Being a marketer, this excited me. After all, I do this for a living. Clearly this would be the most epically successful junk-liquidation ever.

Once I finished rubbing my hands together in anticipation, I cracked open my laptop, picked a font, and typed “Marketing Plan” in bold letters at the top of a fresh new spreadsheet.

In the weeks leading up to our yard sale I would generate some buzz on the local Facebook group. I would post select items on Craigslist. We would use bright neon signs for maximum visibility. I would strategically choose telephone poles with the highest traffic while optimizing the user journey to my house. After the signs went up, I even mapped the user experience, driving the various routes myself, verifying that the signs were visible and the path was intuitive. I eagerly looked forward to crushing it.

As advertised, the sale started at 10:00 am and our first customer arrived at 10:04 am. She came up our front steps, thumbed through some of the stuff and purchased a bag of knitting accessories for $1. The yard sale was on!

That was one of precisely three sales we made that day. After six hours I packed things up, having made $20 in revenue and -$3 in profit. As I sat there, wasting my Saturday, I had a lot of time to reflect on what went wrong and, more importantly, how that reflected on me as a marketer (I mentioned I sat there for 6 hours, right?). Though there was definitely more I could have done to spread awareness, watching lost opportunity after lost opportunity; a pattern emerged. Being an SEO, I quickly formed that pattern into a list. So let’s review what happened.

Poor User Experience

Our house is not designed for yard sales. Mostly because, instead of a “yard”, there’s a giant cement wall with a flight of stairs leading to a front porch. It was from this front porch that I was able to see the cars pull up to the curb, stop to look at the “Yard” sale on a deck 10 feet above them, and then drive off without ever leaving their car.

So what does this have to do with digital marketing? Well, it means that if your product is hard to get to, most people will drive off to get it somewhere else. If someone gets to your site but is confused about what they should do or, even worse, intimidated by what they see, they’re going to leave. If your site isn’t intuitive, your visitors won’t ever see your products or content. Help your users find what they are supposed to find on your site. Make your navigation helpful. Use internal links contextually. Be sure people can get to your content without climbing a giant flight of stairs.

Not Delivering What Was Promised

What happens when you advertise a ton of great knick-knacks and electronics when your inventory actually consists of something like the following?

Who Doesn't Want a Letter Maker?

Apparently, people leave without buying anything.

When you talk about your product or service online and make any claim about how great or useful your company is, you’d better be able to back that up. The only thing worse than someone not being able to find you is someone finding you only to leave disappointed.

Whatever you’re doing with your site, do it well and strive to make it better. Pay attention to what people are saying about you online. Encourage people to review you online. Show off your good reviews and learn from the negative ones.

Not Doing Your Research

Of the $20 we made at the sale, $15 was from a specific Craigslist ad where I mentioned that I was selling some old comics. Conversely, one of the most common pieces of feedback I got was from non-buying visitors telling me about a nearby sale where they were charging about half of what we were.

That's a real Olympic jacket btw

Had I placed some targeted Craigslist and Facebook posts that specifically highlighted the comics, I might have been able to get more special interest buyers. Had I surveyed other yard sales, I might have considered selling our clothes for a bit less. (even though there’s no way I’m letting go of the Olympic jacket that I have for some reason for less than $10).

The point here is that we developed all of our outreach and pricing in a vacuum. When you decide prices and demographics, you need to be sure to have a good sense of what else is out there. If you’re selling comics, go after comic-people. If folks down the street are selling jeans for $5, then don’t charge $20.

So What Did I Learn?

The main point is that marketing can only get you so far. We had plenty of people stop by (especially when you include the ones who stayed in their car). People talked about our Facebook posts. The signs worked perfectly. All of that worked great.

They just didn’t like what they saw when they got there.

Good marketing is vital for getting people to your site and your store. But once that happens, you’ve pretty much reached the limit of what it can do for you. The rest is up to you.

Have empathy for your customers by providing a great experience. Eliminate all obstacles and help them get to where you want them to go. Give people the product and experience they expect, if not better. Take the time to research both your audiences and your competition.

And with old comic books, do some quick research on eBay, so you don’t accidentally sell a $60-$80 first appearance as part of a $10 bundle.

Have your own life lessons that helped you as a marketer? Share your story below!

The post What My Failed Yard Sale Taught Me About Marketing appeared first on Portent.

In this Portent U Webinar, we discussed how you can see whether or not your site was impacted by the mobile-friendly update, identify mobile traffic opportunities, troubleshoot common mobile problems, and put together an actionable list of items to get your ready to go – all in right about 30 minutes.

