One of these things is not like the others,
One of these things just doesn’t belong,
Can you tell which thing is not like the others
By the time I finish my song?

The search results that you see within your browser are not the same as the others, each person is seeing different results. This is because those magic elves that place links on Google’s results pages knows that not everyone is that same and they customize your search results to better fit your needs. These personalized searches are created by multiple factors and from these sources, Google provides you with more relevant searches and gets you to the page you are looking for.

What affects my search results?

There are many factors that go into personalizing your search results, but here are some of the top ones:

Location

Google knows where you sleep. They also know where you work, go to school, and where you go on your weekends.

Don’t believe me? Take a look at this:


This is the location data Google has collected on me for the past 30 days.

Of course, I have an Android phone and take Google everywhere I go, but have a look here and find out if Google already knows what you did last weekend:
https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/b/0

This precise location data allows Google to give you information based on your current location as well as the places you have visited in the past.

If you are not connected to Google via a mobile device, it will get your location based off your IP address of your internet connection. It may not be as precise as GPC, but it gives them the general area you are located.

This location data is used to help you find information on nearby restaurants or other local businesses. These custom results are very helpful to the user, but in my tests they caused the biggest fluctuation of the rankings.

You will also see local results from a couple different sources. One source is the content on your site. Google will look for the best content based on the location and the search query. These results will show up in the regular organic results (see the blue highlighted listings above).

There are still a section of local listings grouped within the search results. This data comes from Google My Business listings and finds local businesses near your location and places them on a map to help you find a store near you.

Search History

Google tracks the different terms that you search for to help understand the context of your search. Google first announced personalized search way back in 2005, which used your personal search history to influence your results. This was only available to users that had a Google account.

Then four years later, in 2009, Google announced that it was giving personalized search to everyone whether they were signed into their Google account or not.

 So you can see that Google remembers your other recent searches. The image below shows the same search query for ‘JavaScript,’ but you can see personalized results on the right based on previous searches.

In the search on the right I searched for ‘Programming Textbooks’ and ‘Books on HTML’ before I searched ‘JavaScript’. This changed the results by bringing in three book listings that were not on the original set of results at all.

Web History

If you are signed into a Google account and use Chrome or the Google Toolbar, your web history is being collected and stored in a vast Google data center somewhere. Google uses this web history to learn what kind of sites you like and base your search results on this.

When testing this, I saw Twitter rise in the rankings over Facebook since I tend to visit Twitter more often. Otherwise, I didn’t see any major changes.

Google+

When you create a Google+ account, you give Google a lot of demographic data on yourself including your age, sex, where you live, other places you used to live, where you work, who your friends are, what your favorite 80’s TV show is (mine is Misfits of Science).

You would think they would use this demographic data to target you, but during my tests I didn’t see any clear indications of this. The only major changes I saw based on Google+ was the additions of reviews or ratings by people I have in my circles.

I moved to Seattle about the same time that Johnathon Colman moved to California, but I have been followed by his ghost ever since. I have Johnathon in my Google+ circles and because of that he shows up every time I’m looking for local businesses.

I didn’t notice any of these reviews making changes in the position of the rankings, but they do make the site listing more visible which would likely increase the click through rate of that listing.

What does this mean to me?

There is no consistent search experience because of personalization. This means that you can track the keyword rankings for your site using generic non-personalized search results, but they don’t match up 1:1 to what your customers are seeing. It’s still OK to track your keywords, but you need to realize that it is not giving you the full picture of what is going on in the wild. You need to use these ranking to see how you are trending, not what place a specific keyword is ranking for this week.

When you are trying to increase the rankings of your site, it is best to take a holistic approach and include onsite and offsite optimization, localization, and social visibility. All of these factor into your rankings and will help you increase your search visibility in personalized and non-personalized search results.

The post Guide to Personalized Search Results appeared first on Portent.

Every time a customer makes a purchase, they go through certain step to determine what they want to buy and eventually, where they want to buy it from. By looking at these stages, you can find out what areas you already cover on your site and find the areas that you need to build up additional content. The holes you find in your buying cycle coverage brings in additional opportunities to attract new customers and with it, new sales.

The customer buying cycle, breaks down this process down to simple 5 steps.

The Customer Buying Cycle

1. Awareness – The customer identifies a need or becomes aware of a product or service
2. Research/Consideration – The customer does some research. They are trying to find answers to their questions and compare different choices. They will be comparing your site against others.
3. Decision – A customer makes a choice of one product or service
4. Purchase – The action of purchasing the item and/or service from your site
5. Retention – (Support/Repurchase): After the original purchase has taken place, how do you support your new customer so they will continue to use your services or purchase from you again.

Let’s go through each one and see what kind of keywords or topics you will use for each one. From this you can determine if you need to make additions or edits to your site.

