Blogstorm
Keeping track of Google algorithm updates is a time consuming job and one that you should try to make as straightforwards as possible – there are much more effective ways to spend your time than monitoring whether Google had made a big change. Having said that it’s still important that you understand when a change has happened so you can do the analysis at the time rather than just seeing the impact in your month end reporting and then trying to figure out when the change happened.
Some people say that ranking data is becoming less important and Raven Tools are no longer going to show the data in their system. The problem is that without ranking data it’s very hard to diagnose technical site issues, spot algorithm changes and perform an effective SEO campaign. Google has removed lots of keyword data via “not provided” and the recent update of Chrome while Apple has removed more with iOS6 so in 2013 we are anticipating that good ranking data will be more important than ever in a large scale SEO campaign.
Below are 5 really easy ways for you to monitor Google algorithm changes via aggregated ranking data & some nice free/paid tools.
Recently I wrote a reply to a blog post on Smashing Magazine and submitted it as a guest post. The post was intended to demonstrate what a specialist SEO agency actually does these days and to address the misconceptions that the design/development community seems to have about SEO.
The post I submitted is below and at the end of the email is the reply I got from Smashing Magazines editor declining to publish it. After a few emails backwards and forwards Smashing Magazine still does not believe what I am saying SEO agencies actually do. The misconceptions about SEO don’t just lie with Paul, they exist across some of the largest design blogs in the world. This is one of the most frustrating email exchanges I’ve had and I just hope they let somebody reply to this from the SEO industry on the blog Smashing Magazine blog.
Back in September, Tinie Tempah signed a letter to Prime Minister David Cameron that claimed search engines like Google should “play their part in protecting consumers and creators from illegal sites.”
Well, Google has gone some way to giving Tinie et al exactly what they asked for – search for “tinie tempah mp3” now and you’ll see this message several times:
What you won’t see is a single legitimate MP3 store on the first page of results – still. The highest ranking MP3 vendor is Amazon, who for me eventually makes an appearance just below the fold on page two.
After another sacking of a Chelsea manager – this time Roberto Di Matteo – we got talking in the office about which was the best football team to support.
Working in SEO. naturally I decided to check out Google’s answer to this “which football team should I support?”. After all the usual Yahoo answers and forums suggesting who the best team is, the first official club site that returns is Liverpool FC.
So, that got us thinking; if we are one of the UK’s leading digital agencies then surely Branded3 should support the UK’s digitally-leading football team. Here we take a look at the Premier League teams to find out who is top of the only league table that matters, the Branded3 Digital Premier League!
Building a strong content strategy for ecommerce sites is a challenge both from a creative perspective and also from a scalability perspective – no matter how important content is to SEO it’s hard for large scale ecommerce sites to produce great content across thousands of product pages, especially if the products are seasonal or have short lifespans.
This article is designed to cover our recommendations for how an ecommerce site should build a content strategy with the aim of becoming more useful and therefore helping with SEO performance in the mid to long term. This isn’t a guide on how to use content marketing to generate links.
Q&A Content
One of the best ways to add unique and user generated content to your product pages is by using Q&A content where your customers ask questions and your expert staff members answer them in a timely and helpful manner. This has a major impact on conversion rates with Halfords seeing a 58% increase and many other brands reporting similar numbers.
One brand doing Q&A content well is House of Fraser who have lots of engagement and also split the answered questions from the unanswered questions and even encourage other customers to answer for them.
Our top tips for correctly implementing Q&A to an ecommerce site:
- Make sure all content is placed on the product pages
- Don’t leave anything unanswered for more than an hour or two
- Email customers when the answer is posted
- Incentivise other customers to answer questions with discount codes or prizes
- Encourage users to share Q&A via social media
- Seed the Q&A with common questions about each product from your call centre or sales team if you can
- Have a team of experts ready to answer questions in a helpful manner – remember it should influence people to buy the product
- Also consider that if lots of people have the same question you need to improve your product description
Useful & Informational Content
Not all content should be on product or category pages – it’s very important to attract users at other levels of the buying cycle too and also to build trust with users as they progress through the site perhaps with user guides, generic Q&A etc.
