Google removes right-hand side paid search ads on SERPs

The big development this week came from Google who removed all paid search ads from the right-hand side of the search engine results page (SERP).

Previously, paid search ads were always displayed in the same format – three ads above organic search results and a number of ads down the right-hand side of the page.

Google’s changes now mean there are now 2-4 paid search results at the top and bottom of the SERPs – so depending on the search query, the entire above the fold space could now be filled entirely with paid advertising.

Solar Centre SERP

This means that for visibility within the SERPs, it’s even more important to be in positions 1-3 and top-of-the-page paid search ads will become even more competitive and expensive. On a positive note, we expect that search relevance will increase over time as the ROI on not relevant ads will become unsustainable due to increased cost-per-clicks. Brands that have a smaller click budget will see limited returns from more generic, head term and prospecting keywords that would previously generally be aimed at lower ad positions.

Google has been doing significant testing around site links, positions and ad text and this development shows how they are becoming increasingly focused on mobile as mobile searches beginning to overtake desktop searches. This change makes for a similar user experience across both desktop and mobile.

How will this impact paid search campaigns?

According to our Senior Paid Search Consultant, Matt Martin, “Ads seem to drop out of search results in favour of organic after just a few unsuccessful searches. This could increase click-through-rate and increase the effectiveness of time-sensitive messages. We have also seen an instant drop in impressions and return for non-brand and generic keywords.

What this means going forward is that we may need to move to longer-tail, less competitive keywords as those with larger budgets change strategies – presumably looking to own the generic space.”

“It may be that those with smaller budgets or more stringent targets now need to pick their battles more carefully for non-brand terms and more focus should be placed on driving better quality advertising going forward. It seems that we are moving towards a state where appearing in the perfect place in Google and at the perfect time can bring substantial returns but the risks are higher if you get it wrong. Owning your Brand space and having user-centric copy, relevant landing pages and a well-structured account becomes ever more important.”

For retailers, Shopping will become a crucial part of most revenue generating strategies. Therefore having a working, correct and optimised feed is more important than ever before in order to allow greater ownership of the space above the fold.

We’re also interested to see how this change affects Bing, as they have a great opportunity to capitalise on this change. Bing is becoming increasingly viable for marketers with the launch of Shopping – they just need to get the search and ecommerce volumes!

Natural search impact

In terms of natural search, our Website Optimisation Manager, Suze, said “The main impact of the having four paid search ads at the top of the SERPs will push organic listings down further in the page. Both for desktop and mobile, organic listings will now likely fall below the fold of the page.

This means that it’s even more important to ensure you have very targeted, useful content on your site to try and maximise top organic positions. It is also becoming more important for sites take full advantage of other ways to get organic visibility, for example: local listings, html markup to encourage rich snippets or knowledge graph cards etc.

By providing useful user-centric content on your site will help your site appear for more conversational, long-tail question-based queries that are less likely to be occupied with aggressive paid search ads. Brand building is also more crucial in order to drive people to search for less competitive brand related terms.

Please do feel free to get in touch if you have any questions about the impact of this change.

Five simple tips to get your site in shape for Christmas

Last year, our Website Optimisation Manager, Suze, gave some great conversion rate optimisation tips for maximising online sales at Christmas time. To follow on from her recommendations, I have provided a few more tips to ensure you ride the sleigh of success straight to the North Pole this holiday season.

 

 

Give your page titles and meta descriptions the attention they deserve

Your page titles and meta descriptions are essentially your organic ad copy and are often neglected.  As the volume of searches ramps up towards Christmas, a fraction of an improvement on your click-through rate could mean additional sales or enquiries to help hit those vital targets.

Ensure your listings stand out in the crowded SERPs with well written and thought out page titles and enticing meta descriptions. You can take this a step further by adding mark-up to your page content to add rich snippets such as product stock level, star ratings and price to your results. You can do this using schema.org or to some extent Google Search Console’s Data Highlighter.

Check for ‘page not found’ errors in Google’s Search Console

A link to a ‘page not found’ is a lost link. It can also mean a search engine drops your page from its index and offers visitors a poor user experience. Google Search Console kindly shares ‘page not found’ errors as it finds them. Work to get these cleared up before the Christmas rush.

'Page not found' errors

Page load speed

Spend some time checking how fast your most important pages load. How do they compare to the site average, are they slow? Do they load slowly on mobile devices? Is there anything you can do to speed them up?

All of this information can be found by taking a look in Google Analytics to see how long it is actually taking your pages to load for site visitors.

Page load speed in Google Analytics

Use Google’s Page Insights tool to identify what you can do to speed up your pages. One of the most common issues that slows page load is having large images. Lossless compression of your images is also probably the easiest (if time consuming) thing to work on.

Check mobile usability

Again Google’s Search Console can help you out here; it will point you in the direction of pages with mobile usability issues and provide some detail how to resolve the issue.

Mobile usability

Have a dig around analytics for any other potential site issues

Look at what happened last year. What pages performed well? Which ones didn’t?

Take a look at what pages had high exit and bounce rates last year. Was there a reason for that? Is there anything
you can do to improve these pages, for example, can you help your users better navigate your site with improved signposting on these pages? Is the information the searcher is looking for immediately obvious?

It doesn’t look good to Google if there is a large proportion of searches bouncing straight back to the SERPs from your pages.

Potential site issues

Optimise your images for search

Finally optimise your images, give them friendly names, and set the alt attribute to something that describes the image. People use Google Image search to look for products so you need to make sure yours are there.

 

As you can see, there are a couple of quick wins you can make to your website to ensure that you are maximising your online sales this Christmas.  With only 41 days to go, don’t delay in making these changes. Good luck!

Image via Kaboompics.com.

 

SEO in web development, keyword analysis & monitoring the bottom line

Over the past few months, a number of articles have caught my eye as they reinforce important learnings about how search has evolved. In light of these articles, I’ve looked at how brands and retailers need to shift their mind-set around ‘SEO’ and use it more strategically within marketing campaigns.

SEOs have a role in development

SEO has evolved greatly over the years and it doesn’t operate in silo. Search engine algorithms have advanced significantly to weed out spam and reward sites that have relevant and valuable content – ultimately sites that provide users with what they want.

SEO and UX go hand-in-hand and which is why it’s important that the SEOs of today have good knowledge of usability and experience design as well as the technical aspects of search.  All these skills can be a huge asset when redeveloping a website.

Your optimisation team will have in-depth, historic knowledge of your current site’s performance, what works and what doesn’t as well as your business goals. They also have knowledge of a number of different platforms so can advise on the best platform even before the project has kicked off.

When developing a site, use your SEO team’s experience, learnings and advice to your advantage. Get their input on technical requirements and recommended specification for your new site to ensure that important elements, for both the search engines and users, are factored into scope.

Then by the combined ideas of your optimisation team, designers and developers will ensure you end up with a site that exceeds expectations in terms of architecture, content, optimisation and user experience.

Keyword analysis

I recently read a good post about the relevance of keyword analysis in Search Engine Land. I couldn’t agree more with the points raised and want to reinforce how brands should be using search term analysis today.

The Hummingbird update in 2013 was an important step in Google’s quest to provide better quality search results. By better understanding the intent of search queries by looking at context (rather than specific keyword matching) they have been able to provide smarter, more relevant search results.

Of course, bespoke on-page optimisation still has its part to play, but brands need to forget trying to rank for certain keywords and focus on adding relevant, more varied content around topics or subjects.

Keyword analysis today should help identify popular keyword themes, product opportunities and review what questions are being frequently searched for. This kind of analysis will help you find gaps and opportunities for targeted content, be that additional products, improved categorisation or filtering functionality, enhanced product information, how-to guides or FAQs.

Think about the role your content plays in a conversion and investigate terms that will target more of the right customers throughout their search.

Measuring your marketing

Another interesting read was this article on Moz which discussed why looking at correlation rather than focusing on causation needs to be more of a focus for modern SEOs and marketers.

It is becoming harder and harder to predict and measure success from individual channels and the key statement in this article is that SEOs are “becoming more complete marketers, with greater influence on all of the elements of our organisations’ online presence.”

All these articles reinforce that SEO shouldn’t be treated as something that operates in isolation. Retailers need to change their view on traditional SEO tactics such as keyword analysis, as these should be used far more frequently and strategically to inform content creation. Expanding quality, engaging content is always going to be the best long-term strategy for natural success, not focusing on specific keyword rankings as many brands still do!

Retailers also need keep focused on the bigger-picture. Of course monitor granular channel specific metrics, but don’t obsess over them. Tie everything back to your bottom line. If your marketing channels are working, you will be able to see this in your sales, revenue and market share.

And finally, be sure to get the most from your agencies by pooling their knowledge to ensure your marketing campaigns are joined up. Whether it is a new site build or a strategy review, get your agencies in the same room to work together, share plans and collaborate on strategy to ensure you maximise the effectiveness your marketing.

The Weekly Shop (8th – 12th Dec)

Welcome to one of the last Weekly Shop’s of the year – where has the year gone! This week we have featured some stories you may have missed around ecommerce returns, the importance of mobile-friendly websites in 2015 and the future of Google’s search algorithm.

Social engagement within the premium furniture sector

During the latter part of this year, we have been investigating how premium retailers are delivering relevant content and engaging socially with their customers. In the first report of the series, we have looked at 20 leading retailers in the premium furniture sector and assessed how well they are engaging their audiences which produced some interesting insights. You can download the full report here.

Men shop very differently from women online and require a completely new approach

Moving onto some retail news, this article from Internet Retailing looks at how men and women shop for clothes in a very different way online and looks at how websites can cater to the male market.

15 tips for improving ecommerce returns policies

With Christmas being the busiest time of year for returns volumes, how should retailers handle returns? In this next article, Econsultancy have rounded up 15 best practice tips from various retailers.

Why a mobile-friendly website is essential to a successful SEO strategy in 2015

Moving onto search news, this article from Search Engine Watch looks at the importance of having a mobile-friendly website in order to have a successful SEO strategy in 2015 .

Press releases are not an SEO strategy

This next article from Clickz explores how press releases and press release websites are not an SEO strategy and explores how you can get much better results contacting journalists directly.

Why SEOs Need To Care About User Experience

Next up, URL profiler looks at how Google doesn’t really care about SEOs and that they only really care about user experience and optimising the experience of Google for their users.

The Future of Google’s Search Algorithm: Refinement Vs. Overhaul

To finish of this week, some interesting reading from Search Engine Land on Google’s search algorithm and specifically where Google search is headed and the signals it relies on.

That’s it for this week!

How to get creative with your content marketing

Creativity is a strange concept. When flowing freely it’s one of the most satisfying and rewarding parts of a content marketer’s daily work.

So, what happens when you get ‘creative block’?  Blame it on the work you’re doing? After all it’s not your fault – there’s just no way to make accounting / car parking / [insert chosen industry perceived as more straight-laced than others here]. WRONG! Getting creative with your content marketing should never be dependent on the perceived ‘coolness’ of a business’s products, service or sector.

In this blog post I will highlight some great tips for creating engaging brand content.

1. Use data creatively

Imagine you’re creating content for a car parking business. The way to generate unengaging, non-sharable content is to focus on the details and nothing else. A blog post or maybe downloadable guide with pricing for each car park the company owns. Boring, right?

What if you flipped that pricing data on its head, creating an online app that worked out the cost of a taxi home after a night out in direct comparison to leaving the car in an overnight car park? You could launch it in tandem with a drink driving awareness campaign, perhaps results could be sharable and each time an app user shares their savings they are entered into a contest for a month of free parking.

Takeaway: The data is there – it’s being creative with it that governs a campaign’s success.

2. Widen your perspective

In order to think bigger picture and step away from the detail of a brand, it’s important to connect the dots to discover creative opportunities that are not immediately obvious. Creating a mind-map is a great way to help make these new connections.

One of our own clients, Flexioffices, provides serviced office space throughout the UK. On first impressions you could think that all content needs to be about available space and current property offers. In reality, there are so many topics linked to office space, such as business issues, or top tips for creating a happy workplace.

We chose to look at what affects employee productivity, making the link with exercise during the working day and exploring the benefits of a lunchtime run. This allowed us to collaborate with fitness and running bloggers, getting them to run a route around Flexioffices’ Shoreditch office locations – securing natural links to the homepage and Shoreditch location page in the process.

The results – increased search visibility, enhanced brand awareness and fantastic blog coverage on blogs not immediately obvious in their connection to an office space provider’s brand.

3. Tap into a story – tap into emotion

A fantastic example of a brand positioning itself as a beauty product for ‘real women’ is Dove. This wonderfully emotive series of videos focuses on the story of several women who have lost sight of how beautiful they truly are, with the subtext being a story of today’s media pressures on body image and expectations of women.

I will let the video do the talking, but it’s a moving example of how emotion and real people make for captivating viewing. If you can create emotional connections with your brand, you are onto a winner.

4. Create newsworthy onsite content that attracts links and visits

‘Newsworthy content’ is the type of content that you yourself would read – irrespective of whether you were specifically on the lookout for it.

It’s not just about a catchy headline, your newsworthy content needs substance and one great tactic is to run a survey. This is because journalists know that the stories they create are given far more weight with some well-placed data involved. If you can provide that data for the journalists, without them having to do the legwork, then you’ve got a great chance of your story being picked up.

