During a recent trawl of keywords to see if the Google Farmer update had started to affect UK websites, an interesting hole in Google’s UK SERPs came to light. This will benefit websites who are not scared of creating content, and who are not wholly focussed on using PPC or social media to achieve results.
Firstly, we need to discuss how users actually use the search engines, because it is by understanding this that the astute website owner can benefit.
For over 10 years now, the lists of most searched terms on the search engines have included both the names and domains of search engines and some of the most popular websites. This highlights quite clearly that many people are unaware of the location bar in the browser, and how the domain name system works. For a reasonably high proportion of searchers, the search engines are the first port of call to find anything, even if they know the domain name of the website they are seeking.
In addition to this, as the search engines have added more and more functionality, many users have failed to either notice these new additions or learn to use them as intended by the developers. So, for instance, whilst most people use the images, video or news options to locate specific items when searching, the options to use the Wonder Wheel or locate within a specific timeframe are not standard fare for your average searcher, unless seeking a particular item that was newsworthy yesterday, known to be on Twitter or in a forum.
Searching on high value but not top competitive keywords showed that there are many websites which feature on the front page of the SERPs which date back a considerable way, and many have remained unchanged for quite some time.
So, if we look at “video conferencing bandwidth” or “Dyson owner’s manual”, we can see that the first page generates results from as far back as 2001. Now, whilst these actual terms may not be relevant to your business, they are not particularly obscure long tail terms, and for every business there will be similar terms which generate results that can give opportunities for top page rankings with a long-life potential.
In fact, if we look at the reasons why some of these sites may be still ranking in the first three positions, we can see that there is an interesting issue here that website owners can capitalise upon when considering their internet marketing. Firstly, often these sites, because of their position at number 1-5, have garnered a substantial number of links to them. As part of the algorithm to decide search engine position, the search engines take note of how many times a link is clicked, how long people stay on the page (bounce rates etc), and backlinks.
Because these sites have clearly been around for a long time, their validity is ‘assumed’ and people continue to link to them, often it might seem without actually reading what is being linked to, or they would discover that the article or information could be considered to be out of date. This causes the items to continue ranking highly in the results. Newer articles or news items can be found by changing the timeframe you are searching, but this does not change the fact that the default organic results are throwing up old results.
And this is where the opportunity arises.
Creating content that is search engine optimised for three and four keyword phrases, which also provides valuable information to your users will give you the chance to be listed in the search engines, possibly for a decade! This content does not need to be a masterpiece, and can be produced for relatively low cost by a copywriter or expert in-house. However, writing even 200 words on a subject with sufficient keyword density and content value also gives you the chance to send out a Tweet, an email newsletter to your subscribers promoting five or ten similar pieces of content, submit a press release, update your status on Facebook or LinkedIn, add to relevant pages on Wikipedia, or open a discussion in a forum about your new content.
You cannot put up any content in isolation. All content creation needs to be part of a wider strategy so you are benefiting via multiple routes of promotion and exposure. However, as your general SEO campaign gains traction and your site moves up the rankings for your major keywords, these other pages of content will automatically be spidered and will help to feed into your wider SEM campaign, thereby pushing these pages of content higher up for their specific keywords and phrases in the organic rankings, that as we can see are ripe for the picking.
It is often the less competitive terms that are the easy win, and which can add juice to your site, but these are also frequently overlooked (as we can see by the two examples given) in the race to feature in the SERPs purely for the most competitive terms.
“Social signals” seems to be the 2011 buzz term within SEO agencies and those who focus on integrated and holistic internet marketing techniques, such as social media, as well as SEO and PPC.
There are ongoing experiments to see how tweets and retweets affect the rankings of pages eg over at SEOMoz. However, simply by creating a link to that page, and then the page it refers to (Jennifer’s profile page) I could be skewing the results. Oops.
The point is that whilst Google’s Matt Cutts is being an exemplar spokesman i.e. saying nothing which can be used against him in future (bear in mind, every breath he takes is archived), he is also telling search marketing agencies and businesses little to nothing that reveals the intricacies of the search engine algorithms.
