Web Search & Marketing Newsletter – October 2016

Welcome to the latest monthly issue of our regular newsletter which features news, tips and advice on effective website marketing, with a particular focus on search engine marketing techniques and trends.

In the first article this month we look at Google’s recent release of the long awaited Penguin 4. This should be interesting to SEO practitioners and webmasters who are keen to keep up-to-date with Google Search ranking algorithms and how those may impact their websites’ rankings.

We also look at the major changes to Google’s Keyword Planner, which is used by many SEO and AdWords professionals but is likely to be less so, as its data becomes less detailed. Finally this month, we look at the demo Analytics account that’s been made available by Google. This should be useful for businesses, or users who want to become more familiar with the full range of reports and data sets.

You can read more below, or you can also browse through previous editions of the newsletter by month. You can also follow us on Twitter for the latest developments during the month, or follow our Facebook page or Google+ page for updates.

On to this month’s edition…

Google Releases Penguin 4

In a significant development for SEO practitioners and webmasters who are keen to keep up-to-date with Google Search ranking algorithms, Google finally released it long anticipated Penguin 4 at the end of September. Notably, the ongoing updates to this algorithm will now be on a real time basis, so that search results will be continually reviewed and adjusted based on the core Penguin criteria.

The so-called Google ‘Penguin’ algorithm update was first announced in April 2012. The update was aimed at decreasing the search engine rankings of websites that violate Google’s guidelines by using ‘black-hat’ SEO techniques to artificially increase the ranking of a web page, particularly by manipulating the number of links pointing to the page through unscrupulous techniques and using poor quality websites.

We’ve covered the Google Penguin algorithm in previous issues of this newsletter, such as in October 2015. At that time we reported that Google was struggling to solve the issue of making the Penguin algorithm run in real time, which had been a “hard problem” for them. This caused its release to be frequently delayed, so the last official update was Penguin 3.0, which took place in October 2014, although since then there have been numerous updates to that algorithm to continually refine and improve the quality of the search results.

So the latest release of Penguin 4 has been an eagerly awaited development, but it only really means that changes in the rankings will be visible much faster, typically taking effect shortly after a page has been re-crawled and re-indexed. Historically, the list of sites affected by Penguin was periodically refreshed at the same time. Once a Webmaster considerably improved their site and its presence on the Internet, many of Google’s algorithms would take that into consideration very quickly, but others, like Penguin, needed to be refreshed. With this change, Penguin’s data is now refreshed in real time, so the ranking changes will be seen more quickly.

Another element of its release is that Penguin now devalues spam by adjusting ranking based on spam signals, rather than affecting ranking of the whole site. That raises the question that if Penguin no longer penalises spam links to a site, is it still necessary to use a disavow file to help recover from Penguin issues? (A disavow file is used by Penguin penalised Webmasters in particular, who want to disavow or ‘annul’ links to their site that Google feels are unnatural and just used for ranking purposes. It allows them to flag and remove links that ‘somehow’ pointed to their site and were previously hard to disassociate from).

Google’s Gary Illyes has said that “specifically there’s less need” to use the disavow file for Penguin, but he added “you can help us help you by using it. So, in a nutshell, it seems Google Penguin no longer penalises sites or specific pages, but rather just ignores/devalues the spammy links and so the rankings are adjusted in that way and not demoted, which should make Webmasters “happier”, but Illyes also said that “manual actions are still there, so if we see that someone is systematically trying to spam, the manual actions team might take a harsher action against the site.”

If you want more information about how Penguin 4 may impact your site’s rankings, contact us now for details.

Major Changes to Google’s Keyword Planner

A favourite Google tool is the Keyword Planner – originally known as the Google Keyword Tool – which is used by many SEO and AdWords professionals to research the keywords being used on Google. However, access to this tool has recently undergone some significant changes, the main one being that it’s now necessary to have an active Google AdWords account to access the full data available to users.

The Keyword Planner is a free AdWords tool for advertisers to enable users to build new search campaigns in AdWords or to expand existing ones, but it’s just as useful to identify the best search terms to target through an SEO campaign. It’s possible to search for keyword and adgroup ideas, see how a list of keywords might perform, and create a new keyword list by multiplying several lists of keywords together.

Amongst other changes introduced fairly recently is that now, instead of showing individual search volume estimates for each keyword or keyword phrase, Google has decided it would be better to lump all of that data together. So even though the keywords ‘SEO’ and ‘search engine optimisation’ are two different search variants, Google displays the search volume for both as the same. So while you might think that each keyword or keyword phrase has unique figures for its searches per month, Google actually adds these two terms’ results, to display the combined total for both.

It’s worth noting that the Google Keyword Planner’s figures have never been 100% accurate and this combined figure means that the tool is even less reliable than it used to be. As well as lumping data together, which can be an inaccurate way to perform keyword research or estimate search volumes for a Google Adwords campaign and it’s been speculated by some that there might be additional keywords included in with this data, completely skewing accurate estimates. This is why experienced SEO professionals use other premium tools, like Moz and SEMRush.

In summary, the Google Keyword Planner is now combining:

• Plurals with non-plurals for any word in the keyword phrase
• Some acronyms with longhand version (e.g. ‘SEO’ and ‘search engine optimisation’)
• Stemming variants: -er, -ing, -ized, -ed etc keywords (ie. designer, designing, designed)
• Words that can be spelled with or without space (ie. car park and carpark)
• Words with and without punctuation (ie. kid toys and kid’s toys)

These aren’t always the case however, as ‘Christmas Day’ and ‘Xmas Day’ have different search volume results, which means that while Google is combining some data together, that’s not a hard and fast rule across the board.

The other main change to the Keyword Planner is access. You would need to have an AdWords account to have full access to the data available from this tool, but not necessarily an active one, although this has now changed so that the data is more limited unless you are running an actively spending AdWords account. Although the spend is not necessarily high, it does mean that users do need to be spending money on AdWords for at least several weeks before being able to see the keyword data, which will otherwise be shown with some broad and fairly meaningless number ranges.

If you want to know more about how we can help your business succeed through essential keyword research, contact us now for details.

Google Makes Demo Account Available in Analytics

In a recent move to help Analytics users become more familiar with the full range of reports and data sets, Google has introduced a demo account of a real website – their Merchandise Store – which can be included into any Analytics account and viewed with all the active data.

Google has introduced this demo account as another learning tool for people wanting to get a better understanding and more familiarity with the Analytics reports and interface, and possibly in a roundabout way, promoting their merchandise store to shift more product! However, it’s a significant new development that anyone with an Analytics account can access and work through.

Many Analytics users may only be running websites with low traffic volumes or with features that are not relevant to their situation, so the new demo account can provide reports with some high traffic volumes and potentially new or different settings in place, including ecommerce tracking data. Google has therefore decided to open this information out to anyone, and reveal what many companies would see as confidential information.

To access the demo account you can start here and click on the demo link once you are logged into your Analytics account, and this will import the Merchandise Store account / property, containing 3 views (although these are all reporting the same data at present, so all are using the same filters). There is linked AdWords and Search Console data showing, site search information and of course goals, events and ecommerce data, so a full array of reports.

You can also view real time data, access a number of preset dashboards and save shortcuts or set up or import custom reports from the Analytics Solutions Gallery. Of course, access is read only, so you can only view settings and not make any changes, but it’s a welcome tool to have a good look around lots of reports with plenty of data and to use all the different functions available.

There’s a good blog post here by Avinash Kaushik that helps you review some of the key areas of the demo account, which you can then translate across to your own data and hopefully find new ways to review and interpret your own website’s performance.

If you’d like more information or help with the Analytics demo account, please get in touch.

We hope you’ve found this month’s newsletter useful. As usual, if you have any questions or need help with any of these items, please contact us if you need any more information on the items covered, or our advice on any aspect of your website’s performance.

Welcome to the latest monthly issue of our regular newsletter which features news, tips and advice on effective website marketing, with a particular focus on search engine marketing techniques and trends.

In the first article this month, we look at Google’s decision to retire “Converted clicks” from AdWords later this month to focus on ‘Conversions’. This should interest any business that’s running an AdWords campaign, or any search marketing managers, as this is a significant development for the way in which conversions will be recorded in the future.