The key here is to create a ‘hook’ for the journalist, giving just enough information in your press release, leading into a link to your blog or website’s news section where the full story / full results from a survey will be hosted.

Reaching out to journalists with interesting content for their publications is a sure fire way to increase awareness of your brand and even establish valuable links back to your website. Google’s algorithm rewards fresh, highly relevant onsite content, so it should be a key focus of any content marketing strategy.

NB it is important to note that any ‘follow’ links you generate from PR outreach should be from reputable sites with high domain authorities that are relevant to your brand. Google frown upon ‘follow’ links from article placement sites and as such this is a big no-no.

5. Monitor results, learn and repeat successes

Analysis and monitoring is always the key to developing future campaigns that fly. Make use of Google Analytics, social reporting, press coverage tracking tools and brand listening to learn what worked and what didn’t during and after each campaign you run.

When your brand’s campaigns ooze creativity, you will frequently reap what you sow, achieving results above and beyond your original campaign objectives. We have delivered several campaigns at Leapfrogg where enhancing search visibility was the primary objective, but a by-product is often sales transactions, enquiries or improved rates of social media interaction.

Go forth and let your creativity run wild!

It’s not too late to maximise online sales this Christmas

Christmas is a key time for many retailers and brands. Therefore, it is important to ensure your website is up to scratch in order to maximise sales.

Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) underpins the success of a website and even a few small changes now could have a positive impact on conversion rates and sales over the festive period.

So where to start? How about with the following:

Carry out some quick A/B tests

Many tools such as Optimizely allow you to test smaller changes against the current design to determine which perform better than others. You can then serve the better performing page variation to a higher percentage of users in the run up to Christmas. This means that even if you do not get statistically significant results quickly, you can still divert more traffic to your higher converting page variation.

Conduct a user test

This will help you quickly identify any changes you can make immediately. If you have specific problem areas you want to test, What Users Do is a cost effective online tool that can top line key issues users’ face.

Conduct a short survey

Tools such as Google Surveys or Survey Monkey allow you to gain some quick, free insight into what users might find frustrating on your site. By focusing on getting something up and running now, you can run it for a month and implement any quick-win changes in time for December.

Identify problem pages in Analytics

Look for pages that drive a good amount of traffic but have low conversion and/or high bounce rates. In addition, review page speeds and work through priority recommendations from Google Page Insights. You will typically find the same problems across a number of pages, so some site-wide changes to improve load time could have an immediate, positive impact on user experience. It will also improve optimisation of the site.

Go through your checkout process

Identify any issues or tweaks you could make to simplify or streamline the process. Look out for unnecessary form fields, enable guest checkout (if you haven’t already,) auto populate address fields where possible etc. Try and be objective, as if you were a customer yourself.

ASOS checkout

Check your online enquiry forms and customer service channels

Ensure they function as best they can. Forms should be quick and easy to fill in and should let customers know that their enquiry has been received. Any queries should be answered promptly in order to try and maintain the attention of the customer and ideally their loyalty to buy with you.

Check your website’s search function

Many people know what they want and will search specifically for gifts at Christmas. They also usually want to view and compare products and prices quickly. Therefore, ensuring your site search functions well and provides relevant, useful results should help support conversions. If you are using Google custom search, you should explore marking up for a Google sitelinks search box which would enable a search box directly in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs.)

 

HoF

Review which products were popular last Christmas

Use this insight to ensure they have good visibility on your site this season. Use popular product imagery to promote email sign ups too (e.g. email / newsletter/ catalogue sign up boxes.)

Offer a price match

If you can, offer a price match offer in case customers have seen lower prices elsewhere. Price is even more important to customers at Christmas, therefore you have to ensure you remain competitive. Ensure price match messaging is in a prominent position across product pages and provide details for customers to contact you to honour the price match.

John Lewis price match

Free delivery

Where possible, offer free delivery as standard. Alternatively, consider awarding free delivery if people sign up to your newsletter. By doing so, you will benefit in the long run by growing your email list.

john lewis

Abandon basket emails

Make sure your abandon basket emails are working effectively in the run up to Christmas. These emails are really effective to bring people back to purchase.

Basket abandonment email

As you can see, it’s not too late to make some fruitful changes to your site that could boost your sales this Christmas. Look at your website with fresh eyes and prioritise any ‘quicker win’ changes so you don’t lose sales to your competitors. But don’t hang around too long – your customers certainly won’t!

