There is quite a lot of data around the web showing “average click through” rates of users on search listings, like the leaked data from AOL in 2006 which contained 35 million search queries. This data provided the SEO industry with a massive click distribution study highlighting the importance of the top 3 positions. Of course this data was very useful at the time but with the current search results so different now, it’s much harder to estimate how much traffic a top position in Google will bring to your web site.

A report from 2011 by Compete.com suggest that on average, a 1st place position in Google would receive around 53% of the total clicks from users searching that particular keyword or search phrase. The second position would receive around 15% and the third place around 9%.

Compete stated this about the above data:

“Compete analyzed 10s of millions of search engine results pages generated by actual consumers in our U.S. panel in Q4 2011.”

Shopping results

When looking at shopping related searches which are often the most competitive for obvious reasons, the introduction by Google of paid listings (Product listing ads) in the shopping results (previously free through the Shopping link) and the display of some of these results including photos just below the Adwords paid listings, means that companies looking for visibility with these kind of search phrases must consider paying as well.

Future strategy

Here are some of my tips on how to get the most out of you SEO campaign:

- Don’t let your ego take over and try to be in first position in the Google organic results for every keyword
- Try to create a niche for your business and obtain positions for keywords and search phrases that have a medium search volume and room for competition
- Use Google’s Keyword Tool to analyse which keywords will drive your traffic
- Try to target keywords and phrases that have about one third to half the search volume of the most competitive keywords in created from the list in the Google’s Keyword Tool. It’s a somewhat quicker way of generating traffic in the short term.
- Take a look at Google trends to see if that keyword is increasing or decreasing over time
- After you have created a search list, take a look at the real results in Google to see how far down the organic results are compared to paid adverts.
- Remember to also check the search suggestions which offer insight into what other key phrases users typed in as well (one example is visitors often make searches with the month or year added on)

Is the 1st position in organic results still worth a fortune? is a post from: Chris Faron SEO blog. Check me out also on Twitter

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Flickr

The Yahoo owned site has a massive range of photos ranging from amateur holiday snaps to professionally taken photos. The trick here is to use the advanced search option & check the boxes – “Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content” & “ Find content to use commercially”. The results found with this search allow you to use the photos on your blog or site for free, but remember that this type of license asks that you credit the original author and not try and pass these photos as your own work.

Image showing the check box to only download creative commons images

If you click the search button without entering a keyword or key phrase then Flickr will return a list of random images, which can be useful if you don’t have a specific type of image in mind but are looking for inspiration. To download a specific image just click on the image from the results, then with a right click you will see various image sizes which can be downloaded to your computer.

Method to download different image sizes on Flickr

Comfight

Comfight is basically a meta search engine for photos showing results from various sites like Flickr (free) or Shutterstock (for a small fee starting from $1). Again to search for images that can be freely used, you must choose the “Creative commons” filter on the left hand side of the page. The advantage of this site is that if you need a specific image size, you can quickly see the maximum available size of each image by hovering your mouse over each thumbnail.

Choose image to download from Compfight

Depositphotos

Depositphotos deserves a mention due it’s slick interface & a special offer for bloggers whereby you can obtain a free limited subscription in return for writing a post about their services. The site offers royalty free images or images that can be purchased from as little as $0.80 each.

Depositphotos screenshot

Imgembed

Another service imgembed.com which allows you to use their images for free as long as your monthly impressions (amount of page views) does not exceed 10,000. This new standard for fair, online image use which is both ethical and includes auto-attribution. If you have more than 10,000 impressions you pay for what you need on a CPM basis.

How to find images for your blog posts or site for free is a post from: Chris Faron SEO blog. Check me out also on Twitter

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After you have completed all the onsite optimization including a detailed keyword analsys it’s important to verify the results before starting an off-site link building campaign. In addition to analyzing the search position results of your chosen keywords you will need a software to carry out this rather laborious task.

Currently on the market are numurous SEO software solutions on offer. One of the best for sure is most definitely Advanced Web Ranking from Caphyon. The setup is very simple: just enter the keywords for analysis, the search engines on which to set the research and the web sites to be monitored including the possibility to automatically add competitor web site positions as well.

The keywords can be added or deleted at any time. The program can handle an unlimited number of projects, making it indispensable to SEO consultants or digital media agencies with numerous clients. Each project can contain an unlimited amount of keywords and URLs, displayed with different colours for easy viewing of the “Evolution in Time” grapths.

