The below screenshot shows a current local results in Google UK for the search term ‘dentists in Manchester’

Here you can see the following changes

• 1. Only two Organic listings at the top
• 2. The map on the right hand side where the PPC ads are
• 3. Local citations are sometimes shown in the main SERPs
• 4. Links to the reviews page

It appears that Google are aiming to raise the importance of having a Google Places listings. One quick check I performed was checking keyphrases without GEO modifiers, such as the keyword ‘limo hire’. Here I can see that Google realizes that the user is looking for a local listing and Google automatically insert the new Local listings into the SERPs based on their IP address.

These changes will certainly have a big impact for the following type of web sites:

• Directory sites – Traditional directory sites used to perform well for a wide selection of local searches, they may not appear anymore unless they have lots of authority
• National sites – You may have a site which covers the whole of the UK, this change means that if you don’t have a bricks and mortar building you may not list as well
• Sites which don’t have a physical address – Sites without an actual physical address will now struggle to rank for local queries.

But what should you do to try and combat this change? local SEO is no longer about trying to get yourself into the top 7 local listings as before, meaning having an optimised Google Places listing will be even more important. One obvious tip is to get your sites physical location into as many top directory sites as possible such as yelp.com, yell.com, thomsonlocal, city search, yahoo local and many more…

Google are even listing some important directory sites underneath the local listings in the SERPs. If Google are showing which sites are important, GET YOURSELF LISTED IN THEM!

Final thoughts
Google and other search engines realise that they need to be more local, this will be especially important to the massive mobile search market. Google know by pushing their local service they will become a resource for people looking for local information, which may well see their overall traffic levels increasing!

This new change is also opening up the market place to smaller retailers who cover their local area, making it easier for them to take some business off the larger retailers. I think this is a smart move from Google and will result in users finding what they want easier, which at the end of the day is the biggest goal for any search engine.

The first thing to note, is that there are many types of links including:

• Blog Comments
• Directory Submissions
• Article Submissions – Writing unique articles for links using services such as ezinearticles, articlebase.com etc
• High PR links – Links with high Page Rank
• Authority links – Links from magazines etc
• Themed links – Links on theme

Each of these links has their own benefits in SEO with different market places requiring different types of links. More difficult markets will require a higher quality link profile, whereas easier markets may only require a lower quality link profile.

Analysing competitors
The first job is to analyse your competitors links. I advise that you write down 4 competitors for your main search term. Once you have your list you need to run all your competitors through the popular www.opensiteexplorer.org tool from SEOMOZ and export all the data into Excel. The idea here is to create a one massive Excel file with the links to all your competitors and your site.

Analysing the data from www.opensiteexplorer.org
Obviously it is difficult to analyse all this link data, what we need is a way to group the data to determine what links are required for our site. Looking at all the links to these sites they come in the following formats:

• Home Page links – These are generally the high PR links
• Inner page – These are generally link pages or directory submissions
• 2nd level links – The links at these levels are generally article submissions
• Level 3 downwards – A lower quality of link

So we need a way of breaking down what level each of the links pointing towards the sites are coming from, the more links at the higher level the more competitive the market place. The below table shows an example of the different level of links pointing towards www.mysite.com, obviously you would have much more links at each level

The next job is to seperate the links at each level, this can be achieved by using the ‘text to columns’ function in Excel, and separating each ‘/’. Please see image below, this basically seperates all levels of the links.

Once you have achieved this you should have a list of all the different levels for each link. You can then use the COUNTA function to count all values in each column. This should give you a total of each level. Once you have this information you can then work out how many links a competitor has from each level, this can be achieved by summing the total from one level and removing the value from the next.

For example if you wanted to know how many level 1 links you had you would remove the total from level 2 away from the total from level 1. The below images shows how this may look in Excel

Now that we know how to evaluate each competitors links we can now run this analysis through all competitors. This data can now be added into one big table, from this table we are able to analyse the links we require. The below images shows a populated data table with 4 example competitors and our site

Once you have this data you can then create a bar chart, this will clearly identify where you are missing links. You need to make an assumption as to where you require links, basically the area with the smallest bar!. The below graphs shows the above data in the bar chart format.

From this data we can see that the main area our client is missing is the higher quality links. They have a very small percentage of root domains linking to them. This means that we should focus on higher quality links and less on directory submissions and article writing

If you have any comments on the above data, or any other ideas to analyse this set of data please contact me via the contact form on this site.

