Maybe you want a quick access snapshot of your referral or organic traffic. Maybe you want a custom KPI dashboard to send to your clients. Whatever the reason, pulling custom reports from Google Analytics just got easier.

Using Google Apps scripts, Google spreadsheets and Google Analytics API you can easily create automated reports and turn those reports into visualizations using charts, graphs, and gauges. Below are the steps:

Open a New Google Spreadsheet

First, you will need to navigate to Google docs and open a new spreadsheet. In the top navigation select tools and then click scripts gallery. A popup will then appear displaying all of the scripts in the Google’s library.

Next, use the search function to search the term ‘magic’ and install the first option titled ‘Google Analytics Report Automation’.  The script will then prompt you for authorization. Once you accept, the script will then be installed on the spreadsheet.

Add Your Analytics Account

After you exit out of the scripts gallery, refresh your spreadsheet. After 10 seconds or so a Google Analytics menu item should appear in the horizontal navigation. 

I have run into this numerous times (sometimes being my own fault) where keyword research was conducted on a site without any analysis of current rankings. You type some broad search terms into Wordtracker or Google Adwords that you think are relevant to your site. You look at all the suggestions and begin narrowing down your targets based on volume and competition. This isn’t wrong, but it certainly should not be the starting point for any site with even a small web presence that is receiving any traffic. Why? Well, lets say for example that your site ranked 5th in Google for the search term “seo workshops” (SEO Tip – Be careful when optimizing for Acronyms). With this being such a low volume search term it likely would have been overlooked during keyword research. What was also overlooked is that fact that moving from a #5 to a #1 for this low competition term is very nearly in grasp and could bring in 100 visitors a month. Remember, high rankings for a low volume keyword is typically better than low rankings for a high volume keyword, and optimizing for a term that Google already thinks you are authoritative for could be much easier than starting from scratch.

Before conducting keyword research you have to ask the question, “What is Google Telling Me About My Site?”.

Here’s a simple way to compare current rankings with new research so you can move forward with the best keywords.

Finding Your Current Keyword Rankings

There are many tools for analyzing your keyword rankings in SERP’s (Search Engine Result Pages). For this example I will use WebPosition. Before moving on to any of these steps, it is suggested that you have a report of your last keyword research data handy for starting points and comparisons.

Pull up your current rankings report and sort from highest ranked to lowest. The goal of this is to see what keywords the Search Engines have decided (According to on and off page factors) you are worthy of ranking high for. We don’t want to start from scratch trying to rank number 1 for a keyword we don’t currently even rank in the top 50 for. Lets focus on our strengths. Also, the gap between result #1 and result #5 in terms of traffic is massive. We’re better off spending our time moving from 5 to 1 on keywords with lower traffic then from 50 to 10 on high traffic keywords.

Export the report to a spreadsheet so you have a way of plugging in other data for easy comparisons.

Comparing Current Rankings to Initial Research Data

Copy and paste the important data (Volume, Competition, and KEI)  for each keyword from your last Wordtracker (or whatever tool you used) keyword research into the new rankings report.

I should also point out that when I did my original keyword research on this website I had assigned a priority number to the keywords I wanted to target.  So now let’s take a look at the keyword priority I had previously set when conducting my keyword research. Does it match up with my current rankings in terms of order?  Not really.  My number one ranking term right now is not on my list of top 10 original priorities, and my number 1 priority term isn’t in my list of top ranking terms.  But that’s OK. I wouldn’t expect it to so nothing is out of the ordinary here.

We are now starting to get a fuller picture of our keywords. In the example above, the keyword phrase [bicycle jerseys] isn’t in our top ten priority list. When we look to the left, we see that we are ranked number 4. If we can move up from a 4 to a 2 or even 1, we can account for a large percentage of that 1300 monthly search volume. Before, the high competition for this phrase might have scared us away, but with our current position, the competition indicator becomes less of a factor.

Never do blind keyword research. You must have a clear picture of where you are at right now to have a clear picture of where you should be going.

There are many other factors that come into play when choosing the best keyword targets so please check out this SEO Blog for up to date tips and news.

Link building can often times be a tedious process, especially for those doing manual outreach. As an SEO, I am always looking for new ways to cut down the time it takes to build quality inbound links for my clients. What better way to do this than through automation?

Google Alerts allows you to monitor words or phrases and emails you once new content using these defined phrases are indexed by the search engine. The tool is also extremely valuable for brand management, but below are two ways that we use it to find new link opportunities.

Alerts for your brand name

Set up an alerts based around your brand name. Make sure to use different combinations, with and without spaces as well as possible spelling variations. You can specify what type of content you want the tool to alert you about including blogs, news, video, and discussions. Setting up alerts to include discussions is a good idea because you can jump into comment threads to either defend or add info about your brand.

Once the new content that matches your defined phrases is triggered, Google will then send you an email with information about the page and a link to the page. When this is sent out, you can analyze the site and decide if it is reputable enough to try to obtain a link. If you decide that it is, we usually just send an email through the contact page asking if they would be nice enough to link back to the given site. More times than not the webmasters have no issue with doing so.

Google authorship is a great way to add a layer of personal branding to your posts and hopefully increase the click-through rate of those posts when they appear within Google’s SERPs. In this post I’m going to talk about the importance of Google authorship(verifying yourself as the official author of content with Google), and how to do it.

Importance of Google Authorship:

Say you do a Google search for “Search Engine Optimization Tips” and you see the following two results at the top of the page.

Result 1:

Result 2: