On Internet Business

Google’s latest algorithms go after content farmers and bad online retailers

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, customer service, Entrepreneur Resources, Leadership, Online Retail, Paid Search, Search, Social Media

Back in December, the Google algorithm was tweaked to deal with a surreal business scenario that was played out through the search engine rankings of an American eyewear retailer, the pages of the New York Times and the number-crunching desks at Google HQ.

Bad Retailers Punished

Essentially, one online retailer had realised that its many extremely poor online reviews and customer comments were actually pushing it up the search engine pages. So (it is claimed) it made an explicit company policy of ill-treating customers and abusing them when the complained, so that they would make negative ‘flaming’ online reviews which served to put the company at the top of the Google searches again, and again, and again.

When the NY Times wrote about this bizarre scenario, the comments redoubled and the company made the top spot on Google … at which point the Google mavens decided to do something. They designed a substantial revision to the search algorithm that stopped negative reviews driving a company up the popularity ladder.  How they did it has not been made clear, and there are still some questions about whether businesses can use this tweak to drive down their competitors by posting false negative reviews to drop rivals back down the rankings. Even so, the tweak made many online retailers happy.

Content Farmers Cut Out

In February a new algorithm, nicknamed Farmer, came into play, and now we’re seeing the results. The familiar name is the clue – this algorithm goes after content farmers who regularly top searches with content that is either derived from other sources (aggregated) or just packed with keywords (spammy).  This is meant to give more content-heavy, original-material sites a chance to reach the top 2 or 3 position, ahead of some of the sites that exist purely to link content to paid-for ads in the hope the viewer will click on them.

Together, these new algorithms herald a substantially different future for online retailers and information providers – they attempt to stop bad retailers using their poor reputation as a search engine tool and they aim to stop content farmers clogging up search pages with keyword-rich but content-poor information.

For many online retailers this heralds a new opportunity – the chance to revamp their own content format to deliver quality information and good customer engagement, not just for its own sake, but because it’s worth competing for a first page ranking again. Or at least it is for now, until the farmers and cowboys work out how to beat this new system …

algorithm billboard courtesy of toastyken

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Google Seller ratings and the advent of customer/competitor terror campaigns

Posted by Michael under Mobile Search, Paid Search, Search

Google’s latest changes have created an environment that can spell disaster for online businesses that rely on Google ad words. It’s recently unveiled seller ratings which mean that advertisers using Google ad words will have a star rating and a link to a page showing customer feedback.

At first glance, this would appear to be fair and reasonable for both seller and potential buyer. But as the recent TripAdvisor debacle illustrated it is essential that the reviews are from bona fide customers.

No problem. After all, Google has a source of reviews and ratings from verified customers. But instead of using its own verified customer reviews from customers using Google checkout, it has instead started using review sites. In order to leave a review on these sites, you don’t have to have bought anything. This opens the whole situation up to abuse. One disgruntled customer can leave a host of bad reviews – in fact, anyone who doesn’t like you or your company can leave bad reviews.

According to Patrick Altoft, seller ratings have a direct impact on quality score. A few negative reviews, perhaps from a competitor and a seller’s cost per click increases. The seller is left to find a way of quickly getting positive reviews in order to control their marketing costs.

Google need to stop doing this and presumably as the feedback works through the system to show that this is not in either the buyer or the seller’s benefit, they will. In the meantime online sellers will need to put effort into ensuring that they have four or five star reviews on Google product search. As Altoft points out, don’t forget that masquerading as a customer and leaving a review of your own product or service is illegal.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

What Matters? Google Rank v Customer Feedback

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, customer service, Online Retail, Paid Search, Search

These are such different animals that at first you might not think to compare them, but I come across business people who have strong belief systems that incline them to rely on one or the other.

• The Google Rank Guys – these tend to be start-ups and online entrepreneurs who’ve grown up in a world of online commerce and focus on the grail of getting the best possible Google rank. They have a point – if you’re the best business the world it won’t do you much good unless people know your name and can access your services and these days that’s an online process.
• The Customer Feedback Fans – this business ideology says that if you have a great reputation you can grow your business organically, without worrying about what Google (and the other search engines) are doing with your online presence. They have a point too – long term gains from good customer relations are not just a way of keeping your business in the public eye, they are a way of learning what your customers want so you’re in the right place to provide it.

