Getting great positions on search engines for popular terms isn’t free. It can take an enormous amount of effort building links, writing content and fine tuning pages that don’t necessarily convert as well as ppc based sites because they have to be search engine friendly. With SEO and Google it doesn’t happen overnight so be prepared to wait months to hit the front page.

If you believed what people tell you nobody ever clicks Google adwords. We had a great opportunity to test something we have believed in for a while, that Google adwords traffic generates more sales than traffic from the normal search engines.

Look at this google result for K&N’s (the worlds leading manufacturer of performance air filters)

The two results of interest are:

Performance-filters.co.uk

A shop we use and promote only via adwords. This was forced on us as the previous domain name (kandnshop.co.uk) was asked to be taken down by the manufacturer. We’ve spent a lot of time optimising the adwords that we use so as to get the maximum number of clicks.

filterpower.co.uk

A domain we purchased because it was the #1 result for K&N but the existing owners had ceased trading. We knew it had traffic and the price was right so we threw a duplicate site on but retained the title and description tags so we could retain the #3 position.

Both sites are exactly the same except for a different colour top banner and logo.

The differences – Ive rounded the monthly numbers to keep it simple.

Traffic to adwords site: 15,000 visits
Traffic to #1 shop: 2,500 visits

Revenue from adwords site: £24,000
Revenue from #1 shop: £1,700

Each visitor generated from adwords site: £1.60
Each visitor generated from natural site: £0.68

Action points

• What is clear (in this situation) is people who click on PPC buy more than visitors to the organic results. People do click adwords in much higher numbers than most would tell you.
• The highly targeted text in the adwords campaign allows you to tick the emotional boxes that make customers want to click them.
• If time is short, I would be hitting adwords harder as a priority rather than working on search engine traffic because its easier to buy this position and as long as the price is right for the adwords then it is going to make you more money quicker.
• Getting people onto the site is one element but the better and more targeted the page you send them to the better.  The gains in sales from fine tuning these pages let you turn poorly converting adword campains into winners.
• Getting to #1 in Google is not free, SEO is expensive and time consuming.

Nobody likes paying for adwords compared to the free traffic from the organic listings but these are great reasons why you should.

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

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

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.