Category Archives: Google

Aren’t a great site and brilliant products enough?

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In a word, no. Consider the nature of the battlefield. Google is king of the Web – more than 70% of searches worldwide are on Google. And, in the B2B sphere, probably more.

Google actually prefers older, established sites – it even largely ignores new sites by ‘sandboxing’ them for 9 to 12 months. The big hitters have been there for 10 years or more, and they have thousands of mature links, many of them inevitably of good quality. They’re the kind of sites that will be entrenched in the top positions on popular searches.

Now do you want to take them on? Do you have the budget, stamina and time? Or will you find a better way?

Read the full article Only pick a fight you can win – the first rule of successful Web marketing at Web Positioning Centre.

How landing pages can affect your ROI

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The role of landing pages continues to be a bit of a mystery to many people who run PPC campaigns.

Until recently, I hadn’t realised quite how much of a gotcha they can become for some people. You see, as someone trained as a direct marketing copywriter, I naturally think in terms of how a person will make their way from initial contact through to sale.

When you use PPC, the route looks something like this:

    SEARCH ON KEY PHRASE -> CLICK ON PPC AD -> LANDING PAGE -> BASKET/ORDERING SCREENS -> CHECKOUT

The landing page can be the home page, but it’s just as likely not to be. If you’ve developed enough content to properly match up with the interests of your visitors – sell to your prospects – you should have some copy that matches with the key phrases you’re buying traffic on. If you find yourself directing traffic from all your ads to the home page (or any other catch-all page), you should be asking yourself why there isn’t any copy to satisfy those specific interests.

Without that fit between search and landing page, you’ll be causing yourself two problems. Firstly you’ll be failing to manage your visitors’ expectations effectively, and they’ll be very likely to just go back to the search page because they cannot see what they’re looking for. You’ll have paid for a click and not done anything profitable with it, so pushing up your cost per conversion and having a disastrous impact on your ROI.

Secondly, you’ll be running the risk of attracting the wrath of the Google Adwords system (and if my reading of Yahoo Search Marketing’s latest rules is correct, most of these points also apply to advertising on YSM). If Adwords believes the landing page is not relevant to the key phrase traffic being bought, it will just refuse to run your ad; if it believes the landing page content is marginally relevant, then you’ll end up paying more for your clicks. So you may be blocked from buying the traffic you need, or your ROI may end up being affected through paying more for clicks – even if you do manage to move the visitor on from a less-than-relevant landing page through to purchase.

Another implication is that PPC has become less of a standalone add-on, something you can just fire up and point at your home page. Many of the marketplaces I look at are getting more and more difficult to make good margins in because costs per click (CPCs) are regularly hitting £1 plus. So that means you have to do everything you possibly can to buy traffic at as low a CPC as you can, and then engage with your visitors as effectively as you can.

Proper landing pages can help with both these issues.

Google’s unified search results – what do they mean for you?

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Last week, Google announced it is to unify its search results into a single search, called Web. The news made the mainstream media.

On its blog, Google said:

Here’s the challenge in a nutshell: Until now, we’ve only been able to show news, books, local and other such results at the top of the page, like this example for [trends in education]. But it’s a tall order to earn placement at the top of our search results, so plenty often we end up not showing these kinds of results even when they might be useful. If only we could smartly place such results elsewhere on the page when they don’t quite deserve the top, we could share the benefits of these great Google features with people much more often.

and concluded:

This is just the tip of the iceberg in making Google results more comprehensive and useful. It has involved launching a number of new systems that will make it much easier for us to continue making improvements so you get the most relevant information from our varied content areas. We hope you like it. And finally, we’re especially happy to know that Google is still very much a place where we can get big things done!

At Web Positioning Centre, we’ve seen some shuffling and inconsistency in Google results for some of our clients recently. Internally, we predicted some upcoming changes in the Google algorithm. I guess we were right.

It’s difficult to know exactly what implications Google’s unified search will have. One immediate response is that with more results competing for each search, you may have to invest more in SEO to get on that first page. Google takes a positive spin on its Webmaster Blog and makes some suggestions on how to take advantage of universal search.

We’ll be keeping a close eye on the effect of the changes following the launch on Wednesday. It’ll almost certainly take a few weeks for things to settle down and it should start becoming clear what kind of sites and content Google is giving highest weightings to.

Google Analytics Upgrade

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On Tuesday, Google announced a New Version of Google Analytics (henceforth Analytics).

We will be activating this new version on all current Analytics accounts over the next few weeks, so please be on the lookout for an email from us and keep an eye on your settings page.

Well, our main account has been upgraded, and my look around the new version this afternoon put a huge smile on my face. Google must have been listening to my grumblings and finally put its house in order!

Google summarises the upgrades as follows:

Here are some of the improvements:

* Email and export reports: Schedule or send ad-hoc personalized report emails and export reports in PDF format.
* Custom Dashboard: No more digging through reports. Put all the information you need on a custom dashboard that you can email to others.
* Trend and Over-time Graph: Compare time periods and select date ranges without losing sight of long term trends.
* Contextual help tips: Context sensitive Help and Conversion University tips are available from every report.

At first glance, the most exciting thing is the ability to e-mail and export personalized reports. So Analytics is not now dragging its feet behind Adwords – always very frustrating when trying to sell the benefits of Analytics to a client, and having to point out that, by the way, they can’t have those reports e-mailed.

I’m very much looking forward to spending some more time with the new Analytics. It looks as if I won’t be saying ‘Google Analytics is good for the price’ any more.

Reciprocal linking and how to lose a lot of money on diamonds

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I had a conversation earlier in the week with someone who insisted that what his chosen SEO company was doing was correct and he was spending his company’s money correctly. I told him it wasn’t what Web Positioning Centre either did or recommended. To cut a long story short, we agreed to differ ;-) and went our separate ways.

I was reminded of the conversation while I was catching up with Matt Cutts’ blog at lunchtime. He responds to The Forbes article, Condemned to Google Hell that has been been referenced all over the place. Basically, some poor site owner complains how they’ve been so hard done-by Google, and how much business they’ve lost consequentially.

There’s something familiar about the story Matt pitches in Google Hell? For some reason, it seems the company featured in the article has employed an SEO company that in turn employs, er, questionable practices.

The guy I talked to earlier in the week could be headed into very similar waters.

Playing the Google Sandbox

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The Google Sandbox is the part of the Google algorithm that keeps new sites out of the top pages for popular natural search results. If you have a new site, you’re potentially sandboxed for up to 12 months – we give 9-12 months as a rule of thumb. That’s maybe up to a year of investment in Organic SEO, with little immediate to show for it.

But, like most things on the Web, you’re not 100% certain of being sandboxed. It’s only for the really high traffic key phrases that the sandbox operates. Somewhere, there’s a line, below which Google will be happy to list you up there on the first page.

In fact, we’ve discovered that as we dig deeper and deeper in key phrase research for our clients, we have found ourselves recommending key phrases that it later turns out they have not been sandboxed for – in some cases to our great surprise. So we find ourselves recommending a mix of high-traffic key phrases as an investment for the future – they’ll kick in when the site emerges from the sandbox – and some that we might just get some immediate results for.

If we do succeed, then maybe we can save our client some PPC click-through budget.

I don’t like Google’s innate conservatism

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Like all start-up businesses, it’s tough enough for start-up sites. Then Google sandboxes them as well. And that’s just one end of the stick. Google actually prefers older, established sites with mature links.

While Cynical Dave says pushing new sites into using Adwords does no harm to its profits, my realistic side gives Google the benefit of the doubt – webmasters have been working at a huge number of ways of gaming the search engines, so it’s hardly surprising that new sites have to prove themselves before being let out on to the natural search results fairway.

But that means your new site has to work hard. As I often find myself saying to clients, the big hitters have been there for a decade or more, and they have thousands of mature links, many of them inevitably of good quality. And with the current algorithm they can be just about impossible to dislodge within realistic budgets.

What worries me is what this bias towards older sites is doing to the Internet. Is Google’s innate conservatism strangling some new sites before they even have a chance? Are the odds being stacked unfairly against 2007′s online businesses?

I’d personally like Google to evolve its algorithm so that it can tell which of new sites are spam and which aren’t. And stop weighting the Net in favour of the old war horses.

YSM becomes even more like Google Adwords

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YSM (Yahoo Search Marketing) is junking the long descriptions in its ads. No longer do we have 190 characters to get over our message, but we have just 70, instead – the current short description.

I’ll leave it to YSM to explain why:

Why are we making this change?
We’ve found that ads written more concisely give users a better experience and generally get better results. Users are exposed to higher quality search ads and advertisers may attract more interested and enthusiastic potential customers.

I wonder if this is really true. Longer rubbish copy doesn’t get you anywhere, but longer good-quality copy normally out-performs shorter copy on line as it does off line. I think, instead, Yahoo! is just continuing to make YSM more and more like Google Adwords.

What happened to the idea of brand differentiation? Why should I ever buy a pale imitation of the original or the market leader, unless it’s significantly cheaper.

I do hope that YSM will tell me a compelling reason for recommending YSM to my clients – for Yahoo’s sake, as well as mine.

Top 10 Adwords mistakes

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When I review prospective clients’ running Adwords campaigns, I find the same mistakes being made over and over again. Here are some of them:

1. Buying searches on the company name - many, if not most, companies or sites rank well on organic/natural searches for their own name. Why bother to buy clicks when you’re already on the first page for organic searches?

2. Not using Ad Groups - you’ll be paying more for your clicks as you’ll be sacrificing relevance

3. Always aiming for the top spot - positions 2-5 often perform just as well, and many PPC professionals report that they get fewer tyre-kickers from the lower positions

4. Bidding on too many keywords (phrases) – focus on the key phrases that are doing best for you and Google will reward you with higher positions and/or lower bid requirements

5. Not tracking conversions - make sure you’re using the tracking code on your site, because traffic levels are only part of the story. Make sure you know the ROI on your campaign

6. Using PPC for branding - no, no, no. It’s a direct response medium. If you must spend money on branding, do it in a more effective way

7. Not understanding where break-even lies - OK, it’s related to 5, but what happens when your cost per click doubles? Do you carry on? Or do you wait for the market to cool? Selling at a loss rarely makes sense, unless you have a structured sales back-end

8. Buying traffic for the sake of it (having no strategy) – all traffic isn’t good traffic. Make sure you’re buying relevant traffic, even if the clicks are a bit more expensive

9. Not understanding the principles of good advertising copy - you can either see writing PPC ads as being simple, totally dictated by the low character count, or you can work hard at applying the proven rules of good copywriting to that small space. Get it right, and you’ll give the competition a drubbing

10. Thinking that Google Adwords is a straight auction for positions - it’s amazing how many people think it is. Google mixes in other factors such as relevance and past performance to skew what you need to pay. Read all the information on the Google Adwords site and make sure you actively manage your campaign

Are you making these kind of mistakes with Adwords?