Here was the latest email notice Ecreativeworks received:

NOTE: Due to Google’s “Penguin” update last month, press releases distributed online are now considered to be the most natural and effective method for online marketing. Weekly or even monthly press releases have been proven to work best.

Or recently, I was on a call with one of my customers and a 3rd party company that they buy advertising with. The advertising company has about 5 sites that all share the same content, has ads running on it, etc. etc. The advertising sites were not sending as many leads to my customer anymore and they were questioning the dollars spent and the lack of new traffic and business. The directory’s response was that because of Panda it was up to the client to change all of the content on the advertising sites and essentially placed blame on the client. I was amazed. How many of their customers would believe them? I can guarantee, that if the client took the time to rework their content they still wouldn’t have received any more traffic from the site. The advertising sites were gone from targeted keyword phrase searches. It might show up for a branded term, but then who would go to a directory ranked 7 or 8 on the page when the main domain is ranking #1!?

Something you should keep in mind:
1. If you are executing white hat SEO tactics, then most likely you don’t have to hit the panic button when Google makes a change.
2. If you are spending your marketing dollars well, you don’t have all your eggs in one basket. The traffic to your site or new leads coming in are probably well rounded. Search may drive a good part of your leads, but not all.
3. If you care about ROI, you are monitoring and tracking each dollar spent and each source of revenue for your company.
4. And if you care about your search engine traffic and understand the value of ranking well, you are monitoring your analytics and important keywords on a regular basis.

Check out Brian’s blog post on our EcreativeIM site. He does a great job explaining some things you should be paying attention to regarding Panda and Penguin updates.

What is changing is the way that Google handles variations, misspellings, and plurals for these keywords. The exact match keyword [Blue Widget] would no longer just trigger Blue Widget, but also Blue Widgets, and any misspellings or close variations of the word that Google associates with the keyword. This change will be turned on by default, and could have significant impact on any campaign you have running.

The reason this is such a large change is that people frequently target plurals, misspellings, or close variations separately. This is because search intent can differ greatly between keywords, and having these keyword lumped together would be less optimal then having them separated out as distinct keywords. The good news with this update is that it can be disabled if you think that it will affect you negatively. To disable these changes, go into your campaign settings and navigate to the advanced settings at the bottom of the page. Once there you will see the option for keyword matching options. Expand the area and select the do not include close variants button. Once you disable the new changes, you can continue to run and structure your accounts as you see fit.

Where to turn off Phrase & Exact match keyword variations

These changes are expected to launch in the middle of May, so make sure to keep a eye on your account. Test the changes and see if they improve your performance, or disable them if your account is already structured to include plurals, misspellings, and close variations.

• Excessively long or manipulative page titles
• Meta keyword tag stuffing
• Stuffing your page content with keywords
• Aggressive internal linking
• Manipulative anchor text from external links
• Reciprocal link pages
• Footer Links

They key thing to take away from this update is that it is more important then ever to focus on the end user. If you design your site around usability and emphasize quality content and you should be fine. Our very own Brian Wood has written a fantastic post on the danger signs and what to watch our for. He has a more in depth analysis of each potential issue and what to do about it. If you would like to know more, then I highly recommend you go read the full web spam article as Brian has a lot of fantastic insights into this update.

Claim Your Google Places Listing
The first step in making sure you have a presence in local searches is to claim your listing with Google. You can easily claim your listing by going to http://www.google.com/places/ and logging in with your Google account. You can choose to verify your listing by either selecting the phone verification or by receiving a postcard with a pin number via email. Phone verification is recommended because it is instant, while the post card can take 2-4 weeks to arrive. Once your listing is verified, simply fill in the requested content. Be as descriptive as possible, but be cautious when using any local terminology. You don’t want to add any keywords to your business name as this can get your listing flagged. Instead focus on using keywords in your description and categories where it makes sense.

