Discount UK

Article source: http://www.collegerecruiter.com/blog/2012/05/29/developing-your-executive-brand-on-linkedin/

In his Smashing Magazine response to Jakob Nielsen’s directive to build separate desktop and mobile sites, Bruce Lawson used the line “you never know better than your users what content they want” to argue that we shouldn’t be building separate mobile websites. I would agree with him that you never know better than your users what content they want, but would argue that’s usually a reason to build a separate mobile website.

In search, we have the benefit of user queries that tell us what the majority of users want, and those queries often tell us that they’re looking for different things than what’s on the desktop site.

I’ve illustrated this discrepancy in the past with individual examples from State Farm, Walgreens and others, but I wanted to see if these were isolated examples, or if they were the rule rather than the exception.

To find out, I used the category keyword lists in the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, supplemented with the top queries per related category in Google Insights for Search, to get a better sense of whether mobile searchers are looking for different things in different frequencies than their desktop counterparts.

It turns out they are, but more so for certain categories.

For example, if you have a restaurant or a local business that provides entertainment, a large portion of the keywords in your category (21% of the total) are searched more from mobile devices than desktops or laptops.

This includes the high funnel keywords, [restaurants], [restaurant], [bars], and [fast food]. According to Google search volumes, 88% of the total search volume for the keyword [restaurants] comes from mobile devices, and 97% of the total volume from [bars] comes from mobile devices.

It’s not an accident, then, that Google lists restaurants and bars on their smartphone browser UI homepage and not on their desktop UI.

Ironically, according to a recent Restaurant Sciences industry study, 95% of independent restaurants do not have a mobile website, and only about half of chain restaurants have some sort of mobile site.

Real-World Mobile Desktop Queries

Word cloud of top 200 dining and nightlife keywords on Google desktop search

When we look at the top two hundred queries for desktop versus the top two hundred queries that have more mobile volume than desktop volume, we start to get a sense of what mobile searchers in the category need, and it’s not the same as what desktop searchers are looking for.

Desktop searchers are mostly looking for coupons, menus, locations, and specific names of restuarants like McDonald’s or TGI Friday’s. What’s more, they’re putting geomodifiers like Atlanta, New York or Puerto Rico to find a location in a specific area.

However, when we look at a visualization of mobile search queries, we see a different story. A lot of the same words appear, but with more or less frequency, and some of the words are absent entirely. Other words appear (like “number” and “nearest”) that didn’t appear in the desktop list.

Word cloud of top 200 words primary mobile searchers use on Google mobile search

For example, we can see that while desktop searchers were looking for locations of restaurants, they’re looking for coupons and menus more often.

Where mobile searchers are mostly not looking for coupons in this category, are looking for menus, but much less than they are for locations, which is clearly the most repeated word in the query list by far.

What’s more, they’re not putting in specific locations, but seem to be expecting the search engine to find the location nearest them without that information (e.g. “nearest”).

In fact, the keyword [restaurants near me] has almost 10,000 searches per month on desktop computers, but four times that on mobile devices. Beyond that, they’re looking for hours and phone numbers more with the mobile site.

This is consistent with recent Google smartphone research, which found that 94% of US-based smartphone users look for local information on their phone and 90% take action a result, such as making a purchase or contacting the business.

If you represent a restaurant or bar, you don’t want to serve your mobile searcher printable coupons, job applications or a Flash animation illustrating how irresistible your atmosphere is, as there’s a very good chance that user is just looking for a phone number, directions, or hours.

They have different goals than the desktop searcher, as illustrated by their queries, and if you try to serve them the same experience with a lot of content hidden, you’re just going to slow them down and make it more difficult for them to achieve their goals.

This is probably why the major chain restaurants that do have mobile sites (e.g. Wendy’s, McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Domino’s, etc.) serve stripped down versions at mobile subdomains or subfolders with the Store Locator foregrounded instead of a responsive home page at the same URL with a lot of hidden content reformatted for mobile searchers.

We know what the mobile searchers want in the case of dining and nightlife, and it’s not what desktop searchers want, generally. Providing them a mobile experience at an m dot subdomain makes sense in this case.

To Bruce Lawson’s point, however, there still could be searchers looking for content that most mobile searchers aren’t looking for, and they should still be able to access that content. By providing a mobile home page and making duplicate pages responsive, we should be able to give all searchers a positive user experience regardless of what they’re looking for and from which device (unless their device doesn’t support media queries, that is).

How To Target Mobile Searches

How do you know if your audience has different search behavior on mobile devices than on desktop computers?

Use the research summary chart below as a guide. Based on Google search volume and queries, the categories at the top of the chart are more likely to require a separate URL for the mobile home page, while the categories toward the bottom of the list are less likely to have differences in user behavior and are more likely to benefit from a single site made responsive.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool list sorted by mobile search variance. Categories most in need of dedicated mobile content toward the top.

If you’re going to SMX Advanced in Seattle in June, be sure to attend the iSEO: Doing Mobile Search Engine Optimization Right session for more details on how this research was done, and what it could mean for your business. If you won’t be able to make it this year, contact me through the author contact form for specific vertical info.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: Mobile Search | Search Marketing: Mobile | Search Marketing: Search Term Research | SEO: Mobile Search

Article source: http://searchengineland.com/why-restaurants-and-other-local-businesses-need-mobile-not-responsive-sites-122002

All too often, I get a fair amount of frantic emails from people who are seeing a dropoff in rankings and/or traffic after the latest algorithmic update and are looking for help or just a second opinion.

Sometimes a keyword that has been number 2 for 8 months in a row moves down a spot to number 3. Sometimes one drops off the first page and isn’t in the top 100. Sometimes traffic almost completely dies. In any case, it creates panic.

Most people don’t think very clearly when they panic. Their immediate response is something drastic, their directives are to take place yesterday, and they start second-guessing everything else.

Now, I will panic about some things (no sea salt potato chips in the house, Netflix won’t work properly) but I don’t panic about rankings. Yes, a drop off can indicate a long-term problem that you need to fix, but in many cases, stopping what you’re doing or reversing direction can create even more problems down the road.

Look At Where Your Traffic Is Coming From

If you get very little traffic from Google and/or your Google rankings take a beating, making big changes can cause detrimental effects in those other sources. If you rank well for your money keywords in Bing and you’re getting good traffic and conversions there, making changes to keep up in Google could potentially hurt you.

Right after the Penguin update, my agency’s site was nowhere to be found in Google. We didn’t rank for our brand name (something that had never happened before) and other SEOs had this same problem.

Now, while I’ve done some potentially questionable stuff on behalf of clients, I have never done anything shady with our own site and it has a clean profile. I couldn’t find our site ranking for my name, my husband/partner’s name, or any of the terms that we used to rank for, at least not in the top 50 results.

You know how much traffic we lost? Very, very little. Most of our traffic comes from referral sites. I did nothing, waited it out, and we were back where we’d been, 48 hours later. I’m still not sure what happened.

Try To Stop Chasing The Algorithm

First of all, you’ll never catch it. Secondly, what makes you rank well in Google may not create more traffic or conversions. People don’t trust the first results in the same way that they used to anyway.

If you’re constantly changing strategy, how can you tell what’s going to work for you in the long run? Everyone went after money keywords and saw great rankings for awhile for those terms, then people started to focus on brand and URL keywords. We talked about how noise links were part of a natural profile.

Now, the rug has been pulled out from under all of us and even people who can’t figure out what they could have done wrong are suffering. People who know exactly what they’ve done wrong are cleaning up their messes and starting to capitalize on something else that they will eventually have to clean up.

Make Sure Your Site Provides A Good User Experience

Searchers want a quick and easy user experience on your site, and if you’re number 2 but your payment process is laborious and you suddenly reveal a massive shipping cost of $12.95 per item on the last step of the process, you’re probably not going to get as many conversions as you would if you were number 2, payment could be completed in 3 easy steps, and you revealed (on the homepage and the first page of the payment process) that shipping is free.

There’s a lot more to what’s going on with your site than simply ranking factors but many webmasters forget this when they panic.

Focus On Other Sources Of Traffic

As I have said before, it’s critical that we all diversify our sources of traffic. If you analyze your traffic and find that you are not getting much from your social media campaigns that you have in place, you need to get on the ball and maximize those.

If you’re in the position where your business would be crushed if you were penalized or deindexed in Google, you need to start making sure that you can be found through referral links on other sites (like through guest posting or writing a regular column for a site) and that people know your brand well enough that they can just type in the URL and get to you that way.

If your brand isn’t that well known, you need to focus on offline marketing so that it becomes more well known. Go speak at an event and give everyone your business card. You can’t continue to count on being in Google’s good graces even if you currently are.

Try Not To Wait Until Something Bad Happens

This is much easier said than done of course. If what you’ve done is working well right now, why mess with it? Even if the latest update hasn’t negatively impacted you, read all that you can about what it targets, and see where you stand. If you’re relying on 75% exact match anchors that are money keywords and you’re the only site left standing, you might want to consider switching it up before you get hit, too.

In the end, you can do everything the “right” way and still the algorithms will change. Some sites will not perform as well as they once did and accidents will happen. This is a game of art and science.

Know that if you haven’t yet suffered online, there’s always a potential risk, whether it’s a traffic loss, rankings loss, penalty, deindexing, etc. And, like they say in the financial industry, spread the risk. Hopefully you’ll panic less in the long run.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: How To | How To: Links | Intermediate | Link Building | Link Building: General | Link Week

Article source: http://searchengineland.com/how-to-panic-proof-your-link-campaign-122096

I’ve got a joke for ya: What has 250,000 URLs, a content team of 15 people and three target keywords?

Your website.

I understand SEO’s keyword obsession. It’s hard to let go, and a nice, high ranking for a really juicy phrase tends to justify budget. But, as I’ve written before, there’s more to justifying enterprise SEO than keywords alone.

In fact, in enterprise SEO, I’d say keywords should be the last thing you look at. You can get your biggest, best wins with a a general focus on site visibility, content clarity and site performance. Here’s why:

Someone’s Already Picked Your Keywords

Most enterprises have been around a while. If you fit that description, you already have a brand. Your audience already uses certain non-branded phrases to find you. And there are hundreds or thousands more long-tail terms that they’re using.

But you’re not getting any traffic from those terms, because you don’t appear. See “You’ve got bigger problems” below.

You’ve Got Bigger Problems

Show me a website larger than 10,000 pages, and I’ll show you a site with:

• Massive duplication
• Thousands of un-crawled pages
• Poor page load times
• Improper response code configuration
• Broken external and internal links
• Utterly nondescript, probably duplicate title tags on at least 10% of all pages
• Content slightly less compelling than Ishtar (the movie, not the deity)

So far this year, we’ve crawled and tested 10-15 sites I’d qualify as ‘enterprise’. Every one of them had the problems above. Address any three of them, and you build organic traffic.

If Sears wants to rank for dozens of ‘automotive’ phrases, they should fix this 302.

The bigger the site, the more easy wins you’ve got. Go after those first — each easy win boosts every page’s SEO-readiness just a bit. Multiply that by every page on your site = Big Wins.

Keyword Selection In A Large Organization = Herding Angry Cats

Have you ever tried to get 5+ product teams to agree on a keyword set?

If you want a preview:

1. Get four grumpy, hungry alley cats.
2. Hold them in opposite, equidistant corners of the room.
3. Put a nice big chunk of tuna in the middle.
4. Let go of the cats.

When you send out the fateful “We’re starting an SEO campaign. Please send keywords.” e-mail, it’s like that, only uglier.

Everyone wants their ‘share’ of the keyword ‘pie’. Product managers who have poo-poo’ed the idea of SEO for years suddenly buy you lunch. Sales teams start calling you complaining they lost a sale because the company isn’t #1 for ‘Failover hardware with bright green enclosures.’

As difficult as it may be to convince your VP that yes, shaving 1 second off site-wide page load times is worth it, getting everyone in a large organization to agree on a keyword set is even harder.

Don’t say I didn’t warn ya.

Keywords Are Getting Harder To Track

With Google’s lovely not provided rollout, it got a whole lot harder to track keyword-specific traffic.

You can track:

• Leads from organic search
• Overall traffic from organic search
• SEO’s contribution to the bottom line

And those metrics are what really matter.

It’s About Business Objectives, Not keywords

Most important: Enterprise SEO is not about a few fat head keywords. It’s about visibility and discoverability in the long tail. That’s the best path to a natural rise in the rankings for relevant ‘head’ terms, anyway.

Your efforts help a page on your site rank for ‘legacy COBOL integration’. But they do more than that: They help you optimize for ‘COBOL integration’ and ‘integration’ at the same time. You get the early long-tail gains while building for more competitive terms later on. Trying to optimize your homepage for ‘integration’ is like emptying the Pacific Ocean with a thimble. You won’t make much progress.

