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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…
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.
Since the Google Search Plus changes recently, there appears to have been a backlash from players such as Twitter, as well as the SEO industry and users.
Google has led the way in search since its appearance on the market, replacing such well-loved engines as Altavista as well as the meta search engines – Dogpile etc. Microsoft created Bing in a long delayed response to Google as a ‘decision engine’, and there are computational knowledge engines (Wolfram Alpha), as well as new and novel engines such as DuckDuckGo.
Until recently, none of these engines appeared to threaten Google’s position as the world’s best search engine because Google did one thing better than any other – relevance. However, the latest inclusions of social results and the seeming preference given to Google properties before, for example, original content rather than a discussion about said content, has caused an upset. Whilst the social results can be switched off, many users find the fact that an ‘opt out’ is required an additional niggle to the already heated discussions about Google properties listing above seemingly more relevant non-Google properties. In addition, Google’s removal of Boolean operators (which Bing permits) feels like an unnecessary dumbing down of the search process.
There are many pieces in the blogosphere detailing Google vs Bing vs other search engines, giving examples of where Google has failed to produce the relevant results, compared to the other engines. As Google have always said, the user is only one click away from using any other engine and it seems there are now many changing teh default search engine in their browser to Bing and other options. However, there is a percentage of Internet users who seem entirely unaware that there are other search engines, particularly since many began to use the Net after “Google it” became the replacement term for “search the Internet”.
For internet marketers, the process of SEO has always been a constantly shifting set of sands; however, this latest change to Google’s search results may result in users, especially the more savvy folk, seeking alternatives to Google. For a marketer, this presents a further challenge, particularly if new search engines continue to appear which return to Google’s initial USP – relevance – which Bing appears to be achieving after a shaky start.
It is unlikely, in the short term at least, that Google’s dominance of the market will plunge dramatically. But for those who are seeking to shop or conduct research, the prevalence of social and Google results above independent sources may be irksome enough to prompt a move away from Google to other search resources. And for those whose product set and content is not specifically enhanced by social results or is directly hampered by social SERPs above theirs which lead to less relevant content, it may be time to consider paying less budget and less attention to high Google SERPs.
After all, if your target audience include those who are dissatisfied with Google and who will only hear of you elsewhere, then you will need to increase your marketing efforts across those properties to capture their attention. Are you optimising specifically for other search engines or are you simply increasing social media marketing to stay/regain top SERPS on Google?
Let us know.
Holy mackerel! ClickThrough Marketing’s very own Fantastic Four dumped their tights and capes this week to complete Digital Academy certificates in Pay Per Click best practice.
The awesome foursome, led by Head of Paid Search and Affiliates, Amy Bott, work on PPC campaigns for a number of ClickThrough clients, including Nectar, Halfords Autocentres and Norgren.
The heroes – comprising paid search experts Joe Farley, Meriem Nacer, Martyn Wright and Samantha Thomas – were put to the test by some super-villainous questions about running a successful PPC campaign.
ClickThrough’s own Digital Academy was set up to ensure staff are equipped with the latest techniques and knowledge for Internet search marketing. The PPC test, on Thursday, January 12, was devised to test the PPC’s team ability to complete a range of tasks related to pay per click activity.
ClickThrough's Paid Search Experts (Martyn, Sam, Meriem and Joe) reveal their secret weapon - their Digital Academy Certificates in PPC Best Practice. The team is joined by Head of Paid Search, Amy Bott.
PPC is an ever-changing game, and ClickThrough Marketing is committed to helping its employees with continued professional development. It’s imperative that we stay ahead of the latest changes to PPC marketing to maximise client revenues.
The test challenged the PPC team to prove it had mastered account management, were aware of Google’s latest editorial guidelines, knew how to prioritise and report on client targets and metrics, and could properly optimise keywords for conversions.
Amy Bott, Head of Paid Search and Affiliates, said: “We’re delighted with the way the team applied themselves to this Digital Academy test.
“All four members passed with flying colours – which shows the level of expertise we have here at ClickThrough Marketing.
“This wasn’t particularly easy, and we’d deliberately devised means to test that the team not only know how to run our PPC services, but also that they understand why certain actions are necessary, and how to adapt if certain elements of a campaign are not proving successful.
“This kind of professional development ensures we’re keeping our client’s interests centre-stage by equipping our PPC heroes with the latest knowledge.
“We’d originally put it down to an odd quirk of fashion, but now it makes perfect sense that my PPC team usually wear their pants outside their trousers.”
Breaking news concerns a Kenyan start-up called Mocality which has crowdsourced (and paid) Kenyans to help create a comprehensive business directory for Kenyan businesses, large and small. Late last year Mocality received calls from a growing number of their member businesses (who get the listings for free), confused about paid hosting and website packages being offered through cold calls. The phone calls selling these services claimed that this was a Google Business in partnership with Mocality.
Mocality decided to check their server logs to discover whether there was any suspicious activity on their website which would account for so many member businesses being contacted and reached a damning conclusion. Google IP addresses had been scraping the Mocality directory and then phoning Mocality’s clients claiming to be from Google.
The CEO of Mocality, Stefan Magdalinski, set up a comprehensive sting operation in order to gather evidence, and server logs plus transcripts and recordings from the calls made are available on the Mocality blog post – Google what were you thinking?
In the last hour, Google’s Vice-President for Product and Engineering, Europe and Emerging Markets, has posted the following to his Google+ account:
Whilst the world of business, particularly on the Internet, is cut throat, especially in times of a global recession, there does appear to have been a considerable overstepping of the line here. What do you think?
Adam Symes, senior account director at ClickThrough Marketing, joined senior PPC account executives Meriem Nacer and Samantha Thomas at Google@Manchester last month, as reported in our previous blog post.
But what if you wanted to learn those six things in just 30 seconds? Well, now you can with this handy Infographic…
