Both seOverflow and ConversionIQ have established an auditing process for Google Analytics along with a few set-up/clean-up steps as well to ensure that our clients at a minimum have clean and useful data moving forward. I’ve outlined the items we look for below, but keep in mind based on each case this can change slightly.

Every page on the website must be ‘tagged’ with the appropriate analytics code.
Rachel Gerson of SEER interactive has an excellent blog post based on many other great blog posts, explaining a foolproof way of auditing that the GA code is installed properly on every page of the website.

Conversion goals must be set-up correctly. Each ‘confirmation’ page must be unique for each goal.
We inspect each conversion goal to ensure it is functioning properly and capturing the intended information. We tend to use Regular Expression format for every goal URL instead of Head Match or Exact Match. RegEx, while slightly more difficult work with if you are not experienced, gives you much more certainty over how each goal url is configured. In addition, you can test your regular expressions inside the content report to make sure they work as expected.

Conversion goals are monetized (meaning a dollar amount is assigned to each goal).
There is an optional monetary value that can be assigned to goals in Google Analytics. Especially when working with more than one goal it makes sense to assign a value here as it helps calculate the “index” value of pages and remind the analyst which goals are more valuable.

Data must not be collected from other websites/domains/sub-domains unless proper cross domain tagging is in place including proper link tagging.
For this step we like to use AnalyticsCheckup.com, a free tool that runs quite a few checks on a Google Analytics profile in search of red flags. One of the items it detects is other domains that are tracking traffic to your GA profile. It is not uncommon for sites to get scraped in their entirety including the GA tracking code. There is also the common case of test or development servers using the same GA snippet. You don’t want that junk traffic in your profile. In addition, this check is great for detecting whether cross domain tracking has been or needs to be implemented on the website.

‘Events’ such as downloads, videos, and other key events must be properly tagged.
Tracking each interaction happening on the website is key to complete data. It may seem like an easy step to skip, and it is, until you need the data later. There are plenty of scripts that help automate the process of “tagging” download links and outbound links such as this one from Luna Metrics.

‘Internal’ traffic such as Client, Agency and Vendor traffic must being filtered properly.
Make sure to set up filters to prevent data being collected from your office, your client’s office, and any other vendors of the client that frequently visit the website. Remember to always keep a ‘Raw’ or unfiltered profile in your account as well. This way if you make a mistake in your filter set up you still have a ‘back-up’ of the data available.

If the site is an e-commerce website, e-commerce tracking should be set up and working properly.
E-commerce tracking provides a whole additional level of data above and beyond simple goal tracking. Make sure e-commerce tracking is enabled for all e-commerce sites and as much data as possible is being collected for later analysis.

Analytics must be configured to exclude unnecessary URL parameters and eliminate any other duplicate URLs.
This is probably the most important, most overlooked, and most tricky step of all. There are many common situations we see where traffic for a single “page” is “split” in analytics among multiple URLs. The most common scenario is when there are multiple URLs for the homepage such as /, /index.html, /index.html?affiliate=123XXX. Another very common scenario we find is URL parameters used for sorting content such as product pages. While it is important to track the fact folks are sorting, you should do so as an event not a different URL. You can eliminate most duplicate URLs by telling GA to ignore parameters and properly using the default URL.

Ensure PPC or other special campaign traffic is tagged/tracked appropriately.
It is not frequent but we do see many cases where PPC traffic has not been tagged appropriately. Make sure autotagging is turned on and the Analytics account is linked to the Adwords account. In addition, make sure PPC campaigns from other sources are tagged properly as well.

Ensure no other filters or other modifications are affecting analytics in any way.
Double check all existing Google Analytics filters to make sure no stone is left unturned that maybe affecting your data.

I come to seOverflow with a background in Operations and Project Management and have worked in a variety of industries, but always stayed clear of “tech” jobs because of some unknown fear that it was too “techy” for me.  That was, until about this time last year, when I started helping a friend out on some of his websites a few hours a week.  That opportunity, and rich experience, really turned my baseless fears into something more akin to thinking in terms of “unlimited possibilities!”

Now, I am playing catch up.  I think SEO is a great “new” career for me and look forward to what the future brings.  Starting as a Project Manager is a perfect segway into this field; integrating what I’m good at (building client relationships and managing workflow) while learning all I can about SEO in the process.  For the first time in years I don’t see a ceiling above me – I can learn, gain experience and work into a lot of areas besides Project Management, and that is what keeps me glued to my screen for 8 hours a day!

So what is the second most asked questions about my new job?  “What is SEO?”  Good thing is I can now explain that a lot better than I could a month ago!

That reaction got me thinking about client expectations around SEO. I think any business owner looking to get SEO services should first stop and ask “does my site deserve to rank highly in search engines?”