The content strategy framework we use may come in useful here when deciding what content to place on the site.
Our Data Insights team analysed visits across one of the UK’s largest retail ecommerce websites and found that users who engaged with a piece of content such as an article, forum thread or video on the site before reaching a product or category page were 5 times more valuable than users who arrived directly on a product or category page.
Users who engage with quality content place more trust in the brand so convert at a higher rate, purchase more products and have a greater tendency to make repeat purchases in the future.
Increasing brand trust, improving conversion rates and encouraging larger sale values are all vital elements of any SEO campaign and adding additional content is the primary way to develop this.
As the chart below shows, people are already doing this just not perhaps with as much structure or commitment as we would like to see.
Below is a slide from our recent seminar where we demonstrated the value of content that sits at other levels in the buying cycle – some top line stats from this presentation include:
- Non brand organic SEO is 40% more valuable than a traditional “last click wins” methodology would show
- 40% of ecommerce transactions are carried out 24 hours or more after users first visit the website
- Only 40% of revenue is attributable to users who buy on the first visit – most of your customers will need to remember you and find you a second time
The full slides from the presentation are below, some useful stuff in there I hope.
User Reviews
The most important thing an ecommerce site should address is the issue of user reviews and how to correctly integrate these within the website. There are two types of user reviews we are interested in:
- Reviews of products purchased
- Reviews of your company & service levels
Product Reviews
There are two key reasons we add product reviews to a website – they help with long tail SEO traffic and improve conversion rates. The Bazaar Voice site has some case studies including gems such as how Argos uses product reviews to decide on which inventory they should be stocking (or getting rid of) as well as improving conversion rates by 10%, how Appliances Online use reviews to generate 30 times the CTR that a standard PPC campaign does, how Halfords saw users who engage with product reviews converting 82% higher than standard and how Evans Cycles increased SEO traffic by 23% just by adding product reviews to their pages.
Evans Cycles is the UK’s largest independent bicycle and cycling gear retailer. Recognizing their customers’ intense passion for cycling, Evans Cycles launched Bazaarvoice Ratings & Reviews in November 2009 and Ask & Answer in July 2010. User-generated content (UGC) has proven search benefits, so to maximize those, Evans Cycles launched SearchVoice Inline (SVI) for their reviews in July 2010. SVI embeds the text of the first few reviews on a product into the product page’s code, effectively updating the content to feed the freshness search engines crave.
What was measured
The team monitored Evans Cycles’ site traffic during the 12 weeks prior to and 12 weeks immediately following the SVI launch. Using Advanced Segment functionality in Google Analytics, we were able to specifically track organic traffic that landed on Evans Cycles pages with URL containing “/products/.”23% increase in search engine visits
After launching SVI, Evans Cycles saw a 23% increase in search engine visits to product pages. Additionally, the retailer’s keyword reach — the number of search terms referring searchers to Evans Cycles’ product pages — increased 14%.One product gets 361% more search visits
An Evans Cycles analyst also noted that he sees huge value in the addition of UGC on product pages due to the pages’ higher page rank in searches. “Diamondback Venom,” for example, a specific model of Diamondback bicycle, saw a higher page rank after launching SVI, and 361% more search visits than before launch.SearchVoice Inline for Evans Cycles reviews has been so successful at increasing search traffic that the retailer is now working to implement SVI on their customer Q&A as well.
Reviews of products purchased sounds like a straightforward feature to implement and most ecommerce packages have this. The problem is that without correct execution the systems are often useless. Below are the top tips we have for correctly implementing a product reviews system.
