WebpageFX Weekly: Our top 10 blog posts of 2011

December 22nd, 2011 posted by Trevin Shirey 12:08PM | View Full Story

2011 was an awesome year for WebpageFX! We added new talent, were named one of the 50 Fastest Growing Companies in PA, received an Entrepreneur of the Year Award and were named the #1 SEO Agency by Heardable!

It was also an exciting year on our blog. 2011 brought more visitors than any other year to WebpageFX Weekly and our posts were featured on PC Mag, Search Engine Land, Sphinn and Web Pro News.

The above graph shows total visitors for our 10 most popular posts published in 2011. More info on each (including a link) is below. If you are in need of some good reading over the holiday, look no further than our top 10 blog post 0f 2011:

#10: 6 Pressing Google+ Questions Answered

In my opinion, to ensure Google+ doesn’t become defunct, 750 million people need to jump on the bandwagon. That means 750 million people need to abandon their comfortable Facebook personas and habits and learn an entirely new interface, albeit very similar to Facebook. They need to download a new app, add all of their friends and start +1-ing all the content they previously “liked”. These are some major hurdles to ask of people before they know whether or not it’s here to stay.

#9: Employee Awards

What does a team of award-winning web designers, brilliant (and I do mean brilliant) web developers, Google Certified PPC managers, seasoned SEO analysts, social media gurus and link building geniuses do when they’re not busy enhancing and optimizing websites, increasing web traffic and search engine rankings or making websites look absolutely stellar? Reward ourselves for all of our hard work of course … with awards to frame and hang up in our cubicles.

#8: SEO Alignment Chart

I have been obsessed with alignment for the past few months. I never played Dungeons & Dragons growing up (in fact the first time I saw it played was in this season’s awesome Community episode), but the concept of alignment has fascinated me since I learned about it. Which characters personify each alignment? Where do I fall? Where do my friends fit in? I have a long commute so I have a ton of time to think :-) . So in the spirit of obsession, here is my stab at an alignment chart for the SEO community. Notes, embed code, a detailed explanation of alignment, and references follow below.

#7: Google Plus Widget

Today, we released version 1.0 of our Google Plus Widget for WordPress! This plugin allows you to add a Google+ profile badge to your WordPress blog or website. Once installed, users can add you to their Google Plus network and you, in turn, can show off the number of followers in your circle.

#6: How We Increased Facebook Fans by 43% in 23 Days

Hands down, the most common question we get is “How do we increase our Facebook fans?” There are a million and a half ways to do this, but we’ve come up with a few specific methods that generate lots of quality fans without breaking the bank. Below are a few specific examples from one of the Facebook pages that we manage.

#5: 10 Things Users Need To Know About Facebook Timeline

Timeline marks the biggest update to Facebook’s design ever and considering the backlash the Facebook team receives for even the smallest of changes, I won’t be surprised if the reaction to Timeline reaches never-before-seen levels of vitriol. Already, their blog post announcing Timeline has been trolled to oblivion and the introduction video already has over 2,000 dislikes on YouTube.

#4: How To Study SEO in College

There is no such thing as an SEO degree. You can Google it and see some mostly shady results, but — as far as I know — nobody is walking around with a B.A. in SEO. That doesn’t mean that you can’t go to college and study SEO, though. You just have to get a little creative. My degree reads “B.A. Communication Arts with a focus in journalism,” but I studied and learned Internet marketing during my 4 years in school. How did I do it? I hustled. I was curious. I tried a bunch of different things and usually failed spectacularly. But I learned a ton.

#3: Notorious SEO: 10 Crack Commandments of Link Building

One of The Notorious B.I.G.’s greatest hits was “Ten Crack Commandments,” released in 1997. As the title suggests, Biggie rapped through his 10 commandments for selling crack in the 90s. I have no clue how ‘effective’ his tips were for his chosen trade, but it turns out they work pretty well when applied to link building.

#2: SPAM: More than an annoyance? (Infographic)

We discovered that a certain amount of Spam emails is actually the equivalent to the level of Green House Gas (GHG) emissions released from driving 3 feet.  Discover how far the number of 2010 spam emails can take you across the world!  You’ll be shocked!  We also highlight the nations most responsible for the furthered adverse impact of Spam’s GHG emissions on our environment.  Our hope is that awareness may create change.  And a great start to doing your part is by personally installing a spam filter on you’re own email account, forwarding spam emails to spam@uce.gov, as well as informing others!

