Author Archives: Tom Petryshen

My 2010 Digital Marketing Wishlist

Posted on 8 January, 2010 by Tom Petryshen

While debating whether I’d throw my hat into the prediction pool and risk being wrong again about this being “the year of the mobile” (I’ll save that for another post), I thought I would instead put together a wishlist for the coming year. With inspiration from Brian Halligan, the CEO of Hubspot, I’ve put together my own list of desires for 2010.

PS: I would really like to see Brian’s point on PR transformation come true but I have no faith in Australian PR companies getting their act together just yet.

1. Traditional marketers finally realise that they’re overpaying for print and tv media (the eyeballs have mysteriously gone elsewhere) and immediately begin to appropriate more money to digital media.

2. Anyone other than Google gains market share in search. Google, we still love you (and would love you even more if you released the Nexus One here at the same time as you did elsewhere), but with a 90% market share we love competition even more.

3. Social media hype subsides and businesses realise that there’s a great opportunity to listen to their audience and have a real two-way conversation with their customers. After all, it’s not about technology, it’s about communication.

4. Australian companies stop bitching that they’re not making as much money from Google Adwords doing the same thing they were three years ago and start investing more in SEO where there’s better ROI.

5. Multinationals come to the realisation that markets are local and that managing all aspects of the digitial marketing message and technology from a foreign country is not the best option for success. “Think Global, Act Local” becomes the catch phrase for global business.

6. I figure out a real business use for Google Wave, write a book, join the speaking circuit and retire to a beach side, golf resort.

7. Australians see new innovative tools and businesses created from the government’s $40 billion broadband implementation which leads to a faster rollout to all major cities across the country.

8. Online retailing crosses the chasm thanks to a few foreign retailers (Best Buy, Amazon, & Costco) invading our shores. Combined with strong experience and great technology, their immediate impact forces local retailers such as Harvey Norman, Myer and David Jones to get their act together just in time for the 2010 Christmas shopping season.

9. Entertainment companies realise that they can make more money by releasing their movies to DVD and online services such as Tivo & iTunes at the same time rather than pretending that there is still a chance to save the DVD.

10. More companies realise that there’s no advantage to paying extra (up to 18%) for the privilege to use mediocre technology to manage their SEM campaigns. A great strategy and strong people will win out for most advertisers.

11. Matt Cutts is finally persuaded to visit Australia for SMX Sydney in April, falls in love with this great country and decides to move down under.

Do you have any wishes you’d like to share?

Posted in General | 1 Comment

Qantas’ Reputation Takes a Beating

Posted on 5 January, 2010 by Tom Petryshen

If you’re responsible for Public Relations at Qantas you’re either looking for a place to hide or hoping you could restart 2010. In the first 3 days of the year, the reputation of the Qantas brand has been pummeled in both the traditional press and on twitter and the blogosphere after a number of unfortunate technical glitches and delays. The first three news stories listed on Google News provide a quick glimpse of the carnage.

Whether you’re a large company like Qantas or a smaller outfit, a single negative story can have a detrimental effect on your brand and ongoing business. Online, these stories tend to linger and can easily be found on search engines such as Google. If you’re a restaurant, a single blog post about’ a bad meal’ or ‘rats in the kitchen’ can be enough to turn customers away, even after you clean up your act. For many businesses, ignoring a customer complaint, negative story or review online is no longer an option.

Having a series of negative stories over such a short period of time would be be devastating for most. While the Qantas brand will survive, there’s no doubt the business could do a much better job of managing its reputation and responding to these issues online. Here’s just a sample of some of the comments posted on Twitter over the past 24 hours:

And…

While it appears that Qantas has done a reputable job offline to answer some of the issues head on, they have been eerily silent online. To date…

There’s been no mention of any of the issues on their website. This would have been a great opportunity to make passengers aware of the current issues and prepare them for the wait (and to let them know what Qantas is doing about these issues…)
There’s been no mention of the problems on Qantas ‘ Facebook Page. As far as new fans of the airline are concerned, life is just perfect at Qantas.
The business is invisible on Twitter where most of the critical comments have been posted (there have been 1,000 mentions of Qantas in the past 7 days alone – the majority being very negative).

So how does Qantas tackle these thorny issues? Obviously, there are always going to be technical problems, weather, or uncontrollable events that cause delays and inconvenience travelers. It’s inevitable, if you’re in the airline space. Ignoring these issues and hoping that they go away is, however, not the answer. If this is part of the strategy then heads need to roll to make way for a new way of thinking. It’s just not acceptable for any business to ignore what their customers are saying and pretend that life is rosy.

