Archive for the ‘search engine marketing’ Category

A fantastic blog by Karl Harvard this week on econsultancy.com talks about how SEO is evolving from just keywords and content. Off site optimisation such as blogging and contributing to other social networks.

A social media engagement strategy is now key in terms of SEO for clients. The key is getting clients to buy into this and accept this as part of an SEO strategy. With SEO, there is a distinct skill in writing optimised content and being able to code effectively for SEO. With social media marketing, its all about research and time - making sure that you put the effort in and that you are selective in where you put the effort in.

The theory of themes still runs true - if you run a site that sells gardening equipment, make sure you post on other sites within your genre. Relevant quality traffic is what you want, and building a picture of your site being a regular contributer to popular relevant content sites is key.

Social Media Marketing as we term it here, is the area we expect to grow the most over the next 12 months, and its long and short term benefits towards your overall SEO strategy should not be overlooked.

Not too sure about the goal hanger term though Karl. Where I come from it was called a “jonny liner”, presumably because a lad called Jonny was obsessed with standing on the goal line…

Traffic Online Marketing are a Leeds based online marketing agency. We are a specialised team who focus purely on online marketing. Our approach is to focus on our strengths and ensure that we deliver online marketing campaigns that meet your business goals and objectives. From experience, we know that digital marketing requires in-depth technical and marketing knowledge rather than general knowledge. That is why more leading brands are trusting Traffic Online Marketing to grow their online presence.

We are located in the centre of Leeds close to the railway station and main motorways enabling us to service our clients nationwide.

We are currently looking for an energetic and self-motivated account manager to join us. As Account Manager, you will join a successful team of highly skilled individuals who are dedicated to the care and development of a number of client accounts.

Based in Leeds, you will be responsible for project managing digital and search-specific marketing campaigns.

Key Experience Required:

* Proven Track Record of managing, creating and developing SEO and PPC Marketing Campaigns
* Ability to Build Effective and Long-Standing Relationships with clients and partners alike
* Expertise in setting up an managing social media, comparison shopping and affiliate campaigns
* An Understanding of Web Development and Design

This is a key role within the company and will require you to liaise with internal departments and clients effectively. Helping to shape and manage budgets, time-scales and campaign strategy, you will have a sound knowledge of all things search and digital.

Package:

Starting basic salary: £20,000 upward depending on experience
Holidays: 25 per year pro rata (excluding bank holidays, with at least 3 days to be taken at Xmas)
Full time 9 - 5:30 working hours, Mon - Fri

For more information on the company, visit www.traffic-om.co.uk

Interested applicants should send a CV and covering letter to steve@traffic-om.co.uk

** Strictly No Agencies - any agencies who contact us regarding this role will be invoiced for our time **

A recent post about writing content for SEO sparked a thought about generally writing website copy…

In every case with a new website, we tell clients to make sure they write compelling copy, and even look at hiring a copywriter. Most copywriters we have worked with have heard about SEO, but are not always sure how to write good optimised copy. Give them a list of keywords and phrases however, and the copy comes back keyword rich and focused on the user. This is exactly the balance everyone should aim for.

All content on the website must be interesting to humans, and as such should be written for them. Its all well and good getting web content ranking highly in search engines, only for users to visit the content and find it dull and uninspiring. This will not encourage the user to carry out the action you want, whether it be a sign up, a purchase or whatever. It’s kind of like walking into a store which you have seen a great advert for only to find the store is hard to find your way around, or the staff are unhelpful. It’s not going to inspire you to do what the advert set out to do.

We were asked to look into some variations to a client’s PPC campaign this week. After logging in to the campaign and seeing what options we had, I was impressed to notice that Google Adwords allowed me to restrict ads to be shown within a specific town or city within the UK. You could even set a radius of a certain amount of miles for your ads to be shown in, which is really helpful for advertisers who want to attract local business only.

I began to think about exactly how this could be enforced though.  It has to be through IP address I thought, so looking through Google’s help section I found the following explanantion:

When possible, we determine the user’s physical region based upon the Internet Protocol (IP) address. This applies to regionally- or custom-targeted ads and to any ads that are displayed on Google.co.uk.

Regional and custom-targeted ads: If someone searches for plumbers from a New York area IP address, we may display ads targeted to New York, even though New York was not in the search query.

Ads that show on Google.com: Unlike country-specific Google domains (such as Google.fr), we consider a user’s IP address for ads that show on Google.com. For example, if a user with an Australian IP address visits Google.com, we will display ads targeted to Australia, even though the user is not accessing Google.com.au.

All very clever. For a full explanation of how Adwords knows where to show keyword-targeted ads, see here.

I’ll take a wild guess that a lot of people don’t know about this! It’s a great way to stop unwanted clicks from areas you don’t / can’t serve, and it could drastically reduce your PPC spend, and increase your campaign effectivenesss.

All our clients on PPC are UK wide so no real savings for them, but it’s useful to know that it can be restricted so ad revenue wastage doesn’t occur as often.

A study this week highlighted how major US companies are failing to take advantage of organic search. It’s well documented that blue chip business invest heavily in paid search, but the figures this study unearths are more than enough to raise an eyebrow. A staggering $51 million is spent by Fortune 500 companies on paid search per day, on around 85,000 keywords.

Looking at how these businesses perform on organic search should make fairly depressing reading for marketing directors of these businesses. Just over 10% showed a strong visibility in organic search results, with this defined as having presence in the top 100 total organic search terms and a rank in the top 30 results.

