Want to know what to expect from the next year in terms of SEO and how these changes will affect your business? Our Head of Search Adrian Durow offers his predictions for Search in 2012.
The more the years roll on, the less SEO is about just SEO. Over the past year, SEO has really evolved into SEO x Social x Content x UX, and unless sites take a holistic approach, then they’ll be left behind. Here are a few brief predictions for Search in 2012.
- More formats on search results / Less need to click through for specific queries? Google will utilise advanced tagging and channel info (such as Schema.org) to make the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) even more, Specific flight times, restaurant reviews, definitions, weather forecasts… can all be obtained from the SERPs without clicking through.
- Even more personal results Google will utilise even more data from browser history / click-through-rates / Google+ activity / location / Gmail activity in order to further personalise your results to provide a better search experience.
- Analytics data used as a ranking factor I do believe that the time (quite soon) will come when Google looks at site retention data and bounce from it’s own analytics accounts where permission has been granted, in order to determine relevance and positions in the SERPs. So if you’re not paying attention to optimising site performance and conversion rates, then your positions could be affected.
- Google providing less data We’re really gutted about the non-passing of keyword data into Analytics from logged in visitors. We’re anticipating that this could evolve with less organic-keyword-specific data being passed to Google Analytics to help us SEOs. On the flip-side of the coin… Google Analytics range of functionality has really developed in leaps and bound over the past 12 months.
What are your predictions for Search in the coming year? Leave a comment and let us know.
After reading Avinash’s brilliant post about the importance of segmentation, and how all data in the aggregate is crap (read it here – it’s great) – it’s inspired us here to start segmenting and analysing ourselves. Segmenting:
- Visitors how frequently visit certain parts of websites
- Visitors who’ve provided a specific answer when registering on a site (these guys can easily be segmented using custom variables)
- Visitors with high average order values
- Visitors how buy specific products
… there are loads of ways you can segment your website visitors.
A basic marketing strategy would typically involve identifying market segments, and targeting them with specific messages. Websites and landing pages should follow this basic marketing principle too. A marketer should think about how different segments are interacting with their websites, measure this activity (which is where Google Analytics’ advanced segments and custom variable functionality comes in handy), and adapt their sites and pages accordingly.
Here’s an example of how we’ve used segments to analyse site activity.
Segmenting all converting visits allows you to understand what are those valuable pages on your site which are contributing to conversions.
We’ve also segmentated visitors based on what they’ve entered into forms, by calling the setVar function. For example, one of our clients principally have 2 categories of visitor who register on a site. In order to register, they have to specify what category they belong to. When they do this, GA drops a __utmv cookie in order to classify them, which means that data for the category as a whole will appear in the visitor reports of Google Analytics. This is great, because it means that we can then analyse at the usual GA stuff:
- Bounces
- Top content
- Goals / conversions
… all by category! More information on how to implement this can be found here.
So, think about your different types of web audience, think about how you can measure those types of web audience on the site, and start segmenting, segmenting, segmenting!
So Google are beta-testing an Intelligence section of Google Analytics for select users – this includes us lucky people at Refreshed.
For those of you who haven’t seen it, it looks like the below:
Google Analytics Intelligence (click to enlarge)
Users can determine the sensitivity of these alerts with a typically Google-Analytics-user-friendly setting, and can even decide to create advanced segments defined by the metric alerts, and use them to benchmark over time or query other analytics data with (I like this… though it’s a bit of a mind-boggler).
It’s great to break from the rigidity of the GA reports being sent only daily, every Monday, or the first day of every month. It should save marketers and site owners time logging in an checking for trends, stats, spikes… as they can now just be told when they should scrutinised their analytics accounts.
It’s a good move for Google Analytics this, and should get users thinking more about advanced segmentation and the importance of trends (and interpreting / reacting to trends).
Am a little frustrated that there is no custom alert for volumes of goals / conversions, which is pretty much one of the most important metrics there!
