As inevitable as the summer season in England only lasting four days, Google has changed their Trademark policy in the UK to align with the US.

From 14th September 2010, advertisers will be able to use third party trademarks in their paid ad text, even if they don’t own that trademark or have explicit approval from the trademark owner to use it. So if you were selling smartphones, for example, you could put ‘Buy the iPhone here’ in your ad text.

But why did Google decide to make this change in the first place?

“We believe that this change has helped both our users and advertisers by improving the usefulness of text ads on Google.com and across partner sites in the U.S,” explained Google Product Manager, Dan Stokeley, in an official blog post.

But is there another reason behind this change?

“For example, resellers of jeans have been able to highlight the actual brands they sell in their ad text making their ads even more specific and relevant for users,” said Stokeley.

Yes, as Dan suggests, adverts will become more relevant, but in addition, everyone will be bidding for that brand name, which means the price will rise and Google will make a larger margin.

Any restrictions?

However Google isn’t completely opening the field and this policy change does have some restrictions.

For example, you can only bid against a trademark name on the basis that your site is actually selling the item, components of the item, offers to repair the item, or is an informational site about the item.

If you’re concerned about this policy change, the SEO agency team here ar dotSEO suggests the following:

1.    Monitor your brand terms now. If your CTR starts to decrease you will be easily able to detect the impact of this change on your brand.

2.    For direct retailers, keep open communication with your resellers to keep them happy and so as not to increase the cost of your brand terms.

3.    Have a chat with your search team or SEO agency; they should be aware of this change and can advise accordingly.

4.    Don’t panic! The new policy changes don’t apply to competitors. So, with some persistent enforcement, you will still be protected.

So, in summary, yes Google is allowing ads to be more targeted, but it is also increasing the cost of trademarked terms and putting more money in its pocket!

If you want to find out more about these changes then give the dotSEO team a call!

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Have you ever wondered what people actually do on your website? Or how to find ways in which you can improve your online conversion rate?

Well using Google analytics is one thing. Understanding how to ask it meaningful questions and knowing how to find the answers in your reports, is another.

That’s why I  have put together this totally practical course of interactive webinars for marketers who want to get more from Google Analytics.

Over 6 weeks starting on the 1^st September I will be providing a weekly webinar which makes it easy to understand how to use Google Analytics effectively – whatever your level of experience.

Each webinar includes clear examples, demonstrations and step by step instructions.

By the end of each webinar you’ll be able to test, measure and make worthwhile changes to your website that will give you immediate results. Maybe your site is getting enough traffic so search engine optimisation is the answer, or maybe your retention rate isn’t very good so email marketing could help, or maybe your site just isn’t converting so improving your website design would turn your online sales around. Attending this course will let you find what your problem is and provide the solutions to fix it.

Together and individually, these totally practical webinars will teach you in clear no-nonsense terms how to use Google Analytics to empower you to:

• Understand what’s really happening on your website
• Increase your website traffic
• Reduce page and webform abandonment
• Improve your onsite conversion rates
• Increase the ROI of your online marketing

The webinars will be held every Wednesday at 11am from 1st September. Each class  lasts 40 minutes followed by 20 mins for questions and answers.

Don’t miss out – book now

At dotSEO, our approach to SEO has always been straightforward – we aim to demonstrate to our clients exactly why SEO is important for them, and to show how intensive on-site and off-site SEO activities can dramatically affect their Google rankings and really have a major business impact.

But we’ve always felt that the SEO industry itself isn’t helping to educate businesses. Too often SEO agencies shroud their techniques in mystery as a dark art, not within the reach of ordinary marketers.

Today we’ve released the findings of a major new SEO survey revealing the attitudes and opinions of marketers at small and medium sized business (SMEs) and it really backs up our findings.

Download your free copy here.

The survey shows that nearly a quarter of marketers still don’t know much about search engine optimisation (SEO), despite Google being the first port of call for most of us when surfing the web.

There are lots of eye-opening stats in the report, along with over 30 tips and practical guidelines for improving your SEO, and we’ll be pulling these out in future blog posts, but I thought I’d highlight some of the key findings here as well.

Along with our survey findings, the report includes the results of a new SEO benchmark study we conducted. We took the 50 fastest growing SMEs in the UK and analysed their websites to see how effectively they were optimised for Google natural search.

SMEs avoiding the simple SEO steps

The dotSEO benchmark study found that the majority of SMEs are failing to take simple steps on their sites to improve search engine rankings

SMEs were generally getting the more basic SEO on-site requirements right with, for example, 76% using heading tags in titles on their homepage and 64% using meta descriptions to give a good summary of the site.

