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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!
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…
Google Farmer Update
One of our favourite things about working in online marketing is that there’s always something new to think about. Embracing new technology, expanding our knowledge, keeping up with the ‘new’ and learning from the ‘old’ – these are all essential elements to an effective digital marketing strategy.
That’s why we jumped at the chance to attend last month’s Google@Manchester event – which was led by Google’s director of agency sales, Dominic Allon.
We sent Adam Symes, senior account director at ClickThrough Marketing, along with senior PPC account executives Meriem Nacer and Samantha Thomas, to check out the event and catch up on the latest industry news – direct from Google itself.
They reported back with some intriguing details, and the information that they gleaned from the event confirmed that our innovations in search marketing are very much in tune with Google’s own reports.
That isn’t to say that we didn’t learn anything new, though. So to start 2012 with some fresh industry facts, here are six things we learned from our visit to Google@Manchester – firstly in detail, and then summarised in a ClickThrough Google@ Manchester Infographic:
1. 52% of conversion journeys are multi-click
Shane Cassells, online conversion specialist at Google UK & Ireland, gave a presentation entitled ‘Full Value of Search’, during which he provided some inside information that will be useful for any online retailer. Cassells recommended that the timeout for shopping baskets on eCommerce sites should be extended, and that we should all consider offline sales in our conversion strategies, as it has been shown that 40% of customers will buy offline after researching a product on the internet.
The big statistic to bear in mind, however, is that more than half of conversion journeys involve multiple clicks – whereas nine out of ten PPC conversions are still credited to the final click. As a conversion-focused online marketing agency, this kind of statistic is a nice reminder that we’re doing things properly – understanding that conversion paths are as unique and complex as the people buying your products.
2. Google+ is the fastest growing social media platform in history
Google’s foray into social media has proven to be a powerful marketing tool, with 94% of the top 100 brands already on board. We’ve been keenly watching the progress of Google+ and it will feature significantly in our social media marketing strategy for 2012, as we create and promote Google+ brand pages for our clients.
What Google@Manchester revealed is just how breathtakingly quick the rise of Google+ has been. Despite only being launched in June of last year, Google+ now has more than 40 million members – making its initial growth faster than Facebook, Myspace or Twitter.
To further cement its position as an innovative social networking tool, the portion of the show dedicated to Google+ was delivered as a video conference via the Google+ Hangout feature.
3. Customers are nine times more likely to click on mobile banners
Dr Patrick Dixon, futurist and chairman of Global Change Ltd, delivered a stirring speech called ‘Bringing It All Together: A Look Into the Future’. His scientific approach to marketing had the crowd transfixed – our own Adam Symes described Dixon as “one of the best speakers [he had] ever heard.”
His talk focused on the future of marketing, the emotional effects that marketing has on us and how we can build emotional relationships with our end users – pointing out that 80% of potential customers will lose interest if a process takes longer than 20 seconds. He made enough points to warrant multiple blog posts on this theme alone – but for the sake of brevity, we’ll focus on the intriguing details he offered on mobile marketing.
Dixon pointed out that whilst standard web-based banners typically have a 0.5% clickthrough rate (CTR), mobile banners boast a CTR that is nine times higher. He also mentioned the fact that mobile users are twice more likely to click on a banner after 8pm than earlier in the day. With only 17% of UK businesses offering mobile-optimised websites, but almost half of online consumers using their smartphones or tablets when researching or buying a product, it’s clear that businesses are risking missed opportunities if they ignore the powerful and growing mobile user base.
4. 60% of organic clicks are from top-three search positions
Dr Dixon also shared this search engine results surprise. We’ve always focused on getting top-tier results for our clients in the results pages of Google, Yahoo!, Bing and other leading search providers – what Dixon’s statistic shows is how incredibly important it is to optimise every facet of your business’s webpage. With an increasingly clued-up online user base, appearing in the first page of a Google search just isn’t enough anymore.
