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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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As more of us become reliant on social media, not just for marketing campaigns but as a means to find out news, engage with peers, and so on, the need for search engines which specifically bring blog posts, Tweets, Diggs, social bookmarks etc to us has increased.
So, we set off to find some of the social media and real-time search engines that are already in existence. Get away from Google for a few hours and explore the many discussions and conversations on topics of interest to you!
LeapFish – this is a great little engine. Blogs, Youtube, Facebook, tweets, diggs, autosuggestion tool for searches, and much more. Definitely worth using.
SocialMention – interesting ranking system, plus regular users, sources, social media alerts, trending topics, and a blog widget.
Whostalking – search by category eg news, blogs, forums, images, videos, networks and tweets.
Samepoint – offers a wide range of searches across wikis, news, blogs, tweets, bookmarks, networks, podcasts, videos, news and so on.
OneRiot uses social networks to influence the results you receive. One Riot basically looks at what is being shared and trending at the moment, so that it is bringing you the most popular items.
AardVark is an interesting example in that you submit a question and the search engine finds the best person to answer for you across your social networks of friends and FOAFs (Friend of a Friend). An interesting idea, but one wonders if it implies that you can’t know your friends very well if you don’t know who to ask for yourself!
Fluther works in a similar way to aardvark, although it also shows all questions recently asked, and you can discuss your questions and answers in real time with other users and experts.
So, there’s a few to start with. Please let us know more – these are great fun as well as providing fascinating insights into what people are looking for from the social media they adopt.
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I know you won’t believe me, but it’s true.
Recently, we wrote about phone call tracking. The point being that it gives very strong data about conversions from landing pages when the call to action is to ‘p.p.p.p.pick up the phone’.
Interestingly, this has now cropped up again as a subject for discussion on SearchEngineLand.
Let’s ask why consumers might call a number, rather than send an email or complete a form. The article above fails to address the issue from a consumer point of view, instead looking at all the reasons why the industry has ignored phone calls to date and why there is now a resurgence of the humble call.
As a consumer, how many times have you emailed an enquiry to a company and then not received a response? Not received a timely response? Or not received *any* response? Ditto with forms on websites. You complete the form, which is often far more lengthy than it need be, and you hit ’submit’. You get an error and are thrown back to the previous page, yet now all the fields are blank. UGH!
Having cursed all coders under the sun for that last primary school error, which are you most likely to do:
a) just return to a search engine and seek another company offering a similar deal?
b) start all over again completing the form and pray that this time it will actually be delivered and that there isn’t another bug in the system that has failed without informing you?
Now, let’s look at it a different way, but still from the consumer’s point of view.
You are looking for a particular item, to be delivered by the weekend, and the first website you fall over clearly has the item in stock (great landing page, BTW, it took you straight to what you were looking for!), they can deliver in 2-3 days guaranteed (force majeure excepted), and have the item at a price you are prepared to pay.
You have Skype or similar installed, and the only call to action on that page is “Call this number and order today”. No alternatives. Just call. No email address, no online web form, although there is obviously clear navigation to the rest of the site.
You click and the phone call is initiated. Within moments you are through to a lovely receptionist who, within literally moments, has taken down and double checked your address, your order and removed a reasonably substantial amount of your money from your account on your instructions.
Two days later, the item you wished for is on your doorstep and is precisely what you had anticipated.
Next time you try online shopping, having been more than happy with your last purchase, and less than happy with other companies’ failures to answer emails, respond to forms etc, will you be:
a) More confident using the phone to order
b) Less confident
Each time a company gets it right by having well-trained staff to answer the phones, a back-end system that confirms the product is in stock, processes the order, and ensures that is sent out to the customer’s spec, that customer will use the phone.
Any company who starts ensuring that their phone answering process is up to scratch, and PROMOTING THAT FACT publicly, will begin to win out as customers feel let down by technology and revert to the one thing that they can rely on – the goold old telephone.
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It looks as though load time will be taken into account as a ranking factor in the next few months.
Slow page loads, eg content that buffers as your hosting company struggles to serve the pages, bloated code and so on, could all now affect your ranking in the search engines.
It has taken a long time for this to actually be mooted as “close to implementation” but it is a really obvious ranking factor. Users do not want pages served up as top results that take a long time to load. They want instant gratification.
This should come as a heads up to many. Website designers who do not strip unnecessary items out of code or who program inefficiently; hosting companies who do not have enough bandwidth available for their customers; traffic analysts who fail to equate high bounce rates with slow pages and advise their clients accordingly; and others.
Take a long hard look at your site. Try it on different connections, not just the fat pipe in your office – don’t try to be an imaginary user, go and be a real one. Visit the library or cybercafe and see how long your site takes to load. You could even consider digging out that old dial up modem and see how it works for all those who still live in a non-broadband world.
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The 10 UK search terms for the 4 weeks since Oct 19th 2009 show that UK searchers still don’t comprehend how a browser works.
The top 10 search terms include Facebook, Bebo, Youtube, Ebay, Argos – all major brands with basic TLDs eg argos.co.uk, facebook.com and so on. What this implies is that users are not using the location bar to directly enter the domain name or URL of a site, even when it is a global company with a simple and recognised name, such as Facebook.
Therefore, even if you have picked an obvious domain name for your widget company, such as widgets.co.uk, the majority of users don’t even have a stab at guessing the domain in the location bar – they use a search engine instead.
This snapshot of search behaviour should indicate to many businesses that one of the most important terms they need to be optimising for is their business name and brands, in order to show up in the search engine rankings.
It is surprising how few companies get this, and insist on putting their business name in a pretty logo invisible to the search engines, and giving the index page of their site a page title such as “Homepage”.
Whilst it is not necessary, nor desirable, to scatter liberally across every page the name of your business and brands, to the point where users can’t see beyond those terms to actual quality content, it is vital to ensure that they are included in visible text and indexable content. This includes alt img tags, reference tags, H1 and H2 and so on.
Check your website today and see how many instances of your business or brand names occur on your site, and how many are indexable. Searchers may be researching the availability, price, existence etc of a product they desire, and not know the names of companies who offer it, many more will be searching directly for you if your advertising and marketing is working as it should. If they can’t find your company even though they know the name, they will resort to researching the product/service type instead, and that is where deeper optimisation on many more keywords is essential.
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Back in August, Google announced an ‘under the hood’ upgrade for the search engine called ‘Caffeine’.
Today, Matt Cutts has blogged about the next stage of Caffeine roll-out. Basically, Caffeine will be going live at one data centre only, meaning that engineers etc can continue to gather data and test the technology.
This will NOT affect search engine results in the run-up to one of the busiest times of the year for retailers and so on, so there is no need to be concerned that your site is going to suddenly vanish from the SERPS!
Expect a sandbox link in the coming days or weeks for those developers and search engine marketers wishing to play on the new toy.
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Google’s new version of the search engine, Caffeine, has been launched and is currently in beta (Isn’t everything from Google?!) and users and SEOs are being invited to give it a whirl.
This has obviously be in development for some time and is not therefore a new thing. However, the timing may well be a knee jerk reaction to yesterday’s announcement re Facebook and Friendfeed.
We may see more real-time results coming through with Caffeine, which is of course one of the main issues that Google needs to address. Much of the development is behind the scenes and many users may not notice much difference, but Google has said that SEOs etc will find there are more algorithms to play with.
So, roll your sleeves up. This looks like an exciting time!
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For those still mired in ye olde worlde of search engine optimision eg on page, off page, a dash of PPC, a smidgen of article marketing, some brief sojourns into forum marketing, and, of course backlinks and link marketing, yesterday’s announcement that Facebook have acquired Friendfeed means that it really is time now to take stock of this new social media world.
For those who don’t know, FriendFeed was set up by 4 ex-Google employees, and it operates as an aggregator of information from your Twitter account, blogs, social bookmark sites, Facebook, and more. For some eg @Scobleizer, FriendFeed is the ideal tool for bringing all social media activity into one pot.
There are, however, many others who just don’t get FriendFeed, but they are generally the ones who just don’t get social media marketing or engagement full stop. And it is perhaps those people who will now need to admit that they have missed the point, and are going to need to play catch up.
Many of the social media tools, such as Twitter and FriendFeed, have contributed to the creation of the real time web. This is the stream of information which sees breaking news, such as Michael Jackson’s death, being announced to the world at large long before the news machines can rumble into action.
But it’s not only news. All sorts of opinions, commentary, topics and content can go viral on Twitter within minutes or hours, giving marketers a chance to access a global audience with a mere 140 characters. The #watchitspread retweets gave a very interesting example of how this works.
SEO is no longer about optimising a website so the search engines can find it. (And hence the terms used by much of the industry need updating) Google et al have real problems indexing the real time Web and are playing catch up as more and more people use the real-time Web to find answers to questions rather than searching the indexes of the search engines.
If you are not engaged with the tools which allow communities of users, often strangers to each other in real life, to develop responses to questions, recommend products, damage or enhance reputations, and much more, within moments of the first query/comment/link being tweeted, you are going to find yourself stuck in a static world of archived websites found by search engine spiders. And not in the “now” world that is now the Web.
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Once upon a time, and sadly still, in many SEO eyes, off page optimisation was one of the two keys to online success. Off-page optimisation includes link marketing campaigns, article marketing, posting to forums and blogs, video content, podcasts, joint ventures, syndicated content, and so on.
What we have seen is a dramatic change in the effect these strategies have in driving traffic to your site, building brand awareness, quick wins and so on, as the emphasis moves to social marketing, and the search engines fail to keep up with this stream of ever-changing data.
We have seen companies forbid even their marketing teams from using Facebook and Twitter and so on; yet by doing so, they are removing themselves from the social web, with its amazing capacity for fast-moving, viral campaigns, that can not only result in bottom line results eg a boost in sales, reduced marketing expenses and so on, but also in long-term brand building that can bring results for years to come.
A satisfied customer will use word of mouse to pass on to friends, family and followers the great deal, fab customer service, friendly staff, even the free cup of coffee your business has just supplied. A grumpy customer may well do untold damage to reputation just with one tweet that is RTd multiple times by other also dissatisfied customers.
Anyone who dismisses social tools, such as Twitter and the many newly born apps that have come from that and other social applications, is going to find themselves with a historically useful skillset, which no longer delivers results. Off page optimisation will not die, because it willalways be the foundation of the archive that creates the majority of search engine indexes. But even those are going to have to change to adapt to this fast-paced world of real time information we now live in.
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Unless you have been under a rock, you will by now know that Yahoo and Microsoft have joined forces in the search engine arena.
Although some of the commentary in the blogosphere is mere speculation, with many answers being unknown until the deal goes through (which could take quite some time), it is worth considering what the deal means for SEOs.
Even though Bing is quite a new player on the market, this deal means it is time to take it seriously. Estimates show it may hold around 15% market share following this deal, and that, compared to say AOL with around 2%, means optimising for Bing has just moved up the priority list. Time to experiment with its algorithm, folks – you may have a couple of years though so you don’t need to clear your desk right this minute! In the meantime, you really need to get to know Bing’s webmaster tools, especially as these will help you compare how Google and Bing may view your site(s) differently.
Losing link info – Rand Fish is postulating that link data might become scarcer. For those in the coding business and SEO, it might be time to look at ways to replace what could well go missing when Yahoo fully adopts Bing.
Loyalty – there are many who are struggling to decide where their loyalties now lie, as users, and Microsoft’s involvement with Yahoo could affect this, pushing some (possibly a miniscule number of) users to Google permanently. However, it is likely that for the many who seem to manage to get through life without disliking Microsoft, Bing’s potentially better search features will be the pull, giving Bing an increasing market share.
There will now only be two major players in the PPC arena, which may simplify matters for SEOs, but it will undoubtedly mean that days of cheapie listings on MS AdCenter and Yahoo! Search may be over, depending on how things pan out.
In some ways, it is good to have simplicity, but as in all things, with more competition comes more innovation, and it is to be wondered whether we are now prisoners to these two monoliths’s plans, or whether new entrants may attempt to take them on in the future.
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