Understanding your audience is the first step in learning how to better market to them and engage with what makes them ‘tick’. If you’ve got a website that’s converting then that’s half the battle won, as you’re obviously doing something right, but if you’re sat watching and waiting for the elusive sale or contact form completion, there may be a few things you can look at in the meantime.

Play With Google Analytics Features

Google Analytics has done a pretty nice job in providing us with some deeper analysis for website activity, much more than the raw interface we had 5+ years ago. Event tracking is one of the quick wins for understanding user website activity easily. Perhaps you have some file downloads or ajax elements which don’t generate a unique URL, in which case adding on_click event tracking can help to track what exactly people are clicking on. This will then appear in GA under Content/Events. Because rich media sites are becoming ever more popular (YouTube Videos for example), event tracking can benefit you when you want to see how people are engaging with videos embedded on your site and understanding at what point they play, pause or end the video – Here’s a great post to help you setup YouTube Video Tracking.

Not only that, but we can get ‘at a glance’ information on the site hotspots with the In-Page Analytics (formerly called Site Overlay) feature in GA and see real time reporting now which can help content analysis of your site if you have just added some new elements and need to track how it’s being received. Gone are the days of just using GA for seeing how many visits you get to the site – there’s far more important stuff going on.

Seeing Your Site In More Detail

A commonly overlooked feature is Site Search. It’s been around for years but when we get access to a new client’s analytics we often find there is no real evidence (other than bounce rate) of whether people have found what they are looking for or if they haven’t and gone elsewhere. Add Site Search to your initial campaign set up. It’s basically the digital equivalent of asking someone in a department store at the checkout if they have found everything they’re looking for before they leave. There could be a product that people are regularly searching for on your site which you know you should get in stock…and hey presto…there’s your user evidence right within Analytics.

Experiment With Other Tools

Don’t be afraid to use 3rd party tools either to monitor user engagement. A lot of them integrate nicely with Analytics and enable deeper analysis. Probably best to get someone to work on the analysis of such data full-time though, as investing in 3rd party software is only going to be worthwhile if you’re going to really drill down and use it to maximise your customers’ experience. Infinity Tracking is a good example, where they track phone calls and user engagement to keyword level on the site.

Take It To The Next Level

In the last few years there’s been quite the paradigm shift from people thinking they don’t need to pay too much attention to how users engage with a website to realising the importance of it and being able to do something about it. Conversions are the crux of it all – yes – but what about those visitors that came to the site and then disappeared? Wouldn’t you like to work out why they left? Through exploration of activity on the site you can then broaden your outreach and potentially look at remarketing with Google Adwords, to specifically target those users who have seen you but never converted.

Tracking website activity in greater detail now will give you an advantage over your competitors and potentially help you gain the valuable info you need to keep people on your site as opposed to someone else’s. With the average website visit lasting less than 1 minute, consumer time is most definitely of the essence but your site activity analysis needn’t be.

Client Knowledge Can Be a Threat

But what of the agencies who sell the traditional service of “SEO”? As an agency ourselves, we’ve not seen a drop in enquiries for SEO, but more client-side interests in how exactly we intend to optimise a website which is vulnerable after meeting and greeting Google’s zoo animals of Penguin and Panda. Clients themselves want to gain an increased knowledge in the SEO arena, at the same time showing their caution at placing their website in the hands of an agency who might make them
more vulnerable at the hands of further Google algorithm updates. It’s a tough call; how does an agency get client buy-in on an element like SEO which is notoriously hard to estimate ROI with, whilst at the same time reassuring the client that the way they work won’t get a Google slap from one of the many, and seemingly regular, algorithm updates. Life as an agency suddenly got tough.

Not only that, but an agency also has to contend with client-side SEO recruitment. More companies are realising the potential of hiring an in-house SEO and this can have a sudden impact on the agency. If you’re a big brand then employing someone in-house to do the SEO might seem like the best option, but it may not always be the most cost-effective. Still, it’s another element that the agency has to consider.

Agency SEOs Have The Hardest Job

It’s important to remember that not all SEOs can get it right every time, particularly with Google moving the goal posts all the time, so an agency can suffer just like everyone else. The problem with SEO agency-side is that there are so few second chances. If it doesn’t work as quickly and cost-effectively first time, clients aren’t likely to give you repeat opportunities to make it work. As an agency, it’s a balancing act between keeping up with the latest algorithm updates and trying to stay ahead of the game, and working on client retention to ensure they don’t give up on you when the proverbial shit hits the fan.

And let’s not forget the agencies that focus purely on organic SEO. Putting all your eggs into one basket might seem like a good idea when SEO is such a buzzword, but when you’re always playing catch-up with Google changes then you could find agency life gets even harder. It’s time to broaden your approach and offering.

