webqem blog

Local Search

Google local business search results have been a hot topic of discussion in SEO last year, and it looks like continuing in 2011.

If you search for a product/service + suburb, then Google will attempt to deliver their local business results, known as Google Place Pages, as the first results on the page.

In practise, you many have seen Google Place Page listings, and not recognised them.

For example, at google.com.au, search for a local shop, such as “ski shop Collaroy”.
You’ll probably see a map on the right side of the page, and a handful of Place Pages at the top, identified by the standard Google map marker.

Google has been experimenting with the layout of these results during 2010, juggling the location of Place Page listings, Google AdWord listings, Google maps, and traditional (organic) search results.

Currently the results for local business search have Google Place Pages at the top of the page, with a large map in the right column, followed by AdWords listings. Organic search results are in the centre of the page, below the Place Pages, frequently pushed below the fold.

So if you have a physical shop location, and haven’t claimed or created a Google Places page, you could be missing out on a lot of traffic.

Creating a Place Page

Google has written several blog posts about how to create a Google Place Page;

1. Creating business listing titles
2. Creating business types
3. Useful descriptions and categories

Google may have created a Place Page for your business already. Typically listings from the yellowpages.com.au appear as Place Pages, and are waiting to be claimed and verified.

If there is not yet a Place Page for your business, you can go to google.com/places and create one.

Verifying your Place Page

A Place Page needs to be claimed and verified by the authorised representative of the business at the time of creation, or if you make any changes to phone number or location.
This is done by Google either phoning, SMSing or mailing a PIN, that you will need to enter on the Place Page.  Verification by phone or SMS is the fastest method, so make sure you enter the address and phone details correctly the first time.

Currently there is no process for transferring ownership of a Place Page, so we recommend using a dedicated email address for all Google products, such as Google Analytics, Google Places and Webmaster tools.

Optimising your Place Page

Google Place Pages allow you to specify a business description, up to five product/service categories, up to ten photos, opening hours, area serviced, and additional information fields, which can be useful for listing brands, products, services or accreditations.

As the profile of Place Pages increases, you’ll need to stand out from the crowd and optimise your listing. Here are some of our tips:

1. Upload a logo as your first photo.  This photo will be resized and appear in the initial listing results, so keep the dimensions of your logo to a multiple of 85×60 px.
2. If you service a surrounding area, select a radius around your location. This will help you to be found for searches outside your immediate suburb.
3. You must select at least one of the Google categories from their dropdown. However the next four can be more targeted to the products or services you provide.
4. Upload lots of photos. Show your shopfront or products at their best.
5. Use the Additional Information fields to list your top products/services/qualifications.
6. Update the status, to let people know when a special promotion is on.
7. Get listed at other business directories, such as yellowpages and truelocal, bing local.  Many recommend using ubl.org to get multiple business listings.
8. Use microformats for testimonials and addresses on your website,  to make them recognisable to review sites.
9. Ask satisfied customers for a testimonial on your Place Page, gradually.  Testimonials are also scraped from other sites such as truelocal, eatability, citysearch and more.

As of 25 Jan 2011 Google is allowing anyone to upload a relevant photo to a Place Page, subject to review.  Reviews and community interaction are being encouraged by most search engines this year, probably in reaction to Facebook’s incredible growth rate.

webqem can help you with your SEO, SEM and online marketing solutions.
Contact us now, and see how we can help boost your online presence.

Google Analytics has been the preferred web analytics tool for webqem ever since Google made the rebranded solution available in 2005. All new sites we develop use Google Analytics as a matter of course, providing an enterprise-class analytics solution to clients and developers.

Access

A Google Account is required to access your Analytics reports. However any email address can be turned into a Google Account simply by going to google.com and clicking on the “Sign in” link on the top right-hand corner of the screen. On the next screen click on “Create an account now”, and then fill in the details on the next page, including the email address you wish to use and the password you would like to use when accessing Google Account features. Google will then send an email to your usual email inbox for you to confirm creation of the Google Account.

Access to Google Analytics is from the URL http://www.google.com/analytics/. Click the big blue button “Access Analytics”, and enter your email address and Google Account password.

