Search Strategy

4 February 2011

AdWords Ad Extensions and their Effects on Your AdWords Campaigns

With the constant innovation occurring at Google, you may have noticed some new and exciting changes to Google AdWords. Some recent additions include Ad Extensions such as Sitelinks, Location Extensions, Click to Call Extensions to name a few, and more to come in Australia like Seller Rating Extensions and Product Extensions, all of which give advertisers even more opportunities to enhance their PPC campaigns.

But if we stop getting caught up in the buzz of these new AdWords features for just a moment, you might ask yourself the question - How exactly are these extensions going to benefit my AdWords campaigns?

Utilising ad extensions opens a whole new world for your ads by extending the ad format and helping to make your advertising stand out from your competition. Additions such as Sitelinks and Location Extensions mean that AdWords ads are beginning to look more like the natural organic search results, which is great for us PPC marketers!

However, there are many other advantages and benefits your campaigns could gain through utilising ad extensions.

This article will explore and analyse each of the current available ad extensions and, furthermore, will highlight exactly how you can maximise their performance and better your SEM results.

Sitelinks

Sitelinks are additional links that can appear below your AdWords ad in instances where Google deems your ad to be of ‘high enough quality’. Usually only showing 3 to 4 extra links, you can add up to 10 links in AdWords. The advantage of these extensions is more options for the user. Rather than your ad having one focus, you can now add sitelinks which directs users straight to a special offer page, a specific product page or a contact us page on your website. And how does this help the performance of your campaigns? Firstly, sitelinks are often known to increase the Click-Through-Rate which can help the overall quality of your campaigns. But more so, sitelinks can offer more high quality clicks because potential customers are choosing where they want to go once they click on your ad, and having done this, are less likely to bounce straight off the page.

Location Extensions

Location Extensions add location specific information as a 5^th line to your ad. These can include your full business address, and even a drop down function that opens to a Google map. The obvious impact that this extension has on your campaigns is that it makes it much easier for potential customers to find your business! Location Extensions may also save a wasted click from someone who has clicked on your ad, only to realise they are not close enough to your business, or are not willing to travel to where your business is located. For example, utilising location extensions is a great one for car dealerships and other similar businesses where the aim is to get customers through the door.

Product Extensions

Product Extensions are yet to be released in Australia, but when they do the possibilities will amaze you! This extension allows you to showcase your products before a user has even clicked on your ad. When your AdWords text appears on the Search Network, it will display the product that is most relevant to the user’s query as well as displaying the product’s price. At no extra CPC charge, Product Extensions can also link to a more relevant landing page on your website. For example, the checkout cart for the product on display. Product Extensions allow you to enrich your AdWords Campaigns and can present more relevant and specific information to the user, thus heightening the chance of creating a conversion, increasing the click through rate or realising another goal.

Click-to-Call Phone Extensions

Click-to-Call Phone Extensions make it even easier for potential customers to call your business. Mainly used for a mobile targeted campaign, the Phone Extensions appear as a 5^th line to your ad allowing users to click directly on your phone number, and automatically call your business straight from your Google ad!

This extension can potentially increase your conversion rates by making it quick and easy for potential customers to ring your business. And with AdWords, you can even schedule your ads to only run when your business is open! Therefore, your ads will only show when your business is operating, and you can avoid disappointed customers calling an unanswered phone.

Seller Rating Extensions

Although not out in Australia yet, you can see Seller Rating Extensions appear on Google.com and Google.co.uk which include a star rating beneath your ad. The rating is a combination of ‘user-submitted’ ratings and reviews about a particular business. However, once a user clicks on the rating, they are directed to a new page which outlines the reviews, therefore distracting potential customers further away from your website.

On the other hand, this rating extension may be good for a potential customer who wants to choose the highest rated business or product with the most reviews. But, this may become a disadvantage to your ad by giving potential customers evidenced based pre-judgement to not visit your site. It’s a well known fact that one unhappy customer will tell as many people as they can about a bad experience, where as happy customers aren’t always that inclined to tell the world. So how then, are these user reviews actually providing applicable information for potential customers clicking (or not clicking) on your ads? I’ll leave this thought with you.

If there is one thing we know at Reload Media for sure about Google, it’s that change is inevitable and new AdWords ad extensions and features are going to keep coming. So, Google will continue to provide the power for your AdWords campaign potential – you’ve just got to plug in the extension!

Images Taken From: http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=188235

And: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_X6aeJvBBv4o/TCj-kUVrrKI/AAAAAAAAAH8/rvSIfABVF58/s1600/laser+printers+-+Google+Search.jpg

Popularity: 30%

Posted in Search Engine Marketing, SEM Tips | Tagged AdWords, ppc, SEM | Leave a comment

18 January 2011

Yahoo & Bing Join Forces: What it means for SEO

This week has seen the announcement by Yahoo and Microsoft that their worldwide deal involving the sharing of search results has been rolled out in Australia.

For those who haven’t heard, Yahoo and Microsoft agreed last year to a deal whereby Microsoft’s Bing search engine algorithm would power the organic results in Yahoo; and Yahoo’s Search Marketing software would supply paid listings in Bing.

What this means is that, in theory at least, the results in Bing and Yahoo will be identical.

However, I suspect that this won’t be the case in reality.

For one, paid search advertisers may choose not to advertise on one or the other, or have different sets of keywords in different engines, meaning the paid listings will vary.

Why would they do this? Mainly because the demographic makeup of users on the two search engines vary, and so advertisers who know that their target market is more aligned with Bing’s userbase will only advertise there.

However, this difference in demographic usage is also the reason why the two search engines probably won’t spit out the same organic search results.

The deal between Yahoo and Microsoft will see Bing’s search algorithm used on both engines. However, search engine algorithms are made up of thousands of individual factors and one of these is the actual search and click patterns of its users.

Eg: If, for a given keyword, a search engine discovers that the listing at number 3 is proving more popular (i.e. getting clicked on more) than those higher up, it will adjust its search results to reflect this.

Given that different demographics will have different interests and tastes, it holds to reason that the website that attracts them the most in a given list may not be the same one.

Based on that, results in either Bing or Yahoo may start to vary (because of the underlying algorithm) if users of one of those engines are preferring certain sites.

What this means is that you may still see very different sets of results in Bing and Yahoo (and the disparity will probably grow larger over time).

Popularity: 20%

Posted in Search Engine Optimisation, The Big Issues | Leave a comment

17 December 2010

AdWords Display URLs – All Lowercase? [UPDATED: It's Official]

Well now it’s official.

Google have updated their AdWords blog to announce the change of display url appearance. From now on, your primary domain will be in lowercase but your tail at the end can still be capitalised. See some examples below:

Time to put those w’s back in!

To read Google’s official statement, click here.

[Previous Post - December 17th 2010]

About two weeks ago I noticed on my computer that all AdWords display urls on the Google search results pages were showing up in lowercase.

I did a quick whip around the office to check to see if anyone else was seeing what I was seeing but to no avail.

However, I am now convinced that Google were testing a new ad format on a limited sample of users.

My ads have gone back to normal for now but another blogger identified the same phenomenon last week.

Why do I believe this was a deliberate test by Google:

1. For some reason, my PC has been included in other Google trial runs in the past. This included access to Google Instant prior to launch and the appearance of the new purple AdWords background colour a week or two before the full roll out.

2. It makes sense for Google to try & make their sponsored links look as similar to their organic search results as possible in order to blur the lines between paid and organic results. This would help to increase the CTRs of the top three paid ads and, therefore, increase revenue for Google.