Enterprise SEO is all about business objectives. I know what you’re thinking: All SEO is about business objectives. True. But in enterprise SEO a focus on visibility, clarity and site performance achieves those objectives far more easily than chasing a keyword list.

So please, do your brand a favor: Stop worrying out keywords. Focus on business objectives, instead.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: Enterprise SEO

Article source: http://searchengineland.com/why-enterprise-seo-shouldnt-focus-solely-on-keywords-122656

The Elk Grove Regional Scholarship Foundation, formerly the Elk Grove Foundation, is hosting “Spotlight at the Ranch” Barbecue Blues on Sunday, June 10.  It will be held at the William Mosher historical ranch, 10161 Grant Line Road from 1 to 7 p.m. Tickets are $20, children under 12 free.

We just completed in early May our “Spotlight on Excellence” scholarship evening where the foundation gave 186 scholarships totaling over $160,000 to seniors in the Elk Grove Unified School District.

The “Spotlight on Excellence” dinner and program  is held at the First Baptist Church at a sit-down dinner where scholarship donors and the recipients have the opportunity to meet, eat, and receive their scholarships in an “academy award ceremony” atmosphere.

We don’t use the donor funds for anything other than scholarships.

To help fund the evening, the donors buy their own tickets, we ask for donations and low dollar sponsorships, and utilize our service clubs to provide both monetary and physical assistance.

One of the fundraisers for the evening is the raffle. Ol’ dad, besides co-chair, heads up the raffle. We raised $2,000 on it this year. We had great prizes from this group of civic and business folks:

Boulevard Bistro, Dalin Jewelers, Pat and Lisa Hume, Capital Nursery, All Clear Pool and Spa, Valley Motor Parts/Boulevard Motors, Trader Joe’s, Raleys at Elk Grove and Franklin boulevards, Bel Air at Calvine and Elk Grove-Florin roads, Sprouts Farmers Market, Grocery Outlet Bargain Market, Nugget Market, Soroptomist International of Rio Cosumnes and the Joe Tallerico family and more.

If you have the opportunity, thank them.

We receive widespread community support for the Elk Grove Regional Scholarship Foundation. John Shook and right arm Arnie Adreani head it.

The foundation board members pay a good piece of change for membership to add money for the fund.

Then on Sept. 6 we will have the “Spotlight on Elk Grove,” our other fundraiser.

But once again we offer a “deal” on tickets . For the Barbecue and Blues tickets are $20 each. We have 10 tickets for $15 – a $5 dollar savings to our readers.  They are at the Elk Grove Citizen office, 8970 Elk Grove Boulevard, and ask for June.

Enjoy the barbecue and blues event. Music is by Mick Martin and the Blues Rockers, Gary Mendoza Band, Nat Brown and Val Star.

It is all in the setting of one of Elk Grove’s treasures, the Mosher Ranch. See ya there.

Article source: http://www.egcitizen.com/articles/2012/05/29/news/doc4fc552eb5749d240261883.txt

Have you ever needed prescription medication and wondered how you would be able to afford it?

The Greater Susquehanna Valley United Way is spreading the word about a free program that can save folks up to 70 percent on prescription drugs.

It may sound like it is too good to be true, but according to the United Way it’s not.

The Family Wize Program is for everyone, but it is geared towards people with little to no health insurance.

Monica Leitzel works for Susquehanna University but has off during the summer.  She likes it that way so she can spend time with her children at their home in Sunbury, but not working during the summer concerns her in other ways.

“Right now I don’t have a prescription plan. I don’t know if I even have insurance right now. My children have ACCESS. I had to pay for my prescriptions,” Leitzel said.

According to Liz Grove of the United Way, Leitzel is not alone.  The United Way said one in four people in Northumberland County does not have health insurance.

That’s why the agency is getting the word out about the Family Wize Program. It’s a free, national prescription discount program. Funded by the pharmaceutical industry. Grove said Family Wize can save people up to 70 percent on medications.

“If they have medication they should take it daily. They should not be trying to figure out if they should pay for a meal to eat or buy their prescription medication,” Grove said.

Signing up for the program is easy and you can do it from your cell phone. You just text the word ‘family’ to 700700 and click send.  Almost immediately you will get a return confirmation which you take to the pharmacy.