Enjoy!

or just view the slidedeck:

References:

• Google: Mobile Friendly Test
• comScore: 2015 U.S. Digital Future in Focus
• comScore: A Digital Update, By the Number
• Google Webmaster Central Blog: Rolling out the mobile-friendly update
• Advanced Web Ranking: Google Mobile Friendly Update – Early Study Results
• Moz: Day After Mobilegeddon: How Far Did the Sky Fall?
• Google Analytics: Enable Benchmarking
• Google Developers: Mobile SEO Guide
• Google Developers: Include Your Site Name in Search Results
• Google Developers: Breadcrumb Structured Data
• Google: PageSpeed Insights
• Google My Business

The post 30 Minute Audit: Mobile SEO [VIDEO WEBINAR] appeared first on Portent.

Portent: where all mobiles are welcome

If this still doesn’t convince you, remember that mobile traffic is likely already exceeding desktop traffic and that mobile visitors typically convert at a higher rate than desktop visitors. Mobile isn’t the way of the future or even the “next big thing.” Mobile is here and it’s been here for years.

Because of this, I grabbed a bunch of sites and ran them through Google’s own Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool that lets you know whether or not Google views your site as optimized for smaller screens.

Here are the 5 most common things that cause a seemingly mobile-optimized site to fail Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

1. Blocking CSS or JS Resources

This was one of the most common mistakes, and by far the most heartbreaking. You’ve spent all this time making a beautiful, responsive site. But what you don’t realize is that when Google crawls it, it’s just seeing this:

Noooooooooo

Google has already specifically stated that blocking Image, CSS, and JavaScript resources from their bots is against their webmaster guidelines and can negatively affect your indexation and ranking. But what’s worse, those are the elements that search engines need in order to render your mobile site. That means all of those painstaking hours you’ve spent making break points, image resizing instructions, and minimized design elements go completely unnoticed to the search engines.

The solution here is simple: don’t do it. Get rid of those meta robots instructions. Check your robots.txt files; especially if your resources are delivered via a CDN. Show off all those beautiful images and stylesheets to the search engines!

2. Using Too Small a Font Size

This one may seem obvious but it’s an easy thing to miss. Your text has to be big enough to read on tiny screens or else mobile visitors are going to give themselves headaches trying to read your new Top 5 Beyoncé Themed Holiday Dishes blog post.

Does that say 2 cups of glitter or 3?

This is a super easy one for search engines to check and, because of that, it’s a super easy rule to follow.

Google recommends using a base font size of at least 16 CSS pixels, then resizing based on the font’s properties. For detailed instructions, follow their actual guidelines here.

3. Placing Buttons Too Close Together

Another thing that Google looks at is how close your links are. Fingers are much clumsier than mouse pointers (especially if you’re me) and, because of this, Google uses the size and proximity of links as a mobile-friendliness factor.

To make sure your site passes the tap-test, be sure that important buttons have a height and width of at least 7mm (or 48 CSS pixels). You can make less important links smaller, but you need to be sure that there are no other links within 5mm (32 CSS pixels) of them. Again, Google has more detailed instructions on their own developer’s site.

4. Not Making All Pages Mobile-Friendly

This was the other common mistake I saw. Google’s “mobile-friendly” badge is awarded on a page-by-page basis. That means if your homepage is a shining example of responsive cross-device beauty but your product page still is full of tiny text, tiny images and tiny buttons, it’s all for nothing.

So, when you’re doing your next mobile-makeover, be sure to hit every page on your site. If you don’t, those internal pages are going to start losing out on all that precious, high-converting mobile traffic.

5. Content Is Wider Than the Screen

This last one, admittedly,  happened primarily with sites that didn’t seem to be going for mobile-friendly designs in the first place, but it’s definitely worth mentioning. Making sure you don’t have to scroll sideways to view your page may seem like a no-brainer but it was one of the most common flags that the Mobile Tester threw out.

Typically, your best solution for managing widths is proper use of the viewport meta tag. This allows you to instruct browsers  to display a page’s dimensions based on screen size. Out of everything described in this post, this is the most difficult to fix since this happens when you have an element that is larger the defined veiwport width. Fortunately, there are a few guidelines out there on configuring a viewport, including this one from Google.

Do you have any tips that weren’t mentioned here? Post your questions and advice in the comments below!

The post 5 Ways Your Site Might Fail Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test appeared first on Portent.