- Create a CRM system that emails customers a week or two after the purchase to ask for their feedback on the product
- Make sure the email is well designed with strong call to action and split test to get the best click through & open rates
- Incentivise customers with monthly prizes or discount codes if they leave a review
- Create a strong landing page for customers to add their reviews without having to login or find the product – link directly from the email to a nice form they can complete
- Make sure customers can review multiple products in the same form
- Allow customers to review different attributes such as value, quality, price etc and then calculate an aggregate rating
- Use rich snippet markup on your product pages
- Try to use your own system, if you have to use 3rd party reviews be careful about duplicate content and always own your data
- Encourage users to share their review via social media when it’s posted
- Place the reviews on the product page not on a separate URL
Reviews Of Your Business
The second type of reviews that ecommerce sites need to implement are reviews of their business and service levels. These are commonly left on a review site such as Trust Pilot or Feefo. These sites offer three main benefits and have the usual good case studies about why you should use them. If you use PPC then you really can’t choose not to use them due to the CTR benefits they give (assuming you have good reviews).
Helping you get star ratings next to your PPC ads.
Improving your onsite conversion rates by allowing you to display a nice badge showing what a great business you are.
The reviews also help your rankings in Google Product Search but this system is being merged with AdWords so the benefit might not last much longer.
Most of the review site services will integrate with your system and email your customers asking for reviews themselves. There isn’t much that you need to do other than make sure everything is running smoothly and they are emailing after you are sure the product has arrived and you have had chance to resolve any delivery issues. This review email should be sent before the one asking for a review of the product because you want customers to review your business and not the product.
Product Descriptions
Making a product description exciting isn’t always easy depending on your industry but one thing is very clear these days, it’s no longer acceptable to have product descriptions that are short, bland, duplicate content or not designed to encourage users to make a purchase.
The best strategy for product descriptions is to inject some personality into them and have your product team write a unique description of at least 250 words when the product is uploaded. We always recommend that clients have a secondary blurb about the product which is an experts opinion on why the user should buy it over other similar products on the market. This can increase conversion rates even further especially if you add things like an author bio box to the expert comment or can find another way to add credibility to their opinions.
Writing product descriptions isn’t complicated, as long as you follow some simple rules:
- Write informative & descriptive copy designed to reflect your brands personality
- Write for your target audience
- Make sure the copy sells the product & covers features / benefits
- Forget about SEO and keywords
- Inject some fun into the descriptions
- Don’t make them too short – it’s rare that less than 250 words is OK
- Add an extra Experts Opinion to explain why you should buy this product over another
- Try to cover all the likely objections and questions people might have about the product
- Think about the product description as if you were stood on stage in front of thousands of people trying to sell the product – what would you say? How long would you spend writing your speech?
Category Pages
Category and sub-category pages are quite a challenge when it comes to SEO because for most sites other than the really small specialist retailers it’s the category pages that are going to have to rank for the big commercial keywords. Amazon for example needs a really strong category page to rank for “laptops” but a specialist laptop retailer might be able to use their homepage. How can Amazon or another generalist retailer hope to compete with the specialists using a category page which has less link equity?
The key to creating a great category page is to think of it as a hub which links to all the important information about the products in that category. So if we had a “laptops” category page we would link to the top selling products but also various buying guides, the latest reviews, informative articles, the latest Q&A content and perhaps some credentials or information on why you are the experts in selling laptops.
We need to make sure there is content on the category pages and the important thing here is to make sure the content is very useful to a user who is researching or buying the product you are selling. For example if the product was a laptop you should be explaining about the latest offers you have and why the user needs to be thinking about a touch screen or Windows 8 machine etc. Perhaps some notes about battery life or the benefits of a solid state drive. Users should want to read your category page text before they look at the products – if not then you are doing it wrong.
Content Strategy and Content Marketing have been getting a huge amount of attention this year for a number of reasons and I wanted to discuss our views on these strategies and how best to use them as part of an SEO campaign.
The interesting thing about the focus on content strategy is that it’s not a new strategy at all. Content strategy has been around for years. Bill Gates talked about “content is king” in 1996, Jakob Nielsen in 1997 and the “content is king” phrase has been in use within the SEO industry since around 2003 with SEObook and seroundtable discussing content as an SEO strategy in early 2004. This isn’t cutting edge SEO – people have been doing it for nearly a decade.
