What is a geo located SEM campaign?

A local geo-targeted campaign is an essential part of any marketing strategy for small to medium sized businesses. In particular, to have in place a correct GEO located SEO and PPC campaign is a great way of driving quality traffic to local websites.

A geo-targeted search marketing campaign is based on optimizing location long tail keywords in order to increase local leads and conversion rate.

To take advantage of the recent growth of geo located social websites like Foursquare and Gowalla, any web-savvy local business owners should start getting into social media marketing by launching its own geo targeted social campaign.

There are some interesting tools out there that help you get started with geo targeted social marketing.

Geo-targeted campaign tool

For example, GEOtoko is a nice platform that allows you to create your own geo targeted campaigns in a minute.

You can create location-based contests and sweepstakes to reward customers for checking in using Foursquare, Gowalla, Twitter, Yelp and so on. You can also post your updates directly in Facebook.

Once you have created your campaign, it is crucial to promote it on a daily basis through your social networking profiles as a constant reminder of the on-going contest to your potential customers.

Our first location based campaign

Here at Euston Digital we have recently launched our first location based campaign with GEOtoko, an interesting contest based on the tweets and checks-in that we receive daily.

For every tweet and check-in with Foursquare and Gowalla, from August 10 to August 17 we have been giving away a free website audit .

We think that geo-targeting marketing is a great addition to the overall SEM strategy of small to medium sized businesses, so keep your eyes on our blog for the latest tips on how to best strengthen your local popularity.

Start your own geo targeted campaign today for your chance to win more local leads!

Happy Friday Guys! We hope you enjoy some of our favourite picks from the last two weeks in search.

GENERAL SEO

Google can’t find the original source of content? – May update follow-up

What are biggest challenges for an SEO project? In this article you will find 9 essential  SEO action points.

Using Excel for SEO, in this article a nice collection of tips.

MOBILE SEO

Start thinking mobile SEO, how to optimise your website for iPad and tablets users.

Best practices for mobile search marketing campaigns in this article featured @searchengineland.

SOCIAL SEO

Twitter vs. Facebook – Twitter is imposing itself as the new “Answer Machine”. Why Google should fear Twitter.

What makes a tweet influential? New research by HP Labs’ Social Computing Lab, shows some interesting insights.

Foursquare vs. Facebook – Facebook is jumping into the geo-location game. And the winner is …

GLOBAL SEO

In this interesting article, Bill Hunt explains the SEO challenges of language detection, essential information to optimize local market content.

Other News from the World of Search

Google and Verizon, two leading players in Internet service and content, are nearing an agreement that could allow Verizon to speed some paid online content. What does this mean for SEO? Your site speed is an even more important factor now.

As any marketer knows, search engines can bring your website traffic from two separate areas of the search engine results page (SERPs).

The red section is the paid-for listings (PPC). The green is for the organic listings (SEO). Euston Digital can help with both your PPC and SEO.

The question is: which side brings the most valuable traffic?

The short answer is: it depends. It varies from site to site, and the only way to really work it out is by analysing your conversion rate and ROI using your web analytics.

And the long answer? What about ‘on average’? Well according to an economic study published recently by Google, it’s the paid for – or sponsored listings – that bring the most valuable traffic. Google go as far to say that organic clicks are worth just 70% of their paid-for counterparts.

Why are paid-for listings worth more?

Google don’t say why they make that call, so here are a few ideas of our own.

1. People who click on the adverts have a specific intent. They know what they want, and are prepared to cost a business money in order to get it. They consider that a fair exchange, and are prepared to enter a transactional relationship.

2. There’s fewer paid-for listings that organic listings. For each search term there are probably just a few thousand competing advertisers, but 100s of thousands of websites competing for the organic listings. So a click on the paid for listing is takes a great share of the overall opportunity.

3. The only advertising that sticks around is the stuff that’s working. By and large, business won’t poor money into advertising that doesn’t work, and would sooner turn it off. By contrast, a website might continue to rank highly in the organic listings even though it no longer sells a product. Therefore the paid clicks are more likely to be accurate and result in good value for both users and website owner.

4.Adverts are human edited and controlled more closely. Not only are they written, and placed on a keyword by keyword basis, they also pass a ‘quality score’ judgement by the AdWords system. Therefore they are more likely to represent the best place for that user to arrive. By contrast, the organic listings are Google’s best guess at the user’s intention.

5. Adverts are deep linked to the most appropriate page on the website. By contrast, organic listings often send traffic to the home or category page, or make poor judgement due bad signals as to the best landing page.

Which side of the page brings you the most traffic? How does it vary in quality? Leave us a comment below.

Here’s the latest news and developments in the world of SEO to help you keep up to date.

LINK BUILDING

In this article there are some fantastic tips and ideas about how to get links in tough industries.

LOCAL

How can you improve your ranking in Google Places? In this article you will find some great tips for optimising your listing and rankings in Google places.

The latest changes in Google Places OneBox – now if you click on the OneBox result, it does not take you to the business’s website but to the Google Place Page for that website (and the “More Info” link has been renamed “Place Page”).

SEO GENERAL

The biggest SEO Dont’s as suggested by SEOmoz

And the biggest SEO Dont’s for small businesses as suggested by Searchengineland

Does Google pay attention to the presence of a keyword in the URL? Apparently so … and so do Yahoo and Bing, take a look at this interesting test!

Starting from August/September 2010, Yahoo! and Bing organic search results will merge … We will keep on monitoring them head-to-head, so stay tuned!

Need a laugh? Well this guy tried to boost his website rankings by using the word “page rank” in the meta tags.

SEO EDUCATIONAL

If you want to find out more about SEO and even become an expert in this subject, we recommend this fantastic list of SEO resources.

That’s it!

Any of your own to add? Please leave ‘em below!

Every couple of weeks, we’re going to be bringing you the most important developments in SEO, along with links to the most valuable sources.

LINK BUILDING

In Link building less is definitely better than more. This is a good example of how 1 good link is far better than 100s … this link building article shows how a site with 1 link from  a very powerful directory (I guess it is yahoo directory) is doing better than a site with 100s of poor quality links.

Further considerations on Google Reasonable Surfer Patent, all links on a page do not have to carry (or pass) the same weight.

IMAGES & VIDEOS

Images are a very good “engagement object” to add to your website, they improve user experience and are also essential for your SEO. In fact 1 image can be worth more than 1000 words, check this out !

…and a video is worth more than 100 images, an interesting presentation on video marketing at the International Search Summit held in Berlin in June.

LOCAL

Google Expanding Local Tags, Pushing Them Into Mobile.  Google announced that it’s rolling out its fixed-fee local ad product “Tags” (formerly “enhanced listings“) nationally. It also announced that Tags will be showing up in mobile search results. Tags offers local businesses (or locations) a way to make their listings in the map-related 7-Pack “pop.”

MAY DAY UPDATE

May day update 5/30/10: Matt Cutts from Google has posted a YouTube video  about the change. In it, he says “it’s an algorithmic change that changes how we assess which sites are the best match for long tail queries”. This should be good news for us! In this interesting post by Vanessa Fox says this change will mean an increase in traffic for long tail keywords = smaller sites stand a chance.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) falls into two basic categories.

1. Onsite SEO – These are changes that need to be made to a website, either  to the code, the text or the images.

2. Link Building – This is the generation of inbound links to a website

Both tasks involve a lot of thought. Both tasks require access to great tools. But when it comes to link building, it’s the tools that can often be the difference that makes the difference.

Here’s a problem: there are more ‘link building tools’ out there than you can shake a stick at.  In order to find the best ones to use, you need to work out what you want them to do. There are the range of tasks they can carry out.

Link tools can tell you:

*how many inbound links you have;

*the pages on your website they link to;

*where those links come from;

*the type of links they are;

*any anchor text used in those links

*the ’strength’ of those links – how much ‘juice’ they are passing to you

Link tools can help you research:

*pages that include your brand name but don’t link to you – low hanging fruit when it comes to link building

*Powerful pages that you should target for link acquisition

*Pages that include the right context for link acquisition

*links used by your competitors that you may wish to target

Link tools can help you:

*record your link building activity

*monitor your links and check their strength and continued existence

*report the effects of link building program to stake holders

So as a company that does great link building, what tools do we use? Here are a few of my favourites:

Basics

http://wholinkstome.com/

https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mysite

http://www.analyzebacklinks.com/

Advanced

http://www.backlinkwatch.com/

http://www.linkdiagnosis.com/

http://www.advancedlinkmanager.com/">Advanced

http://www.seomoz.org/linkscape

http://www.majesticseo.com/

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/

My Choice

Without a doubt, my favourite link building tool is http://raven-seo-tools.com/. This does the lot. It analysis, reports, researches, monitors, and can also pull in data from your Google Analytics too.

What do you think?

Have I missed any great link building tools? Leave us a comment below.

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.

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.

Starting from today, Google is rolling out a new look Results Page. The main change is a side bar – similar to the ‘options’ panel that previously opened on request. Here’s what it looks like:

The change is the result of months of testing. The panel allows users to get more specific in their search requests, to obtain results not just from the web but Videos, Maps, Blogs and so on. Users can also drill into the old-look options panel from here, which looks like this:

Although there are no new features – this is purely a UI change – it shows the direction that Google is travelling. They want to be able to answer search queries as accurately as possible. But they recognise that in order to do that they need more input from users about what they’re looking for.

The key opportunity for an SEO agency is that this will boost the amount of search volume generated by long tail keywords. Whether this means adding new content, developing new landing pages, or modifying your link building strategy, this long tail traffic should convert much more effectively than general terms.

When it comes to Pay Per Click, its going to be interesting to see how this impacts on CTRs, and ultimately quality scores.

What do you think of the new look SERPs? Leave us a comment below

Link building is one of the key ways to build the authority of your website in the eyes of the search engines.

And the greater the authority of your website, the higher up the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) it will rank.

Its important to remember when link building that you don’t just concentrate on your homepage, but build links to high quality sub pages too. This is called ‘deep linking’, and can significantly boost the traffic – and conversion rate – of your site.

Most websites only have links going to their homepage. This is because when they are mentioned and linked to from other sites, its easiest for others to lazily link to the homepage, even though there may be more relevant pages on your website.

Why you need to focus on deep links

1. It will improve your link profile.

Your website is best served by a range of links including those that go to sub pages, those that include images, some with your website name and others with appropriate anchor text. This link profile makes your website look authentic in the eyes of Google, and is a good basis for long term link building programmes. .

2. It will improve your useability

Links work best when they take users directly to the most relevant content. If people arrive on your website expecting certain information, and then have to search and click around to find it, many will leave before completing that exercise.

3. It lets you get more varied traffic

Deep links will make certain pages on your site rank much more highly for keywords that your homepage can’t. If you focus your homepage around one topic, but have other pages on other topics, those others need good external links in order to get a chance to rank highly in the SERPs for searches that are relevant to those other topics.

4. It lets you exploit the long tail

The chances are your sub pages include longer and more varied keyword phrases, since sub pages usually have more in depth information on a particular product you sell, or highlight a particular element of your service. This make your sub page more likely to rank highly for those longer tail keywords. If you build inbound links with the right anchor text too, then those pages will easily rank more highly for those longer tail terms.

How to improve your deep links

1. First of all, check how many – and what type – of deep links you have.

2. Work out which sub pages would benefit from inbound links

How many do they have already
What anchor text do they have
Do they get search traffic already?
Are they an important page?
Are they a good landing page for users?

3. Assess your internal links to those pages, and make the necessary improvements.

Do they have links from the homepage?
Do they have links from other powerful pages in your site, especially from within blocks of text?
Do you have sitewide navigation to your sub page?

Now its time to build some links to those pages!

Use directories for these links, even if your site is well established. Try to use niche directories relevant to those sub pages

Look at your homepage inbound links and work out which of those would be better off pointing towards your sub pages. Contact the party responsible for those links, and ask them to modify them. The chances are that the change would take their users to the most relevant page on your site, so they should be happy to make that improvement.

Utitlise relationships your business already has with suppliers and trade bodies, and try to work out if any of those are ripe to be approached for a link to relevant content.

Thats it.

Deep links are better for users, and they give more pages on your website the chance to rank highly in the SERPs and get more, relevant traffic. If you want Euston Digital to show you how to improve your website link profile with our link building services [link] then get in touch.