Awareness

Imagine that you want to start biking into work and you are looking for a new bike. You might start off your search with some terms like this:

• road bikes
• commuter bicycles
• commuter bikes
• online bike sales

These are some basic terms that people use when starting out a search. You want to make sure that you have some good pages that can give the potential customer the information they are looking for.

Research/Consideration

Now you have a little more information about bicycles, but you still have to figure out which is the best for your commute. Your searches start looking like this:

• best bikes for commuting
• bike commuting in seattle
• bike commuting in the rain
• commuter bikes vs road bikes
• rain gear for bicycles
• types of commuter bikes
• commuter bikes reviews
• commuter bike videos

You can see here that the customer is getting a little more focused, but they haven’t made any decisions. You can help give them more information via pages on your site, blog posts, or YouTube videos. You might also develop guides that they can download or infographics that can help them understand concepts.

Decision

Ok, you’ve learned a lot so far. You got some good information and now it is time to decide where to buy your bike. To do this you are going to look for information about the purchase of the bike like price, shipping costs, shipping times, store reviews.

Here are some of the searches you might see:

• cannondale commuter bike
• cannondale commuter bike sales
• cannondale commuter bike free shipping
• cannondale bad boy commuter bike

You should have your product and category pages optimized for these long-tailed searches. This will allow the customer to find what they are looking for and help them make the final decision.

Purchase

And now you found a bike and price you like, but you are looking a little closer at the store:

• REI shipping costs
• REI shipping times
• REI store locations
• REI Seattle
• REI coupons

At this point the customer is about to purchase, but is getting the final information before making the purchase. Make sure that you have information for all of these types of searches on your site. If you also have physical stores, make sure you are showing up in local search and have clear information on your site about each location.

You will want to make sure that your checkout process is simple and easy to complete. Review each step to make sure you remove any issues standing in the way of a customer trying to complete their purchase.

The sales funnel is a good place to run A/B testing to make sure it is optimized to its fullest.

Retention

At this point the purchase of the bike is done and your new bike is on its way. You will want information on when your bike ships, as well as tracking information. This information should be supplied via email but also be available to the customer via the website. If you run into any problems after you get your bike, there should be clear ways to contact the company via email or phone.

At this time the customer might be looking for some more information about accessories for their new bike. Make sure you have content that includes accessories and other related services:

• bike tuneups
• cycling rain gear
• how to fix a flat tire
• bicycle tire repair kits

You can also automate emails to be sent after a purchase with related accessories or with a coupon for their next purchase.

What to do Next

Now that you went through the entire conversion full, you should see places on your site that you have missing or weak content to cover your customers needs at each of the stages. As you add this new content you will be able to use analytics to track how the pages are performing and which pages are the most popular. This can guide you in further updates to the site by letting you know what to focus on most.

The post Content for the Customer Buying Cycle appeared first on Portent.

The demise of keywords and the rise of Not Provided have made our job more difficult, but it is not impossible. I am going to review various techniques I use to look at analytics to find how my SEO updates have improved the site. This will help your clients break through the mumbo jumbo and finally understand your worth.

Rankings… Not so much

Search rankings are the first thing asked about when trying to figure out how well your SEO is performing, but it is not that simple.

There are many factors that make rankings less than useful.

1. Personalization –  Search engines personalize your search results based on what they know about you. They know what you have searched for on the web, your web browsing history, who your friends are and where you live. Big brother anyone?

Even if you check your rankings with no personalization, it’s not the same as what you customers will see. Most of them will have some sort of personalized results.

2. Localization – Even if you clear all your personal information out of your browser, search engines still know where your computer is and provide you localized results so you can find the closest Starbucks. Also, if you are using a service to pull your rankings for you, they will use different IP addresses each time they scrape the search engine results pages. This means that Google will give you results based on the location of that IP. This causes fluctuations each time they grab your current rankings.

3. Not tracking the relevant keywords – You may be tracking 500+ keywords, but out of those, how many are actually sending traffic to your site and converting? With that many keywords you will likely be overwhelmed and confused. Instead, you want to keep it simple and focused.

First, figure out the broad keywords that are most important to your site. Then get more focused and find some of the more specific, mid to long-tail, keywords that directly relate to your content.

What you can use rankings for

All these factors make tracking rankings less accurate, but you can still use rankings to help you get a high-level view of how you are doing on certain keywords and see how your site is trending over time. You can also watch your rankings to alert you of major problems (like Google manual penalties). Just do us all a favor and don’t make them your main KPI.

Look for big trends in site traffic

One of the most important metrics you want to look at is the amount of traffic that you are bringing to the site through your SEO efforts. You can find this information on the Organic Search Traffic report in Google Analytics. The problem with this report is that it is hard to see what is going on with it just by looking at it. You can look at the graph at top to see if traffic is going up over time, but it doesn’t tell you what is going on. You need to dig deeper.

Compare date ranges

First, look for short term changes first by comparing this month with the previous month. Are you doing better than the previous month? How well are you doing compared to last year?

It’s great to see how you are improving from month to month, but you need to be careful when looking at this, since you will eventually run into seasonality issues. For example, if your site does well during the Christmas season and you compare traffic in January to December you are going to see your traffic numbers decrease, but this doesn’t mean that your SEO is doing bad. It would be better to look at improvement year over year.

Look for spikes and drops in traffic

Sometimes you will see abnormal increases or decreases in traffic during the month. These will stand out visually on the graph. You can usually find out what caused the spike by looking for the landing page that drove the additional traffic. Finding out what happened is important so you can let the client know what is going on and so you can continue to increase traffic in the future.

Look beyond Analytics

If you can’t figure out why there was increase traffic to a particular page or section by peering into the Google Analytics crystal ball, then it is time to put on that detective hat on, dive a little deeper, and look elsewhere for clues.

Here are some good places to start your search for clues:

1. Changes to the Site – Even small changes to the site can sometimes have big results. Find out what was changed and when. This can at least give you an idea of what pages to focus on.
2. Look for Holidays/Events/Seasonal Trends – Look at last year’s data to see if it had the same swing. If so, it might be a seasonal trend for your industry. Also look for big shopping holidays or for big industry or sporting events.
3. Social Media – Look at the social profiles of the site and see if there was any activity during that time. If you see a spike of social referrals it can help you pinpoint it to a certain event.
4. Sales/Specials – Is the company having a big sale or special? This often brings additional direct and organic traffic to the site.
5. Other Advertising –  Was there any old school advertising done? Radio, TV, newspaper, mailers, billboard ads, etc. are still effective. Look for spikes when that advertising campaign started.
6. News/Press – If there was any news about the company (good or bad) it can definitely send more people to the site.
7. Ask the Client – You don’t have to waste all your time chasing down everything. Go ahead and ask the client. They might actually know what is going on.

Filter results

After looking at the big picture and seeing the general trends you want to dig deeper and look for specific results related to your past optimization efforts. To find those pages you worked on you will have to look at them as a group and compare them to the rest of the site. One of the easiest ways to do this is by creating an segment that allows you to filter your results and see just want you want.

Creating an advanced segment

When looking for SEO changes, it is best to create a segment that looks at organic landing pages and whatever that visitor did afterwards.

1. Open the Advanced Segment panel and click the “Create New Segment” button
2. Write the name of your new segment
3. Define your filter to Include the pages that your segment matches
4. Set the segment to track Users which allows you to track multiple visits
5. Define Sequence Start to include the First User Interaction
6. Add Step 1 set the dimension to Landing Page and set the filter to “Matches Regex” and use a regular expression that matches the pages you want to track.
7. Add a filter to look only at visits whose Medium exactly matches Organic
8. Save the segment and test it out by looking at the Behavior >Site Content >Landing Pages report to see if the correct pages show up. If not, then adjust your regular expression or add other filters as necessary.

That’s it, now you have an Advanced Segment that shows only organic users that first landed on the pages you want to look at.

This segments helps you see how these pages helped bring people to the site and how well they converted. You can use it on almost all reports in GA.

Look at those landing pages

One nifty way to see your ongoing progress is to look at the number of organic landing pages that get at least one visit during the month. When you see this number going up, it means that your SERP visibility is growing and that you are generally improving your rankings.

To see this, look at the bottom of the Landing Page report and see how total many pages are included. Then you can compare this to the previous year or right before you started working on the site.

Not all keyword data is lost

Next, you can use Google Webmaster Tools to find out what keywords are ranking for what pages. This isn’t as good as the previous keyword data we used to have before Not Provided. Just know that this data is highly sampled, so don’t look at the traffic numbers too closely, just look what keywords each page is ranking for.

When looking at these keywords, it gives you an idea of what the page is currently optimized for. If you are still not seeing the keyword that you are targeting, then you know you have more work to do.

Track conversions

Getting more traffic is great, but if you are not selling more products or getting more transactions, then you need to take a look to what you are doing.

Pay attention to transactions and revenue to see if they are going up along with your traffic. If not, you may have some other problems. Also take a close look at your conversion rate, this can tell you if your are sending the right audience to the site or if you have other problems. If you are consistently increasing both traffic and revenue, your client will have no problems with sending you those checks.

You can also take a look at assisted conversions and other attributions models to get a fuller picture on how your organic traffic is affecting the site.

Do you have any other ways to track success of your SEO efforts? Please leave a comment below so we can discuss.

The post Rankings Aren’t All That: How to Really Track SEO Improvements appeared first on Portent.