SEO Keyboard

ZoomRank had the foresight to embrace Local search a couple of years ago, and now in the updated tool set, Local is well entrenched in the reporting. In both the Widgets and in the core SERP reporting, data can be viewed by Organic results, Local results or Blended. When working with a company that has a local presence, this is a tremendous help in understanding the rankings, which will vary locally and nationally.

A Real Life Example

While it may be difficult to rank your best keywords on a national level, locally, the competition can be much lighter and provide more ranking opportunities. ZoomRank offers three different views of the SERP ranking report; Organic, Local and Blended. What’s nice about seeing these different views of the data is the ability to pinpoint what is and is not working.

I met with a client and went through the reporting to show how their web site was doing. They are local company, with a brick and mortar retail business. One of their desires is to grow the business beyond Denver and have national customers. Pulling up the Local ranking report, it’s all great news. Almost all of the results are in the top third of the “seven pack”, or the 7 Local results Google provides.

Bringing up the Organic report, we don’t see a lot of ranking keywords, meaning we are not competing well for the more general keywords across the country. While the client is competing very well locally, on a national level we have more work to do. Thus, where we would have to really work at ranking nationally for a generic term like “Apple Pie”, at the Local level they are leaders of the pack.

But this is really the point of Google + Local. I have many local clients that do very well because of the Local search. Many of these businesses don’t reach beyond a small section of town, much less the city or state. Having the ability to eliminate the majority of the competition based on geography makes it much easier for the SEO and business alike.

As a business, it is important to begin managing your Google + Local page. You can be certain that Google + will positively affect your Google rankings. Local rankings are easier to achieve than short tail keywords nationally, and ZoomRank is already up to date and ready to help you track your progress.

Rand Fishkin Keynotes TBEX 2012 in Keystone Colorado. Photo by Brad Crooks.

SEO is for many webmasters and business owners is a mystery, where the rules and internal workings are unknown and misunderstood. For most business owners, they know they need “SEO”, but have no idea what that really means. I have even met my share of web designers who prefer to stick with the “creative development” of the site and leave the SEO to someone else, not understanding that good SEO work starts with the structure of the web site.

The Travel Blog Exchange conference provided a good example of the disconnect between content writers and SEO. Through the two day event, sessions focused on the how’s and why’s of travel blogging, including monetization. The SEO session had full conference attendance and was clearly a topic of interest.

Rand’s presentation, How To Earn Traffic Without Selling Your Soul, (view his slides http://bit.ly/trafficwithsoul ) focused on the idea of being authentic with your content writing, doing some basic SEO tactics, and not doing the distasteful marketing ploys to gain search engine positioning. He put forth the concept that if you write for the audience, focus on content you care about, and be consistent with your posting, you will benefit in better rankings. Keeping the content natural, while doing the simple things the search engines are looking for is more effective in the long term.

Fishkin’s hour long presentation did include a couple of basic instructions. Be sure you have your top keywords in the title and first paragraph, but don’t keyword stuff, which could result in the opposite effect you are looking for.

Creating content you care about and not forcing what he termed “artificial” posts was echoed throughout the presentation. Assure that you love the brand you are building. Writing about something you are passionate about will provide for better, more interesting reading, and will flow more naturally as the content is created. Select a niche or topic that is unique, and make sure your content is memorable.

He also suggested that you don’t share stuff you don’t like, but do share what is amazing and worthwhile. Recognize that not every piece of content you write will be award winning material, but certainly spend time sharing the work that is.

One area Fishkin touched on, but didn’t go into any depth was link building. Whereas professional SEOs know back-links are a critical piece to good search engine ranking, the message was “produce good content and people will follow”. This was a nice, subtle way to reinforce what Google’s Panda has been all about – don’t force links, create link-worthy content and be rewarded with higher search engine rankings.

The presentation was insightful, informative and at a level where the non-SEO could understand and use the advice that was provided. Overall a great SEO session from Rand Fishkin at TBEX. I suspect we will see more of this type of presentation at upcoming Blogger conferences.

Photo credit Brad Crooks http://trippingtheglobe.com/

Even for small business owners who don’t use an outside agency for their SEO work, ZoomRank provides insight to the status of their web site on the major search engines. Understanding what keywords are driving your business helps you understand how the search engines, and users, view your site. If your specialty is oil changes, but your web site is ranking higher on tire sales, you know there are changes to be made.

The New ZoomRank Dashboard

ZoomRank has a variety of reporting options that provide insight into the rankings of a web site. New in 2012 with a re-vamp of the ZoomRank tool is the Widget. ZoomRank’s new dashboard view contains 5 spots for Widgets, where you can choose from a list of different graphical tools to show reporting. The Widgets provide an interactive, visual look at the keyword ranking data. The interactivity of each Widget will allow you to look at specific search engine data and zoom in to see detailed views. This interactivity includes the ability to view data from specific search engines or select and highlight a specific period of time on the graphs.

