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| Early Launch of SERPs Analysis Tool + June Linkscape Update Posted: 08 Jun 2011 09:21 AM PDT Posted by randfish If you're anything like me, you spend several hours each month (maybe more often) preparing elaborate worksheets of ranking analyses to help uncover why a particular site/page is outranking another and what it will take to reach top rankings. Which is why the screenshot below has me pretty excited. That's the first version of the new SERPs Analysis Tool, and, even in this early form, it's a thing of beauty. There's data on nearly every point I'd put in a worksheet comparing search results (social data and more sophisticated on-page analysis is coming soon). It's exportable to CSV so I can put the data into Excel and make cool charts and graphs, and it automatically generates based on any keyword set in a matter of 10-90 minutes (might be a bit longer this week since it just launched). Here's some more views: Ever since Adam tossed out that awesome preview last month, I've been dying to play around with this. Now that it's finally here, I can almost feel the pain of manual SERPs analysis disappearing. Feel free to give it a spin and provide feedback. To get the full data, just run a keyword difficulty report and click the "run full report" button. In the next few weeks, we'll have more data, some additional UI elements and a version in the web app, but for now, feel free to save enormous amounts of time + energy with this first version. Of course, that's not all! Linkscape's index is also updated as of Monday of this week (we accidentally had a brief rollback, but the correct data's out there now) and have some new analyses of our metrics correlations, too. This is part of how we measure whether our data quality is improving - on the whole, our correlations should improve over time if our index quality (what we crawl, how we handle duplicates, canonicalization, etc) is getting better.
The short story is that there's barely any change from the prior index from May (a couple metrics fell by >0.01), but we have improved somewhat from the figures presented in the ranking factors from late March (when, for example, Page Authority was as low as 0.28) . We've also improved the coverage of the index for URLs we found in Google's top 30 results across a large sample set of keywords from 84.27% to 85.59%. In the future, we'll continue to try reporting regularly on these numbers to stay transparent about our own data confidence and quality. Here's the stats for the latest Linkscape update:
This index also features the first time we're treating the rel=canonical attribute like a 301 redirect. After several tests internally and observing the search engines' relatively liberal handling of rel=canonical, we feel this is the best behavior from a link-juice / metrics calculation perspective. You'll still see these as regular "links" in Open Site Explorer for now, but we plan to update to show rel=canonicaling pages with a special notation (like a 301) in the tool soon. Enjoy the fresh link data, the spiffy new SERPs Analysis feature and let us know if you've got feedback or suggestions. p.s. The new tool is PRO-only, but if you want to give it a spin, there's this spiffy free trial thingy we've got going :-)       |
| 8 Methods + Lots of Tools for Getting to Know Your Audience Posted: 07 Jun 2011 06:18 PM PDT Posted by Laura Lippay Music to enjoy while reading this post: We Know Something You Don't Know by DJ Format & Jurassic 5 You provide something specific: That might be a product, a service, a trustworthy source of information, a community space… And you know exactly what your audiences may be searching for to find your wares. But do you know what they really want out of you? Do you know how they really feel? Do you know what they want more of or less of in your industry? Do you know what they like or don’t like on your site or your competitor’s sites? Do you know what they think about your new product launch? If you knew this information, how could you use it to improve your products or services? In this post we’ll look at a few ways in which you can gather insightful information to help you position your brand against your competitors, laser target the specific desires of your audiences, and dive into the psyche of the people you want to attract and convert, categorized by what they want out of your industry, you, and your site. WHAT DO YOUR AUDIENCES WANT OUT OF YOUR INDUSTRY? Let’s say you’re in the online car insurance industry. You are considering what steps need to be taken to avoid search engine algo disasters and provide unique, compelling content and services that your audiences want. You’ve done your keyword research, so you know what search terms people are using, but what do they really want from your industry? Here’s some ways to find out. 1) Industry Market Research You can typically find a wealth of market research by industry from sites like the ones listed below, although oftentimes this research is not cheap. What to look for:
Sources:
2) Social Industry Sentiment Many people think of social media as a way to connect with your industry influencers and brand advocates. But social media data is also spectacular for simply passively gathering insights. There is a wealth of information online about your industry and how people feel about it, talk about it, interact with it, etc. This information can help you take a strategic approach at entering an industry, or refine your current positioning and offerings within an industry. What to look for:
Source A: Expensive, detailed (and mostly deep crawl) social media monitoring tools There is still a major gap in social monitoring tools where the ones that provide the best crawl and interface for useful, actionable industry and/or brand health data can run you from $30,000/year to $30,000 month or more. For enterprise-level sites looking to harness conversations around the web, enterprise-level social monitoring solutions are the only answer (in this case, typically as an alternative or accompaniment to traditional survey-based brand health metrics). I’ve done audits on several of these solutions over the years and here are some worth looking into if you can throw the cash towards it.
