In addition to the free data that is available for to all registered users, we are including everything the Essentials entail. The only thing that isn’t included is data exporting.
But it does include:

SEO & SEM, social and links: All modules with all the basic functions:

• unlimited number of requests per day
• preset and individual filters for large data volumes
• variable settings for historic data
• visibility progression for up to four websites at a single glance
• unlimited information on competitors
• historic data, also for the universal search
• winner and loser domain keywords

Plus the following special functions:

• reports with own graphics and texts (normally 60 $/month)
• sub-domain and directory analysis (normally 300 $/month)
• keyword discovery (normally 30 $/month)
• individual reports (normally 42 $ /month)

Profile Analysis for Online Marketing

Website relocation à la Google: The only way to see how today’s play.google.com developed from market.android.com is with a combined sub-domain and directory analysis. A relocation that went off (almost entirely) without a hitch.

It’s nice being able to see how the top shopping sites developed in recent years. The data on dates back to three years ago. And that’s important for a long-term analysis.

Finding all strong links with the brand names in the link text that do NOT direct to the homepage could be important for accurate link research in times of possible anchor text penalties. This is a matter of seconds with the Searchmetrics Essentials filters.

Thankfully there’s the FC Bayern Munich soccer team. At least as far as social media visibility for the Telekom company is concerned. The soccer players from Munich are the only ones bringing a high volume of tweets and shares to telekom.de.

What was happening at welt.de over the past few weeks and months? The news integrations in the universal search have recovered. But things aren’t looking so good for images.

And all this is free for 14 days!

Everyone can get Searchmetrics Essentials free for 14 days. That’s a value of several hundred euros. The info:

From May 18 – May 31, 2012 you can try Searchmetrics Essentials – valued at $365 – with all its features* for free. This offer is available for all existing and new users.

*except “Export Credits”

What’s definitely new and surprising for me was the day of the update. It’s unusual for Google to make a major update on a Tuesday or Wednesday.  Normally Google makes this kind of update on a Monday or Thursday. That’s why I presume that in the next few days we’ll see more updates and this update is just the beginning.

That’s why all of the results in the winners and losers tables are marked as preview. I’ll keep you updated with my analysis with every iteration Google releases. In the Searchmetrics Essentials you will get the updated data most likely on Friday, so you can see movers and shakers for your specific domain then.

Update: I updated the data tonight so it is fresh and you’ll see more losers and much better correlations to the Google update. You can also click directly in the table to see more data in the Searchmetrics Essentials.

What happened?

I took nearly a huge set of keywords from short-head to medium and low search volume and looked at the current rankings from position 1 to 100 and compared the rankings to April 20th. In the data were also some glitches from the Panda 3.5 update which was going live from April 19th to 20th, Matt Cutts mentioned. But overall you see a trend of those domains which really lost visibility within the Google Penguin update.

In the data I saw some striking losers, which suggests to me there must have been another update today. There is a pattern in the winners and losers table and I’ll give you some insights below the table. Note I analyzed the visibility, not the overall traffic. The SEO visibility only includes calculation on organic rankings. Direct traffic, Social, PPC etc. is absolutely not included.

List of SEO visibility losers (google.com)

UPDATE: I updated the table (2012-04-26) with more keywords and fresher data.

A lot of these losers are database-driven websites – they mainly aggregate information and use large database systems to create as many pages as possible. Sites such as songlyrics.com, great-quotes.com, cubestat.com or lotsofjokes.com fall into this pattern. It makes sense that these sites will lose visibility.

Press portals and feed aggregators such as pressabout.us, newsalloy.com and bloglines.com were also affected, which makes sense from a Google point of view since these are the website types that are very often created by very aggressive (possibly overly aggressive) SEOs and often contain similar content.

A couple of heavily template-based websites were also affected – ticketnetwork.com/ticketcity.com, hotelscombined.com and customerservicenumbers.com fit Google’s anti-SEO bill perfectly when it comes automatically (possibly also spun) content.

Furthermore, a lot of sites that copy or rehash other peoples’ content (or are used by their users to do that) were demoted – examples include mayor sites such as digg.com, folkd.com and pastebin.com.

