Having worked with Yale Door since the start of the website 1 1/2 years ago, we are very happy to see our efforts recognised on this shortlist. They have achieved top 5 rankings in Google for their most compeitive terms including “Composite Doors” and a considerable increase in organic and referring traffic.

Looking forward to the awards cermony on the 3rd of November at the Emirates Stadium.

UK Search Awards 2011 – Verve Search Shortlisted in “Best SEO Campaign” Category is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency

Lisa has been gently coercing me for about a year now to finally put down on paper my experiences with optimising Google Products (base, shopping etc) feeds. So I suppose this post is aimed at providing an introduction into the set-up, and I hope, more insightfully, some techniques and ideas I apply to increasing ranking positions within Google Product results.

Why worry about Google Products

If you do the amount of keyword and competitor research that I do, in fact if you have been paying any attention to search results over the past year; you will have noticed universal search’s hostile SERP invasion. OneBox product results are seemingly constantly being associated with new products and product groups.

As an SEO, the BIG idea here is that of an alternate route to first page visibility. Now I am not saying you should drop everything and spend all your time editing and re-editing your product feed but every SEO worth their socks will approach ranking challenges from different angles, and Google Products provides that angle. If your keyword research shows product feeds are triggered, why not allocate a bit of time to creating an XML feed?

Google Product optimisation, a grey area

Unlike other elements of SEO, optimisation for Google Products is seemingly not a hugely written about subject. I appreciate that when talking about Google and algorithms, the word ‘speculation’ cannot be used enough. Therefor I must add; the suggestions I make are solely due to me having had success from these techniques and are importantly based on real clients, real experiences and real XML feeds.

Keyword research

The foundation for most SEO disciplines, Google Products is no different. Obviously search volume should be a concern, but importantly whether the keyword triggers OneBox.

There is no harm speculatively creating feeds on the off chance that said keyword will trigger shopping results in the future. Although, if you are optimising for the now; then don’t spend time on terms which won’t trigger product listings in the search results.

XML vs CMS

Most CMS ecommerce solutions such as Magento have Google Product feed functionality built in; and requires you to map out attributes and assign values (more information can be found here) Unfortunately the ones we have worked with use product database attributes to populate the Google Products feed. So, whilst being an extremely efficient way of creating a product feed, what you gain in efficiency you lose in customisation.

For this post I am assuming you are creating a standalone XML or text/tab delimited feed.

Google Merchant account

You will need one of these. If you haven’t set one up already, what are you waiting for…

The Tips

1. Use an example

Let’s be honest; the prospect of setting up an XML RSS 2.0 feed is a little daunting, especially from scratch. Luckily Google does provide you with an example, which from a coding perspective makes a lot more sense if you ‘view source’.

2. Attributes, attributes, attributes

Google uses a number of product ‘attributes’ to determine firstly for what search terms a product should be visible and secondly to generate supporting information; be that price, dimensions, or the fact that each tin of cat food contains 4 grams of organic chick peas. Sorry.

Google uses a number of product ‘attributes’ to determine firstly for what search terms a product should be visible and secondly to generate supporting information; be that price, dimensions, or the fact that each tin of cat food contains 4 grams of organic chick peas. Sorry.

There are essentially three different types of attributes:

Required, Recommended & Custom

Required attributes, as the name suggests are attributes which must be included in order for your feed to be successfully uploaded. Recommended attributes are those which Google suggests you add to your feed in order to better it match your products to search queries. Check out the full list of required and recommended attributes for more info.

Custom attributes allow you to add an unlimited number of additional product attributes.

My tip is to add as much product information as possible. Firstly, because if Google has to choose between multiple similar products it will it seems pick the one with the most comprehensive description. Secondly by adding as much product detail as you can, you give that product a greater chance of ranking for more long tail terms.

3. Use the 70 title characters

In my experience the item’s title is one of the biggest ranking determinants. You are allowed to add up to 70 characters, so if you can (without being spammy) put as much product detail in as possible.

4. Keep an eye on the attribute list

Things move fast in the world of Google Products, and from my experience unless you keep one eye on the Google webmaster development blog you often miss things. For example Google often update their ‘recommended attribute’ lists or create market specific feed examples. I tend to dedicate about an hour per week to researching recent changes and working out if there are any workable angles for my client feeds.

5. Use Google checkout if you can

Now who would ever suggest that Google would favour products which utilise Google’s own checkout system… If you can set-up a Google checkout account, make sure you do. I know that some more bespoke ecommerce systems find it difficult to integrate, but if you are able to; make it a priority.

6. Product reviews – which sites to get them from

It is no surprise that customer reviews in a similar way to Google Places, are one of the biggest ranking factors for Google Products. If you have a Google Checkout account you will hopefully already be receiving reviews. But in my opinion; the larger the variety of review sites your product is referenced by the better, so go out and submit your product (and company if it isn’t already).

But where do I find the review sites to submit too?

Fair enough, I asked the same question. Google doesn’t pull reviews from every review site out there, and from my experience references different review sites for different markets and products. There is an easy way to find out which review sites are being referenced for your competitors:

1. Search products for the search term you wish to rank for
2. Find a product listing with reviews
3. Click on the ‘seller ratings’ link – which will take you to a page containing all reviews for that product
4. In the top right (usually) there will be the list of all the review sites from which Google is pulling data from – which are thus the site which you should set-up an account with.

7. Add tracking code

I know the majority of you reading this (hopefully) would rather go noodling for catfish than consider not adding tracking code to the online marketing material you control.  But sometimes things get forgotten, and there is a lot to remember when setting up a feed. Spend a minute, build a tracking URL or prepare to speculate… a lot.

8. Update your feed

I usually try to update my product feed at least once a month, usually correlating feed updates and my monthly feed change research. It seems that Google holds updated products in a brighter light than those which aren’t updated very frequently. If due to the sectors you work in and the products you are selling your feed needs to change daily; you are in a good position. If however your product details simply won’t change in time, consider holding some attributes back.

I tend to make a list of all the potential attributes I can associate with a product, then try to determine which I will need to include initially in order to rank competitively (if the market is saturated you will need to add more etc etc). The rest I divide up and gradually add to my product listing over time, ensuring Google always associates new information with each product.

How to optimise for Google Products is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency

The first video was just called SEO Wars and featured Rand Fishkin as Rand Linkwalker and Fantomaster as DarthCloakmaster (of course)..

The second video was called “SEO Wars – Planet Linkspace” and also featured Rand Fishkin as Rand Linkwalker but this time Darthcloakmaster was Dave Naylor, this video came out just after SEOmoz’s Linkscape was launched and was our way of backing up the SEOmoz crew.

And if you don’t find them funny, don’t worry, it doesn’t mean you are not a good SEO it probably just means you’re not an SEO with “stupid” humour

SEO Wars Spoof Videos – from “back in the day” is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency

We can offer you the exclusive chance of a sneak preview HERE + in addition we can also offer you a discount of £20 as a pre-publication offer if you order the guide before 31st July (2010 of course)…The totlal cost of the guide is £130 (£150 post 31st July)

When we set about writing this guide we decided that we were going to share as much as possible, this guide gives you an insight into exactly how we (at Verve Search) carry out Search Engine Optimsiation. From keyword research and mapping to link development. We have also chosen to cover aspects such as optimising Video content and how to make the most out of Google Local (now called Google Places). Unlike most SEO guides out there this guide is NOT a promotional piece for our company but a genuine attempt in helping YOU the reader to understand and learn more about all aspects of SEO. Explained in plain English wihtout baffling techy speak to confuse you, we really do believe this guide is educational and useful.

EDIT: If you attend the “B2B Marketing SEO Seminar” on the 8th July you can get the ‘SEO Best Practise Guide’ for 1/2 PRICE!

