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Are you selling products online? Then you should check out Pinterest…. It gives you an opportunity to showcase all of your products, with photos, and Pinterest is fast becoming a buzzword in the social media world. It is driving more traffic to corporate websites than Youtube, Google+ and Linkedin together, so ignore it at your peril.
Why should businesses be interested? Pinterest offers a great chance to link your product photos back to your website, offering another traffic driver to your site. However, it is also social media and – the clue is in the name – the ability to comment on photos and share offers an additional opportunity to engage with users.
By pinning other people’s images on your boards, as well as your own, you can open up the doors for pins (rather like Facebook posts) to be repinned, shared or sent to other users, and also to go viral if an image is particularly good. The images you pin do not necessarily need to be directly related to your brand or products, as you can create multiple boards for different topics. In fact, Pinterest, unlike many other social media sites, puts subjects and topics before people in its search capabilities so you could create an artistic images board, photos of landscapes, funny shop names or anything that will encourage users to find you when searching on a specific topic.
As with all things social media, this is not a static site and requires engagement to reap maximum benefit. This means finding and following users or subjects that are of interest and interacting with those people. Pinterest is very much not about ’sell, sell, sell’ and anyone pursuing a purely promotional strategy on Pinterest will quickly lose ground. Social media users want engagement, they want conversations, they want dialogue not monologue, they want to be treated as people rather than as a potential customer.
This change in tack for marketing and PR teams has exercised many, who have been slow to realise what social media is and what it most definitely is not. There are few social media tools that work purely as a broadcast channel; yet many companies are still only using their Twitter, Facebook etc accounts simply to put out marketing messages. This works until one person complains on your wall, posts on Twitter that you don’t respond and then others will come out of the woodwork quickly to add their negative comments, whether or not they have any experience of the company, products, brand etc.
Agile responses are required and many social media crises can be avoided by monitoring your socmed accounts and responding promptly to any input, positive or negative. Pinterest gives a gentler arena, particularly whilst it remains new and novel, and is an ideal opportunity for you to use any images you have (don’t forget to also put them on your Flickr account and on your Facebook page) whilst also giving your company the chance to develop a personality through the boards you set up. Allowing your staff to contribute funny pics, or examples of great design, or quirky photos, will help you to attract more followers who will then share your pins on their boards and lead more traffic back to you.
As ever, content is king so choose your images and boards carefully to give the appropriate image of your company. You can optimise your descriptions of your photos with keywords so pick from your keyword list wisely and this should also help the Google and other image search results. Don’t forget to include your brand or product names in the description, and actively follow people so that you can easily engage with a wider audience.
Happy Pinning!
Google has launched a new initiative to get more small businesses using 360 degree and high quality images on search pages, G+, Google Maps, and Google Places and local pages. The new Google Business Photos site includes a list of Trusted Photographers in and around a limited number of UK cities, but Google are actively seeking businesses requesting photographers to join the program and help businesses to use images in search and on Google properties more effectively.
The resulting photos after a shoot are stitched together using panoramic technology to create a 360 image which allows zoom, pan, tilt etc and hence permits website visitors to get a great experience of how it will be to visit your business. This is not only suitable for retail outlets, museums, gyms and salons, but also for restaurants, cafes, hotels, B and Bs – infact, nearly every business could benefit from this.
The photos are stitched together – you can do this yourself with apps such as Photosynth – and can then be used on your own website, as well as on Google properties such as Google Places etc. You can also upload your own 360 photos to Google Places etc if you wish, and embed these photos elsewhere with a small HTML snippet.
There would seem to be a likelihood that Google is looking to add an extra dimension to Streetview by allowing users of SV to virtually enter businesses with these photos, which would be an interesting development, and make a useful marketing addition to SV for businesses.
AdWords Express vouchers are being offered to the first who take up this offer, but the vouchers expire on 31st March 2012 so you need to act fast.
Lily Bowron, SEO Executive at ClickThrough, explains why TDKs are an important part of on-page optimisation.
