Google Cut Off SEO Keyword Data

Well they did it again. For at least the second time this year Google has changed how they are ranking your web site. Google said a few weeks ago that all keywords from organic searches will be encrypted and/or secured through the HTTPS protocols. From an SEO perspective, this means site owners and marketers will no longer benefit from organic referral keyword data.

Ouch there goes all those SEO amitures running around saying 1st page Google guaranteed. Don’t know why anyone would fall for that stuff anyway but. . .

The term "Not provided" is a term that SEOs have had to deal with for the past couple of years. If you are unfamiliar with "not provided," this is how a referral keyword is listed in Google Analytics as a result of an encrypted search. "Not provided" started in October 2011, when Google decided to change its privacy policy to protect users who were logged into their Google accounts. These logged-in users performing a query through Google would then have their keywords suppressed from Web analytics tools. These keywords showed as "not provided" in Google Analytics, as "keyword unavailable" in Omniture and as "search phrase not provided" in WebTrends

Over the years, the amount of traffic from "not provided" referrals grew. This was not only due to an increasing number of users logged into Google accounts, but also, Firefox 14 included secure search in its search bar. Then Safari with iOS6. Then this year, Chrome started encrypting searches performed.

In September, something happened. Something that made "not provided" become the rule of the web. In September 2013, there was a sudden spike of "not provided" traffic. That is basically when Google started turning off the magic switch on organic keyword referrals.

What does this mean for marketers? How can you adjust to make sure your site is found effectively in search?

This move has made many SEO marketers mad. Well ya, now they have to work harder. It really changed how hard they have to work top get results. I will say a good SEO marketer is worth their weight in gold but the bad ones were really getting away with murder. Efforts to focus on keywords at the page level will become much more difficult. You still have to be mindful. Key words and met tag descriptions are still a must but where data was available to show SEO marketers which keywords to target, well now it's almost a guessing game. What could be done in a month now will take a year. Google Webmaster Tools do continue to provide some degree of organic keyword referral data, but it there are limitations. Some people are saying that this is merely sampled data and no complete. Additionally, it only shows the top 2,000 keywords, and data that is no older than three months. Google says it is working on extending the backdate to a year, but this still means SEO marketers will have to download keyword data on a monthly basis. Otherwise there will be no way to make year-over-year comparisons.

Larson Notes & Satire:  Yep, if you are not on the cutting edge you’re on the cutting block. If you site has going down I the rankings or not getting the hits you were, well face up to the face that you don’t know everything or maybe it’s time to find someone new to work on your sites SEO and page ranking.

There is a reason that Larson & Associates is #1 in a Google, Yahoo or Bing key word search. Trying typing in “telemarketing for printers”  Maybe we do it better then the rest.

If you’re behind with your numbers we CAN help! If you want your business to be more and have more, call us for an appointment.

Howard Larson
Larson & Associates
Target Marketing & Telesales Professionals for new account acquisition
Making good businesses great and great businesses even better
847-991-1294
howard@larsonassociates.ws
http://www.larsonassociates.ws
http://larsonassociates.blogspot.com
http://www.facebook.com/LarsonAndAssociatesFans
http://www.linkedin.com/in/larsonassociates

https://twitter.com/LarsonAssociate

P.S. We make telesales for small business affordable by offering programs down to only 15 hours a week. Maybe you could add telesales into your marketing mix call today and find out.

Power Drive Your Search

We all understand how powerful it is to own the top spots in a key work search. The higher up you are usually means you are going to get some good quality hits on your site. On the same line of thought, a keyword search is one of the few chances where you have someone just stopping by (your web site) and basically saying “This is what I am looking to buy.”

So some of my more aggressive customers have come to old Uncle Howard and asked, “How can I get more without killing my budget?” And to solve this problem I put a plan that wedded Social Media Marketing and Search Engine Marketing a little differently. First I had a landing page created for the project, packed with all those juicy key words in content, Meta tag key works and title. Then launching that I constructed a Social Media attack around that message basically pushing it into and through their Social Media world so when we were done, they actually owned the first page of a keyword search.


Now it you push it to its logical conclusion you will use those same keywords and content in email, mobile to direct mail to yes your telemarketing attack and hammer those words home.


Now add a pay of click?


Larson Notes & Satire: Can it be done? It already has. I have always preached that you need to work within your budget and your means to hold and work your media at near 100% efficiency. Do that day in and day out and you will control your position and your destiny.


“We don’t sell lists, we find customers.”


Want to be a Blogger but can’t write?
Try our ghost blog writing service!


