In recent times, social media has captured the majority of the limelight compared to other channels such as email and search, in terms of digital marketing channels. Marketers love writing and talking about social media, as it’s fast growing, exciting and less money is actually spent on it. We have also seen that in the last couple of years, social media is gaining more importance in Google’s ranking algorithm.

However, according to a study by a Pew Internet survey conducted in May 2011 and results released this week, the proportion of people in the USA using social networking services is 65%, whereas 92% of internet users send email and use search engines. These figures remind us that even though social media is important, we shouldn’t let social become too much of a distraction.

Compared to less than 5 years ago, when only around 20% of adult internet users in the USA were tweeting and liking, 65% is actually a good figure and a tremendous growth, which undoubtedly cannot be ignored. However, when it comes to established, continued usage, social media is still not yet up to the same level as email and search.

Usage of search and email is also astonishingly consistent across demographic categories. For example –
96% of those aged between 18-29 use search engines and 87% of those who are 65 and older use search engines too. 94% of internet users in the 18-29 category use email while 87% of those in the 65+ group also use email.

Usage is also consistent through socioeconomic categories as 90% of those earning $30,000 per annum use search engines and 98% of those earning $75,000+ per year also use search engines, which isn’t significantly higher.

Some people may think that email is dying, however we can see from the survey results this is not true. Many organisations are still undecided about social media and can see emails as a vital part of their business as they use it every day.

Even though there’s a buzz around social networking sites, mainly because they are seen as “the new kid on the block”, search and email should not be forgotten. At the moment search and email can be seen as currently the two most reliable digital marketing channels. Saying this, all three channels have unique attributes and if they are all integrated in a marketing campaign, this can lead to a successful campaign.

Last week, Google threw itself into the big world of social networking. They have launched a new project called Google+ which aims to make Google more social. It is a communications tool designed to complement and reflect all of our offline relationships. At the moment, Google+ is still in a limited field test and the service is currently restricted, unless you were one of the lucky people who got an invitation.

In the past, Google used Twitter for faster indexation of content, to power real time results and also for use in their ranking algorithm. It has been reported that Google removed real time results from Twitter and other websites such as their News and Facebook. However, Google plans to reinstate real time results using Google+.

Even though Google+ is different from Google+1, with each having their own unique functions – they do connect with each other. Users who have a Google+ account or a normal Google account will be able to click on the Google+1 button, which will essentially allow users to vote for their search results and see which websites other connections or friends have “+1ed”. Therefore, the result’s rankings will not only affect you, but also people that you are connected with through Google.

Some of Google+’s features

The main feature of Google+ is the Circles feature, which is similar to Facebook and Twitter Lists. Circles allow you to allocate contacts to Circles e.g. Family, Friends, Snowboarding Group, Acquaintances and whoever else you want in the Circle. You can then publish content to specific Circles or specific individuals, because as Google states, “not all relationships are created equal”.

At the moment, there seems to be more control over privacy on Google+ compared to Facebook. You can share photos with your family in one post, and then publish something publicly in the next post.

Hangout is another feature of Google+. It’s a group video chat feature where you can invite members of a certain group by sending them a notification. An additional feature of the new social networking site is Huddle, which is a mobile group chat service which could also become available from your mobile phone in the near future.

Sparks is an online sharing engine where you can create a topic of interest and share links with group friends who also have the same interests. E.g. you could share results of Snowboarding in France with your “powder chasing” friends.

Why Google+?

Some people may wonder why Google has bothered launching Google+. The reasons are because nowadays, search is about real-time information, people and the relevance of information to them, not just about pages.

Google has been an advocate for real time and social media for a while now, with Google Buzz, Google Places, Google Wave and not to mention the list of its acquisitions of social sites e.g. YouTube and Blogger.com.

The senior vice president who oversees Google’s social product, Vic Gundotra, said “It’s ‘project’ rather than a product because it’s an ongoing set of products and ‘Plus’ because it takes products from Google and makes them better”.

Google doesn’t see itself as a competitor to Facebook or Twitter, as they say that the way people connect online is limited – it’s just a new way to connect online with the people that matter to you.

What’s next?

For now, businesses and organisations have been warned to stay away from Google+. Christian Oestlien, advertising lead on the team behind Google+ explains that the social media site was designed for individuals in mind, “We’re working on building a optimised business experience for Google+ which will hopefully be rolled out later on this year. It will include the ability to connect to other parts of Google such as AdWords and other rich analytics”. However, their main focus at the moment is optimising the consumer experience for Google+.

In terms of SEO, social media won’t replace traditional SEO however, it will indeed help it. SEO practices including link building, content creation, keyword research and targeting will be the foundation for ranking success. Even though social media is gaining more importance and interest, using a combination of both technical SEO techniques and social media are the best steps towards success.

Sadly, we weren’t lucky enough to get our hands on an invite the first time round, but we are looking forward to when we are able to get onboard with the project.

Since the dawn of Google one of the main aims has been to make search results more personalised and relevant to the individual user. Over the years Google have tried to achieve this aim with additions such as Stars in Search results, Search Wiki and of course the addition of location settings and Google Places.

However, even with all these additions, Google is still trying to make search results more personalised and so this week has introduced a new blocking feature on Google.com which will allow individual users to block whole domains from their search results.

Basically the new process will work like this; when you search for something, i.e. “how to fix a TV”, your usual search results will come up and there will be nothing different about the results. However, if you click on a site and then go straight back to your search results (because the site wasn’t what you were after) you will then see an option to block the website from your search results, located next to the “Cached” button.

So say there is a particular How To or Content site you always see in your results but don’t like, you will be able to block the domain and stop any of their pages from ever appearing in any of your search results.

This new option is linked to Google Accounts and so to keep the block permanent you will need to do it whilst logged in. And don’t worry if you change your mind later there will be an option to undo all of your blocks.

Ramifications for SEO

On the service this is simply a new tool to make search more personalised for individual users and in that sense has very little impact for SEO. However, although they are not doing so yet, Google have mentioned the possibility of using this new feature as a signal in ranking, stating that “we’ll look at the data and see whether it would be useful as we continue to evaluate and improve our search results in the future”.

In a very simple sense, the way this would work is, the more times a site has been blocked the more damaging to its rankings. So if a sites blocked by 100,000 people it will likely move lower than a similar site blocked by just 100 people.

If this idea were to be used as a new ranking criteria in Google there could be huge ramifications for SEO. With the addition of a block button, businesses could target rivals with negative SEO, setting up hundreds of fake Google accounts through Mechanical Turk and blocking a competitor site over and over.

So how can Google prevent this negative SEO? Well if they were to use this as criteria for rankings they would surely have to use just a select group of user’s activity to determine rankings. Basically, they would have to just look at users who have been around for a long time, have a well built up profile and are blocking domains very selectively.

Is this likely to affect rankings?

In theory this sounds like a great new way for Google to evaluate rankings, but with the huge possibility for negative SEO and the labour in finding a very select group of users doing it properly, it seems unlikely that it will come into practice anytime soon as the logistics are just too large.

However, although we may not see this impacting SEO anytime soon, the new blocking option is another step towards the ultimate personalised results that Google so desire! The new feature has gone live on Google.com this week and will be making its way to Google.co.uk very soon, so look out for it and start thinking of some sites you are sick of seeing in your results.

2010 seemed like one the busiest years in search that I can remember. I say seemed , mainly,  because it wasn’t. Don’t get me wrong, there was a fair deal of activity from both engines last year – it’s just that I don’t think much of it had anywhere near the impact so many people thought it would.
I’m talking, of course, of things like Google Instant and Instant Preview . These were pretty significant changes as far as user experience goes, and received a huge amount of attention from both the SEO community and (especially in the former case) even the mainstream media. They were the kind of changes that would make my mum say “Ooh, Google’s changed”.