3. We have seen other efforts on Google’s behalf to try and get advertisers to aim for the top 3 ad positions in recent times. The most significant change has been the new places map overlay which now covers up ads on the side of the screen when a user scrolls down the page:

Conclusions

Google don’t appear to have announced anything yet so they may have just been doing a limited test to see what would happen in terms of click through rates. However, if there were to be widespread changes to display urls in the future, many advertisers would need to:

Rethink display URL capitalisation tactics (e.g ReloadMedia.com.au vs reloadmedia.com.au)
Perform new www vs non www split testing. Currently, in most split tests, non www ads perform better than www ads. However, this is likely due to the extra capitalisation that is allowed in AdWords display urls (e.g. ReloadMedia.com.au ads will generally have a higher click through rate than www.ReloadMedia.com.au or www.reloadmedia.com.au ads).
Amend every ad in every campaign in order to harness the results of aforementioned split testing.

As mentioned, this may have just been a case of Google experimenting with AdWords results to see what would happen. Only time will tell if this new Ad format will be rolled out and how they will affect current AdWords campaigns. However, considering the rapid rate that Google have been making changes to their search results pages lately, I would keep a close eye on this one!

If you’ve seen these lowercase urls in YOUR search results or would just like to discuss the implications further, feel free to comment below.

Popularity: 23%

Posted in Google, Search Engine Marketing, SEM Tips, The Big Issues | Tagged adwords display urls, display url, google adowrds | Leave a comment

14 December 2010

Canonical URLs

Search engines today are very adamant on why duplicate content should not exist and how fresh, unique and relevant content is better for the user. Duplicate content is frowned upon because it’s a common practice used by black hatters to manipulate the SERPs. However, this is not always the case. Duplicate content can be accidental and not aimed at manipulating the SERPs. Either way, it is a troublesome issue for search engines such as Google – which is why canonical URLs were introduced.

What is a Canonical URL?

A canonical URL is used to help determine if two or more URLs are the exact same, even if they’re syntactically different from each other. Search engines do possess the intelligence to analyse and conclude whether URL A and URL B are related and/or identical, however they’re unable to be sure whether it’s intentional or not.

Before canonical URLs were introduced and used in the SEO world, it was common practice that if you had duplicate content on URL A and URL B, you would 301 redirect one to the other to prevent any potential duplicate content issues. However, sometimes this isn’t always feasible and content which is on URL A may be duplicated onto URL B, URL C, URL D etc because of a number of factors.

For example:

Session IDs – In programming, sessions are used to help preserve data for a limited time to each visitor. Every unique visitor will have their own Session ID. However, the problem is created when Google crawls a URL with a Session ID and indexed it as a completely different URL, thus creating duplicate content.

URL: http://www.myurl.com.au/index.php
URL with Session ID: http://www.myurl.com.au/index.php?PHPSESSID=183249374871234872314

In order to help Google and other search engines determine which in fact, is the source URL, a canonical URL can be placed within the <head></head> section of the website. For example:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.myurl.com.au/index.php” />

This way, whenever Google or another search engine crawls and indexes multiple session IDs, it will be known to them that only 1 URL is the source (real URL).

Another good example which I experience regularly is pages with search results. Let’s say we have a WordPress blog on the following URL:

http://www.myblog.com.au

We’ve already gone ahead and filled our blog up with various articles related to Electronics and added categories such as Televisions, Computers, Phones and Cameras. Now when a category is clicked by a user, they’re taken to a page with a list of articles within that category. For example:

http://www.myblog.com.au/category/computers/

Looking at our list of computer related articles is nice but they’re only excerpts and there is no real information about what we are writing about or what computers are. So, we add 250-300 words of content, briefly describing what computers are and what we’re discussing. However, after a few weeks and over 40 articles added, Google has come along and crawled the computers category and indexing all the page URLs, thus creating duplicate content.

http://www.myblog.com.au/category/computers/
http://www.myblog.com.au/category/computers/page1/
http://www.myblog.com.au/category/computers/page2/
http://www.myblog.com.au/category/computers/page3/
http://www.myblog.com.au/category/computers/page4/

Therefore, to prevent the possibility of duplicate content in this situation, we would add a canonical URL (like our first example) to the computers category within the <head></head> section of our website:

URL: http://www.myblog.com.au/category/computers/
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.myblog.com.au/category/computers/” />

For more information on Canonical URLs including a list of commonly asked questions, you can visit Google’s webmaster central blog:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

Alternatively, Wikipedia has an article on canonical URLs or more specifically, URL normalisation which includes a list of examples:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_normalization

Popularity: 20%

Posted in Search Engine Optimisation, SEO Tips | Tagged cononical url, cononical urls, seo help | Leave a comment

2 December 2010

All Publicity is Good Publicity – Does it Apply to SEO?

Over the last few days, the SEO world has been abuzz with a story that was originally printed in The New York Times (you can read the full story here) where it was claimed that an online business owner was deliberately annoying and threatening his customers so that they would go online, post negative reviews and subsequently increase his organic Google rankings.

It was claimed that these reviews were generating a massive boost to his online search engine rankings, as many of these sites featuring negative reviews were providing a link back to his site.

As the number of links pointing to a site does impact on a its search engine ranking, the owner of the business felt that by aggrivating dissatisfied customers, he could stir up more publicity (and more links) for his site. Since many of his customers were simply typing in things like “designer glasses” and purchasing without checking the reputation of the company they were buying from, one unhappy customer was turning into 100 new ones for the business.

So do unhappy customers actually boost search engine rankings? When it comes to Google, is all publicity good publicity?

On the face of it, the idea seems plausible. Hundreds of negative reviews all linking back to the site they were ripped off from, providing the owner with a bevy of new links to his site on a daily basis.

One thing is for sure though, the article drew the attention of Google itself, who have (kind of) admitted there was a slight flaw in their logic (you can read Google’s official release here). They have since rolled out a change to their search results, designed to take into account “bad” customer experiences as part of their algorithm.

The official release from Google made some interesting points though. As they mentioned, they can’t just go penalising sites that have negative publicity (otherwise you’d never be able to find a politician’s website), and most review sites (like TripAdvisor and RippedOffReport) use “nofollow” tags to stop the links carrying any SEO impact.

What Google has actually changed remains a tight-lipped secret, however it does raise an interesting issue. If “bad” reviews are now having more of an impact on a site’s rankings, it does open the door for “black hat” SEO sabotage whereby a dodgy competitor can post hundreds of fake reviews on your business around the web attempting to get Google’s new algorithm to pick it up and punish you in the search results.

This seems like a dangerous position for Google to put itself in, which is why I doubt it’s that simple.

Long ago, Google put in place ways to stop shady companies deliberately putting links to their competitor’s pages from other dodgy sites by simply not counting them, rather than actually penalising. This meant that even if your competitors went out and sent 10,000 dodgy links your way, it wouldn’t negatively affect your rankings. You might get a temporary boost, but when Google realised they were dodgy links you would simply return to where you were (unless Google can find evidence that it was you who did the linking).

I suspect that a similar approach is probably going to be taken here, whereby negative reviews and posts don’t affect your SEO rankings at all, reducing the likelihood of these situations from happening again.

However, this issue is not finished with yet. As Google’s official statement says, they are “reasonably confident” that being bad to your customers will be bad for your Google rankings.

Popularity: 13%

Posted in Google, The Big Issues | Tagged black hat seo, reputation management, seo news | 1 Comment

16 November 2010

Reload Media is ‘Tick Green’ Certified

Reload Media’s main purpose in business is to help make businesses successful online. We realise that the web is one of the largest and fastest growing emitters of Carbon Dioxide on the planet, so we have chosen to do something about it – Become Tick Green Certified!

The internet has revolutionised modern communication and provides us with the ability to openly communicate and exchange information. Reload Media recognises that the threat of Climate Change is becoming increasingly evident, and that the online community must pursue a more sustainable and greener future.

Your business can become Tick Green Certified here and offset your website through Carbon Credits to ensure a more sustainable and Green future.

Popularity: 11%

Posted in Featured | Leave a comment

11 November 2010

Google Launches ‘Instant Previews’

Google has taken its search platform to the next level… Again!

The search engine giant has unveiled a new feature called Instant Previews. Not to be confused with Google Instant, Instant Previews allows viewers to fully preview a website before visiting it.

To utilise this feature, all a user needs to do is simply click on the small magnifying glass next to a search result in order to see a snapshot of the website in question. Clicking on the preview will take the user directly to the website.

Google explain that their new preview engine “matches a user’s query with an index of the entire web, identifies the relevant parts of each webpage, stitches them together and serves the resulting preview; completely customised to the user’s search and all under one-tenth of a second.”

Google have also incorporated ‘call-outs’, which highlight a user’s search terms within the website preview. Further to this, some previews will also utilise ‘tears’; a feature that highlights which parts of the website are most relevant to the user’s search whilst still providing a snapshot of the website in its complete form.

So what does this mean for SEO?

These new features has some large implications for Search Engine Optimisation as search engine users no longer need to click through to a website to decide if it is where they want to be. This seemingly small change on the Google results page has the ability to monumentally change the way in which people search online.

Google Instant Previews has one obvious implication – the more enticing your website, the more likely a searcher will visit it!

Don’t worry, I won’t leave you empty handed. Here is some advice from Google detailing how you can make Google Instant Preview work for you:

Keep your web pages simple with fewer distractions.
Keep interfering content to a minimum. Ad Pop-ups and other elements may come up in your page preview, making it less appealing.
Google Instant Previews has not changed Google’s algorithm, rankings or how clicks are tracked.
If you add the nosnippet meta tag to your pages, they won’t show a text snippet in Google’s results. Pages with the nosnippet tag also won’t show previews. Google advises against this because their studies showed that sites with previews were four times more likely to be clicked on. URLs that have been disallowed in the robots.txt file also won’t show Instant Previews.
Some videos and flash in previews are appearing as a ‘puzzle piece’ or a black square. Google is working on fixing this.

Google Instant preview for Organic Results makes you question ‘Will there be Instant Ad Previews?’ It’s still unclear but we’ll keep you updated.

Google Instant Demo Preview:

Popularity: 17%

Posted in Google | Tagged Google, Google Instant, Google Instant Preview, Instant preview | 1 Comment

2 November 2010

How to Convince Your Boss That Your Website Needs SEO

Are you sick of seeing your boss continually deflect potential marketing ideas that are preventing the business from growing?

Here are six tips to help you convince your boss that SEO should form a pivotal chunk of your marketing budget:

1. Scare Your Boss!

Ask your boss for 5 keywords or phrases that potential customers would use to find your company in a search engine. Then show the boss where your company is actually ranking for these keywords.

If your website is absent for these keywords, you might put forward the question “How are people going to find us then …the Yellow Pages?

If your boss hasn’t thrown you out the front door like a bouncer on a Saturday night after your first sarcastic question, the next step is to grade your website against competitors. Use two of your main competitors (do more than two if you like, generally your boss’s ego will not be able to handle this ass kicking!) and compare where you rank in comparison for your boss’s chosen keywords. If you want an overall SEO score, I suggest using the Reload Media iPhone App or the Website Grader from HubSpot.

Note: I can guarantee that you now have your boss’s attention! Now it’s time to sell him the benefits of SEO…

2. Quality Leads

Providing you have decided to implement SEO with a reputable company (yes, there are a lot of 2-bit dodgy brothers jobs out there), the strategic selection of keywords is of paramount importance. In layman’s terms, using a good SEO company to help choose the right keywords means that you can attract quality, high converting to your website.

Perfect keyword selection means that people who are searching for your products or services can find you easier in search engines for these keywords. This is why strategic keyword selection by a reputable SEO firm can actually delivery quality leads to your doorstep. It’s that easy!

3. Brand Perception

When was the last time you utilised the services of a company that you found on page 4 or 5 of Google results?

You’re right! Probably never! Searchers who are surfing the Google tidal wave of information automatically assume that the industry leaders are the firms that appear on the first page of Google. This means that if you and your boss want to be seen as leaders in your field, you’ll need to start thinking about getting some SEO done now!

4. Maximise Your Website Investment

Your boss more than likely dropped a sweet wad of cash on developing a fancy website. But what good is a website if it’s sitting out there in cyberspace getting no traffic, leads or enquiries? This is where SEO is the bee’s knees. SEO is a cost-effective way of driving traffic to your website. So tell your boss that having a website is step 1, driving traffic to it is step 2, and step 3 is sitting back and watching the leads and sales come in!

5. SEO is Low Cost

Depending on geographical scope and competition for your desired keywords, SEO is a low-cost investment when compared to other forms of marketing like Print Media and the Yellow Pages. When comparing traditional marketing to modern marketing, SEO gets the thumbs up because of its measurability. Through Google Analytics, you can track what a user has typed in or searched on to find your website. This data is invaluable as you can calculate your ROI (return on investment) from your SEO efforts. Your boss can actually see a ROI figure, meaning they will be less likely to keep turning SEO away!

6. Integrate Your Marketing

Is your boss pumping a large chunk of your marketing budget into TV, Radio, Magazines or Newspapers, but forgetting to integrate it online?

Studies show that a consumer is likely to go online and search for your product or service after seeing or hearing it through an offline marketing channel. So unless they remember your businesses name, they are going to be searching online for your products and services. If you are not ranking for these relevant search terms, your offline advertising efforts could be wasted! This is why your business must use an IMC (integrated marketing communication) approach for all forms of marketing.

Print this out, take it to the boss, and tell them why he or she needs SEO. If this doesn’t convince them, start your own business!

Add your tips below on how you think a boss can be convinced to implement SEO.

Popularity: 19%

Posted in SEO Tips | Tagged Importance of SEO, increase brand perception, integrate online marketing, Quality online leads, Search Engine Optimisation tips, SEO, SEO Tips, Why do i need SEO | Leave a comment

15 October 2010

Google PageRank

Most know of it, and many would have heard about it, but what is PageRank (PR)? How does it work? And how does it affect SEO?

Questions such as these are often asked to SEO experts and it’s important they are answered in the clearest possible sense.

What is PageRank?

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm named after Larry Page, co-founder of Google and involves assigning a numeric value to a page to represent how important it is on the web. It’s Google’s way of reflecting how important they believe a particular page is by considering over 500 million variables, 2 billion terms and the number of incoming links.

How does PageRank work?

Apart from considering variables and terms, PageRank takes into account how many incoming links a page has or as I’ll refer them to as, “votes”. Simply put, the more votes a page receives combined with the PageRank of those votes, the higher PageRank a page may receive. However other factors such as content (relevance) and visits to a page also influence PageRank but by how much is unknown. There are also other factors which contribute to improving PageRank but aren’t officially released.

How does PageRank affect SEO?

In the earlier days of SEO and PageRank, the higher PageRank you had, the higher your website would rank. However since then the web has evolved along with Google and their ideology of the web, the effect of PageRank on a websites ranking has reduced.

PageRank still contributes to where your website ranks however is far from the only factor. Therefore it should be considered lightly and used as an indicator only, as a range of other factors such as relevant content contributes to your websites rankings.

So what should I do next?

I won’t leave you empty handed so I’ll reiterate what I mentioned above and help you on your way with some helpful SEO tips:

Focus on factors such as relevant content and the quality of your incoming links.
Keep PageRank in mind as an indicator but focus on keyword rankings and traffic as they always tell the story.
If an SEO company or SEO expert advises you PageRank is extremely important to your SEO, they may have limited knowledge and it’s recommended you seek advice from a range of SEO companies first before proceeding.

Popularity: 16%

Posted in Google, SEO Tips | 2 Comments

Popular Posts

Categories

Authors

Blogroll

On Facebook

Linked In