Just imagine what these business could achieve through online marketing if 10% of their yearly paid search budget was apportioned to natural search! The old chesnut of “no one searches for our brand online” (a phrase I have heard far too many times from major UK businesses through the years) no longer applies. By actively investing in paid search, these businesses are stating their intent to attract more visitors to their website. There are contrasting opinions about how many search engine users click on paid results compared to organic results, but we have always worked on a 80:20 split in favour of organic. Does this not make this look even more appealing for these businesses?

We can only assume that this type of assessment holds true of equivalent UK businesses. If this is the case then such companies should take heed of this report. The right SEO strategy can work wonders for any business - and we have the results to prove it! Not only have we increased traffic to our clients websites via SEO, but we have also managed to reduce paid search spend, whilst increasing conversions from the same campaign! This has to be the target for any business serious about gaining an ROI via search marketing.

Online retailers in the UK have been pushed in recent times to improve their website’s accessibility characteristics. Everyone knows about the River Island debacle, and since this, many of our favourite high street names have stepped up their efforts to make their site accessible to all.

But what other benefits are there to improve your website’s accessibility? Well for one, improving this will almost certainly result in an increased effectiveness in your quest for search engine optimisation perfection!

Take something as simple as providing a replication of text links on your website if your website uses an image or Javascript based navigation. When a search engine comes to visit your website, it can now access these pages that were previously “hidden” from its spiders due to the way the navigation worked. This means they have more chance of including these pages in the search engine results, which means people have more chance of finding them, visiting your site, making an enquiry etc.

In fact, when looking at the W3C standards a good majority of them are relevant when it comes to basic search engine optimisation. So improving your websites accessibility will help your SEO in the long term. Carrying these improvements out will make your website more “accessible” overall.

The next step on from accessibility is usability. Again usability practices and good search engine optimisation can be very similar. Providing deep links into internal web pages to allow website users to access more relevant content is good usability practice, but also helps your internal site architecture which in turn impacts on your website’s SEO.

So although the implementing improved accessibility and usability on your website can be a bit of an upheavel, your website’s long term prospects for search engine optimisation will be improved.

There’s an interesting post on the Google blog today about how people read the search engine listings.

In brief people read the listings in order, top to bottom, spending more time on the listings at the top.

Optmising for search engine listings or users

When optimising the title tag and meta description for search engine optimimisation purposes - does anyone actually think about what the balance is between optimising for search engine listing vs optimising for visitors and click through rates.

We aim to ensure that the tags are balanced between both criteria - but looking at other websites, it is plain to see that they are only optimised for the search engines.

My guess is that most people optimise for the search engines.  But when the website gets to page one - it is then making sure that the title and meta description tag stand out from the competitors.  At that point the competitors are only one click away, and making the tags as compelling as possible with a call to action can make a substantial difference.

Let me know if you have tested different optimised title and metadescription tags and what you found?

Shari Thurow wrote a great article about ‘Are you a SEO Hybrid‘.  We have long been an advocate of ‘holistic SEO’, where we have looked at the wider problems associated with search engine optimisation.  We have come across many challenges where we have had to work with internal development teams to look at how we can change the site architecture or how dynamic URLs work.

The Wider Implication

SEO overlaps with many teams such as PR (how they write the press releases or manage social media), IT (how the site and HTML were built) or the e-commerce team. The challenge is leading beyond our authority to work with the individual teams to achieve the overall goal.  When people think SEO, they need to think about the wider remit of the project and ensure that all the stakeholders are involved in the project from the outset rather than getting them involved half way through.

Getting people involved

Getting all the stakeholders involved in the SEO project can be a real test of negotiation. During the sales cycle we always aim to understand who the main decision makers are and the decision making process it. When you start describing the long term vision of where SEO could grow the company tends to get people’s attention and is a good starting point for the discussions

When measuring the effectiveness of an search engine optimisation campaign looking at the volume of traffic to a site is more a measure of the ROI than the rankings.  The rankings are a reflection of the presence in the market, but it is the volume of traffic that the rankings produce that will be the true test of the campaign.

Looking at the traffic from search engines over a period of time can show specific trends.  Some of these can be attributed to seasonal variation (so not many people search in Google on Christmas Day!).  However there can be some trends which cannot be accounted for.  Google Insights which

‘Google Insights for Search analyzes a portion of worldwide Google web searches from all Google domains to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you’ve entered, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. We then show you a graph with the results, indicating interest over time, plotted on a scale from 0 to 100; the totals are indicated next to bars by the search terms.‘

This can be invaluable when trying to work out why certain trends have occurred on site and how to communicate these to a client.  I was looking at why an increase in rankings had not correlated with a larger growth in traffic to the site for one of our clients.

Interestingly, one the key terms the volume of searches over the last quarter had slightly dropped.  Even though the client had a wider presence on the search engines, fewer people were searching overall.  So if we had not increased the rankings, then potentially the effect of the slight drop in traffic could have been greater.

A good start to the SEO year with an update in the Google Page Rank.  This was confirmed by Matt Cutts (Head of Google search team).  Hearsay from other leading industry blogs suggest that this PR update has not effected many rankings for sites.  Which suggests that PR is not such a major criteria for rankings as it use to be.

Back in October 2008 there was another update where obvious paid links were devalued and PR aligned accordingly.

So what does this mean for link building campaigns?

Inbound links historically have been a primary be a source of traffic into a site and a way of promote the site.  Inbound links from social media marketing could be the next generation of inbound links. This source of inbound links potentially could create the competitive edge online and drive quality traffic too.