The whole new update is all about giving users results quickly. It seems speed is something that Google has been working on heavily in recent times, first they introduce the site performance tool in Google Webmaster Tools, then they release Google Local which is a massive change to the search results.

The below video shows one of the first demos of Google instant:

Since the launch of Google instant may SEO’s and website owners have been worrying about how this may change their online marketing campaigns. Some questions that have been going through peoples heads are:

• Will my listings drop?
• Will I still receive as much long tail traffic?
• Will the impressions of my ads massively increase?

The main thing to do is not panic, look at your analytical data and don’t make any quick decisions as to your marketing plan, if you do you might regret it!

I thought I would voice a couple of opinions on how I think Google Instant may affect SEO, they are:

International SEO
The new Google instant system predicts searches from search databases. Search database however will be different from country to country. This could mean that optimising for a search term which appears as an instant result in the UK may not work in the US. This could make it more difficult to optimise one domain for many different countries.

Make those top positions even more important
I don’t know if you noticed but the search bar for Google instant is slightly larger, this means users will need to scroll more through the results. But as users generally don’t like scrolling down the page this will mean the top positions will receive even more clicks.

Enforce short tail terms
As the results change as a user types words into the search box the short tail terms will receive far more impressions. This will mean that large brands will potentially receive more clicks than previously.

Long tail search terms
The affect on long-tail search is a massive subject that has aroused intense debate. My thoughts are that this could go either way. Firstly you may notice a shift towards more mid-tail search terms as these results will instantly rank for the term before Google suggest a longer term, meaning short terms become very important. For businesses that heavily rely on long-tail searches to compete with the larger brands they may well receive less traffic than before as a user wont bother finishing their search term. It could however go the other way with certain long tail phrase that appear as an instant search getting more traffic, Google is in fact narrowing down their search for them. This could lead to certain long tail search terms which appear as a suggest to be very competitive. I guess on this one we will all have to wait and see.

Adult Search Terms
Adult search terms are actually some of the most popular on the internet! Using the new Google instant it does not show instant results for a selection of adult terms, the user has to hit enter to get the results. Does this mean less clicks for these terms, who knows?!

So there is some food for thought with this update, I guess as with anything Google does we will just have to wait and see. For now review your Analytics data regularly and see how this could be affecting your business. If you have any thoughts or comments on this interesting subject please get in touch

Directory Submissions – Submission to relevant directories
• Press Releases – Press releases of your products and services
• Article Submissions – Writing relevant articles and submitting them to high quality article sites
• Guest Posts – Completing guest posts on related sites
• Contacts – Utilize your contacts to get some quality links
• Authority links – Links from magazines or high PR sites
• Blog comments – Commenting on relevant niche sites in your industry
• Competitions – Running a competition
• Link Bait – Create tools, write something controversial, this is great as link bait
• Social Media- Using social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter to build up your links

There are of course many other methods of obtaining quality back links to your site. One of the most important factors when link building is to use your main services as the anchor text to your site. This can however lead to an unnatural link profile, resulting in loss of rankings and all your hard work lost.

To make your links appear more natural you should look at building links that appear more natural such as image links, brand links, using people names in links, and links simply to the domain name. This is especially important if you are link building to a new domain as it is likely the new domain would have very few natural links on the internet.

To test this theory I completed some tests on a domain name evaluating all the links, and deciding if they were one of the following:

• Brand links
• Service Links
• Image Links
• No anchor text
• Brand and service links

The test involved exporting all the links, and then breaking the links down into the different anchor text that was used. I then manually decided if the links equated to one of the above list. This showed the following:

Here we can see that the site in question was heavily service related, with very few links towards the other types. To me this link portfolio is a little unnatural. Google would expect to see more non service related links in the sites link profile.

Evaluation
After reviewing the above link profile of the above site I would evaluate that this site needs more non-service related links. This can come in the form of blog commenting or perhaps some brand linking using social media. I would also concentrate on creating some links that contained a brand and service, as this would relate the brand and their services more closely together in the search engines.

• Shopping Cart – Your shopping cart maybe on a sub-domain, and you may wish to track traffic from your site into your shopping cart in one report profile. You may also want to set up goal tracking and funnels all in one profile.
• Blog – You may have a blog on a sub-domain – You would want to track traffic to and from the blog in the same profile
• Your site may use sub domains for site content instead of sub folders, and you want to track the traffic in one easy to manage profile
• Many other reasons…

If you don’t set up cross domain tracking your sub-domain account will produce lots of referrals from your main site, meaning that the original referrer such as Google will be lost. This means that potentially you are losing out on important data as to where your traffic is coming from when a users skips between your domains.

In order to track visitors between your main domain and sub-domains you will need to edit the tracking code that appears on both domains.

Lets suppose you want to track traffic between the www.mystore.com and cart.mystore.com. The tracking code to achieve this is indicated below:

Asynchronous syntax

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_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-12345-1']);
  _gaq.push(['_setDomainName', '.mystore.com']);
  _gaq.push(['_setAllowHash', false]);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

Traditional (ga.js) syntax

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var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12345-1");
  pageTracker._setDomainName(".mystore.com");
  pageTracker._setAllowHash(false);
  pageTracker._trackPageview();

You will notice that there is a leading “.” before the domain name, this indicates that you want to track any sub-domain of this main domain. It is important that you add this tracking code to all pages on the main domain and sub-domain in order to track everything successfully.

I consider myself to be quite advanced in Google Analytics so therefore decided to take the Google Analytics test, where you have to get over 80% to pass. I went through all the tutorials on the Google Analytics Conversion University to familiarize myself with all the features before taking the exam.

I thought that taking the exam would be a great way of testing myself, ensuring that I know all about the many features of Google Analytics (and there are many)!

A few days ago I passed the exam, so I am now officially Google Analytics qualified. It’s good to know that I can prove I can use the platform at a professional level rather than just working on particular clients accounts.

I would suggest that anyone involved in Internet Marketing takes the test as its proof that you know what you are talking about.

To achieve this you have a choice of two different features in Google Analytics they are:

• Virtual Pageviews
• Event Tracking

Below I have detailed the different methods of capturing this data within Google Analytics

1. Virtual page views

The first method of tracking such events is using a virtual page view. Virtual page views are a way of faking a page view after a given event, say clicking on a video or an external link. This is achieved by adding the ._trackPageview function to the link. For example if you were to tag an external link to say www.google.co.uk you could use the following call.

pageTracker._trackPageview(’/outgoing/google.co.uk’);

When a users triggers a virtual page view the data is passed to Google Analytics and is recorded will all the other page views in the system, it is a good idea to use a strong naming convention to track your virtual page views, which is why in the above example I have used the subdirectory /outgoing/.
One problem with virtual page views is that it can greatly increase your overall page view figures, making it more difficult to analyse data.

The main reason you would use a virtual page view is so you can use the page view as a goal, and track conversions with it

2. Event tracking
Another way of tracking these events is to use event tracking, which is different to a page view. With event tracking you call the _trackevent() Javascript call within a link. This allows you to add the following attributes to a link

• Category – The name you supply for the group of objects you want to track.
• Action – A string that is uniquely paired with each category, and commonly used to define the type of user interaction for the web object.
• Label – An optional string to provide additional dimensions to the event data.
• Value – An integer that you can use to provide numerical data about the user event.

As event tracking allows you to define more variables you can track more information such as page load times, how long a video is played and what buttons a user clicks. For example the below link shows how you could track a video, when someone clicks play, and the video is called ‘gone with the wind’.

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<a href="#" onClick=_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Videos',
 'Play', 'Gone With the Wind']);">Play</a>

You should be careful to plan which metrics you want to record, this will ensure that the data sent to Google Analytics is actionable. The advantage of event tracking over page views is that event tracking won’t ruin your overall page view data, the only disadvantage is that event tracking cannot be added into a goal which is slightly annoying. The data that you can get from this however is great and provides a huge amount of data to act on.

• Banner Advertisting
• Email Campaigns
• PPC campaign

One problem many webmasters find is tracking the success of these campaigns. Recording any marketing campaigns success is a critical part of the optimisation process, you need to know which of your marketing campaigns is working well for you.

Luckily Google Analytics provides the ability to tag your URLs so that the traffic data is sent to your Google Analytics account. You should remember that if your Adwords and Google Analytics accounts are linked, your adwords data will automatically be tagged, meaning cost, campaign and click through data is automatically sent through to Google Analytics.

You will however still need to tag your other non search engine campaign, such as banner ads and promotional email. It is important to remember that you don’t need to tag any natural search clicks as Google Analytics automatically records these visits under natural search.

Within a tagged URL you can use the following variables:

• Campaign Source – The referrer such as Google, citysearch etc
• Campaign Medium – CPC, Banner etc
• Campaign Term – Keyword
• Campaign Content – Used to differentiate between different adverts
• Campaign Name – Used to indicate the campaign, for example xmas campaign

To help your tag your URLs Google has created a URL builder, this easy to use tool creates the tagged URL for you, you simply have to copy and paste the URL into your campaign links. The below link shows a tagged URL for a Google banner campaign, for a christmas campaign using the keyword xmas trees.

http://www.website.co.uk/?utm_source=Google&utm_medium=banner&utm_term=xmas%2Btrees&utm_campaign=christmas%2Bcampaign

Once you have completed your tagging you will be able to review the success of your campaign through Google Analytics, it is important however to remember that data can take hours to reach your Google Analytics account.

In Google Analytics go to Traffic Sources –> All Traffic Sources

You will then be able to look for medium and source of your campaign, such as Google banner advertising campaigns. It is important that you analyze and review the traffic from your tagged URLs to discover what form of advertising is working for you, and achieve the highest return on investment possible.

• Video
• Images
• News
• Blogs
• Forums
• And more…

Videos will always attract users as they are more appealing to view than traditional adverts. The search engines have quickly caught onto this allowing users to search a huge selections of videos on sites such as YouTube.

One of the main things to think about when deciding to use video as a form of marketing is where to host the video itself. Traditional it is more efficient to host content on your own site as this builds up your site, and provides more search terms for users to reach the site. Video however is generally hosted on third party websites such as Youtube, mainly due to the technical reasons of hosting video. Users also host videos on Youtube due to its popularity and reach, Youtube is now in fact the 2nd biggest search engine.

In more recent times however websites have become more powerful, making it easier to host the video on your site itself. Most people however will still host their video on Youtube as they will make more money per view than they would on their own site.

A good idea is to promote the video on your site and third party video websites, that way you get both of the benefits including links to your video on both Youtube and your site. One great way to get your video on as many third party sites as possible is to use a video syndication services such as Tubemogul which will sent your video to a selection of third party websites.

But what ranking factors are used for videos
Like natural search Youtube uses a selection of ranking factors including title, description, tags, views, ratings, how many times it has been embedded, comments, age, subscribers and inbound links

One way to get Google to index the video on your site is to use a Video Sitemap, video sites are like traditional XML sitemaps, it is a sitemap of the locations of your videos. The video sitemap protocol also allows you to specify a thumbnail image which can appear in the search results. Once you have completed the video sitemap you should upload it to Google Webmaster Tools as usual, you should also reference the sitemap in the robots.txt file

To help your video rank better in the search results it is still best practice to include some text description of the video next to it. Google’s algorithm still heavily relies on text, so including some relevant text can only help your chances of listing.

One great tool to discover new SEO keywords from your PPC account is the search based keyword tool. Firstly you should login to your Google Adwords account then open the search based keyword tool. You should then be able to pick your site from a drop down list and click on find keywords.

This tool will then provide you with a long list of keywords from your Adwords campaign. Each keyword comes with the following metrics of data:

• Monthly searches
• Competition
• Suggestion bid
• Ad/Search Share

The most important parts of data from this list are monthly searches and Ad/Search share, you can actually use this data to discover niche keywords for your SEO campaign, that you were not aware of before.

To discover these niche keywords you should export this keyword list to Excel and then filter the list by ‘monthly searches’ and ‘Search Share’. You should look to filter the search share by anything between 50-75, and search volumes over 200 a month.

This will provide you with a list of keywords that appear on the first page 50-75% of the time, and have high monthly searches in Google. This gives you a great starting point to push more long tail SEO keywords which are one the first page of Google, but can be pushed higher through SEO to improve your sites visibility in the search engines.

Doing this means you are actually using all the keyword research your PPC account manager has undertaken to help your SEO campaign. Not only this the data you are analysing is real data from your account and hence is more trusted than other methods of analysing websites.

This way of analysing keywords for SEO only works for clients who have both an SEO and PPC account. I will be reviewing other ways of analysing this data soon, so watch this space.