Reseo Blog

Does Page Load speed affect search engine ranking?

2010-02-05T09:22:00.004+11:00

Is your site slow to load? Have you checked it lately? How would you even know?

In 2009 Google flagged to website owners that the speed at which pages on your website load (or “site speed”) is an important metric you should be assessing from a usability perspective.

And it’s not just a matter of upgrading your website hosting to a faster, dedicated hosting plan, it’s also about creating elegant code, which loads quickly and is nimble for browsers.

Developers take note.

Research shows that website conversion rates are improved when a website is lightening fast, as people spend less time waiting and more time browsing in their task -based mindset.

Google does seem to spending a lot of money educating us about ways we can improve the speed of our websites with this dedicated “let’s make the web faster” section.

And recently Matt Cutts (head of Google’s Web Spam team) weighed in on the act, saying in a late 2009 interview that although Google doesn’t currently factor in page speed to its ranking algorithm, it’s something “...that could change in 2010”.

I think we can read that as, “...it probably will change in 2010”; so here comes yet another change to watch out for in amongst the 400 or so algorithm changes every year.

I think you might be able to get the ‘seo jump’ on competitors in 2010 if you spend a little time optimising page load time on your site. That’s got to help your online sales.

To check the speed of your site, get the FireFox Plug-in, FireBug then add YSlow, or “PageSpeed” to find out!

Without going into too much detail, these tools will help you or your developer understand which aspects of your pages and associated code cause page-loading times to slow down.

You can upload the results from the Page Speed (and YSlow) to http://www.showslow.com to see how your site ranks amongst some of the biggest and the best.

Speaking of concern, looking at the screenshot above, there’s quite a discrepancy between the two tools! YSlow says the MSN website (second from the bottom) gets a page load score of 68% where as the PageSpeed Tool returns 81% for the same site.

So which score will Google use?

Given YSlow is a Yahoo product, my money’s on PageSpeed.

Google’s not saying anything, but I’m guessing any ‘score’ slower than 80% could be cause for concern. You should at least forward this answer to your developer if you’re worried.

Another aspect to consider is the physical location of your webhosting. Ideally you should host in the primary country where your audience lives as this will “generally speaking” make your website load quicker for them.

Obviously it’s tempting to take your web hosting offshore as it can be a lot cheaper, but it is getting much competitive here in Australia and you can pick up some pretty good hosting deals these days.

Speed thrills.

How to Test Print Ad Effectiveness Online

2010-01-28T13:34:00.004+11:00

The best way to find out how your print ad's are performing for an online store is to create a special URL which is unique to your Newspaper Ad, which people will type in directly in response to seeing it!

So for example, you could create a url which provides some kind of incentive to type it in, like this: http://www.yourdomainname.com.au/freeshipping

This will then redirect to your free shipping offer page.

http://www.yourdomainname.com.au/product-cateogry/product1-free-shipping.html

You might need to get your developer to help set up the redirect if your CMS doesn’t support it.

To really see what’s going on in Analytics, you’ll need to add some campaign tracking script to the end of your link above (your destination URL).

To do this, visit Google’s Campaign URL Builder. Don’t get scared off, this is really easy!

Here’s an example:

What you’ll get is a link that looks like this (where the campaign tracking information is added automatically to the end of the link):

http://www.yourdomainname.com.au/product-cateogry/product1-free-shipping.html?utm_source=Sydney-Morning-herald&utm_medium=Print&utm_campaign=Free-Shipping

If you don’t add this additional code to your url, you won’t be able to tell whether someone came through via your print Ad (or any other channel for that matter, Twitter, facebook etc – and ideally links from those channels should also be tracked).

Then, to see a report in analytics you’ll need to go to Traffic Sources > Campaigns.

Then voila!

Over time, this report will tell you how many people came from your Print Ad.

Here’s how it looks:

Select "Source" to sort your campaign by the sources you have defined.

In the above example screenshot, you can see that Print was responsible for 153 visits during the period.

This will really help you understand whether your print campaign is performing against other campaign channels.

You can get much more granular information if you create goals, or have e-commerce enabled analytics tracking, as you can then see revenue generated based on each campaign channel.

Now that’s powerful!

This is going to help your online sales because you’ll begin to understand where your advertising budget is best spent!

So simple.

More information is available here.

Affiliate Marketing, link building & SEO

2010-01-22T10:18:00.003+11:00

Let’s face it, for most of us, link building is a time consuming and (sometimes) soul destroying past-time! (I have to say though, I actually really enjoy it! – But I’m a bit weird like that).

But that’s enough about me.

I think that if you’re an online retailer, you might want consider investing some of your link building budget in an affiliate campaign. The reason is that if you set this up properly, you’ll receive lots of inbound links from affiliates, who often deep link into your product and category pages.

Getting links to pages other than your home page (known in the trade as “deep links”) isn’t easy, so this is a neat way to get other people to do a lot of the hard work for you.

Basically there are three ways you can go about setting up your affiliate campaign:

Create your own affiliate campaign
Use what I call an “affiliate portal” website
Use a combination of both

Creating your own ‘propriety’ affiliate campaign involves a bit of mucking around; you’ll need to install the software on your own server. I haven’t personally used this software, but I’ve heard good reports about http://www.idevdirect.com/. You’ll need to promote you own affiliate program yourself and wait for people who actually visit your site to sign up for your program themselves.

Affiliate portals such as www.clixgalore.com.au, www.commissionmonster.com.au and http://www.dgmmarketing.com.au allow you to create your campaign as a merchant, and they promote your campaign to a bunch of potential affiliates who are members of their networks.

This is probably the easiest method if you’re just starting out. They manage all the tracking and payments on your behalf (for a fee of course!)

Basically you’ll need to setup your promotions with banners and recommended text links etc so that affiliates who join your program can cut and paste your links and banners into their own websites. Instant links!

Clixgalore does allow for search engine friendly text links and linkable banners, as does commission monster, but at this stage DGM does not.

If you’re using a proprietary affiliate program, ideally you’ll also set your banners up so they have image alt text, which becomes anchor text for search engines when they view the link, so you can get the most ‘bang’ for your SEO buck.

Unfortunately, the affiliate portals that I’m aware of don’t provide image alt text settings for affiliate banners.

Anyway, the upshot to all of this is you’ll enjoy increased traffic from your affiliate links, deep links from their websites to your home page, category and product pages and hopefully, more online sales as a result of improved search engine ranking positions as well as your affiliate traffic.

With this strategy, everyone wins!

Pingbacks & Trackbacks for link building

2010-01-15T10:06:00.003+11:00

Personally, I really like “pingbacks” as a link building strategy, simply because done properly it genuinely adds value to your own blog and other people’s blogs and it isn’t a spam technique!

I did touch on this topic a while ago in my “link to others to get traffic” blog but I’d like to expand on it a bit as I’ve learnt a lot more about it recently.

I suppose we should first define what “pingbacks” are so that we understand how they work and what the benefit is.

Pingbacks (or Trackbacks) are simply links which occur automatically when one blog post links to another, usually in the form of a citation or reference. It’s a great way to inter-link related content! Note that you will need a blog platform to take advantage of pingbacks.

To give you an example, in a blog post I made some time ago, I referenced another blog by linking to their post. I use Blogger.com (not for much longer mind you, Wordpress here we come!) and Blogger supports Pingbacks, which means that we automatically received a link back from the other blog. See below.

Also, pingbacks are much more friendly than posting comment spam on other people’s blogs to get either traffic or SEO benefits! From an SEO perspective, pingbacks are really a form of reciprocal linking, but if you’re smart about it, you can get quite good benefits.

So here’s my 3 step guide to using pingbacks to get traffic, links and PageRank (AKA, “authority”) for SEO.

Make sure your blog platform supports pingbacks.
Make sure the blog post you link also supports pingbacks. That’s also kinda critical!
Once you’ve written a blog post, search for other blogs which are relevant and accept pingbacks. You can do this manually by going to Google and typing “blog pingback (your blog post topic/theme)”. This way you can find blogs which are talking about your topic and copy and paste their links into your own blog post.