In another AdWords development, we highlight the long-awaited and welcome return of device bid adjustments to AdWords campaigns and how this feature can be used to control bids and ranking positions separately for desktop, mobile and tablet devices. This is great improvement in the ability to manage AdWords campaigns more effectively.

Finally this month, we examine how anchor text should be used in links as part of an effective SEO strategy, but how they need to be handled with some caution. This is important information for SEO practitioners as the correct use of these can improve search ranking performance.

You can read more below, or you can also browse through previous editions of the newsletter by month. You can also follow us on Twitter for the latest developments during the month, or follow our Facebook page or Google+ page for updates.

On to this month’s edition…

‘Converted Clicks’ To Be Retired From AdWords

Conversion tracking was introduced to AdWords in the early days, as an important way to measure what happened after someone clicked on an ad. The ability to know whether or not people completed a desired action on a site meant that it was possible to determine which keywords, ads and campaigns were the most effective. However, the original “Converted Clicks” conversion measurement metric was very basic, as it simply reported on whether an ad click led to any type of action on a site. Therefore Google has now decided to retire this metric later this month, with “Conversions” becoming the default way to measure valuable actions for a business.

In the 15 years since the introduction of conversion tracking, multiple improvements have been made to measuring and attributing conversions. The “Conversions” metric now offers the full picture of how many conversions AdWords drives for a business and is the best way to track these valuable actions. The advantage of “Conversions” over “Converted Clicks” is that only the former can measure behaviour that spans multiple conversion events, or multiple clicks. It can also track important, non-last-click attribution models, different counting options and mobile-centric actions, like cross-device conversions and store visits. The significant cross-device conversion numbers will be included in the “Conversions” column in AdWords from this month.

If you are already using the “Conversions” metric for reporting and bidding, then no action is required. However, if Target CPA or Enhanced CPC is being used and the primary bid metric is set to “Converted Clicks”, that should be updated to “Conversions” by September 21st and there should be a warning message and email sent to accounts using this technique.

Proper conversion counting is vital, and it’s something that’s imperative to get right as online behaviour evolves. This change is therefore a welcome and timely decision by Google, and the new metric will enable businesses to more precisely track how well AdWords keywords, ads and campaigns are producing leads and sales.

If you need to update your conversion figures, there are a few points to consider, which can be found here. If you want to know more about how this change could impact your AdWords campaigns, contact us now for more details.

Device Bid Adjustments Return to AdWords

In another development for AdWords, Google has just announced the introduction of device wide bid adjustments at the campaign level, which gives the advertiser more flexibility in controlling bids and ranking positions across all devices – desktop, mobile and tablet.

Prior to Google’s introduction of ‘Enhanced’ AdWords campaigns in 2013, it had been possible to create separate campaigns by device and bid separately for each (or block ads from appearing on a particular device). Google then stopped that option and all campaigns had to target all device types, with only an option to modify bid levels on mobile devices.

Earlier this year Google announced that bid adjustments would be introduced for all types of device, and this has just been rolled out to all AdWords accounts. It is therefore now available in the campaign settings (if All Features is selected), so that the default bid level can be adjusted up or down by each of the 3 device types, depending on results being achieved.

This new feature allows advertisers to review campaign metrics and performance by device and adjust bids accordingly from -100% (which would turn the ads off on a device) to +900%, so there is quite a range of bid options available. However, it’s best to maintain some level of coverage across all devices and optimise the bid levels based on historical data and conversion tracking results (CPA – Cost Per Acquisition).

Keeping a campaign active across all devices still retains the efficiency of enhanced campaigns, but also allows advertisers to continue to target all devices in the most effective way, on the basis that many searchers will use different devices for their needs and at different times of the day. You can also use manual or automated bidding (if you have at least 50 conversions in the past 30 days) to try to improve the targeting of your spend.

This is certainly a great improvement and opportunity to manage AdWords campaigns more effectively and to direct spend to the most effective devices, based on past performance and expected searcher behaviour. You can read Google’s Best Practices about bid adjustments, or contact us now for more information about how this can help your AdWords campaigns.

Using Anchor Text in Links

When thinking about links as part of an SEO strategy, the use of anchor text has always been an important consideration and something that Google uses to determine search engine rankings. That remains true today, but needs to be handled with some caution.

‘Anchor text’ describes the visible, clickable words used in a hyperlink that point to another page or website. These words have always been used by Google in varying degrees as a ranking factor, so that the page where the link points will gain some ranking benefit from the anchor text in the link, whether it may be an exact match (such as ‘adwords training‘) or a partial match term (such as ‘best adwords training courses in Sydney‘).

It can still be possible for a web page to rank for a search phrase that isn’t used on the page, but is contained in links pointing to that page. Recent research continues to show a strong correlation between the keywords in the anchor text of links, and ranking performance.

However, it should also be noted that although keyword use in anchor text can have a positive impact on rankings, it can also take on a negative effect if there is an overuse of keyword rich anchors using the same term, so that there should ideally be a variety of anchor text used across multiple links to a website. The use of too many anchor text links with the same phrase can be seen by Google as a sign of link manipulation and may incur link penalties, such as those seen from the ‘Penguin’ update in 2012.

Using links between pages on your own website is a good way of controlling anchor text (such as in navigation buttons or body content) and thinking about key search phrases as well as relevant content that helps the user navigate around your website. Using text links that say ‘click here’ or ‘read more’ is not ideal, if the link can be used behind some content that is also relevant to the target page the link is pointing to.

External links from a variety of sites are also still an important ranking factor and using a range of anchor text content is also advisable. It’s also good practice to get external links pointing to pages within a site, as well as to the home page, with relevant anchor text terms.

If you review your Google Search Console reports, the ‘Links to your site’ report includes one showing how your website content is linked by anchor text, and whether the terms or phrases have a good relevancy to your content and your ranking aspirations.

If you’d like more information about the use of anchor text as part of a link building strategy, please get in touch.

We hope you’ve found this month’s newsletter useful. As usual, if you have any questions or need help with any of these items, please contact us if you need any more information on the items covered, or our advice on any aspect of your website’s performance.

Welcome to the latest monthly issue of our regular newsletter which features news, tips and advice on effective website marketing, with a particular focus on search engine marketing techniques and trends.

In the first article this month we look at Google’s recent release of price extensions for mobile AdWords ads. This should be interesting to AdWords managers who are keen to promote products and services with prices in the first position on Google’s mobile search results.

We also look at some helpful tips on how to boost video rankings through both invisible and visible ranking factors. This should be useful for SEO practitioners who focus on improving their video rankings on both YouTube and the Google organic search results.

Finally this month, we look at the purchase of Yahoo by US telecoms giant Verizon and how it intends to turn around Yahoo’s recent second quarter loss of $440m by focusing on its brands and large existing user-base through digital advertising.

You can read more below, or you can also browse through previous editions of the newsletter by month. You can also follow us on Twitter for the latest developments during the month, or follow our Facebook page or Google+ page for updates.

On to this month’s edition…

New AdWords Price Extensions Introduced

Google has recently released a new ad extension, for prices, so that additional information can show with mobile text ads that includes the cost of services and products. This is a useful addition that allows advertisers to showcase some of their range in the search results.

These new price extensions show as multiple rows and provide valuable information to prospective customers before they click on the ad. Each row features a type of product or service, its description and price, and a link to a relevant landing page. This structured way of highlighting information makes it easier for people to compare their options and decide if they’re interested in the products or services, right from the mobile search results page.

Google claims that the addition of these price extensions can increase the CTR by as much as 18%. Also, by highlighting the price of a service or product it may encourage people to call directly from the search results, without needing to visit the website and therefore incurring a cost per click.

For time-sensitive offers like promotions, it’s possible to create multiple price extensions with corresponding start and end dates to ensure the prices remain accurate. There must be a minimum of three entries for each extension, and up to a maximum of eight.

This is an appealing addition by Google, but the catch is that price extensions will only show with mobile text ads that are in position 1. It’s highly likely that the introduction of these will lead to an increase in the average cost-per-click for that position, as demand and competition increases for that top spot, especially in peak shopping periods such as the lead up to Christmas. So the best practice we’d recommend for these is to have them running only for very short periods during special promotions.

If want more information about how these price extensions in AdWords could help your business, contact us now.

Video Content Optimisation Tips

This article provides helpful information on the best practices to boost video rankings and should be interesting for any SEO practitioners who need to focus on video search results. It’s divided into two sections: invisible and visible ranking factors.

Google’s YouTube is the second largest search engine on the Internet. It offers a wide range of management features and even provides its own comprehensive analytics dashboard to help channel managers determine the value of their content. These functions, together with the close link with Google, help it to achieve a competitive advantage over other platforms, like Vimeo or Vine and attract more users by doing do.

Any company that produces video content therefore has the opportunity to attract video views and website visits from this content, either directly from YouTube or from the integrated video results that sometimes appear in Google’s search rankings. However, to achieve this visibility, video content owners need to consider the following ranking factors:

Invisible Ranking Factors

• Video Filename – Use a descriptive video filename as well as hyphens between words
• Meta Tags – Research the popular search keywords before tagging your video and use the relevant tags, with 10 or less keywords per video. Also don’t use the same keywords you used in your title and description as ‘tag-stuffing’ can get your video removed
• Watch Time – Create descriptive and emotional video thumbnails as well as a compelling introduction, then build up interest throughout the video with programming, branding, and packaging techniques. It’s good to use annotations in the video and links in the description to encourage users to view more content on your website, and then encourage comments and participation to get users involved and to keep them interested
• Flags/Reports – Make sure you follow the Community Guidelines and if you feel that your video was wrongly flagged, appeal the removal.

Visible Ranking Factors

• Title – Write a descriptive, relevant title using appropriate search keywords, and limit titles to 100 characters with the main keywords towards the front of your title for better SEO value
• Description – Include keywords here as well but be aware of the first 157 visible characters. Describe the video without giving away too much information amd provide a clear ‘call to action’ link to on-site content
• Transcripts, Subtitles and Captions – Your channel name, icon, banner and vanity URL should reflect your brand. Remember to fill in the channel keywords and targeting, plus the channel description and social links.
• Quality – Make sure that you focus on delivering the best content possible (preferably in HD), ensure that the audio is comprehensive and of cousre the picture should be clear and not blurry or out of focus!
• Engagement – Use any and all channels to get people to watch your videos and measure your views/engagement with analytics. Promote the video and moderate comments to ensure quality and recency of engagement, and respond to people who are commenting
• Inbound Links and Embeds – Utilize any and all marketing and PR channels to build links to the channel and videos, with a focus on your best content because it will naturally attract links. Remember to also embed videos on your site or blog to build up views and engagement
• Social Shares – Set up social buttons on your website to make it easy for users to share across networks and encourage your followers to share your content.

As shown above, there are close similarities between the techniques for optimising videos as there are for web pages. If they are correctly implemented, they will result in a better focus on YouTube’s priorities and a business channel that has a greater potential to rank content well.

You can read more about these tips here or if you want to know more about how we can help you to improve your video rankings, contact us now for more information.

Verizon to Buy Yahoo For US$5bn

At the end of July it was announced that US Internet firm Yahoo is to be acquired by American telecoms giant Verizon Communications for nearly US$5bn. Yahoo was once a market leader in the early days of the web, but has slowly dwindled in recent years and will now be combined with AOL, another faded Internet star, which Verizon bought last year.

The price tag for the deal is well below the $44bn Microsoft offered for Yahoo in 2008, or the $125bn it was worth during the dot.com boom around 2000, when Yahoo and its directory were popular destinations on the growing web. Verizon said the deal for Yahoo’s core Internet business, which has more than a billion active users a month, would make it a global mobile media company.

Marissa Mayer, chief executive of Yahoo, who took the helm at Yahoo in 2012 but who has made little progress in returning the company to profit, said: “Yahoo is a company that has changed the world, and will continue to do so through this combination with Verizon and AOL.” In late July, the firm reported a $440m loss in the second quarter, but she said the board had made “great progress on strategic alternatives”.

The takeover however, which is due to be completed in early 2017, raises questions about whether the Yahoo brand could disappear. Together, AOL and Yahoo will have more than 25 brands, including Yahoo Mail, the photo sharing service Flickr, Tumblr as well as AOL’s Huffington Post and Techcrunch news sites. AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong said the deal was about “unleashing Yahoo’s full potential”, and creating a major player in mobile media.

Beyond the talk of becoming a global media company, Verizon chief executive Lowell McAdams wants a larger share of the booming digital advertising pie. He thinks this deal will help him and, as a leading US mobile phone network, Verizon already had a wealth of data from smartphone users that it could mine. Its purchase of AOL a year ago for its programmatic advertising technology allowed it to leverage that more effectively. Yahoo, meanwhile, has struggled to build its mobile advertising business.

So its appeal is that it has content. With Yahoo, Verizon gains the Internet company’s 600 million monthly active mobile users, as well as its email service, Yahoo Finance, and Tumblr, which are popular among the latest generation of users. The idea is for Verizon to take on Google and Facebook. In 2015, these latter two claimed the largest share of the digital ad market. Whether or not Verizon can compete with them, and overcome the trouble Yahoo had building its mobile advertising business, will be interesting to see. It certainly will be a significant challenge.

If you would like more information about the Yahoo takeover, please contact us now.

We hope you’ve found this month’s newsletter useful. As usual, if you have any questions or need help with any of these items, please contact us if you need any more information on the items covered, or our advice on any aspect of your website’s performance.

Welcome to the latest monthly issue of our regular newsletter which features news, tips and advice on effective website marketing, with a particular focus on search engine marketing techniques and trends.

In the first article this month we look at Google’s recent announcement of the largest change to AdWords in years with Expanded Text Ads, which will allow search marketers to promote their products or USPs in more detail.

We also look at how caution should be taken when receiving emails about link schemes that could improve a website’s organic rankings – both from the recipients perspective and for prospective link builders. Finally, we look at how Microsoft is to buy LinkedIn for US$26bn and what it means for the shareholders of both companies, as well as the market as a whole.

On a separate matter this month, we’re delighted to announce that we have just been given the status of a Premier Google AdWords Partner, which recognises Web Marketing Workshop UK as ‘one of their most valued agencies’. Google says that this new badge is designed to recognize Partners who manage a substantial portfolio of Google advertising campaigns and deliver great results for their customers.

You can read more below, or you can also browse through previous editions of the newsletter by month. You can also follow us on Twitter for the latest developments during the month, or follow our Facebook page or Google+ page for updates.

On to this month’s edition…

Google AdWords Rolls Out Expanded Text Ads

Google recently announced the largest change to AdWords in years – the format of text ads is changing. According to Google, this new format – known as Expanded Text Ads – has delivered clickthrough rates up to 20% higher compared to existing test ads, during their tests.

The most prominent feature of the change is an increased character length in the headline from 25 to 60, over two headlines. This will enable advertisers to maximise the space on mobile, desktop and tablet devices to promote products and services. The description lines, which currently consist of two lines of 35 characters each, will be merged into one, with 80 characters (inc. spaces). This increase from 95 characters to 140 characters in the headline and description combined is a significant one, with almost a 50% increase.

This new ad format reflects the recent change where Google moved all AdWords ads in line with the organic search results (with no ads being shown in a right hand column any more) and therefore Google wants to display the ads in a way that look more like the traditional organic results. The roll-out of this new format is currently limited but is expected to appear as standard ads on Google.com (USA) from the end of July, and globally by the end of October this year, when the current ad format will be discontinued.

AdWords campaign managers therefore need to ensure that the testing and rollout of Expanded Text Ads is included as a top priority over the next few months. Google recommends that advertisers need to rethink their entire creative by trying not to tack copy onto existing ads and initial tests have shown that advertisers who completely rethink and rewrite their ads for the new format see better performance.

The benefits for advertisers include more direct control over headlines, without having to hope that Google would automatically carry up correctly punctuated portions of description line 1 into it, which it only did randomly and not all the time. There will also be room to fit in more product specific information or unique selling propositions.

We’ll be testing these new format ads over the next few months and if you want to know more about how ETAs could improve your business’s advertising, please contact us now.

Caution About Link Schemes From Black Hat SEOs

In the early days of SEO, ‘black-hat’ techniques such as hidden ‘keyword stuffing’ and ‘link farms’ were prevalent. Thankfully, things have progressed significantly since then with Google’s enhancements through the Panda/Penguin algorithms penalising such unscrupulous techniques. However, there are still some shady link schemes so it’s necessary to be cautious about emails that offer to put strong links to your site upon reputable, powerful ones, as these offers are usually too good to be true!