But what if you can’t? Implementing schema markup requires dev resources, coding skills, and file access that aren’t always the most available. Maybe you need something quick and dirty. Well, that’s where the Data Highlighter in Google Webmaster Tools comes in.

What is the Data Highlighter?

The Data Highlighter is your new shortcut to rich snippets in Google. If you haven’t played around with it, you definitely should.

Let’s say, for example, you have an event that you want to promote. You’re on a bit of a time crunch so you don’t have time to wait for resources to free up but you also know that this is only applicable for a few pages, so you shouldn’t have to derail an existing development project.

Simply log into Google Webmaster Tools and go to the “Data Highlighter”. Then select “Start Highlighting.”

Select item type:

Use your mouse to highlight text and notate it:

When you’re done, hit “Publish”:

You did it!

What data can I highlight?

The Data Highlighter isn’t nearly as robust as Schema.org, but it does offer its share of data types to markup.  You can do Articles, Events, Locations, Book Reviews, Movie Reviews, Products, Software, and a few others.

This is especially useful for small businesses who want to highlight their location pages:

Or for business that only have a few products to sell online:

What are problems with the Data Highlighter?

The Data Highlighter isn’t perfect, which is why it really is the quick and dirty method. First, if you change any aspect of the page’s coding, it will break the Data Highlighter project even if the content remains the same. In order to get pages to re-cache, you’ll need to delete the old project entirely and start from scratch.

Secondly, you can run into problems if you have a lot of pages. One of the Data Highlighter’s features is that it will try and guess what chunks of content go with what data item, and it’s pretty good at it, but not perfect. It leans pretty heavily on placement of text and images on the page. So if a specific item isn’t constantly located in roughly the same spot in the page as it is on others, the Highlighter will have difficulty finding the items to notate.

For example, it has no problem identifying the different items on this most pages when I set up the page set for the Portent blog, but when the featured image is removed, the guesses are completely off:

It also requires patterns in the URL structure to group pages together. For example, here it’s looking for URLs that contain the word “blog” in the file path.

You can use regex to refine this a bit, but at that point its probably worth going straight to Schema to markup the data on the pages, since that’s easier to implement on a template-level.

Lastly, it’s only visible to Google. Other search engines and sites that may crawl your site for data won’t be able to use the markup at all, so you aren’t communicating the data categories to Bing or anyone else.

When should I use the Data Highlighter?

You should use it when you have no other choice! Maybe you got an enormous development queue and want to start seeing rich snippets earlier. Or maybe you want to measure the impact of a rich snippet to see if implementing schema markup site wide is worth the effort. Perhaps you have limited coding resources and just need to markup a few things, like your product or physical location.

All in all, the Data Highlighter is what it is: a quick and dirty method for rich snippets. If you have the ability, you should absolutely use schema to markup your code directly. It’ll make a difference in the long run and is much easier to scale. But if you’re a small business or just have a few things to notate, the Data Highlighter might be the perfect solution for you.

Have you used the Data Highlighter before? Was it a headache or a revelation? Share your experiences in the comments below!

The post Google’s Data Highlighter: Your New Favorite Backup Plan appeared first on Portent.

Look at this expert search result!

Then, over two years later, it happened. First, Authorship pictures were significantly reduced. Then they disappeared entirely. Next was the data from Webmaster Tools. Finally, a modest Google+ post formally announced its death. This is the way Google authorship ends; not with a bang but a whimper.

Upon hearing this grim news, I mustered the strength to send an email to my fellow Portent marketers to get their thoughts and predictions about the death of Authorship. What’s different now? Why did it happen? What does its death mean? Did it ever really mean anything in the first place?

Why did it happen?

The first thing many asked was “why?” Why did they do this to us. Marianne Sweeney, our own SEO/UX expert gave her insight on this:

“Google is a for-profit company. I believe that they initiated the enthusiasm for Authorship to build participants for their social network. They have failed miserably to draw close to Facebook’s membership numbers and so have decided that the cost of processing results with this feature does not warrant the benefit that they are getting.”

Another one of our SEOs, David Portney, is suspicious of Google’s motives:

“I’m not the only one who finds it pretty interesting that the death of Google Authorship markup does not include Publisher markup… but can it be far behind? Same for Google Plus altogether?”

For me, the main take away from both Marianne and David is that Google wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t somehow making more money. How that is, exactly, is the question. Perhaps our VP of Search and PPC expert, Elizabeth Marsten, has the answer:

“More space for ads.”

How will it impact websites and authors?