Quick Information Through Widgets

One of the most useful tools in the Widget dashboard is the SERP Page Distribution graph. This chart shows you instantly how many of your keywords are ranked on the top five pages or search engine results. Through the Widget you can view each of the three major search engines. In the example below, 41 keywords are ranked on the first page of Google’s search engine results, and four are located on page two.

The other similar Widget is the SERP Rank Distribution. Like the Page Distribution graph, this Widget shows the number of keywords in certain positions in the search engine results, plus gives a visual history of keyword rankings. This is another very quick way to see the performance of the SEO work you have been doing. Through this Widget you can see the progression of keywords to the top spots for each of the big three search engines. Like the other Widgets, you can also turn different the different data sets on and off so you can view only the data you are interested in.

These new reporting changes from ZoomRank are an exciting addition to the overall toolset. This reporting is reliable and easy to understand, but at the same time incredibly powerful. In my next blog, I’ll go into the core of the ZoomRank tool and highlight the power and flexibility of the new SERP ranking reporting. This revamp allows you to go deep into the rankings, providing both organic and local rankings, giving you better insight into your SEO work.

The Big Guys

I believe at a high level, clients fall into one of two buckets, the “Big Guys” and the “Small Guys”. I realize this is a painfully simplistic view of the universe of clients, but web sites tend to either be large, with hundreds or thousands of pages and products, or they are small with the basics, who we are, what we do and how to get in touch with us. The Big Guys are a tougher client to get, because they quite often have already done the SEO work. You will find they have someone knowledgeable in SEO on their staff, or have hired an agency to do the work.

On the “Low Hanging Fruit” scale, these potential clients are at the top of the tree. They can be very valuable, but are much tougher to secure. Case in point, I worked with a small agency who wanted to build their PPC and SEO business. To generate leads, they would search Google for a specific business type, and call the businesses listed on the first page of results. These businesses tended to be bigger, well established and the sites already professionally optimized – after all, they were highly ranked.

Once they set up a meeting with a prospect, I would be called in to do an analysis of the prospect’s web site and then present my findings at the meeting. It was often difficult to come up with a compelling argument why they needed our services. They had a site with great SEO work already, and room for improvement was limited. Needless to say, we didn’t sell much.

The Small Guys

The better prospect is the “Small Guy”, who very likely doesn’t have the SEO experience or staff, and has a site that has either not been optimized, or optimized poorly. There is a lot of room for growth here. I’ll run my analysis on the web site, and also put some of their obvious keywords into a ZoomRank account and run reporting to present to the potential client. This provides a baseline of where they stand, and an easy way to show progress over time once they are on board as a client. As their rankings improve in your ZoomRank reports, which I provide to my clients as often as daily, based on their needs, the client should also see additional web site activity and increased sales.

Fee Structures

The agency I was helping also made the mistake of trying to charge big dollars for what I saw as maintenance and not fresh SEO work. The smaller businesses will have much lower budgets, but for the lone SEO, small agency or enterprise level agency with hundreds of similar clients, there is great long-term value here. A few years back I switched to a monthly fee program, which kept the monthly cost at a palatable level for the client, and gave me a steady revenue stream for several months. Knowing that there is a great deal of work up front, and that once this work is complete you shift into an easier maintenance mode, I set a minimum number of months for the service to run. This way I receive the full cost of the work over time.

Isn’t This Obvious?

Perhaps this seems far too obvious, and these ideas are not really “secrets” to landing new SEO clients. However, I have personal experience with an agency that didn’t sell any SEO, because they didn’t go with the obvious.

You can easily increase business by targeting the smaller businesses without the wherewithal to do their own SEO. Provide a good analysis up front to justify the need, follow up with good ongoing ranking reporting from ZoomRank, and set a fee schedule that pays you over time and is reasonable to the client.

I have heard the dissension that rankings don’t mean much with personalized and blended search results, and conversions are the true measure of good SEO work. I don’t completely disagree, however I have yet to come up with a better way to show my clients that I am working, and the work is producing positive results.

In today’s Social Media world, search engine optimization has moved from living in the HTML code of a web site, to working with broader perspective of the web experience as a whole. Social Media has worked its way into the ranking factors of the search engines, and for the SEO professional, the learning curve and workload continues to increase.

How Do The Search Engines Use Social Media?

I often talk about the importance of backlinks in the ranking of a web site, and generally refer to these links as “votes” of support for specific content or the site as a whole. Google’s Panda updates were directly targeting the unnatural backlinks, because the spam team recognized links can be easily purchased, essentially scamming the system.

Your social media reputations, on the other hand, can be far more difficult to manipulate. Reviews, both good and bad, come naturally from individuals. A string of bad reviews for a business will certainly drive away potential customers, and a strong list of good reviews will increase revenue. Google sees this the same way. By relying on the individual users as the “votes” for the web site, Google has a more reliable gauge to justify the ranking.

