SEO Blog - UK Search Engine Marketing News & Tips

Having a quick look through Alexa’s top 100 UK websites, I was surprised by how many of these have forgotten to buy the .co.uk top-level domain version.

Here’s the main ones I noticed:

apple.co.uk
facebook.co.uk
myspace.co.uk
wikipedia.co.uk
blogger.co.uk
flickr.co.uk
wordpress.co.uk
digg.co.uk
reddit.co.uk
stumbleupon.co.uk
about.co.uk
download.co.uk

As they are all very popular, well-known websites the volume of brand queries are likely to be very high, many via “Pages from the UK” searches on Google.co.uk where most of these websites won’t be listed because they don’t use the .co.uk TLD and are hosted in the states. Still they could always try and buy the domains back, it might cost a little more than the original registration cost though!

Recently Ciaran Norris wrote a thorough piece on how the Guardian basically denounces SEO as scams and fails to grasp the whole concept of it, while facing the Google monopoly with all it’s ramifications. I took a closer look just to discover what the problem with search engine optimisation and the Guardian is: According to an article published at their own website the Guardian is not the leading UK online newspaper anymore. The Telegraph has outpaced them due to “hard technical work, SEO and increasing editorial content by as much as 50%”. As we know in the SEO industry content is still king and combined with proper SEO it can make a difference. So no wonder that the Telegraph managed to increase it’s traffic by 153.4%.

“To me it shows that some people high up in the publishing hierarchy are still stuck in the past, have a superficial expertise if at all in online publishing and blame a whole industry for their own failure.”

The folks at the Guardian better face reality and hire a solid SEO company. Newspapers are not bought solely on newstands anymore they are found via Google and read online for years now. If the Guardian is too slow to adapt they must face the responsibility themselves and stop badmouthing the SEO industry for their own lack of understanding of the new media environment.

It seems that most other established UK newspapers by now have grasped the concept of SEO with the exception of the Guardian. I already cited the The Times article predicting a huge SEO boom in the near future. The Independent has covered SEO only in a single a paragraph last year but the article was a sound one. Indeed The Guardian itself published a primer on SEO, as Ciaran correctly notices, and it was not only about scams. So it seems that it’s not The Guardian as whole but just an incompetent individual.

It’s a strange coincidence though that the publication of the outstanding SEO results of The Telegraph is followed by the denouncement of “SEO scams” by the Guardian a few days later.

Recent headlines have highlighted yet again that Britain is in for a rough economic period. A combination of worried head-shaking from the Bank of England and screaming sensationalist headlines have understandably caused consumers concern.

Furthermore, economic fears have provoked a wave of blog posts from the SEO sector about the best ways to buckle down and survive a slump – many of which have been filled with a strained optimism which does not quite ring true.

However, I am not worried. I know that a gloomy economic environment (dare I mention the R-word?) is actually a fantastic time for a firm to focus on online marketing. Here is a brief summary of my reasons why.

Reason Number One: Consumers still need to shop
Yes, it is more than likely that consumers will not be consuming with the free abandonment which characterised the last few years – but they still need to make purchases. From food to footballs to financial services, people still need to buy things, even if the inflation genie squeezes itself out of the bottle. Businesses must ensure they are highly visible to gain the biggest possible share of the market.

Reason Number Two: Cash-strapped consumers research purchases
When people have limited cash, they consider their purchases more carefully. They go online, they research thoroughly, they read reviews - they research. Now is the time for businesses to ensure their websites can be easily found through search engines. It is also a good time to consider online reputation management - where every potential purchase counts, a business cannot afford to have uncontested negative content regarding their product or service circulating the web.

Reason Number Three: It is a good time to outpace the competition
If a firm’s competitors have outranked them online for years, now is a great time for it to exert its search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts and overtake them. If the competition has panicked and reduced its marketing budget, then a company which thinks ahead can dramatically increase its online audience and traffic. Cutting budgets is a short-term financial strategy which will impact future sales and profitability and hurt a firm even once the economy recovers.

Reason Number Four: Consumer awareness is a long-term concern
Marketing in general is about increasing consumer awareness as well as driving sales. Even when they are not in the market for a product or service, firms need to ensure people are aware of them so that, when they do finally decide to buy, their brand is first choice. A gloomy economic period will not last forever and firms need to ensure brand awareness remains strong so that they are best-placed to generate sales when spending picks up.

Reason Number Five: Firms must not be left behind
The internet is a developing marketing medium and the last thing any firm wants is to be playing catch-up once the slump stops. From SEO to email marketing and viral messages to reputation management - all online marketing develops all the time and a savvy company will want to be involved. Dated marketing can have a negative effect on a brand, meaning businesses cannot stop all promotional activity now and hope to pick it up in three months time. The internet is a fast-paced environment and dipping in and out is both costly and hard.

Should search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts be regulated by the Advertising Standards Agency? Recent discussions over whether or not the UK Code of Advertising Practice should apply to SEO have interested me considerably, because the existing rules simply cannot cater for the sector. Furthermore, while much of the recent debate has centred on whether or not the sector should impose self-regulating standards, I have seen considerably less debate about what those standards should be.

Kerry Nielson, the director of legal and public affairs with the Periodical Publishers Association, told the Association of Online Publishers that it is becoming “increasingly apparent” that some advertising platforms do not fall under the jurisdiction of the code and therefore cannot be investigated or regulated by the ASA. She called upon the online advertising sector to decide whether it wants self regulation or new, targeted legislation and makes some interesting points about the benefits and issues resulting from each possibility.

The ASA itself admits that, while paid-for advertising on the pages of search results fall under its remit, it cannot issue edicts on content which is not in paid-for online space.

However, it is hard to see how any regulator could exercise control on something as all-encompassing as search. The purpose of SEO is not to make wild claims about the brilliance of a product or service; it is, very simply, to shout down the competition. Well done SEO means drowning out all competing online voices, it means raising one company’s visibility at the expense of other firms.

This makes it a pretty unique form of marketing. When Coca Cola advertises its pop it does not follow that Pepsi has to make fewer adverts. There is no limited print space for advertising studenty food over which Pot Noodle and Supernoodles must wrestle. I believe this means that Ofcom or the ASA are unable to effectively monitor the sector, which suggests to me that self-regulation is necessary, if just to stop less-informed groups from imposing rules.

However, I also think that some fairly extensive debate and round table discussion should take place regarding precisely what those rules ought to be. Regulation is coming and we the industry need to act first.

Google has expanded its share of the UK market even further, managing to attract an incredible 87 per cent of visits in May alone, new research shows.

Analysis published by Hitwise has shown that, while Google properties accounted for a substantial 68 per cent of all US searches last month, the search behemoth was responsible for almost nine in ten UK queries.

This represents an increase of 12 per cent on last year’s healthy figures. Google really is the search engine of choice for Brits – and here in the UK, we make an astounding number of searches. In April alone, UK consumers made more than 4.1 billion searches, according to comScore research.

Now, to me and many others, this suggests (Continue Reading…)

If you need to keep ahead when all about you
Recession looms and economists are blue,
If your marketing department doubts you,
And you can see that some of their points are true,
If you want to boost visibility as well as sales,
Or raise brand awareness should spending slow,
Or leave the competition chasing their tails
While you watch your consumer numbers grow.

If you want expansion but aren’t sure what’s best,
If you need to increase your firm’s ROI,
If you want new projects in which to invest
And want a piece of the online pie,
If you want revenues to reach a new height
And you know that staying offline is dumb,
Then you need to develop a corporate website
And – what’s more – you need SEO my son!

Poor Rudyard must be turning in his grave…

As a German SEO Consultant I worked with UK and US SEO companies and other clients on many internationalisation or localisation projects in recent months. The international sites we tried to optimise in many cases failed to compete with even much smaller local competitors. Also the SEO measures undertaken were far from sufficient due to structural limitations of these projects.

Thus I want to introduce 10 most common fatal localization mistakes English language sites face when entering other markets.

1. No local domain, instead using internationalcompany.com and having no local domain like .fr for France, .de for Germany or .pl for Poland. Thus everybody will link to the .com domain and the non-English speaking audience will bounce off it before finding the small flag in the right top corner. In the meantime a domain grabber will make big bucks off your brand.
2. Translating before doing local market research. Ever tried selling beef in India? Or freedom fries in France? Not all mistakes are that easy to spot. Nonetheless most companies just translate their sites without even taking a look at what a new market demands.
3. No local server. You need a German server to rank high in Google for Germany. The difference is substantial.
4. Translation full of grammatical and spelling errors. I’m astounded how many business sites fail at that and how bad. Nobody will trust you if you can’t even spell correctly trying to sell something. Hire a translator who is a native speaker of the language you want to localize to and actually lives there not someone living next door.
5. Setting up a completely new domain for a new country days before you enter the market. Basically you should register the most common international domains months or years before you enter the markets. It might be gone already later and you risk ending up in the Google sand box not being acknowledged as an authority and thus not ranking.
6. Being far too late on the market. I’m still amazed by the companies which need months or years to offer a product or service in Germany fisrt offered in the US. Why give away 100 million German speaking potential customers to copycats and local businesses? Coming too late (like Facebook in Germany or eBay in Poland) means you will probably never be the leader on the market.
7. Not having a local address or representation. With the rise of local search and a plethora of local websites and services that replaced directories you won’t even get a link without a proper address.
8. Not offering payment via PayPal or other locally accepted or wide spread payment methods. Unlike in the US e.g people in Germany don’t use credit cards much.
9. Broken character sets: Recently I joined several ad networks and affiliate networks and those sites which were translated had in many cases broken German “Umlauts”. In most cases I will leave such a site.
10. No local blog. If you do not have a “company interface” in a local language you won’t reach the public. You rely solely on search engine traffic but you won’t get it for the reasons above for a while. No useful localized content means no local links. Without local links you won’t rank, even as an authority domain.

Are there more issues? Yes there are, but most sites fail to implement these localization basics. On the other hand: These 10 fatal mistakes are easily avoidable.

A recent conversation with a friend has made me think about how the public perceive search engines.

Readers may have noticed that I often express my amazement at how little the average person considers how their engine of choice selects the websites it offers them, but lately I realised that some people believe search engines have undergone no major changes or evolutions for years. That search portals might in fact be as good as they are going to get.

It was one of those Sunday afternoon chats in a beer garden, where - having mocked each other’s careers for a while – we began to chat about the SEO sector. My friend remarked that it is odd that search engines have failed to improve their accessibility for the end user.

I expressed amazement that he would think this (Continue Reading…)

• Your competitors have never heard of you.
• Your boss thinks a search engine is a mountain rescue helicopter.
• The majority of your clients communicate with you by post.
• Your corporate website includes the legend “.angelfire”.
• Your marketing budget is entirely spent on printing coupons on the back of bus tickets.
• You have no clients in their twenties, thirties or even forties.
• Your IT worker leaves for a job in McDonalds because they want more of a challenge.
• Your marketing executive has taken to drink.
• Your sales figures resemble a graph plotting Gordon Brown’s popularity.
• You think the word blog is something to do with the Flower Pot Men.

Do you use Google Analytics? Well, a recent study shows that you’re not alone, roughly one third of the Alexa top 500 websites traffic wise use it. That surprised me a little. Anyways, I use Google Analytics myself and noticed before that some numbers are inaccurate or downright wrong. In May I discovered how wrong, completely wrong.

The numbers of search engine referers, more specifically, are wrong. I’ve noticed that before but wasn’t panicking as no statistic tool is perfectly accurate, you always should use at least 2 of them and compare the numbers. Now this time I checked my stats over at SEO 2.0 I was unable to ignore it anymore.

SEO 2.0 is mostly about social media and blogging SEO and it relies on traffic from other sources than Google. I only get insignificant numbers of visitors from Google on my blog, mostly due to very specific “long tail” queries. The only really important keyphrase is “SEO 2.0″ itself. Now looking at my May stats I was very surprised that one of better performing keywords was “site seo vs blog seo” without quotes.

I looked deeper into that just to discover that all 60 visitors looking for this keyword is one person from Bucharest, Romania. Google Analytics counted her or him several times a day for more than 2 weeks.

Now I sometimes create returning visits just by launching my FireFox with my saved tabs but how can a person search for the same query every day several times and then click the search result each time? This one riddles me. I’ve seen that kind of behaviour with Google Analytics in the past but always thought it was due to myself or several developers from my client working on the same site.

Not this time, there is certainly no Romanian developer working on my site. Now try to multiply these numbers for one of the top 500 sites and you end up with completely worthless statistics.

I’m not here to bash Google for their great analytics solution. I love checking and comparing bounce rates etc. but it’s more than strange that a search engine gets the search referers wrong in its own analytics solution. So if they don’t want people to make up conspiracy theories about Google overstating their search referers numbers they better fix this quick.

What can you do about it? Look out for some alternatives and either use Google Analytics and at least another solution or even more. What alternatives are there?

Well, if you’re running a “top 500 website” you better rely on a solution used and recommended by leading search marketers. This is ClickTracks in most cases. Also Omniture has been recommended by many professionals. Many people outside of Germany probably don’t know it but some German marketers prefer Etracker. Just to name three of them. There are plenty of high end solutions out there you surely can afford if you run such a huge site.

For the average webmaster seeking a low cost or free solution there is no single alternative to rely on. There is Piwik, an open source alternative recently hailed by many, but it’s in alpha now and didn’t work for me, it produced SQL errors instead.

Another solution is to use Google Analytics along a specialized search analytics tool like:

• Hittail
• 103bees
• Enquisite

Have you experienced similar issues with Google Analytics or am I the only one to discover this?

There have been a post at SEOmoz, by SEO theory blogger Micheal Martinez already in 2006 and a post in 2007 from AimClear focused on the reliability on Google Analytics with another topic, outages.

My conclusion right now is a grim one: Google Analytics is cheating you, I hope not on purpose. Unless you do not care about accurate search referers and visitor numbers you should use one of the solutions above or resort to log file analysis.