With millions of results for any given search query, only 10 listings appear on the 1st page of search results. Google wants to show the best, most relevant results to users.

In a very competitive industry, there are surely at least 10 websites that have extensive content, solid on-page SEO, and an envious link profile that they’ve been building for years. Does your brand new site have tons of useful, unique content? Have you built links from quality, reputable sites?

Yes, you can create your new site in a couple weeks, but why should Google start ranking it above all the others? SEO isn’t magic and Google won’t rank your site #1 because you WANT them to. You and 10,000 other sites want Google to rank them #1. You have to earn it.

You can’t earn it without an investment of time and money. You need to have quality, unique, and useful content targeting the right keywords. You need to have a properly structured site that isn’t producing duplicate pages, 404 errors, and producing a terrible user experience. You need to do outreach and acquire links from other sites.

If that weren’t the case, you’d be sifting through tons of crappy, spammy sites every time you searched on Google.

You might not want to hear that. You might not believe it. You might opt for an SEO company that will promise you results at shoestring rates. But in the end, you will come to the same conclusion. And if you want to come back and get proper SEO, we’ll be here.

Why was this group the best fit?  They are passionate, creative, and have a proven track record in increasing their clients’ success.  They have a straightforward and transparent process to engage their clients.  Striving to provide excellent work and service is at the heart of every decision they make.  Mike is interested in developing his team and staying on the cutting edge of the industry.  As an SEO intern, I am working with the link building gurus- Reid and Alex, and learning about the creative and technical side of link building.  It’s truly a rewarding experience to come to work and learn from the best in SEO.

This lack of data is only going to grow. Mozilla recently announced that Firefox will soon start blocking keyword data by making all Google searches secure by default – and Chrome may well soon follow suit. It’s going to become essential as an online marketer to get as much information as possible out of this data. While there is no silver bullet solution to retrieve this invaluable data, there are a few ways to dissect it and glean some better insights.

Real Life (not provided) Traffic Data by Site Type

First let’s take a look at some (not provided) client data from November through February and how different industries compare. I have also pulled their percentage of Firefox traffic for the four-month range. Finally, I have added the average (not provided) traffic to their Firefox traffic and guesstimated what percentage of Organic Site traffic these sites could soon be losing.

** Click Image Above for Larger View**

Obviously this analysis is far from scientific, but as you can see there is a wide range of potential data loss. Losing 6% of your keyword data is one thing, but losing 39% could downright throw your data analysis into a tizzy! From this small statistical sample, it looks like WE have the most to lose! Uh oh… let’s take a look at a few ways to dig into the (not provided) data and make the most of this missing data.

Beginner: View Traffic by Landing Page

This one is pretty simple. Just browse to your Organic Search Traffic and click the “keyword” (not provided). Next, set the secondary dimension = Landing Page.

Voila! You can now view the (not provided) traffic by landing page. While you still cannot associate a keyword, you can get a pretty good idea whether traffic to a particular page was Branded or Non-Branded (and if it converted).

Beginner: Estimate Percentage of Branded vs. Non-Branded Traffic

This is a technique to simply estimate the percentage of branded vs. non-branded (not provided) traffic & attribute it to its proper source. This data is useful to us as an agency because when comparing year-over-year traffic data, we really aren’t comparing apples to apples because (not provided) traffic wasn’t around at this time last year.

Here’s how you can estimate (not provided) traffic based on the rest of the site’s traffic:

1. Set your date range
2. Split Organic search traffic into: Not Provided, Branded, Non-Branded (in some cases you may want to make a fourth category, splitting ‘qualified’ and ‘non-qualified’ non-branded traffic)
3. Find percentages of Branded & Non-branded traffic
• Non-branded / (Organic traffic – Not Provided) = % Non-branded traffic
• Branded / (Organic traffic – Not Provided) = % Branded traffic
• These two percentages should add up to 100
4. Split Not Provided traffic based on percentages

Again, not rocket science – but being able to estimate & attribute additional branded/non-branded search traffic could be the difference between a negative and a positive year-over-year comparison.

Intermediate: Create a Filter

If you find the two methods above useful, you may want to take it to the next level and create a filter. This method takes the landing page idea above & kicks it up a notch. It makes the data more permanent when you’re browsing around GA. If you’re looking at data as much as we are, it’s probably a good idea to set this up, pronto.

First, I need to give credit where credit is due – I read about this (not provided) hack by Dan Barker here. He does a great job explaining, so I encourage you to peruse his post.

So what does this filter do? It rewrites (not provided) visits as individual keywords based on their landing page. Instead of 100 (not provided) visits, your keyword data might look something like:

MUCH more useful data!

Advanced: Compare Google Analytics Keyword Data to Google Webmaster Tools Data

Last but not least – an advanced tactic I found that lets you uncover more insight than anything else I’ve seen thus far! Again, giving credit where due – this one comes from Ben Goodsell over on SearchEngineWatch. Ben writes about how to export data from both Google Analytics & Google Webmaster Tools (both reports come from GA), then consolidate the reports to help give an identity to some of your (not provided) traffic. Webmaster Tools does not give exact data like Google Analytics, using Webmaster Tools ‘Buckets’ allows you to estimate your site’s missing traffic.

This tactic requires knowledge of how to export data from Google Analytics & merging data by running a VLOOKUP. The most time consuming part is associating the ‘Next Lowest Bucket’ data with the ‘Clicks’ data from Google Webmaster Tools (If anyone has a script handy to do this let me know!).

Conclusion

Well, that’s all I got. How do YOU dissect your (not provided) data? Please do share!

Let me lay out a few reasons why:

1) If you already rank number one in your organic listings for your brand term, you should still be bidding on this. First, by bidding on the brand term, you insure that you are taking up the top two slots – you’re getting “sticky” with potential clients. If ever have a drop in your organic listings, the PPC ads reinforce your search efforts.

2) Not everyone clicks on the organic results. You can do things with your ads that you can’t do with organic listings: tailored copy, sitelinks, special promotions, etc. You’re able to drive your marketing message.

3) Google is not going to prevent people from bidding on your terms. Competitors will try to steal your traffic if they can. In the cases of trademarked terms, Google is only going to prevent competitors from using your terms in the ads themselves. Affiliates are also known to use this strategy to “steal” business from the parent site. This really comes down the relationship you have with your affiliates, but we strongly discourage allowing affiliates to bid on your brand terms.

4) Branded terms are usually the cheapest ones in your account. When you bid on them, you’re going to increase your competitors costs and decrease their quality scores. (If you do decide to pause or turn off the keywords to test their efficacy, be prepared to pay more money for them when you turn them back on.)

At the end of the day, it makes sense to bid on your brand terms.

image courtesy of Okko Pyykkö

It’s easy to build links when you don’t care where you’re getting them from, but you don’t want to waste time building low quality links. Even if you’re going after easy directory links, you need to make sure they are actually worth the time it takes to submit.

There are several Firefox toolbars you can install to help make the process easier, such as the SEO Toolbar from SEOBook.com or the SEOMoz Toolbar. For this exercise, we’ll use the SEO Book Toolbar. Set up a free account at SEOBook.com and get the toolbar from http://tools.seobook.com/seo-toolbar/.

Is the Page Cached?

One of the first things that you should check is if the page you want a link from is indexed by the search engines. If it isn’t indexed, it won’t provide any value because the search engines will never see it.

After installing the SEOBook toolbar, click the blue “i” icon and look at the cache date.

If it’s empty, it hasn’t been indexed. If the cache date is from 3 or 4 months ago, the search engines probably don’t care about the page because they aren’t even coming back to see if the page has been updated. If the cache date was several days to a couple of weeks ago, Google probably considers it an important page.

In many cases, you want to avoid pages that haven’t been cached yet, but there are exceptions.

Sometimes a page might be new and the search engines simply haven’t found it yet. If it’s a directory page and it isn’t cached, you can probably skip it, because directories are almost always low value. If it’s a quality blog post or article that hasn’t been cached yet, it still might be worth trying to get a link.

Oh No, Not Page Rank!

Yes, toolbar page rank has a bad reputation from experienced internet marketers, but it’s still a useful tool that even many of the naysayers still use. If you don’t know what Page Rank is, it’s a measurement of the amount of links that a website or page has. The problem with Page Rank is that it doesn’t take into account the quality of links and where they are coming from.

Still, it’s a useful tool to get a quick indication of page value. In most cases, having a good page rank (at least 2 or higher), means that a site has some links coming in, and usually the links aren’t all that bad.

What Else Can the Toolbar Tell Me?

You can also look at some other quality indicators the toolbar has – Blekko links, OSE links and unique linking domains.

Blekko and OSE are 3rd party research tools that try to identify how many links a page has. If there are no links to the page from Blekko or OSE, it might not be a good page. If the website as a whole has a lot of quality links though, it can spread some value to the page you want a link from. This is really a judgement call you’re going to have to make on your own.

The unique linking domains number is a great indication of quality. Using this metric, if one site is linking to a page more than once, it’s only counted one time. For example, some businesses will purchase a sitewide link in the footer or sidebar of another website. Their link will then show up on every page of the site. Not every single one of those links is valuable, and the search engines are wise to those types of links. So the higher the amount of the unique domains, the better.

