Yesterday Google added an Advanced Filters tool to the content reports allowing users to filter using a number of different parameters. The tool even supports regular expressions.

The filter can be seen at the bottom of the keyword or content reports and allows you to drill down into the information in a much more intuitive way than the previous filtering options allowed, mainly because it’s no longer hidden away in another section.

Below is an example where I drilled down into a keywords report to find all keywords containing the word “car” with an per visit value greater than £8 and a conversion rate higher than 20%.

A top tip is to add a few different keyword sets using the | operator to mean OR. For example “cats|dogs|mice” would match all 3 keywords. If you’ve got a favourite filter post it in the comments.

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Google Analytics adds advanced filters in content reports

Google Local has a different algorithm to the main Google search engine and requires different optimisation methods. The main ranking factors for Google Local include elements such as citations and customer reviews as well as the usual link factors and the expected address and geographical factors.

There has been a lot of talk recently about using tracking numbers for businesses and the concerns are quite valid. If you have 2 phone numbers listed in different places then it’s the same as having 2 domain names showing the same website but a lot harder to fix. Some companies have a geographical number, an 0845 number and several tracking numbers all listed in various places which makes it very hard for Google to accurately measure citations.

Given the vast number of small businesses without a website (~50-55%), or weakly-optimized one (probably an additional 40%), Google Maps and the other local search engines need indicators of relevance and authority that are not based primarily on links. User reviews on major portals like Yelp or Citysearch are obviously key indicators, as is the information that businesses tell the engines directly at the respective Local Business Centers.

But citations are also a critical component of any Local SEO strategy—recall that Local Search Ranking Factors contributors placed them as the #2 most important factor for ranking this year.

What’s a citation? Essentially, just a mention of your business information (your name + address, your name + phone number, or both) somewhere out there on the web—even if it doesn’t contain a link—remember that most businesses don’t have anything to link to!  The bottom line is that search engines’ ability to tie a particular phone number to a particular business gives them increased confidence in that business’s information, especially if that information matches what the business owner has entered into the Local Business Center—so they’re more likely to rank it.

Phone numbers may even be seen as a stronger confidence indicator than addresses, as Chris Silver Smith stated eloquently in his interview with Eric Enge last month:
“The phone number has in the past typically been considered something that doesn’t vary as much as some of the other information from all the different business sources.”

The best method we’ve found to fix the issue of multiple numbers is to find all the old phone numbers in existence and search for them on Google before contacting all the directories and websites listing them to correct the data. Time consuming but totally worthwhile.

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Dealing with multiple phone numbers in Google Local

We’ve been doing a lot of work with Google Local recently and have come across a lot of challenges. In the next few weeks we’re going to be covering some of the issues on the blog.

Google allows businesses to add new listings or claim existing listings via the web interface but for businesses with thousands of locations that’s not really possible. Luckily Google offers a bulk upload feature which allows you to upload a spreadsheet of all your locations nice and easily.

The main issue with bulk uploads is that in the past there was no way of verifying the data so it was treated with the same trust as data which Google had scraped from one of the large online business directories and often didn’t show up in the listings. In August Google announced a new feature which allowed people to fill in a form to verify their data based on a declaration and AdWords login.

Generally, the best way to verify that you own a business is by receiving a phone call or postcard with a PIN. However, this process can be difficult if you have many business locations. If you have a minimum of 10 locations, you can submit a bulk upload. Bulk uploaded data is not verified and so may not show up on Google Maps.

To verify a bulk upload, first make sure that it satisfies the following requirements:

• Accurate and up-to-date data
• Full compliance with our Local Business Center Quality Guidelines
• Submitted by the owner of all businesses listed
• All businesses have only been submitted by a single user

You must make sure to update your bulk upload whenever anything changes. We’ll review your account periodically for freshness of data, and listings will become unverified it if we find it doesn’t meet the requirements.If your bulk upload meets all of the requirements above, please fill out the form below. Please note that we will not respond to all requests.

This all sounds great in principle but after we tried the form for a business with 1400 locations we saw the message “Flagged, waiting for content check”. I naturally assumed that Google would check the content and then make the listings live but after waiting 6 weeks it turns out that there isn’t anybody monitoring these listings so it took some manual intervention to get them pushed through.

