5 Harsh Truths About Google’s ‘Search Plus Your World’ Update

The recent update by Google termed ‘Search Plus Your World’ has invited a lot of criticism from the SEO and the social media arena (Twitter is almost enraged!). While many feel that it would be a unique experience for them to see personalized results in Google searches, many others view the update as an ‘antitrust’ move. Though different people will have different thoughts on the Google+ content integration with Google searches, there are a couple of truths that (I think) nobody should deny.

Here are the five harsh truths that you really need to be aware of, if you just heard about the ‘Search Plus Your World’ update.

#1. It will Impact a Brand’s SEO
As the search results start to get personalized (content pulled in from the searcher’s Google+ network), it’s quite obvious that the public results will be pushed down the SERPs. Yes, if a major portion of your brand’s traffic comes from Google, you’re in trouble. Now, you’ll have a hard time as customers will see the personalized results towards the top by default (when logged into their Google accounts).

#2. Not Everyone Would Notice (or Use) the Toggle Button
The social search shift that’s happened does come along with a toggle button, which users can use to switch from personalized results to global results and vice versa. The bitter truth, however, is not every user will be able to notice or use the toggle button. You can never expect all your potential customers to be as savvy as to switch between personal and public results.

#3. Personalized Results May Not Always be Significant
Now this is a big problem! It’s fine that the personal results will display content shared by the people you know on Google Plus. What’s important to note is whether you trust everyone in your contacts list or circles for recommendations, as you may have thousands of people in your Google Plus network.

#4. Search Results will be Social only ‘Personally’ (not ‘Globally’)
The personalization of Google search results also sends a clear signal that a website won’t rank higher simply because it contains superior quality information. In fact, you won’t be able to see a lot of potential results (or information) while searching on Google logged into your Google account.

Instead of directly promoting Google+ content into the search results, Google could definitely use social data from their social network as signals to differentiate wheat from the chaff. The results that this social search shift will return are only ‘personally social’ and not ‘globally social’.

#5. Google has the Hammer to Make Us all Use Google Plus
Certainly, Google has a wide range of products that it can use to propel the growth of Google Plus further. According to a recent research, Google Plus will boast more than 400 million users by the end of 2012. So, you can never say ‘No’ to joining Google Plus at the cost of losing your organic rankings, can you?

What’s your take on this social search shift by Google? Please feel free to talk back in comments.

SEO Tutorial: How to Optimize a Magento Site

Part of our jobs as marketers of the new age is to understand and learn the popular platforms of the internet. You will be hard pressed to find a professional Search Engine Optimizer that isn’t familiar with Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, and simple table HTML websites. We preach about how to edit the background of your Twitter homepage for better branding and to include keywords on your Facebook fan page by renaming your images.

The new platform that I have been seeing more frequently is Magento. My responsibility as a freelancer is to understand the system, and utilize it to maximize its value. Here, you will find, not only where and how to optimize your Magento Client’s website, but how you can actually automate portions of it to save some time.

What is Magento?

For those unaware, Magento is the fastest growing e-commerce platform on the internet. Don’t be alarmed if you have yet to encounter it, because it is just new in comparison to WordPress or other CMS systems. Magento is Cross-Platform, written in PHP, that calls a series of SQL tables to fill the site. It is completely open-source, and much like WordPress there are a ton of extensions to customize any themes you desire.

Magento has a back end content management system, very similar to WordPress, but it is so much more robust. To truly optimize a Magento site, I recommend a working knowledge of PHP; if you want to be a Magento Pro, some SQL knowledge is necessary.

Based on SEOMoz’s Study: 2011 Search Engine Factors; the on-site factors that are estimated to most affect your SERP’s are Page-Level and Domain-Level Keyword Usage; adding up to a substantial 25.66%. Let’s get into how you can make that 25% work for you.

Let’s Get Started: Introducing the Back-End

Here is a look at the Magento Dashboard:

This is completely customizable, so these are the data points the client wanted to see. What important for me was the built-in analytics. Adding Paypal order tracking to Google Analytics is extremely difficult since Paypal transactions redirect you to the Paypal website where the final steps occur. Magento not only has a great system to allow for that sort of tracking, but with the right plugins, credit card data can be stored on Authorize.net’s servers. This allows your website to track the Customer ID’s, which you can see the last 5 orders on the left side. This data, in combination with GA, gives the SEO more data, which in my opinion makes better optimizing possible.