 

The Weekly Shop (29th Sept – 2nd Oct)

Welcome to this week’s Weekly Shop. This week we feature our latest report around the hot topic of customer experience, seven disruptive retail trends and lessons for effective blogger outreach.

Report: An Introduction to Customer Experience

‪‪Retailers‬ face huge challenges in meeting the needs and expectations of their customers. In light of this, we’ve just published a new report called ‘An Introduction to Customer Experience’ which aims to highlight those challenges and the steps that we recommend retailers take in order to address them. If you’d like to learn more, you can download your free guide here.

The Customer Experience Is Key: In Every Channel And At Every Interaction

With consumers being overwhelmed with marketing messages across multiple channels and mediums, they are becoming less likely to trust branded content and more inclined to seek out recommendations, tips and insights that come from their own peers and networks. This next article explores the vast opportunity that this shift presents to marketers.

Seven disruptive trends that will kill the ‘dinosaurs of retail’

Next an article from Retail Customer Experience which presents seven major disruptive trends that will cause the next wave of retailer casualties if retailers are unwilling or unable to adapt.

Five lessons for effective blogger outreach

The world of blogging has seen several changes recently which have come to interrupt and redefine the blogger-brand relationship. In our next article, Econsultancy conducted the UK’s largest ever blogger outreach study and rounded up the findings to provide their five tips for effective blogger outreach.

49% of U.K. Consumers Use Organic Search to Find Online Retailers [Study]

New research this week has highlighted how 49% of consumers in the U.K, leverage organic search as the main point of entry to e-commerce shopping sites, yet only 35 percent of online retailers in the U.K. believe consumers find their website through the organic channel.

SEO Is No One-Trick Pony

To finish this week, an article which aims to help to shape the discussion of “what SEO is,” and help others to understand that it’s not simply a ‘quick-fix’ solution.

Thanks for reading and see you next week.

Tis the season to start planning for Christmas

So it seems summer may very sadly be on its way out as we enter September. For retailers, this can only mean one thing – Christmas is well and truly on its way. Earlier in the month, Selfridges even opened their Christmas shop – making it the first retailer in the world to do so. You might not want to be purchasing your baubles just yet, but with Christmas being the busiest and most important time of the year for online retailers – it’s never too early for retailers to start planning for the festive season. Being prepared and identifying a strategy now can make or break a successful year for retailers – in other words the difference between a lump of coal or the latest gadget from Apple in your stocking!

With only 115 days until the big day, we’re already hard at work planning for Christmas with our clients. In light of this, I thought it was worth sharing a couple of tips and tactics from the Leapfrogg team to help get you started.

What do your customers want?

Rosie, Leapfrogg’s Managing Director, recommends running a survey and asking your customers what they think they will want to buy from you at Christmas. You can ask them if they are likely to shop with you for Christmas gifts this year and if so, what categories, price points and people they will be shopping for.

It may well be too late for this insight to influence your product range for Christmas, but what this will do is give you a good steer on where to spend your marketing budget. If you know that your older customers are likely to buy a certain product from you in store, then make sure you remind them via email to pop in store as Christmas approaches. If you know that your younger customers are likely to buy a particular product from you online, then ensure you promote that product to them via all online channels in the run up to Christmas. A quick survey via email with an incentive for completion is an easy way to do this.

You could even go one step further and ask your customers to help you develop a new product for Christmas. If it isn’t too late and your products are applicable, then use social media to showcase a few product ideas or ask your customers to submit ideas for voting that you will be able to put into limited edition production. A loyal fan base will be very engaged with the process and will be likely to buy the product and others when it is released.

Can you offer free delivery?

If you can, offer free delivery – your investment really will pay off and may make the difference in a customer choosing to order with you rather than one of your competitors. A customer experience design project we ran for one of our clients revealed that a major barrier to conversion was a relatively high delivery charge on a low average order value. By offering free delivery, they increased online revenue by 20% within eight weeks.

Be clear and simple

Ensure all your delivery messaging is clearly displayed on your website across all pages, as well as your last online order dates for pre-Christmas delivery to ensure there are no nasty surprises for your customers and their expectations can be met at all times.

 

House of Fraser Christmas

Image source: Econsultancy

In addition, ensure that your returns policy is also clearly displayed across your website– especially if you are offering extended returns over this period.

 

asos Christmas Delivery

Image source: ASOS

Have a look at what questions you were asked last year and ensure your FAQs are up to date with the answers to those questions. Doing this will make life easier for your customers, and remove the need for them to contact you for questions that can be easily answered.

Also spend some time making sure that your product information is as detailed as possible. It’s worth bulking these out now, so your product pages contain as much information about the products as you can, again, making life easier for your customers.

