Stay in the know: Search Marketing Blog

A Short How-To On Identifying Indexation Problems during an SEO Audit
If you think you might be having trouble with indexation there are some simple checks to do.

1. Do a physical check of the pages and site structure. This could be done with a database tool or by hand, thus giving you a chance to review the copy of your site, because most likely you haven’t done that in a while.

2. Run a XML sitemap of domain.com to get a list of the URLs present on the site. It is important to use a web-based or desktop application to do this and not rely on an internal tool that generates the sitemap from a CMS database. Why you ask? External sitemap generators (Web-based or desktop) do not have access to the server so they must crawl the site from link to link, just like a search engine. This will give you a better understanding of what content is accessible and what is not.

3. Check your Analytics program. Run a report of all content on the site that has received non-paid Search Engine traffic over a period of time (how long depends on your site traffic levels).

4. Query “site:domain.com” in any Search Engine to get a list of the URLs from that domain that are included in the index. Also, check the www version of the site to see if there is any variance. Theoretically, these numbers should be near identical.

Now that you have this data, what do you do with it?
Now that you have this data, compare them to each other. In Step 1 you identified all the pages/URLs that exist on the site. Now, compare this list to Step 2 – if not all pages that physically exist on the site are present in the sitemap, then you have some investigation to do. This indicates that there may be some issue with the structure of the site that is preventing crawlers from reaching those pages.

Next, compare Step 3 with Step 1.
Are there pages that are present on the page but have never received any traffic from Search Engines? This is an indication that these pages may not be indexed by the Search Engines.

There are pages that you don’t really want traffic to, like your refund policy, or your list of pending lawsuits (note: if you have this on your site take it off). If your product or services page is not receiving traffic this is something that should be addressed.

Finally, compare Step 4 with Step 1.
What pages on the site are not indexed? If you see that a large number of pages are not included in Step 4, you may have an indexation issue. As a method for double-checking this issue, compare the pages missing from Step 4 with Step 3. If there are pages that are not currently in the index, but have gotten Search traffic in the past, these pages may have gotten de-indexed for some reason. Investigate why this might be, especially if you consider them mission-critical pages. Don’t overlook checking your robots.txt file. It is not uncommon to see large sections of a site disallowed, when they shouldn’t be.

How well is your site performing, contact us today to conduct a Technical SEO Site Assessment and start improving or rebuilding your online presence for maximum visibility?

This article first appeared on agencyside where Mike Swan, Director of Search Marketing Strategy at Liberty Interactive Marketing is a guest columnist as well as a panel speaker on topics for search marketing strategies.

Content Network is a Waste of Time and Money! Really, Are You Sure About That? I hear clients and Internet marketers alike make this statement as often as I hear the question “Why aren’t my ads showing?” but for now let’s discuss some best practices for advertising on the Content Network. It is not unlikely for us at Liberty Interactive Marketing to see content account conversions in the double digits, we recently managed a Gaming and Hospitality account with an average conversion rate of 11.11% on over 1,700 conversions. So we’re not shy in sharing some of our best practices with you.

Five Best Practices to Setting Up and Managing a Content Campaign:

1. Do not run Search- and Content-targeting in the same campaign. This is far and away the most important rule. When you create a campaign in AdWords it defaults to include all 3 networks (Google Search, Search Partners + Google and Content), make sure to separate them. If you are currently making this mistake, stop reading for a moment and turn off Content-targeting immediately.

2. Do not duplicate your Search campaign, run it on Content only, and call it a day. This is a reasonable place to start if you are in violation of #1 above, however, the job is not done. The key thing to remember is that while Search campaigns will give you performance metrics on a keyword basis, Content does not. You only have adgroup visibility, (an adgroup is a logical grouping of related keywords). So you don’t have a way of knowing if one or more of your keywords is making or breaking your adgroup.

3. Campaign construction is crucial to Content-network success. You want to make sure your campaign structure is as focused as possible. This means more adgroups than you would use for a Search campaign. You don’t have the same Quality Score considerations with a Content campaign so duplicates and plurals are acceptable. Also, keep the number of keywords per adgroup small. We have found the most success with 5-10 keywords per adgroup. Every campaign is different, so testing is important.

4. Content targeting algorithm matches content on the page to the keywords in the adgroup so, while “foreclosures real estate phoenix” may make a great keyword in a Search campaign, it is very hard to use in a sentence, so it is unlikely it will match to many content pages. So with that said, long tail keywords are not usually a great idea in a Content campaign. Using this example, you would be better served creating an adgroup with 3 keywords – “foreclosures”,”real estate” and “phoenix”. This combination will give the algorithm many more opportunities to match your ad to desirable content.

5. Google Keyword Tool is still recommended to find your initial keywords but it will just get you started. The Keyword Tool is primarily geared towards Search, so it merely serves as a jumping off point. If you already have a Search campaign running you can use that as a resource too. One methodology involves looking at the top performing keywords in your Search campaign (or promising ones from the Keyword Tool) and then looking at the organic results for each of these terms. Take the top 20-30 results and compare their content. Understand what phrases are commonly used and identify keyword themes. Sound like a lot of work? It is, but it is the difference between a mediocre campaign and a case study. I recommend building a tool to do this for you. We did.

These are some of the best practices to get you pointed in the right direction as you delve into the fascinating world of Content-targeting. But before you go hog-wild reconfiguring and re-launching, remember Content is not appropriate or profitable in all cases. Make sure you have a good understanding of the goals of the campaign or hire us to manage your campaigns.

Read the full unedited version here.

Image credit: Google Display Network

Whether novice or pro, the annotations feature in Google Analytics (GA) is one feature your entire organization should be using. Earlier this year it became available to all GA account users and is one of the most simple features to use. Not only can it have a huge impact on tracking and monitoring site traffic, it will save you eons of time when going back historically to understand what components had the highest influence on generating traffic to and actions on your site.

What is the Annotation Feature in Google Analytics?
The annotation feature allows GA users to add notes to a website profiles’ traffic, they can share these with other users of this profile or mark them private. See example below. Notations were made to indicate when internal IP traffic was filtered, when an action to promote the site was performed and when campaigns launched.

What are the benefits of this feature and how can they make a difference for you and your company?
There are many spokes to an organization’s wheel such as PR, marketing, and customer service. In addition, there are the spokes that are not entirely under our control like social media channels. Since there are so many moving parts in an organization it is difficult to keep track of what may be influencing or impacting your daily web traffic.

The annotation feature in GA allows users to tell a story through site statistics. Perhaps major site changes were made, a new campaign was launched or a high profile blogger mentioned your company. These are just a few of the types of items that can be notated in the time-length of your web stats in GA. The possibilities are endless when logging and reviewing quarterly activity within your company – what happened this month, last month, the past 90 days? By allowing all departments to add notes to the site traffic they can provide insight into how their efforts are effecting the overall mission and understand which activities were most successful.

Think of annotations as a shortcut to digging into that spike in traffic or boost in sales. If you can follow traffic on a specific date or length of time when a specific campaign was launched you will be providing yourself and your team with a visual on its performance.

I’ve included a 58 second demo video from Google on their annotation feature below, enjoy and get to posting the notations in your stats regularly for the benefit of your entire team.