Image optimization is an important part of running a successful eCommerce website. Since people usually begin their search for a product online, your products will have as good of a chance as any to end up in front of a customer, as long as your images are optimized.

Here are some tips for getting your images to display in Google’s image search:

1. Optimize image names

If you have hundreds (or thousands) of photos in your store, optimizing each one can be a daunting task.  There are distinct benefits to spending the time to do this, though. In the same way the right proportion of keywords in the content of a web page can help that page rank for the keyword in the search engines, the proper use of keywords in your images can help them rank as well.

Let’s take this particular photo as an example:

The file names for your product images should be descriptive, and include the right amount of keywords. Consider the:

• image file name
• image alt tag
• image name

For this product example, instead of keeping PRODUCTIMAGE22.jpg for the file name, a better choice would be to name the file: Gray-3-Button-Mens-Suit.jpg.

There are a few variations you could use to name this file, but generally it’s best to look at your web analytics to see how your customers are searching for the product. This thread on the SEOmoz Q&A section explains some best practices for image file names.

The alt tag for the image is also important, since a browser will display the alt text when the image can’t be displayed properly. Alt tags are also important for the visually impaired, as they rely on software programs to read the image alt tags to communicate what the images are.

Every image should have a corresponding alt tag. For simplicity, you can use the file name for the image’s alt tag, without the hyphens.

2. Optimize image load times

It may not seem like much, but a few extra seconds of load time on your website can cost you customers. According to Kissmetrics, most consumers wait about 5 seconds on their mobile device before they leave the website. Desktop users are even less patient, waiting 3 seconds on average.

Here’s a good rule of thumb for images: the larger the file size, the longer it will take for the page to load. To combat this problem, you can decrease the size of each image by compressing them.

If your eCommerce site has only a handful of images to compress, you can use any of these image editing tools:

• PicMonkey
• Pixlr
• Pic Resize
• Gimp
• FotoFlexer

If you have hundreds (or even thousands) of photos, compressing them one at a time is probably not a viable option.  If that’s the case for you, there are a few tools that can compress images in batches.

If your eCommerce platform runs on WordPress, download any of these plugins and run your images through:

• WP Smush.it
• Cloudinary
• EWWW Image Optimizer

There are other, similar tools and extensions for platforms like Magento and Joomla.

3. Choose optimal image file types

Different types of image files can affect the performance of a website, so it’s important to choose the right file type for the right situation.

Three of the most common image file types are:

• JPEG
• PNG
• GIF

JPEG formats typically offer a low file size and good image quality for products, while GIFs are better for smaller icons. PNGs can show more colors than JPEGs and GIFs, but file sizes can be considerably larger.

Here are examples of each type of file:

.PNG file at 195.3 KB

.JPG file at 68.7 KB

.GIF file at 51.3 KB

4. Create an image sitemap

Google says their goal with image search is to display the most relevant results to users, and that statement is no different than their goal for web search. Along with optimizing your images, you can increase the chance of having your product images indexed by creating an image sitemap, and uploading it to Google Webmaster Tools. This is especially important if your product images are served using JavaScript, and aren’t showing up in the page’s source code. You can also add images to your main sitemap.

There are a number of tools that can generate a sitemap:

• XML-Sitemaps.com
• Inspyder
• Google sitemap generator

5. Integrate social sharing into product images

Social media is an integral part of digital marketing, and social signals do play a part in search engine rankings.

There’s an opportunity for products to gain traction on bookmarking sites like Pinterest, especially if they’re products for the home and garden, or related to the beauty, fashion or food industries. The larger the net your brand casts, the greater chance your website has at attracting new visitors.

To increase the likelihood of your product pages being shared and linked to, social sharing buttons should be added to each page of the website, including product pages and product category pages.

I have always been a fan of Zappos, and they do a nice job of integrating social sharing buttons on their product pages:

“If your product images are beautiful and unique, your potential of achieving additional traffic from the [social] networks alone will be incentive enough to utilize this approach,” says SEO consultant Preston Van Dyke.

“For instance, Everlane.com takes a really unique approach to their product category pages. Check out their Oxford shirts page as an example. Rather than just laying out their shirts in the boring table, like so many eCommerce  category pages do, they take an infographic-ish approach with images. I love these pages for a lot of reasons, but they need social sharing integrated right into the experience on the category page.”

