jondyer.net

Posted by Karen Semyan

Hi, I’m Karen, a new product manager at SEOmoz. On the heels of our Firefox toolbar launch in May, I’m happy to announce that we’ve launched our MozBar for Chrome. With this update, you’ll be able to research sites in your favorite browser–Chrome or Firefox–using a powerful toolbar that gets you quickly to the data you need most.  

We’ve made a number of useful improvements, most suggested by you! Let’s take a look at  what you can do with the new MozBar.

1. Redesign for better integration with the Chrome user interface

You can now access all functions, menus and tools in Chrome from an icon to the right of your address bar. This update incorporates the toolbar into the native design of Chrome, which intends to give you access to to extension menus and toolbars via icons tucked into your address bar to remove “clutter” from the browser window.

The “toolbar” has become your analytics bar. You can move it to the top, bottom, or right side of your browser, or close it, easily at any time.

We realize that while this design might be less intrusive, it also creates an extra click to get to some functionality and tools. That’s why we’ve rearranged the toolbar features to give you Page Analysis and country info on launch of the toolbar window. You’ll find all function buttons (Page Analysis, Highlighting, and Country info) positioned to the left in the menu. Tools, settings, SEOmoz quick links, and help menus are placed to the right.

2. More highlighting options for links and keywords

With yesterday’s toolbar, you could easily highlight no-followed links. Now, you can also highlight followed, external or internal links, as well as keywords. 

3. Define custom searches by search engine, country, and region/city

Let’s say you own three Zum Uerige alt-bier pubs in Nordrhein-Westfalen in Germany (you lucky duck), and you want to see how they perform in search results for those three areas. You can set up one or more search profile (and up to 10 total) for each area to monitor how they rank:

Then, you can use the profiles to monitor and compare results between areas or compare their rankings between the major search engines:

4. Country flag/name and IP address at a glance

You can view the country flag, and on mouse-over, country name and IP address. When you click the flag, you’ll be directed to full details for the first IP address listed for the site.

and in the main menu, for at-a-glance access when you need it.

5. Subdomain metrics, plus one-click access to to Open Site Explorer

We’ve added a subdomain metrics display alongside domain metrics in the analytics bar.

6. Run Keyword Analysis reports quickly

You have one-click access to keyword difficulty reports for your search terms from a link in the SERP overlay.

Thanks again to for your feedback and suggestions for improvements, and for helping us build this toolbar, one great idea at a time! And feel free to head over to our feature request forum and tell us how we can make the toolbar even better.
 

But wait, there’s more!

Adam just stopped by my desk and asked me to tell you about some updates to the Keyword Analysis report. By popular request, we’ve added two new features to the SERP Analysis:

1. On-page grades for each URL. Now with each report, we will analyze how well-targeted each page is for the selected keyword, and provide each with a letter grade.

2. Competitive URL. You can now add a URL that you want to compare to the top-10 ranking URLs for a SERP.

Be sure to check out the new keyword analysis report.

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Posted by PhilNottingham

The Conundrum

 

Creating detailed and actionable client reports has become a vitally important skill for any agency SEO to hone. Often we’ll spend 20-30 hours composing a veritable treat of a read for our clients, a hand crafted sluice for a torrent of brilliant ideas, delegations, and requests that will certainly lead to a better performance in the SERPs once put into practice… but, as we’re all painfully aware, sending over these floods of text and screenshots often fails to get stuff done. It seems that often these reports get stuck in the quagmire of uncompleted items lurking at the bottom of our clients inboxes for weeks; to end up competing with a perpetual inundation of other requests, constantly clamouring for attention and requiring immediate action. And it’s no surprise that these reports often fail to make the impact we have in mind for them.

 

Consider a typical reading list for a web marketing type on a monday morning. It’s probably going to look something like this:

 

• Emails
• Blog feeds
• Google Reader – News & Articles.
• Twitter
• Facebook

If you’re anything like me, this list is going to feature well in excess of a hundred items, the vast majority of which you will only skim read and deal with quickly. As technology thunders on, accelerating global connectivity and productivity on an exponential scale, this brevity and superficiality of attention span is likely only to expand; threatening the practical viability of our beautifully crafted and detailed client reports.

