Ani Lopez's Search Engine Optimization Blog

Comparing Google Trends for Websites and Google Analytics data. 2011 Edition

Jan 09, 2012

In June 2009 I wrote an article comparing charts and data provided by Google Trends for Websites and the one coming from Google Analytics, for the same site of course.

This is 2011 edition and these are the details:

Period of study goes from November 2010 to November 2011, 12 months
Charts from Analytics show data by weeks to shape trend lines as close as possible to Google Trends for Websites ones
All charts show unique visitors

Without further ado let's face data side by side from 9 different sites to see how well or bad they match.

Google Trends versus Analytics

How Google gathers data for Trends is described in this page, something you can guess yourself with a bit of imagination and taking into account how they are cannibalizing everything in the internet. Google Analytics is mentioned as one of the sources not surprisingly.

What we can infer from this comparison?

Most of the trend lines at GTS (Google Trends for Websites) charts achieve a decent grade of similarity with GA ones
Ups and downs are slightly more exaggerated at GTS charts
Even when we know they have Google Analytics accurate data they never match exactly. Is done in purpose? If I were Google I would do it

What about the numbers, do they match too?

The numbers below are very rounded because of the little information we have from GTS charts, just numbers in the vertical axis that makes them a rough approximation. In any case what it relevant here is the deviation.

GA shows 1,143K unique visitors a week, this means
~163K a day - GTS ~142K a day. Deviation -13%
GA ~171K - GTS ~120K. Dev. -30%
GA ~53K - GTS ~23K. Dev. -57%
GA ~100K - GTS ~60K. Dev. -40%
GA ~114K - GTS ~70K. Dev. -39%
GA ~36K - GTS ~30K. Dev. -17%
GA ~16K - GTS ~16K. Dev. 0%
GA ~6.5K - GTS ~5.8K. Dev. -11%
GA ~64K - GTS ~50K. Dev. -22%

In average Google Analytics numbers are 25% higher than the ones shown in Google Trends for Websites but, a big blinking 'but' here, there are cases where GA shows double than GTS while some other numbers match so you are never going to know how far from reality numbers from GTS are if you are checking competitors traffic for example.

Differences with the comparison made in 2009

A couple of them:

In 2009 last quarter of Trends tended to be less accurate compared to Analytics. This issue seems to be solved now
Actual trends lines in GTS charts seem a bit more faithful to the ones pulled from Analytics data

In general terms Google seems to be doing a better job on accuracy with the charts available at GTS lately.

Next time you show one of those Google Trends charts to somebody and he / she despises them saying they are unreliable show also to this person how good they mimic real data.

Revenue by keyword length. Is the money in the long tail?

Dec 24, 2011

We have always heard that big part of the money is in the long tail keywords. Is that true? If this is the case, how much the long tail is adding to the total revenue?

I'm getting pretty addicted to real numbers, charts and anything we can distill from them so I pulled figures from a bunch of e-commerce and booking sites, case scenario where we can truly talk about money, and cooked the numbers to see what was coming out of them.

Details of the analysis:

Exactly 20 sites
Time frame: 9 months
Several languages, not only English
Only organic non-branded traffic, of course
Numbers in charts are average ones from the sites analyzed

Long tail definition and how to filter by words count

How many words should a key phrase include in a query to be considered long tail? A quick review of related articles and some answers from twitter mates (thanks guys) seems to establish the break point on 4. If a key phrase has four or more words it is commonly considered long tail and this is the criteria followed here.

The regular expressions used to filter traffic and revenue in GA were:

^\s*[^\s]+\s*$ one keyword
^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){1}\s*$ two keywords
^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){2}\s*$ three keywords
^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){3}\s*$ four keywords
^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){5}\s*$ six keywords
^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){6,}\s*$ seven or more keywords

You can use them in your sites to analyze them, otherwise who knows what you are going to find there if you don't do dig it?

Visits by number of words in search query

As expected key phrases with four or more words, when combined, represent the highest percentage of traffic, 35.6%, compared to total visits from organic non-branded.

If we break down this 4+, just 4 words has higher percentage than one word queries but 2 and 3 are queen and king respectively.

Revenue by query length

Landscape changes when we look at revenue instead of visits. Money from one keyword queries tops close to 40% of the revenue of an e-commerce. In second position the 4+ bucket.

Broken down we see none of the 4+ stands out significantly and it decreases with query length. There is a nice 21.7% of the money in the long tail bag but not as much as I was expecting.

Revenue per visit by key phrase length

Three interesting facts here:

The difference gets bigger between one keyword and the rest if the chart shows revenue per visit
Difference reduces to minimum comparing the rest of key phrases lengths although 2 words pops up a bit from the 2+ gang
No remarkable differences but 5 and 6 words in search query are almost as profitable per visit as 3 words while 4 words gets closer to 7+ ones

Comparing Visits and Revenue. Keywords performance

In order to have better perspective of how this works, next chart combines visits and revenue percentage compared to total.

