The Ever Changing Google

Businesses spend hundreds and thousands of pounds into SEO and SEM. Every time Google brings about a change to their results page, a lot of the money that was spent on SEO – goes to waste. For example, Google started showing 3 to 5 links from the same website, if the search keyword matched a well established business. You can try search for Optimise Solutions.

You’ll notice that the top 4 results are from our own website! In the past, companies were spending a fortune on SEO to make their website appear at the second position when their competitors name was searched for. One change from Google and all the time and money spent has vanished into thin air!

Instant Approval or Rejection

While Google Instant is a great feature for consumers and searchers, it can be a killer for many poorly designed or badly laid out websites. Imagine you have a website that your target visitors can find on Google. Now assume that there is a competitor of yours appearing just above your result. Let’s take it that your competitor’s website is higher up in the ranking but not so good looking or cannot appeal to the consumers in that 0.35 second preview through a tiny screenshot. The consumers might eventually end up on your website, even without having visited your competitor’s website! Isn’t that amazing? While it sounds great, hope that your competitor’s website is not better than yours, when seen through Google Instant.

Using Google Instant to Drive Visitors

We know that Google shows a snapshot of your website. Why not make the home page and other landing pages appealing? Interesting and big banners, well formatted typography, a clean and simple interface, and clutter-free layout would work well with Google Instant. Google is only trying to provide better search results to its users.

There have been calls from companies that claim to be connected with Google and promising that they will get you to Google page one within the same day. The scam is that they ask you for £100 – £1000 deposit then a monthly payment of £30 – £300.

How do they do it?

Most probably these companies have no roots in SEO or SEM. All they do is setup a Google Adwords campaign, chuck in a few keywords, and bid on some search terms that won’t cost much per click. They’ll have honoured their part of the deal, by having your website listed on page one! They might be paying only a tiny percentage of your monthly payment to Google. They wouldn’t get you to Google page one using Organic Search Engine Optimisation.

While Google never sells better ranking in our search results, several other search engines combine pay-per-click or pay-for-inclusion results with their regular web search results. Some SEOs will promise to rank you highly in search engines, but place you in the advertising section rather than in the search results. A few SEOs will even change their bid prices in real time to create the illusion that they “control” other search engines and can place themselves in the slot of their choice. This scam doesn’t work with Google because our advertising is clearly labeled and separated from our search results, but be sure to ask any SEO you’re considering which fees go toward permanent inclusion and which apply toward temporary advertising.

- from Google’s own SEO guide (Read Google’s SEO Guide)

What they might not do:

I have attended a few Adwords seminars where Google professionals encourage companies to invest more time into research / analysis and little time in creating the ads. Adwords is a very powerful marketing tool. With good research, right budget and focused ads, businesses can convert more sales / enquiries than what organic SEO can deliver. Such are things that the scam companies might not do for you. They merely act as an agent, taking your money and setting up your ads.

Unless the person on the phone supplies you with a verifiable website address with a verifiable phone number and a verifiable portfolio of satisfied clients / businesses, PLEASE DO NOT give them your money / credit card details. All they need are a few businesses that can be tempted by the much desired PAGE ONE listing on Google.

• Segment your customers using Optimise and export them to a spreadsheet.
• Import the spreadsheet into Mail Chimp’s address book. You can create different lists based on your different target customer groups.
• Create a new campaign and fill in some details about the campaign.
• Use their existing templates or create your own new email template and compose your marketing email.
• You can test the email shot using the preview features. By testing the email, you can check how the email looks in most popular email clients and websites. You can also predict if the email will pass the standard spam score.
• Associate the customer list that you want to send the email to and set a delivery time. Lot of research has been conducted in identifying the best time to send marketing emails. Wednesday noon is considered a good day and time.
• Once the emails are delivered, sit back and relax. You can now keep track of all clicks, opens, subscription opt outs, re-opens, reading time, etc. For example, you will know when Mr. John Doe opened your email, how long did he read it, when did he open it again, which links did he click, and much more.

Major players in the online marketplace use Mail Chimp to try understand their customers buying behaviour. Also, Mail Chimp has special arrangements with all email providers to trust emails sent through their service. This ensures that you have fewer emails that land in the junk folder.

Visit their website for more information. They offer a FREE package that lets you add 500 contacts and send up to 3000 emails a month. You can pay monthly or pay as you go, if you require a higher quantity.

Optimise Web can help you setup email marketing campaigns and help spruce up your emails by re-writing them with action words and phrases.

Seth Godin is a popular marketing guru and he writes some really interesting articles on his blog. I spotted his new article – ‘Things to ask before you redo your website’. The article is spot on and a must read. The web design business has been around for a decent while and only now are businesses finally grasping the true value of a well planned web strategy. I would like to highlight a few important facts before you head on to Seth Godin’s blog.

Public relations face of your business – Visitors, potentials, and customers would want to find information about your company, products, and services. Your website creates the perception of your brand in the minds of the visitors. What they see on the website is what they perceive.

Hits / Visitors / Conversions – Thanks to all those SEO (search engine optimisation) conmen, the entire purpose of websites have been misunderstood to be a war of competitors that take place on Google. Websites require a lot of hits (number of page views). Some of those hits will qualify as a quality visitor (someone who is interested in your products). The visitor will convert to a customer if you can convince them that you can provide the products they are looking for; at the right price; and to the expected quality of service. Conversions have nothing to do with search engines, even though SEO helps you get noticed. If your website’s strategy is not precise, you can get a million hits but end up with no conversions!