Howard Larson
Larson & Associates
Target Marketing & Telesales Professionals for new account acquisition
Making good businesses great and great businesses even better
847-991-0488
howard@larsonassociates.ws
http://www.larsonassociates.ws/
http://larsonassociates.blogspot.com/
http://www.facebook.com/LarsonAndAssociatesFans
http://member.merchantcircle.com/larsonassociates
https://twitter.com/LarsonAssociate


P.S. We make telesales for small business affordable by offering programs down to only 15 hours a week. Maybe you could add telesales into your marketing mix call today and find out.

Need A Social Media Expert?

After our blog of yesterday “Bing To Index Facebook” I have to ask the leading in question, Do you need a Social Media Expert on your staff or team?


As Social Media grows as an accepted form or marketing, advertising and sales do you need a Social Media Expert? If you are a Social Media enthusiast you are probably jumping up and down saying Yes! Yes! Yes! If not, you’re sitting there thinking ya right. Social Media is a bunch of busy bodies sitting around with nothing else to do.


I doubt if you even have to guess where I stand on this issue. Yes!


No matter what side your on, pro or con I think that we can all agree that when a SM program fails it is because of 1 of 2 reasons, either the company went out and set up a Facebook pang with a twitter account in a loud voice declares “We are doing Social Media” and does not work to be established and noticed and makes no consorted effort to become a involved player or a company goes out and tries to buy their way to the top without any real strategy. Wrong platform, wrong content, and they push out there message thinking it works like traditional advertising does.


Think again, Social Media heavy on the SOCIAL.


I have found and seen that companies that are doing well in Social Media Marketing for the most part have a person or group of (excited) people who serve as the core to their program. This is a person or people who want to be using the social channels any way they can, tying to push the envelope to deliver the kind of INTERACTION MESSAGE that the F’s (friends, fans, followers) want to see, hear and interact with.


Now the key question for me, Can this function or should this function be outsourced? IN some ways yes and others you better think about it.


Using a company like mine can help you plan out your attack, organize it, putting together the strategy, policies and general education of your employees on what to do with this new tool. Some people say that what they, an outside source might not be able to do is actually speak for the company, but again I question that. In the Larson plan there is 1 person and1 person alone that works on any given account. They know you, love you, understand you. They can get so close that they are able to speak as “the company” would. Then you need to trust them to do it. Can you? If you hold the leash too tight your Social Media will stagnate and stall.


Larson Notes & Satire: As a company I have for the last 13 years devoted myself to lead generation and the kind of advertising and marketing the gets customers to my clients FAST. Today, not tomorrow. They don’t have time to wait, and I don’t have the patience. So where does Social Media fit in? When we started at it was a little more each year, then the year became a little more each month and the month became a week and the week became a day. Will the day become an hour? http://www.larsonassociates.ws/SocialMediaMarketing we are ready to serve you if you want us.


“We don’t sell lists, we find customers.”


Remember our 3 new programs for 2011
1st is our Virtual Sales Manager Program.
2nd our Sales Function Outsourcing Program
3rd our Virtual Business Consulting Program


Howard Larson
Larson & Associates
Target Marketing & Telesales Professionals for new account acquisition
Making good businesses great and great businesses even better
847-991-0488
howard@larsonassociates.ws
http://www.larsonassociates.ws/
http://larsonassociates.blogspot.com/
http://www.facebook.com/LarsonAndAssociatesFans
http://member.merchantcircle.com/larsonassociates

https://twitter.com/LarsonAssociate


P.S. We make telesales for small business affordable by offering programs down to only 15 hours a week. Maybe you could add telesales into your marketing mix call today and find out.

Bing To Index Facebook

Bing has made an announcement that might prove to be a big hit, I mean a very big hit for those of us now are using Facebook as a Social Media Marketing tool and at the same time huge blow to Google’s dominance. Starting now, yes now, Bing is incorporating Facebook data into its search results. Been there and did some searches and yes it is up and running on the Bing search engine! So now if you search for something on Bing and you have activated Facebook results, you will see the pages, products and websites your friends (even their faces show up) like and recommend way up in results, no matter if that website normally ranks first second or heaven forbid, the last page on a search.

Perhaps even more interesting is that these results will appear totally independent of any traditional and what we thought of as normal SEO practices. If your friends like it, it will appear on the first page. Magic?


More than ever for companies engaged in Social Media Marketing “It's Not What you Know, but Who you Know”. Content is important but it is who you are rubbing elbows with that will be making a major difference.


The more your business is visible on Facebook, the better chance of your website being Liked and your content, products and services being pushed higher up on this new social search results.