Don’t invest time in a social network that isn’t producing any fruit, however. If your customers are not using Pinterest, and Pinterest doesn’t provide any value, don’t incorporate it into your strategy. You should focus time and effort into the social networks that your customers are spending time on, and are will to share and engage with your brand.

–

With any process, greater insight comes with testing, so continually test and refine the layout and design of your product pages. Conduct interviews, commission surveys and see how customers react to changes. How can changing the angle of the product views increase revenue? Would multiple angles and colors increase conversions? How about increasing or decreasing the number of product images on a page?

Continually ask how you can bring traffic to your products through different means. While image optimization is a part of inbound marketing as a whole, you can increase the opportunity for conversions and revenue with a solid strategy behind your product images.

Image Optimization Tips For Online Stores is a post by SEO expert Andrew Johnson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Every once in a while, you come across a piece of information that revolutionizes the way you perform. I had that epiphany the other day in Google Analytics as I was experimenting with custom dashboards, and I want to share these downloads with you. Hopefully you can glean some information about the performance of your website through these custom dashboards that you otherwise wouldn’t have noticed.

What are custom dashboards?

There is so much data to be discovered in search Analytics, that it can sometimes be difficult to find the KPIs that can prove the value of an SEO campaign.

With custom dashbards, you can segment the metrics you need at a glance to understand how visitors are interacting with your site. All the important information is there in once place, and you can export that data into a PDF report to share with your company’s decision makers.

You can either set up your own custom dashboards in Google Analytics, or you can search for pre-made dashboards that will import into your Analytics profile with a few clicks.

The importance of website Analytics

For humans, introspection is an important component to being effective in life. We can’t ever begin to understand how other people view us unless we take the time for self-reflection.

The same is true for businesses and their web properties.

Analytics is all about discovering and tracking patterns in data, and how visitors interact with the pages, products and services listed on a website.

“One of the beautiful parts of using any clickstream analysis tool is the ability to segment data that provides actionable insight,” says Brian Jensen, an SEO Manager with SEO.com. “Data and metrics presented by themselves really don’t tell much of a story without some point of comparision. By providing this context we can get a better understanding of what’s really happening.”

So, without further adieu…

Here are some of my favorite Google Analytics custom dashboards:

To download these dashboards, open your Google Analytics profile, and then come back to this post, copy the URL for the download and paste it into the address bar. You can download the dashboards directly into your profile.

1. Personal blogger dashboard by DashboardJunkie.com

With this custom dashboard, you can see the basic metrics of you blog, written in plain, jargon-free English. View search terms, screen resolution, links, mobile traffic, visitor locations, visitor source, mobile metrics and popularity of content among others.

Download here >> http://www.dashboardjunkie.com/getdashboard/50

2. SEO monitoring dashboard, by Mike Meisner

Download this custom dashboard to see how well your site performs in organic search. You can view metrics related to non-branded search terms including conversions from keywords, organic visits and organic search referrals.

Download here >> https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?type=dashboard&uid=qBF59OdCT26RW9DtjiPbpg

3. Brand monitoring dashboard, by Koozai

I love this dashboard. Are you keeping track of your brand in the search engines? With this dashboard, you can see information like the number of people coming to your site through a brand name search, which social sites are sending visitors and the important hubs for your brand.

Enter your brand name into each of the widgets to track these metrics.

Download here >> https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=5naWKM71TeChQ2-lyYfseA

4. Social media dashboard, by Justin Cutroni

Track the important metrics from your social media strategy, like revenue, shared content, visitors from social, actions taken, referral traffic and more. This is a great dashboard to show how effective your efforts in social media are, and where to improve your campaign.

Download here >> http://troni.me/GASocialDash

5. Mobile Ecommerce dashboard, by Google

If you want to see how mobile users interact with your Ecommerce site, download this dashboard. You can see actions taken by visitors from social media, the bounce rate and average visit duration, mobile revenue and average order value, bounce rates for specific mobile devices and more.

Download here >> http://goo.gl/W6Wki

6. Site performance dashboard, by Google

How is page speed affecting your visitors’ experience on your site? With this dashboard, you can bring useful data to your IT team, and identify performance issues related to the website or servers.

Download here >> http://goo.gl/oJ2MU

7. [not provided] analysis dashboard, by Google

Technically, this is a custom report (not a dashboard), but is a worthwhile download. You can drill down into the data coming from [not provided] keywords in Google search, and view metrics like bounce rate, % new visits and revenue.

