For the first time in a good while, I managed to spend a few hours sitting in sessions here in London, re-absorbing some information and even picking up a few new bits here and there. Short post, but I figured if it's new/interesting to me, it might also be enjoyable to others (hopefully).
Lisa Ditlefsen opened a new consulting agency - Verve Search. She's the brains behind some genius campaigns, including Conde Nast Hotels' Johansens property, this embarassing tragi-comedy, SEO Chicks and much more (in her former role as Head of Search for Base One). Congratulations & best of luck, Lisa!
Lisa had a few interesting items of note during her chat on Universal Search:
- She pointed out that many folks using Google Analytics don't know how to separately track universal search results. To do so, you can create a filter based on the referring URL (universal results, this local one or this image one, for example, contain a unique piece in the URL string). The string to filter for is "oi=", which can refer to a number of items. More detail in this post from SearchCowboys (you can also apply this same logic to any analytics package).
- She also mentioned, briefly, that you can use vertical search results (videos, images, news results, etc.) as a great way to help with reputation management campaigns. This one should have been obvious, but I actually never considered it!
- During the session, Will and I wondered (via Twitter) if one could actually build a network to game Google's display of image search results...
Horst Joepen, CEO of SearchMetrics in Berlin, had some interesting stats to share based on their amalgamated rank tracking data (note that SearchMetrics' tool pulls from Google's results with 100 URLs displayed at a time) from December 2008 of 3.3 million keyword searches (that's a lot of tracking!):
- 29.9% of the results contained at least one video result
- They estimate that a video result in the top 10 pulls between 10-30% of the clicks from the page
- Of the video services, the shares (in Google SERPs) are YouTube (69%), Metacafe (11%), Google Video (7%)
Luisella Mazza from Google's Search Quality Team in Dublin also spoke on Universal and has some surprisingly good marketing tips (keep putting her on panels, Google):
- Google's video sitemaps let you map your own thumbnail images to videos, which can help create much more compelling images and thus, improve CTR in the SERPs for those doing video SEO.
- For image search optimization, Google has an image labeler in Webmaster Tools that you can enable if you don't have the time/bandwidth to do so yourself.
- A brilliant use of Google Local's more advanced functionality is to submit coupons along with your advanced listing to help boost traffic & sales (you can also submit images of your business that contain a coupon, which is pretty cool)
On the measuring success panel, several panelists made some keen insights worth repeating:
- John Marshall of Market Motive noted that a critical reason to track rankings (or at least good competitive data) is that it gives you a better sense of how you're performing from a share perspective. For example, you could be getting more search traffic but losing share because traffic overall in your sector (or for your keywords) is up, but you're actually under-performing next to the competition.
- John also noted that many people trust Google Analytics simply "because the graphs are pretty." Productizing SEMs; heed this call.
- Another panelist noted that E-Benchmarkers, an anonymous peer rating service, can review your internal analytics and tell you how you perform in your given sector. Apparently, this is particularly applicable/useful in the world of finance.
- Onalytica - which measures "buzz" and brand mentions in the social media sphere, was also recommended as a high priced, but valuable service.
Unfortunately, that's all I've got for the day, but London has been terrific so far, particularly spending time with our partners, Distilled, whom I've neglected for far too long. I'm on a panel in 9 hours, so I need to run and attempt to banish my remaining jetlag, but will hopefully have more to share tomorrow.
wow thanks for the kind words and link Rand =) It was so weird seeing you in the audience and me on a panel, what's Obi One doing in the audience? It was a fun panel =)
It is quiet daunting starting my own consultancy, but I'm super excited. And I'm set on making it a success, there is no plan B ;)
Great catching up with you! I will see you in 5 min probably (as you are walking around right now lol)
Congrats on the new agency Lisa :-)
Your notes on John Marshall's presentation raise a question for me. For large web properties with hundreds of thousands of referring keywords in a month, what is a practical application of rank tracking and how would it be applied to determining market share?
It looks like someone went through thumbed down every comment in this post. What's up with that? Having a bad day?
It would be good if there was code to detect this kind of "thumb spam" and auto-ban the user's account.
I'm taking care of it...
Nice little recap, Rand. It was so much fun hanging out with all of you guys last night! Sorry we kept you out so late, but Twitter tells me you've rocked your presentation this morning, so we obviously didn't do too much damage ;)
Some interesting tidbits there, my thoughts:
Oh, and nice to see you over here as always :-)
Nice summary Randfish. Looks like I should have been at SES London this year :/
Thanks Rand,
Great notes and cheaper than a flight to London. ;-)
>>>Of the video services, the shares (in Google SERPs) are YouTube (69%), Metacafe (11%), Google Video (7%)...???
Does anyone remember the interview with Matt Cutts when he said something about Google going over board to include more videos in search results that are not from Google properties???
Rand, great one day recap of the SES London. I enjoyed the orion panel session this morning...the discrepancies about the canonicalisation of urls between you and Kevin Ryan? definitely brought some entertainement to the discussion. i like it when two speakers kind of disagree ona given topic. :)
Some great new bits of information to chew on here Rand. Thanks.
I was struck by SearchMetric's data on video. If you're not using video, then this data is a clear sign that you should get started now.
As a side note, I wrote my own custom rank checking code and noticed that you surprisingly get different results when you search with 100 URLs displayed at a time. After discovering this I modified my code to loop through the 10 pages instead. Just thought this might be an interesting point to share with others who are checking their rankings.
I'm curious, does anyone have a theory as to why the rankings are different? For example:
https://www.google.com/search?q=komondor+mop+dog&num=100
versus
https://www.google.com/search?q=komondor+mop+dog
If you're basing it on a hundred results at a time, then obviously the double indentations for sites that have results on say, the 1st and 4th pages normally would influence the difference in rankings than if you were to restrict to 10 results at a time. Is that what you mean?
***
Edit: Aah, sorry, just took the time to actually look at your SERPs like a good mozzer would have done in the first place, and I see my answer doesn't really address your question as I thought it did.
Interesting Information!
Amazing information about the stats of videos. I would have thought Google Video would have had more of a share than 7%
That is not that surprising that people would rather click on a video if it is high up in the search results. Video is going to become a very important part of search in the near future.
Great Post Rand - some great tips to think about!
Although why is it most of the nifty tools like the vouchers Google release, arn't avaliable in the UK - typical!
I was in the same universal panel - but didn't get to any other sessions yesterday so useful stuff - thanks. Looking forward to getting to more sessions today and tomorrow with a bit of luck. It's been fun hanging out - I promise I'll get a blog post done for you soon!