Google adds page level data to its Webmaster Tools providing AdWords equivalent for organic search

Exciting news for all data obsessed search marketers, Google just added page level data to its Webmaster Tools! Previously Google would only show you how your entire domain was ranking for organic search terms but now you can also see the same data for your top pages (see below).

Google Webmaster Tools will tell you what pages are ranking organically for what search terms, how many times your pages were displayed on search results pages (i.e. impressions), your average rank, the amount of clicks and the click-through rate including change over time.

Essentially Google is now providing marketers with the organic equivalent of AdWords data so download your paid search data from AdWords, your organic search data from Webmaster Tools and compare the two and I'm sure you will find some interesting insights that will allow you to optimise both your paid and organic search campaigns. 

Given there's already and integration between Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools (i.e. you can use the Google Analytics code to authenticate your site rather than having to add meta data), I'm also wondering how long it will take for Google Webmaster data to appear in Google Analytics so we don't have to manually compare the two data sets.

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Google launches another new search results page feature: Preview popup for organic search listings

Just in case you haven't noticed yet, Google introduced a new search results page feature - previews! If you don't click on the actual search result page link but just somewhere in the vicinity of the listing an overlay pops up showing a preview of what you will get if you decide to click through. 

Interestingly enough, the preview function is only available for organic search results (which seems a bit inconsequential) but nevertheless an interesting innovation and I'm wondering how this will impact click-through rates (please share if you notice anything in your data). If anything, the new feature will elevate the importance of appealing website design as I cannot imagine people clicking through to lame looking landing pages anymore.

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Big blow for web analytics: Google search is going secure and along the way hiding all referrer data

Google search is currently in the process of beta testing a secure search, check it out yourself at https://www.google.com.
 
Even though this might be commendable from a privacy perspective, the move could potentially have devastating effects for all search marketers and online analysts. Turning the normal Google search results into secure pages will essentially hide all usage information including the referrer string which contains data on the used search term. So if you would like to know what keywords are driving your business, you're out of luck. For all secure searches, standard analytics software packages will no longer be able to see the what domain referred the visitor (i.e. search engine) and what search term was used (see screen shots below).
 
It's rumoured that China may be part of the motivation for the switch as this will prevent filtering of certain keyword searches as well as the ability to packet sniff the usage of Google. The switch hasn't rolled out in Hong Kong yet, but you can safely assume it won't be too far away!
 
For more information check out the following Google and Wired articles.
(download)
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Google Webmaster Tools gets more transparent, now shows impressions and clicks by result position

In case you didn't catch it, Google Webmaster Tools recently deployed a VERY useful new feature. You can now break your sites search traffic down by the query keywords and also your position in the results. These new stats show how many times you appeared in the results for a given search (impressions) and also how you performed (clicks and CTR). The data also breaks down which pages the users were sent to on your site.

You wouldn't have to be Einstein to know Google is definitely using this information to adjust search result rankings. It's bringing more of an adwords style performance metric into the search algorithm. If people love clicking your link, then it's probably a good result for that search. This type of adjustment obviously helps to weed out crap results, but if it's a well formed result listing to a bad site it may not matter too much (Note: that's likely where Chrome and/or Google Analytics usage data are integrated)

Below shows how the Datalicious web site is performing for the search term "osama bin laden" (Note: We were surprised to see we somehow get traffic off this term too!). For a given query you can see the traffic, and the click through rates for each position. This is not a fantastic example as the click through is too low to compare, but for high traffic terms you will notice wild variations in the click through percentage of each position in the search results. 

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Tynt: Leveraging the copying and pasting of your website content for search optimisation

Tynt is an interesting piece of technology that deals with people copying text from your web site. The software essentially adds a backlink to the copied text that is also trackable. The result is that when people copy the text, more often that not they will also paste your link.
 
The benefits of this technology are pretty obvious, more back links which increases traffic and aids SEO, as well as additional analytics to help you better understand your site content.
 
The company has a patent pending on the technology and it is apparently already used by thousands of sites. It is free and the total javascript payload is only approximately 12k. Worth a try, particularly for content rich sites ... 
 
For more details, see http://www.tynt.com/
 
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