Archive for the ‘Search behaviour’ Category

You’ve got the most beautiful and intelligent and relevant online brand presence – but nobody knows you’re there…

September 3rd, 2010

I am constant amazed that some of the most intelligent people I know believe in the power of Google to such an extent, that they even credit it with the ability to discern between ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Google does have it’s own in-built ‘quality control’ i.e. human beings looking at stuff, but the algorithm and spiders are as yet unable to make any genuine decisions about whose online web presence is more relevant and interesting to you, the user.

Take my personal example. My household is what’s technically known as ‘in market’ for a replacement for our five year old 4×4. However, recently I have become increasingly concerned about our carbon footprint, and feel that any new car that we buy needs to be as environmentally friendly (as well as comfortable, fuel efficient, able to take the six of us plus suitcases, have an iPod stand, fully adjustable seats and as many safety features that you can shake a stick at) as possible.

However my primary criteria, before any of the others, is the new car’s environmental credentials. How can my current marque know this, unless I go out of my way to tell them? Online car brands that want my business need to have a presence when I am looking for information on environmental cars of course, but I don’t want a ppc ad for my local dealer – its annoying and irrelevant. I want quality information that is going to persuade me that their marque are ticking all my new eco-friendly boxes, as well as tickling my brand loyalty mojo… In a nutshell, they need a ppc, seo and social content dissemination strategy that makes sure all that beautiful, interesting and intelligent stuff they have online is findable – and better still, they have to make sure that it can find me.

Blog post by Mary Keane-Dawson, non-Executive Director of Reform

Digital snacking – the death of downtime?

August 13th, 2010

Next time you’re in the queue at Starbucks or Tesco, watch people.

If it doesn’t look like they’ll get served in the next few seconds, chances are they’ll start prodding at their phone. Which will be in their hand. Ready. There’s even a phrase “Blackberry jam” that has been coined to describe being stuck at tube station exits behind office workers slowing to a halt as they breathe in that fresh phone signal.  http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Blackberry%20Jam.

Increasingly, people don’t do downtime. And this includes me. I’m not proud to admit it, but I find myself digitally snacking in the those oh-so-boring seconds in-between lift floors. Or waiting for the train to pull to a stop. Or while your colleague grabs a drink before a meeting. A watched kettle might never boil, but it’s definitely enough time to read the BBC headlines. I wager that checking facebook has replaced reading a tabloid as the nation’s favourite on the loo pastime (or is that a boy thing?).

I don’t say this is a good thing. It might even be a dreadful malaise, but it’s definitely real. And it’s getting worse/faster. Multi-tasking on iPhone 4.0 means – God forbid – that no longer do we need to stand by idly whilst the Spotify app hogs the foreground. Nope – we can start a track playing and check Twitter. Why has no-one updated anything in the last five minutes?

So what does this mean for marketers?
1. Recognise that mobile is not just a different screen size, but a different occasion, involving different mind states and needs.
2. Think little and often. It could be titbits of information, mini games or a decent facebook page; brands would do well to provide snacks.
3. Speed up. Marketing has always been about getting messages across efficiently, but boy, that really matters now. Halve your copy, and double its punch.
4. Social again comes to the fore. Opening up safari, then going to Google, typing a search and clicking on results is slowwwww. Just gimme the link or a Like button to press already.
5. Or provide alternatives. The world isn’t on its way to hell in a handcart. Downtime is good, and brands that help people to switch off will be more important than ever.

Guest blog: Carl Mesner Lyons is Marketing Director at toptable. He has been in marketing since the 90s and has worked on brands such as Guinness, the Guardian, lastminute.com and Capital Radio. Read more about his take on how brands can get famous and stay relevant at http://www.talkablelikeable.com/.

Who searches for who?

July 9th, 2010

In a world dominated by social media and the Facebook generation, brands are – naturally enough – focused on making sure they are in front of people.  Search techniques are sophisticated and complex.  Billions in revenue has flowed into Google.