Concentrate on improving your basket and checkout pages now to ensure you have a well converting process in time for Christmas. Maybe run some user-testing to check it’s as user-friendly as possible, and if you don’t already, offer guest checkout and consider a one page checkout.

 

Macy's one page checkout

Image source: Econsultancy

Be mobile responsive

We all know the importance of having a mobile-optimised website by now. If you don’t have one yet, definitely make this a priority as soon as possible as mobile searches increase over the festive period as more shoppers use their phones whilst on the high street to research products. According to the IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark, last Christmas, mobile traffic grew to 58% of all online traffic, an increase of 42% over 2012 and we can only expect this figure to rise even more this Christmas.

 

John Lewis mobile website

If you do already have a mobile website, take some time to ensure it provides a seamless purchasing journey for your customers.

Content planning

Ben, our senior and social media content consultant suggests preparing a content schedule that includes relevant seasonal content such as tips, videos and blog posts. Rather than just pushing products, try and tap into your customers’ needs and help solve their stressful shopping problems. This type of content will help ramp up your audience in the run up Christmas and you can link in an association of how your products can fit into Christmas preparations. Ensure that this messaging is published in a steady flow throughout the Christmas period.

Generate Christmas discounts as a special reward for your social followers, which will make them feel special and like they are getting a bargain before the New Year’s sales. This can aid revenue flow and attract any buyers that usually wait until the sale period to purchase.

Offering competitions and promotions around the 12 days of Christmas are always a winner as they encourage people to keep coming back to your website and making purchases throughout the Christmas period. The Whistles annual advent calendar is a great example of this.

Think in advance about tying in in-store services with ways to boost social following and brand loyalty. For example, offering a free gift wrapping service to customers could be tied in with a data capture exercise to capture customer email addresses and dates of birth in reward for the free gift wrap. This data can then be used to target customers through email marketing and also through custom audiences advertising on Facebook.
Create any new pages well in advance of Christmas

Our senior natural search consultant, Ben and website optimisation manager, Suze, both recommend keeping your Christmas landing pages/categories the same year to year. This ensures Google keeps them in its index and all trust associated with those pages remains. You can always hide the URLs from the customer visible sitemap, but maintain them in the XML sitemap.
If you need to create new pages or categories, ensure you create them well in advance of Christmas to allow Google to index and begin to assign trust to the new pages. Again, link in from the XML sitemap, and if you don’t have your Christmas range confirmed yet – create a holding page for them. You could always include an email signup form on this page, so keen customers can find the page and register interest before you have the range finalised.

Paid search recommendations

Our paid search analysts, Joe and Andy, have a number of recommendations for planning paid search campaigns for the festive season:

  • Have a solid marketing plan in place, so you know exactly what promotions will be running and how they will be promoted e.g. which channel, paid search feature, and site/ad language and also the budgets available for each period building up to Christmas and after Christmas.
  • Look back at which promotions have worked best in the past and test again e.g. a flash sale, free P&P or exclusive discounts.
  • Plan paid search budgets to anticipate shifts in search volume such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Take a look at your historical data for this to see which days last year were popular and plan accordingly.
  • Upload all new ad creatives well in advance of their launch to ensure they are reviewed and approved before your campaign starts – this includes text and image ads.
  • Migrate any changes made in Google across to Bing Ads to ensure consistency and more visibility for your ads.
  • Make sure product feeds are fully optimised for Google Shopping. New feed requirements are coming into effect by the 30th September, so ensure you’re ready for this change now so you don’t run into any problems in build up to Christmas. Google Shopping will be a key channel for retailers this Christmas.

So there you have it – a few tips from the Leapfrogg team on how you can start preparing for the festive season. With only 115 days to go, the time is definitely ripe to start getting into the Christmas spirit and planning ahead. By doing so now, you’ll definitely be in a better position this festive season.

 

The Weekly Shop (30th June – 4th July)

Welcome to a new edition of The Weekly Shop. This week we look at how Google’s search algorithm is an ongoing challenge for anyone selling online, SEO for content marketing, the future of PR newswires, and what you need to know about the Google Shopping upgrade.

Searching times: Keeping up with Google (£)

Our first article this week explores how Google’s search algorithm is an ongoing challenge for anyone selling online. Our commercial director, Ben, has contributed to the article and provided his thoughts on the recent Panda and Penguin updates (please note – you will need a Drapers subscription to read the article).

