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3 SEO Strategy Mistakes to Avoid

May 6, 2014 by April Wilson 2 Comments

The world of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has changed radically in the last year. (SEO is marketing language for how easy it is for search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo to find your website.) You may have heard of Google’s “Penguin” or “Panda” updates.

white computer keyboard with blue SEO keys and yellow pencil beginning to erase blue "e"The reality is that the search engines have made several big changes in the way that they calculate which websites best match a user’s search query. Everything that you may have been told by your SEO consultant in the past is likely to no longer be true. Gone are the days where your HTML code and tag structure were important; and repetition may hurt your ranking.

It’s not about keywords, it’s about subject matter expertise

The search engines aren’t dumb. They figured out pretty quickly that SPAM websites were working very hard to “game the system” by repeating several high-traffic keywords over and over. Unfortunately, many legitimate business owners had also been using those same strategies. If you saw your search strength go down dramatically in the last 12 months (meaning that the percentage of traffic you get from search dropped significantly, or that you used to be on the first page of Google but now you’re showing up on page 12), you are probably overusing keyword repetition. [Read more…]

Rethinking Navigation for Better SEO

April 15, 2014 by April Wilson Leave a Comment

Image of a globe with the title SEO representing SEO practisesRethinking Navigation for Better SEO

In the new world of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), it’s becoming more about what you say than all of the technical ways that you say it. The new post-Panda and post-Penguin Google rankings, for example, are focused on finding subject matter experts on certain topics who are asked to write about that topic across multiple websites.

Search engines are looking for rich and varied content on your core subject within the body of your website. In our series on Search Engine Optimization, we’ve focused on how to pare down your expertise into one of a handful of keywords (or topics). Now it’s time to optimize your website navigation to help your audience find your valuable content more easily – as well as the search engines.

What is navigation?

Your site navigation, in essence, is how you choose to organize all of your content on your website. Most of us understand the concept of creating folders and directories that help organize all of our offline files. [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…]

Why branded search traffic from Google Chrome has almost disappeared

October 1, 2013 by Lukas Oldenburg 3 Comments

I search for “e-fellows” in Google and click on the first result, a link to “www.e-fellows.net“. What should the traffic source be in Google Analytics? “google | organic”, and the keyword should be “e-fellows” or at least “not provided”. At least that’s what you would expect.

Maybe you have wondered why Chrome sends you less and less branded keyword traffic recently? “That is probably because of the ever more increasing ‘keyword not provided’ traffic”, you might answer. But then why do the other browsers not follow this trend?

Graphic: Branded keyword traffic from Chrome (blue) vs. other browsers (orange)

  chrome-vs-other-visits

 

First and foremost, it is because Google has rolled out “secure search” (leading to “keyword: not provided) when you are logged into Chrome and use the Omnibox (which most people do for searching) over the last months. But there is also another reason for that.

Basics: How does your Analytics tool get the keyword?

First, back to the basics: How does your Web Analytics tool know the keyword? Right from the referrer string on the landing page which it gets by looking up the DOM variable “document.referrer” via its JavaScript tracking code. (Remember that the good old referrer has severe issues and can be trusted less and less).

Referrer with keyword parameter: The old world before “not provided”

In the old ideal world before “not provided” keywords, I searched for “e-fellows stipendium” on Google (the scholarship that e-fellows.net offers), I clicked on the first result, and then, on the landing page, by using my referrer bookmarklet, I could see that the referrer is this beautiful long url:

ie-keyword-provided

http://www.google.de/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=e-fellows%20stipendium&source=web&cd=...and so on...

See the red “q=e-fellows%20stipendium“? That’s where your analytics tool’s JavaScript tracking code extracts the keyword from. Since the referrer also provides your tool with the referring domain (“google.de”), the tracking code infers that this visit must be a google organic search visit with the keyword “e-fellows stipendium”.

But of course, nowadays, you only rarely get the chance to view this kind of a referrer from Google because of the “keyword – not provided” phenomenon. It was even hard to find a place where I could still use Google’s non-secure search to provide you with this “keyword-in-the-referrer” example (using IE 10 and clearing cookies and cache did the job). As we have learnt just recently, Google has expanded secure search even to users that are not signed in. This will make it hard to discover the phenomenon I am describing here because you simply won’t have any more visible “branded keyword traffic” at all.

The referrer in times of “keyword not provided”

So what has happened to the referrer when we see “not provided” in our Analytics tool’s keyword reports? 

The referrer, in this case, varies from browser to browser:

  • In Chrome, it is simply “https://www.google.ch” (or .com, whatever Google site you use).
  • In Firefox and Internet Explorer 10, you get http://www.google.ch/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s…etc. => Note there is a q= parameter, but there is no value behind it.

In this case, your tracking code still knows that a visit from “google.ch” must be an organic search visit. But since there is either no query parameter “q=” (Chrome) or the query parameter’s value is empty (Firefox, IE), the tracking code cannot extract a keyword. So it infers that the keyword was “not provided”. Subsequently, it fills its keyword parameter with “not provided”, “keyword not found” (Webtrends) or whatever its creator foresaw for this case. It then sends this info to the Web Analytics tool servers with its usual gif request (see the coloured highlight in the following example of a Google Analytics gif request for a pageview):

http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmwv=5.4.4d&utms=1&utmn=1250476888&utmhn=www.e-fellows.net&utmcs=UTF-8&utmsr=1440x900&utmvp=1423x440&utmsc=32-bit&utmul=de&utmje=1&utmfl=11.8%20r800&utmdt=e-fellows.net%3A%20Das%20Online-Stipendium%20und%20Karriere-Netzwerk%20%7C%20e-fellows.net&utmhid=1572690879&utmr=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.ch%2F&utmp=%2F&utmht=1378745775106&utmac=UA-1111111-1&utmcc=__utma%3D115705945.1695678686.1378742152.1378742152.1378745775.2%3B%2B__utmz%3D115705945.1378745775.2.2.
utmcsr%3Dgoogle%7Cutmccn%3D(organic)%7Cutmcmd%3Dorganic%7Cutmctr%3D(not%2520provided)%3B&aip=1&utmu=qBWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAQ~

Now, the “keyword not provided” issue is nothing new, you may say. And you’re right. I just want to make sure we understand the ideal world of theory before we dive into the ugly, complicated reality.

Some referrers nowadays: no referrer, no keyword

So I delete my cookies on e-fellows.net (make sure you do this, too, if you want to replicate my scenarios) and search for “e-fellows stipendium” in Chrome’s Omnibox again. I land on Google’s secure search results page again. Again, I click on the first result and land on www.e-fellows.net. There, I click on my referrer bookmarklet and see this:

referrer not provided

No referrer! Or should we call it “referrer not provided”? 🙂 What kind of traffic source will our tracking code infer in this case? Correct, “direct traffic”. No “google | organic”, simply “direct | none”, no keyword. 

At first, I was completely puzzled by this. My first thought was that Chrome’s Omnibox search may not return a referrer anymore at all. But then, I tried searching for another keyword: “Karrierenetzwerk” (career network), a keyword where e-fellows.net ranks highly, but also a search term that contains no keywords that are part of e-fellows.net’s domain name (like our earlier keyword “e-fellows stipendium”). Result:

referrer-chrome-non-branded-keyword

So here, we get the referrer again.

What can we conclude from this?

This means that if someone searches for a keyword that looks similar to the domain (even in a combination with another keyword like “stipendium”) in Chrome’s Omnibox, Google does not give us the referrer => direct traffic in our Analytics tools! For other keywords, it does give us the referrer, so we can at least rejoice in another visit of the “keyword not provided” type.

I call this phenomenon the “Chrome Omnibox Domain Keyword”. Because it only seems to happen in Chrome’s Omnibox. If I go to google.ch in Chrome directly and search for “e-fellows stipendium” there, I get the regular phenomenon (no keyword, but google.ch as the referrer).

Hold on! It is not that easy!

Of course, it is not as simple as I have described it. First, it does not work with all the domains I have tested (so check for yours), but I could replicate the behavior with several other sites (If you are a frequent GA user, search for “Google Analytics” for example, and look for the referrer – it does not work all the time!). I also seem to get a different result if I am logged into my Google account. It seems probable that Google does not want to make visits look like search visits when I have been to a site before and when I use a keyword similar to a domain name. Again, no general rule here, but certainly a strong tendency – just look at the disappearing branded search traffic graph above again!

Why would Google do this?

Google is harming itself here, you may say. Why would Google not show a legitimate visit from its search engine as a visit coming from its search engine? I can only guess, but here are two possible explanations:

  1. If someone types something similar to a domain name into the Omnibox and has been to that site before, then you might argue that this is not a real “search” visit. The user just used the Omnibox as a quick navigational help to get to his good old favorite website. So it could be seen as a logical step to count these visits as “direct traffic” since you can compare this “search” behavior to clicking on a bookmark.
  2. Marketing people are mostly interested in how their paid campaigns perform – and Google earns its money through paid campaigns (ads). Even in the time of multi-touch analysis (“Multi-Channel Funnels” in GA), most GA Conversion Reports are still based on the “last click”. That means that every new traffic source overrides the previous traffic source. Only direct traffic does not! So by counting domain-keyword traffic as “direct traffic”, more ads may get a conversion attributed to themselves. Take this typical scenario for example:
    1. Someone originally comes to your site through a click on an ad somewhere. Google Analytics Traffic Source / Medium will be “MyAdnetwork | cpc”.
    2. The user becomes interested in your products, remembers your site’s name, but does not buy anything. The next day he comes back, but he just types your site’s name in his Omnibox, then clicks on the search result to your site and buys a gold mine for 2 billion dollars from your online shop.
    3. In the old world, Google Organic Search would get the credit for this monstrous conversion. In the new world of the Omniboxes, this second visit is “direct traffic” (in most cases) and the credit goes to your ad.

Have you discovered a similar trend on your site?

Has your site experienced a similar decline of branded search traffic from Chrome users? And do you have an idea what could be the exact logic behind this? Because as I wrote, it does not work in 100% of the cases and not with all domains. Maybe you know more and can chime in in the comments section? Thank you!

Web Analytics: How deep should you dig?

June 4, 2013 by Ralf Haberich 1 Comment

Nothing is more important than knowledge in professional life. Contextual knowledge, knowledge of usable networks, sources and future developments. Nothing should be more important in a company (apart of course from the people who work with the data) than data. Only reliable data sources can provide managers with information on historical successes and current and future target achievements. Only data provides a usable, combinable and valid source of assessable decisions.

Web Analytics is an integral part of this vital data flow for entrepreneurs, managers and experts. Web Analytics may act as primary and/or complementary source of knowledge and is therefore indispensable, especially in the future.

Analytical Benefit

How much benefit can be derived from web analysis that provides optimization options based on metrics and analytics reporting? The general answer is certainly “a lot!”, although subjectivity will always augment final decision making.

However, in this process of analysis remember to apply the law of Gossen. We all know Gossen’s law of diminishing marginal utility – even in terms of web analytics and conversion optimization Gossen’s Law comes into play.

A redesign of email format might lead to increased newsletter registrations. Avoiding getting lost in the minutest detail, probably also helps the conversion. Even a minimal chance of synergy between two campaigns may have a positive effect on sales.

But at what price?

At what cost?

Gossen´s law

There is the law of diminishing marginal utility of the economy (or First Gossen’s law), which is based on the assumption that the magnitude of a given pleasure decreases continuously as we continue to satisfy it until, at last, saturation occurs. Applying this in a digital context, it can be represented, albeit simply, here in this chart:

Gossen Law in Digital Analytics

The more investment a web analyst makes in a project or a general optimization, the smaller the benefit over time. A quick optimization change is often the beginning of a project; leading to more continuous improvement or conversion increases which are only achievable with significantly higher costs. This law of diminishing marginal utility is universal enough to be frequently observed in practice with users!

In order to make the available (though often necessary) small steps, requires a maximum effort of the staff. But – and here is the crux of this model – in most cases it is necessary to accurately perform these minor improvements, or to gain a competitive edge through detailed work, in order to become a successful online store rather than a less successful one. Human effort is required to succeed in taking a confusing, not goal-orientated, search and redesigning it to create a perfectly designed internal search tool – so that you might achieve that essential digital competitive advantage.

The real challenge is that we have long since arrived, in many areas of the knowledge economy, at the point of the minimum marginal utility, so that the difference is small, but crucial. Relevant optimization and targeted increased conversion that can identify a market difference – can only be achieved with great effort. This effort must always be set against the potential benefits. Economic models that are applicable across a range of sectors and which have stood the test of time are becoming increasingly popular. Be it the phenomenon of over-optimization or the Six Sigma DMAIC cycle (Define, Measure, Act, Invest, Control). 

Nowadays a lot of companies still struggle with the benefits of using Web Analytics software. This will change and more and more departments will see the value of data-driven decisions. So, do not only feed your software with data – feed your brain with knowledge and experience. As soon as you come to a border and remind yourself on Gossen´s law; you need to decide if it is worth investing the additional efforts to get close to perfection or if you should concentrate on parallel projects within Digital Business. 

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