Renegade Search

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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For anyone who spent too much time in their formative years learning how to photoshop pictures of themselves or their friends into embarrassing or funny situations, Google Image Search has been a blessing. In my younger days, I could count Image search whenever I needed to find a picture of a celebrity, movie poster, or historical event that would be the perfect kickstart for an inside joke that I'd spend around four hours on and would only make sense to at most three people. I did this often. (I had a lot of free time.)



But Image Search can also be used for legitimately useful purposes. On sites where a large amount of the content is visual (such as image hosting sites, art galleries, celebrity photo sites, and more), it can often make more sense to target potential users via Image Search than traditional channels. And even when a site isn't completely 'visual', there are always plenty of opportunities to draw traffic using Image SEO.

Every type of non-traditional SEO, from Blog Optimization to Video Optimization, has its own set of best practices and rules. Image search is, of course, no exception to this rule. For the rest of this post, I'm going to go over a few of the most basic best practices for Image SEO.

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As a new employee at Digital Third Coast, to say that I’ve been learning a lot about SEO basics lately would be an understatement. Though there are many other topics I could have just as easily chosen, I thought I’d write about eliminating internal competition among a website’s pages by targeting each keyword or keyword phrase on only one page of the site.

When you’re assigning the keywords you’d like to rank for across the pages of a website, it’s important that you target each keyword on only one page of the site. Targeting the same keyword on multiple pages causes the ranking power that you build for that keyword, through things like on-site SEO and link building, to be diluted by spreading it across several pages. This weakens each of the page’s ability to rank for the term. In addition, it causes the individual pages to compete against each other for the keyword in the search engines, just as they compete with other websites. Concentrating all of the ranking power of each keyword onto only one page of a site solves these problems. 

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PPC is typically seen as a short-term investment. You pay money and in return receive traffic to your website. When you stop paying that money to the search engines, the traffic dries up.

That being said, if you have retained access to your accounts and if have associated your paid search accounts with your Google Analytics account, then the data left behind can bring some additional value to your paid search efforts. So the truth is that a well-planned and properly executed PPC campaign can provide a lot of value long after the traffic has stopped.

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