The “Reports” drop down menu gives you access to all of the data we’re seeing snippets of on the Dashboard. If you’re familiar with most tracking software, this one tab is worth spending the first couple of hours in, comparing to Google Analytics.

For Optimizing, we have to go to the Catalog menu:

The first place you need to go is “Manage Categories”. Unlike some CMS systems, categories are more-or-less required in Magento. This is where we can rewrite title tags, url’s, and the increasingly-useless Meta Description and Meta Keywords. I personally subscribe to the theory of completeness, so I fill all of these fields. Here is what you will see:

Quick Breakdown:

URL Key – This is to change the URL string, if you enter just a keyword, it will add it to the end of the URL in category order. (Ex. http://www.site.com/category1/URLKey) If you wish to rewrite the entire URL, just write the exact URL you want the category to have.

Thumbnail Image – I always name images keyword-friendly, and this is where you can upload and change the path of the thumbnail.

Description – Copy on the Page.

Page Title – Title Tag.

Meta Keywords – Meta Keywords.

Meta Description – Meta Description.

**Magento Pro-Tips**
1) I do each category manually, since I optimize for each individual page’s best benefit, but if your website is smaller, or can use the same title tags throughout, please save yourself some time and use the “URL Rewrite Manager” tool, which can batch-rewrite categories to the same entry.

2) Save yourself some time and avoid the “Manage Products” category all together. The essential attributes that you will want to access are conveniently held in the “Category Products” tab in category management.

If you trust the SEOMoz data like I have come to; (I read every little case and footnote on that page, every year) the most important aspects of On-Site SEO can be accessed through that Catalog Menu, specifically the Manage Categories menu. For those SEO’s that want to dive into the nuts and bolts, Magento will blow you away.

Advanced Magento Optimization:

DISCLAIMER: SQL is needed in some form to really get the most out of these steps. At the very least, you’ll need to understand how to read it and how the tables are structured. Ideally, you are comfortable editing the actual tables in the database. For the rest of this tutorial, I will be providing real examples the client site.

Using Attributes:

Attributes are Magento’s way of describing a product, and how the system will handle it. For example, this is where the product page knows what information to display, and how to display it. You can organize attributes into sets, that will apply to a full category.

For SEO’s, this functionality is best used for inventory management. If you have gone through the Categories and optimized each product, then when that product is no longer in stock, you want to avoid sending customers to a useless page.

In the picture above, you see an attribute under General called “Status”. This is the attribute in this particular system that calls the Inventory table. Once you know exactly what table that attribute is calling, you can then set it to remove the product from the site when the inventory value = 0.

Keyword-Specific Rewrites:

Instead of diving into the .htaccess file of the website to do all of your 301′s and 302′s, you can create redirects right in the back end. These rewrites are for the search function specifically, and you avoid having to do the redirects on the page level.

For example, my client sells wallpaper and wallpaper borders. For their Sports category, the number of wallpaper styles far outnumbers wallpaper borders. For SEO purposes, there are two separate pages; however, we found out through Analytics that most users are finding those borders in the “Related Borders” section on the bottom of the sports wallpaper page.

So, instead of trying to sculpt the traffic the way we wanted it, it was decided to just model it after the users. Go to Catalog -> Search Terms, and you see a page like this:

Here, you can see that we set a redirect when someone searches for the term “sports wallpaper borders.” It redirects to the redesigned sports wallpaper page that includes the limited selection of wallpaper borders; this can be done for any search term.

Unique Batch Category Title Tag Rewrites:

For those that know SQL, instead of going to each individual category and product to change the title tags, there is a command you can run to help automate it. In my case, there were 700 wallpaper categories, and these were mirrored in an equal amount of “wall mural” and “wallpaper border” categories. Instead of rewriting 2100 title tags manually, I did the wallpaper category manually, and then used this function to apply it to the corresponding Mural and Border category:

Here, you see that the Wallpaper category was used as a template, and then scanned the attributes of the other categories. Since there were Floral Wallpapers, along with Floral Wall Murals and Floral Wallpaper Borders, there would be a common attribute between them.

