At one interlude during a New York concert, the musician Beck spoke over his live mic: "Electronic sound man, turn me ON!" That's what I think everybody using Google Analytics for their website should do: turn on the "benchmarking" reports. If you are like the clients I know, or deal with clients like the ones I know, then you are often wondering how you stack up to the competition. Who has better rankings for top keywords? Who has more and higher-quality links? Who's getting larger market share? Who's copying whom?
Well, there is another window of comparison in addition to the previous standards. Google Analytics offers an easy way to see how your website stacks up to industry competition.
Benchmarking Report: "Visits"
Google Analytics Benchmarking: What it is
The "benchmarking" report in Google Analytics allows you to see how your site compares to other sites in your industry that have opted to share their data anonymously with Google via Google Analytics. You can sort by size and business categories. For example, you can compare your site to all sites in your industry, or just those in your weight class (classified by Google based on visits): small, medium or large. Business categories can be broad (computers & electronics), narrow (hardware) or sometimes narrower (storage)
How to set it up
In Google Analytics, the "benchmarking" report is the second item in the "Visitors" navigation, under the "overview" item. In order to view the 6 reports, you will need to be opted in to the anonymous sharing of your data with Google. This may have been done during the analytics account set-up, but if it hasn't, you will be prompted to adjust your settings in order to gain access to the reports. Essentially, you give some to get some. Google wants you to share your data with its benchmarking pool so that it can build its ever-expanding list of vertical benchmarking categories. In exchange, you get the reports.
Google Anayltics "benchmarking" location in navigation
What to do with it
Not sure how successful your SEO efforts are relative to your peers? See in how many categories you meet or exceed the industry average. Each individual benchmarking report also links to a corresponding report in Google Analytics that allows you to further analyze your own site. For example, the "average time on site" benchmarking report links to the individual "length of visit" report for your site, so you can quickly see just how many visits to your site are above the 2-min. average Google says is the industry benchmark you exceeded in a given time period.
Benchmarking reports can be used to isolate areas of your website that need improvement. If your bounce rates measure far above the industry competition, then you know you need to look at the usability of your top landing pages and see what more you could do to keep visitors on your site and convert them to leads and revenue.
Got Google Analytics? What are you waiting for? Go set up or check your benchmarking reports now. Learn more about where you stand against your rivals. Knowledge is power.
No Comments yet, your thoughts are welcome. »October 27, 2009
11:30 AM - 1:00 PM
Panelists: Dominic Litten, Jess Baker
Moderator: Cathy Zapata
Location: Windows on the River, Bridgeview Room
Type: Luncheon
It has been a long time since our last event that covered search in a broad sense, but the search landscape has not been standing still. That means that we have a lot to talk about! Microsoft has a new search engine, video and social sites are more important than ever, and there are powerful new ways to measure and manage your campaigns.
Come learn from some of the area's best and brightest as our panel discusses the tactics and strategies of SEO at a global scale.
No Comments yet, your thoughts are welcome. »
If you missed the announcement earlier today, Microsoft announced that they were bringing Twitter search to their Bing search results. After finally playing with Bing's new Twitter search results integration - for, oh, 10 minutes - Google announces on their own blog that they too will be adding Twitter updates to their search results. What a coincidence!
From Google:
Given this new type of information and its value to search, we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you'll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.
From Bing:
Because today at Web 2.0 we announced that working with those clever birds over at Twitter, we now have access to the entire public Twitter feed and have a beta of Bing Twitter search for you to play with (in the US, for now). Try it out. The Bing and Twitter teams want to know what you think.
Also from the "not a coincidence" file, both search teams spoke (or will be speaking) today the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Take that Apple headlines.
RT @google: Tweets and updates and search, oh my! (Official Google Blog)
Bing is Bringing Twitter Search to You (Bing Blog)
At Fathom, we've always optimized the meta keyword tag. While most search engines - including Google and Bing - have ignored the tag for years, the meta keyword tag has always carried some value because Yahoo! never abandoned it.
Earlier this month, Yahoo! announced that it too had stopped using the meta keyword tag for search results. Web programmers figured that, since the last major search engine had stopped indexing it, the meta keyword tag was finally dead.
Not so fast. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land recently tested the policy by including a line of gibberish in his site’s meta keyword tag. Sure enough, Search Engine Land now shows up as the top result for "xcvteuflsowkldlslkslklsk" in Yahoo.
Yahoo issued the following statement after they found out about the test:
What changed with Yahoo's ranking algorithms is that while we still index the meta keyword tag, the ranking importance given to meta keyword tags receives the lowest ranking signal in our system.
Words that appear in any other part of documents, including the body, title, description, anchor text etc., will take priority in ranking the document – the re-occurrence of these words in the meta keyword tag will not help in boosting the signal for these words. Therefore, keyword stuffing in the keyword tag will not help a page's recall or ranking, it will actually have less effect than introducing those same words in the body of the document, or any other section.
However, when no other ranking signal is present, unique words that only appear in the meta keyword tag section of documents can still be used to recall these documents.
So meta keywords still do matter to Yahoo!. In fact, Yahoo!'s recently updated Help page encourages programmers to optimize the meta keyword tag. Even though the tag now receives the "lowest ranking signal" in Yahoo!'s algorithm, it's still worth taking a few seconds to fill in 3-5 keywords and possibly giving your page a small boost in Yahoo!.
1 Comment »Susan Moskwa, a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google recently wrote about ways to manage your reputation through search results.
It is great to see Google offering practical tips to people or companies looking to improve their online reputation. As an online reputation monitoring strategist I am encouraged that Google is taking steps to educate their audience on this topic. Reputation management can be a daunting task for any company or search engine marketer looking to repair or improve upon negative publicity.
Susan approaches the problem at hand with three strategies. Here are some additional tips to help with your online reputation management campaign:
Think twice
If you decide to put your information online, it is crucial to determine the right keywords to use. Whether it is the name of a company, product, or individual - the key to success is to remain consistent. URLs for online profiles are typically derived from the user name you select, so be mindful of your final choice. Your Facebook, Twitter or YouTube account can rank right behind your website on a search for your company name.
Tackle it at the source
You noticed a forum post from 2004 ranking #57 on a search for your company name. If you are trying to get this post removed from a site to lower the ranking, the worst thing you can do is reply to the thread. Adding new content to the thread can increase the chance that Google will re-crawl this page and increase the ranking of the forum post. Leave it alone!
Proactively publish information
Be very careful to the way you go about responding to any reputation issues. If not handled correctly, a small campfire can turn into a raging forest fire. Don't add more fuel to the fire if you can help it. If a blogger is not responsive to your rebuttal of false claims, consider taking the conversation offline with a phone call. Some journalists strive to post controversial topics, but make sure they aren't denying your right to respond. I have seen a well written response denied by the journalist because they don't want to cater to the reasoning of the company they slammed. As unfair as it is, it is a reality for a blog that has comment moderation.
Publishing new and positive content across the web is the best thing you can do to improve your online reputation. There are numerous social networks, wikis, article and press release websites that can be used to spread your name and positive image, along with improving your inbound links as entrance points to your website.
View more reputation monitoring articles by Fathom.
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