Blog Archive

Posts Tagged ‘Google’

SEO Implications of New Generic Top Level Domains

Monday, July 9th, 2012

You may have heard that in June, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), released a list of the new generic top level domains (gTLD) for which many applications were submitted. This represents a major expansion in the current TLD list, which includes .com, .biz, .org, etc. Any company willing to pay the $185,000 application fee and approved by ICANN can gain control of any top level string (i.e., .example).  If approved, these new gTLD will come online in 2013.

What does this mean for search and search engine optimization?

Over 1000 organizations applied for 2000 different gTLD. Many of these applications were from large corporations protecting their brand names (Target Corporation applied for .Target, General Motors applied for .Chevy).  While this will allow these brands to create a linked set of related sites that would reinforce their content, for example: football.nike and basketball.nike; the companies who are doing this are the largest brands in the world and are already doing well in terms of search optimization.

On the other hand, there are numerous other applications who applied for more generic terms and plan to become registrars and sell domain names to the public. This includes gTLDs such as .hotels, .bank and .attorney. One start-up named Donuts used $100 million in venture capital to bid on 307 different gTLDs.

We’ve been getting a number of questions about what to do in preparation for this expansion of potential addresses.

Our answer right now is: nothing. History has shown .com as being a very sticky domain. The lack of acceptance of the past expansion, such as .biz and .info, would lead me to advise not overreacting about the new gTLD. However, it would certainly be worth a few minutes to review the list and make note of any new gTLD that may impact your business to follow more closely.

The only caveat to this wait-and-see approach is the fact that Google itself applied for 101 different gTLDs. If Google sees a future in the expansion of TLDs and utilizes them to significantly impact its search algorithm, then search marketers will need to pay attention. On the other hand Google may just be looking to protect its many brands.

Share

Tags: ,
Posted in Google, SEO | No Comments »

Google Study: 89% of Paid Search Clicks are Incremental

Thursday, April 26th, 2012

The search engine result page has become one of the most valuable landscapes for businesses of all sizes and types because it drives more customers to their website than almost any other channel. That’s why establishing your presence on these pages is so important. One of the biggest questions that businesses ask themselves is if they need to pay for that presence and if so, how much of it do they need to pay for. The answer to that question really revolves around clicks and what mix (organic vs. paid) generates the most. Well according to Google’s recent Search Ads Pause research study, the majority of paid search clicks are actually incremental – 89% to be exact. Or in other words, 89% of the visits to the advertiser’s site from ad clicks are not replaced by organic clicks when the search ads are paused.

I’m sure that many of you are thinking the same thing that I thought after seeing this. Of course Google is going to tell us all that paid search clicks are incremental. However, after digging into their research a bit further it does give you the confidence and reassurance that you’ve been looking for all these years. One of the most interesting elements of this study was the way that Google broke out these incremental clicks by organic position. The proportion of incremental clicks varied from 50% (when the organic result was ranking #1) to 96% (when the organic result was ranked lower than 4). Even when the organic result ranked between 2 and 4, which are very productive positions, the percentage of incremental clicks from paid search was still 82%.

It is very interesting to think that even if you’re ranking #1 for a top keyword that there is still opportunity to capture 50% more clicks with the presence of an ad right above that. This research also gives you the confidence to be aggressive from a paid search perspective on keywords that you’re struggling with on the organic side. As much as we’d like to think that having a strong presence organically is enough, knowing that there are many more clicks out there for the taking makes paid search a very valuable tool for growth. So the next time you’re thinking about turning off your brand campaign in AdWords think about that 50% that you might be saying goodbye to.

Share

Tags: ,
Posted in Google, PPC, SEM | No Comments »

The skinny on Google Instant

Monday, September 20th, 2010

Whenever Google rolls out a new search feature – Personalization, Universal Search, Search Suggest, Real Time search, etc. – people go crazy. Blog posts come out saying this is the end of SEO, or you need to do X, Y and Z now, because this is going to change the game, etc. This has always been the case, and probably always will be. Everyone wants to have the first post, the first tweet, about the latest and greatest news in search.

Google Instant is not unlike Search Suggest. That’s all it is – a suggestion to save you some typing time. The main thing it will change is people are probably going to try a lot of different queries before settling on one. Searchers have done this for years, though – refining a query to explore a topic. Now they can do that even faster! What it does do for search marketers, though, is provide an extra source to conduct keyword research. Now we can see not only how many people per month do a particular search, but also what Google displays as they arrive at typing in those searches.

Google Instant didn’t even make a big splash on PPC results. Google Instant also displays paid ads, and impressions incur under 3 different scenarios:

  1. The user begins to type a query on Google and clicks anywhere on the page (a search result, an ad, a spell correction, a related search).
  2. The user chooses a particular query by clicking the Search button, pressing Enter, or selecting one of the predicted queries.
  3. The user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of three seconds.

Impressions before and after Google Instant

As you can see, the team at Nina Hale, Inc., hasn’t noticed an increase in impressions across the board for our clients. The Google team frequently rolls out improvements and new functionality to search – sometimes they are game changers, but for now it’s business as usual!

Share

Tags: ,
Posted in Google | No Comments »

What Happened to the Google AdWords “Previous Interface” option?

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010

When Google came out for a visit last month we got hints that they might be ready to kill the "previous interface" option for finding new keywords in Google AdWords. And today (tonight we think) it seems that they did finally. There is a hint of a new backend that might be better called "nostradamo" that is linked from the new keyword interface, but it’s broken right now. 

Why I liked the old version better.

 

  • I was used to it. (lame I know, but still)
  • Less broad. Now I enter a keyword and I get a huge amount of synonyms and I have to go in and uncheck the categories. 
  • Automatic. Hear me out here. So in the old version if you didn’t add anything into the box if would automatically give suggestions on anything that was in your ad group already. SO you could enter some placeholders in Google AdWords Editor, post them, then look for suggestions. Seems like not a big deal, but it saved time, and it felt like a lot of time. If the new interface had this one option, I think I would like it more. 
  • This is a big one: "Don’t show me suggestions for other keywords." This allowed you to quickly get estimated monthly searches for your previously chosen keywords. So we would settle on a set of keywords to recommend to clients, and would then want to go get number of search estimates. 

 

There are some things I do like: The ability to drop different keywords into different ad groups. That’s nice. 

And of course this comes at a bad time. There are three of us tonight working on deadlines, and we’re all sending sad and frustrated IM’s back and forth about it. You can still access the open version that isn’t tied to your account. But that means that you can’t save them into the ad group. Also the keyword tool in Editor is still working, but that works only 1 keyword at a time. 

So my plea to Google: PLEASE bring back the previous interface. 

Please leave comments (legitimate – we’ll ruthlessly delete spam.)

Share

Tags: , ,
Posted in Google, PPC, SEM, SEO | 3 Comments »

Google Indexing “Freaky Fast”

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

The popular sandwich shop near my house has been freaky slow lately– half-hour waits and the drivers seem to get lost even though I live on the same street and only three blocks away. Go figure.

Google, on the other hand, is insanely fast– picking up new sites and ranking them in as little as 10 hours. We helped a web developer launch a new client site yesterday on a brand new, just registered domain at 4:30PM CDT. We added the domain to the usual Google, Yahoo! and Bing URL submission forms, set up Google Webmasters Tools with a sitemap XML feed. This morning when we got to work– there was the site, ranking in Google number one for their brand. A quick check of the Google Webmasters Site Crawl report indeed confirmed it: Googlebot visited and indexed one page.crawlstats

Yahoo! was just as fast if not faster as they’ve indexed a total of three pages from the new site over night, BUT they missed the homepage and rank the "privacy policy" page at number two for the brand– not ideal.

So far, nothing on Bing.

Share

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Google, SEO | No Comments »

AdWords Click Attribution: New PPC Reports Shed Light on Conversion Attribution

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

It has always been tough to get the full picture of what drives potential customers to visit a website. Even with expensive and complex web analytics packages, conversion and click attribution has been difficult. Recently, Google has taken a step toward providing AdWords users more in depth information regarding the impression and click behavior leading up to a conversion.

Within the next several weeks, Google will be rolling out what they call the Search Funnel Reports (beta). In the past, this information was only available to SEM agencies, like Nina Hale Inc, by request from their Google reps. This will allow AdWords users to see which ads and keywords assisted in bringing in conversions. The premise behind these new reports, is that people generally start their search with broad, non-branded queries, and often end with product specific branded queries. So even though the final conversion is only attributed to the last click (the last ad that was clicked on), there were likely other keywords, higher up in the search funnel, which assisted in the conversion.
 
There are two types of reports that are included in this Search Funnel beta – click-assisted conversions and impression-assisted conversions. Here is a brief explanation, of the information that each provides:
  • Click-assisted conversions: someone types in search query A “red shoes”, clicks on the corresponding AdWords ad from Shoe Warehouse, but does not convert. Later, this same person types in search query B “Shoe Warehouse”, clicks through the corresponding AdWords ad and converts. In this situation, the conversion will be attributed to the branded keyword associated with search query B, however, the new report will show a click-assisted conversion for search query A too.
  • Impression-assisted conversions: someone types in search query A “red shoes”, the corresponding AdWords ad is served, the person presumably sees it but does not click through. Later, this same person types in search query B “Shoe Warehouse”, clicks through the corresponding AdWords ad and converts. Like in the previous situation, the conversion will be attributed to search query B, but the new report will also show an impression-assisted conversion for search query A.
 
At Nina Hale, Inc. we have used this information to shed more light on the performance of non-branded campaigns for several of our ecommerce clients. Generally marketers assume branded keywords convert much better than non-branded keywords, but this new information demonstrates we can’t take conversion data at face value. There is much more going on in the search process – the broader non-branded terms are assisting the specific branded terms to convert.
 

 

Share

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Analytics, Google, PPC | No Comments »

Top Search Engines – The Landscape Might Change Quickly

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

Neilsen reports Bing added almost 2% to their share of searches in February over January. By the time the Yahoo! And Bing search merger is complete, the two engines should command more than 26.5% of all US search.  The real question is how will Yahoo! users respond to Bing natural search results? If they like Bing, the two groups might have the critical mass necessary to steal some Google users.  The merger informational site set up at SearchAlliance.com notes that “algorithmic search” results will be completely integrated by the end of 2010. And depending at where they are in the process prior to the holiday shopping season, Yahoo! Search Marketing might exist until the first quarter of 2011.

China is the really interesting area to watch right now. If the Chinese government does not renew Google’s license to operate search in their country, Bing stands to step in and go head-to-head with Baidu.  The decision will greatly affect the stock prices for Baidu, who closed above Google in trading yesterday at  $573.

Share

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Google, SEM, SEO | No Comments »