Joel Pinkham

Google Instant Preview

I’ll assume you know what I’m talking about with this new feature from Google – and if you haven’t then read more about it on SearchEngineLand.

Funnily enough, 2 years ago I wrote about a new visual search engine where I mentioned all of these points – and if you’re curious you can read that here.

5 Ways Google Instant Preview will Impact SEO & Your Website

1. Lower Bounce Rate – visitors will be pre-qualified and know what to expect. This is bad for publishers who make money on a CPM basis who just want as many impressions as possible.
2. Higher or Lower Click Through Rate – depending on your design, your organic CTR will change.  And if you’re site looks poor, it might turn users off, but if it matches their expectations you’re going to get more visits.
3. Demise of Spam Sites – How often do you click through to a search result and get some average content that is unreadable because of the number of AdSense blocks on it? If you knew that’s what the site was, you wouldn’t click through. Based on this theory, their CTR will go down which may impact…
4. Lower ranking for poorly designed sites – I’m speculating a lot here, Bing have admitted to using CTR in their ranking algorithm so I can only assume the big G does as well. If you get a lower CTR, then by this theory your ranking will go down. It gives Google great insight into the quality of a website, preview -> click ratio shows a stronger picture about how users perceive your site.
5. Prominence of on-page keyword usage will become more common – To match searcher expectations and make your page seem more relevant, you’re going to need to make your keywords visible on the design. Either with a large title or even within a graphic.

1. All Brand Traffic
2. Non-brand Organic Search (qualified)

Key segments will vary from website to website, but for me these are extremely useful.

All Brand Traffic

Looking at Direct traffic on it’s own is useless, just like Google (organic) doesn’t show a true picture.

This segment includes:

• Direct Traffic
• Branded Search Terms (paid/non-paid)

You simply select direct traffic OR keyword contains [your brand name]. It’s always best to test your keyword usage a few times. My company is called “RedBalloon” so I look at any keywords including “red” or “balloon days” (old branding). But I always make sure it doesn’t include “delivered” which has red at the end of it.

This will give you a true picture of how many people are actually seeking you out.

Non-Brand Organic Traffic (qualified)

As it says – ignores any brand terms and also any bouncing visits. After all, who cares about a bounced visit? You obviously are getting traffic from a person who doesn’t think your site matches their query. This is what I mean by qualified.

In this example we do the opposite to all brand, then make sure it’s organic and then the bounces is 0. To make the branded terms removed check it doesn’t contain what you contain in the brand terms, and then add “Or” statements to overcome terms where that would should be.

I’m surprised Google Analytics doesn’t make it more obvious – Organic traffic shows totally different stories as one, brand terms are the new direct.

Google has just announced Enhanced CPC bidding

As days go by, I’m losing trust in Google’s bidding methods and feeling like I need to use a third party bid management tool. But let’s take a look at the options we have using AdWords:

1. CPC Manual Bidding
2. CPC Manual Bidding with enhanced CPC
3. CPC Automatic bidding
4. Max CPA
5. Target CPA

I’m not even going to bother talking about Manual Bidding (it’s obvious), Automatic Bidding (never, ever use this) or Max CPA (why would you use Max CPA when you get use target CPA?).

Enhanced CPC

You set the bids and Google tries to assume if the actual users search query is more likely to convert (which makes smart bidding).

Advantages

• Individual bids for a lot of different search queries  – your keyword listed in AdWords will match a multitude of user search terms. So instead of setting up a huge campaign with a lot of exact match terms with individual bids, it does that work for you
• It finds patterns it what converts – let’s say your keywords are “gifts”, “birthday gifts” and “gifts for dad”. Enhanced CPC might find that when the user adds “buy” to their query they’re more likely to purchase, and when they add “ideas” then they’re less likely. You might be bidding $2 for “gifts”, but when someone searches “buy gifts” Google puts your bid to $3, or when someone searches “gift ideas” your bid goes to $1

Disadvantages

• You give Google permission to increase your CPC at their will, based on their assumptions (they say it won’t raise for cost-per-conversion, but of course it would for your high performing keywords)
• Google makes assumptions very quickly – they can get it wrong to start with

Target CPA

You set the end amount you want to spend on a conversion at an ad-group level.

