A lot has been written about the importance of long-tail keywords for SEO campaigns. As an SEO, I know it’s hard to convince clients that pursuing long-tail keywords that result in less search volume is actually a better long-term strategy than pursuing more appealing core terms with high search volume.

But with a proper set of data and analytics based on the usage of long-tail keywords, it’s possible to persuade your clients (or yourself) that a long-tail keyword strategy is the path to success. But how do you identify and leverage long-tail keywords?

People’s keyword searches are increasingly moving toward long-tail because natural language search is becoming more popular and pervasive, especially with the momentum of mobile technology and search. But unlike the fiercely competitive field of core keywords, it’s hard to precisely identify the right long-tail keywords to focus on for your SEO campaigns.

That’s what I’d like to cover in this article: how to search for, locate, and identify long-tail keywords for your optimization campaigns and content strategies.

Where to Get Long-Tail Keyword Suggestions

There are many places where you can find excellent candidates for long-tail keywords. Money is not a prerequisite; you don’t have to shell out anything if you rely on Google’s Keyword Tool or other free services… and there are plenty of them.

Below are some of the most popular sources from which you can mine long-tail keyword suggestions.

Google Suggest & Related Keywords

Google’s very own Suggest and Related Keywords offer some insights into the most-used long-tail keywords in search. Google Suggest is the auto-suggest that automatically drops down when you start typing keywords into the search field.

Most of the keywords that appear there are what real people have actually searched for. Once you type in a search query, Google provides a set of related keywords at the end of the page, including a few that are long-tails and potentially worth pursuing. Of course, you’ll want to vet them before you take it any further.

Competitor Analysis

In all probability, your competitor has been using long-tail keywords already, which makes your job a little easier. In order to leverage this, check out the keywords your competitor has targeted. You can find them in the meta tags in the source code, from keyword density checking tools, or from a general scan of the content on the website/blog of your competitor.

Be sure to look closely at the titles and the snippets. The long-tail keywords are most likely going to turn up there.

Natural Language: Forums, Comment Threads, E-mails

People’s queries often contain the precise terms (i.e., keywords) they would use in a Google search. So when you pick queries out of forums and comment threads, you’re also picking rich long-tail keywords that real people are undoubtedly using on Google.

Most SEO experts miss this because it goes beyond usual convention, but it’s naturally intuitive. I’ve picked dozens of long-tail keyword ideas straight out of comment threads on a few authority blogs. If you run a blog where there’s already a certain level of substantive interaction — where people are asking you about issues related to your area of expertise — you are most likely seeing a steady stream of long-tail keywords you can target.

Professional Tools

And of course, there are lots of professional tools (both free and paid) on the web that can help you find related long-tail keywords for the keywords you are targeting. Some examples of these include Ubersuggest, Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool, Google Analytics, and Google Webmaster Tools, which contains a goldmine of information.

As with any keyword research, identifying long-tail keywords for your campaigns shouldn’t end at simply finding them. Integrate them into your text copy so they can work their magic. It’s important be very picky here, because you’re dealing with keywords that already have a lower search volume.

How do I Identify a Good Long-Tail Keyword?

Step 1. Once you’ve identified a potential long-tail keyword, head over to Google’s Keyword Tool and acquire Broad and Exact match search volume for it. Here’s a walkthrough on how to do that. This will pull up another set of (related) keywords with all the data you need about the search volume, the estimated competition, and the average CPC, which will give you a sense of how profitable that particular keyword is likely to be.

Step 2. Long-tail keywords are often grammatically / syntactically incorrect. In other words, they shouldn’t be used in your content “as is.” You’ll have to find creative ways to derive a slightly modified version of the keywords to be used in your content, while keeping them mostly intact.

Step 3. Not all long-tail keywords with decent search volume and competition numbers attached to them can be used to generate high-quality, lengthy, and informative content. Some of these are going to be intensely specific — which is to say, content that focuses on this topic would form the basis of no more than a single blog post. You’ll have to be creative here too, and devise keyword sets that can be merged and used together in order to be productively targeted in your content.

For Long-Tail, It’s Hard to Go By the Numbers

Often, long-tail keywords have little or no search volume according to Google’s Keyword Tool. However, in my experience, they can still pull quite a bit of traffic. It’s a bit of a guessing game, which is why it’s difficult to go simply by the numbers when it comes to long-tail keyword research. Trust your gut, write your blog posts around your long-tail keywords, and most importantly, analyze and address user intent.

These are some of the things that should guide you in identifying profitable long-tail keywords that will not only help you rank higher, but also convert better. As with other keywords and their associated content strategies, choosing the right set of long-tail keywords doesn’t guarantee you traffic or rankings automatically; it’s a long-term time commitment that should be treated as an investment. With enough time and consistency, your keyword research and content strategy will pay off.

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.

Featured image credit: OpenIcons

The post How to Identify Long-Tail Keywords for Your SEO Campaign appeared first on Advanced Web Ranking Blog.

Even though Pinterest now uses rel=nofollow, except for the link in your bio, it still has potential to generate benefits for your online business, just in a different way. Pinterest is an excellent platform to drive targeted traffic to your site, but only if used correctly.

First, a few questions to make sure Pinterest is right for your business.

Can you breakdown your services or products into images?
Determine whether your products are something pinners would want to pin on their personal boards. Your services need to be communicated in an attractive visual format on your business’ Pinterest boards and on the company’s website for people to be able to pin them.

You can download the pin it button for your website here.

Are your potential customers on Pinterest?
Seventy percent of the Pinterest audience is female and the majority is between the ages of 25 and 64, according to Nielsen. While some brands are targeting males or females in particular, others are non-gender, such as a background check investigation company. For the latter, the decision to use Pinterest is not that obvious. It requires a thoughtful analysis to determine whether it’s worth their investment or not.

Think of aspects of your company and products these women would like to learn and share. For the private investigations company it could be: how to protect your privacy, ways to get a background check on a nanny, or questions you should always ask a babysitter before hiring.

You could write an article on the company blog accompanied by an image or meme that captures the essence of the topic. Also, think about whether these pins would translate back into sales for this target market. If yes, then go for it!

Do your competitors have a presence on Pinterest?
If you truly want to be successful on Pinterest, you have to do your research on competitors, understand what works and doesn’t work, and who your most influential pinners are or could be.

You’re not going to see instant turnaround on Pinterest. It takes time to create shareable content; and a lot of it! You also need to monitor your referrals and check if Pinterest is generating revenue or just a higher bounce rate and then figure out how to make it better.

Make Pinterest effective

Conversions come in many ways, shapes and styles though they always end in one form. Keep in mind the end goal may be money but there are multiple chutes and ladders to getting there and you should find the best one for your company.

1) The “Real”
Pinterest is a chance for your company to become “real” and build your customers’ trust even more.

Your Pinterest board should have more than just your products and services. It should be a collection of who you are as a brand. Chobani does an excellent job with their persona and they have close to 60K followers on Pinterest.

Make sure to also follow and interact with other pinners through repins, comments and likes. It’s a two way street to success. If you’re invested in them, they will be more willing to check out your products.

Create on your board an even mixture of pins from your site, other non-competitive sites, and repins to keep your profile surprising and interesting.

2) The Shortcut
It’s a company’s dream to have their customers spread great reviews about their products to friends, creating thus new customers. But in order for Pinterest to help this happen, you first need to have a “pin it” button for all your products on your website. If you don’t have that, the chances your content would end up being pinned by your visitors are quite low and your Pinterest strategy bound for failure.

Think of these buttons as an easy way for your customer to put a gold star next to your product and tell all their friends about it.

To encourage even more your current customers to share the products they like on Pinterest, add a pop-up during check out that asks your customer to share their purchase on Pinterest.

3) The Push
Invest time and effort in building an audience for your Pinterest boards. Once you have a small following, you can use a contest or special offer to encourage your followers to spread the word about your company and lead your potential customers to your Pinterest page.

4) The Reminder
It’s important not to get discouraged if you don’t immediately see a rise in conversions from Pinterest. Many pinners are pinning items they eventually want to purchase so it might take awhile before the actual conversion.

At this point, think of Pinterest as reinforcement. When pinners go exploring, your timely pins should send notes of inspiration, creative ways to use the product, and related humor to continuously remind them of your product and why they desperately need it.

Tip: Holidays are a great time to send out these reminder pins as pinners are actively seeking what to buy their loved ones.

5) The Loyal
Pinners should feel like they own your brand so do not hesitate to encourage pinners to interact and get creative with your products. Their followers will join in on the fun, which will boost interest in your products and create brand loyalty.

Focus on finding pinners with a large number of followers who might be interested in being one of your brand’s mavens. Send them a sample product or think of a creative way to make those pinners love your brand.

Don’t be constrained to just these five ways to enhance your Pinterest boards, be creative and have fun because if you are enjoying what you pin your potential customer will too.

Below are a few Pinterest tools to help you get started in researching and evaluating your Pinterest strategy:

http://www.pinreach.com/
http://digitalhighrise.com/pinterest-tool-and-bookmarklet
http://www.socialable.co.uk/20-of-the-best-pinterest-tools-for-businesses/
http://www.piqora.com/
http://www.pinpuff.com/
http://www.curalate.com/

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.

The post Effectively Using Pinterest for Your Business appeared first on Advanced Web Ranking Blog.

Since YouTube is frequently referred to as the world’s second largest search engine, and its results often populate the top of search result pages for certain keywords, this tool can be a powerful one in the hands of an SEO expert or a marketing agency, as it can help them determine what themes they should pursue in their video-based content creation strategies.

Here are some ways that the new Trends for YouTube tool can be used to help optimize your SEO game:

Term and Time selection

People usually visit Google and YouTube with specific search intents, and the obvious goal is to show up in the results when they type them in. Google Trends for YouTube allows you to see the popularity of your targeted keywords, in addition to suggestions of similar keywords that also have substantial search volume. This data will help you optimize your videos for YouTube results and hit the keywords that are currently driving the most traffic.