They are notified that you’ve linked to them and they will automatically link back to you. If their post is old and has some PageRank, your post will inherit some authority quite quickly and have more chance of ranking highly for your chosen blog topic.

You can use Google’s “Show Options“ feature in the search results to filter and search for older blog posts which may give you some additional authority.

I rarely do this, but a quick plug for the oddly named, but I have to say, rather impressive Market Samurai software which does all this hard work on this front for you. You can see their video explaining pingbacks for SEO here. Quite interesting....

Useful links & further info:

http://knowseo.net/link-building/link-building-what-are-trackbacks-and-pingbacks/
http://www.seoworks.com.au/seo-tips-ideas/trackbacks-pingbacks/
http://www.clicknewz.com/2114/pingbacks-vs-blog-comments/ and fu

Google Local Business Centre Tips

2010-01-07T17:52:00.006+11:00

Claiming your business through Google Local Business Centre is one of the simplest and easiest ways to get on the front page of the Google search results. With a little optimisation you can be ‘almost’ guaranteed a spot next to the map!

Almost.

While you can’t guarantee anything when it comes to Google, you can at least increase your chances of success.

Here are a couple of ways you can do this...

(Disclaimer – this is by no means exhaustive so if you’re serious about all this, check David Mihm’s excellent 49 factors that affect local search ranking positions).

First of all, claim your listing if you haven’t already. You do this by searching for your business in Google maps. It’s an easy process; go to Google maps, type in your business name and click on the ‘more info’ link next to your result on the left hand side.

The next screen you’ll see is your little place on the net; a page created by Google just for your business. These days the business info is being sourced from Yellow Pages.

Make the most of this page and update it with as much information as you can.

You need edit this page click the “business owner?” link.

The next step is to edit your listing if you need to, but as you can see, it’s very easy to hijack other businesses and claim them as your own (as we’ve experienced with our own clients from time to time – but that’s a whole other story for another day)...

So click the “edit my business information” radio button and voila!

This next phase is where the magic happens. This page is where you need to be thorough and be smart about the information you enter.

Most importantly, right from the beginning, make sure all the information about your business is correct.

The Company/Organisation field is one of the most important pieces of real estate, as it becomes the actual listing title next to the map in the Google results!

If you can make this slightly more keyword rich, this will give you more chance of a rank in the Google results.

But don’t go overboard – Google’s quality guidelines are fairly clear about not being spammy with your Company name title.

So for example if you sell solar hot water systems in Adelaide then try optimising your Company/Organisation name to be slightly more keyword rich; perhaps just add your location as well to your title.

Try something like: “Solar Solutions Adelaide”.

Add as much information about your business as possible, upload as many pictures as you can, upload any videos you have, as well as adjusting your map marker position.

Then hit the submit button at the bottom of the page.

Next you’ll need to verify your listing and you can do this in a number of ways. You can receive an automated phone call from Google and note down a pin number, or have the verification number SMS’d to your mobile, or you can request a letter to be sent to you and turn old and grey waiting by the mail box (by which time you’ve forgotten you even made the update and wonder what Google’s doing sending you a letter with some numbers in it).

Anyway, once you’ve got your listing verified and all under your control, you’ll learn a lot about how much traffic you’re getting from your listing to your website!

The reporting section is quite new and reasonably powerful.

There’s also another really useful section, which enables you to create coupons for your customers. It’s worth discussing this because I think it’s also a way of Google subtly showing us the way of the ‘future’.

You can create nifty coupons which people can print out, or display on their mobiles or even see when they’re looking at your result on a Google Map.

Here are some examples...

One for your phone...

And one for the map:

I think it’s telling that they’ve created a coupon specifically for mobile devices, Google’s been saying that 2010 is the year of the mobile, and many of their products, from Google Analytics (showing us visits from iPhones) to Local Business Centre Coupons are showing us how important Mobile devices will be from a marketing perspective from here on in.

Happy 2010.

How to take advantage of Google's Real Time Search

2009-12-18T11:47:00.004+11:00

Can my business use the new Real time search feature in Google?

Google announced Real Time search a couple of weeks ago, and while I was tempted to write about it when it first came out, I wanted to digest this new change to try and understand how we can use it for our online sales.

Of course as I type this post this morning, Google seems to have turned Real Time Search off!

Typical.

It appears easy enough to appear in the real time search results – I managed to get a couple of tweets to appear in the Google Results without too many problems.
Of course the problem is that they only sit there for a few seconds before decaying away as more real time results pile in on top of yours!

What used to be ‘that’s so 2008!’ is now ‘so, like, 20 seconds ago’! Pffft!

But even those few seconds in the spot-light could be very valuable…

That got me thinking, let’s say that there were a hundred thousand people who had just searched Google for ‘tiger woods’, and my tweet appeared for 10 seconds or so. That means it received a potential 1 million seconds (or 277 hours) of ‘air time’.

That’s pretty good value.

But before you go haring off spamming Twitter to get your business in front of millions of pairs of eyes (for 10 seconds), don’t go changing your whole online marketing strategy just yet!
Our next test will be to see how much traffic will we actually receive from a tweet on a strongly trending topic.

We might do a couple of tweets for “Tiger Woods” for example, and check our analytics data (and bit.ly data) to see how many people click on our link. But of course there are a lot of variables! How compelling is the tweet, what value will it bring to the topic etc, etc. That’s for your marketers to figure out! And they’ll need to be creative, because if you’re perceived to be spamming, I’d say you’ll be banned for sure.

Just by extension, I think Real Time Search is going to create Real Time SEO. I think tools are probably being built as we speak to :

figure out which search terms are triggering Real Time Search in Google, because obviously, not all searches bring up real time results in Google &
how to get your results in front of lots of people!

Time will tell.

But as I blogged about last year, at the end of the day I still maintain that social media allows YOU to seek out people who have problems and help them solve them as politely as possible.
SEO/SEM works the other way; people have problems and they come looking for your solution (if they can find you).

You're in business to solve people's problems, and there are lots of ways you can go about that. Social media just one method.

Both methods work in my opinion; a "gentle push" (social media) and "pull" (SEO/SEM) is what's required.

Competitors Using Blackhat SEO?

2009-12-10T15:32:00.004+11:00

As an SEO company, we find sites using Black Hat SEO techniques almost every day.

I guess Black Hat SEO can be defined as techniques that are used to get higher search rankings in an unethical manner. Black hat SEO techniques usually include one or more of the following characteristics:

breaks search engine rules/terms of services
creates a poor user experience directly because of the black hat SEO techniques utilized on the Web site
unethically presents content in a different visual or non-visual way to search engine spiders and search engine users.

Simply put, using Black Hat SEO techniques can give you an unfair ranking advantage over other websites.

Even some of the biggest companies in Australia are up to no good. Jim Stewart highlighted black hat SEO techniques Fairfax Online Network use on dozens of their websites (like www.wedding.com.au) – The black hat technique used by Fairfax appears intentional, but it may be a developer error! Anyway, view Jim’s very interesting exposé video here.

Smaller players also find it tempting.

Here’s a site which is ranking number 1 at Google for its declared search term and has white on white text all over the home page, including keyword flooding. Visit the site, click somewhere on the page (which isn’t a link) and Ctrl A (select all) – you’ll see what I mean.

I mean this is the oldest trick in the black hat SEO book, and there’s not a penalty within cooee!
Seriously I could ‘out’ websites all day long...

But black hat SEO has a much darker side, as many thousands of British consumers discovered last week.

Scotland Yard shut down hundreds of websites selling counterfeit goods online. One example was counterfeit Ugg Boots, where 400 ecommerce websites were shut down almost instantly.

As I write this about 6 of the top 10 sites listed in the top 10 at Google.co.uk for the search term “Ugg Boots” are inaccessible.

What’s interesting is that the owner(s) of these websites were very well versed in Blackhat SEO and they used all sorts of dodgy black hat techniques to get their websites to rank highly in the results.

Some had even hacked or have friends who work within the Chinese Government and various education websites and obtained back-links to their website!