The impacts of the many interface changes in 2010 changes in 2010 were all very modest though, as far as SEO goes (not even the eventual rollout of the infrastructure related ‘caffiene’ update made a huge impact). What is easy to miss is how little these changes affect consumer behaviour – people still use a search engine to find websites and click on one of the top ones, just as they did a year ago. The only difference then, is that new distractions exist – given many distractions (think vertical search) already existed; the impact on traditional search has proved to absolutely minimal. There were some bigger changes to SEO – the heavy places integration in q4 of last year is bound to have a huge impact, but only if you’re competing for ‘local’ type searches.

Despite the hype, the caffiene update didn't provide a rush of traffic for many SEO's

Nevertheless, when these changes happened, they all provoked huge debate ranging from the usual “SEO is dead”, to predictions of more specific impacts on things like click through rates. The blogs were busy, Twitter was trending, and there were doubtlessly thousands of emails received by clients and managers about how these changes would fundamentally change search and how a new strategy was needed ASAP. And yet, if we’re honest, we’re probably entering 2011 largely unchanged.

But rather like the boy who cried wolf, I do think there could be more changes in 2011, from Google in particular. Google could have a huge impact and has the potential to catch many off guard, as we remember all the changes which didn’t change much in 2010. With Google’s algorithm still being hugely dependent on links, despite viable alternative now existing and being used in a limited capacity , Google have the potential to make a change to what really matter to marketers and (particularly) SEO’s – the way websites are ranked.

If any of the below occur to a moderate degree, 2011 would create the biggest challenge to SEO’s in many years:

• Tweets/Likes used heavily in to determine popularity (as opposed to , as I suspect currently , regency)
• User behaviour, such as bounces, folded into main algorithm
• A change to the ‘reasonable surfer’ model to how links are weighted
• A complete , or near complete disregard for Anchor text in the same way as happened with meta tags
• Prevention of duplicate “mill” content from being indexed and passing page rank

For what it’s worth, I’m expecting a least a couple of these things to happen. If they do, it’ll be the year that SEO really does change.

“So what’s the secret with PPC?”

The question is usually something along those lines. I feel a bit like scrooge cancelling christmas writing this post (especially if you’ve found this post searching for the PPC silver bullet) because, quite frankly , there simply isn’t any silver bullet with PPC.

This is not to say that paid search can’t be complex (it often is) , or that there aren’t really any ways to make a difference to a campaign – just that there’s no 1 overpowering method to suddenly reduce your CPA or increase your clicks. You’ll need to do better than that.

There’s now more settings and options with adwords than there have been. Whether you want to add videos , text links or phone numbers to your ads, you can now do it. There’s new keyword match types, mobile device targetting, new ad formats and the ability to ‘remarket’ to people who’ve previously visited your website.

These changes , combined with future improvments, make PPC one of the most exciting areas of digital marketing to be involved in – it means that , increasingly , every paid search account is different not only just in the keywords and campaigns , but in a whole range of ways.It also means that we need to take even more time to understand not just all of the options available to us, but how we can apply these to the client account in question.

The impact on PPC is subtle, yet important. Any marketeers approaching PPC with a fixed methodology are likely to find their work increasingly ineffective. To give an example, I’ve seen checklists and process plans for PPC management – while best practises can be beneficial, a checklist applied to every client is a classic way to get things the wrong way round.

As with traditional marketing, the best way to approach a PPC is to start with the objectives of the  business in question – for us, it means understanding our client. It may sound banal to point out that understanding a client means understanding how best to make the campaign work, but it’s nevertheless the case. The most important part of the planning phase for a new PPC client is in being able to map activities according to the level of impact they will have on the client – how much difference optimising them will actually make. When you’ve done this, you know what you need to spend time on, and what you really need to get right.

For cleints, rotating ad-copy can make all the difference , while for others it’s all about conversion rate optimisation. If rotating ads frequently doesn’t make the difference, don’t feel compelled to do it every week. Equally, If reducing the dropout of a form doubles your return on the entire campaign, do feel compelled to spend every last hour trying to achieve it.

If anything, the ’silver bullet’ of PPC could be as simple as understanding the impact of your work, before you start.