Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category

Google Instant Suggestions Misleading Users And Businesses Alike

March 23rd, 2011

This isn’t exactly recent news, and maybe more along the lines of criticism. But so many clients and people in the industry have referred to it that we had to take a closer look.

It has been six months since Google Instant officially became part of the default search results in the US (and since then in some other countries too), and actually there is an interesting transcript of a presentation at SMX in New York that touches base on this.

But that’s more of a side note. What I want to talk about here is that when people type in a query and see keyword or brand variations suggested, they think that these are the top terms people are querying based on the main term. For example, if you look for “Reform Digital”, Google will suggest “Reform Digital Limited” or “Reform Digital SEO” or “Reform Digital London”. Fair enough. Google Instant will often suggest up to five terms as you conduct your search, and they are often some of the top variations of the query; however that is not always the case and they don’t appear in any particular order.

A recent test, based on data from different clients and companies that we work with, as well as Google data, showed that the suggested terms were actually a selection of five key terms found in what Google considered to be the top ten queries around a term. From as long ago as 2006 you could go to a URL on which Google was testing what was then known as “Google Suggest”, where they used estimates of Google impressions (perhaps query estimates?), which differ by market. Google then took the top ten variations that it sees in terms of impressions and lists them out. Have a look at the following URL which we generated using the term “mobile phone” as an example, to see what we’re talking about http://www.google.co.uk/complete/search?output=toolbar&q=mobile%20phone (or http://www.google.com/complete/search?output=toolbar&q=mobile%20phone if you want to see the US variations). This kind of query can be done with any term to see what terms Google Suggest would return (ie first four or five listed on the page) and to see what the other contenders are (based on query totals next to most terms).

So what we saw is that Google picks the five search terms that it’s going to show via various parameters, but to have a decent chance of being listed amongst those five, you need to at least be in its list of the top ten (or know how to automate queries etc). In terms of timings, we saw that Google Instant’s suggestions don’t respond immediately to changes in impression volumes, there is some delay. When checking for AT&T following the announcement that they were buying T-Mobile at the weekend, it wasn’t until late on Monday that a T-Mobile variation appeared in the list of top ten key terms, and even then there was no “impression total” next to it (it’s the only keyword suggestion with no data on that above URL).

Or, for another example, for the term “Reform” (including the space, as if you were going to add another word), Google’s top ten list includes the term “Reform Digital”, and it actually now gets the most queries of the group. But as a newer addition to the list, it’s not one of the five being suggested when you search in Google proper.

So Google Suggest is definitely sensitive to a combination of historic data and trends, and, like everything else on Google, it’s subject to manipulation. Website owners have looked at getting users to query variations to make their business look cleaner, for example “Business Name scam” is a common suggestion. Tools such as Amazon Mechanical Turk – where users are paid very small amounts to do basic tasks such as “like” or tweet something – have also been used by sites in the past to try and manipulate the results, as have several other methods of pushing query data.

This issue comes into play when looking at brand reputation. What if one of the ten terms was some other negative comment about your company? How can we get a more positive variation up there in its place? Of course, if all five of Google’s suggestions were negative, you probably have other problems!

Blog post by Niall Madden, Search Director of Reform

Update: “Scam” variations of a keyword are now blacklisted in Google Instant – so… “Business Name scam” won’t reveal a drop down. Nor does it appear in the URL that lists the 10 keyword variations. However, some brand names still have the “scams” variation, for now.

The Oscar Prediction: Why We Were Wrong

March 9th, 2011

A couple weeks ago we did a short Oscar blog wondering if the new Oscar watch created by Google could accurately predict the Oscars. We took the data given by Google and localized it, limiting it to Los Angeles county. Our assumption was that voters who were preparing to vote during this time would go online and look at the film’s website or they would do some research on the film they were planning on voting for. We predicted, based on this data, that The Social Network would win. We were wrong.

Why were we wrong? Was it because The King’s Speech was a better movie? Is it because of Harvey Weinstein’s power and influence or is it because the Academy Awards are just political? The fault probably lied in our assumption. Most likely since Academy Awards voters get a free dvd of the films they didn’t need to search for the movie to watch them in the theatres and possibly they didn’t go to their computers at all for research.

But what does this prove? That while the data compiled for Google can show a trend in a specific area, it cannot determine a smaller base of voters on the assumption that they may go online. Was it a longshot that we could pick the winner? Yes, but it was fun and we’re sometimes geeks for data and we were intrigued. Although it didn’t go as well as our previous prediction, it was still an interesting experiment that had us on the edge of our seats for an otherwise drab awards show.

Can Social Media and Sports Play Well Together?

February 24th, 2011

The previous week the English Premier League warned footballers that tweets, blogs and entries on Facebook that are deemed improper by “bringing the game into disrepute, or are threatening, abusive, indecent or insulting may lead to disciplinary action.”

This is following a £16,000 fine by Liverpool’s Ryan Babel after he posted a photoshopped photo of Howard Webb, the referee whose calls the Liverpool striker didn’t agree with, wearing a Manchester United shirt.  Babel apologized soon after the post, stating it was “just an emotional reaction after losing an important game.”

Yet this raises the question of is social media and sports able to play nicely? An increasing amount of fines have been levied to sports superstars with many superstars citing that they use it because they don’t enjoy how media outlets portray them and, on twitter, they can show their true character.

Though, many sports organisations are concerned about this character and rules on social media have become increasingly stringent. And many would say this is a correct step since athletes around the world have shown great carelessness in their social media. Athletes have been fined for tweeting during a game, commenting about their team’s performance, even for blaming God after missing a touchdown catch. Australian Rules Football players have even used it to find women…a tactic that backfired when one woman started posting pictures of footballers naked on her site.

Yet Twitter is growing in the sports world. Last season in the NFL draft two teams posted their picks on twitter before announcing them to the commissioner. Also more sports stars, from golf to swimming to FA football, are joining twitter and gaining massive followers, undoubtedly changing relations between the sports star and the fan. But whether players will conform to the increasingly strict rules brought by sporting organisations is another matter. Ryan Babel’s twitter and Google search spiked as news of the Liverpool striker’s fine hit the web. Seems like £16,000 buys a good amount of PR for the young man.

Blog posted by Matt Dorville, SEO Strategist at Reform

2011 Academy Awards – Oscar Predictions

February 22nd, 2011

Today the 2011 Academy Awards ballots are due to Price Waterhouse Coopers and we noticed that Google did an Oscar watch, tracking the search queries on each film nominated. At Reform we looked this data and noticed a few things that might help accurately predict who will hold the statuette Sunday.

In looking at the graph above it seems clear that, judging on search queries, Black Swan should win on Sunday. Yet, the amount of publicity surrounding Natalie Portman due to her recent engagement and pregnancy with Benjamin Millepied made us wonder if that publicity may have affected black swan’s search queries.

As shown above, Natalie Portman dominates the Best Actress category and provides good evidence that her search queries may have affected the overall data for Best Picture. Therefore we should look at Black Swan with this graph in mind.

Next we thought about the voters themselves. Since most of the Academy currently work and/or live in Los Angeles, we limited the results to Los Angeles. This is very important since when we looked at query locations we noticed that the current leader, Black Swan, had most of it’s queries from Singapore (the United States was ranked 4th).

In looking at the top five frontrunners for Best Picture, we limited the search queries to Los Angeles and limited the search to the last 30 days. Our hypothesis is that Academy members would query the movie they are thinking about voting for, whether to watch the film again or decide between two or three films. In the short amount of time, the number of queries by members of the Academy (about 6,000 in total) should make a difference in the acceleration of queries within the 30 days.


Judging from the graphs above we see that Black Swan is significantly lower than on the overall graph at the top of the page. We can see that The Social Network has had significant spikes with overall excellent production. We’d like to immediately call it for The Social Network but the significantly high climb in interest in True Grit has us question this. Many Academy members are notorious for leaving voting late and this recent jump may be due to late voters.