If your business has not been active in Social Media Marketing you better get it going. (A pause for a commercial message: At Larson’s we know what we are doing and we can get you going on a Social Media Marketing campaign, quickly, easily and completely)


Yet, content is still King, long live the King. The only way a page will be Liked by the masses on Facebook is if it contains great content. So don’t think you can park your content on the side and get all your friends to like you and you will be projected up onto the heaven of web search pages, the first page. It is still going to take work, lots of work. Varied content, blog posts, videos, images and audio, not to mention content that is optimized. And not to add more challenges but this does not kill off traditional SEO. Pages will still need to be "found" in order to be Liked from this new Bing button. Total strangers to your business can still influence search results, so SEO still matters.


It's easy to see that Bing is relying, or are they hoping and praying on using Facebook for social search. You might think that, because it's focused only on Facebook, this news is not totally earth shaking, as Facebook goes past three-quarters of a billion users across the world, but, it is. At least to Bing. Consider now that Facebook users 750,000000,000 (looks more impressive when you type out all the zeros) of them now have a reason to use Bing rather than Google.


Another interesting thought is that Facebook could technically block Google from indexing any or all of its content. This would and could kill Google’s need to heavy Facebook users.


In the words of Bing:
"At Bing, our mission is to help you make faster, more informed decisions. We designed a new way to experience search, focusing on great design, task completion, instant answers, and vertical categories like shopping and travel to help you make decisions faster. While we’ve made great strides in these areas, there is a huge opportunity for improvement. Today, search remains largely driven by facts and links – we think it’s time to change that.


Research tells us that 90% of people seek advice from family and friends as part of the decision making process. This “Friend Effect” is apparent in most of our decisions and often outweighs other facts because people feel more confident, smarter and safer with the wisdom of their trusted circle. A movie critic may pan the latest summer block buster, but your friends say it’s the feel good movie of the year, so you ignore the critic and go (and wholeheartedly agree). Historically, search hasn’t incorporated this “Friend Effect” – and 80% of people will delay making a decision until they can get a friend’s stamp of approval. This decision delay, or period of time it takes to hunt down a friend for advice, can last anywhere from a few minutes to days, whether you’re waiting for a call back, text, email or tweet.


Today, Bing is bringing the collective IQ of the Web together with the opinions of the people you trust most, to bring the “Friend Effect” to search. Starting today, you can receive personalized search results based on the opinions of your friends by simply signing into Facebook. New features make it easier to see what your Facebook friends “like” across the Web, incorporate the collective know-how of the Web into your search results, and begin adding a more conversational aspect to your searches. Decisions can now be made with more than facts, now the opinions of your trusted friends and the collective wisdom of the Web.


You can quickly see what your friends like and are sharing. Find and connect with the right friends faster. Pick the brains of friends of who live where you’re traveling and share shopping lists with your own team of retail gurus. And, return the favor to your friends by liking more things on the Web. With one click you can let your network know that you like a brand, an article, a celebrity or even a place. Because we know the best decisions are not just fueled by facts, they require the opinions and recommendations of your friends."


If you are a heavy social or local Social Networking person Google search results, while complete are now less relevant as my person search needs become more social and localized. How many online socialites are there? Now you can start to understand why Google has been frantically trying to enter the social space with Google +1. Maybe, for once it's too little, too late for Google.


Larson Notes & Satire: Ill just let the above words set in and let you think on it for a while. If you are not hammering away at Social Media Marketing like we have (active since 2006) you better. I’ve been saying it over and over. Get involved in Social Media Marketing for your business, and then Google started doing “Real Time Search”. At that time the Larson web site http://www.larsonassociates.ws/ saw a 1000% weekly hit increase, yes you heard me 1000%. Now with this new Bing deal? http://www.larsonassociates.ws/SocialMediaMarketing we are ready to serve ourselves and you. Will we see another 1000% increase? That would be nice.


“We don’t sell lists, we find customers.”


Remember our 3 new programs for 2011
1st is our Virtual Sales Manager Program.
2nd our Sales Function Outsourcing Program
3rd our Virtual Business Consulting Program


Howard Larson
Larson & Associates
Target Marketing & Telesales Professionals for new account acquisition
Making good businesses great and great businesses even better
847-991-0488
howard@larsonassociates.ws
http://www.larsonassociates.ws/
http://larsonassociates.blogspot.com/
http://www.facebook.com/LarsonAndAssociatesFans
http://member.merchantcircle.com/larsonassociates

https://twitter.com/LarsonAssociate


P.S. We make telesales for small business affordable by offering programs down to only 15 hours a week. Maybe you could add telesales into your marketing mix call today and find out.