First Preview of SEO visibility winners

On the winners side it’s not as easy as on the losers side to find a pattern. But a lot of brand sites won visibility, which makes sense to Google strategy. Sites like menshealth.com, gq.com or lots of other magazines fill perfectly the gap that the losers leave.

The day started exciting and it will end exciting and tomorrow will start again exciting because I have so much data to analyze. I keep you updated.

Source: SEOmoz.org

With the rel=author tag it is now possible to connect ordinary web content to an author. This gets interesting if you also factor in data like Shares, Tweets, Plusones, Pins, time on site, bounce rate related to content, all of which is connected to an author.  Considering how much data is available, an author that produces content with many social mentions could be rewarded with higher value and more attention from Google.

For me as an SEO, it will be more relevant in the future to get links, so recommendations, from established and topically relevant authors. I also have to analyze the authors which link to my competitors.

That’s why I analyzed the author integrations in the SERPs for a million keywords in google.com.  For nearly 170,554 keywords, I found a minimum of 1 author integration in the SERPs and a total of 15,274 unique authors. It was surprising to me that 17% of results tested are showing author integrations because this is still a new feature – this was much higher than I expected.

In the table you’ll find the Top 20 authors, ordered by count of page 1 integrations. You will also find the overall count of author integrations and the ratio of overall author integrations to page 1. You’ll see how many integrations an authors has and how well his content ranks. You also have the Google+ profile URL in the Excel spreadsheet to get more details about the author. The Excel spreadsheet with the Top 200 authors is available for download at the end of this article.

Download spreadsheet: Top200-Google-author-integrations

But first – what’s been happening with One Boxes over the last few months? We’ve had another look at the integrations for millions of keywords from the English and American indices. Here is our overview:

In the English index, video integrations have seen a lot of movement. However, after a somewhat dramatic loss in November they are now at an extremely strong 70% and once again at a high level.

In the US index, the upward trend for videos is near unstoppable. Here, despite a slight end-of-year dip, the figure is almost 80%. In other words: video teasers are included in more than 75% of all search queries in the US index!

By the way, obviously many of you will notice that the sum total of all these One Boxes is greater than 100%, even though there are still search results without Universal Search. This is of course because results pages often include multiple One Boxes.

Added to this are advertisements, errors and other SERPs evaluations like stars and Search Plus Your World. With all this, it’s worth taking another look at the organic search results…

So let’s take a closer look at the weaker integrations in the British index:

It is immediately apparent that Books, having nearly disappeared completely, just started receiving some SERPs support through December and the start of the year. Does Google still have big plans for Books? It could be, but maybe this was just an algorithm correction.

The trends for Maps and News are particularly interesting. Like videos, they also experienced a dip but are now near their original level. Here it’s also important that integrations only appear for location specific and news specific keywords and the more targeted (and perhaps also more precise) the responsible algorithm is, the less One Boxes there are to see.

Something similar, if a little dampened appears in the US index. Here, all three smaller integrations struggled toward the end of 2011 before lifting again in the new year. Incidentally, something very similar occurs in the German index.

Who’s on top of Universal Search

As I mentioned at the start, Universal Search can be a a powerful traffic source. Let’s take a look at the sites that have benefited the most (from this source):

In comparison to observations in November 2011 a few things have changed:

• For Videos, The Guardian and 5min.com have moved up while google.com and ents24.com are now out of contention.
• For Maps, holidayinn.com, hiexpress.com and nationalrail.co.uk moved-up, replacing direct.gov.uk and transportdirect.info
• For News, washingtonpost.com and sacbee.com are in the top ten, pushing out bloomberg.com and independent.co.uk.
• Shopping is now dominated by Amazon and ecrater.co.uk has risen up to replace very.co.uk.
• For Images, freeblogs are once more at the top. Somewhat surprising is the image strength of alibaba.com, made-in-china.com and guardian.co.uk. Dailymail, deviantart.com and flickr.com were the losers this round.

