Recently (August 16th to be exact) Google made a change to this.  Now, instead of extra search result listings, brands get site links underneath their homepage URL listing.  Following this, there are 9 organic listings, the first of which is Jegs.com.

I have noticed a definite change in search engine visits as a result of this change.  Based on data from numerous clients, this change leads to less visits to websites for their own branded terms, as more of those visits are now going to websites that rank just after the branded website.  This is certainly beneficial to those websites who now show up at the bottom of the first page of results and, under the old format, would have been pushed back to the 2nd page of results.

So in this scenario, Jegs.com would receive more visits from the term Magnaflow.

Of course, for the keyword Jegs,  the number of clicks on Jegs.com would drop as more would filter down to the listings below.

Local Search has become more Relevant

Local listings now appear more frequently on non-geospecific-searches.  For example, merely searching Jeep Parts will show still show the typical listings but you will also see physical locations in Google Places.

What this means for SEO

Small local businesses: This is a good thing.  You may not have the budget to really rank for competitive head terms the way large E-commerce websites with huge marketing budgets do.  Having a physical location within the proximity of the searcher will now help even those odds.  And if your business model revolves around your physical location (and not selling online), you are likely to get relevant traffic.

E-commerce sites with physical locations: This is also a win for sites like BestBuy.com and Target.com.  Having physical locations throughout the United States increases the chances of having a physical location in proximity of the user.

E-commerce sites without physical locations: This is a bit of a hindrance for e-commerce sites with no physical location like Buy.com or Amazon.com.  Someone physically near a Best Buy store searching for an item carried by both Best Buy and Buy.com is likely to see Best Buy’s physical listing pop up near or even at the top of the listings, pushing Buy.com’s rankings further down.

Ranking Measures: This change has changed SEO web analytics to an extent.  As location has become a larger factor (along with past user behavior), traditional methods of measuring keyword rankings may have become slightly less effective.  Ideally this could make Google Webmaster Tools’ average keyword ranking metric (and therefore Google Webmaster Tools in general) more important.  However, I remain a bit skeptical of some of the avg. position results as I see clients who don’t average #1 for their own brand name.  However, it may be that Google’s avg. position measures all of Google’s properties (Google.ca, Google.es, Google.com.mx, etc) into a single aggregate.

Branded websites have become more Relevant for searches

Google’s algorithm appears to be giving a much larger berth to branded websites.  So searches that include a brand name are likely to yield numerous results for that brand’s website (as opposed to the 2 maximum that used to display).

Retailers (Brands): Someone searching for a retailer by name will now find numerous results for the brand’s website.  This means that competitor websites ranking for their brand name are now pushed further down in the results.

Manufacturer Brands:  These sites made off like a bandit.  Gaining as many as 7 or 8 of the top searches, searchers are far more likely to land on such a website before going to a retailer website selling their product.  One could argue that this increases the need for retailer websites to be listed on a manufacturer’s “Where to Buy” page.

Retailers (when someone searches for a manufacturer they market): Retailers have no doubt seen brand-specific search traffic drop for brands they carry.

Retailers who solely or primarily market a single brand: Thoroughly screwed until/unless Google decides to roll this change back.

Social Media affects Rankings

Google and Bing have both confirmed that social media mentions affect their ranking signals.

For all websites: Similar to inbound links, Tweets and Facebook ‘shares’ are counted as ‘votes’ by Google and Bing.  So having a presence on these websites is important, as is getting brand awareness.  While Social Media marketing has become an industry unto itself, it’s affect on SEO adds to its credibility

Google Shopping has become more Relevant

Google Shopping results have been given a far more prominent placing in search results.  Sometimes these results displace the top ranking webpage as the first result.

What this means: Having a well-formatted Google Product Feed has become that much more important.  As Google Shopping results siphon clicks from organic search results, re-commerce websites will find a greater need to be included and gain better rankings in Google Shopping results.

Duplicate Content has become even less effective

Largely a result of the Farmer/Panda update, content farms (a term for websites that simply act as content aggregators for the sake of search engine placement and don’t necessarily provide value to visitors) have been hit hard.  And with this, websites whose SEO was overly dependent on inbound links from such websites have seen their SEO become less effective.  It’s been said that 12% of searches have been affected by Panda/Farmer update.

What this means: Websites whose existence was based on gathering up ‘SEO content’ and websites who depended largely on such websites have seen their rankings drop.  You can see  a very visible drop for websites like Ezine Articles, Hub Pages and Squidoo.

I don’t believe there is anything inherently wrong with these sites but rather the ways they’ve been used by the bulk of their visitors is something Google’s algorithm has been modified to devalue.  So while many SEO’s refer to this as a ‘punishment’ I see it as more of Google’s version of a market correction.

On a side note, there is indeed a sense of justice in this for anyone who has found an article they wrote copied verbatim on another website with no credit and no inbound link to their website.

Google +1  will no doubt make personalized search results even more important factor

Google is integrating social media into their rankings (and virtually all other Google services) with their new +1 feature, which allows users to flag certain results as “pretty cool” (similar to Facebook’s “Like” feature).   In fact, there already exists a script for adding a +1 button to websites and Google has already added tracking for +1 in Analytics and Webmaster Tools .  This will certainly add a new dynamic to search result, making it a more social experience.  Assuming this catches on and Google sticks with it, it may change the face of SEO.

In Conclusion

Regardless of one’s opinion and willingness/ability to adapt to Google’s latest changes, it’s clear that their changes follow through (or least, intent do) with their mission to provide relevant results to their searchers.  By giving users results that are catered to their location and past behavior, Google is tailoring their results to individual users.  And since Google doesn’t seem poised to lose market share any time soon, all we can do as SEO professionals is adapt our strategy, largely by incorporating social media, local search optimization, and perhaps shifting away from relying on lower quality inbound links and brand-specific keywords.  Of course, one could also argue that this makes small local businesses a more viable market for SEOs looking to expand their client list.

First create an Advanced Segment where you select Medium=CPC (click here to import the segment automatically).

* While I’m only referring to AdWords in this post, this really works for any CPC source (like Yahoo!) assuming CPC is tagged as the Medium.  If for some reason you really want to apply your segment to only to Google AdWords, then in addition to filtering for CPC as your Medium, filter for Google as your Source.

Once you’ve created/saved the segment, select it and check your top landing pages (Content > Top Landing Pages). Google Analytics will now display the pages on your website receiving the most traffic from your AdWords campaigns.

The next step is to create a segment that filters for visits from Adwords this landing page. You can either create a new Advanced segment for this OR modify the one you have by adding the Landing Page filter for the one you just created.  Have CPC selected as your Medium AND your selected landing page URL (in our case, we are taking the page with the highest volume from AdWords, but you can just as easily use the landing page with the lowest revenue, the highest bounce rate, etc) as your selected Landing Page.

Select this new segment and see what people are searching on your website (Content > Site Search > Search Terms).  Are people searching for items not on this page?  Do their searches reflect a different  train of thought than what you’re presenting them with (ie, part numbers, sizes/metrics, colors, brand names, etc)?  This may clue you in on changes you can make (adding new links, rearranging content, using a different page altogether for certain phrases).  You may even find some new ideas for low volume but high converting keywords.

One of the more concrete, yet overlooked methods for increasing AdWords ROI involves filtering out regions with little/no conversions.  Thankfully, we can find out which regions (in this scenario, states) are costing money by way of clicks and offering little/no revenue in return.

1-Create an Advanced Segment

Log into Google Analytics and create an Advanced Segment for AdWords Visits with no Revenue.  Your Source will be Google, Medium will be CPC, and Revenue will be no greater than 0.  Make sure you’re using AND, not OR statements.

2- View Map Overlay

In your Visitors section, choose Map Overlay, then choose the country where you want to separate regional information.

3- Dive Deeper!

Now look for the regions (states) that are dragging your ROI down.

4- Save Money in AdWords!

Log back in to Google AdWords and filter out those states.

Adwords Target Region Filter

Setting Ad Slot Position in Advanced Segments

Click to Enlarge

You can add these segments through these share links I created.

• Ad Slot Position 1
• Ad Slot Position 2
• Ad Slot Position 3
• Ad Slot Position 4
• Ad Slot Position 5
• Ad Slot Position 6

Going through the AdWords subsection (Traffic Sources > AdWords) with different Ad Slot segments selected you can compare valuable metrics which will tell you quite a bit about how Keyword ad positions are performing.

Click to Enlarge

Going deeper, we can compare ad slot data at the campaign, ad group, and keyword level.

Click to Enlarge

One of the caveats..at this point it appears that Google Analytics doesn’t include Clicks (though you can get more or less the same information from Visits), impressions, or ROI (though you can calculate this yourself).

Click to Enlarge

]]> http://www.seoracle.com/google-analytics-how-to-tutorial/ad-slots-adwords-roi-google-analytics/feed 0 http://www.seoracle.com/seo-tutorial-optimization/official-google-algorithm-factors-site-speed-rankings http://www.seoracle.com/seo-tutorial-optimization/official-google-algorithm-factors-site-speed-rankings#comments Sat, 10 Apr 2010 00:43:05 +0000 admin http://www.seoracle.com/?p=807 While rumors have floated around that Google was now considering site speed as one its ranking factors, Google finally christened the rumor with an announcement on its Webmaster Central Blog.  They also list tools for helping assist those looking to boost the speed of their sites.

Using site speed in web search ranking

Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.

Read entire post here

One way I’ve always tired to simplify Google’s ranking factors for friends and clients is to have them think of Google’s business model.  Google’s dominance depends on its ability to return the most relevant results to its users.  If users stop believing that Google is providing them with the most relevant results for their searches, they’ll go elsewhere (essentially what happened to Yahoo! in the late 90′s). It’s not hard to imagine why/how returning sites with extremely slow load times wouldn’t be so beneficial for Google.

A Big Deal

Often times, SEOs debate over what are really minute matters, and they spend time debunking the same myths over and over that very few SEOs believe anymore.  But the core of SEO never really changes: Good content, and good linking (and the second one is largely dependent on the first).  Most of what SEOs debate are in regards to factors within these two.  How important is article syndication?  Which link directories are still worth purchasing from and how do I get new/better links?  How many instances of keywords can/should I add before I start to devalue the quality of my content?  What ratio should I use for top domain linking vs deep linking?

What this does is give SEO a whole new factor to consider, and it’s hardly a minute detail.  No doubt, a stronger market will now exist for people who can optimize site speed and designer/developers will be pressured more than ever to code in an organized manner.

Click for Larger View

In order to add annotations, simply click on a specific date in your trend graph (it doesn’t matter which section you’re in).  As you can see below, these annotations can also be shared with users of other accounts.

Click for a Larger View

This makes it easier to correlate historical trends with campaigns and website changes in the past.  Sharing this data across teams and departments will also allow more people to correlate data (and hopefully add their own).

• Download the SEO Report Card Here (PDF)
• Read the Google Webmaster Central Blog Post on this here

• Kill Useless Web Metrics: Apply The “Three Layers Of So What” Test (Wonkish) – Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik
• Google Wrap Up: Above the Fold; Gesture Search – Marketing Vox
• Don’t Be Afraid of Negative Reviews – Marketing Vox
• Social Networking SEO Tips and Techniques – SEO Chat
• Keyword Difficulty vs. Size of Domain – SEO Chat