The review of graphs by limiting the data to region while taking into account the outside factor (namely Ms. Portman’s recent publicity) we can say that The Social Network has the odds on chance of winning the Academy Award for Best Picture with True Grit running as a dark horse.

This demonstrates, once again, the need not only to have the correct data but to read it in a way that is the most beneficial to your goal. Looking at the initial graph, one may discern that queries are predicting Black Swan, but filtering the data and analyzing it proves something different. While both critics at The New York Times and Roger Ebert have predicted The King’s Speech as the victor, SEO for Los Angeles tells another story. We’ll see who will prove correct Sunday.

Blog posted by Matt Dorville, SEO Strategist at Reform

The Joy of Stats.

February 11th, 2011

There’s a saying that goes, “There are lies, damned lies and statistics”. It rather suggests that statistics aren’t very popular, doesn’t it? It could be to do with the fact that they are often presented in a dull, linear fashion. But behind each statistic lies a story. And, if you can tell that story using fantastic imagery, then it comes alive and people will remember it forever.

There was once a little girl. She was fascinated by science, and at the age of 9 she started collecting data. Her data was the fruits and vegetables she grew in her parent’s garden.. She measured, organised and catalogued them to create her first statistical table.

Fast forward about 20yrs and this now grown woman was a nurse on the battlefields of the Crimean War. She was horrified by what she saw but more so about the deaths of wounded soldiers from disease in the filthy battlefield hospitals.

She began to count the dead. For two years, she recorded mortality data in meticulous detail. When the war was over she persuaded the government to set up an enquiry and presented her data in a devastating report. What cemented her place in the history books was her presentation of the data, in particular her use of graphics, and one in particular, the polar area graph.  For each month of the war a huge blue wedge represented those soldiers that had died from preventable diseases. Florence Nightingale’s graphics were so clear they were impossible to ignore.

They sparked a revolution in healthcare and hygiene worldwide and saved innumerable lives. Far more than her nursing work in the Crimea could ever have done.

And there you thought statistics were boring.

Blog post by Alex Marks, Senior Consultant at Reform

What data tells us, and how it helps us to improve.

February 4th, 2011

“Data consists of propositions that reflect reality, such as measurements or observations of a variable.” (Wikipedia)

The definition doesn’t necessarily fire one up with enthusiasm or excite your imagination, right? Once I had a boss once who was fond of saying to me, usually when I’d come up with a new and crazy idea for a product or service, “Ah, Mary… that’s all very good, but what does the data tell us?”. She would then squint her eyes and turn on her heel in a most disturbing and enigmatic way. I finally realized, years later, that what my boss hoped for was by my burying myself in the ‘data’, and scrutinizing it for pattern, shape and linear connectivity, the empirical truth and Holy Grail of marketing certainty would emerge… and into the bargain, she would avoid the risk associated with impulsive experimentation. Today marcomms, marketers and media folk have the collective opportunity to use data to afford both discovery and alacrity of purpose.

All around us, the web provides endless streams of real time data… after all, that’s what enabled the internet to become a reality – bits of datum connecting with other bits of datum. Now that should makes us EXCITED, because as it is real time data, we can test and experiment with our new ideas, and gauge almost immediately if those ideas are having the desired impact on our customers and our commercial objectives. We have this opportunity to disseminate and analyse enormous amounts of consumer behavioral data, sound bites, conversations, blogs, films, tweets, transactions and check out drop offs etc.  There’s so much of the stuff, where does it begin and where/when will it end?  THE TRICK IS – DO NOT BE OVERWHELMED!

Reform recognizes that our clients and their agencies will need independent expertise and informed guidance into how best to manage all this information and shape it into meaningful business insights.

We also recognize that solutions must be both robust and cost effective, and most often a selection of automated tools alongside human squirreling, will yield the most powerful results.  To this end we have developed sway, our proprietary tool for developing business strategy based on information derived from amalgamating digital data sources. Our sway breakfast seminar on February 15th is a must attend event, and the opportunity to learn more about Reform’s services in this area. (for more info about this event please contact events@reformdigital.com). I hope to see you there!

