WhyCommunicate?

Let’s face it, how many people do you know under the age of 40 who don’t use Facebook. Personally I know one and that’s because he’s concerned about online privacy. With the recent changes in privacy settings users are now able to lock their accounts down, so this issue is addressed. Will he be using Facebook now? Yes, because if he doesn’t he will have no idea what anybody is doing with their lives, when they are going out, what happened and the pictures to prove it!

Google has long highlighted search terms in the search results (SERPS) using bold text. As with all things Google, this practice is evolving not static and there are no hard and fast rules. Increasingly, Google is also highlighting abbreviations and acronyms not just the exact search terms. For example, a search on “ROI” returns results highlighting “Return on Investment” as well as “ROI” itself. Similarly, search on “PPC” and “Pay Per Click” will be highlighted.

Now there seems to be a shift towards highlighting words of semantic equivalence as well. Interestingly, a Google search on “Search Engine Marketing” performed on 5th July 2010 returned the following:

Notice that the direct acronym “SEM” isn’t highlighted by “SEO” is.

Bold text draws the searchers eye and grabs their attention. Highlighting doesn’t impact on search engine rankings but is likely to have some impact on click through from the SERPS to your website.

Climbing to the top of the search returns is a question of smart Search Engine Optimisation. But once you get there, your website needs to sell itself to encourage searchers to actually click through to your website. The challenge becomes one of Search Engine Marketing.

The preview text displayed with each web result is known as the snippet. Search engines often use the meta description as the snippet – hence the great importance of writing good meta descriptions. Clearly, a meta description must contain important keyphrases and accurately describe the content of the page, but a really good meta description must also capture the searcher’s interest like an advertisement so they click through to your website.

In retrospect, perhaps the title for this post should have been “To Click or Not to Click”. Online Marketers don’t have direct control over the snippets displayed for their webpages – neither over the text itself or which terms appear in bold. But, we can and we should monitor and experiment in the search for the best results.

UPDATE: Thanks Jaamit http://bit.ly/basSaJ The Times has now been re-indexed in Google, now who said Newspapers were old skool.

As the index loss is only half a day the revised figures suggest a reduced cost of £17, 500.

While Times Online begin their move to an online charge model following a very public spat with Google, it’s been revealed that Google has removed the paper from its all important news index.

Effectively this means Times Online will no longer receive any organic traffic from Google representing around 90% of their overall organic traffic, bearing in mind the respective market shares of Bing, Yahoo! Et al.

The monetary value of this loss of organic traffic could be significant if you consider the effect on Times Online’s online advertising revenue.

Times Online received 7.1 million browsers in March 2010*. If we assume that of this percentage only 20% comes from organic search traffic then this could amount to over 1.4 million browsers. Let’s assume that an average browser views 10 pages and visits the site 4 times a month this equates to nearly 57 million page impressions a month.

If the primary income from these page impressions is advertising and this is sold at £15 per 1000 page impressions then the revenue lost would be in the region of £850,000 per month.

These calculations obviously make several assumptions. Times Online tends to run two ads per page so this figure could easily be increased to £1.7 million a month.

Interestingly this equates to a just over a pound per browser, which just so happens to be the daily charge to online subscribers.

One thing is for sure, Rupert Murdoch has probably done his sums.

*Source ABCe

The iconic Duracell bunny advertisements were originally launched in 1973, a long time before a rival bunny, by Energizer came on the scene. In the UK and Australia, nobody remembers the Energizer bunny now, but in the US it’s the other way around. When Duracell’s trademark ran out, Energizer jumped in and 115 advertisements later, Duracell’s bunny is buried in US advertising history.

A lesson in commercial complacency perhaps, but certainly proof that if you’re not watching your marketing closely, a competitor may jump your bandwagon or you may miss an opportunity to jump on theirs.

This is particularly true for retailers when it comes to bidding on keywords and phrases in the run up to Christmas. Competitor considerations aside, the most popular during the Christmas period are not going to be the same as those for the rest of the year so it pays, literally, to review your keyword strategy.

We saw uplift of over 100% in visitor traffic across all of our online retailing clients, with all the keyword conventions of the rest of the year thrown out of the tinsel framed window. With such a surge in traffic it’s easy to lose focus on conversion rates, which is essentially what the keyword strategy is ratcheting up.

Consider what a 1% increase in conversion rate equates to in revenue and there you have a specific motivation and ROI figure to work with. In the New Year, the game changes again, in fact a keyword strategy should really just roll on continuously, like the Duracell bunny, or the Energiser one if you’re in the US.