Hello, Happy New Year and welcome to the first SEO video blog of 2012! My name’s Nick and today I’m joined once again by Joel from the SEO department. So today we’ve decided to take a look at the increase in the number of search ads displayed in many Google search results, and what impact this could have on SEO.

Yes, like the guys over at SEOMoz, who discussed this very issue this week, many of us in the office have noticed over recent months that Google has become more and more aggressive in their paid ad strategy.

Remember the introduction of paid ads at the bottom of search as well as the top? These gave the SERPs a much more crowded appearance, and hemmed our organic listings into a small space in the middle. The increase in the popularity of star reviews has also meant that the SERPs now have a much more promotional theme for many search terms.

Finally, while a few Google shopping results in search is nothing new, there now seems to be more, especially in the paid advertising area of the page. Google has also been testing the ability for a searcher to insert their email address directly into a PPC ad, demonstrating their focus upon increasing the usability and CTR of paid ads rather than concentrating on organic search.

So what does this all mean for traditional SEO? Well, although organic search listings currently get the most clicks of most SERPs, this lion’s share could decline if Google continues to push paid advertising. Organic search listings could become so plain and unappealing in comparison that users go for the more colourful, interactive paid listings which are often accompanied by images. Maybe schema mirco formatting can save the organic listings appearance, we will cover more on this in the coming weeks.

Alternatively, the increase in paid ads could have the opposite effect, which is also bad for organic SEO. As a rule people don’t like ads and promotional material being forced upon them in an aggressive way, so as SEOmoz suggest in their blog post, this could lead to enhanced bad feeling toward Google.

If extreme, this could lead to searchers abandoning Google search in droves to make a point, which would likely enhance Bing’s market share and force us in SEO to review our strategies so that bing’s alien ranking factors are taken into account more.

As the both the number and aggressiveness of Google’s paid ads increase, it will be interesting to see whether your listings gain you more traffic or less in 2012. What do you think, is less more? Do more paid ads have any positive effect on organic SEO? If you do notice a difference, or have anything to add please don’t hesitate to do so in the comments below.

Thanks for watching!

Thanks to SEOmoz.org who’s images we used in this blog post from their 8 predictions for SEO in 2012 post.

Hi and welcome to this week’s video blog with me Nick Rinylo and my colleague Joel Tarplin. So another year has come and gone and we’ve had some exciting developments within the technology industry in 2011. Today, we are going to be discussing what you should be looking out for in the up and coming 12 months and the impact this will have on your online marketing strategy.

That’s right, with the various Panda updates that we have seen as well as other developments in online marketing strategies, we will be going through various aspects that we think will be big in 2012 – such as Social Signals, Rich Snippets and even more content updates.

As we have seen this year, Google has been very content focused in how they are ranking websites and their hard line approach to article spinning and duplicate content. We only expect for this to continue and fresh content to be the pinnacle of what will propella website to the top positions of a search engine.

Alongside content, we can expect to see a rise in the use of social signals as a ranking factor and a way for businesses to connect with their audience. With Google+ going live this year and creating major hype, there is no reason why this won’t continue.

Most websites you visit will already have social signals integrated. Due to the growing online activity, no wonder so many people are beginning to understand the impact that being part of an internet community can bring to their business. It makes you wonder what will be the next social trend in the coming year.

Finally, 2011 has seen the introduction of a whole raft of rich snippets designed to render your listing more attractive and therefore improve SERP click through rate. The rel=author tag for example is designed to allocate authorship for a page or article to a certain person, based upon their Google + profile. Trusted authors can therefore generate more traffic from their listings.

Similarly, the reviews rich snippet introduced by Google even earlier this year allowed searchers to see a one to five star review of a site without even leaving the SERPs, just because the webmaster had used the correct markup on their site and had been whitelisted.

In fact, with the inception of the schema universal markup scheme, a number of other rich snippets have been released in 2011 alone. These include music, events, products and even prayer times snippets. As recently as October of this year, rumours abounded that Google was on the cusp of released movies and tv series rich snippets.

With all these different technologies creeping into the everyday use of webmasters, it is only a matter of time before they are part of our everyday online marketing strategy.

What else do you think will be making more of an appearance next year? Please leave your comments at the end of this post. Wishing you all a very Happy New Year!

Hello and welcome to this week’s SEO video blog. My name’s Nick and today I’m joined once again by Joel from the SEO department. So you may have noticed that it’s Christmas, the time for giving and goodwill to all. So naturally, we decided to play a little SEO related prank on our esteemed co – presenter, James Bavington.

Using some pretty clever computer wizardry, we were able to convince poor old Bavo that his rankings had taken an unexpected nose dive! Here’s how…

So there’s something to get your colleagues stressing about when they come back from the Christmas break, although Creare accept no responsibility for the consequences!

That’s all from us this week, thanks for watching today and a warm Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from Creare.

Hello and a warm welcome to this week’s SEO video blog with me Nick and Joel, an SEO consultant from my department. Today we’re going to be focussing on Google new style analytics.

If you’ve become used to the old layout of Google analytics, it can be a shock to the system trying to switch to the new look. Data and information that was previously available at your fingertips can be frustratingly hard to locate.

