SEO Tip #3

If there’s one catch-22 in the SEO game, then having a high-ranking, fully optimised search result that is right at the top of Google but is not getting any clicks is it.

This problem normally comes about because a business has spent so much time optimising their page full of keywords that when their listing appears in Google or one of the other search engines, their result is just a mash of keywords.

Having your website ranking highly is one thing, but actually getting users to click on it is another.

The trick then is to optimise your site well whilst still keeping your listing as an attractive result for the user.

One of the first ways to do this is to include your business name at the start of your listing. So instead of having ‘Neon Lighting Brisbane, Neon Lights, etc’ as your listing heading, you want to modify it so it reads ‘Search Strategy - Neon Lighting Brisbane, Neon Lights, etc.’ This allows your business’ listing to still remain attractive to the user.

This logic is also followed through to the second and third lines of search engine listings, where it is important again to ensure your description is attractive to the user. Once again, simple things like capitalising appropriately and punctuation makes a big difference, whilst avoiding those unsightly keyword mashes.

And finally, having a primary domain name, rather than a free subdomain, makes a big difference to the appearance of your listing as it gives your business a professional look.

The internet is a big place, so making sure your online advertising dollars effectively reach your target market is one of the biggest challenges for managers.

When it comes to most marketing activities, whether it be a newspaper advertisement, television commercial or internet campaign, managers are always striving to choose marketing mediums that attract the most number of potential customers for their dollar.

This is where search engine marketing has a huge benefit over its more traditional rivals. SEM can obviously be targeted to the exact keywords you want, which gives you a great level of control over who your advertisements reach. By targeting the phrase “neon lighting brisbane” you can be fairly well assured that your ads are going to be displayed to those who want to buy neon lights in Brisbane.

However, not everyone includes the location when searching, meaning that someone from Perth can search “neon lighting” and click on your ad, costing you money without ever really having any intention of purchasing from you.

One way to get around this dilemma is to use what’s called ‘location targeting.’ Location targeting in programs such as Google AdWords allows your business to specify to what geographic regions you want your ad displayed.

For instance, you might want to target the whole of Australia, so you select that option. Alternatively, you can narrow down your region even further to a particular state or city.

An even better option however, is to use an ad radius, which allows you to set a certain size ring in which you want your ad displayed. For instance, you might set up your campaign so that your ads are displayed within a 50km radius of the Brisbane CBD, and only users within that radius will see your ad.

Obviously this is an extremely useful tool as it enables businesses to really target their potential local customers.

Wrong!

But before I go into why your business should be including search optimisation as part of your marketing budget, let’s go back to the basics of exactly what marketing is.

Marketing is essentially any activity that aims to increase awareness about your brand, its products or services and reach potential customers.

What does search engine optimisation do? It aims to increase your business’ appearance in search engines, and reach more users than before, just like more traditional mediums.

To help with the thought process behind this idea, think of a search engine like you would a newspaper, magazine, or some other traditional marketing medium. The aim of placing your ad (at considerable cost) into a newspaper or magazine is to reach consumers who you wouldn’t have reached otherwise. A search engine is no different.

SEO aims to lift your site’s rankings in the search engines, exposing your business to more potential customers than before.

One major stumbling block for SEO in the past has been the reluctance of managers to spend $$$$ per month on what they considered to be web design costs. However, they are more than happy to spend thousands on print media ads that are fast losing their effectiveness.

The challenge for managers is to realise the need to treat SEO as a marketing item and not as some nuisance or web cost.

But how much should a business spend on SEO?

There are many different SEO services available, but how much you spend on SEO should be consistent with your business’ online goals and objectives.

If you currently, or would like to, achieve 40% of your sales or referrals via the online channel, then you should seriously consider spending around 40% of your marketing budget on SEO and SEM (search engine marketing).

Obviously this depends on your industry and business, but far too many businesses are not maximising their website’s earnings potential because they are not giving it a fair weighting in their marketing budgets.

After that article went live, I was contacted by the Me.dium search team who were keen to hear my thoughts on their new search engine.

