It still amazes me how many major brands are not owning their Google Places listings. Bunnings, Mitre10 and a ton of other big brands should really be getting on top of this. Some already have, so ‘hat’s off’ to the agency that looks after Harvey Norman. All the Google Places listing for their stores (that I’ve had time to check) have been claimed.

The reason why I raise this issue (again) is that there’s been yet another push by Google to promote Google Places listings in the search results.

I caught up with Search Engine Optimisation legend, Bruce Clay at SMX Sydney this week and he’s been noticing some interesting developments in the search results in the United States, and I’m seeing the same thing here in Australia.

Bruce has a bit of theory on Google Places and the latest round(s) of Panda algorithm updates and more recently, the Penguin Update. I’ll work my way towards Bruce’s theory, but as many regular readers know, I’m quite prone to wandering off on a tangent. Hang in there with me!

The Panda and Penguin changes have really hurt many websites which have been using questionable SEO tactics to improve their rankings. In a nut shell, the Panda updates penalised websites which were full of junk content to clean up the Google Index.

My take on the Penguin Update is it has been implemented to penalise websites who have a back link profile that is too heavily anchor text optimised and/or has a ‘paid link’ profile.

I never thought this would happen simply because you have to ask yourself the question, “How can you control who links to you?”

In theory it would be reasonably easy to buy a bunch of links, point them at a competitor and ‘Bam’ their ranking positions would be demoted or their website taken out of the index altogether by Google.

I think Google made the decision that hardly anyone would have pockets deep enough to do this, but on the flip-side, lots of people are buying links. It’s been introduced for the greater good. If you’ve been buying links or over engineering your backlink anchor text profile, you’d better check your Google Webmaster Tools account and your rankings to see if you’ve been caught out.

There were a couple of SEO agencies at SMX who were sweating on the Penguin update I can tell you! Ours wasn’t one of them.

Anyway, back to Bruce’s theory.

So we’ve established that Google is cleaning up the index and removing overly optimised or heavily SEO’d websites.

If you now type in single product key phrases in to Google such as ‘shoes’, ‘coats’, ‘sunglasses’ etc, you’ll typically see Google Places listings quite high in the results for shops nearby where you are searching from.

Bruce has also seen Google experimenting with Google Product feeds or listing in retailer’s Google Places listings.

He thinks this clean up and promotion of Google Places has to do with Google trying to get into the ‘daily deals’ market.

If you remember, not so long ago Google had a tilt at buying Groupon. Ironically Google was left at the altar on that ‘deal’ and is now looking for ways to get into the (still) highly lucrative deals market.

Facebook has moved pretty quickly with the launch of Facebook Offers and Google could enable retailers with Google Places listings to promote their daily deals or offers in the search results.

If you’re a retailer with a store and haven’t claimed your (free) Google Places listing, you should, just because it’s a ‘best practice’ thing to do. But it may also allow you to get ahead of the pack if Bruce’s theory proves correct.  He’s been pretty spot-on in the last.

By the way, he’s called the next update which will, in theory, promote Google Places for lots of product related searches ‘Orca’. Like a Panda or a Penguin, it’s black and white, but this one has teeth.

Just a quick note to say ‘Thanks for dropping by’!

We’re really excited to be attending the Online Marketer, SMX 2012 event and hope to see you at our stand (Stand 9).

Reseo team attendees will be Samith, Ophenia, Philip, Jeremy and Chris.

Chris is speaking about Advanced Retargeting tactics in the PPC session on Tuesday morning’s PPC session:

http://sydney.onlinemarketer.net.au/conference/search-marketing-conference-and-expo/2012-agenda/

Be sure to drop by and say ‘Hi’!

Contact us today: enquiries@reseo.com

Before I start, let me be clear, you need to be careful and you need to be ethical. Please ensure you adhere to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines if you decide to try this.

To explain how this can work for you, it’s probably best told as a story.

We had a client a couple of years ago who feature all sorts of franchises on their website. Basically they send a survey to Franchisees who rate the Franchisors they partner with. It’s a great way for prospective franchisee to quickly see the best Franchisors as rated by franchisees!

Their website was quite new but didn’t rank very well organically, and as a result was burning through cash using AdWords to drive traffic.

