Have you proofread your website copy lately? Not only do the typos and errors look unprofessional to your visitors, they also jeopardize your Google PageRank. Google announced last week that they’ve witnessed a correlation between sites with correct spelling boast a prime PageRank—and those that display poor spelling don’t rank as well. For further explanation watch this GoogleWebmasterHelp video. Need help? We have PPC and SEO experts eager to improve your PageRank.
Category Archives: SEO
Two Recent Google Changes That Could Affect Your Website
It seems like Google is always changing things, but generally these changes are behind the scene changes in the algorithm that are generally too obscure and boring to people who are not search engine optimization specialists. This time, these two new Google changes take place right in your face and they could affect how successful your website is when compared with your competitor’s website.
Sitelinks
The first change is a change to Google sitelinks. When a website becomes popular enough Google adds additional links to your website below your website’s main listing. This is supposed to help users more easily navigate your website by quickly locating the information on your website that they are looking for. For instance, a search of a local museum may produce sitelinks that point users to hours they are open or contact and tour information as these are destinations that searches generally want to find quickly.
Google has now increased the number of sitelinks a website can have from 8 to 12 and also added and additional one line text snippet description of that page. How can this affect your and your competitor rankings? Well the new sitelinks now dominate the search results which is good for you should you rank at number one for the queried key term, but very bad for you if you rank number 2 or below.
The screenshot to the right (click to expand) shows the new expanded sitelinks as indicated by the red arrow. The Google Place’s result for that specific company appears directly below the sitelinks as indicated by the blue arrow. All of this pushes down all other rankings below the page fold. As you can see indicated by the green arrow Yelp, the second place result it shoved way down to the bottom and this example only contains 6 sitelinks when the maximum amount available are 12. When you think about below the fold results only receiving 10% of search result clicks, this is a major shift in how search results deliver traffic.
Google Related
Google is offering up a new extension for Internet Explorer & Chrome called Google Related. This extension adds a bar to the bottom of your browser which should deliver additional relevant information to the web page you are currently on. So the website for your local city may also include a map in the related bar, weekly weather forecast and cities nearby that you may be interested in travelling to. Neat!
The thing is, Google does not distinguish between an information only website and a commercial website. In the example website below I am at a local restaurant and when I hover over the additional data in the Google Related toolbar I can see a map to the location (purple arrow). The next column lists reviews of the establishment taken from Google Places and links to more reviews around the web (green arrow).
In the last column of the Google Related bar, the column that commercial websites will take issue with, is a listing of “Related Places”. That means when I simply hover my mouse that column I am exposed to local competitors who in this result all have a higher review rating than that of the restaurant whose website I am currently on (red arrow). Say this restaurant paid a monthly retainer for SEO work or spent money advertising through PPC solutions. That is an expense that can ultimately end up driving visitors with Google Related barinstalled in their browser to their local competitor’s Google Places page. Not cool Google.
Free Webinar on Effectively Leveraging Google Tools
Paul Segreto President & CEO of franchisEssentials teams with Jeremy LaDuque CEO of ELEMENTS Inc. to discuss how businesses and specifically franchise companies can use the free tools that Google offers to improve their online marketing efforts.
10 Things Franchises Can Do to More Effectively Leverage Google Tools
Tuesday June 21st, 2011 at 9:00 AM PST
This webinar will cover Google’s tools for better productivity, improved local search results, mobile tools, analytics products and more. This webinar will also discuss Google’s new ‘+1′ button which is brand new and a hot topic in SEO.
Sign-up now because there is limited seating and spots are filling up quickly. For more information on this free webinar, please visit our webinar information page.
How Can Franchises Take Advantage of Everything Google Offers?
Google is the most popular search engine in the world for a few good reasons. Its simple uncluttered interface, vast number of webpages and great results are among the top reasons.
But that’s not all Google has to offer and we find Franchise businesses using Google more and more to market and advertise, enhance their social media and mobile marketing, analyze their website traffic and even optimize and split test how effective the conversion is on their websites.
So ELEMENTS has decided recommend some of the hottest Google tools we see Franchises using today. ELEMENTS will also be conducting a FREE webinar on this topic on June 21st (click here to sign up >>).