 

How Can We Communicate Detailed Concepts and Suggestions to our Clients More Effectively?

 

The obvious answer is to do more phone-calls, lunches, video-conferences and direct face to face communication with the client so you can explain things and answer questions when you have their full attention available. However, most clients are typically busy and over-loaded people like us, sometimes based in different time-zones, making this approach rarely feasible.

 

At Distilled, client reports were taken to the shearers a while back. It’s now company-wide policy to send out succinct, simple, bare-bones reports a maximum of 3-4 pages long, which focus purely on the actionable and achievable aspects of all the findings from our 20-30 hours of research.

 

But just recently, we’ve also started trying out a more creative method of communicating complicated tasks and ideas to our clients and colleagues – demonstrating our thoughts and suggestions through recorded video.

 

Without going into too much detail, below is an eloquent summary of our findings so far from my colleague Tom Anthony:

 

Written reports – 20-30 pages = very little shit gets done

Distilled reports – 3-4 pages of actions = lots of shit gets done

Video report  - video(s) + 1 page summary w/checklist = masses of shit gets completely annihilated  

 

Why Go To The Effort?

 

There are some unique benefits of using video to communicate with clients as a supplement to email and telephone calls…. 

 

1. It’s different and fun

Video doesn’t feel like as much of a chore to plough through as emails or reports and this helps it to stick out from the remaining mass of inbox clutter and generate interest.

 

2.  It’s a great teaching environment

If you’re client is not particularly SEO savvy, video is an efficient and easy way to practically explain some of the basic principles driving the ranking factors.

 

3.    Clients can’t skim read a video

You cannot skip through a video as innocuously as you can skim through an email or document; it requires conscious effort to avoid.

 

4.     It’s easy and quick to make

If you become practiced and efficient at making videos, it can be an extremely fast process and take less time than composing a long email.

 

5.      You can demonstrate complicated technical issues as if explaining them in person

It can be easier to explain complicated design and technical considerations with screencasts and diagrams, rather than through extensive writing and annotated screenshots. Problems with UI and design are often better looked at than talked about.

 

6.      It can be edited

As with an email, but unlike a phone-call or video conferencing; a video allows you time to consider your response and suggestions before sending it.

 

7.      It lives on after it’s been created

Unlike a phone-call or VC, videos can be watched back by multiple people at their leisure. This can be a great way to help clients and as can keep the video for future reference, as well as showing it quickly to colleagues.

 

8.      It can be rapport building

Videos can also be a fantastic tool for building rapport with your client.  If they happen to live a long way away and are on different time zones, so you’ve never met, allowing them to see your face and hear your voice on a regular basis is a great way of building trust and mutual understanding. You can also convey emotion through video where you would struggle in formalised written word.

9.    It’s not Rocket Science

 

While is fantastic to have a top-of-the-range camera and microphone to work with, you can still create relatively high quality videos with modest resources.

 

This…

 

 

Was recorded and uploaded using this…

 

 

 

 

Common Pitfalls When Making Videos 

 

Although videos can be an incredibly useful resource when integrated into a holistic approach to communication, it is incredibly easy to undo the potential benefits videos offer…

 

1.      Lack of Clarity

The best thing about email and reports is that they can be edited down to succinct actions points, which cut out the prognostication and deliberation populating everyday phone-calls and conversations. To make effective instructional and informational videos – always stick to the point at hand and avoid meandering tangents. Videos are only valuable in as much as they maintain an audience’s interest.

 

2.      Inability to hone in on specific points

If you’re going to end up putting your video on YouTube, then an interactive transcript can be used to allow your client to skip to relevant points within the video. If not, then creating a contents list with corresponding time-codes for your video can be a great aid for efficient viewing.

