Q: I just began reading your book SEO: An Hour a Day and am very pleased with the advice found in it.  Thank you.  My main concern lies with PPC (AdWords), as I’m just starting out my campaign and currently have very little budget.  I’m concerned that not every click on my ad will be a sale and, thus, cause me to lose money rather than make a profit.  Is there another method I could perhaps attempt before diving right into PPC from the get-go, maybe a “Pay per Sale” option? Or is there another form of PPC I could try that may not put such a strain on my wallet, so to speak?

A: You’re right to assume that not every click will translate into a sale for your paid search campaign. Typical conversion rates (the percent of clicks that “convert” into sales) vary widely from industry to industry, but it would be reasonable to expect a conversion rate for a brand new campaign to be under 5%. (Brad Geddes suggests that 3% is Google’s stated benchmark)

Instead of relying on every click to convert for you, you need to identify a cost per conversion that you can live with, and set your bids accordingly. For example, perhaps you sell hat boxes at $15 apiece, and you are willing to spend $5 on advertising for each sale you get.  That translates to much less than $5 per click, because you know that only a fraction of your clicks will convert to a sale.  Perhaps $.25 per click would be a reasonable starting point.

I would suggest trying Google’s Conversion Optimizer, which will allow you to set a target cost per acquisition (CPA). But before you can enable Conversion Optimizer, your campaign will need to have conversion tracking in place, and the campaign will need to have at least 15 conversions in the last 30 days. Here’s information about Conversion Optimizer: http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2471188

When you are starting out with a new paid search campaign, you should expect that there will be a learning curve, which means that your advertising dollars may be less efficient than you’d like them to be, at first. You’ll want to take time to manage your campaign regularly, monitoring bids, tweaking your ad text, your keyword list, and possibly your landing page, until you have reached an acceptable conversion cost.

When you’re getting started, there are no guarantees that you’ll make a profit, so determine what exploratory budget you’re willing to spend, and choose your campaign levels accordingly.  Or, in other words, only gamble what you’re willing to lose.

The post Ask the Experts: Will my AdWords Campaign be Profitable? appeared first on Gravity Search Marketing.

In our work trying to provide the best possible analysis of SEO, SEM, and social media efforts using website analytics, we often come across the dreaded “Not Provided” keywords.  These are organic search website visitors for whom Google does not report what keyword they searched for.  This can pose a real barrier to accurate SEO analysis.  Here, we look at the current state of encrypted search from Google, and present some workarounds we’ve seen.

Percent of Encrypted Search

When Google originally announced that some search keywords would be hidden, Googler Matt Cutts estimated that this would only affect single-digit percentages of all Google searches on Google.com – in other words, less than 10%. Much to the chagrin of the SEO community, this statement has proven to be inaccurate.  Website owners started noticing larger percentages of encrypted search within a month of its inception.

We analyzed a handful of our clients for March 2013 and found that 46% of searches in Google are currently being encrypted and reported as (Not Provided):

• Educational Site: 47%  of roughly 2 million visits
• Game Site: 52% of ~500,00 visits
• Portal Site: 60% of ~600,000 visits
• Non Profit Site: 41% of ~500,00 visits
• B2B Site: 38% of ~20,000 visits

Looking around at other firms’ published data, the lowest percentage we see anyone reporting is 20%.  The original 10% estimate?  Just a distant memory.

Encrypted Search Now Includes Toolbar Searches

The percent of encrypted search has risen significantly in the past year and a half. This due to the increase in users that are covered within the encrypted search space, which now includes the following:

• all Google searchers who are signed into their Google accounts while searching
• searchers using the default browser address bar to search in Chrome, FireFox and Safari (still not the default in IE)
• searchers who choose to have their keywords encrypted by going to https://encrypted.google.com/ to perform a search

Looking at Google Analytics data for one of our clients, we can peer into the percent of encrypted search for each browser:

• Chrome – 72%
• Firefox – 73%
• Safari – 21%
• IE – 22%

(Data for March 2013)

Doing a deep drive into Safari, the majority of Google searches are coming from older browser versions. Looking at the most current browser version, encrypted search is at 44%. So, we expect this value to increase over time.

