Archive for the ‘Search marketing strategy’ Category

How businesses should (or shouldn’t) react to Google’s latest update

May 20th, 2011

SEO has come a long way in the past decade, with companies focusing on search as a key component of their digital marketing strategy. And while you can probably guess I would be in the position to say such a thing, the truth is that SEO can indeed make or break a business on the web, leveling the playing field in this day and age between big names and local startups.

Companies around the world have started to use a good portion of their overall marketing resource based on how they perform in search. This is great, but it seems to me as still less of a “plan to action”, and more of a “knee jerk reaction”. The recent Google Panda / Farmer update was a major example of this – with companies “reacting” left and right wondering what they did wrong. While we love the fact that in today’s marketplace, many businesses are watching their search engine marketing performance much more closely – unfortunately, many are also believing everything they hear! So yes, SEO has indeed come a long way – and companies won’t fall for just anything, but there are certainly are still a fair bit of misconceptions going around the industry.

One recent example was the Overstock.com SEO Spam incident that you may have heard about on both the major news sites like CNN, or industry sites such as Search Engine Land where the major US retailer was penalised in the Google algorithm – supposedly (but this reason was never fully confirmed) for having a link building strategy that consisted of bulk .edu links. Weeks later, Overstock itself issued a statement saying that they had made the fixes Google required and sure enough they were back in the index – and all was well.

Some people simply assumed that Overstock had simply fixed things up, while some people complained that it was unfair that the big companies get such an advantage and got reinstated (not bothering to check why), while most companies only remembered the first part of the Overstock story, spending the time since chasing their SEO team, consultant or agency about some other new story that made the rounds in the industry or mainstream press. Perhaps direct competitors did look a bit closer at the overall situation, but we cannot confirm this, and thats not the issue here anyway.

Either way, it seemed like no one from any of the groups above double checked the story. If Google says no to bulk link acquisition and Overstock got banned from Google, does that mean Overstock’s bulk link acquisition got them in trouble? No. It was a poor misconception, an assumption that A+B=C. Clients should expect more from an agency, consultant or in house team, especially when monitoring competitor activity. We in this industry should be looking at the full answer and not taking other people’s word all the time. The EDU links by the way are still quite active in many places (example: http://www.alumni.ncsu.edu/s/1209/index.aspx?sid=1209&gid=1&pgid=632) – and so what changed then? Well, on the pages that got penalised for generic terms such as “living room furniture” – Overstock.com had pop-up/expandable text coded within the tags of their page. The pop-up text was filled with keywords and was in Google’s cache and visible to text browsers (screenshot of this example below).

The text strategy was reported by a competitor and got penalised shortly after. Yet, when Overstock was allowed back in, what changed? The links stayed, yet the hidden text is no longer there. Could this have been the “real” reason why the penalty was imposed in the first place?

No one will know for sure, but the point is that many companies will go by what they hear/read and that there are still many misconceptions about SEO as a whole. Here at Reform we make sure we try to not just throw some excuse about why sites perform the way that they do, but examine closer into it and find out what the real reason may be – instead of a “one size fits all” answer. With this extra insight and custom approach to your overall digital marketing strategy, SEO can become more of a natural approach, rather than a mystery. Not necessarily the wrong answer or right answer, but exploring multiple answers and possibilities and avoiding any potential misconceptions is key to any project we take on.

Search analytics helps us to know our customers that little bit better

November 19th, 2010

Most businesses are interested in who their customers are and curious about where they come from. However brilliant their product or service, there remains a wonderful undercurrent of insecurity. Why are people buying what I sell?

Traditionally this insecurity has been addressed by market research firms. Research is then passed to business analysts, who review these surveys and other data. These techniques have value, but also fall down in a couple of key areas. Firstly – it may seem obvious – but market researchers can only work with the responses they receive. This may not represent a realistic client base, leaving them to extrapolate results to draw conclusions.

For potential customers, research and internal data is going to be even less representative. A holiday letting business may know that many of its customers come from a cluster of postcodes but does not know where potential customers from the same postcodes go on holiday or why. It would have an even poorer view of the holiday aspirations of people outside of the postcodes where most of its business originates.

With the shift to ecommerce the situation has improved, as more customer data is captured by businesses generally. Online surveys help too, as they mean a business can get a better grasp of customer motivation. But sadly this still does not solve the riddle of the non customer. Well, not unless you step into the world of Search.

