During October Google announced that it is going to increase the privacy for users of their search engine by encrypting personalised search results. This has caused much consternation in the search engine marketing field, since the end result will be that search query data will no longer be accessible through any web analytics stats from these searchers.

Google says that this change is important for security and privacy, so that users who sign into their Google account will get their search queries encrypted by default. As the use of the search engine is becoming an increasingly customised experience, the results become tailored towards individual users.

This additional layer of security means that Google and the web browser itself can only see any searches. A third party can’t intercept the search and know what’s being searched on, so it’s especially important for people that search using an unsecured Internet connection, such as a WiFi hotspot in an Internet cafe.

Google is doing this by securing the results for signed-in users, through the use of an encryption protocol called SSL (Secure Sockets Layer). This is the same technology that is used when performing secure credit card transactions and is evident by the extra “s” in the “https” in the address bar for Google’s homepage, when signed in to a user account.

Google may hope that this change will encourage more people to search through a personalised account, which will protect the user’s information but also allow Google to display more relevant results to the user. However, the downside for website owners and marketers is that less information will be available in Google Analytics – or any analytics package – so that although visits from Google’s organic results will still be counted, the individual search terms from logged-in users will be hidden and just displayed as ‘not provided’.

Google says that an aggregated list of the top 1,000 search queries that drove traffic to a site for each of the past 30 days will be available through Google Webmaster Tools and also any AdWords data will still be displayed at the search term level, whether the searcher is logged in to a Google account or not. However, the loss of organic search term data is significant and will become more so over time.

Initially this change will only happen on Google.com, and only relates to those searchers who are logged into a Google account. According to Google’s software engineer Matt Cutts, this is likely to account for only single-digit percentages of all Google searchers on Google.com at this time. However, as more people use Google’s services such as Gmail or Google+ and remain logged in when they search, this percentage is likely to grow and impact the level of data available through web analytics accounts.

We’ll be tracking this issue and reviewing the impact over the coming months, but if you’d like to know more about this and how the change may affect your search referral data in analytics, please contact us now.

After many years of developing the product in the US and the UK, Google’s Shopping search tool is likely to become a leading player in the online shopping comparison market and is something that all online retailers should consider as part of their marketing strategy.

Google Shopping is a product and price comparison tool, and one of many sites that offer this service to online consumers. However, the advantage of this service for e-commerce sites is that it’s completely free to list products and the prominence of the service is controlled by Google. Many product related searches now on Google will display a number of featured listings from the Shopping search results, so it’s another way for online retailers to gain search visibility and attract traffic to their website.

Like all the shopping comparison sites, Google Shopping requires online retailers to create an account and submit a product feed to the service, although some retailers are also getting their products listed simply through Google automatically indexing their e-commerce pages. Once listed, items will be listed by relevance – which is based on similar SEO factors that determine the main search results on Google. However, shoppers can also re-sort the results by price as well.

There is no browsable directory structure to Google Shopping, so results will be determined by search query, although Google does display some links in the side panel, which lists related categories, or links to the retailers whose products are being displayed. At present, many of the results are being dominated by eBay listings, but as more retailers submit their product details directly to this service, there will be more variety and competition between the listed results.

As a free service, this is something all e-commerce sites need to consider. The product feed needs to be prepared and updated as necessary to keep the listed information and prices current, but as Google Shopping becomes more commonly found and used by online shoppers, it has to be important channel for retailers to use.

If you’d like more information on, or help with, the new Google Shopping service, please get in touch.

A common question from Google AdWords / PPC advertisers is whether they should still run their paid ads alongside search terms that also rank well in the main search results, due to the SEO on their website. A recent study by Google may help to answer this.

Google’s report concluded that paid search ads can give advertisers an 89% lift in site visitors above that which would normally be expected from organic listings. This is a very high increase and poses the question of whether or not the study is biased, considering Google is commenting about its own search properties (and again, trying to get more advertisers to pay for an AdWords listing).

Independent views, however, support the search industry’s opinion that it’s important to manage and bid on brand name terms in paid search ads when you already have good organic positions, even if it’s to keep your competitors from dominating the paid ad spots. Using paid search ads in addition to the organic listings can compliment those with brand building and controlling messages, that aren’t so easy to portray within the organic listings.

However, there may also be benefits from running simulataneous adverts alongside natural SEO rankings for more generic terms, since 2 listings in the search results can support the brand awareness for a business, increase the likelihood of a click, and block another advertiser from appearing in the results. Ultimately, though, the activity for a search term through PPC advertising has to remain cost-effective.

Coming back to the Google study, the main result of more visitors – as defined by their research – can be enhanced with sensible brand building through PPC adverts. The 89% increase in visits can be treated sceptically though, as the research was conducted on US AdWords campaigns in the holiday period, so that the figure is not likely to be as impressive if the research was conducted over the period of a full year.

