Thought I’d do another post on SEO Rank Monitor which I reviewed last week, I wanted to show a quick way to get your keywords into the software with tags attached. SEO Rank Monitor allows you to group sets of keywords together using tags. This is a great feature as you can quickly filter your keywords by group and see which ones are performing better than others. This is very helpful as sometimes you can work on a few keywords, which will then have an effect on other keywords within the group. So using SEO Rank Monitor you can see these changes easily.
How to Import Keyword Groups in SEO Rank Monitor
1. Put your keywords into Excel in your first column, then in the next column add the name of the keyword group, eg:
2. In the next column, enter the following formula:
=CONCATENATE(A1,”|”,B2)
3. Drag the formula down the rest of your cells so that you get something like this:
4. Highlight the cells in the column you just created
5. Login to SEO Rank Monitor and go to Settings > Keywords and paste in your keywords, click Submit
So now you will be able to filter your keyword rankings by tag and narrow down your results better! If you are a regular user of SEO Rank Monitor, you may also want to checkout my post on Exporting Keyword Rankings.
Tags: keyword ranking software, SEO, seo rank monitor, seo rank monitor tips
As regular readers will know, I love Google Analytics. Its a great piece of free software and can tell you a lot about how users interact with your website. However it can’t do everything, sometimes you need something a bit more advanced to tell you more details about users. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at various Analytics products which help spot problems with converting a visitor into a buyer, one of the products I came across was Clicktale.
I noticed that they have a free trial so I decided to install Clicktale on this blog to get an idea of what it can do. I was pretty amazed with what I learnt and what Clicktale can do, even with just the free version. With the free version you get access to click heatmaps which show you were people have clicked on a certain page, you also get access to scrolling heatmaps which shows you which section of a page people keep their attention on the most. A great application for this would be if you have an ecommerce website and wonder whether people actually scroll all the way down a long product page.
The best part of Clicktale for me though is the opportunity to watch actual videos of browsing sessions by real users. So you can see exactly what they did as they browse your website. This really is valuable information which is also very actionable. You can make an assessment on what people do on their site and change your design or calls to action to suit. Although there is a drawback – if you are a large website recording hundreds of sessions, you can’t aggregate them into one movie like you can with heatmaps etc. So this is a potential issue.
One thing that I learnt from the analysis run on my blog, is that the blog post titled “New SEO Strategies and Marketing Ideas” which is linked from the right hand side, attracted more clicks that any other blog post in that section of the page. So I know that this kind of content is of high interest to my visitors. But it also tells me I may need to work on my other blog post titles as they attracted very little attention! You can see how this data was shown to me in the image below -
Clicktale have a free trial version which gives you a good idea of what it can do, I’d recommend just giving it a try and seeing what feedback you can get from this. I’m sure you can get some good, actionable tips just from the free version. If you are running an Ecommerce website, I think software like Clicktale is essential.
Tags: clicktale software review, Google Analytics, SEO, usability software, web analytics, web analytics software
I recently wrote a review of SEO Rank Monitor and if you read it, you will know how much I like the software! Well I came across a small problem with exporting keyword ranking data into Excel. It was only a small problem which was easily fixed after I dropped a quick email to support. But I thought that it would help to show the process here as well in case others have the same problem.
Basically when I export a report I ended up all the data being combined into one cell – not very much use to anyone!
To overcome this problem you just need to import the data in a certain way and reformat it by following these steps.
1. Open a new Excel spreadsheet
2. Go to Data > Import External Data > Import Data
3. Navigate to your CSV file that you’ve just downloaded from SEO Rank Monitor and import it
4. Select Delimited and click next on this screen:
5. Select semicolon from this screen and click next:
6. Click Finish followed by Ok
Thats it, you should now have all the data seperated nicely into columns which is much easier to manage, sort and manipulate.
If you haven’t tried it yet, read my SEO Rank Monitor Review or go over and get a free trial and see what you think.
Tags: how to export data from seo rank monitor, keyword ranking software, seo rank monitor
I wrote some time ago about the top Google Base Ranking Factors and had some good feedback and opinions. One of the questions which kept coming up was how to monitor traffic you received as a result of listing your products on Google Product Search. I’ve found a pretty good way of doing this via Google Analytics so I thought I’d share this technique with you. You do get some stats by logging into your Google Merchant Centre but I wanted to see how much revenue was being generated in comparison to other traffic sources.
If you’ve used Google Base at all, you will know that it involves uploading a feed of all of your products to the system. Part of this feed is the URL of your product, all we are doing is adding a small piece of tracking code to each of your product URLs which will feed click data into Google Analytics.
I used the principle behind the Google URL Builder to get the correct tracking URL.
I’ve basically tagged all my product URLs with the following:
?utm_source=google&utm_medium=base&utm_campaign=products
The important parts are the source=google and medium=base which feed back into Google Analytics. If you use this format, it will show as this when you view traffic sources:
Now that you have your tracking code, you need to attach it to all of your product URLs. If you are a developer or have someone to call upon, they can do this automatically for you when you generate your product feed. However if you are limited to just the standard feed, you can do some tweaking with Excel to take care of this issue quickly.
1. Download your product feed and open with Excel
2. Insert two columns to the right of the column that contains your product URL (column header should be “link”)
3. Write your tracking code into the cell to the right of the URL:
4. In the next cell to the right that you’ve previously inserted, write the following formula, substituting cell numbers if appropriate:
=CONCATENATE(B2,C2)
You should see a result similar to the screenshot below showing the two cells merged together:
5. Copy the cell formula all the way down to cover all of your products so that all of them having the tracking added.
6. Highlight all of your product URLs which now have the tracking code added, copy and paste them into Notepad
7. Delete the columns you’ve just created so that you only have the ones you started with.
8. Paste in all of your new URLs over the top of the old ones – you have to do this in order to get the spreadsheet back in a format to be uploaded – the extra columns will be rejected.
9. Upload to Google
10. After a day or do, log into Analytics and go to traffic sources. You should be seeing traffic from Google / Base showing. Assuming you are getting traffic! It can take some time to start showing and build up a good ranking. Best to test by clicking on a few of your own first to see if the tracking is working properly.
Tags: google base, track traffic from google base, tracking clicks from google base
Finding a reliable keyword ranking tool has been quite a struggle for a while now, I’ve used quite a few and they’ve had various problems. One of which was running too many queries on Google in a short space of time and getting our IP address banned – which the other guys in the office weren’t happy about! Another problem was exporting results into a nice format and monitoring over time, it often took some trickery with Excel and some extra formatting for the results to make sense over time.
I stumbled across SEO Rank Monitor by chance really, in fact I can’t actually remember where I first saw it but I remember making a note to test it. I setup an account last week and put a few sites into the interface. I went for the $39 a month plan and got the following -
- 10 Domains to track
- 2500 Keywords
- 3 Competitors
- Analytics integration
After a day or so there was enough data for me to assess how the software worked. I was very impressed, the user interface is very smart, tidy and easy to use. But the best part was the fact that the software updates my rankings automatically, plots it on a graph and shows you progress over time. It took me ages to accomplish this with Excel! Here is an example of how you can see your overall rankings at a glance:
There is also an option to integrate with Google Analytics so that the software can record how many visitors you get and aligns this number with that keywords ranking. This involves giving user access to your Analytics account which I was a bit unsure about but after an email to the rank monitor guys I thought I’d give it a shot. Again this data is great and presented in a friendly interface.
My only slight disappointment was that you can only track three competitors as well but this isn’t a major problem. I can get over it!
As you can probably tell, I’m very impressed with the software hence I’m recommending it to you guys. If you want to take a look here is the website link – SEO Rank Monitor.
Tags: Google Analytics, keyword ranking tool, keyword research, SEO, seo rank monitor
