SEO Blog - UK Search Engine Marketing News & Tips

A couple of weeks ago I reported that Yahoo! Site Explorer UK & Ireland launched in beta, today I noticed that they have also rolled out a country specific Yahoo! Site Explorer for a wider range of countries.

So far I’ve noticed this for Germany, Australia, Spain, France and Italy. Looking at the results returned for inbound links these are returning different counts and appear to be heavily weighted towards inbound links from each specific country.

Following on from my original example which looked at links for www.bbc.co.uk, here are the results for the same search on Yahoo! Site Explorer Germany:

Yahoo!7 Site Explorer Australia shows a different set of results, many of which are from .au domains as opposed to .de from the German search or .it from the Italian results etc…

These results can certainly be useful if you are looking to find country specific links which may be influencing competitor rankings in google.com.au for example.

Over the last 24 hours Alexa has updated it’s ranking algorithm in a move to make traffic stats more accurate, they have also reduced the date range to a maximum of 9 months.

The official Alexa announcement states that “Your ranking wasn’t wrong before, but it was different.”, there’s a few people who will probably disagree with this but the new rankings do appear to be a big improvement. This now takes into account that users viewing a technical website are more likely to have installed the Alexa toolbar. For example SEOmoz, used to have a top 1000 Alexa traffic rank, while this is clearly a hugely popular website in the search industry the new rank of 9,197 is far more reflective of where the site stands in terms of traffic over the whole internet.

Other SEO websites seem to have seen similar drops, SEOptimise going from 55,000 down to 142,648, while I’ve noticed client websites with high levels of traffic and previously low Alexa ranks now take large jumps. The actual traffic levels are obviously still the same but now Alexa may have more credibility in terms of trusting a websites estimated traffic.

Google AdWords have today added a new feature which allows advertisers to name and view different conversion types.

This looks like it could become very useful to clearly differentiate between leads, registration signups, sales etc. For more information here’s the Google Help page.

The big talking point over the last week has been about Google’s decision to allow trademark bidding in the UK.

Everyone seems to have an opinion about whether allowing trademark bidding is a good or bad idea, I understand why Google would want to keep a good relationship with advertisers by preventing competitors bidding for their brand, like they did with Marks and Spencers in February. But from the perspective of an online retailer like Argos who previously had to sell products without being able to use trademarked terms such as iPod or Sony in their ad copy the new rule does make sense. Just imagine how difficult it would be to avoid using these terms in offline print advertising!

But despite what anyone else thinks it is Google’s policy, so whether advertisers and brands agree with this or not they will need consider the implications this has upon themselves or risk losing sales and traffic. The decision now lies with advertisers as to whether they choose to bid upon their competitors, but what can you do to protect your own brand?

SEO
You obviously should be ranking #1 organically for your brand name, but if in addition you can build the strength of your site so that it displays Google Sitelinks this is going to take up more valuable on-page real estate and distract users from clicking competitor ads.

Online Reputation Management
Online reputation management is possibly even more important now, if you can the control the top 10 natural listings with interesting content about your brand you can potentially reduce the clickthrough rates to competitors ads.

Bid for your own brand
If you didn’t previously bid on your own brand you probably should be now. As soon as you notice competitor ads appearing it’s important users find the brand they are looking for, clearly labelling the ad text as “Official Website” should also help to increase the CTR of your ad.

Set your own affiliate brand bidding rules
Affiliate websites generally don’t pay out on brand search referrals, this is because the likelihood of this leading to a sale is much higher. They now face the dilemma about how to deal with brand bidding on Google AdWords themselves, for example gadget website iwoot have taken an early step to announce they won’t payout on brand traffic.

Bid on your competitors
Many brands will take the stance “if their bidding on us, we’re going to bid on them!”. With the new rules there’s no reason you can’t do this, but perhaps if no-one is bidding on your brand you should be careful about who you annoy before bidding on popular brands as it may backfire.

So are you planning ahead for the trademark policy update? Are there any other strategies I’ve missed which can help a brand protect themselves or take advantage of the rule change?

Robin Goad from Hitwise posted an excellent report today looking at the search engine market share in the UK.

What I found interesting is that the “Pages from the UK” search option accounts for 13.6% of Google traffic. When you consider that in the UK www.google.co.uk has a 73.74% market share of UK searches (www.google.com has 13.77%) then 13.6% is a very significant number of searches!

Many UK websites are also more likely to convert into sales and leads from referred UK-based traffic so it’s essential you’re listed and ranking well for relevant searches to maximise your exposure from Google UK.

