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Archive for the ‘Search Engines’ Category

How to use AdWords Search Funnels

Wednesday, August 25th, 2010

Ever since Google Analytics launched, a big criticism has always been its focus on the last click in the customer journey.

As any marketer knows, a business usually reaches potential customers a few times before they finally buy. So to reward the marketing channel with the final touch point takes value away from all those other channels.

Robust, detailed tracking solutions (we use DC-Storm) provide hard evidence of these multiple touch points. Using lifecycle reports you can drill into all the keywords someone used before they finally bought from you. And if you can see these touch points, you can attribute some marketing value to them all.

Finally, AdWords and Google Analytics have wised up to this, with their recently introduced AdWords Search Funnel Reports (ASFR).

And there’s something a little bit special about AdWords Search Funnel Reports. Whilst other tracking solutions can tell you which keywords generated clicks on the customer journey, the ASFR can tell you which keywords created clicks and impressions on the customer journey. So this report can tell you when a customer saw your ad even if they didn’t click on it.

Here’s some new metrics that the ASFR reveals:

Assist clicks: These are clicks that did not lead directly to sale, but occurred in the lead up to a sale.
Assist impressions: The same as assist clicks but for when your ad appeared but was not clicked on, and did not appear immediately prior to a sale.
Path length (clicks): The number of ads clicked before a sale.
Assisted conversions: The number times a keyword or campaign played a role in the journey to a sale.
Last click conversions: The traditional metric – when a campaign or keyword was the last one before a sale.

So what are the most useful reports to look at?

To start with, try the ‘Assist clicks and impressions report’:

With this, you can find out how many times a keyword or campaign assisted a sale, whether it generated a click or an impression.

If you’ve got keywords that are great for assists, then these are good keywords to target for expansion.

Then try looking at the ‘Top Paths report’:

With this report you can identify the particular combinations of keywords or campaigns that led to a conversion. You can quickly see the customer journey that often moves from generic keyword to brand keyword.

That’s it for now

The AdWords search funnel reports can highlight much greater depth to your data. If you want Euston Digital to use AdWords Search Funnels in your PPC Search marketing, get in touch.

Tags: adwords, adwords search funnels, customer journey
Posted in Conversion Optimisation, PPC, Search Engines | No Comments »

Google introduces Something Similar

Friday, June 4th, 2010

Last week we updated you about Google’s most recent modification to the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Their ‘brand suggestions’ has potentially played into the hands of big brand owners, and increased their share of 2nd and 3rd searches.

Power to the Smaller Player

To give some power back to the smaller competitor, Google have now introduced a ‘similar’ link, at the bottom of the search results.

This is a block of similar sites published at the bottom of the results pages. These link to new websites that Google thinks are similar to the ones that you usually click on. If you click on the ‘pages similar to’ link near the top of the block, you get a full list of similar pages.

Discovering Variety

Google say that this will make it easier for users “to discover the variety of choices available on the web”.

This is what it looks like:

In contrast to ‘brand suggestions’ release, this may help people navigate to less well known websites and brands that are considered similar by Google.

Some Winners… and some losers

If you have a small brand that competes against some large players, you may find that you are getting traffic from this ‘pages similar to’ box.

The flip side of course is that Google is going to be suggesting alternatives to all the big brands. When your own website appears in the SERPs, the last thing you want is for Google to suggest a list of alternatives or competitors.

What about you?

Have you experienced the upside or downside to either of these developments? Leave us a comment below.

Posted in SEO, Search Engines | No Comments »

Google Tweaks the SERPs by introducing Brand Suggestions

Thursday, May 27th, 2010

In the last couple of weeks, Google has quietly slipped out a couple of modifications to their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). One of these is ‘Brand Suggestions’.

Brand suggestions

For some product searches, Google has started introducing suggestions about which brand of the product you might like to search for next, in a single line above the rest of the results

For example, if you’re looking for a digital camera, Google gives you these suggestions at the top of the results page:

Google say that these suggestions are designed to help those who are researching which product to buy. They are based on brand searches that other people have moved on to.

What does this mean for your SEO and SEM strategy?