#1: App Store Wars (Infographic)

We compared the Apple App Store, Android Market, Blackberry App World, and the Nokia, Palm and Windows Phone 7 application directories. Statistics include OS distribution, percentage of paid vs. free apps in each directory, average apps downloaded by device, average app cost, and total 2010 revenue from all apps sold.

http://www.webpagefx.com/blog/general/how-we-increased-facebook-fans-by-43-percent-in-23-days/

Posted in Internet

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Comprehensive Multi-Channel Conversion Reporting in Google Analytics

December 15th, 2011 posted by Xander Becket 12:08PM | View Full Story

Now that Google Analytics has blessed us with the Multi-Channel Funnel reports, you’ve got unprecedented access to your website visitors. But how do you segment this traffic effectively?

I’ve developed the following “Comprehensive” report to break it down. Don’t use this or exact revenue or traffic reporting, but rather for resource allocation. As in, “Should we put more money towards SEO or Facebook next year?”

Let’s have at it!

Getting Started

Go to the New Version of Google Analytics.

Under the Conversions tab at the left, click on Assisted Conversions.

The “Basic Channel Grouping” will appear, with all of the default Organic Search, Paid Advertising, Email, etc. channel groupings:

Go to the Channel Groupings blue link right below the graph. Click on “Copy Basic Channel Grouping template”.

This gives you Google’s default template. Now the fun begins!

Here’s the master list you’ll be going for:

You’ll need to edit most of the default groupings. But you can leave some the way they are.

*I’ve provided text copies of the form fields below each screenshot so you don’t have to type them in!

Creating Each Channel

1. (not provided)

This filters organic traffic where Google blocks the keyword. We want to remove this first because it can pollute the unbranded organic reports.

Fields to copy and paste:

  1. (not provided)
  2. google

2. Organic – Unbranded

This only displays traffic excluding your brand name. You’ll have to create a custom regular expression here that you will use in a couple other channels.

So take the lowest common denominator of your brand name and any popular products or people bringing in search traffic. We’ll use WebpageFX, Bill Craig (our President), and CrawlerFX, and any searches for “.com” for this example. Here’s that regular expression:

webp|craig|crawler|\.com

This regular expression matches anything containing webp OR craig OR crawler OR .com (with the . escaped), so theoretically anyone that has heard about us before.

Make a similar one based on your traffic, and have it ready.

For our Organic – Unbranded report, we want to EXCLUDE keywords matching this regular expression and INCLUDE the organic medium.

Fields to copy and paste:

  1. organic
  2. (your regex)

3. Organic – Branded

This is the same configuration as Organic – Unbranded, but we’re INCLUDING the branded traffic, rather than excluding it. Scott has pointed out that this step is unnecessary because any keywords not matching Organic – Unbranded would necessarily fall in this group. But I like symmetry :-)

Fields to copy and paste:

  1. organic
  2. (your regex)

4. Paid – Display

We want to pull out our Google Display ads before we get into the rest of the paid traffic so it doesn’t mess with the unbranded reports. This example just pulls ads on Google’s Display Network, as that’s the one we use most often.

Fields to copy and paste:

none

5. Paid – Unbranded

Use the same nifty regular expression you wrote for the Organic Channels. Google’s Basic Channel Grouping – Paid Advertising regular expression is awesome and captures all of the “cost per -” acronyms you can think of! So we’ll use that while excluding branded traffic.

Fields to copy and paste:

  1. ^(cpc|ppc|cpm|cpv|cpa|cpp)$
  2. (your regex)

6. Paid – Branded

Exact same as above except INCLUDE the branded traffic. Again, I like symmetry!

Fields to copy and paste:

  1. ^(cpc|ppc|cpm|cpv|cpa|cpp)$
  2. (your regex)

7. Direct

You shouldn’t need to touch this one. Google’s default Direct grouping gets it right.

Fields to copy and paste (if needed):

  1. (direct)
  2. (not set)
  3. (none)

8. Email

This one captures any traffic marked as Email. If you’re not using custom Google Analytics tracking codes in your email marketing, start!