5. 48 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
Another highlight of the event was the ‘Connected TV’ panel, featuring experts from Google, the BBC and IAB (the Internet Advertising Bureau). Here we learned that video-sharing site YouTube is continuing to grow at a phenomenal rate, and how technology manufacturers, agencies and companies can come together to combine the best elements of internet video and traditional television – with the interactivity and customer targeting of the internet, and the quality and reach that television can still offer.
Perhaps the overarching theme that we can glean from this discussion is that YouTube should not be ignored as an online marketing tool. By their nature, Google+ and Facebook offer a quicker, easier and more cost-effective way of communicating directly with customers. However, when a video booms on YouTube, it really booms – few social websites have the potential for viral marketing that YouTube provides. Rest assured, we have some tricks up our sleeve that utilise the video sharing site that started it all.
6. Digital sales grew by 16% in the third quarter of 2011
‘It’s All About You’ was Mark Howe’s contribution to proceedings. The country sales director for Google UK opened the show by discussing the tremendous growth that was been observed in eCommerce in the third quarter of 2011.
This is good news for any business that uses the internet to promote its products, and further proof that consumers are increasingly turning to online purchasing despite the continuingly difficult economic circumstances. With the rise of price comparison websites, and review portals such as Trustpilot – which provide customers with the opportunity to rate online shops according to their experiences – it is more important than ever to ensure that your online business practice and promotional strategy are up-to-date. Dr Patrick Dixon predicted that price comparison websites will destroy businesses within five years if their prices aren’t competitive enough.
Did you attend the Google@Manchester event? If so, what were your highlights?
The 16 changes that mattered to Google marketing in 2011
Since December is that time of year when we look forwards and also reflect, I’d take a look at some of the major changes in search in 2011. I hope these will act like a checklist helping you think through what you have covered and what you may have missed. My update includes a combination of paid and natural search and some of the changes to Analytics which have helped us improve our search marketing better (and in some cases less well).
There’s been plenty to keep us busy in getting the most from digital marketing and I’m sure there will be next year.
We don’t know yet how many changes Google made in 2011, but Google CEO Eric Schmidt told Congress that Google made 516 updates in 2010. They tested over 13,000 potential updates!
Well I’ve been tracking the changes carefully and I think there’s far fewer that really matter – just 16 in fact, but do let me know about what I missed – there must be at least 20?
I hope you manage an enjoyable break from the digital world! All the best for a successful 2012.
Let’s go!
The year got off to a quiet start with few changes in January before the major changes in the first part of the year. Read this introduction to finding the volume of mobile searches
The official announcement on Google’s High Quality Site updates
How are finding it so far? See Dan Barker’s analysis of the top 10 new Google Analytics features
View the Google introduction to Google +1
Another of the many ad innovations in Google, this one has been rolled out worldwide. Check Google’s mobile ad features on the Ad Network
Post on Evolving the Google Design and Experience – these changes occurred throughout the yeargoogle
The biggest change to Google Marketing this year. View The What’s New in Google+ page for the latest updates
Not new in 2011, but following-up on site visitors became much more popular in 2011. Read this video introduction to Google’s Remarketing
Read The tutorial from Tim Leighton Boyce on how to use multichannel funnels to help with paid search
The official announcement from Google
Read Dave’s update on ClickThrough’s blog
Read how you can differentially bid for clicks vs calls
These made quite an impact on brand search – did you check the impact? Google’s explanation of the changes to: Expanded sitelinks
See the official announcement for Google+ pages with examples
Social extensions – recommendations appear on your ads – November 2011
Increasing the argument for having fresh content on your site. Read this summary from Chris Soames and see how ClickThrough covered the news.
OK, so what am I missing?
We spoke previously about how to make more of mobile marketing, so let’s look at yet more methods which you could be using to get more traffic to your websites, social networking pages, and to your bricks and mortar stores.
QR codes, which we have written about previously, have a mixed press. As they have become more popular, so have the types of QR code and number of readers increased, until there is no standard and this has caused customer confusion. However, judging by the fact that even shopping channels on TV are now adding QR codes, there is still mileage in making information available by a QR code.
