Australians have almost completely dumped every search engine except Google as their search engine of choice. It was reported over at Marketingmag.com.au that Google.com and Google.com.au combined for 90% of the searches online in Australia; 85.18% of these were via Google.com.au/.
Some interesting points from the report:
Yahoo!7 has lost market share with 2.38% of searches
Bing had 3.65% of the market share
Travel, health & medical, sports & aviation experienced the greatest growth in search volume in April
Drop us an email via the contact form if you need help getting your website found in Google.
Google Adwords can be a complicated mythical beast to conquer for the small business owner to expert digital marketing agencies. There has been a recent “incident” that has left the NT Tourism and media agency MPG a little embarrassed, so here are 3 Adword techniques you can learn from their screw up.
Limited Keywords
Don’t have an excessive amount of keyword phrases in your online campaigns; keep your campaigns and ad groups nice and tight around a common theme. It was reported that they had 128,000 keywords (source).
For example, if you an accommodation provider in Maleny you may structure your campaigns and ad groups in this manner: Campaign – Maleny Accommodation Ad Group – Maleny Accommodation Keywords – “Maleny accommodation”, “Maleny accommodation QLD”, “Maleny accommodation Queensland”, “Maleny accommodation specials”, “book Maleny accommodation”.
I would also recommend using the the above keywords again in the same ad group with exact match to gain better understanding of search data for my Search Engine Optimisation campaigns.
Avoid Broad Match
Using broad match can burn your Google Adwords budget real quick before you have even had the chance to show one of your killer ads to a real potential purchaser. It also avoids your ads being showed for incomplete word searches, go and do a search for toyot and you will be presented with ads for Toyota.
Using the keyword phrases from point 1 you will notice that I have enclosed each keyword phrase with “ ”, this is known as phrase match. Without using “phrase march” the keyword phrase, Maleny Accommodation, can be trigged by any search that uses the keyword, Maleny, or, Accommodation.
For example, if someone searched for, Mt Tamborine Accommodation, or, Maleny Coffee Shops, both these search could trigger my ad because they contain, Accommodation, or, Maleny. However both these searches are not relevant to me and therefore can waste money.
Build Negative Keyword Lists
A negative keyword list can be added to either an Ad group or the entire campaign and is one of the most overlooked aspects of Google Adwords for beginners. Using a negative keyword list will tell Google if a search that contains part of your keyword phase but a word that is on your negative keyword list, your ad will not be shown.
For example, let’s use the Maleny Accommodation Adwords scenario again. If I had a negative keyword list that contained the term, photos, and someone searched for, Maleny accommodation photos, my ad would not be shown. This would not giving them the opportunity to click on my ad and spend my budget.
I admit it that was a pretty bad play on the famous Video Killed The Radio Star by the British group – The Buggles.
The real question should be:
Is Twitter Killing Link Bait?
There’s an interesting phenomenon going on involving Twitter and linking. A couple of years ago, when someone would see an interesting piece of content, they would link to it. Today, when this happens, people tweet it. So, what does this mean for link bait?
In this interview Mike McDonald from WebProNews chats with one of the worlds SEO super heros, Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz. Fishkin goes on to say:
…essentially, Twitter is cannibalizing the Web’s link graph, and it’s doing so in a disproportionate manner for more social media forward industries.
Although Fishkin does not believe the link graph is disappearing completely, he says it’s growing faster in the social Web than it is in the blogosphere. Google is also picking up on this trend and is paying attention to tweets. According to Fishkin, people can calculate Page Rank with the Twitter graph in the same way people do on the Web. He thinks Google is working with this concept now and expects to see more from them in this area.
While on the topic of Google, Mike McDonald asks Fishkin about Google Buzz. From a strategic standpoint, Fishkin believes Google wants to let people know that the social Web and social media are important to them. In addition, Google realizes the amount of sharing and connection that happens through email and wants to leverage it.
There are, however, many issues that have been raised over Google Buzz, as WPN previously reported. While the lasting power of Buzz is still to be determined, Fishkin says SEOs are waiting to where it goes before they fully embrace it.
Google has recently redesigned their search results page, basiclly Google have moved some of their optional search options, such as, Google News, Images, Blogs etc to be on the left side of a results page puting these options right in your face. This layout is very similar to that used by Yahoo and Bing and has worked extremely well for them.
When we added features to their left-hand navigation bar, engagement increased. We’ve been steadily adding more filtering options and relevant search suggestions to our left-hand navigation bar…and have seen engagement and click-throughs for those features double over the past seven months. source – WebProNews
You would think if this is successful for Yahoo, the possibilities for the search giant Google are endless. Below is the video released by Google describing the change.
How Does The New Layout Impact You?
At the end of the day, ranking in all of Google’s different search engines, Google Images, Video, New, Blogs etc has become even more important for getting traffic from Google. If you are already being listed in these other search engines with Google you should expect traffic to increase as a result of Google’s new layout. Keep in mind that Google has been testing this for a significant amount of time. If you think Yahoo was seeing increased engagement, imagine what Google will attract.