Behind all this activity, however, lies a huge shift in how we use media.  Profound in its consequences, the shift from the broadcast age of ‘the big shout’ to the digitally enabled, always-on narrowcast ‘big conversation’ is with us.  Even a cursory consideration of what is going down points to huge changes in the way any brand needs to reach out to customers and encourage their purchasing behaviour.

Much search activity is driven by ‘big shout’ thinking: testosterone-fuelled, high energy masculine ‘make them buy this’ thinking.  But if we accept that we live in a world of a ‘big conversation’ where power is flowing to the savvy, demanding consumer then we must be ready to earn respect through how we behave as much as how we succeed in getting in front of people.  We must tell the story of our brand with passion and honesty.  We must allow our customers to participate, and listen to them with skill, attention and deep understanding.

As any author will tell you, good stories demand an innate, even intimate understanding of the audience.  Then the story can be told with passion and intrigue.  The audience can participate, question and feel that they are receiving special attention – that they are party to a little magic.  Brands have to learn this skill.  Rather than so much emphasis on the ‘shout’ perhaps we will see more time, energy and resource devoted to the ‘listen’ part of the conversation.  Who is saying what, to whom, and are they being listened to?  Who is influential, and who is merely shouting into a bucket?  Search can be used to answer these questions, too.

Might we see the telescope of traditional search being turned around?  Isn’t it about time the skills of effective search are harnessed by brands to listen to and interpret what is being said about them?  And wouldn’t that put a premium on intelligent search practitioners?

Blog post by Mary Keane-Dawson, non-Executive Director of Reform

The SEO community starts to test social media search optimisation strategies

July 2nd, 2010

When we think of search we think of external search i.e. search engines like Google that act as windows onto the web. From these windows we can find and access news, videos, social media forums, maps – as well as a wealth of branded content and information about businesses, products & services.

But of course people search elsewhere on the web. After email communication search is the primary web behaviour. And there is another kind of search engine: internal or enterprise search. In the US in March of 2010 Facebook’s internal search engine, for example, saw its usage soar by 48% to total 2.7% of all US searches carried out on the Web in that month. OK, so compared to Google’s 64% share of the US search market that might not seem to impressive. Still, that’s a whole lotta searching going on – and mostly for people’s names.

As brands and businesses start to saturate social media properties like Facebook, SEOs are already trying to fathom what the ranking factors are, so that they can lend their services to help brands become more visible in social media search. This article by Marty Weintraub entitled “Facebook SEO Ranking Factors, 2010 Study Results” suggests that criteria such as the Facebook Suggest Box, inserting generic keywords into name fields, population of the Interests field, encouraging as many Fans and “Likes”, might become the focus of SEO test strategies.

However, as Weintraub points out it’s early days in terms of cracking the social media search algorithms. But that won’t stop the more innovative and curious SEOs from having a go!

Blog post by Amanda Davie, Managing Director of Reform

Is it an art or is it a science?

June 25th, 2010

Albert –László Barabási is probably not well known in the world of search and that is not necessarily surprising as he is a physicist living in Boston, USA. But he is a physicist with a difference, who employs detailed scientific modelling to help understand social behavioural patterns.

In his research he maps the daily movements of millions of mobile phone users over many months. His latest study of a random 50,000 person subset has concluded that 93% of human mobility patterns are predictable. If he is right, and there is no reason to believe otherwise, that is a big number – in fact that is a huge number.

At this point he seems to be most excited about the prospect for using his ‘data burst’ analytics to model the spread of viruses or road traffic engineering. From a marketers point of view these individual and collective physical travel habits will be of interest, but people’s virtual travel habits are likely to prove even more interesting.

With Google and Facebook representing the most travelled sites online, the brands that can best analyse the ‘data bursts’ of search and social media activity will be best able to ensure that their products and services lie in wait as each consumer makes the next click with their mouse.

But better still, a little bit of reverse engineering will actually inform brands as to the moves that their competitors are most likely to make. This is where the art of pursuing means reversion or trend acceptance will force the data analysts to take a back seat as the business tacticians plot their course.

