderful, engaging phrases not get used on their websites? Because no-one sits down and writes in sound bites. We write prose, like we were taught at school. And it doesn’t work on a website. What I would have done to have a couple of days locked away with a good facilitator and a white-board when we created our new site. I wonder if builders have the same problem planning improvements to their own house. . ?
"Next speaker!"
The other thing that struck me, was what a great discipline creating a website is for any communicator. What would conferences be like if speakers knew that the audience would make their mind up about you in a twentieth of a second? That people would pay attention to them for five seconds, scan what you are about to say, and skip to the bits that interest them? Or that they would search for a better speaker in a flash, if you didn’t give them what they were looking for?
Well on that basis you might not have got this far. So if you have, thank you for your interest.
Chris
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