Time is money. Act fast – The web is a fast changing medium. For every minute you waste, you are allowing thousands of other businesses / web entrepreneurs to win over you. Set aside some time for your website and PR. What might be surprising is that businesses spend thousands on print and TV advertising and fail to invest similar time and money into their websites. After seeing your print advertisement your potential customers will want to head to your website. You don’t really want to waste the effort and investment that you put into your print campaign to be ruined by a website that couldn’t live up to the expectations of the customer.

Rather than me trying to regurgitate the checklist all over again, I thought it would be a good idea to post a link to his article. Click here to read it.

Google changed the way we use the internet. Information at your finger tips they say! We all love Google. Google helps us find information about virtually anything. During the late 90’s web techies didn’t care much about Google rankings. Having a website was such a cool thing and companies flashed their URL everywhere. The early 2000’s saw a steep rise in the number of websites. Consumers found it hard to keep track of all the URLs that mattered to them. Google, Msn, Yahoo and other search companies were doing a smart thing. They were indexing every website, word for word. Consumers started looking out for new options and searching for reliable sources of information. Wikipedia created a wave bigger than any tsunami did. Suddenly people were using the internet not only to find information on companies, products and to meet friends but also to assist their research, education, career, and so on. The internet became the one stop shop for everything.

Information became the most sought after commodity and Google became the retailer that provided information, fast and accurate. The ‘keep it simple’ approach gave Google the biggest market share. 90.58% in the UK (Hitwise)!

Come the mid 2000’s, Google had far too much web content indexed on their servers. Consumers were becoming impatient (Generation X). They were fed up of clicking the Page 2, Page 3, Page 4, … links to find what they were looking for. Google was quick to realise this and started putting a certain value on every website and page they had indexed.

FACT: Nobody knows the algorithm used by Google to rank websites and Google keep it their closely guarded secret.

TRUTH: Some smart people decided to benefit from the situation. Consumers were not prepared to go beyond page 1. Companies wanted to be on page 1. This demand and supply scenario created a new business model. They named it as SEO.

Having been in the web business for more than a decade, I can say that SEO is the biggest internet scam of all times. SEO is even bigger than the Nigerian bank scams! Through trial and error, web developers like myself assumed to understand Google’s ranking algorithm. Just like the excitement that scientists found when trying to split the atom, web developers were getting a kick out of playing with Google’s algorithm. We stuffed keywords into the invisible parts of the websites, created gateway pages, wrote reviews about our own sites, submitted the sites to all available engines, used special software to spam the search engines, and so on. Remember the Dot Com bubble? Web companies were making big bucks by selling SEO services. Some were lucky and got it right, while others were learning from the mistakes (at the expense of innocent customers). SEO was becoming a must do thing and web companies were successful in putting fear into the heads of potential customers.

Those were the learning years for both Google and web developers. Google finally decided to publish a set of guidelines. Click here to read Google’s guidelines. They also helped us understand how their search spiders work. Read about Google’s indexing process. SEO became a regulated trade and Google was punishing wrong doers by pulling off their websites from its index.

You will always find people who are ready to step on the wrong side of the line and make an under-the-table deal. This caused the big rift in the SEO business. The bad guys called themselves the Black Hat SEOs and I joined the good boys, the White Hat SEOs.

The White Hat SEOs understood that content was king and websites need to be coded according to the standards set by the likes of Google and W3C consortium. We develop properly written websites and stick to the rules. There is no way to work around Google’s strict guidelines. Following are the five golden rules of SEO. They are all that you need to know about SEO.

Build the website with search engines in mind (nearly 75% of the so called web people have no clue what this means)

Write and Design content with your audience / customer in mind (do not talk about utility bills, when your website is about furniture)

Know who your friends are (build strategic links that will be of use to your visitors)

Promote yourself and get as many visitors as possible (Adwords, Social Media, Twitter, Facebook, etc)

Retain your visitors by giving them useful information (Google will fall in love with you if you manage to succeed at this stage)

The first two are the web developer/designer’s duty. You shouldn’t be paying extra for search engine friendly website code. A web company (such as Optimise Web) that has the combined expertise of technology and marketing will know how to write quality/keyword rich content. Stages 3 and 4 will be tough and time consuming. This is where you need a web company that will assure you a good return on your investment of time and money. Stage 5 will be the hardest. No top web company can promise to get this right the first time. Retention of visitors requires running various live and simulation tests. There are people who specialise in usability testing, A/B comparisons, and so on. Companies like Optimise Web have trusted and successful partners that can give you that extra edge of SEO.

If you are a small business or even a medium sized one, you might not have the time and financial resources to go beyond stage 2. There are many other ways to promote your website and get quality traffic onto your site. Think twice before you let any magician (SEO expert) tell you what you should be doing. There are many amateurs who read a few books on SEO and believe to have acquired the required skills of design, coding and marketing in one easy shot. Also please do not give away your hard earned money to web directories like Yell, Scoot, Touch Local, etc. I met someone at a tradeshow who gave £500 to Scoot and got a useless business card style website and no traffic at all while another person paid £1,600 to Yell for a premium listing and got a whole lot of spam calls and emails.

SEO is similar to traditional marketing. There are no rules nor formulas. It is all about selling and buying of HOPE (to be seen on Page 1).

Call (0131 448 0483) or email (info@optimiseweb.co.uk) Sid Vel at Optimise Web before you make any big SEO or website decision. We love to help and charge nothing for basic consultation. We might be able to offer you a service that is worth twice the money that you are ready to spend or point you to the right people or company if we know someone else that can do a better job.