Google Trends allows you you to check and compare how popular a particular search term, or collection of search terms, is. Very useful when deciding which are the most popular terms in a selection you are looking to use in your campaigns. A while back Google extended the functionality to allow comparison of websites. Google Trends for Websites shows the number of Unique Daily Visitors to a web site and allows you to compare web sites too. Simply enter the site URLs separate by commas.  Useful to see how you are doing relative to your possible peers and competitors. Another couple of very useful additional pieces of information are also provided – a list of other sites that people viewing your chosen sites have visited AND the the top terms they have used. You can sort all this lot by region and vary the period of interest eg last mth, last 12 months, etc. The main drawback I have found is the lack of data on smaller sites and less popular search terms. Still, valuable data to help you get and stay on the right track.

When defining site effectiveness most of us use headline statistics such as Visits, Page Views, etc but for sites devoted to providing information and news, ie Content Sites rather than e Commerce, this does not provide an accurate or useful picture. To get greater insight into how visitors are making use of a Content site or the Content part of a site we can define two key measurements, User Loyalty and User Engagement.

First User Engagement. Google Analytics provides on the Dashboard two useful indicators ie Pages per Visit and Avg. Time on Site. Next, in the Visitors section > Visitor Loyalty there are two further indicators of how engaged visitors are with the site – Length of Visit and Depth of Visit. Taken together these 4 give a clear measure of how `engaged` users are with the site.

To measure the overall User Loyalty we can consider 3 figures. First, from the Dashboard we can deduce the percentage of returning visitors from the % New Visits figure. Second, we can determine how many visitors make more than 3, 4, 5 (whatever number we choose) visits per month from: Visitors > Visitor Loyalty > Loyalty. Finally the number of Visits divided by the number of Unique Visitors will give the average number of visits per visitor.

While average figures can be useful they rarely provide the all important `actionable insight` that we really need. To make the User Loyalty and User Engagement metrics as defined above really useful we can do two things. First we group pages or sections of interest together so that the people who author material can see clearly how the audience is responding . Secondly, segment by Traffic Sources ie direct, referring site, PPC, etc so we can see what the `best`traffic is coming from. In this way we get real insight into how each part of the site is performing.
Fortunately Google have now provided a really easy way to do all this selection of pages and sources in Google Analytics – The Advanced Segments feature. This feature allows non programmers to easily segment any group of pages and see all historical data for them. Something that until now was not possible in GA. Well worth checking out.

Google have now produced a great SEO starter guide. It covers the basic steps needed to make sure that your pages are easily found on the web. It deals clearly with things such as title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, etc. Some have criticised it for not emphasising the importance of back links in getting higher ranking for your pages but it will save endless time in trawling the web looking for beginner hints and tips.

Introduction to Google AdWords. This is a presentation that I gave in London in Sept 2008.

The updated Google Keyword Tool is probably the best starting point for SEO. If you are just beginning your keyword research you can use it to find the most popular terms and how many searches are performed on your initial set of keywords. For adwords it gets better as you can either do keyword research or enter the url of the proposed landing page. Here the Google system analyses your page and lists all the keywords it thinks suitable – nicely arranged in groups. You can enter any term you do not want the system to consider. The Google system is very fast and very accurate but like all computers it can be very stupid, so be careful. For example, I asked it to examine a page devoted to the `In the Pink` campaign at Breast Cancer Care. It insisted on giving terms related to the band Pink Floyd ! So I used the Filter Option so that all terms relating to `floyd` were excluded.

In the `Choose Columns to be displayed` field select `Show All`. To the left of this is the `Calculate estimates…` field. It is a good idea to leave this blank as you can then see the `Estimated Avg. CPC` for all the Keywords. The low cost ones with high search volume are what you are looking for – the hidden gems that can get you lots of visitors for little expense.

Note that the in the image above the columns have been sorted by`Approx Avg Search Volume`. This way you can quickly scan for high volume and low cost Keywords.

How big is the web? the short answer is very big indeed. Google recently reported that there are now  1,000,000,000,000 (trillion) unique URl`s. This is after removing all the duplicates and ignoring many auto generated URl`s. Google does not index all these pages and how many are useful is a whole different question which does not have an easy answer. But whichever way you look at it marketing your web pages is becoming more and more important.  SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) has moved from being a side issue when creating web sites and pages to being the first consideration when you first plan a web page. ie Who is this page for ? What keywords will they be using ?

UK Google Grant users will now be able to get even better results by using the latest feature in the AdWords Keyword Tool. Google has added search volume data. So for each term entered the Keyword tool displays the approximate number of searches for that and similar terms. Previously the Keyword Tool had a bar display which provided a vague idea of search volumes. Note that the default setting for the volume of searches will be for your standard country and language settings (eg UK). There are three versions of the AdWords Keyword Tool. The external version does not factor in the performance of your account but it will be useful for early stage development without logging in. When you are looking to make changes best use the Keyword Tool from within the ad group. This will take into account your account performance history.

As always the goal remains, get the most clicks for the value of the grant. This means finding the search terms for your campaign with the highest volume and with the lowest cost (CPC). In the Keyword Tool select ‘Choose Columns to be displayed’ followed by ‘show all’ to give you most information on each keyword.

| View | Upload your own

This is a presentation that I gave at Breast Cancer Care in London on 24th June 2008. Thanks to the 40+ attendees who came along.
Seamus

Many thanks to the 40+ people who came along to the Search Engine Marketing presentation on June 24th 2008. If you would like to participate in a Roundtable of 4/5 people with the aims of Teaching/ Learning/ Supporting then please send your details to <roundtable(at)find50-marketing.co.uk >

The first 5 attendees at the June 24th presentation on Search Engine Marketing who sent their details to the address below received a free on-site review of their SEM plans. This covered all aspects of search engine marketing, search engine optimisation, the use of Google AdWords, Google Analytics, etc. This has now closed. If you would like to be considerd for future reviews send your details to:                 <review(at)find50-marketing.co.uk>