Fields to copy and paste:

  1. email|eblast|newsletter (or however your email marketing is tagged)

9. Referral

Once again, Google’s default grouping gets it right.

Fields to copy and paste (if needed):

  1. referral

10. Twitter

We want to take out Twitter and Facebook traffic from all of the other Social Networks. So go into the purple Social Networks default channel grouping and copy out the Facebook and Twitter definitions that Google has already provided, and paste them somewhere.

Then paste them back into their own channel grouping to separate that traffic:

Fields to copy and paste:

  1. ^(.*\.)?twitter\.com$

11. Facebook

Same with Facebook as with Twitter. Now if you’re running Facebook ads or specific promotions on Facebook, I would tag your URLs with custom Analytics code and create a separate channel for that. Because this will include ALL traffic from Facebook, paid or not.

Fields to copy and paste:

  1. ^(.*\.)?facebook\.com$

12. Other Social Networks

This grouping, minus the deleted Facebook and Twitter, will match Google’s default exactly. You shouldn’t have to do anything but rename this one if you did steps 10 and 11 right.

Fields to copy and paste:

WAY too many!

13. Feed

If you’re running shopping feeds and tracking them via a custom URL, this will display it for you. Have I mentioned to start tracking outside advertising with custom Google Analytics tracking codes?

Fields to copy and paste:

  1. feed

One more thing: Set other traffic as source/medium

This sets any traffic not matched by our above rules as a source/medium. You’ll be able to see which of your traffic channels are not covered, then create custom segments based on those!

Save Channel Grouping and Voila!

Now you can see which channels drove the most Assisted and Last Interaction conversions, so you can allocate accordingly for 2012:

*Note: you’ll be able to view conversion values. I removed them for the client I used as an example.

Happy testing!

Tags: google analytics, multi-channel
Posted in Analytics

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The Blog About Nothing: How to Increase Your Rankings with Seinfeld

December 8th, 2011 posted by Scott Redgate 12:08PM | View Full Story

Seinfeld Logo
Who would have thought America’s favorite sitcom, Seinfeld, was created on the basic premises of search engine marketing (SEM)? Okay so maybe it wasn’t; but let’s have some fun and see how the two stack up. By referencing Seinfeld, we can easily recall several facets of search engine marketing that help increase your site’s overall presence on the web. Let’s meet the cast shall we:

George Costanza

“Hi, my name is George; I’m unemployed, and I live with my parents.”

George from Seinfeld

 

 

 

 

 

Arguably the funniest character on the show is George Costanza. He spends more time figuring out a way to avoid work than actually doing it! In almost every episode, two things are always discussed. One, George is cheap, and two, he’s bald. How can these two qualities help your efforts in ranking higher in the search engines? First, your site cannot be bald; rather, it should be filled with keyword-rich copy. Many professionals recommend writing strong relative content instead of maintaining a specific keyword density in an attempt to please Google. Be sure to always keep your site’s visitors in mind first while creating new copy.

Next up, Google recommends building high quality links to your site instead of going the “cheap” route and participating in link buying. One of Google’s recommendations is to “get involved in the community around your topic.” For example, if you own a bakery website, contribute to different blogs about baking desserts, delicious pie recipes, and so on. In doing so, you will positively increase your reputation and eventually drive people to your site. Keep in mind that results may take time, but it will be well worth it!

Kramer

“Boy, these pretzels are makin’ me thirsty!”

Kramer from Seinfeld

 

 

 

 

 

Seinfeld wouldn’t have been the show it was without Jerry’s unemployed, eccentric, always entertaining neighbor. Whether it be accidently burning down the cabin, committing mail fraud, or urinating in the parking garage, trouble always seems to find “Cosmo” Kramer. By excusing his many, many faults, viewers have fallen in love with the man who entered almost every episode by sliding through Jerry’s door.

Having a great entrance is pivotal not only in the show, but also for your website! If you truly want to get the most out of your pay-per-click advertising campaign, a custom landing page is crucial. Not only will this help improve your quality score, but you could potentially increase your return on investment by grabbing the attention of your visitors during the most critical time, namely the few seconds it takes them to decide whether your webpage is the solution to their search query. Make sure the page has a clean design with a compelling, and very obvious, call to action above the fold visitors are sure not to miss.

