SEO Blog - Internet Marketing News

Britons have upped the amount they spend online, according to a new report compiled by the Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG) and Capgemini.

Again.

Every time they publish this report, the news is the same, online spending rises every month as Britons gradually shift their shopping onto the web. I should just publish the same story and update the numbers each time!

The IMRG/Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index August 2008 revealed spending rose to £4.8 billion (£79 per person) in July. The month before that it, the organisation discovered growth of just 24 per cent to £4.3 billion. I say ‘just’ because in May, online retail growth was more than 30 per cent.

What really interested me this month, though, was a comment made by Mike Petevinos, Head of Consulting for Retail at Capgemini UK. He explained growth is rapid, even within the current gloomy economic climate. One reason he gave was “the increased choice, price transparency and convenience that online has to offer”.

It is this choice, ease and transparency which have made the web such a successful place to operate from. However, it doesn’t matter how many consumers are using the internet to shop – if a company cannot be found then it cannot compete. Visibility is hugely important.

Yahoo! has urged marketers to choose appropriate keywords for their paid search campaigns.

A post in the engine’s search marketing blog reiterates the message we tell clients day after day – choose business specific keywords.

It suggests firms bid on both generic and specific phrases, warning generic selections can quickly eat up budgets and are less likely to result in sales than more targeted choices.

This is such an important point for search engine marketing and for natural search tactics.

Yahoo!’s example is the broad word “guitar”. Now, a consumer plugging that word into a search engine could be looking for lessons, wanting to buy a guitar or seeking sheet music.

Businesses choosing to bid on that word had better have a pretty broad range of guitar-related services, or they risk wasting their marketing pennies.

So, in terms of paid search, it makes sense to target keywords which are highly specific.

However, often it is tempting to pursue generic and highly-competitive keywords through the organic results.

If a company decides its wants to aim for high rankings in the most-competitive phrases, it is important to make use of some less generic phrases at the same time.

This allows them to rank highly for business-specific keywords while they battle to climb the rankings of those more difficult phrases.

Nathania Johnson posted some very interesting stats on SEW yesterday to show how Wikipedia’s traffic has grown 8,000% in 5 years due to search referrals. This is an unbelievable statistic but as mentioned in the article that’s what happens when Google ranks all of your pages as #1!

There’s a mixture of opinions but many SEO’s would agree that Wikipedia shouldn’t appear in Google’s top 10 for searches on nearly every piece of content they have. I think it depends on the specific search term, but in my opinion Wikipedia provides little value when ranking #1 for searches such as SEO and restaurant. Most people performing these queries would be looking for somewhere to eat, or looking for SEO advice, blogs or tools. If they wanted to find a definition a “what is …” or “define:…” query would have worked fine.

Lets take a look at the results for a Google search on holidays:

Surely people know what a holiday is!

And how do you think Wikipedia would perform if they used Google AdWords?

I would imagine an ad like this would be lucky to get a CTR of 0.1% with a low quality score, but it’s not a problem in the organic listings.

Google has become by far the leading search engine because it gives searchers what they are looking for, and there is an argument that Wikipedia mixes up the results to provide a different type of listing, I agree with this to a certain extent but in all reality it’s nowhere near being the most relevant webpage for any of the above searches. Although not all of it’s rankings are unfair, if you search for a footballer, for example, you get quality content and stats from Wikipedia which deserves it’s ranking at the top as it’s useful to the searcher.

How can Google’s algortihm change to prevent Wikipedia’s SERPs domination?
In my opinion the Google algorithm should pay less attention to the strength of wikipedia.org as a whole domain, calculating rankings based upon the inbound links to a specific page instead. If your content is of a higher quality and more relevant to the actual search term this should be out ranking Wikipedia, but how do you compete with 5 million links?

These rankings would be completely different if the algorithm considered that only 2,000 inbound links are relevant, probably less when you consider no-one should really be linking to this!

What do you think, does Wikipedia rightfully deserve most of it’s rankings and provide searchers with the information they are looking for? Or is Wikipedia irrelevant for many search terms and ranking far too highly?