Additionally, this system is more difficult to manipulate. Even if I were to get all of my friends and relatives to post positive comments regarding a web site, in the big picture, it is likely a small percentage of the overall feedback.

Take Advantage of Social Media

Use social media to your advantage by setting up Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, Google+ accounts, and other socially interactive sites to support your web site and business. Add content! Yes, it is a lot of work to continually add new content to all of the different outlets, but it is a critical factor in maintaining a good social media presence. Then engage users on those sites, and encourage positive comments and reviews. This not only helps with your site ranking, but also helps on the customer level, which is what this is all about in the first place.

As always, this is only one item in a list of many factors to work with in good, SEO development. This is an area, however, that will continue to grow in importance to the search engines, as it is a reliable measure of a popularity, usefulness and quality. Like it or not, SEO practitioners need to understand the different aspects and opportunities of the social side of the web. Going beyond the code will create more success overall.

But what happens when you develop an SEO firm that has hundreds, if not thousands of clients? And what if some of these clients need to track more than 100 keywords? The solution is ZoomRank’s Enterprise Level of service.

Based on the needs of agencies and large businesses, ZoomRank’s Enterprise level allows businesses and agencies to manage multiple SEOs, working on multiple client sites, while maintaining all of the keyword rank reporting in one place. With thousands, and even hundreds of thousands of keywords, a large agency has the ability to secure monitoring and reporting and a reasonable cost.

The ZoomRank Enterprise level of service allows for assigning accounts to individual SEOs, where they work with their assigned clients and provide specific site reporting. Accounts can be moved from one SEO to another, shared, and accessed by management. Plus, as a way to further promote the agency, reporting is white labeled and branded with the agency’s information.

While the Enterprise solution isn’t the right solution for every instance, it is a great solution for the bigger agency with multiple SEOs and a large client base. Tracking search engine results is key to providing reporting to the client that supports the value of the work you provide, and for the agency management, it provides visibility into the performance of the individual SEOs.

The Panda updates also gave us new targets in written content, increasing the minimum amount of written content that should be used in a page to 500 words. In this case Google is looking for more user friendly content. Of course your goal should always be to provide good written content for your visitor while focusing on specific keywords to increase the page rank.

With more written content on the web site, you have the opportunity to use more long-tail keywords to attract more search-specific visitors. Something I have found on my own web sites is competing with big, well established web sites for short-tail keywords can be difficult, especially when my site is relatively new. But optimizing for the long-tail terms gives me a much greater chance of being on the first page with the competition. Although the traffic quantity isn’t as high, the quality is better due to the long-tail
search term the user has entered.

If you are following Google’s insistence in adding more relevant content to your site to improve your search engine rankings, then this is good reason to explore the long tail keywords. Just like you would do with any of your highly targeted keywords, build pages focused on those long-tail words. Again, your traffic may be lower than having high ranking short-tail keywords, but your site can rank high on the search engines and people searching the long tail terms are more likely to visit your site. In terms of
conversion, like on an e-commerce site, people coming in through a long-tail search are far more valuable because they are already better qualified to make a purchase.

Like most SEOs, I will optimize for both high traffic short-tail keywords and a set of long-tail words. Clients will typically only recognize the obvious, short tail key terms. A little education and a good plan will drive more targeted traffic relatively easily.

The most notable change is the new dashboard with movable widgets. Holding five widgets, the new dashboard set up allows you to customize how you look at the overall data in a single view. Select the widget you want to use with your dashboard reporting, and drag it to the spot you want it to occupy. Although the number of different widgets is limited right now, additional widgets are planned for future release.

The larger, but less obvious changes are in the data grid. On the data side, gone is dark blue grid of keywords and placements, but now sports a bright, open interface that is more flexible than ever. In the previous version you were limited to the data provided – there was no choice but to see the ranking positions for Google, Yahoo and Bing. In the new format, you have the ability to select your columns through a check box system. Now you can view only rankings from Google, plus additional metrics including URL, language, country and more. You can also view a single keyword’s complete metrics with a click, and zoom in to see specific time periods on the resulting charts.

The cool-factor doesn’t stop there. With your data in the specified columns you selected, you can download this information to a spreadsheet and generate further views and analysis. The ability to create reports is still part of the application. Running either on-the-fly or automated, daily reporting is still as easy as in the previous version, plus reports can be e-mailed to multiple addresses, so you and your client are both kept up-to-date.

Additional application updates are on the horizon for ZoomRank. The new search engine monitoring platform takes a big step forward in ranking your keywords. The new look is more appealing, and more importantly the upgraded tool is filled with more usable data and reporting capabilities.

If you are not yet a ZoomRank customer, you can take a 30-day test drive for only $4.95.