If we were Qantas, here’s what we’d do:

Use the website (specifically the home page) to tackle the delays or technical issues that pop up alerting travelers of the issues before they arrive at the airport. At least then travellers have a chance to prepare both mentally and physically and might prove more understanding to the airline’s plight.
Update the Qantas Facebook Page with alerts. Don’t be afraid to mention when bad stuff happens. It’s inevitable, so be proactive. You will be praised if you tackle the issues head on.
Monitor the comments on sites such as Twitter and formulate a plan to provide feedback to your customers. V Australia does a great job of using Twitter for customer service and reputation management.
Hire knowledgable people who understand the online and social media space and get a plan in place quickly.
Create a long term PR strategy that tackles good and bad coverage in both the traditional and online forums at the same time (integration is key – it should not happen in isolation).
Fire your Public Relations company if they haven’t already brought up two of the five strategies mentioned above in the past year. If your agency isn’t up to date with the online world then it’s time to consider other options (we’ll even help point you in the right direction). Qantas has pioneered online sales in Australia so there’s no reason why the business shouldn’t take the lead when it comes to online PR.

Ultimately, there needs to be buy-in at the top starting with the CEO, Alan Joyce. As the brand ambassador, his input and support is critical for the business to take control of its brand reputation across all media. While it may be too late do much about the current crisis, there’s no reason to sit on the sidelines any longer.

What are your thoughts? What would you do if you were Qantas?

Posted in branding, Reputation Management | Tagged a380, alan joyce, branding, google news, Qantas, qantas brand, qantas passengers, qantas reputation, qantas trouble | 2 Comments

ABLAC Selects Amplify for SEO Initiative

Posted on 21 December, 2009 by Tom Petryshen

The Australian Business Limited Apprenticeships Centre (ABLAC), a wholly owned subsidiary of the NSW Business Chamber (NSWBC) has selected Amplify to implement a SEO strategy across the business.

Amplify will work closely with ABLAC and third party partners to increase awareness of ABLAC’s Australian Apprenticeships services with employers and potential apprentices and trainees through SEO and later Paid Search.

“We chose Amplify because they took the time to understand our business and showed a genuine interest to work closely with our team and technology partner. We needed a partner with the right culture and expertise to help manage our stakeholders and educate the group” says Danielle Wilmot, ABLAC’s Marketing Manager.

Amplify’s proven SEO methodology & stakeholder management experience helped win the work from some of Australia’s leading providers that were short listed. “We are very transparent with our approach to SEO and spend a lot of time managing the stakeholders throughout the process,” says Amplify Managing Director, Tom Petryshen. “There are no smoke and mirrors. The success of a SEO project hinges as much on managing people and expectations as it does on the strategy, especially with a large group like ABLAC.”

Posted in SEO | Leave a comment

Google Introduces Cross-domain Canonical Tag

Posted on 17 December, 2009 by Tom Petryshen

In a move that provides more control to webmasters to handle duplicate content, Google has introduced cross-domain canonical tag support.

The new cross-domain rel=”canonical” link element provides some hope for businesses that are not able to setup server-side redirects such as a permanent 301 redirect. Unfortunately though, the tag is still treated as a suggestion, so there’s no guarantee it will be followed.

If possible, we still recommend that you use a 301 redirect to tell search engine crawlers the preferred domain as it makes it very clear which URL should be indexed. As part of a strong migration strategy, a 301 redirect ensures that you leave nothing to chance.

Outside of moving your domain, the tag could also be used for content syndication to ensure that your own content does not get outranked by the sites you share it with.

Overall, it’s great to see Google providing this additional support and provides another tool in our arsenal to tell the search engines which domain to pay attention to.

Posted in SEO, website migration | 2 Comments

Amplify Appointed Search Marketing Strategist for AOT Holidays & Crazy Sales

Posted on 8 November, 2009 by Tom Petryshen

Independent search marketing agency, Amplify has been appointed to handle the search marketing strategy of Australia’s largest wholesaler of domestic travel product, Australia Outback Travel (AOT) Holidays.

With a stable of consumer facing brands such as NeeditNow.com.au, Need to Escape, Sunlover Holidays, NSW Holidays and Travel Mate, Amplify will manage the search activities campaigns across all brands with a focus to lift conversions and revenue from the search channel.

AOT Holidays chose Amplify based on its results oriented methodology and proven track record in travel working with the likes of Webjet, Europcar and travel insurance provider, Mondial Assistance.