The search engine list available to choose from amount to over 2,000 in total, in virtually every country in the world. There various options are searching from the same search engine in different ways including Google search results without Geo-location results, Google Places, Images and News, etc.
After running the SERPS positions, the results can be viewd in either graphical or textual format. Among the available data for each keyword is : the current position, the best position reached, the increase or decrease compared to a previous scan.

Multiple types of reports can be created to summarize the position of each individual keywords including trending over time (previous 7 days, month, 3 months, 6 months, 12 months or all time). Each report can be exported in PDF format (my favorite), xml, csv and html. You can customize the header and footer to insert your company logo for example. With the html report you can also customize the style sheet to match the design of other reports that you create.
Another useful option is the scheduling of your ranking reports. You can decide to check your ranking on a daily, weekly, monthly basis or even every x days. At the end of the rank check Advanced web ranking can be scheduled to automatically create one or more reports and save them in a folder, send them by mail or transfer them via FTP to your server so they can viewed online by your client for example.

Advanced Web Ranking prices are very competitive and offer great value for money ranging from $99 to $399 depending on the version you require (Standard, Professional, Enterprise). There is also the server edition for larger teams to be able connect to the same database all at the same time. Another plus is that this SEO software can be installed on Windows, Mac or even Linux (my preferred OS!)
In conclusion, Advanced Web Ranking is definitely one of the most interesting rank checking software solution currently on the market, a “must have” for the webmasters, SEO consultants, web agencies and in-house professionals looking to optimize their time.

For more information, check out their offical web site www.advancedwebranking.com

Advanced Web Ranking Seo software review is a post from: Chris Faron SEO blog. Check me out also on Twitter

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“Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.

Improved local results. We launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.”

From this, a well known SEO Specialist Riccardo Perini thought of the idea of doing a little test to try to understand what percentages of  geolocation results or ”geo” targeted results (detected via the users IP address) were being shown when searching for generic keywords (not usually connected with local results) . The aim was also to see if somehow there was a constant for these customizations.

It was decided to do the test using the general search “hotel”.  ”hotels” was chosen instead of “restaurant” as the search [hotel] did not show any results for UniversalSearch, or Google Places.

Riccardo then contacted around 100 people and asked them for help with the test, the test procedure was as follows:

“Using the Chrome browser. Go to Tools > Options > Under the Hood > Clear browsing data (all)
Then open an incognito window.
Now go www.google.it (not logged in), and search for the keyword ”hotel” (do a single search, so that there is nothing in your browsers history).
Take a screenshot of the entire first page of results.
If possible also note the IP address from which you have done the research.”

Data collection was from the 4th to the 14 March 2012 and included 70 screenshots.

The sample is not very large, and the research was done only for a keyword, so the results are to be ”taken with a pinch of salt.” He would of liked to have collected more data, both in terms of different IP’s and different keywords. Also it would be interesting to have the SERPs (results) for this research shown  from a few months ago, in order to analyze the changes over time.

However, even with the small sample it is not possible to define an exact rule, here is the data collected.

Total research carried out by different IP: 70

SERP results without any Geo-localized results based on the users location (detected by Google): 21
Among them:
SERP standard (*): 13
SERP results Geo-localized but not different from the standard SERP: 8 (**)

SERP results Geo-localized based on location detected by Google: 49
Among them:
SERP with 1 Geo-localized result: 16
SERP with 2 Geo-localized results: 32
SERP with 3 Geo-localized results: 1

In 70% of the cases analyzed from the Google SERP the results showed Geo-localized ones  customized by location detected by Google. Among these 65.31% of cases 2 results out of 10 were customized , in 32.65% cases only 1 result in 10 were customized  and only 2.04% of the cases were 3 results customized.

In none of these analyzed SERP’s were present Universal Search boxes, Google Places Maps or single G. Places boxes.

* The standard SERP for the search [hotel] was composed of these 10 results:

1. it.hotels.com
2. www.venere.com/it/
3. www.tripadvisor.it
4. www.booking.com/index.it.html
5. www.expedia.it/Hotel
6. www.it.lastminute.com/site/viaggi/hotels/
7. www.edreams.it/hotel/
8. www.italyhotels.it/
9. www.italysquare.com/
10. www.italy-hotels-reservation.it/

[Note: this "standard SERP" result was the same one that was displayed for the duration of the test by setting the location as "Italy"]

** This was the “normal” results, having collected the data on different days. With any freshness results taken out of the equation.

Here are some SERP examples of customized results (Results marked with arrows are customized results based on the location of the user):

As a side note, I wonder if using the open source version of Chrome called Chromium would have produced the same outcome?

This Post has been translated with the kind permission of Riccardo Perini.

SEO test of Geolocation results with generic searches on Google is a post from: Chris Faron SEO blog. Check me out also on Twitter

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This is how the result for the keyword “b&b venice” looked like before:

Note that the result was showing 115 reviews on that particular Place Page. These reviews where taken from the major travel portals/OTA sites like Expedia, Booking and Tripadvisor, etc.

Now take a look at the same result today:

The reviews from third party sites are not shown, instead they have been replaced with Google only reviews. This must be an attempt by Big G to give more incentive to users to write reviews directly on the Places page.

And finally the other change for all you SEO’s out there, the “Reviews from around the web” situated at the bottom of the Google place result was an indication of the citations (known to be part of the Google places algorithm) has disappeared!

Google travel portal getting ever closer with the launch of hotel finder? is a post from: Chris Faron SEO blog. Check me out also on Twitter

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What was highlighted first was the increase in popularity of sites where users can create personalized one off designs or mix and match existing garments to create that special look.

polyvore.com

A social media site were you can create your own fashion style from anywhere on the web. After creating your design the site offers links to the merchants site where you can purchase online the garment.

nikeid.nike.com/nikeid/

This mini-site from the famous sportswear and equipment supplier Nike, allows you to create / design and customize shoes to match your particular style by selecting the materials, design and colours. This is worlds apart from the usual mass produced shoes found in all the major chain stores.

louisvuitton.com/us/personalisation/mon-monogram

Create a unique bag by personalizing a various handbags.

shoesofprey.com

This site allows you design your own hand made womens shoes.

create a unique bag by personalizing a Speedy handbag

Social media: new rules of the game=personalization is a post from: Chris Faron SEO blog. Check me out also on Twitter

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With all the talk about the new panda update penalizing sites that have low quality content, I was surprised to find a very poor result in the first spot in Google for the key phrase [google buys beatmyquote] . Clicking on the link to a Smart Company result takes the user to a virtually blank page (apart from the ads and an excerpt). This page /Search.html?keyword=BeatMyQuote is clearly an auto-generated page that shouldn’t be indexed at all.

The link on this page points to an article about how Google penalized a site that it had just acquired for violating the company’s webmaster guidelines. Now considering with the above search, a user would most likely be looking for a news or blog post about Google’s recent acquisition of BeatThatQuote.com, this doesn’t seem to be the best result for a number 1 spot in Google.

Google Panda update missed this one is a post from: Chris Faron SEO blog. Check me out also on Twitter

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Here are the screen-shots of the (at the moment beta) listings using a UK ip address:

Google Search results with only 3 normal organic listings is a post from: Chris Faron SEO blog. Check me out also on Twitter

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Also the other strange thing about this saga is that the domain in question is not in English, so it would be very unlikely that a user from San Francisco, using Linux (used more o less by only 1-2% of the total users), visiting a non existent URL. All this leads me to believe a Quality rater, working for Google is testing various sites to see the server response codes when a user calls a non existent page (which should be a 404 of course), probably to see if any funny busy (Black-hat SEO) is going on.

Google quality rater paid me a visit? is a post from: Chris Faron SEO blog. Check me out also on Twitter

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Like Google analytics Piwik is a javascript tag based solution which as the advantage of tracking real visitors rather than automated bots but has the drawback that any visitor to your site with JavaScript disabled (certain mobile phones for example) would not be tracked at all, there is a solution to this using an Simple Image tracker (inside a no-script tag) which in testing tracked correctly a normal browser with JavaScript disabled but with a Nokia E71 mobile smartphone  it was completely invisible.

In my next post I will go into detail all the features of Piwik, in the meantime check out their site and download it at piwik.org

Piwik the open source alternative to Google analytics Pt1 is a post from: Chris Faron SEO blog. Check me out also on Twitter

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