This information can also help you establish the ideal time to schedule the release of your video content. For example, if the subject of your video is “party ideas,” a quick look at Google Trends shows that historically, the highest search volume occurs annually in the month of October.

Long-lasting vs. In-and-out viral hits

Google Trends also offers the ability to compare the YouTube search volume of selected keywords between each other at a glance. By adding search terms into their sidebar, it’s possible to compare up to a total of 5 keywords and gain a visual perspective on their performance throughout the chosen time range.

As the example on the YouTube Trends blog shows, this comparison can help identify trends that are long-lasting, versus in-and-out viral hits such as the screaming goat phenomenon.

Competitive analysis for YouTube

Not only do these metrics help identify the longevity of certain keywords, they can also be used to gain some insight into your performance versus your competitors’ if retrieved for your brand names.

Also, as it goes all the way back to 2008, this information can be used to identify any performance issues that have occurred in the past, and correct them in order to get a competitive edge in future YouTube results, just like Coca Cola seems to have done in 2010.

If you look at the example above, you will notice that between 2008 and 2010, search interest on YouTube for Pepsi was greater that for CocaCola, but things dramatically changed in the period after.

In addition to searching for your actual brand name as a keyword, searching for other terms related to the industry in which you operate can shed some light on your industry’s presence on YouTube.

Jump on the latest viral video trend

By learning what is trending on YouTube and when, it becomes much easier to determine whether certain types of videos are worth pursuing.

If you’re thinking of jumping on the latest viral video trend, it’s a huge advantage to have some insider information as to whether or not it’s still going to be relevant by the time you produce and release it.

Browse through the trends that Google currently lists as “Hot” and then copy those into the search term menu with the “Limit to YouTube Search” option to see what video themes are up-and-coming. Certain keywords also have a “Forecast” option enabled, which provides an educated guess as to how they’ll perform in the upcoming months.

Final thoughts

Google Trends for YouTube is a great new tool for SEO specialists and content creators. However, it’s important to remember that this is just one weapon in an arsenal of SEO tools at your disposal. Focusing your entire YouTube content strategy around Trends may make your work seem flat, as if it’s just trying to jump on hot topics and get some easy traffic.

Keep the core values of your web presence in mind, and keep your strategies well-balanced to attract a solid and dedicated viewer base, rather than a slew of traffic passing through to see something trendy.

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.

The post YouTube Trends: Optimizing for the World’s Second Biggest Search Engine appeared first on Advanced Web Ranking Blog.

The new release comes with lots of other cool features as well. Check out this video for a quick preview:

Video Transcript:

Hello, my name is Aura. I am an online marketer here at Caphyon, and it is my pleasure to introduce the new features and enhancements in the Advanced Web Ranking 9.5.

So, here is what we’ve been up to in the last couple of months:

• we have integrated the Majestic OpenApps API so that you can use Majestic links data in the Advanced Web Ranking reports
• we added the ability to evaluate the risk of your links profile by resolving the IP address of your referrers
• we also made the data export available for the Website Audit and for the Content Optimization tools
• we also added an option to display your customized header and footer on each page of your PDF reports.
• now you can also append location to your keywords when tracking rankings on location based search engines
• and last, but not least, we added visibility metrics in the AWR project manager, so you can evaluate your overall progress at a glance

First, let’s take a quick look at the Majestic SEO links.

As many of you know, Advanced Web Ranking is already able to provide complete SEO analysis with links data.

Until now, you could integrate links in your reports only from SEOmoz. But with the new AWR version, you have a choice now to use Majestic SEO links.

The Majestic OpenApps enables you to enhance powerful links data in complete SEO reports made with Advanced Web Ranking.

To choose your links data provider in AWR, just make sure you are in the Links menu and click on this icon here to open the Links Data Source dialog. Now just authorize AWR with Majestic SEO and enter the token from your account to start retrieving data. It’s very easy.

Data from Majestic SEO is further displayed in links reports, and in powerful analysis where you can dig in different aspects of SEO.

Now, another enhancement that we added in AWR 9.5 for link building is the ability to resolve the IP address of your referrers. This is very important when it comes to evaluating the risk of a backlink.

To retrieve the IP addresses, just use the “Verify Links” update in Advanced Web Ranking. This works for both link data providers: Majestic SEO or SEOmoz.

This will reveal the referrer IP and also it will tell you if the referrer is still linking back to your website. Now, when you sort the items by IP, you can see the links that are coming from different domains but are hosted on the same IP. Cases like this may add a risk to your overall links profile.

Now, on that note, let’s move on to some more powerful data analysis:

In this new version, we added the ability to export SEO audit data to several formats: HTML, PDF and CSV.

These exports are available for the Website Auditor, that helps you run a complete technical audit for your website, and for the Content Optimization tool, which shows you the on-page optimization level for a specific keyword.

Now, the export for these research tools is made via the Quick report function, up here. For this example I will make an HTML export, from the Content Optimization tool.

Here it is. Looks pretty great! It’s a nice way to show your progress to your team or to your customers.

Now, let’s move on to another enhancement we added in the new version, for the white labeling mode of the AWR reports.