 

3.      Low Quality

Having good picture quality and clear audio is essential when producing a video. Especially when discussing complicated technical processes, there cannot be any compromise on this. Ensure you record all content at high resolution and avoid microphone interference.

 

4.      Difficult to work out actionable tips

Clients aren’t going to want to watch through your videos multiple times and transcribe the point you make in order to ascertain appropriate action points. Whenever you send a video, ensure it comes complete with a list of jobs to be undertaken, which you’re client can study while watching your presentation. This will focus their mind to the practical essentials of what you are trying to say and ensure stuff gets done.

 

How to Convert a Written Report into a Video Report

 

1.  Decide the form appropriate form the different parts of your report should take – which bits are best shown through a screencast and which bits would work best with a whiteboard Friday style talking head presentation?
2. Convert your report into a script, removing any descriptive passages which can be displayed visually – If it makes sense within the context of your report; write a script for multiple videos covering a single subject on each one. Six 5-minute long videos are easier to digest than one 30-minute video.
3. Practice speaking through your script in time with your screencast a couple of times before recording, ensuring you cut out any “umms” or “likes” opting for pauses any time you are unsure what to say.
4. When recording, always talk slightly slower than you would in everyday conversation, as the nuances of corporeal expression are inevitably lost through the cables of a microphone — Speak at the speed where it just starts to feel uncomfortably slow. In most cases, when you listen back to your recording, you’ll be surprised how slow it doesn’t feel.
5. For any talking head passages of your recording, always look straight into the lens of the camera.
6. After recording, trim out any sections which lag or feel unnecessary to make the overall points.
7. Add zooms, markers and annotations where necessary.
8. Export your content to video and upload to a cloud hosting service if necessary.
9. Creative an executive summary of the key points in text and create a contents checklist for your client to use to navigate to relevant points in the video(s).

Examples:

 

Last week Rand published a blog titled The Best Kept Secret in the SEOmoz Toolset, which explains how to access the new SERPs analysis tool. i’ve taken the process he explained through text and diagrams and put together a tutorial video which works towards the same purpose. Using Rand’s post as a script, this video took rroughly 10 minutes to make using Camtasia for Mac. 

 

 

Do you find it easier to watch through the video or read through the post? Please let me know your thoughts!

If anyone would like to see further practical demonstrations of turning a written report into a movie, then i invite you to email me over your content (phil.nottingham@distilled.net) and i will use the above formula to convert it into a video and share it in the comments section.

 

If you’re interested to know more about the practical process for making awesome videos, please check out a post I created a the Distilled blog last month –  Creating Awesome Videos for SEO.

 

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Posted by Slingshot SEO

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Google and its user experience is ever changing. For Slingshot SEO, a company that has more than 60% of the search market, it’s common to hear the question, “How many visitors can we expect, if we rank [x]?” It’s a fair question. It’s just impossible to predict. Which is a fair answer. But, as my father says, “If you want fair, go to the Puyallup.” So we inevitably hear, “Well, can you take a guess? Or give us an estimate? Anything?”

To answer that question, we turned to majored studies about Click-through rates. There have been major studies about CTR, namely Optify, Enquiro, and the studies released using the leaked AOL data of 2006. But these studies are old.

This study is new. Ladies, Gentlemen, Mozbot, it is our immense pleasure to present to you …

The Slingshot SEO Google CTR Study: Mission ImposSERPble

There have been a number of changes to the Google user experience since those studies/surveys were published years ago. There’s a new algorithm, a new user interface, increased mobile search, and social signals. On top of that, the blended SERP is riddled with videos, news, places, images, and even shopping results.

We made this study super transparent. You can review our step-by-step process to see how we arived at our results. This study is an ongoing project that will be compared with future SERPs and other CTR studies. Share your thoughts on the study and the research process to help us include additional factors and methods in the future.

Our client databank is made up of more than 200 major retailers and enterprise groups, and our sample set was chosen from more than thousands of keywords based on very strict criteria to ensure the accuracy and quality of the study results.

