With the city rolling out the red carpet for big O’s visit downunder, we’re estatic to announce that our very own Jamie, a Digital Media Strategist, will be attending the afternoon show on 14 December 2010.
Rumours are swirling that U2 will sing a revised version of “It’s a Beautiful Day” appropriately renamed “It’s a Beautiful Sunny Day” and that the Queen of Pop, Britney Spears will stop by to share her personal pain of losing 30 kg after child birth.
Come back soon for Jamie’s own diary of her visit and the prizes she picks up.
In the meantime, we’ll all be wishing we were her.
Often, little thought is put into the initial structure of an SEM campaign. Needless to say, we don’t build a house without the help of plans and an architect. The same should apply for Paid Search Accounts. Google and Yahoo! are here to make money. They aren’t going to come knocking like the local building inspector when you haven’t planned.
A strong, well planned account structure is key to the success of any paid search campaign. A solid account structure will make it easy to expand and identify new trends within your industry, to apply budgets appropriately and assist you to take full advantage of search engine tools that reward well structured accounts.
Google: Broad | Phrase | Exact
Yahoo: Standard | Advanced
Broad match (aka:Advanced match at Yahoo!) is generally over-used, and other match types generally over-looked. Best practice would suggest to use: phrase and exact (standard) match for words you know work and utilise broad match to discover new ones.
Starting out? Don’t feel like you need to think of every possible keyword variation, campaign or the best ad. This will happen over time. It’s best to start small, evaluate performance and build from there.
For established Search Accounts; don’t be afraid to pause / delete. If something is under-performing, pause it and use that money to test some other keywords variations or maybe increase the budget and visibility of other campaigns that have performed well.
Themes should be focused around your text ad. if the keywords in an ad group don’t directly relate to an ad. Create another ad group. Themes can be categorised many ways – brand, type of product, size, high / low volume words. Always remember that the purpose of creating these themes is to maximise performance. The main focus of creating themes is so the best performing campaigns always have budget available to them. Other groups are for discovery, used to continually optimise and improve your SEM performance.
Generally speaking, more ad groups with fewer keywords are easier to manage. It also makes the task of removing poorly performing keywords a cinch. Ads should always be clear and relate directly to the search query. Highly relevant ads will increase the chances of a higher CTR% and better quality score. Use tools like dynamic keyword insertion and negative match to eliminate any irrelevant matches and make your ads highly relevant to visitors who search using long-tail keyword phrases.
Always have a separate campaign for brand related words. Brand words should be visible 100% of the time. Visibility is often limited budget and if brand words are competing with other more expensive terms. Always separate brand words from broader, more generic terms.
We all know search engines reward relevancy, in the form of lower CPCs and higher ad rank. A good SEM account structure ensures you tick all the boxes and if done right will mean everything is rightly relevant. A clear structure will allow you to measure apples to apples and help identify whats working. Invest the time in a good SEM account structure, this will keep you ahead of your competition, have you paying less and hopefully growing your profits!
Youtube is the largest hub of videos on the Internet today and allows viewers to watch almost anything, from sports highlights to one of Will Smith’s music videos. Making sure your video can be found is the difference between getting a couple of hundred views and reaching millions. Similarly to a website, video page content can be optimised to help search engines index and rank them based on relevance to particular keywords.
Tagging your video with keyword rich titles, descriptions and tags is a good way to improve your videos presence from a search perspective. Now the actual video content will become increasingly important to the way a video is indexed.
Youtube recently launched a new feature that allows you to upload a transcript of your video, which is then synched with the audio in the video. This transcript not only assists with indexing the video, but more importantly it allows deaf users to read through the video content captions and provides language support.
The example video below leverages this new feature:
The transcript of the video content is turned into timed captions on Youtube which are clickable and take the user directly to the position in the video where the caption of speech takes place. This feature enhances the user’s ability to skip to certain points in the video, rather than blindly guessing where the best moments exist.
Video Optimisation
This technology also emphasises the importance of optimising video content. While it is still important to optimise the headings, tags and descriptions, the captioned content provides yet another area for content producers to further optimise the video. While I have yet to conduct any tests I can only imagine that the words you use, especially within the first few minutes, will eventually have an impact on where your video shows for a particular search query.
Youtube has hinted that there is an automatic transcript tool in the pipeline that will decipher and generate a transcript on Youtube. Once this is in place, there will be no need to post your own transcript, although depending on accuracy, some may find writing their own transcripts to be more accurate than relying on the technology.
Whether your goal is to improve the accessibility of your video for the hearing impaired or garner a wider audience the words you use are now more important than ever and when combined with the right video tags, titles and descriptions should help bring you one more step closer to becoming a Youtube star.
After the rollout of Real-time Search with Google Instant in Australia, it appears the evolution of the search engine results page is set to continue with a new level of importance given to Local Search Results called “Place Search”.
See the below example screen grab from a search results page for the searched query “pizza sydney” in Pyrmont, NSW.
The first point of interest is the top of the search results Google’s algorithm delivers only two premium listings followed by organic results, rather than the 3 premium sponsored links we have come accustomed to at the top of the results in Australia. The first result also bears a stronger presence on the page with an arrow pointer at the front of the result, enticing the user to click as the most relevant organic result available, similar to the Australian search pages where this usually appears on the first premium sponsored link.
The first 2 organic results in this particular example appear to be the “standard” result you would tend to find on any search with the title, description and URL text. Following this, things start to get interesting.
Place Search results incorporate Local business results relevant to the location of the searcher. A user’s location is determined either by Google via IP address or the location specified by the user. These Local Search Results will vary based on the user’s location illustrated with the plotted map placed on the top right hand corner of the results again coming before the Sponsored Listings on the right hand side of the page.
The Local Results are incorporating the organic result with Local Business parameters such as the address, contact details and a placement pin pointed on the localised map. The information is grouped to help enhance convenience for the searcher to find and compare different businesses.
The new organic result with local business features links to review sites which feature their business. Most interesting is in some cases a customer reviews quote appears below the address and phone details. Not only is the result a standout compared to the rest of the organic results, the review reinforces quality and customer satisfaction.
In addition to the links and occasional review comment, a star rating on the right-hand side of the search result for those with high volumes of user reviews providing an average on the reviews collated by Google. The addition of these visual features again assists the user to find the desired result based on popularity and trust, in the case of the example a place to grab a good pizza from.
The first result also bears a stronger presence on the page with an arrow pointer at the front of the result, enticing the user to click as the most relevant result available, in the case of poor quality score sponsored results an the most relevant organic result would be pointed out by the arrow.
The SEM results appear predominantly on the right hand side of the results page. Where a Place Search and Map is present, the sponsored results sit below the Google Map plotting the relevant businesses on the map. The new position for sponsored search could dramatically affect the volume of searchers clicking through sponsored results.
It seems apparent that Google are placing a greater emphasis on the location aspect and increasing relevance by providing local search results to the user. Place Search follows on from Google mantra of delivering highly relevant results which lead to quality clicks and improvement in site engagement, as well as improving the overall user experience to help locate the best results and save time.
To be in a good position businesses will need to ensure a strong presence on review sites, they prominently include their business contact details on their website and make sure they are being recognised locally by Google with a business listing to increase the relevance and prominence of their result on the organic search results.
Online Reputation Management is a combination of online public relations and search engine marketing to help protect a brand on the internet.
More people are researching and sharing information online about brands relevant to them. And with the emergence of social media, consumers are looking beyond corporate websites and communications. This is where Online Reputation Management helps businesses to track and control what is being said about their brand. Are people building brand communities by discussing their positive experiences, or are they criticising a product or service that didn’t deliver on its promise? Information can spread like wildfire on the internet, and a brand may be destroyed overnight by a blogger upset with a company.
Online Reputation Management ensures a brand attains high visibility and the top search engine rankings for all the good publicity. This subsequently pushes any negative or harmful results down the search engine listings and out of the public eye. But the focus is to capitalise on the positive stories about a brand as well as be an honest voice for the company when trouble does strike. A company’s brand may be affected by some or all of the sources listed below:
Most marketing agencies that provide services in Online Reputation Management follow three steps:
Employing this strategy can help maximise a brand’s online opportunities while eliminate threats to a company’s image. There are a number of tools that can be used to monitor a brand’s reputation - Marketing Pilgrim offers free tips on this. During analysis, it is important to discover the complete picture of the scenario before dealing with bad publicity. Then, influencing the search results involves responding honestly to negative stories, and possibly offering insight into the company’s side of the story.
Last week, our COO, Tom Petryshen spoke at SMX East in New York City on Pain Management Strategies for Enterprise SEO. The 15 minute session covered strategies and tactics to stay on top of SEO once your business has achieved success. Using examples, from large, enterprise campaigns the session covered:
Part A: Introduction
Part B: Training
Part C: SEO Website Migration
Amplify’s COO and founder, Tom Petryshen will be speaking at SMX East in New York City on 5 October 2010.
Tom will join a panel of SEO experts including Tony Adam from Myspace, Topher Kohan from CNN and Jonathan Ashton from Agency.com for an indepth session on enterprise SEO.
Tony Adam will kick things off an overview of the technical and business challenges of large organizations using examples of companies he’s worked for.
Jonathon Ashton will follow with a view on the challenges of integrating SEO with existing processes, engaging with key stakeholders, teaching skills and sharing knowledge, helping “partners” change their behavior and building success metrics that help everyone see the value of SEO.
Next up, Topher Hohan will share best practices for staff training, working with a fast pace development cycle, and know what battles to fight.
And finally, using experience from working Australia’s top enterprise companies, Tom will share his thoughts on how to stay at the top once you have reached the pinnacle of SEO success.
Visit Search Marketing Expo for more information or follow the conference sessions on Twitter at #smx.
Here’s a sneak peak of the view from our new office.
Stay tuned for more…
Hi. My name is Tom and I have a problem. Actually I have a lot of problems, but none are more pressing or more relevant to you than how SEO has affected my perception of the Internet. More specifically, SEO has ruined how I use the Internet so I hope that sharing my story will keep you free from suffering my fate.
Everywhere I look, I see bad websites. I see hideous design, poorly designed technology, flash implementations that render websites invisible, information architectures based on a company’s organizational chart, copy that looks like it was written by my six year old, cluttered layout, garbled code, ugly interfaces, and worst of all, sites that forgot they were there to serve a purpose.
Read more at Search Engine Land.