Lily Bowron, SEO Executive at ClickThrough, explains why Titles, Keywords and Descriptions are an important part of on-page SEO optimisation.
Writing the best Meta Titles and optimising Meta Descriptions has been a constant struggle for many websites since the dawn of SEO. With Google continuously moving the goal posts, and high competition for specific keywords, making the most out of the display space offered by a Google search has never been more important.
When it comes to optimising a web page, the first port to call for most is TDKs:
For years, ‘guidelines’ have circulated the Internet, providing glints of hope and some kind of direction as to how many characters to use for a description, in order to maximise conversions. Sadly, it’s often the case that people are left grasping at straws looking for authoritative sites to show them the way, so their descriptions don’t get cut off half-way through, and end with the dreaded ‘…’
Anyone else confused? Still looking for an answer? Here are some examples of previous guidance:
Guidance 1
65 characters for Meta Titles
Google displays about 150 to 160 characters for Meta Descriptions
Guidance 2
70 characters is the maximum for Meta Titles
Roughly 155 Characters for Meta Descriptions
Guidance 3
“Google shows 69 Characters (including spaces) for Page Title.
Google shows 156 Characters (including spaces) for Meta Description.”
Well, the answer is … drum roll, please! …Well, the answer actually depends on the letters you use.
Don’t get more confused. It’s quite a simple premise. When it comes to choosing your letters, some obviously take up more ‘font space’ than others. For instance, ‘M’ and ‘W’ are much wider characters than ‘I’ or ‘J’. Therefore, descriptions or titles with space-hogging letters or characters will provide much less space to display your targeted keywords than descriptions using thinner characters.
Writing a word like ‘Woolworths’, for example, would take up considerably more space than other, more svelte ten-letter words, such as ‘Illiterate’:
Now, knowing this, you may look at your wording choices a little differently in future. You could use alternative words, which may have the same number of characters, but use letters with less width. This will allow you to show more keywords for both searchers and Google robots, especially for words that are not a priority, or wide conjunctive words which are necessary to help the flow of your sentences.
For example:
Call instead of Ring
Note instead of Memo
Female instead of Women
Heater instead of Warmer
Cupboard instead of Wardrobe
Exclude instead of Without
This month, I will be researching the text shown by Google for a variety of search terms, then comparing the displayed number of characters depending on the use of thin and wide letters.
This, I hope, will provide a better indication as to how many characters will be shown on Google searches, depending on the specific letters used.
Follow this blog to find the ‘Perfect Size’ for Meta Titles and Descriptions, rather than the ‘Magic Number’, and it could help you get the most out of your Meta Titles and Descriptions.
In my next post I’ll be looking at title tags in more detail.
Lily Bowron, SEO Executive at ClickThrough shares some thoughts on optimising title tags
Lily Bowron, SEO Executive at ClickThrough, offers up some thoughts on changes affecting page title tag optimisation for search engines.
You may have noticed recently that Google seems to be altering title tags for branded pages – or rather, it is altering the way that a title tag is displayed, depending on the user’s search query relating to brand searches. This is frustrating when SEOs like us spend a long time writing and optimising TDK’s (Meta Titles, Meta Descriptions and Meta Keywords) to improve search rankings and maximise clickthrough rate.
For example, let’s say that your client sells unicorns (let’s keep it simple), and their page title is a simple, straightforward brand name:
Unicorn Corp
When users search for this brand, the page title would be displayed ‘verbatim’ – using exactly the same text as the search query.
Let’s suppose that your strategy is to show that your client’s website specialises in other mythical creatures, as well as unicorns, and you want to attract a user’s attention with additional title information. In this case, if Google decides to display the text in a different way to your carefully optimised, keyword-rich title, it would be very frustrating. For example, Google may not display the title below as originally optimised:
Unicorns Corp | High Quality Mythical Creatures | Fairy Tale Animals
The question therefore is, to what level do we spend time deliberating over our titles, if Google then decides to veto titles for the best interests of its users relating to brand names? In some cases, I can understand how it could be beneficial if the user was looking for something very specific such as:
Rangemaster Toledo 110 Duel Fuel Stainless Steel Chrome
In this instance, displaying exactly what the user had typed could increase clickthrough rate. But at what point does Google decide to change the Meta Title of a site? If the top 3 search results are all similar selling the same brand or product, would it display the same ‘Google-edited’ title for each of them?
At the moment Google seems to be experimenting with this idea of ‘Title Tailoring’, stating that changes are more common with sites that have left their titles blank – or pages with the title ‘Home Page’, which is not descriptive or useful to the user.
But does this present an unfair advantage to those sites that have not taken the time to optimise specific titles to specific page… ?
Will Google now add search-query influenced titles to these pages if the title tag is left blank… ?
Will this increase the popularity of these sites and result in competitive disadvantages to those sites that have taken the time to submit their own TDK’s…?
THEREFORE… Should we all delete our TDK’s relating to our brands and let Google do the hard work for us…?
Unfortunately – for the moment, at least – there seems to be no clear guide as to if and when Google may change Titles. Despite the efforts of many bloggers, the lack of clear information means that we’re in a ‘blind leading the blind’ situation. In our opinion, Google is experimenting with title tailoring to examine the change in clickthrough rate (CTR) if a branded page’s title tag is changed.
It would, after all, be a logical experiment to examine the CTR of a brand-only title for a home page, versus a title tag edited by Google. We just wish Google would make it clear when it is altering site search results in this way, so we could also measure it too. Otherwise Google is affecting our CTR without informing us, leaving us faltering in the dark, trying to justify any unusual activity. We can only hope that Google’s testing is reaping interesting CTR results, and that – hopefully – they will share these Title-editing gems with us in future.
We will keep you posted on how this testing should alter your search engine optimisation strategy…
We are increasingly moving from a search driven world to a social driven world. If your online marketing spend includes the vast proportion being spent on SEO and SEM, it is time for a rethink. Google’s development of Google Plus in an effort to ‘get social’ (against the behemoth in the social world that is Facebook) is based on a simple fact: that Facebook and social is beginning to dominate traffic on the Internet. And traffic = money. Not just for the big players such as Facebook and Google, but to those these giants serve. That’s you, and your business.
There is no getting round it. We have moved into a new era on the Internet and there are now companies (and not just those who at first glance would seem most suited to the social world) where anywhere from 30% upwards of traffic comes directly from Facebook activity, and not from the search engines. Some companies, according to research published in 2011, are seeing nearly all of their traffic coming from social sites such as Facebook, Stumbleupon, Twitter etc rather than the carefully crafted SERPs.
Whilst it is unlikely that the world is suddenly going to cease using the search engines, and hence the need for SEO will continue, the reality is that social media marketing is becoming THE traffic driver and cannot be ignored.
“We don’t do Twitter or Facebook because we have banned all access to social sites within our business” sounded fairly ludicrous 4 or 5 years ago. But now it sounds more like a death knell for any company taking such a stance.
Ignoring the fact that Facebook is introducing new forms of advertising and using social signals amongst friends and networks to bring advertisers closer to potential customers would be plain daft. Google would seem to be deeply concerned about the Facebook threat to the display advertising market Google has held almost absolute power over this last few years. After all, that’s part of Google’s core business, and any threat to that level of revenue has to be taken seriously.
We are seeing the big advertisers exchanging www.ourdomain.com on TV and print ads, packaging, websites etc with Follow Us on Twitter and Like us on Facebook. Short status updates are so much easier to manage than redesigns and website updates. There is a level of immediacy about social media which is missing from websites; a layer of personalisation and response that is difficult to ’see’ on your bog standard, old school website. Whilst adding +1, Tweet, Like and other social sharing buttons to content on a website can help to illustrate the popularity, authority and quality of content, it somehow lacks the impact of a status update with 100+ comments, or a tweet that has been ReTweeted multiple times. A website also lacks the reach of social updates and it is easy to see how a simple tweet or status update can go viral, (mainly because of the lack of overlap between every individual’s personal network), at a cost – HR and cash – that is verging on impossible with more ‘traditional’ internet marketing methods.
Google’s Search Plus Your World is a clear indication that social signals are receiving more importance in the algorithms. And hence businesses need to pay more attention to the social space.
Are you still focussed on SEO and SEM? Or has your business decided to put more budget into social? What are your social media marketing plans for 2012?
There does seem to be a constant erosion of privacy by social networks, and the announcement this week that Google’s latest privacy changes will use data across the entire product set is already subject to criticism. LinkedIn introduced social ads last summer which had a default opt-out setting for your name and photo to be used publicly in advertising on the network. Facebook has caused untold furores with its many privacy changes and this week is ‘forcing’ users to adopt the new Timeline.
The need to monetise social networks and apps and services is of course standard business practice. However, the consumer created content which leads to the growth and potential of services such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube etc should not come as cheaply as it does to the network. The harvesting and use of personal details in order to attract advertisers is the payment that the users have to make in order to generate the profits for the network. This is not on a commission or affiliate level, but is ‘gifted’ freely to the network to do with as they choose. However, the depths to which some social networks seem willing to go in order to maximise this “free” content seems to increase rather than decrease over time. It is this seemingly never ending of the pushing of the limits of privacy decency with little respect for opt-in, permissions, or even the awareness of the users, that is worrying privacy advocates.
Despite protestations to the contrary, there would seem to be a casual yet ruthless attitude towards users’ privacy, mainly due to the cut throat market the networks are in. Facebook has been forced to add the strapline – it’s free and it always will be – after unfounded rumours that users would be charged to use the social site, leaving Facebook with one less route to capitalising on their enormous user base. (Friends Reunited, for instance, made its money by charging a nominal £4-5 per annum to access additional data on friends such as email addresses). However, the continuous drip drip introduction of default settings that require action by the user, rather than opt in, is telling about the attitudes which prevail amongst the internet giants.
LinkedIn require you to opt out from having your name and photo used on advertising across the site. Although this was introduced last summer, it is likely that a vast proportion of the users of LinkedIn remain unaware of the change. For many, the account and privacy settings on Facebook are simply too complex to work out what is being shown to whom. Google+ endeavoured to address these concerns by allowing you to choose precisely the people with whom you shared content, but the inclusion of Google+ posts in top search results, as well as the latest privacy changes across all of Google’s real estate, may have unravelled that feelgood strategy.
There have been users leaving the social networks in protest, but for many the privacy issue, or rather the possible results of such policies, is still unclear – what harm does it do me? Meanwhile, there are a number of start ups looking to create privacy enhanced and open source social networks, but the real benefit of social networks is when *everyone* you know is on them and a start up with limited members will struggle to compete with the phenomenal global user base that is Facebook today. (By the end of 2012, it is estimated that more than a billion people will be using Facebook).
How do you feel about the social networks use of your personal data? Would you leave a social network because of its privacy policy? What changes would be one step too far for you to stay?
Facebook is planning to give away around £4.2M of advertising to help SMEs, according to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, through the AdBoost programme. This campaign will offer £80 of Facebook ads to companies across Europe, hopefully encouraging more small businesses to use Facebook effectively for internet and social media marketing.
The new Facebook programme is being launched with the British Chamber of Commerce and businesses will be helped with the creation of Facebook pages, engaging with users, and using the ever-growing selection of Facebook tools for advertising on the network.
Small businesses can struggle to commit fully to social media marketing, often not grasping the importance of it for their business growth and reach, or finding it difficult to define a clear strategy for doing so. Small businesses also suffer from a lack of human resources and social media is, by its very nature, time consuming. However, this is where an agency can help, by offering additional resources, expertise and value for money marketing.
A simple Facebook page and associated advertising across the Facebook social network can help SMEs in many ways. For example, by allowing loyal customers to share their recommendations to others, including to their friends through posts on both their walls and the business page. For businesses who struggle to keep a blog updated, it can provide an easy, short form method for keeping customers in touch with new products, offers, sales, or events. However, it should be remembered that not all of the target audience of any business will use Facebook and so a more comprehensive internet marketing strategy will be required to attain maximum potential.
It is to be hoped that the free ad credits will not go to waste and that the 50,000 SMEs Facebook is intending to help across UK, Spain, Italy, France and Germany will benefit from the exposure. Start creating your ad today!
Possibly the biggest differentiator at present between Google Plus and other social networks are Hangouts – the chance to video conference at the click of a button with up to 20 other G+ users. Hangouts are moving forwards quite quickly now as the G+ developers and third parties realise the benefits of making recording G+ Hangouts a one click process with Hangouts On Air.
The Dalai Lama, the Muppets and a few others were the first to be permitted to record their Hangouts On Air, and now the facility to do so is being extended more widely. Hangouts On Air is being turned on initially for celebs, public figures and those with large G+ followings, but it is likely that a full rollout will not be far behind. The really cute feature is that once the Hangout is finished, a private video clip will be uploaded to your account at YouTube.
For businesses and marketers, this new feature, once available to all, offers an infinite number of possible uses to reach a wider audience, to offer one on one training sessions, for recorded customer support ‘calls’, to archive webinars, to preserve fascinating discussions, meetings or focus groups – the list truly is endless.
Until this feature is rolled out fully by Google to all G+ users, there are plenty of other options for recording Hangouts, such as Camtasia, Camstudio (an Open Source version of Camtasia) and Fraps (which avid gamers will know for recording their gaming moves).
The benefits of Hangouts for businesses do not yet seem to be being explored by many businesses, large and small, and yet the content and collaboration and discussions created within Hangouts by those who do use them can be seen all over G+. Are you using Hangouts? For what purposes? Have you experienced any problems? What do you feel is the potential for this type of application within your business?
When it comes to making predictions, no-one has an infallible magic crystal ball. But here at ClickThrough, we’ve got Senior SEO Account Exec, Martyna Sroka – our very own Mystic (Marketing) Meg.
She’s gazed into the future of SEO and drawn some conclusions about the industry in 2012.
Of course, nobody can predict for certain what Google, Yahoo! or Microsoft have up their sleeves. But Martyna’s run the risk of embarrassment in 12 months’ time, and put together a list of her predictions for the coming year. We’ll be back in 2013 to mock her if she gets any of these wrong.
Do you agree with Martyna’s predictions for 2012? Get in touch and let us know your thoughts!
Well, we’re not far into the year and already Google has made an announcement of a new feature which I believe will have a major impact on SEO, if it stays in its current form. It’s already been released in the US on Google.com, if you want to take a look, but hasn’t been rolled out to Europe yet.
You can read more about the change in Google’s official announcement
The new change is about making Google more personal and integrating social conversations. It’s an extension of previous enhancements to personalisation and Google Real Time. Google now effectively has two views – a default view with personalised results included and a non personalised view, that the majority of people are unlikely to click on.
Taking an example of a generic term “fashion”, you can see how big the impact is:
This is the personalised view (default):
The results with the blue heads next to them are personalised results.
And this is the general view:
You can see that in both cases there are prominent recommendations for People and Pages who have taken the time to grow their Google+ circle – effectively large ads to encourage adoption of Google+
Well, the implications are obvious I think:
In short, this change means that it becomes more important for companies to get active on Google+ and build a network based around the content they share.
Of course, the impact will vary by sector. It is greatest in sectors like fashion, media, B2B services and technology where there is a high degree of engagement in Google+ already. But as adoption of Google+ increases in other markets it will have more impact on these.
So, even before this feature becomes live in the UK it’s worth reviewing the impact on Google.com on different types of target keyphrases and benchmarking against competitors to see their success in engaging their audiences through content on Google+.
Finally, you may have noticed the caveat “if it stays in it’s current form” at the top of my post. There are already rumblings that Google may be subject to an “anti-competitive practices” lawsuit. Twitter are rightly angry. They say:
“We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users”.
I agree with this and hope we see a diluted version with the default swapped to the non-social view, though that’s unlikely to happen.