“Is it really dead or just keywords dead, which is not dead at all, but just not something you can’t track anymore? ” – Meegan Kauffman, Content Strategist

The impact of this is difficult to say since, unfortunately, none of us at Portent are also Google. But a few Portentites did have some thoughts about this, starting with our CEO and Overlord, Ian Lurie:

“Google is being carefully vague about this. “They’re no longer processing this data” but we should still use schema markup. And they’re still using publisher markup? My gut tells me they’re still tying citations together across the internet, and this markup is still playing a role. They’re likely seeing abuse, and want to nip it in the bud.”

Marianne similarly predicts that the data driving authorship may still play a role:

“This is hard to predict as it was not so much the Authorship use but the association with Google+ that seemed to enhance ranking during Google’s fascination with social annotation phase. Authors may notice a drop in traffic to their sites from searchers that actually clicked on the thumbnail image or the More from link in the SERP blurb. “

Another of our SEOs Katilin McMichael, saw a silver lining many people were skipping over:

“Google+ profile pics still show up, if they’re in your circles. I think that’s a distinction most people miss. “

While this may not seem significant, people should remember that the default setting in Google search is to have your results personalized. This means that if your active on Google+ your activity still affects people in your circle. As a matter of fact, since sharing a post still actually puts your profile picture in search results, you could argue that this move highlights the person who shares a post on Google+ even more than the author that actually wrote the post! And down the rabbit hole we go…

What will you miss most?

For whatever reason, the Authorship show has come to an end. And, as with all endings, opinions differed. I asked the folks at Portent if they wanted to share any parting words before heading back to our respective corners of the Internet.

“[I’ll miss] the image of the author in the SERP. I actually found it to be useful amongst the noise.” – Elizabeth Marsten

“Nothing. Now I can delete my neglected Google+ page.” – Marianne Sweeney

“The awkward headshots” – Mike Fitterer, Account Wrangler

“My thumbnail made me look fat, so good riddance.” – Braxton Kellogg – Social Media Diva

In the end, though, our Social Media Strategist Madelaine Kellman probably summed up the number one concern for most all of us consultants out there;

“This was my biggest argument for a brand to actually use Google+.”

I guess we’ll see if Google sees things the same way.

What are your thoughts about Google’s shutdown of authorship? What will you miss most about it? Share your thoughts and concerns in the comments below.

The post Team Portent Bids Farewell to Authorship appeared first on Portent.

Learn all about Local SEO best practices, including basic on-site SEO for businesses, business profiles, directory and citation providers, duplicate listings, reviews, and more in this free PortentU webinar.

Watch the full video:

Get the link bundle here.
See just the slidedeck here.

The post Get on that Map: Local SEO Best Practices [VIDEO WEBINAR] appeared first on Portent.

While the data in it hasn’t always been the greatest (Ian gave his opinions about Webmaster Tools’ reliability a few months back), Google rolled out a fairly quiet update at the beginning of 2014, and started giving us “exact” impressions and clicks (more on those scare quotes in a minute). So let’s go over what Google is giving us with this free tool.

Why is Webmaster Tools so great?

For a couple reasons. First, WMT is dead easy to install. In fact, if you have Google Analytics installed, you just need to set up a profile. If you don’t, there other options like uploading a single file or adding a single line of code.

Second: it’s free. I use SEMrush all the time and the data it gives is invaluable. But I am also lucky enough to work for an agency that pays for my subscription. WMT gives you great data that you wouldn’t be able to get for free anywhere else.

Lastly, it tells you how Google is crawling and indexing your site. If there’s a problem or you get penalized, this is how they’ll tell you about it. It also gives you information about how your site is being displayed in search results, lets you submit a sitemap, and much more.

For now, though, let’s just focus on the keyword part of WMT.

Where is this Keyword Data?

The section you’re looking for is called Search Queries, which you can get to from the Search Traffic section of side navigation or the main dashboard. In there, you’ll see two tabs.

The first tab is Top Queries, which is basically the raw list of keywords that drove traffic to your site, sorted by Impressions, Clicks, CTR (click thru rate), and even Average Position (which, surprisingly, is usually accurate). Using the filter option, you can filter by search type (Image, Video, Mobile, Web, or All) along with region and amount of traffic. The default for the search filter is “Web” but, for the most comprehensive data, I recommend switching that to “All.” Unfortunately, you’ll need to do this every time you navigate away from this screen.