To start with, its going to boost the number of secondary searches for big brands.   Big brands by their very nature will be better known, and therefore more frequently searched for. This will push even more people to search for them.

If you run a PPC campaign for a big brand, then you need to make sure you are appearing in top position for all your brand + generic searches, since theses are the ones that are going to be boosted.

If you’re a retailer then your SEO strategy should include building brand pages on your site. These will give you a better chance to grab some of that brand + generic traffic. Be sure to build targeted links to these pages within your site that include the brand name

If you’re a smaller brand, then it might be a good time to start bidding on competitor brand names + generic keywords; and building product comparison tables on your website. This will give you a chance of getting other brand’s traffic onto your website, and then converting it once there.

Tags: brand suggest, PPC, SEO
Posted in PPC, SEO, Search Engines | 2 Comments »

How to get your content published on Google News

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

Every day we speak to website owners who are obsessed with boosting the amount of traffic they get from Google. They want to be number 1 for searches that are relevant to their product or service.

But if you publish a blog, or regularly update the content on your website, you also have a crack and getting traffic from Google News.

Google News is a constantly updated feed of the latest news from publishers all over the world. Whilst the main news topics are often provided by major news organisations, content for the smaller topics and niche areas often comes from quite small publishers. And if you get it right, Google News can send you lots of traffic: Last year they sent 4bn visits to news publishers.

Here’s how to try to get your content into Google News

A/ In addition to your main sitemap, create a news Sitemap. If you have a WordPress site, you can also run the Google News Sitemap Generator plugin.

B/ Place your articles into folders and sub folders.

Again, if you run a WordPress blog then your articles will already be categorised in this way. This is so that Google know which news section your content is most appropriate for

C/ Start your article with your location. EG ‘London’. This is so that Google can place your content in the region that’s most relevant.

D/ Use a large non-clickable image at the top of your article, and give it a caption and alt tag

E/ Make sure your URLs are permanent and static. Again, if you are using WordPress then this will happen automatically.

The reason that you need static URLs is that Google needs to be able to easily locate specific content, and it doesn’t want your content to move around, as it makes it harder to place it in the right section.

F/ Use relevant keywords in title and main body.

This is probably a bit obvious, but make sure you use the keywords that your article is all about within your title. For example, if you’re doing an article about a new factory opening in Swindon, make sure the keywords ‘new factory’ and ’swindon’ are in the headline. This means that you’ll have to dispense with witty, leftfield or unusual headlines.

G/ Write a continuous article, in paragraph blocks, without breaking up your text with ads.

This makes sure Google is getting your whole story, not just the top segment.

So that’s all the stuff that helps you get indexed and published. But how do you boost your rankings in Google News?

1. To start with its good old link equity. Make sure you clearly link to your article from the powerful pages on the rest of your site. Use Social Media to try and quickly develop inbound links to your content

2. Is your news ‘new’ and ‘timely’? The nature of ‘news’ is that it tends to be short lived. Can you make the story on time before the world moves on? How recently have you posted your content? Link equity

3. Are you using citations and quotations? The best news stories quote their sources and often link to them. Make sure you use the most relevant ones.

4. Locally Relevant: Is your news pertinent to you local population? A good local story talks about local issues and how the news is relevant to them.

5. Popularity defined by Click Through Rate. Google wants to publish news that people are interested in. If your news article gets lots of interest, defined as the number of people clicking on your link divided by the number of people seeing it, then your ranking will be boosted.

Summary

Google News can be an important and valuable source of traffic to your site. If you regularly update your content with news, and you are operating in a niche area, then follow these guidelines to try and get published.

Had any luck with Google News? Leave us a comment below.

Tags: google news
Posted in Search Engines, Social Media | 2 Comments »

5 Tips to Boost your Directory Submission Workflow with a Simple Google Account!

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

Here’s the 1st blog post of series that will hopefully help you in your daily task of Directory Submissions and managing them VERY FAST!

As an SEO Manager, I’ve seen many SEO’s pretending to do fast and efficient Directory Submissions.

While many do an excellent job, some use automatic submission tools, resulting in significant drops in rankings.

Others like myself go the long way round and submit manually. This is a time consuming, so its all important to do in fastest way possible!

I think it would be relevant to share a few tips on how to submit to directories Fast AND in a 100% White Hat way.

Let’s start with something straighforward: managing your Link Building Campaign with a simple Google Account. I will give you 5 Tips that you can apply straight away & are meant to be a time saver for any Seo Manager who does directory submission on a daily basis on a regular.

Ready? Here we go!

1. Submitting easily with Google Toolbar Auto-fill

Autofill is an essential tool in any directory submission process. The one integrated in the Google Toolbar is pretty straighforward and will autofill any basic info like the company name, email address and  address.

Once you’ve installed the Google Toolbar, here’s what the auto-fill button looks like:  

The Google Toolbar has 2 important drawbacks though:

1. 1 set of data per Google account, that is per toolbar. In other words it’s impossible to manage several accounts/clients without logging out and logging in again.
2. the data auto-fillable is static: that means it doesn’t work with selections, checkboxes, radio buttons and any valid form fields and you cannot choose which field you would like to autofill.

To do all that, you will another tool, but that will be another post!

2. Creating Filters in Gmail to easily redirect each email to its appropriate folder

If you do dozens of directory submissions for dozens of clients, you easily end up after just a few months with thousand of emails to manage. Between confirmation emails,  emails related to articles that need to be edited because they don’t fit into the directory editorial guidelines & listings that need to be relisted as they have been rejected, we, as Seo Managers, needs to keep track of everything fast… and for that you have to have a reliable and friendly email client.

Here at Euston Digital, we’ve been using Gmail for years and we can easily say it’s by far the best email client. You can sign up for a free account here.

With the last months improvements, playing with filters has never been so much fun!

So what can you do with the filters?

3. Take Advantage of the Import/Export Filters Function & apply your settings to all your Google accounts

Once you’re happy with a set of filters, here’s where Gmail makes the difference: you can easily apply the same set of filters to all of your clients, that is all of your Gmail accouts!

Here’s how:

Step 1: enabling the Filter import/export function.

This is still a Gmail Labs function so you will have to go to lab (upper right of you screen, as pictured here: 

then do a Ctrl+F for the term “Filter import/export” and click on “enable”.

Step 2: Once that’s done, you will have 2 new buttons in your filter section, as shown below. The rest should be self explanatory, drop us a line if it’s not!

4. Articles Management made easy Using Google Docs

Nowadays, Article Directories is still considered as a relevant way of obtaining quality backlinks to any website. However, managing  articles for dozens of clients can be one of the most time consuming task in Link Building. To Help you be faster Google Docs is here! Many benefits from it, let’s expose 3 great functions here:

1. 1st Pro, no need to search each article on your computer or anywhere else anymore. Each article will now be at one click of a button! Indeed you can access Google Docs direcly from Gmail, upper right of the screen. There, all the articles related to the appropriate Google Account/Client will be listed and stored as long as needed.
2. Another great benefit from Google Docs: you can invite any of your clients to view the possible changes you’ve made. Once invited, they’ll be able to review the changes and edit them on the fly, without even signing in to any Google account! 
3. And last but not least, with the new Bulk Upload Function launched a few days ago, you can easily upload on Google Docs all the articles your clients are likely to send you in a Word format at once! Files can be uploaded to Google Docs either by enabling a right-click menu item or through drag-and-drop functionality… another great time saver!
   

5. Managing Multipe Gmail Accounts at one click of a button

A final tip useful when Deadlines have to be met and it’s just a hassle to switch from one account to another:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1320

Once Installed, you  will quickly realize this is a fantastic Plugin for directory submissions! A simple right click at the bottom right of your browser will display the following pop up:

As you can see, it’s now easy to visualize which one of your client account has messages, and, even better, a simple click will direct you to any Google account of your choice. Everything’s working fast and smooth!

Conclusion

At Euston Digital, we all hope this blog post – my very first post actually! – will help you optimise your work flow while managing your link building campaigns. Feel free to drop any comments about what you think about this article as well as sharing some tools that could help SEO’s to be even faster and have more time to…. say… do more PPC?

