Search Keywords

Searching for Answers in SharePoint using Analytics

November 17, 2015 by Marlee Long Leave a Comment

Image of steps in the dark highlighted with light and text "step into SharePoint search analytics"

Image courtesy of clotaire lehoux via Unsplash.com

We’ve officially reached our final stop on our SharePoint analytics journey (although it’s not to say that there isn’t much more that can be learned from this point!). We’ve explored the possibilities with your portal visitors, navigated through your SharePoint ecosystem, and cruised along with various content reports.

Our final destination will show us how to dive deep into optimizing your SharePoint search facility by analyzing your visitors’ use of your search engine. An essential question you may want to ask yourself before assessing your SharePoint search status, is

“Do you know how well your search engine is performing within your intranet?”

[Read more…]

Strong SEO Keywords are Key

March 25, 2014 by April Wilson 2 Comments

The world of SEO or Search Engine Optimization is all about helping the search engines find websites with expertise on what the user is searching for. The old world of search engine indexing focused on a series of computer codes that lived “behind the scenes” on your website and had names like meta tags, meta keywords, and meta descriptions. It was considered normal to repeat about 20 of the same keywords over and over on your entire website in order to “tell” the search engines that your website should be on the first page of search results for those keywords. However, this kind of behavior can get your website penalized in the new search landscape – so what do you need to know to make sure your site is ready for the new rules?

Choosing the right keywords

Today’s SEO is all about subject matter expertise. Your first step should be to audit all the keywords you have competed on in the past. If, like most businesses that have internal SEO experts or have done business in the past with an SEO consultant, you have a long list of around 20 keywords, you need to pare those down. [Read more…]

How to report Organic Keywords Performance in the world of ‘Not Provided’

September 9, 2013 by Himanshu Sharma 7 Comments

According to NotProvidedCount.com, the website which tracks the data of not provided keywords, the average percentage of ‘not provided’ Google traffic is around 60% at the time of writing this post.

And according to the same website, the not provided traffic will reach 100% on 29^th April, 2014.

While I take these numbers and calculations with a pinch of salt (and expect the same from you because of the small sample size used in these calculations), it is not really a “news” for anybody in the digital marketing industry now that the ‘not provided’ keywords traffic is rising each month.

The rise of ‘not provided’ keywords is gradually eating away the contributions made by both your branded and non-branded keywords in generating traffic and conversions.

As a result the value of your SEO efforts is being diminished by Google. Today I am going to fix this problem for you. I will show you how you can report your organic keywords performance in the world of ‘not provided’ keywords.

The first thing that you need to remember is that ‘not provided’ traffic is the traffic coming from some keywords. It can not be the traffic coming from some other referral.

The second important thing to remember is that the not provided keywords are organic keywords.

So we have got two valuable insight from ‘not provided’:

Not provided traffic is keyword traffic
Not provided traffic is organic traffic.

What we don’t know about not provided traffic is how much of the traffic is from branded keywords and how much is from non-branded keywords (and of course the actual keyword referrals) .

So it would be safe to conclude (in theory) that not provided traffic is neither branded nor non-branded. It is simply a different type of organic traffic called the ‘not provided traffic’.

So we have three different types of organic traffic:

Branded Keywords Traffic
Non Branded Keywords Traffic
Not Provided Keywords Traffic

As the traffic from ‘not provided’ keywords will increase, there is a strong possibility that the traffic and conversions from both branded and non-branded keywords will decrease over time.

So if you don’t report the traffic and conversions from ‘not provided’ keywords, you won’t be able to report the accurate picture of your SEO efforts.

Not provided traffic will continue to eat your branded and non-branded keywords traffic and conversions, and over time, you may give the impression of running a poorly optimized SEO campaign to your clients.

So here is my solution.

Create three different column charts which shows the traffic and conversions coming from branded keywords, non-branded keywords and not provided keywords.

Create one more column chart which shows the traffic coming from all of the keywords (branded + non-branded + not provided).

For example:

To get the number of branded, non-branded and not provided keywords you need to create and apply advance segments/filters to your ‘organic search traffic’ report in Google Analytics.

Once you have applied these advanced segments/filters (which can filter out branded, non-branded and not provided keywords), you just need to count the number of keywords sending traffic for each month and note it down in your excel spreadsheet.

For example:

In order to count the number of ‘not provided’ keywords sending traffic to your website, you need to apply ‘landing page’ as the secondary dimension.

For example:

I have saved these three different customization of organic search traffic report as ‘shortcut’ reports so that I don’t need to apply advanced segments and filters every time.

Note: You can learn more about the various shortcuts in Google Analytics from this post: Google Analytics Shortcuts: Tricks, Tools, keyboard & APIs

Ideally the total number of keywords which send traffic to your website must increase every month. This is a sign of a healthy SEO campaign.

And the last chart on ‘total keywords sending traffic’ exactly solves this very problem.

No matter how much the volume of not provided keywords increases over time, you can always analyse and report the true value of your SEO efforts if you can report the relative changes in branded, non-branded and not provided keywords as well as the total number of keywords sending traffic and conversions to your website.

So if branded/non-branded keywords traffic is going down then look at the volume of not provided keywords.

Is there a correspondence increase in the volume of not provided keywords? If there is, you know where the branded/non-branded traffic ended up. If there is not, then you know the SEO campaigns are not performing well and it is not the fault of rise in not provided keywords.

To learn more about ‘not provided’ keywords analysis, check out these two posts:

SEM Rush New Features

April 3, 2012 by Brian Kane 1 Comment

Back in November I reviewed one of our favourite tools SEM RUSH – SEM Rush Review

The guys recently gave us a heads up on some features they have added to the mix and asked if we would do a quick post with our thoughts on the new additions. If you don’t know about SEMRush then our previous post will give you an overview of some of the key features but essentially it’s a very smart keyword research tool. Focusing primarily on Google data, it pulls all sorts of information on keywords, search volumes, trends, commercial values, advertiser competition etc. When it comes to building more effective, relevant and commercial keword lists; its keyword reports, phrase and exact match reports and competitor analysis are some of the ways that the tool can help.

So what is new in SEM RUSH?

The 2 new features recently added are Adsense Reports and Back links Reports.

The back link report lets you analyze your website(or anyone else’s) producing a full list of sites which link to your site. It provides the exact URL of the site/page which links to you and shows you the target URL (the page on your site that the link points to). It also gives you the anchor text of the link. This is very useful data for checking your own links, analysing competitor back links etc. however as it stands we already source this type data from a few other tools but I’m keen to see how the SEM Rush guys develop this report over time as I am sure they will be build in more features.

The Adsense Report
I found the Adsense report very interesting. For anyone who doesn’t know about Adsense it is effectively a Google run program which allows website owners (once signed up and accepted) to make space available on their sites (ad blocks) for Google to populate with Adverts. Revenue generated is shared between Google and the website owner. The flip side of Adsense is the Google Adwords program where Advertisers can use something called the Google Display Network to get their adverts placed in other websites. Essentially the Google Display Network is comprised of website publishers participating in the Adsense program.

Advertising effectively through the Display Network involves investigating and identifying a range of web properties that are relevant and complimentary to your own products or services and then targeting these sites through the network. There are broader, more general ways to use the Display Network however typically the more targeted, the better. Analysis of click through, rates and conversions can then tell you what sites are working for you and what ads are generating interest.

Using the Report
After entering a website address and selecting the Adsense option this report will give you all kinds of information and data on how that particular company is using the Google display network to publish adverts around the web in various web properties. It contains top level data on the total number of ads running, split between text ads and banners etc. it then lists all of the websites where these ads are appearing and actually displays each of the ads being run with key metrics such as number of publishers displaying the ad, first seen, last seen dates, frequency and average ad position on the page.

So how might this data be used ?
Aside from the immediate insights into exactly how your competitors are spending money through this channel, there are ways to use this report to inform your own Google Display network strategy. By analysing larger direct competitors you can find out all of the sites they are targeting through the Google display network. You can then check the ads they are actually displaying and get data on how long the ads have been running. The ads that have been running for a while are likely to be converting well so this is useful information to take note of.

If you have a way to compete with some of these competitors on price, quality or service you can then tailor an ad to reflect this and target the same sites. By conducting this research on a number of competitors and possibly even on related and complimentary websites you are likely to find a very targeted range of websites which you can target with your ads through the Google display network. Further tailoring of ads based on the nature of these sites and based on what you have learned from competitors can give you a real leg up when it comes to smart online spending and Return on Investment

Choosing the right keywords

Identifying the Gap – User Adoption Versus SharePoint Acquisition