You can also stop by the Great Susquehanna Valley United Way in Sunbury and get a free discount coupon or apply online.

“I think it’s a great thing for people that are down on their luck and need somewhere to go. It will help out tremendously people that are low income and don’t have the means to get regular insurance,” said Kenneth Jenkins of Sunbury.

“It will save money on my part. I can get them more toys and clothes and things they need,” Leitzel added.

The United Way said the average savings from the Family Wize Program is $17 per prescription and eight out of 10 times you will save money.

Article source: http://wnep.com/2012/05/29/discount-prescription-drug-program/

↑View the full-size infographic ↑

Google tells us that 97 percent of Americans use search to find local businesses, and we know 21 percent of big brands are dedicating up to one-quarter of their internet marketing budgets to local targeting this year. Whether you have a B2C storefront or you’re a B2B company trying to reach key audiences in different communities, it’s time to get serious about your online local marketing strategy – take it from this San Francisco searcher!

In the first part of Your Local SEO Blueprint, I covered tips on hitting the basics of local SEO: Determining the key local ranking factors, claiming all of your business listings and optimizing your site with street addresses. (Be sure to check out the Local SEO Blueprint: Part One if you missed it.) While those are essential to local SEO, you also have to consider how you can engage local audiences.

Just as content marketing is key to SEO, local content marketing can help fuel your local SEO. With the right targeting, your website content can naturally build your local search- and social-friendliness to boost your visibility among nearby searchers.

In Part Two of this local SEO series, we’ll go over to create targeted local content to influence nearby shoppers. Brafton’s Amy Ahrens and Katherine Griwert have created a related infographic to help you through the process.

Here’s how you can get started:

Step 1: Use Analytics to discover your key demographics

Google Analytics traffic location insights

Use Google Analytics to discover regional details about your site visitors. By narrowing down the state and city results under the ‘Demographic’ section, you can easily view visitor location data to see where you have the biggest audience (and how you may need to redouble your efforts to gain a following in communities that aren’t fueling much traffic).

You can incorporate local keywords into your paid search and SEO strategy. Use trusty AdWords to help you out, and then add location to standard on-page optimization best practices – title, description, relevant image names, etc.You can even get hyper local, which will help you uncover lucrative keyword opportunities. For instance, you can narrow down results to view how many page views your site pulled in from Berkeley versus Marin, and target keywords accordingly to reach clients and prospects in those places.

Step 2: Find local keywords

If you’re using AdWords to shape keywords, be sure to pay attention to local search volumes around your core terms. You may discover some geo-modifiers that can help you prioritize your keyword list.  Adding hyper-local modifiers is easy, but if you’re targeting a broader region, check out 5minutesite.com for simple, but thorough, location-based modifier suggestions.

Google Insights for Search heatmap

Also, check out Google Insights for Search for detailed regional info about your targeted keywords. You can create specific geographic filters, and view data from years at a time through easy to read maps and graphs. The heatmaps give you a sense of where phrases are most commonly searched.

Use local keywords and landing pages to target paid search

I know we said this was a local SEO tool, but let’s sneak in a little paid search info – because that’s another way to boost your local visibility!

On top of adding local keywords to your PPC campaigns, you can update paid search campaigns with new targeting features.  Google has a fairly new zip code targeting feature, which it has said marketers have used to more easily track ROI. (At ad:tech SF, Google cited the case of one business that successfully tracked its local PPC to learn that $1 spend corresponded to $5 in sales.)

Google offers clear resources for targeting your paid search campaigns to local audiences. It also offers instructions on how to connect your Google Places listings to your paid search ads.

And don’t forget – your locally targeted PPC campaigns should be supported by locally optimized landing pages!

Step 3: Create local-friendly content marketing

Once you have your local keywords and you’ve used them for the purposes of on-page optimization, also think about how you can build great content around them.

Visit local forums to see what prospects in your area are talking about or asking about the most. You can address their concerns with content that has broad reach, but still take advantage of your local keywords and leverage the fact that your brand knows this is on “local shoppers’ minds.”

Consult Twitter’s trending topics tab or Insights for search to measure rising social buzz and search activity around topics in different regions. And make sure you’re on top of local news. You can subscribe to community-focused media outlets, or set up Google Alerts that deliver relevant headlines right to your inbox. (You can learn about trending topics and ‘hot searches’ through Google Trends as well.)

When it comes to creating content around these topics, think outside the box: Create an infographic that combines your business offerings with local trends. Promote it with local audiences on social to catch more links and shares from the audiences you want to be visible to.

Finally, add rich snippets (information-rich microdata!) that disclose your location.

Another thing to consider: Cultivate reviews, testimonials and user-generated content

Reviews are huge in local search. The extent to which they impact a Google Places page’s rank is debated, but they certainly encourage click-throughs on Places and other business listing sites. In fact, foursquare’s Explore tool recently added more features that help users search through reviews to find businesses based on desired characteristics, like ambiance.

You can consider rewarding loyal fans for adding positive reviews and ask them to give authentic ones instead of anonymous ones (these might look spammy and you don’t want that held against you). And don’t live in fear of negative reviews – respond to them and use them to make your business better.

Step 4: Measure, modify, repeat

Do you see yourself getting more website traffic from the targeted regions after implementing these practices? (Check back in Google Analytics!) Are your keyword referrals from localized keywords rising over time?

How about foot traffic? Is it picking up? Where are customers saying they found you?

Brafton has reported that marketers expect local efforts to yield big returns. Yet, 58 percent have are not actively monitoring ROI for their localized content marketing efforts. It’s crucial to have an analytics and reporting process in place with local initiatives, as with any other content marketing campaign.

You have to update the keywords, the content types and the platforms you use to enhance local SEO on an ongoing basis. The local search market is evolving and growing and so should your strategy.

Article source: http://www.brafton.com/blog/your-local-seo-blueprint-make-content-marketing-drive-local-seo-infographic

Throughout the week, the Google have been busy rolling their new AdWords feature, “Auction Insights” out into all existing accounts. For those who have not yet heard about the new feature, it basically allows you to select any given keyword within your AdWords account, and then gain insight into how you’re performing for that keyword compared to other advertisers that are also bidding on the keyword – don’t start panicking too quickly though! Google have assured us that no actual account data will be shared with your competitors. The only information that the report shares is information that could already be obtained by running Google searches manually or with a scraping bot.

The reported metrics include:

• Impression share (the percentage of time you and your competitor’s ad appears for searches on Google).
• Average position (the average ad position for you and your competitors).
• Overlap rate (the rate at which you and your competitors appear for the same search).
• Position above rate (how often your competitor’s adverts appear above ours for a search).
• Top of page percent (the rate at which you and your competitors ads appear at the top of the page rather than the right hand side).

Here’s a screenshot to show you what it looks like:

So, onto the interesting part. Now that I have this new data for my account, how do I use it to improve my campaign performance? Here are a few ideas!

1). High quality keyword discovery.

You might think that you have covered all bases with your campaign, but the truth is that there will always be areas that you’ve missed. Your competitors will have missed a lot too, however they may sometimes know something you don’t. Regularly monitoring these Auction Insight reports will allow you to see which keywords some of your major competitors are putting a heavy focus on. When you see that a competitor has a high ‘Impression Share’ and ‘Top of Page Rate’ for example, the kinds of questions you should be asking are “Why is this person ensuring they have such high exposure for the keyword in question?” “Could this suggest the keyword is converting well for them?” These sorts of questions might prompt you to pay more attention to keywords within your campaign that you otherwise might have forgotten about.

2). Gain insight into your competitor’s media budgets.

While this report will not actually tell you how much your competitors are spending, it does tell you how often they appear on Google for specific keywords, as well as how often they’re at the top of the page. If you find that a particular competitor is gaining close to 100% impression share for a lot of keywords, and also appearing at the top of the page most of the time, then this suggests that they probably have a large budget allocated to AdWords – or at least a bigger budget than any of its other competitors. This might mean it’s time to lift your spend to get a bigger slice of that online pie!

3). Identify high performing competitor landing pages.

Similarly to the process mentioned in point 2, if you notice a particular website with an extremely high impression share top of page rate for a long period of time – particularly for a competitive keyword, then this might suggest that they’re seeing some pretty strong results from the keyword. I’d recommend taking a good look at their website and identifying which areas of the page could be helping to achieve a high conversion rate. Do they have strong offers listed on the page? Clear contact details? An appealing layout? This will help you to think of new ways to improve your own landing pages.

These are a few ways that the tool can be used to help you with your campaign, however as the tool is very new I’m sure there will be plenty of information being shared over the next month by people  using the tool in other useful ways. Would love to hear your thoughts on how you’ll be using it!

Article source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/using-the-adwords-auction-insights-feature-to-improve-your-marketing-efforts/44042/

By Andrew Redfern @ 29th May 2012 11:53 am

Poor URL structure is one of the most common debilitating factors, which stands in the way of a successful SEO campaign. Great search engine optimisation should include a focus on the structure of URLs.

By neglecting URL structure and allowing your URLs to fall into disarray, you run the risk of harming your SEO performance.

Thankfully, there are a number ways in which to prevent this; from getting your structure right first time to fixing up some of the more common URL problems.

-    Word Delimiters – Using hyphens or underscores will not have a negative effect on your SEO performance; though hyphens seems to perform better in both SEO and readability terms. It is advisable, however, to not adjoin words with other characters.
-    Length – A shorter URL is always more advisable than a longer one. Ideally, your URL will contain no more than 5 words. Avoid the use of abbreviations, stop words or really short SEO keywords.
-    Keywords – Keywords are the bread and butter of a successful SEO strategy and it can prove very helpful to include them in your URL. Beware, however, that stuffing too many keywords into your address could have the adverse effect of appearing less trustworthy. Keyword stuffing is a black hat SEO technique.
-    Numbers – One of the most problematic factors when using numbers in SEO and URLs is that search engines can mistake these numbers for dates, and this can subsequently make your content appear outdated. Avoid number wherever possible.
-    Redirects – On occasions, you may be required to change your URLs. Using a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one can prevent any problems arising.

Andrew Redfern, Director of Hitsearch, said: “Do not underestimate the importance of a URL to your SEO strategy. To be most effective, the optimisation of your URL should be just one of a number of measures to optimise your site and increase your performance within search rankings.”

Article source: http://www.hitsearchlimited.com/news/9993613/

You spend time extracting data about AdWords campaigns to send to your clients, your boss, and other stakeholders. But more important for your performance is the data you extract for yourself, to really analyze issues. Let’s look at what you should take into consideration when preparing data for analysis.

This Isn’t Reporting.

The most important thing to keep in mind when analyzing your own data is that this isn’t a report. You don’t need to keep things as simple as possible, and you don’t need to dumb things down.

If the problem in your campaign level stats is being caused by a single keyword, you need to know which keyword. So you need keyword level data. If things change on a daily basis, you can’t do your analysis using weekly data.

What Should I Download?

Everything.

Get more data than you think you need, and don’t try to analyze it in the AdWords interface, or even your reporting system. Get this into a spreadsheet so that you can package it whichever way you need.

AdWords has an intuitive way to download data. Set up the report you want to see in the main interface, and hit the download button. Your date ranges, filters, sorting, and segments will all be respected and included correctly in the download.

• Date ranges: If you intend to do time analysis, get a longer date range than you expect to need. You will get more context for the changes in the period you mean to analyze. If you want to see your winter traffic against your summer traffic, you need last winter’s traffic to make an accurate judgment. Is winter always a lower volume season, or was last winter really great?
• Filters: You’re going to end up downloading a lot of data. Seriously loads. With that in mind, use filters judiciously to get rid of anything you’re not going to need (e.g., filtering out keywords with no impressions in your date range). They haven’t contributed to the traffic or spend, so are likely to be expendable for your analysis.

• Segments: This is where it gets awesome. In the interface you can apply one segment at a time, but when downloading a report you can apply three. Segments provide you with a way to split your data out (e.g., if you are looking at keyword data over a one week period and apply a segment of “day” then each keyword would now have 7 entries: “keyword one, day one” “keyword one, day two” etc.).

If you were to apply a second segment (e.g., device) then you’d now get even more entries per keyword: “keyword one, day one, desktops” “keyword one, day one, mobiles” and so on.

You can see that over a long time period with several segments you’re talking about a lot of rows of data. You can’t open more than about a million rows in a single sheet in Excel, so consider that when putting your data together.

For any time series analysis you’re going to want to keep a time-based segment involved. The other two most common segments you’ll want are likely to be Device and Top vs Other. These two are crucial for many kinds of campaign analysis since the behavior of users in each situation is likely to be so disparate.

You’re Going to Love Pivot Tables…

Pivot tables appear much more intimidating than they really are, because the interface to use them is so different from the rest of Excel. Different, but better.

The purpose of a pivot table is to allow you to grab any set of metrics by any dimension in your dataset. You may have downloaded keyword data, but each row will have a campaign and an ad group associated with it. By setting campaigns as your row labels and clicks as your data, Excel will add up all the clicks which match that row label (e.g., total campaign clicks).

So you can do campaign or ad group analysis, even from your keyword-level dataset. In fact, you can split by your segments too, so you can see total clicks, impressions, etc by device, or by top vs other.

For most pieces of analysis it should be a default to start off by putting your data into a pivot table, and work from there.

Pivot Tables 1, 2, 3

Once you create your pivot table you will have four boxes. Drag any field (e.g. column from your dataset) into a box to set it to have these features:

• Report Filter. This will give you a drop-down to filter in (or out) particular items (e.g., only include items where the “Device” field is “mobile”).
• Row Labels. Drag any field here to make it be the set of rows for your new table. Every unique entry will have one row, and any values will be summed (or counted, or averaged) for every item in your dataset where this field matches.
• Values. The actual values you want to see, e.g. clicks, cost, etc.

Column Labels. This gives you an ability to add a second dimension and see the results as a flat table. In this scenario you’d usually only add a single value, and you’d be able to find the intersection of your rows and columns to find the right value. This might be something like “Top vs Other” if your value is impressions. Then if your row labels are campaigns you’d be able to see the total impressions in the banner vs the right hand side for that campaign.

It’s important to note that if you’re using column labels you’re likely to also want to change the way the values are displayed. Click on the field you’ve dragged to the Values box, and choose “Value field settings”. In the “Show Values As” tab you can choose “% of row total” to show each column as its percentage contribution to the total. Voila, you now have the proportion of impressions in top vs other.

If you aren’t using column labels you might instead choose to show the values as a percentage of the column total. So you could quickly and easily show something like the proportional contribution of each ad group to total spend. Throw in a device filter and you’ve got some interesting data.

Calculated Metrics

Pivot tables have a limitation. If you want a calculated metric in there you’re going to struggle. The default calculation is to sum all values matching that row’s field. To see why this is a problem, imagine you want to see click-through rate (CTR) per campaign from keyword data. Your table will show you a row for each campaign, with the total sum of CTR measures.

That’s bad. You can’t just add up CTR for each keyword to get overall CTR. You need an average. That’s lucky, because pivot tables have an “average” option, instead of a summation.

But that’s bad too. If keyword A has 10,000 impressions and a 3 percent CTR and keyword B has 1,000 impressions and a 10 percent CTR, using the “average” option in a pivot table will give you a value of 6.5 percent CTR. Which is clearly incorrect. Instead you need a weighted average.

Select a cell inside the pivot table and you’ll see the “PivotTable Tools” tabs appear in the ribbon. In there you have a drop-down labeled “Fields, Items Sets”. From this drop down choose “Calculated Field”.

Set up the calculation you need. In this case, clicks/impressions. What Excel will then do is create a whole new field, which is calculating correctly the sum of clicks, then dividing by the sum of impressions. Much better than adding up or averaging CTR values.

Pivot Charts

Make sure you’ve downloaded a time-based segment in your report if you want to do time series analysis. If you use “day” you’ll get a date. Use Excel functions to turn those into weeks or months if you need to.

If you choose to insert a pivot chart (or add a pivot chart to an existing pivot table) then you’ll be able to do the same drag and drop setup as before.

Drag your date to the horizontal axis, and drag your value(s) into the value box. Use calculated metrics if necessary. Now use the Legend field (equivalent of the Column Labels field on the pivot table) to set different series (e.g., drag device into the legend field to see your metric as separate lines for desktops, mobiles and tablets).

What This All Means.

With pivot tables and pivot charts you can package data by any field that you have in your dataset. But you need to have those fields available to begin with.

Within the constraint of trying to have fewer than 1 million separate lines of data, you can go with the maxim that more is better. You don’t want to set up your comparison and then say “I wish I could have filtered this by device!”

You can apply three segments to your report downloads. Use them all and use them wisely. The ability to slice and dice later on will make your job much easier.

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Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2180415/Downloads-Pivot-Tables-for-AdWords-Analysis