Download here >> http://goo.gl/x6cl5

8. PPC dashboard, by Koozai

See the effectiveness of your pay-per-click campaigns in one, single dashboard. View visits from PPC, impressions, goal completions and CTR. You can also segment the data by campaign.

Download here >> https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=Q4mOwZEzR9eNFW8Y1Dtv0A

9. Top content & searches dashboard, by Blue Riot Labs

Here’s a quick view at your top performing site content, which is great if you need to pull out some wins for a report. Includes top-visited pages, keywords and top referral sites.

Download here >> https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?type=dashboard&uid=7WuTTiykTZGHET_Srztb3Q

10 Visitor technology dashboard, by Justin Cutroni

I’ve saved the best for last! With this report, you can view visitor metrics like traffic from specific operating systems, mobile, browser popularity, screen resolutions, and conversion rates segmented by browser.

Download here >> https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=C8ug-THUTUeX-OA81X8G3w

As with any of these custom dashboards, you can rearrange the placement of the widgets, edit the data pulled within each widget, or even delete the ones you don’t need within each dashboard. All that matters is that you’re getting the information you need to prove the value of your SEO campaign, and focus on areas of your website that need attention.

What are your favorite Google Analytics custom dashboards? Share them in the comments!

Prove The Value of SEO With These Free Google Analytics Dashboards is a post by SEO expert Andrew Johnson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Content Marketing involves creating and distributing beautiful, valuable, click-worthy and share-worthy content as a means for attracting and retaining customers.

The concept of “Content Marketing” is nothing new, but the methods for delivering new and fresh types of content are evolving.

One of those methods is the idea of slide presentation, and walking the viewer through a set of instructions or process in a visually-enticing way. In simple terms, you create a slide deck with PowerPoint (which is probably the easiest and most common software platform for slides), and you can upload it to a number of websites that will display your slide deck. This approach can generate more awareness for your brand, more traffic to your website, and also some distinct SEO advantages, which we’ll talk about later.

For now, let’s discuss the process of creating a SlideShare presentation:

Plan your strategy

The most crucial step to any content marketing initiative is the planning process, and with SlideShare it’s also important to plan your presentation before you create it.

Before you begin, ask yourself these questions:

• Who is going to view my slide deck?
• What questions of theirs will I need to answer?
• Who are the key influencers in my industry that I should target?
• How will my viewers be motivated to share this slide deck?
• What are some specific calls-to-action (CTAs) that I can insert into the slide deck?

Once you have your strategy mapped out, you can create the flow and design of your slides.

Design your slide deck

A slide deck designed for a content marketing campaign is not like a PowerPoint presentation that you would run through in a meeting. Since you aren’t going to be narrating the slides for the people viewing them, it’s important to make each slide as self-explanatory as possible. Here are some things to consider:

1. Create an introductory slide

This first slide will be the only image displayed on SlideShare as people are browsing through decks, so it should be eye-catching and enticing. There are a number of sites that have a collection of free, creative commons images to use for your slide deck, including:

• http://commons.wikimedia.org
• http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/
• http://photopin.com/

Use an eye-catching color for the background, and place an image in the slide to draw people’s attentions, like this:

2. Create a call-to-action template for the rest of the slides in the deck

This is something that I have learned through trial and error. As with any content marketing strategy, one of the areas of focus should be driving relevant and qualified traffic to your website, and you can do that with calls-to-action located in key areas within your slide deck. You can either do this by including links to related blog posts or linkable assets on the last slide of the presentation, or within specific slides throughout the deck. One method that has been particularly successful for me is to segregate an area of each slide to house a clear CTA. This maintains a look of consistency throughout the deck, and ensures each slide has an equal opportunity to send traffic to your intended destination.

3. Give just enough information away to make sense and invite clicks

You’re not “giving away the farm” here, but still giving enough info to the viewer that the slides can stand on their own. For example, if you’re providing instructions on how to properly harvest a crop, provide the basics of the process, but still encourage the viewer to click your CTA to see “the rest of the story”.

4. Encourage social shares to become “hot”

How do those decks end up on the homepage of SlideShare.net? It all begins with a solid promotion strategy for your slide deck. Here are some tips:

a.) Share it on social media

According to Kissmetrics, you have a good chance at having your slide deck featured under the “Hot on Twitter” section on the home page if you get 15-30 tweets. The same goes for Facebook and LinkedIn shares, and being featured under those categories on the home page. Once your deck ends up on the home page, it has the opportunity to go viral, and gain a massive number of views and additional social shares.

b.) Embed it in a blog post

You can gain additional views for your slide deck if you embed it into a blog post on your website. Viewers also have the option to embed the deck on their own websites, so you can encourage that as well.

c.) Build links to it

The easiest way to gain visibility for your SlideShare deck is to build links to it. You can do this within your guest blog posts, your own blog posts and through social media channels.

The links in your SlideShare profile page, and the links within the slides themselves are nofollow, but there’s still a definite advantage for your SEO campaign with a popular SlideShare deck. TJ Welsh, director of SEO with SEO.com explains the value of these nofollow links:

“While they do not pass on link juice, they do create relevance for a given topic. Slideshare creates a transcript of your slides, which Google and other search engines are able to crawl. As search engines crawl the Slideshare account, they can trace the content back to your website through the Nofollow link. The Nofollow link builds an association between whatever you publish and your brand. Google also creates an association between certain keywords and your brand, so include your brand name somewhere in the presentation.”

5. Track the wins

You can gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of your SlideShare decks by tagging the URLs in your CTAs, and tracking the traffic in Google Analytics. Create the URLs in Google’s URL Builder by providing the website URL, campaign source, medium and name. Once you have the tagged URL, shorten it with goo.gl or bit.ly and place those shortened URLs in the slides.

The best KPIs in Analytics to measure the effectiveness of your SlideShare deck include:

• Total referral traffic from SlideShare
• Time on site
• Conversions
• Pages per visit
• Bounce rate

There may be other KPIs you need to measure, so be sure to map your specific goals before you publish your slide deck.

There you go! Really, the best way to discover a winning formula for SlideShare is to experiment, test theories and track your results.

Have you had success with SlideShare? Post your comments below!

How To Create An Epic Slideshare Deck is a post by SEO expert Andrew Johnson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

You’re probably thinking to yourself, “What is Schema, and why should I bother with it? I’m already blogging….what more do you want from me?!”

Having structured data is an integral part of a robust on-page optimization strategy, which is one of the pillars of an SEO strategy. While many of the tried and true on-page methods are still very much valid today, as Christian Arno says in his blog post, it’s still wise to think about ways to set your content apart from the others in the search results. One of the ways you can do that is through the use of Schema markup within your content, which can impact the click-through rates (CTR) of your listings in the search engines.

What is Schema?

Structured data is a way to add HTML attributes to the code of a page, in order for search engines to understand what the content on that page is about. The big search engines, Google, Bing, Yahoo! and Yandex, use this markup to enhance the display of their search results, which in turn help people find the right pages. A collection of these schemas are found on schema.org.

Now, search engines can do just fine understanding what your content is about without structured data, but search robots might pass over data that could set your web page apart from others in the search results.

Common Schemas

Schema.org lists hundreds of schemas for any type of situation, but some of the more common schemas include:

• Reviews
• Products
• Events
• Books
• Movies
• Recipes

Here’s an example of how schema markup can give rich snippets to the search results, as you can see in this screenshot of a search for the movie “Evil Dead”:

While using schemas in your content won’t necessarily lead to higher rankings, as explained in this video by Matt Cutts, Google’s head of webspam, this markup can increase the CTR of your listing in the search results. In fact, check out this case study on seo-chicks.com that shows how adding product schema increased the average CTR for one of their clients.

How to Add Schema to your Content

Let’s talk about a couple of ways to add schema markup to the content on your website. I understand coding to an extent, but I would usually rather find a tool to help me implement changes to my website with minimal effort. There are a couple of options when it comes to adding structured data to your content, including the Schema Creator and the Schema Creator WordPress plugin, both by Raven Tools.

Schema Creator

With Schema Creator, you can choose from six schema types, and simply fill out a few fields in a form to create the microdata. When all the fields are filled out, the right HTML will be provided to you.

Schema Creator from Raven Tools

Get started at schema-creator.org.

Schema Creator WordPress Plugin

If your blog runs on WordPress, Raven created an awesome plugin to help you add schema.org structured data to your content. A few of the features of this plugin include:

• Shortcode functionailty
• Editable schemas
• Form-based editor

With this plugin, you get an icon right above your text editor. When you click the icon, you can select a schema type, fill out the fields and the correct schema will be automatically inserted into the blog post.

This plugin is free, and can be downloaded at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/schema-creator/.

Do you have any success stories from adding schema markup to your content? Share them in the comments!

How To Add Schema Markup To Your Blog Content is a post by SEO expert Andrew Johnson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

I initially had some hesitation to join Pinterest in 2010.

It was an invitation-only site back then, and I didn’t really see the value in maintaining another “social network” in addition to Facebook, Twitter and, later, Google+. But Pinterest can be a great way to drive relevant traffic and prospective customers to your website, and since the addition of Pinterest Analytics, you can measure the success of your efforts like never before.

Pinterest is a visual experience by nature, so it’s critically important to keep this in the front of your mind as you’re developing your campaign. With that being said, there are a few ways to create high impact, click-worthy images for your pins, including various free and paid applications. But my favorite is PowerPoint for a number of reasons, but mainly because the learning curve is relatively simple. There are so many image editors to choose from, including Picmonkey, Fireworks, Pixlr and more. Each of these applications have their pros and cons, and I have used them all to some extent. While the features of PowerPoint aren’t as advanced as some of these programs, there are a couple of things you can do with PowerPoint that are, quite frankly, cumbersome on the other platforms.

One of the best examples of a click-worthy graphic for Pinterest is what’s called an “instructo-graphic”, which was first explained by Colby Almond over at the SEOmoz blog. It was a great post, and prompted me to create a few instructo-graphics for my own websites. I’ve had some time to hone the process, and think PowerPoint is the best platform to create some really killer graphics for your blog.

I want this post to be as actionable as possible, so let’s go through the steps of creating an instructo-graphic for this specific post.

Step 1. Open up Microsoft Paint

Ok, did I lose you? You’re probably thinking, “Microsoft PAINT? Should I lace up my Air Jordans while I listen to ‘Blame it on the Rain‘?” As much as I love the 90s, some things are better left in the past, but Microsoft Paint is only going to be used sparingly for the graphic.

First, edit the dimensions to be 600 px by 3000 px. This will ensure enough space to work with as you’re creating your graphic, but also entice Pinterest users to click through to see the full graphic on the website.

Step 2: Color the background

Pick a bold color, or something that will make the components of your instructo-graphic stand out.

Step 3: Copy & paste the background into PowerPoint

This is where the magic happens! Once you have that background image pasted into PowerPoint, you can add text and images and rearrange them as much as you want. Before you paste the background in, though, make sure to delete the text boxes, and zoom the window in to 100%.

Step 4: Create an eye-catching title for the graphic

The title should convey the main message of the graphic, and also relate to the content of the page it will be posted on too. Often, you can use the same title for the graphic as the blog post itself, and if you’re creating an instructo-graphic, anything titled “How to…” is usually enough to grap people’s attention and compel them to click. You can also repurpose the title area to create a pinnable title card to use instead of pinning the entire graphic. This can come in handy if you’re planning to pin to more than one board.

Draw a different colored box near the top of the graphic, and apply some effects like shading or perspective to make it stand out. These effects are found in the Picture Tools menu, and then under Picture Effects. As with any graphic, the goal is to draw the eye in and where to go next, so really make the title area pop from the rest of the graphic.

Step 5: Add images & text boxes for each step

Here is the meat of your instructo-graphic. Basically, you’re going to be walking the reader through the steps of whatever they’re going to be creating, but only highlighting the high level steps for simplicity. Don’t worry about spacing between the steps, because you can adjust when all the steps are added. The alignment of the elements in each step is important  however, as PowerPoint will superimpose guiding lines to help you determine where to place each element.

Step 6: Check for alignment

The easiest way to check for alignment is to zoom out to see the entire graphic in one window. That way, you can check the spacing between each of the steps, the alignment of images and text fields, and generally see how the graphic will look when it’s finished. Make sure there is enough space at the top and bottom sections of your graphic, and ensure the headings are properly aligned too.

Step 7: Proof the graphic

This is a critical step. Make sure you check for spelling errors, factual errors, or any other mistakes that could cost your website credibility in the readers’ eyes. Have someone look the graphic over for a second opinion.

