Renegade Search

With two full days of speakers and knowledge, there was much to take away from SearchLove this fall. George (@gzlatin) and I were able to visit Boston and attend the conference, so we've summarized the multitude of things that we learned and heard at the event. You'll note that the "Keep it Real" comments from the speakers are missing most of the important words as these are supposed to remain "attendee secrets" for the next 30 days.

Yes, I know this list is long (it's supposed to be), so I've summarized it into the following categories to make things easier on you. (side note: within each category, the individual items are ordered from when they were provided throughout the event)

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When you’re thinking about which keywords you’d like to target on your business’s site, or pouring through Google Analytics reports to see out which terms have been bringing traffic, it’s important to consider the user intent that a particular keyword implies. A little common sense can go a long way when deciding if a particular keyword is valuable.

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Ask anyone around the office about my eBay addiction lately and most will either laugh or shake their heads in confusion. However, as I look around for antique butter churns, trade stimulators (think slot machines where you win products instead of money), old CTA tokens and memorabilia, I can't help but be intrigued by the similarities between internet marketing generally and selling on eBay.

So as I slowly turn the Digital Third Coast office into my grandmother's house, I leave you with 5 takeaways that come into play for both internet marketing and selling on eBay:

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I tend to find that most Google Analytics users are primarily looking at how people reached their website and hoping that the traffic graphs get bigger over time. George wrote a great piece last month on setting up goals so that you can see what actions users performed once they reached your website - this is very important! This can show you the value of the traffic coming to your website and how well your marketing is working for your business. All the upward trending graphs and thousands of visitors don't mean much for reporting purposes if you don't know what actions those visitors took. Now the next step is figuring out how the users interacted with your website and one great way to understand both user action and user intent is through the Site Search reports.

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We have been discussing Google's recent decision to encrypt searches for those signed in to a Google profile, rendering a portion of keyword referrer data "(not provided)" within Google Analytics reports. Webmasters and professionals throughout our industry utilize this information to improve a site or campaign. At the time that Google announced this decision, Google associate Matt Cutts attempted to allay fears that a large percentage of this keyword data would be lost by stating that only a "single digit" percentage of people are actually signed in while searching. Since then there has been much debate as to whether or not Cutts' statement was accurate. We decided to investigate further with a study of our own.

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