If you cannot see any Analytics accounts listed in the dropdown box at the top right of the screen, then your email address may not yet have been granted access to the Analytics Account for your website. webqem can easily add access for your chosen email address to the Analytics Account.

There are two levels of access available for Analytics Accounts:
1. Read-only access
2. Administrator access

Administrator access is required to add other users, to edit settings, to define conversion goals, and to add any filters.  Read Access allows viewing of all reports.

Profiles

webqem prefers to use multiple profiles, for each website using Google Analytics.
1. A “raw” profile, without any filters or goals, reporting the data exactly as provided by Google.
2. Additional profiles, with goals or filters.

Filters

Filters are most useful when a website includes multiple subdomains, or when rewriting of URLS is required, to simplify reporting. For example if you have multiple sites, such as blog.yourdomain.com, yourdomain.com and shop.yourdomain.com, by default Google does not include the full URL in reports, and the index.cfm page on each site would be hard to distinguish in Analytics Content reports, unless filters are used to include the full address in reporting.

Filters are also useful for excluding traffic from particular IP addresses, such as your office, or test locations.

Goals

Conversion Goals should also be defined for each site, to measure the success of each component of the site, and different traffic sources. Measuring goals also allows use of Google’s AdWords Conversion Optimiser.

Events

Interaction with specific components of a page can be measured by placing additional tracking code on page components. This may include tracking controls and buttons in Flash movies, tracking downloads, or tracking specific links on a page, using Google Analytics Event Tracking.

AdWords

If you have an AdWords account, it is recommended to add the AdWords data to your Analytics Account.  Access is granted through the AdWords account. Additional information is available through Analytics that can enhance your understanding of AdWords performance.

URL parameters

Many content management systems append parameters to the URL, for example when paging through search data, or when cacheing information. These parameters can be stripped from URLs for reporting purposes.

If your site has an internal search function, identifiable by a parameter, for example yourdomain.com/search=keyword1, additional reporting is available within Analytics on the search keywords.

An excellent introduction to Analytics is available at http://www.google.com/analytics/ as the Product Tour.

For more detailed information, the official YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/googleanalytics?hl=en provides many hours of training on advanced features.

webqem has met Google’s requirements as a Google AdWords Certified Partner company, after long-time search addict Chris Raynor passed the exams in AdWords Fundamentals and Search Advertising recently.

We’re looking forward to receiving our first batch of 20 promotional coupons worth $100 each for new client accounts, which Google is due to mail at the end of September.

We can now proudly display the Google AdWords Certified Partner logo on our website, and can be found through the Google Partner Search.

Why not give us a call, and see how webqem can help improve your performance at Google and other search engines.

webqem has been managing AdWords campaigns for a number of clients over the past four years, in financial, retail, health, and software markets.

For the last few months we have been running paid advertising campaigns at Google AdWords, Facebook and LinkedIn, observing striking differences between the three platforms. A major factor would be due to the different levels of targetting possible.

Each platform does allow a measure of targetting, as follows:

AdWords campaigns can be targeted:

• geographically (eg 20km radius around Sydney),
• by language
• by network (eg Google search, search partners, or display network partners)
• by device (eg desktops, phones with browsers, mobile carrier or operating system)
• by keyword
• by placement (for the display network)
• by demographic/gender (if available for display network)

Facebook campaigns can be targeted:

• geographically (eg 10 miles around specific cities)
• by age, gender, relationship status, language, education level, workplace, birthday
• by interest.

LinkedIn campaigns can be targeted by three of geography,company size, job function, industry, seniority, gender and age. Note that interests cannot be specified with LinkedIn.

Each platform allows bidding by CPC or CPM, and we tested both for each platform.
We compared the results of advertising a new online retail site providing hire services across the three platforms.

LinkedIn’s lack of targetting by interest or keyword left it lagging in third place, with the lowest click through rate, and by far the highest cost per click. LinkedIn’s suggested price for the demographic we targeted was over $4/click. LinkedIn visitors typically stayed on site for less than 30 seconds, and converted poorly.

Facebook provided the lowest cost-per-click – around 2/3 the cost of AdWords visitors. Facebook visitors tended to stay on site for around a minute, but only 10% came back for a return visit. They also converted very poorly. CPC advertising was clearly better than CPM advertising on Facebook for our client, with a much higher effective click through rate.