There are no visible links on this page for example, http://www.hztc.edu.cn/www/english/Introduction.htm but there are dozens hidden behind the main banner image.

In spite of repeated spam complaints that I’ve personally lodged with Google in the last three years, I have yet to see one single website using black hat SEO be penalised.

Putting it bluntly, if Google’s so called web spam filters actually worked, then many thousands of British consumers wouldn’t have been ripped off.

At the end of the day it’s comes down to trust perception. If the current situation continues, people are going to be less inclined to trust the Google results. And when that happens, people tend to start using different search engines.

I seriously think that it’s got to the point where Google’s run up the white flag, so it occasionally slaps a big branded website (like BMW Germany, or Flight Centre) to make a high profile example. They then get some publicity as the media machine cranks out the free PR, which in turn sends a few shivers down the spines of smaller website owners, who in turn pull in their heads for a few weeks, before going all over again.

For you I have two recommendations;

DO NOT under any circumstances take the “if you can’t beat them join them approach”! You have to think that ‘eventually’ black hat SEO techniques website owners are getting away with at the moment might be banned at anytime as Google tightens the algorithm.
If you’re got spare 5 minutes to waste, fill in the web spam complaint form.

Personally, I’ve stopped bothering.

How to lose sales using coupon codes

2009-12-03T14:50:00.007+11:00

Coupon Codes sound great in theory; you can offer a short or long term discount, rewarding your existing customers or attracting new ones.

You can see one in action on the new General Pants Online Store:

But for the most part, I reckon coupon codes, vouchers, promo-codes, call them what you will, do your online sales more harm than good, and here’s why.

I don’t know about you, but every time I see a coupon code field in a shopping cart process, I race off to Google and type in “retailer.com coupon code”. And I’m not alone; there are thousands of searches every month on Google for just those terms.

Here’s proof.

You can see from keyword research that approximately 74,000 searches are conducted monthly at Google for “newegg promo code” and for Amazon, it’s around 49,000. The numbers in the middle column are estimated local searches.

And with the rise in popularity of Smart Company award winning sites like www.retailmenot.com the trend can only continue upwards.

See, when someone sees a coupon code field, they often think to themselves, “How come someone else can get this cheaper than me?” or “I don’t want to be a sucker and overpay!” And they’re perfectly reasonable feelings to have in anyone’s book.

The other risk coupon codes pose is you (the customer) losing your flow and leaving the middle of checkout process to go off in search of a coupon code online so you can score a better deal. And if you can’t find one, there’s a chance you’ll get annoyed and not complete the purchase at all!

Of course the other downside to coupon codes is the margin they take away from your profits. Not only that, some (sneaky) affiliates will often attach their special tracking to your coupon codes (in a link) so you’re paying affiliate commisions on top of the coupon discount for any sales generated.

I also think that for some brands, coupon codes can potentially damage the brand by cheapening their image and condition their customers to expect a discount time after time. They may not be willing to pay full price with you again!

I read recently (but can’t for the life of me find the article to cite, so you’ll have to trust me!) that one online retailer couldn’t figure out why so many people were dropping out of the checkout process at one particular stage. So they tried A/B split testing and in one of the variations, they removed the coupon code field. It immediately unblocked the cart and sales rose dramatically.

So is there a solution?

Well, yes, sort of.

I think the best solution is not to display a coupon code field at all and offer no codes to anyone. Instead provide ‘those in the know’ a unique link to the promotion. You’d need a developer to set this up, but you’d make a subfolder like this:

http://www.reseo.com/20-percent-off

Hitting that subfolder would create a parameter which would include the coupon code and automatically apply the discount at checkout, meaning customers wouldn’t see a coupon code field at all.

Sure the link might be shared around, but it would stop people seeing the coupon code field and heading off online to get one!

It would stop me!

Update 15 Jan 2010: Our analytics report shows 7 visits to this page from people searching for "general pants promo code" in the last 30 days. This post currently ranks 4th at Google for that term, so people are definitely searching for promo codes from retailers!

Search Engine Room 2009 - 2010

2009-11-27T09:36:00.003+11:00

I’m going to be a little self indulgent this week... I promise to get back to answering your questions next week. Cross my heart!

Last week Annemarie, Liesl and I travelled to Sydney to Search Engine Room to catch up with the latest developments in our industry. It’s worth sharing some of the information we collected with you so you can get a feel for where online might be heading into 2010.

The first keynote speech was presented by Justin Baird, Innovationist at Google Australia. Speaking of ‘keynote’, his presentation using Apple’s keynote software was something to behold! Very flashy.

Justin spoke to us about how the web and search is evolving, how the web technology is allowing us to connect with your brand in new ways (like videos and channels in YouTube as just one example).

Speaking of connectivity, he talked about the way in which the ‘real’ world is increasingly connecting to online, through technologies such as QR codes etc.

Then there’s the way we consume “video” and how technology is evolving so rapidly that it won’t be too long before we’ll all be watching TV pretty much solely through online channels.

Mark Thompson; Director General of the BBC stated recently, “We’re less than 5 years away from fully individualised drag and drop TV and Radio Stations”. Sounds pretty cool.

Justin spoke about some of the new things coming through Google Labs such as http://www.google.com/squared which presents information in a tabulated way enabling you to compare things at a glance:

Finally, (because I’m running out of space to talk about anyone else!) he demonstrated “Cross-language Information Retrieval” (sat THAT 10 times quickly).

He used his android phone to speak (in English of course!), and it came back almost instantly with an audio translation in Spanish. This means that soon you will be able to speak to someone in China and the translation will happen via machines in the middle! Love that stuff.

Alan Kohler was the second Keynote speaker – a very ‘old school’ presentation in which he simply referred to his notebook on occasion, but extremely engaging. Quite refreshing in fact and Alan definitely has charisma!

Alan spoke to us about the future of journalism and the upheaval major news publishers are facing at this very moment. The speed of change has really caught them off guard and people like Rupert Murdock are desperately trying to figure out what to do to maintain revenues when so much information can be gathered online for free.

Alan pointed out that quality journalism was the key – noting that his 14,500 subscribers were happy to pay their $330 annual subscriptions to his Eureka Report newsletter. I did the maths, that’s a good business to be in.

Next we saw Jye Smith, Social Media Strategist, Switched On Media and Nicholas O’Flaherty, Bullet PR who spoke about Social Media and Search Engine Visibility.
Because so many social media results are showing up in the search engines, they spoke about ways to leverage social media to get traffic to your social media channels and then back to your website. Nicholas also spoke a little on reputation management.

Karen Grinter from Global Reviews did a fascinating speech on user testing, a topic very close to my heart. They use a system similar to www.usertesting.com but in a much more hands-on interpretive way. Some of the case studies were extremely insightful in terms of user behaviour online, how people search, what annoys them and makes people more inclined to do business online with you.

Key take-away? “Even when a user had a brand in mind when they went online, 51% searched on general terms”.

In the session I spoke in, we saw Jon Ostler, FirstRate talk about how everything that was old is now new again, the click economy and how it’s evolved over time. I loved his take on Forbe’s most powerful list – Google Founders Larry and Sergey now out-ranking Rupert Murdock!

1. U.S. President Obama
2. China President HuJintao
3. Russian President Vladimir Putin
4. U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke
5. Google founders Sergey Brin & Larry Page
6. Telmexchief executive Carlos Slim Helú
7. News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch
8. Wal-Mart chief executive Michael T. Duke
9. Saudi King Abdullah bin AdbulAziz al Saud
10. Microsoft founder Bill Gates

Matt Bateman of Commission Monster spoke about affiliate marketing, a topic which isn’t usually discussed at the sorts of events, so it was an interesting and new insight into the world of performance based online advertising.

Finally! I spoke about the rise and rise of shopping comparison sites like GetPrice, Myshopping etc. These big sites are starting to dominate the head terms and the long tail search terms online with 3 of the top 5 sites ranking for “LCD TV” being comparison websites for example:

They also completely dominate the long tail as you can see from the next screenshot:

So from top to bottom, these sites are squeezing the life out of product related search results. So in essence, if you can’t beat them, join ‘em.

You can download a copy of my comparison sites presentation here.