Blog post by James Kilpatrick, non-Executive Director of Reform

Thinking outside the search box.

May 28th, 2010

I’m not going to bang on about how great search is, or about how you should make sure that your site maximises the use of SEO with PPC as part of an integrated strategy involving all types of media. Chances are you hear that all the time anyway if you work with us. However, I will look at some of the things that, for me, make natural search a unique experience – not just in marketing terms but in the way that people approach it, the way their minds work.

Clients are becoming increasingly involved with and interested in SEO, which I think is great. I have no idea why some companies still try and make SEO such a top secret operation. By now everyone on the ‘practitioner’ side ought to know that the best projects are the ones where we can help the client understand how natural search truly works, pushing aside the mystique. Once the client understands and believes in it, they are more likely to make changes. Just as the search algorithms constantly evolve, so does the need to clarify with more depth. We want clients to ask about our recommendations, or suggest recommendations of their own, as we’ll be glad to discuss and explain what we feel works best.

Of course, there is never just one right answer. There are so many factors that influence natural search that it is imperative that we continue to think outside of the box. For example, for one of our clients the biggest influence on their SEO traffic is daily news stories. It is not a news site, but if a subject is not on the news then no one searches for their related terms. Another example is a site which sees increased traffic whenever specific episodes of certain shows are shown on TV. The trick is spotting these trends and attempting to capitalise upon them. We’re not necessarily saying look out for every wave of traffic, but when you see one wave coming in, think about how you might catch the next. A referral from a search engine may not result in a sale right away, but other influences can help you convert it into a sale further down the road.

The worst thing you can do in SEO is think “if I do ‘A’, then ‘B’ will happen immediately”, and it is crucial that agencies and clients communicate to avoid this kind of assumption. When clients understand more about the process, hopefully conversations around SEO will go far beyond the ‘As’ and ‘Bs’, to questions such as the right way to link several sites together, or how to sculpt ‘link juice’, ‘page rank’ or ‘link strength’ within a site. Or on the PPC side, whether to use keywords with ‘free’ in them if you are targeting something that users have to pay for.

If you’re keeping score by the way, the short answers are: you can build some strength by connecting your different sites, but it needs to be done in a way that seems natural; for link strength if you don’t want a link to be followed, it’s not going to improve the other links on your page, in fact it can hurt the site overall as retaining link strength is unnatural; and last but not least, for the PPC question, yes, some of the best ‘paid’ conversions came from ‘free’ keywords.

As for the long answers, well that’s another conversation or blog post. Still, here at Reform we like being asked questions, because in the world of search there is always at least one answer…

Blog post by Niall Madden, SEO Director of Reform

The State of Search Marketing Survey – guest comment from Ed Stevenson, MD of Marin Software

May 21st, 2010

Congratulations on your recent State of Search report.  I thought it provided some extremely valuable insight into the big issues facing our industry.

In particular, I was interested in the things that advertisers want to see more of from their agencies. Here’s the full list from the report:

• More insights from performance data, not just impression levels and basic daily reporting
• Better recommendations that can be implemented quickly
• More transparency of data
• More pro-activity overall
• More advice and assistance planning with ATL activity
• Direct access to tools for data without waiting for agency to provide it
• Ability to do more structured testing
• More meaningful (not necessarily more detailed) reporting and analysis
• Better understanding of the client’s company and its products to make PPC campaign changes easier
• More integration between SEO and PPC

What I think shines through here is a growing desire for control: advertisers want more of it; agencies have not always been able to demonstrate they can provide it.

Of course, advertisers have always wanted to know how their search campaigns are performing, but – as the report clearly shows – search spend has increased dramatically both in absolute terms and as a share of the overall marketing mix in recent years. With this growth inevitably comes greater scrutiny and a desire for more intelligence around how search is directly impacting the business.