So a lot has been happening and even the big players are not safe. That Bloomberg and The Independent can be so easily forced out of the News top ten like Flickr was from Images, is particularly notable. On the other hand, new entrants like 5min.com, holidayinn.com and even the Images winners are generally examples of well executed optimization.

This is also true for the US index:

• For Videos, vimeo.com, 5min.com, videojug.com, google.com, hulu.com are all newcomers. This is of course due to the success of Hulu. Although it’s a little fishy that Google should happen to rank so well for Videos now…
• For Maps too, a lot has changed: now with daysinn.com, comfortinn.com, super8.com and holidayinn.com at the top. And for this, we’ve had to say goodbye to ca.us, starwoodhotels, hyatt.com and regmovies.
• The Washington Post once again dominates News, but they are joined by sacbee.com, usatoday.com and businessweek.com. while Latizes.com, chron and bloomberg.com have all dropped in rankings.
• For Shopping there was only a single change, with macys.com making way for jcpenney.com. After the Panda Update they’ve obviously busied themselves with optimizing for Universal Search results.
• For Images, squidoo.com and about.com have gained the top ten, whereas zimbio.com and flickr.com have both departed.

Flickr.com’s loss is near universal across every Google locale search. Here are the Universal Search changes for Flickr.com. This could be a serious blow for the image platform.

Link Essentials Open Beta

Our crawler has been digging through hundreds of millions of websites and identified billions of links. We used this data to develop KPIs and reports from which we now present you the first and, in my eyes at least, most useful. For the next three months, we are making Link Essentials available to everyone as an open beta. All you need to take part is to register – no payment or long-term commitment required!

We have crawled an incredible amount of data and continued to scale our system to accommodate a growing numbers of users. We are also continually updating our databases with new links. The system is designed to deal with an extraordinary number of links and for this reason we currently have 43 billion links in the test mode alone (with over 100 billion crawled). But more important than the number of links, is the purpose of use of these links. What use are 100,000 links to a domain if you have no associated evaluation criteria? This is just junk data. In this area, we have continued to refine our analysis and the results are described in detail below. Please remember that this is a beta release and therefore there is no guarantee that all the functions and values will be the same as in the live release. We are still optimizing a lot of the data, and with increasing import levels, we are also changing the Page Strength and Domain Popularity values. So don’t worry if your results change suddenly during the beta. However, please send me your feedback, ideally as a comment with your address. We will do our best to collect and address all your feedback.

Register here free-of-charge for the Link Essentials Beta.

The most important data in overview

We’ve also improved the Essentials start page by collecting all of your important data in one place. Simply enter a domain for immediate results – anyone can now perform searches. However guests and registered users (registration is worth it for this reason alone) will see additional, deeper, and more detailed data.

Newly included are the SEO and Paid rank metrics. They evaluate the top 100,000 domains for each country and provide a real comparison of where you and your competitors stand. The only trouble you might have with our new start page is being able to pull yourself away!

Click here to go to the new Essentials start page.

More about Link Essentials

Fresh links, a break-down according to link type, detailed anchor text analysis and referring page types – Link Essentials is ready to go. Even though we’re launching with a reduced data set for the purpose of performance testing, the beta contains a range of vital reports and functionality. We are extremely proud of the result, having invested a lot of time and effort to provide you with ever fresher data, deeper analysis and more detailed results.

All of the most important data at a glance, with deeper analysis only a click away…just like in the rest of the Essentials package.

We have packed a lot of information into the analyses and reports. Where else can you find a backlink overview with the positions of linking sites or an anchor text analysis with this much detail? Where else can you review the internal link structures for analyzed domains quickly and easily? Plus, in a completely new addition, we now offer you the page types of incoming links – i.e. blogs, news sites, shops or web directories. We have no doubt that you know exactly what could be done with this kind of information.

Plans for link-building? What kind of sites are linking to you?

Just as exciting is our industry sector of origin section. We let you know where links are coming from for each domain, allowing you to identify link strategies and discover the sectors where a domain is likely to perform well. How do we know all this? Here we get to show off the connection to our SEO module, and we even have a similar report in the SEO+SEM module that shows the real payoff to you from our massive data stores.

Luckily for Zalando, the majority of their links come from the 'clothing' sector, which fits their business model...

Which links are the freshest? In other words, what’s happening to the domain right now? For this, we have a tally of the freshet links as well as the most import metrics to help you rapidly identify which anchor texts were most recently used and which subpages they refer to. Here, freshness is key. We know how reliant link building is upon fresh data. This is why we crawl all of our data ourselves, without relying on anyone else, and can ensure that we will continue to regularly deliver fresh data into the future at the level of quality that people expect from Searchmetrics. Our goal is to provide you with the highest quality and most practical link data, not to bother you with each and every outdated or site-wide link that we find.

Where are the freshest links pointing? I think we can assume that Zalando has recently been focusing on Adidas and children's shoes...

Searchmetrics Page Strength: a completely new measure for an ever-present need

The next big thing: with ‘Searchmetrics Page Strength’ (SPS), we calculate a value for the link strength of each page and subpage. Something like what Google’s PageRank used to be and, according to Matt Cuts at least, still is. With these tools at your disposal, you can easily evaluate a page’s backlinks in a single glance with links from stronger (i.e. strongly linked) sites weighted more than links from weaker (i.e. seldom linked to or not all) sites. All of this is naturally presented on an intuitive and easy-to-understand scale from 0 to 10.  Don’t forget: as the number of links increases this will affect the Page Strength metrics as well.

In the next few months we will continue to release new components and features that are currently going through the final checks on our test servers. I think we have probably proven that we have what it takes to impress with functionality over the last few months… And don’t forget people – this is just the beginning! There are still a few Elements to come, the likes of which you will have never seen before.

Dive into Link Essentials and get started straight away

Our offer for Link Essentials: to access our unique link data, you only need to register, free-of-charge. Nothing more. Then you’re ready to start, as quickly and simply as that. As a registered user, you are allowed up to 500 queries per day and can access the complete data for up to 1000 links. Of course, customers of our SEO/SEM and Social Essentials and Searchmetrics Suite receive additional queries and data for additional links.

Many of you will already know the simple and straightforward approach of Link Essentials from our SEO/SEM and Social Essentials. The well-known and well-reviewed user experience allows every SEO to arrive quickly and easily at their analysis goal. In addition, for anyone feeling a little lost at sea in a new environment, explanations for all the various KPIs, graphs and tables aren’t hidden in some help file, but can be found directly on the site via the little question marks you will see throughout the software.

Link Essentials Functions

But back to Link Essentials once more. What will you find inside? I’ve compiled a list to provide a quick overview of what’s on offer:

All the important metrics can be found behind the simple figures.

• The most important KPIs, tables and graphs in a single glance
• Detailed link data in tables including:
• Link type (text, image links)
• Target and origin URL
• Anchor text
• Link position
• Searchmetrics Page Strength (SPS)
• Filter capabilities for all values
• Analyses of link, host, domain, IP and IP C-class popularity
• Most recent links, linking sites and anchor texts
• Internal link structure

Please note: We know that we aren’t perfect and look forward to hearing any criticisms, suggestions or praise.

Searchmetrics Essentials: complete website analysis

Together with the SEO/SEM and Social modules, the Searchmetrics family continues to grow and provide you with the tools you need to analyze and optimize every aspect of your domain. A perfect addition to our project-based enterprise software, Searchmetrics Suite, adding the additional practical elements to your optimization workflow. Speaking of Searchmetrics Suite, we have a few big things in the pipeline in this area as well. But more about that when the time is right…

In addition, since we believe that every online marketer should be using these tools, we’re offering everyone access to our basic-level data. For every country! Anyone can identify a website’s most important information without the need to register:

Have fun!

