6S Marketing Blog

Is Crosby about to lose his Crown?….. Google AdWords says Yes!

Simon Lewis — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:31:04 +0000

Everyone knows that Sidney Crosby’s Gold medal winning goal has catapulted him into the history books. A Stanley cup winner and now a gold medalist, Crosby has achieved much in his short professional hockey career and he has certainly had his fair share of the limelight. However another young star might actually be securing his spot in the hearts and minds of Canadian fans.

6S Marketing recently had the chance to work with Elastic Path on the Official Vancouver 2010 Online Store. While managing the Google AdWords program for them we found some interesting statistics in the search query reports. It turns out that Canadian Hockey fans seemed over twice as likely to search for a shirt bearing the name of Jonathan Toews than they were for Sidney Crosby.

A closer look at the figure revealed that Crosby was perhaps not the fans favourite by quite some distance. In fact he was quite a way down the leaderboard when it came to searches for shirts with his name on them. He even failed to beat out Martin Brodeur who was pulled in favour of Vancouver’s favourite Roberto Luongo. Over the last 7 days of the Olympics, the top two Team Canada players to register people searching for shirts with their names on were Toews & Doughty. Perhaps an indication of how Canadian fans rated their performances in the games.

The top ten leaderboard looked something like this:

1. Toews
2. Doughty
3. Iginla
4. Luongo
5. Brodeur
6. Crosby
7. Weber
8. Getzlaf
9. Richards
10. Thornton

We’re sure that results like this certainly won’t have Crosby hanging up his skates anytime soon. However Sid the Kid’s crown may just be slipping slightly. What do you think?

Using Twitter to Rank in Google Real Time Search

Jonathan Becker — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 21:57:40 +0000

We get a lot of questions at 6S Marketing about how to optimize websites and social media for new Google search features like social search, rich snippets, and real-time search. These are things that our team of 25+ Internet marketing strategists, social media experts, SEO (search engine optimization), SEM (search engine marketing), and analytics specialists are constantly researching and testing.

The most important thing to understand about SEM for Google search features is that the same strategy will never apply to all websites. An e-commerce enabled dynamic website will require a different web strategy than that of a restaurant, a news portal, or a mobile phone company. Tactics may vary, but keeping up to date with new search developments and always adapting your search strategy is a must.

Getting Listed on Result Page #1 of Google’s Real-Time Search

Recently I had the opportunity to research a few optimization tactics for Google’s new real-time search feature. Two important things to note before you consider using this strategy for your own clients or website:

This research was not the product of a formal SEO experiment. In other words, although it worked for me, I never tried to have a 3^rd party replicate my results, and I didn’t use any kinds of controlling factors to isolate any variables. It was just a test, not a formal experiment. If you yourself replicate these results, I’d love to hear your feedback in the comments section below.

To reiterate another point above, this tactic won’t make sense for EVERY client’s website. That’s right, if you are doing SEM for your engineering client, they probably won’t benefit from this type of tactic at all. You can be the judge of the kinds of websites that can genuinely benefit from this type of optimization strategy.

My goal for this test was to develop an optimization tactic that a client could use in order to consistently get listed within Google’s real-time search results.

Targeting Google Real Time Search with Tweets

We know that social media content makes up a huge percentage of the results displayed within Google’s real-time search feature, so I decided that Twitter was probably the best tool I had available to run the test. I used my own personal @jzbecker account to try out the tactic.

Step 1: Find a Topic With High Search Volume

Google’s real-time search results don’t appear on all result pages; only on those of search terms that are particularly popular at the time. In order to run a test on real-time search I therefore needed to figure out which searches at Google.com were currently the most popular. For this I turned to Hot Topics, a new feature in Google Trends that identifies the keywords of topics that are currently receiving the highest volumes of searches. By seeing which topics were trending in Hot Topics, I was able to easily identify result pages where I knew real-time search was likely being displayed.

At the time, the top two trending topics were “state of the union address”, and “obama gop” so I decided to try to optimize for these two topics.

Step 2: Optimizing my Tweets for Search

Next I used my @jzbecker Twitter account to tweet about these two topics. In order to create the best possible tweets for the test, I ran a quick search on Google.com for “state of the union address” and then “obama gop”. The purpose was to identify some highly relevant content I could include as links within my tweets. Through my Google search I found video footage content that was relevant to “state of the union address” and “obama gop” at The White House and CBS YouTube channels respectively.

Finally, it was time to decide what I was actually going to write within each tweet. Within the first tweet I included the exact same keyphrase that had been listed within Google Hot Topics; “state of the union address”. I decided to take a different approach with the second tweet and simply include the terms “obama” and “gop” contextually within the copy of the message. Shortened versions of URLs to the video content I found were included within each tweet by using HootSuite, my favorite social media management tool. I also chose to include a hashtag within the second tweet in order further optimize it for the keyword I was targeting. In this case I used “#gop”.

Using the “#” within a tweet is a strong indication of the overall subject of your content to both search engines and users. It’s an excellent way of optimizing Twitter updates for a specific keyword or phrase. (I talk about this in a bit more detail in my last blog post, Strategizing for Google in 2010.)

Step 3: Wait for it .. Wait for it …

Here’s a screenshot of how the two tweets looked on my Twitter page:

I sent off both tweets within about 2-3 minutes of one another. To my amazement, one of them (the Obama GOP tweet) was listed within the Google real-time search results only moments later!

Not too shabby! The test worked! My tweet was listed in the real-time results for the search “obama gop”; the exact same topic that I’d targeted and optimized it for. Notice how Google has highlighted the keywords “obama” and “gop” in bold, and both the YouTube link and hashtag “#gop” in blue?

This is part of how Google helps users to determine the relevance of their own search results. Links are returned within search snippets in blue, and matching keywords are returned in bold black letters. How you format a tweet, and how Google then displays it as a snippet, has a huge effect on your click through rates. And while the tactic worked, perfectly optimizing tweets for improved click-through rates could likely be the subject of an entirely different blog post.

Getting Listed on Google’s Result Page #1

So after all that effort, how much traffic can this tactic actually bring to your website or Twitter page? The answer is: it depends.

Instead of including my own unique content within my tweet, I used videos from other organizations’ YouTube channels. Rather than clicking through to my personal Twitter page, most of the traffic my tweet received from getting listed in real-time search seems to have gone directly from the Google result page to the YouTube videos themselves. So in order to truly maximize the benefits of this tactic, I’d always recommend tweeting about your own relevant and unique content rather than simply re-posting somebody else’s.

The important thing to consider here is that my tweet almost instantly surfaced on Google’s #1 results page for the exact same keywords I had optimized it for. This is even more significant because of the high volumes of traffic this term was getting at the time, the amount of competing content for result page #1, and the incredibly short amount of time it took me to put the test together (only about 5 minutes btw).

I’ll leave the best usage of this tactic for your own determination, but if you discover anything worth sharing don’t be shy; drop us a comment in the comments section below.

Make sure to follow the @6s_marketing team on Twitter for the latest in SEO, Social Media, and Internet Marketing. For more information on our search marketing services, please see our Search Engine Optimization page.

Yahoo! Microsoft Alliance Approved

Kelly Robertson — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 00:30:02 +0000

Last July, the long anticipated Yahoo-Microsoft ten year deal was announced, after a number of futile attempts by Microsoft to purchase and work with Yahoo over the previous years. Yahoo quickly learned that saying no to the $47.5 billion offer in 2008 resulted in sagging profits and a slumping stock ever since, with share prices being at just half of what they were offered by Microsoft, $33 per share, during the May 2008 hostile bid.

Late last week, it was announced that after much waiting, US and European regulators had cleared the partnership and the two search engines are now free to form the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance. This alliance is currently only valid in the United States and the European Union with additional countries being added on a staggered schedule in 2011.

The Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance will benefit advertisers by utilizing the Microsoft AdCenter as the single platform advertisers may access and manage their advertising campaigns, with Ads being served to both the Bing and Yahoo! search engines. Additionally, Ad inventory from Microsoft and Yahoo! will join a new marketplace powered by Bing. This marketplace has an audience of over 500 million searchers worldwide.

Obviously, this last benefit to users is a move geared towards ganging up on Google, which currently receives two-thirds of the world’s search queries (according to comScore). This alliance was approved by the US Department of Justice and European Commission as they felt Google was so far ahead of both Yahoo! and Microsoft in the search market, this deal would open up a greater competitiveness in the marketplace.

However, early last year a proposed partnership with Google and Yahoo had just fell apart, due to the US Justice Department threatening to sue to block the deal on “antitrust grounds”. Yahoo wanted to fight it, Google walked away.

This new alliance with Microsoft is eventually expected to boost Yahoo!’s annual profit by $500 Million with Yahoo! receiving $150 Million to start in April, and Microsoft taking 400 of Yahoo!’s total 13,900 employees. The large majority of profits for Yahoo! aren’t expected to start flowing in until next year.

When the alliance is eventually rolled-out to other countries in 2011, Microsoft will manage the technology platforms that deliver the search results (Bing) and the paid search results will be served by AdCenter. The only part Yahoo will play in search after the alliance is entirely rolled-out is support via its sales teams, which will be supporting high volume advertisers (agencies).

For now, there is no change to advertiser’s accounts or services with either search engine in Canada, with expected final alliance roll-out in late 2011. Read more about the Yahoo! Microsoft Alliance.

6S Partners with Tidal

Kelly Robertson — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:00:58 +0000

6S partners with a number of development companies to provide search engine friendly sites within a vast array of content management systems; our latest Partner, Tidal, specializes in open source technologies (i.e. PHP & MySQL). In particular, they have successfully developed over one hundred web sites using the Drupal CMS.

Drupal is recognized as one of the best content management systems in the industry and it’s been used by thousands of different organizations. Most recently, Tidal has developed the following websites using Drupal:

City of Vancouver
Simon Fraser University
Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver (Intranet Site)
Asia Pacific Foundation

6S has partnered with Tidal to deliver powerful, robust websites that are also search engine friendly. For more information, please contact 6S Marketing.

We Have a New Partner…Pereira PR

Kelly Robertson — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:00:01 +0000

Working to ensure that our clients are getting the very best and most effective exposure online is what we do, what we know and what we love. Having a strong message and communicating it through the right online channels are key to success and in the rapidly changing online world, we make it top priority to keep on top of trends and anticipate new opportunities to improve our client’s online presence.

Through our work with our public relations company, Pereira PR, over the past two years, we have witnessed the lines between online marketing and public relations blur and blend. PR efforts and outreach are easily translated for online use and the results are impressive. Optimization techniques and social media can now power important PR messages and often breathe new life into communications campaigns.

What we have learned is that pairing public relations and online marketing is a winning combination. We have worked with Pereira PR to test this on both our own company outreach as well as on some client work that we have done together.

With that, we are proud to announce the launch of a new partnership with Pereira PR, which will give our clients access to PR services.

Our partnership will allow clients to engage combined internet marketing and PR services that can enhance exposure to their brand messages and offer a well-rounded approach to communications and marketing overall.

Where the fit is right and we recognize potential, 6S will work to offer online campaigns that include public relations. Some of the PR services that Pereira PR will offer 6S clients include:

Strategic Communication Planning
Media Writing and Online Content Development
Online Media Centre Development
Media Database Development
Media and Blogger Outreach
Social Media/Online Integration
Online Press Releases

About Pereira PR

Pereira PR was founded in 2007 as a full service, boutique public relations firm based in Vancouver, BC. The company has quickly established a reputation as a fresh thinking, results driven firm capable of delivering local, national, and international results for an impressive client roster.

In a changing media relations landscape, Pereira PR remains ahead of the curve with a unique and uncommon approach to public relations. Our strategy and methods take into account a multitude of new avenues for communicating messages, stories and news.

For more information on how this partnership can help you, contact 6S Marketing.

Strategizing for Google in 2010

Jonathan Becker — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 04:52:22 +0000

It’s no secret that over the last several months the team at Google has been busy developing, testing, and implementing, the next-generation of the company’s search algorithm. As a matter of fact, Google made over 540 search-quality improvements in 2009; that’s an average 1.5 changes each day! Most media attention given to these developments covered the set of improvements that Google referred to as its caffeine update. These changes were implemented in order to further Google’s continuing goal of broadening index size, improving index speed, search accuracy, and the overall comprehensives of its search results. For individual users, these changes have led to search results that now contain a more relevant array of data from across the web. As Google changes the way it approaches weighing and displaying search results, search marketers will have to incorporate some new ideas into the way they approach search marketing in 2010.

Does your site have the ability to generate the kind of updates found in real-time search?

In December 2009 Google revealed that it was including a brand new way of displaying up-to-the-moment changes within its search results. This new feature, know as real-time search, makes use of 12 new search technologies that enable Google to monitor billions of web pages daily, track the hundreds of millions of changes that are being made to them, and display real-time changes within search engine result pages (SERPs). Certain SERPs now display a scrolling list of relevant search results that may have been posted on the web only moments before you made your search query.

Here’s an example for the search phrase, “Haiti earthquake”:

Initial real-time search results.

The same results only moments later. Notice that they're different?

Optimizing for this new feature requires an understanding of the kinds of content displayed in it. Google itself has noted that real-time search puts a heavy emphasis on social media services like Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, MySpace, Jaiku, and Identi.ca. It’s probably ok to assume that content from Google News is included in real-time search results as well (here’s a Google News ranking guide btw). Basic level search optimization for sites like Twitter is relatively straightforward. Write unique content that your audience finds useful, and structure it so that search engines can easily identify what it’s all about. Utilize the “#” tag in front of keywords within your tweets in order to tell users and search engines what the content of your post is all about. It’s similar to the idea of how meta keyword tags used to work with HTML.

Forum Posts Surfacing in Search Results

2009 also saw the deployment of a new Google feature that enables the surfacing of a website’s forum posts within result snippets. Providing users with the ability to view forum posts at a SERP level enables users to easily identify what other individuals have said about the topics they are googling. This feature is intended to provide users with a “deeper view” into the relevant content available on websites.

Here’s an example for the search “getting from jfk to manhattan”:

See the SERP results surfacing directly from the forum?

User Generated Content

As Google begins to give up valuable SERP real estate to features like real-time search and forum post snippets, it is becoming clear that the search engine is beginning to put a higher emphasis on user-generated content. Old static brochure-type websites are out; blogs, news feeds, forums, and social media are in. Remaining competitive in 2010 will have everything to do with incorporating user-generated content into your Internet marketing strategy, and determining the best way to optimize for it.

Check out our search engine optimization page to learn more about 6S Marketing’s search engine optimization services.

Click-to-Call in AdWords!

Kelly Robertson — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:52:57 +0000

Just launched this January 2010, location-specific phone numbers related to an advertiser’s business will now be displayed beside destination URL’s in mobile ads that appear on high-end mobile devices.

Users will be able to “Click-to-Call” a business just like they click to visit a website in Google.

Advertisers and business owners can view the number of calls that resulted from a click on their ad in the campaign summary section of AdWords. This can be viewed by segmenting clicks by “Click Type” on the “Filter and Views” drop down menu.

To take advantage of these new reporting and targeting capabilities, ensure your campaign is targeting “iPhones and other mobile devices” under the “Campaign Settings” tab in AdWords.

How to Rank in Google News – WhitePaper

Quentin — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 17:27:48 +0000

If you’ve been paying attention to the news lately, it has been hard to miss the squabbles between NewsCorp and Google over NewsCorp’s content being included in the Google News content aggregator. The most interesting quote to come out of the war of words between these two Goliaths, however, is where Google notes casually that they send NewsCorp’s sites thousands of clicks per minute.

While not all websites can generate quality content at a rate and consistency that NewsCorp does, we at 6S Marketing know that Google News can be an important stream of traffic for those sites willing to aggressively generate high quality content pieces. To help people take advantage of this, we’ve compiled the “How to Rank in Google News” whitepaper. It’s free, go ahead and download it!

Included in this guide is technical requirements for getting your site into Google News, content formatting and separation requirements, and a section on Google News SEO, as the Google News rankings function very differently from the organic search index. Currently only available within the Google help pages and within Google videos and blog postings, now you can have all the information you need for getting your site into the Google News index and ranking prominently, all in one document.

Click here to download the guide.

6S “Makes Good” for Good Business

Kelly Robertson — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 16:00:43 +0000

6S Marketing ‘makes good’ – named a member of the world’s leading community for “good business”

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Vancouver, BC – December 29, 2009 – 6S Marketing is proud to announce their membership with MakeGood, the world’s leading community for good business – a growing network of companies committed to social responsibility and supporting charitable organizations.

As a member of MakeGood, 6S now displays the “MakeGood Badge” on their website as a symbol of their commitment to being a socially responsible company. The badge serves as a link to 6S’s dynamic and interactive profile that highlights the positive community contributions that are made throughout the year.

“Community involvement has always been an integral part of 6S’s company values, and through MakeGood, we can reach out to and help a diverse range of charities that are important to our staff,” says Chris Breikss, 6S Marketing Co-Founder and President.

Based on a keen understanding of the importance of giving back to the community, 6S recognizes that employees become engaged and committed when they work for a company that is aligned with their values. The company has a long history of community involvement and support. Management and employees are actively involved in various community groups and fundraisers including the North Shore Search & Rescue, Weekend to End Breast Cancer, Movember, Camp Goodtimes, imagine1day and Y.E.S! Vancouver.

Membership with MakeGood will help coordinate such involvement according to a structure and each month, 6S Marketing contributes to a cause that is determined by an open online community vote. To date, 6S has donated to the United Way of the Lower Mainland, Upwardly Global and STEPS CHARITY through MakeGood.

MakeGood provides a unique online marketing system that helps companies communicate social responsibility and core business through the MakeGood Badge, Profile and Platform.

About 6S Marketing – 6S Marketing Inc. is recognized as one of North America’s top internet marketing companies. They provide search engine and social media marketing services aimed at increasing profits through a targeted and effective online presence. 6S takes a cutting edge approach to internet marketing and since 2000, has been increasing revenues for hundreds of clients, including some of North America’s most respected brands.

6S is a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant, Authorized AdWords Company and a Google Website Optimizer Authorized Consultant and was recently named one of the Top 50 companies to work for in British Columbia, Canada. They operate out of the stylish Yaletown district in downtown Vancouver, Canada. For more information about 6S Marketing, visit www.6smarketing.com.

About MakeGood – MakeGood is a growing network of socially responsible companies who are committed to doing good. MakeGood provides a unique online marketing system that helps companies communicate their social responsibility and their core business through the MakeGood Badge, Profile &Platform.

For more information please contact:
Nicole Hall
Sara Pereira: Marketing & Communications
p: 604.568.9454 l m: 778.231.4284
e: nicole@sara-pereira.com

6S Becomes Member of MakeGood

Kelly Robertson — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 14:00:50 +0000

6S Marketing is proud to announce their membership with MakeGood, the world’s leading community for good business – a growing network of companies committed to social responsibility and supporting charitable organizations.