The most definitive way to test the findings would be to stop a currently running brand-building AdWords campaign that your business is running and see what impact that has on traffic and conversions. The likelihood, however, is that many businesses that rely upon this method of paying for clicks in addition to the free ones from the organic listings would not be willing to trial this. This indicates that the additional clicks and brand awareness that the PPC ads create do support Google’s finding that it’s worth running PPC and organic campaigns concurrently with the same keywords.

To find out more about the cost-effectiveness of running a PPC advertising campaign alongside an SEO strategy, please contact us now.

Google’s excellent Insights for Search tool allows you to compare search volume patterns for a number of search terms across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties. Whether you’re an advertising agency, a small business owner, a multinational corporation, or an academic researcher, Insights for Search can help you gauge interest in relevant search terms.

Insights can help you determine which search queries might product the best results for your business. For example, when comparing 2 or more different search terms in this tool, it’s easy to see a comparison between interest levels. Although this can’t be used as a primary keyword research tool, Insights for Search does help to provide more background information for search engine marketers to help them understand the profile of a market, which in turn can be a crucial element of a Google AdWords campaign strategy.

Insights can also be used to determine seasonality of search traffic. For example, it can show at which time in the year there are the most searches for a particular product or service. By producing a comparison across a number of previous years, the results can be fairly consistent. This information can be vital in the planning of resources, such as advertising budget or staffing requirements.

Another useful function of Insights is the ability to create brand associations. This is done by applying the category filter which narrows the data down to just the selected category. So a computer company, for example, could determine what the related and rising searches are for desktop PCs, hence allowing it to understand competitors’ offers and how to compete with, or differentiate from, that brand.

Finally, Insights can be useful in determining a new market, or where to target existing marketing campaign. By entering search terms within the regional interest section, the results of the volumes can be displayed across global, country, suburb, or city views. Using this form of targeting can save companies revenue from entering into a wrong market, or marketing in a region where there is little interest in its product or service.

Google states that the tool is designed for general analysis of search volume patterns. To get some reliable results from this tool, you do need to compare search terms that attract quite high volumes of activity, or terms that have a similar search volumes so that the charting provides meaningful data.

However, if you’ve not yet tried it, Insights is worth a look and you might find some surprising results! If you’d like any help with this tool or need further information, please get in touch.

To make your search engine marketing campaigns effective, it’s essential to ensure that the landing pages to which your visitors first come onto your website are optimised to maximise their potential. This is especially important if you’re running a Google AdWords campaign, because the relevancy of these pages to the adverts and keywords helps to increase your Quality Scores and hence reduce the average cost per click.

The primary aim of any marketing landing page, however, is to get conversions – whether these are enquiries, newsletter sign-ups, sales or any other interaction from the website. Therefore if the landing page is correctly optimised it can provide a competitive advantage for your business compared to your competitors, and achieve a better ROI (Return on Investment). Landing pages can be customised to suit the product or the traffic source and there are two main kinds of tests that can be done to improve the performance of a landing page.

These tests are known as A/B split testing or multivariate testing. The former is the simplest method and involves a comparison between the control page (A) and the test page (B), which has a change to a single element, such as a picture, or headline. Once both pages have generated a required volume of visits and conversions, the one with the better conversion rate would be retained as the control page and a new test page would be created to try and improve upon those numbers again. The maximum recommended number of pages to test at one time is three, otherwise the tests can take too long to complete.

Further tests would be performed upon different elements and page copy until the optimal page is created. The time when no more improvements are possible would become known once all variations have been tried and there’s no significant difference between the pages. The advantage of A/B split testing is that not much technical knowledge is needed and useful results can be achieved with only a small number of visitors.

Multivariate testing is a more in-depth process that involves changing multiple elements of a page simultaneously. The advantage of this approach is that the experiments can be very complex and they can produce great results for a website that attracts high volumes of visits. However, this testing methodology needs careful planning and some skilled interpretation of the accrued data to get statistically reliable results. If both these factors aren’t taken into account, the landing page can end up actually producing fewer conversions.

The main point to remember with landing page optimisation is to remain consistent in the changes being made and to just alter the same type of elements in each test (i.e. the page’s content, rather than any other factors such as traffic sources or, possibly, page design). Another crucial factor to consider is to keep records of what has already been tested, as it’s easy to replicate previous tests and end up going round in circles without making any progress.

Google can help with this process through their Website Optimizer tool, which enables website marketers to set up and track the results of landing page tests. In time, and with the correct strategy, the benefits of a well-implemented testing procedure can result in the reduction in the cost of a Google AdWords campaign as well as excellent improvements in a landing page’s conversion rate, thereby lowering the cost per conversion.

If you’d like more information about how to use landing page optimisation to improve your website’s conversion rates, please contact us now.

Following on from our article in the April newsletter about Google’s changes to its ranking algorithm and how it could affect the ranking of some websites, this month we focus upon on recent blog post by Google, which outlines some of the key elements that they consider as best practice for building high quality web sites.

Google states that the introduction of the so-called ‘Panda’ algorithm change is only one of approximately 500 search improvements it expects to roll out to search this year and thus shouldn’t be the primary consideration when building a quality website. Instead, the main focus should be upon providing users with the best possible experience though quality content, (rather than trying to optimise for any particular Google algorithm), as it’s this element that determines the high and low-quality sites and thus the associated rankings.

However, if your website has been impacted by the recent ranking changes, Google provides some useful guidelines about how they identify high-quality content in a recent blog post for webmasters. An important factor is the level of a website’s or author’s authority and neutrality about a topic or article, which in turn leads to the level of trust that users place in it. Also, the degree of comprehensiveness, depth, helpfulness, originality of an article and how unique it is, can provide some indication of the value it provides compared with other search results.

The quality control of a site’s content is another important factor, as content produced with little care would be penalised. Inaccurate editing would be deemed as low-quality, particularly if content contains spelling, grammatical and factual errors. It would meet this factor’s criteria if it were of high enough quality that it could be printed in a magazine or book and encourages a user to bookmark it. Content that invokes any complaints from users would be deemed to be low quality, as would sites that users think would be too insecure to feel safe enough to enter their credit card numbers.

If a website’s content has been manipulated purely for ranking purposes, such as being replicated across the site with keyword variations, this would actually hinder, rather than improve its ranking. It must be remembered that Google is making these changes automatically, based in signals they have identified from sites they deem high or low quality, and although the system can never be perfect, they hope that the quality of results being presented has improved following these changes.

So with the introduction of the Panda algorithm and the other on-going search improvements, it’s clear that Google is tackling the problem of low-quality sites that are built purely to rank well. It wants to promote high-quality sites that have minimal duplicate content, are knowledgeable, accurate, well-written, informative and concise, as this will benefit the user.

You can read more in Google’s blog post or if you’d like any more information about best practices for building high-quality websites, or how Google’s changes could affect the ranking of your website, contact us now for details.

Google has recently implemented a significant change to its ranking algorithm that it has been working on for over a year. This change is initially being introduced on Google.com in the US but is then being rolled out to the other regional versions of Google and is intended to exclude low-quality, ‘shallow’ and copied “spam” content from its top search results.

Although Google hasn’t made any large scale changes to their ranking criteria for several years, this recent one follows growing criticism of the quality of Google’s search results, with the increase in duplicated or low grade content sites populating the search results. Since this change was introduced, a number of studies (including one by Sistrix) have indicated a large impact on sites that carry that type of content, with some – such as citytowninfo.com – losing up to 86% of their rankings.

These type of sites have been coined as “Scraper” or “Farmer” sites. The former are those widely defined as not having original content, but instead pull content in from other sources. The latter are content farms that have shallow or low quality content – these sites are typically achieving revenue from affiliate links or Google AdSense links and add little value to the searcher. From initial studies, the change has impacted about 12% of US results and these changes will be rolled out worldwide soon.

Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s spam fighting team, recently said: “we’ll continue to explore ways to reduce spam, including new ways for users to give more explicit feedback about spammy and low-quality sites”.

One of these methods is for Google to target the correct sites through feedback from users of the Google Chrome browser. Cutts says that 84% of the sites that were impacted by the new ranking changes were in the top 50 of the sites that were most reported as spam. He also mentions that none of the data from that tool was used to actually make changes that are part of these latest algorithm changes but explained that “these are sites that people want to go down, and they match our intuition”, so Google crafted a ranking algorithm to tackle the “content farm problem” independently of the Chrome spam reporting tool.

In the real world, the difference in the results seem negligible for many companies, as it still seems easy to find plenty of low quality, irrelevant or duplicate content in the US results, but Cutts insists that the changes Google is making does improve results according to its own internal testing methods.

If you’d to know more about how Google’s new algorithm could affect the ranking of your website in the future, please contact us now for details.

In the second of two articles about Google Places, we review the best ways to manage and optimise your local business listing on Google, to help improve your local search visibility and to see how users are viewing your business details. This follows on from last month’s article where we discussed the importance of claiming your existing Google Places listing, or creating a new one to ensure that your business is taking advantage of this feature.

Once you’ve claimed or set-up your new Google Places listing, there are a number of ways to optimise this in order to increase your ranking visibility. Google provides an interface for listing owners to edit and review the performance of their listing, which includes ways to improve the potential visibility of your business details.

The first point is that you should ensure that you have a business listing right away, as Google gives prominence to older, more established listings. Once the listing is created, the address of your business relative to the centre of the designated search location is important. Businesses that are closer to the “centroid” used to have an advantage, though not so much anymore, although searchers are also likely to be looking for companies closer to their search location.

You need to list your business name in its correct format and add your address details, which will also be used to verify your listing (see last month’s article). Include one or more phone numbers, an email address and web address, plus you can add a business description, which should be brief and include relevant search terms in the text.

It’s also important to ensure that the 5 categories that are selected for your business are relevant and keyword focused. You have to choose at least one category from Google’s existing list, but you can also add other relevant category titles that include the keywords that you most expect your local customers to use to find your business.

Another important factor in optimising your listing is to ensure that there are numerous references to your business in local business directories, as these “citations” re-enforce your business as a well-established local one. The number (rather than the quality) of local reviews on your listing also helps its ranking.

An optimised Google Places listing should aim for 100% “completeness” by including photos, opening times, payment information, videos, other information fields, coupons and more. You can track the “completeness” level of your listing by logging into your Places account, plus you can see data on user activity in the past, such as the number of impressions that your listing has received (which reflects search activity) and how many “actions” have been completed (i.e. the number of users clicking on your listing to visit the website or to find out more information about your business).

So as Google Places listings are becoming increasing important, it’s imperative that your business is represented by a fully-optimised one immediately. If you’d like more information, or details about how we can help your business to get the most from a local listing, contact us now.

At the start of February there was extensive news coverage and online discussion following Google’s accusation that Microsoft had been “cheating”, by taking search results from Google to use on their Bing search engine. This debate is likely to run for some time as the two search giants exchange claims and counter-claims about each of their search engine practices.

The story was first broken on Search Engine Land, and stated that Google ran a “sting” operation against Microsoft, catching them using some unique search data that had been set up by Google to check their suspicion that Bing was taking people’s search activity from Google and using that data to improve their own search engine’s listings.

Bing doesn’t deny this and say that they use ‘multiple signals and approaches’, which seems to include tracking search activity through the Internet Explorer browser and the Bing toolbar. They counter that accusation by stating that this was just a stunt by Google to take focus away from the event that Microsoft was simultaneously holding to discuss the “Future of Search”.

The author of the article subsequently stated that both companies approached him to discuss the issue, but remains convinced that the timing of Google’s accusation was purely coincidental. He says that undoubtedly, “both Google and Bing play the PR game” and “what’s happening right now is that there’s a perfect storm of various developments all coming together at the same time”.

He concluded by saying that he sympathises with Google’s opinion that Bing is “doing something it shouldn’t” and that Bing should be truly independent and not use Google as “a tuning fork”. He also states that as a result of Bing’s alleged data mining of Google’s searches, its name now, jokingly, stands for “Bing Is Now Google”.

If you’d like to know more about this story and how it might affect your search engine rankings, please contact us for details.

The prominent US retailer, JC Penney received a large amount of unwelcome publicity last month following press coverage about how the store’s website came to dominate many searches for product items that they sell, even though they might not be the ‘best fit’ for the searcher. This led to the accusation of the store utilising “black hat” SEO techniques and a subsequent reduction in search rankings on Google.

“Black hat” optimisation is the term given to the range of techniques that could be described as ‘spamming’ or methods that contravene Google’s standards when targeting search engine rankings. These techniques were described as “the most ambitious attempt to game Google’s search results that I have ever seen” by an independent online marketing consultant who investigated the JC Penny issue.

JC Penney’s SEO agency were accused of using a “link farm” to give the company a benefit from thousands of links placed on hundreds of sites scattered around the web, all of which lead directly to JCPenney.com. A “link farm” is a website or combination of websites containing many hyperlinks, especially designed to increase the index ranking of other websites to search engines and contravene Google’s guidelines on ethical SEO practices.

Google’s Matt Cutts confirmed that the “link farm” techniques being used violated Google’s guidelines and that “corrective action” was being taken. He stated that even as recently as last November, Google had been aware of JC Penney’s violations of its guidelines but they hadn’t followed up to ensure this was no longer happening.

A JC Penney spokeswoman is quoted as saying: “JC Penney did not authorize, and we were not involved with or aware of, the posting of the links, as it is against our natural search policies. We are working to have the links taken down.” They have also fired their search engine consulting firm, SearchDex.

This is yet another high profile case of a major company falling foul of unscrupulous SEO techniques, which although might have gained them some advantage in the short-term, have proven to be a bad investment as a long-term search engine ranking solution.

If you’d like to know more about this story, or how your website can benefit from legitimate SEO practices, please contact us for details.