You need a smartphone in order to be able to read a QR code, so be aware when using them that you are targeting only those with smartphones. This is a growing percentage of the population though and it is going to become increasingly likely that those without a smartphone are not as inspired by the digital world as those who find them essential.
QR codes can be used in a huge variety of ways and there are some excellent websites which cover news and reviews of QR codes, such as Anise Smith’s QR Scoop.it
Google+ has also made life easy for mobile users from day 1 of the field test, with apps for Android and iPhone, and now additional facilities such as being able to join a Hangout from a mobile. This is a great way to engage with mobile users. For some, it may be the novelty of being able to get involved in something that is outside of their previous experience, but for others the ease of access wherever they find themselves when the Hangout is ongoing may fire the enthusiasm to join in.
Hangouts can have infinite purposes and it is worth considering how you could use the Mobile side of Hangouts to reach out to your own customers.
As with both QR codes and Hangouts, one of the side effects of using such features is that you are upskilling your customer base. Whilst these may seem to be features that at present only early adopters and adept smartphone users may understand, the simplicity of use and the additional benefits you can offer – discounts, one to one interviews, direct feedback to your company, focus groups, special offers, etc – will encourage your audience to try them if you provide sufficient motivation to make the effort.
Let us know how you get on!
There seems to be a fear, not just in major brands but also in SMEs, about mobile marketing. We all relate to the subject based on how we feel about our mobile phones. Just ask around the office right now, or your family, how they feel about marketing messages on their mobiles, and you will see where this fear could stem from. For the vast majority of people, receiving a marketing message on your mobile is a no-no.
However, mobile marketing is not just about sending a text/SMS to a willing (or unwilling) recipient. Mobile marketing needs to be thought of as a far broader church. Once you understand what a mobile phone is capable of, and how your potential audience are most likely to use theirs, then you can target your actions appropriately.
For instance, SMEs, retail outlets and rural businesses should all be at the least listed on Foursquare. This is one of those discrete and gentle touches with mobile marketing and geolocation. A simple sticker in your window, register your venue/outlet/premises on the Foursquare site, and offer a Mayoral prize each week to attract customers to check in.
You can take this further by organising flash mobs at your venue or shop and offering a special FourSquare badge or similar to those who attend. Tie this in with a Tweet-up and people will hang around that much longer. And spend, remember, talk, tweet about the event etc. Don’t forget a good hashtag for Twitter….
Apps are of course the big thing and generally these fall into three main courts – iPhone, Blackberry and Android. Whatever you do with mobile marketing should try to reach all the bodies of smartphone users, or risk alienating those who are left out.
Starting with the simplest type of engagement, you can encourage people to take photos either of your venue, products or for a themed competition. Add a little creativity, such as encouraging instant uploads with Instagram, or composing them into Photograms, and almost anyone with a camera phone and an app can enter.
Perhaps this is where many people fall down in the definition of ‘marketing’. It is no longer simply push marketing that is required, but now, especially with social networks, pull marketing with heavy consumer engagement is equally as important.
So, it is no longer about billboards and TV adverts that force feed the information about a product to the consumer, but very much more about dialogue, engagement and consumer interaction.
What else can you do with mobile marketing? What are you doing with mobile marketing that you feel others couldn/should be doing too?
Apple’s iPhone 4S launched last week and whilst it may seem little different on the outside, there is one feature of definite interest to search marketers. It is called SIRI and it is voice recognition software that may finally prove VR has come of age.
This is not just your “Phone Home” type voice command system, but seems to rely quite heavily on the development of AI (Artificial Intelligence) since Apple bought SRI. The software is sufficiently advanced to be able to complete several different processes in order to carry out a task, and Apple dedicated enough of the 4S launch to show that SIRI is important to Apple in future.
Let’s move beyond the basics of reminding you to order flowers for your wife and adding your anniversary date to your calendar though, and look at what this might mean for voice search.
