Rumblings in the machine Thanks to the ever watchful eyes that keep track of Google’s every move there is news of some significant tweaking going on within the vast and secretive search engine. Eagle eyed users spotted three different interface design experiments going live for a while over the weekend before the screens were rolled back to Google’s existing format. The tests seem to have been restricted to the US and were not reproducible on all computers, but they were significant enough to cause a flutter of excitement among insider SEO circles. The first report of testing was a tweet showing a screenshot of Google trying out a bigger font size on the URLs it lists in search results. It was not clear, however, if this was only being applied to selected URLs because the test disappeared before the professional tech bloggers could get their hands on it. The second sign of rumbling within the machine was a post on Google + from a user who said the familiar ‘cached’ and ‘similar’ links on Google search results were displaying as a drop down option on his screen. The third came shortly afterwards with another Google + post reporting that the results line which shows the number of similar products listed on a page was appearing as a rich snippet. No one outside of Google knows what it is up to but the signs are that it could be in the final test phases of some notable design changes. Advertisers shift to social This year could see more money being spent on social media than ever before if the predictions of a recent survey prove to be right. The figures, compiled in the US by the Nielsen company Vizu, show that two thirds of the advertisers surveyed are aiming to increase their social spend in 2013, pulling the money away from other online and offline channels. The rises are modest, up to ten per cent, but a sure sign of advertisers beginning to take the social media very seriously indeed. The survey also found that the average US internet user spends between 20 and 30 per cent of their online time on social media platforms. The signs are that advertisers can see where their audience is heading and are hot in pursuit. Twitter under fire Twitter’s defenses were breached last week when it came under attack from a mysterious group of hackers who broke into its user database and accessed personal details of around 250,000 users. Although the attack was quickly spotted and shut down the damage was already done, and Twitter found itself in the embarrassing position of having to reset passwords for all affected users. It may have been small consolation that they are not alone – there have been a series of sophisticated attacks, thought to originate in China, on high profile sites such as the Wall Street Journal and New York Times recently.  Twitter says it is working with law enforcement agencies to track down and prosecute the hackers responsible for this latest attack.

Google’s Knowledge Graph has been a prominent part of its search results pages since May 2012 (in English, followed by other languages in December). Its purpose is to enhance search results with additional, semantically derived information about the subject being searched. You can see it used most often for searches for people, places, names and subjects. It draws from a large network of open sources of information and data such as Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook. To date all the information presented has been non-commercial and ad free. Recently however, Google have added Google Books to the mix. It is employed for any book title search and displays a short description of the book, a cover image, some significant details about the book and related books.

The key difference with Google Books is that it is a monetised site, owned and controlled by Google. It provides links (basically ads) to places to buy the book and gives the greatest prominence to the Google Play store where you can buy the ebook.

This is scooping traffic off the SERPs and into Google Books and for searchers with buying intent, into Google Play. This will dramatically reduce the clicks received by sites ranking in the natural listings, in turn hitting their revenue.

Google’s battles with anti-trust regulators are coming to a head this month. They are under pressure from the EU to stop promoting their own properties unfairly in their organic search results and diverting traffic. By the end of January, Google will be proposing changes to their search pages to appease Brussels. With Google Books/Play Books Knowledge Base position, they even bypass the algorithm-derived search results altogether and appear right at the top of the page, with imagery that attracts attention away from text on the rest of the page. Surprisingly, it is very difficult to find any mention of this to date. All the discussion so far has been about the organic positions being skewed in Google’s favour which Google denies and no one has proven successfully otherwise. Indeed, the US regulators dropped their antitrust case 2 weeks ago. With the book results however, it could be argued that Knowledge Base is being used as a Trojan Horse to promote Google Play Books to the detriment of other ebook retailers and other sites ranking for book titles. If anyone else has noticed this or been affected, I’d be interested in your views in the comments.

      Oooh dear seems like Don Draper is not impressed! In fact it’s not the first time eyebrows have been raised when I make this statement, particularly from “comms people” who tend to look at me with disgust when I dare suggest their creative superpowers have anything to do with the rudimentary SEO activity of link building. To all Don Drapers of the 21^st century; don’t get your knickers in a twist! You are still really good at what you do but you do miss a trick or two by not working with your SEO team. Likewise to all SEO link building gurus, infographic architects and social media viral champions; PR is there to help not to impress with your digital skills! For the last few months I found myself explaining why online PR these days is a key piece in the “digital marketing mix” where I must highlight, the blend between what we call SEO and Social Media is increasingly harder to distinguish. Speaking to small and big brands I have found two shocking facts:

1. Most brands have an outdated understanding of what online PR is and how it works
2. The bigger the brand the bigger the disconnect tends to be between their SEO and PR teams.

So what is online PR or SEO PR as some refer to it? The most common misconception that I tend to hear is it’s a simple redistribution of slightly optimised press releases through online PR networks.we get a few cheeky backlinks through the PR that we have already created. This is probably what online PR entitled in 2004, since then Online PR has evolved from the concept of acquiring  a few cheeky links. Online PR is a more sophisticated process that combines the best of the creative ideas traditional offline PR tends to produce and the targeting, amplification and measurability online marketing strategies are so good at producing. Sounds like a marketer’s dream come true right? So what do you actually mean by this? Sounds like a lot of PR malarkey to me! Don Drapers will ask. Traditional PR has always been good at using creative ideas to give exposure to a brand no matter how mundane or boring it is. However, this exposure in most cases has been hard to measure with precision resorting to measures like the famous AVEs (advertising value equivalent) that as their own name suggests are close to useless to measure real ROI. On the other hand, we have SEO strategies that are much better at delivering ROI measurements but fail miserably to deliver creative ideas for their link building strategies and I am talking about strategies beyond competitions and infographics so keep reading SEO geek squad! At the end of the day both traditional PR and SEO try and achieve the same, PR calls it exposure through news coverage and SEO calls it rankings through link building. You are both after the same what we refer to in SEO as the “golden links” so if both strategies are combined their effect complement each other, saving money and amplifying their results making a lot of marketing directors smile. “So what’s up with Social Media?!?! I knew this guy was full of it..” screams the heckler of my imaginary SEO-PR stand-up act. When both strategies are combined Social Media becomes an amplifier as well as a targeting tool. Social Media platforms these days give us enough information through APIs on our target market to identify who the influential individuals in a sub vertical are, what they like to share and most important what are the sources they tend to share the most. Now you know what type of content you have to produce and what your target publications are, all you have to do is hand it over to Don and his creative bunch to come up with a strategy that will make your golden link sources prick up their ears. When they do come up with the creative wacky PR campaign the online team has to make sure tangible digital assets (microsites, videos, reports, images) will be produced as part of the activity and placed online strategically. Using these assets we can measure ROI through visits, views, online sales and social shares that consequently will encourage the amplification effect that will make what was once an offline PR strategy an excellent link building machine. The result? A chuffed PR strategy team that can now prove the ROI of their campaign and an ecstatic SEO team that no longer has to build 3,000 links and 40,000 mentions to get the rankings they need.

I recently read a light-hearted post on searchengineland.com and was reminded of my own experience where my unflinching trust was placed in Google’s palms. For those that are unfamiliar with the aforementioned article, Matt McGee refers to the St. Rose of Lima Church in New Jersey which has suffered from a misrepresentative positioning on Google maps, along with a misleading search query suggestion that directs patrons elsewhere. Rev. Michael Trainor explains that in some instances the map discrepancy led to mothers of the brides getting lost and causing delays to the start of wedding ceremonies. My story does not involve coffins being delivered to wrong funeral services or brides marrying the wrong grooms but, at the time, the stress levels were comparable! Alex Wares and I had organised a client lunch meeting to discuss the progress of the project and had asked the client to suggest a suitable restaurant. The suggestion was Nottingdales; an Italian style café-restaurant local to where the client is based in Notting Hill, West London. “No problem”, we thought. The evening before, I printed out a map for myself, got the post code from the London Eating webpage and forwarded it to Alex as we were coming from different directions. Both Alex and I have smart phones (being the tech savvy new media types that we are!) and assumed that if we got lost en-route we could Google Maps ourselves out of trouble.

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So what is Quality Score? According to Google: “Quality Score is the basis for measuring the quality and relevance of your ads and determining your minimum CPC bid for Google and the search network. This score is determined by your keyword’s click through rate (CTR) on Google, and the relevance of your ad text, keyword, and landing page.” Quality Score, as the name suggests, is a quality scoring method for Pay per Click Ads. It is an assessment by Google AdWords (and now other search engines) of an individual keyword and its ad, which, in combination with the bid amount determines the ranking of the ad relative to competitors. The primary factor for determining Quality Score is the click through rate (CTR) for each ad, but Google also considers the match between the keyword and the occurrence of the keyword in the ad copy, historical click through rates, and the engagement of the searcher when they click through to the site as well as the speed at which the page loads.

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I’ve read before how ideas tend to spread like germs, often occurring to people around the same time, independently of each other. The discovery of DNA and the Theory of Natural Selection were both arrived at by different scientists independently of each other. Anyway, these lofty pretensions are just meant as a preamble to introduce the fact that Rand Fishkin blogged about this subject last week, while I was preparing my own post and I immediately became Alfred Russel Wallace to his Charles Darwin.* Regardless, I have pressed on and tried to add to the discussion and avoid any overlaps by focusing on keyword strategy and therefore addressing PPC as well as SEO. Search as a marketing channel is so attractive because it enables companies to get in front of prospects who are already looking for their products. However, does that mean search is redundant when there is no one looking for your products?

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In the second half of 2010, Google began to roll out notable changes to Google Places. Some of these I have touched upon in my previous post and deserve a little deeper consideration. Some changes seem to be purely for the benefit of Google’s users, others seem beneficial to Google Places registered websites and some changes are unclear as to whom they benefit. This is all well and good, but over the last few months I’ve noticed, in many of my PPC accounts, CTRs dropping noticeably from location based keywords that have an average position of below 4. Why is this? Could this be related to the changes to Google Places? Firstly, let’s revisit the changes. To trigger Google places results, a user must search for a location based keyword, a good wintery example being “boiler repair London”.

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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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