Blog

“Porn as Pain Management” and Other Weird Searches of 2011

December 28th, 2011 admin

During our daily travels through all things digital, we here at Nina Hale Inc Search Engine Marketing see some pretty strange search queries. Join us on a trip through the strange, the hilarious, and the down-right bizarre in round three of “Weird Searches from NHI.”

These are real searches that people conducted on Google from February, 2011 – December, 2011.

  1. “Porn as pain management”
    • Uh huh. Sounds like something my ex-boyfriend would have claimed: “no, really honey! It does, I read about it in Maxim.” Maybe it’s the lamest Psych 101 experiment ever, we really didn’t want to dig too deep to figure it out.
  2. “Cure snoring by playing digideroo”
    • Well, supposedly it strengthens your throat muscles or something… I guess if I were desperate I would try it out.
  3. “Pooping for charity”
    • We have one word for this: Eeeewwww! This is an alternate reality we don’t want to live in. X2 for the not wanting to go too deep into the bowels of Google search to figure out this one <ahem>.
  4. “How do you fake a bladder infection?”
    • This is how you might retaliate against your boyfriend’s pain management methods (a vicious cycle!)
  5. “Baby pandas for sale”
    • Seriously? Please also refer to our previous post with the entire list of most popular baby animals for sale (and we’re not talking about stuffed plushies).
  6. “How much did milk duds use to cost”
    • Our kind of searcher!
  7. “Cosmic war criteria”
    • It’s good that the off-the-gird community is truly planning ahead. After all, someone has to look after all us wimps unable to deal with alien invasions. But really, someday we should put together a list of the top searches we’ve identified as off-the-grid survivalists because they can get pretty wacky.
  8. “Where can I get some Charlie Sheen?”
    • Good question! Gimmee some of that winning magic.
  9. “Equocoliptous boupouri”
    • This one wins the prize for Google’s correctly identified phonetic search of the month (Eucalyptus Potpourri)
  10. “Goat play equipment”
    • No it’s not some creepy fetish, it just turns out that some farmers like to keep their fun-loving goats amused. We even found a site with a nice product. Awww, cue the Willie Nelson video of “the Scientist” (for Chipotle)!
  11. “Room and boars”
  12. “Snore sounds like horse puffing”
    • How do you know what a horse puffing sounds like? It is puffing ON something?

 

It’s an odd world out there in the Internet. Check back again in a few months to see more crazy searches uncovered by our search marketing gurus.

Pinterest: The New Kid On the Social Media Scene

December 15th, 2011 admin

There’s a new kid making waves on the social media scene. No, it’s not another music sharing site or Facebook spin-off. It’s something completely new: a way for users to organize and share images and videos found on the web. An online, virtual scrapbook called Pinterest.

Pinterest is formatted like a pinboard, with users “pinning” images or YouTube videos found on the Internet onto “boards” they have created.

For example, many brides-to-be have boards for dresses, table arrangements, bouquets, and more. During their Internet travels, they pin images of favorite dresses or unique flower combinations to the appropriate board, creating a convenient way to organize scattered thoughts. Users can then search through other Pinterest users’ pinned images and “repin” those images onto their own boards. Look below to see an example of a personal Pinterest account.

Katie Pennell's Pinterest Page

Pinterest has grown from 40,000 to 3.2 million users in just one year and is currently operating at 45% monthly growth. This growing popularity can and is being translated into serious benefits for companies including product sales. The links created by pinning images from a company’s site improves page rank and increases brand awareness. Some of our clients have seen significant revenue from Pinterest traffic.

By building a company site on Pinterest, you can also engage customers on a whole new level, building the perception of your brand as a trusted resource in your field. See an example of a successful brand presence on Pinterest below.

At Nina Hale Inc, we are excited to offer Pinterest as part of our social media consulting. We’ll be happy to set up your Pinterest account, provide training and a list of best practices. If interested in exploring what Pinterest can offer your company, please contact us at info@ninahale.com.

– Katie Pennell, pinning enthusiast. For images of Muppets, s’mores, unique bookshelves, and more follow my Pinterest page at http://pinterest.com/kpenn.

Today: Widespread Availability of Google Analytics Visitor Flow and Goal Flow

November 21st, 2011 admin

Last Thursday, Google announced they would roll out two new reports across Analytics accounts over the following days. Today, November 21st, most accounts should have access to the reports “Visitor Flow” and “Goal Flow”. The two reports are only available in the new, beta version of Google Analytics.

Google defines the Visitor Flow report as “a graphical representation of the paths visitors took through your site”.

The report is comprised of “nodes” and “connections” and defaults to a starting node of “Country”.

The report is quite intuitive, so we won’t spend any time regurgitating information you can learn yourself, but two quick tips for navigation:

Two of the most important buttons on the report are small brackets on either side of the home icon in the upper left corner. These brackets allow the user to scroll  horizontally through the entire series of visits. Also important is the small “cog” icon at the top of the flow diagram. This allows the user to filter the assigned metric by keyword or regular expression.

It is important to note for clients with larger traffic levels that reports with over 100K visits use sampled data, so the numbers are not precise.

The reports themselves are located under Standard Reports, Visitors, Visitors Flow and Standard Reports, Conversions, Goals, Goal Flow.

New Hire Questionnaire: Angela Needham

November 10th, 2011 admin

Angela Needham
Nina Hale is thrilled to announce the newest member to our team! Meet Angela Needham, our Search Intern. With some real-world SEO experience and an enthusiastic attitude, she’ll be a search guru in no time. Learn more about Angela in her own words:
What is your educational background?

I graduated this past May from Augsburg College. I majored in Marketing and minored in International Business.

What lead you to search Marketing?

My dad has his own hardwood flooring company which was hit hard by the recession. To generate some business for him, I created a website for his company. We used AdWords for a few months while we worked on improving our ranking in the organic results. Our focus now is on SEO, which I love since it allows me to be both creative and strategic when optimizing his site.

What’s your favorite part of Thanksgiving?

Bragging that my ancestors came from the Mayflower. I haven’t looked at the lineage recently but William Brewster, the preacher of the ship, is my great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather (that is a rough estimate on the “greats”).

Biggest Facebook snafu to date?

Say what you will, I am a huge Britney Spears fan. When I went to her concert this summer, I changed my profile picture to a picture of Brit a week before the concert. The following week, I had an interview at a brand consulting firm. They asked me what I thought my Facebook profile picture said about me. When I realized they saw it when it was a picture of Britney, I didn’t know what to say. But everything happens for a reason because if it wasn’t Britney and if I got the job, I wouldn’t be sitting here at Nina Hale today.

Welcome to the NHI team, Angela!

More Weird Seaches – Animals for Sale

October 5th, 2011 admin

I admit it, I have a thing for people’s fascination with animals and pets. This can be found in my collection of animal lamps, including our life-size Horse Lamp at the office, and my other favorite lamp, Charlie The Tuna. Working on a keyword research project today I ran across of series of searches for baby animals for sale. So I turned off the clock, and did a little more digging. Here is the list, in order, of top monthly searches on Google for different types of animals for sale. And I’m thinking that these aren’t stuffed animals because of the way I set the words so that the search has to be in the order they show below.

Google Analytics launches real-time reporting.

September 29th, 2011 admin

If you are like us, you probably use a metrics package like Google Analytics for your month to month and year over year reports and a secondary tool like Chartbeat to tell you who’s on your site at any given moment. In the next few weeks, Google will be launching their own real-time reporting tool that might make tools like Chartbeat unnecessary. Google just announced real time reports– a series of new reports that illustrate what’s happening on the site as it occurs. Most reports on the current version of Analytics have a delay of several hours and some reports only update daily.

The real time reporting feature will track immediate the impact of online interaction, providing a minute-by-minute analysis of site performance. One big impact this will have is the ability to measure the effect of social media on site traffic.  For instance, if we posted a link to this article on Facebook at the same time the article was published, we would be able to see the visits from links back our site instantly.

The real-time data will also enable users to ensure their ad campaigns are setup correctly  and allow for quick fixes to links to be made as they are noticed.

The form for requesting early access is open to anyone, and we look forward to our own access to this new report soon!

https://services.google.com/fb/forms/realtimeanalytics/

Mobile Advertising: Change is coming…Are you Ready?

