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Archive for the ‘Search Engines’ Category

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 »

Google is good at Search, Google is good at making money

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

The big three search engines all reported their quarterly earnings a couple of weeks ago. No guesses for who came out top of the heap.

Microsoft online ad revenues, the part of the business in which their search engines sit, were down 14% for the quarter. Even further behind, Yahoo figures were down a whopping 16%.

And Google once again confounded the critics and the recession by revealing revenues up another 3%.

This is as much about what Google does right, as what the other two do wrong. When it comes to Microsoft, as we mentioned previously, Bing has gone down very well with both consumers and experts, although some have questioned whether bing will end up being a has-bing…

Microsoft is making other moves to boost its online advertising revenue, with a recent announcement of an online version of their desktop based Office Suite. Although that might be as much about pressure from the likes of Linux based Open Office and of course Google Docs.

Google has recently made further inroads into areas previously dominated by the other two. This month they announced the launch of ad exchange where banner inventory can be openly traded. Yahoo are already in this space, and Microsoft say they too will enter next year. The company that gets it right is ensured another huge revenue stream.

Who is going to win the race? Well from a users perspective I think few can doubt the ease and depth of searching on Google compared to the other two. And the rate of innovation at Google means that anyone else is going to have a hard time catching up. Of course as any advertiser will tell you, Google’s tools far outstrip the others for ease of use and for results too.

Google’s dominance looks pretty set. But I wonder for how long will we put up with a single big company occupying our online experience? Leave us a comment below.

Tags: google
Posted in Search Engines | 2 Comments »

Is Real Time where search goes next?

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

Two of the three big search engines have made announcements this month about new developments in ‘real time’ search.

Real time search has been seen as the next big thing for search engines. Much as it sounds, ‘real time’ search means getting up to the minute results pages – even for articles and posts that have only just been made – rather than a traditional ‘index’ of the web which has been compiled over the last 3 months.

It has been ushered in due to Twitter’s search function which allows you to see what people are Tweeting about right now.

To prevent themselves been left behind in a potentially lucrative market, both Google and Microsoft have developed ‘real time’ additions to their products,

In a previous newsletter we showed how Google allows you to see if any new instances of a search query have been added in the last 24 hours. Google has also updated its Blog Search, which includes the opportunity to see the latest posts from popular blogs.

And Microsoft’s new search engine ‘Bing’ has just announced a trial that means that the latest Tweets from a few high profile users will be instantly displayed in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

But how useful is real time search to us consumers? Do we really care if someone has just Tweeted about the subject that we’re searching for – will that really make any difference to us?

It probably depends on the sorts of things that you’re searching for. If you want to know the latest developments in Michael Jackson saga, then  its pretty important to have instantly available results. But if you’re researching a place to go on holiday, then it’s not going to be quite as necessary.

One problem with real time search is its inaccuracy. Web pages with true and accurate information are often linked to by other web pages. These links – amoung other things – ensure that those pages rank well in the results pages. As a consequence, more people see these accurate pages. It’s a positive feedback loop.

Whereas a 140 character Tweet is at the other end of the scale. Apart from being unverified, it might be a joke, a rumour re-tweeted. If other people then search for and find that Tweet in the SERPs, and then subsequently find it to be untrue, then those people will loose faith in that search engine’s ability to return accurate results.

So maybe Google has got the balance right with this one. Bing has no way of knowing how accurate the Tweets in their SERPs are. Whereas blogs – which by their very nature are a bit more accurate and more thought out that Tweets – might be a good way to capture that ‘real time’ essence without compromising accuracy.

What do you think? Would real time SERPs help you promote your website? Do you as a user want to see Tweets in the SERPs? Leave us a comment below.

Tags: google, twitter
Posted in Search Engines | No Comments »

Can you afford to see my adverts?

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

In a move that is gong to incur that wrath of privacy campaigners, Google is planning to look at people’s credit scores before deciding which adverts to show them.

This addresses one of the key issues faced by marketers of luxury items, in that they need to know the person they reach can afford the products that they are advertising.

A Google spokesperson confirmed this week that they had been working with research firm Compete on whether it would be possible to add credit score targeting to adverts on the Google content network.

Google might be allowed to identify consumers with good credit, based on information they submitted when applying for credit cards online.

This information would be made available to advertisers on an aggregated basis so they could better reach their target market.

“Let’s say we have an advertiser who wants to reach consumers with a high FICO [credit] score who applied for mortgages in the first quarter,” a spokesperson said. “We can provide the advertiser with a list of websites on our Google content network that index against this segment.”

However, any move to make use of this data could be met with fierce resistance by groups wishing to preserve online anonymity.

In November 2008 NebuAd – who target users based on their web surfing habits, information purchased from ISPs – were sued by web users of felt their privacy rights had been violated.

And of course here in the UK behavioural targeting company Phorm has run into resistance whichever way it has turned, and is yet to launch at all.