3 words is the one bringing more visits but in terms of revenue it is the third
2 words queries have a nice balance on both metrics
1 keyword although fourth in visits it is the king of revenue

Trying to come up with a number that could represent performance of key phases by length the simpler formula I can think off is

performance = visits to total x revenue to total x revenue per visit

That's what comes out of it:

One keyword queries perform more than 3 times better than any other.

Not all key phrases are made equal

While collecting data from this post I didn't spend too much time observing the differences in types of keywords, this requires a complete different study but some similar characteristics were observed.

Single word queries

Some e-commerce sites sell technical products and more frequently their audience search by SKU number instead by product's name. This specific situation makes SKUs a highly converting keyword if you want to consider a bunch of letters and numbers with no meaning a real keyword.

This is what creates a big difference from one single word and the rest in terms of revenue per visit as we saw before.

If you are one of those e-commerce sites make sure, for money's shake, SKUs play an important role in the content optimization.

A second group of single word converting pretty well is the one with very generic terms like sunglasses, smartphones and such. A single word does not infer the intention of user is to buy anything but if this is what user has in mind and your site is there right at the top of SERPs, bingo!

Obviously fight for good rankings for very generic single keyword queries can be really expensive but seems ROI should be more than decent.

Long tail keywords

This is the kingdom of definitions, questions and advice

Detailed explanations but roughly written: "spider bite on dog"
How to [verb]: "how to clean your paintball gear"
What is [noun]: "what is algaecide"
-ing: "cleaning your paintball gear"
a vs b (comparison): "iphnone vs android"
How much�
Best time to�

Harder to fit in corporate content or product copy optimization so, definitely, to have to take them into account in a more general content strategy involving blogs, FAQ and such.

Probably they don't represent as much as anybody could think before getting deep into data but they are more than 1/5 of the income. You have to be insane to disdain them.

BTW: I wish you all a happy new year crammed with SEO success.

Matching Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics keywords data

Nov 29, 2011

This is the first version of the SEO dashboard or the first one of the set, if I finally decide to have them separated for a more easy usage.

While working on ideas for the Ultimate SEO dashboard and having in mind that keyword analysis is getting harder thanks to Google reporting 'not provided' keywords in a scandalous percentage that question came back to me again: How can we merge keywords data from WMT and Google Analytics to pull more insight from it?

Google knows this information is relevant for SEOs and they don't want to make it easy for you. Unless they change how WMT information is integrated in Google Analytics or the GA API is updated to merge both sources it is impossible by now as far as I know

So I had one of those Vicky the Viking moments (my European fellows will understand the reference): NextAnalytics Excel plugin to the rescue! And it works like a charm although it requires with a bit of manual work. Follow instructions ahead.

How to make the SEO Keywords Tool work

1. Download the keywords tool dashboard excel file.
(What you see there is a sample of data from this web, nothing relevant).

2. Get the NextAnalytics Excel plugin, required to make it work.
Download a trial for free or buy it, it is the best money I ever paid for a tool helping me analyse SEO and Social Media. (Thanks Mike and Ward, amazing customer support, for enduring patiently my insidious questions)

3. Decide the period to analyze selecting dates, let�s say past month.
Google Analytics > Traffic Sources > Search Engine Optimization > Queries

4. Exporting the WMT data.
You will find out that you have more keywords than the ones you can list but there is a trick for that.

Select any number higher than 10 at "Show rows:" drop down selector. Then go to the URL input of your browser and change the last number between the D and the / to match number of total keywords, 1102 in this case.

explorer-table.rowCount%3D50/ -> explorer-table.rowCount%3D1102/

Then you can export CSV for Excel and save it to your computer.

5. Import WMT data into the dashboard.
Clear "keywords-WMT" tab or worksheet of the dashboard. Important, this is the worksheet where we want the data coming from WMT or it won�t work.

At Data menu in Excel, select Get External Data > From text and follow instructions to get keyword�s data there. Delimiter is Comma, not Tab.

Delete first 6 rows to move everything up and leave Query, Impressions, Clicks, Average Position, and CTR at the first row. Also delete last row having totals.

Manual import finished.

6. Configure Google analytics connection at "GoogleData_actions" worksheet.
Enter the email and password you use to access Google Analytics. Enter the Profile ID.
IMPORTANT, it is not the typical UA-9415164-2. Two ways to get it:

a) Navigate to any report in Google Analytics, take a look at the URL and find the number between p and /

trafficsources-overview/a9210124w20511295p18438502/%3F_.date

b) You can either use the Next Analytics plugin to reveal it.