But in other crucial areas the results were poor, with only 28% using relevant keywords on their site, just 22% of page titles beginning with a keyword and only 44% having a clearly visible sitemap.

Win six months free SEO worth over £7,500!

As part of our ‘Naked SEO’ campaign to demystify natural search marketing, we’re giving every firm that downloads the report the chance to be entered into a prize draw. The winning firm will get six months free SEO with a dotSEO Professional SEO agency package worth over £7,500.

We’ll openly chart the progress of the winning company on the dotDigital Blog to help demystify the SEO process even further. To enter the prize draw, just download the report from http://www.dotseo.co.uk/nakedseo

Why do you use one search engine over another? Is it by chance, by choice or do you change on a regular basis?

In 2008, Google reported a turnover of £2 billion generated purely from clicks on Adwords adverts, but what about Bing and Yahoo?

The graph below is fascinating. It shows search engine usage according to how technologically advanced the user is. There’s no surprise that Google wins the ‘Middle Majority’ with a greater overall percentage, but Bing and Yahoo are also leaders amongst certain other demographics.

So when you are developing your online advertising strategy it’s important to understand your audience; how and where they search. Different searchers (and therefore search engines) have different characteristics that will benefit some brands more than others.

Every search engine displays different results, some more relevant than others, but all with the goal of satisfying consumer needs. If it achieves this than that search engine has a greater appeal to that particular customer, leading to a longer relationship. Some search engines will do this better than others depending on what they are looking for.

It’s pretty easy to look at the impact of this on your bottom line too. Looking at your web analytics, you can see whether traffic from certain search engines actually converts at a better rate than others. For example, a client of ours receives only 1% of web traffic from Bing and Yahoo, but the conversion rate from these is 42%, a whole 131% better than the site’s average conversion rate. What does this tell us about users of Bing and Yahoo? Are people that use these search engines more likely to buy from our client?

So before committing online spend, it is worth spending some time properly understanding your prospects in order to spend your money wisely. If you want a bit of a helping hand, get in touch with the guys at dotSEO who will be happy to assist!

We’re all inundated with wonderful and often colourful spam. So I decided to take a closer look to see if any mileage could be gained by giving a random SEO spam email a chance. It hit my inbox yesterday.

Initially I was asked, “Does your site rank low? Is it optimized?” And of course, “Are you aware that we have a 98.95% success rate in achieving top page rankings?” Answers: “No”, “No” and “No”. So let’s get cracking…

With no company name anywhere in the email, and a salutation that just said “Dear Sir/Madam”, the only reference I had to anything resembling a company was the return path which pointed to an internet data centre in India. I responded highlighting my interest and asking for additional information.

Within 10 minutes I had my response, details of the company and a name of the person who contacted me. Not bad.

Then came what I’ll call THE FLOOD.

I was bombarded with facts, figures and hooks to try to capture my attention. I was told they were a company of significant reputation, 75 staff and a successful track record of providing up to 5,000 natural links every month. Top 10 rankings would be achieved in the first 6 months and best of all, my traffic was going to grow by 120% in 26 weeks! Supporting this was the fact they had over 240 clients in the USA and UK. Brilliant. The email directed me to their website which presented 65 task options for SEO (all practical and required for rankings). Sadly, to the uninitiated, this could look impressive, and the prices, amazing!

Too good to be true! Where do I sign?

Not just yet… I asked for proof of rankings and some client examples and I was returned a spreadsheet showing terms, rankings and clients’ websites.

Not surprisingly, these websites were obscure and in one case redirected from an international top level domain to an Indian domain name of a completely different company. Despite the spreadsheet rankings being accurate, the terms in many cases had limited or no search volume. Few sites had any contact information so I had no way to check if these companies even used the one in question. The one with contact information I tried to call but couldn’t be connected.

Ignoring these obvious warning signs, I emailed back and asked how long my NEW site would take to rank for the terms ‘camera’ and ‘digital camera’. These are searched for 368,000 and 450,000 times a month respectively in the UK. To their credit they came back and said “these could take some time to rank.” Some time? Correct! Probably an infinite amount of time!

The lesson here is to be careful that you check how long your own competitive terms will take to rank, rather than simply absorbing at face value a term that you are provided. These terms could be branded, non-competitive or have no search volume. Rankings can look impressive but they will do little for your ROI.

Now the implosion:

It is always a good test of quality to assess the SEO of an SEO agency – ie the company’s own website. If they can rank and perform well themselves, the likelihood is that they can do it for you. Our critique on the site in question found that not one of their own terms ranked in the Top 100 of Google in the UK, USA or India, and the site failed miserably across every SEO check and lacked the most basic on & off-site elements for any site. They also had no Page Rank.

Google’s Page Rank is the premise for Google rankings. Page Rank is a measure of strength, authority and relevancy and is scored between 0 to 10.  A new site or site that can’t be indexed is often referred to as un-ranked. To check a site’s Page Rank yourself, download the Google Toolbar and hover over this symbol.

Now don’t forget those links; they promised me 5000 natural links a month, but like the other checks we performed we found that their own site had under 20 links! These had no anchor text, their primary source quality was horrendous, and many were simply broken. Would I want them link building for me? No way! If they can’t do it for themselves the likelihood of them doing it for you is slim at best.

As for their 75 staff, their Facebook page had a grand total of 1 employee!

So all in all my response has to be: “Dear Sir/Madam… your email has been deleted.”

Video content sharing and video blogs on destinations like YouTube is more popular than ever, and offers businesses and organisations important opportunities for sharing their messages, building their brands and raising their search engine profiles.

When it comes to SEO for video postings, you need be sure you optimise the Title, Descriptions and Tags for each video, using your key search terms.

One aspect of SEO for video that you may not have considered is “subtitles”.

Although Google and other major search engines have not released confirmation that they are now indexing subtitles,  they are regularly appearing on more and more videos across the web.

Video content is notoriously difficult for spiders to index. But consider the fact that Google owns You Tube and it becomes a safe bet that this these indexing issues will improve.

It’s also a safe bet that video subtitles will become part-and-parcel of the standard algorithm criterion, maybe sooner rather than later.

What’s in it for you?

By captioning or sub-titling your media, you can provide search engines with a further opportunity to index and understand that video’s content. And because it’s generally accepted that search engines rely heavily on contextual elements for their indexing, subtitles can only help with placing your videos’ meta data into context.

As an added benefit, by captioning your media it opens up the content in that video to people with a difficulty in accessing audio. An example is seen here in one of our client’s videos for USN. Your SEO agency should be able to do the same subtitling for you.

Some may consider subtitles a time consuming process. The time and resource for transcribing audio content is a factor especially if you type slowly.

I’d rebut this objection with one question. “What is the reason for placing that media online?” If the answer is “because it is business critical or valuable,” you may well want to consider options for subtitles.

This is a developing space so consider giving your media the best chance for indexing and SEO benefits and take the added advantage of allowing those with hearing difficulties an opportunity to understand your message. Current statistics from RNID place this figure at nearly 9 million in the UK alone.

For current file formats advice, try: Google.

Search marketing is all about being found by your audience and delivering converting traffic to your site.

Whether you or your SEO agency do this by focusing on search engine optimisation or on PPC, it’s important to base your campaigns on thorough keyword research.

As we move into a world of real time search, understanding search engine results pages (SERP) becomes ever more important. For maximum success you’ll need to know what terms your markets are searching on, trending search terms, seasonal patterns and forecasts.

A helpful tool from Google

Fortunately there are some great, free online tools that can help you research trends, search patterns and numbers in your market place.

Tools in the Google arsenal include the Google Keyword Tool, Google Traffic Estimator and Google Trends, all of which can be used with any one of the other competitors online such as Wordtracker.

Here, I want to focus on Google’s Insights for Search. This tool can provide some great visual representation and data surrounding search behaviour.

Use it to compare multiple keyword search behaviour over time, filter results by time, region, type and category and drill down into regions to see exactly which localities are contributing to the searches.

Insight for Search will also give you a forecast for the next 12 months as well as related and rising search term trends. This may help offer insight into future marketing budgeting focus or campaign design.

You can also use the tool to compare several search terms.  Below, I compared search patterns for the terms ‘SEO’ and ‘PPC’ in the UK from Jan 2006 to Jan 2010 and found an intersection in the ascent and descent around 2007.

SEO v PPC search graph

It is interesting to find that searchers are increasingly seeking information about SEO in place of PPC.

Measuring Marketing Campaign Effectiveness

The tool can also help measure the effectiveness of multi channel marketing campaigns. To view the increase in brand awareness or recall around the time of an integrated marketing campaign, simply select the surrounding date range (both pre and post launch) and view the fluctuations in search behaviour.

If the campaign had a wide reach and was successful you should be looking  for an increase in searches in the relevant period.

An interesting blog on Econsultancy.com last month raised the issue of Google monitoring our search history and personalising search results based on patterns of previous searches and clicks.

This functionality is now turned on by default, recording your brand affinities and to a greater or lesser extent, shaping the results you are shown.

On the face of it, it looks like this means search is becoming more targeted and more relevant  – which can only be a good thing for marketers and for users (and for a hard working SEO agency!)

But is this really the next step in precision targeting for search marketers?

Here’s where I’m coming from: If for example, I made a number of searches on Google using the term ‘Sony UK’ I might expect to see an array of results related to the Sony brand. So in this case I might want the personalisation to kick in and filter out the noise.

But what if I later searched on ‘laptops’? What Google might do in this case is show me a predominance of Sony laptop results, because I have visited the Sony site a certain number of times before.

If I’m looking to buy a laptop online, believe me I’m hunting for a bargain. I would want to see the widest possible choice of relevant online retailers and then search for the best price.

Buying a laptop direct from Sony is probably not what I want. Obviously this is a simplistic example but I think it illustrates a point.

Fresh flesh

When searching the web I often want to be exposed to a mix of results, the more varied the better – ones I might expect, but also results I wouldn’t expect at all.

Will personalised search mean that stumbling upon new and interesting sites while conducting a search becomes a thing of the past?

Will having customised or semi-tailored results means we are literally spoon-fed with information? If so, where might the line be drawn between useful customised results and blinkered results?

And how will this benefit either searchers or PPC advertisers looking to target fresh contacts?

Time will tell.

I was interested in a recent blog on the Search Engine Journal, questioning the wisdom of blurring the lines between SEO as a traffic driving tool, and techniques to turn traffic into website conversions.

To my mind, there’s no doubt that the lines of differentiation between these 2 areas of expertise are becoming increasing blurred. And that’s a good thing.

To the old school SEO purists who see SEO as purely a rankings and traffic based specialism, I would ask the question – What is the point of driving traffic to a site that doesn’t convert? Who’s fault would the failings in that campaign be down to?

Shouldn’t the site optimisation expert be in a position to advise the client on how to maximise their search ROI – right through their website?

SEO is a truly dynamic craft, evolving as quickly as the web itself. In this dynamic world of digital marketing, simply ‘driving traffic’ for a client is no longer enough. Rankings are no longer the full story.

SEOs need to approach a campaign with a detailed understanding of the goals and paths in the site they are optimising, and work towards goals that stretch beyond rankings and traffic.

‘Pay per performance’ pricing models remain hard to implement as so many factors beyond an SEO’s control can come in to play – but surely every SEO should approach a campaign with performance measured by conversions at the very top of their agenda.

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch has been making the headlines himself recently by revealing plans to de-index his news websites from Google, when they start charging for access to online content.

This follows a long running spat between media publishers and the world’s leading search engine. On the one hand, Google drives substantial traffic to news websites. However, publishers are frustrated by the editorial power that Google is able to wield through its Google News service – power that traditionally resided with publisher/newspaper. They also claim that Google is in breach of copyright by publishing news from their websites in its index.

The counter-argument has always been that if newspaper sites are so annoyed by Google’s actions, then they should just block the search engine from indexing the site. Murdoch seems to finally be putting his money (or traffic) where his mouth is.

The Belgian ruling

Back in 2007, a group of Belgian newspapers successfully sued Google for copyright infringements. And now, Murdoch is hoping to get one over on Google by taking back the power in the battle for online news.

Recent reports have suggested that after removing news from Google, Murdoch will seek to secure a deal with new Microsoft search engine Bing. So how would this affect the balance of power in the search engine war?

How do we search for news?

If we imagine a situation where Bing managed to achieve exclusive access to most of the world’s major news feeds, it’s interesting to consider how that would affect the way we search for news and the way we use search engines in general.

We are used to being able to access anything from any search engine, so would closing off content reduce our reliance on Google et al as the fount of all knowledge?

Even if this did happen (and I think it would be hard for Bing to get ubiquitous control of the news space), Google has such a stranglehold on our online searching that, even if they lost the news battle, they would still be used for our everyday searching needs.

That said, we could see a split in the search market, where if you wanted to search for news, then Bing would be the engine of choice, whereas for everyday surfing needs, Google would still retain its dominance.

It’s safe to say that this battle is only just beginning; it’ll be interesting to see how it pans out.

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