When that common attribute was found, it would take the title tags from the Page Title field of Wallpaper and fill that field for murals and borders. (Category ID 1149 and 1151 respectively.) This can be done any number of times as long as there is a common established attribute between the products or categories you wish to edit.

That, Ladies and Gentlemen, is my tutorial to Magento SEO. Depending on your coding skill, Magento can be an relatively effortless optimization project, or it can be a tedious reminder of how SEO can be. Either way Magento is a CMS system that is here to stay, given the amount of sites converting to Magento and the popularity of the Extension Marketplace; http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/.

So go do what we SEO’s are best at; adaptation, and get yourself some Magento Clients!

11 Internet Marketing Lessons I Learned in 2011

As we enter the last week of the month I sit here and look back at what I’ve learned this year in the world of internet marketing. From the Panda update to Twitter rolling out changes to their platform, our industry has seen quite a few changes this year. Many things stand out in my mind but at the core are eleven that I thought I’d share.

Lesson #1 – I never realized I could hate link farms more than I already did. 

Ever since I first started working in this industry I was taught that link farms are bad news. Anyone who would link out to another site without any qualms or cares for whom they are linking to isn’t a site that we want our clients affiliated with. This year the point was hammered home even more after Panda. After you’ve been on an hour long conference call with a client whose previous SEO only built content farm links you’ll understand why I hate link farms.

Who you link to is certainly important and who links to you even more so. Avoid link farms like the plague and conduct a bit of link reclamation for any links in your backlink profile that shouldn’t be there. 

Lesson #2 – How much I really love (good) content. 

I’ve dealt with a few clients this year that suffered from Panda and others that didn’t. The difference? Great backlinks and great onsite content. Last year our focus at Vertical Measures switched from mostly link building to an equal distribution of link building and content marketing. Being ahead of the curve and focusing on content has helped not only our own rankings avoid hits from Panda but also ranking hits for clients. I can’t stress enough how important good content is. 

Lesson #3 – The industry certainly has its ups and downs…but it’s all about the long haul.

If you want to succeed online you really have to be in it for the long haul. Half-assed attempts at improving your website conversion rates, developing social media presence, building links, writing on a blog, or promoting your website online aren’t going to cut it. Year after year this proves to be true and for me 2011 cemented in my mind that I was meant to work in the field. I just plain love it!

Lesson #4 – Don’t put all your eggs in Google’s basket. 

The inbound traffic you receive should not all be from one place. Sure, this seems obvious but for many the sole focus is Google as an inbound traffic source. This year I learned that referral traffic from Bing and Yahoo is important. When conducting keyword research or looking to improve website SEO don’t forget about Bing/Yahoo.

Even traffic from a site like Yahoo Answers can make a huge difference to your bottom line. Forums, social sites, guest blog posts and comments are all great ways to diversify your efforts so you aren’t 100% dependent on Google. After some websites took huge hits due to Panda they had to close their doors or inject massive sums of money to other efforts. One solution is to expand your efforts and diversify your inbound traffic sources so you aren’t so reliant on one exclusively.

Lesson #5 – The more data the better.

Any opportunity you have to collect data do it. You’ll have the opportunity to segment that data and analyze when using a web analytics program like Google Analytics. Set up filters using regular expressions, use event tracking, examine social analytics such as Facebook Insights, anything that has data. Facebook rolled out their advanced insights; Twitter rumored at doing something similar soon. Then there’s Google – taking data away with keywords showing ‘not provided’ when visitors to your site are signed into their Google profiles and/or using encrypted search. You don’t miss it until it’s gone so take advantage of data as much as possible – a good lesson for 2011.  

Lesson #6 – Long tail keywords can turn a bad year into a good one.

Focusing on single keywords or short tail phrases is certainly more competitive in some industries. Long tail phrases can prove to bring in just as much traffic cumulatively and in some instances convert at higher percentages.

Lesson #7 – Domain Authority > Page Rank

I’ve never given Page Rank much credence – it can be fairly simple to artificially inflate Page Rank. But more so this year than ever I’ve found that domain authority is the best metric to utilize when trying to establish a sites authority ‘score’ (as measured by SEOMoz).

Lesson #8 – Social links matter more than we know.