Source B: Free and cheapish (but often not very deep crawl) sentiment tools I want to have more faith in “tools for the people”, but in most cases, I’ve found search engines (see next section) to be more useful in finding good sentiment data than any of the free/cheap tools (and sometimes even the expensive tools). Try the software out and compare the insights you find with what you find in the next section using search engines to make the decision on whether it might be worth shelling out $200-$3000/mo or more towards these sentiment research tools.
Source C: Search Engines If you don’t have a social listening tool or you’re just not getting good info from it, use the tool we all know and love: Search! Search engines still crawl much farther and deeper than most social media tools, so you can find more information if you know how to look. Search for any variation of things like:
Additionally, search Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo! Answers or other social networks for the same type of information. I typically find the best feedback in this manner (using search + searching social networks), although it is more time consuming than the social media monitoring tools.
WHAT DO YOUR AUDIENCES WANT OUT OF YOU? 3) Social Brand Asset Sentiment In addition to what people want out of your industry, it is important to know what people want out of you and your brand assets. Your brand assets could include your services, products, product features, executives at the company, editorial personalities, and the brand name in general. What to Look for + Sources Test brand asset topics out in the social media monitoring tools mentioned above (including search engines) to gather insights on what people around the web are saying about your brand. Each tool may provide different types of information, like:
4) Traditional Brand Sentiment These survey-based reports typically show similar types of insights as the expensive social monitoring tools, only they are derived from surveys rather than scraped from the web. What to Look for
Sources: WHAT DO YOUR AUDIENCES WANT OUT OF YOUR SITE? Lastly, you’ll want to gather insights on the site experience that your audiences are having, and how it can be streamlined and improved. Don’t forget, search engines want to see sites that people find valuable, so make sure you’re doing what you can to attract your audiences and keep them engaged, as well as prompting the sharing of your content in social spaces. 5) Solicited Site Feedback If you ask your visitors for feedback you can use that data as well. Although soliciting feedback is not as unobtrusive as just using your site analytics data to determine where there are problems, it may be useful in getting a more human response to the potential issues on your site. Consider small incentives in return for feedback, like discounts, being entered into a contest, access to survey results (when appropriate), or other types of special recognition. Sources:
6) On-Site Search Queries Looking at what people are searching for on your site, and what they are or aren’t finding, can be very useful site feedback. For sites with large databases like music or movies, site search may be the simplest way to get to the destination. See what is searched for the most to provide that content up front. For other sites, look at what people are searching for, which may be an indication of what they expect to find but can’t. Determine how your site can better meet those needs. What to Look for:
Sources:
7) Click-tracking & heat maps These colorful displays are probably the coolest ways of gathering site feedback. Use these tools to determine whether people are seeing your most important content and calls to action on each page. What to Look for:
Sources: 8) Focus Groups and User Groups Set up some objectives for a focus group to try to accomplish with your site and watch how they try to get there, what obstacles they come across along the way, how they think and feel about the experience, and more. This can be useful feedback from people who are not familiar with the site the way you and your team that are building the site are. What to Look for:
Sources:
Have any additional methods or tools not listed here? Please share!     |
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