It’s a story I hear about once a week!

When we partnered with the company in question the brief was pretty simple; get high organic rankings on high traffic search terms to do with franchising.

As you probably know, link building (if done properly) is a highly effective way to improve search engine rankings. Strategically, the low hanging fruit in terms of link acquisition to the client site was its featured Franchisors.

We got on the phone and called quite a few suppliers to negotiate some text links to be built to our client’s website. Sometimes this wasn’t possible, but some were open to placing a small logo banner on their website which linked back to the client.

The results were pretty dramatic, from outside the top 100 for the keywords we were optimising for to top 3 positions inside 5 months.

What a lot of people don’t realise is that when images are turned off on a website and an image is linked to another web page, the image ‘alt’ text becomes anchor text.

Read that last sentence again carefully.

I don’t care what anybody says, anchor text (or link text) is still an incredibly important signal to search engines in terms of where a web page ranks.

By influencing the keywords in the image ‘alt’ text on a clickable image or logo, you can improve the anchor text relevance of links back to your site without being too obtrusive.

But this is where the ethical bit comes in. You need to match the textual content of the banner closely to the image ‘alt’ tag content to stay compliant with search engine policies. It’s also important from an accessibility perspective. Image alt text should accurately reflect what the image actually is and not be stuffed with keywords!

Just to give you a visual example of the concept I’m trying to get across, check these logos on the Reseo blog. They’re all clickable and link to Twitter, Google, SEMPO and WAA, but only 3 of them have image alt text:

In the next screenshot I’ve turned off images through FireFox (you can do this by going to Tools, Options, Content and unchecking “load images automatically” then refresh the page you’re looking at).

You can see the text links pointing back to Google, SEMPO and Twitter. Poor old Web Analytics Association misses out on some optimised anchor text.

Might just have to fix that.

At the time, most advertisers weren’t using them much at all, save for the some of the bigger outdoor advertisers such as Telstra and a handful of others.

But QR codes seem to have come of age, and they’re popping up everywhere as Smartphone use proliferates, especially in direct mail catalogues. And some advertisers are being very smart about how they’re being implemented.

A quick case in point is www.Aldi.com.au. Like most of us, I recently found an Aldi catalogue in my mail box (OK, I admit it… I have a secret and shameful love of junk mail – forgive me). Being a geek at heart, I noticed that Aldi has a sale on a pretty well-spec’d computer for $499.

They also have a noticeable QR code sitting close to the product and its price. (I’ve also seen ones in Officeworks catalogues as well).

I dutifully scanned the QR code on my smartphone and was taken to a mobile friendly landing page which was perfectly optimised for the iPhone. It even had a video demonstrating the product features and benefits! Love that stuff.

The other thing to note about this tactic is the way Aldi’s digital marketing agency can track visits to the page through their analytics platform. They use an analytics package called http://www.webtrekk.com/en/home.html which looks to have German origins (Aldi is from Germany). This would help them to understand more about the traffic from smartphones to the page and how engaging the traffic is.

I’d also recommend to them adding some remarketing codes on this page to advertise to people about the product during the campaign.

If Aldi were to go ecommerce, they’d then be able to track revenue from smartphone and tablet traffic. Nirvana! Perhaps one day they will, who knows?

If you’re running catalogues and you’ve got some budget, throw in some QR Codes and direct people to the product landing pages on your website (they don’t have to be mobile optimised, but it would be better if they were).

If you’re using Google Analytics, then use UTM campaign tagging in your link before you generate the QR code.

Here’s how:

First off, visit this link: http://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578

This will enable you to generate your Campaign tagged link – see below:

Then you take that link you’ve generated (which looks like this: http://www.smartcompany.com.au/product.html?utm_source=Catalogue&utm_medium=QR-Code&utm_content=Product-Name&utm_campaign=Direct-Mail-Feb-2012) and you put it in your QR-Code Generator (like this free one: http://qrcode.kaywa.com/)

The rest is easy! Put the QR Code into your artwork next to each product, send to the printers and watch the traffic roll in.