One thing we’ve seen in recent years is Customer Terrorism. If one in a thousand customers has a bad experience with you, they will share their experience a thousand times more loudly and widely than the 999 who had a good experience. Counteracting customer terrorism requires a two pronged approach: engaging that customer, and the people they’ve reached out too is one side of the equation, but the other is to maintain your investment in Google and other rankings so that the rant of complaint doesn’t feature as the top hit when your brand is entered as a search term. This is crucial management of reputation which companies need to have as a focus, if they are to survive the occasional blip of a bad customer experience going viral.

There’s a risk to over-reliance on Google too, which is that failing to build customer retention can leave you exposed to failure if your Google rank drops, which it can do for no obvious reason. It’s a poor strategy that builds a business on one supporting structure.

We use the NPS framework to help us evaluate how we’re doing and monitor recency, frequency and average order value to give us metrics that show how our regular customers are changing their relationship to us. This tells us about ourselves and our place in the market, but it also shows trends in the market as a whole, which then gives us a chance to respond to global changes swiftly and professionally, meeting client needs without compromising on quality or service.

Google doodle courtesy of dannysullivan

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Making Pay Per Click work for you

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Paid Search

There are good and bad sides to pay per click marketing. If you’re new to the PPC world or need a refresher in how to do it well, here are the good and bad parts of PPC.

PPC explained

It’s a simple concept – Google, Yahoo and other search engines and search services will offer listings on a bid basis. These listings appear either above, or to the right of, the ‘natural’ search results which are generated by a complicated blend of website keywords, link popularity and other elements. Each search engine has a algorithm that calculates natural search results but pay per click results always appear, regardless of the quality of your site or links, as long as you’ve bid enough for the keyword that generates the search results.

Depending on how much you pay, you will be the first ranking site in the paid listings or further down. Obviously, the big brands can pay more to make sure they always hog the top spot on popular words, so it’s worth finding search terms that are relevant to your business and used in searches.

When somebody clicks on a pay per click listing, they land at your site, and then you are charged the amount that you bid for your listing. So if you bid 10 pence per click on ‘shrubs’ and 100 people click on your pay per click listing, the search engine (or a PPC service that you’re using) will charge you £10.00

Obviously then, you need to ensure your bids generate enough income to cover their charges and then some! You don’t want to just be servicing a PPC campaign, you want it to generate substantial income.

Good reasons to use PPC

The good stuff is very good indeed:

1) It can drive a lot of traffic to your site
2) It happens in as little as a few minutes – unlike natural searches which can take a while and require you to do a lot of work on SEO and content to reach the top of the rankings, your bidding can put you top and drive traffic within half an hour of signing up
3) You have to write a good advert, but that’s easier than writing a similarly good website
4) PPC campaigns can be adjusted swiftly – it can take weeks for natural searches to adjust to new content, but a PPC campaign can be tweaked in a couple of minutes
5) If you are selling goods or services that people can buy the second they arrive, like insurance, gifts, an appointment with a therapist … anything that sells immediately out of an online storefront, PPC generates immediate income
6) Using PPC as a focused tool for a short term campaign can generate more income than anything else.

PPC goes wrong for reasons that are not always understood by businesses but the bad stuff is avoidable if you understand it:

1) PPC is a risk and should be treated as one, not as a guaranteed reward system
2) If you don’t manage it well, you can spend a lot of money on creating a high number of visitors but still end up without income generation
3) Getting involved in automatic bid management (as you can opt for with several systems) can mean that every time a competitor bids up, you do too, without necessarily knowing it’s happening, and that means you can end up paying a lot more than you intended
4) Return on investment can be hard to understand if you don’t devote enough time to exploring the analytics you get back, or if your service doesn’t provide good enough analytics to understand what works, when, and why
5) PPC doesn’t seem to drive long term brand recognition as well as natural search does.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Why Paid Search Campaigns Matter

Posted by Michael under Paid Search

Microsoft undertook some research late in 2008 that revealed that nearly 60% of all small businesses that had a website didn’t also have a paid search campaign. Paid search frightens small businesses because they have to ‘bid’ on words with the biggest players in the market and that feels a bit like setting up your market stall outside Tescos – but there are good reasons for investing in paid search, especially if you have a marketing strategy that uses bursts such as spring collections of clothing or sportswear or Christmas or holiday related products – in those cases, as well as in creating brand awareness, paid search is an unparalleled tool.

To get value from a paid search campaign you need to measure you success by understanding the return on your investment – ROI. If you’re aim is to build brand awareness, then simply increasing traffic to your site may be all you care about, but if you want sales, you need to ensure that the increase in traffic is also an increase in conversions. Don’t just assume that the paid search is the bit that needs tweaking though – perhaps your website or your customer service is failing to pull through visitors and convert them to buyers/users.