Define Your Categories
When you create your Google Places listing, you will need to select up to five categories that fit your business. For example two of Ecreativeworks categories are web design and internet marketing, which clearly shows any one that views our listing that we offer those services. Categories don’t just show potential clients what it is you do, they also show Google what your business does. These categories will be one of the factors that Google uses to decide what searches your listing shows up for. At least one of these categories will need to be from Google’s pre-made list, but the other 4 can be created by you. One thing to keep in mind is to avoid using any local keywords in the categories; this is against best practices and could result in your listing getting flagged.

Citations & NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number)
One of the biggest factors in determining how your local listing will rank is its citations. A citation is any mention of your name, address, and phone number (NAP) as it appears on a website. It is important to have a consistent NAP across all your listings, including your website.  Having the NAP in the footer across all your pages is a great way of keeping your information consistent and present. There are many methods of getting citations. A few easy sites to get listings are online yellow pages and sites such as Map Quest. For a list of some other citation sources, check out this article.
Following these basic Google Places fundamentals will help you get the most from your search presence.

Until recently however, we had also lost some functionality that we dearly loved: ability to email reports and ability to export into PDF.

But the moment we’ve been waiting for is here! Google announced on April 2, 2012 that those features are now back!

Additionally, you can use Google Analytics to track data from your Site Search to help you improve your online marketing campaigns.  It’s not set up by default, but with just a little bit of work, you can get a bunch of great Site Search data from Google Analytics.

Find New Keyword Opportunities

By viewing the Search Terms report, you can get ideas of new terms to use in your SEO and PPC campaigns. If visitors are typing a particular keyword into your site search, they may be using that same keyword when they search in Google or Bing. If you see a lot of on-site searches for a keyword, you might want to try that word out in a pay per click campaign or add it to your list for SEO.

Get New Product Ideas

The Search Terms report in Google Analytics is a great place to research what your website visitors want, but you don’t offer. For example, a plastics supplier used this report to find out that a certain material was the single most searched keyword in their site search. It was a product they hadn’t previously offered for online sale. By adding it to their website, they can increase online sales and expand their product offering, making their site more valuable for users.

Improve Landing Pages

Whenever you see large numbers of searches, make sure you set the secondary dimension in Google Analytics to “Landing Page” to see which page visitors landed on when they typed in that keyword.

Now you can see which page visitors landed on for that keyword, and make adjustments to ensure visitors are getting to the best possible page of your website for that keyword.

Make Sure Visitors Can Find It

If users can’t see your Site Search, they probably won’t use it. Try testing the location of your site search to see if you can improve the user experience. For example, Freelin-Wade’s site search used to be below the fold, under the left navigation. In order to provide a better user experience, they moved it above the left navigation and saw a 77% increase in use of site search when it was above the fold!

Additionally, they created a timeline showing the searches…which will soon be printed and hanging at my desk, along with the SEO Table of Elements and Does Your Website Suck? infographics. What can I say? I love visual representations of information related to SEO.

Google has now announced that they are making these reports available to everyone, without having to modify your tracking code!

Thanks to Search Engine Land for pointing out this video.

Yesterday, Google announced some new reports that will help you get a clearer view of how visitors move across your site. These new reports are based on aggregated data (no, you still can’t track a single person’s visit) and allow you to see the “most common” paths and fallout points on your website.

The visitors flow report lets you see how visitors enter, move through, and exit your site. For all of us who have dug far into GoAn to find this data in the past, well, we know how awesome this is. You can segment your data to see how visitors from organic behave compared to social media or paid advertising.

There is also a Goal Flow report. This one is super-cool because we’ve been able to set funnels in the past, but visitors don’t always follow the nice, neat paths we lay out for them. Now we can see the most common paths and fallout points, regardless of if they are part of our funnels.

Both of these reports let you do one of the most important things you can do for website success – get to know your website visitors better.

These reports aren’t available to everyone yet, so don’t panic if you don’t see it yet. Google did say they will be rolling them out over the next week to everyone. In the mean time, spend some time getting to know your advanced segments and multi-channel funnels.