Optimising your Facebook Ads campaign

2009-11-19T15:35:00.003+11:00

Facebook Ads provide incredible reach to a targeted audience which can’t be matched by any other online (or offline) advertising system.

Unless you’ve been living quietly in a cupboard, you’ll already know there a lot of people using Facebook and they spend a lot of time there. Here are some very recent stats from Facebook itself.

There are over 300 million users, 57% female and 43% male and the fastest growing demographic is that of the 35+ age group.

If Facebook was a country it would be the world’s 4th largest behind China, India and the US. It actually looks set to become the 3rd largest as its ‘population’ is now only 7 million behind that of the US!

But I digress.

Facebook Ad’s are more ‘pushy’ than Google AdWords and by this I mean, when someone performs a search at Google for, say, “sleeping bags” relevant Google Ads appear to help you research or buy a sleeping bag.

AdWords are a classic “pull advertising” model.

Facebook Ads are pretty much the opposite. Users on Facebook generally aren’t specifically trying to solve a problem; your Facebook Ads appear in front of them whether they’re interested in what you have to offer or not. It’s ‘push advertising’, but up to a point.

Because you can target your Facebook ads to people by their interests (eg. “camping”) your Facebook Ad which offers deals on ‘Sleeping Bags’ may in fact be relevant to them at some point.

What’s more, using this “sleeping bag” example, Google’s keyword tool tells us that approximately 10,000 searches a month are conducted at Google.

Over at Facebook, there are over 87,000 people who have told us they like “camping” in their profile:

You can see there’s quite a bit of potential at Facebook!

So here are some tips to help you optimise your Facebook Ads so you can generate more online sales.

Create a compelling Ad with an image which graphically matches the landing page a person is sent to when they click on your Facebook Ad.
Like AdWords Ad’s, include a strong CTA (Call to Action), such as “mention this Ad for a free gift!” or “Offer ends soon!”
Create 5 Ad’s with different copy (split test your Ads) so you can see over time which is working best and make variations. The other reason is so that people don’t get bored seeing the same Ad from you all the time.
Try targeting different audiences, demographics, ages, locations etc.
Use Google’s Campaign URL builder tool so you can track what people are doing on your website once they arrive from your Facebook Ad in Analytics.
Use Facebook’s interesting reporting tool to help you gain insights into users, their profiles and behaviours (note, this is aggregate data, you do not get access to any individual’s information!). You can see in the screenshot below that for one of the campaigns we’re currently running, young women aged between 18-24 and 25-34 represent the highest “% of clickers” on our Ad.
We can use this data to create a new Facebook Ad specifically targeting this age group and sex with more customised content to try and lift click-throughs further.

Facebook Ads are still quite new, but really the fundamentals are all the same for all online adervtising; be relevant, test your creatives / offers and keep an eye on reports & ROI!

Should I be advertising on Mobile Phones?

2009-11-12T12:13:00.000+11:00

I guess it’s fair to say that Mobile Advertising is still in its infancy, but its growing fast and definitely something to keep your eye on.

Let’s look at some stats before we make a decision whether to set sail:

Wikipedia notes that there are currently 3 billion handsets globally – and they out-number computers by more than 4 to 1.

It states, “In Spain 75% of mobile phone owners receive ads, in France 62% and in Japan 54%. More remarkably as mobile advertising matures, like in the most advanced markets, the user involvement also matures. In Japan today, already 44% of mobile phone owners click on ads they receive on their phones”

So it’s looking promising.

There are effectively 3 ways to advertise on mobile phones: 1. Standard top and bottom banners, 2. SMS (which currently makes up an estimated 90% of revenue) and 3. MMS - which is effectively embedding ads in games and apps. Video is appearing more and more as phone technology improves.

In our neck of the woods we’ve been looking at and reporting to our clients the iPhone usage trends in the monthly reports we send them. The growth in visitation from mobile devices has been remarkable across all clients, from corporate to ecommerce.

Google has been offering Mobile Ad’s through the Google AdWords interface which I wrote about last year but it’s clunky at best.

Probably in response to the lack of use by the AdWords Mobile Ad’s system, Google snapped up AdMob (for $750 mil – which they found in the petty cash tin next to reception).

AdMob is one of the world’s largest mobile advertising providers and it will give the search giant more reach (just like DoubleClick has provided with banner display advertising).

Presumably, this will allow you to place mobile Ad’s into mobile phone app’s and mobile websites through the Google AdWords interface. As soon as it happens, I can tell you now, we’ll be the first to start experimenting with this ‘new’ advertising medium. We’ll probably make a few mistakes here and there, but that’s how you learn.

It seems Mobile Advertising is working well for big business but will it work ok for SME’s?

Again, I think the deal done by Google and AdMob will allow SME’s access to Mobile advertising and really start to drive already explosive growth in the medium to the next level.

Given that most of us have our phones on 24 hours per day, and most phones have internet access I’d say ‘yes’, now’s the time to be advertising on Mobile devices and as is always the case online, keep an eye on your ROI.

My budget is tight, what’s the best bang for my buck getting more traffic to my website?

2009-11-09T11:41:00.003+11:00

Author: Chris Thomas on 9th November 2009

Traffic. It's the blood that courses through your website's veins.

But there's good traffic and there's bad traffic, and anyone can get a bucket load of crappy traffic. All you have to do is wander over to Google and type in "buy traffic" then pick a site and spend a few hundred dollars buying tens of thousands of visitors a month!

I can tell you now; you might as well pass the time at home setting fire to $100 bills (unless you need to get banner ad impressions up!). While the stats in your analytics package will look impressive, the needle on your website goals (sales, conversions, newsletter sign ups) won't have moved an inch. That's because the traffic you buy (through expired domain redirection - and a host of other ‘shady' pop under tricks) isn't targeted.

You'll probably melt your server too, so be warned.

But be my guest, knock yourself out. Try it for yourself!

So what's good traffic?

Good traffic is targeted traffic (it's a mantra, so keep saying it over and over again). It makes up the second pillar of online marketing, no matter how big or small you are.

You need:
1. A good product or service.
2. Targeted traffic.
3. A website that converts.

Targeted traffic comes from a search engine, a Google Ad, Facebook Fan page, Twitter, other referring sites and bookmarks.

So frankly speaking, I'm not interested in pure numbers, I like to see the best quality traffic hit your site because it has the highest chance of converting.

Works every time.

Top tips for cheap traffic building:

1. SEO - can take time, but if you get it right and are patient enough, high rankings in search engines will provide lots of traffic for many years to come.

2. Affiliate Marketing - not for everyone, but affiliate marketing can deliver free and targeted traffic into your site and you only need to pay someone for it once a conversion has occurred. It can also be a useful link building tool for SEO as (if you've set it up properly) each link on affiliate site can create link popularity.

3. Google AdWords - yes you need to pay, but if you're keeping an eye on your ROI (conversions versus AdWords spend) then it's worth every penny.

4. Social Media - Facebook fan pages can drive a lot of traffic to your site, and the more fans you get, the more traffic you'll probably receive too. It takes a lot of work, but can be well worth it in the long run. Really great info on how to build a Facebook community here.

5. Twitter - some of our clients are receiving a lot of traffic from Twitter. Build your list of followers, make awesome, compelling tweets and link those tweets to your website. Slow going in the beginning, but can be worth it in the long run. You could also explore advertising on Twitter - try www.ad.ly - and have your ‘tweet' message forwarded (and to some extent, endorsed) to 675,000 of Nicole Richie's Twitter followers! One guy recently made $15,000 in a month using Ad.ly. Scary.

6. Secondary Networks - Getprice, myshopping, get your product list up on these sites and get quite cheap, targeted traffic.

7. Don't forget offline - Display your web address on your car, business card, letter head, email sig and press releases you might send out.

8. Web 2.0 (remember that?) - Any content you create from a blog post to a new article - Digg it, Stumble it, Delicious it, Reddit, etc.

Obviously outsourcing much of the above to an agency will make things more expensive, and if you have the time then that's sometimes the only cost involved. What's the price of time spent with the kids?

