Ask-Susan Blog

"We're a Favorite Place on Google"

2010-03-31T10:02:00.001-04:00

Wondering about those "We're a Favorite Place on Google" Stickers on business doors or QR codes? Read Why Google’s Slapping Decals on Small Businesses

Word of Month takes a Giant Leap Forward

2009-10-26T16:00:00.002-04:00

Google's Social Search: See search results from your social circle instead of the whole world. This takes word of mouth to a whole new level and it makes it much more difficult (impossible) for companies or anyone to control their reputation on the Web. Just like real life. This is HUGE.

MSN AdCenter to provide PPC Ads to Yahoo

2009-07-29T11:25:00.003-04:00

On the conference call this morning, Yahoo (Carol Bartz) said that Microsoft commits to an easy of use platform (for AdCenter).

Microsoft-Yahoo: Who will run PPC?

2009-07-29T11:02:00.001-04:00

"Self-serve advertising for both companies will be fulfilled by Microsoft's AdCenter platform, and prices for all search ads will continue to be set by AdCenter's automated auction process." from:
Microsoft-Yahoo! Search Agreement Website

Yahoo may handle MSN PPC Ads

2009-07-29T09:37:00.002-04:00

If this deal goes through, Yahoo! will handle selling text ads that appear next to the search results for its sites and some Microsoft sites. Yahoo!, Microsoft near search deal: WSJ

Ask-Susan on Twitter and Facebook

2009-07-12T08:43:00.005-04:00

I am now sharing web marketing ideas on Twitter and Facebook. Please follow me there.

How to use Video

2009-05-12T11:04:00.003-04:00

Hi Susan,

I'm looking into an SEO issue for another client I'm working with and wondered if I could pick your brain on this. We were seeding videos out onto other sites like YouTube (Viddler, Metacafe...) assuming that it would help with SEO. But what we found was that the video sites were coming up in Google - people would watch the video, but they wouldn't come to the site (the link to the site wasn't always readily visible). So in a way, the videos on the hosting sites were almost competing with the original pages on those keywords. You hear so much about the SEO benefits of having videos up on sites ... but if it's not driving traffic, is it just the fact that there are links on those video sites to the main website? Does that seem worth it? I'd appreciate your thoughts if you have few minutes. If you're busy, I completely understand!

Ask-Susan: Here are some thoughts:

Optimize for different key phrases. Particularly those that are important targets where they don't have good rankings.

YouTube is one of the largest search engines (It is owned by Google). So you can consider the video a separate entity from the website in an overall visibility /branding strategy. You could use a different phone number on the video to track video leads.

Many people believe that Google views a video on the website as a positive thing when computing page rank. Should it also be on other sites? I think so. More visibility is good. Twitter and other social media can be used to get the word out and drive people to the website.

You can also add the website URL to the description in YouTube to provide the link but I agree that not many follow it. The video has to "stand alone".

Using Social Media Successfully

2009-05-12T11:01:00.002-04:00

Good Idea: Check out http://www.ercwipe.com/news.html -

Become a Fan of ERC on Facebook, LinkedIn In addition to following ERC on Twitter, you can now become a fan of ERC on Facebook or follow ERC on LinkedIn. Just another way ERC makes it easy for you to get updates, news, specials and general information. Click Here to become a fan on Facebook. Click Here to follow on LinkedIn.

Superhero Client Video

2009-05-12T10:59:00.001-04:00

Check out http://www.thermofab.com/thermoforming_superhero_video.html. Great job by my client!

How to use video on your website.

2009-05-01T16:00:00.002-04:00

How to use video on your website.

From http://www.reelseo.com/website-video-globe/7912/

They analyzed the top sites worldwide:

In March and April of 2009, the VIEW main index for the 100 surveyed Web sites was 30-65-35, which indicates that 30% of the web sites had video on their home page, 65% had video on their site, and 35% didn’t use any video on their website.

46% of the 100 surveyed companies have placed their videos 1 click away from the home page.

13% of the surveyed companies have placed their videos deep into their web sites, 3 clicks or more away from the home page.

42% use online video in an advanced manner: contextual integration of videos, variety of video players, call-to-action tied to the video.

0% have video on autoplay (i.e. video starts as soon as the user lands on the page).

7% open video in a new browser webpage.

12% use a pop-up window to display video.

Search Engine Rankings Don't Matter Anymore

2008-12-08T18:58:00.007-05:00

Search Engine Rankings will no longer be a good measure of success. Google is adding two aspects of search – geo-targeted search and behavior based search. They are phasing this in, and soon no two searchers will get the same list of search results.

Using geo-targeted search Google will be more apt to show listings near the searchers’ location. If your customers are located near your business, this will work to your benefit as your listing will more likely show up higher on the list of web search results. If you have been drawing customers from all over the country, this will make it more difficult to compete with companies offering the same products or services who are located closer to the customers.

As an example, a company located in Boston that sells cleaning supplies has been enjoying a large percentage of sales to California because of their prominent position in the website rankings. The Google rankings should continue to be good for local customers but may drop in position for searches in California as California companies offering cleaning supplies appear higher on the list of search results.

Using behavior based search techniques, Google will base the results on the searchers’ search history. So we will each see different websites listed in out search engine results page. This will apply especially to shorter searches - one or two words where the intent is not clear.

As an example, let’s look at Major Marine Tours, a company in Seward, Alaska that offers wonderful wildlife and glacier day cruises. If someone has been searching for cruises or tours and then types in “Seward” – they are more apt to have MajorMarine.com listed near the top. If they had been searching for hotels prior to the search for “Seward” they may not see the MajorMarine.com listing at all.

As you can see, your Google listings will appear in different positions for different searchers even for the same search. So any measure of your current search engine ranking will not be valid.

Depending on your business, this may or may not hurt your results. It may actually improve them. However, we cannot determine a fixed search engine ranking any longer and will not be able to use it as a key indicator of our progress.

Since ranking is not a good measure we will use web analytics to look at visitors and conversions per key phrases – visitors and conversions is the goal of good rankings anyway. For my clients, I will continue to report on these key indicators and track progress from month to month and year to year.