Nag

M Posted 13 years 12 months ago

t 9 min read

Firefox recently announced that users who search using Firefox’s built-in features, such as its search box, will also have their searches done using a secure connection. Secure search is poised to affect an even greater number of searches and we thought this is a good time to follow up on our previous post on Google secure search. In this post, we analyze how secure search affects search marketing (and how it doesn’t), quantify the impact and come up with recommendations to assess this change. I hope you find this post useful!  

Firefox now uses Google Secure Search By Default

Back in October 2011, Google announced that users logged into Google would see their organic queries default to secure search. In other words, for the portion of visitors that are logged into Google and coming to your site from a query on google.com, you will only get the information that the visitor came through an organic search. What you won’t get are the words that they searched on with Google. Now, searches using Firefox’s built-in features, such as its search box, will be done via secure search. Therefore, when a user visits your site, the exact search term used will be known only to Google and the user if the user is signed into Google and/or uses Firefox Google search. Notable exceptions are Google AdWords and Google Webmaster Central users. Let’s save that discussion for another day.  

The number of secure searches is significant

The percentage of secure search referrals is increasing rapidly. Our clients across industries have 15-25% of their traffic coming in through secure search. You can see a few examples from different industries below:

Secure searches do not affect your rankings or optimizations

Secure searches have no impact on rankings. If you are a BrightEdge S3 user, all ranking reports continue to be unaffected. Recommendations, Tasks, Share of Voice and other SEO analysis provided by BrightEdge S3 are also not impacted.  

Secure searches affect insight into user behavior at keyword level

The increasing number of secures searches does  affect visibility into why users are searching for you and how they are coming to your site. Previously, web analytics solutions such as Google Analytics, Adobe SiteCatalyst, Webtrends and Coremetrics attributed metrics such as conversions, traffic and revenue to individual keywords or keyword groups. You could identify the organic search keyword that drove every one of the visits on your site. With secure search, SEO marketers can not attribute all the site traffic to individual keywords. This means that the reported traffic (and not the actual traffic) from those keywords decreased while the site traffic attributed to unknown keywords increased. It is important to note that secure search does not affect reporting at an aggregate or page level i.e. total traffic to the site remains the same and so does the traffic for each page.  

Measuring the impact of secure searches

Secure search referrals cannot be ignored. While they do not affect rankings directly, they do impact search marketers' understanding of why and how users come to their site. Fortunately, the impact of rising number of secure searches can be mitigated and here are some suggestions:

• No impact on top level reporting - There is absolutely no impact on top level metrics that report “total organic searches”.
• Adjust all keyword level metrics -  The metrics associated with the individual keywords will be artificially lower. We recommend adjusting the traffic, page views, conversions, orders, revenue upwards for each keyword. The adjustment factor varies on diversity of the target segments and products.
  • Sites fairly focused in terms of products and target segment - Increase web analytics metrics such as traffic and conversion by a percentage equal to the proportion of secure searches. If the percentage of secure searches is 25%, increase the metrics for each keyword by 1/(1-0.25). This assumes that secure searches are evenly distributed across all searches – brand, non brand, day of week – which is a  reasonable assumption for sites focused in terms of products and target segment.
  • Sites with a broad variety of products and diverse audience profile - When the products on a site or the audience demographic vary greatly, it might not make sense to increase the keyword-level metrics by the same percentage. We recommend classifying the site/pages by product type or audience profile, and applying a different adjustment to each bucket.
• Adjust brand vs non-brand keyword reports - While reporting on brand vs non-brand organic search analytics, create a third bucket for empty or “keyword unavailable” keywords. Otherwise, the secure searches will be added to the non-brand group and skew percentages.
• Monitor monthly - Monitor the % of secure referrals in your site monthly.

How to find the percentage of secure searches on your site

In Google Analytics:

• Go to Traffic Sources -> Search -> Organic.  Select Source as your Primary dimension and drill down into Google.
• Select a secondary dimension, Traffic Source -> Keywords, and look for the keyword “not provided”.
• The ratio of visits from that keyword to the total visits is your percentage of secure searches.
• By changing the dates, you can then see how that percentages have changed over time.

In Adobe SiteCatalyst:

• Go to Traffic Sources -> Search Engines – Natural.
• Drill into the Google results by selecting Traffic Sources -> Search Keywords Natural  and look for the percentage associated with the keyword “keyword not available”.
• By changing the dates, you can then see how that percentages have changed over time.

Summary

• 15-25% of searches are secure - By looking at our customer base of 2000+ brands , we conclude that 15-25% of searches are secure.
• Ranking is not affected: Secure searches do not affect ranking. If you are a BrightEdge S3 user, ranking reports, recommendations, tasks and other SEO analysis is not affected.
• Visibility into user behavior is affected - Metrics like traffic can no longer be attributed to keywords so marketers have lesser visibility into why users come to their site.
• The effect of secure search can be partially managed - Make adjustments to metrics provided by your web analytics platform by increasing traffic, page views, conversions, orders and revenue to compensate for the queries which are not accounted for.

agouyet

M Posted 14 years 2 months ago

t 9 min read

Google rolled out its biggest update to search with ‘Search Plus Your World’. The new search results allow users to find public information and privately shared content through a single search.

Results now include Public web listings, Public Google+ and Picasa posts and photos, Private Google+ and Picasa posts and photos. We keep a close eye on changes in search and help you respond right away.

In the meantime, let's review what this means for marketing and how you can navigate and capitalize on these changes

What this means for marketing

Social matters even more

Social’s impact on search has been discussed for a while, and the update reinforces it’s influence on rankings and brand. Google+ content such as posts, pages and photos will feature prominently in search results, and the importance of social as a ranking factor will continue to rise over time. For marketers, this is a powerful way to drive SEO performance and brand image.

SEO scope expands

SEO continues to expand - it is both more segmented and more integrated across digital channels. SEO success now requires a unified strategy that spans both websites as well as social media presence. This strategy requires integrated analytics, integrated content, and a unified user and search engine experience. SEOs must also begin to optimize social channels for search engines.

Impact varies across segments

While the impact will likely affect many segments over time, searches with heavy personality-driven keywords (entertainment, politics and sports) or strong customer facing brands (cars, consumer electronics and games) will see more Google+ content sooner

Universal search evolves

Universal search has been present for some time, but the source of content displayed has changed. This may mean that previous content no longer displays in the same prominence as before - marketers will see competition from content within their users’ social networks.

How you can navigate and capitalize on these changes

Create or optimize your Google+ page

If you don’t have a Google+ page, please create one. If you have a Google+ page, optimize your site to reinforce your Google+ page and vice versa.

Unify site, search and social strategy

Make sure there is a coherent, integrated plan between the three different channels that includes integrated analytics and messaging. It’s also important to create a unified “search engine” experience—make sure that Google and other engines see and show the consistent messaging and content.

Manage site, search and social together

Understanding the relationship between the three channels in a changing market is critical. We recommend creating a single dashboard with visibility across channels; be sure to include universal, social and keywords specific to Search Plus Your World. Analyze your keywords to identify the value and importance from different channels, and prioritize.

Assess universal search results

Look at the universal search results and see if there are any major changes, positive or negative. Analyze keywords to determine their likelihood to be impacted by the change and build an improvement plan.

Nag

M Posted 14 years 5 months ago

t 9 min read

So, what is Google secure search? On Tuesday October 18, 2011, Google announced that users logged into Google would see their organic queries default to HTTPS (Secure HTTP) instead of HTTP. This is described by Google as an enhancement to protect the privacy of users. Paid search is not impacted at this time.

Overall Impact

This change will reduce visibility into why visitors are coming to your site. This is because, contrary to HTTP, HTTPS does not pass the referring query to the destination site. In other words, for the portion of visitors that are logged into Google and coming to your site from a query on google.com, you will only get the information that the visitor came through an organic search. You will not know whether they searched on “shoes”, “running shoes blue size 10 less than $50”, or another phrase. This referring information will be missing from all the solutions that track usage on your web site, including Google Analytics and all the web analytics vendors (Omniture, Webtrends, Coremetrics). However, according to Google, you will still be able to get to some of this information in Google Webmaster Tools. BrightEdge conducted research over the last three days to quantify the impact of this change. Based on our analysis, this change is currently impacting just fewer than 10% of the referrals originating from Google, which is consistent with estimates released by Google. The reason the impact is not higher is because:

• It requires users to be logged in to Google
• Users have to perform their queries on google.com and not through another site or toolbar
• Google has not enabled this change on all the signed in queries yet.

Impact on SEO

This does not change your SEO metrics and optimizations. The BrightEdge dashboards, reports, recommendations, tasks, analysis, etc. continue to function as before. However, you might see a decrease over time of the visits and conversion associated to specific keywords. The best practices for optimizing your site – on-page, backlinks, social, internal linking - are unchanged and it is recommended that you not make any adjustments to your SEO roadmap or strategy. As secure searches become a larger portion of the organic traffic referred by Google, it is likely that keyword attribution and ROI calculations will become more sampled. This is because they have to rely on the portion of the traffic that is not from secure searches. However, attribution segmented by page or page category/type – important for E-Commerce and any web site targeting the long tail - are unaffected by this change. This is because they are driven by analytics on the entry page which themselves are not impacted by this change.

BrightEdge Roadmap

We are looking at a number of innovations to keep you ahead of these changes. For example, we are considering integrating with Google Webmaster Tools so we can provide the referring information that is important to you directly into the BrightEdge platform. In parallel, we are also looking into deeper integration with our partners that provide visibility into user web behavior – for example competitive intelligence vendors. We will keep you posted as we get closer to releasing this functionality.

agouyet

M Posted 14 years 6 months ago

t 9 min read

Today, BrightEdge announced the launch of BridgeEdge S3 - the first SEO platform to enable social signal tracking and monitoring to support user driven marketing campaigns. BrightEdge S3 is offered in response to an industry-wide shift in how marketing is traditionally done.

“The Internet is changing how companies engage with customers, and the rise of social networks and sharing is accelerating a user driven approach to marketing,” said Jim Yu, CEO of BrightEdge. “Just as strategies to manage and optimize search were essential for marketers during the past decade, CMOs will now require new tools in the next 10 years to leverage the torrent of data their customers generate everyday across site, search and social channels."

Facebook and Twitter users are sending millions of social signals daily, which is a huge boon for marketers seeking better brand engagement. A special SocialShare Study that BrightEdge released in September shows that pages that display Twitter share buttons get 7 times the social media mentions than sites that do not, pointing to enormous social marketing opportunity that brands can implement immediately at almost no cost.

These social plugins and share buttons are creating voluminous streams of data that signal consumer interest and intent. Building on the company’s industry leadership in SEO, BrightEdge S3 is the first integrated offering that enables companies to track site, search and social signal streams and make the data actionable to drive customer engagement, traffic and leads.

New features offered by the BrightEdge S3 platform include:

• Social Site Audit – Provides custom recommendations to help companies properly adopt Facebook’s extended open graph tags and better leverage customer engagement
• Social Signal Measurement—Enables marketers to measure, manage and take action on Tweets and Facebook Likes, which directly impact search rankings
• Facebook Page Recommendations—Provides proven recommendations to help companies’ Facebook pages rank higher in search
• Search ROI Comparison–Enables marketers to measure the true value of their organic and paid search efforts
• Collaborative SEO – Allows cross-departmental teams to work more efficiently by assigning tasks and workflow along with proven SEO recommendations to increase search rankings
• Global Insight – Empowers rankings success around the globe with support for Google on 5 continents, Baidu, Yandex and Yahoo! Japan

agouyet

M Posted 14 years 10 months ago

t 9 min read

This week's search news includes some different tips for SEO, branding on Facebook, SEO ranking factors and a take on the Google vs. Facebook debate. BrightEdge and Facebook also released an exciting Whitepaper about social SEO. Here are the top 10:

#1. Facebook Best Practices for Social SEO Leveraging Facebook for SEO - Social SEO - is a huge untapped opportunity. As search engines increasingly look at social media for relevant content and signals of authority, Facebook Pages become highly valuable company assets that must be optimized for SEO.

#2. Coming Soon: Google Panda Update 2.2 The next update will target a common webmaster complaint related to the original Panda/Farmer update: sites that scrape and re-publish content and are out-ranking the original source of the content.

#3. Why Google Won't Survive the Facebook Threat If Google’s business has been built on choosing which Web pages, out of all those in the universe, are most likely to appeal to any given (but anonymous) query string, think about this: Facebook already knows, for the most part, which pages appeal to whom—specifically and directly.

#4. Getting Creative With SEO One of the biggest topics in SEO right now is ‘social’ SEO – the idea that the more people engage with your brand/product/website in the social space by liking, tweeting, and hitting +1, for example, the more likely you are to be rewarded with top rankings.

#5. Welcome To The Summer Of Search Social Search is everywhere you look. In both PPC and SEO conversations, search marketers are scrambling to understand how social is impacting search and what actions should be taken to stay current. Google's +1 roll-out has dominated much of the conversation, given its newness. But it's become very clear that social search is here to stay.

#6.SEO Industry Takes A(nother) Stab At Deciphering SEO Ranking Factors  More than 130 search engine optimizers around the world have shared their opinions on the most important (and least important) factors that influence natural search engine rankings. Those opinions are included in SEOmoz’s just-published 2011 Search Engine Ranking Factors survey.

#7. Google Analytics To Add Search Query Data From Webmaster Tools Big news for webmasters and SEOs: Today at SMX Advanced, Google announced they will be adding Google Webmaster Tools data directly within Google Analytics. This was also announced simultaneously on the Google Analytics Blog and the Google Webmaster Blog.

#8. Twitter Now Automatically Shortens Links In another step towards filling all its holes, Twitter has just announced its own link shortening service which starts rolling out today. The Twitter link shortening service will pass through t.co and shorten links to 19 characters, still allowing users to see what site the links are pointing towards.

#9. 6 New & Innovative Social Media Campaigns to Learn From  From utilizing online video in an inventive way to creating a unique presence on Facebook, these six social media campaigns are some of the most original pieces of work as of late. Let us know about your favorite recent social media campaigns in the comments below.

agouyet

M Posted 14 years 11 months ago

t 9 min read

Greetings everyone! We are proud to announce that we have partnered with comScore to provide a deeper level of competitive intelligence into our SEO platform. Our Integration with comScore brings forth competitive intelligence information straight from comScore Marketer into our platform, enabling you to promptly identify new high value keywords to target, and then immediately track and surface actionable recommendations for these keywords. This latest innovation helps you maximize your organic search opportunity.   Benefits include: Pinpoint new opportunities – Our integration leverages behavioral information to identify the exact phrases people search for and the sites they decide to visit. With this information, you can identify previously unknown keywords and phrases to target for SEO based on search volume and conversion value. Immediately Develop Action Plan – After identifying these new keyword opportunities, you can track them in BrightEdge and surface actionable recommendations based on social, on-page, and off page (backlink) factors. Tie SEO To Business Value – BrightEdge's high level executive dashboards will enable you to present a clear justification for SEO based on Return on Investment (ROI). We are proud to be the SEO partner to many of the world’s best-known and most trusted brands. As the leading SEO Platform we continue to innovate at a rapid pace to help businesses break through the web clutter and target new high-value opportunities that drive ROI in ways that have never been available before.

agouyet

M Posted 14 years 12 months ago

t 9 min read

We are constantly adding new features to BrightEdge, and I’m excited to announce that we have added the capability to flag events in your SEO reports very similar to Event Tracking in Google Analytics. You can now enter notes to flag significant changes and events to your pages, sites, or competitors. These events will be visible in reports enabling you to see SEO milestones directly alongside your rankings.

Events can be tied to a Keyword, Keyword Group, Competitor, or Account enabling you to note significant events only when relevant to the report. For example, optimization changes made to a certain keyword will only surface in reports pertaining to that keyword and keyword groups including that keyword. Larger account wide events such as Google algorithm changes or a site redesigns will be visible on all reports. Once again, we want to thank all of our customers for their great feedback and continued support of the BrightEdge platform. As the leading SEO platform, we always welcome your input as we continue to innovate.

agouyet

M Posted 15 years ago

t 9 min read

As many of you already know, Google recently introduced a new feature, the Google +1 button. When you are logged in and searching Google, the +1 button will appear next to search results. You can click on the button to share pages that you think are "pretty cool.” When your friends search on Google, they will be able to see your +1s and vice versa. You can always undo +1s if you change your mind at a later date. The search results currently will only display items +1d by your social network although at some time in the future Google may start showing how many people globally or nationally have +1d a result. The Google +1 button is essentially a response to Facebook’s like button. 

Google is currently working on getting +1 buttons rolled out for websites similar to the Facebook Like and Twitter Tweet buttons already in place. For SEO managers, this is a further example of search engines emphasizing social signals as indicators of relevance. We know that Bing and Google already use information from Twitter and Facebook when calculating their results. For BrightEdge customers, we have already integrated Facebook and Twitter information into our Recommendations Engine. We will be monitoring the impact of the Google +1 on search engine rankings, and, if relevant, we will be looking at ways to bring that data to you in our platform.

agouyet

M Posted 15 years ago

t 9 min read

Today we are proud to announce that BrightEdge and blekko have partnered to deliver new powerful capabilities in the world of SEO. This is the first time that a search engine has partnered with an SEO platform and we are  excited at the possibilities opened by this new type of partnership. Blekko is an innovative search engine with special capabilities to filter out spam and clutter from organic search results. Blekko offers the concept of slashtags to refine search results whereby users can mark search results as spam, and remove them from future searches. BrightEdge, combined with blekko’s real-time link graph will be utilized to track one’s own link building performance, as well as diagnose and remedy potential issues - such as paid links - that they might not aware off (see New York Times article).  Brands will also be able to keep their competitors in check and determine if sites ranking ahead of them are guilty of using black hat link building schemes. This is a long overdue day for the world of search and SEO.  Both users and legitimate search marketers will benefit from less clutter on the web and more high relevance/high quality results.   We cannot wait to roll these new capabilities to our customers!