Blind Five Year Old

In February, Matt Cutts referenced a parameter in AJAX based Google search results that would let you track the rank of that result. Sure enough, it’s there and with just a little bit of know how you can track keyword rank in Google Analytics.

Tracking Rank in Google Analytics

At first glance you might think that tracking keyword rank would be tough to implement, but it’s really not. Here’s an easy step-by-step guide to capturing keyword rank in Google Analytics.

Create a New Google Analytics Profile

Simply click on Analytics Settings within Google Analytics. You must be a Google Analytics administrator to do this.

At the bottom, find and click on Add Website Profile.

You want to Add a Profile for an existing domain and then select the domain and enter a Profile Name. I suggest something easy and descriptive like “Google Rank”.

When you’re done you’ll see a new profile appear in your Analytics Settings list. Don’t worry if you see a yellow triangle with an exclamation point in the Status column. The tracking for a new profile takes a bit of time to populate. As long as the current tracking for that domain is working, this will take care of itself.

Create Profile Filters

Click the Edit link next to your new profile so you can create three filters. The first ensures this profile will only report organic traffic.

The second ensures this profile will only report Google traffic.

The third one is a bit more complicated and involves capturing the keyword rank using a regular expression in an Advanced Filter.

If the picture isn’t clear enough you want to enter: (\?|&)cd=([0-9]+)

All the regular expression is doing is looking for that special parameter (?cd= or &cd=) in the URL and then capturing the number (aka rank) after the cd= and using it in the User Defined field. You might be able to get away with just &cd=([0-9]+) but smart folks like Yoast are using both. I did a quick test and captured that data ($A1) and found 100% of it to be the ampersand (&). That said, I recommend covering your bases and match on both.

Remember to be sure to use $A2 since the number 2 refers to the second parenthesis where you’re capturing rank. If you’re interested (like I was) the advanced filters help on Google isn’t a bad read and this regex cheat sheet is a nice reference as well.

That’s it! Really, you’re done.

Wait and Review Your Keyword Ranking Reports

You’ll have to wait a day for the data to be collected since filters are not retroactive.

Wake up the next day and visit your new Google Rank profile. You’ll need to navigate to the User Defined section under Visitors. Once you click User Defined you’ll hopefully see a clean keyword ranking report. The (not set) value at the top indicates that no rank was captured, most likely because it was not an AJAX search result.

Now, there are other ways to configure these filters to combine keyword and rank, or exclude non-AJAX URLs. I’ve chosen to do it this way because I find it easier to view and more flexible in creating additional filters and custom reports. That’s not to say that you couldn’t create yet another profile to try different filter variations. Don’t be afraid to try (and break) things until you figure it out.

In my next post I’ll show you some ways to configure ranking reports and gain additional keyword insight.

There have been a number of recent posts around selecting the right SEO clients.  And I’ve certainly had my share of frustrations. Yet, one of the issues I often run into are potential clients who think SEO is the only marketing tactic they need to grow their business. This is just as difficult as a client who distrusts SEO.

When SEO won’t work

Okay, SEO will always work but it won’t always be the best way to grow your business. Too many start-ups seem to believe that they’ll be able to drive massive amounts of traffic from Google. End of marketing plan.

The fact is SEO is but one part of an overall marketing plan. Sometimes it can be a very large part of the plan, particularly if you have a long-tail strategy. More often than not it’s going to be a focused SEO effort on a handful of high value keywords. While this is a fine strategy it may not bring a lot of traffic right away.

SEO is not a ‘just-add-water’ solution

SEO is tougher than it looks, particularly if you’re looking at optimizing a handful of competitive keywords. Sure, the basics are easy but the devil is in the details. Even when you’re doing all the right things, it may take time to conquer the rankings for those keywords. Never mind the pesky keyword volume data that can provide a reality check on expected traffic.

Unlike skeptics, SEO converts have a distorted sense of the speed and effectiveness of SEO. While they don’t understand the mechanics, they’re sure that some expert can wave a magic wand and turn on the Google spigot.

SEO Infomercial

The lure of SEO is, of course, that it’s free. In some ways SEO is like a late night infomercial. Promises of flat abs in 30 days with just a 10 minute daily workout! Did we mention that it folds up and fits under your bed too?!

SEO can be a very effective low-cost channel. But to get those flat abs you still need to eat right. And if you’re listening carefully to the legal disclaimer you’ll hear that those magical results were ‘not typical’. That means it’ll take longer than 30 days and more work than 10 minutes daily.