To see the results in your Google Analytics account, go to Traffic Sources > Sources > Campaigns:

You can typically relay much more information about a product on your website than you can within the constraints of a product catalogue, so why not give it a try?

You’ll either sell more online or more in store. Either way, for a small additional effort you stay ahead of the pack and make more sales.

On the weekend I decided to do some online shopping on the thing as I needed some new jeans. Pretty simple.

Now, I guess like most people, I do have a favourite little online store where I usually do my clothes shopping, it’s pretty basic but reliable; www.sambear.com.au.

Before I went to Sam Bear, I decided to do some comparison shopping (browsing) and hit www.myer.com.au. The site worked OK on an iPad, the prices were terrific but when it came to finding the right size and style, they’d completely sold out of the jeans I wanted. Sad (and frustrated), I left their site disappointed.

Then I surfed over to their direct competitor, www.davidjones.com.au. Again, the site looked OK on the iPad, but I couldn’t navigate to the men’s apparel section and I couldn’t figure out how to get there…

I sprang out my trusty laptop to see what was going on…

Sure enough, the navigation didn’t work properly on the iPad! They use what’s known as a ‘mouse hover state’ to reveal sub category menus. Obviously the problem for iPad owners is they can’t hover a mouse over the navigation, so they can’t get to the categories and products they want to.

That issue, coupled with a complete lack of an internal site search feature, meant that sadly for David Jones (and me) no sale was made that evening. Even though I’d whipped out the laptop, it was the principle.

Tail between my legs, I went to Sam Bear.

Sam Bear’s site doesn’t have any fancy bells and whistles like the others, but it never runs out of stock, works with an iPad and I was able to buy a couple of pairs of new jeans and a t-shirt in quick time without fuss.

I might add that their prices are a little more expensive, but it was worth it given the ease of the transaction.

Last year I blogged about the high conversion rates we see at our agency from people using iPads and with all the fuss over Myer’s and DJ’s foray into online shopping, I find it really disappointing that they (or DJ’s in particular) haven’t properly grasped mobile or tablet shopping.

In America online shopping from Tablet owners is tipped to reach $31 billion by 2016.

You’d expect these two to be the leaders in the online shopping/ecommerce space in Australia, but it looks like they’ve still got a ways to go.

Google has decided to encrypt their main site using SSL when people are logged in for “privacy reasons” so that people’s search queries can’t be intercepted by nasty hackers and also remain invisible in analytics reports.

The keyword report is incredibly useful to website owners and online marketers as it allows you to see what kinds of keywords people are typing into the Google search bar to find you. The report helps your SEO and your Online Sales if you know what to do with this data.

Many people in our industry have expressed their dismay and disappointment with Google’s decision including SEOMoz CEO, Rand Fishkin, who explains what it means and how it will affect people in his recent SEOMoz “Whiteboard Friday” video: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-hides-search-referral-data-with-new-ssl-implementation-emergency-whiteboard-friday

Confusingly, Google has allowed AdWords keyword data to still show in analytics, whether a person is logged in or not. So it seems that if you’re prepared to pay for AdWords, you’ll get all the keyword data which referred traffic to you.

I think that this in itself is really weird, as it directly contradicts Google’s stated reason for this move which is supposedly to protect users’ privacy!

There are lots of conspiracy theories going around why this has happened. It’s almost coincided with the announcement of Google’s new and very expensive enterprise level analytics package http://www.google.com/analytics/premium/index.html. Could Google be trying to squeeze out other Analytics products like Omniture and Webtrends in favour of its own product?

Maybe but I doubt it.

Others think it’s to protect Google’s near monopoly over its Ad serving networks and maintain it’s near monopoly.

Personally I reckon the whole thing (at this early stage) is a bit of a storm in a tea cup, although it could get a lot worse in future.

Assessing our Google Accounts which have SEO rankings in the United States (where this has been rolled out first) the impact has been minimal at worst.

If you want to assess the impact in your Google Analytics Account just filter for “(not provided)” in your organic keyword report. The next screenshot shows how to do this if you’re interested, as well as the tiny impact SLL has had on blocking the keywords appearing in the report.

You can see above that just 9 visits have been blocked from view since it was rolled out last week. It’s such a tiny percentage of the total report it’s hardly worth worrying about. In the United States, it’s a bit higher than that for many other website owners, but not enough to cause too much of a flap.