Elaine

“GET OUT!”

Elaine from Seinfeld

 

 

 

 

 

What would you say is the most memorable Elaine Benes moment in the 9 seasons Seinfeld aired? Chances are that her dancing skills at the office Christmas party come to mind. The way she danced caught the eye of everyone in the office. So what is one way you can catch search engine and user attention for keywords in which you are trying to rank higher? Proper keyword use in the title tag! Let’s say your bakery is called “Betsy’s Baked Goods”. You have a page dedicated to discussing apple pie recipes (you are trying to rank for this term) and your current title is “Baked Goods and Pies”. One helpful tip is to move the keyword to the start of the title, as this will help click through rate and rankings. The new title tag could be something like “Apple Pie Recipes | Old Fashioned Pies – Betsy’s Baked Goods”

Newman

“Jambalaya!”

Newman from Seinfeld

 

 

 

 

 

Once upon a time there lived a postal worker named Newman. Unlike the slogan, he didn’t deliver mail through “rain, sleet or even snow.” Jerry was unable to avoid Newman as he seemed to sneak up on him at the most inopportune times. Luckily, you do have control from search engines coming into different parts of your site in which they are unwelcome. On a site-wide level, simply “Disallow:” folders (directories) or pages in the robots.txt file. If configured properly, the robots.txt will restrict search engine robots from crawling the page. Keep in mind however, it does not keep the actual URL from being indexed if there are external links pointing towards it. My preferred method is to include specific instructions in the head section of the HTML document called the “Meta Robots Tag.” Some of the available commands include “NOINDEX” which prevents a particular page from being included in the index, and “NOFOLLOW” which will prevent a robot from trailing the links on a page.

Jerry Seinfeld

“I don’t wanna be a cowboy!”

Jerry Seinfeld

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are two absolute certainties in my day-to-day life. The first is that I will go to Starbucks and order a Venti Iced Coffee. The second is that when I turn on the television to watch Seinfeld, Jerry will have a new girlfriend. All of his girlfriends seem to be temporary, which leads me to my final point. If you are switching domain names or attempting to redirect a URL, be extremely cautious when employing a 302 redirect, indicating to search engines that the page is merely a temporary move. This redirect also passes 0% of the ranking power of a page. In most cases, you should use a 301 (permanent) redirect, as in this case, an estimated 95% of your link juice will be passed to the new page.

There you have it, one of the first ever comparisons of the Seinfeld characters to different aspects of SEM. This concludes the “The Blog About Nothing.”

Images by Sony Pictures

Tags: rankings, search, Search Engine Optimization, Seinfeld, seo
Posted in Google, Search Engine Optimization

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Bounce!: Why visitors leaving your site isn’t always a bad thing

December 1st, 2011 posted by Leona 12:08PM | View Full Story

[photo by sean dreilinger]

 

Bounce! Go ahead … it’s okay!

That’s right, I said it – Bounce!

The term “Bounce” or “Bounce Rate” has a negative connotation surrounding it when referring to site analytics. There are many instances when bounces are a typical aspect of traffic however, and it’s (gasp!) not always a bad thing.

Types of Content

Before you even begin looking at your analytics, it’s important to understand what type of visitor you are driving to your site, the anticipated lifecycle of these visitors and your actual goals for these pages.

Blogs – It is common for visitors to blogs to bounce. Many visitors find a link to a blog post from a blog they frequent; they visit the link, view the blog post and simply close it out. Now if you have a lot of valuable content and internal links in your blog post that refer to related content on the same topic found within your blog; you MIGHT be able to get visitors to travel further into your blog – but otherwise it’s the normal course of action.

Image Sharing, Image Galleries, etc. – If your site is mostly images or heavily relies on traffic from Google Images or people who are searching for images to view then it is likely your visitors will bounce. They will search on Google images or some sort of image search, view the image you have available and then bounce. They will likely return back to the image results of their original search and then continue to view other images on other sites. Now, if you add related images, similar images or can group images by a topic there is a SLIGHT chance you can get visitors to click on other images and continue through your site; otherwise it is again a normal course of action for this type of visitor.

Flash Sites – If your site is a full flash site, then it is possible the entire site loads on one page. Even if they load and / or look at 10 pages within the flash movie it still only counts as one page view and eventually a bounce. Setting up advanced analytics pageview tracking will help you get a more accurate understanding of what visitors are doing on flash sites.

Comparison Shopping – If you’re driving traffic into your site for specific products and the terms visitors are using are closer to the buying cycle, visitors may come in to get information, gather pricing and spec data and bounce to compare pricing on other sites that are listed. This is common, but doesn’t necessarily mean that particular visitor didn’t come back and eventually make a purchase; it’s simply part of the process for this type of visitor in this stage of the buying cycle.

Videos – People love videos, and it’s a great way to drive traffic into your site (if you have them properly optimized!). Someone who clicked on the link to your video from search results is highly likely to watch the video, click the back button and then return to their search results to watch more videos. You may be able to pair the video up with related videos, articles, products and / or solutions that work well with the video and the visitor’s search; but other than that, it is likely this type of visitor will ultimately bounce.

Meeting Your Visitors’ Expectations Before They Bounce

There is the old frame of mind still lingering on the net that says “if I can drive them to my site, I can make them convert”. Unfortunately, this is far from true. In the Ecommerce world, there are terms that are meant to convert and terms that are not meant to convert (initially). Both understanding the visitor’s expectations and meeting those expectations when the visitor lands on your site are the only ways to ultimately get the sale.

Below I will go into a few advanced steps that should be taken to have a more successful organic and paid search marketing campaign by lowering your site’s bounce rate wherever possible.

Review Your Site – Look at your site and each of its pages on a page-by-page basis and determine what each page offers, its own goals separately and its role within the entire site.

Assign Keywords Based On Expectation– On a keyword-by-keyword basis, determine the possible expectations of a visitor making a search using a specific keyword.

Users’ Intent – Users have actions they wish to carry out when performing a search. You want the page you selected within your site to match up with the actions the users wish to carry out when searching a specific keyword.

Setup Analytics – Once you have determined the three areas above, make use of the goals function in Google Analytics to setup goals and funnels based on your findings. Use the available information to gauge how accurate you were and make the needed adjustments to increase performance.

Review analytics –Review your goals and ensure they include all the possible variations of goals for your site. Review the keywords that are driving traffic to your site. When looking at how to better an existing campaign and for actionable data, simply work backwards.

Landing Pages – Review your landing pages and what keywords are driving traffic to that landing page. Ask yourself a few questions: does this landing page meet the user’s intention? Would a better page within the site provide a better user experience? Is there a gap between what my content offers and what my site offers?

Keywords – If visitors are landing on a page that doesn’t match up with what they were expecting to find, work on transferring that traffic to the appropriate page. Search engines aren’t as smart as humans; just because the search engines have determined they have the right page to rank for a certain keyword, doesn’t mean they are right.

Content Strategy – Create a content strategy based on any area within your site that is lacking and how you could better meet your visitors’ expectations.

Remember: obtaining traffic for a competitive term can be difficult and maintaining that position may be even harder; but to drive traffic into a page that doesn’t meet the users’ expectations where they end up bouncing for the wrong reason makes all your hard work and effort futile.

When building pages for your site, make sure you understand the purpose of that page and base its performance based on that goal. Then brainstorm ideas to help improve and increase that goal.

When looking at your analytics, remember you can’t just look at bounce rates and make good decisions without considering the primary intention of that page, why it was built in the first place and how it is used by your visitors.

Posted in Analytics

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Internet Blacklist Legislation: A Threat to the Economy and our Liberty

November 17th, 2011 posted by Shane Jones 12:08PM | View Full Story

Image provided by Martin Willms

 

Over the past couple of years, the U.S. economy has been on a rollercoaster of turbulent, unpredictable times. In 2008, a global recession attacked our markets. Due to a rising volatility from securitization of subprime mortgages, explosive inflation and an unhindered commodity boom, our nation was left dreaming of the glamorous days of growth that we experienced in the 90’s. However, despite the losses being published across headlines, our nation had one glimmer of hope left in its arsenal. That spark of optimism came in the form of the tech industry, with the internet as the motor that could propel start-ups, innovation, and progress. While many other sectors were falling apart at the seams, the technology industry retained its ability to report growth.