Bing admitted it, Google eluded to it – social links may influence search engine rankings. This year we’ve seen that social links matter and in my opinion I think they  matter more than we know. This makes participating on social platforms and having something to share all the more important for brands in 2012.

Lesson #9 – Weak content = Weak rankings

Post-Panda website content must provide value which means: links, social mentions, comments, and traffic. If most of the content on your site provides no use, receives very little traffic, has very few links and has never been mentioned on social sites then you need a revamp. Weak content can directly correlate to weak rankings.

Lesson #10 – Exact match anchor text is the kiss of death.

Seen a dramatic decrease in rankings for a keyword? Look at the distribution of anchor text to the site. This is one of the most common reasons for ranking decreases I’ve seen in 2011. Natural anchor text is the way to go – vary it up with these 12 ways to vary your anchor text (a post I wrote last year).

Lesson #11 – Editorial links can change lives – or maybe just bottom lines.  

Link building can be harder to do year after year. This year guest blogging and editorial link building was brought to the forefront. Links in the content of an article, blog, or content piece on a site that doesn’t just link out to anyone and everyone can be the best links out there. Also they’re sometimes the only way to get a link on certain sites (think a guest blog post on your competitors website…).

What are the internet marketing lessons you learned this year?

5 Geospecific Link Building Tips

When I’m approached with a client who heavily relies on business from a specific geographic area may seem daunting to come up with advanced strategy for SEO without a bit of out-of-the-box thinking. There are only so many profiles you can submit, customers who review your business, citations you can claim, and onsite optimization changes to make. Eventually there comes a time when you need a strategic link building campaign that focuses on giving search algorithms the signals needed to improve your geospecific rankings.

Through the use of content marketing, social media, and traditional link building you can compete against the rest of that 7 pack. The concept is simple: look for sites that are designed and used almost exclusively by those in your geospecific area. Those signals can help improve local rankings. Here are a few tips to help you with your geospecific link building.

Local Community

If you have the luxury of being a business in a large metropolis or heavily populated area you stand a chance to integrate your business into the local community through a variety of avenues. Reach out to local bloggers, influencers, artists, photographers, business owners and PR professionals. These are the people who will want to link to your site, share the good word about your brand, and of course become your customers too. Many of them likely have websites or blogs where they can link back to you.

Contact local organizations like Local First Arizona, here in Phoenix where I live. Their goal is to work to support the local economy. Organizations like this, promoting the local movement, exist in many other areas too.

Government and Local Resources

The department of commerce websites often contain large lists of local businesses with information such as phone, address and website. Submit your business to sites like this and to local resource sites also. Using an advanced search command such as “phoenix” “list” “businesses” “add your company” or “phoenix” “list” “add your company” “pizza” can yield some decent results for local resource pages.

Targeted Local Directories & Libraries

Many local directories exist still today. More commonly used prior to the popularity of search engines, local directories are a great place to obtain a link. Advanced search commands, just as described above, can showcase some opportunities. Try adding “add your link” to the searches listed above to find additional sites.

Libraries often have local resources linked to from their sites as well. Again, advanced search commands come in handy to track these sites down.

Newspaper Websites

Online newspapers and news sites offer a great way for businesses to highlight their businesses – allowing them to become contributors. A news site like NowPublic.com are crowd powered sites, relying on citizen journalists to help tell the news. They are looking for experts to help contribute and as an expert in your own field you can apply. Bio pages on these reputable sites often have in content do-follow link building opportunities, along with of course the content itself.

Radio Stations

More and more radio stations are becoming content publishers. Many have entire forums and social components to their sites where users can drop links. Additionally some rely on citizen journalism as well. Apply to become a writer or search around the site to see if they have a local resource list to add your business to.

These are just a few of MANY strategies that work to reinvigorate a geospecific link building campaign. Have you done much geospecific link building? Tell us about some of the ways you were able to find some great local links in the comments below.

How Would You Like To Increase Your Traffic by 34.35%?

I recently stumbled upon a search engine ranking report from Chitika, an online advertising network, that focused on answering one question: how valuable prime search ranking positions really are.

Although the report was published a while ago, I believe that little has changed since then, and the following results are definitely something to pay attention to.

Of course we all know that it’s great to have #1 Google search engine ranking for your keyword.