Advantages

• You don’t have to worry about bidding and Google “tries” to meet your conversion expectations
• Let’s you focus on things like creating new ad groups & testing new ad copy – where you (as a person) can add real value
• Computers are smarter than humans when it comes to calculation

Disadvantages

• It starts out bad – everytime I’ve started using Target CPA on a campaign my CPC gets massive. It comes back down but overall not all that trustworthy
• You’re relying on Google to maximise your revenue, when they also want to maximise their revenue
• You could actually be better a better cost-per-conversion but the system will push your bids up to your target (meaning all of your ad-groups need

In Conclusion?

I’m testing out Enhanced CPC now on 1 of my campaigns, and will see how it goes. Target CPA needs time to really test out but none of them really match ROAS bidding like you can do with a bid management tool.

Excellent blog post/video on SEOmoz – read Danny’s article over at SEOmoz.

When search engine optimisation (SEO) is the main part of your business model, chances are you spend too much time trying to get traffic and not enough time improving your customer experience or building a brand.

I’ve heard plenty of people with “improving rankings” at the top of their list – SEO is one of those things people get caught up with when they don’t even have fundamentals right. It’s an easy trap for small businesses to fall into, but at the same time an easy trap for big businesses to dodge.

Let’s put SEO into perspective – imagine 3 restaurants

First restaurant ranks 1st for “restaurnts in internetville”

They’re going to get a lot of people discovering them this way and maybe even make a few $$$ along the way. Their food is average, nothing exciting and the service makes you yawn.

They’ll do OK but repeat visits and referral business will be lacking.

Second restaurant is invisible in search, but has a great reputation

This is the trendy place you heard about from your trendy friend. Always busy on a Friday night and serves a mean meal.

These guys will do pretty well…until the next trendy place comes along. Repeat visits and referrals will be what they rely on, fresh new business will be hard to come by without an established customer base to pass on the good word.

Third restaurant ranks 2nd for “restaurants in internetville” and has a good reputation

I think it’s pretty obvious where I’m going with my point. The 3rd restaurant of course wins the race.

Without good cusomer acquisition tactics (of course SEO is a big one) your business will peak and die as the trends do. With ONLY good acqusition tactics, you’re never going to grow organically.

So the point is: you do need both SEO & customer satisfaction to be significant. Thanks Captain Obvious.

There are a lot of Dotcoms who need SEO to survive as a business – to me they are the rats of the industry. The dodgy corner convenience stores of the web. Why would you want to be one of those?

With Facebook overtaking Google in terms of traffic, there’s an obvious increase to the importance of recommendations from friends over pure SEO. But Google is definitely not going away, you just need to be more accountable for your product/service.

Don’t get me wrong, SEO is a huge factor in any online business and something that can’t be ignored. While it presents a bunch of opportunities, by itself it’s not a sustainable strategy to run a company by.

Bounce rate will impact your search rankings. We can never be certain about how search engines rank pages – but here’s my logic on this…

The problem with most SEO’s is that they are focussed on getting rankings. Sometimes the easiest way to get rankings is using ‘techniques’. More and more often though I see search results rankings that can not be explained by SEO techniques. Inbound links, title tags and good quality content are of course important, but certainly not the be all and end all.

Let’s take a step back here.

What is the point of a search engine?
To help a person find the information they are looking for.

So, when a user types something in they want to find something related to what they typed in.

What is the point of a search engine ranking sites?
To help a person find the best possible information for what they are looking for.

So logically the order of search results should show the best site, with the best content, and the most relevant to a persons search words.

OK, that’s obvious – what’s my point?
The best site has content that the person wants and is easy for them to get.

The trouble is that Google is not a person. It’s pretty close, but at the end of the day it’s an algorithm. It needs to a way to logically determine which site is best.

To measure this best factor Google is going to use a bunch of things to determine a web pages score. User experience is of course a huge factor if a human was going to score a website. Google can’t tell a good design, or if something is interactive and capitvating for people viewing. What they can measure though, is the bounce rate* of a site.

It’s a dead give away to search engines that your site didn’t match the users expectations, why else would they be leaving.

My advice is to always think about users first and search engines should be kept happy naturally.

*Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors to your site who leave after seeing just one page. For example, 100 people visit your homepage, and 25 of them decide to leave without viewing any other pages. This would mean you have a bounce rate of 25%

Getting onto the first page of Google for organic search results is usually going to be quite a challenge. That’s where Google AdWords comes in – and it’s the easy way to get that ranking.

However, these days are coming to an end and it seems that ranking on paid search results is becoming more and more of a challenge. Especially with a quality score to filter out the terrible ads that don’t actually add value for users.