This is the ability to add a customized header and footer to each page of your printable reports. So, let’s open the editor of a printable report, let’s say… the Keyword Rank report. Here, we can tell AWR to add the custom header and footer on each page of the printable report.

And, this is how it looks like, displaying your company name and logo on each page.

Next, let’s take a look at the improvement we added for location search engines.

AWR 9.5 now includes the option to append the location for location based search engines defined in AWR. So, when this option is selected, the requests that the application sends to Google Location search engines appends the name of the location to your keyword.

For example, let’s say we are tracking “mobile phones shops” in Google with location: Miami. When this option is un-checked, the results retrieved by the application are similar to what people see in browser when searching for “mobile phones shops” in Google.com, from Miami.

When you use this option, AWR will retrieve results similar to what people see in browser when searching for “mobile phones shops Miami”, from Miami. Here is a set of results already gathered, in the Top Sites report. As you can see here, the actual keywords in your project are not modified in any way. Everything is done in the background by the application, for a better accuracy.

And last, but not least, the new version includes the ability to evaluate the overall visibility progress for all your AWR projects at a glance.

So, let’s take a quick look at the Project Manager. This is where you can see the visibility score, and also the average rank of your website, across all keywords and search engines in the related projects. Once you have several project updates, you can also see a comparison of these values to the previous update dates.

Other visibility metrics are also available for comparison. You can choose them from the columns selector, up here.

That’s about it. I hope you enjoyed the video.

You can download AWR 9.5 from our website, or you can update to the latest version directly from the application.

If you have any questions, please write us at help@advancedwebranking.com. We’d be more than happy to help you.

The post Announcing Majestic SEO API Integration with Advanced Web Ranking v9.5 appeared first on Advanced Web Ranking Blog.

Dig Into Your Google Analytics

When you look into your Google Analytics referral traffic, you’ll likely see Twitter’s own shortened URL, t.co.

When you click on t.co, you’ll see a detailed breakdown of the specific shortened URL’s that have led visitors back to your website.

From here, you can analyze your Twitter traffic two ways. You can analyze the t.co links that have driven the most traffic to your website or you can click on your Goal Sets at the top of the Explorer view to see which t.co links have brought you visitors that convert.

Once you have chosen the t.co links you want to analyze, click on the outgoing link icon to find out what piece of content it directs visitors to.

Search Twitter Trackbacks

Next, you’ll need the Topsy trackback bookmarklet. Just drag this link for Topsy Trackbacks to your browser’s bookmark toolbar. Then click on the bookmarklet when you’re viewing the piece of content you clicked to from Google Analytics. Now you should be on a page that shows you the tweet history of your content.

Use your browser’s find box (Ctrl F or Command F) and paste in the specific t.co referral path to search for it on the trackbacks page. You may need to hit the More link at the bottom to get more trackbacks. The goal is to find the first person that tweeted that link first. Note that sometimes it might be harder to get all of the trackbacks for older content.

Voila! You now know the most popular piece of content on your website for a specific period of time that resulted in a tweet from an influential Twitter member and lots of visits from Twitter to your website.

Keeping Influencers in Your Corner

At this point, you’re probably thinking that you want to keep this person interested in you and your content. So how do you do that? Here are some ideas.

• As you find influential people on Twitter whose tweets lead to lots of traffic or conversions, add them to a Twitter list (public or private). Monitor this list using tools like Commun.it (as shown in the image above) to track your engagement with them and make sure you never miss the chance to reply to their updates.
• If your influential followers have a blog, subscribe to it via RSS. Google Reader is a great option if you are already logged in to your Google account for Analytics, Google+, and other Google products. If their posts will resonate well with your audience, be sure to tweet the post and include the person’s @username in the tweet so they know you are following them closely too.
• If these people have a ton of Twitter followers, they may miss your interactions on Twitter. Seek them out on other networks where they may have fewer followers (Google+ is usually a sure shot) and interact with them there. The fewer interactions they have, the more yours will stand out.

By using your analytics data, Topsy, and a Twitter list monitoring tool, you can make sure you get to know the people who support you who bring the best traffic results to your website and keep them on your team!

What strategies and tools do you use to analyze your tweets to find the most influential members of your Twitter community?

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.

Featured image credit: Kamarashev

The post How to Find Your Most Valuable Twitter Followers appeared first on Advanced Web Ranking Blog.

Instead of valuable search keywords showing up in our analytics, we have “not provided” accounting for upwards of 50% of search traffic in some cases.

This started in late 2011, when Google stopped passing keyword query data through its referrer string for logged in users. And the bad news is that the hidden data will only increase as Google begins encrypting all Chrome searches–whether users are logged in to Google or not.

For those who rely on organic traffic data for search engine optimization, this trend is serious cause for concern.

Or even worse, if you’re targeting low-volume phrases, tracking the channel of every website conversion or reporting to a client demanding results will become a steep challenge as the (Not Provided) tag can swallow up all “proof” of results.

The keyword data for these queries still exists—and those using AdWords will note that all search keywords are magically provided in their reports, but for organic search, we’re losing a significant piece of the picture.

