How good reviews might boost your organic ranking
The importance of generating positive reviews have always been important. Whether on your own website or on third party reviews sites, these reassure hesitant shoppers and give them the confidence to buy. Reviews became even more important earlier this year when Google decided to start including them within AdWords creative. And now it seems like there’s another reason: Google may also be using online reviews as a signal to help rank your website in the organic search results. What about Bad Reviews? This news emerged following a story in the New York Times about how a merchant with bad reviews was ranking highly due – apparently – to those reviews alone. The idea of merchant’s benefiting from bad reviews was quickly analysed and dispelled by Google, who updated their algorithm so that the no-one could benefit from having complaining customers. Google has for a long time gathered together merchant reviews – you can see how they’re displayed on Google product search in this screenshot. Various pros including those at Search Engine Land have summarised that Google does in fact use these reviews to help organise the results pages, although there’s no official confirmation of this from Google. Google’s blog update on the matter said: “In the last few days we developed an algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide a extremely poor user experience. The algorithm we incorporated into our search rankings represents an initial solution to this issue, and Google users are now getting a better experience as a result.” Whatever role reviews are playing in rank organisation, the message is clear: Generate authentic positive reviews. These will help boost conversion rates, boost CTR of your AdWords ads, and may well boost your organic rank too. We really appreciate positive feedback too. If you have time, and if you think it’s appropriate, please let others know what you think of 123-reg by rating and reviewing our service in one of these locations: http://www.reviewcentre.com/reviews92855.html http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/internet-sites/123-reg-co-uk/reviews/ http://www.ciao.co.uk/123_reg_co_uk__5111134 http://www.hostratings.co.uk/host_review.php?id=3 You can also give us feedback on http://twitter.com/#!/123reg and http://www.facebook.com/123regfans. Nick Leech runs Digital Marketing Agency Euston Digital
How to grow overseas with the help of Google
Selling overseas is not easy. You need to identify the right market; create localised versions of your website; change your ads so they appeal to locals; create localised distribution; and find out how to reach potential customers with your message. Introducing Google Ads for Global Advertisers To help out business looking to expand to overseas markets Google have developed a load of new resources. These are all clustered on a new site called Google Ads for Global Advertisers. This allows businesses to find the right market for their products, translate the website and ads, set up campaigns to reach new customers, and work out payment, shipping and customer service issues. The Global Market Finder There’s also a tool called Global Market Finder which helps work out which markets have a high demand for products and services. The tool translates a keyword into 56 languages, and then uses search trends to see where in the world people search for the products and services. The tool shows the volume of local searches, the estimated price for keywords, and the competition for keywords in that market. This makes it really easy to work out how competitive local markets are, how much interest there is a in a product or service, and how much it would cost to start advertising in that market. We know what you’re up to! It’s easy to see Google’s play here: the more global interest there is in international markets, the higher the market CPC will rise. But as a company this is a great way to take a quick snapshot at a market before starting the more expensive and lengthy process of local research. Nick Leech runs Digital Marketing Agency Euston Digital
Google’s Social invite
You know how sometimes you get an invite to a party where the person extends the invite you and a guest by using the “+1” suffix? Well Google has brought the concept to the web so that if you find a decent site when searching its database you can recommend it to others using the new +1 button. That +1 is the latest move by Google to keep step with the social sharing world after their recent integration of what you share via Twitter, Flickr, et al within Google search results. The official Google Blog announced the arrival of the +1 function to be rolled out on Google.com first. For those who can’t wait to see it they have also released an experimental search site so you can see exactly how it works. In practice it is being aligned with the Facebook ‘like’ function. Again like the social sharing integration for your +1s to show up you need to have a Google profile and upgrade it to include enhanced profiles. It looks like this is a good attempt by Google to grab hold of the social searching reins before they run away from them to other providers, but its certainly nothing ground-breaking and from our own quick poll in the office it seems the use of Google profiles is fairly limited so we will wait and see how successful the +1 may become. Have you used the +1 function? What did you think?
Google’s latest goodies
Those lads and lasses at Google labs are a clever bunch and they’ve recently rolled-out a couple of new useful tools to make web surfing more enjoyable and seamless. Here’s what the Google Systems Blog recently revealed. First up Google Dictionary has been added to the Search tool. Although sadly not for all. Google are testing the tool on an ad-hoc basis with the dictionary available on the side bar as a search option. The idea is to allow users to find definitions of words without using “define” within their search, with the results returned coming direct from the Google Dictionary, with other web definitions also available. Secondly, Google has integrated its reading level tool. It’s been around for a while under the advanced options but is now coming to a side-bar near you. If English is not your strong point then this could be what you are after with a little indicator as to how hard the article will be to read based on standard tests. What do you think of Google’s latest tinkerings?
Understanding searchers to maximise your site
The Google Keyword Volume Tool has been around for years in some form or other but via the odd tweak here and there has now evolved into a ‘must visit’ site for anybody designing a new web project. The Keyword tool is linked with Google Adwords designed to find you words you might want to bid on and use in any paid for campaignsm but you don’t need to be logged in to use the Keyword Tool. Searching is simple and the results show you how many searches have been made for that term in the past month – both locally, based on your location and globally. The Competition bar also shows how competitive the market is for buying up adwords for that term. If you think there is value in you moving into a pay-per-click campaign then you can get an idea as to how much that might cost you by using the Traffic Estimator link on the left. This will provide as estimate on the likely cost per click of the keyword and also the likely volume of traffic and how much that is then likely to cost you per day. All your research ready prepared and easily presented. If you are designing any new site, even just planning a new project the Keyword Tool is something you can’t fail to ignore, the results offfer valuable insight into words to use on your site both hidden and visual and even your site name. Do you use Google’s Keyword Tool? Any tips? If you want to drive more traffic and sales to your site, read more about our Pay-Per-Click management solutions to see how we can help.
Google’s moderating revealed
While Google remains one of the most sophisticated ‘automated’ search engines around it still has a crack commando team of human experts checking content is suitable and meets its guidelines and dealing with those sites that don’t. This YouTube video presented by Matt Cutts, a Search engineer at Google explains more about its search rank penalties. The first in the process is the web spam team acting manually on flagged issue such as an adverse spam report or the discovery of off-topic porn within a site. Such issues are dealt with a “time-out” punishment, excluding that site from search results. These seem to be fairly arbitrary with Cutts suggesting those found guilty of using hidden text perhaps likely to get handed a time-out that expires after 30 days. Yet even the more serious offenders also get given a second chance. Found guilty of using cloaking and / or perhaps something more malicious and the time-out punishment will be longer but even that will expire at some point in time. Yet every flag and manual intervention also improves the automated side of Google’s search. Learning all the time, the Google techies then try and use that information to update and improve their algorithims, to hopefully minimise the need for manual intervention in the future. For those hit with a time-out the ‘suspension’ can also be brought to an end quicker. Clean the offending bits up, submit a re-consideration request and Google could lift the ban earlier. The three minute video is an interesting insight into how Google is using human intervention to improve its already leading automated technology. Have you been the subject of a Google time-out? Were you able to lift it easily? The
Paying for content? You will be
We’ve written before about the move by some providers to charge for content and suggested that before too long it will become the norm. This week that scenario came another step close with both Apple and Google announcing payment systems for subscription to online content. Apple was first with a service for newspaper, magazine, music and video purchases through its App Store. Apple plan to take a hefty 30 per cent of the subscription charge, but publishers will be able to set prices and subscription length. The move follows an earlier Apple announcement that from 1 April this year in-app subscription methods would need to be adopted, to drive traffic into the iTunes store. The aim was to stop publishers selling subscriptions only via their own websites, thus cutting Apple out of the deal. As a concession the new system will allow publishers to sell app subscriptions through their own websites thus bypassing Apple’s 30 per cent stake – however they will also have to offer subscriptions through Apple from within the app for the same price or less. Following this announcement, Google has launched its own much whispered online payment service for newspaper and magazine content. Google One Pass aims to provide a single point of payment for content across a variety of websites. Publishers will again – like through the Apple system – be able to set their own prices and terms. However, instead of the 30% Apple charge, Google will only take 10 per cent of revenue. Google’s system appears to be the more flexible too with a variety of business models allowed including metered access such as a certain number of visits instead of a specific time period. So with two payment systems in place, backed by two of the biggest names in the online world, the only barrier to more moving to paid content models simply appears to be consumer attitudes. In a tougher economic world, expect a lot more being done by publishers looking to change those attitudes. Have you paid for content yet? Is the move to paid content now inevitable?