The next section is Top Pages, which will give you the URLs and data about the impressions, clicks, CTR and position for each page. But the best part here is that clicking on a URL will give a drop-down of all the terms that the URL showed up for!

Now there’s no data passed between this and Google Analytics, so you can’t actually track behavior through this, but at least you have access to some raw data and potential keywords that you may not have been aware of.

How accurate is this data?

The best answer I would give to this question is either “meh” or some word that uses the suffix “ish.”

Ian’s post was written before the update, so it’s a little better than it used to be, but using the word “exact” is a pretty big stretch. Now that there’s been a bit of time since this went live, I decided to do an actual comparison between “exact” WMT data and Google Analytics visits.

To do this, I pulled data for a few sites and compared non-paid search visits from Google Analytics to the number of Clicks from Webmaster Tools for the same period. The results were actually pretty well summed up by this snapshot of Portent’s own organic traffic and click data.

At first glance you can see that they kind of sort of match up. But then you see things like that -64% difference. Yowza!

But really, it’s not that awful. First off, we know that both are pulling from a sample, so some discrepancy is to be expected. But from a trending perspective, you at least see that the amount of traffic each page gets roughly breaks down in the same manner.

What not to do with this data

The most important thing to remember is that this isn’t the same as the old organic keyword data. You don’t want to give this to your client in a nice spreadsheet with one column named branded, the other non-branded, and tell them that they got 424 organic clicks in February for “Nerf bats.” The data will never match up and you’ll be spending most of your time explaining where these numbers came from and speculating on why a click may or may not have triggered a visit in Analytics.

So what can we do?

If it’s not exact, then what is it for? Well, this is where you can do some keyword discovery. Remember how you used to find some traffic to your site from a term you never thought of? Then you would yell “SEO powers activate!” and start focusing on that term, seeing those visits rise!

Form of: "Alt Text"!

Well, now that’s back, to a certain extent. Let’s look at the organic keywords from Analytics for a specific page on Portent.

98% not provided! Are you kidding me? And out of the 638 visits, the most popular keyword has one visit. Now let’s look at the same page in Webmaster Tools.

Hot dog! Look at all those keywords. Before the update, WMT would just give you a list of terms with “< 10” clicks, and impressions rounded to the nearest thousand, which wasn’t terribly useful. Now we have exact(-ish) counts to sort by. Unfortunately, that neat little drop-down won’t export through WMT, but you can just copy/paste it right from your browser and throw it into Excel. Then you can copy that same list of keywords into Keyword Planner (Google’s other amazing free tool) and get search volume. If you want, you can even pair this with ranking data from your favorite rank tracking service or Webmaster Tools itself.

Now you have new terms and old school style.

This isn’t perfect. In fact, just looking at the drop-down, you can see that the number of clicks it gives for each keyword typically won’t add up to all the clicks for the page. But it’s something. And something is better than nothing.

What do you think of the new Webmaster Tools data? Have you found any amazing research tricks of your own with WMT data? If so, comment below!

The post Old School Keyword Research with Google Webmaster Tools appeared first on Portent.

Well it finally happened. In what they claim is a move to make search data more secure, Google has begun to encrypt all searches, effectively placing all organic traffic into the (not provided) category. This means business owners will never see the keywords people used to get to their site.

We’ve already gone over what this means for SEO but, since big changes like this are always accompanied by big opinions, I decided to ask around Portent and see what people here thought about this new era of SEO. With that, let’s meet the players:

Ian Lurie, CEO, Founder, Dictator. Probably already knew this was happening from some important-people news feed.

Elizabeth Marsten, Senior Director of Search. The Commander Riker to Ian’s Darth Vader aboard the Galactica.

Josh Patrice, Director of SEO. “Directs” the SEO team through the troubled waters of the industry. Recently lost compass.

Michael Wiegand, Senior PPC & Google Analytics Strategist. Still has all his keyword data.

Aviva Jorstad, Director of Accounts. Courier of terrible and depressing news from SEOs to clients.

Ken Colborn, SEO & Analytics Strategist. Informed team of Google’s update by loudly sobbing into his keyboard like a little, baby girl.

Travis Brown, Offsite SEO Strategist. Couldn’t be happier that Google is making life miserable for other SEOs.

Nick Bernard, SEO Strategist. Lives in Montana. Keyword research process almost certainly involves fly fishing in some form.

Marianne Sweeny, Senior Search Strategist. Has been warning colleagues, clients, and people walking on the sidewalk about this for years.

Matthew Henry, SEO Developer. Half robot, half cyborg, half wizard.