The idea behind the me.dium search engine is that it they claim to be the first crowd-powered search engine. According to the team, search results are adjusted to reflect what users are currently browsing.

The idea seems sound. Having search results mediated by recent search trends should in theory create better results. The problem that I can see from my test searches is that unless you are searching for a high-popularity search term, there isn’t enough data to adjust the results based on trends, which mean you get standard search results.

Having said that, if you are looking for the latest “hot spots” on the net for a topical search term, then the me.dium search engine does seem to deliver some reasonably good results.

But to be fair to Google, let’s compare it using the search term I’ve used as a example before, “neon lighting Brisbane.”

In Google:

Of the top ten results 6 of the 10 were actually sites selling neon lights in Brisbane, one was a wikipedia article on Brisbane Tourism, two were informational sites on neon lights and one was my old article where I used ‘neon lighting brisbane’ as an example just like now.

In me.dium:

Top result was my old article, but five out of the ten were for sites actually selling neon lights, one was a wikipedia article, and three were sites that had some relevance to neon lights.

The Verdict:

The natural un-mediated results are not bad in me.dium, and they’re certainly better than Cuil. And when you search using popular terms the crowd-control does step in quite nicely, but realistically I would see no benefit in moving away from Google, especially when most SEO’s believe that Google takes clicking-patterns into consideration as part of their algorithm anyway.

Me.dium currently has over 2 million users who have installed the me.dium toolbar, and those users obviously find it useful but I won’t be switching anytime soon. A very good niche player.

The search engine, called cuil (pronounced “cool”) is an old Irish word for knowledge and is the brainchild of a former Google employee, Anna Patterson.

There are some in the industry who claim that cuil could threaten Google but others are very sceptical.

The engine works on the premise that it returns results based on content relevancy to the search criteria. They claim that this results in better search results for the user. They also claim to have indexed more pages than any other search engine on the net, over 120 billion.

Here’s the problems for Cuil as I see them. For one, the fact that they have gone down the content relevancy path is dangerous because it means that for certain three or four word search phrases, such as “neon lighting brisbane”, sites could theoretically keyword spam and get high listings.

Despite Cuil’s line that they weight content relevancy more heavily, in many cases I found that the sites that were ranking well on a search phrase only mentioned that phrase once on their page and weren’t even on that topic.

For a quick comparison, lets use a Google vs Cuil search for ‘neon lighting brisbane.’

In Google:

Of the top ten results (and let’s face it, that’s all that matters), 6 of the 10 were actually sites selling neon lights in Brisbane, one was a wikipedia article on Brisbane Tourism, two were informational sites on neon lights and one was my old article where I used ‘neon lighting brisbane’ as an example just like now.

In Cuil:

Unfortunately, the results were hopeless. There was one result for a blue light disco (not in Brisbane), a broadway musical in Brisbane, a chrysler site, a blog (who mentioned lighting in passing), a mini jukebox, a site selling computer hardware, a film studio, an electrical transformer store, and two news sites.

The Verdict:

Obviously this is just one example, but try your own searches and you’ll see that quite consistently Cuil generates fairly obscure results with little reference to the search topic.

Now I’m not trying to be too harsh on them, it would be very difficult to spring up overnight and upstage Google but they have a long way to go before they’re even playing in the same league.

Location targeting is a must, as is fixing the logo-like images that appear beside results that are either poorly cropped, pixelated or simply of no relevance to the site they are beside.

But users would probably put up with some of these drawbacks (at least for a while) if Cuil generated more relevant results than Google. However, they don’t really get close.

Don’t write them off just yet, the layout and design is quite nice, but underneath it all you just feel like there isn’t the guts that Google has.

This practice was causing such a problem that Google introduced a new attrbute for hyperlinks; nofollow. The nofollow tag can be added by webmasters to their pages to show that they do not endorse the outbound link. When a search engine spider reads the hyperlink, if it detects the nofollow attribute it will ignore the link.

It is important to note however, that all search engines treat nofollow differently. The 3 big players, Google, Yahoo! and MSN all discount links with the nofollow attribute, but in different ways. Most importantly however, is that nofollow links are not counted as part of Google PageRank.