Something which I find very frustrating with Yahoo Search Marketing is how to display your ads to a worldwide audience. The current system only allows you to geographically target the location which your account is registered in, for example UK accounts can only target the UK and Ireland market. You can unblock targeted continents in your account settings, but this means that while your ad will be displayed outside of the UK it will only appear on www.yahoo.co.uk and not www.yahoo.com.

I found this information quite difficult to find at first but the email below from Yahoo clears up some of these issues and might be useful for people experiencing similar issues:

“We would like to inform you that even though you have unblocked the continents on your account this does not mean that your ad’s will show on the respective websites. This means that if someone in the US goes to www.yahoo.co.uk and enters a keyword that your ad will show. If however you want your ad’s to show on www.yahoo.com you would need to open a US account or other account depending on the country you wish to advertise in.

There will be a set up fee for each sister account which varies by market:
UK account = £60
Other EU marketplaces = €50″

I’ve found the content network is an excellent method of getting large quantities of cheap traffic converting at a positive ROI. But in my experience most pay per click campaigns I’ve taken over have not maximised their performance on the content network, below are the main reasons why I’ve found accounts seem to under perform.

• Disregarding the content network completely
  Many advertisers focus only on the search network, I think Anton Konikoff’s quote about getting traffic from contextual ads at SES San Jose yesterday sums up why it’s always worth trying to target this audience; “Provides access to everyone who reads online (not just those who search)”.
• Not setting individual content network bids
  Some people don’t check the “Let me set separate prices for content clicks” campaign setup box, the quality of traffic from the content network is never (or at least very rarely) as high as the search network so you should definitely be setting separate bids here.
• Targeting all worldwide locations
  Click fraud for contextual ads is a commonly discussed issue and is one of the main reasons people choose to stay away from the content network completely. I normally begin by selecting the main English speaking countries (US, UK, Canada, Ireland and Australia). For high budget account’s it also makes sense to separate countries and regions into individual campaigns so that it’s performance can be tracked and managed individually.
• Not splitting keywords into small ad groups
  This has obvious advantages for the search network as you can use more specifically targeted ad descriptions for each keyword, but it also helps to monitor the cost per conversion of content network clicks more closely.
• Failing to test, test, test
  This is probably the final rule in every search marketing list but trial and error testing is very important to monitor how new changes have affected the account. Keeping a close eye on the cost per conversion figure will help you to set bids based upon it’s performance to keep the campaign cost-effective.

These are all fairly basic tips but I’ve found these changes have a positive impact upon many account’s advertising on the content. To improve this further you could also exclude negative sites and setup pay per action (PPA) and site targeted campaigns.

UK Yahoo Search Marketing accounts will use the new ranking model from July 23rd. The ranking model, which was launched in the US back in February, uses the bid amount and quality score to determine an ad’s rank in search results.

Here’s the email sent out by Yahoo! this morning:
“Dear Advertiser,

Regards,
Yahoo! Search Marketing”

I receieved the following email from Yahoo! Search Marketing this morning, look’s like we won’t have to wait too much longer for the Panama platform in the UK:

“Dear Advertiser,

Regards,
Yahoo! Search Marketing”

I meant to post this on Friday but didn’t quite get round to it, anyway here’s a recap of the pay-per-click advertising news I found of interest during the last week.

Google AdWords

• On the Radio: more on Audio Ads - Inside AdWords
• Introducing preferred cost bidding - Inside AdWords
• Using Google Analytics with Website Optimizer - Google Analytics Blog
• Google AdWords Preferred Cost Bidding Not Welcomed - SERoundtable
• Google Pay Per Action First Results For Publishers & Advertisers - SERoundtable
• Does “GoogleClick” Spell The End For Bid Managers? - Search Engine Land
• New Google AdWords Dashboard Looks Like Yahoo Panama - Search Engine Journal
• Google Ads Tracking Mouse-Over - Google Blogoscoped
• How to lower your AdWords minimum bid - eWhisper.net

Yahoo! Search Marketing

• Faster, Simplified Online Customer Checkout - YSM Blog
• Upgrades and Enhancements - YSM Blog
• Punctilious Punctuation - YSM Blog
• Despite Panama, Yahoo Earnings Fall 11 Percent — Investments Blamed - Search Engine Land

Microsoft adCenter

• adCenter Quality-Based Ranking - adCenter Blog
• adCenter’s New Quality Based Ranking has Issues - PPC Discussions

General Pay Per Click

• Ad Copy that Increases Conversion or Click Through Rate - eWhisper.net
• PPC, the Classic Geo-Targeted Mix - aimClear
• Google, Yahoo Speaking More Freely on Click Fraud - Search Engine Watch

I’m not quite sure where to start this week as my FeedReader seems to have been overflowing with news from Search Engine Stategies over the last few days. I’ve picked out the main PPC stories from SES New York in addition to the rest of this weeks pay per click news.