7. Configure details
Enter the dates of the period to analyse, first and last day matching the period you selected at step 3 while exporting WMT data.

If you wish to remove some keywords, branded ones for example, use the filter the same way you would be doing it in Google Analytics, otherwise leave it blank. This will filter the keywords you already have from WMT and the ones to come from GA.

8. Hit "Refresh" button and let the magic happen.

What data and insights you get from the keywords

Data from Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools is matched by keyword so you have several columns ordered by visits.

Query or Keywords
Impressions, Clicks, Average position and CTR, numbers in red, from WMT
Visits, Pageviews per Visit, Avg Time on Site, Bounce Rate, and All Goals Conversion Rate from GA (if you have goals properly set conversion rate numbers will appear) in blue

Insights you can get from keywords

Bad news first: keywords bringing traffic from organic not reported in WMT. We knew WMT is providing inaccurate or partial data. Here you are going to find how much.

Now the good ones.
The whole picture, from impressions to conversion and everything in between. Again, not perfect but at least you have both sides of the story, what happens at SERPs and after the click.

Keywords making your site appear at SERPs but not bringing any traffic (bottom of the worksheet) what means room to improve your content optimization. Some of those will have quite high Average Position values but a bunch of them are probably having positions in third, fourth page that could yield some visits/conversions with a bit of effort.

Relevant keywords quite related to your business core with a high Average Position and no traffic. Sorry, this means something is quite bad in your optimization for those.

Keep on digging on your data playing as much as you want with more advanced Excel features like filters or add other columns with the calculations you would like to include.

I hope you find it useful. Any constructive comment is appreciated and will be added in later versions of this SEO Dashboard. Have a great content optimization!

Numbers after a month of 'not provided' keywords

Nov 18, 2011

Update November 18th

This is the third and last update I'm going to do by now.
Not a surprise, all numbers are growing fast. Maybe another update in some months ahead to see if this stops here and how bad it gets.

Highest percentage seen is 15.94%
Lowest percentage 1.69%
Average 9.35%

Distribution

50% of sites are above 10% of non provided keywords
30% of sites are between 5% and 10%
20% of sites are below 5%

At this point it is clear that, thanks to Google, we have lost a big chunk of relevant information. Thanks guys!.

In any case, I'll stand by what I said from the very beginning: no crying, just move ahead. Take it or leave it. This is who SEO works.

The only thing that pisses me off is Google treating us as toddlers. Take a look at Accessing search query data for your sites and how they pretend to mislead us:

Webmasters can still access a wealth of search query data for their sites via Webmaster Tools.

Users of Google Analytics� Search Engine Optimization reports have access to the same search query data available in Webmaster Tools and can take advantage of its rich reporting capabilities.

Are you kidding me? Any rookie Analytics / WMT user knows it is not possible to compare this data with other metrics like Conversion Rate or Revenue, for example, so it is pretty much useless.

More advanced Google Analytics users, the ones pulling data from API, know "Search Engine Optimization" section in GA is not accesible via API. Useless again.

Dear Google, it is your company / data / game, you can do whatever you want with the only restriction of law but pay some respect to your clients.

Update November 3rd

As mentioned down the article, here you have the first update. Let's see how this goes:

Highest percentage seen is 9.17%
Lowest percentage 0.72%
Average 5.01%

Yes amigos, amount of visits from organic traffic with not provided keyword is raising pretty fast as anyone could guess. From 0.82% average the first 4 days after announcement to 5.01% average we have now after 16 days.

Percentage Distribution of missed keywords

43.5% of the sites are over 6% of 'non provided'
26.0% are between 4% and 6%
30.5% are below 4%

True that 5% average is far from the 10% some out there are mentioning but it is also certain that more and more sites are closer to that 10% what indicates the thing is getting worst quickly.

Checking number for those 23 sites I noticed (not provided) is now appearing at the top 5 keywords for most of them as the sum of keywords not informed is higher than the rest.

Not nice, on the contrary. Time to find another job? :D

Last Tuesday, October 18th, Google made an announcement and Armageddon came to SEO world (again). Signed-in users are routed to the SSL version of Google "as part of our commitment to provide a more secure online experience" they said.

This means some of the visits from organic traffic are not including our beloved keywords. Instead you can see reported a flaccid "(not provided)".

Ok, stop lamenting for a while, wipe your tears and let's see how much should we worry about.

I've checked organic traffic at 23 sites from Oct. 18th, first day when "not provided" appeared, till 21st. Not thousands of sites (disclaimer: it is Saturday and I should be having beers instead of digging data for you) but enough to bring some light. Here you have them:

Highest percentage observed is 1.75%
Lowest percentage 0.18%
Average 0.82%

How does this affect sites?

