Tuesday, May 20, 2008
As a sign of the recent shift in perception of Internet Marketing as a fringe activity to a central aspect of the marketing mix, the Times Online site has recently focused an article on this fast growing industry. The article, which can be seen
here, is a good brief introduction to the industry we specialise in.
One of the interesting things it talks about is the way that the balance of budget spend, normally growing in favour of PPC advertising, is now starting to swing towards organic SEO. The Times article cites data from specialist online site e-Consultancy, which has released figures that say that spending on SEO rose by 68% to £250m in the UK last year, compared with a 56% rise in pay-per-click spending to £1.97 billion.
Many companies with an online prescence are finding that, in the long run, focusing energies on improving their site's organic search engine ranking offers a better ROI than PPC spend. We at Searchpath often recommend that a combination of the two, that captures the benefits of both spheres, is the best approach. Give us a call to find out how this two pronged approach can work for you.
Friday, May 16, 2008
New clients often express concern over the minimum bid that Google AdWords has applied to some of their keywords. As you may already know, Google’s search engine ranking and AdWords pricing algorithms are based around the relevancy of websites to searchers.
As a result, we usually formulate a 4 part plan to combat any relevancy issues that may be encouraging Google to apply higher minimum bids to keywords.
1. Keep Ad Groups tightly themed – If keywords do not directly relate to each other separate them into multiple Ad Groups.
2. Put keywords in the ads – Where possible include what people have searched within the ads you present to them. However, make this as natural as possible and ensure the ad makes sense.
3. Use the keywords on the landing page – If the Google AdWords bot can see the keywords in the H tags and body of the landing page it is likely to view you as more relevant.
4. Account history – Have you previously used similar keywords that have achieved very low click through rates? If so it may be worth opening a new Google AdWords account for the problem keywords as account history can have a negative influence.
Applying these 4 principles to keywords with high minimum bids should help to push the required amount down.
Friday, May 09, 2008
A recent study has shown that 60.5% of search engine users select a natural (organic) listing over paid results. For Google searchers, this figure rose to 72.3% choosing a natural listing as the most relevant search result.
This bears out previous research that natural listings are clicked far more than paid, and hence the importance of ensuring that your site is 'optimised' to gain good visibility in the natural listings.
Furthermore, anohher study showed that 60-70% of users trust organic results, while just 30-340% of users trust paid results. Natural listing are therefore giving you more traffic and more trust.
The web is vast. Incredibly vast. Some estimates put the searchable web at around 11 billion pages. it would take
lifetimes to view all that content. But that is just the tip of the iceberg. Behind the searchable, Google oriented web is massive amounts of content not available to search engines; this is called the hidden, or invisible web. Some estimates put the amount of data that is hidden to search engines at 15 billion + pages; much larger than what most people would normally call the web.
Pages can be hidden from the search engines for a number of reasons: the content could be unspiderably dynamic; the content could be unlinked; the content could be limited access; the content could be in an image or video or the content could be only accessed by a form. Since the early days of the web the search engines have wanted to gain access to this uncharted realm of information to enhance their reputation as having the biggest index available to surfers.
Last month Google announced in their Webmaster blog that a technological breakthrough had been made to gain access to hitherto inaccessible web content. In the past few months Google has been experimenting with using their spider (Googlebot) to fill out HTML forms in order to gain access to hidden content and URLs to index for Google users. Google's blog comments:
"Specifically, when we encounter a form element on a high-quality site, we might choose to do a small number of queries using the form. For text boxes, our computers automatically choose words from the site that has the form; for select menus, check boxes, and radio buttons on the form, we choose from among the values of the HTML."