But now, in what feels like mutiny from a democracy that has relied so much on the success of its tech figureheads, Congress has developed legislation that attempts to devalue its star player — a technology industry that has been a selfless contributor for freedom of speech, innovation, entrepreneurship and job creation.

This triumvirate of Bills, known as the SOPA/E-PARASITE/PROTECT IP, are being discussed by the House of Representatives and the Senate and propose to pass censorship power of the internet to the entertainment industry.

The new legislation provides room for heightened censorship and abuse of power. Here are the implications that it carries:

-  Private companies have the power to shut down unauthorized sites where we download movies, music, and TV shows.

-  Government can force internet providers to block infringing domain names. The effect of this power could mean the deglobalization of the internet, as domains outside the U.S. border will almost exclusively be blocked.

-  Any personal blog, site or forum with a link to one of these infringing domain names is liable to legal action taken by the government. So what may have been a simple recommendation to a site that could have provided other users a benefit may actually cost you time in court. Even worse, offenders could face being blacklisted as an infringing site and forever be blocked from internet users across America.

-  Eliminates jobs established by the entrepreneurship of the internet

-  Allows corporations and the government joint ability to cut any funds a site can earn by imposing that any payment service or advertiser cancel an account if they perceive a website to be infringing on these new laws.

-  Gives the power to large, already established corporations to sue any site that they feel is not filtering their content to match its standards. As a result, this will drastically inhibit new start-ups who could face becoming bankrupt due to overwhelming lawsuits from competitors. The crime lies in giving the power to corporations to eliminate almost all of their competition and stifle innovation as very few start-ups will be able to enter a competitive arena.

However, the worst implication revolves around the ability of the government to limit our constitutional rights for freedom of speech and individual expression.

Under this new legislation, the internet’s most beloved sites are now subject to the control of our government. Sites like Tumblr, Facebook, Youtube and Twitter have become our largest method of self-expression and are subject to the rigors of the government’s new censorship program. Sites where everyday users share opinions, news and daily activity are highly vulnerable because their users also often share videos, TV snippets and copyrighted music. For instance, as a very frequent Facebook user, I am constantly sharing videos of my favorite TV show moments. But according to these new censorship laws, Facebook is required to either censor me or risk being shut down for they are liable for anything that their users post.

With the enacting of this legislation, individuals who even so much as post a video of themselves singing along to a Nicki Minaj song on YouTube could face up to 5 years in prison.

This has caused some of the internet’s biggest players like Tumblr to fight back. The blogging platform has replaced its user’s dashboards with censorship blocks and a link prompting it’s users to learn more about the law that could be censoring the internet.

American CensorshipAmerican CensorshipImage provided by Thomas L. Raukamp

 

 

Other companies have actively opposed these bills by addressing the issue on their homepage.  Among them is Reddit, an online community that largely relies on freedom of speech, and the renowned search engine, Firefox.

 

 

Congress aims to pass a bill with a transparent goal of eliminating piracy on the internet to make consumers buy more movies and TV shows. Therefore, our government is showing favoritism towards an industry, ranked 51st most lucrative in 2008 by CNN, at the expense of its 2nd most profitable industry, Internet Services (CNN Money).

With that in mind, can we rely on the government and private corporations not to abuse their power? Even if we can, other nations may adopt a similar approach to the internet and their governing bodies may not be as ethical in their decision against abuse of power. This domino effect would adversely affect the integrity of the internet, and the technology industry overall.

As a recent graduate and an employee at a company composed almost entirely of Millennials, I have personally witnessed the value that the technology sector provides our economy, in providing growth, and a future for graduates, who face an otherwise bleak job market.

The SOPA/E-PARASITE/PROTECT IP bills are fast-tracked to be approved by Senate for Christmas. Please help stop them by learning more about them at http://americancensorship.org/. Also, please do your part by spreading the word, and joining the cause. If you own a website, you can paste a small code on your site that helps people to write to congress.