Marcus and the Searchmetrics Team

P.S. Let us know about your SEO in our comments – we look forward to hearing how well your sites are ranking

(Not just) for individualists

There’s a whole range of possible applications for customized reports from Searchmetrics Essentials. We use these reports ourselves in some of the following scenarios:

• Overview of multiple domains: on Friday morning, we want to know how our favorite projects did during the week. For this purpose, we have constructed a report that provides a visibility overview. This gives us a clear and expressive dashboard in red and green displaying our weekly developments.
• Detailed overview: as an SEO agency, we have a comprehensive view of our clients’ SEO positioning. We want to keep an eye on the SEO visibility curve just as much as the changes in SERPs. Perhaps more importantly, we want a view to specific competitors’ rankings for important keywords and, of course, social visibility for the previous week (plus a few other KPIs that vary according to the client, like monitoring the strongest categories, etc.). We can even fit all of this into one customized report! It has never been easier to find and collect all of this information in one place…
• Communication with clients: standard reports are, in my opinion, bad for client relationships. It is better to offer results in an attractive and customized summary with your own commentary. For this reason, a customized PDF report from Essentials is the ideal model.
• Archiving: even if nearly all your data is recorded in the Essentials history, it is still helpful to make and store reports at least once a month. I promise that someday you will need them and be glad that you did.

Thankfully, you can immediately create a customized report the first time you review a site, even if it’s partially complete. You can edit and adjust the report at any time later on.

Step 1: Select an element

Note: Any data point in Searchmetrics Essentials can be added to a report. For KPIs (the smaller elements), the option to include them in reports can be found via mouseover, while a small plus-document icon appears next to all larger tables and graphs.

It doesn’t matter where or when, click on the plus-document icon, select (or create) the appropriate report and then add the desired element.

But, that’s not all. If you’re adding a graph that covers an extended period of time, you have the ability to define the time frame that will be reported and displayed. You can select either a fixed date (that can also be changed in the subsequent weeks), or select an interval. This can be very practical for new client projects for which you might not want to haul all the weight of your old data but instead concentrate on, let’s say, the previous six months.

Customizable: you don't always have to display

If I have the feeling that I’ll be looking at a domain frequently in the future, I’ll include the KPIs, tables and curves that I think are most important in a customized report.

Step 2: Report layout and branding

You can navigate to the creation and layout of a customized report via a link in the drop-down box in the lower-left corner of the Essentials screen. In the top section, you will find the associated elements (navigate the page by clicking on the green dots beneath the elements) and two elements for graphs and text. If you want to brand a report with your own logo and comment on the content, simply drag and drop the appropriate elements wherever you would like them in the report.

As simple as can be – just drag and drop to embed your text or logo

For logos, you need to upload an existing image in a standard format (around 200 x 100 pixels) from your system – this means the server will have to do less work scaling it to the appropriate size. And, of course we all know how this kind of automatic scaling can look anyway… The text can be formatted using a small editor where you can adjust highlighting, numbering, font size and alignment. In addition, you can mouseover to see small symbols above and below a box that allow you to enlarge or shrink it as desired. This works for text as well as any element that can be scaled (we will look at this again a bit later).

You can use images for branding in your reports. In the text, you can write commentary regarding the current results. For anyone who wants to put in the work, you can also embed other text windows further down in the report and give more detailed commentary for each point. This way, you can often avoid sending additional reports.

Step 3: Positioning elements

Elements can be scaled using the plus and minus symbols.

With branding out of the way, we can turn our attention to the placement of elements. I’ve already provided all the necessary information: placing an element onto the grid from the top of the page via drag & drop and adjusting the size via the smaller +/- symbols. As an example, keyword analysis rankings should be given a little more space than they are given by default, because that is the only way to really get an overview of the first ten places. Above all, with our reports we try to work the same way that Searchmetrics does with the entire Searchmetrics Suite: the most important items at the top, followed by detailed information below. However, everyone has their own preferences and needs in this area, so feel free to experiment and work out what is best for you.

Most importantly, when considering the layout, you need to think from top to bottom. Unfortunately, you cannot slot even just a few lines in at the top, however, everything else is very intuitive and simply structured.

Step 4: Save, publish, archive

A preview, which is very helpful at the start, can be created by first saving and then clicking on ‘Display’. Logically, customized reports cannot be forwarded as links. However, each report can, of course, be ‘frozen’ in a PDF and sent. As I mentioned above, I recommend you generate and archive important reports at least once a month. You never know when they might come in handy.