Would you mind being targeted based on your credit worthiness? Do you sell an upmarket product and not want to waste your advertising on people who can’t afford the product? Leave us a comment below.

Tags: google
Posted in PPC, Search Engines | 9 Comments »

Put your Business on the Map

Friday, July 3rd, 2009

Do you run a business, or are you responsible for marketing a website for your business or someone else’s? You may or may not know, but thanks to Google Maps and some information lifted from the Yellow pages, there is already information about you that is appearing in the Google search results.

You may yourself have seen this. When you search for a particular sort of business in a specific place, you are often presented with a map along with a list of providers who fit the bill.

Here’s an example:

These maps really grab the attention of anyone presented with them. To start with, because they are a visual representation they stand out from all the other text on the page. Second, since they provide specific map based information to someone who has searched for a specific business type in a local area, they are likely to be extremely relevant to the searcher’s query.

These listings are compiled from a database called ‘Google local’, or ‘Google Business Center’. Since people are finding information about your business in this way, it makes sense to take control of those listings, and to expand or improve them.

Here’s a link to the Local Business Center.

The first thing to do is make sure the information is factually correct and up to date. However, you can provide additional incentives for people to both look at your listing, and then follow that up by looking at your website or visiting your physical shop.

These extra incentives might include photos of your business or a relevant topic, your business hours, and coupons or money off vouchers.

Google have put together a video that shows you the sign up process, and the benefits of the local business center.

Check it out and then start editing (or creating) your listing!

Let us know how you get on by leaving a comment below.

Tags: google local business center
Posted in Search Engines | No Comments »

Searches up, clicks down

Friday, July 3rd, 2009

Some research by Comscore, an online traffic measurement company, came out last week. It was covered in some depth over on Techcrunch.

The research is based on US traffic, but it applies here too.

Comscore have basically found that whilst the number of searches rose last year by 68%, the number of clicks on search advertisements went up by just 18%.

Here’s a graph that shows it all:

Comscore are attributing the relative decline in clicks compared to searches to the increasing length of search queries. They say that as the number of 3, 4 or 5 word searches increases, adverts are less likely to appear because advertisers are less like to have those word combinations in their AdWords account.

Comscore say: “And this apparently reduces the likelihood that an advertiser has bid to have his/her ad included in the results page from these longer queries, due to paid search advertising strategies that limit ad coverage, such as Exact Match, Negative Match, and bid management software campaign optimization.”

Techcrunch think that this doesn’t explain it enough. They reckon that clicks on adverts have declined because many US advertisers have reduced or stopped their AdWords campaigns.

They say: “Sharper Image, Wickes Furniture, Levitz, Foot Locker, Wilson’s Leather, Ann Taylor, Zales, Mervyn’s, Macy’s, Circuit City and a ton of other retailers are either shutting down entirely or closing lots of stores… All of these companies used to spend tons of money on paid search ads. Those budgets don’t exist any more.”

Another idea is that as Google gets better at displaying more relevant results pages (SERPs), maybe users are less drawn to the sponsored AdWords ads because they find what they want in the organic listings. I haven’t got any evidence for that, it just seems like logical conclusion.

Whatever the reason, once again its a good opportunity for your to get your website to the top of the SERPs. Make sure you are ranking highly for the specific search phrases that people will use that are relevant to your website.

Do you find yourself clicking less on ads these days? Or have you never done so? Leave us a comment below.

Tags: PPC
Posted in PPC, Search Engines | No Comments »

Do we like Bing?

Friday, July 3rd, 2009

Research from Hitwise UK out this week shows how well Microsoft’s the new search engine ‘Bing’ is getting on in the UK. We all know how well the US has taken to it. But whilst Americans are bombarded with a $100m advertising campaign for the new engine, over here we’ve had to be content with a few niche press releases.

The UK stats show that following the official June 3rd launch Bing’s market share grew significantly. If you exclude Google US and UK, Bing was the third ranked search engine, making up almost 11% of the UK market. After the launch hype, traffic has declined although the average length of visit has grown to over 8 minutes.

And what are people looking for on Bing? Well the top search term for the week ending 6th June was ‘facebook’, which made up 3.94% of all searches.

Branded terms (those that include a company or product name) make up the other big numbers (as usual), but despite that there are 5 generic terms in Bing’s top 100.

More of a concern for Bing is that a significant proportion of its ‘downstream’ traffic – those websites that people visit after having been on Bing -were other search engines. This suggests that people tried Bing our before returning to their favourite search engine.

And another concern for Bing is who they are stealing market share from. Most people visiting Bing came from MSN UK- another of Microsoft’s search engines. There’s obviously not a lot of point in building a brand new search engine if the only people who end up using it were previously customers of your other search engine. Microsoft would clearly rather convert users from Google and Yahoo.

Here’s a graph showing UK visits to Bing, from Hitwise.

Have you tried Bing yet? If so, what do you think? And how does your website rank well in Bing’s Search Engine Results Page? Leave us a comment below.

Posted in PPC, Search Engines | 5 Comments »

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