These type of offers violate Google’s quality guidelines and can harm your site rankings. Such ‘spammy’ link-building tactics, defined by Google as ‘link schemes’ are, buying or selling links that pass PageRank (which includes exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links); exchanging goods or services for links; or sending someone a “free” product in exchange for them writing about it in a blog, for example, and including a link.

Google considers these schemes to be an attempt to fool the search engine algorithms. If lower-quality content can rank high just because it has amassed a high quantity of backlinks, that is not a great experience for the searcher. So Google strives to rank quality content that will meet user needs.

When it comes to spammy link building techniques, there are two types of penalties that can impact your site: algorithmic and manual. An algorithmic penalty occurs when your site loses rankings as a result of an algorithm update – in this case, Penguin. Webmasters may be able to restore rankings by getting rid of spammy backlinks before the next Penguin update, but that is not a guarantee. In any event, steps should be taken to remove or disavow spammy backlinks.

An algorithmic ranking demotion is bad, but it is not as devastating as a manual penalty, which can cause a site (or some of its pages) to be removed from Google’s index entirely. Essentially, the Google ‘Spam’ team manually reviews your backlink profile and places a penalty on the site. To remove a manual penalty, you must work to remove or disavow spammy backlinks and then file a reconsideration request, which is a process that can take weeks or months.

Ideally, all links to a site would be earned naturally, rather than acquired through deliberate link-building efforts. To gain natural inbound links, webmasters and SEOs should build content that is engaging, shareable and easily linkable. So, when receiving emails from SEO practitioners, make sure that you follow these guidelines:

• Ignore offers of paid link-building or link schemes;
• If the email states the person is from a reputable organisation, they would use the email address of that company, not a generic one, such as from Gmail;
• Punctuation and spelling errors in the email should also ring alarm bells!

It’s certainly beneficial to remain cautious and ideally stay away from link-building offers that do sound too good to be true, as doing that will help to avoid link penalties, which can severely damage a sites rankings, traffic and consequential conversions.

If you want more information about how unscrupulous link-building prospecting, or black-hat SEO techniques can impact your business, contact us now.

Microsoft to Buy LinkedIn For US$26bn

In June it was announced that Microsoft will pay $196 a share for LinkedIn – valuing it at US$26bn – which is a deal that Microsoft hopes will help it to boost sales of its business and email software. It will also give it access to the world’s biggest professional social network with more than 430 million members worldwide.

It’s possible that LinkedIn will be integrated with a number of Microsoft assets such as Office 365, Exchange and Outlook, but how deeply integrated it will be isn’t specified at this stage. Microsoft emphasised however, that LinkedIn would continue to operate as an independent business and there will be a different approach to previous integrations, to preserve LinkedIn’s “distinct brand, culture and independence”.

Microsoft has to be cautious about such purchases, as the entire US$7.2bn value of the Nokia’s mobile phones division, which it bought in 2013, was written off just a year later. So Microsoft’s investors may look at that $26bn price tag nervously, while anyone with a few LinkedIn shares would be pleased with the 50% premium (on the Friday before the deal) closing share price to buy LinkedIn. That price amounts to US$250 for every active user.

Shares in LinkedIn, which floated in May 2011, have fallen by more than 40% this year. The stock plunged by a quarter in February after the company issued a profit warning for the first quarter and reported an annual loss of US$166m. However, shares soared 47% following the announcement of the deal, whereas shares in Microsoft have fallen by 2.6%, bringing the decline this year to almost 10%. The takeover is by far the biggest acquisition made by Microsoft, which paid $8.5bn for Skype in 2011 and it eclipses the $19bn that Facebook paid for WhatsApp in 2014.

If you’d like to know more about this move by Microsoft, and the possible impact on LinkedIn, please contact us.

We hope you’ve found this month’s newsletter useful. As usual, if you have any questions or need help with any of these items, please contact us if you need any more information on the items covered, or our advice on any aspect of your website’s performance.

Welcome to the latest monthly issue of our regular newsletter which features news, tips and advice on effective website marketing, with a particular focus on search engine marketing techniques and trends.

This month we look at 2 recent enhancements made to Google Analytics, with some new reports that provide better insights for website marketers. Firstly, we look at the new User Explorer reports that further enhance its value, by allowing website marketers to review individual actions of anonymous users.

Secondly, we review the recent introduction of more detailed search console data in Google Analytics, which enables the ability to review organic search data with User behaviour, to get more useful insights and to see which search terms generated the more engaged visitor traffic to the website.

Finally this month, we look at how Shopping Ads now target mobile Users on Google Images and the possible ramifications upon AdWords managers’ Shopping campaigns.

You can read more below, or you can also browse through previous editions of the newsletter by month. You can also follow us on Twitter for the latest developments during the month, or follow our Facebook page or Google+ page for updates.

On to this month’s edition…

New User Explorer Report in Google Analytics

Last month Google Analytics started to roll out a new report – the first for some time – which is called User Explorer. This feature allows website marketers to review individual actions of users, which are anonymous but help to provide insights into user visits and paths through a website. They can also help to improve the user experience by seeing how people interact with a website.

The new User Explorer report can be found in the Audience section of the reporting menu, and the initial view of the report shows a list of anonymous client IDs collected from a visitor’s device and browsers. This basic data includes the number of sessions made by that user, their average duration, bounce rate, goal conversion rate, and transactions / revenue if applicable.

If you then click into an individual client ID, you can see their activity history with time-stamps for each site interaction and page view. You can then filter this report by PageView, Goal, E-Commerce or Event, and individual entries can be clicked for additional data, which enables website owners and marketers to get insights into individual user visits and repeat visits, leading to a goal completion, or visits to a particular page on the website.

Along with the Real Time reports which have been around for some time, the new User Explorer report advances the value of Google Analytics even more, with the kind of detail and insights that some marketers will find really insightful. For example, Google suggests that you might want to see how your top 10 customers interacted with your website (or apps) and you can gain insights into visitors that spent the most with you over a given time frame and analyse each of their journeys on your site over that time period.

By viewing these reports, it’s possible to use these individual interactions to uncover new opportunities to improve the overall experience of visitors and their common path to conversion. The User Explorer report can also help with marketing activities, such as identifying anonymous individual customers who have not converted recently and help them to re-engage with your site using different existing marketing channels.

Check out the new User Explorer report in your Google Analytics account now and see what insights can be gained about individual user interactions. You can find more information about this report here, or you can contact us for further help.

More Detailed Search Console Data in Google Analytics

In another new development for Google Analytics, there is a newer version of the Search Console report now being rolled out, which helps to provide users with more detail about search traffic coming from Google. This continues to be a valuable report and a good insight into search engine optimisation (SEO) activity, as the traditional keyword report remains limited with over 95% of search visits still being shown as ‘not provided’.

For many years, Google has enabled the linking between the Search Console (previously Webmaster Tools) account and Google Analytics, so that organic search visitor activity has been accessible in the Acquisition section of Analytics, under the Search Engine Optimisation menu. However, data has been quite limited, until now, as Google is now enabling a deeper integration of data between the 2 accounts, and renaming the menu item as ‘Search Console’, with 4 sub-reports being made available.

This new development shows the Search Console metrics combined with Google Analytics data in the same reports, so that users can now see a full range of Acquisition, Behaviour and Conversion metrics for your organic search traffic. You can therefore review organic search data with user behaviour to get more useful insights and to see which search terms generated the more engaged visitor traffic to the website.

The most valuable of the new reports is the Queries one, showing the search terms people used on Google to find your website. The landing pages report is also useful to identify the most common pages people found on Google, plus there are reports for visits by country, and a new one by device. You can therefore gain new insights into the organic search traffic coming via Google and review how visitors engage with this site, to reflect good, relevant search terms, and possibly landing pages which are not performing well.

These reports also help to identify new opportunities for search traffic, either through low ranking positions for good search terms, or pages on the website that could benefit from improved optimisation or content. In addition, the data being collected in Google Analytics can also be downloaded automatically each month by email, which is important to do as the Search Console data is still currently only available for a rolling 90 day period.