With this in mind, we thought we’d run through a few useful tips for beginners using the new style layout. These tips have been chosen based on what real consultants find difficult to do using the new layout.

1. How to drill down to keyword visits from a particular search engine.

If you’re used to the old style analytics, you’ll notice that you have to drill down a little further for this information now. Go to the sidebar, click traffic sources, sources, search and organic to get you started.

Next click the source filter and your search engines should appear in the list below. Click on the one you want and on the next screen select the secondary dimension box. In here, type keywords and select the keyword dimension that appears. Your keywords should appear below.

2. Top Conversion paths.

This one is a handy little tip for looking at top conversion paths for your site. Access this info by going to the sidebar and clicking conversions, multi channel conversions and then top conversion paths.

Here you’re given a list of the most common ways in which visitors who converted visited your site. It shows if a visitor has landed on your site first via organic search and then has retuned via direct in order to make a purchase or enquiry. This is valuable insight into site user behaviour without any need for time consuming custom reports or cross segmentation.

3. Percentage Differences

More specifically, this point is about how to find percentage differences when comparing two sets of data from different time ranges. In the old style analytics, these percentages were instantly available once the comparison date ranges were set and a lot of SEO consultants relied on them for a quick health check of a campaign.

Unfortunately, the overview page no longer displays this information, but if you do want the comparative percentages, the data can still be found by drilling down to specific sources. For example, to compare the difference in bounce rate from search via a percentage go to the side bar, click traffic sources, sources, search and overview.

4. Setting up a goal.

Toward the end of next paragraph fade to screenshot of the cog page with the goal tab clicked.

This final point might sound easy but the process has changed very slightly. Instead of clicking the edit button next to the domain, instead click the domain and then click the cog button in the top right hand corner. Next click the goal tab and fill out the required information as normal.

So that’s everything from us today, thanks for watching. As ever, if you have any tips and tricks or even any questions for us regarding the new style Google analytics, please leave details in the comments below.

Hello and welcome to this week’s video blog, I’m Nick Rinylo and today I’m joined by Joel from the SEO department. Today we’re going to be looking at two ways we’ve found to configure Google analytics for your mobile sub-domain.

With the increasing popularity and technological capability of smartphones, mobile sites are set to become a bigger and bigger part of your online marketing campaign, and you need to be able to monitor the traffic your mobile site receives.

The advice online for achieving this is generally quite vague and unclear, but we’ve found two ways which work. The first method involves using the same profile with cross segmentation.

This method involves configuring a new code for your site so that it doesn’t count visits from your mobile sub domain as a referral. This new code basically tells Google analytics to include all of your visits for both domains within the one Google analytics profile.

Before you do this, it might be worth creating a duplicate of your existing profile, so that you can still see the date from your regular site in the event of something going wrong.

Ok so to generate the new code, log in to the new style analytics, click the domain in question and then click the cog icon in the top right hand corner of the screen.

This brings you to the settings screen.

From here, click the ‘Tracking Code’ tab and then check the radio box saying ‘One Domain with multiple sub – domains’. This automatically generates the code stating that any sub – domains should be treated as visits, not as referrals.

Once you’ve generated the code, embed this in both your top level site and your sub domain in the usual way. The data that comes through will now be a combination of visits from both sites.

The final step is to use cross segmentation in Google analytics to generate a report showing only visitors using a certain operating system – in our case a mobile phone operating system.

You need to decide what kind of traffic is important to you, for example you could cross segment all traffic to the site, or you could just focus on referrals or organic search. For people like us in the SEO industry, organic traffic is obviously the most important.

So to create you segement, navigate to the traffic sources tab on the main report, click sources and then click search and organic. At the top of the list of keywords, click to select a secondary dimension and type in Operating system.

This presents you with a long list of search visits divided by which operating system was used. You should see examples such as iphone in the list. What we have to do now is create a custom filter to see only those visits to the site from a phone based operating system.

To do this, click advanced at the top of the list, set the filter to include and operating system, and set to exactly matching. Then enter the mobile operating systems you saw in the list, taking care to spell them correctly. Click apply and repeat for all operating systems in the list. When you’ve finished, click ‘add to dashboard’ at the top of the page to pin your report to the main dashboard for easy reference in future.

With this method, remember to keep checking back to the full list in future to ensure you’re including in the report all operating systems being used to view the site.

OK so the second method might seem much simpler but be aware that this one involves creating a new profile for your mobile sub domain. Which method you choose all depends on whether you want all of your date within the same profile or not.

To set up a new profile, navigate to the main domain and click the cog icon again, then click the ‘add new profile’ button on the right hand side.

Fill out the relevant profile information and click ‘create profile’. Then, navigate to the tracking code again but this time click the advanced tab. This adds a radio button which generates the option to create a code designed specifically for a mobile site.

Select the correct server side language and following Google’s instructions for embedding the code and verifying the site. This will allow you to track data from your mobile site only, without any interference from the main site or need for cross segmentation.

So there are just two ways to track your mobile sub domain, we know there are more and if you have anything to add or query, please don’t hesitate to do so in the comments below.

Thanks for watching and Merry Christmas.