Renegade Search

You've been working on SEO for your site for months. You've done your research, and your site is perfectly optimized for high-volume, highly-relevant keyphrases. You've gone out of your way to make sure that everything you're doing is ethical and your site should be firmly in Google's good graces.

After a few months of diligent promotion, you've greatly improved your visibility, and your site's traffic and conversions have been exploding.

And then one day, without warning, it's all gone. For reasons you can't fathom, your site has dropped off from Google results like a rock. Your traffic disappears.

If you care about SEO, this is the stuff that nightmares are made of. But if you've been working in internet marketing long enough, and you've been around enough sites, chances are that you might have seen a similar situation. But there are plenty of causes for this terrifying prospect, so the most important thing is to take a deep breath, relax, and figure out the cause of the problem. While it is always possible that something bad has happened (such as your site being hacked), most of the time the problem will be much more inocuous.

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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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In August, I wrote a post about common error pages that can be found online. As that post explains, the most common, and problematic, error page is the dreaded 404. Whenever a server spits out a 404 page, it means that the user is trying to access an invalid URL. This might be because they misstyped an address, or it may be because they followed a bad link. Whatever the cause, no site owner wants users to see 404 pages, and minimizing their appearance should be a central goal for any webmaster.

In this post, I want to give a quick tutorial on how to identify and fix 404 errors using Google Analytics. With just a few short steps, you should be able to identify how often users are accessing the 404 page, how they arrived there, and how to fix any issues.

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Ok, so you've got Google Analytics on your site and you're tracking your goals and making changes on your site based on your reports. You've got your PPC conversion tracking codes on your site so you can better optimize your site based on actual user search queries and account metrics you can't see through analytics. You seem to have your bases covered. But what happens when your business does a large portion of their conversions offline? This is when you'd want to use call tracking on your website!

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Last week I attended a wine webinar hosted by our friends over at Orbit Media Studios. It's a meet up for professionals to discuss best practices in digital marketing and have a few glasses of wine. Last night's topic was email marketing and it was packed with useful information and best practices. Here's a list of the top five valuable take aways from Orbit's April 19th #WineWeb:

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