I'll leave that for you to decide.

Chris Thomas heads Reseo, a search engine optimisation company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.

The Twitter Deal Between Bing and Google.

2009-10-29T12:06:00.004+11:00

The recently announced deal between Twitter, Google and Bing could have enormous implications for your online sales.

While there’s not a huge amount of information coming from Google about how it intends to integrate Twitter results into its search, Bing has led the way with a Beta site which you can see here: http://www.bing.com/twitter

Bing does quite a job of returning twitter results. They group the results into the ‘latest tweets’ about a topic, as well as the pages which have been linked to from Tweets.

Google is taking a far more cautious approach as this blog post from Marissa Mayer explains it will be a few months before we see anything on Google.

The reason for the agreement being reached between the search giants and Twitter is simple. Search Engine robots can’t index Twitter quickly enough to return real time information about various topics, especially if a hot topic is trending hard.

Up goes the white flag!

The issue for the search engines though is which ‘most recent tweets’ should they display?

If a topic is hot and folks are commenting at a rate of thousands of tweets a minute, the search engines need to take the ‘best’ tweets and display them in the results.

What’s unclear at present is whether the search engines will be running their own algorithms over the twitter results to help them make a decision about the most relevant tweets to display. My guess is they will.

And they’ll probably need to, because what you see often see happening is spammers who jump in on a trending topic and post tweets to their porn, pills & casino sites to try and get some traffic from the ‘crowd’.

It could lead to some undesirable results showing up in the Search Engine Twitter feeds!

There’s also been some talk that the Search engines will be looking at each Twitterer’s history, the amount of tweets they’ve made, the amount of re-tweets they’ve received from others, in other words, the quality of the Twitterer. This would help the search engine establish the authority of the twitterers posts and may give that their tweets preference in the search engine results.

The other factor which is still unclear is whether there will be any change to the search engine algorithms regarding links from tweets to web pages. Currently there is no search engine benefit from links from tweets.

In spite of that, we’re already seeing Bing follow links from Tweets and list them in the twitter results to help categorise the most popular web pages which twitterers are linking to.

This could potentially turn SEO on its head. It means if you haven’t set up a twitter account for your business you need to pronto, just to be on the safe side.

I believe Twitter Feeds in Search Engine results will be the biggest change in search engine results since the introduction of Universal Search back in 2007.

My advice is to sit tight and wait and see what Google does, which is where the greatest impact could be felt in terms of potential traffic to your site from Twitter feeds.

Never a dull moment.

Make online shopping fun for visitors!

2009-10-15T15:18:00.005+11:00

Adding some levity during the ecommerce process is a great way to build trust and improve your online sales.

One example which springs to mind is Virgin, who have created an upbeat, fun and cheeky style to their online experience for users. I like their conversational style; it’s certainly not stuffy!

Here’s an example during their checkout process:

Here’s another example from Teefury. As soon as I saw it I smiled as it was completely unexpected (and then shared it with my colleagues).

What I like about these examples is the disarming nature of the approach. If you can turn a frown upside down, I reckon you’re more than half way to securing a sale.

But you know, humour is a funny thing. Sometimes just when you think a gag is going to be hilarious, it can turn around and bite you – just look at Hey Hey it’s Wednesday.

So if you’re going to try a little humour, please test it out on some friends before you offer it the world!

Another really fun shopping experience I had the pleasure of trying out the other day was Plurchase – which, as they say, “lets you shop at your favorite stores with your friends”.

My colleague Liesl and I tried it and absolutely loved it.

It’s a doddle to invite friends to along on your shopping trip and you can all chat away as you browse through the site (shown at the bottom of the purple side bar).

Seriously, keep an eye on this thing because I have a feeling it could be big and it could change the way online retailers model their stores. At the moment our online retail stores are really geared towards just individuals browsing their websites.

This is a potentially game changing product, because it now allows two or more people to shop together online, commenting on products, and asking for advice as they go!

Notwithstanding any privacy issues, I wonder if they’ll ever allow website owners the chat information. If they were able to do that, I think this could also become a brilliant usability tool.

Let’s make shopping fun!

And a big thanks to Reactive's new gun Account Director Su Debnath for bringing Plurchase to my attention for today's post!

How to create custom Facebook Tabs and Pages

2009-10-02T09:30:00.006+10:00

Facebook Fan Pages can look great can’t they!

There’s been quite a shift recently in our business; obviously we’re still focusing on our core business of SEO, PPC management and conversion optimisation etc. But we’re now getting more heavily involved in social media by creating and managing Facebook Ad’s and helping clients create Facebook Fan Pages.

Fan Pages are quite nifty, because you can almost replicate a page from your own website within Facebook, where a lot of people just happen to spend their time these days!

So, here’s a ‘step-by-step‘ to show you how to create a Facebook Fan Page for your business; (by the way, mega ‘screen-shot-alert’ for today’s post)

Set up a Fan Page in Facebook

You’ll need to link the Fan Page to your normal account (as someone needs to be an administrator and it might as well be you). Once you’re logged in, the biggest challenge you’ll face is how to accomplish this first step!

You’ll find the ‘Fan Page’ link conveniently located in THE MOST UNOBVIOUS PAGE LOCATION IN THE HISTORY OF WEB DESIGN! It’s hidden down in the bottom left hand corner of your screen:

Next, just fill in the details about your Fan Page, giving it a name etc.
Having created the Fan Page, the next step is to perform a search for ‘FBML’ (Facebook Markup Language Application) as this will allow you much more flexibility for customization when building your new Fan Page (as you’ll see a bit later):

Click on the Static FBML result:

Step 5 is just as easy; just add the Application to your Fan Page once you’re in the Static FBML App Page:

Navigate your way back to the Fan Page and upload a profile logo (image) and then click ‘Edit Page’:

Once you’ve clicked ‘Edit Page’ you’ll see in a list your new FBML application in the applications associated with your page list. Click the Little Pencil Icon located far right of the App to edit:

Next you enter the name for the custom tab in the Box Title field, and enter your desired HTML in the FBML field – if you want to insert a banner across the top, the width you can play with is 765px (all very easy if you know HTML). Choose Save Changes and preview the new tab on your Page

Go back to your Fan Page. Choose the Plus sign (+) in the row of tabs, and choose your new FBML tab from the list of available tabs. This will make your new tab appear in the list of tabs.

You can also remove the default tabs which you may not need (eg links, photos, discussions etc) by clicking on those tabs, then selecting the pencil icon and selecting Delete Tab. Be warned though. Do not delete your new FBML Tabs; they’re gone for good if you do!
On the Wall tab, select Settings. Choose your FBML tab from the drop down menu next to ‘Default Landing Tab for Everyone Else’. This will ensure all visitors land on your new themed tab when they visit your profile!

That’s basically it; you’ve created a nicely customized and themed Fan Page. You can also link your new Fan Page to your Twitter account, which means any tweets you make will appear on your wall, and any wall posts you make will appear as new tweets (watch out for the 140 character twitter limit though!).

Of course, add some additional content about your business or campaign, try adding the wildfire promotion application (which I haven’t tried yet), and try and get as many fans as you can!

To finish up, here’s a really nice example from Jason West’s company, Websalad.

And many thanks to my colleague Liesl Pfeffer to researching the information for today’s post!

What factors can influence conversion tests?

2009-09-25T09:25:00.001+10:00

Improving your website conversion rate is something everyone should be constantly working on.

Obviously, lots of people in our industry bang on about the importance of A/B split testing and Multivariate testing as tools to lift Conversion rates. And more often than not, these systems work.

But there are factors which can come into play which can knock your testing efforts for 6.

So here are 6 factors which might be affecting your conversion rates and your ability to test effectively.

1. traffic spikes from left field.

We recently had a situation where a client received a huge amount of junk traffic, right in the middle of a test. The traffic came from a new affiliate the merchant allowed to promote her site called AdFlasher – basically a system where people get paid to click on affiliate banners on the AdFlasher site.

The bounce rate from this traffic was sitting at 99% the reason being is that people actually get paid to click on as many banners as they can in a 10 second time frame. Can’t for the life of me work out how AdFlasher makes any money – none of the traffic was converting into sales - but traffic went through the roof regardless. By the time we’d figured out what was going on the test lay in tatters.

Always test the integrity of your traffic!

2. Conversion ‘pressure’

Conversion pressure is a phrase I’ve coined to describe a phenomenon which rolls around every year. Quite simply, it’s the pre-Christmas shopping rush.

Nearly every retail client we have sees a lift in their conversion rates in the weeks leading up to Christmas as online shoppers make last-minute, hasty and impulsive decisions to buy gifts. They’re under pressure and it shows! Conversion rates can double without lifting a finger, but don’t expect it to last post Christmas. It never does.

3. Seasonality (needs)

Like conversion pressure, seasonality also can affect your conversion rates -depending on your industry. Usually B2B sites experience abysmal conversion rates over summer. People are visiting their sites, but no one’s filling in enquiry forms! Folks in business are looking and planning, but they’re usually on leave.

If you’re selling sunglasses – then summer will probably be a good time for conversion rates. A bit like running a carwash after a dust storm. Same amount of cars driving past, but more people driving in to get their car washed.

This is why it’s always important to be testing all the time (Always Be Testing!).

4. Competitors

Competitors can definitely affect your conversion testing efforts. A big sale on a competitor site will probably sink your efforts. In many categories people do browse quite a bit online looking for the best deals, which means if a competitor does something dramatic in the middle of your test, the effort is wasted. Pull the test and compete!

5. Currency

If you sell internationally, then you might be seeing your conversion rates starting to drop, especially if you advertise your prices in international currencies, mainly because the Australian dollar is strengthening rapidly against most other currencies.

Same amount of traffic, but fewer sales due to the fact you’re less competitive on the pricing front. This also plays havoc with your testing. And don’t forget, it can work the other way too if the currency weakens.

6. Annualised tests

Don’t run a test just before Christmas this year with the intention of running it again the same time next year thinking you’re going to get conclusive results. You can’t, because so much can change which is outside your control. The variables are just too great, your data will be different, economic circumstances will have changed, and so on.

I mentioned earlier, Always Be Testing, so run your tests as quickly as possible which and check the integrity of your data during and after your test.

If it all sounds too hard, don’t forget to stick to the basic tests that always work; keep up your usability task-based testing (try http://www.usertesting.com) and run http://www.Crazyegg.com and http://www.Clicktale.com over the site once in a while!

Go Saints.

Should I create more content to get more traffic?

2009-09-17T17:34:00.006+10:00

Creating more content on your site is probably the ‘easiest’ way to build more traffic to your website. The reason is that every single bit of content you create will be indexed by search engines and, over time, your new unique content will start to rank well for lots of (usually long tail search queries).

But at first glance it can actually seem rather daunting! I hear you… ‘Build more pages and content? You’ve got to be kidding! I’m running a business and I just don’t have time!’

But sometimes it’s easier than you think.

Before I get to some expensive but powerful options, let’s look at the way our very good friends at Smart Company have achieved it without too much effort at all! They’ll correct me if I’m wrong!

You’ll notice at the bottom of each Smart Company article, there are related ‘tags’:

When you click on one of the links, you’re taken to a search result page showing all other related content on the Smart Company site which has the same tags or is keyword related.

What’s really neat about the system they’ve adopted is the fact that they’re assisting not just humans, but search engine robots crawl the search result pages of the site, which creates more pages a search engine can index!

Here’s the ranking position for the above search term and search results page at Google. Not bad!

See, the problem a search engine robot has is that it can’t type queries into a search bar on your site! Search Engine robots are quite dumb like that.

So by creating search tags, you can help the robots generate and index your search pages. And for Smart Company this has meant an additional 9,400 pages being indexed by Google! Good effort guys. Hat’s off.

Recently a new client showed me some other interesting sites doing similar things, such as GetPrice and Dick Smith Electronics.

GetPrice has an astounding 19 Million pages indexed by Google! That’s one hell of a xml sitemap! (or 38 individual sitemaps to be more precise).

They’ve done this using some pretty sophisticated programming to auto-generate pages on their site for literally millions of search terms. Spammy and undoubtedly expensive, but effective.

Dick Smith has utilized a great piece of technology from Sli-systems (not ‘Sly’!) where (in a nut-shell) each time someone uses the search bar, the system actually builds a static ‘results’ page for Search engines to index. Very intelligent, but perhaps a little on the expensive-side for most of us.

For dick smith, this has meant an additional 8,400 pages indexed, and there are more added every time someone performs a new search!

Improve your brand awareness online with Google Image Ad's

2009-09-11T11:40:00.007+10:00

Author: Chris Thomas on 11 September 2009

Media buying can be an expensive business, especially when you're going through an agency. Frankly, it's not an area that I have specialised in in the past, mainly because banner Ad's are notoriously bad for online sales. But it's one that's become more accessible to all of us recently due to Google's acquisition of doubleclick.

In your Google Ad Words account you may (or may not) have noticed various options for when you create a new creative or Ad.

Most of the time you probably just want to create a standard text Google Ad.

But try exploring the ‘Image Ad' option if you're interested in increasing brand awareness and you never know, you might even get a sale or two (as some of our clients unexpectedly have!).

One of reasons that Google Image Ad's are so powerful is the ability to contextualise your placements. What this means is you can create a keyword list alongside your Image Ad so that it'll only display when certain words or key-phrases are used on a page.

I saw this in action recently when I was reading an article about zoo animals being inadvertently sold to a hunting group. Sitting beside the article was an Image Ad (or banner) for an animal welfare agency.

Very clever.

Another powerful feature is the ability to select the websites you'd like your Image Ad's to appear on, and because Google has become such a colossus, the list is breathtaking.

First you simply use Google's placement tool to select where you'd like your Image Ad's to appear on.

Then you select from the list of websites which have Google's Partnerships.

Here's an example of some local newspapers and the possible impressions your Image Ad might receive each day if you add them to your list:

There are two ways you can bid to make your Image Ad appear on partner sites, CPC (Cost per Click) and CPM (Cost per 1,000 Impressions). From our experience, it's better to pick CPC, even though the bid amounts need to be quite high, (say around $1.50 to $3.00 per click) in order for your Ads to appear.

The reason is that you get unlimited impressions and given that your CTR (Click Through Rate) is quite low, you don't have to spend an arm and a leg branding your business or product.

Should I buy links to improve my search engine rankings?

2009-09-03T10:19:00.002+10:00

Happy Spring.

Ah... the old link buying debate – it never seems to go away.

Before I answer the question, I’ll put a little context around the importance of links pointing to your website. I know many of you already understand why they’re important to your search engine rankings, but it’s always helpful to do a little SEO 101 for those that don’t.

In its simplest form, a link to your site from another is a signal to search engines that your website is ‘popular’. If I like the content on your site I’ll probably link to it so I can share it with others. If lots of people like the content on your site, they’ll probably link to it too.

Search engine robots follow all these links and (all things being equal) will reward your content with a higher search engine ranking position.

For some sites, their content can be, shall we say, a little dry, and not many people are inclined to link to the site.

So it can be tempting to purchase links to improve the in-bound link count, and therefore improve search engine ranking positions.

It’s a highly dangerous practice though, because search engines like Google have declared war on those who buy links from other websites – citing that paid links are not genuine ‘votes’ or links. They’re deemed artificial and placed for one reason, to improve the search engine rankings of the target site.

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team has said that paid links are only ok if they’re ‘no followed’ – in other words search engine robots are explicitly instructed not to carry any link ‘weight’ to the site being linked to. So in summary, you can buy links to get traffic from another site without being penalised if you ‘no-follow’ the links. Here’s Google’s explanation in more detail:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66736

For many years, it was difficult for search engines to detect paid links, but their algorithms are getting better at detecting them and discounting paid links, potentially making the whole exercise pointless anyway.

Google’s also asking the online community for help in detecting paid links and there’s a form which you can fill out to report paid links if you detect them yourself. I’ve personally used this form on more than one occasion!

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks

Last year, one of the biggest link building companies in the world, We Build Pages stuck its head up a little too high and was cut down by Google’s spam team, who (apparently) launched an investigation into the back-link profiles of its customers. The fall out that ensued almost brought the company down, as (allegedly) many of the links ‘built’ for their customers were in fact paid for.

There are companies which offer paid link placement such as http://www.textlinkbrokers.com/ – and they do their best to keep the sites who are offering links in exchange for cash a secret. But seriously, how hard is it for a search engine spam team to create an account, buy a few links here and there and detect who’s actually offering links for sale?

My advice is to stay well clear of paid links and use standard, ethical link building techniques so you can sleep well at night.

Tips on How to Improve your Google AdWords Campaign

2009-08-27T11:13:00.004+10:00

I’ve never seen a Google AdWords campaign that can’t be improved, and we’ll often restructure existing campaigns to help maximise the ROI of the account.

Most people often set up their Google AdWords campaigns using the one campaign and one AdGroup with (in some cases) hundreds of broad matched keywords all delivering traffic to the home page of a site.

The real trick to an effective AdWords campaign is to break your campaigns out into small, targeted AdGroups with just a handful of targeted keywords delivering traffic to a relevant landing page on your website.

I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you are Mitre10 and you’re setting up a large Google AdWords Campaign.

The way to tackle it is to whiteboard the structure first before you jump in and start building.
So one way to set up a Google Ad Campaign for paint might be to do the following:

Campaign: Paint

AdGroup 1: Interior Paints
AdGroup 2: Exterior Paints
AdGroup 3: Ceiling Paints
AdGroup 4: Automotive Paints
AdGroup 5: Spray Paints
AdGroup 6: Paint Accessories
AdGroup 7: Acrylic Paint
AdGroup 8: Enamel Paint
AdGroup 9: Paint Brand (Dulux)
AdGroup 10: Paint Brand (British Paints) etc, etc.

Each AdGroup should have at least 1 dedicated Ad, have a maximum of 20 keywords and phrases triggering the Ad and should go to a relevant landing page on your site.

So you can see, it can be a fair bit of work, but the long term benefits in restructuring your account will likely to be improved keyword Quality Scores (meaning your bidding costs for each keyword will significantly reduce and your Ad positions will likely be higher).

The other useful tool to save you money and improve your campaign performance in AdWords is the “Search Query Report” in the Google AdWords Reporting Section.

This can be amazing especially if you’re using broad matched keywords because it shows you what search query people actually typed into Google before clicking on one of your Ad’s.

Why is that powerful?

Well it’s because it enables you to set up negative keywords in your account to prevent wasted clicks.

I can feel another example coming on.

In the interior paints example above, we might see from the Search Query Report that 25 people typed in “Interior house painting contractors” resulting 25 clicks - which will happen due to the ‘broad matched’ key phrase. This means that if the search query contains the words “interior painting” anywhere in the string, the Mitre10 Interior Paint Google Ad will display.

In my opinion, that’s 25 wasted clicks because Mitre10 don’t offer a painting contracting service.

What you should do is look for words that aren’t relevant and set up ‘negative matching’ to stop your Google Ad being displayed for “contractors” or in your case, non-relevant key phrases or words.

Google AdWords can be a beast of a thing to get your head around, and there are literally dozens of little tricks you can use to continually refine your account But hopefully the two outlined above will go in some way to improving the overall performance of your account.

Using Paid Search (PPC) for Intelligent SEO

2009-08-25T12:42:00.012+10:00

Annemarie Hunter - Search Marketing Specialist

We frequently recommend our clients run a paid search (PPC) campaign prior to optimising their website for SEO. The information and insights gained from PPC, specifically Google Adwords, are invaluable for the long-term success and effectiveness of a search engine optimisation strategy.

Keyword Research & Refinement

Using Keyword Research tools such as Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery and Google’s Keyword Tool can often display skewed and conflicting results. You never really know the true traffic volumes you can expect, or what variations of a keyword or phrase will deliver the best results.

With paid search however, you get the raw data. You’re able to test an infinite number of keyword variations and track each of them extensively. In addition to the number of “clicks” generated, “impression” data (the number of times an ad is shown) provides a fairly reliable metric for a keyword’s search volume. You may discover the singular version of a keyword outperforms the plural, or that a multi-word phrase is most optimal.

Paid search uncovers the exact keywords and phrases to target organically. This is especially powerful given SEO campaigns can take months to produce solid results. You need to be certain which keywords are worth your time, effort and investment from the outset.

Keywords that Convert

Having thousands of visitors to a website each day means little if they don’t convert. The most valuable insight a paid search campaign can provide, is uncovering the keywords that actually produced a conversion. With Conversion Tracking, it is possible to identify the exact keywords and phrases that resulted in a desired outcome - whether that’s a lead, a sale, a sign-up, an enquiry or a download. Identifying and then using these phrases on the website is hugely valuable for maximising its overall SEO strategy.

Long-Tail Content Opportunities

Searchers are increasingly using “long-tailed” search queries (3 or more words) to find exactly what they need. These refined, highly-targeted, specific searches indicate intent and generally lead to higher conversions. Paid search campaigns allow you to identify and mine these valuable phrases to then create additional, highly-optimised web pages.

Testing Title Tags & Meta Descriptions

One of the most important elements in organic search is the Title Tag. They’re vital in influencing a page’s ranking, as well as a user’s “click decision”. They’re not only very difficult to test, they’re risky in that they may jeopardise the page's current rankings. With paid search however, you’re able to trial multiple ads using various title options. You can then determine which performs better in terms of clicks, CTR or conversions.

Similarly, Meta Descriptions are essential in influencing a user’s “click decision”, due largely in part to the keywords that are bolded. Testing calls-to action, unique selling points and product descriptions with paid search is a useful way to uncover the most effective sales message.

Landing Page Optimisation

A/B split and multi-variant testing through paid search is an effective way to craft the ultimate landing page. With Google Adwords and Google Website Optimiser, you’re able to reveal the better performing page layout elements (content, headings, images, design), as well as the best placement for them. You can test different sales copy, deals, specials and calls-to-action to see which combinations drive the most conversions, to then use in your final version.

Paid search and SEO should work in unison to deliver optimal results and maximise the overall ROI. This relationship needs be on-going and shouldn’t stop once the organic search strategy is producing strong results. No matter how effective an SEO campaign is, there are numerous advantages in using paid search when you’re already ranking organically.

Can I use Google’s shopping cart?

2009-08-13T12:31:00.000+10:00

As we hurtle along at breakneck speed in the online world, the battle is well and truly on between Google and the new Yahoo and Microsoft merged entity. Both companies are trying to win the hearts and minds of users by offering more and more features to build and maintain user loyalty.

Just look at Google’s free Analytics, Website optimiser, Gmail products etc.

In the US, Bing is luring users with cash-back offers on goods purchased through their associated merchants. Maybe ‘cold hard cash’-backs will win the search engine war! Maybe not.

Speaking of battles, Google is a long way behind with the one it’s having with PayPal, but has recently made a move to allow users to install a free shopping cart on their websites.

It’s pretty nifty, gives Google a bit of an edge and for most basic needs, it fits the bill.

The main problem is that unless you’re based in the US or UK, you can’t use it here in Australia – yet. This is so frustrating! When it comes to so many of these ‘new’ features, countries like Australia are always the bridesmaid, never the bride.

You’d think Google would beta test their new features and products on ‘small’ markets like ours before rolling out to the big ones like the US and UK.

From memory, Google Checkout (Google’s answer to Paypal checkout) has been around since 2006, but Australian merchants still aren’t able to offer it as a payment option. Too slow Google.

For now, if you want to get a free shopping cart and integrated checkout, you’ll either need to use a third party shopping cart product and integrate with Paypal or indeed use Paypal’s own shopping cart solution, which isn’t quite as good as Google’s but it does allow you to easily create a ‘buy now’, or ‘add to cart’ button which you can place beside products you offer for sale on your site.

It’s reasonably powerful; you can add a drop down next your products showing, for example, sizes of a product with associated prices.