SEO for content marketing: seven success factors

This next article from Econsultancy looks at how content marketing and SEO should go hand in hand. Great content attracts links and can rank highly, while good SEO means the content you produce brings searchers to your site. In this article, Graham Charlton provides insight into how Econsultancy approaches SEO and content and their seven tips for success.

Does Google Panda 4.0 mean the days of PR newswires are numbered?

Back in May, Google rolled out its latest Panda 4.0 algorithm update, which was again aimed at clamping down on sites with low-quality or thin content. Press release websites were heavily affected by this update which has put into question whether the days of these websites could be numbered and if press releases will have a future in digital PR.

Back To Basics: 5 Fundamentals Of Link Building That Will Never Go Away

Despite all the changes we’ve seen in SEO and link building over the past few years, the qualities that make a good link have remained largely the same. This article goes back to basics and offers five fundamentals of link building that will never go away. A useful read.

Google Shopping upgrade: what you need to know

Earlier this year, Google released Shopping campaigns to all advertisers in AdWords, which offer a simpler and more flexible way of managing Product Listing Ads on Google. Prior to this announcement, campaigns were managed using regular Product Listing Ads (PLAs). Since Google will be retiring PLA campaigns at the end of August, our senior paid search analyst, Andy, has put together a useful checklist of important things you can action now to make sure you are fully optimised for Google Shopping.

The 10 Most Important Paid Search Developments So Far In 2014

Following on from the above, there have been a lot of changes this year for product listing ads on both Google and Bing. Now we’re halfway through the year, Search Engine Land have taken a step back and explored what’s happened so far in paid search.

Thanks for reading!

A round-up of Brighton SEO

At the end of last month I attended the best Brighton SEO yet. From the opening keynote to the afternoon’s content-focused talks in the Corn Exchange, the day was packed with actionable takeaways. However, the five talks that really stood out for me were:

  • How I Earned Loads of Links by Ignoring SEO – Malcolm Coles
  • The Habits That Land You Links – Stacey Cavanagh
  • How journalistic principles will shape the digital marketing of tomorrow – Julia Ogden
  • Using Content for Direct Response – Matt Evans
  • The Content Marketing Blueprint for Boring Industries – Mike Essex

Below, you’ll find my summaries (largely taken from my frantically scrawled notes) of the key points from each talk plus links to slide decks where available.

How I Earned Loads of Links by Ignoring SEO – Malcolm Coles

The conference kicked off with a keynote from Malcolm Coles, General Manager at The Daily Mirror and founder of UsVsTh3m. Malcolm spoke about how UsVsTh3m’s goal has always been to gain the biggest share of their traffic through social rather than search. They’ve achieved this through creating topical, highly shareable content in the form of games and quizzes, such as:

  • The ‘Where’s Damascus?’ Game – thousands of people played the game online and failed miserably, including people from the Houses of Parliament, which resulted in news coverage.
  • How Much Are You Hated By The Daily Mail? – though impossible to get to the end of unless you’re Michael Gove, this short piece of interactive content attracted over a million players, multiple pieces of online coverage with hugely authoritative links and caused UsVsTh3m to rank 3rd for the search term ‘Daily Mail’ for months.

Malcolm also spoke about how The Daily Mirror now sees more mobile traffic than desktop. Therefore, you must ensure that any content you outreach to publications (e.g. infographics) needs to look good on mobile. Your outreach email will probably be read in mobile too. What’s more, infographics sent as huge JPEGs won’t look good on mobile – these should be created in HTML and should be responsive. When UsVsTh3m launched their ‘Northometer’ quiz, 85% of plays came from mobile. In fact, the entire UsVsTh3m site is designed for mobile – Malcolm even went as far as to say that they “don’t really care” how it looks on desktop.

The most important takeaway of Malcolm’s talk was about content headlines. The best-performing headlines are interesting (you want to read them) and mysterious (they don’t give too much away) – these are the headlines that get you clicks AND shares.

Essentially, online content can be divided down into four categories: 

  • Gets clicked AND shared (what goes viral)
  • Gets clicked NOT shared (tends to be content that includes swearing – after all, “your Mum is on Facebook”)
  • Gets shared NOT clicked (rubbish headlines, but good content)
  • Doesn’t get shared OR clicked (most online content) 

You want your content to fall into the top category and sites like Buzzfeed work extremely hard to get this right – it’s standard for them to A/B test up to 25 different headlines for each piece of content.