Search Engine Strategies

• Meet the Search Ad Networks - Bruce Clay
• Advanced Paid Search Techniques - Bruce Clay
• Ads In A Quality Score World - SERoundtable
• In House Big PPC - SERoundtable
• Getting Traffic From Contextual Ads - SERoundtable
• Landing Page Testing & Tuning - SERoundtable
• Creating Compelling Ads - SERoundtable
• Auditing Paid Listings & Click Fraud Issues - Bruce Clay
• Web Analytics & Measuring Success - Bruce Clay
• Admitted: “We Do Arbitrage” - Traffick
• Microsoft adCenter: Today and Tomorrow - SERoundtable
• Video Recap and Reflections on SES - New York 2007 - Pepperjam Blog

This Weeks other PPC news:

Google AdWords

• The next step in Google advertising - Official Google Blog
• A new case study on botnet-based click fraud - Inside AdWords
• Improve your account performance with expert help - Inside AdWords
• Reach and Frequency reporting now available - Inside AdSense
• Using AdWords for Keyword Research - Link Building Blog
• Google Releases Detailed Content Network Reports - Marketing Pilgrim
• Use Google AdWords & AdSense Distribution Data to Broker Direct Ad Deals - SEO Book
• Increase Conversion Rates with the Google Website Optimizer? - Marketing Pilgrim
• There are Inconsistencies in Google Adwords Minimum Bid Prices - PPC Lab
• Will Similar Google AdWords Campaigns Affect Display of Ads? - SERoundtable
• Why Do Google AdSense and Google Analytics Impressions Differ So Much? - SERoundtable

Microsoft adCenter

• Microsoft adCenter and Superpages to use Quality Score - eWhisper.net
• MSN adCenter Update Coming Soon - Search Engine Watch

General PPC

• Turn Your PPC Advertising Campaign Into An Effective Search Marketing Machine - Search Engine Land
• The first 100 impressions: What your paid keywords can tell you - Marketing Pilgrim
• Thomson provides PPC buying to listings customers - e-consultancy

Here are the main stories from the world of PPC over the past 7 days:

Google AdWords

• Google confirm two changes to how top ads are displayed and make Website Optimizer available to all.
• Brad Geddes discusses what determines the ‘Account Quality Score’, ‘AdGroup Quality Score’ and ‘Keyword Quality Score’ for AdWords?
• John Battelle reports that AOL are to launch white label AOL-only AdWords system on Monday.
• Jennifer Slegg starts a new blog with some great early posts such as Targeting keyword variations for increased search & pay per click traffic, Using dynamic keyword insertion in AdWords URLs for higher click throughs and How to Brand with Google AdWords & Pay Per Click.
• Vinny Lingham posts about Google’s new metric: Impression Share.
• Search Engine Guide takes a look Inside Google’s New Pay Per Action for Advertisers.
• SERoundtable posts about Google entering TV market with TV commercial trial.
• And the Inside AdSense blog confirms some fresh, new look AdSense ads.

Yahoo! Search Marketing

• The YSM Blog confirm that short ad descriptions will be required from May, they also post an intro to finding your editorial status.

Microsoft adCenter

• The adCenter blog this week talks about capitalizing the display URL in adCenter, Integrating your offline marketing efforts with an online strategy and the release of a new Microsoft adCenter welcome guide.

General PPC

• Andrew Goodman takes a look at multivariate landing page testing.
• SERoundtable cover the launch of Yell’s own PPC advertising solution.

There may be a couple of items I missed as I’m catching up at the moment after getting back to the UK yesterday. After going back 17 hours from Sydney to LA and then forward another 8 hours to GMT I’m still trying to work out which timezone I’m in at the moment, up at 4.30am today so I probably should be somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic at the moment!