This latest appointment comes on the heels of winning the search engine optimisation (SEO) business for Crazy Sales, a rapidly growing online retailer located in Melbourne. Having previous experience with Deals Direct and OO.com.au, Amplify brings an intimate mix of strategic and technical knowledge within the competitive online retail space and will help Crazy Sales to drive sales and build their brand via search.

“We wanted a supplier that understood our market and business with the insight to improve our sales” says David Yin, Crazy Sale’s General Manager. “Amplify’s background with other leading online retailers gave us the confidence that they could help us achieve better results than we could do on our own.”

Posted in SEM, SEO | Leave a comment

Are you Wasting Money on Google’s Content Network?

Posted on 28 October, 2009 by Tom Petryshen

As a search agency, we were tickled when Google first launched the Content Network and Adsense for Publishers. Not only did it give us a new channel to increase the exposure and sales of our clients but it also allowed us to help some of our clients monitise their content. When setup correctly, Adsense can be profitable for both advertisers and publishers alike.

However, without the right strategy, advertising on the Google network can also be a costly adventure.

The biggest issue we see with advertisers is that they inadvertently use their ads created for the search network across the content network (thanks in large part to Google leaving the content network on by default). While it is possible to achieve a positive Return on Investment (ROI) running your ads across both networks in the same campaign, we often find that it leads to wastage as the ads are less targeted . Most accounts we review where ads are setup in this manner tend to only make money for Google.

Sadly, combining search and content ads in the same campaign often leads to poor targeting as shown in the example below from About Seniors.

In this example it’s clear that the advertisers have not actively targeted ads for Seniors Travel Insurance. In fact, only the dating ad is even targeted at seniors with the others focused on general insurance, or worse ski travel insurance. Based on our knowledge of the content network, there’s a very good chance that these ads will not be profitable for the advertisers in question. In fact, the only bottom line they’re helping is Google’s.

How to improve your ads on Google’s Content Network?

So what can you do prevent your hard earned cash from funding Google’s slush fund? Here’s what we recommend at Amplify:

Turn off the content network in campaigns where you’re already running ads across the search network.
Setup a new campaign that only targets the content network.
Be specific about the keywords you use for each Adgroup. In other words don’t include keywords that are not inline with your product theme.
Be creative. Remember your audience is not searching so you will need to entice them to click away from the other website.
Use different tracking code to help identify the ads in analytics.

These simple steps will help ensure that your content based ads are easier to manage, measure, more targeted and make you money.

Note: We believe strongly that Google should make the content network opt-in or clearly explain the difference between the search and content networks during the campaign setup process. We find their opt-out practice just a tad misleading.

Posted in SEM | Leave a comment

Australia.com and the Comic Side of Google Adsense

Posted on 26 October, 2009 by Tom Petryshen

For publishers, Google Adsense can be a great way to monitise traffic. However, we don’t recommend the following approach currently in use at Tourism Australia.

While conducting research for one of our clients, I came across a very interesting implementation of Google Adsense on Australia.com that left me scratching my head. Whether by design (without knowing Tourism Australia’s strategy there’s a chance that they wanted this outcome) or error, the Australia.com website is only showing their own ads (see screenshot below).

As a general rule, most advertisers use Adsense to display ads from other businesses so they can make money. So using Adsense to pay Google to display your own ads defeats the purpose of using it in the first place (at least it would if I were using it).

Of course it doesn’t mean I’m right. I’m sure someone at Tourism Australia has a very valid reason for using Adsense in this manner. I’m just not sure what it is.

If you do, please feel free to drop us a note to clarify their strategy.

Posted in SEM | 2 Comments

SEO Discovery Checklist – Page Discovery

Posted on 15 September, 2009 by Tom Petryshen

In part 1 of our post on Vanessa Fox’s Discovery Checklist, we looked at the Initial Accessibility Assessment. This time around we dig deeper and look at the on page related issues that may prevent your pages from being crawled and the tools you can use to determine what’s wrong.

At least one internal link to every page
Most important pages linked from home page
Comprehensive HTML Sitemaps
Google external links
XML sitemaps
Links work without Javascript, Flash, or images enabled

At least one internal link to every page

No page is an island. If you want folks to view it and the search engines to index it then you need to show them that it’s important by linking to it. The more important the page, the more links you should have to it from within your website.

One way to find out whether a page on your website has a link from another page is to use Yahoo’s Site Explorer. In the following example, you can see that JB HiIFi has over 4000 internal links to their main DVD page with many of the links coming from pages within the DVD category.

Most important pages linked from home page

For most websites the home page is the most valuable (due to the incoming links from other websites) and carries the most weight. If you want to highlight the importance of other pages within your website to the search engines then you need to include a link from the home page to the most important pages. The key here is to make it useful and add it to the content or navigation.

Note: Don’t go overboard or you will confuse and overload the visitor.

Also, avoid adding your links to the footer which can be easily identified by the search engines or worse out of sight as the search engines will pay less attention to it and even knock you back for over optimisation.

The approach below should be avoided:

Comprehensive HTML Sitemaps

For small sites (less than 100 pages) it’s fine to include all of the pages in a single sitemap. But if your pages are numbering in the hundreds, thousands or more then it s important to break your sitemaps into smaller more usable lists.

Good external links

The power of links cannot be underestimated. While a bad information architecture will prevent search engines from reaching your content, the content is nothing without inbound links from other websites. As the real currency of SEO, it’s vital to remember though, that not all links are created equally. What you strive for are links from partners, local businesses, government websites or news sites or what we in the industry call “Authority Sites.” Acquiring quality links over time will help raise the credibility of your content and improve your search rankings.

Yahoo’s Site Explorer can also help you identify inbound links to a particular page on your website from other sites as shown below for JB HiFi.

XML sitemaps

Well you can definitely get by without a XML sitemap, we still recommend one due to the additional information you can gleam from Google’s or Bing’s Webmaster Tools. Once your sitemap has been validated you can find pages that can’t be crawled or have duplicate Title and Meta Data Descriptions.

If possible, try to align the sitemaps with the category structure of your website. Doing so will allow you to collect unique information by category helping you to diagnosis future problems more easily.

<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”UTF-9”?>
<sitemap xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
<sitemap>
<loc>http://www.domain.com/mobile-phones.xml.gz</loc>
<lastmod>2009-23-06T10:20:30+00:00</lastmod>
</sitemap>
<sitemap>
<loc>http://www.domain.com/broabband.xml.gz</loc>
<lastmod>2009-23-06</lastmod>
</sitemap>
<sitemap>
<loc>http://www.domain.com/internet-access.xml.gz</loc>
<lastmod>2009-23-06</lastmod>
</sitemap>
</sitemapindex>

Links work without JavaScript, Flash, or images enabled

Search bots dislike technology that prevents them from getting at the content. While there is evidence that the bots are getting smarter at crawling Javascript and Flash, they still won’t give you much credit for the content sitting behind the links. One way to determine whether your links can be seen by the search engines is to check Google’s cache.

Start by conducting a search for your own pages in google: site:www.yourdomain.com.au.

Next, click the Cached link to the right of the display URL for one of the listings.

Finally, click the Text-only-version link in the top right corner of your browser window.

In the examples above, we can see that Google is picking up the links from the Javascript pull down menu which means that they can be followed.

You can also browse your website with images and Javascript turned off in your browser. Hopefully you will be able to see the same links you see on the real page. If not, then there’s a good chance the search engines can’t see them either and further work will be required.

Stay tuned, for more insight into Vanessa’s Discovery Checklist on:

Page Accessibility
Indexing Drop Diagnosis

Posted in SEO | Leave a comment

SEO Discovery Checklist – Initial Accessibility Assessment

Posted on 30 June, 2009 by Tom Petryshen

What do you do if the number of pages indexed in the search engines drops by half? Is there a problem? Is it the typical, gyrating flux of the search engine’s algorithm or has the 900 pound gorilla just dumped a number of poor quality or duplicate pages from their index? These are important questions that will help you diagnosis the issue(s) quickly so you can move on to making great content and a more successful website.

To help answer these types of questions, former Google alumni, Vanessa Fox (best known for her work creating Google Webmaster Central and as a Google spokesperson) has put together a nifty little Discovery Checklist to help people work through their indexing crisis.

We’ve used a similar list for years, but find Vanessa’s version to be a bit more sexy for sharing (okay, we admit, it’s so much better than ours). However, we felt we could make it even more useful for our audience. So in the spirit of giving we’ve added some of the tools and techniques we use in practice to accomplish many of the items on her wonderful list.

Vanessa likes to say that “just because you have a traffic problem it doesn’t mean you have a ranking issue.” In fact, your problems could be closer to home and have everything to do with the way search engines crawl (or fail) to crawl your website.

Today I’ll cover the first three points under the Initial Accessibility Assessment:

Is the site indexed?
Are the URLs from the XML Sitemap indexed?
Are the right pages indexed (without duplicates)?

Is the site indexed?

The best place to start is with the search engines themselves. Search for site:www.yourdomain.com.au in Google, Yahoo and Bing. If your site is indexed you’ll see a list of pages from your website as shown below for janeandrobot.com:

You can also use url:www.yourdomain.com.au/page/in Bing.com to identify whether an individual page is in the index.