This legislation presents disastrous implications for our own personal freedom of expression and insinuates a halt of innovation. It could do permanent damage to the American dream of success that our nation was founded upon. Jay Gatsby would hardly approve.
Please share your feelings by commenting, or if you’d like to continue the discussion, you can find me on Twitter at Shane Jones.

Tags: censorship, Internet
Posted in General, Internet

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Internal Site Search: Why You Need It and How to Use It to Your Advantage

November 10th, 2011 posted by Mary Mattar 12:08PM | View Full Story

Do you currently feature an internal site search for your visitors? And if you do, are you sure you’re taking advantage of its potential? What you may not realize is how valuable it can be for your SEO and PPC campaigns and, more importantly, your website’s conversion rate.

As an SEO and PPC manager, I’m often asked how I begin my keyword research process. While it’s difficult to break it down to an exact formula,  since each website is circumstantial, regardless of the website, I always do my due diligence on what visitors are looking for upon entry and when browsing that particular site. Doing this puts me in the proper mindset to understand the most useful keywords to the site and to its visitors. How do I do this? Naturally the keyword traffic sources report is quite helpful, but one extremely valuable report that I find is often overlooked is the internal site search tracking report in Google Analytics.

Having this internal search data helps a great deal when it comes to setting up an effective campaign. When this reporting functionality is set up properly in advance, I know I have a solid foundation to the SEO or PPC keyword list. By understanding how your visitors who are engaged on your site (as opposed to simply landing on your site and may end up bouncing anyway) perform searches, you can have a better understanding of keywords you should be targeting with an SEO or PPC campaign.

Besides the keyword data, an internal site search has plenty of other advantages as well. Because so many sites offer this option and with expectations set by popular search engines, users have become acclimatized to the idea of search quickly providing exactly what they are looking for. They count on search for immediate and accurate results.

Visitors to your website should be able to find exactly what they’re looking for as quickly and efficiently as possible. Bridging the gap between your visitors and the information on your site is made possible with the implementation of a site search.

In fact, many companies claim that search is the primary means of navigation on their site while a large percentage of web users admit to using site search to find the information they need – many who admit to abandoning a site with poor search functionality. By connecting your visitors to products and information quickly and easily, you increase the likelihood they will perform a desired action on your site. This can even reduce customer service costs by connecting users to the product and service support information they need.

Benefits of Site Search

Do you want:

• An increase in revenue?

• An increase in conversions?

• Increased average order size and value?

• Increased frequency of purchases?

• A decrease in bounce rate?

• Increased cross-sell and up-sell opportunities?

•An increase in the length of each visit?

• A solid foundation to your keyword list?

Performing Site Search

Here’s an example. Our site search on webpagefx.com provides visitors with a whole page of results based on what they are looking for. For example, I typed in email design in our search, of which elicited an entire page of web pages on our site that mention our email design services. This is extremely beneficial not only for our users, but for us as well. By looking at the data, we know that users were either 1) interested in our email design services, 2) were not aware that we offered such a service or 3) could not find it on our site as efficiently as they would have liked.

WebpageFX Site Search for Email Design

 

WebpageFX Internal Site Search Results

 

Setting Up Site Search Analytics

Configuring the tracking is easy.

In Google Analytics, simply navigate to your profile settings and main website profile information.

Here is what you’ll see:

New Google Analytics Site Search Settings

Or if you are in the old version of Google Analytics, you’ll see this:

Google Analytics Site Search Settings

Obviously, you’ll want to mark “do track site search.” Then the query parameter is what Google should look for when determining the search query. It’s easy to figure out what yours is, simply perform a search and look for your search query.

When you perform a site search on webpagefx.com for example, it will elicit a URL like this:

http://www.webpagefx.com/search-results.html?cx=001301597750837549631%3Apftfbnocxlm&cof=FORID%3A11&ie=UTF-8&q=email+design&sa=Search&siteurl=www.webpagefx.com%2Fsearch.html#920

Look confusing? Allow me to break it down for you. All you need to know is the search query parameter. You can find this by finding your search query (“email design”) in the URL string and looking at the parameter directly in front of it. In this instance it is the “q=”, in other words, “query=”. The ‘+’ simply represents a space. This tells me that the query parameter in Google should be set to “q” – as we’ve done.

