WhyCommunicate?

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

Often it’s the things you see every day that you don’t notice changing, your face in the mirror, the length of the grass and then all of a sudden you’re an old man pushing a lawnmower.

Where am I going with this? Other than into a scary future, well Google. Noticed anything different lately? Probably, like me and my developers who look at the Google letterbox everyday, not much on the face of it, yet our ‘Frenemies’ as Martin Sorrell likes to call them keep adding brilliant little search addendums and waiting for us to spot them.

Seen the wonder wheel yet? Put in your company name and with wonder wheel you can see which areas of the web your profile inhabits and your relationship with other online brands. This ‘mind-map’ of word association is a real boon for SEO, enabling you to find the words most frequently associated with your brand and add them to your keyword list.

Part of the problem for Google in publicising these gizmos is that they don’t want to mess up the mega successful, minimalist front page of Google which, incidentally came about because Page and Brin couldn’t decide how it should look so just left it functional (typical techies).

We’ll therefore have to continue to peel back the layers of Google’s big white onion to find the good stuff underneath. It does beg the question, if we as SEO specialists have a hard time keeping up with Google developments, what chance has a broad focussed marketing department got?

From time to time I hear SEO agencies referred to in terms normally reserved for dodgy car salesmen and other rogue traders. ‘Charlatans’ is one of the more prosaic descriptions I’ve heard recently. Strong words indeed for marketing circles and an unfortunate by product of the ‘black art’ nature of SEO which enables some unscrupulous companies, attracted by the sizeable budgets available in SEO, to operate dubious practices behind the promise of spectacular results.

In the worst cases of SEO work, brands whose agencies have adopted more aggressive, ‘black hat’ approaches to boosting their clients’ rankings have ended up boosting them off line altogether once the search engine people caught up with them. Famously BMW and more recently Go Compare the high profile aggregator have been delisted as a reward for such SEO practice.

Guarding against overly ambitious SEO agencies wearing fur coats and promising the world is now a necessary part of a marketer’s armoury so how do you separate the good from the bad? As in the used car show room, it’s a time for hard questioning. Here’s a guide to the sort of questions you should be asking.

1) What are they promising to deliver and what does it cost? Do the two match-up?

2) What are they doing technically to achieve the result? If they can’t or won’t explain what it is then don’t hire them.

3) If they’re using link building tactics where are the links from? From valued sources, worthless directories, paid links?

4) What are they doing with website content to optimise it? Stuffing a website full of keywords is not a good practice and will be detected by search engines.

5) Google has changed its algorithm three times this year already, is the SEO agency aware of this?

Ultimately the big question you should be asking yourself is ‘do I understand this?’ If not, don’t work with them as ultimately it’s your responsibility if you fall foul of Google & Yahoo for ‘being evil’ in your SEO tactics.

It’s ironic that many insurance companies fighting for high ranking in Google are not aware of the potential downside of their search activities – you’d have thought they had that covered.

Forget the admirals hats or black cloaks, the senior directors of these companies should be finding out what colour hat their SEO agency is wearing to get their company ‘above the fold’ in Google search rankings.

Because while the rewards are high, so are the risks. The number one position on Google typically gets, 40% of the traffic, the second rated position only 8%, third 4% and so on down. If the SEO agency a top ranked company is using isn’t playing by the rules and gets spotted by Google for ‘being evil’ they’ll remove the site from the rankings altogether.

Suddenly losing 40% of traffic for a top ranked insurance company means millions of pounds a month immediately lost – it’s a financial disaster for any company, yet board level executives are unaware of this.
Part of the problem is that many of the tricks SEO agencies use are so devious that only other SEO agencies can spot them and let’s put it this way, this sector isn’t particularly known for its self-regulatory zeal.

You can draw parallels with some of the more arcane areas of banking, where many of the directors simply didn’t know what the derivatives were they were trading – they were just too complex but so long as they seemed to be making money, nobody worried too much.

Until one of them got caught out so publically that the entire world changed.

Board level executives in any company with a significant online retail operation need to understand the downside, before Google shows it to them.