Jim and his team were so generously welcoming – I felt like visiting royalty, even though I was sure I didn’t deserve it. Despite how busy he was, Jim and I sat down and had long talks every day about his plans for the business, what my contributions would be, and where I fit in to the scheme. We all dreamt big, and it was an exciting time. And just a few days after that, I was back in my home office in Woodinville, WA, pounding on the keyboard, developing new blog posts and conducting mini site reviews for IMN clients. You see, I could not relocate, despite Jim’s request that I do so.

Remote employment

Unfortunately, the transient nature of my visit to Upstate New York was the Achilles Heel of our arrangement. I remember a series of tweets by Wil Reynolds early in my tenure with IMN in which Wil ranted about the impossibility of success with hiring remote workers. I remember that Ian Lurie chimed in with concurrence. I respect both of those guys enormously for who they are and what they’ve accomplished in this field, but I was personally offended by their statements. I wanted to say, “Hey, guys, what about me? I was a remote worker for Bing during my last two years there and was highly productive and professional! And better yet, I now work for Jim Boykin, who’s willing to take a chance on me as a remote worker!”

I never sent those reply tweets, of course. I realized that when I was young in my immediate post-collegiate career, I probably would not have been the productive and disciplined remote worker that I am today (and it seems that many SEO agencies are quite heavily dependent upon youthful talent, although that may just be the emerging curmudgeon in me speaking). Make no mistake, I still bristle at the generalizations made by Wil. At a minimum, I would have corrected him by saying he’d not YET worked with anyone who could be successful working remotely. After all, he’d never hired me! Same goes for Ian!

But I soon came to realize that establishing a successful, remote work relationship is a two-way street. It’s not solely the responsibility of the remote worker to make it work (although I do believe the lion’s share of the responsibility does fall on the remote worker). To truly make the situation work, the company office also has to actively accommodate the relationship, keeping the remote worker informed of office doings, maintaining regular communications and conveying the wishes and needs of top management across a variety of channels on a constant, ongoing basis. That’s a big commitment on the part of management (perhaps that challenge is the problem Wil & Ian were alluding to).

Logistics, logistics, logistics

Some company cultures work just fine across digital communication mediums (especially email and conference call meetings), whereas others really only thrive with interpersonal, verbal, face-to-face communications (such as hallway conversations and impromptu meetings). Ultimately, while I loved the arrangement, my remote work status with IMN didn’t meet the needs of their top management. There were no performance problems, no professionalism or productivity issues, or anything of the like with regard to my work. And that’s not just me talking. That’s what I was told. What we had were challenges with logistics. Plain, old-fashioned logistics. Simply put, I wasn’t there to participate in the office activities, and that meant my remote role wasn’t a comfortable fit for the IMN team – that’s all.

And truth be told, I understand Jim’s position on the matter. It’s his business, and he is free to run it in whichever fashion is most advantageous for him and his team. Frankly, if I were Jim, I’m not sure I would have taken the chance to hire me, sight unseen, the way he did. I think he showed amazing courage and resolve in attempting to make this remote, cross-continent relationship work. He had never previously met me, and yet, on reputation alone (and an interesting interview), he was willing to give it a try. I simply can’t argue with Jim’s difficult decision for us to part ways. We definitely had something really good, but it wasn’t ultimately what he wanted or needed, so we both are moving on.

In the last six months, I have learned so much more about the business (especially from the agency perspective), met some incredibly smart and talented co-workers, been exposed to some fascinating client situations, heard about some amazing plans, and I am still enthralled with Jim and his amazing company. I consider myself more than lucky to have had this opportunity to meet, work with, and learn from so many brilliant people, starting with Jim himself and going down the line. He is a force to be reckoned with in this business, and I see big things for him and his dedicated team.

Note that I still am a true believer of remote working. I agree that it takes the right person to make it a successful opportunity, but it also takes commitment on the part of the team to integrate the remote people into the business. The Internet offers so much in the way of technology for advancing the cause of interactive communications. In fields where specialized, talented individuals are not easily found, businesses that embrace the Internet to find and work with remote talent will have an edge over their competition. Not everyone you need to hire lives close by!

Perhaps in 2012 we are still not ready to accept the challenges that remote workers entail, and I imagine that the challenges can be especially hard for smaller companies due to limited resources. But as we advance deeper in the 21^st century, with traffic choking our cities, the cost of living rising in urban areas, and the quality of life of workers fading as they face longer work days compounded with ever-longer commute times, something has to break. The companies who can figure out how to attract and retain key, qualified talent who are not local and are unable to relocate will have an edge. I remain hopeful that remote work is not dead, that in fact it is the true wave of the future. We just need a few more baby steps to get there.

Next steps

Don’t worry about me. I’ve already landed on my feet with a new role (my streak of very good luck continues!), with this one being MUCH closer to home (if you want to know more, start following my LinkedIn profile in the next month or so). I know I will be of much greater value to my new team thanks to the experiences I had with Internet Marketing Ninjas. Of course, I’ll continue blogging at Search Engine Land, resume my blogging for my own blog, The SEO Ace, and perhaps meet some of you SEOs local to me at the monthly Seattle SEO Network meet-ups.

So, I move forward with transitions and new opportunities. So does Jim and his team. It’s been a great ride, folks. I hope to see my Ninja colleagues at industry events. I’ll be speaking at SMX Advanced in Seattle in June, attending MozCon in Seattle in July, and speaking again at PubCon Las Vegas in October. Let’s keep in touch, OK? Thanks for everything!

• Detecting malware and its implications
• Sources of malware code, attack indicators and what to do about them
• Recommended strategies for avoiding malware in the first place, tips 1-5
• Malware avoidance tips 6-10, with a bonus tip on how to request the removal of the Bing malware warning for your site

Check them out. Most of the information is still highly relevant and timely for today.

I will admit that the material in those 2009 blog posts were Microsoft-solution- and Bing-warning-centric. Now that I am writing for Internet Marketing Ninjas, I can look into how Google handles the issue of malware on websites. But wait – how is this relevant to an SEO-oriented blog? Ah, yes, there is a connection.

Webmasters have to be highly vigilant about protecting their sites from hacker-originated malware attacks so their sites don’t become a new vector for the malware infections. And one of the vectors through which a site may become exposed to malware is via a client computer’s administrator access to the web server! If you are the webmaster or the SEO and you have admin access to the production site, any corrupted or malicious browser-based plugins, Trojan horses, viruses, worms and more that have infected your computer may also potentially infect your website, which in turn can then infect your website’s visitors. It’s imperative that you keep your web server admin client computer clean.

Implications of malware

Way back when, the point of most malware was to be blatantly disruptive and destructive. Hackers today usually work to install malware for economic reasons. These days, that means using stealthy, malicious technology and expertise intended to secretly gather users’ identity information and send it to a location where hackers can gather it and either sell it to networks of identity thieves or use it themselves to steal money and/or open credit accounts in the users’ name. The other big use of malware these days is to set up hidden networks that can be used as storage locations for child pornography, stolen entertainment media files, or perhaps use infected zombie computers as weapons in distributed denial of service attacks (or the threat of such, which can be worth huge amounts of extortion money). It’s all nasty stuff.

So what happens when your website becomes a vector for malware? Well, in terms of Google search, its crawler, googlebot, will no doubt detect the infection (Google will typically report on such findings in its Webmaster Tools). As such, they have several ways in which they handle infected pages within their search engine results pages (SERPs).

I have no technical, insider information on how Google specifically handles detected malware in the SERPs, but I can make some educated guesses, given my past search engine background. Most likely, Google classifies the malware it finds on sites during googlebot crawls either into one of several categories or as ratings on a scale, ranging from “largely benign” (such as adware) to “highly dangerous to data integrity” or “highly infectious across systems” types of threats. According to Google’s public statements about hacker- and malware-damaged websites, they give two levels of warnings to searchers inserted as links within their SERPs:

• “This site may be compromised”
• “This site may harm your computer”

An educated guess would assume that mostly benign junk falls beneath the threshold of generating any SERP warning. A compromised (aka hacked) page that includes changed content, inserted links or newly added pages to a site, especially changes that may try phishing tricks or other means of deceiving site visitors without attempting to load any malicious malware, will probably be tagged with the “compromised” warning above.

On the other hand, a site that does attempt to install malware is probably classified by the type of malware infection attempted. I’d imagine that pages infected with the most malicious and dangerous malware are most probably blocked from showing in the SERPs altogether, whereas pages infected by less infectious, less dangerous malware continue to show in the SERPs, but receive the “harm your computer” warning and have the link to the site deactivated. At least, I’d hope that would be the case. I’d hate to think that Google, after detecting the most dangerous and malicious malware infections, would continue to display the URLs of such pages to its users, regardless if those URLs are hot or not. After all, who can resist the urge to push the shiny red button even when we know it’s dangerous?

Google SERP samples

Check out the following clipping from a Google SERP. This image shows the first three organic links on Page 1 results for the query “cheap cialis online” run on my computer on 5/10/2012 (given Google’s use of personalized results and continuous algo updates, your mileage may vary with the same query):

Note the first SERP listing’s <title> tag text and the inserted exact match query terms used nonsensically within the <meta> description tag’s snippet text (a field that has no keyword relevance!). An examination of the page’s source code shows the page’s <title> and <meta> description are clear of any reference to “cialis”, yet there it is in the SERP. Is it a Google error? Not likely. I can’t say for sure, but this result could be due to cross-site scripting or a man-in-the-middle-types of attacks. Whatever the cause, the SERP listing shows the page to be compromised, and yet no “page compromised” warning is presented (probably because Google did not detect any malware and the hack work was not algorithmically detected).

The second result in the clipping does contain a linked warning line within the SERP listing. Considering the site’s domain name, I’d imagine it is indeed hacked. At least the third site listed in the SERP clipping is a legit (if there can be a legit) online provider of prescription pharmaceuticals without the required prescription!

Finding an example of a malware warning was tougher, but I found one:

A navigational search using the query “gogo2me.net” showed the SERP listing for a well-known, malware-infected site, along with the linked Google warning line. Google more actively intervenes in malware cases. Clicking the site link in the SERP does not go the dangerous site. Instead, it brings up a Google-generated, interstitial warning page. In fact, there’s no link at all to take you to the malware-infected URL. And this appears to be a good thing.

Note the second result in the previous SERP image. Google offers what they call a Safe Browsing Diagnostics page (this link shows details from the gogo2me.net site) to report helpful information on pages detected to be malware vectors. The Google Online Security team discusses the Safe Browsing Diagnostics page in detail in a 2008 blog post. In fact, Google places a link to the corrupted site’s Safe Browsing Diagnostics page on the interstitial page as well, so you can’t miss its contents:

In 2007, Matt Cutts wrote a blog post in which he addressed Google’s historical interest in protecting its users from malware threats, and included several links as reference material.

It appears Google does a good job at detecting and, when necessary, intervening in the behalf of users to protect them from malware. They also generate warnings about compromised pages, but they appear to be less effective in managing that. What’s not publicly known is whether they block the most dangerously infected pages from appearing in the SERPs or just block linked access to them via the interstitial pages. I hope it is the latter, but we’ll likely never know. Google knows that malware creators are always testing to see how Google handles their work, and any specific words from Google about that issue could only help malware become more stealthy.

Back to SEO relevance

So why is this important for SEO? Let’s rephrase the question: Why are malware warnings important for online marketing? Ah, now it becomes clear. Let’s answer that question with some metaphorical questions: How many customers will walk into a brick-and-mortar shop that have fire suppression sprinklers running? How many customer will open the door when signs warn that the store is being fumigated or has a gas leak? And if the business is in the process of being robbed and the doors have been locked by security, customers who wanted to come in are actively blocked! Bottom line: your online business will be in jeopardy if you are not vigilant about hackers and malware. Google will make it clear your business is untrustworthy and dangerous. And that makes this all relevant to SEO.

What do you do?

Here are some basic steps you can take to prevent your online business from being effectively shut down by hackers and malware:

• Run a virus scan on your web server. If you suspect your site has been hacked, review Google’s information on cleaning your site.
• Run a high-quality, Internet security (anti-virus and anti-spyware) utility on every client computer that uses elevated rights to connect to your production web server and scan those computers regularly for malware.
• Regularly monitor your Webmaster Tools accounts in Bing and Google for malware reports.
• Check your site’s malware history on the Google Safe Browsing diagnostic page (in the browser search bar, substitute your page’s URL for the default sample URL used).
• Review the anti-malware best practices advice from Bing (both posts) and Google.
• If SERP listings identify your site as compromised or malware-infected, thoroughly clean up the site, and then request a malware review from Bing and Google to clear your SERP listings of any unnecessary warnings.

For more information about malware, including statistics, preventative best practices, de-blacklisting and more, check out StopBadware.org.

Malware is dangerous stuff, not only to your site’s visitors (you never help your cause by infecting your potential customers!), but also to the reputation and availability of your online business in search. Take careful precautions, be vigilant about protecting your website, and if the worst does happen, attack the problem quickly and judiciously. Bad decisions are often made during a panic, so be careful.

I am a huge believer in content. Providing great trendy content is by the most reliable and efficient way to market your site. No wonder many internet marketing companies are switching to various content marketing services.

However producing great content on a regular basis may be overwhelming (and as many people believe, impossible). Coming up with new and new great and popular article ideas is something we are all struggling with. Therefore organizing and streamlining your brainstorming process is so important.

I have come up with three efficient ways to create a content brainstorming dashboard (feel free to try them and stick to any or all):

Content Brainstorming Dashboard #1: Aggregate and Filter Your Sources

We all have some individual sources of inspiration. To me these are:

1. Buzzfeed

Find the hottest trending stories that are being shared all over the social networking spectrum here. They have several ways of finding content. The first is seeing the most popular on the front page. Then you can go by category, like Politics, Tech, Lifestyle, Sports, Animals, What’s Hot and More. Above that are more specific items, under LOL, WIN, OMG, Cute, Geeks, Trashy, FAIL and WTF.  (You can choose your RSS options here)

2. Tech Meme

Known as the first to often catch any technology related news, especially where it is trending, Tech Meme is one of the most popular sites that is still rarely talked about. You can see top news or what is newly released. The format is really simple, and they have a search bar if you find you need something specific. One useful element is a ranked list of their top sources, which is worth checking out. (RSS feed is available here)

3. Lifehacker, MakeUseOf and Digital Inspiration

I am a tool gal, so it’s quite natural that I love tracking the above sites for new tool reviews and round-ups. There are other numerous options here but I have found the above three quite exhaustive.

4. Visual.ly

If there’s anything hot under the sun, chances are, it’s been already “infographed”. Tracking new infographics is one of the best ways to come up with cool content ideas (especially round-ups). Besides, infographics are created for re-publishing, so re-using them is not only legit but highly encouraged.

Again, quite a few options here, but I like Visual.ly because they have a very handy RSS feed that displays an infograph thumbnail and short description.

So now that we have determined the sources, let’s aggregate them!

The tool I am using here: Yahoo Pipes!

I have created a Pipe here that unites all my inspiration sources and lets me search them by a keyword.

Feel free to use mine or (if you have other sources of inspiration) login, clone my pipe and create your own. All you need to do is to:

• Grab your own RSS feeds;
• Copy-paste them in “Fetch Feed” modules and click “Safe”

Now you can search your new aggregated feed by your relevant keyword and subscribe to new results. You can subscribe by RSS or even email (through Yahoo! Alerts)

Content Brainstorming Dashboard #2: Google Spreadsheet

This one is already created. You don’t need to do anything except for:

• Copying it;
• Searching your copy for your keyword;
• Scan through results for interesting ideas.

The brainstorming spreadsheet aggregates search results from the following sources:

• Google News;
• Bing News;
• Digg (most dugg and most recent)
• Reddit (Top)
• YouTube (Top rated)
• Topsy (latest)
• Blog catalog;
• Yahoo! Answers;
• Twittorati Search;
• AllThingNow (Most Popular FB shares)
• Fark (Latest and Most Popular);
• How Stuff Works;
• Redux;
• Helium;
• Cracked;
• UberSuggest

You are free to hide any of the columns if you want less (depends on your niche):

Content Brainstorming Dashboard #3: Hot Trend Tracking

Trend tracking is a must if you are into content marketing.

The Internet is a whirlpool of information. Graphs, memes, articles, whole books, movies and albums, shopping carts, pictures, personal comments list goes on and on. Most of the stuff on the web you will never see, much less use. It is constantly updated and often what is posted will become obsolete within days, even hours.

There is just too much to shift through, and blind searches aren’t helpful. Endless supplies of topics will leave random search attempts for the sake of finding trends an empty endeavor.

Having a list of trend tracking tools by hand when you are stuck will improve your content brainstorming productivity. When trying to come up with a good post idea, try visiting one of these trend tracking dashboards:

1. Google Trends – One of the most well-known and used sites for this purpose, Google Trends gives you an easy to understand look at what is hot right now. They are all based on what is being searched for most at the moment through the engine. When you select one of the search terms, it takes you to a collection of stories on the topic. You can also see more terms, and search out anything else.
2. Trendsmap – Sometimes what you need to brainstorm is simply to switch to a completely new layout. Want to know what is being posted on Twitter based on the location of the tweeter? This is a real-time map that takes trending topics and shows them based on where it is most commonly being shared. You can see what is being talked about all over the world.
3. What The Trend – Brought to you by social media dashboard Hootsuite, this shows you what is trending at this very moment, or has been trending all day. You can also look at the sidebar to see the most commonly tweeted topic by country. It is a live feed, so you can always be sure to have the latest information.
4. Megite – This is a wider social media tool. But they have a Trending and Top Ranking section if you click on the More drop down menu. It is based mostly on news, and it is updated almost constantly. So it is a great website to have in your bookmarks for quick access.

Conclusion

Traditionally we think that the creative process is counter-productive. You need time to brainstorm. In today’s world most of us don’t have time at all but we brainstorm a lot. How do you increase your brainstorming creativity? Please share your ideas in the comments!

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Robert Couse-Baker (off line for training)

1. Friends in Low Places

Imagine the page your link is on as a bar. Is it a high-class lounge with reputable business professionals like you, drinking martinis? Or is it a seedy dive, where your feet stick to the floor and a couple of drunks are passed out in the corner?

If you see your link is hanging out in a bad place with a rough crowd, that’s not good. But the problematic neighbors aren’t always as easy to see as a link to Phentermine next to a link for Dog Collars. A lot of times, the signs are more subtle. Like even when your link shares space with links that aren’t downright smarmy, but are a bunch of completely unrelated sites, there’s a strong likelihood it isn’t one of your best. Groups of random links, with no discernible organization scream “Paid” and that’s not a message you want to send.

It’s not even just the links you are with that determine value. Where you hang out matters, too. Sure, page positioning on its own may not be a deciding factor. A link in a side bar could be a blog roll, or a list of recommended sites. So context makes a difference. But footers and sidebars are also some of the most popular places for paid links. And labels like “Advertisement” or “Sponsor” make a bad page placement even worse. So if your link is in a list on the sidebar or footer, you’re off to a bad start. If the list of links is made up of bad company, too, you’re pretty much finished.

2. Directories No One Uses

Everybody has some directory listings, just like everyone has an appendix. They don’t really do anything for you unless they get infected. The truth is, you probably have some far worse links in your profile than any directory listings, but if you’re trying to really gauge value, look objectively at the directory. Is it likely that any human being would prefer this cluster of links to a Google search? If you want to get really practical about it, see if the directory has sent you any traffic in the last 6 months. Any free listing that sends referrals is a keeper. If it hasn’t, well, think of it as profile stuffer, because it’s probably not really doing much for you.

3. Too Much Anchor Text

Hey! Your link has keyword anchor text, that’s good! Oh wait; you have 500 links with that exact anchor text going to your home page from only 12 domains. That’s unfortunate. Disproportionate anchor text links like that usually wouldn’t happen naturally. Instead, it looks like blatant over-optimization of a keyword which can actually be counterproductive to ranking well for that phrase. It’s not like having targeted anchor text isn’t going to help you, but it shouldn’t be that heavy-handed. If your backlinks are real, and not inflated by the linking equivalent of silicone, there should be a lot of variations in the anchor text and the pages you’re getting links to (and from!).

4. Paid Posts

If you have blog links, and you take the time to read through some of the other posts on this blog, what do you see? Is it a genuine attempt at providing thought-provoking posts intended to stimulate conversation? Or do you see posts written about products and services that just so happen to have mid-to-high-volume search value? Also, how frequently is this blog updated? Are there any comments that aren’t blog spam? When you look honestly at the quality of the blog content, it’s pretty easy to tell if the blog only exists to sell posts and links. Blog links like that probably aren’t worth much to you. There’s also a good chance this blog is a part of one of those…

5. Blog Networks

BuildMyRank was one of the most public instances of the fall of a blog network. But just because it made the loudest noise doesn’t mean it’s the only tree in the forest that went down. At this point, blog networks that are easily mapped have probably lost most, if not all, of their influence and are unlikely to be helping you. That’s especially true if they come with shady co-citation and paid posts, too.

6. Useless Pages

The ultimate factor that determines the value of a link is the purpose of the page. So when you spot a links page, is it a real, editorial resource, links page or a generic link exchange page? It makes a big difference. Not because Google has devised some sort of omniscient “intent algorithm,” (although they might have, I‘m not ruling it out completely). But the formatting of a page, other links and mostly the reciprocal nature of the vast majority of links on a link exchange page are going to pretty much give up the game.

If any page that your link is on seems like someone genuinely attempted to add value to the Internet in creating it, then you’ve got no worries. If the surrounding links are a random pack of degenerates, and the content is written with little attention to style, substance or basic rules of grammar, then worry a little.

Google has gone a long way to tell us all about their desire to reward quality content. So if you’re trying to find those of your links that well, suck, look at the pages your links are on and ask yourself this: Is this page honestly aiming for quality? If it is, or even might be, give it the benefit of the doubt. But if it’s not, then it’s a link you can probably stand to lose.

I love spreadsheets and I’m always looking for new ways to approach the data – sometimes you analyze spreadsheets the same old way and it’s hard to figure out what they’re telling you. The data just isn’t as forthcoming.

That’s when a new way to manipulate them might be the trick needed to pull out those juicy, actionable insights. A few of my favorite data hacks come in handy when I’m comparing two different keyword reports for a site: the most recent one and an earlier one, usually a benchmark report.

Nothing gives you a better understanding of the dynamics and ecology of a client’s keyword space than getting granular and analyzing keyword rankings line by line, but it’s a true luxury. If a client has a few dozen to a few hundred keywords, you might get to pour over every nook and cranny of the reports.

But what do you do when you’re staring down the business end of a 5,000 to 10,000-line spreadsheet (or bigger!) and comparing it to an earlier one? The data is too overwhelming – there’s simply no way you can approach it the same way.

The way I approach these types of situations is to go in the opposite direction: don’t think granular, think Big Picture. Or rather, visualize the Big Picture. Here’s the process I use to quickly visualize what the data is telling you in ways not immediately clear on the surface.

Identify Gains and Losses

When comparing keyword rankings, I’m always thinking in terms of Then and Now. Whether I’m looking at keywords that rank in the Top 10, 20 or even 100 spots on the SERPs, the first thing I want to know is how many did the client gain or lose from Then to Now. That’s easy enough – I just subtract the number of lines in Then from Now and the remainder is my answer.

If it’s a positive number, the client’s had keyword gains. If it’s negative, they’ve had a loss. I take the number of gains or losses and determine what percentage it is of Then. That’s the growth rate or shrink rate of the keyword space. I create a line graph to visualize the growth or shrink rate from Then to Now. The steeper the line, the more keyword growth or shrink the site has seen.

The overall growth or shrink rate is useful to know, but it doesn’t tell me much beyond that. To dig deeper, I want to know which keywords the client’s gained or lost. I need to start using some tricks. Here’s what I do:

1. I sort the keywords in both spreadsheets by alphabetical order.
2. I then isolate the keywords they have in common – duplicates. I don’t want to delete them, so I won’t use the Dedupe function found in Excel and other software. Instead, I copy the keywords from both spreadsheets into a text manipulation tool like the Duplicate Line Remover at TextMechanic.com (which lets you isolate duplicates) or you can just dump them into a third spreadsheet and use an advanced filter. However it’s done, I want to isolate the duplicate lines, not eliminate them. These are the movers – keywords that were in both reports and moved either up or down in the rankings.
3. I go back and find the movers in the Then and Now spreadsheets by quickly moving down my alphabetized lists.
4. I use a fill to shade the movers a distinct color and then sort them by fill. Even in a spreadsheet with thousands of lines, the alphabetical lists will help you move through the lines as quickly as possible. All the un-shaded lines in the Then spreadsheet are the losses. All the un-shaded lines in the Now spreadsheet are the gains.
5. I cut and paste them into a new spreadsheet and put them aside for later. You could spend hours just poring over the gains and losses alone.
6. I then delete the losses and gains entirely from the spreadsheets.
7. I save a different copy of the spreadsheets with a different name so I can always come back to the raw data if I like.

Identify Bumps and Slides

Now I’m left with just the movers in both spreadsheets, sorted alphabetically. The order of the keywords should be the same, but the Then and Now rankings should all be different. Now we start playing with the data:

1. I add a new column to the Now spreadsheet right next to the Now rankings, label it “Then”, and then copy the entire Then rankings into that column.
2. I add another column labeled “Change” next to the Then column.
3. I place a relative formula in the Change column to subtract Now from Then, and I then use the Autofill function to quickly apply the formula down the rest of the Change column.
4. I sort the spreadsheet by Change and look at the results. All the positive numbers are ranking bumps and all the negative numbers are ranking slides. The bigger the Change, the bigger the bump or slide.
5. I compare how many bumps vs. slides there are and make a pie chart to visualize the ratio.
6. I also give bumps and slides their own different color fills. I shade bumps in green and slides in red. If Change = 0 for a keyword, it stayed static and I don’t add any fill.
7. Finally, I keep the bumps and slides sorted by fill but add a secondary sort criteria – search volume. Each site is different, but I determine an appropriate cutoff spot for high and low search volumes for that site.
8. I go back to the bumps and slides and add one more layer of color fills. High volume bumps I leave green but shade low volume ones with a yellow fill (cautiously optimistic). High volume slides I leave red (alert!) but shade low volume ones with an orange fill (monitor situation).
9. I resort the entire spreadsheet of movers by overall search volume from high to low. It now appears as bands of colors – green, yellow, orange and red.

Take a Step Back

Finally, I literally take a step back and just look at the color distributions, not the individual keywords. Based on what I see, I can quickly draw a few conclusions and determine where I want to look deeper:

• If the top of the spreadsheet is evenly mixed red and green like a Christmas tree, the high volume phrases are showing specific fluctuations but no overall trends emerged.
•  If the top is mostly green, the client’s seen more high volume bumps than slides. If it’s mostly red, the opposite is true.
• If the bottom of the spreadsheet is evenly mixed orange and yellow, the low volume phrases are showing specific fluctuations but no overall trend’s emerged.
• If the bottom is mostly yellow, the client’s seen more low volumes bumps than slides. If it’s mostly orange, the opposite is true.

Ideally, a best-case spreadsheet would be mostly greens on top of mostly yellows. A worst case spreadsheet would be mostly reds on top of mostly oranges. One with mostly greens on top of mostly oranges means high volume bumps with low volume slides. One with mostly reds on top of mostly yellows means high volume slides with low volume bumps.

These visualization tricks let you quickly get a sense of what’s the Big Picture in the client keyword space from Then to Now. The larger the spreadsheets, the more useful this becomes, because it lets you decide where you want to dig deeper and investigate more. Time is money and these tricks allow you to be efficient with your time.

This can save you hours of time and headaches rather than moving through keyword rankings line by line – time and energy better invested somewhere else. Try out these visualization techniques the next time you’re comparing two different keyword reports and you’ll see the data in a whole new light.