Searching with a small ‘s’ has been a fundamental human characteristic since time immemorial. The advent of search engines, however, has dramatically broadened our ability to find even the most esoteric products, services or solutions to our problems. But if you look at search engines from a different perspective, they become a business analytics nirvana.

In the right hands and with the right technology a company can now answer questions like: “What search terms led this customer to buy my service?” They can even see how many people were searching for the same thing – giving their market share for that particular search – and how available their service was compared to competitors, by using systems like AdIntel to measure share of voice.

There is virtually no limit to the quantitative data that is available through effective search analytics. What makes this all the more interesting is a more recent ability to overlay qualitative analysis on the results. Historically a buyer was good, and someone who did not buy was bad. But now we can analyse things like the lifetime value of a client to improve our understanding. And by ‘listening’ to social media traffic, (and other user generated content), positive and negative attitudes can be interwoven with quantitative data that tracks the movement of consumers around the net.

Given that the internet both sells directly and informs consumers for offline purchases, the opportunities for satisfying the curiosity of businesses grow larger every day. Not only can we tell you where your customer came from and why, but we can also suggest why they did not go to your competitor. Tidy?

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

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

Google’s Search Market Share Fallen Behind in Asia? Not Exactly

July 30th, 2010

Don’t call it a comeback, but Google might actually be gaining a lot of ground in the Asian market very soon. Yes, the make up of search engine usage in the Far East (the focus of Reform’s International Search Review series so far) – where only a few months ago Google left China, Yahoo! dominated in Japan and few people in Korea even used Google at any point – has changed drastically.

Yahoo! Japan has about a 57% share of the market there, while Google’s share is just over 35%; Microsoft has a share of about 3%. Yahoo! and Bing are merging results elsewhere, but Yahoo! Japan, being to some extent independently owned (unlike in other markets, the Yahoo! Japan branch is actually majority owned by Softbank) has opted to go with Google instead of Bing for its results on both the SEO and PPC side. Microsoft quickly protested, citing that Google will suddenly have close to a 95% share of the 3rd largest search market after the US & China, thus monopolising it in a similar way to Microsoft’s dominance in the PC market over the years.

As for China, Google is back to work in the market that they shocked many people by threatening to leave earlier this year. Only a couple months ago, Baidu was pulling away with a clear lead in one of the fastest growing markets (and potentially largest) in the world.

But earlier this month, Google managed to work out a deal where operations in China could resume through 2012, and the google.cn domain no longer redirected to Hong Kong. But the relationship has been short lived, as while http://www.google.cn/ is back, trying a query as of July 30th takes you to Hong Kong once more. So, the comeback is still a work in progress there. In fact, you can take a quick look at day to day status via http://www.google.com/prc/report.html#hl=en

Google has also cut ties with two of the twenty five “authorized advertising agents” in China, which account for most of the paid search spend within China.

Moving over to Korea, where Google’s market share is even lower (under 5%), they’ve worked on a new strategy – going away from search and moving towards mobile and even TV. Working on partnerships with local companies, Google has shown progress in the mobile market there (which rivals such as Naver were late to enter) and are working with companies such as LG and Samsung on integrating search with other forms of media, such as TV, where Samsung is potentially working on launching a Google TV that would run on Google’s Android Operating System.

Still, contrary to what some people felt a few months ago, Google hasn’t given up on Asia yet, and the search market in countries like China, Japan and Korea is still ready for new competition. Find out more about these markets and more via our market research pieces:

Search Marketing in China

Search Marketing in Korea

Search Marketing in Russia

Search Marketing in India – Coming Soon.

Blog post by Niall Madden, SEO Director of Reform

The integration of search with other marketing channels

July 16th, 2010

Integrating search with other marketing channels has been a hot topic for many years now.

We’ve seen paid & natural reporting interfaces developed by technology providers, studies that correlate uplifts in performance in PPC with TV activity, and path to conversion analysis which shows that ATL activity also generates interest in generic search terms, not just brand. These are all significant steps forward and very useful for making investment decisions, but are based on budget justification, rather than guiding us in creating a more coherent and user-focused strategy.

So what can we do to align our marketing strategies, so that we are presenting the consumer with a consistent message that provides them with exactly what they’re looking for? The answer is to think about it from the consumer’s perspective.

In search, the results page acts as a point of confluence: it is the meeting point for the efforts of many marketing channels. A searcher could have been influenced to search by PR, a television or radio ad, a mail drop, an email, word of mouth, or any other form of marketing. It is therefore crucial for a search marketer to understand some key things about this results page:

  1. What results pages are searchers viewing (i.e. what search terms are they using)?
  2. What type of content are they looking for?
  3. What options are they currently presented with?
  4. What is the best way to get this content ranking?

This isn’t a reactive process, though. By the time a piece or PR has generated a spike in search volume the opportunity will be lost. The key to success in integration is therefore proactive communication; ensuring that the search team are aware of the ATL strategy and are anticipating search volume and optimising for it with the right kind of content before the event.

It’s not just about being there, it’s about being there with the content that the user will be most responsive to to make sure that you have what the user is searching for. This requires bringing together multiple stakeholders and possibly drawing on multiple budget lines.

With marketers from different channels often being very different in terms of personality and skill sets,  it’s not always an easy win. But in terms of efficiency and capitalising on the full investment that you are making in your marketing budget it is absolutely crucial. Search is also particularly cruel in that not only is there an opportunity cost of not pro-actively aligning your strategies , you will be feeding traffic to competitors who are ranking on those pages already!

Blog post by Graham Everitt, Search Consultant at Reform

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

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.

The winds of change…

May 14th, 2010

Have you found it strange that so many commentators have been aghast as the new UK government formation has emerged over the last few days? Only a week ago we were off casting our votes at school halls up and down the country – did we realize what momentous change we were about to make at the time? Our vote appears to have delivered a completely new and surprising shape and flavour of government; only time will tell if it will pass the collective taste test.

‘Sense-making’ and ‘sense-guiding’ are how we join up the dots of change, giving meaning to ourselves and others when situations need order. It’s a rather retrospective endeavour, and I’ll give you odds now that future explanations of how our coalition government came to exist will have Gordon’s ‘bigot’ comment woven in somewhere central to the story. We all use it, and as participants in a knowledge-based economy, probably more frequently than most. Our digital world thrives on innovative thinking, surprises, and what can appear like chaos eventually emerging as opportunity. However, the temporal nature of this world throws up anomalies and uncertainties; what is robust and proven today can lost by the wayside tomorrow.

Change is everywhere, and it is no surprise that we seek out some certainties. We need to be able to make informed decisions that can guarantee us at least medium-term stability… don’t we? Whether we are aware of it or not, transformational changes such as our new government are not simply the result of our vote on the day, but a combination of small emergent changes effecting and affecting our environment, social and cultural world views, the economy and even technologies. These changes impact our perception, our ‘sense-making’, of how the shape shifts, with occasionally surprising outcomes.

Reform is in the business of making sense in real time of those incremental changes, whether emergent or planned. We can help realize our clients’ value, potential business development, and increased profitability. Through our process of exploring the business, utilising data, looking at search behaviours and so forth, we develop and deliver planning tools and action plans that enable truly transformational change outcomes, without causing a revolutionary shake down.

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

You can take a horse to water…

May 10th, 2010

The web is a marvel that has transformed the way consumers interact with the suppliers of goods and services, but it has not changed some of the basic rules of merchandising. Over the last few years the BBC has run a few series featuring Mary Porter the ‘Queen of Shops’, where our inimitable heroine has been challenged to improve the retail performance of an assortment of different shops, ranging from the super fashionable to the charitable end of the perspective.

Some of her focus has been on signage and window displays in an effort to attract more visitors to the individual shops, but far more emphasis has been placed on what merchandise is bought, and crucially how this merchandise is displayed. Online retailers of both goods and services would do well to understand the importance of this distinction. It is all very well developing a highly optimised website that ensures that relevant keyword searches drive traffic to your site, or indeed targeting specific paid-for-search copy to attract visitors to specific features within your site.

However the key to successful deployment of search budgets is the adoption of a holistic approach that goes beyond making your site findable, but also facilitates transactions for prospective purchasers. This means considering the usability of sites both from the point of view of being able to quickly identify the specific goods or services within a site, and also being able to complete an informed purchase with the minimum of hassle.

As the Queen of Shops would tell you, there is no point having your best selling items in a dark room at the back of the shop and only having one till operator for a queue of thirty customers; especially if you have just spent thousands painting the outside and dressing the window. The same applies to search, where the most effective budgets will utilise search spending as part of a comprehensive marketing strategy and the best search practitioners will understand the wider ramifications for servicing the customers that they drive to your site.

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

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