The moral of this story is that you should always do manual verification where possible but if you have to use a bulk upload it’s very likely to get flagged and require somebody from Google to manually make it live which will take some time.

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Bulk verification in Google Local

It’s fair to say that we are now surfing the crest of the first great Twitter wave. Slight tweaks to the interface (the recent introduction of lists) don’t disguise the fact that growth in US user numbers has stalled.

Multi-million dollar deals with Google and Bing, as well as translations (Spanish has just launched), will give the service a shot in the arm but its long-term future is somewhat of a mystery.

Twitter’s development so far has been fueled by users – and developers harnessing its API – not by the company itself. It is these continuing changes in the way it is used that will shape the service’s future and ensure its long-term success. But what are those changes and how will they impact?

Seesmic founder Loic La Meur gazed into his crystal ball this week and gave us some ideas:-

This is my take on the interesting bits from this:-

Mobile

• Mobile will be used more than the web – a huge number of users now tweet using client software and as an increasing number of people acquire smartphones their tiny keyboards will be the beginnings of most posts.

• Geotagging – Smartphones are already feeding this trend and the adoption rate for the latest handsets is ever increasing. Coupled with Google and Bings’ deals, this will make location-based SEO and advertising ever more important.

• Status updates will be everywhere – Hard to disagree with this one as they already part and parcel of so many social networks. Facebook has the biggest chunk of the action at the moment (45 million updates a day) and mobiles with Facebook and Twitter clients will only increase this trend.

• There will be more devices publishing updates than humans (planes, trains, cars all posting updates) – Err… not sure about this one.  It would serve a real purpose for public transport but might not replace already well-established services at the moment.

Reputation management and marketing

• Live reviews of any place and product will deeply influence it – This trend will only grow in significance and those companies that don’t monitor Twitter will have no way of mitigating the fall out if a faulty gadget or bad meal is broadcast to the twittersphere.

• Promos by brands and retailers will have big success for last minute deals – Again location has a big part to play in this if we are looking at local, physical shops. It seems inevitable that online retailers will also continue to see the sort of benefits that Dell has through its promotions on twitter, although they have to be selective or will end up just seeming spammy.

• The social graph will also open up – As an open network Twitter is doing a good job of this already, analysing that data however is still a massive challenge. As users do we realise how much data we are exposing? And perhaps more importantly, do brands know what to do with it?

• Twitter as an overview of a brand or person –  Twitter is an open network (unless you are one of those perverse people who makes their feed private) meaning anyone will be able to get a snapshot of a person or brand through posts, retweets and links. Consumers will use this to judge whether companies are right for them, and brands will use the data to target consumers.

Search

• Google and Bing will be the dominant ways to search Twitter – Both Google with Social Search, and MSN through a recent redesign of its home page have got the ball rolling on this.

• Google will have its own Twitter and won’t acquire Twitter – This one is interesting and Google’s recent work on Friend Connect, plus the chat features within Gmail and Google Wave could well be different attempts to steal Twitter’s thunder.

Twitter’s business model

• Twitter won’t display ads in your main feed. Other revenue opportunities such as pro accounts for businesses will be enough – Twitter’s ability to open up the social graph of its users will allow the company to continue selling real-time data about its users to search engines, marketers, application developers and social media monitoring services. Anyway Ads would become increasingly useless as fewer and fewer users choose to tweet at twitter.com

It seems these revenue streams coupled with the huge amount of money recently thrown at it by VCs will mean Twitter is here to stay.  However, what it evolves into over the coming years is very much in your hands and remains the billion dollar question.

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Future Twitter trends

Google has this week been granted a patent for adjusting search rankings based on click data for related queries.

The patent, entitled Rank-adjusted content items, talks about the same types of query refinements we discussed earlier this month in the satisfaction rates post and in previous brand update analysis.

In plain English the patent explains that Google may be counting the number of people who search for “insurance” and then search for “confused.com”. Google can then analyse the queries and determine whether they are statistically significant enough for confused.com to be displayed in the rankings for “insurance”.

Rank-adjusted content items

Abstract
Click logs and query logs are processed to identify statistical search patterns. A search session is compared to the statistical search patterns. Content items responsive to a query of the search session are identified, and a ranking of the content items is adjusted based on the comparison.

Inventors: Datar; Mayur (Santa Clara, CA), Dhamdhere; Kedar (Sunnyvale, CA), Garg; Ashutosh (Sunnyvale, CA)
Assignee: Google Inc. (Mountain View, CA)
Appl. No.: 11/694,268
Filed: March 30, 2007

Content items, e.g., video and/or audio files, web pages for particular subjects, news articles, etc., can be identified by a search engine in response to a query. The query can include one or more search terms, and the search engine can identify and rank the content items based on the search terms in the query. Typically the content items are displayed according to the rank.

The content items, however, are often identified only in response to a particular query, i.e., the search engine may identify and rank content items to independently for each query. For example, for three different queries, the search, engine may return a particular identification and rank of content items for each particular query, regardless of the other queries. In such implementations, a particular content item that may be highly relevant to a user’s current interests may not be identified and/or highly ranked and presented to the user until the user has conducted multiple searches. Additionally, other users may experience similar challenges when searching for content.

SUMMARY

Disclosed herein are systems and methods of identifying content items. In one implementation, click logs and query logs are processed to identify statistical search patterns based on the click logs and query logs. A search session is compared to the statistical search patterns. Content items responsive to a query of the search session are identified, and a ranking of the content items is adjusted based on the comparison.

In another implementation, query paths and content terminuses associated with query paths are identified. Additionally, a context of a search session is identified and a determination of whether the context is related, to one or more of the query paths is made. Content items responsive to a query of the search session are identified based on the determination.

In another implementation, a system includes a mining engine and an adjusting engine. The mining engine mines click logs and query logs to identify query paths and content terminuses associated with the query paths. The adjusting engine adjusts a ranking of content items responsive to a search session query based on the identified query paths and content terminuses.

In one implementation, identification of a context of a search session facilitates the adjusting of a ranking of one or more content items in response to a search session query. The adjustment can, for example, be based on the likelihood that a current user is searching for the rank-adjusted content items because a statistically significant number of prior users that exhibited a similar behavior to the current user selected the rank-adjusted content items.

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Google patent granted: Rank adjustments via click data

PR industry bible PR Week caught up with the debate about Sidewiki this week.

While it isn’t the best idea Google has come up with (the company needs to balance user experience with its business relationships) and is a serious headache for pharmaceutical companies, it isn’t all that bad and some reactions have been over the top.

Sidewiki is a toolbar plug-in that users will have to download to see wiki content on pages. The question remains as to how many will actually bother installing it.

Social Search

You may well have noticed Google Social Search pop into Google Labs this week, or read Patrick’s post highlighting what it means for SEO.

At the moment it is an opt in option that presents relevant search results from social networks you subscribe to in universal search results. Google says:-

With Social Search, you’ll be able to more easily find relevant public content from your social circle, such as the following:

• Websites, blogs, public profiles, and other content linked from your friends’ Google profiles.
• Web content, such as status updates, tweets, and reviews, from social services that your friends have listed in their Google profiles.
• Relevant articles from your Google Reader subscriptions.

For now it is opt in and for those who don’t have a Google account, or aren’t always signed into theirs, it will remain so if it stays in its current form. Even those with a Google account will have to add profiles from other networks to make full use of it.

So although this feature will likely prove more popular than Sidewiki, the user still has to make a conscious effort to activate it.

The Google effect

As Patrick said in his post now is the time for SEOs to look at Social Search’s data points and increase users, subscribers and friends in relevant networks.

One of the best ways of doing that as a company or brand  is to look at what you can offer as a whole – now more than ever before is the time to seriously think about creating a social media marketing strategy that will engage a new audience with your brand. SEO is a major reason for you to get involved in social media, but shouldn’t be the only one.

While Social Search and Sidewiki are interesting developments users have to decide to download or configure them, with immediate and universal adoption highly unlikely.  In that sense there is still breathing space, but brands now  seriously need to think about whether they want to opt in as Google starts to throw its weight behind social media.

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Social search and Sidewiki – not game changing, but the game is changing

Google announced a new service yesterday called Social Search which shows search results from sites owned by the searchers online friends. Currently an opt-in service but widely expected to go live over the next few months it cements the need for brands to have a Twitter account, Facebook page & a decent blog.

Data on a persons social circle is pulled from their contacts in Gmail, the people they follow on Twitter, the blogs they read on Google Reader. Google has a help centre article explaining more about how it works.

All the information that appears as part of Google Social Search is published publicly on the web — you can find it without Social Search if you really want to. What we’ve done is surface that content together in one single place to make your results more relevant. The way we do it is by building a social circle of your friends and contacts using the connections linked from your public Google profile, such as the people you’re following on Twitter or FriendFeed. The results are specific to you, so you need to be signed in to your Google Account to use Social Search. If you use Gmail, we’ll also include your chat buddies and contacts in your friends, family, and coworkers groups. And if you use Google Reader, we’ll include some websites from your subscriptions as part of your social search results.

The next generation of search

At present Google is only including these results as a universal search element in the same way they embed news results. However there is little doubt that in the same way news results are giving priority for certain queries we will start to see results from our social circles being given a boost in the normal search results too.

This makes perfect sense, if I follow a brand on Twitter or are fans of a site on Facebook then they are more relevant to me than another brand who happens to have more links.

Optimising for social search

Take a look at the data points Google is using and make sure you are making attempts to increase your followers, subscribers & friends in each of those areas. It’s not easy for brands to be social but those that manage it are likely to reap the rewards.

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Optimising for Google Social Search

Everyone loves a good viral video and when successfully executed they can deliver a real boost for your brand – spreading a message or just getting you mentioned and noticed. But can you replicate viral success time and again?

The question came to mind when I heard that one of my favourite virals of recent times was getting a sequel.

J’aime la Tour

 
Commissioned by visitBlackpool to promote tourism, this clip gives a humorous take on the Lancashire town, comparing it to Paris with a cinematic nod to French cinema thrown in.

This video is undoubtedly very clever, but by viral conventions isn’t particularly humorous, is a little slow paced and doesn’t really wow.

Despite that it still attracted 60,000 viewers on YouTube because what really made it stand out when uploaded earlier this year was its ability to jump vertically between different media channels. It had crossover appeal which was capitalised on by an effective PR campaign.

While people sharing your video on facebook, twitter, or even through good old fashioned emails is great, it is never likely to have real penetration unless it migrates to other channels.

Mainstream media remains the biggest game in town and successful PR  increased viewers and the video’s spread. National TV coverage included BBC News and Sky News, with newspaper coverage including the Daily Mail and a host of regional newspapers and websites.

This was in effect a great PR campaign based around a solid, but not spectacular video.

Repeat success?

A lot what we do online is about the ‘new’. People want  a succession of exciting, fun and interesting experiences (as trendwatching.com pointed out, describing it as ‘nowism’).

The media is no different and is constantly looking for fresh content and stories – especially in the 24-hour news cycle we now inhabit.

In that environment can we expect virality to strike twice? It does sometimes as Blendtec’s Will it Blend? series and VW’s recent Fun Theory videos have shown -  but they are the rare exception.

If you can get one of your viral masterpieces off the ground you should consider it a success – thousands have failed in the same quest, lacking the resources to mount a PR campaign that would help it jump between channels and gain mainstream penetration.

In essence though viral videos are an opportunity to look creatively at your brand or products. While they might not lead to overnight YouTube stardom they can give you a fresh perspective on marketing . People like fun, engaging content –whether it is a video, news story, tweet, picture, or podcast.

So will the second video share the same success at J’aime la tour? I’ll let you be the judge of that…

Love, from Blackpool

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Viral videos – can you catch the bug twice?

Most people are in broad agreement that the brand update is about maximising satisfaction rates and making sure as many of your visitors find what they were looking for at your site rather than having to go to Google and search again.

However some people are looking at satisfaction rates and thinking about bounce rates but they are a totally different thing.

First of all lets look at how Google defines bounce rate:

Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert. You can minimize bounce rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy.

To view the bounce rates for your website, go to the Bounce Rate report under Visitors > Visitor Trending > Bounce Rate.

My definition of satisfaction rate:

Satisfaction rate is the percentage of people who find the information or products they were searching for at your website without having to return to Google and perform any further searches.

So while on the surface it’s easy to think that the brand update is just about minimising bounce rate and maximising conversion rates we can see that bounce rate is quite a flawed metric when looking at satisfaction rates. Take Wikipedia for example, they probably have a huge bounce rate because every page gives pretty much the answer to every question somebody might have about the topic they were searching for. The visitor searches for a topic and arrives at a page giving a huge amount of information about that topic – they have no reason to click onto another page or to revisit Google and search again.

Wikipedia visitors have a high bounce rate and a very high satisfaction rate. Contrary to what Google says above about landing pages sometimes the best & most relevant landing pages can have high bounce rates.

Obviously it’s important to fight for the second click but if Google is looking more at satisfaction rates than bounce rates informational sites need to focus on giving away as much information as possible first and worry about increasing visitor retention later.

Sometimes visitors from social sites can skew bounce rates dramatically even though they were satisfied with the content so it’s important to segment when looking at bounce rates.

Engagement rates

We use a product called Click Tale to show engagement times rather than just time on page and this week they’ve been explaining why Google Analytics isn’t the best way to measure engagement.

Like most traditional web analytics services, Google Analytics records a “Time on Page”, denoting the time a visitor spends looking at each page in your website. It does this in three stages:

It records the time your visitor opens the first page.
It records the time your visitor opens the next page.
It subtracts these two times and calls the result “Time on Page”.

So unless a visitor views a second page the time on page will always be zero. Even with the new time on site goals it’s hard to see engagement times in Analytics.

You can see the difference in data between Google Analytics and Click Tale below.

Google Analytics noted the visit, but could not give us any qualitative or quantitative data about our time on the site.

ClickTale, on the other hand, was able to show us the bounce, the time spent on the page and the exact time spent engaging with the content. What’s more by clicking on the “Play” button, you can watch a video of the entire browsing session.

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Analysing Bounce Rates & Satisfaction Rates

This new dilemma was highlighted to me yesterday as I tried to update my LinkedIn social profile to include my involvement with MajesticSEO. LinkedIn’s privacy statement is robust and reassuring, but they have a new beta section asking me to add details about my company. The ”number of employees” section was a compulsory field. Now I am not especially precious about this data, but I serve many masters. My legally binding contract with MajesticSEO includes a confidentiality clause, naturally. Even if it didn’t, I think that I should make it just a LITTLE difficult for prying eyes to build up inside knowledge about businesses where I am not the controlling interest. What if you work for TESCO. How many employees even KNOW how many people work there?

Making this a compulsory field simply made me abandon the company profile setup.

The ongoing process of disseminating information about ourselves and our associates online through social networking has an insidious feel about it. Even the most honorable of useful applications usually requires us to hand over login details to complete strangers. Whilst it is often in our own interests to do so, that decision is also often not ours to make. Often we have casually promised confidentiality on the one hand, then casually ignored it on the other. You think you haven’t? How many online services require – in their terms – that you promise to keep your password safe? Well how about paragraph 3 of Twitter’s terms:  http://twitter.com/tos. If you are on Twitter, you agreed to:

You are responsible for safeguarding the password that you use to access the Services and for any activities or actions under your password.”

Or if you look at the same URL on an iphone the agreement simply says:

You are responsible for keeping your password secure”

I agreed to that too. Yet I have given my Twitter password to at least the following: Ping.fm; Twitpic; Twittalator; Echofon; Netvibes; Friendfeed; Facebook; Some third party Facebook App; Apple and who knows who else. If we can’t share the logins with other applications. Mashed up services lose much of their value. But how do we reconcile breaking every agreement we enter into, without so much as a second thought?

OpenID was set up as a solution to this problem… But I doubt that system is infallable either. I feel Big Brother bounding in through the great big open barn door that we refuse to close or even see. Legislation won’t help either, if we so blatantly ignore agreements that we enter into, then legislation has already failed.

Dixon.

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You ARE a Law Breaking Black Hat. Yes YOU!

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