Here’s something that I have been speaking about quite a lot of late:  The impact that getting it right with local search can have on a business. As Google evolved and developed its universal search methodology, opportunities arose for small businesses to compete with well established organisations for SERP positions on competitive keywords. Google Maps (now called “Places”) allowed local businesses to generate overnight exposure from historically competitive terms, delivering qualified, targeted traffic. Naturally, as awareness increased, keyword spamming and rule bending became rife as businesses sought a competitive advantage. This was most evident in trade service industries (plumbers, electricians, locksmiths etc) i.e. companies that could exploit Google’s maps to highlight areas that their service is offered in, rather than where their company is physically located. Initially Google, perhaps pre-occupied with making public examples of household name rule-benders (Ocean Finance, BMW, for example), was slow to penalise map spammers. However, Google is always as keen as mustard to protect the integrity of their results pages, so the question of penalisation was always “when” rather than “if”.

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A topic that had predominately been the focus of many debates last year was click tracking specifically in natural search arena. For those who are not familiar with the jargon I am referring to web analytics tracking. Typically all free or generic tracking tools work on the basis of tracking the last click. The last click is deemed as the last search and click through to your website by a user from a natural search result converting into a sale or lead. Normally everyone would think that it is okay except it is not! Here is why:

1. Google analytics only tracks the last click performed by a user as they arrive on a website and not the first (historically original) click. Therefore you can’t tell how a visitor originally found your site, making it difficult to prove conversions of non-brand traffic when users return via a brand keyword to finalise a purchase or make an enquiry.
2. There is no history on what the user had previously searched for or seen on the website.
3. There is no easy way of integrating a multi click solution

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Our fashionista experts flagged this to us and I have to say I had no idea this was going on. It’s very interesting to see Google expanding to such a niche market like fashion were the giant had never revealed any experience or involvement in the past.  What are we talking about? Well Boutiques.com, a platform for all fashionable clothes to be listed and categorised by designer, style or type.  The purpose of this platform is to change the way users shop for fashionable clothes online.

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For those of us who have heard of the Venus flytrap know that it traps flies and spiders in it’s jaw and hold them there with no escape while it slowly devours them. It would appear that Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has its own Venus flytrap known as the ‘sandbox theory’, although we don’t know if it really does exist. However going by popular speculation from many search professionals, it does exist in various argued forms and is a danger to new websites. Luckily, unlike its Amazon counterpart it does not completely devour its prey. Google has always preserved that “The Sandbox” is a figment of SEO companies’ imagination derived from SEO companies need to satisfy themselves and their client’s by making the name synonymous with the delayed time between the promotion of a website and it gaining results. It would appear logical that a new website would need to work its way up the rakings by building itself over time and can not expect instant positions after launch. This phase can be anywhere from as little as 2-3 months up to 1 year. Going by the number of companies that now resort to spamming and under hand techniques to get their website ranked, it would appear that a sandbox policy would be a perfect system to weed out the work of ‘bedroom bandits’ and black hat SEO techniques. The downside to this system is that some legitimate websites also get caught in the trap for sometimes exaggerated periods of time.

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A few weeks ago, one of our e-commerce clients migrated their website with the hope of boosting conversions and site usability ahead of the peak Christmas trading season. Fortunately the conversions increased; unfortunately the (Reputed) agency that was appointed for launching the new site ignored all the key points of migration thinking them less relevant than focusing on the correct placement of images on the pages. As a result they lost all the SEO credibility that was build over the years, dropped their internal page rankings by more than 80% along with a bulk of their site traffic.  The impact this would have on their Christmas trading season is unimaginable. For established online business, who have a steady traffic, conversion and rankings and are highly dependant on seasonality, need to take extreme precautions when they are looking re-developing their website as they might otherwise find themselves going back a few years in lost work. Here are a few suggestions for companies that are looking at redeveloping their website to help ensure that your design & build agency doest write off your Christmas.

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