Local Search & Advertising
1) Google Places
One of the largest impacts to the local search arena stems from Google Places, an online local directory of businesses. Most importantly, Google Places is no longer a separate search product anymore. Google now displays Google Place’s search results blended directly into Google’s general or “Everything” search when the search terms indicate that the end user might be looking for a product or service that can be satisfied locally.
Franchises now must ensure all of their locations are setup properly and optimized in Google Places in order to show up when people perform searches that can be satisfied locally.
2) Google AdWords Location Extensions
AdWords is Google’s PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising platform. Google has added location extensions to their AdWords system which allows the owner of the advertisement to display their advertisements to specified locations. Location extensions help make the consumer aware that the product or service they are looking for can be fulfilled locally.
3) Google Keyword Tool and Google Trends
By using Google’s free Keyword Tool, companies are better able to determine what keywords people are searching for and which keyword term targets would just waste their website’s valuable real estate. To receive top rankings in Google a company must play by their rules, expand their offerings and monetizing the marketability of their products or services. Getting traffic is great, but converting traffic into sales or leads is the true goal of the SEO game.
The Google Trends Tool can help your company determine search traffic trends when comparing multiple sets of keywords. For example, the following search comparing Netflix, Block Buster and Hollywood Video shows the dramatic difference in searches for those three businesses:
Social Media
4) Social Signals Effect Rank
Recently both Bing and Google have admitted that mentions of and links to web pages found in public social media postings can positively effect a website’s search engine rankings. The idea behind this is that social media users will share links to websites that they trust and enjoy so the more users sharing these links through social media the more perceived value these websites have. However, not all social media personas carry the same weight. Search engines look at the “social authority” of the user that shared that link and give more value to links shared by users with more credibility.
5) Google +1
At the time of this publication Google +1 is currently in beta testing mode. The idea behind Google +1 is to use one’s social network (Google contacts) for recommendations on which search results they found the most for their own search queries. So if your friend marked a result as valuable, there is good cause for the Google search engine to think that you might like it as well because you both exist within the same social circle.
Today (June 1st), Google has launched their +1 Button which can be added to any website to encourage friend recommendations in the same way that Facebook users can currently “like” a website page. In a way, Google is leveraging its’ entire user-base as quality control staff. While Google states that under the current system recommendations only come from the user’s social network, we can foresee a time when Google will recommend websites from outside of your social circle based on the number of +1’s a website has received and the perceived social authority of the rankee.
Click here for more information on the +1 Button.
6) Google Places Reviews
Earlier we discussed the importance of Google Places to local search. Perhaps the most important factor in getting a Place’s page to rank well is the number of positive reviews a business has in relation to their local competition. The reviews found on Google Places can be drawn from several places. One such place is the social review website Yelp. Google also has its’ own social review system (formally called Hotpot) which has now been integrated directly into Google Places. Both Yelp & Google Places allow users to track reviews and interact with their friends within their social network. According to Google, they now have millions of users rating places more than a million times per month.
7) Google’s Realtime Social Media Search Results
Alongside their Everything and Places search Google has various other search types. One of these variant searches is Google’s Realtime search. Google’s Realtime search results display “up-to-the-second” updates from various social media outlets including news articles, blog posts and Tweets. The search result page is no longer a static listing, but instead updates when a new post relevant to your search query is detected by Google.
These real-time searches can be beneficial for businesses looking to leverage current trends in their marketing efforts or for franchises looking to react quickly to protect their brand when trouble arises.
Google’s Algorithmic Changes that Recognize Brands
Social media mentions of a company name will pass along a brand impression for that company. The more mentions of a company’s name Google can find the more likely it is to treat that business as a notable brand. Brands have become an important factor to Google when determining search engine rankings because Google now considers brand name products and services as more trustworthy and therefore ranks brands higher than their non-branded competition.
Franchises can leverage social media to expand their company’s brand impression. Companies should encourage their employees to create personal LinkedIn profiles and link them to their company. Facebook posts & Twitter tweets can now be found in both Google’s Realtime search and its’ Everything search giving more exposure to a company’s brand name than franchises with inactive social media accounts that are not engaging existing or potential customers through those social mediums. Serious and authentic blog commenting with a mention of your company’s brand is just another social media outlet that can garner your brand’s name more exposure.