But how much is it really worth in terms of traffic generation?

According to the data from the Chitika network, it’s worth a great deal – double the search engine traffic of the #2 spot, to be precise.

Let me put it another way:

The #1 Google search engine ranking spot gets as many visitors as positions 2-4 combined!

To come up with these impressive numbers, Chitika analyzed a sample of 8,253,240 impressions across their network.

“In order to find out the value of SEO, we looked at a sample of traffic coming into our advertising network from Google and broke it down by Google results placement.

The top spot drove 34.35% of all traffic in the sample, almost as much as the numbers 2 through 4 slots combined, and more than the numbers 5 through 20 (the end of page 2) put together.”

Search engine ranking #10 gets 143% more clicks than #11.

“The biggest jump, percentage-wise, is from the top of page 2 to the bottom of page 1.

Going from the 11th spot to 10th sees a 143% jump in traffic. However, the base number is very low – that 143% jump is from 1.11% of all Google traffic to 2.71%.

As you go up the top page, the raw jumps get bigger and bigger, culminating in that desired top position.”

Here are the search engine ranking numbers:

Show Me the Money!

I admit, having a number 1 search engine ranking on Google is very exciting and all, but if you are ranking of the wrong keyword, it won’t help your business much.

How do you know when it’s worth to improve google ranking?

To determine that, you can do one of the following:

Test your keywords with Google Adwords

1. Start a Google AdWords campaign for the keyword, select “exact match” and point the ad to the page on your website that is most relevant to the keyword.
2. Track the impressions and the conversion rate of the ad. To get useful data, you should track at least 500 clicks.
3. With that data, you can make a guess about the value of a visitor that finds your website through that keyword.

For example, your ad might have had 10,000 impressions during a week and 200 visitors have come to your website. Six of them purchased something of your website and the total profit was $500.

That means that the average single visitor who finds your website through that keyword is worth $2.50 to your business ($500 / 200). The 10,000 ad impressions in a week can create a click-through rate of 34.35% (see table above) if you have the number 1 ranking for that keyword.

That means that you would get about 3,435 visitors per week. Based on the average value of $2.50/visitor you would earn $8,587.50 per week or $446,500 per year just with a single keyword.

Getting Market Value figures in Market Samurai

If you already own a copy of Market Samurai, the task of gathering all this info becomes even more of a breeze.

This data is gathered under you Keyword Analysis Data in Keyword Research tool.

Here are the numbers we are interested in:

• SEO Value (SEOV) – This is the maximum total value of traffic that the #1 ranked web page for this keyword (based on search results) is likely to receive – per month.

• Adwords Value (AWV) - This is the maximum total value of traffic that the #1 ranked advertiser (in Google Adwords) is likely to receive – per month.

In both cases, Market Samurai is taking the Market Value benchmark to the next step…

…by breaking down the Market Value number into how much #1 ranked web site will bring through organic SEO and Google Adwords respectively.

If you don’t have Market Samurai, I would recommend you get a copy – it will save you a lot of time (and money) doing market research and give you access to a lot of really powerful keyword research tools.

Image credit: ICanHasCheezburger.com

The Mystery of SEO; What Are You Really Paying For?

Recently I spoke with a partner in an insurance agency about his needs for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Services. It was a referral, which is how I prefer to do business, because I never want anyone to think I am just trying to sell them something. We had a brief chat and he shared that he was paying $500 every month for SEO and that he wasn’t happy with the results. I asked him what exactly the SEO company was doing for the $500 per month, knowing that for an insurance agency in his city that really wasn’t a reasonable budget to see success.  He said “they do SEO stuff” at which point, I realized we had another victim. A victim of the smoke and mirrors often associated with SEO, where the company doesn’t really tell you what they do for you.

I told him flat out, “if you don’t know what the company is doing for you AND it’s not working, you would be foolish to keep paying.” He asked me what I would charge and I told him I couldn’t tell him until I did an analysis and took a look at everything. The funny part was that he seemed to have a problem paying for something tangible (an analysis which would be followed by a road map) yet he seemed ok to pay someone and not get any results.