You can read more about these new reports here and to access these new reports you need to have a Search Console account set up and linked to your Google Analytics account. If you need help with this, or would like further information about how these reports can be used, please contact is for more information.

Shopping Ads Now Target Mobile Users on Google Images

Another interesting development recently announced by Google is the introduction of Shopping ads into the ‘Images’ section of its search results for mobile devices. This is as a result of mobile’s share of online retail purchases continuing to grow, with the latest figures for 2016 showing that 34% of online retail purchases (in the US) took place on mobiles.

People who search and shop on their smartphones at least once a week say that product images are the shopping feature they turn to most. The top questions Google Images users ask Google are ‘What’s the price of this?’ and ‘Where can I buy it?’. That’s why Shopping ads have been introduced on Image Search through the Google Search Partners network. (Google Image Search is not yet part of the ‘core’ Search Network, which is composed of Google Search, Google Play, Google Shopping and, from April 2016, Google Maps). So now, for Shopping campaigns that are opted into displaying upon the Search Partners, the ads for related products will appear as shoppers browse Google Images.

Google explained that the goal behind this change is because many shoppers begin their research using Google Images. When they find something they like, they’re forced to click through to the website to see whether the product is actually for sale and how much it costs. Shopping ads are a natural fit for this activity, since they provide merchant and pricing information directly alongside the image. This is especially useful on mobile devices, where jumping from website to website can be particularly challenging.

If you would like to know more about how these changes to Google Shopping can be used to improve your business’s sales, contact us now.

We hope you’ve found this month’s newsletter useful. As usual, if you have any questions or need help with any of these items, please contact us if you need any more information on the items covered, or our advice on any aspect of your website’s performance.

Welcome to the latest monthly issue of our regular newsletter which features news, tips and advice on effective website marketing, with a particular focus on search engine marketing techniques and trends.

In the first article this month we look at how Google recently provided more information about ranking factors for ‘Google My Business’ listings. This should be of interest to any businesses, or SEO managers who are setting up or managing these listings to target a local market.

We also look at the identification by Google of the new and emerging threat of ‘Clickjacking’. This is a sophisticated form of online threat to Cost-Per-Click display ads, so Google’s defence against it should interest any business running AdWords campaigns.

Finally we look at the latest online advertising expenditure report from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) UK for the 2015 year, which increased to over £8.6bn and saw an increasing importance of mobiles and, more recently, videos in the online advertising space.

You can read more below, or you can also browse through previous editions of the newsletter by month. You can also follow us on Twitter for the latest developments during the month, or follow our Facebook page or Google+ page for updates.

On to this month’s edition…

Google Updates Details on Improving Local Ranking

In an interesting development from Google – who are usually notoriously coy about releasing detailed information about how to achieve good search rankings – they recently added more details to their help page, named ‘Improve your local ranking on Google’. This provides more insights on how to achieve better visibility with local search results.

As reported in our September 2015 newsletter article ‘Google Changes Local Search Results’, the reduction in the number of listings displayed from 7 to 3 has led to increased competition for those spots. Therefore these recently updated details are welcomed by small business owners and the SEO industry, as any information provided by Google about these factors is always useful.

Google does still do their best to keep the specific details of their search algorithms confidential, to make the ranking system as fair as possible for everyone. Previously, the help page had about five paragraphs of text around relevance, distance and prominence for ranking in the local results. Now, Google has vastly expanded the document which now covers the newer local ‘3-pack’ results, as well as how to be included in that pack and how the ranking positions are determined.

In terms of these rankings, Google still outlines relevance, distance and prominence, but expands upon each of them. Here is a summary of the key points in the revised content:

• Relevance – this refers to how well a local listing matches what someone is searching for. Adding complete and detailed business information can help Google better understand your business and match your listing to relevant searches. Relevant terms in a business name can be important but this should still be the correct name for the business, plus selecting the best category/ies and using a good business description can all help.
• Distance – just like it sounds, how far is each potential search result from the location term used in a search? If a user doesn’t specify a location in their search, Google will calculate distance based on what’s known about their location, which tends to be more accurate if on a mobile device.
• Prominence – this refers to how well-known a business might be. Some places are more prominent in the offline world, and search results try to reflect this in local ranking. For example, famous museums, landmark hotels or well-known store brands that are familiar to many people are also likely to be prominent in local search results. Prominence is also based on information that Google has about a business from across the web (like links, articles and directories).
• Reviews – having Google reviews, including the number and rating score are factored into local search rankings. More reviews and positive ratings are likely to improve a business’s local ranking. A business website’s position in the main search results can also a factor, so SEO best practices also apply to local search optimisation.

You can read the updated Google help file here. If you want to know more about how ranking well in a local listing could help to improve your business, contact us now.

Google Rolls Out More Defences to Thwart Clickjacking

Google recently identified ‘Clickjacking’ as an emerging threat to cost-per-click display ads. This is a type of web attack where the appearance of a website is changed so that a victim does not realise they are clicking on one or more ads. For example, a user may intend to click on a video play button or menu item, but instead clicks an invisible ad unit. They reacted quickly by rolled out new defences to protect advertisers against this threat by using a combination of technology, operations, and policy.

Earlier this year when Google’s operations team identified Clickjacking activity on the display network, they moved swiftly to terminate accounts, removing entities involved in, or attempting to use, this technique to trick users. The engineering team worked in parallel to quickly release a filter to automatically exclude this type of invalid traffic across display ads.

This approach delivered a two-phase solution to publishers who violated Google’s policies: firstly, the operations team cleaned out publishers from the ad systems; secondly, engineers built a new filter as a durable defence to protect against Clickjacking traffic.

The combined Clickjacking defences operate at considerable scale, analysing display ad placements across mobile and desktop platforms, evaluating a variety of characteristics. When the system detects a Clickjacking attempt (or an normal ‘invalid click’), Google zeros-in on the traffic attributed to that placement, and removes it from upcoming payment reports to ensure that advertisers are not charged for those clicks.

Ad traffic quality has always been a priority to Google, which has consistently put in place sophisticated technology to detect and not charge for, or eradicate, ‘invalid clicks’. It’s swift to respond when such emerging threats appear and the combined defences work well to combat those.

If you want more information about how ‘invalid clicks’ and Clickjacking could impact your AdWords campaigns, please contact us now.

Online Advertising Expenditure in the UK Increases to Over $8.6bn

In their latest report for the twelve months ending December 31st 2015, IAB UK stated that the online advertising market experienced another year of significant growth in 2015, growing by 16.4% over the previous year on a like-for-like basis, to finish the year at £8.606bn. This reflects the ongoing growth of the market, and in particular, the strong trends in mobile and video advertising over the past few years.

This latest data comes from the regular Digital Adspend Study conducted by the Internet Advertising Bureau in the UK, together with PwC and shows that all online advertising segments experienced another strong year of growth in 2015. Display ads were up by nearly 25% to over £3bn, with 60% of this spend being reported as programmatic advertising. Paid Search was up by 15% to £4.36bn and Classifieds grew by 5% to £1.1bn. Search remains the largest sector of spend with a 51% share of the market, followed by Display at 35% and Classifieds at 13%. However, as usual the Search figure remains an estimate as Google doesn’t reveal their actual figures for this report and this would comprise the largest part of this spend.

Most notably, mobile advertising continued its meteoric rise, increasing by just over 60% to reach £2.6bn in 2015. This is a significant increase and mobile now accounts for just over 30% of all digital ad spend, compared to just 2% in 2010. This rapid growth should clearly be noted by all online marketers, and was accompanied by strong growth in the social and video advertising sectors.

You can read more here. If you would like more information on how these figures can be used to improve your online marketing, contact us now.

We hope you’ve found this month’s newsletter useful. As usual, if you have any questions or need help with any of these items, please contact us if you need any more information on the items covered, or our advice on any aspect of your website’s performance.

Welcome to the latest issue of our monthly newsletter, featuring news, tips and advice on effective website marketing, with a particular focus on search marketing techniques and trends.

In our first article this month, we take a look at the core principles of mobile site design. This is becoming increasingly important for all businesses, as the rate at which the use of mobiles to access the Internet has risen rapidly over the past few years and, central to this growth, is the issue of usability and speed so that users expect to be able to complete a transaction smoothly.

Our second article examines how the on-going testing by Google of its Home Services procurement in California has resulted in that becoming more humanised, with the Google Concierge service. Our final article this month explains how the PageRank score will no longer be made publicly available by Google – something which should be of interest to all SEO practitioners, as it was an indicator that was erroneously relied upon by many in the industry.

You can read more below, or you can also browse through previous editions of the newsletter by month. You can also follow us on Twitter for the latest developments during the month, or follow our Facebook page or Google+ page for updates.

On to this month’s edition…

Principles of Mobile Site Design

In a quest to establish mobile site design best practices, Google recently partnered with AnswerLab in the U.S. to research how a range of users interacted with a diverse group of mobile sites. Consumers increasingly rely on the mobile web to research and make purchases, which makes it more important than ever for companies to have an effective mobile presence. So this article should be of interest to any business that realises the increasing importance of having a good ‘mobile-friendly’ website.

From this new research, Google has established 25 principles of mobile site design to help companies build mobile sites that meet customers’ requirements and drive conversions. For this article we’ve selected a few of the best practices, but we can also email the full list on request – please contact us for a PDF copy of the report.

For each site that was included in the research, AnswerLab asked the participants to complete a conversion-focused task, like making a purchase, booking a reservation or researching plans/prices. The participants then rated their experience with each site and also the researchers provided ratings based on site experience and task success and logged errors/site issues by severity.

The key findings were:

• Mobile users tend to be very goal-oriented – they expect to be able to get what they need from a mobile site easily, immediately, and on their own terms. So, to ensure success, design the site with their context and needs in mind, without sacrificing richness of content.
• Place prominent calls-to-action – it can be easy for mobile users to miss menu items, so always put your key calls-to-action where you know users will see them. Study participants had the easiest time completing tasks on sites that clearly displayed primary calls-to-action in the main body of the site.
• Keep menus short and sweet – mobile users don’t have the patience to scroll through a long list of options to try and find what they want. So create a shorter menu with distinct categories.
• Make navigation clear and simple – easier navigation encourages users to explore the site and ultimately convert. Also use the business logo as a navigation button to return to the homepage, as mobile users expect that.
• Include a site search box – being able to search a site is vital for helping mobile users find what they’re looking for, quickly. Place your site search near the top of your homepage via an open text field.
• Use click-to-call buttons – mobile users expect this nowadays. Offering a prominent click-to-call button can help to prevent them from leaving the site without purchasing if they feel the business isn’t easy to contact. It also provides the option to buy over the phone rather than online.
• Encourage conversions – allow users to navigate the site without first having to register and also, to purchase as a guest.
• Streamline form entry – most users, whether mobile or not don’t like filling in forms. So whether it’s for making a purchase, getting a quote or joining an email or newsletter list, the user’s conversion experience should be as seamless as possible. This can be achieved through design that produces efficient, clear and concise forms.
• Optimise the entire site for mobile – unsurprisingly, participants had a much easier time navigating mobile-optimised sites than trying to navigate desktop sites on mobile devices. Sites that included a mix of desktop and mobile-optimised pages were actually harder to use than all-desktop sites.

Of course, great design is only part of a mobile site’s success and it’s just as important to get the technical side right as well. Remember to test the site in multiple browsers and devices, to ensure maximum performance. Following these well researched guidelines can help to improve the mobile conversion rate for any business that realises how increasingly important it has become to have a user-friendly mobile site.

If you would like to receive the full PDF report on this research, or to discuss any of the above recommendations, please contact us now.

Google Concierge Humanises Home Services

In a recent development to its Home Services ads (introduced last July and only in California to provide searchers with details of local services), Google has been testing a more ‘human’ version of the service, that’s colloquially named ‘Google Concierge’. This may be a sign of things to come in the UK and should be of interest to the type of businesses – such as plumbers or electricians – that would use a third-party directory to offer their services.

The new ‘Concierge’ service appears to simply emulate the process followed in the Google Home Services ads, but now reduces the consumer steps to simply calling and having Google complete the process, rather than clicking on the few options to complete the process via Google themselves. Clearly Google is looking to enter the Home Services procurement space even if it means engaging a human to complete the query, as opposed to a search result. Even if it’s only an experiment, it’s quite a change for Google, which has always relied on programmatic rather than human solutions.

When you click on the ad, you are taken to this page that encourages a call, or text to directly discuss your project “with a home services expert from Google”. They will then have appropriate plumbers call you to quote and book an appointment.

With this new enhancement of their Home Service Ads product, which allows consumers to call Google directly when searching for a plumber, rather than searching for one and completing the transaction via the Home Services interface, it shows how hard Google is trying to make these sorts of efforts a success. It also implies that the current Home Services ad implementation that has been limited to California has not been that successful – or that refinements are needed before rolling it out to the rest of the country, or globally.

We’ll be keeping track of these developments and whether the service is expanded to more regions and countries. If you’d like more details about this, please get in touch.

Google’s PageRank Score is Discontinued

Google’s numeric rating of how important it considers pages to be will soon no longer be accessible to the public. Website marketers and SEO practitioners should be interested in this decision, as PageRank was an indicator that was erroneously heavily relied upon by most of the industry.

When Google first started, PageRank was something it talked about as part of its research papers, press releases and technology pages to promote itself as a smarter search engine than well-established and bigger rivals at the time, (such as AltaVista and Lycos). The PR score essentially represented a measure of how Google viewed the importance of a web page, based on inbound and outbound links. However, the function of PageRank was diverted in 2000 when Google released the first version of its Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer, which gave those who enabled the PageRank meter the ability to see the PageRank score out of 10 for any page that was viewed.

For most SEO practitioners, the toolbar was an amazing present, a numeric rating of how important Google considered any of their pages to be. It was also a terrible trap for them and a disaster for the web as a whole. PageRank always was and remains only one part of the Google search algorithm, the system that determines how to rank pages. There are many other ranking factors that are also considered and so a high PageRank score did NOT mean that a page would necessarily rank well for any topic. Pages with lower scores could beat pages with higher scores if they had other factors in their favour.

Those practitioners that fell into the trap and wanted a better PageRank then also wanted links back to the site being optimised. So the link-selling economy and ‘link-farms’ emerged. Google wasn’t happy with the Pandora’s Box it had opened and so it began to fight back and ended up in court to defend its actions against companies that provided such links. That didn’t stop link selling and the quest for boosting PageRank scores quickly, rather than earning them naturally, continued for many.

As link spam became prevalent, people were chasing higher PageRank scores by putting links wherever they could, including into blog posts and forums. Eventually, it became such an issue that demands were raised that Google itself should do something about it. It did, in 2005, by releasing the ‘nofollow’ tag, which was a way to prevent links from passing along PageRank credit, but that certainly didn’t end link spam. Google then took 10 months in 2013 to finally update the PageRank scores it was feeding into the toolbar for IE users. It’s likely that it never updated the scores after that and PageRank was finally removed from the Google Toolbar, officially. That made the quest to improve the score futile, as the public could no longer find ways to see those scores.

So Google eventually alleviated the pressure put on the importance of having numerous back-links, but gave the game away that they depend upon them to some extent in their complex ranking algorithm (although no-one but Google knows exactly how much). As such, PageRank – Google’s original ‘secret formula’ – has gone back to being secret. Only Google will know the scores, which it will continue to use, mixed in with the many other factors that make up its ranking algorithm.

If you would like to know more about how we can help your business website improve its rankings through Search Engine Optimisation, contact us now.

We hope you’ve found this month’s newsletter useful. As usual, if you have any questions or need help with any of these items, please contact us if you need any more information on the items covered, or our advice on any aspect of your website’s performance.

Welcome to the latest issue of our monthly newsletter, featuring news, tips and advice on effective website marketing, with a particular focus on search marketing techniques and trends.

In our first article this month, we take a look at the recent introduction into AdWords by Google of Smart Goals Optimisation. This is a development that should be of interest to all businesses and AdWords managers that are keen to reduce their average Cost Per Acquisition for conversions, which in turn, can lead to increased margins.

Our second article examines Google’s launch of a new Webmasters website for the recently re-branded Search Console and how User feedback influenced that release. Our final article describes the significance of the recent update to the Google ranking algorithm and how SEO practitioners and industry experts are still often surprised by these updates and the speed at which they can dramatically impact the Google organic ranking results.

You can read more below, or you can also browse through previous editions of the newsletter by month. You can also follow us on Twitter for the latest developments during the month, or follow our Facebook page or Google+ page for updates.

On to this month’s edition…

Google Introduces Smart Goals Optimisation in AdWords

Conversions are a key metric for AdWords accounts, to help advertisers make better use of their ad spend. However, some companies haven’t got conversion tracking in place, so a recent development by Google should be of interest to any business that runs AdWords, as there is now an alternative way to track conversions.

A conversion is a key metric for almost any business and can be defined as “that moment when users do the thing on the site that you want them to do” – e.g. complete a form, view an important page or .pdf document, or make a purchase. Many AdWords advertisers are already measuring their website conversions, using either AdWords Conversion Tracking or imported Google Analytics Goals and Ecommerce transactions. Measuring actual conversions is ideal, because it allows bids, ads and the website to be optimised with a clear goal in mind.

However, numerous small and medium size businesses aren’t currently measuring website conversions as they may not have a way for users to convert on their website, or they may not have the time or the technical ability to implement conversion tracking. Google understands the importance of this metric, so recently released an easy-to-use solution, termed ‘Smart Goals’.

These Smart Goals need to be set up in Google Analytics, and they can then help to identify the highest-quality visits to a website so that the data can be imported to AdWords and so the ad spend can be optimised for those key visits. The implementation requires no changes to website code and can lead to many more conversions.

Smart Goals are generated by Google applying machine learning across thousands of websites that use Google Analytics which are opted in to share anonymised conversion data. From this information, dozens of key factors are distilled that correlate with the likelihood to lead to a conversion – such as session duration, pages per session, location, device and browser. These key factors can then be applied to any website.

The easiest way to think about Smart Goals is that they reflect website visits that Google’s model indicates are most likely to lead to conversions. The highest-quality visits to a website can now be turned into Smart Goals automatically, as there are no additional tagging or customisation required and there is a Smart Goals report in Google Analytics. The behaviour metrics in this report indicate the engagement level of Smart Goals visits compared to other visits, helping to evaluate Smart Goals even before the feature is activated.

Smart Goals can be then be used as an AdWords conversion and optimised accordingly, by setting up a target CPA (cost per acquisition). However, there must be at least 1,000 clicks from AdWords over a 30-day period to ensure the activation and validity of the data. The Adwords spend is then based on the likelihood of a conversion, as determined by the Google model.

If you want to know more about Smart Goals, you can read more here, or contact us now for details of how this feature could help benefit the performance of your AdWords campaigns.

Google Launches a New Webmasters Website

Webmasters should be interested to hear that in mid-January Google introduced a new Webmasters website for the recently re-branded ‘Search Console’ (formerly know as Webmaster Tools). This was created as a result of extensive user feedback by analysing visitor behaviour and conducting user studies to organise the site into the most useful categories.

The site contains support resources to help fix issues with a website, SEO learning materials to create a high-quality site and improve search rankings, and connection opportunities to stay up-to-date with Google and the Webmaster community. It also contains new features, including:

• Webmaster troubleshooter: A step-by-step guide to move a site or understand a message in Search Console. The troubleshooter can help answer these and other common problems with a site in Google Search and Google Search Console.
• Popular resources: This section contains Google Webmasters YouTube videos, blog posts and forum threads are detailed in a curated list of Google’s top resources.
• Mobile-friendly tools: With mobile search and mobile-friendly websites becoming ever more important, there’s a section to test your site on a mobile device, read a mobile guide and a checklist for design and usability.
• Events calendar: It’s possible to talk to someone from Google through a series of online ‘hangouts’ or at a live, local event. There are office hours and events in multiple languages around the world.

You can visit the new Google Webmasters site here or if you want to know more about how this resource can help to improve the SEO of your business, contact us now.

Google’s Significant Core Ranking Algorithm Update

SEO practitioners should already be aware of the critical importance of following developments in Google’s ranking algorithms, especially as the recent one led to much confusion within the industry. In mid January Google updated its core algorithm and although it rarely confirms these types of updates, it was significant news when Google went on record that the change webmasters were seeing in the organic rankings was related to the core update.

Google Panda, one of Google’s most significant spam-fighting algorithms that was first introduced in February 2011, was only recently confirmed by Google as officially part of its core ranking algorithm (probably since late 2015). There will therefore be no more separate Panda update announcements which helped to clear up some of the recent confusion. Gary Illyes of Google has stated that although Panda is now part of the core algorithm “the recent ranking fluctuations you noticed have absolutely nothing to do with Panda or other animals!”.

There is still some confusion about which parts of Panda run with the core algorithm and which don’t. So the remaining questions are, now that Panda is part of the core, what is the difference to the update and how does it differ both in terms of ranking and to webmasters, impacted by Panda?

Google recently answered this question, which is unusual, as it typically doesn’t discuss the core ranking signals and updates. To be core, the algorithm needs to be consistent enough to run by itself without much worry that it won’t work right – i.e. the algorithm is consistent enough to not require many changes in the future and can run with ‘less hand-holding’. Now that Panda is now part of the core ranking algorithm it means that it’s been tested, it works, and it can now run by itself without much worry.

That doesn’t explain the content of the core that caused the recent ranking fluctuations, though. There was another core update on the following weekend (16 & 17 January), which resulted in SEOs and webmasters reporting major ranking changes in Google. Many webmasters are waiting for a Google Penguin update (the first Penguin update was in April 2012, to better catch sites deemed to be spamming its search results). We are expecting it to happen early this year so that when we see major fluctuations, some are quick to say it is a Penguin change, but Google is telling us this is not Penguin but rather just common core ranking algorithm updates, the same as those which occurred on the previous weekend.

The main issue is that January has been pretty volatile in the search results for both the automated tracking tools and the talk in the community. But again, Google is saying it is not Penguin, it is core, so there is still not a Penguin update to report.

The specific content of these core ranking updates will always be mysterious and hard for webmasters to understand, which is just the way Google likes it! But, based upon the patterns established over the past few years, it is most likely that this adjustment, like the others, focused on the better understanding of user intent and identifying high-quality content.

If you would like more information on the Google algorithm updates and how they might impact your website’s organic rankings, contact us now for more details.

We hope you’ve found this month’s newsletter useful. As usual, if you have any questions or need help with any of these items, please contact us if you need any more information on the items covered, or our advice on any aspect of your website’s performance.

This is the first issue of our newsletter for 2016 and so we’d like to wish you a happy and prosperous year ahead.

The start of a new year is usually a good time to review what’s been and to plan for what’s to come, and so we’d like to contribute to this process with a review of best practice for search engine marketing.

From our regular client management as well as training courses we run, there are some key essentials required – what we’d suggest are the ‘3 pillars’ of any website marketing activity using search engines (and in particular, Google).

We’ve outlined below some of the key things that you should have in place, or be considering as part of your online marketing activity, and why they are important for your business.

You can read more below, or you can also browse through previous editions of the newsletter by month. You can also follow us on Twitter for the latest developments during the month, or follow our Facebook page or Google+ page for updates.

On to this month’s edition…

SEO Essentials for a Website

Every website should have the basics for SEO – search engine optimisation – in place, particularly as there are many things that can be controlled by the website owner and implemented reasonably easily.

Although some search markets can be very competitive and challenging, having a good SEO structure will enable a website to maximise the opportunities to rank on the first page of results for as many terms as possible. So, the key things to consider are:

• Search term research – identify what your potential customers are searching for across many different variations. Use the Google search suggestions as a starter, but the AdWords Keyword Tool for more in-depth insights, and build a list of good, relevant search terms including the most popular, common terms, as well as the wide variety of ‘long tail’ terms that can provide many opportunities to reach your search market.
• Using terms on the website – from the list of search phrases you can then write keyword focused and attention grabbing title tags and description metatags for each page of your website, as well as coordinate the page content to target the same phrases in a prominent way that’s not too repetitive.
• Creating internal links – external links, or backlinks, to your website are important but can be hard to achieve, so make use of your own internal website links as a first stage, linking suitable content together to help engage users and also target search terms in the anchor text of the links.
• Using Google Search Console – every website owner should have a GSC account in place (previously known as Webmaster Tools). It’s a free service and enables a communication channel with Google, as well as providing help and insights to ensure your website gets the best experience with Google, plus you get access to the excellent Search Analytics report and links reports.
• Using Google My Business – this is essential for any local business but just as important for any business to ensure that their company details and ‘owned’ and up to date on Google / Maps. Claiming and verifying a listing is important, as well as ensuring it’s 100% complete, uses some suitable content and category groups for the business, and attracts some good reviews to help ranking positions.

Paid Search Marketing Objectives

Using paid search ads is always an option for websites to improve or expand their coverage in the search results and to target core search terms to drive more visits to a website. However, whether it’s Google AdWords, Bing Ads, or another form of paid advertising, every business should have an objective for the ad spend, and a way of measuring that.

Paid search advertising can be a very cost effective way of getting interested prospects onto a website, and it can become one of the primary sources of traffic for a website. However, it can also be an expensive exercise, especially in markets that are seeing more advertisers bid on terms, so having clear objectives and a way to measure them is essential, such as:

• Online sales – an easy one to track and a clear objective for an online store, with sales and transaction value providing an excellent and measurable way of proving if the ad spend is working, or where spend can be cut or increased to get the best results.
• Online enquiries – any online forms are also a measurable way of identifying good responses from a search advertising campaign, whether it’s an online form or a clickable email link, these can be measured and a cost per lead identified.
• Phone enquiries – this becomes harder to track where the action happens ‘offline’, but any business where calls are a key response mechanism should use a call tracking service, even with Google’s basic call extensions in AdWords. There can also be ways of tracking related signals from a website, such as clicks on the number from a mobile device, or views of a contact page.
• File downloads – maybe a key metric involves downloads of a PDF document or order form, or even clicks off to an external site like your business’s Facebook page. Using event tracking provides more flexibility in tracking actions on a website that you want visitors to take, and combining these with conversion goals is a great way to track the effectiveness of your marketing activity.
• User engagement – for some websites where content is key (such as blogs or news websites) it can help to track user engagement metrics such as bounce rate, pages viewed, time on site, or repeat visits to gauge the success of a marketing campaign at getting the ‘right sort of people’ onto your site, and use these as measurable objectives and goals.

Insights from Google Analytics

The third essential element for any search marketing campaign is to understand what’s happening, both with the quality of visitors coming to the site, but also how the website performs in converting these visitors to the required conversion objectives.

Any website analytics package would be good for this, but as most websites use Google Analytics these days (and it is an excellent free tool for this purpose) then we are covering the use of this here. Some of the main reports and tools to use would be:

• Key metrics – tracking the trends with such key metrics such as sessions and users, as well as new v returning visitors, is a core focus. Also user engagement based on bounce rate trends, time on site, pages viewed and, ultimately, goal conversions all help to indicate the success or otherwise of your marketing activity.
• Trends – this is an important way of looking at data, rather than just as a snapshot for one time period. Trends in data, such as month or month, or year on year, provide better insights into what’s working well – or not – and how recent changes or testing programmes are working.
• Secondary dimensions – within most data tables in Google Analytics, there is the option to add a secondary dimension, or to break down the initial line of data into more detail by another set of criteria. This can be a great way of gaining more detail and insights about a report when looking for answers.
• Segments – probably the best tool in Analytics is Advanced Segments, available above most report tables, which provides the ability to isolate data or compare two or more datasets for a particular group of visitors to the website. Also good for better insights and to delve into small, specific groups of users via the default or custom built segments.
• Custom reports – to access more advanced data insights, custom reports provide the ability to build your own data tables and combine these with secondary dimensions or segments to view data tables not available through the standard menu options. Gaining insights by hour, or day of the week, for example, or monthly trends for the past 12 months, are just a few ways that custom reports can be used to understand more about your marketing and your website.

We hope you find the above summaries useful and a good checklist to compare how your search engine marketing is set up ready for 2016. If you’re not using some of these options, but should, please get them ready as some of the main cornerstones for the coming year to help give your online business a greater advantage.

And, as usual, if you have any questions or need help with any of these items, please contact us if you need any more information on the items covered, or our advice on any aspect of your website’s performance.

Welcome to the latest issue of our monthly newsletter, featuring news, tips and advice on effective website marketing, with a particular focus on search marketing techniques and trends.

In the first article this month we look at Google’s recent update to its Ad Preview and Diagnosis Tool in AdWords and its decision, due to popular demand, to retain the version of the tool that’s available to everyone.

We also look at the radical changes to the new version of Google+ and how reviews will be removed from the G+ Local pages, but will remain in the Search and Maps results. This is a relief to Local SEO practitioners and businesses that source numerous visits to their sites from positive reviews.

You can read more below, or you can also browse through previous editions of the newsletter by month. You can also follow us on Twitter for the latest developments during the month, or follow our Facebook page or Google+ page for updates.

On to this month’s edition…

AdWords Preview Tool’s New Look

Google has always provided a useful advert preview and diagnosis tool to help advertisers view AdWords ads and the interface has recently been given a new look. This is a valuable tool in the AdWords account and has a number of advantages when reviewing the search results, both for paid ads and also for SEO rankings.

The AdWords Ad Preview and Diagnosis Tool is available in the Tools menu when logged into an AdWords account. For advertisers, this is useful to help identify why an advert might not be appearing, or to check that the correct ad is showing from the right adgroup. It shows a preview of a Google search result page for a specific term and for a selected location so that advertisers can check which ads are appearing and in what position, without the influence of any historical or personalisation factors.

The tool allows you to see the exact same results as a Google search, without affecting your ad performance by generating additional impressions, and the results displayed can’t be clicked, as they are simply an image of how the results would be appearing to most searchers at that time.

By changing the version of Google and the user location, the results can also replicate how people in other locations or countries could see the search results, which would be very difficult to replicate in the main Google search interface.

In mid November, Google quietly updated the tool within AdWords and the new interface now embeds a Chrome-like browser directly into it, as opposed to having it open in its own sub-browser. The new interface makes the tool feel more part of the AdWords portal and makes things a bit more compact and cleaner by keeping the user within the overall experience of AdWords.

Google also recently announced that, after hearing feedback from its advertisers, they decided to keep the ‘logged-out’ version of the tool as well, so that anyone can use this, whether or not they have an AdWords account – although the full benefit comes from being logged into AdWords at the same time.

You can view the logged-out version of the tool, here.

If you would like more information about how the Ad Preview and Diagnosis Tool can be used, and how it could benefit your AdWords campaigns, please contact us now.

Reviews Disappear From Google+ Local Listings

Google recently introduced the new Google+ design and announced that reviews are being removed from the Google+ Local listings. This news initially alarmed local SEOs and businesses that rely upon those reviews to attract regional traffic, although Google has fortunately alleviated those concerns – for now – by stating that reviews are still accessible on Google Search and Maps (which have always been the primary way that users find business reviews).

The removal of the G+ Local page that was integrated with the Google My Business listing is seen by many as a move in the right direction, as having so many interlinked G+ products only led to confusion for many users. So the news that the reviews will still be shown on Search and Maps (as well as the Local Finder and the Knowledge Graph) means that the removal of those from just G+ Local will not be a large concern for local SEO, thankfully, as numerous good reviews can be effective at generating traffic.

Google is being positive about the imminent demise of G+, which appears to be another failed attempt to take on Facebook in the social media field. Google states that due to feedback from users, there were two features they kept coming back to: Communities (which now average 1.2 million new joins per day), and Collections (which launched just five months ago and is growing even faster). Therefore the new and fully redesigned Google+ focuses upon interests in the form of those Communities and Collections.

Google+ was always un-intuitive to use, so it’s a wise move that the new G+ is much simpler, although this could also mean that its value and usage declines as well. It’s also more mobile-friendly and cross—platform compatible as it’s been rebuilt across web, Android and iOS so that users now have a fast and consistent experience, whether viewing it on either a big or small screen.

You can read more about the new G+ here and here. There is also a good article about how to get reviews on Google here.

If you would like to know more about how the removal of reviews from G+ Local listings could impact your business, contact us now for more details.

We hope you’ve found this month’s newsletter useful. Please contact us if you need any more information on the items covered, or our advice on any aspect of your website’s performance. Also, if there are any issues you would like to see in future editions of this newsletter, please submit your suggestions to us.