Note - all rankings were taken at the time of writing and will vary between users. This is an analysis of  Google Web UK’s SERPS, which are accessible to the general public. 

The tide has come in for brands with the roll out of Google’s Vince update in the UK, with changes appearing over the past few weeks.

The Vince update is otherwise known as the ‘Brand Update’, as with it Google has put more weight on a site’s brand strength when deciding its position in the results pages.

Position shuffling in results was initially noticed about 3 weeks ago; since then, improvements have been seen across all verticals for the majority of iCrossing’s blue chip client base.

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Updated 09.07.09 with additional Twitter POVs

I’ve noticed a marked decrease in activity on some of the many blogs that I have on my feed reader, particularly those that are run by just one individual.

Microblogging has been growing at an almost vertical rate thanks mainly to Twitter. Almost all of the blogs that I subscribe to have their own Twitter feeds. Many use this as another channel to promote their blog posts, along with the likes of Digg and other news aggregation sites.

Personally I use Twitter as a useful opt in way of filtering out a lot of the noise from the vastness of the web. I try to share interesting articles and opinions on hot topics, as well as a little bit of “I’m at the Blur gig atm, it’s amazing!” (shameless plug @chriseden)

I’ve tried to setup my own blog, but still currently ‘finding my voice’ (in other words I haven’t posted to it in ages!). I still need to find my niche and have trouble with finding unique content to cover, I think this is the reason that I’ve not kept it up. I also think one of the hardest things about blogging is starting out, it’s hard to write when you know there is only a very small community there, hence me posting this to iCrossing’s blog and not my own. I think this is a real benefit to ‘Blogging for Business’.

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This isn’t exactly groundbreaking and likely many of you already know this, but it came as news to me when investigating the question for a client recently, so I thought I would flag it for the benefit of anybody in the same epistemic position. Also as evidence that I don’t just sit here thinking about kittens all day.

Google has for a long while indexed PDF files and their contents. However, it seems to be less well known that Google not only follows links from within PDF files too, but that these links both flow PageRank and pass anchor text benefit. Various commentators I read differed on whether the links are devalued relative to an equivalent HTML link, but some benefit is certainly attainable.

(The subject came up because a certain client’s press release handling was recently centralised with its US arm, meaning that their new press releases were being hosted off-site and in PDF. This suggested an opportunity for happy international vampirism via links in the PDFs. Sadly, I was thwarted in this.)

The major downside to using PDFs seems to be that they acquire incoming links much less readily than the same content in HTML - Rand of SEOMoz claims that people are less than half as likely to link to a PDF, presumably because they are still seen as inaccessible. Hmm. At least one of our ebook creators has been paying attention to PDF linking anyway; the recent iCrossing “How to Start Blogging” ebook contains a single highly targeted link back to icrossing.co.uk. Limiting the number of links is useful in a PDF as nofollow cannot be used to selectively direct link benefit - recent news about nofollow notwithstanding!

I was also interested to read that (allegedly) no duplicate content penalty is assessed against HTML that duplicates the content of an available PDF; perhaps we should take the time to offer any new iCrossing ebook in both formats?

Quality Score is King in the Land of Generics

The issue of quality score has been receiving even more press than usual of late.  Unsurprisingly the consensus is that click through rate (CTR) is king.  We all know the ins and outs of maximising your CTR to ensure the core generics and brand terms get maximum traffic for minimum cost, but how do we get the mid to long tail performing well?

No Sandbox for the Long Tail

When a keyword with low traffic volumes is launched it takes far longer for you to prove its worth to Google.  We often see high volume terms appearing surprisingly high in the rankings when they are newly launched, before bedding down to a normal level.  This is the paid search version of the ’sandbox’ where Google can quickly assess whether your ad is any good and assign a true quality score pretty quickly.  For the less popular terms though Google doesn’t rely on this method, rather it takes the word history from everyone else’s campaigns.  In this way if you have an obscure term albeit relevant to your account, if everyone else has used it poorly in their campaigns your quality score is likely to be low.  Unfortunately the only way to combat this is to raise the bids… 

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An interesting new study by the guys over at Catalyst Group shows that although users like Microsoft’s new search engine Bing, they are unlikely to switch.  From a usability focus group of 12 (expected to capture 80-90% of issues), after using both engines 8 said they preferred Google while 4 said they liked Bing.  That being despite the fact that 82% preferred Bings design, 64% preferred Bings organisation of features and another 64% preferred Bings refinement and filtering options.  With regards to relevance of results, the majority of users thought both engines preformed equally well.  I think  this goes to show how entrenched Google has become in our thinking when it comes to search.  Even though Microsoft won 3 out of the 4 tests and tied the last, two thirds of users were unprepared to switch.  After all, we no longer search for something, we Google it!

What I found particularly insightful, was in seeking out participants for this study the researchers were unable to find anyone who hadn’t heard of Google, but none of the participants had heard of Bing.  Granted it’s a new engine, but it just goes to show the marketing mountain Microsoft has to climb if it wants to even get close to knocking Google off the top spot (although I’m sure having $100 million to throw at the problem won’t hurt!)

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Over the past week I have seen the SERPS in the UK fluctuate massively, with sites coming into the top 10 for a couple of hours or even a day and then returning to outside the top 30. This has been happening for a number of terms such as ‘flights’, ‘hotels’ and ‘travel insurance’. The SERP I have most closely been monitoring is the ‘car insurance’ SERP with sites jumping in to the bottom 3 listing of the first page for a day and then back out. Some examples of this are:

Diamond:

Coming in from outside the top 30 and ranking in position 9 on Wednesday. Bell and Elephant also coming in from outside the top 30 and ranking in position 9 and 10 on Thursday:
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The Federal Trade Commission wants power over bloggers who fail to declare their commercial interests a move that fails to recognise the ruthlessly democratic nature of content popularity on the web and the ‘connectedness’ of its consumers.

Yes, as a journalist, a failure to disclose a conflict of interest was not just wrong from a legal standpoint but against the very essence of journalism, which, even in the business press, we liked to think was to unearth and fully reveal ‘the truth’.

And, yes, bloggers, in contrast, come from all walks of life and, in many cases, are driven by an imperative far removed from such pompous ideals. Most often, the imperative is commercial, whether to build a profile, increase a site’s SEO ranking, or, even - as a ‘media owner’ and affiliate - drive traffic and sales to advertisers.

And, true, most often - since this is not formal ‘publishing’ - there are no clear boundaries between commercial and editorial, which means that the editorial output can be indistinguishable from a blog’s commercial needs.

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Photo credit: by Kris Kros

Since its launch around 3 weeks ago there has been a lot of industry buzz and discussion about Bing’s pros and cons, whether the results are any good, and generally if it is actually any better than MSN’s previous incarnations. Read Jonny’s to Bing or not to Bing post for a more general overview. The consensus seems to be it is better, not just in appearance but also usability and effectiveness.

From a paid search perspective however we are really not that bothered by all this - we simply want to know if it gives ROI!

With this in mind I’ve taken conversion and click data from the past 3 weeks and compared it to the previous three weeks on MSN/Bing - and some trends have shown up already.

As impressions and spend will vary according to budget allocation and other factors, I’m more interested in the cost-per-click, cost-per-order and sale/lead conversion rate.

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Developing highly relevant, punchy ad copy is a vital step to boosting the performance of your paid search campaigns.   The benefits of developing high-performing creative messages are well known and can be easily and objectively measured.   The positive effects of great PPC ad copy include increased clickthrough rates, reduced CPCs and increased conversion rates - all factors which will come together for you in a mighty confluence of plummeting cost per acquisition values and soaring sales volumes!

Unfortunately there is no magic formula to writing highly effective paid search but here at iCrossing our approach is led by a simple four-step process which we’ve seen get great results time and again: Test, Analyse, Refine and Repeat.

Test

Develop a hypothesis and implement a change.  Keep your test simple and manageable. Ensure you capture enough data to make a decision.

Analyse

What was the impact of the test?  What was affected? Was the result positive or negative?  Can you call the test a success?

Refine

What learnings from the test can be implemented on a wider scale? What changes were not successful and need rolling back?

Repeat

Keep up the momentum!  Most testing programmes fail because people don’t keep at them long enough. 

The key to success is iteration and tenacity - you may not see stellar results from your first test but persevere and you will be rewarded.  The testing process is simple but highly effective:  choose a high traffic adgroup, write a new creative and run it against your existing copy (make sure that you tick the ‘rotate’ campaign setting in Adwords to ensure a more even split of impression).  Analyse the results and keep the winner.  Keep testing and beat your last set of results, extending your tests to cover more adgroups and campaigns.

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