Aside from social media there are other very useful ways to expose your brand’s name to consumers. Successful offline advertising can have a positive impact on brand recognition. Franchises could even publish an eBook or two about franchising and about their brand which not only will receive mentions from social media and traditional media sources like press releases, but these books can also be found in online libraries like Google Scholar.
Mobile Marketing
9) Google Mobile Location Based Ads
Google AdWords offers location centric mobile advertising to allow local businesses to target leads based on the user’s immediate location. These location based ads offer the interested user an expandable map with turn by directions and a click-to-call phone number. There is some chatter at Google about other new “rich ad units” for mobile coming down the pipe to further leverage the mobile platform, including ads meant specifically for tablet devices.
10) Google Places Offer Mobile Coupons
When customers find a specific local store or service on Google Places through their mobile device, that business can offer digital coupons directly to that device in order to convert that lead into a walk-in customer. Owners of the devices can then show the business their coupon directly on their phone without having to print it out on a piece of paper. One of the best benefits of Google Place’s mobile coupons is that the coupons get distributed for free, unlike many offline paper distribution methods.
Traffic Metrics & Conversion Optimization
11) Google Analytics Traffic & SEO Metrics
Google Analytics is a free traffic reporting tool that allows companies to tunnel deeply into their visitor and website metrics in order to better determine the success of their website. Just some of the valuable visitor and search metrics one can obtain from Google Analytics are the most popular pages on your websites, the keywords that are driving search traffic to your websites, what external websites are sending your website traffic and the level of engagement of your website.
Google Analytics has completely changed how businesses look at their website’s statistics. This free hosted solution makes adding metric tracking to your website a breeze and provides in depth reporting second to none. Along with these valuable benefits, Google Analytics also allows companies to integrate their Google AdWords & Google AdSense campaigns into its reports, to set goals with varying values for conversion tracking and to build custom scheduled statistical reports.
In the franchise space specifically, ELEMENTS has begun using Google Analytics to provide rollup reporting across an entire franchisee network of websites as well as offering franchisees access to their own individual Google Analytics reports.
12) Website Optimizer for Conversion Optimization
The success of a website cannot purely be determined by the number of visitors to a website alone. Most websites have conversion goals like a checkout through their shopping cart or a newsletter sign-up for future targeted marketing. This is where conversion optimization comes into play.
Conversion optimization is the process of altering a page on a website in order to increase the amount achieved goals. Sometimes this can mean changing the call to action text or adding a big green button to the page. Conversion optimization is an art form but with Google’s Website Optimizer almost anyone can learn how to better their conversions on any given page.
In its simplest form, Website Optimizer allows you to create to competing pages and then it splits the traffic between the two pages and determines which page has the best conversion or goal achievement ratio. Website Optimizer also allows a company to alter individual page snippets in order to determine which of these snippets on the page lead to the most conversions.
Google’s New Analytics
While it’s still in Beta, the Google Analytics dashboard is getting a facelift and it’s not all just cosmetic. There are two changes that really interest me, the addition of widgets and the ability to have multiple dashboards.
I have signed up for the beta, but it could take a while until I get access so for now I’m going off of the screenshots I found over at BlogSpot.
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From my understanding the widgets will allow you to customize the look and feel of the dashboard. So you could put in a timeline of views right near the top of the dashboard for those clients most interested in brand awareness or a pie chart of goal success for those clients most interested in goal conversion. Then with the ability to create custom dashboards you could create both dashboards mentioned above for a single customer in different tabs.
I’m eager to test out the widget options and I’m curious to see if Google will add any new functionality beyond standard charts & graphs and how they work with advanced segments. For now I’ll watch my inbox for acceptance into the beta program of the new Google Analytics and I’ll report what I find when I get approved.
Google’s Farm Update & How it Affected Franchise Traffic
At the end of February Google released an update to their algorithm that was supposed to penalize and deter content farms (sites that reproduce content from other websites or use low quality content purely for the sake of higher search rankings). Google claimed that this would affect almost 12% of all US queries. Some SEO experts have dubbed this algorithm change the “Farm” or “Farmer” update.
Now I’ve seen recent articles out there about the short term effect of the Farm update so I decided to check out some of the Google Analytics I have access to in
order to see how a variety of our clients are fairing. I got a mixed bag of results as you can see in the examples to the left.