Let me take the mystery out of SEO; there are a handful of factors that make up good SEO, but for the most part it’s about good site architecture with good content that has good links to it. The architecture part is fairly straightforward; use static pages with WordPress CMS being a preferred platform.  Good content means that it is unique (not stolen), reads well (not stuffed with keywords), optimized (it has a theme and does target specific keywords), and the pages are of reasonable length. That leave us with the link building aspect which is where you find out who really knows there stuff. Links can come from a variety of sources including web directories, social media sites, blogs, trusted industry websites, press sites, and the list goes on.

Now that you know what is involved, the real question is “what do you need to move your website from where it is to where you want it?” And I assume that it is ranking in the top 3 positions of Google for your keywords. The only way to know what you specifically need is to do some checking, otherwise known as an SEO Analysis.  Some items will be glaringly obvious, but others should involve some analysis to see what types of links the site has, what kind of rankings the sites has, where the site is already listed, and the list goes on.

I met a local web designer who impressed me because he said he would not do any work for a company unless they allowed him to do an SEO analysis. I’d say that’s pretty impressive coming from a web designer; it says they have a holistic understanding of their craft and don’t just see it as “making a pretty digital brochure” which no one is likely to find.

Should You Optimize Your Website for Mobile?

The trend of accessing the internet via mobile devices only continues to grow. From iPhones and Android phones to iPads and Kindle Fires, more and more mobile devices are used to access the Internet. The IDC reported in September that by 2015 “more U.S. Internet users will access the Internet through mobile devices than through PCs or other wireline devices”. Amazingly, an estimated 79% of websites today aren’t optimized for mobile devices.

I recently had a conversation with a client about this very topic, and why they should optimize their site for mobile. They’re an online retailer receiving a significant amount of traffic and as you’d expect many visitors are using mobile devices to access their site. Since their site wasn’t optimized for mobile it was no surprise that mobile performed significantly worse – bounce rates, conversion rates, returning visits, etc… In the end we came to the conclusion that it was completely essential that they optimize their site for mobile and we had enough proof to get higher ups to take into consideration this additional expense in their budget.

After my experience with this client I thought I’d share some of the areas I suggest you examine to determine if you should optimize your site for mobile. You might just be leaving money on the table!

Bounce Rate

Savvy mobile and online users absolutely hate a site that isn’t optimized for mobile, which can result in increased bounce rates. Examine how your mobile traffic performs on your site and pay particular attention to bounce rate. How does it compare to site averages? How about year over year? In Google Analytics this information can be found by selecting the advanced segment “mobile traffic”. If you were able to improve bounce rates how much more traffic would that equate to?

Conversion Rate

Does your mobile traffic convert better or worse than other traffic? If your site isn’t optimized for mobile it’s very likely that mobile conversion rates are much lower than site averages. A large difference between mobile traffic conversion rates and site wide average is a sign you should optimize your site for mobile. Using site average conversion rate and average traffic numbers determine how much potential profit your site is losing by not optimizing for mobile. In my client’s case it turned out to be tens of thousands of dollars per month!

Returning Visits

Visitor loyalty can be very important to keeping your online doors open. Examine visitor loyalty of mobile traffic – if visitors aren’t coming back as often (or at all) then having a site that isn’t optimized for mobile may be to blame.

Time on Site and Pages Per Visit

Other important factors to consider are time on site and pages per visit. If mobile visitors aren’t staying on the site as long as site wide averages, and if they aren’t visiting as many pages on your site then your unoptimized site may be to blame.

These are just a few areas you can examine in the analytics program you’re using to determine if you should optimize your website for mobile.

What areas do you examine to determine whether a site should be optimized for mobile?

How Many (Not Provided) Keywords Are There Really?

It’s been about the month since Google made the switch to SSL search for users signed into their Google accounts. With this change came the loss of receiving keyword data from organic search which now shows in your Google Analytics under Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic as (not provided) keywords.

Initially, Matt Cutts said webmasters would only see (not provided) keywords in single-digit percentages which made it sound like it would be something that would be hardly noticeable. Maybe what Google didn’t factor in was how many people would be staying logged in to their Google accounts thanks to Google+, but regardless of whether it is a single-digit percentage or not, it is noticeable.

After a month, I decided to take a look at my own analytics. Compared to the keyword data you are still getting using an Advanced Segment for (not provided) traffic vs. all visits, it doesn’t look so bad and is as promised, a single digit percentage of 4.59%.