—————————————————-

SEO Best Practise Guide Contents:

SECTION 1: Introduction to SEO

1.1 Search engine optimisation
1.2 The UK search engine market
1.3 Why use search engine marketing?
1.4 SEO’s place in the Internet marketing mix
1.5 How search engines work

SECTION 2: Technical SEO – The foundation of SEO

2.1 Site architecture
2.2 URL structure
2.3 Canonicalisation
2.4 Sitemap
2.5 Geo-targeting – hosting and domain
2.6 Technical toolbox

SECTION 3: On-page SEO

3.1 Keyword and competitor research
3.2 Conducting competitor research
3.3 Organising your research
3.4 Keyword research tools
3.5 Writing content with the search engines in mind
3.6 Keyword mapping
3.7 Current most important areas for content optimisation
3.8 Anchor text optimisation of internal linking

SECTION 4: Off-page SEO

4.1 The PageRank algorithm
4.2 TrustRank
4.3 Future importance of links
4.4 Link development
4.5 Evaluating link equity and carrying out link analysis
4.6 Link generation methods
4.7 Online public relations
4.8 Link baiting
4.9 Social media marketing as part of link development
4.10 Link analysis tools
4.11 Why link analysis is important

SECTION 5: Universal search

5.1 Optimising image content for universal search
5.2 Optimising video content for universal search

SECTION 6: Google places

6.1 Creating a local business listing
6.2 Optimising your local listing
6.3 Data citations

SECTION 7: Web analytics

7.1 Free and paid platforms
7.2 Importance of analytics when doing SEO
7.3 Setting up Google Analytics
7.4 Tracking the right metrics in analytics

APPENDIX i. Outsourcing SEO services

ii. Unethical SEO practices
iii. Future changes in SEO

GLOSSARY
—————————————————-

Happy reading…and please feel free to feedback what you thought of the guide! To request the guide please GO HERE and submit your details or email dominic.rookeallden[AT]b2bm.biz

Search Engine Optimisation Best Practise Guide is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency

Everyone loves a secret. Some people keep secrets, others like to gossip. Similar to the latter I couldn’t hold this one in any longer, so unlike most secrets here is one that can really benefit you. You ready? Ok, come closer…

Did you know the average conversion rate of a website is 3%

Even after all the vast increased capabilities of technology, design and analytics in the last 10 years it still hasn’t improved. Why? Read below and see.

1.    Communicate UVPs/UCPs (unique value propositions & unique campaign propositions)
Online users on average decide whether they want to purchase your product or service within 7 seconds so ensure you communicate your UVP/UCP simply and effectively

2.    Persuasive and Relevant Offers
In the B2C environment messages like ‘Free Shipping’ has a very small cost but a massive impact on conversion rates, surprisingly even scrapping a few £’s. For the B2B environment, consider ‘Free Trials’ as a persuasive offer.

3.    Reinforce Offers Sitewide
Surprising how many websites reinforce offers across the website except for the most important page – the checkout. Jacob Nielson said “Don’t make them think”, if you make them question whether they missed a stage and do not qualify for the offer then you are going to lose a sale. Customers make a decision on every click.

4.    They Maintain Scent
The term and concept ‘scent’ was discovered by Xerox in the late 90s. It essentially details the clues that a website can give to ensure users follow the right path. This includes imagery and colours as they can be visual clues that separate ages are connected. It is important not to focus on one page but the whole journey.

5.    Strong First Impression
Every type of advertising needs to create a human connection. It is widely believed that advertising mediums and even human interaction has 8 seconds before you form an opinion.

6.    Appeal to multiple personas/segments
Online users can be placed within 4 individual character types; competitive, spontaneous, methodical, humanistic.

Competitive
-    Price orientated
-    Know what they are looking for

Spontaneous
-    Make quick decisions
-    Look for clickable features

Methodical
-    Most time spent on pages
-    Analyse every detail

Humanistic
-    Look for human elements (reviews)
-    Like images of product/service

7.    They don’t do Slice/Dice Optimisation
The issue is time and resources; you need to look at the opportunity cost of implementing multi variations. The best way to test is for impact not variation and this is best suited to creating hypothesis such as ‘if A changes then would affect will this have on B’.

8.    Leverage Social Commerce
It is important to not only listen but to utilise the voice of the customer. Reviews make HUGE impacts on the conversion rate of websites.

9.    Using Social Voices in Navigation
By adding features such as ‘rating’ in the navigation it allows customers to view honest and peer opinions which is great since 78% of users trust peer reviews.

10.   Use Social Voices in Promotions
Let customer voices shape the content you write. By analysing customer conversations you can review strengths and weaknesses of your brand/product and address these issues in promotional content. Additionally, utilising user generated content in emails works well to increase conversions.

11.    Use Social Voices to Build Credibility
By implementing user generated content you increase your authenticity which will have a direct effect on decreasing bounce rate.

12.    Use Social Voices for Feedback and Research
Jacob Nielson states that “5 people can identify 80% of problems on a website” Ensure you use the free tools or undertake studies to highlight usability issues within your site. If you search Google for “69 free tools” you can find great resources.

13.    Use Persuasive Principles like Scarcity
Utilising persuasive statements such as “until stocks last”, or “for a limited time” can help drive conversions. This is especially important for spontaneous buyer types.

14.    Make Forms Engaging
Just because you managed to get users this far it doesn’t mean you should stop paying attention to the little details. The brand colours and design should be kept consistent so users know they are on the right path.
It is also a strong recommendation that you should you the thank you page as an opportunity to up sell your product or service.

15.    Provide Point of Action Assurances
Ensure that when users enquire they receive an assurance of a time when they will be contacted. Leads are shown to lose effectiveness by 6% after 1 hour delayed response time.

16.   Keep You in the Process
Don’t necessarily take people to the basket once clicked.

17.    Consider Email Preview
Ensure that the message you are trying to portray in emails can be read without downloading images. A large percentage of people with email will disregard emails if they have to download images.

18.    Budget for Experience
Clients will often spend budget on methods which aim to drive traffic to websites yet will debate whether to spend the same amount of time on website testing. Prioritise what is more important, increasing traffic by % or increasing conversions by %

You should build a better customer experience. Amazon run over 400 tests at any given time and are constantly monitoring what changes could positively affect their business.

19.    Utilise a system for Prioritization
When making changes to your website use a simple methods which highlights the ‘impact’ over ‘resources needed’. This will let you assess what changes can be made with relatively small effort and can let you plan further changes with your resources.

20.    They make data driven design decisions
Make educated and informed decisions based on data.

21.    How to execute Rapidly
The key to online is change. Websites need to be flexible and react to changes in the online environment.

5 steps which would help you move forward and see real progress:
1)     Identify problems, identify high bounce and exit rate
2)     Create a to do list
3)     Document your hypothesis
4)     Prioritise your to do list
5)     Start testing

21 Secrets to Improve Website Conversion Rates is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency

Interested in the chance of WINNING a place at the SEO Training Course on the 28th Jan, 2010? ALL you need to do is FOLLOW us on Twitter AND retweet the following:

RT @VerveSearch We are giving away 2 places to a 1 Day SEO Training Course on the 28th Jan, to enter visit http://is.gd/644WV

We will pick 2 winners on Friday (15th January) and contact you via DM on twitter.

NB! The place is not transferable and you must be available on the 28th January 2010. The prize does not include transport to the Verve Search offices, which is in Kingston Upon Thames (20 min from Waterloo station, London)

Click Here to view full details on the 1 Day SEO Training Course

WIN a place at our 1 Day SEO Training Course is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency

The presentation gives an insight into the key areas of link development strategies:

- Content Syndication (referred to in this presentation as Contentlinkation)
- Link baiting (the process of creating content with the objective of recieving links)
- Site Seeding (the research you do beforehand including competitor backlink analysis)
- Relationship building
- Press releases
- Events and Offline activity
- Social Media

A4U Expo – Lisa Myers “Beyond Linkbaiting” Presentation is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency

“I never guess. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”

Google Local is a relatively new channel for marketers to obtain traffic and however much we theorise and assume how valuable it is, nothing will give clearer data than tracking and monitoring. We track and monitor every other aspect of our organic and paid search so why wouldn’t we want to track other channels that generate site traffic?