Ensure you understand paid search

The mistake many small businesses make is to invest only in the most popular, and therefore most expensive, words. This puts you in direct competition with the biggest spenders for one thing, and for another, isn’t necessarily going to maximise your conversions. You might want to bid on chocolate, for example, but if you get fifty visitors who type in chocolate and miss out on three hundred who were searching for party favours, you’ve failed to understand your product and the marketplace.

Integrate paid search

Paid search alone won’t do the job – you also need good SEO, an excellent website that is easy for the customer (and not just Google) to navigate, and good customer service if people choose to pick up the phone or send you an email, because consumers are now wise to empty promises, and many test companies by exploring the whole structure of the organisation, not just the website. They’ll also check you out on social media. Integration allows you to present a seamless professional face in all these directions and it’s not as hard as it sounds.

Master Analytics

If you discover a percentage of your visitors come from Finland, or that many of them visit a specific page on your site, use that information, provided by analytics to increase your attractiveness to the consumer. If you ignore this kind of learning it’s like walking away from the till when a customer approaches to pay for something.

Don’t be cynical

Consumers expect a company to match up to the words it bids on. Don’t bid on cashmere if all you sell is viscose. Don’t lure people to your site with the claim that you have global travel insurance if you only cover Europe. They may land but they will soon fly away again, and they will spread the word about your cynical approach to customers across the internet.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

How a website can please a search engine

Posted by Michael under Paid Search, Search

Understanding what a search engine needs to put your business at the top of the search table is vital if you want to have any kind of online business. We’ve talked about the way Google Caffeine might change the way businesses look at their SEO tactics, but the basics remain the same.

Here’s a quick rundown of what the major search engines do, bearing in mind that the developers don’t just hand out details of the algorithms that decide the search rankings.  If they did, SEO experts would be able to use them to design websites that matched the algorithm perfectly!

Google

Leaving aside the alterations that Google Caffeine will bring to the SEO business, the standard Google-courting system will still apply.

Google is the Emperor of SEO and there are a lot of SEO practitioners who base their service package entirely on getting a site higher up the Google rankings. And it is simple to state the basic Google need – content, content and more content. Pages that appeal to the Google algorithm have three main attributes in terms of content: they are easy to find, they are coherent (clearly written and logical) and they have high information content.

Google also responds positively incoming links from other relevant websites. It treats each link as a ‘vote in favour’ of the relevance of your site, and that pushes your page up the results ranking.

Technically, it’s vital that your site is easy to navigate – Google is the search engine that is most like a person, it responds to clear linking. This means that you need to have at least one static link that points to every page of your site to satisfy the Google algorithm as well as the actual visitor.

Bing

Is not new, despite the vast amount of advertising that seems to suggest it is. It’s a revamp and rename of Microsoft’s old Live Search – it’s been much more heavily promoted in the USA than in the UK, especially through hotmail and the MSN pages. A couple of interesting features are that Bing ‘makes sense’ of its search results by organising them into helpful categories, rather like the Clusty search engine so beloved of journalists (but perhaps not loved by many others as it’s not become a credible rival to the big three) because it allows them to exclude searches that don’t meet their needs when tracking down leads in a hurry. Bing also broadens a user search by offering related search terms that – it says – will increase the likelihood of a searcher finding what they are looking for.

To please Bing, you can use the same algorithm tactics as for Google i.e. relevant and popular content provision, but it does seem that Bing is predisposed to give a higher rank to websites that have the search word in the URL – so, as an example, websites that have ‘cruise’ in their URL rank about some others that are more content rich but are simply cruise company name URLs

Yahoo!

SEO used to take account of Yahoo! But now that its search engine is going to be powered by Bing, there’s no differentiation in tactics for these two engines.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

The Top 5 Most Popular Blog Posts

Posted by Michael under Paid Search, Social Media

Popularity is the professional blogger’s bread and butter, but knowing how you stack up against the vast and far reaching competition can be a huge task. That’s where Technorati comes in with their new Authority application. Authority tracks the success of a blog post or article by charting the number of links it has generated in the past six months, thus finding out exactly how big the waves your blog is making really are.