Costs & processes

The option to integrate your own image and texts costs an additional $60 for agencies using Essentials. If the two customized reports included in Essentials by default are not enough, you can increase this to 10 for $30/month or 25 for $42/month. Searchmetrics Suite clients can create ‘xxx’  reports with their own logo and text without additional cost.

These additional reports and capabilities

include all the modules and sections from the Searchmetrics Essentials package and the SEO+SEM, Social and Link modules.

Now it’s time to get started!

I managed to put together everything I needed for a report from scratch with a logo and sample text in less than ten minutes. Ok, so it wasn’t a particularly elaborate exercise, but I used this report as the basis for an excellent collaboration with one of our clients.

So, what I really want to say is this: use this truly unique chance to turn Searchmetrics Essentials into a totally customized SEO tool. If you have any additional ideas, I look forward to hearing about them in the comments below!

This is all based on Frank’s piece at SEOKomm. Even though the conference finished a few days ago, work like this won’t go out of date any time soon. So, take a look for yourself:

Universal Search Integrations – AT, DE and USA

We regularly look at German SERPs in relation to Universal Search integration, so we took the opportunity to do the same for Austria at SEOkomm. The results were not all that surprising. As in Germany, video integrations outweigh images with around 57% and 37%, respectively. In the USA, videos are even stronger.

News and Maps trail behind and there are no Shopping integrations in Austria since Google AT has yet to launch their Shopping vertical. In comparison to the apparent “top dogs” of Universal Search, it is obvious that they have a vastly different distribution in terms of their search results.

In AT (Austria), DE (Germany) and the US, image OneBoxes are found almost exclusively on the first two pages:

However, while videos also appear to be focused on the first two pages, they are still strongly represented in the lower pages.

Some other important results from the comparative analysis of AT and DE figures  include:

• In Germany, videos are the the most important (= most frequent) Universal Search integration.
• Nearly 16% of AT video integrations appear on the first page of search results, which is also the case in DE.
• Around 18% appear on the second results page compared to 16% for DE.
• In total, nearly 50% of all video integrations appear on the first three results pages.
• On average, less videos are displayed per box – 2.2 videos compared to 2.5 in Germany. On average, Austria only begins to have more videos embedded than Germany on the fourth page:

Technical requirements for video optimization

Now, this is a massive topic and there are already enough quality sources that address it in detail.  Not least of all, we have the Webmaster Tools Help, that sets forth relatively idiot-proof sitemap specifications http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=de&answer=80472. Nevertheless, in my daily work I continuously come across sitemaps that contain errors or are simply incomplete.

The big question, however, is normally connected with tags and goes along the lines of, “Where is the best place to host videos?” Should you host on your own server because Google might have a problem with the external hosting service? What’s the  answer? In short, location URLs can be different. So, if you have a more suitable video-hosting service, then this really shouldn’t cause any problem. Really? Really. Unfortunately, there are always Video-hosters that have never heard of Google and deliver data so meekly that the search engine has no chance of finding it.  So, be careful in making your selection and always keep a close eye on your hosting provider.

Above all, your site needs to be strong. If Google questions the ownership of the video or if the true source is unclear (for example if the same video can be found on YouTube), then it can be assumed that videos with the stronger host will rank higher than your own. This is particularly annoying in the case of brazen video piracy. Then, even if the host of the stolen video doesn’t rank above you, but ‘only’ just under you, you will still lose valuable traffic. Therefore, you should always try to make yourself recognizable as the owner-host via sitemaps, content, thumbnails and player location, as much as possible from your own domain.

Youtube Optimization

YouTube is a very special case. As the  authority in online video, Google’s own site doesn’t just receive a preference from Google but it also receives a ton of traffic. This alone is a reason to establish your own YouTube channels and regularly fill them with videos. What do you need to watch out for when doing this?

• Always publish on your own domain first before including videos in YouTube indexing.
• Optimize like you would for Onpage-optimization.  This means usingYouTube Suggest & the YouTube Keyword Tool.
• User signals and video metrics tend to dominate account metrics. This means that a weaker account (subscribers etc.) will potentially rank better with a popular video than a strong account with a less popular video (corresponding to user signals).
• A top YouTube search result doesn’t necessarily mean that the video will automatically be at the top of Universal Search results or that the video will even have a Universal Search integration.
• Important: account location info relating to a video’s upload location. For example, when in doubt, DE accounts will be favored in DE, even when the content is an English song and the ranking of the ‘Foreign Language Version’ makes more sense in other countries.  So, for maximum Geo-optimization in Europe, it is best to use country accounts appropriate to your optimization target.
• User signals are incredibly important! These can include:
• Video queries over time
• User Feedback -> Comments
• CTR, bouncerate -> good thumbnails improve CTR
• Appearance in user playlists
• Positive ratings
• Embedded in blogs

I hope that these figures and tips help you get off to a good start in the 2012 SEO year! And as always, let me know in the comments if you have noticed any other differences or quirks for Germany and Austria in Universal Search.

Although I love spending time with my two kids and my wife during the holidays, I’m not really a Christmas fan. Instead of celebrating in the age old traditions of eating, drinking, eating, sleeping and eating,  I prefer to create things and come up with creative ideas. If you’re like me and not too far away from your computer this holiday season, I think you will like the special present that Searchmetrics has for you.

That’s why I got a cool idea. This year you don’t need to “train” unnecessary kilograms, you can analyze your projects, find new ideas and keywords, create reports with cool data and think about the past and prepare the New Year.

And to do that you need the right SEO tool, that’s why I have a present for you. Every registered Searchmetrics Essentials user will get full access from December 24^th to December 31th for Essentials SEO+SEM and Social.

You will get all features including subdomain and directory analysis to analyze your projects, find new ideas and keywords, and create reports to think about the past and prepare for the New Year. Just register for free!

What do you get?

SEO + SEM Essentials

• Access to a unique database of 100 million keywords and 70 million domains across 15 countries
• Fast SEO Visibility data for your site and competitors
• Universal search integrations
• Keyword research within the 100 million keywords
• Most detailed competive analysis based on 100 million longtail keyword set for domains and subdomains (this is absolutely unique worldwide)
• Individual Visibility for domains, subdomains and directories

Social Essentials

• Instantly see how visible your brand and competitor brands are on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Delicious and StumbleUpon
• Assess your most widely shared content down to the exact link being shared
• For billion of URLs including historical data
• Analyze the correlation between your Social and SEO Visibility
• See the impact of your current social media campaigns with historical social data
• Linkbuilding will be enhanced by likebuilding and we have the most comprehensive data for URLs which are liked and shared most

So, make your holidays to an SEO and Social days. There is no catch and we don’t need any billing or other sensitive information from you.

If you’re already a customer or registered, then just login and get started. If you don’t have a login, now is the  best time to signup free for Searchmetrics Essentials!

This is the perfect time to look at this year performance and get some ideas for next year.

Have a wonderful holiday season and Happy New Year!
Marcus and the Searchmetrics team

Btw: Take a look at the most shared URLs of fun sites in the Social Essentials. It’s awesome and much better than any bookmark collection. E.g. http://suite.searchmetrics.com/de/research/social/visibility?url=failblog.org. Especially http://failblog.org/2010/09/08/epic-fail-video-watermelon-launch-fail/

Integrations in details

First we will take a look at a detailed view of Universal Search integrations in the SERPs. In this table you can find the maps, news, shopping results, videos, images and so on for each search results page. Besides this, there are other less common integrations like Transit and Scholar (yes, they exist in Germany too) together with Adwords ads.

This data analysis is made possible by the fact that here at Searchmetrics, we track the first ten Google results pages for around 100 million keywords each month. From there we separate individual sectors, such as organic results and AdWords, and we can also identify individual Universal Search integrations, of which there are now many.

Since subsequent pages are only conditionally of interest for optimization efforts, we have long wondered just how many video, image or shopping ad integrations are included in the first page of Google results.

The first surprise we got was for advertisements. There are now more ads above the search results than next to them, obviously because they generate higher turnover. The distribution of videos and images on lower pages is also interesting.  While the chances of nudging images higher in search results decrease significantly, there are still plenty of videos in the later results pages.