Step 8. Copy & paste graphic from PowerPoint into Microsoft Paint

Yup, we’re back in Paint again. Once the graphic is pasted, align the top left corner to the paint area. Do this by hitting CTRL + A (which selects the graphic), and moving it into the proper place. See the screenshot below. Next, grab the width selector in the middle of the right side along the graphic, and resize the window to the correct dimensions. Finally, take the height selector at the bottom of the graphic, and resize to the proper height.

9. Save the graphic

Once everything is aligned properly, and you feel comfortable with your work, save the file in Paint as a .png, and in PowerPoint as a presentation. That way, you can come back to the template and edit without having to recreate it from scratch.

10. Promote!

Now that you’ve created this awesome, free graphic, write a blog post and add the graphic to it. Then pin the graphic, and the Pinterest users will land on your blog post for an increase in traffic.

Here are some other ways to promote your new instructo-graphic:

• Add an embed code on your blog post, and invite others to publish the graphic for links
• Write an interesting guest post about the topic, and offer the graphic to go with it
• Submit the graphic to infographic aggregators. (NOTE: some of these sites may not accept the graphic, since it’s not a true infographic by nature, but it’s still worth a shot.)
• Submit the graphic to instructo-graphic aggregators and Google+ Communities.

Here is the finished product from our example. Feel free to use this on your own website, but please indicate the owner of the graphic is SEO.com.

Once you’ve built your graphic, I’d love to hear your feedback! Leave a comment below, or post about your efforts on our Google+ Community!

How To Create Killer Pinterest Graphics With PowerPoint is a post by SEO expert Andrew Johnson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

This is a hypothetical story about Buddy, owner of BuddysFantasticLawnSprinklers.com.

Buddy has done everything he can to build a legitimate business. He relies on his superior customer service, transparency and good products to cultivate a stellar reputation in the community.

He attends trade shows, seminars, meetups, and actively participates in online conversations through social media and his blog.

He even encourages feedback from his customers, and handles complaints quickly and professionally.

But what Buddy doesn’t realize is that even one bad review can potentially cause a great deal of damage to his brand.

One day, a customer discovered a defective sprinkler was delivered. The customer contacted customer service, and was told to send the defective part back, and a new part would arrive in a few weeks. But when the customer received the new part, he discovered it was defective too.

Turns out all 500 sprinklers in a particular batch from the manufacturer are defective, and now Buddy has a few irate customers.

KSL-TV’s Bill Gephardt reached out to SEO.com to find out what exactly a business can do in the wake of a negative online review.

SEO.com President Ash Buckles Gives Advice for Businesses Dealing with Negative Online Reviews

Credit: KSL-TV

“Once there is information out online, you can’t always remove it,” said company president Ash Buckles, in an interview that aired Wednesday. “But what you can do is augment the positives you’re providing as well.”

No company is perfect. Mistakes will be made, customers may have a negative experience, and a product or service may live up to expectations or promises. But Buckles says SEO can go a long way in bolstering the positive associations people make with your brand online.

“If you are part of local associations or do business locally and support the kids in the community or what have you, you can use those as an opportunity to help people understand that you might have made a mistake, but you are not generally a scumbag business owner,” he said.

Often, those researching a particular brand or company will use a search engine, but when negative reviews or news stories are showing up in the search results, it can leave a bad impression.

Reputation management is an important component to an SEO campaign. When a business uses search engine optimization to become more visible in the search engines, positive impressions are made through the great content created for the campaign. The same course of action can be used to move negative listings off the first page of results. giving a chance for the positive content to shine.

Here are 3 ways businesses can handle negative online reviews:

1. Address complaint with the customer privately. Emotions can become heated when someone feels compelled to write a negative review, but sometimes a public response can fuel the fire. Someone in the public relations, customer service or marketing department should reach out to the customer through a phone call, email or message on social media with an invitation to continue the discussion.
2. Own more web properties. Social media profiles, blogs, micro-sites and company profiles on industry websites will often rank alongside a company’s main website for a branded search. Authoritative, content-rich web properties will have a chance to rank on the first page of the results, which makes it less likely for a negative review to be displayed there. Of course, that’s why a proactive approach to reputation management should start at the very first step.
3. Encourage positive reviews. Along the notion of being proactive, business owners should curate positive reviews through social media, testimonials, forums and blog post comments. Never feel awkward about asking customers to post about their experience. Happy clients are more likely to take the time to post a review, and usually don’t mind if the process is easy enough.

What are your tips for dealing with negative reviews? Post your thoughts in the comments below.

Advice For Businesses Dealing With Negative Online Reviews is a post by SEO expert Andrew Johnson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

A new report forecasts one-third of paid search clicks in the U.S. will come from mobile devices by the end of 2013.

The research comes from Marin Software, which analyzed paid search campaigns across 2-thousand brands from around the globe, and focussed on mobile.

“Marketing funnels in textbooks look very different. In the real world, search, social and location are intertwined from the point of awareness to purchase,” Marin said in their research. “Mobile devices, often at the heart of the modern shopper’s buying process, provide instant access to product reviews, coupons and competitors.”

Marin forecasts mobile devices, including tablets and smartphones, will drive a third of paid clicks in the U.S. by December 2013. They also noted between January and December 2012, advertisers increased their share of search budget on mobile devices by 85-percent, from 10-percent to 18.4-percent. However, they noted that despite this increased spend, ad budgets lagged in click volume from mobile devices.

Source: Marin Software

Marin also indicated that while cost-per-click (CPC) and click-through-rate (CTR) figures were generally higher across smartphones and tablets, these mobile devices seemed to deliver lower overall conversions. The company indicated that more research should be conducted to see whether those conversions are happening in a brick-and-mortar store setting, and that advertisers should consider their specific situations when building a campaign.

The report goes on to note the search performance of mobile devices in Europe and the United Kingdom, and mentions CTR and CPC across devices in 2012. Not surprisingly, CTR on smartphones is significantly higher than computers in the UK and the Eurozone, while CTR on tablets is not too far behind.

CPC on smartphones is also lower than computers across the UK and the Eurozone, according to the data. What is surprising, however, is the fact that tablet clicks seem to be closing in on computer clicks within the two areas.

The report showed a 36-percent average increase in CPC within the UK, and a 24-percent average increase in the Eurozone, but doesn’t take fluctuations in currency into consideration.

What does all this mean for businesses? Marketing managers should be aware of the opportunities that paid search ads have in conjunction with an organic search campaign.

“PPC is a great way to test keyword phrases before deciding to deploy them in an SEO strategy,” says Darin Berntson, Senior Community Manager with SEO.com. “You can get almost real-time data on what keywords work and focus your energy there. You also get data that can help you with determining long-tail phrases you can build content around. PPC is a very complimentary component to any internet marketing strategy.”

Report Shows Mobile To Drive Third Of Paid Search Clicks By End Of 2013 is a post by SEO expert Andrew Johnson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

A new design for Google+ profiles is rolling out this week, including changes to the tabs, new cover photo dimensions, and a new layout for the “About” section.

According to Google+ Project Manager Sara McKinley, the changes are in response to feedback they have received, and most of the updates will be rolling out gradually.

Here is a summary of the changes:

New Google+ cover photo dimensions

What are the new dimensions for Google+ profile cover photos? According to McKinley, the dimensions are now 2120px by 1192px. The cover photos are much larger than they were previously. You can still upload individual pictures, or have one full width photo.

New tab for Local business reviews

Another change is the addition of a section with all of your Local reviews, which replaces the Reviews link that was previously in the “About’ section. A map widget displays pins of businesses that you have reviewed, and colored widgets display your reviews along the left and right columns.

New layout for ‘About’ section

Aside from the new cover photo, the ‘About’ section is probably the biggest change to hit Google+ users. The result is a cleaner, bolder new layout, with a striking resemblance to Facebook’s timeline layout.

New hovercard format

The hovercard, or the box that displays when you hover your cursor over a profile name, is now larger. It also places the profile photo in the middle of the card, and there are now more options to connect with that person. Besides circling the person, you can also chat, hangout or email them with new buttons added to the hovercard.

Now more than ever, you should be integrating Google+ into your content strategy, and leveraging all of the benefits of increased visibility through Authorship markup.

If you would like to know more about how your website can benefit from Google Plus, contact SEO.com today!

Changes To Google+ Profiles Rolling Out is a post by SEO expert Andrew Johnson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Search engine optimization has always had an aire of mysticism around it, fueled by theories, tests and results.

As an SEO consultant, I read a lot of industry blogs like Search Engine Roundtable, Search Engine Watch and Raven Tools, among others. I also like to keep my ear to the street, so I subscribe to the official Google blog and Bing’s search blog, as well as monitor various industry forums to stay on top of possible changes coming down the pike.