Workarounds

With the significant increase of encrypted search and the fact that it is likely to continue to rise, the need to find other outlets for the lost keyword data is ever-increasing. Below are some ideas to get started with overcoming the missing data:

Simple Multiplication: The crudest approach to handling this data is to simply divvy the (Not Provided) traffic between your organic traffic segments. For example, if you are reporting organic traffic in a Branded/Non-Branded segment, you can split the (Not Provided) traffic based on the percentages of each segment of organic total traffic.  We’re not big fans of this approach because it means meaningful data can be lost.

Google Webmaster Tools: Webmaster Tools provides a report of the top 1,000 daily queries that resulted in impressions and clicks to your website. We believe this data is accurate; we typically find the impression data to be on par with data we see in Google AdWords.

Google AdWords: If you have the budget, Google provides full keyword data for AdWords traffic. You will need to spend money and receive clicks to see meaningful data; bidding low in an attempt solely to get keyword impression data will not yield keyword data.

Landing Pages: As an alternate to using keywords as the starting point for research, start with looking at the Top Organic Landing pages, which can be segmented by (Not Provided) results. For a method of tying the two together for easy review, you can visit this blog post from searchengineland.com. The author uses an advanced filter to marry (not provided) keyword data with the landing page, so instead of seeing “(Not Provided)” in the results, you see “(Not Provided) – (Landing Page)”.

Aggregate (Not Provided) Ranks: Since you cannot see the (Not Provided) keywords, you cannot tell how well the masked keyword(s) are doing in Google. One way around this is to use the power of Google Analytics to show you the ranks for (Not Provided) results. There are a few methods to accomplish this, which can be found on the following two blogs:

Rank Tracking with Events

Rank Tracking with Filters

***

Do you have a favorite method for contending with the increase in encrypted search reporting from Google? We’d love to hear more suggestions in the comments!

The post The State of Encrypted Search – Google’s (Not Provided) appeared first on Gravity Search Marketing.

On March 14, Pinterest announced Pinterest Web Analytics for business pages. Pinterest Web Analytics data enables businesses to identify the content on their site that is popular with Pinterest users. Here’s how to set up Pinterest Web Analytics for your business page:

Step 1: Verify the business website. There is a built-in incentive if you verify: doing so enables Pinterest users to see the business website URL on your business profile page and in Pinterest search results. Verification is relatively simple and can be completed by uploading a HTML verification file or adding a custom meta tag to the head of the business website. (Learn more about Pinterest website verification here.) It’s important to note that a Pinterest business page and a Pinterest personal profile may not verify the same website. If you have already verified your business website on your Pinterest personal profile, you will need to remove it before verifying the business website on your Pinterest business page.

Step 2: Switch to Pinterest’s new look, which promises larger pins and improved search. (Switch to the new look via the drop-down menu in the upper right corner.)

Once these two steps are complete, you may access analytics via the drop-down menu. Have a look!

Pinterest analytics data is segmented into four tabs, including site metrics, most recent, most repinned and most clicked. Analytics enables users to set start and end date parameters, and to export data.  Enjoy!

The post How to Set Up Pinterest Analytics appeared first on Gravity Search Marketing.

Q: I’ve heard horror stories about social media contractors accidentally posting personal remarks to a company’s Twitter or Facebook stream.  How do we know we can trust someone not to do this?

A: Before hiring a social media vendor, it’s important to ask what kind of security policies they have in place.

Vendors tend to manage multiple social media accounts for multiple clients. In addition, your vendor’s account managers are also likely maintaining their own personal social media accounts. One sloppy social media mix-up can hurt the reputation of your business. For example, an individual member of KitchenAid’s Twitter team sent out an offensive personal tweet on the official KitchenAid Twitter account in 2012, resulting in negative publicity for the company. You can read more about this error on Mashable.com.