The top 5 blog posts of the moment according to Technorati Authority are -

Obama’s First 100 Days: The Good, the Bad, and the Geithner by Arianna Huffington

It’s unsurprising that analysis and scrutiny of the most headline grabbing US President in history should feature highly in blog rankings. Obama’s campaign, unique in its resonance with young people, has generated countless searches, articles and conversations across the internet like no political event before or since, and The Huffington Post’s powerful online presence has put it squarely at the forefront of the debate. This article sees Arianna Huffington dissect the good, bad and ugly of Obama’s seminal first 100 days in office, with statistics, opinion and analysis.

Technorati Authority: 25,920

Jew Haters Welcome At Facebook, As Long As They Aren’t Lactating by Michael Arrington

This article’s effects spread like wildfire across the internet, making print headlines and national news here in the UK, and abroad. Discussing Facebook’s dubious allowance of groups dedicated to Holocaust denial and vitriolically anti-Semitic sentiment, Arrington presents damning evidence of how these groups contravene Facebook’s own rulebook. A cutting tirade, this well researched and wittily put post made a serious impact in exposing the darker side of the most popular social networking site of the moment.

em>Technorati Authority: 14,922

Engadget’s recession antidote: win a pair of tickets to attend the Google I/O Developer Conference! by Laura June

Everyone loves a freebie, and when it’s coming from your favourite blog they know exactly what prizes will make you tick. Engadget holds firm as one of the biggest hitters in consumer technology blogging, and here used their considerable sway amongst the world of technology to give away an impressive prize in the form of tickets to one of the tech events of the year. The tickets are all gone, but this exercise in the internet feeding frenzy shows just how well a site can reap rewards with a little generosity.

Technorati Authority: 14,723

Ex-drug czar John Walters made a fool on CNN by Mark Frauenfelder

Boing Boing, the site on which this blog was posted, have a knack for spotting what their readers want. Hooked into the net-savvy audience, their eye for a story on almost any topic is often uncanny. This article simply presents a video and an outside link, showing a CNN interview on an always popular and controversial topic among internet users – illegal drugs. Simply marrying a pertinent article to a well sourced video piece means this trusted blog grabs readership and generates huge debate, with virtually no need to create their own original content.

Technorati Authority: 11,544

Facebook’s Tolerance of Holocaust Denial Won’t Last by Pete Cashmore

Michael Arrington’s post may have sparked the debate, but the world of blogs leaves much room for both new media style and a traditional journalistic approach. In this article, Cashmore applies a more professional voice and collects some of the most pertinent information on the topic. Collecting opinion from both sides of the censorship debate, the article provokes much thought and delves deeper into the repercussions for Facebook and its users.

Technorati Authority: 9,929

Find out more on Technorati Authority via the Technorati Blog

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

SES London 2009 Review

Posted by Michael under Paid Search, SEO Conferences and Exhibitions

SES London is still the pre-eminent UK search marketing conference.  Overall SES London is still useful if you are involved in Search but the really useful “nuggets” seem to be fewer and further apart,

The good

The presentations I enjoyed were:

1. Rob Pierre, Managing Director, Jellyfish

Advanced Paid Search Techniques

This was a really interesting and rather technical presentation on advanced methodologies for paid search campaign management.

He showed by having each keyword in all 3 match types how to make the campaign as targeted as possible. The essence of his methodology was to ensure that each keyword was associated with the most targeted ad copy possible and the most relevant landing page on the website.

The interesting part for me was how he used negative matching of keywords to ensure the correct ad text and landing page were shown. For example he would negative match on a brand term such as Sony to ensure that a search for digital camera would display a more general ad text and landing page.

2. Nick Seckold Head of Search, MindShare

Advanced Paid Search Techniques

Nick Seckold in his presentation weighed up the Value of Automated Bid Management Tools. With the popularity of bid management tools and the huge claims being made by some of the vendors, it was useful to hear about the reality of using bid management tools to manage a PPC campaign.

3. Pete Wailes, Managing Director, Searchlight Digital

Advanced Paid Search Techniques

In his presentation Pete should how Taguchi Arrays can be used to improve PPC testing. Genichi Taguchi developed statistical methods originally to improve the quality of manufactured goods. The benefit of his method is that it allows multivariate tests to generate usable data, without having to run every possible combination.

This allows PPC copy, landing pages and other factors all to be tested in one go.

The Bad

Search Advertising Tools

Maybe he was badly briefed but the session was supposed to be about “a range of popular search engine advertising tools.“

In this session Mike Chowney banged on about how good Kenshoo is !

Maybe it’s just me but when a speaker gets up at conference and shamelessly plugs their own product it really gets my goat. I have paid up to £995 per person for my ecommerce team to be at the conference. Do I really want to pay to hear your sales spiel ? I think not.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites