Bruceclay.com.au - November 2009 Archives - Search Engine Optimisation SEO Blog

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30 November 2009

Brand bidding strategies in search engine marketing

It is obvious the importance of SEO and PPC advertising strategies to brand marketers, however to what extent should these strategies be implemented together for branding queries? It is quite usual to find corporations bidding on brand terms while at the same time running a PPC campaign, mainly because brand terms usually drive quite a large amount of traffic at a low cost per click (CPC). It has been proved that being in both top sponsored and top organic positions for brand queries can lift the site traffic, however it can also cause traffic cannibalization. Should marketers bid on brand terms when a website is already appearing in top of the ranking in Google organic search results?

Brand bidding tips

Below are few tips why you should or shouldn't bid on brands terms.

Generally it is not recommended bidding on brand terms when:

1. Your website is ranking number 1, your brand is trademarked in Google (therefore no one can bid on it) and you are the only one in the sponsored listing

2. Your paid search ads are similar to your organic search results therefore there is no added value to it

3. Your website is ranking number 1 for search queries that include a variation of your brand name and you are the only one in the sponsored listing

4. Your website is ranking number one and only results not related to your brand are coming up in the sponsored search for search query - if users are searching for your brand, users are most unlikely to click to an unrelated ad

Generally it is recommended bidding on brand terms when:

1. You are not ranking number one for brand terms (and generic terms)

2. There are several results and businesses associated with your brand name

3. You are on top of the organic search results, however you want to push users when looking for your brand to a special product/offer page

4. You own different sites for the same brand and you need to differentiate

5. You want to test different promotions

Recommendations

Make sure your brand is trademarked in Google, (you can submit your request directly to Google) to stop advertisers appearing against your brand. Test the impact of pausing PPC ads appearing for a brand related search query for a period of time (ideally 4 weeks). Look at conversion data for the same keywords from paid and organic and run a cost vs. revenue comparison.

Conclusions

Bidding on brand terms really depends on the industry you are in and how competitive it is. You should evaluate the ROI for these terms and test how much traffic you are getting from your organic search results when paid ads are paused. Even if the CPC for brand terms can be very small, the overall cost can become quite considerable for large brand that can drive a large amount of clicks. Don't waste your money for traffic that you will get anyway, especially if you have budget restrictions.

Posted by Raffaella Bronzi on 11/30/09 at 3:34 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
See more entries in Pay Per Click

26 November 2009

Google on Speed

More Caffeine and more Speed

Google and Speed are very much interlinked. Matt Cutts officially announced that speed would play a role in the Google ranking algorithm. This announcement makes sense when put in perspective with the imminent release of Caffeine, an improved version of Google search with a strong emphasis on speed. The SEO implications are considerable, maybe more on Caffeine that on adding speed in the ranking algorithm. Marc wrote two months ago about Google Caffeine if you need more information on the topic. During the interview for Web Pro News, he released two key points about Caffeine. The first is that one data centre will be delivering Caffeine search results, representing a very small portion of the total search results delivered, and this will happen before the end of the year. The second point is that Google will start rolling out Caffeine across more data centres in January 2010.

Speed is already a factor in the AdWords quality score. So what is the speed factor going to change for organic results? Well, probably not much really, not in terms of rankings at least. It is more likely to give a small ranking bonus to faster websites than penalising the slower ones.

Why is Speed important?

The speed of your web pages can have a profound impact on conversion rates, on user engagement, and on the overall experience of your web site. When you have only 3-4 seconds to convince a user that you have what it's looking for, you don't want to waste half of this time loading the page, and run the risk of a new visitor landing on a page already frustrated by your site's user experience.

What speed is definitely going to change, is the overall online experience for the users. The improvements in Internet connections' speed in the past 10 years have increased the users' level of expectations and it now makes sense to improve user experience by preventing frustration through improved page load time.

More speed also means less bandwidth and hosting costs, more traffic, better conversion rates and therefore more profit for websites. It also means reduced costs for hosting providers. But the real winner is obviously Google itself. By encouraging webmasters to optimise the load speed on their websites, the world's number one search engine will benefit from less bandwidth consumption, less server space, better user experience, more AdSense ads impressions, and therefore more profit. This is without taking into account the savings that Caffeine's increased speed will also benefit Google, by increasing the number of search results and ad delivery frequencies (less load time = more impressions/sec = more click opportunities = more $$$).

Bruce Clay Australia Search Engine Optimisation Speed Chart 1

What does it means for rankings?

According to the SEOMoz 2009 Search Engine Ranking Factors, "Registration and Hosting Data" is believed to only account for 5% of the overall Google ranking algorithm. it would be logical that speed would enter in this category, so it would be very surprising to see the share of this type of factors increase dramatically in the overall ranking factors.

However, a slight increase in search engine visibility is not such a bad thing for an SEO, and if faster websites might get a slight boost in rankings, no specific penalties have been announced for slower sites. The big question is to understand how they are going to benchmark your site's speed.

SEOMoz Search Engine Ranking Factors 2009

Some are already arguing that websites with better hosting solutions would be favoured compared to the smaller sites that only have a standard FTP hosting solution.

As the following study shows, most of the benefit to be gained comes from the frontend, which any webmaster can control, so I disagree with the ones arguing that companies with more money would have a competitive advantage when it comes to page load time.

Which Speed are we talking about?

When it comes to serving a page faster, there are two dimensions to look into, backend
and frontend.

A recent study by O'Reilly on website optimisation shows that a 50% reduction in backend response times (server side response processing, database processing etc), decreases overall times by 5% - 10%. Backend performance improvements also often require complex code changes, expensive hardware or software upgrades, which makes it more difficult to manage.

On the other hand, the same study shows that a 50% reduction in frontend performance decreases overall response times by 40% - 45%. This is the part where webmaster can have a significant impact on page load time.

The Performance Golden Rule

According to the Yahoo Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site the Performance Golden Rule is that "80% of the end-user response time is spent on the front-end. Most of this time is tied up in downloading all the components in the page: images, stylesheets, scripts, Flash, etc. [...] 40-60% of daily visitors to your site come in with an empty cache."

Some of the good areas to look into include:

• Rule 1: Make Fewer HTTP Requests
• Rule 2: Use a Content Delivery Network
• Rule 3: Add an Expires Header
• Rule 4: Gzip Components
• Rule 5: Put Stylesheets at the Top
• Rule 6: Put Scripts at the Bottom
• Rule 7: Avoid CSS Expressions
• Rule 8: Make JavaScript and CSS External
• Rule 9: Reduce DNS Lookups
• Rule 10: Minify JavaScript
• Rule 11: Avoid Redirects
• Rule 12: Remove Duplicate Scripts
• Rule 13: Configure Etags
• Rule 14: Make Ajax Cacheable

Some Useful Tools

Google has published a very comprehensive list of tools

Some additional tools are:

Posted by Martin Orliac on 11/26/09 at 12:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)
See more entries in Industry News

19 November 2009

Are Google spreading themselves too thin?

I know that seems like an odd statement for the most valued brand on the planet. However, I was just perusing the latest news from TechCrunch this morning and read 2 articles one after the other, the first was The Google Phone Is Very Real. And It's Coming Soon and the second was Google Holding Chrome OS Event Thursday. Complete Overview And Launch Plans To Be Revealed. Now I realise that there are tons of money to be made from alternative revenue streams, but is Google deviating from their core business and spreading themselves too thin? Are they moving TOO far away from their core business and cash cow i.e. search?

Danny Sullivan did a series of posts fairly recently that criticise the relevancy of certain Google Results and another post with a similar theme, that is The Myth Of Great Search Engine Results. Now I have to agree with Danny on this one, either I'm expecting too much or the quality of the SERPS is decreasing somewhat. You would think that with the recent competition from Bing, Wolfram etc, that Google would be piling their resources into improving and advancing search. They may be doing that in terms of engineers and PHD's but what about a guiding force? Most interviews or news by the big 3 of Google ( Sergei, Larry and Eric) involve wide ranging topics, from the purchase of a mobile advertising company, Google Chrome for Mac and the Google Books, not much on search.

However, I must cut Google some slack, with every advance they make in improving search quality, there are another 1000 spammers trying various very smart methods to game the system. There is also the ever increasing amount of sites being added to the web and therefore the index. Google also has to sift through these sites as well as older sites that are being given an SEO varnish.

There are many thousands of people at Google that know exactly what they are doing and I am sure they have 101 good reasons for diversifying ( not least, trying not to repeat Microsoft's example of not identifying a potential new technology and getting involved right away i.e. the internet). But are they going a step to far?
What do you think? Do you think that by Google diversifying, they are harming search, their product that made them famous (and billions)? Or is it outside factors like social media, exponential amounts of sites being added to the index and new technologies like Ajax that is making the SERPS's less relevant?

Posted by Marc Elison on 11/19/09 at 3:59 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
See more entries in Industry News

13 November 2009

New Keywords User Interface for Google Webmaster Tools

Photo by Yodel Anecdotal via Creative Commons

In a special post-Halloween, the Google Webmaster Central Blog announced a change to the keywords section of Google Webmaster Tools. The major changes are:

• The data is now updated daily

• Google now displays how many occurrences of the keyword through the site

• Google displays a number of URL's through the site that contains the specific keyword

• A frequency column which displays the prominence of a keyword compared to other keywords on the site

These features are useful in identifying URL's that might have been hacked. Another good use for these new interface features is checking Google in indexing all your pages, especially after a major change in hosting or web language. Essentially this new interface helps you visualise more easily how Google views your site.

Posted by Marc Elison on 11/13/09 at 3:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
See more entries in Fun Friday SEO

12 November 2009

Promotional Links or Spam?

Photo by agjimenez via Creative Commons

To have a successful site, in terms of search engine optimisation, a site needs to rank in search engines for key products or services. As every man and his dog know, high quality links are needed from related sites and the best types of links are those anchor text links that contains your most important keyword/s. There are literally thousands of link building guides that comprehensively explain in gritty detail what others have considered to be the key to their success, whilst on the other hand, there are guides that have successfully prompted search engines to remove sites from the index because they have either linked to or been linked from a bad neighbourhood.

In terms of links, we all know what activities can attribute to spam; participating in link farms (communities of pages referencing each other), using hidden links, spam blogs or the practice of page hijacking. There is also the creation of multiple web sites at different domain names that all link to each other to generate traffic and links (doorway pages). It has got to the stage where everybody is very precious about who they link to and use PageRank as a guideline as whether a site is trusted or not.

So what about the links from a web development company stating in the footer of each site they have built "Web Development By [Company Name]" or "Web Design By [Company Name]"? The ethical question that comes out of using such links is whether these promote the work of the web development company or are purely a link building exercise?

This is a common practice amongst web development and web design firms and often results in hundreds of links from just one site. If you take into account multiple client sites that also have the link it can account for thousands of quality keyword anchor text links. It is clear that the use of a link in the footer is a good opportunity to promote the work of a web designer or web developer and theoretically it could bring more leads as the website is a testament to the quality of their work. However many would consider a link on every footer of the page of a website a bit excessive and even label it as an elaborate ploy to gain a large sum of text links containing important keywords. Is it not considered to be "spammy" having multiple links from the one website with the same anchor text (similar to links between domains with multiple doorway pages interlinking with each other)? Even if the anchor text was slightly modified differently for each page this would indicate that the links have been modified purely for SEO purposes rather than the promotion of their work.

One would think that Google would lower the value of multiple links from multiple pages in one domain but research (just do a search for "web development" in Google Australia) reveals that currently sites employing this tactic are being rewarded in rankings. According to Google Webmaster Help they consider a link scheme to be "Links intended to manipulate PageRank" and "Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you.")". Therefore according to Google's own definition, does "web design by ..." links not fit under this classification? So with that food for thought, what does the general SEO community think about this issue?