If you’re particularly adept at digging for clues (and a bit of an SEO geek), you can search for patents filed by Google for their search algorithms to see what sort of things they might be taking into consideration in the future.

In fact, one particular patent that Google filed around 2005 called “Agent Rank” may have been confirmed by Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, in an interview with Gregory Ferenstein of Techcrunch:

“Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.”

Obviously Agent Rank was the precursor to what we now call Author Rank, which is how Google is likely ranking authors of content based on their authority, expertise and influence in their specific industry.

Think about your own knowledge on a particular subject. Would people call you an expert? Let’s say you call yourself a “social media guru”, but have your Twitter account set on auto pilot, and rarely read up on industry trends. If that’s the case, the term “guru” is laughable. The same goes for your content on the web.

Author Rank Explained

When your content is connected through Google’s Authorship markup (see Brian Jensen’s post about that topic here), for better or worse you’re building your reputation.

If Google’s patent filing for Agent Rank is any indication, there are a number of areas they will be considering when determining your credibility within the web.

In a 2011 Webmaster Central blog post, Othar Hansson explained Google’s backing of Authorship markup, and how they’re experimenting with the data within the search results.:

“We now support markup that enables websites to publicly link within their site from content to author pages. For example, if an author at The New York Times has written dozens of articles, using this markup, the webmaster can connect these articles with a New York Times author page. An author page describes and identifies the author, and can include things like the author’s bio, photo, articles and other links.”

The process of establishing your Author Rank, however, isn’t very cut and dry.

Tips for Building your Author Rank

1. Establish Google Authorship for your content. You can add Authorship to your content using one of the following methods:

3-way linking

• Add a link from your Google+ profile page to your author biography page on the website where your content lives.
• Add a link from your author bio page, with a rel=”me” tag on the link, to your Google+ profile page.
• Add a link from your content to your author bio page, with a rel=”author” tag on the link.

2-way linking

• Add a link from your Google+ profile page to your blog.
• Add a link from your content, with a rel=”author” tag, to your Google+ profile page.

Email verification

• Add a link in your author byline to your Google+ profile.
• Add your email address with the same domain name as the website to your Google+ profile.
• Submit your email address to Google.

2. Use a good headshot for your Google+ profile. Cyrus Shepard at SEOmoz saw a 35 percent increase in traffic to his website, after testing different profile pictures. If you don’t have access to a professional photographer, find an interesting background, set up a tripot and take a picture of yourself. Face the camera, look directly at the lens and smile. Crop the picture so your head and shoulders are framed properly. This is an important step, since your Google+ profile picture will be displayed on your content in Google’s search results if you have implemented Authorship markup correctly.

3. Leverage Google+. You’ve probably heard talk about how G+ is a “ghost town“, but from a content marketing perspective, the more you build up your profile, the more credibility and authority around particular subjects you will gain in Google’s eyes. Participate in discussions, join communities, share relevant content, and encourage your connections to do the same. Keep track of influencers in your field, and start interacting with them.

4. Encourage feedback. Google may be using the number of comments your blog posts get, and the engagement on your Google+ posts, as a metric in determining your Author Rank. Even though there’s more to this point than just the number of comments, such as the authority and relevancy of the person making the comment among other factors, make sure the content you’re posting and the articles you’re writing are relevant to the field you wish to build up your Author Rank in.

5. Write content for other websites. If you’re familiar with the term “guest posting”, you may think it’s just another link building tactic. But the real benefit of guest blogging isn’t just the link you get within the content, but the mutually beneficial relationship you are building with people in your field. Check out the plethora of blog posts written on the topic of guest posting.

What’s your opinion of Google’s Author Rank? Will it make the web a better place? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

5 Ways To Build Your Google Author Rank Right Now is a post by SEO expert Andrew Johnson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Google is revealing how the Oscars impacted search behavior during the awards show Sunday night, and released the data on their Google+ page.

According to Google, the top five searches at the Oscars were Jennifer Lawrence, Daniel Day-Lewis, Anne Hathaway, Life of Pi and Les Misérables.

Google tracked and plotted the real time searches at google.com/oscars.

Did you search for something during the Oscars? Join the discussion on our Google+ Community!

Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC-BY-SA 3.0

Tracking Google Searches During The Oscars is a post by SEO expert Andrew Johnson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.