Are the URLs from the XML Sitemap indexed?

For Google, take a look at your Webmaster Tools account to verify that the URLs in your XML sitemap are indexed. Under Site configuration you should find some detail on the number of URLs submitted via your sitemap and the number of pages indexed in Google as shown below. If everything is in order the two numbers should be within 10% of each other.

If you see a big discrepancy, then you clearly have a problem and need to dig deeper.

For a small website, you can also do a quick manual check. However, if you have tens of thousands of pages in your XML sitemap the process will be a bit more challenging. We fortunately have our own crawler that does this menial work for us and makes analyzing larger sites a piece of cake.

Are the right pages indexed (without duplicates)?

Here you need to check that the search engines are not seeing duplicate pages. This step is critical if you have a dynamic website that uses parameters in the URL (http://www.yourdomain.com.au/details.cfm?categoryid=27&subcategoryid=102). With dynamic websites, it’s possible to have a product reside in more than one category which means potential duplicate content issues and poor rankings for these pages.

In the following example, you can see that Google is seeing multiple versions of the Officeworks’ home page noted by the identical Title tag and URL as well as few other pages that should probably be excluded:

Not a great outcome for any business. To prevent this issue from happening, it’s important to identify and nominate the key page you want the search engines to focus on. You can use the canonical tag (i.e. <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.officeworks.com.au/retail/content/Home”/>) or if possible place a Meta NOINDEX tag (i.e. <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex” />) on the duplicate pages to keep them out of the index.

Stay tuned, for more insight into Vanessa’s Discovery Checklist on:

Page Discovery
Page Accessibility
Indexing Drop Diagnosis

Posted in SEO | 1 Comment

What Does Microsoft’s Bing Mean to Search?

Posted on 3 June, 2009 by Tom Petryshen

For those around who still care about the other search engines, Microsoft launched their highly anticipated new search engine called Bing. Touted as the Decision Engine, Microsoft has high hopes for Bing in challenging the Google juggernaut from increasing its market share.

At first glance, Bing provides offers up a simple search interface (a lot like Google). The search results display is clean (like Google) and of course the name is catchy (much like Google).

But what about relevancy?

Like most things in life, if you can’t give people what they want, they’ll go elsewhere or at the very least stay where they are.

From the few hundred searches we’ve done so far, the relevancy appears to be slightly better than the old Live results. However, Bing, like Live, places a lot of weight on the domain name, especially for generic terms. The end result: You get a lot more websites like www.car-rental-sydney.com showing up for queries like ‘Sydney car hire’ (see the second organic listing in the example below). On other words, many websites with keyword optimised URLs gain more awareness than they deserve, largely based on the domain name.

Can Bing win market share from Google?

With Google’s growing market dominance there are plenty of people who’d like to see a more equitable split between Microsoft, Yahoo and Google, especially in Australia where we have more than enough de facto monopolies. More competition would be a win for all of us, even Google as it would help keep them honest and their egos from getting too big.

Unfortunately, Bing’s results are not ground breaking enough to supplant Google. In fact, I’d argue Microsoft still has a lot of work to do improve relevancy. We found a number of irrelevant results that left us scratching our heads.

A search in Australia for ‘amplify’ returns old pages no longer live on our site! Clearly an updated index is badly needed. Searches on ‘health insurance’ and ‘travel’ in Australia returns positively bizarre results. Try it for yourself and see how Bing’s results compare to Google’s. Like us you’ll likely agree Microsoft has a lot of work on its plate to challenge Google.

Even if Bing improves the relevancy of their search results though, one has to wonder whether it will be enough to make people switch. We are, after all, creatures of habit. If it’s not broken, there’s very little chance Bing will make much of a dent, even with the expected marketing weight of Microsoft behind it.

What does Bing mean for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

The short answer is not much… at least not today. While, I’m certain the Microsoft engineers will be tweaking the algorithm to improve relevancy over the coming weeks, the pessimist in me doesn’t believe it will be much help. Google isn’t broken and unless you have something better – and better out of the gate when you’ve got max visibility – it’s just not going to be enough to make us Bing.

However, if Bing does manage to wrestle some of Google’s search market share away, the entire search marketing industry may have to invent a new service called Decision Engine Optimisation (DEO)! We can only hope…

Posted in Search Engines | Tagged bing, competition, google, market share, microsoft, search, search engine, search engine optimization, Search Engines, seo search engine optimisation | 7 Comments