David Portney, SEO Strategist. (bio not provided)

Kiko Correa, PPC Strategist. Uses the word “clicks” in almost every sentence, except when talking about “cliques.”

George Freitag, SEO Strategist. Author of this article, making his opinions the most important.

Where were you when you found out about Google’s switch?

Aviva: At the airport bar in DC, checking Facebook on my phone. Ian had shared the SEL article.

Elizabeth: At my desk, smashing through emails.

David: Working at my desk.

Michael: Probably eating a sandwich.

Matthew: Sitting in my flooded apartment trying to roll out some code.

Ken: I heard about it first from Twitter and the angry mob of SEOs declaring the end of the world.

Travis: At my desk across from THE Ken Colborn during a beautifully dreary morning.

George: Eavesdropping on Travis and Ken.

Kiko: Looking at a search term report in AdWords.

What were your initial thoughts on the move?

Marianne: “No surprises here.”

Josh: I don’t think that we can print my initial thoughts. This is a family blog.

Aviva: The writing’s been on the wall for nearly two years. We knew this was coming.

Elizabeth: Well that’s a hell of a thing… but I’m PPC oriented, so it really doesn’t affect me. If anything, I just got more useful.

Matthew: I figured they would do this eventually, but I was surprised they did it so soon, and so completely.

Michael: It’s a token gesture on Google’s part to their searcher base. But ultimately, one that’s likely to garner them respect outside of the search community.

Ken: I was surprised at first. While it was a move that I was expecting, I didn’t think it would happen this soon. I thought it was going to be a more gradual move over the next year.

Nick: Like most people I’m sure, I’m surprised they just flipped the switch and turned it secure for everyone. I thought they would drag it out some more in little increments, like “This month, all searches from BLACKBERRIES are secure!” (Were they already?)

Travis: Google has been moving towards this direction for a while, and it was only a matter of time. While there are going to be negative side effects and an adjusting period to having no data, the future will be better because we will not be slowly hemorrhaging data for years to come. Instead, it is all gone now, and we have to adjust now. In the end, it is going to be more “wheat from chaff” for agencies.

Kiko: Thank goodness I work in PPC. Total job security… for me.

How do you think this will impact the industry?

Ian: Keyword rankings and data became a poor metric several years ago, when personalized search hit. If you haven’t already changed your focus to true KPIs that impact the business, and started treating SEO as a single channel in a larger strategy, then this would be a reallllly good time to start.

Matthew: People will scream bloody murder for a while, then everyone will eventually calm down and adapt to make use of what information we do have.

Josh: Well, the levels of panic are going to rise in the near future, but if we’re really doing our best to optimize a site, then we don’t necessarily need this data. Sure, it’s helpful; we can build content around long-tail queries, we can chase changes in the lexicon for a site or a product or a category, and we can make assumptions around our audience. In the end, most of the time what we as SEOs really need to be doing is putting the right content on the right pages. I feel that we do that already.

Aviva: There will be freak-outs. There will be outrage. For content-focused, whole-brained Internet marketing agencies like Portent, not much – in fact, in many ways it sets us apart from the pack. My point is, thinking in terms of individual keywords is really, really limiting. As marketers, this move is exciting because it forces companies to be more strategic and holistic with their online marketing efforts. At Portent, we’ve always pushed clients to start from a higher level, and approach SEO as an integrated effort that is part of everything they do online. Now, we have more leverage to push high-quality, link-attracting, and social-buzz-getting content. We have more leverage to talk about user experience and site speed. We have more leverage to stop the obsession with keywords and rankings and look at overall visibility. Can you tell I’m excited?

Marianne: Without organic keyword data, keyword research will have to change as ad behavior is markedly different from organic data. User experience practices will become instrumental in optimizing websites for organic ranking.

Elizabeth: After the crying dies down and we all remember that Google is a privately held company that can do anything they want to in reality, 3rd party tools are going to become a booming industry, anyone who can do correlation fun (i.e. with paid search keywords) is going to enjoy job security, and I think we’re going to see a lot more innovation over all. New tools, new technologies, new math even.

Travis: Rankings may not return as the KPI to watch, but they will continue to be an indicator of performance. Google could get more people running advertisements or paying for the data. Using an analytics platform to appropriately segment attribution and measure page-level performance will be even more important. From a link building perspective, it is a non-issue. There are more interesting KPIs for off-site to judge performance, and anchor text should already be diversified.