Posted by Grant Hilton on 11/12/09 at 11:17 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack (0)
See more entries in Linking Strategy

5 November 2009

SEO News Update | 5 November

Photo by See-ming Lee via Creative Commons in homage to the 40th birthday of Sesame Street

After a lengthy absence the SEO news roundup is back. Enjoy what our analysts thought were the most interesting and high value blog posts, news stories and general journalistic efforts over the past fortnight.

Explaining (Some of) Google's Algorithm with Pretty Charts & Math Stuff

This is a pretty long and involved article based on correlation and causation with regard to data extracted from SEOmoz data, the main points are:

• Links are important, but naive link data can mislead. It seems wise to get more sophisticated with link analysis.

• No single metric can predict rankings (at least, not yet)

• H1s (and H2s-H4s) probably aren't very important places to use your keywords

• Alt attributes of images are probably pretty important places to use your keywords

• Keyword stuffing may be holding you back (particularly if you're outside the top 15 results and overusing it)

• Likewise, overdoing it with (not-so-great) links might be hurting you

What Makes a Link Worthy Post - Part 1

This blog post details the analysis SEOmoz have been carrying out with regard to what kind of SEOmoz posts garner the most links, views etc, this article focused on In Linking Domains (ILD). The main ideas to come out of this article are:

• Content is most important thing to a posts but posts with extra visual content attract extra links.

• By adding simple visual content, like lists and images, can increase the number of ILDs by good percent.

• Posts with videos included will attract almost 3 times more ILDs than a plain text post.

• Posts with all three media types (videos, images, and lists) will attract almost 6 times more ILDs than a plain text post.

• Contrary to common beliefs, large posts seem to attract more links than posts with 900 words or less.

• Posts with between 1800 and 3000 words will attract more than 15 times more ILDs than a post with less than 600 words.

Dive in HTML 5, what does it all mean.

I really thought this was a great article on improving the HTML 5 structure of a site. Not only does it give some great insights and tips on improving the HTML 5 but it does it all in laymen's terms, even an almost complete novice coder could follow this and learn heaps.

You Haz No Blog Comments? Here's the Fix!

• Lisa Barone discusses blog comments and says that they are "an important health indicator for your blog".

• She gives 7 reasons why your blog isn't receiving comments and how to fix it.

• You don't interact with commenter's - Lisa says the way to fix this is to respond to your audience (people that comment)

• No one wants to be first - Lisa says "seed comments to get the ball rolling"

• You make me register first - Lisa recommends getting rid of the registration process and makes it simple for users to engage your blog.

• Your blog isn't passionate and borders between press release and infomercial

• You know everything and don't seem interested in me - Lisa says don't be a know-it-all by only giving readers some of the information and encouraging them to contribute their ideas.

• You act like an arrogant....island - Don't act like your better than other people. Leave comments of other blogs, link out to good people, etc

• Your community scares me - Set ground rules and ensure commenter's are not bullying others.

Google Analytics Now More Powerful, Flexible And Intelligent

Google Analytics has added some new features:

• Engagement Goals - you can now define up to 20 goals per profile. There are also 2 new goal types that measure user engagement and branding success on your site by setting thresholds for Time On Site and Pages Per Visit.

• Expanded Mobile Reporting - Google Analytics now tracks traffic to mobile websites from all web-enabled devices. This occurs whether or not the device runs JavaScript! Not only can you track your mobile website, you can also track mobile apps to measure your mobile marketing efforts. This is all possible by adding a server side code snippet to your mobile website (support is for PHP, Perl, JSP and ASPX sites)

• Advanced Analysis Features - Advanced table filtering allows the filtering of rows in a table based on different metric conditions.

• Unique Visitor Metric - When creating a custom report you can now select Unique Visitors as a metric against any dimensions in Google Analytics.

• Multiple Custom Variables - it's possible to define and track visitors according to visitor attributes (e.g. member vs. non-member), session attributes (e.g. logged-in or not) and by page-level attributes (e.g. viewed Sports section).

• Sharing Segments and Custom Report Templates

• Analytics Intelligence - provides automatic alerts of significant changes in the data patterns of your site metrics and dimensions over daily, weekly and monthly periods.

• Custom Alerts - set alerts for Google to notify you by email when a certain condition is met.