*Firstly, how many ’s’s were in that title?

My trusty colleague Hannah sent me a link to this story.

In a nutshell, Thomson Local asked an Analytics company to audit the state of SEO on British websites.  They found that most businesses didn’t have a clue about SEO.

I get the feeling this is some sort of promotion/push for Thomson Local so take the information with a pinch of salt.

The data isn’t that surprising.  Generally, smaller companies have seemingly less focus on SEO, less pages and so on. Big companies tend to have the most advanced factors, a ridiculous amount of links and pages. Then in the middle is the reasonable standard of SEO which a lot of businesses have.

SEO is a tool for the world of the web and like any other tool not everyone needs it. So if a 10 year old site that has never had SEO is getting enough traffic they don’t need SEO. If a site is a well known behemoth in the flower bed industry then it’s unlikely to need SEO because of brand awareness, offline marketing.

A new company that is involved in a competitive industry will need SEO, a company that is looking to expand and grow into different areas needs SEO.

Though, whether you’re a small, medium or large business when your target audience isn’t finding your site you need SEO.

If this research is to be believed then it paints a nice picture for the future of SEO as there are so many sites that could potentially benefit from optimisation.

*Did you say 6? You were wrong there are 8, don’t argue with me it’s my blog. I win.

Welcome to this weeks SEO video tutorial, Most webmaster are familiar with Google Analytics and the data that it provides can help towards your websites development with both organic SEO and internet marketing.

Filters can improve the flexibility of Google analytics, allowing you to modify and customize data to suit your business.

Some of the more popular filters include:

• Removing traffic from internal sources (Checking your own listing.)
• Restricting data for a particular profile
• Customizing reports

Filters can be great, but they are permanent to a particular profile and once Google has passed the data through a filter it cannot be re-processed, filters forever modify the data within a profile.

For this reason we recommend that you set up a raw data profile before implementing any filters, we found the best way to do this is to apply filter to a new profile and keep any existing profiles as the raw data one.

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To set up a new website profile, go to your analytic settings next to the domain name on the right hand side and click ‘add new website profile’.

Ensure that you ‘Add a Profile for an existing domain’

Give the profile a name and make sure the domain and time zone is correct and click ‘continue’.

You will then see the profile appear in the analytics settings.

</video>

Now you have set up your profile, can start to use either default filter applications or create a custom filter.

<video2>

To create a filter click the ‘edit’ button next your new profile.

Click the ‘add filter’ button next to the ‘Filters Applied to Profile’ option.

Here you have 2 options ‘Add new filter’ or apply ‘existing filter’.

You can use the ‘Apply existing Filter to Profile’ if you want to apply the same filter to multiple profiles.

For new filters, give the filter a name.

Next select either, Predefined filter or Custom filter.

You now have to select a filter that suits your target, we will show a simple example of excluding our own IP. This is so that our own Google queries and clicks don’t influence the reports shown.

To do this select: exclude > traffic from the ip addresses > that are equal too > enter IP address.

And save changes.

</video2>

The example shown was a simple exclude filter, but the custom filters are composed of 3 main parts:

1. Filter types -
   Exclude, Include, Lowercase/Uppercase, Search and Replace, Advanced.
   
2. Filter fields -
   Filter fields represent a wide range of information, I have attached a list in the resources on the supporting blog post.
   
3. Filter pattern -
   This can be exact matches of data or use data as part of regular expressions.

We hope this helps customise your data from Google analytics, The Google conversion university has a video blog on filters and profiles, which we have also added to the supporting blog post, this expands on filter types.

Thanks for watching.

Resources

• http://services.google.com/analytics/breeze/en/filters/index.html
• http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55588

Script: Welcome to this weeks SEO Video Tutorial, we are going to take a look at Google Analytics site search settings. This includes how to set it up, what the results look like and how it can help your organic SEO campaign.

The first step is to identify what search functionality you have on your website, this may include Google’s site search it’s self, a blog search, eCommerce search, CMS search of even the 404 widget supplied by Google.

The process is relativity simple..

Once you have completed the analytic site search set up, you can start to see results under the content tab within your Google analytics dashboard.

Now you have all the pieces in place and the ’site search’ is returning data, you can analysis the information to identify what users are searching on your website. This could show on an eCommerce shop that users are searching for a product that you currently don’t stock creating a sales opportunity or on a regular website a particular service that relates to your industry.

Thanks for watching if you have any questions or comments, please leave them on the supporting blog post.

You only have to do a little research around Google Analytics (GA) to realise there are true fans, there are those who sceptical and those who sit on the fence. We use google analytics, we send our clients a monthly report through GA, the simplicity of the dashboard interface allows them to monitor how their SEO campaign is working.

For those who have no desire to jump into the murky depths of the true capabilities of GA, lets look at the basics of what they can highlight for your website:

1.Traffic Sources overview: Without analytics (doesn’t have to be GA) you wont know how visitors use your site, or come to find your site. If you look at your dashboard you will notice a pie chart in the bottom left hand corner. This will tell you:

2.Content Overview: You can monitor the most visited pages, the time spent on those pages. Which means you can focus your highest converting keyphrases around these pages.

3.Keyword tracking: you may find over time your carefully selected keywords might not be the most appropriate, or that you are missing out on a little golden nugget you had not initially thought off.

4.Track and improve your conversions. A website is there to promote your business, by tracking your conversions you can build upon what works. Monitor market/seasonal trends.

5. Bounce Rate: You will see how long visitors spend on your site (bouce rate), this indicates that visitors are not finding what they are looking for and are clicking away instantly. It is well worth taking the opportunity to re-think your content, design or products.

Google analytics can provide you with an extensive never ending amount of useful information about your websites performance. This blog literally scratches the surface, well it doesn’t really even do that, but I hope it at least gives you an understanding of what is on the surface. The sceptics don’t like that google being the “super power” it is, has the ability to see how visitors from all search engines find and use your site. Meaning should they want to, they can undermine all your SEO efforts, in all fairness SEO is constantly evolving and nothing is set in stone. Google’s aim is to bring the searcher the most relevant results to a query, should google wish the change the game, SEO consultants are going to have to up theirs.

Hi and welcome to this weeks SEO video tutorial, we are following on from last weeks Google analytics setup video and showing how to set up the eCommerce setting for a Magento ecommerce shop.

The eCommerce setting is vital for traffic analysis on eCommerce websites, the settings provide the following information:

• Amount of transactions made
• Value of the transactions
• Best selling products
• Most profitable products
• Traffic sources to individual products
• Conversion rates

Once your logged into your Google analytics account, you can see your website profile. Click the edit button.

You can see the website information and it says eCommerce website no. Click the edit button. The two setting that need changing are the currency and the ecommerce setting. Then save changes.

For the second part of the installation you will need to log into the administration area of your Magento shop.

Before going to magento, make a note of your Google API tracking number. Once logged in you will need to go to system, configuration, Google API.

Enable the Google analytic setting and copy your Google API into the box and click save.

So, that’s the initial setup complete. Now we would suggest that you complete a couple of test transactions to ensure that it is reporting correctly.

Be aware that it can take up to 24 hours to for the eCommerce tab to appear in Google analytics. Thanks for watching.