I know it’s tempting to get angry and theorize about Google’s PPC-minded motivations, but I think that a better use of our efforts would be on preserving and maximizing the search data we still have:

Start Saving the Query Impressions Data

One way to view your site’s performance with high value keywords is to use the Query report in Google Analytics (image below).

To pull this report, go to Traffic Sources > SEO > Queries and choose your desired date range. Keep in mind that Google only stores this data for two full months at a time, so be sure to save these reports for historical comparison data.

This report shows you the search query, your (ballpark) impressions, clicks generated, average search position and click-through-rate.

It’s not as granular as seeing all keywords from your search traffic, but it is a tool that can be used to measure traffic and gauge improvement for targeted keywords.

This report can also be accessed in Webmaster Tools in Traffic > Search Queries.

Analyze Landing Page Reports

Just because you can’t see the search keywords of your “not provided” visitors, that doesn’t mean you can’t see the behavior of these visitors on your site.

You can isolate these visits and mine your analytics to determine on which landing page the “not provided” visitors entered the website—which gives some insight into which keyword groups may have been used in the search.

To use this method, first you need to create a custom advanced segment for “not provided” traffic.

Then, in standard reports, pull up the landing page report and apply this advanced segment. Now you can see that X number entered through the homepage, Y number entered through service page, and so on.

From here, you can segment your “not provided traffic” by landing page, creating a more nuanced understanding of your mystery traffic. Naturally, this will be more useful for some websites than others.

Focus Your Reporting on Relevant Landing Pages

It’s likely that not every page of your website is designed to target organic traffic.

Think about pages like careers, contact us, testimonials, employee bios, and, in some cases, blogs. Even if these are also a component of your organic strategy, it’s likely that they drive a type of traffic you would want to report on separately.

Therefore, to get a closer look at the data that’s really important from an SEO standpoint, create a custom report that excludes these pages.

While this won’t eliminate your encrypted search data problem, it will allow you to analyze and report
on a more focused, relevant portion of your site.

Exclude Branded Terms from your Impressions Report to get a Better Idea of your Targeted Keyword Progress

Apply the same terms you filter organic “provided” traffic to your Impressions report. While highly generic, this can give you a reportable “visibility” metric. This is also useful for reporting SERP progress instead of the traditional keyword page ranking. As Google continues to customize its “first page” results, this can be a useful number to quantify the website’s real presence in search results.

Do a Little Math

In the end, to decompose the structure of your “not provided” traffic, requires a little math:

• As discussed above, take your organic traffic and remove the less-relevant landing pages (blog, careers, etc)
• Look at your keyword volumes and calculate the proportion of Branded vs Targeted keywords
• Apply the same proportions to your “not provided” volume of keywords and determine the rough volume of “not provided” visitors using targeted keywords.

Unfortunately, there is no secret hack that will unlock Google’s encrypted search traffic (and if someone is claiming otherwise, be wary). That said, we still have a good amount of keyword data to work with between our analytics, Webmaster Tools, and other sources like the AdWords Keyword Tool.

What tactics have you used to combat your “not provided” traffic problem? Let us know in the comments section!

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.

The post Providing Metrics in a (Not Provided) World appeared first on Advanced Web Ranking Blog.

How to Create Advanced Segments in Google Analytics

Creating Advanced Segments in Google Analytics is easy! Simply go to your website’s dashboard in Google Analytics and click on Advanced Segments. Then click on the +New Custom Segment.

First you will give your Advanced Segment a name. For segments measuring social media referral traffic, you will select Include > Source > Containing. Then you will enter the domain of the social media network you want to measure.

Once you have entered your social networks, you can use the Test or Preview Segment buttons to make sure you have configured it correctly to filter data. Then you can click Save to save it to your list of Custom Segments. To view your segment later, click on Advanced Segment, check the box next to the segment you want to view, and click Apply. You can view up to three segments at a time to compare data.

Organizing Social Networks for Advanced Segments

You can enter up to 20 domains / social networks in each Advanced Segment. This means that if you want to measure more than 20 social networks, you will need to think of a way to categorize them. To determine your social network groupings, just answer these questions.

• Do you want to view certain social networks’ data as a collection? 
• Do you want to compare one set of social media networks to another? 
• Do you want to separate networks you spend a lot of time on vs. networks you only work with occasionally?

Answering these should help you determine the best way to organize your social networks into segments.

Sample Advanced Segments

The following are some examples of Advanced Segments you can setup to measure specific types of social networks. You can pick and choose the ones that work best for your website, or combine a few sites from each into one. Remember to set each of the set each of these up using the Include > Source > Containing configuration with the following domains.

Main Social Networks

This segment should include the main social networks you focus upon. For most websites, this is Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn. These networks can appear in Google Analytics in multiple ways.

• Twitter: twitter.com, t.co, twittergadget.com, mobile.twitter.com, and api.twitter.com
• Facebook: facebook.com and m.facebook.com
• Google+: plus.google.com and plus.url.google.com
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com

You will also have to decide how to handle HootSuite (hootsuite.com). People use it as a social media management tool primarily for Twitter, but they can also use it for Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and a few other networks. You may or may not want to include it as a part of your main social networks segment.