Three more key points from Malcolm’s talk were:

  • If you’re creating content that’s getting shared, the most important thing is that it’s visual – this means people writing about it are forced to link to it because it’s not something that they can describe with the same level of impact
  • The reason quizzes work so well when it comes to generating content that gets shared is because people want to share content that’s self-affirming – i.e. it reinforces the way that people perceive themselves and/or want to be perceived by others
  • Use Facebook Ads to deliver niche content to the right people – when people in a niche start talking about something, it’s likely to get picked up by relevant publications

The Habits That Land You Links – Stacey Cavanagh

Next up was Stacey Cavanagh, Head of Search at Tecmark, talking about getting into the habits that land you links. Stacey spoke about the importance of allowing time to be creative, championing the 6-3-5 method which enables six people to generate 108 ideas in 30 minutes. Next, you should use NUF testing (New, Useful, Feasible) to work out which ideas are worth following up – score each idea out of ten for each of these things and prioritise the highest scoring ideas.

Additional takeaways from Stacey’s talk were:

  • Use a tool such as fivesecondtest.com to A/B test the effectiveness of your tweets
  • Don’t underestimate the importance of having a Flickr page with high quality, original images – ensure all images have a Creative Commons attribution license and include direction as to how to attribute
  • Have regular image reclamation sessions – imageraider.com helps to find sites using your images, then you can request attribution and a link
  • Create stories from surveys – this is a great tactic for getting news links, even if you just write a story about it (you don’t need a fancy infographic to get quality links)
  • Don’t underestimate the effectiveness of offline content – e.g. doing something “real” that results in coverage; links are a by-product of coverage
  • Old-fashioned communications are disruptive – when it comes to outreaching to your contacts, doing something like sending a hand-written letter will get you more attention than an email

How journalistic principles will shape the digital marketing of tomorrow Julia Ogden 

Julia was a journalist before she went on to work at Zazzle. Her talk was about how she’s used the skills she learnt while working in local media to inform her digital marketing tactics. Key points were:

  • Most people don’t read more than 250 words of a piece of content so make sure all the important information is at the top – the introduction to any piece of content needs to hook the reader and make them want to read on
  • The internet is crying out for high quality, well-written content – in essence, this is all that “SEO content” is
  • Content marketers should take advantage of the citizen journalism approach and crowd-source content from brand advocates and social influencers
  • Google rewards a website/business which has a range of followed links, no follow links and even just online mentions – Google recently released a patent to reward content that just mentions a brand or associated keywords, but has no links
  • When you’re creating content, always think about what’s new or different – why should people care about what you have to say?

 Using Content for Direct Response Matt Evans

It was Matt’s first time speaking at Brighton SEO and I thought his talk was one of the most useful from the day. Matt spoke at length about selling through content and provided some really great takeaways.

In essence, we’ve stopped stuffing Google with keywords and started stuffing it with content – but what so many online marketers overlook is that the sales funnel is content.

Matt outlined that there are four stages of the sales funnel that your consumers go through:

  • Unaware – content at this stage should catch peoples’ attention
  • Know the situation – content at this stage should inform people of the situation
  • Product awareness – content at this stage should inform people about the product
  • Purchase intent – content at this stage should push people to sale

Too often, content created “for SEO” overlooks this and completely misses the sales process:

  • Your content should inform your audience – because an informed audience is more likely to purchase
  • Get your content in the right place at the right time – tailor your content to what your audience want / need to see at each stage of the buying journey 
  • Re-market to your content, not just your products – use your content to move your potential customers down the funnel until they’re ready to purchase
  • Don’t underestimate the importance of post-purchase campaigns – it costs 5 x more to acquire a new customer than to sell again to an existing customer
  • Stop thinking about links first – create content with a real purpose

The Content Marketing Blueprint for Boring Industries – Mike Essex

Mike Essex from Koozai spoke about how we’re so obsessed with “great content” that we often totally overlook that fact that “boring content” is actually the best opportunity in content marketing. Great content might achieve awareness, but boring content is what sells.

Opportunities to create boring content include:

  • Your ‘About’ section
  • Technical specifications
  • Press releases (these are still important and great for targeting niche audiences, which can be critically important)
  • Company location pages

Ways that you can achieve stand-out “boring content” are:

  • Repackage boring content in a visually interesting way  – e.g. highly visual technical specification pages
  • Distil your product information down into simple-to-follow comparisons – sometimes you have to focus on what stops people buying and create content to address this
  • Think about customer aftercare – for example, other sites were ranking for Vax user guides so Vax invested in creating their own
  • Have great product pages – Aviva are a great example of a company which uses its product pages to give them a competitive edge

Above all, remember that on-site content such as this MUST convert – that should always be your end goal!