Mon, 1 Dec 2008 12:52:47 by Matt Hopkins
A recent report by Deloitte's predicts that UK online spending will rise by 10% this Christmas compared with last year.
The results of their recent survey shows that people who shop online are planning to spend more this year compared with traditional shoppers. It also shows that there has been an increase in the numbers of people who shop online. Deloitte's said that consumers who do most of their shopping online are expecting to spend an average of £773 this Christmas, compared with £655 for the total population.
They also point out that the number of retailers offering ecommerce sites has increased to 81 percent from 71 percent last year and 51 percent in 2006.
It will be interesting to see how these UK predictions pan out.
US analysts, comScore, released actual performance results from the Thanksgiving shopping weekend in the USA which were fairly flat:
For the holiday season-to-date,...Read More.
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Fri, 28 Nov 2008 15:36:39 by Joe Bursell
Recently Google has released a beta of it's search based keyword tool. It is intended for PPC usage, but there is some SEO value to be gained in terms of keyword research and selection.
It compares your website (and any current PPC campaigns) with historic search queries, and identifies extra keywords that might be useful.
Here's a snapshot of some results:
Joe BursellCampaign Delivery Manager...Read More.
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Fri, 28 Nov 2008 14:57:30 by Joe Bursell
A year ago I blogged about latent semantic indexing, but didn't offer any SEO tools to test if your content could be seen as contextually relevant, or if your keywords are seen by the engines as closely related to other, perhaps equally useful keywords.
After doing some nosing around I found Princeton University's lexical database that offers suggestions for related words. It works, but isn't good with phrases, or colloquial terms.
Then I remembered that Google is pretty good at giving related word examples, not directly though. By using the tilde ~ synonym finder operator in a search you'll get shown related results, and more importantly the SERPs will show you whether you are pursuing the right keyword if it has multiple meanings.
So, if you're struggling to cover as many bases as possible in your initial keyword research a simple ~ can go a long way. For instance, if you've got a website that sells road traffic monitoring equipment, and you've...Read More.
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Fri, 28 Nov 2008 14:12:25 by Pete Handley
If you are expecting some downtime on your website - perhaps you might be moving web servers or need to perform some server maintenance? If this is going to happen, and you know about it in advance, then there are some steps that you can take to prevent your site being re-indexed by the Search Engines at just the wrong time and protect all those SEO results you have been working to maintain and improve by getting the website to report a 503 header status.
First off, I’ll give a bit more info about why we want to do this. A “normal” web page returns what’s called a 200 header status. This tells search engines and browsers that this page is a normal webpage and is “ok”.
A web page that has been permanently removed reports a header status of 404. This is why it’s important to have a functioning error 404 page, because when it is done badly, an error page can return a 200 status and tell search engines that an error...Read More.
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Thu, 27 Nov 2008 10:16:29 by Matt Hopkins
The IDC have just released the results of a study on social networking services (SNS) such as FaceBook, MySpace, Bebo, etc.
Their research shows that SNS sites have great market penetration with more than half of US consumers (with Internet access) using such sites regularly. They also believe that this will grow over the coming years.
So good news for SNS sites, but not great news for advertisers.
Users of SNS sites seem to be resistant to advertising on these sites - or certainly not in a "buying frame of mind" when using them. It seems that only 57% of users of social network sites have clicked on an ad in the last year compared with 79% of all web users.
In terms of these click converting into sales, apparently only 11% of SNS users will actually place an order versus 23% for the rest of the internet.
So the click through rates and conversions are very low compared to other online resources. This is largely do...Read More.
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Thu, 27 Nov 2008 09:53:25 by David Thomas
Welcome back Pay Per Clickers!
Following on from part 3 of my Glossary, This weeks term I have hand picked for all you keen Pay Per Click guys out there is one that has a real sense of importance within a PPC campaign. Many prospective clients and newbies turning to PPC for the first time want to know what the figures are behind this term as it relies heavily on the amount spent on a campaign.
Today's term for you all is CPA - Cost Per Acquisition. This term is also know to many as the cost per conversion.
With Pay Per Click Marketing being a very direct and instant form of advertising your products or services to the general web search world, a fast and frenzied approach to a new account can be taken. Keywords can be expensive and positions hard to get for the money. Many of you may think just spend and spend more again. However this is not always the case and big budgets are not always available........
So a real concentration on ...Read More.
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Wed, 26 Nov 2008 11:53:45 by Kerry Dye
This is part 3 of my occasional series on “Measuring the Success of an SEO Campaign”. The first part was about the long tail and the second was using search engine traffic levels. This third instalment uses one of the many other metrics available to website owners: conversion.
We post about conversion quite often on this blog, because it is an important element of your website. We’ve given lots of tips on how to improve your site conversions. However, it can have some drawbacks to using it as an SEO metric.
There can be issues with using different measurement of conversion e.g. Adwords and Analytics track conversions differently - this means that in Analytics a sale or lead could be marked as an SEO conversion but in Adwords, the PPC ad would get the credit.
Conversions are much more subject to on-page issues – no two websites ever convert the same. Additionally, making changes on a site can make big differences which are not related t...Read More.
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Tue, 25 Nov 2008 14:31:07 by Matt Hopkins
We've just released the first in a collection of landing page templates that you can use in your own PPC campaigns. These templates are professionally designed around certain core themes - the first one being released today is designed to support your Christmas "special offers".
Each set of templates will include:
main offer page - simply add your copy and your logo
working enquiry form - with php script to handle emailing
thank you page - update with logo, copy and conversion tracking
We've found that pages on most company's primary web sites do not make great PPC landing pages. There are many reasons for this, but they include:
web pages do not sell - they tend to be more informational and lack the necessary call to action to complete a transaction
they are not simple or clear enough to allow the searcher to make a buying decision quickly
they have too many exit links which cause the visito...Read More.
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Mon, 24 Nov 2008 14:48:33 by Emily Mace
When I was browsing the web the other day I found a really good article on the importance of internet marketing at the current time. Internet marketing gives you some real flexibility for marketing your business and responding to trends quickly whenever needed. The costs associated with some tweaks to your SEO or website content will be more cost effective to you than rushing out adverts to the traditional media.
As the news is full of stories about the economy it’s more important than ever to make the most of your website and it’s potential.
More and more consumers and businesses are being discerning about the services that they use and who they buy from. This means that making the most of your website is key to being in pole position to get the sale.
Make the most of your blog, publicise your special offers and deals. Pay attention to the long tail searches people are performing at the mo...Read More.
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Fri, 21 Nov 2008 15:53:29 by Pete Handley
Google's personalised searching changes have taken a new twist with the release of Search Wiki, as is being widely reported at the moment including on Google's own blog.
Rather than Google deciding how to personalise results for you, when signed in, you can now remove and move around the placements of the search engine results - and then next time you search for the same phrase, the order that you gave results will be remembered and served back to you.
Google are stressing that this data isn't going to be used to determine standard placements - they say "The changes you make only affect your own searches" - but it will be interesting to see if they use this data in the future to help
quality assure the results that they serve for particular keyword searches.
When you look at a SERP when signed in, there are a number of new elements that you wouldnt have seen until now:
I've marked the new button...Read More.
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