So I thought I should right a follow up blog post on my first instalment around my 3 month secondment in Singapore capturing some of the things I have been up to or have seen.
So I have been here around 2 months now, and I’m just starting to think about home and Christmas with the family. Believe it or not I am looking forward to a long holiday (yeah I know…you’ll say “but you’ve been sunning it up in Singapore for 3 months”) but its still hard work here!
Some recent highlights….
Below are some recent highlights from my time here, in no particular order and without any particular flow. Just some things that made me laugh or were particularly enjoyable and recommended if you ever get the chance to come out here.
Whenever something new happens, naturally all of the blogs pick up on it and start talking about it. One of the recent hot topics was around the wider roll out of Google product ads available in the US to showcase specific products within the advertising spots on Google.com.
The product ads are still in BETA, and will only be available to US advertisers and only on US (.com) search results.
One of things any webmaster should do when putting together a website or updating an existing one is think about how well optimised the site is for the location(s) the site is trying to target.
This article will explain the key identifiers the search engines look for when determining which search locations your site and content is relevant to (i.e., Google.es, Google.it, Google.com etc). This area has become even more important lately with the introduction of more local search results (also referred to as the Google 7 pack).
My second post on optimising your local business listing focuses upon the off site optimisation process. If you haven’t read my first post yet on optimising your local listing, then I recommend you read this first.
Consistent Details Across Relevant Data Centres
With the Google local listings the major step to improving your rank in the 7 spot is simply by verifying your ownership of the business in Google’s local business centre.
This is a straight forward step and allows you to modify details such as address, and phone number and then confirm those changes either by post or phone.
Due to the ease in which anybody can add or edit a business listing, Google will index additional data centres to confirm the details on a business. Those businesses who take the time to optimise their listings on these 3rd party sites will rank higher than those that don’t.
Online marketing should be relatively easy for any business to justify investment in, but this often isn’t the case. The reality is that whilst many organisations now understand the value of the internet and are investing in it there is still usually a fight on for investment in SEO in particular.
This is usually down to one or more of the following reasons:
The budget owners don’t understand SEO “organic search is free right”.
Nobody in the business has been able to clearly articulate a monetary benefit to investing in SEO.
The company believe SEO improvements should just come naturally through good site creation.
The company are seeing great returns from investment in PPC, so are unwilling to reduce budget in this activity to support SEO enhancements which aren’t proven to work and additional budget isn’t available specifically for SEO.
In truth whether it be PPC or SEO, investment should be very easy to justify internally if you go about it in the right way. Some budget owners or senior brass might want to understand the technical mumbo jumbo, but most just care about how much money their investment will pay back.
So you’re looking into outsourcing your SEO efforts and trying to get a feel for what is an acceptable cost for these services? Well the below post aims to give you some examples of widely used SEO pricing plans, plus where possible some information around specific costs.
Let me begin by giving a summary of the various SEO pricing plans that are used in the industry:
By the Hour Consulting
This is probably the simplest and most well used method of pricing in the industry, particularly with consultants and freelancers. The model is pretty self explanatory, the SEO will name their hourly rate and then bill you based on the number of hours completed in a given period time.
So we have had the new roll out of the Google 7 Pack, and some updates to the local business centre and now we’re just waiting on the global roll out of their local ads.
It’s pretty clear that Google is sold that locally optimised listings are the way forward, and I can’t say I disagree with them. Providing they get it right that is!
A recent YouTube video by Matt Cutts supports the theory that Google will continue to drive more local based results on even quite generic terms that don’t include a city location with the query.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the rel=no follow tag the basic idea is to tell the search engine spiders that whilst there is a link pointing out from your website to another site you aren’t vouching for its content.
Whilst I see the point of this for things like advertising or comments on blogs I still don’t see the value of creating an external link in your main content and then saying to the search engines “I don’t vouch for this content”…..if that is the case then why the hell did you link to it in the first place?
I’m not stupid though, I get why people do it. They want to link to relevant content, but believe that by no following the link they maintain their precious link juice within their page rather than passing it out to others. Don’t you think this is a pretty sad state to be in though?
The Fortune 500 might have spent $51 million per day on PPC keywords in Q4/2008, but only 20.82% of those keywords rank in the top 100 organically.
What does this tell us?
In theory a company should focus investment on keywords that are generating business benefit, i.e., driving sales or generating leads. If we assume the FTSE 500 is efficient with their investments (in fairness this is unlikely!) then the keywords they are bidding upon must be important to their business, right?
So if the FTSE 500 only appear organically on 20.82% of those keywords you can conclude that they are doing a pretty bad job of performing SEO to target the keywords they deem as important to their business.
Another interesting point from Conductor report was the mention that FTSE 500 visibility decreased on the longer tail search terms.
If someone asked me why I loved online marketing so much I would probably have to say the analytical nature of it and the fact I can see so much detail around what I am doing. I love the fact that at the end of the day I can tell someone my work has generated £x or 5000 incremental visitors, whilst the traditional marketers in a dying industry come up with some ropey figures to support a print advert or billboard.
But how accurate is the data you see from your analytics in terms of PPC revenue or other tracked online marketing activities? I would argue if you use a standard out of the box 30 day cookie…..not very!
Welcome to my blog. My name is Ben Rush and I specialise in online marketing strategy, search engine optimisation (SEO), local business optimisation, and pay per click. My blog touches upon all of these areas.
I have been involved in online marketing for around 4 years now. Outside of running eCommerce project delivery on the web for a large multinational organisation I run a freelance business called ClickITSEO.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the rel=no follow tag the basic idea is to tell the search engine spiders that whilst there is a link pointing out from your website to another site you aren’t vouching for its content.
The Fortune 500 might have spent $51 million per day on PPC keywords in Q4/2008, but only 20.82% of those keywords rank in the top 100 organically.
If someone asked me why I loved online marketing so much I would probably have to say the analytical nature of it and the fact I can see so much detail around what I am doing. I love the fact that at the end of the day I can tell someone my work has generated £x or 5000 incremental visitors, whilst the traditional marketers in a dying industry come up with some ropey figures to support a print advert or billboard.