Charly Wargnier

Tags: Directory Submissions, Link Building, SEO
Posted in Link Building, SEO, Search Engines | 10 Comments »

What to do if someone is bad mouthing you in the Search Engine Results Page

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

In the last post, we found that thanks to the Internet, a customer complaint can be heard by a great number of people. Not only can they moan about you on a particular website, the chances are that their gripes will rank highly in the SERPs when people are looking for you.

Your website should definitely rank no.1 when people search for your brand. We’re now going to show you how to control the remaining 9 positions on the page, the ones where negative comments might show. Believe it or not, its possible to control the whole lot!

Social Media pages

To kick off, your social media accounts should have a strong chance of ranking highly for your brand.

(This isn’t the time to discuss social media, but having a Twitter and Facebook account for your business is important way for you to connect with your customers.)

Thanks to the power of these services, your Twitter, Facebook and (if you’ve done some video tutorials) Youtube pages should all be in the top 5 positions. So even if you haven’t yet bought into the idea of using social media for your business, using these accounts has the secondary benefit of helping you control the SERPs for your brand. Since your social media pages should be chock full of positive brand experience, their high ranking will mean the SERPs are shown in the best light possible.

Get good Reviews

It’s paramount for every consumer facing business to get good reviews. First of all, find the websites where your industry reviews tend to be published. You can do this by searching for ‘your market + reviews’. Compile a list of reviews websites relevant to your market.

When a customer next gives you positive feedback on email or over the phone, ask them if they wouldn’t mind leaving their feedback on one of the reviews websites on your list.

Here’s a list of good of general reviews websites.

pricegrabber.co.uk
reviewcentre.com
shopzilla.co.uk
ciao.co.uk
dealtime.co.uk
truste-marketing.co.uk
webuser.co.uk
maxxsave.co.uk
dooyoo.co.uk
resellerratings.com

Get a Google Local Business listing

As we mentioned before, a Google local business listing lets you generate high quality traffic from both Google local and Google maps. They are highly likely to rank well for brand searches too, so this is an easy win on two separate counts.

Use your website profile pages

There are many websites which automatically create a static page for each domain name that contains a small amount of information, usually from the domain whois record, all about your website. This includes the website name, a screen grab, the domain owner, and a traffic assessment.

These pages are created to grab brand traffic from the search engines, and are covered with Google ads. But as the domain owner, they do give you the opportunity to edit the information they include. These websites often rank well in the SERPs for brand searches. Editing yours allows you to control yet another result in the SERPs.

Here are some websites that offer this service:

websiteoutlook.com
weeviews.com
statbrain.com
aboutus.org
valuatemysite.com
quantcast.com

Think about getting a Wikipedia page?

The power of Wikipedia means that an entry all about your business will rank highly. Its not easy to succeed getting one of these, not least since your business needs to pass the notability guidelines.

The other problem is that a Wikipedia article can be edited by anyone, which means that you have to keep a close eye to check that no-one has been tampering with yours.

Respond to bad comments

Whilst this won’t stop bad comments from appearing in the first places, what it does to is show to anyone reading is that you are trying to respond to the customers’ complaint, and right the issue. Most people accepts that some customers will always complain, but if you fairly -and publicly – deal with that complaint, then readers will see the truth in what you’re trying to do.

And that’s it.

So if you do find some poor comments rankling highly for brand searches, it’s not the end of the world. Use all the tools listed above to make sure you control the whole page of the SERPS for your brand searches.

And there’s an upside too. By controlling the whole pages for your brand searches, you can show your website and company in the best possible light.

Tags: customer complaints
Posted in Search Engines, Social Media | 21 Comments »

Oh no! Someone is bad mouthing you in the Search Engine Results Page

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

Back in the dark old days before a few bright chaps at CERN decided to stick leads from one computer into the back of another, a complaining customer had few outlets for their rage.

The chances are, they’d moan to their friends, which would mean that you could kiss goodbye to getting any business from them.

If you were lucky they might ring up your product support line, which mean you’d at least get the chance to listen to their gripes and try and help them out.