While I saw several examples of traffic spiking, falling, bouncing or remaining consistent throughout our network of individual domains more often then not our domains took a noticeable of a dip after February 25th (31% as seen in the bottom example shown) followed by an immediate traffic increase (again in the bottom example shown an increase of over 50% above the average daily traffic).
It’s all interesting, but what does it really tell us? A highly trafficked website receives traffic from a variety of sources so a dip in a single traffic referrer - in this case Google - might not show much of a traffic loss. A small website like our new affiliate blog which receives 90% of its’ inbound traffic from Google would definitely show an impact, but the low traffic volume means that we can’t trust the traffic drop to be directly correlated with the Google Farm update.
For the most part at ELEMENTS we focus on franchise companies which generally have hundreds of websites across the board and we are able to track those websites as a whole. So how will traffic to 700+ like websites be affected by the Farm update? Let’s find out.
Franchise A
Franchise B
Looks to me like there was very little if any effect at all on the overall franchise traffic for these two clients following the February 25th update roll out. Other franchises I looked up had less than a 10% degree of variance after the Farm update, so thankfully not much changed across our franchise networks.
So who wins and who loses with this new rollout? That remains to be seen. Some have reported (EZineArticles for one) a loss of up to 40% of their traffic since the Farm update went into effect and Mahalo.com which describes itself as a knowledge sharing service has reportedly laid off 10% of their staff in response to the significant dip in traffic & revenue resulting from the Farm update. On the other hand possible content farms themselves, eHow and Wikipedia are reported to have seen a traffic boost from the update. My take is that websites with a strong offline brand (perhaps even some online brands) are not going to see much negative effect from the latest update.
Looking Forward to Online Marketing in 2011
2010 was quite a busy year in regards to internet marketing. We saw local search become the top focus of SEO experts at the beginning of the year and we watched those same experts scramble back to basics when Google blended the local and organic results. We witnessed social marketing become the bees knees to online marketers only for them to learn that creating a Facebook and a Twitter account was not a panacea for an already weak marketing campaign. We saw Bing power Yahoo results and the emergence of Google Instant which caused a mild panic when certain naysayers prematurely declared it to be the “death of SEO”. And those are just the highlights, but as we pause to look back at 2010 it’s prudent to look to the future as well. So what can we expect from 2011?
Social Marketing
According to Hitwise in March Facebook surpassed Google as the most popular web destination in the US and as of November Facebook accounted for 1 out of every four page views. That’s an insane amount of eyes on the Facebook network which means a ton of views on their advertising platform. Facebook is now pushing out their new email platform with the intent of blending their user’s mail with IM and SMS messages; to borrow a phrase from Tolkien 1 inbox to rule them all. I remember thinking something very similar when Gmail first launched.
Borrowing from Google’s playbook Facebook is trying to become the solution to everything, to become so useful that we can’t imagine doing without it. In 2011 I expect Facebook to add more new features and perhaps even take a run at Google with search. I know that sounds kind of crazy, but Facebook is already dominating in page views so if Facebook can even take a small percentage of Google’s existing searches away from them they would become the undisputed king of the internet hill.
Some PPC (Pay Per Click) pundits already claim better success with their Facebook Ad campaigns than they have had with AdWords, mostly because through Facebook Ads they have a better ability to narrow the target demographics. Now if Facebook makes the move to search and adds purchase intent alongside that demographic targeting Facebook Ads could easily dominate the PPC landscape.
Mobile Marketing
For years we have been claiming that mobile will be the next big thing, but as the number of smart phones increase exponentially each year we still are not seeing mobile web traffic driving revenue as we have expected. According to Cisco’s estimates mobile traffic will increase 39-fold by 2014, so the traffic is there or soon will be but the real question is where are the sales?
Many experts in the mobile market predict that mobile driven revenue will be derived from location based services like Foursquare, Gowalla or Facebook Places, but while the number of competitors in this realm increases (e.g. Google Places, Yelp, Twitter) the usage by mobile users is still quite low. Pew Research Center found that only 4% of online adults use location based services and it only accounts for 1% of daily internet traffic.
I think in 2011 we will see companies better integrate location based services by driving users to local check-ins with deep discounts & incentives and then somehow integrate these location based services with social media platforms. While it is useful to know that someone has checked into one of their business locations, it is even more useful if you can track those check-ins alongside their social demographics. Understanding the age, sex & interests of those customers that are visiting a location, what times they are visiting these locations and how often they are visiting these locations will allow marketers to drive more sales through time-specific incentives advertised specifically to the captured demographic audience.
