Latest Search Marketing - Organic/Natural (SEO) content from Econsultancy

Search engines attract 2.3bn UK visits in January

2012-02-09T10:45:00+00:00

Microsoft and Yahoo sites saw their market share drop by 0.21% and 0.54% year-on-year.

However, thanks to Bing, Microsoft sites retained second place overall with 4.16% of search engine traffic.

Experian Hitwise market research analyst James Murray said search is one of the most crucial elements of online marketing and is clearly an expanding industry.

As search continues to grow marketers need the right tools at their fingertips to understand how they can maximise their search campaigns, to get traffic delivered to their website.”

Yet despite Google’s dominance of search, one of its employees suggested this week that SEO is bad for the internet.

Googler Jon Rockway posted comments to Hacker News stating: “It's a bug that you could rank highly in Google without buying ads, and Google is trying to fix the bug.”

He quickly tried to play down his comments, but it does raise interesting questions about how Google feels about companies trying to manipulate search rankings. You can read the expert view on Rockway’s comments here.

Is SEO really bad for the internet?

2012-02-08T11:49:00+00:00

Here's Rockway's quote in more detail:

Instead of being able to SEO the entire Internet, businesses can now only affect the search results for a tiny percentage of users. That's a good thing because SEO can't scale, and SEO isn't good for users or the Internet at large.

If you look at the Google experience from the standpoint of customers, it's pretty good. Users get relevant search results and ads. Advertisers get their content on top of everything else. It's a good compromise between advertising and usability, and it works really well. It's a bug that you could rank highly in Google without buying ads, and Google is trying to fix the bug.

Manipulating Google results shouldn't be something you feel entitled to be able to do. If you want to rank highly in Google, be relevant for the user currently searching. Engage him in social media or email, provide relevant information about what you're selling, and, generally, be a "good match" for what the user wants.

What is the thinking behind this statement?

Search consultant Rishi Lakhani feels that Rockway has "gaffed by revealing what could be a very much internal sentiment by Google on their stance on free traffic".

It kind of reminds me of an old SEO joke: What is the Meaning of SPAM? Search Positions Above Mine. However in Google’s “possible” view, SPAM could mean Search Positions Avoid Moneymaking.

Essentially what is Google’s money making model? Selling Ads. Every bit of free traffic that a site receives from organic search is a loss in revenue to Google. So are you surprised at this stance? I am not.

How is SEO bad for internet users?

Andrew Girdwood, Bigmouthmedia:

I have a lot of sympathy for Rockway’s comment. SEO that attempts to manipulate Google’s (or Bing’s) search results so that less relevant results are returned above more relevant results is not good for users or the internet.

I don’t believe there is a single “SEO” any more. Some of the SEO throwbacks and perhaps some of the new strands do fall into the “not helpful” category. Spam, for example, is not helpful.

The benefits of SEO for web users

Yes, there are plenty of spammers out there, but good SEO has benefits for businesses and web users. Here are just a few of those.

It has encouraged greater usability

As Site Visibility's Kelvin Newman points out, many improvements to website usability have been made in order to optimise for search engines:

There’s lots of annoying aspects of websites that SEO has had a role killing off, I think the good Karma for SEO ending the trend of splash pages is enough to see the industry through a decade of bad behaviour!

Elizabeth Ayers from iCrossing echoes this sentiment:

If large quality brands did not optimise their sites for search then it is likely that the web would be a poorer place. The web and social would not be as advanced as it is today if SEO hadn’t been such a key revenue driver for brands to take advantage of and participate in, creating quality content and participating on social platforms. ‘

It encourages business to create better content

Content is key to great SEO, and cheap tactics like keyword stuffing just don't cut it any more. Instead, creating content that people want to read and share is what works best.

Andrew Girdwood:

Modern SEO is helpful. It is less an advertising tactic and more a marketing strategy. Modern SEO involves creating and working with engaging content; content so good that users want to share and discuss it. This is a boon for users and the net as it creates an upwards pressure on quality.

It makes businesses more relevant to users

Rishi Lakhani:

Competitive SEO actually helps make businesses even more relevant to searchers. Because we know who links naturally, and why.

A page full of carburettors for sale may not get links, what is the motivation? But a page that shows how to clean your carburettor will. The difference between intent and motivation differs, and it’s the SEO community that is hard at work encouraging such content.

SEO is not bad for the user, but for Google’s pockets.

SEO can help small businesses to punch above their weight

There are businesses spending big bucks on SEO and paid search, but by using solid SEO techniques, creating a usable site and filling it with great content, small businesses can rank higher than bigger rivals.

Social CRM

Andrew Girdwood:

A strong example of how Modern SEO is great for users in general is in the emergence of social CRM. Businesses are increasing their efforts to look after customers online, using platforms like Twitter and Google+ to reach out to people who have had a bad experience with a brand or encountered some other problem.

This is in part due to the rise of social but this is also an example of Modern SEO. Google blogged back in 2010 that being bad to your customers is bad for business. Customers benefit whenever brands take extra effort to look after them and the convergence of search and social have given business extra incentive to do just that.

Is SEO bad for Google?

Is this the real subtext of this statement, gaff or not?

As Rockway says, thanks to recent changes such as 'Search Plus', the amount of Google homepage real estate which is open to influence by SEO is shrinking. So is Google seeking to minimise the role of the SEO?

Rishi Lakhani feels strongly about this:

Of course there are bad approaches to SEO. However, this attitude that SEO=SPAM should stop. Because the biggest violators are Google themselves. It takes content from third party sites and slowly wraps it up with ads. Google gets into short term partnerships with businesses with an edge, learn their processes, use those to build up their own offering, and then terminate those relationships.

Up to a few years ago, Google used to use Yell to supply local content. Now, it’s overtaken by Google Local. For years Google has been taking money from credit card companies and comparison sites alike. Now, it has launched its own version, which it uses Adwords to push.

JUMP 2012 London

2012-02-07T15:59:14+00:00

JUMP, now in its third year, is a one-day conference for senior marketers looking to join up on and offline data, technologies, campaigns, agencies and creative. If the last decade was all about figuring out digital, the next is about integrating it, dissolving it into the mix and finding new hybrid strategies that combine on and offline.

JUMP brings together over 1500 digital and offline and marketers who are not just learning to speak the same language, they are their sharing data, insight, strategies and successes.

JUMP is a fast-moving, content-rich symposium packed with exciting new insight from top marketers across every industry wanting to learn about how to join up online and offline.

Photos from JUMP

JUMP is all about more effective marketing across channels...

Using search marketing to improve TV campaign effectiveness
Doubling catalogue sales using insights from web analytics
Driving call centre improvements with web metrics
Generating media coverage via online buzz (and vice versa)
Optimising marketing budgets with the right mix
Leveraging customer insight from all channels
Driving up ROI

See what happened at JUMP

41% of Super Bowl ad searches during game made via mobile: infographic

2012-02-06T16:36:37+00:00

However, none of the ads made it into the list of the top five trending searches:

Madonna
Halftime show
Patriots
Tom Brady
Giants

The most popular commercials in terms of Google searches were ads from Acura, GoDaddy and M&M’s.

Most of the ads were previewed on YouTube in the weeks building up to the big game, cumulatively clocking up more than 30m views before last weekend.

YouTube said the pre-Super Bowl activity in 2012 was higher than in 2011 and spread across significantly more brands.

This was also the first year that the Super Bowl was live streamed online and Google said there was a significant spike in searches related to Super Bowl live streaming at kickoff, with searches made predominantly on desktop, followed by mobile and then tablet.

The Digital Ocean: how to market to fishers and swimmers

2012-02-06T13:01:00+00:00

So, fellow marketers, we are all likely beyond the trial and error phase of digital and realize that an intelligent, synchronized and aligned plan is needed to maximize our digital investment.

Start with your prime objective: for example in the B2C world it may be the collection of marketable contacts (via coupon/offer) or for B2B it may be lead generation with a primary call-to-action of a signup for an online trial.

Next, how are you going to connect with the targeted audience? This is where the digital ocean analogy is helpful. The ocean represents all the possible online channels and locations (e.g. search, websites, blogs, social communities, ads, articles, email, text ...) where your audience could be reached.

Now consider whether you are only trying to reach targets who are actively looking for a product/service/offer like yours (fishers), or those who are not actively looking but may respond to a discussion, or an ad, or blog related to their interest (swimmers), or both.

Take a look at the graphic below:

If your audience is fishing, what are some of the digital mechanisms and places they would go to identify, research and evaluate. What is the likely journey they would take to select your product/service/offer?

You need to create the appropriate fishing bait comprising content, search results and outbound campaigns to attain consideration. Your content and tactics will be oriented towards that fishing model as you can see from the (B2B) example.

The tactics used to attract swimmers can be very different, and are more educational rather than promotional in nature. Social media plays a bigger role here, as that is where your target audience 'hangs out' and engages with people/content related to their interest.

Creating or engaging in conversations is an obvious tactic, adding value and opinion without overly promoting. Advertising on social and industry sites is effective, as pinpoint profiling and targeting is usually possible.

Search keywords that you should orient towards can also differ whether your targets are fishing or swimming.

Fishers tend to use more action/competitive oriented search terms aimed at a product or service type (e.g. cheapest airline ticket to London, best performing mutual fund), whereas swimmers are usually more interested in education and discovery related to their topic of interest (e.g. mortgage industry best practices, diabetes discussion groups).

As a next step to work on this concept yourself, try printing and filling in the graphic above which is a worksheet (this one for B2B models) to help you identify locations and search terms based on audience intent.

Once you have these locations and likely search terms identified for SEO planning, determine the 'customer journey' from discovery through education through engagement through selection of your product/service/offer.

In some cases that journey might be short, even immediate (e.g. B2C coupon signup), but for B2Bs that journey may have several steps requiring a combination of fishing and swimming tactics and content made available along that path towards selection.

Bottom line, don't create content or invest in inbound or outbound tactics that are not aligned with both the intention and location of your target audience.

Does your web team know how to use Webmaster Tools?

2012-02-06T10:53:00+00:00

The first question to ask whoever manages your website day-to-day is have we implemented Webmaster Tools?

If they look at you with a vacant stare, be worried. Adding Webmaster Tools to your website is quick and easy (either add a meta tag or drop a file onto the root domain - learn the basics here). You can add up to 100 sites, so if you own multiple brands/domains, you can verify each one.

Once that's done, you can log-in to your Webmaster Tools account and go to work with a pair of piiers and a blow torch. In this blog I'm concentrating on what I consider, from personal experience, to be the top priorities when using the data available.

However, as with anything, I strongly advise that you learn yourself how best to interpret the data avaialble to help your e-commerce business.

Top tip

Make sure somebody in your web team starts every day by scanning the Webmaster Tools dashboard for anomalies. If your site crawl errors spike suddenly, you need to know why and do something to prevent it happening again. Keep an eye on:

Search queries. Any big new entries, or previous home bankers gone missing?
Links to your site. Are the numbers increasing or decreasing?
Crawl errors Are the numbers reducing over time (they should be)?
Keywords. Is your keyword density in the right areas?
Sitemaps. Have you got a green tick next to your sitemaps?

Below I will focus on the top three priorities based on what I consider to be the business benefit.

There are many other facets to the data available via Webmaster Tools, including page load speed and setting crawler access, but we'd be here all day if I covered everything and I'm a consultant, so I'm allergic to handing over all the goods upfront.

Priority 1. Site Crawl Errors

There are two key reasons you need to address site crawl errors regularly:

If you have a broken link or obsolete URL, that means a broken customer journey. Dead ends put people off and could prevent potential customers from visiting your website, making them less likely to come back in the future.
Search engines don't like dead ends. If your URL returns an http error status, the page will be discarded as the search engines will focus on pages that work properly and internal links pointing to it become worthless.
If this is the case, you can wave goodbye to SERPs visibility.

The basic tenet of SEO is that to be loved by Google, you need to be loved. You can't be loved if people can't find your website because the links they're shown don't work, or the pages they have bookmarked no longer exist.
Why might some URLs return error messages? There are many reasons but here are the most common:

Obsolete product removed from website so URL no longer resolves to valid product page.
URL has been changed during re-categorisation of the product catalogue and old URL has not been redirected.
Content page has been moved/deleted as content is considered out of date.

That's by no means an exhaustive list, but represents common errors on e-commerce websites. If a customer has bookmarked one of your webpages, if you then remove the page from your website how will they know? When they click the bookmark they will most likely be shown your 404 error page (which you should also customise to make as friendly and helpful as possible). A popular solution is to add a 301 permanent redirect from the obsolete URL, pointing it to the most relevant active URL on the website. When doing this try to deep link people and not just redirect everyone to the homepage. For example, if you sell an Olympus digital camera, if that URL no longer exists, redirect them to an alternative digital camera product page or to the Digital Camera category page.

Priority 2. Sitemap submission

The XML sitemap is an important component of SEO. It tells search engines what pages are on your website that should be indexed and it helps get those pages indexed quicker than if you submit manually, or wait for the search engines to stumble upon your pages during their cyclical crawls.

Ideally your XML sitemap should be run from a server-side script to automatically update and resubmit each team a new pages is created. If you don't know what this means, speak to your development team.

You submit your XML sitemap to Google via the WMT console. You can see if it has been successful by checking the status symbol in your dashboard. A green tick means relax, a red cross means it ain't working.

What to look out for:

Are you seeing sufficient URLs being indexed? i.e. if you have over 10,000 unique products on your website but only have 2,000 URLs indexed, you need to investigate and find out why.
When was the sitemap last submitted? If you have a process that auto-submits weekly but the last dated submission in WMT is 3 weeks ago, find out why.

If you think something is wrong, click on the "Test sitemap" button and check results. You'll soon see if it's not finding what you want it to.

Priority 3. Influencing sitelinks

Sitelinks are the additional text links that appear in organic search results for your website (see below).

Although you can't control what Google shows in SERPs (though you can influence through on-page SEO levers like content optimisation and off-page factors like link building), you can tell Google which pages you don't want it to show in the quicklinks.

Why would you want to do that?

There are times when you don't want certain categories or global navigation links dominating sitelinks, preferring to make other areas of the site more visible to customers.

A good example is Sale/Clearance categories. Retailers want these in prime place during the seasonal sale periods but at other times will want people to access their main product catalogue.

To do this:

Click on Site Configuration > Sitelinks.
Add the URL you wish to demote and click "Demote".
Check that the URL has been added to the Demotions list.

How are you using WMT?

I’d be interested to hear from other people and learn how they use WMT to keep a beady eye on web performance, so please drop by and add to the discussion.

If you don’t agree with something I’ve written, please let me know why as I’m always open to suggestions and advice.

Integrating Search Marketing - Organic (SEO) and Paid Search (PPC) to maximise sales and profit - Dubai

2012-02-05T13:30:54+00:00

It’s now well known that SEO and PPC are the extremely effective methods of driving traffic to a website. Integrating both natural search engine optimisation and PPC search can make a site dominate search engine positions. Being top in search engines can be a powerful and profitable way to build your business and increase your profit if done well.

This training course combines both disciplines of SEO and PPC and shows you how each integrates and supports the other. The training course consists of two distinct but overlapping areas created to show you how to make a high return on investment in organic (SEO) and paid search (PPC).

Search engine marketing is not a mystery; it’s about attracting the right customers at the right time. Completing this training course will equip you with the necessary understanding, technical know-how and insight to build an integrated search engine marketing strategy that will stand up in today’s fiercely competitive online marketing sector.

Throughout the day there will be a series of hands on workshops giving attendees the opportunity to build their knowledge. Links to multiple resources will also be provided to attendees to access after completing this one day training course which will provide a wealth of opportunities and information long after the course has finished.

Internet Statistics Compendium

2012-02-03T17:00:00+00:00

Econsultancy’s Internet Statistics Compendium is a collection of the most recent statistics and market data publicly available on online marketing, e-commerce, the internet and related digital media.

The compendium is available as eight main reports, split across different geographical regions:

Updated monthly, each document is a comprehensive compilation of internet, statistics and online market research with data, facts, charts and figures.The reports have been collated from information available to the public, which we have aggregated together in one place to help you quickly find the internet statistics you need, to help make your pitch or internal report up to date.

There are all sorts of internet statistics which you can slot into your next presentation, report or client pitch.

Those looking for B2B-specific data should consult our B2B Internet Statistics Compendium.

Areas covered in the main compendium include:

10 amazing Google infographics

2012-02-03T10:49:00+00:00

Google's 2011 revenues (via scoop.it)

How big is Google? (via smashing apps)

Google algorithm changes of 2011 (via infographics showcase)

What does it take to get a job at Google? (via Search Engine Land)

Is Google making us e-tards? (via Daily Infographic)

How to search Google more efficiently (via Mashable)

The constantly connected customer (via buzzintechnology)

Google's most expensive keywords (via StateofSearch)

Who's using Google+? (via flowtown)

Intelligence on Google apps (via Cloud Infographic)

StumbleUpon brings the iFrame back

2012-02-02T18:55:17+00:00

As detailed by Brent Csutoras on Search Engine Land, the company responsible for bringing them back is popular social discovery service StumbleUpon:

...on all content pages within StumbleUpon, you have a single button saying ‘Stumble This’, which when clicked takes you to an iframed version of the content.

Not only are they now iframing all content from the site, but if your logged into StumbleUpon, they are not even offering a way to remove the iframed toolbar, leaving you in stuck in the iframed version of the site. If you are not logged in, then there is an option to click X in the right side of the toolbar to remove it.

Csutoras observes that there hasn't yet been an uproar about StumbleUpon's change, despite the fact that iFrames have caused so much angst before. In the case of the DiggBar, to placate angry users, Digg founder Kevin Rose was forced to backtrack and admitted, "Framing content with an iFrame is bad for the Internet."

Is the lack of widespread anger here an indication that StumbleUpon's relevance has declined? Perhaps, even though unique visitors are apparently way up year-over-year. But regardless, there are more than a few publishers who still get a meaningful amount of traffic and link love from StumbleUpon. And they can't be too happy about this.

At the end of the day, you have to hand it to the iFrame. While it does have uses, it has arguably been one of the most abused 'features' of HTML. But you can count on companies ignoring internet history and using it in the worst ways imaginable.