Michael: SEOs will look for more creative ways to siphon data from PPC. Ironically, there’s a new report in that shows click-through balance on a given term when you have paid running, when you have organic listing or when you have both. Additionally, Google Analytics’ eventual move to tracking users instead of cookies will render a lot of what we used to ascertain through search queries – customer intent, namely – useless, as we’ll get a much bigger window into how many visits and influences lead to a purchase. We’ll need to start solving for the entire marketing mix and not just one keyword on one channel.

Google claims that they are doing this for enhanced security. Do you feel there is any legitimacy to this reasoning?

Josh: Ha.

Ian: I question Google’s statement that this is privacy-motivated, given that they still store the data (I’m sure) and they still show all AdWords clicks.

Kiko: Did someone say enhanced? Seriously though, are you implying Google would have an ulterior motive behind hiding keyword info behind a pay wall? $hocking.

David: At SMX Advanced 2013, Matt Cutts passionately argued this as a justifiably important protection for searchers, but that seems hypocritical when the data is available if you pay for it via AdWords advertising.

Matthew: Nope. I think they are withdrawing this information because they have no real motive to give it to us, and because the information makes it easier to manipulate.

Elizabeth: No, it’s crap. That’s the kind of thing that’s thought up by a scriptwriter for a movie or TV show to cover up the real reason. I’ve got cable. There have to be other mitigating factors and one of them (it wouldn’t surprise me) has to be around the fatigue of fighting spam and jerks trying to “game” the system. Take away the stuff they’re using to do it and you’re left with fewer options. Like creating good content for people.

Michael: While I think they’ve taken an appropriate response to NSA activity in general and in crying out for more government transparency, I think the query data they’re storing to benefit their AdWords user base is at odds with any legitimately good motives they might have on the privacy/security.

Aviva: User data is still available for sale. And we have encryption technologies that make it possible to protect users, which are or will soon be enabled anyway. So no, this has nothing to do with security.

Marianne: Google’s justification fig leaf of protecting privacy is very small and extremely thin. User privacy was never compromised as it was not accompanied by the data points of who and where. Also, Google still retains all user data for use at their end. How private is that? IMHO, the motivation for this move on the part of Google is all of that tantalizing Big Data and its richness of actual user behavior data.

Travis: Yes, there is legitimacy to the Big Bad Wolf’s reasoning. What is not legitimate is keeping the data for paying parties. To reinforce their claim, Google is moving towards more transparency by showing the amount of requests they receive from government agencies and probably would do more if they were legally able. Recently, there has been buzz about tracking users without cookies. How Google accomplishes that will be a huge hint at how they truly feel about privacy and whether they are walking the walk.

George: I do think that Google being able to state that they no longer give your search data to marketing agencies can play pretty well for them from a political standpoint. Even if it is a totally empty gesture.

Any final thoughts on the matter?

Ken: While we lose some valuable insights on keyword data, our main goal should stay the same: create great content that is truly useful to our customers.

Kiko: In all honesty this seems like a poorly motivated move by Google that will have an unintended positive impact on marketing. Crap marketers will still be crap, but have one less leg to stand on. After the initial shock of client expectations people doing the real quality work will have no problem getting the job done.

David: We just have to adapt accordingly. Search marketing will undergo radical changes as Google works toward its dream of a “Star Trek” computer and continues to serve itself and its shareholders, being a publicly traded company and all.

Matthew: The SEO industry has always had to adapt to squeeze as much use as possible out of very limited information. When we are given something useful, and then it is later taken away, it’s easy to fall into a sense of entitlement. “Google OWES us that keyword data!” but, of course, they don’t really owe us anything.

Michael: AdWords will still have a ton of data that’ll be useful for SEOs. Hopefully this’ll be the (albeit awful) thing that drives legitimate cooperation between organic and paid search folks for good. We’re in the same game and it’s been stupid of us to create these borders – blog posts about cannibalization, mainly – between our goals, which should be to grow search holistically.

Travis: ¡Viva la Rankings!

What were your thoughts about Google’s switch to secure? Do you have any questions? Any tips? Share your thoughts and stories below and keep the conversation going!

The post Team Portent Weighs In On the Loss of Organic Keywords appeared first on Portent.

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Transcription:

George: Which video thing?

Katie: The video thing about how to post videos not on YouTube.

George: So [chuckle] just right, right here like this?

Katie: Yeah, just right now.  Just do it.  Drop some wisdom.

George: So the problem with YouTube is that it’s a really popular site that’s very authoritative.  It’s like the third most popular site ever, and so one of the problems when you’re posting videos is that it’s hard to compete with YouTube.

Your video on YouTube will usually outrank your own site for the video, so that’s why it’s good to use one of the third-party hosting services that offer secure hosting most importantly.  So the important thing there is that they allow you to host the video but not have it indexed underneath their own website.

So we use Vzaar.  Uh, that’s – so we like them, but, um, there’s other ones out there.  And so, basically, the point is to host it with them so when you post it on your blog, all the authority gets driven to that blog post.  Then, you post it on YouTube later after that initial social bump has already associated with your website.

So maybe two – three weeks later, you go post it on YouTube so you can take advantage of the popularity of YouTube, but the most important thing is that, uh, all that initial buzz gets associated with your website.

Katie: Say goodbye, George.

George: Bye.

The post Portent Pop Quiz: George Freitag on Why You Should Delay Posting Your Videos on YouTube appeared first on Portent.

At Portent, we’re pretty big fans of Dashboards in Google Analytics. We’ve made a few. So here’s another for all of you writers out there; it surfaces the stuff that’s most important to you, so you don’t have to sort through a zillion different screens to get to the stuff about your blog.

So with that, let’s hop into it:

The Blogger Dashboard

The first thing the dashboard does is filter the information so that it only pulls information related to your blog. I’m not saying other stuff on the site isn’t useful, but if you’re a writer, you’re probably more concerned with the interaction your articles are getting, and less about how the sales pages are converting.

(The filter is the one part that might need to be customized so be sure to check out the video at the bottom of the post that shows you how to do that.)

Visits, views, and all those number things

While the dashboard is focused mostly on content stuff, there are some numbers that you’ll want to pay attention to. These are pretty straight forward, but just in case, here’s what they are telling you:

Next to that, you have the “New Visits vs Visits.” This shows you the number of people coming to your site for the first time vs returning visitors.

Unfortunately, readers doing things like switching devices, clearing their history, or switching browsers will screw this part up, so it’s important just to look at this graph from a high-level point of view. I have this set up as a line graph for that reason; this way you can focus more on trends and less on the literal numbers.

More graphs and numbers

There are more graphs as you go down the left-hand side of the dashboard. These are breaking down where your visits are coming from. The first is “Visits by Medium.” This is breaking down how people are getting to your site.

The next thing we have is referrals. This way you can see which social networks and which other websites are driving the most traffic.

The last thing we have is the On-Site Social Actions widget. This is cool but only covers Google+ data without special markup.

Using the dashboard for content

The main thing you’re probably looking to do with Google Analytics is to figure out which content is performing, consequently that’s where most of the real estate in the dashboard is focused.

The sections that focus on the actual articles are the “Top Landing Pages” and “Top Landing Pages from Social Media” sections.

These are sorting the most popular articles by channel so, at a glance, you can see which articles are getting the most overall visits and the most visits from Social Media.

You can also quickly see the average time spent on page. This way, if you see an article is getting a lot of traffic but only a few seconds average time on page, you know that people probably aren’t reading. This could be the time to revisit that article and make it more engaging, if possible. More importantly, you can see what works and what doesn’t.

The keywords!

The last section is the “Top Organic Keywords.” It shows you which terms people typed into Google to get to your site. This can be an excellent source for content ideas and show you opportunities that you might have missed otherwise.

Is this all?

Absolutely not! This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t learn more about Google Analytics or ignore the other sections. In fact, one of the most helpful things about the dashboard is that if you click on any widget’s title, it’ll take you the relevant section within Analytics, so you can go as deep into to the data as you’d like.

Setting it up

To use the dashboard, the first step is clicking on the link below and selecting the site you want to use it with:

The Blogger Dashboard

The second step is customizing it so it only shows the blog traffic. The dashboard is set up to only show you analytics for the pages that contain the word “blog” so if your site is set up with a “blog” sub-folder (like https://www.eigene-homepage-erstellen.net/blog/), you’re all set.

If you have it a folder named something else (like eigene-homepage-erstellen.net/buzz/) or a subdomain (like blog.eigene-homepage-erstellen.net) you’ll need to customize each widget. To do that, just follow the directions outlined in the video below.

Also, if you want to filter out branded searches from the “Top Organic Keywords” section (for example your company name or an author name), the video goes over that, too.

Did I miss anything? If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions, just let me know in the comments below. If you have a really amazing suggestion, I’ll probably add it!

The post The Blogger Dashboard: Google Analytics for Writers appeared first on Portent.