Posts Tagged ‘search engine optimisation’

The new domain name game

September 12th, 2011

Starting in January 2012, companies will have the opportunity to register new tailored domain names. Traditional naming conventions such as .com and .net will continue to exist, but brands will be able to use other words or phrases, such as their own brand name, as their domain name. For example, Reform.com could use reform.reform and other variations thereof using the .reform structure.

What will the cost for this new domain structure be? There’s an application fee which costs around £180,000, plus an annual running cost around £25,000. So, for many businesses, this kind of investment will prove cost prohibitive.

At Reform we’ll be monitoring what effect, if any, these new naming conventions have on search optimisation best practices. Will Google and other search engines favour one domain name over the other, and if so, could it lead to an unfair advantage in preserving top rankings? This will be an interesting space that we’ll be keeping an eye on for our clients.

Additionally, the new domain naming convention .xxx has been approved by ICANN after eleven years. Although some countries, such as India, have already started banning the new naming convention, brands and individuals now have less than a fifty day window to register to ensure their assets are not used in the adult online industry.

While the benefits of the .xxx domain include heightened parental control, as well as the hope that people will be less likely to unwittingly stumble across adult content, the 15,000 domain names that have been reserved are almost certainly not enough to protect all the people that may be affected. What about everyone else’s reputations?

ICM Registry’s chief executive Stuart Lawley said, “Regardless of what your personal views are on the existence of pornography on the internet, at least .xxx will give people the information they need to make a choice.”

Reform provides a bespoke brand monitoring service that can help you to ensure your brand is not misrepresented. With these new developments, it is more important than ever to invest in the right amount of diligence to protect your brand. Get in touch if you would like to know more.

Blog post by Anthony Dobson, Business Development Executive at 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

Our Trip to Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East 2009 in New York

October 12th, 2009

We all packed our bags and hit the bright lights of New York.  Actually, no, not really….. We have someone here in our New York office, and we sent him out to SMX 2009 at the Javits Center last week. 

There were many things to be seen at SMX East.  Perhaps more so than in the London equivalent.  Here is what we saw plenty of. . .
 
Out of the booths, or tables, stands, whatever you want to call them, it felt like HALF of them were about tracking solutions of either website traffic stats, or how to track, analyse, or manage Google / Yahoo / Bing PPC campaigns in one place, with an interface that’s user-friendly and generates the “right” customised reports.

The good side was that some of them had effective ways of separating what the user actually queried versus the ad campaigns keyword bid, and displayed useful figures such as your keywords “impression share” – which could help refine campaigns and increase returns further.  However, most of these applications made the same mistake – they were programmed in Dollars and Cents.  So no Pounds and Pence, and no Euros, makes it a lot harder for the more international sites to use at this point.
 
So I’d say one of the biggest disappointments was the lack of international influence.  Almost everything was very US market focused, with maybe versions coming out later for the UK market (once we asked).  Which is a shame, as some of them looked very promising, quite competitively priced, and ran quite smoothly.  Of course, things always look nicer in the showroom!

And going to the other end of the spectrum, “local search” was almost silent.  There was some buzz and several conferences about optimising via the Web 2.0 tools, a la Twitter, YouTube, etc.  But most of the buzz was around tracking and general SEO.      

There were a fair few “SEO Interfaces” – as perhaps more companies are looking for a more template approach to SEO.  Yet, it’s the “same old” in most cases.  Your Yahoo site explorer links, your Google PR, your Alexa page rank, and various other things you can find online and aren’t even the most reliable sources in some instances.  Then there are others that just over-analyse rankings and keyword density to the point where clients get obsessed with both!  And that’s not how SEO works in the first place.

Too many places trying to define it a certain way, and maybe that’s influenced by client marketing teams and needs.  If there was a template mechanism for measuring SEO accurately, it would be a hit for sure.  However, reality is, you cannot template SEO.  Every tool I’ve seen has promise, but then if you try it with three sites that you either own or have access to the data of – it will usually be way off with at least one of the three.  And that’s a horrendous rate for any marketing tool.  That’s why we give every website a customised approach.

As for my attendance, I was there on day two (Tuesday), as it was more SEO geared and had a “link building” conference.  However, for those that actively deal with link building, there was nothing new here.  The usual “does Google detect link buying” (only meters away from companies that buy/sell links for search marketing purposes!) – and the usual complaints from sites that are making quite basic mistakes.  As for link buying, it has at least becoming more internationally focused itself.  By that we mean, for the sites that want to dabble in buying links, link brokers now have a more international reach.  Since Google’s algorithm has a lot to do with link strength and location, it’s always a touchy subject.  Here at Reform, we make sure all sites know what they’re getting involved in before even considering such routes, and what the pros and cons are.

More details from SMX East 2009 can be seen at http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/020841.html
(which has live blog transcripts of every other session at SMX east too).

Search Beyond The Atlantic

September 7th, 2009

Let’s start things off with a simple statement, I like to travel. Lots of people do, many of whom are quite the seasoned traveller, more so than myself (as much as I’d like to catch up). Somewhat fewer people like search. This is mainly because less people care about search (yes, it’s true), but there are actually plenty of similarities.

Search, speech, dialogue and interaction, are all integrated to some extent in ways that parallel the cultures across society and around our world. These are things that help us progress forward, they help nurture ideas. Google tries to market their product with this concept in mind, but let’s be honest – they’re in it for the money!

And rightfully so (from a business standpoint of course), as a recent look at Google’s sales figures shows that while U.S. market growth has tapered off in 2009, and in the U.K., actually slowed somewhat – the rest of the world is still giving Google it’s “glory days” where quarterly growth in 2009 stayed positive (although this has slowed down a bit too when compared to 2008). There’s more info on that at http://www.searchcowboys.com/research/936 – but let’s get to the real issue at hand and get on with the travels.

How well do you know the PPC and SEO markets in countries outside the U.K. and U.S.? Apologies for offending the few who might, but judging by a look at the overall scene, most people do not. Let’s go a step further and say “Search Marketing in Non-English speaking countries.” Search marketers and agencies from Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and South Africa, please be seated – although there seems to be a lot of untapped resource there too.

Everyone knows the basics…. Right? Host your site in the target market, use their local domain, their language. That’s a start. Build link strength to their site via other sites in that country and sites about that country, perhaps even sites in their language. Research their market, find out what converts via PPC. Analyse their user journeys when the site goes live – refine your strategy further. You’ll soon find out though, that they often travel different than we do.

For instance in Asia, you’ll find that your “Google led strategy” has no effect in markets like China, Japan and Korea, where engines like Naver and Baidu lead the way. Portal sites and social networking have a much bigger influence on where the user goes for information. So SEO is a completely different channel there. Or on the PPC side, how about Latin America, where past studies show that three quarters of users don’t even know that there’s a difference between paid and natural search. Of course, with PPC relatively untapped (read: very cheap), you can really get a lot of information gathered and testing done in these markets. Even financial terms that might go for over a pound in the U.K. can have their translated counterpart go for under 20p in countries that have a good internet user base, such as Argentina, Mexico and Chile. Contrary to studies in the U.S. and Europe, we often see that a term that ranks well in PPC and SEO getting a majority of visitors via the PPC route!

The good news for those looking to expand search campaigns into Latin America though, is unlike Asia – Google dominates here. In fact, check out the search engine market share for various countries around the world at – http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/03/googles-market-share-in-your-country.html

In Asia, one of the biggest mistakes international businesses make when trying to target countries like Japan (3rd biggest web market in the world according to – http://searchengineland.com/getting-to-know-international-ppc-markets-14955) is the actual website set up. Unlike in the western world, a majority of internet users in Japan visit websites via their mobile phone. So now, you have to look beyond the keywords and bidding, but the set up of your web pages also.

Back home though, we realise that many companies want to target foreign users – but may not have the expertise to re-launch their site in every language. We can help build your English language strategy also. Users in countries around the world will often query in English, whether they are ex-pats, business people, or merely educated in English – which is often taught as a second language in many countries. Many sites overlook the opportunity to tap into some of these countries via PPC, where they can generate qualified traffic and at the cost per click that is a fraction of what they pay normally. Of course, your site has to be somewhat relevant. If you’re selling products that only ship in the U.K. it’s probably not worth it. But for some sites, expanding your search marketing strategy across the world just might be the next step you are looking for. After all, wasn’t that the whole purpose of the web?

Moral of the story…. Travel more. Or ask Reform to advise you on an international search marketing strategy.

Blog post by Niall Madden, SEO Director of Reform