The report also shows where this appetite for greater control can logically end up – with search being taken in house. Almost a third (32%) of clients are now taking this option and over half considering doing so. Clearly, in some cases this can make very good sense and certainly knowledge of ‘how to do search’ is no longer confined to a small niche of agency specialists – the basics are becoming commoditised.

But I still strongly believe that in many cases agencies can play a vital role in giving an outside perspective and adding creativity to search campaigns that advertisers can benefit from. And in a world where demand for exceptional search talent still outstrips supply, agencies can help clients access the skills of the best people available.  As I’ve written about before on my own blog, I think to succeed agencies need to directly address the issue of control. They need to be more transparent in their reporting. And they need to offer not just information, but insight and intelligence about campaigns and relate that back to the businesses they are serving in a language they understand.

A third of clients already see search as too important to outsource – and they may well be right.  The key to the future of agencies is to develop such a deep understanding of their clients, combined with outstanding creativity, so that an agency relationship no longer feels like outsourcing at all.

Guest blog: Ed Stevenson has worked in the search industry since the early days of AdWords and is now the Managing Director of Marin Software in Europe. Read more about his take on the rapidly expanding world of big search marketing at http://www.bigsearchblog.com.

You can read more about this State of Search Marketing Survey and download the full report here: http://www.reformdigital.com/reform-search-marketing-survey.

iPhones, iPads and the advent of ‘shortcut search’

April 26th, 2010

The advent of Apple’s iPhone – and indeed smart phones in general – is changing how we consume media and content. Nowadays, web-based information can be accessed more readily (and more cheaply) without us necessarily having to be chained to our desks.

The behaviour of searching for web-based information on the smaller screen is, however, different to how we search on our personal computers. This is exemplified by the fact that mobile search volumes (the amount of times that people search the web on their mobile phones) have been, by and large, disappointing, to the extent that to date neither Yahoo! nor Google have been able to realise significant ad revenue through mobile search advertising.

When we’re on the move we tend to be more time poor, and the restrictions of screen size and bandwidth mean that we are more likely to limit our searches to content such as maps, or for local listings such as restaurants, and less likely to carry out in-depth search-based research for purchases such as office equipment or cars.

Another new behaviour to understand is the consumption of apps. Apps on smart phones are fast becoming short cuts to finding information and the apps development market is being flooded by brands who want to make their mark. Often this new app consumption behaviour is replacing the behaviour of web search. For example, on my PC if I want to find out if there is a National Trust property in a certain area I will open up my browser and I will search on Google for “national trust properties in [area]”; but on my iPhone I won’t search by my browser (Safari), I will open up my National Trust app, and I search within it by area. This behaviour of downloading and deploying apps to snack on information can be described as ‘shortcut search’ behaviour.

Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt has made it clear that the technology giant will be prioritising their product and technology strategy for “first screen” technology moving forwards, in order to capitalise on the larger and faster growing web markets such as India, Africa and South America (where mobile phone adoption takes precedence over personal computers). It is therefore important for digital planners to keep one-eye on the future opportunities for brands on these new platforms. And if app search and app consumption grows to be as prolific as PC-based web search over the last ten years, Google, Microsoft and the other search providers will want to capitalise in terms of advertising revenue.

For those of you who have seen or even touched one of the new iPads, it is enough to melt the heart of the most sceptical of gadget geeks. I think the experience is more akin to the iPhone experience (and eighteen months in, I am still a woman in love!) than to the Mac. It has the speed and the rich visuals of the Mac but it is a giant touch screen that glides at the swipe of your finger, and with big, friendly app buttons on it.

So the big question is: if we start booting up our iPads on the train, bus or in the car (preferably not when driving!) because the very mobile screen size and bandwidth affords us more time online, will our search behaviour be similar to our PC or Mac search behaviour i.e. via the web browser, or will be it be more comparable to mobile phone search behaviour i.e. via apps? Will one platform’s search behaviour cannibalise the other? And what will this mean for brands who rely so heavily on search traffic volume to satisfy direct response, sales and business targets? We shall wait and see!

Blog post by Amanda Davie, Managing Director of Reform