Search Engine Optimisation

Tracking Monthly Differences in Keyword Rankings with Excel

If you track search engine rankings and send reports to clients every month,  a good way to present this information in a monthly report is to create an Excel sheet with historical data of your rankings charting your progress from when their campaign began to the present date.

Keyword Checking Tools like RankTracker is good for giving you an indication of whether your search terms have gone up or down. But if you check your rankings often, have many keywords and track both local and global versions of Bing, Yahoo as well as Google,  the final published report will be quite long. Often you (or a client) will have to trawl through pages and pages of data before finding the data they require that month.

Using Conditional Formatting in Excel, creating a simple chart to track whether you have made a positive or negative impression in the SERPs is made really simple. All you need to do is set up your keywords when the

Large Brands and poor SEO – Nike we are talking about you!

We don’t really like to brag about the success we have within the serps for our clients but this one is worth mentioning. I have monitored the SEO skills of a number of large brands for a while now and continue to be unimpressed. Of course there are the likes of ASOS who are very strong within the serps however some of the traditional offline brands seem to struggle.

A great example of this is from some of our own SEO work within the Golf industry. Using the search term ‘Nike Golf clubs’ you will see the following listings and positions:

Google Instant SEO

Google’s sea change was announced today in the form of Google Instant, interesting challenges for SEO lie ahead, I’ve tried the new system, in a nut shell it’s fast predictive search, looks at bit messy to be honest, however it’s Google and in time it will feel like second nature. For SEO I don’t think it will make much difference (then again I could be completely wrong here), results are still based on keywords predicted or not. One thing I did notice is the ‘I’m feeling lucky’ tab is far more prominent, not sure how Google judges who should be the lucky ones to receive that traffic. At Blueclaw we’ll play around with Google Instant and report back. What’s your opinion on Google Instant?

Blueclaw now offers AdWords training

Not all companies using Google AdWords use an agency to manage their advertising budgets and recognising this fact, Blueclaw now offers training services for Google AdWords for those people that require further training for managing their own accounts. Even for those companies that do use external agencies to manage their spend, it can be difficult to keep up to date with all the new tools and features that Google releases on a weekly basis and these training sessions are designed to share the knowledge that we have obtained through the day to day optimisation of our clients’ accounts.

Google’s Gone Brand Centric

Good morning SEO world. Today I read something pretty interesting on SEOMoz. I’d like to do a little debate/exercise thingy.

  1. Everyone go to Google.com
  2. Search for the word “Apple”
  3. Now what do you see?