Swiss Army Knife SEO

Your marketing plan should be like a Swiss Army Knife with SEO being just one of the tools. Not only that, but you need to use that tool the right way. Getting a whole bunch of traffic that doesn’t convert isn’t going to help your business. Don’t neglect the other tools at your disposal. In fact, some of those other tools might actually help your SEO efforts in the long run.

And if SEO won’t work there’s always social media, right?

A new study by .Fox Networks and comScore shows (again) the positive relationship between display advertising and search.

Video and display advertising both successfully increased brand engagement in each of the four campaigns analysed. The average uplift across the campaigns saw site visitation increase by more than a factor of seven over a four week period following exposure to an ad, with consumers three times more likely to conduct search queries using brand or relevant generic terms in the same time period.

Advertising Attribution

These studies all point to a synergy between advertising channels. That’s not ground-breaking, though the measurement of it is innovative. What marketers have been trying to figure out is attribution. What channel or channels should get credit for a sale or lead? It goes to the heart of the old marketing adage: I know I’m wasting half of my marketing budget, I just don’t know which half.

Impact on Display

Many advertisers and agencies still measure success of a display campaign based on traditional click through rate (CTR) and ROI. The low CTR of display ads makes marketers suspicious. The concept of a view-through conversion made sense to some, but it still seemed like a bunch of hand waving and didn’t solve the problem of attribution. New services like Vizu also go beyond clicks and provide measurable brand lift based on display campaigns.

Studies and tools that provide multi-channel insight into conversion will help advertisers move beyond antiquated success metrics and increase their display advertising budgets.

Impact on Search

Convincing advertisers of the relationship between display and search is only half the battle. How will advertisers respond? The obvious knee-jerk reaction is to increase their display advertising spend. But is that really where advertisers should start?

If display generates more search volume, wouldn’t you first ensure search was optimized to convert that additional volume? Even within search, would you allocate more dollars into PPC or SEO? Would you prefer to pay for that customer twice or once?

Display and SEO

I’d argue that the first action item based on this study would be to invest in SEO. We already know that the vast majority of search clicks come from organic listings. The importance of rank cannot be denied, even with recent studies showing interesting behavior around brands.

Display primes the pump and generates intent. But you could be generating that intent for your competitor if you haven’t done enough SEO. Branded terms are likely safe, but the ‘relevant generic terms’ are a battlefield.

For example, if Best Buy ran a display campaign for HDTVs, this would create additional search volume for branded searches (Best Buy) and relevant generic searches (HDTVs). A brand search works out just fine. But a search for hdtvs returns Walmart as the first retailer result. Best Buy could wind up spending advertising dollars to drive sales for Walmart.

My fear is that instead of investing in SEO advertisers will simply throw money at the problem through PPC. Never mind that you’ll still only capture a small segment of that additional search volume, it’s also eating into your overall ROI.

Last year I wrote about Google’s text-only cache which lets you see what Googlebot sees.  This fits in well with Blind Five Year Old philosophy since Google doesn’t care if your site is pretty. I know, it’s not a perfect analogy because Google would need to read the text but … think of it as braille for Googlebot.

I still recommend the technique but wanted to pass along a better way to access Google’s text-only cache.

Google Text-Only Cache Bookmarklet

A bookmarklet is a bookmark that delivers one-click functionality to a browser or web page. You’re probably using a few already (bit.ly anyone?). Following is a bookmarklet that shows the Google text-only cache of any page.

Text Cache

Simply drag the link above to your bookmark bar to have one-click access to Google’s text-only cache of the page you’re on. This bookmarklet comes from SEOmoz, where they’ve compiled a list of 30 SEO bookmarklets along with instructions on how to create your own.

Create Your Own Bookmarklet

Creating your own bookmarklet really is easy. Here’s one I created that gives you one-click access to SEM Rush.

SEM Rush

The instructions SEOmoz provides are solid, but limited to simple queries. Anything more and you’ll need to learn additional javascript commands and syntax. If you’re technically inclined that’s not a huge task, but start out by futzing around with the simple stuff. As always, doing it is the best way to learn.

So grab or create SEO bookmarklets so you’re spending less time navigating and more time analyzing.

Google suggests can be an endless form of entertainment and insight. Here’s one I caught in late January.

At first glance it seems like a strange combination but upon further inspection it’s a lot like a Google-style Burroughs cut-up.

Theology

You’ve got the adult and kids version of theology with is there a god and is there a santa claus. The current suggester also includes is there an afterlife. Some heavy stuff.