What bothers me is this…

The fact that (not provided) is now my top referring keyword. That’s 1,129 visitors in the last 30 days that I cannot analyze correctly. That’s 1,129 keywords whose bounce rate averages out to 83.97% that I won’t be able to work on.

Is it really about privacy?

Another thing that gets me is that this doesn’t really seem to be about user privacy. For one thing, if I was paying for Google AdWords, I would still get to see the keywords that users searched which led to paid search results. So if I was paying for it, I’d get it.

Then there’s the fact that Google is still logging your search activity. Sure it’s just for your own “personal” web history, but I’m sure whether or not you turn this setting on or off, they are still keeping tabs on your organic searches.

According to the Google’s document on Web History and Privacy…

“Over time, the service may also use additional information about your activity on Google or other information you provide us in order to deliver a more personalized experience.”

To see your web history since you first logged in to your Google account, click on this link when logged in. This is where you can “pause” and remove all web history items if you so choose to.

Of course, if you read further into the Privacy FAQ…

“You can choose to stop storing your web activity in Web History either temporarily or permanently, or remove items, as described in Web History Help. If you remove items, they will be removed from the service and will not be used to improve your search experience. As is common practice in the industry, Google also maintains a separate logs system for auditing purposes and to help us improve the quality of our services for users. For example, we use this information to audit our ads systems, understand which features are most popular to users, improve the quality of our search results, and help us combat vulnerabilities such as denial of service attacks.”

Want see more real not provided numbers in Google Analytics?

The following are additional articles with real Google Analytics numbers related to the (not provided) keyword.

• How Much Data Will Your Site Lose With Google Encrypted Search Default? – Analysis after less than a week of this change going live shows how even .97% can equal the loss of keyword data for 195K searches.
• Quantifying the Impact of Google’s Keyword Referral Data Shutdown – shows a visualization of 60 sites’ analytics data plus SEOmoz’s own missing keyword data.

How has the new SSL search for logged in Google account users affected your Google Analytics? Do you believe privacy is the real motivator? Please share your thoughts on not provided in the comments!

My Experience Delving into the World of Contracting Out Jobs

A few months back I had what I consider to be a divine revelation. See, leading up to this point, I was slowly realizing that I was reaching the breaking point as far as the workload I could take on. When I first started out in the SEO copywriting business, I only had a few jobs here and there, leaving me begging for more work. Now I had built a loyal (albeit still small compared to others) customer base, work kept coming in without me having to really look for it. My main client had quadrupled my work load.

And suddenly those deadlines were starting to choke me out. Not too unlike one of those way-too-masculine ‘roided up UFC guys putting a triangle choke hold on their weakened opponent.

Anyway, that’s when it hit me. Find more writers.

As the lights from the heavens beamed down and the angelic choir sang, I began imagining the possibilities. What if I could actually work on the projects I enjoyed and pay someone else to write the stuff that was just “paying the bills” so to speak?

Not only would my love for SEO copywriting grow stringer, but I’d be able to take on more work. Instead of having to turn down jobs or tell a client “yeah but I can’t get it to you for X amount of weeks,” I’d now be able to enthusiastically reply, “BRING IT ON!” Not only that, but I could start searching for more work—you know, sending out sales letters and what not.

Sure I’d probably take a hit at the beginning, having to turn over a small yet still hefty portion of my profits to the contractors. But this would be a mere short term set back.

My Experience Getting My Feet Wet with Contracting Out Work

It didn’t take much thought for me to decide to jump in head first. I began by asking all my friends if they knew anyone interested in making a little money writing on the side. This attracted a few prospects. However, I learned pretty quickly that mixing friends and business didn’t work out. Not one of these prospects ended up being reliable.

Then I turned to Craigslist. After all, I’d picked up a few jobs there along the way. Why couldn’t I find some decent writers? However, first I had a big decision to make—how much money would I offer? Well, the plan was to contract out a bit of the recurring SEO article writing I had to do, which meant 500 word articles. At this point, I had no idea what the average article writer charged. I knew what I was making, but obviously I had to pay significantly less if I wanted to turn a profit.

After pondering this for awhile, I decided to run a test. I made a series of “Wanted: SEO article writer” postings, each listed at a different price point. One was a bit more than I wanted to pay, one about what I considered reasonable, and one I totally low-balled.