For example, 28% of all search video integrations are on the first search results page while 30% of all searches have them on the second page.
This is what our results looks like in the end, covering the distribution of Universal Search integrations on the first 10 Google results pages:

Click to enlarge

If you noticed the figure of ‘almost 60%’ next to the result from video integrations from the last Universal Search post, then you need to know that the other analysis is based on our longtail keyword set with more than 10 mio keywords, the current analysis is based on our smaller keywordset with only shorttail keywords.

Btw, did you notice, that news results only appear on the first page. But why is that the case?

How many images per integration?

In the second table you can see another source of important SEO intelligence – the average number of media featured in each integration. For example, when there are image integrations for Universal Search, an average of 4.9 images are displayed on the first page.

Click to enlarge

Yes, it’s true. Not all search results pages display ten results! It is also interesting to note that Google News actually only displays 1.1 links on average. This is intriguing because you mostly see a big integration with lots of links, but when the news onebox is right at the bottom of results, there is almost always only one link.

Everyone can probably take their own lesson from both of these graphs. In any case, they are an extremely useful fact check and addition to SEO knowledge that you can of course use and distribute yourself.

Right from the start, you can now choose to display the visibility of directories and subdomains, as well as that of domains Now, for the first time, you can analyze subdomain comparisons, while continuing to utilize the tips and tools that you have come to expect from Searchmetrics.  This quick weekly visibility overview is available right now! On a monthly basis, Searchmetrics also provides an even more granular longtail analysis, which leverages the full spectrum of our analytics capabilities. You can easily recognize which of these data offerings are being displayed via the small calendar icons in the upper right-hand corner of each chart or table.

Four different job directories on Spiegel Online subdomains

Using our longtail data, we can see exactly what efforts Spiegel Online has made to shake up the job listings market.  I found no less than four subdomains with different job markets, none of which would be possible without the longtail analysis.

Many applications

This robust longtail data provides a massive advantage if something like a blog cannot be found and analyzed on a main domain, or if landing pages are used with subpages for particular topics on subdomains. In addition, a detailed longtail analysis of subdomains can also be useful for a clean separation of languages versions or site localizations.
Up until now, anyone looking for a detailed visibility analysis of Apple’s iTunes site had to get by with an Excel download and subsequent sorting functions. Now you can get all this data with a single click.

Click to enlarge

Biggest winners from these new changes:Operators of blogs on community platforms such as wordpress.com or blog.de. The longtail data is the natural arena of most ordinary blogs. In the past, this has also meant that WordPress authors have not bothered to explore the vast potential of search analytics. There is really no other way to conduct optimal keyword discovery for keywords for which you already rank, and you may find that you only need a little nudge to land at the top of the SERPs. On a domain level, your blog is normally swamped by the wordpress.com monolith – now, however, you have can have all these threshold keywords right at your fingertips!

Click to enlarge

People like this poker fan in the image on the right can now learn that their Zynga-poker-iPhone-subpage already ranks highly for ‘poker for phones’ (referring here to the German language example) Now you just need to do something with it…

 
Other examples

einkaufstipps.ebay.de

kleinanzeigen.ebay.de

flug.idealo.de

strom.idealo.de

More depth, more details
Longtail subdomain analysis can be found in Searchmetrics Essentials in the Ranking Feature of the subdomain analysis. You can enter any subdomain here.

New export: simpler and more efficient

Here you can find the Export Center...

In yet another new feature for Searchmetrics Essentials, data export has been powerfully upgraded. In the future, data for export will be processed in the background and then made available in a purpose-built Export Center. One of the biggest advantages here is that you can continue to work without having to wait for all of the complex calculations to be completed. Just let the Searchmetrics server continue to work through your analysis while you continue with what you were doing.

... and export everything here.

Your data, once compiled, can be found in the Export Center and will be available to download as many times as you like over the next four weeks, just like in Searchmetrics Suite. Unlike Searchmetrics Suite however, there is a small notification window when the exported data is ready for collection.

Exports could not be simpler, right? We hope you agree, and we look forward to hearing what you think about our newest updates!