Apparently, 1 in every 100 UK searches is now Sky Sports related. Yes, it is the start of the football season, and so one can no doubt understand the increase in surfing/searching activity post- World Cup, but how does this relate to the increase in female surfing habits? Or the recent news stories about BT Vision?
Let’s start with female activity online. The recently released Ofcom report shows that whilst we all now spend half our waking day consuming media, men now only spend an hour more online than women, which shows a substantial change to a few years ago when the computer and ‘all things geek’ were most definitely in the male demesne.
Could it be that there are now more females interested in sport? In which case, where is the corresponding trend in advertising etc targeting this nascent audience? After all, looking at the football this weekend and during the World Cup, there are definitely more women on the terraces….
However, there can be no doubt that BT’s recent offering of a Sky Sports package as part of its Vision bundle and the kerfuffle over under-pricing must have had some effect on the number of searches being made on Sky Sports. In fact, potentially so much so that Sky have put up a comparison chart on their site showing their offerings vs their major competitors, including BT.
There may be those in the PR industry who are gleeful that press releases about such comparison charts or the price furore, clearly show that old school PR still works (as opposed to online PR), especially if you push your message out across traditional media such as the daily papers, and then hit Twitter, Facebook etc as consumers discuss their choices. Seemingly freely, but those in the know would feel that this is good ole PR manipulation in the 21st century world at its best.
The truth is that without a few good press releases and high-priced TV ads in the first place, the majority of consumers would have been unaware of the deals on the table. The searches are a result of traditional media (e.g. the Murdoch Press) and the incumbent endeavouring to expand its telecom horizons into the online, on demand world, using the Internet for maximum effect.
A cynic would say this is a carefully orchestrated campaign that has undoubtedly signed up new Sky Sports subscribers, whoever their chosen provider, by getting good old column inches.
Google focuses on relevancy, and as such delivering relevant results to a search is key to Google’s operations. However, it has become increasingly obvious recently that quality control is slipping in the search results in that search for relevancy. For instance, if you enter the search term “search engine optimisation articles” into the news section of Google, some of the top results that come back are auto-generated articles.
So, where does that leave you as a business when developing content? Should you go for quality or write your copy specifically so it does well for relevance on top terms? Is it more important to be top of the search engines or to create unique, high quality content that satisfies your users? Or can you find a balance?
If what you are seeking is to be number 1 on the search engines, then you can achieve this by focussing on long tail terms that consistently bring in targeted traffic, but where the competition is significantly lower than on the most obvious terms.
For instance, you may produce help guides or how to manuals, books or white papers, and invariably far less people will be optimising and bidding on the major keywords + those terms than just on the major keywords. Therefore, you can rank more highly in such searches and you are more carefully targetting people responsive to your call to action e.g. buy our book, download our white paper, read our how to guide etc.
Inevitably, you will need to prepare that high quality content to deliver to your website visitors, but the benefits should be commensurate with that cost. If you then encourage people to share your content on their social networks, bookmark it with Delicious, tweet it, create a backlink on their own website, as well as email the link to friends and colleagues, your content will spread to a far wider circle than if you just pursue top search engine rankings for highly competitive terms.
Keyword Spy is a very nifty tool that helps you to find your keywords as well as discover a whole host of information about websites.
Now, there is a FREE Firefox plug-in which brings all of the information to your browser. It sits very neatly at the bottom of your Firefox window and allows you to conduct searches from within the browser.
One of the best bits of this tool is the facility to see exactly what your competitors are bidding on in their PPC campaigns when you search on Google.
If you haven’t tried this plug-in, we strongly recommend you do so – before your competitors!
A search demand gap analysis is an essential part of a search engine marketing audit to check how well your search engine optimisation and/or pay-per-click marketing is working for your company. It will show you the commercial opportunity available from search engine marketing and compare your current performance against this opportunity, so showing sales growth potential. It’s often completed as part of a quarterly or annual review, but due to seasonal fluctuations in search volumes and changes in Google’s ranking approaches and competitor activity it should also be completed more regularly; we suggest monthly.
Here’s an example of a gap analysis. As, you can see it’s based around the main strategic high volume generic for a particular market, in this case related to LCD TVs.
A gap analysis will show you where you are underperforming for particular keyphrases or products and you can then set goals and then brief an agency or colleagues to take actions to improve performance in these areas.
A gap analysis also has the benefit that it enables you to compare performance of your search engine optimisation and pay per click marketing. Since these channels are often treated separately, it helps bring these together in an integrated way to compare their relative performance. For example, in the example above where bounce rates are relatively high or market share is relatively low the cells are shaded in red.
A gap analysis is a comparison of the potential visits, leads or sales from searchers arriving on the site against what the company is actually achieving. It should focus on high volume phrases which are typically two to three keyword phrases including brand searches. However, a form of the analysis can also be completed for longer ‘long-tail’ keyphrases made up of more than 4 keywords.
As for the review of the performance of all traffic sources, the main measures you need to look at are traffic volume, quality and cost:
These measures are all available from your web analytics system such as Google Analytics from which data is extracted for the analysis.
You should also measure the percentage traffic gap which can be calculated by comparing the number of visits against demand indicated by a keyword research tool. We recommend using the Google Keyword Tool to review demand in a single country. It’s best to select the exact match reporting although it can be worthwhile to select phrase match for a different form of long-tail review.
Dr Dave Chaffey is Insights Director at ClickThrough Marketing. As Insights Director he’s responsible for the quality of analysis and reporting used to review and improve the performance of clients’ natural and paid search campaigns. He’s also involved in consulting on digital and search strategy for ClickThrough’s clients through analytics-based audits typically using Google Analytics for which he holds the Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ).
You can also read his advice on best practice and updates on the latest developments in digital marketing at his Smart Insights Digital Marketing advice site. Dave is a recognised expert in digital marketing, listed in 2004 by the Chartered Institute of Marketing as one of 50 marketing ‘gurus’ worldwide who have shaped the future of Marketing. Dave is author of five best-selling business books including Internet Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice and eMarketing eXcellence (with PR Smith). He is also author of the Econsultancy best practice guides to Search Engine Optimisation, Paid Search Marketing, Web site design and Managing Digital Channels. Dave also contributed the foreword to ClickThrough’s first two search engine marketing books.
Often, a little imagination is all that is required to showcase your skills and advance up the career ladder to the job of your dreams.
The Internet has given us chances to do things with our lives that some of us could never have imagined. Here is an example of how thinking out of the box a little can bring to you the job, customers, etc that you and your business need.
Watching this may fire you up to consider creating PPC ads for, hmm let’s see……. maybe your dream client who as yet haven’t realised they need you on board to help their marketing strategy….just a suggestion!
For some people, creating new content is a struggle. It really needn’t be. There is fresh content to inspire you all over the Web. However, you should always create unique content, rather than copying someone else’s work. Internet marketing, whether it is SEO, SEM, PPC, Web PR, all relies on informative, keyword rich content to work properly.
Use the resources below to find exciting content to get your creative juices flowing in no time.
Squidoo – so many people maintain their lenses (or mini websites) regularly, and there are thousands of people who follow specific lenses and encourage the authors to post more often. Look for the top ranked lenses on your keyword, or most recently updated.
Delicious – is one of the many social bookmarking sites and offers a wide variety of search mechanisms which will open up thousands of new sites for you to investigate for inspiration. Others include Digg and Stumbleupon – feel free to add more in your comment below.
Twitter – it’s really quite staggering how many Tweets are now sent each day, and the search feature is becoming ever more useful for finding latest news for particular niches. When it is working, that is!
Alltop – is a funky news site (but be warned: you can get lost in here easily, so use the eggtimer to prevent that!)
That should keep your pen busy scribbling on the paper for a while with all the news and views that are available.
Which sites help you to develop new content, write blog posts, or just get into heated debates with colleagues?! Let us know.
Are you offering facts and figures which people regularly search on? Does it drive traffic to your site?
Let’s give an example: what is the height of St Paul’s cathedral?
As you can see, the information the searcher requires is (partially) in the search engine listing. However, the likelihood is that this is enough to pique the interest of the searcher, who will then click on the site to find out more information.
However, Google announced Google Squared during the summer of last year, possibly in response to Wolfram Alpha, which is a knowledge engine rather than a pure search engine.
Now, using Google Squared, results in the SERPs are likely to generate very different results for search terms if Google Squared assumes it is a research term. The potential is that the entire answer to the search is held within the SERPs.
In plain English, this means that a searcher may well find their answer on Google, in the SERPs, and will not actually visit your website at all.
It has long been known that users search the internet in different ways eg to shop, to research or to socialise, and this latest addition to Google searches is an indication of the recognition of those differences.
Go play! All of a sudden, the SEO industry cannot refer to a particular set of results to show off its prowess or portfolio, because as personalisation and search intelligence kicks in, you are likely to see very different results than your neighbour, even with similar keywords.
There is a problem here though. If Google endeavours to feed all the information to searchers, without any requirement to visit your site at all, where does that leave your carefully crafted website? Or your PPC campaign if the answers are within the organic results provided by Google?
The fun has begun!
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Short of inspiration about the right keywords to use to attract your core audience audience? Here’s a slightly different way to find keywords this week:
Go to samepoint, enter one of your keywords or phrases into the search box, and click ‘search’.
Then below each entry in the results, look at the keyword box and see how many of those terms you are using. Repeat this procedure with as many keywords and phrases as you fancy.
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We all know that people like to use the search engines to get answers to questions, but when promoting our sites, creating content and so on, how do we know what questions they might be asking in their search queries?
Well, look no further than the extremely useful Wordtracker question generator tool
Let’s try some examples:
Internet marketing – of course people want to know what it is, but look at some of the other questions asked that you could create content about…
SEO – what does it stand for and what is SEO come at the top but there are plenty of opportunities to incorporate some of these questions into your page content and optimisation.
Swine flu – pick an item in the news and you get some great ideas for topical content.
Give it a go!
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E-consultancy have recently published a very interesting article citing Google Chief Economist Hal Varian stating that research shows that position is not related to conversion rates.
So, whilst you may have staff dedicated to maintaining your position in the PPC SERPs, it could well be shown from this research that they would be better utilised if they focused on other internet marketing strategies.
Sure, being in the top 10, above your competitors, seems to bring in more clicks, but importantly, it does not seem to bring in more conversions. In other words, the position is not related to attracting quality, targeted traffic who will then complete the call for action, be that a purchase, download, sign up etc.
Whilst being in the top 10 rankings, or nowadays the top 20, is still of key importance, where you figure within those top adverts seems to be irrelevant to produce the results you require.
I can see a few PPC agencies laying off staff…….
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