Health

From herpes to AIDS to cancer, health queries are rising. I imagine that many dealing with these issues might wind up typing in is there a god or is there anybody out there. The Internet can isolate but also connect.

Lyrics

The Pink Floyd song is easy to spot, though at first glance I thought it was a Duran Duran reference. I’m an 80s fan and won’t apologize for it! The other song is by Band of Horses. I’ve never heard of them until now. All the songs do have a yearning and ethereal feel to them.

Miscellaneous

The meteor shower must have been very topical at the time because it’s not included in the current suggester. However, things falling from the heavens certainly fits into the overall theme.

As for hdmi cables, get the cheap ones.

This was the second straight year I attended SMX West. It’s still the best search conference I’ve been to, but a number of the sessions were nearly the same as the prior year. However there were enough new sessions to keep me busy and stoke my interest. Among those new sessions the surprise of them was ‘Search Behavior: Using Research To Improve Results’.

Search Behavior: Using Research To Improve Results

The session was on the third day right after lunch. It had been a long conference and many were more interested in attending ‘Ask The SEOs’ to see if any sparks would fly with Aaron Wall on the panel.

The few that did attend got an entertaining, theoretical, scientific and academic review of search. The panel was composed of Gordon Hotchkiss, Carla Borsoi, Venkat Kolluri and Shari Thurow.

The Brain on Search

Gordon Hotchkiss from Enquiro presented some academic research from UCLA that showed brain function by level of search savvy.

An interesting point of reference was that the search savvy develop habitual search patterns. This would clearly make it difficult to change the search interface in any major way without disrupting those patterns. How long might it take to rewire the brain to get the most out of search? And what new pattern would emerge as a result? It makes any Google 2.0 interface extremely risky and unlikely.

Types of Search

I’ve long been interested in the different types of search: information, navigation and transaction. I’ve had personal experiences in optimizing information and transaction based sites and there is evidence that the habitual pattern for each search type varies. Let me tell you, the SEO strategy is different.

Shari Thurow from Omni Marketing Interactive explored each type of search, mixed in personas and tossed in an F-bomb to boot. There are a number of ways you can use this information, not the least of which is to craft better titles and meta descriptions to match the search type and intent. Rank matters (a lot) but, just like PPC, good copy can also move the needle.

How Do Users Search?

Carla Borsoi from Ask also spoke about information search, looking at how users search. The focus was on questions and the few examples she provided are illuminating.

Here you’re seeing the question a user really wants to ask versus what they actually type into a search engine. Clearly, matching queries with intent is a tough business. It’s one of the reasons why all of the search engines have moved to search suggesters so that they can better match query intent.

The Search Behavior session may not have been the most actionable of sessions. There were no tips, tools or lists of resources that you could use immediately. You didn’t get insight (overt or between the lines) from a search engine representative. What you did get was a rich background into the psychology of search and the implications it may have on our industry now and in the future.

In other words, you saw the forest and not the trees.

There’s still a lot of speculation and conjecture about Google Caffeine. More than a few have analyzed and theorized based on the preview Google provided. Some have even given tips on optimizing for Caffeine. Don’t believe the hype.

The Google Caffeine Myth

Google Caffeine is not an algorithm change. That’s not to say that the results won’t change here and there, but for the most part the actual scoring is unchanged. There are no special techniques or changes needed to address Google Caffeine.

What is Google Caffeine?

Google Caffeine is a re-architect of the entire indexing system for performance. In short, Caffeine:

• allows Google to crawl and index more pages
• allows Google to crawl and index pages faster

The result? The indexing data fed into individual signals is more robust and updated more frequently. This might produce some slight changes to results, but only because of the change in data, not in the change in scoring.

In Google terminology, Google Caffeine increases the rate of data refreshes. I recommend you read and listen to what Matt Cutts has to say on the topic. Vanessa Fox was also a voice of reason with her Search Engine Land Google Caffeine review.

Now, in re-architecting the indexing system, not all data structures are 100% compatible. So, some tiny changes have likely been made, but they’re not meant to be algorithmic changes.

Why Ask For Caffeine Feedback?

Google provided the SEO community with access to Caffeine results and asked for feedback. This request was looked upon by many as an indication that this was an algorithm change.

In fact, this request was a type of distributed QA. The goal of the new indexing system is to increase performance but not appreciably change the algorithmic results. Letting a bunch of hyperactive SEOs into the sandbox helped them to identify any flaws to their re-architected code.

Why Re-Architect The Indexing  System?

Most seem to believe the impetus for Caffeine was around real-time search. I’m sure this was factor, but I doubt it was the primary reason. Google could have pulled off real-time search without Caffeine.

The indexing code in use was written ages ago in Internet-time. Since that time, the Internet has grown and changed dramatically. Algorithmic changes and new signals could only go so far in ensuring quality results. If the data set they were using was incomplete or ‘old’, no amount of signal tinkering would have the desired impact. It’s a simple GIGO problem.

Google needed more data to better inform the algorithm. They need to see more of the Internet. More links. More page changes. Any of you who have ego based Google Alert feeds would have noticed a substantial increase in activity over the last month. It’s not that you’re getting more popular (sorry), Google’s just indexing more and doing so faster than ever before.

Caffeine Is The Beginning

The real question should be what will Google do once Caffeine is fully implemented. Once Google gets all of this data, new patterns will emerge and algorithm changes are certain to follow.

Google has recently been trying to streamline search results as the number of universal search elements grows. It’s what Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products and User Experience, calls ‘user interface jazz’.

Solving Google’s Jazz Problem

Recent attempts to solve the jazz problem have revolved – primarily – around a left contextual navigation pane. Whether it is always exposed or only introduced when clicked, Google seems sure that this is the way to solve search overload.

But is it really?

Google and Web 2.0

Google is rooted firmly in Web 1.0. There’s (clearly) nothing wrong about that. Yet, the interface hasn’t changed all that much as the web has evolved. While Mayer acknowledges the bimodal world of screen sizes (larger desktop screens but smaller mobile interfaces), does the interface fully acknowledge and take advantage of these advancements?

The Splinternet is real and seems only to be expanding with the launch of the iPad.

New User Interfaces

Some of the most interesting new interfaces are far more visual and horizontal in nature, allowing the user to digest more information at a glance. Think about what Google search results could look like if they used an interface like Lazyfeed or the Times Skimmer.

Google 2.0

Here’s a quick Frankenstein of what Google 2.0 could look like using a bit of Google’s Jazz UI and the Times Skimmer.

One or all of these results or panes could update in real-time. Another could present a fully embedded video. Yet another could present thumbnails for image matches. The possibilities, while not endless, are numerous.

I’ve kept the left hand navigation, but you could just as easily do without it. In fact, that would better adhere to Google’s search motto: don’t make the user do something we can do for them.

Google Takes The Safe Route?

Of course, Google would need to determine how to present AdWords effectively in this environment. Perhaps the fear of disrupting AdWords revenue is why a major UI change isn’t in the cards. But this seems like a contradiction in how Google sets goals and measures success.

Achieving 65% of the impossible is better than 100% of the ordinary – Setting impossible goals and achieving part of them sets you on a completely different path than the safe route. Sometimes you can achieve the impossible in a quarter, but even when you don’t, you are on a fast track to achieving it soon. Measuring success every quarter allows for mid course corrections and setting higher goals for the next quarter.

Maybe Google has already tested radical new UI with unsatisfactory results. Or maybe Google is taking the safe route, thinking that the search interface can remain relatively static as the web transforms.

Is Google really doing enough to solve user interface jazz?

Sometimes you want to see your Google Analytics traffic faster. Whether you’re obsessive, impatient, troubleshooting or benchmarking, you might find yourself frustrated with the 3-4 hour time lag, particularly if it’s a site with a decent amount of traffic.

Stop Waiting for Google Analytics Traffic

Here’s a quick and easy tip to see your Google Analytics traffic faster. (Remember, this only works if you’re looking at intraday traffic.)

Go to the Visitors > Visitor Trending > Visits report in Google Analytics. Then make sure you’re looking at the graph by hour. The report will look something like this.

Now, in the far right select the Advanced Segments drop down and choose one of the default segments. My favorite is Non-paid Search Traffic. Then deselect All Visits so only Non-paid Search Traffic is checked. The result? You get a peek at a few more hours of traffic.

You can leave All Visits on to see the difference between the two if you’re really interested. For me, it’s all about looking at the day’s traffic in comparison to the same day last week. Using the same report with All Visits you get something like this.

Look at just Non-paid Search Traffic and you get to see those most recent hours. This is the report if you’re serious about SEO.

You can use any of the default advanced segments and can usually use any custom advanced segment that produces enough traffic. So stop refreshing your dashboard stats again and again without success. Instead, follows these few steps and get ahead of the curve.

The other day I was doing some robots.txt research and found a great little Easter egg on Yelp.

A robots.txt file is a great place to drop Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. Thanks for the chuckle Yelp!