Content Strategy & Google
Is content marketing a white hat way of doing SEO? It certainly is but as with any white hat strategy people will push the boundaries and plenty of people have been using content marketing in a way that isn’t really aligned with what Google wants to see. For example, consider a retailer with 5,000 product pages with below average quality product descriptions and a blog with lots of successful linkbait style posts. Does the fact that lots of people link to the blog mean that the product or other commercial pages are a better destination for Google to send searchers to? Probably not so why should the site rank higher for commercial queries?
If Matt Cutts was to give you advice on how to make the site above better do you think he would suggest improving the content of main site first or doing some linkbait/infographics?
If the blog is outsourced to a writer or an agency and just contains linkbait posts then I would argue that this should have no impact on SEO because it doesn’t affect the quality or usefulness of the actual landing page that a user is going to end up on. If the blog is written by the site owner (perhaps with help from the agency) and is full of interesting information and shows that the business is passionate and knowledgeable about the products then this is a totally different proposition and it should definitely affect the rankings of the product pages.
There is a key principle here and one that will be very important in a year or two. You have to make your content strategy defensible and make sure it never looks like you were doing it to gain links.
The key principle about content strategy is that the number 1 goal is to make your site better – getting more links is secondary.
Looking at the examples above it’s clear that if you are going to invest in content strategy (which is a long term investment, Rand says up to 5 years) then you have to get it right and not run the risk of your strategy being devalued once Google sees too many people succeeding with it. There are plenty of sites who are not willing to sort out the main part of their site so they try to generate rankings by using a content marketing strategy via a blog or other section of the site – this isn’t aligned very well with the Google desire to rank the best sites at the top.
The best content strategy to have is to actually optimise your commercial landing pages to make them as good as they can be before investing time and effort to build fantastic blog posts, infographics and other amazing linkbait pages for your site. It’s a far better investment to make sure your product pages, category pages and any other commercial landing pages that make up the main part of your site are absolutely first class in terms of content and design before you start to spend time putting content elsewhere.
Google wants to send users to the best possible result for a particular query because they see the value in keeping their users happy. If you neglect the content strategy for your commercial pages then Google will stop ranking them no matter how many fantastic blog posts or other great & well linked pages you have on your site.
When you invest in content strategy, start with your commercial pages!
Do people love your pages?
It’s unquantifiable, tough to explain to clients & impossible to make a business case for but site quality and how much your users love your site is a major ranking factor these days.
Google can tell whether people love your website & is rewarding the most loved websites with higher rankings. Panda downgraded sites that people didn’t love – why wouldn’t Google reward sites that people do love?
Hundreds of user engagement signals are analysed and fed into an artificial intelligence algorithm. The algorithm learns how to detect whether users love a site or not (probably with the help of seed sites). Remember, Chrome has 33% market share & Analytics is in use on over 10m websites.
So if user engagement and making users love your site is so important you cannot ignore content strategy for the actual pages that they are driven to on the site. We often speak to clients who neglect the content on their commercial pages but are happy to invest lots in a great blog or some infographics. This is the wrong way round – you have to sort your primary pages first.
What can we do with the site?
Once you have sorted all your commercial pages a big part of content strategy is figuring out what new pages need to exist on the site and again this should be done to make the site more useful rather than to attract links. Sections like Q&A are great as they have lots of natural language content that can attract long tail visitors.
The image above shows a very top line view of how we would start thinking about a content strategy for a client.
Branded3’s Director of Search Patrick Altoft and Head of Search Tim Grice led the first of our monthly Google+ Hangouts on Friday, in which SEO enthusiasts took advantage of the hour to ask the expert pair anything they liked.
The Hangout was the first in our monthly Brunch with Branded3 sessions, and having been such a great success, we can’t wait for the next one!
Questions for the Hangout were either submitted beforehand to brunch@branded3.com, or were tweeted to us or left on our Google+ page during the session, and luckily Tim and Patrick managed to get through nearly all of them.
The Hangout featured a lot of questions surrounding reconsideration requests and the Disavow Tool, and is well worth watching if you’re also facing challenges around these topics.
You can check out the Hangout video below, or on our YouTube channel, and if you have a question for Patrick or Tim but didn’t get chance to ask it last Friday, feel free to post it in the comments section below or email brunch@branded3.com.
Plus, don’t forget to join us for our next Brunch with Branded3 Hangout on Thursday 24th January; keep an eye out on our blogs for details of which of our experts will be leading the Hangout, or if there’s a particular SEO, Digital or Social Media topic you’d really like to see discussed, feel free to email it over and we’ll see what we can do.
Thanks to all those who got involved on Friday, we hope you found it informative and will join us again!
A new study by Monetate shows just how far Safari has caught up with other browsers thanks to the rise of iPhone and iPad use. Our figures for the UK market are not quite as dramatic as the US study but they still show Safari ahead of Chrome and growing quickly.
I always find it amazing how many sites don’t work properly in Safari or on the iPhone/iPad and there are lots of well known sites where you just can’t use them. Sites with ajax sliders are usually terrible on the iPhone – when was the last time people checked their conversion rates in different browsers?
Data from some of our clients is below:
The chart below shows Stacounter figures but these don’t tally with what we see or with what the study at the bottom of the post shows.
Below we can see the results for US sites both for conversion rates and browser market share. Sites simply have to have a version that works in all browsers because otherwise you are losing a huge amount of potential revenue. This Christmas with people buying more tablets of all shapes and sizes the market is going to get even more confused making a good responsive design a must have next year.
Very interesting to see conversion rates on tablets not far behind traditional PC’s.
We’re really excited and pleased to be able to announce that Virgin Holidays has chosen Branded3 as their new SEO partner.
The move by Virgin Holidays marks the end of their search for new digital agencies to partner with. Our SEO team will begin work immediately on the account, working alongside their newly-appointed lead creative agency, M&C Saatchi.
The Marketing Director for Virgin Holidays, Andrew Shelton, had this to say about the new appointment:
“We believe Branded3 is part of an incredibly strong roster of digital agencies that we work with that reflects our ambitions in this channel. It was important for us to be able to pull on the skills of experts in their field and we’re now looking forward to capitalising on their enthusiasm, experience and market-leading abilities. Branded3 is well respected within their individual digital stream and has a USP that fits our objectives in this space.”
Our very own Director of Search, Patrick Altoft, commented on the team’s excitement at the win:
“We’re really excited about working with Virgin Holidays and are looking forward to helping them achieve their full potential in SEO. Branded3 has a huge amount of experience in the travel sector and our online PR focused link strategy is a perfect fit for a well-known brand like Virgin Holidays.”
We’re confident that the work we’ll produce for Virgin Holidays will live up to our usual award-winning standards, and we can’t wait to see what results the partnership brings!
As part of the merging of the Blogstorm.co.uk and Branded3.com websites we have deleted a few of the older and less valuable blog posts. One of the big ones that we have just removed was the post that I created in 2008 to rank for the www.direct.gov.uk/taxdisc keyword.
This post gets around 2000-3000 visits per day with peaks at over 5000 visits. The record was over 12,000 visits in a single day.
We noticed that the post has terrible user engagement and can’t be helping the rest of the sites rankings. The conversion rate is non-existent and if Google is throttling traffic to the domain like they often do we don’t want this traffic to replace relevant traffic.
The post has sent around 750,000 visits per year for 4 years now so we felt it was about time to turn if off. It will be interesting to see what happens to traffic to the rest of the site, I’m guessing it will go up. We have seen before the impact of turning off low value pages that get lots of traffic and we usually see the rest of the site get a boost.
Since Blogstorm was launched in June 2007, quite a lot has changed in the world of SEO and with me as well. When I launched Blogstorm I was doing a lot of affiliate marketing and had just left my day job to focus on that side of things, as well as doing some SEO consulting.
Blogstorm is the only SEO blog so far to be featured on Techcrunch and Problogger on the day of launch and I very much doubt that feat can every be achieved again in any industry. Back in 2007, nobody used Twitter so links were shared around sites like Digg and people got their news via RSS and blogs. Blogstorm was created as a link tracker so people could see what the most shared links on the web were on any given day and you could also look at any site and see the most linked to pages. This was before sites like SEOmoz offered this functionality (they didn’t launch Linkscape until October 2008) and it was all developed just by me with the Yahoo Site Explorer API.