The other thing we’ve noticed with (smaller, relatively unknown brand) merchants who use Paypal as a payment option is a noticeable lift in conversions. It’s a good idea to offer Paypal as a payment option alongside your credit card payment option during checkout. There’s a level of trust Paypal offers users in terms of buyer protection etc.

To get started you’ll need to create a Paypal account (if you’re one of the few people who doesn’t already have one). The merchant fees per transaction are a quite high (around 3.5% per transaction) – generally more expensive than Visa/MasterCard but about the same if you were to accept Amex as a payment option on your site.

So at this stage, Google shopping cart isn’t an option, you’ll need to go to a third party cart or give PayPal a try if you want to make it as easy as possible.

Should I feed my products into Getprice and Myshopping etc?

2009-07-16T15:24:00.000+10:00

Shopping aggregator or comparison shopping sites are big business. Research conducted a few years ago now showed that in the United States nearly 50% of consumers went to an aggregator site before making an online purchase.

What the percentage is in Australia I can’t say, but it does seem that although Australian’s love their brands, price sensitive shoppers do like to visit an aggregator before buying online.

My personal experience with price comparison websites has been overwhelmingly positive, with one site in particular enjoying a conversion rate of 18% and an extremely high ROI.

The main advantage is the fact that you can feed your brand and your products directly into comparison sites where active consumers are shopping.
At the end of the day, it’s all about reach.

Again, from personal experience, Myshopping.com.au has a very strong system of reporting including conversion tracking so you can accurately measure your ROI etc.
They fall down a little on the ‘bid management’ side of things where, (a bit like Google AdWords), you bid for each click. The problem seems to be that when you bid more to get your products higher in the Myshopping search results, it can take a long time for your products to climb higher in the ‘rankings’. It almost seems like a manual process!

Basically if you want to get all, or some of your products & specials into sites like Myshopping or Getprice (the two main Australian shopping comparison sites) you’ll need to create a ‘feed’ which they pick up from your site and use to power their search or display results.

The Australian built Ezimerchant shopping cart has the ability to create feeds for many local and international comparison sites automatically which is very handy.
In short, give it a try, and all things being equal, you should see some extra sales coming through each month. And that can’t be a bad thing!

Please share with us if it has or hasn’t worked for you...

Please note; I’m off on annual leave for three weeks from next week and will resume my blogging duties mid August!

Till then...

Why has my site’s Google Rank dropped from 1st to 2nd ?

2009-07-02T16:29:00.008+10:00

Hard to believe we've been running Reseo Blog central for over 2 years now! I’m still loving it and hopefully helping you with your online sales strategy along the way. There’s always a mad rush on a Thursday afternoon to respond to your questions and write something interesting, but please keep them coming!

My friend Cam McSween contacted me this week with a question, “why has my search engine ranking position slipped one spot from 1st to 2nd?”

Normally my answer would be “don’t worry about it”, it might just be a little Google Algorithm change, but I have a vested interest in Cam’s Website because I helped optimise it about 4 years ago as a ‘favour for a friend’.

Feeling a little miffed and embarrassed I did a quick “competitor check” on the number one ranking site for one of the key phrases that Cam and I want him to rank well for; “window cleaning Melbourne”. No prizes for guessing what Cam does for a living.

The site which has jumped over Cam’s site is www.acornclean.com – so, trying to understand why they rank where they do, I started to do some digging.

The first step I took was a ‘back link check’ to find out who’s linking to Cam’s competitor; the easiest way to do this is to use Yahoo’s link checking tool. “link:www.competitor.com.au”

What you’ll see next is a list of the sites Yahoo has found that link to Cam’s competitor.

It’s always a good idea to analyse the links on these link partners to get a feel for the anchor text they’re using as well as the page content theme and PageRank of those link partners.

Here’s where it gets interesting...

Of course there are dozens of back-link pages just like the one above.
The SEO company (which I won’t name) behind this fiasco has simply taken script from a Bible (of all things! Blasphemers!) and seeded it with optimised copy and created optimised anchor text links back to their client’s website.

Needless to say, they’ve just had a spam report lodged through Google.

http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html

I guess what’s really dangerous about this blackhat back-linking technique is the danger that the SEO client’s website could face a Google penalty. I even wonder if the site owners which have those sub-domains attached to them (linking to www.acornclean.com) even know they exist?

They’re also filling up the internet with spammy pages designed to only make ‘sense’ to search engine robot and offering no use to humans what-so-ever.

Plus, as you can see, it’s so easy for anyone to detect and expose what’s going on!
Whether Google does anything is another matter entirely. I’ve personally lodged dozens of spam reports, but have yet to see Google take any action!

Time will tell.

Which Shopping Cart Should I use?

2009-06-26T11:30:00.002+10:00

OK, this is a question and a topic which I’ve avoided answering for years, simply because it’s an absolute minefield! There are so many carts available with various levels of functionality that critiquing them all will simply take a life-time.

Add to the fact that every business has different requirements means that unless you spend big on a custom cart solution, no single package will cover off every perceived or future requirement you may have.

Obviously I haven’t used or been exposed to all the carts available either, so it’s impossible to judge all of them!

All that aside, I’ll give you some of my favourites... and I’ve broken it down into several criteria:

Open source

Open source is obviously a ‘free’ solution; one really fine example includes Magento - http://www.magentocommerce.com/ which is brilliant and a big favourite.
Another is Silverstripe - http://www.silverstripe.com/ which is still a little green, but getting better.

These packages will literally build you a full ecommerce website from scratch – but there would be a lot of mucking around if you tried to integrate them into your existing site.

Then there are the shopping cart ‘plugins’ for open source CMS’s – so if you’re using Joomla, there’s the trusty VirtueMart ecommerce plugin. Drupal CMS has a cool cart called "ubercart" and there are quite a few for WordPress which I don’t have time to go into.

Obviously when you’re in ‘open source territory’ you’re going to have a good degree of technical knowledge to get these solutions to work for you, so in many cases it’s better to pay someone with experience to build your ecommerce solution (but then suddenly open source isn’t so ‘free’ anymore).

Proprietary Packages

A proprietary cart is one you pay for, usually on an ongoing monthly subscription basis and they’re usually ‘packaged’ So the more functionality, products, transactions etc you need, the more you’ll pay each month.

An excellent up ‘n coming cart is www.goodbarry.com – a crap name for a really good small to medium sized business solution. Pretty easy to set up with very powerful reporting and intuitive to use as well as being SEO friendly – just ask www.haul.com.au.

Like most solutions Goodbarry offers a generous 30 day trial, so give it a ‘burl’ and try it for yourself.

There’s also Ezimerchant - www.ezimerchant.com - which uses a desktop application instead of an online ‘login and get cracking’ (or ‘hosted’) solution. With Ezimerchant you install the software on your PC and build your shop before uploading it to the web. This means you can use your own hosting which can save you costs in the long run. It’s very easy to use and they’re always updating with new features and enhancements.

Like Goodbarry, Ezimerchant is an Australian developed product making it well suited to our postage system, our local payment gateways and GST tax system.

Another robust local solution I’ve used and really like is www.Bizarshop.com.au – good support if you need your hand held during your build. They offer a scalable solution which grows with you as you grow and like Ezimerchant you can choose your own web host.

Then there are some I haven’t tried, such as www.Gate13.com.au and www.ashop.com.au so if you have experience with these, jot down your thoughts in the comment box below.

One final note on Proprietary solutions is that they often use their own shared secure check out process which means there’s little scope for optimising the checkout process yourself, and it can be darned near impossible to set up Google Analytics tracking (for goal funnel analysis etc).

High End Carts

Lastly there are the high end carts which a design & development company will build for you if you have the budget, sales volumes and require a fully customised and designed shopping cart/checkout.

They also allow for much easier analytics tracking as you’ll most likely have your own SSL certificate which means when someone goes to checkout they’ll see:

https://www.yoursite.com.au/checkout.html - rather than https://secure.propietary-shopping-cart-solution.com.au – which can also help conversion rates on your site too as your visitors aren’t leaving your site to complete their transactions.

I’ve opened the tin, let the worms out!