Archive for the ‘Online Advertising’ Category

Google Places replaced with Google+ Local (DON’T PANIC)

Friday, June 1st, 2012

Google have been trying just about everything to try and get Google+ to get some traction.  There was quite a buzz around it’s launch, but since it was largely seen as “another Facebook” by the general populace it failed to take over that market.

Google announced the change on Wednesday, and today local listings in search results have changed in format (see below)

Google+ Local replacing Google Places

A new scoring system replaces stars.

At present the system seems to be in a state of flux.  The top listing above is showing the new scoring system which replaces the star system of Google Places.

Zagat and Google

Restaurant reviewers Zagat have teamed up with Google for the new system. I say teamed up, but actually Google just went and bought Zagat in September which makes working together much easier! It will not only be food that is scored though.  In fact there will be more than one category in some verticals.

Zagat scores on Google+ Local

For categories with only one type of data or without enough just a single overall score will be displayed.

I’m a business owner, how do I access my Google Places information now?

For now you can still access your Google+ Local information through the unchanged Google Places interface.  I’m sure that will change down the line.  After all, it is in Google’s best interest to force people onto their social network.  If you are a business owner you do not need to reclaim your business or anything like that.

What happens to my old reviews and data from Google Places?

This section applies specifically to reviews, not to editing your business.  The next time you write a review (on Google+ Local) you will be asked what you want to do with your old ones.  The reason you will be asked is that from now on your name will be on every review you post! Maybe this will cut down on fake reviews but it is more likely to just result in more fake Google+ accounts in my opinion.

You will be asked whether you want to make old posts private or to put your name on them.  You have to deselect boxes to remove your name.  Reviews with no name will essentially not count.  I know I had to make a few private, even though they were legitimate reviews, simply because they belonged to clients.  I don’t want people screaming “FAKE REVIEW” even though I only ever gave on if it was genuine.

What will the changes to Google Places achieve?

Personally I like the new look.  I like the prices displayed beside the hotels in the example above.  Was it like that before?  I don’t think so and if it was I never noticed.  I also like the multiple review categories.

I don’t really like that I have been on Google+ for the first time in about 6 months.  I’d given it up as dead and I don’t really expect that to change.  That said, it does make sense for Google to put everything in one place.

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Posted in Google, Marketing, Online Advertising, Product Launches | Comments Off

Budgeting for Success – What we can learn from the economy

Tuesday, December 7th, 2010

In times of financial hardship (and it looks like we are in for a few years of that post-budget) it is tempting to reign in spending on anything that is not 100% necessary.  What we can learn from the economy on this is that there is a happy (I use the term loosely) medium.

While the government is reigning in its spending there is precious little talk of investment.  This is reflected across many Irish business’s.  A siege mentality has beset the country.  “Baton down the hatches” is the order of the day.  Lets take a little look at some of the contributing factors.

  1. During the celtic tiger years companies were making enough money not to have to keep too tight a reign on spending.  Thus as sales dropped in reaction to the property crash many Irish companies found themselves to be hemorrhaging cash at an alarming rate.  Fear set in and belts were tightened.  Advertising and Marketing budgets were slashed, staff were let go, and bringing outgoings down to a bare minimum became the order of the day.
  2. The banks, who were also in big trouble stopped lending to business as freely as they had done before.  This led to some dire cashflow problems in many business’s and sadly we have lost an awfully high number of Irish business’s over the past few years.
  3. The number of competitors going out of business increased panic levels among those that were hanging in there.  It was and still is a time where most business’s in Ireland are putting a lot of energy into saving money.  Unfortunately this has also resulted in the sort of dubious practices that make business harder in Ireland, like waiting until final demands before paying on invoices.  This is being done even where it is not necessary.

A time of great opportunity

The Small Firms Association (SFA) is calling out for investment into our economy… and in particular for the 80% of Irish business’s that are the backbone of our economy – small firms.

Brian cowen tightens his belt too far

Tighten Your Belt by all means, but it should still fit around your waist!

The reason is that without investment the economy cannot grow.  By over-tightening belts we are making sure that they no longer fit around our waists, but rather fit somewhat too snugly around our necks and choke us.

We can all too easily see the problems with the national economy, but many Irish business’s are taking exactly the same measures that we rail against when the government does it.  If we do not invest in our business’s they will die.

That means that we need to invest in advertising, in marketing and in customer service.  These are the things that we all learned about in college, but that panic is preventing many from acting on.  Prudence is prudent, but within reason.

How did you start out marketing your business?  Are you still actively looking for new customers and investing in finding them?

Now is a time of great opportunity for those who are brave enough to buck the trends.  The media will jump on any positive stories, advertising prices have come down, and judicious use of Social Media can provide really cost effective branding and advertising to a population that is now more likely to be at home on their computer than out in the pub.

A small budget campaign now can yield results that would not have been the same a few short years ago.

Summary

Yes consumer spend is down.

No, market share is not less important than it was.

Yes, now is a good time to take some of that market share off those concentrating on belt tightening.

Budget for success – not for slowing your demise.

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Posted in Marketing, Online Advertising, Online Marketing | Comments Off

Is it better to advertise on Google or Facebook?

Friday, August 13th, 2010
Pictures get attention on facebook

What has this got to do with PPC campaigns? Read the text. Pictures get attention.

Both Google and Facebook allow you to create a pay per click (PPC) campaign.  The idea is that you only pay when somebody clicks on your advertisement.

On Google these adverts are placed to the right of their search results and sometimes on top of them too.  On Facebook the ads all have pictures and show up on the right hand side of the page.  The question is, which gives better results?

The answer should be straight forward and simple.  Google has waaaaayyyyy more traffic, and your advertisement will be seen by far more users….. or will it?  What about ad blindness?  We are all very used to seeing PPC advertising on Google.  I ignore them.  So do a lot of people.  In fact only about 16% of users actually click on the ads.  This is still a huge number and there is no doubt whatsoever that a Google adwords campaign is very effective.

Facebook on the other hand has some unique advantages over Google.  The biggest one being demographics.  Only want to target females over 20 in Ireland?  No problem.  Marketing departments love that.

What about that picture?  How many magazines do you see on the shelves with no picture on the cover?  Pictures get attention!  It is as simple as that.

Facebook has another ace up its sleeve.  It is a social network.  People are connecting with friends and family – people they trust.  Subconsciously this passes on to Facebook itself.  Sure there have been privacy issues, but overall people trust Facebook.  If they didn’t it would not be the largest social networking site in Ireland.  That trust passes on to advertisers to some extent.  If an advertisement shows up while I look at a friends profile, then I am going to associate.  I won’t even know I’m doing it.

It was for that reason that I was so horrified when I saw the SEO tips advertisement on Facebook.

Facebooks advertising revenue has been shooting up lately. Everybody is going to be doing it.  Now is the time to get the jump on your competitors.  Will it be better than Google?  Jury is out.  It will certainly compliment an adwords campaign though and complement an overall online marketing mix.

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Posted in Facebook, Google, Online Advertising, PPC | Comments Off

Copywriting: Write better internet copy for more clicks.

Saturday, July 31st, 2010

Search Engine Optimisation all but killed good copywriting for years.  Writing for the internet was all about keywords and much less about the actual content.  The theory was, that even a bad site that ranked well would always outperform a good site that nobody could find.  Nothing wrong with that logic!

Lorum ipsum text on billboard.

Too many web pages read like a page of 'lorum ipsum'. You wouldn't do it on a billboard. Good copywriting is vital!

Times have changed though.  Websites are more sophisticated as indeed are the people who read their content.  Take you for example.  You probably look at websites every day (0r nearly every day).  How often were you online 10 or 15 years ago?

What if you are not in that top position on Google? You may have spent a lot of time and effort trying to get there, but have not managed it yet.  You are up against thousands if not millions of competing pages for just about any keyword.  How do you get more clicks.

The short answer is  – write better copy! What does the title of your page say?  More importantly, what does it say that will make it stand out, make somebody want to click it?  Is it just your company name with a bunch of keywords strapped onto it?  Would you write your page title as a headline in a printed brochure?

Lets run with that for a while.  In traditional print media, the images and the copy are all important.  Ask a newspaper editor how important a headline is to selling papers!  Why should it be different online?  Three little letters.  S. E. O.

Of course SEO is important.  But successful online marketing should incorporate both excellent SEO and outstanding copy writing.  (by the way I just did something there… I split copy and writing, which I have not done in the rest of the text.  That is aimed at SEO – catering for the different ways in which people may write their search query).

It is not just the page title that is important either.  What about the meta description? This text comes up under your page title in Google results.  It is a golden opportunity to sell your page.  People have a tendency to use it like the now outdated and largely defunct meta keyword tag.  They fill it with keywords.  Lovely, but it does not appeal to me as a human being and make me want to click on your page.

Pick a keyword that you would love to be at number one in the search results for.  Maybe one where you come in at position 4-6.  Look at the results before you that are ahead of you.  How could you write your page title to be more enticing than theirs?  The first shop on a street does not necessarily make the most money.  The one that can entice and then cater to its customers does.

If you can attract visitors while in a lower position, then it will actually help you to climb too.  If you have good copy people will link to it.  More inbound links from relevant sources = higher search engine positioning (to really simplify it).

I will be writing more on Copywriting and how to use it to get more clicks in the future, but if you take on board the small bit that is in this post it can make quite a large impact on your site traffic.

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Posted in Copywriting, Online Advertising, Online Marketing | 1 Comment »

SEO Tips Revealed on Facebook

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010
Scam advertising for SEO on Facebook?

Top SEO tips or a scam advert on Facebook?

For the last few days I have been seeing the ad on the right showing up in Facebook.  It offers 50 top SEO tips from 8 experts.

Naturally, since SEO and online marketing are my business, I was curious.  So I clicked on it.  I have to say I am appalled.  I do not know who I am more appalled with to be honest.   The creator of the ad or Facebook themselves.

The page it links to offers 5 SEO tips… and I really hope these are not the top 5 SEO tips!

There is no mention of a company name or registered business number.  There is just a form looking for your email address.  In return for your email address you will receive the other 45 SEO tips.

More worryingly (is that actually a word? spell check doesn’t seem to mind), A lookup of the web page using Whois (http://whois.domaintools.com) shows that the site is registered to “WhoisGuard”.  In other words whoever is behind this site is hiding their identity by going through a company that does just that for them.  Alarm bells going off for anybody else or is it just me?

I was in the middle of writing a post about PPC ads on Facebook and Google when I stumbled across this.  Needless to say, it may well colour my findings in relation to which is the best bet.  Do you want to advertise your company in a place that could very quickly become known for scam advertising?

Lets address the actual SEO tips on the page (I’m not publishing the url because I don’t want to be responsible for any traffic going there).

  1. Put your main keywords in the TITLE META TAG of your page. Separate your keyword phrases with the “|”or “-” character. Your page title makes a huge impact to your SEO ranking.
    This is misleading. Yes the title tag is extremely important.  The number of characters should be kept down below 70 and the text should be enticing to humans (who are the traffic you want) as well as search engines.  Try to keep your keywords / phrases near the beginning of the title. As for separating with the “|” or “-” characters… that has ZERO impact on SEO and is purely for how it looks.
  2. Focus on targeting KEYWORD PHRASES rather than single word keywords. There could be millions of pages on the Internet that contain a single-word keyword and searching for one brings untargeted results. If your page is about hair care, then that’s the keyword phrase you want to focus on.
    Badly worded, but the essence of how this works is that the longer the keyword phrase (eg. “SEO tips revealed” – 210 thousand competing pages on Google), the less competition there will be for it (eg. “SEO” – 204 million competing pages on Google).  You should not abandon single word keywords.  It is just easier to rank for longer tailed keywords.  In their example targeting just the word “hair” would make sense too if you ask me!
  3. Get links from authority sites in your industry linking back to your site. Submit your site to quality directories such as Yahoo, DMOZ, Business.com, Aviva, and Best of the web.
    Oh God!
    This used to be great advice…. DMOZ in particular.  But Google have announced that they will not be using DMOZ any more as part of their ranking algorithms.  In general, if you are doing your SEO in 1984 then this is great advice.  For those of us in the here and now, while not detrimental, listings in directories has very little of the impact it once had.
  4. Get quick links back to your website by posting comments on relevant blogs. With your comment include a link back to your site. Use one of your main keywords as your link text.
    (Banging head against wall). Anybody who has ever owned a blog will be aware of just how much spam appears in the form of comments.  If you were creating a search engine algorithm, and were aware that 99% of blog comments are spam, just how much weight would you give to a blog comment in terms of it helping a site to rank highly?  Search engines are not developed by a spotty 14 year old kid in a bedroom, they have teams of doctors working on them… point being, they are not stupid!
  5. Include the META Keyword tag in the HEAD section of the HTML source code of your website but keep your the keyword list to less than 10 phrases.
    Where is my Stone Washed Denim Jacket?Yes friends, the 80′s must be back!  I shall make this short.  Google ignore the meta keyword tag! (and if you’re in Ireland, then frankly Google is the only search engine that matters).

This is the 5 tips that they showed in order to entice you to sign up for another 45 of the same?  Come on… it’s just an email grabbing scam.. surely!  Obviously I don’t know what their intentions are, but bad advice and hiding your identity do not make me trust easily.

Facebook, what are you doing?  Do you not vet your advertising clients in any way whatsoever?  Or is it just a case of get the money in and make your targets?

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Posted in Facebook, Online Advertising, Public Relations, Search Engine Optimisation, Social Media | 9 Comments »