Supplyant

Louis Vuitton is on a mission. It has singled itself out as the spearhead of campaign to manage its brand online, and the largely un-regulated search engines are its enemy.

Louis Vuitton has a  problem with the google adwords results. They hate the fact that google is profiting from allowing people to use the Louis Vuitton brand name in adwords. They also feel that Google is profiting from giving people who infringe trademarks, with fakes, the ability to promote.

Google generates $21 Billion a year from adwords so as you can guess they dont really want to change anything unless they have to.

What you will notice is that the words Louis Vuitton doesnt appear in the title. As you can see there are plenty of way to circumvent that if you need to.

Unfortunately for Louis Vuitton the European Court of Justice has ruled against them, so its business as usual. This issue is far from dead though with appeals already in place.

If you need help with working these methods into your adwords contact us today

I love google, they are one of the new wonders of the world in my eyes. I use about 10 google products on a daily basis, from searching, email, google docs, google reader through to more obscure google services like insights.

Seeing as google pretty much owns the world of internet searches and those searches may be bringing you 100% of your visitors its pretty important when they change something.

Google is about to roll out a significant update to its search engine, the biggest change since 2005. Its been christened “Caffiene” and its available for the public to try out right now. So what is changing that you need to worry about?

Speed

The speed it returns your results is going to get twice as fast. In reality its always been pretty quick so not a big one for us users.

Autocomplete

You may well have seen this in action on googles existing search as it can be turned on. In simple terms autocomplete guesses what your searching for as your typing and gives you suggestions based on that.

Social & Realtime

Its no big secret in search engine circles that Google has a little bit of Twitter envy. The new search engine will be looking much closer at the twitter and facebook . Realtime search results are one of the significant missing parts of the current google setup.

My personal feeling here is that some kind of social ranking will be measured. People who have more follwers than they are following shows authority and google will take note of that.

Theres never been a more important time to setup and manage your twitter and facebook pages.

Potentially big changes in your position

The likelihood is that you may well be moving up or down in the search engine rankings. So far all my clients appear to have been effected by the updates positively.  Google has been waging a war since day one with the search engine optimisers and every year google gets cleverer at pushing out the spam.  Good quality backlinks, strong internet brand recognition and authority are all fundamental in keeping up top.

Try the update now

If theres anything else you’d like to know theres a great post about the changes here

I got sight of some interesting statistics last week showing that peoples use of the yellow pages is dwindling at its fastest ever rate.

The fact given was that the number of people using the book on a weekly basis has dropped by over 20% in the last 4 years.  Interestingly yellow pages advertising rates don’t appear to have changed.

So is it worth being in Yellow Pages?

As with every form of advertising it all depends on your return on investment. On that basis you shouldn’t do yellow pages unless:

• You monitor where your leads come from
• You monitor how many of these leads turn into customers
• You look at the lifetime value of those customers

Once you have an understanding of how much your yellow pages customers are worth to you its a far simpler decision.

What about Yell.com?

Yell.com is a good site for local search its worth appearing on there but:

• It will not give your own site any google friendly back links
• Its going to be under serious threat from Google Local which is free
• Its going to be under increasing pressure from other free providers

Despite this exactly the same rules apply its all about your return on investment. Spend a pound, get more than a pound back in profit then go for it.

Google local

Here’s an example of what google shows you if you search for decorator in Northampton.

This ones easy, its free, it gives you a really high position on google and its easy enough that you can do this yourself. You can do it here

Have you had any good or bad experiences with Yellow Pages. I would love to hear them, or you can tell us about them here

Everybody’s favourite social network Facebook today officially declared it had reached 250 million users worldwide. Whats even more staggering is that it added 50 million new users in the last 3 months or 500,000 new users every day. Whats amazing is that Facebook isn’t the site with the fastest growth, that lies with Twitter.

Lets put this into context:

Number of years it took to gain 50 million users for other media.

• Radio – 38 years
• TV – 13 years
• The Internet – 4 years
• Ipod – 3 years

What does this mean to me?

• If you and your company are not on twitter already get on there and at a minimum secure your company names.
• If your designers have not made consideration of this media and don’t have it in the road-map they are too slow.
• If you think this is all about websites your wrong, Twitter and Facebook are very mobile phone friendly applications.
• If you don’t act now, it will be too late.

Take a look at this video we posted earlier to bring you up to speed on how quickly its all moving.

If you need help with your social media strategy please contact us, it would be great to hear from you.

When your starting a new project its important to do your research and due diligence to understand  whats going on out in the big wide world of the internet.  Luckily Google has a great tool for visualising search trends.

Google Insight allows you to look at how many people are searching for a particular phrase over time. What this tool allows you to do is gain some great additional information about the market, which in turn gives you great insider knowledge to use in your business plan.

• Seasonal ups and downs in particular niches become really clear
• Which of your competitors is growing and which is shrinking
• How different brands compare over time
• Is a brand or market segment you’re looking at, growing or falling.

Example 1: Supporting the good online retailers.

Two wheel brands have adopted very different strategies with online retailers marketing.

Dotz provide great support to high quality online retailers. They see the benefits to the Dotz brand by working closely with retailers, who are then able to present their products in the best light, adding further value to the brand. Nice work from the distributor.

Wolfrace continue to support online retailers that over-discount and show the products in a poor light. The upshot is that the poor representation and over-discounting has devalued the brand. Wolfrace are now trying in-house retailing and should use the extra control this will offer them to begin rebuilding their brand.

This graph shows growth in interest in the brands.

Example 2: Seasonal trends in the DIY sector

Its incredible to see how closely Homebase and B&Q track over the years

Do you have any good examples for you market? click here to comment online

Web 2.0 has become the 1 millionth word in the dictionary.

But just as Web 2.0 has become commonplace, people have started looking forward to Web 3.0  and to what the internet of the future will look and feel like.  Thinking about where the technology is going  gives us an opportunity to start planning now.

My Web 3.0  Trends & Predictions

1. How you will use it ?
   Stop thinking about the web being something you need a computer to use.  It’s started already with the iPhone, even now people are spending huge amounts of money on products and services using phones. Just last week potn.com received an order for a £1000 set of wheels, which was placed using a phone and PayPal. In the next 5 years mobile phones will become the primary method of interacting with the Internet.
2. Single Log In?
   Open ID is a technology that’s growing quickly and being adopted by Google, Facebook and every other hi profile tech company. What this technology will do is allow you to log into any site on the Internet with exactly the same details. No more registering everywhere you go.  By taking away the registration barrier interaction with sites is easier and will become much more common place.
3. Information overload will see social marketing thriving.
   The Internet is crowded already and there’s more information than you can keep up with. This will lead to more people joining groups of like minded individuals who’s recommendations will become more valuable than any advertising.  Management of this information overload will become a hot topic and lead to development of radical new ways of keeping up.
4. PUSH PUSH PUSH
   At the minute you visit websites, but as web 3.0 kicks in you’re going to find more information pushed to you. In whatever form they take, subscription based services are going to take over.

Do you have any predictions of what’s coming next?

As you can imagine I try pretty much every new social network tool that’s out there, but were seeing certain ones are growing in momentum at the minute.  A quick search for potn on google shows that the potn twitter is front page for most people and  potn squidoo pages are now rising fast.

Everybody is talking about twitter at the minute (here’s a quick guide) but you may not have heard of squidoo.  Squidoo is a Seth Godin creation that offers you another spot for talking about yourself (quick guide).

The aim of the game, if at all possible, is to take up the whole of the front page of google with results associated with your brand.

If you haven’t done so already

• head over to twitter and sign up for an account
• head over to squidoo and set up your page

This will help you on your quest to take out the whole front page.  Ill be posting soon about the secret of dealing with all these networks without wasting time, so stay tuned.

The days of tweaking text on your homepage to guarantee a good result on google have gone. People linking back to your site are 70% of the reasons that google will put you high in the search engines.

But how do you  find out who’s linking to you?

In an unusual twist from our normal love of google its Yahoo that does the better job of helping you out on this one.

1. Go to Yahoo
2. In the search box type  link:www. yoursite.com (substituting yoursite.com for your actual site)
3. Yahoo site explorer tells you who is linking back to you.

But don’t stop there!

Try the same search with your competitors who get better rankings than you. This will give you an idea of places that you could contact to arrange links on there pages too.

The answer to this question has launched a whole industry of search engine optimisation companies.

If the internet is an item on your marketing strategy, it’s important you have an understanding of these key concepts.

SEOmoz, one of the best search engine optimising blogs, put this chart together which does a great job of illustrating it in simple terms.

Site history (5%)

• How old is your domain?
• When did ownership of it last change?
• Does it have a history of doing anything dodgy?

The Words on the pages (20%)

• Is a good title and description given?
• Is the structure of the site and its content organised in a way that makes it easy for Google to read?
• Do the words on the page talk about the item you specified in the the page title?

Links back from other sites (75%)

• Does your site have good quality links from other sites?
• Are the sites that link back to you relevant?
• What words are used to link back to you (very important)?

You can help your marketing programme along by:

1. Putting content on your pages that’s good enough for  people to want to link to.
2. Hanging out on other sites, earning permission to post links to your own site.
3. Getting your suppliers to link to you with words, not pictures.

Google analytics is one of those tools that gives you a real insight into whats happening on your website. We build it into every site we produce. When you look at optimising your site, bounce rate is one of those key measures that tells you how well people are liking what they see.

Bounce rate describes a visitor to your site that goes to a single page then leaves the site. This is normally down to:

• They have seen a good headline on google but when they get there it doesnt fit
• The page has nothing of interest to them on it
• An automated programme has been visiting your site
• The page is full of links to other sites which take them off your site

Look at the example below from potn.com

The above shows some of the high traffic pages on the site this week.

Key action points:

• The keyword potn has a low bounce rate, not much point in optimising this one
• The keyword lenso bsx has a higher bounce rate worth a look
• Look at high traffic pages with a big bounce rate as the first port of call, an improvement here will have the biggest impact
• Overall POTN’s bounce rate has improved by 17% this week, looks like Robs been working hard on it

Google.com analytics specialist Avinash Kaushik has stated:

“It is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying.”

If your getting over 50’s the page is not good enough, and needs to be better suited to its visitors.