Below I’ve listed 5 important steps to consider towards localising a UK website:
1) Get Indexed: The first step is making sure your site is indexed for “pages from the UK” searches, in order to achieve this a domain name should either use a .co.uk TLD or be hosted in the UK.
2) Set location: Set your geographic target to the UK in Google Webmaster Central. You can even set individual locations for sub-domains or sub-folders if you have a uk.domain.com or domain.com/uk international website.
3) List address information: Ensure your address details are listed on your website, using this in the contact page and footer will help to show Google your physical location and may also boost rankings for “[keyword] in [town/city/county/UK]“.
4) Sign-up for Google Maps: Adding your business to Google Maps is unlikely to improve your rankings but it can’t do any harm and can get you listed for local searches on Google UK and Google Maps business searches.
5) UK link building: Building UK specific inbound links can also help to improve the relevancy of your website for Google UK searches.

I noticed today that Yahoo! have launched Yahoo! Site Explorer UK & Ireland in beta. There seems to be no official announcement (or any other information on the web about this yet!) so I would guess it’s been released in the last couple of days.

Here are the results for an external inbound link search for www.bbc.co.uk:
Yahoo! Site Explorer UK & Ireland: 1,575,969
Yahoo! Site Explorer: 11,400,000

The reason for the fewer number of links on Yahoo! Site Explorer UK & Ireland seems to be because this is very UK focused, some non-UK links are listed but this mainly contains inbound links from .co.uk and UK hosted .com’s. These also seem to be ordered with strong UK and Irish links at the top of the page:

This could become very useful for UK-based competitor backlink analysis!

I missed the official launch of Google demographic bidding last week, but noticed the option in my accounts campaign settings this morning.

This feature is available for UK advertisers and I’ve actually been able to set this up for a UK geo-targeted campaign, although as far as I was aware it’s only US data which is available for demographic bidding on US geo-targeted campaigns, maybe not?

Here’s a screenshot of the demographic campaign I setup (click for full-size image):

There’s also screen captures on Search Engine Roundtable to show the demographic targeting campaign setup for a US geo-targeted campaign.

I’ve only just set this up but I’ll run off a report and update this post in a couple of days to show any data and see if this is actually working in the UK too.

Google Universal Search was launched last summer and while it didn’t go unnoticed within the industry, many brands didn’t seem to realise the potential impact this could have to their websites traffic and sales. But since the new search box within a search feature they now seem to be catching up, I’ve received many questions from clients during the last couple of weeks asking about how they can get a search box appearing for their own brand queries and which other Universal Search results they can be listed for.

How can brands generate traffic from Google Universal Search?

There has been much debate about how useful Google Universal search is, in my opinion this helps provide a better all-round user experience - in most cases producing topical results of interest in real-time and helping to vary the type of listings displayed. But as far as I’m aware not many brands have adopted targeting Google Universal Search and OneBox results as an SEO strategy, Google obviously benefits itself by helping to promote it’s other services, but there are certainly companies which are receiving large quantities of extra traffic from this too, whether they are targeting this intentionally or not.

Below are some of the types of Google Universal Search listings where you may be able to influence rankings: (Continue Reading…)

As modern SEO is rapidly evolving the days of old-fashioned link building seem to be quickly disappearing. The “old-fashioned” methods are still very popular with many SEO’s and can still add value to a website rankings, but the fact is there’s only so far it can take you.

Traditional link building methods such as directory submissions, article marketing and competitor backlink analysis are commonly used and while this can be effective for improving rankings in an uncompetitive industry it’s not something you can rely on heavily when faced against well-known brands with expensive online and offline marketing budgets. Quality directory/article links are now few and far between, even the links once considered strong now seem to be fading away.

Competitor analysis can be excellent to highlight industry specific links which can add weight towards search rankings, you certainly shouldn’t ignore this opportunity but if your main tactic is to copy a competitors link profile you can never expect to outrank them yourself. Even if you manage to replicate all of their inbound links (which is extremely unlikely as many will be natural links and others you might not find through backlink searches) they still have the advantage that the age of those links will be older and the weight passed towards improving search rankings will be greater because of this. (Continue Reading…)

Most webmasters are aware that doorway pages are against the guidelines of the major search engines but recently they appear to be making a comeback on the websites of some extremely well known brands.

The definition of a doorway page is provided in the Google Webmaster Guidelines:

Doorway pages are pages specifically made for search engines. Doorway pages contain many links - often several hundred - that are of little to no use to the visitor, and do not contain valuable content. HTML sitemaps are a valuable resource for your visitors, but ensure that these pages of links are easy for your visitors to navigate. If you have a number of links to include, consider organizing them into categories or into multiple pages. But in doing so, ensure that they are intended for visitors to navigate the sections of your site, and not simply for search engines.

Google’s aim is to give our users the most valuable and relevant search results. Therefore, we frown on practices that are designed to manipulate search engines and deceive users by directing them to sites other than the ones they selected and that provide content solely for the benefit of search engines. Sites making use of these practices may be removed from the Google index, and will not appear in Google search results.

(Continue Reading…)