So what can an agency do? In the next 12months we’re likely to still hear that “SEO is dead” by some experts, but perhaps we need to think a bit differently now. It’s less about SEO being dead and more about how the SEO agency as we know it can stay afloat given the challenges they face. If you’ve already started losing client s and you’re not being innovative with your SEO strategies then you’ll be left behind as the competition with client side vs agency side SEO continues. Let’s see what the next 12months holds, not least with the numerous algorithm updates we’re likely to see.

UK online sales are growing; in 2011 it peaked at £27 billon, whilst at the same time, reports also showed that approximately 14% of UK high street shops stood empty. If businesses are struggling on the high street, online is the place to be. Traditional shop owners will continue to support the high street and it’s essential for a healthy economy to keep high street businesses buoyant. However, moving your shop online could support your high street sales and open up your shop to a new market of customers; an essential ingredient if businesses are to stay afloat.

Reduced overheads

If you decide to move solely to an ecommerce store as opposed to a bricks and mortar store, your overheads will be greatly reduced which will allow you to invest more in the online business. High street overheads include the lease, inventory, taxes and bills.

Attract a larger market

With a bricks and mortar store, the market reach is much smaller than if you have an online presence. With online commerce, you can adopt SEO strategies to increase your visibility and potentially attract a healthy target market. An estimated 79% of the UK population now use the Internet, with fewer heading out onto the high street. Plus, with an online store, you can promote the ‘always open’ benefit. When a high street shop closes overnight, having an online business means you can make sales even when you’re fast asleep!

Attract the ‘deal hunters’

Those people that still head to the high street for a browse are also considering their purchases more before handing their money over, which is why there are a lot of shoppers that go home after a browse and start price-checking online to ensure they can’t get the product cheaper. Inevitably though, the price online often does come out greatly cheaper than on the high street. This Daily Mail article proved just how much online shoppers can save when shopping online; why not make your business one than can snap up the deal hunters.

Online trust and loyalty is increasing

There used to be fears of security compromises when buying online, particularly with the older generation who were concerned about inputting their card details through an online transaction. However, with greater awareness surrounding online security, people are much less concerned about buying online when they see trust badges and security certificates displayed on an ecommerce website. Plus, you can easily generate brand loyalty online, as you have offline, with some ‘online only’ discount offers and email newsletters.

Understand your target market better

Purely offline stores struggle to know who their core market is when people come into the store to buy. However, with online, you can use advanced analytics tracking to ascertain the type of customer visiting your site, allowing you greater customer targeting when it comes to advertising special offers on your site and seeing what converts and what doesn’t.

Giving your bricks and mortar store an online presence is a great way to broaden your audience and put your business on the search engine ‘map’. There are many businesses that have made the move online as the high street continues to struggle, so it may be a good time to start thinking about what an ecommerce site could do for you.

Want to know more about building an online presence? Contact us today.

It’s a concern to all webmasters when launching a new site – what if it affects my SEO work thus far? There are some things you should be aware of before you launch a new site, so here’s a few ways you can prevent a drop in rankings after a new site launch.

301s

If your existing site carries a lot of page equity then implementing 301 redirects is essential. There are two ways you can do this; via manual mapping or generating a script. The first step is to grab all your old URLs and assess the size of the site to start with. We recommend using xml-sitemaps.com for quickly gathering a list of all URLs, but the free version only lets you grab 500 pages, so for larger sites you could use the Xenu Link Sleuth, which is a much larger, more in-depth crawler. Either way, it’s best to cross-reference with both tools to make sure you have a definitive list of all your old pages.

For manual mapping, you would do this by collating a list of your old URLs and supplying their new destination URLs in a .csv. If you have a big site, this is a time consuming process because you want to be sure that you are correctly mapping your old URLs to their most relevant pages on the new site. Avoid 301’ing all old URLs straight to the homepage, as this only builds up the equity of the root domain and doesn’t pass any value through to your new inner pages. Plus, if you have been backlinking to a number of internal pages, you want those links to be carried across to the closest relevant page on the new site.

If you’d prefer to automate your 301s as opposed to manually mapping, you can generate a script to map them for you. This is useful if you have a large ecommerce site with thousands of pages, for example.

For those that use WordPress, there are some handy plugins available which makes implementing 301s quick and easy.

noindex

When you’re developing the new site, chances are it will be sat on a staging site. This means that you can work on it like a live site, but the content / pages should be kept out of Google’s index to prevent any duplicate site issues. If working on a preview site then be sure to add the ‘noindex’ tag to all pages to prevent it being picked up in the SERPs. Simply adding it to the robots.txt won’t necessarily prevent Google crawling it if it chooses to ignore your robots file (which it can do…and does do frequently).

When you’re nearing the stages of putting the site live, remember to remove the ‘noindex’ when you launch the site because this could harm your rankings otherwise. It’s a common mistake to leave it in, but you’ll soon find your site is wiped from the index if you do. By all means move the noindex tag to those new pages on your site which you genuinely don’t want to be picked up by the search engines (your /thank-you-for-your-purchase pages for example) but check its not in the root folder when going live.

At The Floating Frog, we love using WordPress, so if you have a WP site which has lots of tags and categories generated, it’s a good idea to noindex your tag and category pages too, as these can contain duplicate content otherwise.

PageRank Sculpting

There are a lot of reasons why you shouldn’t pay too much attention to Google PageRank anymore, but let’s also remember this is a Google-owned metric and we shouldn’t dismiss it completely. A few years ago, it was important for webmasters to consider PageRank sculpting when launching a new site so that your root domain equity isn’t passed to ‘unnecessary’ pages on your site. You would do this using the ‘nofollow’ tag. For example, you may have a Privacy Policy on your site but you don’t want this page gaining a lot of weight in the search engines over other important pages. By nofollowing some of these less important pages, it means more root domain value can be filtered through to your product pages, which could be 3 or 4 pages deep. In our view, PageRank sculpting is still worth considering if you want to help your more important pages get the equity over your Ts and Cs, Privacy Policy pages etc.

Duplicate Content Canonicalisation

If you’re launching a large ecommerce site, chances are that you’ll have a few products that sit in more than one category, meaning you could be generating duplicate content, and this in turn could affect your rankings. It can be useful to decide which category is the main one and canonicalise this to tell Google this is the preferred page and therefore should exemplify you from the duplicate content penalisation. The “rel=canonical” tag is commonly found when there are duplicate homepage issues too. Check your site doesn’t reload the homepage with /index or /home, in which case the canonical tag can help to prevent Google picking up duplicate homepages of your site.

Pages with Thin Content

Following the Google Penguin update, webmasters have become much more aware of pages which might cause them problems in the SERPs. For example, if you have a lot of pages with some light copy on, but nothing really adding much value, you might need to rethink your site and page structure. Putting a site live with ‘thin’ pages is just one of the many elements that Penguin wants to penalise you for. Think about where these pages are – are they close to the root? Can any more useful content fill these pages? If not, you’d do better removing them altogether. If Google decides to exclude any pages from its index, without you specifically telling it to, then you know you need to go through the site and find where you can add value. As Google moves closer to being a knowledge engine rather than a search engine, considering how your site is going to add value is key. This will also help to prevent a drop in rankings.

Site Audits

This is one of the most basic elements required when launching a new site and trying to prevent a drop in rankings. Having said that, it’s still something that can be overlooked when the pressures of launch deadlines are looming. It’s important to always find time to do a thorough audit on the site just before it goes live and as soon as it is live (see our Pre Launch Checklist and Post Launch Checklist post). This isn’t just from an SEO perspective, this is also for the health of your site overall. Checking broken links and URL structures will be key if you’re looking to retain rankings.

Webmaster Tools

If Google Webmaster Tools isn’t your best friend by now, it’s time to grab a coffee and get to know it better. With all the data you can get from here, you should place paramount importance on the elements being flagged to you. Why? Because this is data Google is supplying to you, hence they think it’s important and so you should too. The first port of call upon a new site launch would be to upload your new XML sitemap to Webmaster Tools and ensure this is set to update automatically when new pages are added (you can set up a cron job through xml-sitemaps.com)

Other data that Google Webmaster Tools provides which can be useful in helping to prevent a drop in search rankings includes:

• Index status – tells you the number of pages which have been indexed since you first added your site to the account and you can assess indexation changes with your new site compared to your old.
• Crawl errors – its not uncommon for a new site to have some crawl errors if something has been missed and a few pages are 404’ing, but it’s useful to keep on top of what Webmaster Tools is showing you so you can sort the errors out early on.
• Internal links – with this tool, you can check how many internal links there are to your various pages. It’s important that you have links to all pages on your site, and for those really important pages then be sure they are linked to from your homepage.
• HTML improvements – check there are no issues with any HTML elements, such as missing title tags, duplicate tags etc.

There’s a lot more to uncover in Google Webmaster Tools, and when launching a new site it’s a good indicator of what Google likes and what they don’t. One thing to remember though is that even if you correct some elements and clean up the site, you might not notice the changes appearing in your Webmaster Tools account for some time, as its notoriously slow to update with the recognition that you have made changes and the errors found before are no longer there.

Under the Radar?