Fortunately, social media mistakes like this one are preventable with some basic rules in place. Here’s a list of social media security rules that we abide by. Rules like these can reduce the risk of costly social media mistakes and help to build trust between business owners and social media vendors.

Social Media Security Rules

• Never manage client social media accounts on a cell phone or mobile device app.
• Use a different password on every account.
• Never use the same social media management tool to manage personal social media accounts and client social media accounts.
• Always log out after using a social media site or social media management tool so that you or others do not inadvertently access a client account.
• Utilize a secure password program (such as 1Password) to log into social media accounts and tools.
• As an extra precaution, set up browser history to automatically delete/clear after the browser is closed.
• When using social media sites or social media management tools, look for client logo icons and user names to verify that you are in the correct account before proceeding.
• When scheduling future posts, double check them for accuracy in the scheduling tool once the post is scheduled.
• Always double check the destination of shortened urls prior to scheduling or issuing live social media posts.
• When issuing live posts, double check the post for accuracy before and after you have issued it. If you make an error, acknowledge the error and correct it quickly.
• Periodically review the list of applications that have access to client Twitter and Facebook accounts, and ensure that these are deleted when not in use.

These social media security rules should be in addition to general company security rules, such as requiring that all computers and mobile devices be protected by passwords, using two-step verification for Gmail, and never emailing passwords.

The post Social Media Rules to Avoid Embarrassing Accidental Posts appeared first on Gravity Search Marketing.

Here are some of our favorite SEO tools, as of 2013:

Webmaster Tools

Google and Bing Webmaster Tools are must-haves for any SEO, or really anyone who owns or manages a website. These webmaster tools offer a great overview of any potential problems with your site, along with various tools to help manage your presence in both search engines.

While both tools are useful, we spend the bulk of our time in Google Webmaster Tools and leave Bing Webmaster Tools for the occasions when we encounter a Bing-specific issue.

Google Webmaster Tools has myriad tools for managing your site.  These are our favorites:

• Fetch as Google – A simple fetch that shows you how Google sees a page
• Crawl Errors – Shows various site/server errors (404, 400, 500)  that may be impacting search presence.
• The Dashboard – Provides a quick and simple glance at any potiential red flag items
• Links to your Site – Provides total links/domains Google finds pointing to your site, in addition to a sampling of the domains that are providing links.

You can access Webmaster Tools via the following links:

Google Webmaster Tools
Bing Webmaster Tools

Link Monitoring & Domain/Page Strength

These are tools we use to monitor inbound links, or compare domain/page strength among competitors.

SEOMoz’s Open Site Explorer provides an excellent overview of page/domain strength, along with a tool to compare competitors against your own site. Additionally, you can export inbound links for domains you choose, and view a list of anchor texts associated with the incoming links. Our favorite metrics from Open Site Explorer are:

• Page Authority
• Domain Authority
• External Followed Links
• Followed Linking Root Domains

Because we like to be thorough and look at multiple sources for data whenever possible, we also use MajesticSEO and Google Webmaster Tools for reviewing link domain strength.

Rank Monitoring

For checking and monitoring ranks, we use Advanced Web Ranking by Caphyon. There are other tools out there, but we haven’t found a reason to switch — even with the faults we find with Caphyon’s program.

Here are some ways we use Advanced Web Ranking:

• Checking local ranks in Google Places
• Checking international ranks (e.g., google.co.uk)
• Running weekly and monthly rank reports
• Viewing top sites that are ranking for certain terms

As we are a subscriber to SEOMoz, we also use their Campaigns feature to monitor and send weekly reports on top keywords for quick review.

Site Crawlers/Emulators

To get an idea of how Google (or other crawlers) are seeing a web page/site we have a few go to tools:

• Rex Swain’s HTTP viewer – Simple and effective tool to get a quick glance of HTTP requests for web pages. Quick tip: Enter “Googlebot” in user-agent to view the page as Google would.
• Microsoft IIS SEO toolkit – This tool crawls (and optionally stores) a website and will point out errors which can be used as a head start in site reviews.
• SEObrowser.com – A simple yet effective method of seeing a page the way Google (or other crawlers/browsers) would. This tool was once free, it is now $5/year.
• User Agent Switcher (FireFox Plugin) – Helpful tool for using a browser to view sites with via different crawlers (and even different browsers). Be sure to download the big list of user agents, this will make your life much easier.