For many people, computers are still an issue. The rise in smartphone usage and iPad/tablet sales even amongst the non-techies has highlighted that the days of the desktop, keyboard and mouse are probably numbered. Mainly because they are just too complicated for your average person. Ditto search engines.
Each month, the rankings regularly report top level domains in the most searched upon terms, implying that far too many people still cannot use search properly nor effectively. Whilst typing “google.com” into Bing may not seem a major issue, the implication is that even the most simplified browser with a location bar will not prevent enough people in the world searching for a domain they already know.
Imagine if you cut out all the faff of typing, Boolean operators, narrowing down a search by typing endless terms in to Google etc, and instead….
Well, instead you speak your search query into your phone. With AI, there is no reason why, over time, your phone cannot learn to recognise the type of queries which you most frequently make and tie these into the likely search result(s) you are looking for. This type of cognitive and responsive technology has been the end goal of AI for many years.
Could search queries using voice on a mobile phone take traffic away from a text based search service such as Google? One can only assume so, although the tie-ins with Wolfram Alpha, Yelp and Wikipedia point to a slightly different search audience (research more than consumer) at present.
If you have not yet designed a mobile friendly website for your business yet, nor made sure you feature on local search for mobiles, and also aren’t au fait with where mobile devices are heading, this would seem to be the time to take on board that mobile quite simply is not going away.
This means taking a new look at how you provide the information that you want to be easily found by your potential customers. If you sell raincoats and umbrellas and there is a convention in town, with a huge number of people asking SIRI about the local weather for tomorrow, wouldn’t you like to show up as an advert for the shop in the road behind the conference centre when they ask the weather forecast for tomorrow? Or is it just easier to go and hawk them on the street when the rain clouds open in the morning?!
There may be few occasions when Wolfram Alpha is yet the best search engine (it is a knowledge and computational engine after all) for the mass of consumers online, but if I could ask my phone exactly how many centimetres it is between here and my A Level Maths student’s school, I’d be delighted when it returned 1.643 x 10^7!
The more likely scenario though is that as people use more and more apps to get the answers they seek eg comparison apps to find the best price for an item whilst shopping in town, the use of the search engines for such research will inevitably dwindle. And it may be here that SIRI really begins to take a bite from search traffic. And it may be in this change from desktop searching to on the move questioning that we should be pointing our attention.
You may not know it but Tesco is the number 2 supermarket in Korea. And Korea is the land of super dooper Internet connectivity that puts Britain’s 2-20Mbps to shame. On top of that the Koreans have mastered everything mobile and tend to lead the way in mobile apps and services.
Shopping at rush hour in any city in the world is a faff. And carrying the bags back home – even worse. So, what has Tesco done? They have created a shop where there are simply life-size replicas of all the products and you scan them with your smartphone to add them to your virtual shopping basket. Which is then delivered to you at home.
This video highlights the experiment.
Tesco takes QR codes to new shopping levels
Whilst QR codes are still a novelty here, where smartphone ownership is considerably lower than older style phones, there are increasing numbers of uses being found for them around the world. Animated tattoos, QR codes on headstones, people wearing ties with QR codes for business contact details or to show a promotional video, in magazines, and on every product and space imaginable.
Now, start to imagine your expensive print brochure – 2D, static and with just a link to your website – coming alive with the use of QR codes. User manuals, videos of your products being used, customer testimonials on your site or Youtube, podcasts, business contact details, the latest news on your blog, even a webinar held only the previous day. All of this becomes possible with QR codes.
Tesco’s solution in Korea to the rush hour shopping problem, maximising the use of underground tunnels to capture new customers, is just a start. Any business can make use of QR codes in a fun and innovative manner, to cut production costs for marketing collateral, to attract attention to promotional material, to reach new customers.
Even adding one to your business card can mean you can easily share your business details when you are networking and know that your details are now securely held in the phone of your new contact, not lost deep inside a pocket.
All it needs is a little imagination and a QR generator such as Kaywa
Landing hard on the heels of SXSW, one could wonder what exactly Color was doing in not being at “the” event. But the investors must know otherwise.
Is it just social interactivity via photos, or something more?
Right now, it seems hard to say exactly, and as a rural user of such apps, I doubt I personally will get the benefits seen for urban users in densely populated areas. Same as Foursquare etc, for the vast majority of users outside of the cities.
But, no, hang on two ticks….
We see that magic word “elastic” appearing. Elastic computing started to appear more frequently last year, and whilst it still hasn’t moved into the space that ‘cloud computing’ has taken up, it looks to be heading that way now as more companies advance their programming to be ‘elastic’.
Color’s substantial start-up funding reflects the enormity and complexity of the task before them in delivering their concepts to the world. Each photo that is included in Color’s database has a substantial amount of data behind it. We have moved beyond on the fly recording of aperture and light settings to Bluetooth, neighbours in the vicinity also uploading photos, social network contacts (on multiple levels), plus further data that is undoubtedly copyright and patent pending.
However, possibly one of the interesting concepts of Color and elasticity is the “dying of” with relationships that comes from non-interaction. No more friending and being a friend on a static level. For brands, this type of interactivity could become interesting….how serious is one of your ‘followers’ even after the odd poke or two to re-invigorate their interest?
What this misses though is that if I buy a washing machine, I may not need to even think about a washing machine again for 4-5 years, or more. Ditto with long lost friends. Just because I haven’t seen someone for a decade does not mean that when we catch up, online, offline, by phone, through a FOAF contact or similar, we may just pick up the thread where we left it, 10 years earlier.
Assuming that non-contact implies non-interest may be a mistake that purely data driven Color has missed by failing to take into account human psychology etc.
We’d be very interested to hear from anyone using Color from the Android and iTunes app stores. Especially anyone who can see a commercial benefit.
I recently took part at the Econsultancy Digital Cream event where client-side marketers discuss approaches to improve their digital marketing.
I was moderating the SEO roundtable where we discussed the main challenges and opportunities marketers were seeing with their SEO.
These were the main topics which were of interest to the 30 or so marketers at the roundtables:
1. The impact of social signals on rankings
The announcement that social signals now influence SEO rankings is well known, so this has to be a big issue to consider, particularly since many companies don’t have a blog and/or it’s not so well integrated into their site products and services pages.
At each of the roundtables we discussed how to integrate the type of content that will be shareable and linkable into commercial, non-publisher sites. Methods to gain backlinks are unsurprisingly still a major concern.
Even before this announcement I noticed many companies making efforts to integrate their SEO with online PR and social media. There seem to be more joint responsibilities for SEO and social in the larger companies that get it, a good move I think.
Many of the challenges for larger organisations involve getting SEO specialists to work more closely with other parts of a company or agencies working on online PR and social media initiatives.
2. Mobile search
Google revealed recently that over the past two years, its mobile searches have grown by more than five times.
As I showed in my last ClickThrough post, you can see how much this matters for your sector using Googles own tools.
3. Local search
Closely related, following an algorithm and interface update towards the end of last year, Google Places has become a lot more important for local searches involving the name of a location plus a service.
If you see the tell-tale red balloons dominating the search results for searches related to your services in an area, that’s a sure sign you need to take action.
4. Video search
Did you see the stats showing that YouTube has become the second-most important search engine in many countries? That suggests the opportunities for video SEO should be explored alongside other forms of blended search, if they’re not already.
5. Opportunities to engage on other sites
There’s a tendency within SEO to think inwardly about driving traffic to your sites and gaining links on other sites. But as the social web has evolved there may be new options for reaching an audience on other sites which perform well in the SERPs.
I see these types of sites as increasing in importance – often within the SERPS:
Few of the companies attending had been directly affected suggesting that if a site is a recognised brand producing unique, quality content, this update will have a limited impact.
6. Site migration
I chaired 3 roundtables and was surprised to see, in each one that, at least one person mentioned their concern of how a site redesign or relaunch affecting their URLs might impact in SEO. This was based on their experience of previous refreshes. All of this just goes to show that as well as reviewing new approaches, it’s important to know how to get the basics right too.