AdWords was a clear winner, with excellent click-through-rates, high pages per visit, low bounce rate, and solid conversion rate. The cost-per-click was acceptable, with the highly targeted campaign having excellent quality scores and numerous keywords with double-figure click through rates.

It does have to be said that organic traffic also performed outstandingly, with a high time on site, and double the conversion rate of the paid traffic. This was true for both Google and Yahoo, although Google provided 30 times the amount of traffic as Yahoo.

Google Adword’s ability to target an audience by keyword at a time when they are actively searching for infomation made it the best performer by a long way, for return on investment.

However as a branding platform for a new site, Facebook did provide a cost-effective method for a large number of impressions.

Here are illustrative figures from Google Analytics:

Google announced on 30 June at WebmasterCentral that they had been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files, integrating the new Adobe SWF technology and are now rolling it out. This includes Flash buttons, menus and full-Flash websites, and URLS contained in Flash content. It does not include images containing text, or FLV files, such as YouTube videos.  (more…)

So you have a new business. Or you just need a new website. Here are some of the issues you should address when choosing your new domain name:

1. Brand vs Keywords

Company XYZ sells widgets. Should they choose xyz.com or widgets.com?
Consensus is to go for the brand first, xyz.com. Next best would be brand plus keywords, for example xyzwidgets.com. And finally the keyword-based option, widgets.com.

The rationale is that you always want to be found for your business name, especially when you gain a high profile. You can always use your keywords in the titles, heading and content and incoming links. You may even have your keywords in your company name, which would be very helpful from an SEO perspective.

2. Which suffix?

(more…)

Facebook has finally come out with a search function for Facebook Business Pages.

Until recently, you had to know the actual URL, or follow a link from a Facebook page or website. Now you can go to http://www.facebook.com/directory/pages without being logged on to Facebook, and search by business name or browse by type. Facebook says pages are automatically added to the directory, although they do have a disclaimer that only a limited set of results are available to unregistered users.

The fact that you don’t have to login means that Pages can be indexed by search engines. The usual rules apply, in that links from external websites affect whether you will rank well, regardless of whether you are included on the Facebook directory. For example http://www.facebook.com/pages/wwwcostumeboxcomau/8168104555 is indexed at Google, but not yet included in the Facebook directory.

A search at Google.com for say “Barack Obama” highlights the current importance of social networking sites in search engines. Page one at Google includes dedicated pages at Wikipedia, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube. His Facebook page is on page two of Google, with his Flickr and LinkedIn profile on page three.

So if you have not yet claimed your company name at these social networking sites, you are missing out on a boost to your search engine performance, and associated traffic. We also recommend grabbing your name at these sites before someone else does, so that you can control your public image.

The downside to social networking sites is the need to maintain the content. By nature, social networking sites interact with their audience. It can be damaging to your reputation if a malicious or false statement is posted to your page, and you haven’t logged on to respond or remove the comment. And if you don’t add fresh content to your site, people won’t come back.

In saying that, it is easy to maintain content. You can import feeds from other sites you are active on, such as your WordPress blog, or YouTube. That way it looks like you are adding fresh content, and your audience keeps up with what you are up to.

You can share the responsibility for maintaining your Facebook Business Page, with nominated Facebook personal users as administrators. The viral nature of Facebook means that when others see which Pages you are a fan of, they may also become a fan.

When people become a fan of your Business page, you have the ability to send updates to their Facebook inbox, so that you can tell them about special offers.

If you are a high profile brand, you may get a name like http://www.facebook.com/pinkfloyd if you contact Facebook directly. Otherwise you end up with the standard business page naming format http://www.facebook.com/pages/webqem/17279306527 .

Facebook Ads allow you to reach a targetted audience and bring them to your Facebook Page or external website. You can choose your audience by age, gender, geography and keywords. For example if you wanted to display your ad to people in Australia over 18 who listed “skiiing” as an interest, Facebook will tell you the number of people available, and let you craft an ad.

Although it is very easy to do, if you need help, we can setup your page at Facebook and help you setup your ads.