Keyword Research

For keyword research and review, we primarily use two tools to get an idea of search volume and competition levels.

• Google Keyword Tool – A great way to review keyword popularity and to get an idea of similar terms. Can also be used to estimate CPC and competition levels when looking to sponser keywords for AdWords.
• Google trends – A good way to see keyword search interest over time. This tool can also compare multiple keywords to see their relative volume and show you a list of similar terms being searched for to get ideas.
• Honorable mention to Compete.com, which we sometimes use for long-tail keyword research and competitive keyword research

Analytics

Our favorite website analytics tool by far is Google Analytics.  Simply stated, this tool rocks and is a necessity for any SEO.  We’ve been singing its praises since forever ago, and we don’t expect to stop anytime soon.

Thanks for reading about our favorite SEO tools!  We hope you’ll add your faves in the comments below!

The post 2013 Favorite SEO Tools appeared first on Gravity Search Marketing.

In mid-2012 Google announced a new tool in Webmaster Tools that allows you to view the Index Status of your website.  This tool gives you the ability to view a few interesting metrics related to how Google is indexing your website:

• Total Indexed
• Ever Crawled
• Blocked by Robots
• Not Selected

You can learn more about each of these metrics on Google’s Help Page.

With the tool being out now for a few months, we decided to compare the values found by performing a “site:” search in Google vs the number provided by looking at Total Indexed in Google Webmaster Tools.

For our review, we took a sampling of (10) sites we are working on, and reviewed the difference between the two methods. We looked at sites ranging from 70 to  over 12 million indexed pages.

Overall, we saw a trend of “site:” search showing 15-30% more pages than the Total Indexed metric.

We did, however, see one extreme outlier showing a more dramatic difference between the two values. This domain shows 12.1 million pages indexed for the Total Indexed metric in Google Webmaster Tools, but only 2,450,000 in a Google “site:” search.

Has anyone else noticed this variance?  Share your numbers with us in the comments!

The post How many pages indexed in Google? Comparing Webmaster Tools to “Site:” Search appeared first on Gravity Search Marketing.

Q: Lately when I search in Google, a lot of my competitors have nice looking photos next to their site listings.  How can I get a photo of me to show up next to my site?

A: What you’re seeing in Google is called a rich snippet that is present thanks to authorship display for either a full website, or for individual pages on a site.  Originally used primarily by news sites to identify journalists who penned articles, this search enhancement is now seen for everyone from dentists to dogsitters.  We love authorship because it adds a personality and credibility to a website, and it’s appropriate for a wide range of businesses and entities – anyone who’s comfortable adding a human face to the site.

Why Set Up Authorship?

Authorship display is not considered a factor in Google ranks but there are other good reasons to pursue it. Here are some benefits of authorship display:

• Make your search listings more noticeable and potentially increase the number of clickthroughs on your listings
• Create a visible signal of credibility for your content in search
• Get more Google+ followers
• Help readers discover more of your content by clicking the “more by” link

How To Set Up Authorship With Google

Step 1 is very important:  Make sure you have a Google+ profile, as it is required for authorship display.

Step 2: Once you’ve got your Google+ profile set up, there are two routes you can take to set up authorship display:

Authorship Method 1:

If your email account (jdoe@my-domain.com) is the same as your content domain (my-domain.com/this-is-a-page/), then follow the two steps below:

(a) Make sure that any articles you post on your site have a clear byline identifying you as the author (e.g., “By John Doe”), using the exact same name as you have in your Google+ account.

(b) Visit Google’s authorship page and submit your email address (make sure you are logged into your Google account when doing this).

Once your email address is submitted on the authorship page, Google will crawl pages on your domain looking for by-lines that contain your name.  When it finds the by-lines containing your name,  Google will display authorship information for those pages.