I think people are more reacting on principal than anything else.

Head of Google’s Web Spam Team, Matt Cutts reckons that less than 10% of searches are conducted when people are logged in so I don’t see the impact being majorly serious unless Google decides to fully encrypt their search engine for all users logged in or not.

If they do that, it’ll be on for young and old.

It’s early days yet, but I’d recommend that anyone involved with SEO should use this feature to enable some pretty powerful keyword research.  You’ll see why in a minute.

First of all, I’ll take you through how to set this up; luckily it’s pretty straight forward.

Step 1. Jump into the new (beta) version of analytics which you’ll see in the top right hand corner of your account once you’ve logged in.

Step 2. Drill down into Traffic Sources and click the (new) “Search Engine Optimisation” report.

Step 3. The next thing you’ll need to do is link your Webmaster Tools account to your analytics which you can see next.

 Step 4. Pick the account you want to associate the analytics with and you’re pretty much good to go.

Once this is all set up, what you’ll see is some really interesting new data about the keywords you rank for, how many visits you’ve received from them, the popularity of the search terms, as well as each keyword’s click through rate.

There’s an example below:

 At an agency level, we’ve already started looking at this as a new keyword research tool. Our research using exact match impression keyword data from AdWords shows that the impressions listed in Analytics is pretty close to the impressions from AdWords on various keywords.

Using the impression column above means you can do some pretty accurate keyword research in my opinion.

The other interesting report is the Landing Pages report, which when you add a new dimension such as “Google Property” you can see where your traffic is coming from in terms of Google Image Search, Mobile search and the web.

One of the really big problems has been tracking phone calls that came through to your business as a result of people seeing your phone number on your website.

It’s a really important lead conversion event, but for a long time has really only been possible through specialised companies such as www.jetinteractive.com.au who can (amongst other things) dynamically change the phone number on your site to identify where a phone call originated from.

For small to medium business owners, solutions like Jet Interactive’s might be a little out of reach.

But lately I’ve been seeing some really simple solutions to help with Call tracking which I thought I’d share.

Realestate.com.au uses a great system to fire an event to their analytics account when they hope a phone call is about to be made. They simply hide the phone number behind a link. You have to click the link to reveal the phone number, and that click event fires off a conversion to their analytics account.

Another really good example is from an accounting company in Queensland.

As you can see, you need to click the phone number to reveal the rest of it. When this click occurs this is recorded in Google Analytics. There’s a case study about how this was done on the above website here: http://www.marketinghub.info/phone-conversionlead-tracking-for-offline-businesses/. It includes all the code to get you going as well.

While it won’t be 100% accurate because I’m sure some people will click the link but not call you, it should give you an idea in your analytics account.

Below is a screenshot which cross references the source of the traffic to the site and phone call “click events”.

By understanding which sources of traffic have delivered active phone leads has helped the owner of the business make informed decisions about whether to continue advertising with the Yellow Pages for example.

That’s pretty powerful tracking and very easy for any developer to implement.

A big thanks to Daniel Brady from http://www.marketinghub.info for agreeing to let me use some of the material from his case study this week.

I’m constantly amazed at the sheer volume of online competitions running at any one time. Try Googling “online competitions” and flick through sites like Win Free Stuff to see what I mean.

Companies usually need a big prize to cut through and often the competition promotion expense is worth more than the prize itself. Kind of ironic.

Having said that, holding a competition can be a great way to build awareness of your products or your brand as well as get lots of people coming to your website. In my experience, competitions are usually designed as an email database building exercise. Entrants exchange their details and opt in to receive marketing emails in exchange for a chance to win a prize. Fair exchange you’d think.

I’ve certainly seen pretty good ROI from email databases collected from a competition, in some cases quite quickly.

But it can depend on the quality of your email database list.

See, there are lots of people who describe themselves as amateur or professional ‘compers’.  Like professional party goers who would turn up to the opening of an envelope, professional compers basically make a tidy profit by entering into as many competitions as they can. And they’re pretty good at it.