Everything else on the SEObook toolbar can be helpful too. I also like to look at how many links the entire domain has and how old the domain is.

I’m not able to provide specifics on what you should look for when doing quality analysis because it varies by industry. You just have to review the page and make the call.

If you have the time, I would also highly recommend you read “17 Ways Search Engines Judge the Value of a Link” from SEOmoz. It’s a little old, but it explains everything you need to know.

Happy Linking!

There are several different tools on the marketing ranging from a “roll your own” type call tracking solution to enterprise level call tracking solutions. Some solutions even offer features beyond tracking of the calls such as distribution of calls to a phone bank and more.

There are two tools that seOverflow currently uses to track phone calls for our clients:

CallRail (disclaimer we are also CallRail affiliates)

Century Interactive

We use two different solutions rather than one so that we can pick the most appropriate solution for our clients tracking needs and budget. Each one has different features (good and bad) that need to be considered for each project. Honestly both leave something to be desired however they are much better than nothing, and both are typically cost effective for our clients

CallRail was inspired by my blog post a few years back on how to roll your own call tracking system using Twilio. Twilio is a very cool voice application API with tons of features. CallRail has taken the “roll your own” idea and put it on steroids with an easy to use configuration interface and nice looking, useful reporting features. The price is right for small businesses starting at $30 per month which includes 10 tracking numbers and 500 minutes of call time which should be plenty for most businesses. The setup wizard walks you through provisioning numbers and setting up tracking rules for who should see your tracking number (organic visitors, Google PPC, etc.)

We’ve had great support from the founder Andy and his team who quickly fix any bugs we find and are very responsive in adding new features and answering quick questions. They also have an affiliate program which is nice so that we can send our clients directly to CallRail and not have to send our clients a phone bill each month.

The CallRail solution is also “local SEO friendly” meaning it works via number replacement using JavaScript. This means the search engines still see your real phone number persevering your local NAP consistency. While there has been some debate. as to whether this is “cloaking” or whether it could harm you local SEO in anyway we’ve not seen any evidence of this with dozens of clients.

The downside to CallRail unfortunately also lies with the backend that makes it so powerful, Twilio. While phone numbers directly from Twilio are relatively cheap ($1 per local number per month, and 1 cent per minute), they are not cheap enough to create a “number pool” so that each visitor session could be assigned a unique number. Number pooling would allow keyword level details for call tracking which could add a ton of value both for SEO and PPC purposes. Another downside to CallRail is that as of the time of this writing there is no replacement feature if your phone number happens to be in an image. In the past we’ve modified the roll-your-own method to replace images, so we do understand why as of now this isn’t exactly scalable.

Century Interactive is a relatively unknown call tracking provider with a refreshing take on pricing and features. Agency pricing is (not starts at) $25 per month per website and 8 cents per minute. This price includes a pool “big enough” to assign a unique phone number to each of your website visits. They’ve got a super cool feature that shows you the user path visually by displaying thumbnails of the pages a user visited and where approximately a phone call was placed in that sequence. Their sales staff is super help and friendly and simplicity of the pricing makes it easy to explain to clients.

The main advantage of Century Interactive vs Call Rail is that we can get keyword level tracking data for our campaigns. In addition, by staying on the line after a caller hangs up, our clients can “tag” their phone calls as leads, sales, spam, etc. This provides some excellent information for calculating ROI from phone calls. The problem is Century Interactive’s biggest advantage over CallRail also is a major point of dissatisfaction for us not the reporting side. While CI captures ton of useful information, the reports you can run are very limited and mostly canned. We’ve thought of several reports that we’d like to run that simply were not available via the CI reporting interface.

Other downsides to CI include a clumsy and hard to use interface, and the lack of “local SEO friendliness”. While CI also uses Javascript to retrieve and print the tracking number to your webpage, their code does not utilize number replacement meaning your “real” number goes away entirely. This also means you have to track every phone call from your website not just those from certain sources or campaigns.

Ultimately as I mentioned previously both solutions offer some very interesting features but the technology still leaves something to be desired. As user behavior evolves and Click-To-Call technology becomes more of not only an accepted practice, but an expected practice, call tracking will ultimately change and become even more useful than it is today.

They’ve just recently launched, and in celebration, they’ve created an awesome guest blogging contest, which I’ve decided to enter. This is the first guest blogging contest I’ve ever entered, so I thought it would be fun. Sadly, I didn’t hear about the contest until just recently, so I didn’t get as much time as everyone else to promote it, but hopefully my post still gets some traction.

Read my post, 6 Ways to Get Links from an Event Your Business Has Participated In, After It Has Already Happened and share it with your friends and social networks.

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