From an analytical point of view Google Local could previously only be measured if a browser came through the Google Maps section to our site.  We were not naturally able to measure visits from a Local Business Listing (LBL) unless we implemented tracking codes.  Now there are a few posts around the web detailing how we should track Google Local, in particular from Martijn Beijk who specialises in Google Local. What I found interesting after reading these posts was that no one ever replied back, detailing whether implementing the analytic codes created any problems and if so, how they dealt with these issues.

We recently implemented tracking code to one of our clients’ local business listings. We experienced some issues along the way which inspired me to write this post about how to track Google Local.

Track URLs in Local Business Centre

One method that was recommended by a few people was implementing a tagged URL within your local business listing through the local business centre. This included giving each local business listing a URL with GA parameters. By doing this, theoretically it should then appear in GA under traffic sources – campaigns

In order to tag a URL you should use the Google Analytics URL builder tool, which you can find here: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578

You only need to fill in specific information in the tool. The campaign source (in this case; Google local), the campaign medium (local business listing) and also give it a campaign name to differentiate various listings, for example Search_Consultancy_London.

Just to clarify, if tracked correctly the statistics should appear within Traffic Sources – Medium – Local Business Listing

One aspect that you need to be aware of before you update the new tagged URL is to remove any “%2B” or “%20” symbols.  The symbol %2B is part of the URL encoding process and it merely means ‘+’, similarly to %20 which means space. In my experience and after discussing this with others these characters should be replaced with underscores. Hyphens are better from a search perspective but you are not trying to rank this page as it is merely a tagged URL.

Once you have inserted this tagged URL, the local business centre it states that it can take up to 48 hours for the change to be updated. We waited, and waited some more but the change never took place. Some people say you have to wait up to 2 weeks for Google to update their listings to include your utm source code within the URL. After 7 days the update still did not occur and we were not willing to wait any longer as a week without data was long enough. I still remain sceptical that this method works and would love to hear from anyone who implemented this -  was it successful and how long you had to wait? Are you still waiting?

Use Vanity URLs to track page views

Another option is to create separate landing page URLs for each listing that is within the Local Business Centre. The separate landing pages are essentially duplicate pages of the original URL but given a vanity URL name.

For Example:

Original URL:

http://www.example.com/location-service

Vanity URL:

http://www.example.com/localad-location-service

To avoid the duplicate content issue and to specify to Google the canonical URL we would simply input the canonical tag within the source code of the Vanity URL:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/location-service”/>

Once you have created this page, insert the vanity URL into the Google Local Business centre. The beauty of this method is that it appears in less than 48 hours and you can see instant results. Statistics would appear in content – top content – then type in “local” within the filter box.

However, there are some drawbacks to this method; the main factor is you are restricted to the amount of quantitative data you can analyse.

Since the URL of the local ad page has not been tagged it does not appear within the traffic sources as a ‘medium’. This prevents you from easily evaluating how much traffic this medium generated in comparison to other sources. Furthermore, site visits to the local ad page can only be determined through accessing the top landing pages within the content section of analytics which is not ideal.

Another negative aspect to tracking your local search this way is if you are running an ecommerce booking engine through your Google analytics you will not be able to analyse how much revenue was generated through Local search.

This can only be determined if you tag the URL, which brings me on to my last method.

Track Local campaign using 301 Redirects

This method may take a little bit more time in liaising with client programmers and web developers but it is the preferred and recommended method.

First you need to set up a vanity URL, but this time do not create a page, just a URL that will be 301 redirected to the original tagged URL which we spoke about in the beginning.

For Example:

http://www.example.com/localad-service-location

needs to be 301 redirected to the following URL

http://www.example.com/localad-service-location.htm/#utm_source=GoogleLocalutm_medium=local_business_listing&utm_campaign=london

This would then track all visitors and able us to see the TOTAL number of visits from Google Local Listings within the Traffic Source (separate to organic and everything else) under the medium local_business_listing (or whatever you decided to title your medium within the URL builder)

This will ensure reporting on monthly statistical data is far easier as you can compare the effectiveness of your campaign and evaluate individual segments.

The amount of data you can now analyse through this method is much greater than the previous method. Additionally to appearing under traffic sources – medium it will also appear as a tagged campaign under traffic sources – campaigns which will let you view each individual listings analytics.

