SEO News

Just click on the link and, if signed in to Google Analytics, you’ll be prompted to add the segment to your account. 

Not provided segment for organic search

This is a major pain for marketers, and this segment allows you to quantify exactly how much of a pain it is. Then you can bitch about it with the facts at your fingertips… 

See? Almost 25% of all visits are ‘not provided’: 

It gets worse when you view this as a percentage of organic search traffic. Then it’s almost 65% of all organic queries, essentially rendering measurement of keywords almost useless, in our case at least. 

Not provided custom segment

Organic searches minus not provided

This one filters out all the pesky not provided searches so you can concentrate on analysing the keyword referral data you have. 

Organic searces minus not provided

Google+ traffic

Who knows? There might actually be some. 

In our case, not an awful lot, as this segment shows. The spike, if you’re interested, was down to the Google+ discussion around this GA custom reports round-up. 

This does show that, if you provide something of value to the G+ audience, and get involved in the discussion, it can produce results. 

Google+ traffic segment

Search queries with multiple keywords

This one comes from the fantastic Avinash Kaushik, and you’ll see a more in-depth explanation on his blog. You’ll see how much time you’ll save with this if you read how Avinash created it. 

Basically, it’s a great way of measuring long-tail traffic, and shows visits with three or more keywords in the search term. 

For Econsultancy over the past month, this segment shows that 22,183 visits used three or more keywords, 19,967 used four or more, 12,454 five or more, and so on. 

Search queries with multiple keywords segment

Branded vs non-branded keywords 

Of course, branded keywords are unique to your business, so you’ll need to create this one yourselves. Here’s how… 

Click on ‘+new segment’ and select ‘exclude’ from the first drop-down. After this, choose ‘dimension’ and select ‘keyword’. 

Then it’s a case of adding your brand keywords to exclude from the non-branded report. If you have more than one, select ‘add AND statement’ and repeat the process for other brand terms. 

For the branded keywords, it’s a similar process, only you need to include the keywords you excluded in the non-brand segment. 

Mobile traffic (excluding tablets)

Google Analytics has a pre-loaded advanced segment for mobile traffic, but this includes tablet traffic. Since mobile and tablet can be very different, it makes sense to look at each individually. 

Mobile traffic (excluding tablets)

Organic traffic with conversions

The next couple of segments will help you to see where converting traffic is coming from. 

This one shows organic search traffic which converts: 

Organic traffic with conversions

Social traffic with conversions

This is the same as above, only for traffic from social networks. 

Here’s what it looks like, you can add any social sites which are missing, or remove to show the conversions from one particular network. 

Social traffic with conversions

Blog to website traffic

Wany to find out how much traffic your blog is sending to the rest of your site?

This segment shows unique visits where vistors have entered through a blog page and ended up elsewhere on the site. This one only measures unique visitors, but you can edit to add pageviews and other metrics. 

Blog to website traffic

Depth of visits

This segment shows the number of visitors viewing three or more pages on your site. (I found this one on Boagworld but I can’t find the exact article).

This is a good way to look at the depth of engagement, and how effective you are at keeping people on the site. 

For example, we try to provide blog visitors with ideas for further reading, through promotion of reports, and related articles, and effective internal linking. 

It’s a good idea to use this segement to compare time periods so you can see how effective your efforts are. 

In our case, happily, we’ve managed to increase the number of visits with three or more pages.

Depth of visits

Depth of visits for social traffic

This is a version of the report above, which will show you if social traffic is more or less engaged than the average. 

Here’s what it looks like. You can play around with this and use different traffic sources, page depths or see which of the social networks send the most ‘enagaged’ traffic. 

Depth of visits for social traffic

Related posts: 

• How to use Google Analytics advanced segments: a guide for beginners
• 10 valuable Google Analytics custom reports
• 10 more valuable Google Analytics custom reports
• How to steal some ‘not provided’ data back from Google

What have I missed? Which custom segments do you use regularly? Please let us know below… 

The landscape changed dramatically for SEOs in 2012 thanks to Google’s Penguin update, which made it more difficult to boost rankings through blatant and/or slightly dodgy SEO tactics.

A show of hands in the auditorium revealed that a decent proportion of attendees had received an unnatural link warning from Google, so spotting dodgy links is clearly a big challenge for the SEO industry.

Madden suggested the real skill for SEOs is managing the risk that comes as part of any link profile and suggested there are two types of link profiles:

1. Massive brands

For major corporations the risk of being penalised is relatively low, as proved by the recent Interflora case.

“If an average customer searches for flowers in Google and Interflora doesn’t show up they’re not going to think that Interflora has bad SEO, they’re going to think that something is wrong with Google.”

2. Everyone else

Most businesses don’t have the luxury of being protected by their brand reputation, so every link has to be evaluated to ensure it doesn’t expose the company to unnecessary risk.

Furthermore, Madden recommended that businesses only buy in link building services if the supplier can demonstrate that they are aware of the risk and can demonstrate how they guard against it.

Managing the risk

Unfortunately Google has done a good job of hiding the exact criteria it uses for identifying bad links, so much of it is a judgement call on behalf of the SEO or site owner.

It’s therefore necessary to carry out a link audit to determine which links it’s worth removing and which can be kept.

However this raises another potential problem, as removing all your bad links could potentially be as bad as not removing any at all.

Madden’s logic is that Google isn’t aware of all dodgy links and some will be contributing to your search rankings, so if you manage to identify 100 potentially dodgy links it’s likely that Google only thinks that around 20 of those links are bad.

So removing all 100 might be as bad for your rankings as getting penalised in some cases – it’s all about balancing the risk.

What to look for

Madden recommended using Majestic SEO to find a site’s link profile and identify potential risks. He said that sites that have been penalised tend to have high percentages of:

• Precise anchor text links.
• Site-wide links.
• Links from suspect country code top-level domains (ccTLDs).
• Links that 40x or 50x.

It’s also important to bear in mind that your links may come from sites that have been disavowed by someone else, which increases the risk of your link being seen as dodgy in the eyes of Google.

Madden recommended using Screaming Frog to evaluate the likelihood that your competitors or other site owners may have disavowed a site.

It’s also worth checking out LinkRisk, a tool from Paul Madden, which allows sites to analyse the level of risk in their backlink profiles.  

In a nutshell, inbound marketing uses a ‘pull’ approach to attract potential customers, when they are actively searching for products and services.

It rejects the traditional ‘push’ marketing approach of selling to people when they aren’t ready to buy, or may not even want what is being sold. 

Five things every marketer needs to know about inbound marketing:

1. Inbound marketing is advanced and effective, but relatively simple to put into place.

2. Inbound marketing is proven to help businesses achieve more, in less time, at less cost – 93% of companies using it experience increased lead generation.

3. Inbound marketing focuses on ‘pull’ rather than ‘push’ marketing to tap into existing demand.

4. Inbound marketing can form the backbone of revenue management, creating more leads and more revenue with less effort.

5. Inbound marketing lets you view and analyse the results of your marketing activity as it’s happening.

Most companies are keen to win more business whilst reducing costs. Inbound marketing allows them to do that by providing a clearer and more transparent strategy for attracting leads and winning new customers.

Why isn’t marketing keeping up with business?

On their own, the old outbound tactics have become far less effective. Key factors include the expansion of the internet, the resulting shift in information-seeking and buying behaviour and to recent updates to the search engines:

• Google has changed: The world’s most powerful search engine has raised the game for businesses everywhere. Updates like PANDA mean that high quality content is essential.

• Google+ is established:The rise of Google+ and the +1 approval rating means that it’s even more important to produce good content and be proactive on social networks. +1s, Likes, Follows and Shares now all play a part in search engine rankings.

• The old SEO tricks just won’t work: The changes implemented by Google mean that credibility – ranking – relies on great content, SEO expertise and strategic inbound marketing approaches.

• Customers are increasingly online: The behaviour of your potential customers is changing more and more. 78% of internet users conduct product research online. With inbound marketing, you can lead the conversation and reap the business rewards.

What do customers really want?

None of us likes to be sold to. We like to feel that we have control over the decisions we make and about what we buy.

It’s no surprise that with the growth of the internet, the majority of internet users conduct extensive online research when they’re looking for a product or service.

Applying inbound marketing in a strategic way leads to:

• Improved reach.

• Heightened awareness.

• More visitors to your website.

• Higher-quality leads.

• Wider sales pipeline.

• Increased revenue.

• Lower costs.

Instead of expending energy and resources trying to sell to people uninterested in your product or service, inbound marketing makes it easy for the interested prospects to find you, learn from you and buy from you.

Coming soon:

What exactly is inbound marketing? Part two: The nuts and bolts.