Despite this, spammers continue to post keyword-flooded hyperlinks into blogs and forum posts. Why do they do this?

The answer is simple, they don’t get penalised.

Google have come out and said on many occasions that they don’t penalise sites for anything that your competitors could do to harm your rankings.

Let’s imagine for a second that Google and the other search engines penalised sites for putting their links all over blogs and forums. This would certainly stop spammers placing their links all over the place, but would open up a new market; link sabotage.

This would mean that your competitor’s could go around putting your link all over blogs and forums and as a result, you would be punished.

For this reason, Google don’t punish you for putting links everywhere, but through the use of the nofollow attribute have found a way to simply not count the link.

This is currently the fairest system, but is not providing any disincentive to spammers spreading their links. Having said that, it’s still the best way to solve the spamming problem.

Since that article, the much-hyped Microsoft-Yahoo! deal has fallen through (most probably for good now) and Yahoo! have signed an $800 million non-exclusive search advertising deal with Google that will see Google ads appearing in Yahoo!’s search results.

This deal basically means that Microsoft is really the only player left who can seriously have a tilt at Google. All the other players are either too small to be a genuine threat or have some vested interest in Google.

Yahoo! is now one of the latter. The problem that Yahoo! has is that by signing this deal, they have effectively conceded the search advertising war to Google, who maintain a massive market share of around 80%.

However, it’s important to note that this is not the first time that Yahoo! have outsourced to Google. Google supplied Yahoo!’s search results from 2000 to 2004 before Yahoo! engineered their own search engine. Microsoft’s MSN search was likewise outsourced for a number of years to LookSmart, Inktomi and AltaVista before they too decided to create their own engine in late 2004.

So while most consumers believe that Yahoo and MSN have been in the search game for years, and are regarded as the two ‘other players’ in the ‘Big 3,’ both have really only been producing their own search results for about four years. And now that Yahoo have gone back to Google for search engine advertising, it raises questions about whether or not even Yahoo! think they can match it with Google’s AdWords program.

Which brings us back to Microsoft as the only player who has not got some interest in Google’s success. There are a couple of signs that suggest Microsoft may be planning an assault on the Google fortress. The first is the breakaway of the MSN search engine to the Live search engine which operates on a cleaner search-oriented feel (much like Google’s) as opposed to the web portal style of MSN and Yahoo!. This move has allowed Microsoft to frame its Live search as a separate entity that is focused on search, something that Google used very early on to gain credibility.

The announcement of Microsoft’s plans to take on the realm of display advertising is another indication that Microsoft is mobilising its forces. Microsoft AdCenter, while currently no match for the AdWords juggernaut, is in a prime position to receive a makeover and move rapidly into the display advertising field.

However, if Microsoft plan to seriously take on Google they need to move quickly as Google’s acquisitions of DoubleClick, and to a lesser extent YouTube, suggest that Google is keen to move in on this new market as well.

So, whilst there is no doubt that Google is by far and away the leader in terms of market share for both search queries and advertising dollars, there are signs emerging that suggest the Microsoft giant is not ready to lose the search war just yet, although they have to be ready for a long battle if they want to pinch the crown.

Round Two - Google Knockout… but is there movement on the canvas?

The agreement, which still has to be approved by anti-trust authorities, is an $800 Million (US) deal which will see Google’s paid advertisements appear on Yahoo’s search results.

Assuming the deal is approved, and I have the impression that it will as both AOL and Ask.com are on similar arrangements with Google, then this will mean that advertisers who are signed up with the Google AdWords program will be able to get their ads to display on Yahoo’s search pages.

This begs the question, if advertisers are able to sign up to the AdWords program and control the placement of their ads in Google, Yahoo, Ask.com & AOL, why would advertisers then sign up for Yahoo Search Marketing, which is limited to just Yahoo searches?

The answer is simple… they wouldn’t.

When you throw in the fact that Yahoo Search Marketing requires a $30 deposit and pre-pay billing, Google’s AdWords becomes even more of a clear option. To make the contest even more one-sided, Google offer a whole raft of extras to assist you with your campaigns including Google Analytics, WebMaster Tools and the new Google AdPlanner.