The study qualification criteria is as follows:

• A keyword phrase must rank in a position (1 to 10)
• The position must be stable for 30 days

Each keyword that we track at Slingshot was considered and every keyword that matched our strict criteria was included. From this method, we generated a sample set of exactly 324 keywords, with at least 30 in each of the top 10 ranking positions.

We are confident in the validity of this CTR data as a baseline model, since the data was generated using more than 170,000 actual user visits across 324 keywords over a 6-month period.

Data-Gathering Process

Authority Labs: Finding Stable Keywords

We currently use Authority Labs to track 10,646 keywords’ daily positions in SERPs. From this, we were able to identify which keywords had stable positions for 30 days. For example, for the keyword “cars,” we observed a stable rank at position 2 for June 2011.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool: All Months Are Not Created Equal

We found the number of [Exact] and “Phrase” local monthly searches using the Google Adwords keyword tool. It is important to note that all keywords have different monthly trends. For example, a keyword like “LCD TV” would typically spike in November, just before the holiday season. If you’re looking at searches for that keyword in May, when the search volume is not as high, your monthly search average may be overstated. So we downloaded the .csv file from Adwords, which separates the search data by month for more accuracy.

By doing this, we were able to calculate our long-tail searches for that keyword. “Phrase” – [Exact] = Long-tail.

Google Analytics: Exact and Long-Tail Visits

Under Keywords in Google Analytics, we quickly specified the date of our keywords’ stable positions. In this case, “cars” was stable in June 2011. We also needed to specify “non-paid” visits, so that we were only including organic results.

Next, we needed to limit our filter to visits from Google in the United States only. This was important since we were using Local Monthly Searches in Adwords, which is specific to U.S. searches.

After applying the filter, we were given our exact visits for the word “cars” and phrase visits, which included the word “cars” and every long-tail variation. Again, to get the number of long-tail visits, we simply used subtraction: Phrase – Exact = Long-Tail visits.

Calculations

We were then able to calculate the Exact and Long-Tail Click-through rate for our keyword.

EXACT CTR = Exact Visits from Google Analytics / [Exact] Local Monthly Searches from Adwords

LONG-TAIL CTR = (Phrase Visits – Exact Visits from Google Analytics) / (“Phrase” – [Exact] Local Monthly Searches from Adwords)

Results

What was the observed CTR curve for organic U.S. results for positions #1-10 in the SERP?

Based on our sample set of 324 keywords, we observed the following curve for Exact CTR:

Our calculations revealed an 18.2% CTR for a No. 1 rank and 10.05% for No. 2. CTR for each position below the fold (Positions 5 and beyond) is below 4%. An interesting implication of our CTR curve is that for any given SERP, the percentage of users who click on an organic result in the top 10 is 52.32%. This makes sense and seems to be typical user behavior, as many Google users will window shop the SERP results and search again before clicking on a domain.

Degrees of Difference

The first thing we noticed from the results of our study was that our observed CTR curve was significantly lower than these two previous studies. There are several fundamental differences between the studies. One should not blindly compare the CTR curves between these studies, but note their differences.

Optify’s insightful and thorough study was conducted during the holiday season of December 2010. There are significant changes in Google’s rankings during the holiday season that many believe have a substantial impact on user behavior, as well as the inherent change in user intent.

The study published by Enquiro Search Solutions was conducted in 2007 using survey data and eye-tracking research. That study was the result of a business-to-business focused survey of 1,084 pre-researched and pre-selected participants. It was an interesting study because it looked directly at user behavior through eye-tracking and how attention drops off as users scroll down the page.

Long-Tail CTR: Volatile and Unpredictable

For each keyword, we found the percentage of click-through for all long-tail terms over the same period. For example, if “cars” ranks at position 2 for June 2011, how much traffic could that domain expect to receive from the keyword phrases “new cars,” “used cars,” or “affordable cars?” The reasoning is, if you rank second for “cars,” you are likely to drive traffic for those other keywords as well, even if those positions are unstable. We were hoping to find an elegant long-tail pattern, but we could not prove that long-tail CTR is directly dependent on the exact term’s position in the SERP. We did observe an average long-tail range of 1.17% to 5.80% for each position.

Blended SERPs: The “Universal” Effect

Starting in May 2007, news, video, local, and book search engines were blended into Google SERPs, which have since included images, videos, shopping, places, real-time, and social results. But do blended SERPs have lower CTRs? Since these blended results often push high-ranking domains towards the bottom of the page, we predicted that CTR would indeed be lower for blended SERPs. However, a counter-intuitive hypothesis would suggest that because certain SERPs have these blended results inserted by Google, they are viewed as more credible results and that CTR should be higher for those blended SERPs. We analyzed our sample set and failed to show significant differences in user behavior regarding blended versus non-blended results. The effect of blended results on user behavior remains to be seen.

As previously mentioned, this study will be used in comparison to future SERPs as the Slingshot SEO Research & Development team continues to track and analyze more keywords and collect additional CTR data. It is our hope that these findings will assist organic SEOs in making performance projections and consider multiple factors when selecting keywords. We look forward to additional studies, both yours and ours, on CTRs and we encourage you to share your findings. With multiple prospective and recent social releases, our research team will be dedicated to examining the effects of social platforms and Click-through rates, and how the organic CTR curve changes over time.

Visit the Slingshot SEO website for the full Mission ImposSERPble: Google CTR Study Whitepaper. It’s free.

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Posted by Slingshot SEO

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Google and its user experience is ever changing. For Slingshot SEO, a company that has more than 60% of the search market, it’s common to hear the question, “How many visitors can we expect, if we rank [x]?” It’s a fair question. It’s just impossible to predict. Which is a fair answer. But, as my father says, “If you want fair, go to the Puyallup.” So we inevitably hear, “Well, can you take a guess? Or give us an estimate? Anything?”

To answer that question, we turned to majored studies about Click-through rates. There have been major studies about CTR, namely Optify, Enquiro, and the studies released using the leaked AOL data of 2006. But these studies are old.

This study is new. Ladies, Gentlemen, Mozbot, it is our immense pleasure to present to you …

The Slingshot SEO Google CTR Study: Mission ImposSERPble

There have been a number of changes to the Google user experience since those studies/surveys were published years ago. There’s a new algorithm, a new user interface, increased mobile search, and social signals. On top of that, the blended SERP is riddled with videos, news, places, images, and even shopping results.

We made this study super transparent. You can review our step-by-step process to see how we arived at our results. This study is an ongoing project that will be compared with future SERPs and other CTR studies. Share your thoughts on the study and the research process to help us include additional factors and methods in the future.

Our client databank is made up of more than 200 major retailers and enterprise groups, and our sample set was chosen from more than thousands of keywords based on very strict criteria to ensure the accuracy and quality of the study results.

The study qualification criteria is as follows:

• A keyword phrase must rank in a position (1 to 10)
• The position must be stable for 30 days

Each keyword that we track at Slingshot was considered and every keyword that matched our strict criteria was included. From this method, we generated a sample set of exactly 324 keywords, with at least 30 in each of the top 10 ranking positions.

We are confident in the validity of this CTR data as a baseline model, since the data was generated using more than 170,000 actual user visits across 324 keywords over a 6-month period.

Data-Gathering Process

Authority Labs: Finding Stable Keywords

We currently use Authority Labs to track 10,646 keywords’ daily positions in SERPs. From this, we were able to identify which keywords had stable positions for 30 days. For example, for the keyword “cars,” we observed a stable rank at position 2 for June 2011.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool: All Months Are Not Created Equal

We found the number of [Exact] and “Phrase” local monthly searches using the Google Adwords keyword tool. It is important to note that all keywords have different monthly trends. For example, a keyword like “LCD TV” would typically spike in November, just before the holiday season. If you’re looking at searches for that keyword in May, when the search volume is not as high, your monthly search average may be overstated. So we downloaded the .csv file from Adwords, which separates the search data by month for more accuracy.

By doing this, we were able to calculate our long-tail searches for that keyword. “Phrase” – [Exact] = Long-tail.

Google Analytics: Exact and Long-Tail Visits

Under Keywords in Google Analytics, we quickly specified the date of our keywords’ stable positions. In this case, “cars” was stable in June 2011. We also needed to specify “non-paid” visits, so that we were only including organic results.

Next, we needed to limit our filter to visits from Google in the United States only. This was important since we were using Local Monthly Searches in Adwords, which is specific to U.S. searches.

After applying the filter, we were given our exact visits for the word “cars” and phrase visits, which included the word “cars” and every long-tail variation. Again, to get the number of long-tail visits, we simply used subtraction: Phrase – Exact = Long-Tail visits.

Calculations

We were then able to calculate the Exact and Long-Tail Click-through rate for our keyword.

EXACT CTR = Exact Visits from Google Analytics / [Exact] Local Monthly Searches from Adwords

LONG-TAIL CTR = (Phrase Visits – Exact Visits from Google Analytics) / (“Phrase” – [Exact] Local Monthly Searches from Adwords)

Results

What was the observed CTR curve for organic U.S. results for positions #1-10 in the SERP?

Based on our sample set of 324 keywords, we observed the following curve for Exact CTR:

Our calculations revealed an 18.2% CTR for a No. 1 rank and 10.05% for No. 2. CTR for each position below the fold (Positions 5 and beyond) is below 4%. An interesting implication of our CTR curve is that for any given SERP, the percentage of users who click on an organic result in the top 10 is 52.32%. This makes sense and seems to be typical user behavior, as many Google users will window shop the SERP results and search again before clicking on a domain.

Degrees of Difference

The first thing we noticed from the results of our study was that our observed CTR curve was significantly lower than these two previous studies. There are several fundamental differences between the studies. One should not blindly compare the CTR curves between these studies, but note their differences.

Optify’s insightful and thorough study was conducted during the holiday season of December 2010. There are significant changes in Google’s rankings during the holiday season that many believe have a substantial impact on user behavior, as well as the inherent change in user intent.

The study published by Enquiro Search Solutions was conducted in 2007 using survey data and eye-tracking research. That study was the result of a business-to-business focused survey of 1,084 pre-researched and pre-selected participants. It was an interesting study because it looked directly at user behavior through eye-tracking and how attention drops off as users scroll down the page.

Long-Tail CTR: Volatile and Unpredictable

For each keyword, we found the percentage of click-through for all long-tail terms over the same period. For example, if “cars” ranks at position 2 for June 2011, how much traffic could that domain expect to receive from the keyword phrases “new cars,” “used cars,” or “affordable cars?” The reasoning is, if you rank second for “cars,” you are likely to drive traffic for those other keywords as well, even if those positions are unstable. We were hoping to find an elegant long-tail pattern, but we could not prove that long-tail CTR is directly dependent on the exact term’s position in the SERP. We did observe an average long-tail range of 1.17% to 5.80% for each position.

Blended SERPs: The “Universal” Effect

Starting in May 2007, news, video, local, and book search engines were blended into Google SERPs, which have since included images, videos, shopping, places, real-time, and social results. But do blended SERPs have lower CTRs? Since these blended results often push high-ranking domains towards the bottom of the page, we predicted that CTR would indeed be lower for blended SERPs. However, a counter-intuitive hypothesis would suggest that because certain SERPs have these blended results inserted by Google, they are viewed as more credible results and that CTR should be higher for those blended SERPs. We analyzed our sample set and failed to show significant differences in user behavior regarding blended versus non-blended results. The effect of blended results on user behavior remains to be seen.

As previously mentioned, this study will be used in comparison to future SERPs as the Slingshot SEO Research & Development team continues to track and analyze more keywords and collect additional CTR data. It is our hope that these findings will assist organic SEOs in making performance projections and consider multiple factors when selecting keywords. We look forward to additional studies, both yours and ours, on CTRs and we encourage you to share your findings. With multiple prospective and recent social releases, our research team will be dedicated to examining the effects of social platforms and Click-through rates, and how the organic CTR curve changes over time.

Visit the Slingshot SEO website for the full Mission ImposSERPble: Google CTR Study Whitepaper. It’s free.

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Posted by randfish

Late last week, in a move that was apparently spurred by threats of an FTC investigation, Google removed third-party reviews and listings from their Places pages in the Local/Maps results. This change was intended to help thwart complaints by sources like Yelp, TripAdvisor and Citysearch who claimed that Google unfairly used their content to make the Places pages results useful without compensation or traffic.

Below is a visual of the change via the WSJ:

Impact on Local/Maps/Places SEO

Unfortunately, this move has a strong negative consequence for SEOs, web marketers and local businesses trying to improve their rankings (or earn a listing) in Google Places results. In particular, the popular tactic of researching the citation sources of competitors and fellow business listees in a city/region via their Places pages is now defunct.

Since citations are like links for SEO/rankings in Google Places, this change is going to be tough on many citation researchers and local optimizers.

Other Options for Local Citation Discovery

Thankfully, there are other ways to find the sources Google may be using to resource their Places data.

#1: Identify Aggregators in the Standard Search Results

This is as basic as it sounds. Just perform a query and seek out the aggregators – those that rank in the top few pages of results that list multiple local businesses. Not only is this a useful activity for Places SEO, it can also help drive direct traffic and brand awareness (e.g. Getting a listing on Yelp isn’t just good for Google SEO, it’s a great idea because lots of people use Yelp to find local businesses). 

In the screenshot above, I’ve pointed to several well-known aggregators that are likely good sources for a listing/citation if a business is targeting Seattle Ice Cream results.

#2: Perform Competitive Research Using Google’s Standard Results

You don’t need the citations listed in the Places pages to find where a business is earning listings/links/references. You can use good, old, regular Google results:

The screenshot above shows one way to do this – grab a listing from the Local/Places results and use the combination of the business’ phone number and name to see where they’re mentioned on the web. This also works with any combination of address, business name, cityname, etc. It’s likely the most simple and direct way to replace the old competitive citation analysis method.

#3 – Search for Multiple Businesses at Once (Co-Citation)

Another simple option is to query Google for several businesses at once in hopes of finding pages/sites that have listings for several places.

The example in the screenshot above is a very simplistic one – you may want to combine this with phone numbers/addresses to help identify more listing-focused sites.

#4 – The WhiteSpark Local Citation Finder Tool

Darren Shaw’s great citation finding tool has long been a staple of Places SEO research, and since it uses a methodology similar to tactic #2 above, it’s not affected by Google’s change to the Places pages.

Just plug in a search as shown in the image above, and the tool will return a list of potential places to acquire a citation/listing. It takes a while to run (up to 24 hours in my experience), but is remarkably useful.

Undoubtedly, these four aren’t the only options for local citation research. If you’ve got more suggestions/ideas for ways to do this, please leave them in the comments below!

p.s. Many thanks to David Mihm and Mike Blumenthal for their contributions and help in understanding this change and offering alternatives.

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Posted by Cyrus Shepard

By now you’ve heard about SEOmoz’s study of Google ranking factors, but what about negative ranking factors? Sure, positive factors such the correlations between social media shares and higher rankings earn a lot of attention – and they should. Smart SEOs look at all the factors, including those at the bottom of the list! Today we look at negative ranking factors – those SEO characteristics correlated with lower rankings – and how to avoid them.
 

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz! Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we’re going to be talking about negative ranking factors.

Now, we talk about ranking factors a lot here at SEOmoz. Every two years SEOmoz publishes a study called the "Ranking Factors." We just published one about a month and a half ago, two months ago. The positive factors get a lot of publicity. We find things that correlate to higher rankings, and we spend a lot of our time on those.