Authorship Method 2:

If you don’t have an email address on the same domain as your content, follow the steps below:

(a) Add the following link pointing to your Google+ profile anywhere on your page:

<a href=”https://plus.google.com/[your-account-number]?rel=author”>Google</a>

For example:

<a href=”https://plus.google.com/109097091682601072107?rel=author”>Google</a>

(b)  Edit the “Contributor To” section in your Google+ profile with a link pointing to the domain that you just placed the link on.

This method works on a page-by-page basis, so you will need to include the link to your Google+ profile on every page for which you want authorship display. One advantage of using this tag is that it can be placed on pages that are not articles and do not have bylines.

***

Setting up authorship display requires just a small investment of time, and has nice potential benefits.  We hope you’ll give it a try!

The post How to Get Author Thumbnail Photos in Google Search Results appeared first on Gravity Search Marketing.

Adobe Edge Animate is a new platform (in “preview” mode) that allows developers to create Flash-like user experiences including animation built with HTML 5 rather than Flash.

This bodes well for cross-platform compatibility (*cough*iPad*cough*), but what are the SEO implications?  Can Google adequately crawl content that is placed on a page with Adobe Edge Animate?  We set out to answer these questions by looking at two test pages created with Adobe Edge Animate:

• Adobe Edge SEO Test One
• Adobe Edge Animate SEO Test Two 

When we first looked at the Adobe Edge preview in May 2012, we did not see any promising SEO advantages to using Edge over Flash, as the content generated was not search-engine-crawlable.  As of November, 2012, Adobe has updated Edge to include multiple tools & services whilst renaming the main component from “Edge Preview” to “Edge Animate” to go along with other tools in the Suite: Reflow, Code, Inspect, and Web Fonts.

The other tools aid in the development process; for this blog post, we are focused on the SEO implications of Edge Animate.

Since last previewing Adobe Edge in early 2012, we are now seeing a promising new feature in the latest builds: “Publish Content as Static HTML”

When this option is selected, Adobe emits “HTML markup for SEO friendliness.”

In early 2012, we noticed that Google would not crawl the content from Adobe Edge which is housed in JavaScript. The HTML code you get from the default publish option in Adobe Edge is the following:

As a workaround we entered in some alternate text (with and without noscript tags) and Google was able to crawl both. View the source and snippet  in Test Example One to see how this came out.

Now, as of November 2012, our previously workaround is no longer necessary.  Instead, you can use the “Publish Content as Static HTML” feature in Edge Animate. When this is enabled, Adobe renders the readable text as HTML elements for SEO friendliness, like this truncated example below:

You can view the source in Test Two to see how it fully renders the HTML content. Test One and Test Two use the same source file from Edge Animate, the only difference is selecting the Publish Static HTML option.

With this new option, Google can crawl the Adobe Edge content; and with that, this new platform is shaping up to be a promising SEO-friendly replacement to Flash.

The post SEO for Adobe Edge Animate [Updated] appeared first on Gravity Search Marketing.

Q. I own a small business with a local shop plus an online store, and I’ve been told I need more customer reviews for my shop. I’ve heard there are tools that will get the shop reviewed online.  What are these tools and do they actually work?

A. Customer reviews of your business, such as seller ratings on Google or brick-and-mortar reviews on Yelp, are a growing priority for small businesses, as well they should be. Despite the importance of online reviews, soliciting customers for reviews on a regular basis can be a challenge.  A “mom and pop” owner who is already overburdened with running his or her shop may find it difficult to get out there and chat up happy customers to encourage positive reviews.

Below, we’ve listed four tools designed to help businesses gather reviews.  These tools are geared toward online purchases.  They allow the business owner to set up post-transaction customer outreach seeking reviews. The customer reviews are posted on the tools’ own website, not on the business’s site.   These tools won’t help with Yelp listings or other popular review sites with which you may be familiar.

Customer Lobby will contact customers for reviews on your behalf by phone and email. The reviews are posted on a third-party independent website that can be found in Google search results. Customers with Google+ or Yahoo profiles are also directed to post reviews there.