There’s a lot to be said for the fact you might not want to tinker too much with an old site that hasn’t been updated in a while and you’ve still got good solid, high rankings. Despite the Google algorithm updates, there’s still some sites which have ‘slipped through the net’ shall we say, and don’t have a particularly great site structure or valuable content, yet they have an old authoritative domain which has held the weight for them all this time. So what do you do about preparing to launch a new site when you’ve got something really important to hang onto?

By not doing much with your old site for so long and then launching a new one, you’re actually waving a big fat flag in front of Google’s spider letting it know that you’ve taken the time to update it with fresh content, a great design and a much cleaner, tighter site all round. You’d think that would automatically give you a boost in the SERPs, right? Well, not exactly, because there are some sites which have flown under the radar for so long that by turning everything on its head and doing a full site re-launch, chances are your rankings will drop. That’s not to say they wouldn’t anyway with a new site launch – pretty much all sites will see rankings bounce around for a bit straight after launch but things generally come back within a few weeks and settle at a strong position again, providing you have followed the steps above in this article – but its still opening yourself up to a more significant hit when launching a new site if its vastly different to your existing, solid and well-liked by Google site.

In our view, if you have an old site which is doing well and you’ve had the good rankings for some time, don’t prioritise a re-launch. Does it need it or can you tighten what’s already there? Check your site traffic and see which landing pages / top content is being viewed. If you’ve got some strong authoritative internal pages that you haven’t touched in a while but still rank at the top of the SERPs, it makes sense to hang onto that if it’s valuable, converting traffic.

Not sure if you need a new site? Worried about a drop in rankings post launch? Contact us and we’ll give you some more top tips.

So we’ve put together this handy pre site launch and post site launch SEO checklist so you can be sure you’ve got the essentials covered:

Pre launch SEO checklist

1. H tags in place – semantically correct?
2. Elements page created – properly styled
3. HTML sitemap in place – sitewide and containing all pages
4. Absolute URLs used throughout site
5. Clean and tidy URL structure – dashes used over underscores and no special characters
6. CSS and JavaScript called from an external file – helps with page load time
7. Alt tags on images
8. Navigation – can you navigate to all your important pages easily?
9. Keywords – used naturally and where relevant
10. Use of Flash – kept to a minimum
11. Google Analytics installed / code carried across to new site
12. Webmaster Tools linked to Analytics
13. Custom 404 page created
14. 301 redirects mapped and implemented
15. Static pages used wherever possible – avoid dynamic product pages
16. Cookie policy added
17. Privacy Policy added – Bing regards this as an important element in their algorithm, so there’s no reason why Google wouldn’t too
18. Ts and Cs added
19. Editable text throughout – avoid text embedded in an image
20. Check potential duplicate content issues – clean up or canonicalise
21. Blog or News section – adding one of these will allow for regular content updates
22. Meta data written or script generated
23. Xml sitemap generated
24. No unnecessary HTTP redirections used
25. No doorway pages used
26. No cloaking techniques in place
27. Different types of content used – images, videos, text helps with diversity
28. Text links used over image links – when directing users to important pages on the site
29. Breadcrumb trail added
30. Sufficient content on homepage and throughout site
31. Ecommerce tracking set up
32. Check 3 or 4 step process for ecommerce checkout – reduce down as much as possible
33. Goal tracking set up
34. Rich snippets used
35. “rel=author” set up – if relevant
36. Sufficient call to actions used throughout the site
37. Google Product Feed updated to coincide with new site
38. Contact details added to header and footer – adds trust
39. Do a test purchase if its an ecommerce site
40. Trust badges added to site where possible
41. Social media icons prominent
42. Check unique URLs for success and thank you pages
43. Responsive design used or mobile site created (Google recommends responsive)
44. Test, test and test again!

Post launch checklist

1. Check rankings
2. Check Google Analytics working correctly
3. Check the non www. resolves to the www.
4. Check 404s – if erroring, correct ASAP
5. Check 301s have been implemented correctly
6. Check duplicate content
7. Meta data in place and unique throughout
8. No over-optimised text
9. Xml sitemap – set to re-crawl with the new site launch and uploaded to Google Webmaster Tools
10. Check which pages are noindexed – are these the ones you specified?
11. Check Webmaster Tools data – correct errors
12. Check page loading time
13. Ecommerce tracking working correctly?
14. Goal tracking working correctly?
15. Check no 302 redirects – they pass no SEO value
16. If running Adwords, have you updated the ads to go to the new URLs?
17. Site search – set up in Analytics to monitor what people are searching for
18. Conversion optimised site?
19. Consider A/B testing
20. Check newsletter sign up works correctly
21. Check contact form works correctly
22. Check purchase process is streamlined and works correctly
23. Responsive site or mobile site works correctly?
24. Set up Google Places / amend existing account with new details if necessary
25. Create a Google + page / update existing one with new details if necessary
26. Check sitelinks – what is Google displaying as most relevant pages on your site?
27. Regular content added to site in News or Blog section

You’ll notice a clear overlap with pre and post launch elements, but that’s important for consistency and to make sure all elements are implemented, working correctly.

You can download this checklist here

Google itself tell us that for a website to improve its rankings, it needs to include various elements on each web page so that it can understand what that website is about and rank it accordingly. Google uses an algorithm, a piece of programming that reads each web page to find specific code and content, that gives it the necessary information to do this.

SEO meets website usability

These same elements that programmers, designers and SEO experts use when building a website can also have additional benefits to website visitors. They can also help improve website usability – ensuring that visitors find what they want quickly and with confidence when browsing a website.

We’re going to look at a few ways that website visitors assess your website before considering whether to buy from you and which onsite SEO elements can help improve your visitors’ experience:

1. Gaining trust and confidence

As in most other aspects of everyday life, building trust with your website visitors mustn’t be underestimated.

These onsite elements will help you do this:

• Clean URLs – Individual pages with website addresses (URLs) that contain strings of code or unrelated terms that contradicts the content displayed on that page look untidy and unprofessional. Make sure page URLs are not over-long and describe what the page is about. Also avoid file extensions such as .html at the end of the URL – whilst this doesn’t necessarily benefit SEO, it makes them easier to remember and they look cleaner.
• Meta data – A stalwart element of SEO, well constructed Meta titles and Meta descriptions that show in the SERPs listings as well as in your Internet browser tab should explain what the page is about without the visitor being required to think about it too much. Like a clean URL, it’s one of several immediate signals that a website visitor will use, often sub-consciously, when forming a first impression about your website.
• Spelling and grammar – This may sound obvious, but it’s incredible how little attention this is often given. Poor spelling and grammatical errors may not be an issue to some, but for many, it is the cause of irritation and irrespective of how competitively priced a product is on your website, if there are obvious mistakes of this kind, then there is evidence to suggest that potential web customers will go elsewhere.
• Link to resources – This is really important and is often deliberately over-looked due to fear of visitors leaving a website and never coming back. On the contrary – when a useful resource or reference is linked to its source (making sure it’s coded to open in a new window leaving the original page open), this shows trust in your visitors and makes your content increasingly useful and authoritative.
• Contact information – Make sure that you provide contact information that is consistent with your printed marketing material and your offsite online listings on websites like Google Places and Yell.com.
• Trust Logos – Including logos of relevant membership to industry associations and organisations gives visitors confidence that your business is reliable. So, for example, if you are a registered electrician, use the NECEIC logo and link it to their website. Likewise, if you take online payments for products and services, display any payment security systems you use onsite.

2. Reducing frustration

Finding one’s way around a website can either be a joy or an utter nightmare.

One thing is for sure, if you can’t find what you’re looking for through a clear and obvious navigation – you’re likely to go elsewhere simply through frustration. The following SEO elements are also useful for reducing your visitors’ frustrations:

• Navigation structure – Make sure that the content on your website is organised. Use categories and sub-levels to organise your website’s content into a meaningful navigation, therefore making it easier for each visitor to find what they want quickly. This isn’t always easy and requires careful consideration, but it is one of the most important elements of your website. Of course, like all of these elements, categories and unique pages for specific types of products are great for SEO too.
• Navigation text – Ensure that your navigation links contain text that describes what the visitor will find when clicking them. So simple, it’s hard to believe that this is often overlooked.
• Breadcrumbs – Breadcrumbs (remember Hansel and Gretel?) do exactly what they suggest, they leave a visual trail of links that tell the website visitor where they are on your website. This is important in case a visitor can’t find what they want straight away so that they can find the path back to where they started through a series of ‘breadcrumb’ links. Without this, visitors may exit your website and never come back.
• Headers – Using appropriate and descriptive headers and sub-headers in your copy will help direct visitors to the relevant section of a page more quickly. It’s as simple as that.
• HTML Sitemap – As well as giving the search engines a way to crawl all of your website’s content easily, an HTML sitemap will do the same thing for your human visitors if they get lost – providing that there is a link to it from every page somewhere in the navigation. Don’t leave this out!

Getting the basics right

All of these things are straight-forward but essential techniques and practices for SEO and for gaining trust and confidence from your website visitors, whilst reducing their frustration.

If you’d like further advice about your onsite SEO or a review of your website’s usability, then please get in touch with our online marketing specialists at The Floating Frog Web Agency.

Here are 5 simple ways to promote your business on Google:

1. Google Shopping

If you’re a regular Google user, you should have seen the shopping results aggregated on the first page of Google as you search for a particular item. Google Shopping is a much dismissed feature of Google for many SMEs, and it can generate significant amounts of traffic to your site if utilised properly. It’s currently a free service from Google, although it will move to a paid-for version in the coming months. That said, it’s well worth signing up now and seeing what difference it could make to your website traffic before Google launches the paid-for version in the UK. Once signed up over at Google Merchant Center, you can generate a data feed for your website products to display. To do this, you should generate an xml file. It will need to be uploaded to Google Merchant Center to start running and its good to keep regular checks on the quality of your data feeds to ensure all products are being found. A good idea is to optimise your product feed before uploading, ensuring the product titles, descriptions, images and categories are all appropriate and optimised properly. If you need any help with creating and uploading your Google Shopping feed, get in touch!

2. Google Adwords

The sponsored links you see in Google search results can be a great quick way to get your website the visibility it needs. Unlike search engine optimisation which is a long-term process, Google Adwords gets you to the top of search results for the keyphrases you want to be found for. Cost-wise, it will vary based on competition and bid prices. You could be willing to pay £50 per click for a really competitive keyword but your landing page quality is also important if you want to make the most of Google Adwords. It’s best to invest in some on-site optimisation before jumping straight in with PPC so that the cost per click is kept as low as possible. It can be quite straightforward to set up a basic Google Adwords campaign, but the successful management of such a campaign is crucial. It needs regular monitoring, bid adjustments and testing new features if the campaign is to generate good ROI. The best part is if you run Adwords and Google Shopping together, you can integrate your products into your ads to attract the user and improve visibility.

3. PR

If you currently use a PR agency, have you considered how they are really promoting your business online? Are they assessing brand reputation and placement techniques online? Many traditional PR agencies don’t utilise features such as Google News and other news aggregators which could help to drive traffic to your site in a very positive way. Brand engagement is key and this can be improved through the use of PR promotion online. By submitting a press release through sites such as PR Web, your content will be publicised in Google News, a feature which is generating increased prominence in Google’s search results due to the “fresh topical content” benefit which Google craves. Unless you use a PR distribution service, chances are that you won’t appear in Google News and reach a wider audience with your content. As with most things Google-related, they are very selective regarding sites they choose to place in Google News.

4. YouTube

When Google bought YouTube, it was predictable that we’d start to see greater importance placed on YouTube videos in search results. Now, if you search for a product or information, if a relevant video has been uploaded to YouTube then chances are it will show at the top, middle or bottom of search results. With over 60hrs of new videos uploaded to YouTube each minute, embracing video is key in helping to promote your business on Google and across the social web. Invest in quality video production to showcase your business in the best light possible; a company overview, product demonstrations and more. Use YouTube to your advantage and you will find that it helps to increase brand awareness on a super fast scale. If its “shareworthy” content, it will make an impact. Whether you’re an SME or a large ecommerce site, video can give your brand the personality it needs to generate brand awareness and increase conversions. Here’s a great example of how video is executed well – even for a product like knives!

5. Google Places

We hear big name clients say they have succeeded online and they don’t need a local presence on Google, but Google Places does more than it says on the tin. It’s easy to assume that only SMEs need a pretty map with their address details on, but did you know that Google can use local results to merge with organic listings and help your search engine visibility? By having a local listing you are telling Google that you’re trustworthy, and that’s the real buzzword in all this. Not only that, but after the Google Venice update hit in 2011, the importance of Google local increased tenfold. If you’re searching in a particular city, Google delivers results based on the websites which are local businesses. These could be displayed as organic listings or as Google Maps results. Google displays its local Maps results to help users find a local business related to the product they are looking for. Utilising the free Google Places feature could help to promote your business and generate targeted local traffic which you could otherwise be missing. Recently Google merged the Google Places feature with Google+, their social media service, so you would need to have a presence on Google+ to help the local visibility through Google Places.

For more advice on how to get the most out of any of these Google promotion techniques, get in touch and we’ll guide you through it.

But, for many businesses, even after several years of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter being in existence, opportunities are often lost. This is either through an unwillingness to be engaged in something that generates scepticism amongst traditional businesses or because the true potential of a good social media plan has never been discussed or explained.

‘But, Facebook’s not for me!’

How many times do we hear ‘Facebook? – I don’t want to get involved in that – seems like a waste of people’s time.’? Quite a few.

It’s an understandable reaction and, in many respects, it’s a point of view that can make sense to the uninitiated – what exactly is the point of Facebook (or any other social network such as Twitter)? ‘What’s wrong with talking to our customers?’ people often say.

The point is really quite simple – it’s an online space through which the public can share things, comment on things and keep in touch with each other. It’s more than that too – it’s also a forum for showing-off, displaying personal egos and exhibiting personality.

So, whilst it’s understandable from a business owner’s point of view that there may not always be obvious benefits, social networks are about real conversations between potential customers. Facebook provides a forum for engagement between people about everyday things. So in effect, it is a way of talking to people – and those people may want to associate themselves with your business as a way of telling the world who they are and what they think.

Once this is understood, a business wanting to promote products and services to a new market of customers can find a way to do so by using social networks to emulate the way individuals use it and by tapping into the egos of those users too. They can also build loyalty to their business, be it locally specific or on a broader, national level. This of course involves time and patience.

Is using my time spent on social networks worth it?

This is the ultimate question for a business – and one to which we believe the answer is yes, of course it is.

Consider the following:

• Social networks are free to use,
• In the UK alone, Facebook has over 38 million users,
• Access to social networks is not restricted to desktop computers; users access their social network accounts from smartphones, tablet computers, laptops and Internet ready TVs.

With easy, continuous access to so many people in so many ways, why would you not take the opportunity to use social networks to promote your business – for free?

Social media and SEO

There are also secondary benefits of using social media. One of these stems from the fact that it’s becoming increasingly obvious that social sharing supports traditional SEO techniques, such as link-building.

The last couple of years have seen much discussion within the SEO industry as to which kind of social signals Google considers when formulating its rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

One recent post by social media specialist Dan Zarrella explores how social sharing can influence the creation of links naturally to a website – and the results point favourably to the creation of social campaigns for this purpose.

Using data collated from social networks Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, Dan has found a clear correlation between the number of likes, shares and tweets on these networks with an increase in inbound links – an important part of successful SEO. This further strengthens the argument for businesses to get involved with social media as a means to give additional visibility to their online capital in search results.

Clearly, social media promotion can help potential customers find you, talk about you and then buy from you.

What are your competitors doing?

If you’re still not convinced, then why not take a look at how your competitors and other businesses are using social media. You may find that for your niche, there is little activity giving you an open playing field in which to make your move and dominate.

You may find there is lots of activity to compete with – but this shouldn’t dishearten you. Take a look at what others are doing and learn, replicate and improve on the kinds of promotion they are pushing through social networks.

Either way, social media should not simply be dismissed as a fad. Yes of course things change, move on and go out of fashion, but it’s never too late to get in on the act and utilise every online channel possible – especially if it’s free to use!

Further advice about social media

If you’d like to understand the possibilities that social media can bring to your business in terms of promotion and search marketing, then please get in touch with us at The Floating Frog.

Google has certainly taken great pains to improve the quality of its results in the past 12-18 months with the aim of ensuring that Internet users who use Google to find the information that they want are being presented with the most relevant and high quality results.

In our opinion, the following are 3 of the most important and long lasting changes that Google has made during that time that could affect your online business and search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy:

1.     Google Panda

First announced in the early part of 2011, Google Panda (as it became affectionately known in the industry) was designed to remove search results that were clearly designed by Internet marketers to ‘game’ Google. Often, these results showed articles, stuffed with keywords and links by the ‘authors’ that provided little or no benefit to the Internet user. Poorly written, containing dubious content constructed from badly researched subject matter and often hosted on websites that were simply a hub for thousands of other similar articles all linking to businesses wanting to rank higher for those keywords – Google made the right decision to tackle this issue.

For many businesses that had invested in such poor article marketing practices and who had for years often seen remarkable results in keyword positions through such techniques then saw rankings drop when the Panda update was released. Many article directories hosting such content were penalised simply disappeared from the SERPs.

The conclusion was clear – changes to search marketing practices were inevitable if online businesses were to succeed. Google Panda was updated most recently in July 2012 (Panda 3.9).

2.     Google Venice

Google Venice was first released in February 2012 and was designed to give local search results more relevancy to individual Google users. This placed much greater pressure on search marketers to ensure that online businesses were optimising their websites and that listings in Google Places and other local directories such as Yell.com were consistent and full of up-to-date information about the company involved.

It has become increasingly challenging for businesses to retain visibility in Google’s local search results, especially for those businesses which don’t have a physical presence at specific locations. Therefore, it is increasingly important to ensure that local ranking factors are taken into account for businesses of all sizes when optimising a website to maintain visibility.

For more detailed information about local search, David Mihm’s commentary on local search ranking factors is one of the most comprehensive in the search marketing industry.

3.     Google Penguin

About one year since Panda, another update that became known informally as the Penguin Update (we expect the next significant update to be named ‘Google Puffin’ of course) was released in April 2012. This was designed to do a similar job as Panda – but this time by evaluating the type and variety of links pointing to a website and as a result, reassessing where to place that website in the SERPs. Link-building has been a search marketing technique for a long time, however, as with article marketing, building links that were too keyword rich in large quantities was an obvious flag that Google’s SERPs were being gamed by online businesses and search marketers. This was essentially an ‘over-optimisation’ penalty.

Investing time in removing links from poor quality websites and broadening the kinds of links being acquired, including using a variety of anchor text in the link (not just specific keywords) was the result – and much has been written about the importance of reviewing website link profiles as a result (this excellent SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday presentation by Rob Kerry examines the technical side of this more closely).

The last update to Google Penguin was in May 2012 (Penguin 1.1) with another widely being expected shortly by the search marketing industry.

The future of Search Marketing

Without doubt, whilst Google remains the number one search engine in the world, it is imperative that online businesses take advice about their SEO and broader search marketing strategy because there is no doubt that Google will continue to try and improve the relevancy and quality of its search results in the months and years to come.

Onsite optimisation through technical development and page content, relevancy and quality scoring are the cornerstones of good SEO. Google wants Internet users to get the best search engine results – after all, let’s not forget it’s in the search engine’s best interest commercially – and ignoring developments in Google’s algorithm is folly for businesses in today’s digital world.

Online marketing advice

If you’d like further information and advice about Google search and how your business could benefit from specialist SEO advice, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with the team at the Floating Frog web agency.

Today we’re going to look at how the SERPs appear when performing a Google Universal Search (the default Google search) and explore just some of the key elements that now make up these results.

1.     Images

Images results have been a prominent feature of Google’s SERPs for a long time now. For websites that are image heavy, ensuring that images are optimised well onsite is important for trying to ensure that they appear in these results. This means that descriptive and keyword rich text is used (when appropriate) for file names, alt tags and Meta descriptions. Including an image sitemap and submitting it to Google Webmaster Tools is also helpful (WordPress users can download plugins that will generate these automatically). Images can send considerable traffic to a website, and so don’t over-look these simple aspects of website search engine optimisation (SEO).

2.     News & Blogs

News results have become increasingly visible in Google over the last 18 months. Google’s keen to show relevancy in its results and as such it’s able to recognise when news trends start appearing in the media and associating this with searches around key subjects in order to present fresh, related stories to its users (in preference to times when there is little media output for the same subject). In terms of SEO, this highlights the importance of creating unique, regular fresh news, press releases and published comment on issues related to your online business. In order to get into Google’s News results, online businesses need to submit their onsite news feeds for possible inclusion in Google’s results – the criteria for inclusion can be found here – be warned, it’s not easy!

3.     Shopping

For ecommerce websites, it’s naturally vital to ensure that your products and services appear in as many places as possible online. Generating a Google Product Feed and submitting this through the Google Merchant Centre will help ensure that your products appear in the shopping results in the SERPs. There are a lot of criteria for creating your Product Feed correctly – find the many criteria and attributes here.

4.     Local

Again, during the last 18 months, Google has perhaps made some of its most significant developments in how it generates the SERPs in relation to specific localised results.

Many regular users of Google will have noticed what is referred to by search marketers as ‘blended results’. These results take organic website results and literally blend them with listings in Google Places  – Google’s local directory of businesses and organisations. How often they show depends on what Google has determined as the user’s search location (which it can do in several ways) or their location settings when using the search engine.

Online businesses and organisations can give themselves the best chance of appearing in these results by claiming and optimising all aspects of a Google Places listing.

5.     Google Knowledge Graph

The most recent addition to the SERPs, Google Knowledge Graph attempts to give users detailed information about a keyword on the right hand side of the screen – so searching for ‘York Minster’ for example, will show information about the historic building, together with sources of where Google has found this information and further related information that it feels might be useful to the searcher. It aims to answer questions, not just deliver results from the information it’s collated. How this will affect brands and online businesses is yet to be conclusively decided, however, it shows that the SERPs will only get increasingly richer in the diversity of information presented on them – and this will undoubtedly have an effect on how people use search engines in the future because its now no longer necessary to leave the SERPs page to get the answer to your search query on every occasion.

6.     Instant Preview

This function gives Google users the ability to see a snapshot of the website page that has appeared in the SERPs (including on Google Adwords results) whilst showing additional information such as when the page was last cached by Google and the ability to search for related pages. This highlights the importance of ensuring that web pages are not only well optimised for search engines, but that they are also visually appealing.

7.     Rich Snippets

These are the additional pieces of information that Google inserts directly beneath a search result. They can include review information about products and services along with a star rating system as well as contact information or blog author details. Rich Snippets are created by the website owner adding additional code to their website so that Google can associate individual pages with this information and then decide if it deems this information relevant to their users. For webmasters, follow this link for detailed information about how to implement Rich Snippets.

Get specialist SEO advice

If this post has inspired you to find out more about SEO and website optimisation to make your online business more visible to your customers, then please contact the specialist web marketing team at the Floating Frog.