Some of the more positive famous ranking factors that we talk about are such things as page authority, which has a 0.28 correlation to higher rankings. Now, I know we say this a lot, but I need to give my disclaimer here, that correlation does not equal causation. What this means is that when we see pages with high page authority, they are most likely associated with higher rankings. We look at thousands of search results across the website, we analyze those pages, and we try to find relationships characteristic of those pages and those higher rankings. When we find a relationship, we often say that they are positively correlated. Other elements that have positive correlation would be exact match dot com domains. So if your domain name is, say, Diamonds.com, you have a pretty good chance of ranking for diamonds for that keyword. Also, linking root domains with partial anchor text is a 0.25 correlation. That just means the broad diversity of domains that link to you with some sort of partial anchor text, there is a pretty high correlation between that measurement and higher rankings. Now, this is what we talk about a lot.

What we don’t talk a lot about is the opposite effect, the negative correlation. There are certain factors, there are certain things we find associated with web page that actually are associated with negative rankings. We don’t pay a lot of attention to those, but they are actually in there in the ranking factors and they are all the way at the bottom, but they are sort of worth paying attention to, because if we can avoid these, we might be able to learn something about better ranking models and better correlations.

Domain Name Length

Starting with some simple ones, an obvious negative correlation is the domain name length, 0.07. This is kind of an obvious one. If you had a domain, Shoes.com, this tends to rank better in search results than something like Buy-Cheap-Mens-Shoes.com. Now again, correlation does not equal causation. We can think of a lot of reasons for this. For example, Shoes.com, that’s probably a much older domain name. It’s probably been around for 10 years, has a lot of back links going to it. BuyCheapMensShoes.com kind of looks a little spammy. It is probably not something that is going to earn a lot of links. By the way, if you go ahead and look at these correlation statistics, dashes actually are another negative factor. The more hyphens a domain name has, that is actually another negative correlation factor. That doesn’t mean you can’t use long domain names. It just means they tend to not do as well from what we observed.

Response Time

Kind of a controversial one here – response time. We love drawing small pictures of animals here on Whiteboard Friday, so here is our tortoise and our hare. 0.05. Now, we don’t really know what this is. There is a lot of debate in the SEO world if slower web pages, slower servers cause lower rankings. We don’t really have a lot of data on that. We don’t really have a definite answer. What we can see from the correlation, this isn’t a huge correlation, but we see that these pages tend to rank a little lower than others. We know that faster websites, faster response times present a better user experience. If you have a slow site, it is definitely worth looking into.

AdSense

Now here is a surprising one. There are a lot of people, getting new into SEO, they think that if you use Google services, such as installing Google Analytics on your site or putting AdSense on your site, that Google tends to favor those websites and that you’ll rank higher. Correlation data shows exactly the opposite. Google AdSense slots correlated with lower rankings, 0.06. So website A here, if it has all these AdSense, and you’ve seen these pages – you click on them and they are filled with AdSense – they tend to not rank as well as pages with fewer AdSense slots. Another thing is the number of pixels. So, not only the amount of slots you have, but the pure amount of volume, of space on your website that is taken up by AdSense, we see those associated with lower rankings. Again, doesn’t necessarily cause it, but that’s what we see. As a user, if you think about it, which page would you rather link to? Both things being equal, I’d much rather link to that page. So it makes sense.

Percent of Followed Linking Pages

The most surprising result of this year’s correlation data was the percent of followed linking pages. This requires a little bit of explanation. This means that if all your links pointing towards your domain are followed, we tend to see those sites ranking a little lower. That doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense off the get-go. You’d think if all your links were followed, you’d just be great in rankings. But think of domain diversity. Sites that rank well tend to have a lot of sites linking to them. They have sites like Wikipedia that have no followed links, citations no followed links. In general, they have a diverse link profile, whereas spammier sites, smaller sites, newer sites, they are going after those links. They have to work very hard for each one of them, and their diversity is not as great.

These are only a few of the negative ranking factors that you’ll find in this year’s 2011 SEOmoz Ranking Factors. You can dig into it. We’ll link to it in the bottom of this post and Explore Your Own. It’s worth looking into all of them. You can learn so much SEO. I love to hear your comments. Thanks everybody. Have a great day.

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