Reading and Acting on Your Site Search Data

Once it’s implemented and you’ve acquired some data, navigate to the content section in your Analytics  to the site search “search terms” report. This report provides you with the exact search query users typed in when taking advantage of this additional feature on your site. Simply drilldown to Site Search > Search Terms (illustrated below):

New Google Analytics Site Search Terms

And in the old version of Google Analytics:

Google Analytics Site Search Terms

And there you have it, an entire list of search terms your visitors used not to find your site, but to find information within your site.

From there, you can drilldown to see which page those users found the most relevant and voila, you have the information you need to know which page should be ranking in Google and the other search engines for that specific search term.

Are You Turning Away Potential Customers?

I’m not saying it’s absolutely paramount to have site search functionality on your site, especially if your site has very few pages, but I’m also not saying there aren’t ramifications to not having one.

This data is incredibly valuable, and by neglecting its implication, you’re ignoring visitor feedback readily available to you. It can certainly provide actionable data well beyond keywords to use in your SEO and PPC campaigns.

Understanding how users interact with your site can do wonderful things for your conversion rate. If a particular search query is searched often, you may be able to conclude that 1) information on that particular product or service is not easy to find or does not provide enough information to your visitors or 2) that a large percentage of your visitors are looking for that product or service in particular when they browse your site. You can then use this as actionable data to provide either more information or making that information more obvious in the navigation. Keep in mind some users automatically perform a site search as a part of their nature regardless of how easy it is to find what they’re looking for. However, if there are dozens of searches for one particular product, that should certainly tell you something.

If your online store has hundreds of products, you may want to consider implementing a site search to help your customers find what they need quickly. I truly believe if you have an ecommerce store, particularly with hundreds or thousands of products, if you don’t provide your visitors with a site search and they can’t find what they’re looking for in a matter of seconds, they will be onto the next site that is easier to navigate. The implementation of a site search can help your online shoppers quickly filter through thousands of products in a matter of a few mouse clicks.

Let’s face it, these days people are impatient and lazy and don’t want to search for anything, and if they can save time to get what they’re looking for faster, they’ll do it. Can you really blame them?

Users aren’t used to having to manually search through hundreds of category listings to find what they want. When they are ready to make a purchase, they know exactly what they want. Why not help your visitors out and help them find what they’re looking for faster, letting them make a purchase from you before they become frustrated and leave?

Perhaps you’ve tested versions upon versions of your main navigation, and you have the best navigation you could possibly have. While that’s all well and good, there are still some users who are accustomed to always using the site search because they know what they’re looking for and they want to get there fast. Even with a smaller inventory or amount of pages, your navigation could suffice, but why not offer this functionality to users who look for it?

As on online retailer, you can benefit greatly from this simple addition to your site by experiencing increased conversion rates, increased average order value and increased customer loyalty. By implementing a site search, you can also decrease the likelihood of visitors abandoning your site upon entry and possibly downgrade that pesky bounce rate. Site search helps shoppers find the product they’re looking for much more quickly and efficiently, significantly increasing their satisfaction and likelihood to ultimately make a purchase. If site visitors can find what they are looking for quickly and easily, they are much more likely to make a purchase. On the other side of the spectrum, they are more likely to abandon the process and try another site if they can’t find what they need within a few minutes.

Within the site search results, you can also index an entire directory of products relating to the user’s search query, which could potentially increase the user’s order value. This encourages browsing-to-buying behavior, which can certainly increase your conversion rate. And by offering highly personalized search and recommendations to a specific shopper, advanced site search can help increase customer loyalty.

Make Sure It Works For You and Not Against You

Substandard internal search results equate to lost sales. Your visitors often do not have the time (or want to take the time for that matter) or the patience to try different variations of search keywords and phrases.  If you currently have a site search in place, it’s possible that it is too basic and actually frustrating your visitors or providing inaccurate information. You want to ensure your site search has the ability to understand typos, spelling errors, synonyms and ambiguous search queries. Search functions have the tendency to elicit the “no matches found” result simply due to common blunders like spelling errors for products that are actually carried. When this happens, many users become irritated and ultimately end up abandoning a site altogether. Make sure you’re not losing potential customers because they are provided with inaccurate information upon searching your site!

Are you taking full advantage of the site search functionality on your website?

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