Social Bookmarking & Voting Networks

This segment includes sites where people have bookmarked a page on your website for future reference. Many will count bookmarks as votes – the more votes your page gets, the more likely it is to be featured on the homepage of the network, thus receiving lots of traffic.

• stumbleupon.com
• delicious.com
• digg.com
• reddit.com
• diigo.com
• news.ycombinator.com (Hackers News)
• bizsugar.com
• blogengage.com

Image Based Social Networks

This segment includes social networks where the main focus is sharing images.

• flickr.com
• pinterest.com

Video Based Social Networks

This segment includes social networks where the main focus is sharing video.

• youtube.com
• vimeo.com
• dailymotion.com
• revver.com
• metacafe.com

This segment will only show results if you are actively uploading videos to specific networks.

Q&A Networks

This segment includes social networks where the main focus is asking and answering questions from other users.

• quora.com
• answers.yahoo.com
• stackoverflow.com

Social Newspapers

This segment includes social networks where people share stories from others social networks (primarily Twitter) in the form of a social newspaper.

• scoop.it
• paper.li
• instapaper.com
• feedly.com

Niche Social Networks

This segment includes social networks geared for a particular interest or industry. This one will vary based on the industry you are in. For example, photography niche networks include:

• flickr.com
• 500px.com
• 1x.com
• pinterest.com

You can find more niche social networks on KnowEm or within your own Google Analytics data as discussed in the next section.

Discovering Social Networks Driving Traffic to Your Website

The above example segments do not include every social network out there. Your best bet to make sure you capture all of the social networks that drive traffic to your website is to go into your own Google Analytics, look at the last year’s worth of Referral Traffic under Traffic Sources, and examine the sites sending traffic to your website. Chances are you will discover additional social networks. You can also find new social networks on sites like KnowEm.

You will also want to do this check of your referral traffic periodically as some networks change the structure of their URLs that will change the source domain you specified within your segments. Plus you may find new social networks referring traffic to your website that you will want to examine more in depth.

What You Will Learn with Advanced Segments

Advanced Segments for social media will allow you to view all of your Google Analytics data based on traffic from your specified segments. For example, you could compare traffic from your main social networks to traffic from social bookmarking networks.

This kind of view throughout your Google Analytics can help you easily determine whether you should just focus your efforts on the main social media sites vs. niche sites, image based sites vs. video based sites, or other groupings. It is crucial to know this to make sure you are investing in a social media strategy that will give you a strong return on investment.

I’m looking forward to your thoughts and comments!

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.

The post Google Analytics Advanced Segments for Measuring Social Media [samples] appeared first on Advanced Web Ranking Blog.

Take a quick look at this video to find out what’s awesome in the new AWR v9.4:

Video Transcript: 

Hello, my name is Aura and it is my pleasure to introduce you to the new features and improvements in Advanced Web Ranking 9.4. 

In this new version we added

• ranking Alerts that keep you informed whenever important changes happen to your rankings
• two new metrics Average Rank and Traffic Share that I will talk more about later on in this video
• caching of the search engine results pages which will help you see how your website appears in the search engines
• the ability to define multiple Google locations more easily which is helpful if you want to target multiple cities in the same country
• the ability to import search engine locations from a file for those of you who target a large number of local search engines
• and last but not least, the ability to import keywords with categories for those of you who migrate to Advanced Web Ranking from a different tool 

I want to keep this video short so let’s begin with the ranking alerts. 

We all have busy days and don’t always have time to look at the ranking reports every day. The new Alerts are your friend. They tell you when your visibility suddenly drops across all your keywords, which would imply a possible penalty or when your most important keywords fall out of the Top 10 rankings so you know something needs to be done right away. 

You can create 3 types of alerts to track changes in your search engine visibility, keyword positions or top rankings. Every time you update your ranking data all the alerts are checked and triggered if their condition is met. 

You can edit your alerts and select specific keywords you are interested in and you can also change the condition that will trigger the alert. 

For your convenience, you can also receive these alerts by email. Just  check this option here and enter your email address. 

You can manage all your alerts in the Alert Manager, and also you can see which alerts were triggered and when in the Alert History. 

Next, let’s take a look at the new Average Rank metric, which helps you see the average position of your website ranking for all your keywords or just for the categories you have already defined. 

This is useful if you want to see a trend for a group of keywords instead of tracking individual rankings for each keyword. 

The second new metric is called Traffic Share. It helps you see your share of the total traffic that a keyword can generate by dividing the number of visitors that come to your website searching for that keyword to the total search volume of that keyword. 

If you are optimizing for a local market, then you can see the local traffic share which is calculated the same way but taking into account the local search volume instead. 

To get the local search volumes, you just need to choose the country and language you are interested in from the Keyword Priority tool and run a new update. Make sure you have Exact match selected for a better accuracy. 

Now here’s where all this data becomes useful. Let’s sort by Traffic Share and then by position in Google.

This reveals an underperforming keyword that we rank for on third place but only brings less than 4% of the total traffic. 