Blog post by Mary Keane-Dawson, Non-Executive Director at Reform

Data, data everywhere! But how do businesses extract the insight and innovation to drive growth?

January 28th, 2011

Digital data is the new due diligence (DD) of business planning. A recent Accenture report “Will Marketing Get The Message?” concluded that leading growth companies, recognizing that digital technologies and social media, have taken marketing to a new level of rigour. 60% of the growth companies surveyed by Accenture said that they extract and translate customer and market data into strategic insight.

So how do businesses unlock this growth opportunity? Reform gathers, monitors, interprets and reinvests digital data sets every day for clients, and these are some of the trends that we see, both in terms of effective data-led strategies, but also the pitfalls to realising growth.

Search data – both external and on-site – can help inform businesses on what the universal demand is for products and services, which businesses are stealing market share, which price points are most attractive to customers, among other insights.

Analytics data tells businesses why people aren’t buying their products, which products are more/less appealing, what customers’ average order value is, etc.

Social data tells customer service teams pinpoints customer complaints – and indeed gives them a real-time response channel, where untapped communities, tribes or potential customers can be found, what the media is saying about the business and how this is impacting on share price.

So why isn’t every business tapping into the digital goldmine? Collecting the data is the easy part. However here are some of the pitfalls that we see across client organisations:

  • Data gets silo’d within marketing and left to the devices of the online, direct marketing or CRM teams.
  • Businesses are gathering so much unfiltered data that they find themselves drowning in it. They can’t extract the useful information from the pointless.
  • There is a huge data analytics skills gap. And data interrogation skills – few planners challenge the data in a real-world context. Too many inexperienced online marketers take the data at face value. Data in the wrong hands can be a dangerous thing.
  • Data doesn’t get filtered, formatted and interpreted into meaningful management information. It languishes in the world of clicks and ‘likes’ and bounces. This means nothing to C-suites – and why should it?

 

If the first decade of the new Millennium was about gathering and digitising the world’s information, the second will be about filtering and translating it into knowledge, insight and innovation that will bring brands closer to their customers and businesses closer to realising significant revenue growth.

There is gold in them there hills. So let’s grab our spades and get digging.

Blog post by Amanda Davie, managing director of Reform.

Is It Good To Be Bad In SEO?

December 2nd, 2010

There’s an old saying that all publicity, even bad publicity, is good publicity. In a recent article from The New York Times, Search Engine Optimization through search juggernaut Google proves that the old saying may be the current truth in ecommerce.

The story details a consumer who purchased a pair of Lafont sunglasses from DecorMyEyes.com, a website ranked at the top of Google’s search results. While she believed that the high Google ranking and the look of the site brought assurances, she had no idea of the nightmare to follow.

Within a few weeks, she received the glasses in the mail, but, a loyal follower to the brand, she immediately spotted them as counterfeit. In investigating the purchase, she discovered that she was also overcharged by 125 dollars. When she called the website support to inquire about the purchase and ask for a refund, she was berated by the owner of the site, who called her a bitch and threatened her with graphic sexual violence. He also told her he knew where she lived and sent her a picture of her front door.

The consumer immediately called her credit card company but unfortunately, they also gave her trouble in investigating the matter and getting a refund.  Her requests for refunds landed her more harassment from the owner of the site, including calls at three in the morning and e-mail threats against her.

How then did this website get such high status from Google? The answer, according to the article, is simple. Many times consumers expect a smooth transaction and when they receive it, they don’t leave feedback. But when they get a horrible transaction, they need a place to vent their frustrations and the jilted consumer will go a review based website to describe their experience, throw caution to other consumers and link to the website to show where to consumers must avoid. The problem: This actually helps them.

DecorMyEyes saw that while consumers left feedback and provided links to their site on reputable sites on Google’s augustness scale, their Google ranking would increase… and so their sales would follow. They realized that bad publicity is not only good publicity, it’s also free publicity.

Since the Google algorithm may not be able to discern sentimentality, the search engine looks at the added content on a reputable as a benefit and gives DecorMyEyes a greater ranking. The website, seeing the potential, has taken the SEO philosophy and run with it, spurring on more comments by frustrating reviewers on websites into even more action. According to the article, their goal is “NEGATIVE advertisement” and that goal is garnering SEO great dividends.

A Google ranking leading to productivity of the site, even with bad reviews and now a scathing New York Times article about it, reaffirms the great power that SEO has on ecommerce business. Getting a high Google ranking, DecorMyEyes has built an ecommerce site that the owner claims to be “fantastically profitable.” Yet his completely unethical and terrifying business practices show that, in the wrong hands, SEO could be a powerful tool for unlawful sites intending on trapping consumers.

As of Tuesday night, Google was yet to comment on the article but many replies commented on how the search engine algorithm should be altered to punish sites receiving bad reviews, protecting consumers from sites that use SEO to prey on them. Google have now responded on their official blog, announcing that they have developed an algorithmic solution in an initial response to this problem, but they can’t guarantee that people won’t find further loopholes in the algorithm.

The outcry over the site has spread significantly throughout the week and one may wonder if the owner of DecorMyEyes is already relishing the profits of getting his website in the very prominent online version of The New York Times.

Read the full article at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/business/28borker.html

Strictly Come Searching

October 15th, 2010

Summer is over. Autumn is here. But it’s ok, because Strictly Come Dancing and The X Factor are back on our screens, and with them comes the countdown to Christmas. I know it’s far too early to be talking about Christmas, but with 14 Contestants on Strictly you know that at the very most there are 14 weeks to go – less, probably, knowing how the producers like the odd double elimination or three-way ‘dance off’ towards the end. It is the Saturday night equivalent of an advent calendar… with glitter balls.

Everybody talks about it. ‘OMG did you see Anne Widdecombe?!’… ‘Did you hear that she’s farting through training?’… ‘Gavin Henson’s abs. That’s all’… ‘Paul Daniels – definitely more tragic than magic, but Debbie McGee is still cute as a button!’ Here at Reform it is no different, and the conversation recently turned to how we could combine our excitement over all things Strictly with our expertise in the world of search. So, over the next few months we will be doing a series of blogs – Strictly Come Searching if you will (see what we did there?!).

So we have set in motion some data collection which we will be delving into each week and as the data set grows we will examine, analyse and to a certain extent poke fun at what we find. This week as a starter for ten we have looked at Bing UK search volume data collected from Microsoft AdIntelltigence. We looked at the celebrity dancers’ names and tracked the search volume for each person over the past week, the past month and the year to see what we could find.

My assumption had been that the pre-Strictly search volumes of the celebrities would vary slightly dependent on their level of fame – for example, I had assumed more people would have been searching for Michelle Williams, Destiny’s Child singer and Grammy Award winner, than would perhaps have been searching for one of our home grown stars. Well, it’s clear that I had failed to grasp just how important soaps are to us in the UK. More people searched for the beautiful Kara Tointon on Bing in the last 12 months than searched for the rest of the contestants put together. The only other celebrities that stand out on the chart of the last year are Patsy Kensit, Tina O’Brien and, to a lesser extent, Scott Maslan. Go Holby, Corrie and Eastenders!

So, seeing that some of our soap stars have a pre-Strictly advantage, I took a look at the search volume data for the seven days surrounding the first live show after which the first celebrity would be voted off. We still see that Kara is out in the lead, though people searching for Felicity Kendal on Saturday night shot up from nowhere. Searches for Jimi Mistry, Scott Maslan, and Anne Widdecombe all shot up by over 1000%, with Pamela Stephenson not too far behind with a percentage increase of over 800%. Bizarrely, the numbers of people searching for Michelle Williams on Saturday night actually dropped 70%, but as you would expect everyone else saw a peak in interest.

For most of the celebrities the number of people searching for their name spikes on the Saturday night, then falls immediately on the Sunday – though Tina O’Brian, Matt Baker and (once again) Kara Tointon out-perform the rest of the ensemble here by actually seeing search volume increase into Sunday.

