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A few weeks ago I wrote about the BBC’s new web site home page (in beta form) and why they felt the need to revamp it. Today they have set the new home page live. Already I am frustrated! As described in my earlier article it is no longer possible to tailor the home page and to organise it to suit your preferences. So my beloved BBC Business section is no longer accessible directly from the home page. It’s now 2 clicks away rather than being a summary window on the old home page. The other immediate frustration is that while the new home page was built with other platforms in mind (e.g. tablets) the swipe function on my iPad does not let me scroll the top windows left/right as the layout suggests it should.

Final gripe – two months since the beta test started it doesn’t look like many of the comments people have made have been built into the final live version. I predict the BBC’s Alexa rank will fall from the current no.45 pretty quickly. Those of us who don’t simply want to access the “lighterweight” elements of the BBC content and want the “more serious” stuff are likely to wander off elsewhere. I could be wrong of course, in which case I’ll eat my blog…

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One of the major trends in Search is the growth in local search. As people have become more savvy about search engines and search engines have become more savvy about what people want on the results page so localising search results has become more and more of a priority.

In fact so strong has this trend been on search engines such as Google that it has severly impacted on the performance of traditional local advertising services such as Yellow Pages and Thomson Local – you may have noticed just how much smaller their printed directories are these days! It is harder and harder to justify paying for your business to be included in these printed directories.

Local search is about to explode! So, get prepared. Why? Well, the arrival of smartphones means search results are being tailored to the users location. So, if you’re standing in Reigate High Street and search “cinema listings” the odds are very high you’ll be given the current movie listings at Reigate’s cinema – you won’t even have to geo-limit the query. It will be assumed you want local results. So, you need to prepare your business website and advertising for this mega shift!

There are a growing number of ways to get your business advertised locally. You can:

• Use the online directory versions of Yellow Pages & Thomson Local (free and variously enhanced listings are available)
• Use other more specialist online directories to advertise, many with a strong local or regional bias
• SEO your website so it is found high up in the natural search listings (e.g. if someone searches for “Reigate Hotels” or “Hotels in Surrey”):
• using traditional SEO techniques to optimise for local keywords (geographical qualifiers people add when searching online)
• using so-called microformats / geo-location tags in your website
• Capitalise on social media such as Facebook & Google+ – create a business page for each of them and get local people to join you.
• Create a .kml file that stores your businesses latitude/longitude making your business visible on geographic browsers, such as Google Earth
• Register your business with Google Places, so you can be found on Google Maps and in Google search results
• Use Paid Search Networks to advertise your business on a pay per click basis with a local or regional emphasis

You may be wondering about the extent to which you can localise paid search/PPC advertising. Yahoo allows the selection of sub-regions (e.g. South East England), but with Google you can narrow it down to an even finer degree – down to town level. Now there are caveats to this of course, but it’s worth considering.

So, if you have a local or regional business and you have a website to promote it then there are plenty of means of advertising online to get new business. You don’t have to rely just on word of mouth, and you don’t have to risk large amounts of your precious cash to advertise!

At Affiniti we can help your business capitalise on these opportunities, so get in touch and tell us what you need.

 

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You’ll have read about how links to your site (from relevant websites) are “votes” for your site that help to boost its organic search ranking. This off-page SEO technique is very important and you should be doing it every day. But it is a tough and time consuming task. So, it would be great if there were a link building strategy where other sites were biting your hand off to get links to you site. And those links also brought you real traffic that generated revenue at your site. It sounds too good to be true, but it isn’t. All you need is an independently set-up and managed affiliate programme.

The key to this is that it needs to be an independently managed programme – one which Affiniti can set up for you. If you run a programme on any of the usual affiliate networks (e.g. Affiliate Window, Webgains, etc) the links they provide to your site do not transfer the “link juice” to you. They keep the juice and transfer the visitor to your site. So you’ll get revenue from the visitor (hopefully) but not the SEO benefit.

So how can Affiniti help you boost your SEO rankings AND boost your business revenue:

• We build your affiliate marketing presence – we tailor the software that manages the programme to give it the right look & feel, and set it up on the server in the correct fashion.
• You manage the day-to-day running of the campaign, the promotion of the programme, the management of affiliate relationships and the payment of commissions, etc.
• The links the system issues to affiliates are logged by Google/Bing and gradually your site’s ranking will improve (you can control whether you approve new affiliates or make acceptance automatic)

We set up a campaign for a client recently and we saw improved organic rankings and a doubling of organic traffic within 2 months. Organic traffic is continuing to grow month by month as the number of links increases. So whether you are looking to boost your SEO rankings or looking to boost your sales via affiliates you should consider running an affiliate programme independently. You could kill two birds with one stone. Contact us to discuss your requirements.

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We’re always on the lookout for talented people who would complement and add to Affiniti’s current skills. If you have a passion for the online world and are keen to succeed then get in touch with us. We have a variety of different roles open at the moment. We’re particularly keen to hear from people who want to work flexibly (most probably on a consultancy or freelance basis) and may possibly want to work from home.

The roles are:

• PPC/Paid Search/SEM Consultants
• SEO Consultants
• Web Designers
• Web Technology Developers

If you’d like to apply for one of the roles above then click on the links and submit your CV to us with a covering message. For further information go to our jobs page.

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If you use web analytics on your website then you probably know quite a lot about what your visitors do – which pages they favour, how they navigate around the site, which pages they commonly exit from, and indeed the conversion rate of the site as a whole (i.e. the % of visitors that do something valuable e.g. buy something, make an enquiry, sign up to a newsletter, etc).

What about the hidden value – the people who nearly do something valuable but leave instead? What if you could reach them again soon after they leave your site, provide them with some information that then brings them back to your site and gets them to convert? And what if you could do this cheaply? It’s a ”no brainer” – of course you’d do it.

This is called Remarketing or Retargeting. We’ve been using this online marketing technique with a client recently where we’ve used technology to track people (using anonymous cookies) who go to the website’s apply page but don’t make an application. We use both simple text adverts and banners to reach these people in real time on other websites soon after they’ve been to the client’s application page. And we’re successfully getting a good proportion of this retargeting audience to come back and apply. And the great thing is that it need not add very much to your monthly budget. So there’s plenty of extra profit to add for not much outlay.

You can set any pages on your website as ”trigger” pages – i.e. that will trigger a person to be added to your retargeting audience. And you can choose the duration that people stay within the retargeting audience – so if you believe that it is only worth remarketing to people in the first 10 days then on the 11th day the remarketing automatically stops.

We’d love to demonstrate to you the power of remarketing/retargeting so contact us today.

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Since the web took off in the late 90′s we’ve been pretty much tied to our desk or sofa to use it. WAP was an early attempt to give the web mobility but frankly it wasn’t very appealing or usable and that’s probably while it failed to take off. But the rapid rise of the smartphone is giving the web the mobility it’s been craving for years. Ofcom’s recent report “A Nation Addicted to Smartphones”  highlights just how fast things are changing in the UK.

So, does your company’s online/digital strategy reflect these key observations made by Ofcom:

• Over a quarter of adults and nearly half of all teens now own a smartphone
• 37 per cent of adults and 60 per cent of teens are ‘highly addicted’ to them
• Smartphones are beginning to affect social behaviour

Keep in mind the rate of change in the mobile market - every 4 weeks 2.5% of standard feature phone users in the UK are swapping/upgrading to a smart phone! This trend means that by early 2012 smartphones will represent the majority of the installed base of mobiles in the UK, and the long established feature phone could be dead sometime in 2013. This means that within 12 months or so the vast majority of your cutomers will have full access to yours and your competitors’ websites while on the move. Are you ready for this?

Have you built a mobile version of your company website? Have you started to take advantage of localised search (if this is relevant to your business)? Are you capitalising on the mobile-focused advertising options available on the major paid search networks? Do you have a proper social media strategy in relation to your business/brand?

2012 is the year that we’ll feel the full impact of the mobile web so get prepared!

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Personal finance is a highly competitive field and getting more for less from an advertising budget is vital. So when Solution Loans came to us to get help with their Google AdWords campaign we knew we had a challenge. But challenges make you think creatively which is exactly what we did. In this case it made sense to completely rebuild their Google AdWords advertising from the bottom up using best practice Google AdWords techniques.

We examined the original campaign to extract as much learning as we could (e.g. actual search terms people were using to get the Solution Loans website). We also knew which terms and which ads were the most effective at driving conversions. We added new keywords and keyword phrases to the list that looked relevant to the products that Solution Loans deals. We structured the campaigns to focus on driving up quality scores and click-through rates. Target cost per conversion rates were set and everything is now about driving up volumes of conversions while staying within the cost per conversion targets.

So, how have things gone? By effectively weeding out  from the old campaign cost that was not generating conversions and driving up the quality of the advertising (so that Google will promote the adverts more agressively for a similar budget) we have succeeded in creating a virtuous circle – we’ve improved the click-through rate from adverts by a factor of 2, raised the conversion rate at the Solution Loans website by a factor of 1.5 and reduced the cost per conversion by 20% (this is in spite of now being able to bid more to drive greater volumes of traffic to the website).

We’re pretty chuffed about this as are Solution Loans! If you feel your Google AdWords campaign is not generating the returns you need or if the campaigns have stagnated then we’d like to help you. Drop us a line and tell us more about your situation.

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You may have seen that last week the BBC launched a beta (i.e. test) version of its refreshed website homepage. They’re now looking for feedback from their website users which includes us and probably includes you.  You might ask yourself why they would want to do this when the current homepage doesn’t really need fixing. Surely changing this is to expose themselves to a massive downside? What is there to gain? To put the scale of this risk/opportunity into perspective conside the fact that the BBC website has a global rank of number 40 – and it’s number 5 in the UK. They could alienate a considerable number of people if they get it wrong.

Of course the process of making a beta version available is to get feedback so that they can refine the design before the change becomes permanent. When the current design (launched 2008) was in beta testing there was a hullabaloo generated because the design did not incorporate the iconic BBC clock - it was later reinstated! It shows that people generally hate change. This new homepage makes you realise that previous designs were relatively incremental. This new design is a significant departure and so it is likely to drum up a lot of controversy. So what’s it look like?

BBC's proposed refreshed website homepage

The change to the design is driven by a stategic imperitive that recognises that the BBC online budget is being cut (from £135m to £100m p.a.), that people are accessing BBC content from multiple platforms (PC, mobile, tablet and connected TV), and that they need to provide a way of making it easier to find and access the massive amount of content that is available on their website. The BBC call this homepage strategy “one service, ten products, four screens”.

So in practical terms how has the BBC gone about redesigning their homepage? They’ve used web analytics data to understand how the homepage is used by visitors – for instance where they navigate to. It’s also given them insights into the demographics of users versus the site as a whole. The use of research groups has indicated that the current page is not sufficiently distinctive (but does it need to be?). And apparently users want filters rather than the ability to customise the look and functionality of the page. As a consequence they have gone for ” showing less of more”.

The current homepage is, apparently, more “male, ABC1″ orientated. There’s no doubt that the new homepage moves towards a broader demographic. And as this seems to be the BBC’s aim then it could well be considered a success. There will be many who will dislike this transition enormously and the comments are coming thick and fast. You can add your weight by tweeting with the hashtag #bbchomepage, by commenting on the BBC website or filling in their online survey.

 

 

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I was struck recently by an article about the benefits of Google’s “Sitelinks” functionality in AdWords. In case you’re not familiar with what they are they are the additional links (smaller text in blue) beneath the paid for search results in Google, thus:

Google AdWords Sitelinks

AdWords sitelinks are a relatively recent initiative by Google. They are controlled within AdWords and are optional. Without sitelinks the clickthrough URL is that embedded in the main blue headline. With sitelinks you can have up to 4 extra links each with their own url – so you can pitch extra messages to the readers and separately link them to relevant pages deep into your website. In theory this all sounds great stuff – but the question is does it pay off?

I am a great believer in measuring performance. I’d recommend that wherever possible decisions are based on proper data rather than hunches. The problem at the moment is that Google does not provide sufficient data within AdWords to be able to accurately determine whether sitelinks provide a proper incremental return. The only option at the moment is to run your campaign with sitelinks for a period and then as a control run it without for a similar period and see whether profit is enhanced or not. This isn’t ideal as other factors could influence the results and skew the decision.

What I would say is that while Google don’t provide discrete conversion data for sitelink traffic that the jury is out on whether it pays off. We’ve used sitelinks ourselves in campaigns and we do see an increase in clickthroughs from the adverts but it’s not clear whether the extra cost generates extra revenues. So be cautious about using sitelinks and we have to hope that Google brings their reporting up-to-speed on sitelinks soon.

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Over the summer Google has widely rolled out it’s +1 button as a rival to Facebook’s “Like” button. You’ll see it against search results in Google and you’ll see it added to a rapidly growing number of independent websites including Affiniti’s and also on blogs (like this one). Very soon you’ll see it everywhere.

The Google +1 button allows you to vote for a site – the site’s given you what you need and you think it would benefit others to see it too. So, it’s easy to see why it’s great for social media (just like Facebook’s “Like” button). But its strength goes beyond just this “sharing” aspect. With +1 Google also has the potential to take these votes and incorporate them into their natural search ranking mthodology. Within natural search one of the factors that impact rankings is in-bound links to a site. These have always been viewed as votes for a site. Obviously these votes have been open to abuse and while Google has undoubtedly found ways to weed out poor quality votes (e.g. links from sites of poor quality themselves or from less relevant sites) they continue to seeks ways of refining their ranking algorithm. +1 gives them an additional tool – potentially it allows millions/billions of people to add their weight behind what is is useful and what is not. So, watch this space.

But how about this – could it also impact on bid prices for paid search (i.e. Google AdWords). Google’s famous “Quality Score” impacts on bid price – if your quality score is lower than a competitor’s then you’ll have to bid more than your competitor to keep your advert as high up the list as the competitor. But what if everything were equal? What if (for a given keyword) a greater proportion of people visiting your site from an Adwords ad click on a +1 button than they do for a competitor for the same term? Surely this would be telling Google your site is of a better quality? If this were the case you’d be able to lower your bid without losing position?

While this is speculative the potential seems to be there. Which begs the question – do you have the Google +1 button on your site? If you don’t then contact us and we’ll help you.