I used to work with a husband and wife team who won a tonne of stuff, including a new Mini. They subscribed to forums dedicated to competitions; sharing tactics on how to enter a competition to maximize their chances of winning.

They once bought a pallet of diet coke to enter a competition where a prize was being given away every hour. To enter you had to SMS a special code printed on the label. After a while they figured out that at precisely 55 minutes past the hour the prize would be awarded. They cleaned up.

The issue for some of our clients is that many of these competition forums and websites cotton on the fact there’s a competition running and the compers pile in.

The traffic referred from these sites is, on paper, super high quality as you can see from the screenshot below with conversion rates from traffic from the website www.lottos.com.au running at an astounding 64%. Wincompetitions.com.au is also pretty impressive delivering a 61% conversion rate of visitors to entries. You may notice that Direct traffic also converts highly – you can put that down the fact the competition in question was also advertised offline as well as online.

So while you’re patting yourself on the back for the amount of competition entries you received and how big your email list has grown, there could be a catch.

If you’re running a competition to build an email database, you need to be smart about organising the segmentation of people as they are added. Everyone who enters should be segmented into a ‘list’ which is clearly marked as “Previous Competition Entrants” (or similar) so that when you start sending emails you understand the dollar value of the audience when (or if) they convert on your site.

The problem is that your “Previous Competition Entrants” list could also contain a sizable group of compers who probably couldn’t care less about you, your products or your brand. They’ve got their eye focused firmly on the prize.

What we’ve started to do is segment the “Previous Competition Entrants” email lists even further by looking at the referrer when someone enters. If they’re from a ‘professional’ competition website like www.lottos.com.au then those entrants are flagged and segmented.

It will be interesting to see how many of the professional compers unsubscribe from emails when they’re received and how many actually respond at all to the marketing message contained within, compared to the ‘non-comper’ recipients.

My guess is the professionals will opt out of receiving future emails more than average and probably not be interested in the contents of the email at all if they don’t. Unless the email is promoting a new competition of course.

The deal is that they look for common misspells of a domain name like a well-known brand or product and monetise the domain for profit (or try and install malicious software on your browser).

It amazes me how often I find typo squatters monetising misspelled domains right under the nose of the rightful owners. There’s very little awareness by business owners about how insidious and damaging this practice actually is.

Recent examples I’ve stumbled across include: www.k-mart.com, http://www.krumpler.com/,  http://www.angusandrobinson.com.au just to name a handful. Over the years though, I’ve seen hundreds. When this happens we normally refer our customers to the specialist IP law firm www.actuateip.com.au.

Many typo squatters and domain squatters are making a small fortune leveraging other people’s brands for profit. And they continue to get away with it! Disclaimer, I’m not whiter than white either… I own www.ewetube.com.au.

To protect yourself (and your growing brand), you do need to buy up as many misspells as you can without breaking the bank and you can do this quite efficiently using a couple of methods.

The first is by brainstorming as many misspelled combinations as you can think up. Then you’ll need to check to see if they’ve been taken, so use a tool like http://www.planetdomain.com which can help you see what’s taken and what’s not.

To help with your search for misspells, use your analytics data as this will also help you know what kind of misspells are driving traffic to your site.

I was consulting for a large e-commerce provider just this week, and in the top 10 keywords driving traffic to their website was a misspell of their brand name. I checked to see how much revenue this misspelled keyword had generated and it was about $130,000. The first recommendation? Buy that domain.

Here’s an example on a much smaller scale using my own (personal) website.

OK, so the real name of my personal business is Hibermate, but as you can see above there’s a misspelled keyword which in the last 30 days has delivered a modest $70 in revenue so it’s definitely worth the $35 buying the domain for a couple of years to protect my IP.

Also, you can see from the source of the traffic that most people who typed in the misspell are from the United States, so I’ve registered the domain www.hybermate.com (US audience) and forwarded it to www.hibermate.com.

You can get really sophisticated  by adding a UTM tag (or campaign tag) to the redirect to understand how much revenue has come from people typing in the misspelled domain names you own.  Speak your developer about setting this up. Then you’ll really know from your ‘Traffic Sources’ | ‘Campaigns’ reports (in Google Analytics) whether it’s worth renewing when it comes to re-registering the domain!