Search Marketing

Being relatively new to the digital world of search, I still occasionally over hear the search marketing gurus at Zeta talk in a language I don’t always understand. This is the language of Search and relates to all the industry terms used to describe the dynamics and processes involved in search marketing.

My communication with some clients has shown that, understanding search is also hard for them (and of course it should be as it is not their industry, try asking me what I know about engineering!…).

To try and overcome this problem I have put together a guide to search jargon that I hope will help those who don’t know much about search marketing to understand what we do. Most of the terms described are in the simplest form and are of course far more technical in reality. more…

On Friday, Google rolled out personalised search for everyone; so even if you’re not signed in you’ll get results based on your search activity over the last 180 days.

Personalised search works by ranking results higher if a user has shown a tendency to click on them more often. So if I search for [news] every morning while I am drinking my coffee, and I choose the number-eight result www.thesun.co.uk each time then Google will assume that I probably want to see that site higher up the rankings and put it at the top for me in future.

Apart from during our daily checking-of-rankings routine, this might not be such a bad thing for SEOs: we just need to encourage users to click our results instead of our competitors and the next time we might be rewarded with a higher ranking. Frankly, that’s something we should be thinking about anyway, so how can we do it?

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Because this new option from Google is going to become more popular as search options grow in popularity, and if you don’t your rankings could drop significantly!

I wrote about Google’s search options after the launch back in May. Since then Google has included the “Images from the page” option. Image search has become one of the fastest growing verticals in search so my guess is that this will become extremely popular over the next 12 months.

This does not work like searching through Google images, the results are different; thumbnails are more…

“Primary key phrases” are the lynchpin of our clients’ online marketing campaigns. The organic position of these phrases is the strongest KPI we (and our clients) use to measure the success of a campaign. But rankings aside, how much traffic do these primary key phrases (or PKPs) actually generate? We can also ask, “Does the traffic convert?”, “Are visitors interacting with the site?”, but for now I just want to focus on how PKP traffic can be accurately (and quickly) measured. After all, a website isn’t there just to look pretty, it’s there to generate business.
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For those of us who are not pfukers, Firefox’s search bar can be frustrating because it will only allow you to search Google UK with the “Pages from the UK” option selected. As I have previously blogged this practice is unnecessary since Google introduced geographical weighting into its algorithm.

To help out all the people who find this behaviour unacceptable Zeta has created a simple Firefox search extension to allow us to search Google UK with the default “The Web” option selected. The addon has already had thousands of downloads and a five-star rating.

Download and rate the Google UK Search extension

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been working on a campaign plan to get an international software company to appear in Google’s UK search results. The criteria are simple enough: you must have a .co.uk domain name, have your website physically hosted in the UK or, preferably, both. To put your site’s British-ness beyond refute you would also back this up with a substantial number of inbound links from other sites that fulfil the same criteria.

If you’re part of a global company that is using a .com domain and hosting all its websites from its US head office you are going to incur some costs to appear in the UK results, but is it worth it?

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Who was expecting the 12th May to cause such a stir in the world of search? Well it was the second Searchology event hosted by Google and if the first event (when Google announced universal search) was anything to go by, we should have been prepared for some serious progress announcements from the search giant.

Timing could not have been more appropriate as Twitter is surrounded with speculation of challenging Google’s search share with its own search functionality.
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When performing keyword research for any market one is never short of surprises. I always find a popular key phrase that makes me stop and wonder what on earth people were thinking when they typed it, but there is one very popular search that takes the biscuit.

Every month 68-million people worldwide search Google for “google”. (And for those of you familiar with the keyword tool: yes that is on exact match.) That means around 600 people have searched Google for Google while you were reading this post.

So if you think you know what people will type when they are looking for your products and services: think again. In-depth keyword analysis will always surprise you.

It’s been three months since I joined the Zeta team and what a three months it has been. In the short time that I’ve been with Zeta we have moved office, re-branded and expanded the workforce.

Upon meeting the team for the first time I was left very impressed. I felt that these were guys who had a strong vision of where they were going and they really had their finger on the pulse. more…

Achieving page one rankings in Google is like commercial gold dust. Strong organic positions can strengthen your brand, increase sales and keep customers coming back. It’s the most cost-effective form of marketing to give your business long-term stability in stormy times ahead.

Businesses that have already laid organic foundations will reap the rewards in 2009. Even if budgets get cut, this year provides a rare opportunity to grab market share without breaking the bank. And if you haven’t already set the groundwork, now’s the time to invest. The longer you leave it, the further ahead your competitors will be, and the further you’ll be from page one. more…