There are reasons why. Here are three:
1. Twitter and many other social media sites are in development. Twitter does not even have a business plan. We have all seen sites such as Twitter go “Pff” overnight as dotcom bubbles burst, often spectacularly. There are new sites every day, and with the current appetite for ‘all things new, shiny and social”, any site could go viral at an event such as SXSW – it didn’t happen this year, but SXSW isn’t the only global internet marketing or IT event. Google do not yet know, and may never know, how social authority, retweets, or any other social media magnet can contribute to the relevancy of the search results. Think earthquake and aftershocks – the ground is still moving.
2. Spam. If Google announced that tweets and similar social signals affected SERPS, then the latest Farmer clean up would be as nothing to the ripple effect that would need to be dealt with by sites such as Twitter and Google. The spammers would be there in force within minutes of any such announcement. We already see spammers leap on every trending topic across all social media real estate anyway. During a time when Google is trying to come to terms with the effect that social signals could/should/might have on SERPS, the last thing they need is to open the gates for totally useless data floods (tsunamis, perhaps, to pick a topical term).
3. Development - Twitter has already intimated that it will reduce the freeflow of Twitter app creation by locking down the future dev of apps using their API. This has caused a massive kickback, because community and open source developed apps, created at the edge of the network, are proven to be those which bring into existence the solid apps that we all rely on today. Office for instance did not begin at Microsoft at all, but out on the edge. Most people who use Twitter do not use Twitter created apps; rather they use the multitude of tools that come into existence each day that are not created by Twitter. Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, Seesmic, are just three. There are literally thousands of others.
Failing to involve the community will always lead to a slow down of uptake of your applications, and Twitter may well be proven, over time, to be cutting its nose off to spite its face. Should that occur, then Google has two choices – buy Twitter, or ignore it and sit back and see what happens. Whilst developing alternatives.
If YouTube had been heading towards a model where users had to pay to upload, which may well have been the case, then Google had those same two choices. With YouTube, there was no other similar video solution. “Vimeo” for instance, has not become a term in the global vocabulary, and not just because Google bought YouTube. But Google knew that video searches were already surpassing Adult XXX searches – often seen as the benchmark for popularity.
Is there a choice with Twitter? We know not, but the likelihood is that any replacement will not gain that “first to market” loyalty that Twitter has. And much of its code or MO is undoubtedly copyrighted or patented, so could not be replicated.
In the meantime, all you need to remember is that there is life beyond the search engines. Each tweet is another person you have connected to, who will like, follow, promote, share, RT, etc what you say. How much PR and promotion can you ask for that does not require Google to be involved at all?
It is always a good idea to keep your website regularly updated, firstly for your site visitors and customers, and secondly for the search engines. However, maintaining a constant stream of traffic to your site beyond just the standard methods -search engine optimisation, Pay Per Click, email marketing, social media marketing, forum and article marketing and so on – can tax the imagination occasionally.
Here are a few ideas for you to try. However, it is worth remarking that internet marketing is very much a matter of experiment, test, explore, and you will need to repeat this process ad infinitum until you find a formula that works for your company, products and audience. By then, 101 new things will have come along for you to try!
1) Co-operate with complementary rather than competitive sites to generate traffic between you. For instance, your company may sell electrical goods, and there may be a blogger (or group of bloggers) who review products and websites in that category. Talk to them about a ‘joint venture’ e.g. you provide product information for review on their blog, and you post on your site, “As reviewed on XYZ blog” in return.
2) Create free e-books. White papers are one thing, but they are generally PDFs that lack a certain something if you want to offer a snazzy promotional or informational product. Many ebook creation tools give you the chance to create an Windows executable file that packages up HTML files so your book can look like a mini-website. There are hundreds of places to promote (and sell) ebooks, including on Amazon and Lulu.com.
3) Write articles and blog posts with other authors and experts on your subject. For instance, if you sell financial services, you could get top tips from others in your field in a single article. Collaborating in this way, with a link to each contributor, allows cross-linking and backlinks that will help all of the websites and authors.
4) Set up an online radio station on your specific area of expertise. This is not as difficult as it sounds, and you can record interviews, make podcasts with panels of experts, or even have a chat show so people can phone in. It does not need to be live and you can archive all of your material, so that people can access all of it on demand, and you can even sell it on iTunes.
5) Everyone is in to social networking and you can use Ning to develop your own social network for your industry niche or website subject area. This can be quite human resource hungry so be sure you have the time to make it work properly. However, you can also use Ning to run weekly live chat sessions with your customers or users, or run webinars, which means you will only need to commit a limited amount of time to it.
6) Use the Question and Answer sites such as Yahoo! Answers, answerbag, quora etc to answer people’s questions. You will frequently find an opportunity to include a link, but remember to check the T&Cs of the site.
7) Create a Wikipedia page for your company.
8) Join a webring. These are groups of sites which cover the same subject matter, whether that is photography, birdwatching or football.
9) Ask for help on Twitter. This can generate a quite astounding response depending on subject matter and the question you ask. Make sure your website is included in your profile, that you respond to all replies, and that you keep the conversations going.
10) Write How Tos relating to your products and services for sites such as WikiHow and ehow. If you look at these sites, and search in your areas of expertise, you will spot where there are articles that could be written that have not already been covered.
OK, so they email you, you process their order, they sign up to a newsletter, maybe answer a survey. But do you know them? Do you know anything “personal” about any of the customers who shop in your e-commerce store? Could you send a personalised email or tweet to them? (Not just an automated happy birthday greeting on the appropriate date).
In the bricks and mortar store, new visitors are treated to a smile, a courteous, “Can I help you?”, an offer of assistance. Returning customers may be treated to a conversation based on their previous visits, questions about products they have purchased, and for loyal shoppers, a good shopkeeper will remember details of previous such conversations and even ask about their poorly dog, or how the children’s Nativity Play went.
Why should online retailing be any different from offline? Why do we treat it differently? Perhaps because we don’t often meet the customer in person? You might not have a bricks and mortar store but your customers still want you to care about them. Or they will shop elsewhere.
The online shopping experience is becoming increasingly important, and there are too many alternatives for any company to remain blasé about how customers are made to feel whilst on your e-commerce website.
Can you ever treat online customers similarly to the way you would treat a customer standing in front of you? The answer has to be “Yes”.
Is there any reason why an online customer should be ignored, forgotten, or left to struggle alone though your e-commerce shopping basket? If they were in a real shop, would you not be there to help them choose the right product? Is your website currently not working? Just because you know you are right in the middle of a rebuild, does that mean your potential customer will? How can you help them? How can you earn their respect? How can you begin to know them?
It is very simple to find out about your customers, whether this is the first time they have visited, or whether they are a loyal return visitor.
There are multiple options to do so, and you should consider some of the following:
a) Live visitor website tracking – this allows you to see who is on your website right now, including details of which pages they visit, how they arrived on site, location etc. Combine this with
b) Live Chat so you can talk to the visitor whilst they are on your website, for instance, offering help to find the right product or service.
c) Run a survey, either through a pop-up on your website or by email or in your newsletter
d) Google the visitors for whom you have details such as names, addresses, emails etc. Take a little time to get to know your visitors, just as you would in a shop
Here are 5 tips for being a great e-commerce retailer:
1) Know me, the customer. Go the extra mile. Ask for my website address on registration and explain why you want it. Take two minutes out of your life to cut and paste all the email and website addresses of your new customers into a search engine. What little tidbit can you learn about your customers so you can be friendly and personable?
2) Wet paint? You would tell your customers in a shop. Do the same if your website is under development or if there are known problems with your e-commerce. Flag it up, set up an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions), warn them and be there to help if there is a problem.
3) Be friendly. Yes, it has been a long day. But this is the world of 24/7/365. Be nice, be courteous, be respectful, be helpful. These are your paying customers…
4) Test, test and test again. Don’t assume that you have found every way to break something; customers will always find a new way! If a customer complains, work through it with them. Reply to their distraught email, sympathise, help. A simple response could buy you a loyal customer for years….Ignoring it could see you blacklisted globally on a review site.
5) The customer is always right.
Whilst it has been a popular method of gaining a return for free content e.g. harvesting email addresses and contact details for use in further marketing activities, forced opt-ins are going to become a major no-no in 2011.
Google seems to have decided that it hates forced opt-ins on your front page, and if you operate a PPC campaign with them, it is likely that you will find yourself facing penalties on your Quality Score for making users stay on your site longer than necessary just to fill out a form for your benefit rather than theirs. It is likely that other sites, such as Facebook, may well follow suit.
The reality is that consumers are not too keen on this approach either, and if you have a forced opt-in, for instance to download a white paper or similar, you probably see a fairly high bounce rate from that page. Especially if it isn’t clear what they are signing up to without reading umpteen paragraphs of T&Cs about what future contact they should expect from you.
The alternatives are so much simpler, and likely to succeed.
Firstly, don’t force the opt-in, make it optional and keep it simple. By giving people free choice whether they want to opt in, you will have jumped the first hurdle in finding the self-selecting group that is called ‘willing customers’. Make it easy to opt in later by including, within your free content, a chance to go back and opt in for further contact. After all, if they have enjoyed your freebie, they will be in the mood to sign up to hear more from you, receive other freebies, contact from you etc.
Don’t try to extract too much information in one go from those who do choose to opt-in. Customer retention is so much cheaper than customer acquisition so gather little nuggets of information from them over time, rather than all in one lump. Don’t scare them away by asking for inside leg measurements, marital status, an about you paragraph, photo etc! And don’t make email address a compulsory option on the form – allow the user to indicate to you their preferred mode of contact, whether that is through Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, mobile phone, Skype etc. Emails are so yesterday….
Secondly, accept that Facebook is here to stay and that many people, even in business, are now registered on it. Add a Facebook Like button to your site and, if you are eligible, use Facebook Connect on your site to make any log-in easy. Other options include OpenID and similar. Don’t limit the choices your visitors have to communicate their preferences to you.
Thirdly, give the user a sample of what they will receive if they opt-in before they opt-in e.g. a sample of your white paper, a link to your newsletter archive, a flipthrough digital version of your catalogue or brochure, etc.
To summarise: Allow people to opt-in by choice, add a Facebook Like button to your site, and never, ever have a forced opt-in before your site visitor knows what you are about.
Every company, unless a one man band, will invariably have more than one person focused on marketing, advertising, communications and PR. As we see an explosion of tools for marketing in all its iterations, on and offline, and the lines between each blur, so it is becoming ever more important to ensure that all those involved in promoting your business and products know what each other are doing to ensure a cohesive strategy.
For instance, traditionally, it is likely that your communications department or marcomms will have handled press releases, and developed relationships with journalists and media, as well as establishing a system for distribution. Whilst this may have begun to move online, it may well be that some of those who are interested in the goings on in your company nowadays are not the traditional routes to publicity. Your ‘promoters’ may follow your Twitter account, watch what you add to delicious.com, be a friend on Facebook, be LinkedIn to you, or subscribe to an RSS feed which is being pulled from your blog to a location entirely unknown to you. (Add 1 million other possibilities for your ‘followers’ to monitor you, and you might be close to the reality of the situation today!)
This means that all those involved in any type of promotion for your company now need to work very closely together to ensure that any publicity you push out for your business reaches the maximum target audience. Your customer database may not be accessible by the person who would normally have the responsibility for press releases, but it may be that a quick enquiry of your customers would yield details of all those who are interested in your news releases. (Customer Relationship Management needs to extend to *everyone* with whom your business communicates and a database showing contact preferences, the types of data people are interested in etc may prove a worthwhile investment).
Improving communication within and without the company will become increasingly important as journalists move to Twitter to gather breaking or industry news, rather than relying on press release distro services and emails; as bloggers gain traction, reputation and audience; as marketing adopts different guises, such as a promotional video short disguised as a viral clip or game; as everyone becomes more social and your marketing team expands to include all those who follow, friend or link to you; as online communities grow to include not just your supporters, but also competitors; and so on.
By integrating all your communications and marketing, you should make it easier to promote your business, both using your in-house team and the resources available to you from an often willing, global audience looking for content to share.
Last year, we saw real time updates added to Google and other search engines as the truth about Twitter not being a fad struck home. Not just Twitter, but the real time web really took off in 2010, reaching beyond the geeks and technobabblers to Joe Public.
The search pages now include shopping, videos, real time news, blog posts and status updates, as well as the paid listings and organic search results. So, for businesses, it has become ever more important to interact more frequently online. And that means updating your website and social presence on an almost daily basis, if at all possible.
Query Demands Freshness (QDF) is taking on ever more relevance as consumers create more content, news breaks ever more quickly, and a website is deemed out of date if the last update was more than a week ago. Whilst QDF has always been important, and updating your website on a regular basis saw the introduction of such tools as Content Management Systems so that website owners could carry out this process simply, fresh, quality content has become more important now.
There are ways to mitigate this problem using tools such as RSS feeds, which can gather real time data and display it on your website easily and without any human input required. However, no-one will retweet you or interact with your status updates unless you converse and engage online regularly. So, you will need to find ways to create fresh content that stimulate conversation, discussion, sharing and interactivity, whilst keeping your overheads, particularly human ones, at a minimum.
The truth is that real-time interactivity can become a time sink, as many who use Twitter and similar tools have discovered. Therefore, if you have limited human resources, you will need to develop a strategy during 2011 that permits maximum social and real time coverage for minimum input. Also, you need to endeavour to create content which is keyword rich and archived on your site, giving you long-term, search engine friendly, organic results, especially for long tail terms for when your update is past its sell-by date (probably in about an hour for popular topics!).
None of this needs to be difficult, particularly if you understand your niche and audience, and use both automation and the right tools for the job. Quality content will always attract an audience and well-crafted content will stand the test of time, which is why it should be publicised now, and archived for tomorrow.
If you haven’t heard of augmented reality yet, it’s likely that you soon will. However, unless you have been off planet for the last few years, you will already have seen it at work, most likely on TV eg sports such as cricket have shown for years whether the umpire was right or wrong in over-ruling that shout of “Howzat” by drawing lines on screen to show the potential trajectory of the ball.
Now, AR is here to stay, and anyone marketing online should consider the implications from all marketing angles. This article could contain 1001 links to articles worth reading, but the subject is already so immense that it would be hard to even touch the surface of the content out there which may be of relevance to you. Suffice to say, AR is here to stay and the sooner you grasp its potential, the sooner you will also benefit from it.
The release of open source AR development tools means that AR has reached maturity and will be everywhere within no time. Or it would be, if Apple had included the facility for AR in the iPhone, and Flash capabilities so that the target mobile market could be accessed.
Meanwhile, here are some examples of business related uses of AR, which may bear thinking about in one form or another for your business.
Whether AR will become mainstream or be a fad has yet to be seen. It will take off big style if Apple join the game so that mobile phones can access AR, so keep an eye on the next iteration of the iPhone and iPad for any such announcements. If Apple play the game, it will herald a whole new level of complexity to monitoring reputation for any company with multiple mash-ups that could be extremely difficult to keep track of.
Quora is becoming a buzzword and currently seems to be winning as the hot newbie of 2011. Many people may not yet have heard of it, but that is unlikely to stay the situation for very long. Answer engines seem to be the new thing and whilst many may use their close network to find answers, others are using Twitter, Facebook or the answer engines – Aardvark, Quora, Yahoo! Answers, Answerbag.com etc as alternatives to the search engines.
These could be all classified as people powered Q&A systems, but this would be missing out on many of the key values, and differences to the search engines.
Not only are many collaborative and changeable (just as a wiki is), but they are also recommendation engines so that the most popular answers rise to the surface. Compare this to the Google algorithm which no-one fully understands, and the discovery endeavour has made search engine optimisation a major industry!
Answers are grouped into topics, and searchable. On Quora each topic can be followed, bringing you a constant supply of new questions and answers on your favourite topics. For instance, there are topics or categories on Web Marketing, SEO and PPC and when you follow each topic, you will receive a notification of new questions and answers, either by email or simply when you log into the site.
There are going to be some downsides, inevitably, as more people come on board and duplicate previously answered questions, lowering the quality of the experience, but this is precisely what happens with forums (fora) and search engines too – how exactly do you get the answer you are seeking? However, Quora, in particular, has had the experts answering questions (for instance, Steve Case, Founder of AOL); yet this is now perhaps part of the cause for the backlash? Success never seems to sit well with human beings!
Whilst hard sell and blatant promotion is not permitted, there still remains the potential for any company employee to monitor and answer questions. The answers are indexable so each answer given can help your search engine rankings and exposure. Answer engines are likely to prove as valuable a traffic generator as forums over time, with answers on popular engines bringing in long-term traffic, and therefore and it would be wise to become accustomed to how they work, and assess what resources your company can make available to contributing to them.
As we entered 2011, there was a growing unrest about the amount of spam within the top, major, search engine results (Google SERPs are purely one example). To the point where there an increasing number of news stories began, to the point where Matt Cutts blogged about webspam
The main stories were about:
a) The failure of comparison sites to offer valuable consumer reviews
b) A domination within Google results of scraped content and/or Adsense-filled pages
c) Internet user frustration at the non-performance of The Search Engine that has become a household term globally.
What had Google done wrong? Potentially nothing. And potentially everything. There have been lessons learnt since the days of Dogpile, Altavista, Excite, Lycos, GoTo etc; yet, people were beginning to wonder whether the real winning proposition that was Google – less to no spam plus relevant results plus advertiser benefits above and beyond a simple listing – had vanished during the rise to global and economic dominance. Quality results? Um….where? Certainly not in the majority of searches for the top two pages on far too many popular terms.
Google endeavoured to address the problem with a change in the Google search algorithm, as blogged by Matt Cutts. This was then followed up in the US with a move to reduce the number of results containing pages from Content Farms.
There is a lot riding on the success of these updates. Whilst many SEO agencies and internet marketing companies focus on achieving long tail, niche results for clients these days, the reality is that many are also allowing clients’ budgets to be squandered on high bid PPC campaigns simply to beat spam. The spammers use very cheap labour, whose entire days are spent focused on getting first page SERPS for breaking trends, top keywords etc. Will the latest updates help Google prevent the spammers success – it remains to be seen.
The effect to date has been the undermining of the quality perception of Google in consumer eyes. What we are seeing is a growth of established brands – often first to market, often some time ago – such as Amazon, Dabs, Play.com etc, vs. search engines. These brands have spent nigh on the last decade building up a portfolio of products, suppliers, reviews, offers, delivery options, and, hence, reputation. Add to that great search facilities that keep a visitor churning within that particular site to find the products required whilst staying onsite for that brand, rather than externally, and you see a loss in market share for the search engines. Minimal perhaps, but if you rely on Google for your traffic, you really must consider alternative avenues.
We may be seeing a massive growth to include consumer recommendations, to accept purchase decisions made according to your social network, the acceptance of reviews and ratings (or even Wikipedia) influencing consumers, plus a user kickback against spam and drivel on the SERPs, but what we are not seeing is a suitable response (as yet) from the search engine(s) to take this people power into account. We have been seeing a lack of quality control in the SERPs that is seriously undermining the core business – search.
And there are alternatives not just on the horizon, but in existence. For instance, if you look at Blekko’s raison d’etre, you will see how companies entering the search engine market stand to take a share, purely by asking, and answering, what consumers want. Simplicity and single focus, rather than endeavouring to be all things to all men, may yet win out…..
2011 may see search engines reassessing their USP, the real-time Web, the importance of consumer vs advertiser, the economics of the search industry, and the need for engines to serve the retailer/advertiser/business rather than serving, primarily, the CFO, accountants and shareholders.
We are back to the age old reality of doing business: satisfy your customer first and foremost. Are the majority of search engines failing to do so? We welcome your thoughts.
