How old are the top ranking pages and what does this mean for your business?
One very common question everyone wants to know is 'how do I get my website ranking on Google?' Marketing agencies are probably used to hearing this question and responding with the same answers that there's not a 100% chance of ranking on Google even if you do everything right.
Ranking first on Google organically may not be as successful as you once thought when you've got 3-4 search ads taking space at the top. So what does it take for higher chances of potentially ranking based on Google?
Only 22% of pages that currently rank in the top 10 were created within 1 year, with the majority of pages being 3 years and older.
These strategies on this infographic by The Website Group are guaranteed to revolutionize your marketing.
Courtesy of: The Website Group…
Chart of the Day: How Google's featured snippets are reducing the number of traditional organic links
Organic search traffic remains one of the most effective methods of customer acquisition. So, it's as important as ever to be on top of the changes that Google makes to its algorithms and the formats used to show recommended sites in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
This Chart of the Day shows nicely what SEOs have known for a long time, i.e. that the search results features such as featured snippets, related questions, images, video are now so important that they should be an essential consideration in most markets.
It's indicated by this compilation from Moz of 10,000 sample queries used in the Moz features graph (see second chart below) which shows that fewer than half of these SERPs have the full 10 blue hyperlinks we have been familiar. The remainder are the features shown in the…
Great new visual design and usability, but no long-term data (yet)
There has been a fair bit of excitement about the new search console (GSC) since it was first announced, perhaps mainly since it was promised this would give us access to a full 16 months data about search queries to our site rather than the previous 90 days.
Last week took a look, prompted by the many reminders to take a look a the new beta since I asked to join the beta a few months back. Google announced the beta was available earlier in January and it seems most admins will be getting alerts, but if you haven't you can read about the benefits here and see Google's summary of the new search console features.
I was also interested to see whether there would be any new reports or insights which were available.…
Knowing if you’ve got a successful retail SEO campaign all starts with picking the right metrics
With a wealth of information at your fingertips in Google Analytics, how do you determine what the key performance indicators (KPIs) are for your website? Everyone wants to demonstrate the value of organic campaigns but since the cruel and unusual punishment of the removal of the organic keyword conversion report in Google Analytics to be replaced by the opaque 'not-provided', it can seem difficult to measure the impact of all the hard work although the improved Search Console-Google Analytics integration does help. Before we dive into the KPIs, it’s important to remember a few things when you’re pulling data out of Google Analytics and drawing conclusions from this…
What is data without human interpretation?
As with any quantitative data you get the what but not the why. Human interpretation of this data is where the…
Moz releases a new free tool to help you discover, prioritize, and build lists of high-quality keywords.
The Keyword Explorer (KWE from herein) comes as part of the Free tools offered by Moz, a leader in Digital Marketing and Search Tools. It's a result of year-long development by a team already dedicated to the maintenance and development of Moz's rankings collections and research tools. How has it the impacted the final product? Let's find out.
What does it do?
The official strapline is...
"Find The Best Keywords For Your SEO Strategy
Discover, prioritize, and build lists of high-quality keywords."
And I can safely say it passes the "Ronseal Test"; it does exactly what is say's on the tin.
The tool takes users through the entire keyword research process, whilst providing metrics and scoring systems (Volume, Difficulty,…
10 things you need to know about Search Analytics - Google's new tool for Keyword Ranking reports
Rating of value of tool: [rating=4]
Recommended link: Google's announcement of Search Analytics launch
Have you seen Google's new Search Analytics tool? It's an important free tool to help with SEO since it shows how well your site is ranking for different keywords and where visitors are landing.
We've been using it during Google's Beta review and it's now available to all users of Webmaster Tools. In this post we'll explain the main features and where it fits in with Google's other analytics tools to support SEO. Here's how the new tool looks:
What do I need to know about Google's Search Analytics?
1. Search Analytics is a free tool to show how your keywords rank and the…
Five methods to prove the efficiency and effectiveness of SEO
Calculating and proving the value of SEO isn't easy. Not only is there the misunderstanding of how SEO works when discussing SEO with senior stakeholders, but there’s also the added complexity of measurement in a world of ‘Not Provided keywords’.
While rankings can show us how we’re performing for a particular set of keywords, search results are now personalised and this does not demonstrate ROI. Factors including personalisation, localisation and limitations on the number of keywords one can track mean that rankings should be used more as a high-level KPI rather than a solid success metric.
At an executive level, ranking data will not effectively communicate the true value of organic search so we need to find methodologies that will enable us to speak the ‘language of the board room’ and generate buy-in for further activity.
Structure measurement…
Is Google favouring long-form content in its results?
Something rather strange happened recently to the results for one of our major keywords 'copywriting' - see SERPs. For the past 12 months or so, our homepage has consistently appeared in the top 10 results for the term – the largest volume search term in our industry.
This page has been replaced with various other landing pages, most recently settling on a guide we produced titled 'How to become a copywriter.' This is despite the fact that this page does not include the term 'copywriting' in the meta data or header tags on the page and has no external back links.
I suspected that the replacement of this page may have been due to an algorithmic penalty due to overzealous use of the term in link building to the homepage. However, …
An example analysis of Groupon's traffic showing a signficant proportion of direct traffic could be SEO-related
Gaining organic traffic from SEO is a significant inbound marketing investment for many businesses, so making the business case and demonstrating returns from SEO is important. The typical approach for this is naturally to use Google Analytics to report on the organic traffic segment. Since Google Analytics can no longer reliably provide SEO keyword data due to the growth in keywords marked 'not provided' we have written about how to use Google Webmaster Tools keyword data to determine keywords.
We're alerting readers to this example, since it shows that you should make colleagues (or clients) aware that significant additional SEO traffic may be hidden as a referrer.
Case shows that 60% of direct traffic is actually organic search
This research summary of Groupon visitor referrers from Conductor summarises the importance of SEO to Groupon based on their standard analytics. They comment:
'Groupon recently…
Analysis of content CTRs shows the impact of video and images
BrightEdge has reviewed the types of content that perform best in delivering organic traffic. These charts show the desktop click through rate (CTR) in the search results (SERPs) for different ranking positions compared to classic written web content. The text results compare to other research on clickthrough rate on organic results with position. However the results for images shows that clickthrough rates are higher overall for different tanking positions.
The effect is less evident for video where the CTR with position curve is more similar to that for classic text result.s
You can download the full report Cracking the Content Code from Brightedge.
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