The worst case scenario would be if they made it onto trading standards, or even ‘Watchdog’. Few businesses can survive a mauling from those two attack dogs.

Thanks to the Internet – and Web 2.0 especially – a complainer has a whole arsenal at their disposal. They can moan on their Facebook or Twitter, give you a terrible score on a review site, and start ranting on a blog or a forum.

Not only do these negative comments get read by visitors to those sites, they also have a strong chance to show up in the Search Engine Results pages (SERPs) when people are searching using your brand keywords.

Someone searching for your brand is most likely of all searchers to end up buying from you. They are, that is, until they see some bad reviews in the SERPs before they’ve even clicked onto your website!

As we mentioned before, Search Engines are currently engaged in the ‘Real Time’ arms race. They’re giving increased coverage to forum comments, blog posts and social network activity. Google themselves have boosted reviews up their own SERPs. All this means that bad comments are more likely than ever to appear in the SERPs when people are searching for your brand.

So that’s it. Game over. There’s nothing you can do about a poor review ranking highly for your brand, is there?

You bet there is. In the next post, we’ll show you how to take control of the whole 1st page of the SERPs for your own brand searches.

Tags: complaints, SEO, Social Media
Posted in Search Engines, Social Media | 1 Comment »

How to get more from Twitter Search by using advanced search operators

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

Real time search is the new battle ground for search engines. The driving force behind this shift is undoubtedly Twitter, who have place search more centrally within their product offering.

Twitter search offers an unparalleled opportunity find out what people are talking about right now. For brand owners this can give a great snapshot of what your customers and the market is saying about you and your competitors.

But are you getting all you can from searching on Twitter? Thanks to some cool search operators it’s possible to dig even deeper onto your Twitter search data.

For the uninitiated, a search ‘operator’ a symbol or word used in conjunction your search keyword that allows you to be more specific about the circumstances in which that keyword has been used. Whilst all search engines allow the use of operators, Twitter has made these more accessible than most.

Using Operators on Twitter allows you to bypass using the advanced search form. The upside is that you can type operators directly into the search box, which saves lots of time. They also allow you to do a lot more than the form alone.

At the basic level, there’s the exact match operator ” ” that allows you find just exact matches of a keyword phrase. This is going to be particularly useful to cut through the noise if you are looking for mentions of a multi word brand name.

The word ‘from:’ and ‘to:’ in association with a username lets you find out what particular users are sending and receiving. This gives good insight into how your competition is using Twitter: Are they getting asked sales questions or price quotes? Or are using Twitter to deal with support issues? Are they using Twitter more effectively than you – and what can you learn from that?

The operators ‘since:’ and ‘until:’ lets you find Tweets that have happened within a period of time. This is a great way to discover how an event is discussed at the time that it’s happening, as opposed to retrospectively. You can also use this to look at how your competitors have changed their use of Twitter over time.

Perhaps the most insightful operator are the and symbols. These allow you to search for tweets that have a particular ‘attitude’. For example, to find out how you or a competitor has been mentioned in a positive way, search for your brand + . The results will show all Tweets that have used common ‘Smilies’ and other positive statements.

The ‘near:’ operator lets you specify the location of Tweets, and set a radius around which you want to find all mentions of a particular keyword. This is good way to find out how far your sphere of influenced goes if you have a fixed place of business, such as a shop.

For the more advanced user, the operator “filter:links” lets you search for Tweets that just include links to other sites. This is an effective way to discover if your competitors are making use of their follower base to push traffic to their website. This might allow you to see when their followers like a particular offer they have on. Or it might allow you to see how effective a traffic driving competition is.

Here’s an image the operators:

For a full list, have a look here.
Try some out and let us know how you got on.

Posted in Search Engines, Social Media | 4 Comments »

The fastest growing Search Engine? That would be Facebook

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

Searching is the web’s most common activity. Many of our Internet sessions start with a search of one form or another.

The brand fueling this search for much of the nineties was Yahoo. Then came the millenium and the baton was taken up by Google. Over the last 6 months it has been Microsoft’s Bing that has grabbed all the search headlines.