Watch for Google to add more options to the left-panel at any given time. Though they have already experimented a great deal with this layout, more tweaking as time goes on should be expected.
In a push for Google to capture more of the web browser market, they have relased a new campaign that is sure to boost market share.
This is a great follow up to How To Get Viral On YouTube as it is a great example of a video being produced with interesting content and awesome camparisons to help the video become “viral”. This will then lead to creating awareness for a product and help capture additional market share.
Everyone wants their video to go viral on YouTube, but is it really possible? According to Margaret Gould Stewart of YouTube, people need to, first of all, understand what types of videos go viral.
If you are not sure what a viral video is, or what viral means, first take a look at this video – real life viral marketing.
As she explains, most viral videos happen by accident. There is, however, another category of content that could go viral. People producing this type of content create it on a regular basis in order to build a sustained audience.
When it comes to actually creating viral content, Stewart says, “It really is about great content. It’s really difficult to make content that is not interesting or exciting go viral.”
Another factor in creating viral content is knowing your audience. Content producers need to understand who their audience is and build sustainable relationships with them. In addition, Stewart points out the importance of attaching metadata to the content.
Just as SEO is important for Google, it is also important for the second largest search engine, YouTube. Ideally, the best content is at the top, but you can help it by making titles clear and direct and putting in the right tags. If you do this, searchers will be able to find your content easily when they search for it. See Optimising Videos For Search Results for more information.
Lastly, content producers need to make sure they are enabling the embedding capability on their video. Stewart says that as a video starts to go viral, the largest amount of traffic comes from other sources in the first 48 hours.
In the end, all viral videos do not receive one million viewers. For businesses especially, a video can be viral as long as it reaches its target audience. Source – WebProNews
A Look At Videos Designed To Go Viral
Firstly, you may be asking yourself, “why go to such lenghts?” Well the benefits of producing a video that goes viral within your target market are simply amazing for building brand/product awareness, brand/product loyalty and links for increasing search engine rankings. One video that did just this was the, “Will It Belnd” series by Blendtec. The original video that put them in the light was the “Will It Blend – iPhone” video, of course this video was released almost as soon as the first iPhone hit the shelves, see below.
And of course their most recent Apple slaying video is, “Will It Blend – iPad”.
Warning – This video contains excessive violence
What are your thoughts on producing a viral video?
It was not that long ago when words like search, search marketing and search engine optimisation were considered to be terms that only multimillion dollar companies worried about. Now however, every mum and pop business with a website would have some type of idea of what they refer to.
So what is the future of search, where will it go next? Most people might think of mobile and social media, well WebProNews have taken the question to Eli Goodman of comScore to get his insights into what he believes the future of search will bring us.
Goodman talks about the search technology, the searcher and how they affect one another and will continue to do so moving forward into the future. Talk a look at the video for more insight into the future of search.
So, as search evolves, how will SEO change? Goodman says search engine optimisation will always change but will always remain important.
WebmasterWorld CEO Brett Tabke sat down with Lee Odden, CEO at search engine optimization and digital marketing service firm TopRank Online Marketing. Odden shares his insight on effectively utilizing social media Web sites, particularly micro-blogging Web site Twitter, to further business objectives. Tabke points out that Odden currently ranks highest amongst those within the Internet marketing space on social media influence ranking Web site, Klout. Odden goes on to comment on the changing public relations field as it pertains to the increasing ease of sharing information via the Internet.
Google has announced the beta stage of scheduled business photo shoots. In addition to uploading your own photos to Google Places (formally known as the Google Local Business Center), businesses in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane can now request a free photo shoot of the interior of their business, which Google will use to supplement existing photos of businesses on Google Place profiles.
If you would like to learn more about this, Google has created a site for businesses to learn more and express their interest in participating. Due to extremely high demand, Google’s army of photographers will not be able to visit every business that applies. The good news, though, is that any business owner around the world can upload photographs to their Place Page by logging in to Google Places.
An interesting stat that Google has also mentioned is that one out of every five searches on Google are related to location, so now is the time to make sure your local business can get found!
In today’s digital age there is still a massive fraternity of old school marketers that still turn a blind eye to Google and online marketing. Their negative attitude and opinion are not because they don’t accept that it is effective, but mainly because they are either not proactive in learning or afraid and/or don’t understand the full circle.
Ken Auletta is the author of Googled and media critic for The New Yorker. In the video below Ken takes a few minutes with Jon Friedam and talks about the influence of Google on the old media establishments and how traditional media should evolve to meet the challenges of the online age.
Australians have almost completely dumped every search engine except Google as their search engine of choice. It was reported over at Marketingmag.com.au that Google.com and Google.com.au combined for 90% of the searches online in Australia; 85.18% of these were via Google.com.au/.