September 23rd, 2011 admin

A post from Annie Bunkers

We all know the importance of mobile advertising. More and more consumers are browsing and making purchases from their mobile devices than ever before. It’s even estimated that as much as 44% of last minute holiday shopping this year will be performed on smartphones and tablets[1] Advertisers now have even more incentive to develop optimized mobile sites for their business; Google just recently announced that mobile sites or landing pages will now factor into the overall quality score of mobile ads.

To put it simply, you’ll need to have a highly optimized mobile page specifically for your mobile campaigns in order to maintain a competitive presence with mobile search traffic. The idea is to improve user experience for mobile users and in turn, will result in more traffic at significantly lower costs. By building a mobile page or site for your business, you’ll be able to prioritize your main goals and provide relevant information that would be useful for someone on the go.

Read more about Google’s announcement on the Mobile Ads Blog Here: http://googlemobileads.blogspot.com/2011/09/mobile-website-optimization-now-factors.html

Use the Google Mobile Site Creation Tool: http://googlemobileads.blogspot.com/2011/06/mobile-ize-your-business-with-google.html

Local Attraction Turns to Search Experts

September 23rd, 2011 admin

Our founder, Nina Hale shares some insights regarding the Cavalia ticket scams.

Video courtesy of Kare 11, to read the full article, click here.

Block The Google Related Plugin From Your Site

September 1st, 2011 MikeG

If you follow search marketing news, or if you are a tech savvy internet user who likes to test out new gadgets and plug-ins then you have probably heard and/or used Google Related. If you haven’t heard of it, Google Related is a relatively new plug-in for Internet Explorer, Google Chrome and some older versions of Firefox that acts as a web browsing assistant. As you brows the web and go to various websites, the Google Related toolbar will occasionally pop up at the bottom of your screen and provide you with other information related to the page and website that you are currently looking at (e.g. related news, related sites, related images, related videos, etc.). From a user perspective, its a pretty useful tool, especially when it comes to comparison shopping, related reviews and research.

However, form a business owner’s perspective, this tool could take traffic from your site and land them directly on a competitors site. For example, if you are an e-commerce store and someone navigates down to a product page, that generally means that they pretty high intent on buying. Imagine now that that person is using Google Related – they would be able to immediately compare prices, for the same item with your competitors. In the example below, this could mean losing business because your competitors have a lower price point:

Comparison Shopping With Google Related

Google Related shows competitors prices right on your site

As another example, what if you are a service-based business that uses your website to generate leads (e.g. an attorney)? In this case, Google Related will serve up related websites based on your content. See the example below:

Google Related Shows Competitor Websites

Google Related can show competitor websites as having related information

Many business owners that have seen this at work on their sites have complained, including several of our clients, because there is now way to opt out of this program. So we have come up with a simple solution to disable the Google Related plugin. Because this plugin depends on the use of an iframe, a simple change to your websites CSS style sheet will make this iframe invisible. Here is what the code for the plug-in looks like (pay particular attention to the highlighted section):

Google Related HTML Code

Google Related HTML Code

You can see that the code calls the iframe with the class style called “grelated-iframe”. All you have to do is make that style invisible – just add the following code to your CSS stylesheet:

iframe.grelated-iframe
{
display: none;
}

I have done some searches, and it seems that some of the bigger brands are unaffected by this because they have tons of relevant and related content on the web (e.g. toyota, ford, coca-cola, etc.) but most consumer products will be, especially as it relates to price comparison, and most content rich sites will be as well. From the user perspective, this is a good tool, and in certain cases, from a business owner’s perspective it is as well. It can help to reinforce your brand by showing all the various forms of content you have available (press releases, videos, reviews, etc.) It can also be used to find competitive niches that haven’t been tapped yet. For example, if you haven’t taken the time to develop video content, and your competitors have, Google Related will likely show you this.

However, if you find this plug-in to be a detriment to your site’s performance, feel free to add the small snippet of code to your CSS and voila, Google Related has been disabled on your site.

by +Mike Grinberg

2011 Team Outing to the MN State Fair

August 28th, 2011 admin

We were able to get almost the whole team down this year to the State Fair. Roxy and Stephany couldn’t make it. Here are some highlights.