Once you identify such a keyword with a low traffic share, you should check to see what the problem is. Just double click on its position and you will see the actual search engine result page that your visitors see. 

Why aren’t these people who search for this keyword clicking on your on site even though it ranks so well? Could it be the title or the snippet of your entry? Or there are more relevant ads or Universal entries in front of you that get more attention? 

Now you have all the information you need to make an informed decision. 

Next, let’s change the focus a bit and move to search engine management. 

One of the new enhancements gives you the ability to define multiple Google locations more easily. This saves you a lot of time if you track rankings for customers in different cities within the same country.

Here, click on Define and choose the search engine you are interested in. Then add the relevant cities below. In this final step, just choose the search engines you need. 

In this new version, we also improved the local search engine management, with the ability to import locations from a file. This is helpful for tracking multiple local results, also called Maps results. 

Here, choose Import locations and browse to the file where you have the data in the format shown on the screen. 

Once the locations are imported, you just need to choose the local search engines you want. If you are interested in different local search engines, you can simply choose a different category from this filter. Finally, press Finish to add the search engines to your project. 

The new version also features the ability to import keywords from a file and assign them directly to categories. This is helpful when you want to manage a large number of terms and phrases grouped by categories. 

Here’s how the CSV file should be formatted: and here’s the keyword, the priority, the RGB code which defines the color, and the name of the category that the keyword will be assigned to. 

Let’s import the file now, and here are the new keywords in categories. 

That’s about it. I hope you enjoyed the video.

Now you can download AWR 9.4 from our website, or you can update to the latest version from the application. 

If you have any questions, please write us at help@advancedwebranking.com. We’d be more than happy to help you.

The post Get Ranking Alerts When Something Big Happens In The SERPs appeared first on Advanced Web Ranking Blog.

Although the campaign was limited, giving me little wiggle room, by the end of the first 3 months, customer acquisition was already improved by 20%.

You need to keep in mind that if your AdWords campaigns are not properly optimized, Google will laugh all the way to the bank, while your wallets are emptying and you get more and more stressed out wondering how your entire marketing budget got spent.

So, let me walk you through the steps I did for optimizing the AdWords campaign of my client – Omega Pizza.

Step 1 – Research the business (Omega Pizza)

First, to be able to set up the campaign, I needed to get a few essential answers:

What time is the Pizza Restaurant busiest?
The busiest time is from 5pm-8pm, which is not surprising because it’s dinner time for families and people with regular 9-5 jobs

What is the top selling food item?
The top selling food item was pizza combos followed by wings

What devices are people using the most?
By looking at analytics I found that on average this restaurant was getting 35% of their traffic from mobile devices. This month was actually 43%. I predict they will reach 50% by the end of 2013.

What city they are targeting?
Surrey, British Columbia

Step 2 – Adjust the “Account settings”

The single biggest mistake anyone can do is to run the AdWords campaign with all the account settings set on default. Google loves default because you rack up the bill without knowing what happened.

Now let’s go over what I had to change in the “Settings” section.

These few simple changes made a huge difference in the efficiency of the AdWords campaign.

Step 3 – Current ad structure for Omega Pizza

Creating the ads for Omega was not difficult since the client offers only two items, pizza and chicken wings.

Initially they had only one campaign with a single ad group and two ads with keywords that didn’t make sense. I decided to carefully select sections of Omega Pizza’s menu and create testable advertisements of them.

Take a look at the current ads running:

I have trimmed the landing pages they used and only kept a few, based on:

• The menu 
• Omega’s homepage 
• Contact page

Also, I have created specific landing pages just for mobile users since the ROI was increasing so much and the owners were strongly considering investing more into AdWords.

Step 4 – Optimizing Omega’s AdWords campaign

I started my research by looking at their ads and conversion numbers. As expected, the numbers were pretty disappointing.

I came up with a few ads without changing those they already had and focused on using branded and local delivery ads.

Here’s an example of exactly what I did with Ad extensions.

Location based ads:

I decided to clean things up a bit, by getting rid of all of the low converting keywords and added exact match keywords. Some keywords like “pizza delivery” remained a broad choice since essentially, this is what the business is specialized in.

Another thing that was draining Omega’s AdWords campaign were the keywords that had nothing to do with their business at all. In other words, Omega’s AdWords campaign desperately needed negative keywords to be set.

If you are running an AdWords campaign but do not know what I am talking about, you are probably wasting a lot of money. This will help you, so read on!

Check out the image below to find out what keywords people are using to reach your ads:

After checking which keywords were being used to get to the website, I have made a selection and came up with a list of useless keywords, which did not have any relevance to the site. I have set these keywords as negative keywords. For the Omega website, I defined 86 negative keywords.

By doing this, the budget was allocated only for relevant keywords, that we wanted clicks for. If you can’t find where to put the negative keywords just click on the “Keywords” tab and scroll all the way down. You should find your way around from there.

Let’s recap what was changed

I want to go over the list of what I have done for the Omega website so you can apply it to your own projects:

1. Meet the client several times to find out exactly what the business is about and what are the goals of your campaign.
2. Look at the Account settings and make the needed adjustments. In my case money was being wasted in multiple places. Focus the budget where appropriate.
3. If they have an AdWords campaign running, audit it and see if there is anything missing.
4. Create new ads depending on those existing. Your client might have horrible ads, which serves no one. Create branded ads with location included. In my case I still need an ad with Sitelinks pointing to their menu.
5. Check out their keywords. Go to “Dimensions” and make sure your client is getting the right clicks. Research and set the appropriate “Negative Keywords”.

If you will make a good job, the results will start to appear:

My job on Omega’s AdWords campaign doesn’t end here. I am planning to create a campaign just for mobile users next. Who knows, perhaps I will create the ad while writing about it. If you have any suggestions about what would work better or you would like to add anything, please let me know. I would love to hear your thoughts.

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.

Featured Photo credits: Tax Credits

The post AdWords Tricks That Increased Customer Acquisition by: 20% [case study] appeared first on Advanced Web Ranking Blog.

This is not something new. In fact, Google hasn’t displayed “un-customized” geo-located results for over a decade. A change however, came with the “Venice” update at the end of February 2012, when hyper local search results were pushed.

The “Venice” update

The update missed many SEO’s attention since it didn’t affect the results as badly as Penguin and Panda did. But only the fact that this algorithm got its own code name means it was deemed pretty significant by Google.

More than that, location-based customization should be recognized as an important factor for better user experience as Google doesn’t even allow turning it off; it does not require your consent, and it will even occur when browsing in “incognito” mode.

This makes total sense if you think that no one is going to use the services of say, a plumber, who is 4,000 miles/km away from his location. Take a look at the rankings for “car insurance”, a business model that accepts applicants online from anywhere in Canada:

However, even services that are not tied with a physical location will get personalized results. I dare say that all organic results are now influenced by user location in one way (straight IP detection) or another (sneaky toolbars or mobile phone tracking).

Moreover, Google has acquired IPS patents (indoor positioning systems, which let you locate yourself inside a building). In the near future, innovators like Google will be able to capture your exact position (floor level and distance to a store in a mall) and deliver the most relevant ads and content. I wonder how this is going to personalize search results in 2013…

It is not the purpose of this article to detail how search engines identify your location, but here are a few pointers:

• Identify Contact Us pages on the website and find partial or complete addresses
• Use of landmark identifiers on the About Us/Contact Us page (references such as “We are two minutes away from Canada Place in Vancouver”)
• Use of the HTML address tag
• Structured markup such as microdata

For those interested in more technical details on how search engines might track location and use geo data, here’s a list of patents assigned to Google for such activities:

• Assigning Geographic Location Identifiers to Web Pages
• Inferring Geographic Locations for Entities Appearing in Search Queries
• Geographic Coding for Location Search Queries
• Refining Location Estimates and Reverse Geocoding Based on a User Profile
• Scoring Local Search Results Based on Location Prominence

Test your rankings for different locations

Location-based customized results pose a specific challenge to business owners who operate at national levels and would like to track the rankings for their targeted keywords in specific locations.

And if you might think that your keywords and rankings are not prone to customization based on geo location, I challenge you to test that.

1. Go to Google (.com, .ca, .de or other country code) and sign out if you’re logged in.
2. Remove all cookies and then disable customization based on history.
3. Search the keywords you track rankings for (by default Google will try to get your location based on your IP and personalize the results).
4. Change the city and search again.

Keeping track of rankings with Excel

If you need to go about checking the rankings for multiple keywords in several cities, on a regular base, you might end up with a file that looks like this:

In the image above, Column #1 lists the rankings of AdWords ads, column #2 the places rankings, and column #3 the rankings for organic. You could eventually log news or video results too if they are relevant for your business, but you should be aware that the more data you track, the more difficult it will be to build this sheet manually.

Our approach at Pitstop Media Inc

Frustrated by the enormous time required to do this manually and by the inability of many rank tracking tools to record rankings for city based searches, we initially started working with a programmer on our own rank tracking tool (PHP +MySQL).

The basics came together pretty well – within a week we were able to input, gather and scrape non geo-location results, ability to bucket/ignore local, video, news and image results.

But once we started adding the geo-location to the mix, we got into trouble: JavaScript checks for browser detection, CAPTCHA and dedicated proxies in each city. The setup is even more difficult for Canadian results, where the location is not passed with URLs, but rather stored with cookies.

After a while we decided it was not worth the time and investment and that we could get better advantage of our efforts if they were put into a solution that was already effective. That is when we started using Advanced Web Ranking.

I am not going to re-write something that’s been previously explained in detail, so if you wish to know how exactly AWR works for tracking geo-location customized results, please read Rankings by geo location.

However, we did not consider our mini-project a failure – we now believe we know what needs to be done if we want to make such things work in the future and how we can maximize search engine visibility for our business in different locations.

Your thoughts

Tracking geo-location customized search results could vary from business to business which makes it so challenging for any SEO. Therefore, your own thoughts and suggestions on this are much appreciated so, please share them in the comments below.

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.

The post Geo Location and Search Engine Rank Tracking appeared first on Advanced Web Ranking Blog.