Shopper Approved asks customers for reviews on an online thank-you page after a purchase is complete. Each review is posted on an optimized web page that is displayed in Google, Yahoo, and Bing. The more ratings and reviews your business receives, the more pages are created. A 30-day free trial is available.

Demand Force solicits customer reviews from an automated ‘thank you’ message sent immediately after a visit to the business. The company offers a syndication service in which the data is sent to Google, so a client’s Google Plus page is kept up-to-date with new content. A free demo is available.

ResellerRatings offers a customer follow-up platform to gain reviews for your business.  In addition to your business’s reviews being listed on their site, ResellerRatings has the distinction among the services listed that the reviews feed into Google’s seller ratings list for your business.  These seller ratings display alongside your business in Google Shopping listings and can result in gaining stars on your Google AdWords listings.  Formerly a low-cost service, ResellerRatings now charges upwards of $200/month for the platform.

Do these tools work?  We’d have to say “Yes,” but they come at a cost.  ResellerRatings in particular drew a great deal of ire when it cranked up its prices dramatically over the past year or so, given that it was one of the few third-party rating sites that feeds into Google.  All of the capabilities of these tools could probably be reproduced by a do-it-yourselfer at a lower cost, with a bit of time and technical know-how.   However, if you have more money than time available, these tools could be a good choice for you.

The post Ask the Experts: Are These Consumer Rating Tools Helpful for SEO? appeared first on Gravity Search Marketing.

Q: We have two different businesses: catering and personal chef. Over time, we’ve ended up with two sites for these services. Additionally, we’ve purchased other domains and have them redirecting to the main sites. The personal chef site is not ranking well, but there is a personal chef page on the catering site that is ranking well. We are thinking about building a new site and condensing them into one, but are worried we may lose the traffic that the old personal chef page had. What can we do to retain this traffic?

A: First, a quick note regarding your parked domains:  These are probably neither helping nor hurting the SEO presence of your main sites. But one good reason to keep control of these domains is so they won’t be be snagged up by competitors and used to compete against you.  Be sure to re-point any redirects if you do decide to move your sites.

There is no single, definitive answer about whether or not to consolidate your two sites to a single site.  Here are a few pros and cons of consolidation that may help guide you:

• PRO: consolidation of authority & trust signals such as social sharing and inbound links will tend to make a single, unified website have more power in search engines than two separate sites.
• PRO: a unified site makes online word of mouth more straightforward.  Good reviews of one arm of your business will reflect well on the other arm.
• CON: a unified site will need to compete with focused sites that can specifically optimize for each of the specific services (personal chef vs. catering).
• CON: A unified site is probably less likely to have the opportunity to get links from lists or directories of one or the other service.
• CON: You have an existing rank that you are legitimately concerned about losing.  A 301 redirect from the old page to the new page is highly recommended, but even with that, it’s possible that the rank will suffer.

If these two sites truly are two separate businesses, with a different customer base, different service offerings, and having different conversations online, then it probably makes more sense to retain the separate sites (while linking between them, naturally).

If you do choose to unify, re-using one of your existing domains would be best. Is the catering domain name general enough to house both businesses?  In that case we would recommend keeping the page that is ranking well (personal chef) at the same URL that it is currently on, and redesigning around it.

If it is not possible to re-tool the catering site so that it encompasses the personal chef site, and you feel a strong need to move both sites to a new domain, be sure to follow the page redirect recommendations we discuss in “Oops, I Redesigned my Website. An SEO Checklist.”   A key point: you’ll need a 301 redirect from the existing personal chef page to the new URL. So,

www.example1.com/personal-chef/ should 301 redirect to www.example2.com

However, even if you do everything right in a move such as this, you should be prepared for a drop in search rankings.  Like ripping off a band-aid, the pain will probably pass quickly, but it is not impossible that your site would suffer long-term ranking drops from moving domains, so we only recommend moving sites if absolutely necessary.

The post Ask the Experts: Should I Consolidate Sites for SEO? appeared first on Gravity Search Marketing.