Now, what company is in the best position to leverage the mix of check-ins and demographics tracking? Facebook is, because not only are they the largest social network on the planet, but they already have the Facebook Places location-based check-in service in place. While Facebook Places is not currently very popular – mostly because of growing pains and a rush to market – I predict that in 2011 more users & businesses will begin to use the service. Based on what I’ve already seen of Facebook’s tactics in other segments I believe that Facebook Places will allow for integration with Foursquare and maybe even Yelp’s new check-in service allowing marketers to track check-ins across the multiple networks and appropriately target the demographic sweet spot through Facebook Ads delivered to these mobile devices.
SEO
Just recently Google’s “everything” search blended together their original organic style of results with their somewhat new Google Places’ results and placed those blends on the very top of their search results. These results replaced what SEO experts had previously termed the 1-box, the 3-pack & the 7-pack which used to display a group of relevant local results with a map of those locations above the original organic results based on the searchers location. While I believe the blended format of search results will stay throughout 2011 what I do believe will change is the way those results are laid out.
When Google first launched the blended results there was much talk about the new layout as they pushed the map of the blended results into the right-hand sidebar which forced the sidebar placed AdWords advertisements down below the map. Not only does the map now dominate the searchers attention rather than our AdWords advertisements, but it also seems out of place in its’ current location. The blended results are generally bigger than purely organic results which means that with several AdWords listings above the blended results only a few of the blended results will be seen above the fold of the page which means less clicks for everything below the 3rd ranked website (see above image).
In 2011, Google will address these issues by changing their results layout. How do I know this? Because Google is already experimenting with different result layouts. One of the experimental layouts drops the AdWords in the main results column from the top of the page to the very bottom of the page. While this is good news for those with blended results, this is bad news for advertisers as now both AdWords areas are pushed down below the fold. In another experiment Google has dropped a 1-box display of a local result that includes a map to that location below the blended & organic results. My feeling on this is that the Google team still sees value in the 1-box – and perhaps even the 3-pack – and they are looking for ways to integrate them back into the results page while still giving precedence to the blended results.
The problem is that Google has too much information to pass out in their search results and too many good ways to deliver it. So what do I think the results display will look like in the next 12 months? My guess is that by default blended results will be streamlined and made thinner, the map will disappear from the main search and there will be less advertising at the top of the page. That being said I also believe that Google will allow searchers to instantly switch between different styles of search result displays with the simple click of the button. Perhaps there will be three thumbnails of each result style at the top of the page. Hovering over each will produce a pop-up 
preview of the result’s format similar to what the magnifying glasses do to a result in the existing search. Clicking on the thumbnail will change the results display style without needing to refresh the page. This is all speculation of course, but it’s a pretty good option that would allow Google to maintain a quick & streamlined results display and yet give users the options to see more information that they have to display within the results like maps and Google Places information without having to leave the results page.
Conclusion
As far as online marketing goes, I expect 2011 to be a very interesting year with a lot of changes – many of which I will fail to predict – very similar to how 2010 played out. That being said there will still be things online marketing will entail in 2011: best practice SEO, local review harvesting & citation generation, engaging social media campaigns, progressive thinking in regards to mobile campaigns, and good old fashioned hard work. Some things never change.
Google’s New Places Search Results and How They Will Affect Your Rankings
As mentioned in my previous post Google’s search results have changed. In order to better understand how these new search results will affect SEO strategies I think it’s best to take a look at Google’s original intent behind these changes.
As you are probably aware Google has a variety of search types available. One can search for information through Google Images, Google News, Google Maps and more. Towards the end of October Google rolled out a new type of search they titled Google Places. The goal behind Google Places was to provide the searcher with a group of local results relevant to their search phrase that conveniently displays information about the business gathered from various sources like Google’s main search, its’ map search and external websites as well. Google would then blend the information gathered and produce a results page bearing that information along with a map of all of the competing Places on that results page. This format allows the user to get various information about local competing businesses right from a single search.
