Web Search & Marketing Newsletter – June 2013

Web Search & Marketing Newsletter – June 2013

Welcome to the latest issue of our regular newsletter, which covers news, tips and advice on effective website marketing techniques and trends, to help you keep up to date on the latest developments.

In the first article this month we take a look at how the use of Google+ can lead to SEO benefits. Next, we assess Google’s recently released Display Benchmarks tool and how that can be used to improve the success of display campaigns. Finally, we report on Yahoo!’s acquisition of the social networking tool, Tumblr, and the implications of this move.

On to this month’s edition…

The Benefits of Using Google+ For SEO

Although Google+ is still struggling to establish itself as a viable social media alternative to Facebook, the number of users is increasing as Google integrates the tool with other services and starts to create a community around the range of features being offered. There are also some SEO advantages to having a well set up Google+ profile with both personal and business pages.

With any link-building strategy, it’s very important to network and build genuine connections and relationships that will help spread your content. Google+ facilitates this by allowing the linking of all of your social media profiles, sites and blogs in an organised manner. It’s also possible to link to sites to which you regularly contribute and, importantly, all of these links are “followed”, rather than “no follow” links and you’re able to select the anchor text (in your bio).

Google will follow the links in your posts and the more people share them, +1 your posts or link to your profile, the more valuable these links become to you. If your post goes viral or is shared by a high authority profile, the value of the links increases more. Content on Google+ is indexed rapidly – some say almost instantly – so it’s a great way to get posts by you into Google’s index quickly when there is a hot topic.

With many social media sites, you have little to no ability to edit your content once it has been posted. However, Google+ allows you to go back and make edits to posts as you see fit. Furthermore, Google provides the option for you to take ownership of that content and so it’s important to set up an author tag (for an individual claiming content on a page) or a publisher tag (for a business to claim ownership of a site).

Both the author and publisher tag can’t be used on the same page and if the publisher tag is used, it’s only for the homepage, not internal pages. You can use the author tag for internal pages with content. It’s still a good idea to use Google’s “rel=publisher” tag, but you won’t get the image in your SERP listing like you do by using the authorship tag.

It’s important to remember that a Google+ profile needs to be set up in order to implement the Authorship Markup and take advantages of its benefits. To set up a personal profile, you can go here. Business profiles can be set up here.

The benefits of doing this are:

• It makes your listing more robust, because it includes a photo, your name and links to more content by you. There are also indicators that your authorship markup may give you a boost in rankings. While some say it doesn’t directly help, others have reported an increase in rankings after implementing it.
• Your authorship markup also helps you build trust as it establishes you as a real person in the often-anonymous online world.
• It also allows you to claim your name (you don’t want someone trying to steal your name!) and your content (you’ll be seen as the original and rightful owner of the content and won’t have to worry about a “copy scraper” outranking you).
• You can improve your click-through rate by playing with your profile image that’s shown in the SERPs. Images that perform best seem to be close-ups where the eyes are looking to the right towards the listing in the SERPs.

Once you’ve completed the profile and you start posting, keep in mind that the first sentence of your Google+ post becomes part of the title tag, which impacts rankings and influences click-through rates. A word of warning is that Google doesn’t tolerate “spammy” practices, so it’s vital not to turn your profile into a link farm!

There are a lot of different ways to connect with influencers in your industry and networking on Google+ with those is one of the core focuses of Google+ users. It’s fairly easy to do because there are so many ways to do it, but be sure you don’t abuse the privilege, as if you become seen as a spammer, it will be very difficult to grow your presence.

While Google+ numbers aren’t as large as Facebook, they are growing and as with most things, it’s the early adopters that do well in the long run. So it’s worth beginning now to establish your position. Google+ is probably here to stay and also likely to get more important to your rankings and traffic.

If you’d like more information about Google+, or help with setting up a profile, please contact us now.

Google Introduces a Display Benchmarks Tool

During May, Google announced the launch of a new tool called “Display Benchmarks” that provides useful comparisons or reference points aggregated from ad campaigns across the industry. If you are using display ads as part of a marketing campaign, this new tool facilitates an understanding of how your display campaigns compare to the rest of your industry, which helps to better plan and measure the success of those campaigns.

The comparisons can show average expansion rates for automotive creatives, expected Rich Media interaction rates for retail creatives from France, or just the average clickthrough rate for Entertainment ads from the US. So if you’re looking for comparisons by country, industry vertical, or how different ad formats and sizes perform compared to each other, the tool offers up-to-date benchmarks across 10 key display metrics, such as interaction rate and time, expansion rate and video completions.

For example, through its own use of the tool, Google has shown that people are increasingly choosing to interact with video ads. They state that video completion rates are the highest ever seen, increasing by approximately 24% since Summer 2012, to a 60% completion rate. This improved interaction rate correlates to larger ad sizes: the bigger the ad, the more frequently people will interact with it. It also found that rich-media-expanding formats are better for getting people to interact frequently, while in-page formats are better for encouraging longer interactions.

So, if this tool is used to its full potential, it can certainly shed some valuable light on the best way to improve display campaigns by reaping the benefits of the industry-wide information it provides. You can learn more about it here.

Contact us now if you’d like more information about how we can help you improve your display advertising with this tool.

Yahoo! Buys Tumblr for US$1.1 Billion

During May, Yahoo! acquired one of the leading blogging services – Tumblr – for US$1.1bn. This is a notable deal, made by Yahoo’s chief executive Marissa Mayer who was appointed in July last year, and she has called the move a “unique opportunity”. However, it could also be a huge risk for Yahoo!, which now has to generate revenue from the deal without alienating the Tumblr user base.

The plans for the acquisition are for Tumblr to continue operating under its own brand and independently of the new owner, with co-founder David Karp continuing as Chief Executive. Tumblr combines elements of blogging with social networking, and its simple design has attracted millions of users since its launch. According to the site, it now hosts 108 million blogs, with over 50 billion posts. Crucially, it also has a significant presence on mobile devices.

Observers says that the move is partly an attempt by Yahoo! to regain favour with the younger ‘hip’ market, where Tumblr has proved a great success. Yahoo! has lost favour in recent years, both in terms of search and also as a social site, although the initial reaction from Tumblr users to the takeover has been mostly negative – which would be expected.

However, Yahoo! is hoping that its purchase of Tumblr will boost traffic to its other properties, such as the photo sharing site Flickr, which is being relaunched with new features to compete against Instagram. But the question is really whether the US$1.1bn fee will also help to boost revenue?

Analysts suggest that Yahoo! has significantly overpaid for the deal – Tumblr’s 2012 revenue was just $13m, according to a recent report by Forbes magazine, and despite its fast-growing user base, it has struggled to make money and has traditionally resisted advertising. Yahoo! says they will be working with Tumblr to create ads that “are seamless and enhance the user experience”. However, there is a danger of alienating users with more advertising – a challenge that faces most social media sites, including Facebook and Twitter.

Yahoo! has struggled in recent years, with a lack of direction and innovation, which is the reason why Marissa Mayer was brought in from Google. Despite this, Yahoo! remains a major online property, with around 700 million visitors to its website every month and the majority of its revenues comes from advertising. However, it has limited mobile reach and lags behind Google in the search engine rankings. It also shed more than 1,000 jobs during 2012 and has long been divided over whether it should focus on media content or on tools and technologies.

If you’d like to know more about this deal and the role of Yahoo!, please contact us for details.

Web Search & Marketing Newsletter – February 2013

Welcome to the latest issue of our monthly newsletter, which covers news, tips and advice on effective website marketing techniques and trends.

In the first article this month we look at Google’s Search Suggestions feature and how this can be used by search marketers to improve their SEO or PPC / AdWords campaigns. We also review the important distinction between Display and Destination URLs used in the adverts of a Google AdWords campaign and how these can be used most effectively.

Finally for this month, we take a look at Facebook’s recent introduction of its new “Graph Search” tool and what implications this will have for users, as well as concerns over privacy issues.

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

On to this month’s edition…

Making use of Google’s Search Suggestions

Since 2008, Google has provided searchers with the ‘Search Suggest’ option, which aims to predict the search terms that users are typing into the search query box. In 2010, this was combined with Google’s Instant Search service, which continuously changes the results list as the users types in their query. The suggested search term function is therefore a valuable tool for users, but also for search marketers.

The drop-down list of search suggestions that appear as users enter a search query on Google will sometimes display up to 10 options, although in most cases, there are 4 suggestions shown, which are continually refined as the query is typed. The aim of Google is to help the user complete their search query faster, by anticipating the search term they might use. These suggestions come from historical data on how people have searched, as well as the content of web pages indexed by Google.

The search popularity is the primary factor in what Google shows as a suggestion, yet the suggestions may also be influenced by a user’s previous search history, or by relevancy factors that are calculated by Google’s complex algorithms. There is also a “freshness layer”, so that if there are terms that suddenly spike in popularity, these can appear as suggestions, even if they haven’t gained long-term popularity.

What’s important from a search marketing point of view is how these suggestions may influence the results shown on the page, and how this information can be used for a business advantage. Although there are no figures on usage of these suggestions, many people say that they will look at the suggestions being shown and are likely to choose the relevant query to save typing in the full query. As a result, this tool can help to influence the way that people are searching and could increase the times that websites will appear in the rankings for selected search queries.

This is important for search engine optimisation (SEO) and for PPC advertising (Google AdWords). From an SEO perspective, marketers should see what queries are being suggested for the main search terms they are targeting through their optimisation, and then ensure that the relevant suggestions are also being targeted in their site content.

This is also true for Google AdWords, so that by targeting the relevant suggestions for the market – either as a phrase or exact match term – marketers can see how often those terms are being used as a search query, and whether they perform well in their campaign. Targeting these suggestions can also help bid pricing on specific queries, and in addition to this, any suggestions that are shown, but are not relevant, provide good information on negative terms that should be added to the campaign.

If you would like more information about Google’s search suggestions and how these can be used for your search marketing activity, contact us now.

Defining Display and Destination URLs in Google AdWords

A common question that often arises amongst AdWords advertisers is “what is the difference between Display and Destination URLs in the adverts?” This is a valid question and it’s important to understand how these work and how they should be used to maximise the performance of a paid search campaign.

The difference between the two types of URL shown in the Google AdWords ads are as follows:

• the Display URL is the URL (coloured green) that appears below your ad text when your ad is shown in the search results. This URL is purely a visual identifier on the advert and doesn’t function as the link for the website.
• the Destination URL on the other hand, is the specific location within your site where you’d like to take a user that has clicked on your ad (the landing page). This may be a long URL and the Destination URL isn’t visible in the ad, so you can use it to direct people to a specific page within your site without cluttering your ad.

Google has guidelines and restrictions on how the Display and Destination URLs are used. The most important consideration is that the Display URL must show the same domain name as the website that the advert links to. The www. part of the domain doesn’t need to be included here, although Google will show this in the advert if space allows.

It’s important to use the Display URL as part of the marketing content of the advert, to indicate to searchers what they will find on the website and, where possible, to re-emphasise key terms in the advert text, which will appear bold and can help to increase clickthroughs from an advert (such as yourdomain.com.au/Search_Term).

Remember, the text used in the Display URL is not the actual URL link to the website and has no influence on the Destination URL used in the advert. This destination is set up as a link from the ad but hidden from the searcher until they click on the ad and see the website and the landing page URL in their browser. Therefore, in the above example, the Destination URL would be something like: http://www.yourdomain.com.au/category/product/item15.html.

For more information about the use of Display and Destination URLs, including best practice and Google policies, read this. Alternatively, please contact us now for more information.

Facebook Introduces “Graph Search”

In January, Facebook announced their new “Graph Search” tool, which is gradually being rolled out to users of the social networking service. As with many product developments by Facebook, there have been concerns raised about privacy, as the tool now allows greater in-depth searching of the user database.

The launch of the Graph Search function provides a new type of social search that can’t be completed through Google or any other existing search tool. It therefore fills a gap in search because, if used regularly, Facebook has a massive amount of social data on users which can now be mined and used for different purposes – giving Facebook an advantage over Google’s range of search options.

The search function will now enable users to search for ‘people, places or things’ with results shown based on your network of friends and the things they have posted, liked or commented on. For example, if you typed “movies my friends like” into Google, it would have no idea what you wanted, whereas Facebook would potentially provide this information, as the new feature allows members to search for this and find results, as long as your friends have posted this type of information in the first place. (If search results are not widely available from your friends network, then Bing will provide results and this search engine is becoming more integrated with Facebook.)

While this data – called the “social graph” by Facebook – has always been on the site, it’s not previously been easily accessible. Only advertisers could use this type of data previously, through the targeting options provided, such as showing an ad to only “18-24-year-old males who like video games and live in Australia” for example. This has now changed with the wider access to this “social graph” for all users.

The new Graph Search has been getting a lot of media attention, but not all is good. Facebook often faces privacy concerns when they launch new features and this one is no exception. There was an immediate impact on the company’s already battered share price as concerns were raised over how this tool could be used, but Facebook hopes that it will place them in a stronger position for increased usage and, of course, better revenue opportunities.

The privacy concerns revolve around the changing usage and access terms for information posted on Facebook, and from the potential for personal information to be collected by criminals to build profiles of individuals that could then be used to target victims for identity theft. However, users of Facebook also need to be aware of what information they post online and who has access to this through their individual security settings.

For more information about the new Graph Search feature, and the implications for Facebook users (and advertisers), please contact us for details.