Yahoo claim that their Search Marketing program will continue to operate in tandem to Google’s ad placements but how long will Yahoo’s users put up with double the amount of ads? My guess is that Yahoo’s Search Marketing program will simply be phased out over 12 months or so. The other more cynical option is that Yahoo will simply drop its Search Marketing program as soon as the deal is approved, and are only keeping the program running to help get it rubber stamped.

So why did Yahoo! make this deal? Quite simply… money.

Google’s share of online advertising revenue is around 80% (depending on who you believe) but Yahoo’s is only around 5%. Despite Yahoo’s best efforts they have failed miserably at stealing any of Google’s market share. In fact, they are actually losing ground.

This left Yahoo with two options; makeover their own Search Marketing program to be better than Google’s AdWords, or take the AOL and Ask.com path and simply outsource to Google. They chose the latter and one can hardly blame them. This new deal guarantees Yahoo! a stream of online advertising income but tightens Google’s grasp on the search marketing market.

It’s no wonder that this kind of deal has drawn interest from the anti-trust authorities but if it is approved (as I suspect it will) then there is strong evidence that this is the end for Yahoo’s Search Marketing program. Once again it looks as though it’s going to be Google v Microsoft.

So the question then becomes, can anyone topple Google? In the late 90’s Yahoo! was the number one, but Google looked at Yahoo’s weaknesses and created a cleaner search engine that supposedly delivered better search results. But can anyone do it again?

Google continue to go from strength to strength, and their reach is unrivalled. Their advertising network includes AOL, Ask.com and now Yahoo and their recent acquisitions of DoubleClick and Youtube have only broadened their market.

With the much-hyped Yahoo! and Microsoft deal falling through, and Yahoo’s subsequent search marketing deal with Google, who is left to take on the giant of search? Let’s go through the main competitors:

Yahoo!

Currently sitting in a distant second in terms of both advertising and search query share, many claim that Yahoo’s search algorithm is actually superior to Google’s. Whether this is true or not is irrelevant, as the vast majority of users have spoken with their clicks and head to Google for its clean feel. The big thing that Google has over Yahoo is the way Google is able to separate out each of its products to keep that clean feel. Yahoo pack everything they offer into one homepage, which can make it hard to identify what their primary focus is. As a result, many users wonder whether Yahoo’s search is being given the focus it deserves. Yahoo will certainly remain profitable, as they have a loyal fan base that swear by it, but I just can’t see them storming the Google fortress, particularly now they are relying on their ad network.

MSN/Live

If Yahoo is a distant second, then Microsoft’s Live Search is back an eternity in third place. Again, however, there are those out there who believe Microsoft’s search to be better, but I am a definite sceptic on this one. For Microsoft to really succeed in search they need a massive overhaul, and massive overhauls are not really Microsoft’s style. More than likely Microsoft will just let Live run its course, as it doesn’t really seem to have the desire to be number one in search, or else it probably would have put more emphasis on it’s deal with Yahoo rather than letting it slip by the wayside.

AOL, Ask, etc

The old players in the market. Most of these engines still get a decent run of traffic, but most are also relying on Google advertising deals to keep them profitable. These guys are not real challengers for the crown.

Mahalo

Mahalo is an interesting one. Mahalo is Hawaiian for thank you, and the premise behind this start-up is that it is the web’s only human-powered search engine. That is, its search results are not driven by algorithm’s but by human generated results pages. To me it seems like Wikipedia and Dogpile rolled into one, as the user is able to search all the various other engines if Mahalo does not have a page created. I don’t think the concept of a human-powered search engine can work, particularly when it comes to updating it constantly at the speed of web. Wikipedia works but I don’t see Mahalo taking off. It is useful however, if you want to search all the major search engines (and Wikipedia, Youtube, Flickr) all in one go. Other than that I don’t see it ever matching Google. Google’s algorithm’s refresh daily, which is almost impossible for a human-powered search engine to match.

Clusty

Another meta approach to search. Just like Dogpile, Clusty attempts to rank results by aggregating results from other search engines. Once generated however, Clusty clusters results together into categories of results. This is a useful tool but won’t have Google shaking.

Other Small Start-ups

Quintura, Blinkx, Powerset, Kosmix, the list goes on. All these players however, are only targeting tiny market niches, market niches that Google could quite easily swat away with one extra feature to their own search results. The other problem most of these smaller players have is they lack the resources to operate their own search algorithm’s and many of the newcomers rely on refining a Google search.

The Verdict

Here’s the problem as I see it for the other players attempting to usurp Google; all of them either rely on Google’s search is some way or are targeting niche markets that Google could themselves cover by throwing a few million at a new Google product.

Google have already done this with email. Google took a search-based approach to internet-based email and eroded Microsoft’s Hotmail monopoly in a flash, so these small niche players had better watch their back. If Microsoft can be beaten so easily, where does that leave the little guy?

But all the big players (including Yahoo thanks to this new deal) are relying on Google in some way either for search results or search advertising. All, that is, except Microsoft. Microsoft’s Live is the one major search engine out there not dependent on Google’s algorithms or advertising dollars.

Over the last few years Google has continually stripped away Microsoft’s stranglehold on all things digital, and maybe the time is right for the old dog to get angry and strike back.

Alas, however, it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen…

SEM Tip #1

When it comes to managing a search engine marketing (SEM) campaign online in Google AdWords or one of the other search marketing programs, too many businesses get carried away with click-through-rates (CTR).

But before I get into why click-through rates (CTR) are overrated, let’s just clarify what a CTR is. A Click-Through-Rate, or CTR, is a measure of the percentage of people who click on your ad after viewing it.

Typical CTR’s are often well below 1% for most online campaigns, but what is it about them that as soon as they reach 2-3% everyone starts giving each other high-fives even when sales are not affected? So let’s go through the pros and cons of CTRs.

Firstly, CTR’s can be used as a guide to how effective your ad text is. Quite often, the more appealing your ad text is, the higher your CTR will be. But what if you’re in a very specific industry, say ‘neon lighting Brisbane.’ As part of your campaign it would be perfectly normal to include broader keywords such a ‘Brisbane lighting’ in the hope that people who search for lighting in Brisbane will be then interested in neon lighting. However, this is where your CTR can be misleading.

For instance, say my headline for the ad is ‘Brisbane Lighting’ - A large majority of users who have searched “Brisbane lighting” might think this is a relevant ad, so I get a higher CTR. The problem is that they click on the ad, bumping up my CTR and costing me money, only to find when they get to the site that I only sell neon lights. This is a waste…but my CTR looks good right?

On the other side of the coin, if my headline for the ad is ‘Brisbane Neon Lighting,’ all those users who have searched for “Brisbane lighting” will see my ad but only those who are interested in neon lighting will click on it. This means that I get a lower CTR but in this case that’s actually a good thing as I get better quality traffic.

Now, it is well publicised that Google, when ranking ads, don’t just take into account how much you bid, but also your quality score. One of the things that makes up the quality score is your CTR. However, your quality score is unique to each separate keyword, so having a low CTR on a broad term such as ‘Brisbane lighting’ does not affect your quality score on your more targeted keywords such as ‘Brisbane neon lighting,’ so there’s no real advantage to CTR there.

The other downside of having a high CTR is that you use up your advertising budget very quickly. A low CTR has the added advantage of giving you great exposure, as you get more impressions on your ads before your budget is used up. This helps immensly with brand recognition.

So at the end of all this you may be wondering if I can’t trust CTR, what can I trust? Some people put their faith in conversion rates, but this again has many of the same pitfalls. The best statistic to track is cost-per-conversion, which details how much it costs per sale or lead. This is done by the insertion of a snippet of HTML code on your ‘Thankyou for Purchasing’ (or likewise) page. A professional SEM management company (Reload Consulting) can set your business up a conversion tracking AdWords account and manage it throughout the course of a campaign, continually adjusting all facets of the campaign for best performance.

I guess the key thing to take from this today is that when it comes to your online marketing campaigns, don’t worry too much about the percentages; but look at the dollar amounts that it is costing your business per sale to advertise online.