Here’s what I discovered. At the low-ball price, I got one of two things. Either I got really crappy writing and had to redo the articles myself…or I got a decent writer who was flaky and would always be late with some reason why they couldn’t finish.

At the middle price point I got a mixture of bad writers and pretty good writers. I sorted through it all and ended up sticking with a few.

The high price point was especially interesting. I assumed I would pull in some better-than-usual writers through this posting. However, what I discovered is all the same writers that applied for the middle price contacted me for this job too. Interesting…

So the conclusion? Obviously I chose middle ground payment.

How Do You Manage Contractors?

Once I settled on a few writers, I got rolling. I started sending out article jobs left and right. But as you can imagine, I ran into all sorts of unexpected issues. First of all, how was I to keep all the jobs straight? And what about the bookkeeping? Furthermore, how did I decide which jobs to send to whom?

Want the answers? Ahhh…but I can’t unveil them just yet. Yes, I know it’s frustrating, but this is a subject for my next guest post. Until then, let me know your experience with contracting out work!

Drunk Chatting with Clients Bad for SEO Business

We’ve all done it. Went out for a few drinks and a few laughs, and the next thing you know—wasted. And as long as you aren’t getting behind the wheel, no harm no foul, right?

Enter technology.

Let’s be real for a second. Who doesn’t think it’s the best idea to text/Facebook/Gchat someone after a few too many? For whatever reason, it seems like the best idea at the time. Of course, if it really was a good idea, there wouldn’t be sites like www.textsfromlastnight.com.

Bad idea.

I’d even argue that drunk dialing is the best option if you are going to insist on communicating with people who aren’t right there with you when you’re inebriated. Why? Because there is no record of it. But when you text or anything like that, you leave a paper trail that often won’t disappear.

When Drunken Use of Technology Collides with Your Business

It’s one thing to drunk text your ex or accidentally call your mom. But imagine if you accidentally got a hold of one of your clients. Talk about a nightmare.

Well that’s exactly what happened to a friend of mine recently who runs his own SEO article writing business. The other night I was awaken by a text that said, “check your email now.” Here’s what I found. Names have been changed to protect the innocent:

“My drunk ass was trying to Gchat Jason and accidentally clicked on a client. The following is what took place:

me: B*TCHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Rob: ?

11:46 PM me: hahaha. oh my gosh. i was trying to click on my friend’s name. he played a prank on me in my apartment, and i was going to give him a hard time.

wow. embarrassed.

11:49 PM Rob: who is this?

oh Anthony…blogger

no worries man

I’ve done something like this many of times

11:50 PM honestly, pretend it never happened because I think it’s funny

done worse myself

me: HAHAHAH

dear God

11:51 PM happy hour beers

disaster!

 Rob: luckily it was a guy and not a girl

imagine IMing a girl

B****TCCCHHH

and trying to explain that one

me: hahahahah, literal lol’ing

thank God you’re cool about it

terrible

 Rob: haha yeah man I could care less

anyone who would get mad about that sucks

and needs to loosen up”

Okay. So any part of me that was pissed for being up in the middle of a work night reading my email was long gone by now. I was literally LOLing my butt off. True story.

What We Can Learn from This

Anthony got lucky. He made a colossal mistake that could have cost him a pretty important client. In his intoxicated state he accidentally clicked on the wrong name and proceeded to cuss at a paying customer. And not only that, but let’s face it, there’s no way the guy bought the “my friend played a prank on me and I was giving him a hard time” thing. Obviously, Anthony was bombed.

Luckily, his client seemed to be a kindred drunken spirit. But it’s safe to say that not all clients would take it this well. In fact, this sort of behavior could make you appear untrustworthy, incompetent, and downright unprofessional.

So what can we do to make sure this sort of thing doesn’t happen? Stop drinking.

I literally LOLed again.

So that solution is out. Now what? Well, perhaps separating our business contacts from personal? Or better yet—keep a separate business email address and don’t add business contacts to your Gchat!

Of course, that won’t keep you from accidentally texting them.

Best bet? Don’t hit the technology when you’ve been drinking. Instead, go home and go to bed.

Have you ever done something similar? How’d you handle it?