But now there’s a new kid on the block. Well I say new, it’s actually quite an old kid. A teenager in Internet years: the company experiencing the fastest growth in search traffic is apparently Facebook. According to the ComScore monthly search report, Facebook searches exploded by a massive 35% last month.

Yes, the website whose main purpose is Social Networking has introduced new search features which has catapulted it into the search big league. Members can search for stuff like photos, videos, links and even member updates. Whilst they used to have to hunt for these within other users’ profiles, the new Search Engine Results page (SERP) delivers them in categories, depending on what the member has searched for.

Its a little bit different to searching on Google – members are not going to be looking for products and services in this way. It is those product and service searches that advertisers really like, and the reason why Google has so much advertising revenue. But this is just the first step in Facebooks’ journey to become not just a social networking site, but a real player when it comes to search.

Facebook clear has real search ambition. The company has also enhanced its ability to provide real-time search, a battle ground that has only this year become more intense. And of course last month they bought FriendFeed, which will add another layer to the searchable, real time nature of the service.

Google isn’t taking this lying down. They are making the journey in the other direction, from search engine to social media enterprise. They have recently added lots of social features to their web properties in order to make them stickier. And their own moves towards real-time search shows they are defending their interests there too. But if Facebook search continues to grow at this rate, Google may have to move to protect its pure search homelands.

There were casualties in the search market too. Those experiencing declining search volumes were AskJeeves (down 4%), and Yahoo and AOL (who dropped 5% each).

Do you think Facebook has a chance to rival Google as a search engine? How will Facebook monetise their new services? Leave us a comment below.

Tags: facebook, google
Posted in Search Engines, Social Media | 18 Comments »

How much do you think your brand is worth?

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

Last week the Millward Brown Optimor’s BrandZ Top 100 list was published. This is a list of the world’s biggest brands, and their associated ‘value’.

This year the list is topped for the third year running by Google, whose brand worth has gone up a whopping 16% over the last 12 months. This means that it is now ‘worth’ $100 billion.

Here’s the top 10:

As to how this value is calculated, Millward Brown Optimor (MBO) say that it is the sum of all future earnings that brand is forecast to generate, discounted to what that value is today. Some have suggested that a brand’s ‘value’ is arbitrary; for MBO, it’s all about a brand’s ability to ‘generate demand’.

One reason that Google’s brand may be so much higher than its fellow technology companies is that it always calls its products ‘Google’. This contrasts with Microsoft who run many secondary brands such as Hotmail, Windows, and Bing.

Microsoft attracts the second highest valuation, at $76.2bn (up 8 % on last year).

Others in the top 10 include Coca-Cola, IBM, McDonald’s, Apple, China Mobile, General Electric, Vodafone and Marlboro.

The two fastest growing brands were Amazon (up 85 % to $21bn) and Blackberry (up 100% to $16bn).

Despite the economic downturn, the total value of the most valuable brands rose by 2 % to just less than $2 trillion.

So what does ‘brand’ mean?

The word ‘brand’ means many different things to different people. For me, it’s what thoughts and associations people have when they think of your company. Do they think ‘good service, nice people’; or do they think ‘cheap products, fast delivery’. Do these thoughts and associations mean that people will pre-decide to buy from you before buying from your competitor? Apart from your products, ‘brand’ is what your website visitors and customers take away with them, in their minds, having visited your website or bought your products.

So how do you improve your brand’s value?

There are two ways to do this. The first is to make you customers and website visitors have as positive an experience as possible with you, your website, and your products. That might be by having a rich, well designed site; it might be by giving them easy to find information, great service, and a good feeling from their interaction with your website and your business.

The second way is to expose this ‘experience’ to as many people as you can.

The obvious way to expose this experience to more people is for us to carry out a Search Engine Optimisation program to boost your website up the Search Engine Results page. Your should also kick off your Social Networking strategy start building a community around your website. It’s this community who will recommend your site to others, and ultimately build a loyal base of frequent visitors.

Do any of you have a brand that you think is of value? What value do you think it has? Have you got any brand building tips you could leave for us here? Leave us a comment below.

Tags: brands, google, SEO
Posted in SEO, Search Engines | 4 Comments »

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