Although it was a fantastic analysis tool for SEO’s to see which linkbaits were working best, not many people used it in comparison to the number of people who read the blog on the site, so eventually I turned off the link tracker and just kept the blog. Maybe I should have taken VC funding and created a full scale index of the web and competed with SEOmoz.
It wasn’t until the end of 2007 that I merged my consultancy business into Branded3 and we setup the SEO department. Five years later we have a team of 45 people and are working on some of the largest and most exciting campaigns in the UK, so the decision to focus on clients rather than tools was probably the correct one.
With less time to blog personally and no real reason to have separate domains it felt that now was a good time to merge the blogstorm.co.uk domain into Branded3.com so we can use it to showcase our collective opinions about SEO, rather than just my thoughts. Blogstorm still exists and the only difference is you need to visit http://www.branded3.com/blogs/blogstorm/ instead of blogstorm.co.uk. All old posts have been migrated and links will all still work.
If you find any errors let us know in the comments.
Thanks for reading this and for all your support in the past 5.5 years. Below is a screenshot showing just how many visits we’ve had!
Over the weekend I got the usual few dozen spam emails from foreign SEO companies wanting to do some SEO for us. If the emails make it past our spam filter I sometimes read them just to see what they are saying.
Recently I’ve seen these emails starting to sound more and more legitimate and it’s reached the stage where the only thing that a layman would notice is the fact the language isn’t native English and they are emailing from a gmail address most of the time.
The email below talks about all the same things that an SEO agency might talk about in a pitch from domain authority to anchor text variation and even link strategies that are Penguin safe – the difference is that if you were to hire the agency below you will get a definite penalty from Google.
One interesting (and very common) misconception is the one explaining that Penguin causes traffic to drop because sites linking to you were hit by Penguin. This isn’t correct at all – Penguin didn’t devalue links it just penalised sites that had been engaging in overly aggressive optimisation tactics.
They even talk about measuring domain authority using Open Site Explorer which is great apart from the bit where they want to build links on DA 15+ sites which is pretty low.
Our advice is to always ignore emails like this and never work with a company unless you are 100% sure they are reputable. Most of the penalties Google has handed out recently are due to people outsourcing their link-building to spammy companies outside the UK.
Hello
With frequent search engine algorithm updates like Panda, penguin in Google,link building has become even more critical.But we can use effective ways of creating authority links for enhanced link building results
Ranking or Traffic drop in the webmaster tools graph is not due to the penalty sometimes but rather due to value of links which were being or has been discounted.
This is why Google has begun saying that Penguin isn’t a penalty but rather just an algorithmic change,where the algorithm is detecting low quality links or votes and not counting them. If you were a site with a lot of low links or votes, then you’re going to be hit harder than sites that have only a few of them among all the legitimate ones.
“Put your focus on building good quality links rather than trying to fix all of your crappy ones. Eventually, you’ll have a higher ratio, and you’ll get rewarded”
Link building criteria we follow to avoid spammy tactics that can be harmful after panda and penguin
• Domain Authority
After Google Penguin update, to build high quality authority links, we have made a database of quality websites for linking and all sites has been added with checking domain authority from http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/.
• Anchor Text variation
You can use the Junk Anchor text for link if required.After latest Google updates, you should try building your link profile with Junk/universal anchors, Naked URLs, and Branded Anchors texts.We are offering Post Penguin Services to gain high quality links to your web site, All our packages are based to submit in sites which have Domain Authority of 15+ in http://www.opensiteexplorer.org
So if you would be interested please email me back. I will send you some packages along with price.
Hope to have a positive response soon from you
Thanks and Regards,
Thomas
Latest from B3Labs
- Another milestone reached for Branded3 as it’s acquired by the
St Ives Group - The latest media consumer findings & what they mean for digital marketers
- Talk to Branded3 at @BuyYorkshire in Leeds next week!
Latest from Blogstorm
- Early thoughts on Penguin 2.0
- 5 myths about manual penalty recovery
- Google gets more aggressive with link devaluation