So what kinds of conclusions can be drawn or statements can be made from these results. Is it possible to predict who will be voted off and who will last in the show based on what we can see here? Are the people searching for the celebrities the same people that pick up the phone and vote to keep their favourites in the show? Well, time will tell. The phone vote in Strictly only accounts for half of a celebrity’s overall score, so however popular they may be, if they are a terrible dancer then that will put them more at risk of being sent home.

Goldie and Peter Shilton – the two celebrities that faced the axe on Sunday night having been in the bottom two after the judges and viewers votes were tallied up – made up two of the bottom four celebrities in terms of the number of searches performed on the Saturday night. Neither of them had set the world alight with their dancing performance. To put it politely.

Matt Baker and Michelle Williams made up the other two in the bottom four in terms of search volume on the night of the live show. Perhaps they are at risk of early departure if their standard of dancing drops off. Having said that we can see that searches for Matt have increased in the week following the live show, so maybe he is in a safer place – particularly as his former life as a gymnast has developed in him a keen level of timing and grace.

This is of course all just speculation , and it will be interesting to see if over time any more interesting patterns come to light. In terms of conclusions for this week… making a wild statement based on search volume (and a little bit on her dancing), Kara Tointon is going to win Strictly Come Dancing 2010. You heard it here first.

UPDATE: Find out who’s going to win Strictly Come Dancing in 2011

Blog post by Penny Anderson, Search Consultant at Reform

Google Instant Creates a New Type of Query: Incomplete Match, AKA Short Tail Search

September 12th, 2010

As you may have read over the last week – be it on Amanda’s blog post or the general buzz on the web – Google Instant search was heralded, hated, mocked, loved, loathed, etc. In fact the only common opinion was that everyone had an opinion!

Now that the dust has settled, the new feature exceeds the initial shock value. No, SEO results didn’t change (although they did get pushed down a bit and number one rankings may have even more value now), and PPC impressions won’t go through the roof due to their being a set amount of time of three seconds needed for the result to display in instant search (but they will go up, as people look at their query and refine further before even clicking anything). And is Google is trying to make users customise their searches in a way that their ads can appear across a greater percentage of search queries – perhaps also forcing an increase in keyword query totals for certain queries, and reducing them for others? That remains to be seen.

So what have we discovered so far? Well, you can now get traffic for keywords you do not even rank for!

What? Yes, Google Instant has brought about a new type of search query. We have had brand search queries, market sector queries, generics and local search queries, along with the ever evolving “long tail” of search that has been an industry buzz word for years.

And the new type of search query? You heard it here first: “short tail” search. Or perhaps “incomplete match”!

Already, since the launch of Google Instant, some US sites have reported a slight growth in “incomplete keywords”. For example, one of the top volume driving keywords for our client Angel Investment Network in the last few days has been “angel inve”. Yes, by then, the main site was top of the results. And the user, well I guess the user couldn’t be bothered to type “angel investment”, saw the result they wanted and clicked away! Still, this example is quite relevant. But what about an example where the word the user intended to type is quite competitively different…

Let’s say am looking for “photography”, but by the time I get to “Pho” I see Photobucket ranked 1st – it sounds relevant to me, and I click it (as it’s a site about photo sharing, and yes while if you read the details it may not be the right site for me, first impressions are big, the site name seems relevant, and most users are impatient – so I click away).

However, this is a site that does not rank for the term “photography” yet it got a semi-relevant click that now tells the user “OK, we’re not about photography, but if you ever want to share photos online, now you know where to go”. So photobucket.com can now steal potential clicks for a term they didn’t even compete well for! And there are several other examples of this I’m sure. The whole ability to click via an incomplete keyword query opens up a new dimension to how we study keyword targeting. And that is what we call, the “short tail” or the “incomplete match” (if you have a preference, do let us know!) keywords of search.

If you’re still new to Google Instant, check out Google’s explanation of how Instant Search works here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-instant-impact-on-search-queries.html

Blog post by Niall Madden, Search Director of Reform

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