It also provides you with further dimensions in which to breakdown the data, including:

•    keywords visitors typed into Google to trigger your listing
•    Visitor type (new vs. returning)
•    Visitor Country/territory/region

Most significantly, if you have e-commerce set up through analytics it allows you to view how successful your local ad is in terms of generating revenue.  Within traffic sources you can breakdown the following:

•    Overall Revenue
•    Transactions
•    Average Value
•    Conversion rate
•    Per visit value

We also found that by creating the Vanity URL and implementing this in the Local Business Centre it actually improved our local ranking.  We believe this is due to the added keywords within the Vanity URL so ensure you use appropriate and relevant keywords (without spamming) related to what you wish to appear in the local listings for.

How to Track your Google Local Listing is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency

I personally believe VSEO is a great opportunity to dominate the Search Engine Results pages and a fantastic way of also communicating with your customers once they are on your website. Video Optimisation should be part of you marketing efforts.

Video Optimisation – VSEO Video is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency

The value in regards to SEO is not the only factor that we will be analysing, the effect bold and italic tags has on usability and their ability to convert customers will also be considered.

Halt…. Attention:

Beliefs are split into two camps; some people believe that the bold tag is now ineffective whereas others still believe it holds value.  Within the SEOmoz ranking factors, the contributors (various respected industry figures) draw the conclusion the bold tag has a moderate importance.   Opinions and attitudes here range from “Has some weight as a ranking factor, but not very much”, “I’m still doing it sometimes, but I’m really starting to wonder why” to “We focus on communication to the user; we never bold terms in an effort to rank for them”

These opinions contrast particularly to the views from 3-4 years ago, where contributors to the SEOmoz ranking factors (2005) commented: “I think that this is still very important” and “H1 and BOLD are still vital indicators of important factors.” The belief was the algorithm used to determine that any keyword placed within a bold tag would be given value as to determining what the page is about. The question is, has Google now realised this was being manipulated for the search engines and not for the user as was its original intention? Additionally, is the bold tag now obsolete?

Why and How to utilise the bold tag

Personally I believe that the bold tag still holds slight value and should be incorporated within on-page content.  Search engines spiders can read and understand html code so it seems logical that the assigned keyword within a bold tag would carry a degree of importance to the page.  This question still remains to be decided whether it carries any ranking weight but undeniably it does carry visual weight.

The usability of a website is a big feature of converting visitors into customers. Bold tags are vital for catching readers that scan, reinforcing the belief that they have found the right page. Various eye tracking data indicates users are drawn to breaks in the text, including bold and italic fonts.

Furthermore, when online users read or scan text, they apparently will only re-evaluate their scan strategy when they detect particular formats. One of the main factors, that subconsciously make users eyes stop and evaluate; is bold tags.  So even if they hold no weight within search engines, I feel it is vital to ensure you give your website the best possible chance to connect with visitors.

Research always shows that user behaviour when consuming information on the internet follows a very basic pattern. In Jakob Nielsen’s words; site visitors don’t read; they scan. His study found that only 16% of people will read a post word by word. The implication is that readers need to be able to extract the key messages of a post at a glance, and not have to work for it. This means that content must be made scannable. Roll out the red carpet; cue the brass band and the victory march parade!  Welcome home Bold…

So to end, I was recently watching the film American History X and related to the part in the script when he said “it’s always good to end a paper with a quote, if someone else has already said it best. So if you can’t top it, steal from them and go out strong”.

So here is my victim, Seth Godin.  He undertook an experiment regarding eye tracking and said he learnt the following:

“The biggest lesson wasn’t news to me, but it might be to your boss: your visitors are not rational and organized and linear. You can’t count on them sitting still and hearing your story from beginning to end. They won’t. The answer is not to try to change human nature. It’s to embrace the hunting skills that people are bringing online (and to their daily offline media consumption) and to make your media match their needs.”

Resources:

The following resources can help you monitor how well your online content is doing in terms of time spent on page and users clicks.

Heat Mapping

Crazy Egg, ClickDensity, Google Analytics (Site Overlay)

How to be Bold and Influence People is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency