A new look and less features for GWT
Importance: [rating=2]
Recommended link: Google Webmaster Blog announcing the new design
In the past 3-4 weeks Google have made various changes to the Google Webmaster Tool platform, including, more recently, updates to the design.
The new design implementation is focused on bringing the platform into line with other recent design updates for the search giant. During the update Google has also updated the navigation grouping of features:
We distinguished the following groups: Configuration, Health, Traffic and Optimization. Each group represents a related set of functionality:
Configuration: Things you configure and generally don’t change very often.
Health: Where you look to make sure things are OK.
Traffic: Where you go to understand how your site is doing in Google search, who’s linking to you; where you can explore…
7 of the best sources for learning about Google SEO algorithm updates. Sites and forums that discuss the latest updates?
I’m often contacted by site managers and marketers who have just experienced a change in their rankings in the natural listings. Often this is because Google has recently made changes to its algorithms that have affected rankings. I’ve been hearing more of these recently (especially from site owners who've received to unnatural link notices), so I thought it would be helpful to create a short reference of the best sources to learn about current updates.
These are the sites I monitor to learn about changes - I’ll start with the official Google line which I recommend subscribing to through a feed or Twitter and then look at other sources including forums which are often more useful for understanding the SEO techniques which may have been penalised.
1. Google Webmaster Tools Blog
As the…
The latest data on UK retail search volumes
Value/Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: BRC-Google Q1 2012 monitor - Published April 16th 2012
The British Retail Consortium (BRC) and Google produce a regular Online Retail Monitor (ORM) that measures changes and trends in the growth of retail search terms over time. The latest version has some interesting data on the growth in mobile search which also has implications for all site owners. Since it’s direct from Google, using their data on searches for retail terms, it’s a reliable source, although it only gives relative changes not the absolute % of searches that are mobile.
The headline figure is a 132% year-on-year growth in mobile search for retail broken down as follows:
Search volume variation through time
The data is also useful for top-level benchmarking…
A step-by-step approach to identify and attract visitors with higher intent to purchase
In part 1, Why your conversion rate is lying to you, I explained why using average conversion rate to measure the performance of search campaigns paints a misleading picture of search success (or failure). Search traffic (both organic and paid) has a mixed potential for convertibility which dictates that you can reasonably expect visitors with different likelihood to convert to exhibit different behaviour.
While that theory has legs (please leave your thoughts in the comments if you agree and especially if you disagree), Part 1 did not answer the question:
How do you actually use people-focused analytics to identify visitors by potential for conversion?
So let's explore this further.
Intent dictates the reason for visit
Visitor intent dictates reason for visit and as a byproduct, the potential for conversion. If the visitor is there for a completely different reason (like a customer seeking…
What is the objective of your SEO program? Actually you will have many but at the heart will be the desire to increase the amount of relevant traffic that hits your website(s) from natural search.
The total number of potential keyword searches that could drive traffic to your website is enormous. Some web owners get traffic from hundreds of thousands of different keywords. However, not every keyword delivers high quality traffic that adds value to the bottom line of the business.
One of the biggest challenges for SEO is to learn which keywords are contributing to ROI, focusing efforts where they can deliver the most reward. To achieve this you need to separate the wheat from the chaff and that means using the data available to discover what doesn’t work.
This article takes a look at some of the techniques you can use to identify and screen poor performing keywords, enabling you to…
Part 1. Using web analytics to benchmark website performance and drive insight through data
This is the first in a 12 part series on website optimisation to boost natural search traffic. The series started in 2011 and will continue into 2012. We're featuring it as a part of a series of posts about optimising marketing in 2012. You can see all my posts in the series here.
I hope these articles will provide you with a solid framework to review and improve your current approaches to SEO or to apply SEO to a new site. I've discussed this advice with Dave Chaffey and Dan Barker who write for Smart Insights too, so I'd like to thank them for their input.
As this data on site visitor traffic sources shows, search engines are still one of the major drivers of visitor traffic to sites, so there's good potential for driving more visitors…
A survey of the most popular SEO tools
I found this infographic really interesting since it shows the range of tools available for SEO. It also shows how other people approach managing SEO and the kind of reasons they choose to use software to help.
I think software that helps review and improves SEO is great, as long as it is not trying to help cut corners, such as automated link building!
I have used a majority of the software mentioned in the infographic below and we have paid subscriptions for Majestic SEO (Backlink analysis) and Screaming Frog (Managing internal links).
Our reviews of SEO services:
Over the last eighteen months we've introduced the main types of SEO tools for marketers - here are the options:
Rank checking
Google Webmaster Tools
Keyword research and specifying target keyphrases to monitor
Monitoring competitor activity
Backlink analysis
Link-checking tools
Here's the infographic from Search Engine Journal:
…
A five step tutorial for better SEO targeting
This is Part Four of a 12 part guide to Website Optimisation. In Part Three, I explored the Google toolset that can help you with keyword research and planning. In Part Four we take that a little further and look how you can target relevant keywords to cover the tail of search, including head, mid tail and long tail search terms.
It’s never an exact science, but with a little patience, you can identify keyword sets that represent logical targets for your search optimisation.
Why is this important?
Because not everybody converts from the first search query they make. You might have heard of the “long tail of search”. There are many visualisations of this; the basic premise is that the volume of searches for a keyword/phrase is dependent upon how specific that keyword query is.
If a keyword query is highly generic (e.g. “moisturisers”), it is indicative…
If you use Google Analytics, and your site gets any traffic from search engines, you will love the latest feature they've just added, which was announced on the Webmaster Tools Blog on 4th October.
Here are the stats you used to get when looking at a 'Search Engine Keywords' report:
keyword
number of visits
pages per visit
average time on site
% new visits
bounce rate
So, you could see that you had (say) 50,000 visits for the word 'laptops', but you were left asking questions like "so what?", "is that good, or bad?", and left looking at other tools to try and answer those questions.
So What's New?
Now, here is one of the new 'Search Engine Optimisation: Queries' reports:
I've highlighted the exciting bits there:
The red circles are new pieces of data they've added (from 'Webmaster Tools')
The pink arrows point to a single example of an instantly actionable piece of…
Part Two of a 12 part guide to Website optimisation
In Part 1, we explored how to use web analytics to benchmark performance and drive insight through data which is a theme throughout this series of in-depth articles. We continue this theme in this guide where I will look at approaches I use to review competitors. I hope you find the approaches interesting and I'll be interested to hear how they differ in the approaches and tools you use.
Competitor research is a core part of optimisation and involves studying websites that rank well for keyword targets.
While it's common to think of which keywords you should target, it's less common to research competitors in detail. But I think this is really important since each keyword and industry can be vastly different in terms of what puts a website at the top…