Only 35% of sites are above 1.0% of non provided keywords
40% of sites are between 0.5% and 1.0%
25% of sites are below 0.5%

I agree this adds a bit of inaccuracy to our work, nothing new as you may know if you are a SEO consultant. Are we going to cry in rage for some 0.8%-ish? Not me.

'Devastating effects' as some alarmists named it? Not at all by now. Although Google said that change will be rolling out over the next few weeks it is already there (seems a small proportion), otherwhise we would not be able to see those numbers.

I'll keep an eye on numbers and update this post over the weeks to evaluate how it goes.

Reasons for killing organic referral data: privacy? anti-competitive move? To be honest, when it falls to daily basis SEO work, I don't care at all. We are here to increase client�s revenue from organic traffic and Search Engines manage their business the way they want with the only limit of law. Are they hypocrites? No more or less than anybody else working for money.

Ultimate SEO Dashboard

Nov 11, 2011

Mixing again two of my favorite topics, SEO and Dashboarding but this time I would like you to help me create a very specific dashboard for SEO that I'll create and share with everybody, free to download from this page once it is ready to go.

Download the SEO dashboard: Matching Google WMT & Analytics keywords. First version.

What Analytics is got to do with SEO

There are two ways SEO and analytics interact. You do your stuff and wait to see what happens. I already explained to you how to do it with a dashboard to measure SEO performance. Post-action use of web analytics data flow.

The other way round, pre-action use of data. Besides a general strategy you might have for a SEO campaign, best practices and such things we all know, in a daily basis work you have to dig deep into data to find underperforming areas, discover unsuspected trends, outliers, correlations or any other pain point to heal as soon as possible. Then you make decisions, what is going to be your next actions, implement them and back to performance evaluation.

Objectives of the dashboard

The goal here is to create a dashboard going further than Google Analytics interface goes for SEO purposes or make scrutinize data easier for us. Not reinventing the wheel, just a free tool where you can do some simple settings, hit 'refresh' button and ready for surgery.

Data sources

In SEO world data sources for analysis are not limited to Google Analytics, or any measurement tool you installed. We have some other like� ranking reports? To say the truth it is pretty hard to drive clear conclusions from them due to their inconsistent accuracy. It is part of the game, we know. To spice up everything a bit more some keywords are now reported as not provided lately.

Google Analytics, not perfect but probably the best tool we have now to get hands dirty and successfully connect some dots so data from this tool is what we are going to be using. Its popularity is also going to help to make the dashboard useful for a larger audience.

Tools involved and limitations

It makes no sense at all having to do all this manual work: export data from Google Analytics, import it to a spreadsheet (data layer), do some math (analysis layer), and then create charts and tables (presentation layer).

We have a fabulous plugin that, using GA API, solves and automates the two first layers leaving everything ready for the presentation one in Excel: http://excel.nextanalytics.com

The advantage is that GA API is more flexible while pulling data from dimensions and metrics than the regular GA interface. The disadvantage is that the latest features and integrations in GA are not yet available via API like data from Webmaster Tools recently integrated added to the mix.

In any case, if someone comes with relevant data from other tool or service, rankings exported in CSV format to be imported to Excel for example, that could be integrated it would be welcome of course.

Wait, did I put together in the same sentence 'relevant' and 'rankings'? My apologies, it won't happen again.

Want to help creating your SEO dashboard?

It's simple:

Write down there in the comments what would you like to have in the dashboard
Contribute with your opinions to improve any ideas from others

I'll be moving the finest ideas here at the reportlets section.

Of course all contributors will be listed here and in the dashboard itself, authorship must be credited conveniently.

Reportlets

Here we a couple for an start:

Keywords to landing pages
List of pages (landing ones) receiving traffic from organic, obviously, + keywords + metrics like bounce or conversion rates.

This would help us check what keywords are driving traffic to what pages and how they contribute to conversions helping you guess where is the gap between your initial keyword research, content optimization and what is really happening with the visitors' keywords.

Landing pages not receiving organic traffic
A must have classic including some metrics. Any page with a decent conversion rate but receiving thin or not organic traffic at all?

Want to become a dashboard master?

You know, SEO consultants have to be like the Renaissance men, whose expertise spans across different areas. Analyze web traffic data and represent it in an insightful way is one of them.

There are many more but If you want to start somewhere mastering the noble art of dashboards here you have some resources

Chandoo Advanced Excel website is the place for almost daily pilgrimage.

Microsoft Excel dashboards & reports by Michael Alexander & John Walkenbach is THE book for your first dashboarding steps.

Why not? My presentation From KPIs to dashboards.

Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data & Now You See It: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantitative Analysis by Stephen Few are books teaching you coloring numbers. In better words Visual Intelligence made right.

Google Analytics Data Export API: Reference, Query Explorer and Official group. Understanding how queries work will help you tame the learning curve with other software based on the API.

NextAnalytics does not only provide the tool previously described, also tons of ready to use dashboards and widgets.

Thanks in advance.

Measuring SEO Performance

Apr 25, 2011

Visitors, Unique Visitors, Page Views, Average Time On Site, Bounces, Pages Receiving Organic Traffic, Keywords Per Landing Page, Long tail, Rankings, Backlinks? Sorry I don't buy it.

"You can't see the forest for the trees" situation here in my opinion. After reading quite a lot of articles about the topic that's my attempt to face measuring SEO performance in a scientific manner. Nothing spectacular but I like simple things that work great, I like to start from scratch after set aside everything learned previously.

Reasons why you should measure your SEO efforts? Answer with another question, does anybody have to tell you?

Observe user behaviour

Overwhelmed with so many metrics, dimensions, numbers, and charts in your web analytics tool? Get the head out of it, two steps back, a sip of a good espresso and perspective becomes very different.

What are the typical user behaviour patterns from search engines to goal completion or transaction? Not rocket science here:

Visits bouncing
Visits not bouncing not converting
Visits not bouncing and converting

Image speaks for itself

Objective of SEO

At this stage of the twentieth century we should not be wasting time discussing what the objective of SEO is but you can still see articles talking about keywords rankings, volume of traffic as the sole purposes of this art, science or whatever you want to call the way we make a living.

'Pure SEO is not about conversions' Ouch! Go tell the client paying good money that you are not there to increase their benefits, if you have guts.

'Purists' against 'modern SEOs'? A nice topic for a bit of link bait but again, we are paid for a very clear purpose, the rest is cheap chit chat or plain scam.

Yes, of course some other disciplines like Conversion Rate Optimization are relevant to increase the number of visitors achieving a goal, especially at the end of the funnel, but CRO is going to play in the benefit of any medium bringing traffic to your door, not only organic one.

Social media campaigns have relative impact in organic branded traffic, hard to measure as any other branded medium but nor CRO neither SM or any other are excuses to forget about conversions in SEO.

The objective of SEO is to bring to your site the maximum amount of non-paid converting traffic.

Interlude: No goals or e-commerce set up? Fix that and come back later.

Following the example of the previous picture this is what we work hard for:

Increase total amount of visits
Decrease visits bouncing
Decrease 'not bouncing not converting' visits
Increase 'not bouncing and converting' visits

In top of those three tasks if you also manage to increase revenue per converting visit, transactional sites obviously, then you are my SEO guru, not those "I-write-some-fancy-WP-plugins" title contenders.

Now we have a good perspective of how things are going in general terms it is much easier to:

Present in a silver crystal clear way how good you are as SEO consultant to your clients or audience
Drill down to diagnose effectiveness and improve it having relevant objectives in a more scientific procedure. Please, no more unorganized nonsense collections of metrics

SEO performance in 3 charts

I confess, I'm becoming a dashboard-aholic. Business objectives and KPIs defined first and then a good dashboard picturing them. It saves a lot of time going back and forth across your web analytics favourite tool reports. Only when some outliers need more analysis I come back to GA (mostly, I hate Torture SiteCataclysm).

So I tried to figure out the simplest dashboard for SEO performance evaluation and this is the result.

The one and only important chart

Client: Is the revenue coming from organic increasing? How much? That's the chart answering these questions so is the most important one. Note the visits from organic have a discrete trend line in the background, just to bring some context.

Only a chart for visits would make you think, "poor boy, his SEO is a shame" but the revenue shows a complete different history: "woohoo, this guy rocks!"

Performance chart

Getting a bit more into the interesting details, this chart shows the rate of quality visits from organic, the ones converting and how much money they spend per (converting) visit in their transactions.

In other words, how many visits we are moving towards the third bucket.

Entrance chart

Having a clear vision of what is happening at the beginning of the funnel is important for us as consultants, not so for the client. Did they come to your door for nothing? Visits and bounce rate.

The more the bounce rate is decreased more quality visits are moved to the second bucket.

The all in one measuring performance chart

A different type of reportlet, a combination of percentages and trending arrows.

Not complicated, just comparing month over moth the changes in volume in the three buckets plus a forth arrow on the right to show trend in revenue per visit.

← ← Red, money and visits are running away, pretty bad
→ ← Light red, although the bounces are decreasing the converting ones too, a bit worse than next one because althoug you are keeping the people in the house, money is flying away
← → Light green, some of the 'non-bouncing not-converting' are escaping towards the bouncing visits, not good, but at least a portion of them are now converting, not so bad
→ → Green, moving visits from the beginning of the funnel towards conversion. Good
→ → ↑ Super Green, same then previous but also increasing revenue per visit

Ups and downs are part of this business, having some mediocre months from time to time is not something to scare you. Having several greens in a row demonstrates you are good or excellent. Finally you can't call yourself a SEO if reds last several months.

Now you can really check where in the scale from pure-crap-SEO to super-guru you are.

No metrics yet?

Ok, ok, you are right, time to add your favourite metrics to your SEO magic but always keeping in mind our scientific procedure.

From visits to conversion, decreasing bouncing traffic comes first. Pretty straightforward, what we know about these guys? The keywords they queried and landing pages they ended up from organic. 'fix and measure' mantra here.

If your SEO is good you will be moving visits from the first bucket to the second what mean more people likely to convert.

Second step, moving visits from the bucket of the 'not bouncing not converting' to the converting ones but now go on your own amigo, this is about measuring, not about telling you how to do it.

Don't forget seasonality or other external factors that might confuse you a bit like farmer pandas or any other delights search engines will have ready for you.

Well, in fact this measurement framework could be applied to any medium but SEO is what we discuss here. Again, you are free to tweak it if you have non-transactional goals or if you want other traffic mediums reflected there.

SEO Performance Dashboard

I'll make it easy for you. Feel free to download the SEO Performance Dashboard for e-commerce sites. A single click will tell your qualification, who said fear?.

NextAnalytics plugin for Excel is required to make this dashboard work. Buy it or download free demo here http://excel.nextanalytics.com. (Disclaimer: I don't get any money for this, I already paid my license. I do it because it is a tool I use daily, I like it and the support they offer is insuperable).

I hope you like my approach, constructive criticism is always welcome.

*All the charts and figures in this article are coming from the same real live site, no fake numbers here.

Spring is getting really hot, Cardinal Path, WAA Awards & SMX Toronto

Mar 15, 2011

You, my few and loyal readers and followers, already know I moved to Vancouver looking for a personal adventure including the professional part of it.

Year and a half later I can say for sure it has been very interesting till now but near future is getting amazingly exciting. That's the main reason I've not been writing a lot lately here.

I asked for adventure and this is what I'm getting. Be careful, sometimes you get more than you wanted.

Conquering the Web Analytics Association Awards

First VKI Studios, the company I've been working for last 12 months, was nominated and made it to the final as Most Influential Agency category what is per se a marvellous price taking into account that we are competing against big guys like IBM. I feel proud to be part of the team.

Then I discovered that Spanish mate, one of the best world wide web analysts, Gemma @sorprendida Mu�oz is finalist too for Web Analytics Rising Star category. She is now in San Francisco enjoying like a child meeting her loved Avinash and waiting for the gala. BTW, if Avinash reads her blog in Spanish using Google translate sure woths a try.

Probably the other finalists deserve it too but my heart is with her as you can imagine. Wonderful person and terrific professional.

Not enough. Justin Cutroni, now a work mate as I'll explain later, is finalist for Innovator/Technology of the Year. Since I started to put my hands in the analytics thing, Justin was the first relevant personas I followed. His "Google Analytics Shortcuts" book absolutely helped in my first steps while implementing tracking solutions correctly. Be sure to read his blog.

What can I say? I bet on him, of course.

Three of my favorites in the pole position, the gala is ours.

Update 9:49pm via Twitter: none of my favorite three won an award :-(
Esto cabreado! (sorry I had to say that in Spanish).

Presenting at SMX Toronto

March will be gone but April will keep me busy too. I enjoy sharing knowledge and meeting other professionals so every time there is a chance there I go.

I did some presentations while living in Spain, SMX Madrid. OME Online Marketing Expo Madrid, Search Congress Barcelona but the only opportunity I had here in North America was IMC Vancouver 2010.

I asked to present at several SMX conferences and bingo! Toronto response was positive asking me to participate in, not one but two, sessions:

Day 1 Multi-lingual Social and Search
With Guillaume Bouchard, NVI and Jean-Fran�ois Renaud, Adviso
Day 2 Evaluating SEO and Paid Search Activity and Conversions
With Brent Chaters, Tribute Entertainment Media Group and David Sprinkle, ROI Labs

Oh my dog! Looking forward (and frightened, I should say) to be seated side by side with such good professionals. Also meeting excelent profesionals from the east side of this big continent is going to be fantastic.

Citius, Altius, Fortius. Three relevant agencies join forces, a new one is born: Cardinal Path

To make things more electrifying we were told recently in a VKIstudios.com internal meeting that we were going to merge with Websharedesign.com and Publicinsite.com to lead in web analytics and data-driven space under a new company/name: CardinalPath.com. A secret hard to keep when you feel so excited about.

All three companies are well known for their relevancy in web analytics business but also strong in SEO, PPC, Usability, Conversion optimization, web development and many other online marketing disciplines. We can now offer more and better services all across North America and beyond.

Willing to team up with my new mates.

There are some more interesting things coming through the pipe as we head to the summer but they have to be confirmed first and better take one pill at a time to avoid choking.

Helping blog spamming morons

Jan 02, 2011

Past December @hugoguzman wrote about the ugly truth about blog commenting as link building tactic, you know, comment signature including keywords instead name of author.

Days later Dennis @TheNextCorner at his blog talked about the plague of comments stuffed with spammy links something I had to fight in the old sites I coded with no captchas or any other anti-spam methods because I never use Wordpress to build websites, not even blogs.

Blog spam is part of the SEO game you like it or not because it achieve some results the same way Black Hat does. Not to discuss that today but last weeks I had a complete idiot trying to stuff this blog with comments signing as "seo vancouver" and URL http://www.reach-services-inc.com.

Something I like from real black hat guys is they have to be clever and imaginative to find ways to hack the SERPs but in the other side of the galaxy we have the spam lamers.

This blog ranks pretty well for some keywords related to "seo" and "vancouver", sure he performed few queries and targeted the ones on top positions.

The first bunch of this Einstein�s comments included the email listed in his domain whois record so I sent an email asking him to stop but more than dissuade him a second burst came with more of those great comments now with fake email addresses, a remarkable improvement in his elaborated strategy.

Then I went to his website and sent a note via contact form but same result, more spam.

Besides deleting them I don�t usually waste time paying more attention but sometimes you can�t avoid get affectionate, maybe it�s the Christmas thing or because he seems to be learning something from my posts and he thanks me, who knows, but I want to help their ilk somehow so here it is the complete list of the crappy comments this guy used (several times each) in case you run out of ideas to keep on spamming blogs begging for a bit of link juice.

Nice posts
Great articles
Congratulations. So informative
Most of them related to two basic
I definitely agree with some of your points
It imagines a news without a good heading
How ready are to easy working SEO aspects?
I know in detail about my professional background
I was planing to move to the city so no better chance.
Nice posts, I definitely agree with some of your points.
Thanks, there's a lot of good stuff in here. I appreciate it!
It is much bigger investment due to very hard competition.
It limits creating a larger sitemap index with more sitemaps
I am sure you want to relate the page describing the mobile.
You list quite a few citations sources that I wasn't aware of. Thanks!
Each other to death for obscure reasons you don't have to care at all
This creates a complex net of internal linking without any order of relevance.
Here found some good tips and very useful article as well. Thanks for the tips
Content structure is a pretty invisible task in any SEO project but absolutely fundamental
Your posts are full of useful info for the newbies, and good reminders for those that have been around awhile.
I have read a few of your posts and they are all interesting and informative. Keep up the good work. :) Cheers!
I didn't know about the more advanced search queries and more so the google trends. Thanks for sharing with us.
Blogging is one of the most important in business.Thanks for the tips. I am looking forward for more post! Keep it up!
Your article is much more informatics for all of the visitor. I am very happy to read it. This is really very nice. Thank you for it.
This is an excellent resource for Google?s local listings. You list quite a few citations sources that I wasn't aware of. Thanks!
Well said! Everyone wants something different. One of the beauties of social networks is that they allow us to filter out what we don't want. Thank goodness
When linking to your website from an external source, don't always link to the home page, but vary it between important pages located lower down on your information structure
Very informative,Thanks pal. Yes i do agree location matters. Appearing in popular sites like yahoo and Google will really be a great help. Thus, giving you more chances to be known.
Its really wonderful and watchable. I like to share it with all my friends and hope they will definitely like it. (courtesy of seogenies.com, also spamming)

It would be definitely more helpful, I know, to create a web tool to generate automatically tons of those comments. Sure somebody already made it.

By the way, Elisa @egabbert wrote a funny article at, always recommended blog, Seobullshit describing 10 kinds of comment spam. Would you mind, my dear seo spam lamer to read it, first, and, second, get a life?

Happy organic traffic in 2010 and thanks everybody for reading this blog.

Improving SEO with web analytics

Dec 26, 2010

My workmate Brian Katz asked me to present at his Vancouver Web Analytics Meetup Group.

The idea for the topic came from the premise that many SEO consultants do their stuff first. Then some of those, the ones showing some more quality as professionals, verify results taking a look at stats stream and finally a smallest group, even more qualified, do a more in depth analysis regularly for a serious ongoing SEO.

In this third step is where things get electrifying and hot so that was set as the topic of the presentation I did past November 1st including basic concepts and some examples of how to use these measurement tools to improve SEO strategies.
Here it is.

Available also here Improving SEO with analytics.

Moving further from a basic study could take you along two different approaches:

Get to know the tool looking for a more advanced use beyond out of the box options without searching for any particular way to get a set of data to corroborate a hypothesis.
Think first what you need to analyze and figure it out later how you will manage to get it from the tool (if possible).

The second one seems more rational, I know what I'm looking for and I investigate to get it but the first one is a must too.

Having a good idea of how to squeeze the analytics tool to the max has to benefits:

Helping you discover ways you didn't know you could dissect and correlate data. Tool modifies results.
The other way round, once you know the objective of your analysis guess pretty quick if process it is going to be doable or you will have to make use of workarounds to reach the objective if not completely impossible. Results need the proper tools.

Thanks Brian for the invitation.
What's your approach to web analytics for SEO?

What SEO can do for your hotel bookings

Sep 20, 2010

These is a case study on quite basic SEO for hotels project, not advanced strategies required to double revenue, even better, more than double!.

Client was Husa, a Spanish hotel chain with more than 140 hotels and this work was for El Palace, emblematic luxury hotel in Barcelona.

The objective, of course, was to increase bookings and revenue so the initial project goals were:

Update web design and improve usability
100% SEO friendly site with a 100% SEO ready CMS
Fine handling multi language support to increase international clients
Increase non branded traffic as branded was big part of the organic cake
Increase quality converting traffic

Traffic and revenue results

New website was launched August 20th, four weeks latter these are the results.

Visits
Visits: 28.65% increase
Absolute Unique Visitors: 28.67% increase

Engagement metrics
Average Pageviews: from 2.17 to 4.23, 95.24% increase
Time on Site: from 02:08 to 03:20 56.07% increase
Bounce Rate: from 54.83% to 31.02%, 43.43% decrease

Traffic by type
Direct +8.77% visits
Referral +41.52% visits (pure referral traffic)
All organic +31.44%
Organic branded +21.75% visits

Organic non branded +488.55% visits

Revenue
Average daily income from bookings: 124.51% increase

Project details

Design was an important point in the agenda and was not an easy task due to trend in luxury hotels being heavy Flash addicts but a JQuey slideshow was accepted so a pure Html site was achieved sacrificing, in exchange, some details I would consider crucial like booking form on top left of the pages for example.

New design reflects much better the luxury hotel it is, what makes it closer to the type of public they target as clients.

A better usability makes the bookings more easy to achieve and the site to navigate what helped clearly to increase engagement and number of bookings.

A 100% SEO friendly site with well structured readable URLs, for example, and improved content organization helped search engines to understand better the site and, as consequence, more traffic from them.

Proper redirections from old URLs were set to avoid traffic drop and xml sitemap was added to Webmastertools to accelerate transition and new content indexing.

The right language handling under directories by language, made the site rank better in other search engines outside Spain getting more international traffic. Geographic targets were set in Webmastertools by directory.

Increase by language
English 18.60%
French 13.27%
Italian 53.16%

Increase by country
Spain 46.03%
United States 11.26%
United Kingdom 28.75%
France 12.39%
Italy 37.74%
Japan 22.69%
Germany 34.97%
Australia 58.16%

Some content was added, not a lot compared with the original site but a basic optimization has been made in all the pages. Special attention to rooms and hotel services description pages what usually are the most visited pages in any hotel site.

The new CMS, I have been developing along last 10 years, made the content management an easy task with emphasis in all SEO on page aspects, friendly URL formating, meta-description and title simulating how they are presented in SERPs while they type, a terrific idea from SEOmofo by the way (content editors love this feature and makes the importance of these texts absolutely obvious), automatic H's hierarchy managing and some others.

This graph shows the big jump overnight in organic non branded traffic achieved once Google indexed the new site and re-asigned relevancy.

In sum, project goals achieved successfully

These are the basics of a SEO project and the good news is there is big room to keep on growing with a wider and deeper SEO strategy now a solid foundation has been laid.

No project is 'defect free', some few details could have been tuned to perfection but client, now the benefits are obvious, sure is more receptive to keep on investing on more SEO, Web Analytics, Web Site Optimization or any other search marketing discipline.

No need to tell the details but the money invested in this project has been returned easy as pie, great ROI, happy me and super-happy client.

Before moving to Vancouver, one similar project I did for a different luxury hotel chain, Hospes.com, achieved 37% increase in bookings and 48% increase in number of night booked one year after the new site was launched compared with the previous one. Taking in consideration that this particular year had a general decrease in hotel bookings due to the economical crisis by 12%, it represented a very good turn over.

I especially thank Josep Cortes for his confidence in me as SEO consultant and web project manager. He knows well what hospitality online business means and makes my work very easy.

Any other hotel online marketing director or revenue manager wanting to share good or bad experiences with us?