I recently have been working on a campaign for a client – targeting highly competitive terms. I did all I could on the campaign in terms of optimisation and bid a huge amount on the keywords. The result? The ad showing up a tiny portion of when it should, driving 2 clicks a day, a huge cost per click and a ‘Poor’ quality score.

So I discussed with issue with a Google Optimiser – and they essentially said there was no solution but to wait for improvement. But in doing so they gave me a good description of the way quality score was working in this case.

Here’s a summary of the impact of quality score in this situation

• When you don’t have enough data for your own quality score – you get the average of other advertisers for that specific keyword. In my case, there are a ton of dodgy advertisers which will not be relevant for users so overall have a poor quality score.
• When there’s lots of competition, you absolutely need a good quality score to get displayed. My ads were put in the place of a bad ad and therefore not showing up.
• The only way to improve quality score is to prove that your ad is of quality to Google. You can only do this by showing valuable clicks and beat the average performance for that keyword by other advertisers.

This basically means I’m stuck in a rut, as I’m sure many other advertisers are who actually are selling a good quality product. No solution yet either.

The other day I read a story on the NZ Herald about the hard times ahead for Google. I doubt this guy really knows what he is talking about, search advertising spend can’t really be looked at the same was as more traditional advertising.

I don’t think that Google will be hit as much as Mr Pauly is making it out to be. They may face trouble with a lack of consumer buying (following through to a lack of searching), but not from marketers cutting their budgets. Here’s why:

1. Search marketing budgets are tiny compared to other media spends by well known brands
2. It’s certainly one of the most measurable – and usually profitable
3. Reducing search marketing budget is going to directly reduce revenue
4. Branding budgets are used to grow a brand – wouldn’t it be most logical to cut back on growth/less measurable expenditure first?

It’s fairly safe to say that a Google budget should be the last one cut.

By the way: NZ Herald, you’re lazy for publishing this article. If you’re not going to write your own content, at least publish articles by industry experts, not opinion columnists.

Searchme is a new visual search engine which is currently in a private beta. I’ve just signed up to try and get onto it, so I’ll let you know when I can comment on my experiences with it.

They’ve already got invesment from Sequoia Capital who was an early investor in Google and YouTube.

I have to admit the features and appearance of Searchme do look impressive, and it’s always nice to see innovation in the search arena. It looks like it’s all AJAX based and the beautifully displayed visual search results are returned quickly using the Apple cover flow design used in iTunes.

It also uses category filters, kind of similar to Ask.com. So if you searched something like “nets” Google will traditionally show what it considers the most relevant and a big part of this relevance is importance. New Jersey Nets completely dominate these results, but what if you were actually searching for fishing nets? Searchme would present category options to you, so you could either choose to look at basketball category sites or fishing category sites.

Take a look at their introduction video

Will it catch on?
For a new search engine to catch on it has to be necessary and more useful than Google to give people a good reason to change, or at least use in combination. While Searchme looks good, I don’t think it’s necessary. The reason why Google is so popular is because of the quality of it’s search results and the simplicity to get to them. Googles search results are based on the fact that content is King, and trust is it’s Queen. How useful would Google be if it ranked results with a design factor?It’s a common assumption among SEO’s that Google already considers user behaviour after a search. Higher click through rates of your organic listing if you’re in second place, will show people like your listing more than the 1st place which proves it to be more relevant. Also once you click through from a search result, and hit the back button straight away – Google will know that the page you saw didn’t match what you wanted to see. Based on this it’s fair to say Google doesn’t judge these sites ‘by their cover’ which is exactly what Searchme will encourage.The other main feature it has is the category filters. In my example above I talked about fishing nets and the New Jersey Nets. If you were searching for fishing nets and searched for “nets” and got results for the basketball team, wouldn’t you just try again but this time be more specific and search for “fishing nets” instead?

If it does catch on, what effect will it have?
Design will be king. If users can see your site before clicking on it – it needs to look good. Not only does it need to look good, but it will also need to appear extremely relevant. You would need to have quite specific pages to match specific search results. You should be doin this already, but it would take it to a new level.I’m not sure how Searchme will rank it’s search reulsts but surely it won’t be as complex behind the scenes as Google, so most likely not as high quality results. It might be a more useful idea if it was actually just a new way to display results, using the backbone of Google technology. Perhaps not a possible business model though.

Overall I think the idea is ‘cool’ and might come in handy for certain searches and industries. But no one will have to take it too seriously, at least not for a while.