The image to the right shows the results of a Google Places search I ran for local BBQ restaurants. As you can see the results provides us with external links to review sites like Yelp, contact information including telephone numbers and physical address, a map location relative to their competitors and a link to the local business’s official website. Previously, in order to get all of this information about a single business a person would have to run multiple searches and some on external websites as well to find the corresponding reviews, and that was just for a single business. Now all of that information is displayed for the top local business and its’ nine top competitors.
These new search results would appear to be very useful, so useful in fact that when someone searches in the Google “Everything” search the search engine will attempt to determine whether the surfer could possibly be looking for local results. If Google determines that searcher is looking for local results it will provide a Google Places summary result at the very top of the search results. The picture on the left shows the results of a search run in Google’s “Everything” search using the same key phrase that we used in the Google Places search above. As you can see, Google is still giving us a map with competing locations, contact information, a link to the business’ official website and a link to Google’s own Places page which lists offsite reviews, pictures and customer testimonials. The link at the top of the results that reads “Places for bbq near San Luis Obispo, CA” will take the surfer directly to a Google’s Places search result, as will the “More results near San Luis Obispo, CA” below the Places summary.
So what do these new blended or hybrid results mean for Google’s general search results and SEO? It means quite simply that if your business does not receive one of these top Google Places results on the first page of Google then your website’s results are going to slip below the fold of the page and not be seen by nearly as many searchers. It means that if you have a brick & mortar business the time when you could just focus your efforts on either organic listings in the general search or local search results has passed and you will now need to focus on both.
7 tips to help your website rank well in the new blended search results:
- Claim your places page. While sites can rank well without this effort, it is rare and far easier to have your listings rise to the top when you have claimed your Places page and added content to that page like photos of the business, hours of operation or even your menu.
- Place your contact information in a clear spot on every page of your website; somewhere like the header or footer.
- Use micro-formatting on your contact information. Google has stated that they use hCard formatting on contact information to tie websites & places together in their blends.
- If you have multiple locations, build a separate website or page for each location focusing your optimization efforts on service & location.
- Encourage recent customers to submit reviews of your service to varyious review sites like Yelp or Trip Advisor.
- Place customer testimonials on your website and label them in a micro format to clarify that they are a reviews of your business.
- Verify that your correct contact information is in the various online yellow pages websites and if it is not make an effort to correct it.
Google Local Results Are Finally Changing
We touched upon the upcoming changes to local Google results in our article here, and it looks like those changes are finally taking place. Currently local results are mostly moved over to the new format as you can see in the image to the right, but there are still some areas that haven’t received the new format roll-out yet. The major changes are the move of the map to the right sidebar, the merging of the Google Places info with the organic result and the preview text of a user review is no longer seen in the result but instead just the number of reviews.
If you would like to check out the new format but it is still showing the old style results in your area, you can check it out by clicking on this link.
Link Location Matters to Google
In 2004 Google filed a patent that was just recently granted to them on what they dubbed their “Reasonable Surfer” model, which is really just a way for them to determine a link-importance hierarchy on any given web page. The idea behind their patent is that links that are reasonably more interesting to surfers should carry more weight and be of more value in regards to their website ranking system.
“This means that certain links, like footer and sidebar links in particular, are likely to be devalued. And it’s as they should, right? If a link is tucked away in the footer, the webmaster is stating that he doesn’t care much for it – or it has little value other than for extraneous pleas to the search engines.” Search Engine Journal
Well it makes sense as the sidebar and footer are often populated with paid or reciprocal links, neither of which Google views in a positive light. Sure there are instances when those sidebar links are more valuable or should carry more weight than inline links but no system is perfect. But is that the end of the implications of Google’s “Reasonable Surfer” model?
Link location is just one of the many factors that could influence the importance of a link on any given web page, at least in Google’s eyes. Font-size could certainly point to the importance of a link with smaller fonts being less important than larger ones. Do links above the fold carry more weight than those only a paragraph or two below? What about the number of words in the anchor text, could that effect link weight? In all honesty we don’t actually know, but we can conjecture and make best practice judgements based on the patent’s inferences.
This actually isn’t anything new, it was just something most folks didn’t really consider too much until the publishing of the patent brought it to the media’s attention. Of course, we also cannot say that Google’s determination of a link’s quality ends with a six year old link-heirarchy strategy. What this patent is however, is a patent reminder that inline links that we as a surfer might click on are far more important than throw-away links in a web page’s footer.
