Make Mine Instant!

So Google announced yesterday the launch of a service they are dubbing “search faster than the speed of type”! Calling itself Google Instant, it has had Twitter and the blogosphere flooded with people from the search industry fretting about how this innovation could affect their campaigns.

If you haven’t tried it yet, Google Instant automatically populates the results page (known in the industry as SERPs) whilst you type. No longer do you have to press the Enter key on your keyboard, or the ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button to see the results of what you’re searching for. Google themselves estimate that Instant will save users anything up to 5 seconds per search. This may not sound like a lot, but these seconds all add up when you consider how many searches we conduct through the search engine each day.

But let’s face it; Google has done this for several reasons. Firstly, it’s innovative, and part of Google’s brand is based on their innovative and intuitive products. Automatic search suggestion as you type has long been with the three main search engines, but none of them have hitherto showed a full search result based on the first letter typed into the search box!

Secondly, it’s a time saving tool which will lure users back to the Google home page. Google search has been increasingly appearing on different corners of the web for a while (perhaps more prominently, in the right hand corner of our web browsers), and these handy shortcuts have steered people away from using the Google homepage as their search starting point.

This tool is highly dynamic and potentially game changing for those who work in search or even advertise on Google. It means that some Pay Per Click (PPC) adverts may only appear for a split second on the results page, as Google changes the visible results according to what the user is typing. This could affect PPC and SEO campaigns in three main ways. Firstly, it could mean lower Click Through Rates (CTR) on Google Adwords. For SEO, It could also mean increase the importance to rank high on short tail organic keywords. Finally, it could also further decline the importance of misspellings as Instant automatically corrects

At present, Instant is only available to users logged into a Google Account, who are located in certain countries, and who are searching from the Google home page. And because of its current level of restricted access it is hard to see Instant changing anything from an SEO and PPC perspective in the immediate future. But as with all things that Google does, the proof is in the pudding. Time will tell as to how this ground breaking change to Google’s core product will affect those who advertise with it, and wish to rank high in its search results.

No Blackhats please, we're British!

For more years than I care to remember; I was a perennial outsider to the SEO industry. Gazing through a frosted window into a sector which was visibly growing and (I have to admit it), exciting! As a former recruiter for the digital sphere, I know all the terminology and some of the tricks, and was very keen to move over into SEO practice.

Now that wish has been granted, I’m moved to reveal just how open and forthcoming the SEO community actually is, and how this can benefit a webmaster/ client.

For starters there is a belief in the rest of the digital industry that geek speak is king. Unless you are familiar with HTML5, JavaScript or even the intricacies of design software such as Photoshop; then you’re lost. In SEO there is real technical jargon you can learn, but much of it is made easier to understand thanks to the burgeoning SEO community and their openness.

A key example of the openness that runs through the veins of the industry is the community in the US called SEOmoz. These guys originally offered SEO consultancy, but have since changed their business model, and now offer a set of tools for the SEO industry. However, what’s really interesting is the community. There’s a wealth of knowledge and ideas shared via both the SEOmoz blog, and the YOUmoz blog.

I’ve been really impressed by the lengths at which different corners of the Search industry go to in order to make their knowledge available to the wider world. There are plenty of other sites full of shared information that an SEO can turn to for advice. The likes of Sphinn, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, and State of Search, offer their readers an insightful view of the changing Search landscape.

How can this benefit you, the client? Well, the more open the exchange of information, the easier it is to begin to understand SEO as a process, and indeed how that relates to your particular niche. Plus as your knowledge and understanding grows, it can also help you seperate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to appointing an SEO agency – which can only be a good thing, right?

One of the toughest challenges for a digital agency, after building an SEO proposition, is how to scale it. Being a human capital driven service, many good SEO agencies are borne out of a small pool of talent that embrace the medium and have the right skill set to capitalise on it. On the face of it then, it sounds rather straightforward to scale – just get more good people in to service the new clients as they flow in.

Are you trying to get too big?

The reason then, why this often doesn’t work as planned, would also appear to be quite logical – many new recruits to such businesses simply don’t reach the same standard as the founders, perhaps because the best people are already part of a successful company already, or they aren’t able to grasp the knowledge needed. There is some truth in this – SEO, being a relatively new industry, isn’t easy to recruit for – people with many years experience are in short supply while there are few educational alternatives for those without it.

Although good recruitment can help to overcome the problem, it usually needs to be backed up by a pretty good training proposition for new staff. Training SEOs can be harder than it sounds too – good SEO doesn’t just require a large amount of knowledge around a variety of subjects, but it also requires that the knowledge is up to date. As such most agency SEO training is done in-house, further draining away the time the talented staff have to spend on clients.

But recruiting and training staff is only half of the problem, and arguably the most solvable. A bigger problem could be successfully achieving scalability itself. In an effort to achieve scalability, economies of scale must be achieved to compensate for the almost inevitable dilution in talent. The few agencies that have grown beyond a few dozen staff have tried a variety of things to achieve this, from content networks & their own indexes of the web, to heavy automation of regular tasks like reporting. While the effectiveness of these particular strategies can of course vary, they all tend to have the side effect of making life for their new staff easier. And herein lies that deeper problem.

These SEO agencies that were good enough to achieve a good reputation and rapidly grow their client base typically didn’t have these luxuries when they started out – more likely, they probably had to make do with small budgets, a shortage of time, and basic resources. Such constraints, as with many creative industries provide an environment perfect for innovation. With severe constraints, it’s not just desirable to innovate – it’s essential. Without the need to innovate, it’s even more challenging to prevent a great proposition becoming stale and mediocre.

Despite this,  I have no doubt that there are many large and growing SEO agencies that provide excellent service to their clients, but I’m also equally convinced that smaller agencies have an often overlooked advantage over their larger peers – the creativity and innovative capacity of their staff can be a bigger asset than any automated system or content network.

About 12 years ago Google launched their search engine which would change the world of search radically. The basic principle was simple – instead of just relying on the data contained within a given web page, a formula called PageRank was used to determine how important the page was according to other websites. Although the actual algorithm has evolved a great deal since this time, the basic principle of incorporating other data from the web to assess the relative importance of a web page has only, if anything, increased.

Despite this, there are still many who will treat or describe SEO as a purely on-page technical exercise. Essentially they’re saying that high amounts of traffic can be recieved simply by tweaking various tags and attributes and strategically using keywords on one’s website. Whilst this can certainly help, and, in the case of some very niche keywords, raise rankings, this is sort of activity will not enable a website to compete on phrases where large amounts of traffic are available.

This situation partly explains why it’s possibly to get 10 radically different solutions for an SEO strategy with equally radical price differentials – many of the very cheap solutions are only optimising the on-page technical factors, which, according to industry experts are only around 15% of the algoirthm.

The explanation for this is very simple – there’s simply too much competition on the web. To demonstrate my point I’ll show you exactly how much competition there is for a big phrase. Here is a search on Google for the phrase “Car Insurance” :

Yes, that’s right – 35 million web pages seemingly competing on that result . Ok, so you’re probably thinking that most of those pages aren’t relevant at all, and this is where the clever SEO comes in. Not so.

If we use Google commands to search for the same phrase with that phrase in both the title and page URL (a very strong indicator that the web page is actively optimising for that phrase) we see that there are still a staggering 439,000 web pages in Google’s index. It doesn’t matter how advanced your software is, or how technically adept somebody may be, there’s simply no way you can do anything on-page that puts you head and shoulders over half a million results, because there isn’t a logical way for Google to determine which is the most relevant.

It would be rather like trying to pick 10 people to hire from 439,000 applicants based purely on the contents of their CV – they can *say* whatever they want on their CV – but it ain’t necessarily so – you’d definitely want to meet them, collect references and so on before hiring, right?

There is the also argument that on-page is fine if you’re not targeting super competitive phrases, but even for some less competitive terms you’ll need to do a lot more than tweak a few elements on-page.

There are many people who prop up the ‘tweak it and they’ll come’ theory – these include designers of wordpress plugins; £199 website optimisation ‘tools’;  lazy SEOs and those who simply don’t know any better. The sad thing is that it not only does it not work, but it could cost the business owner thousands of pounds of lost sales.

So, if you’re in the market for some SEO consultancy make sure you take a long hard look at those proposals. Ideally the activity proposed should comprise of:

1. Technical & on-page
2. Content creation (NB you may be able to save yourself some pennies if you’re willing (and able) to create the content yourself)
3. Link building

Oh, and bear in mind that great old adage – “pay peanuts… get monkeys”.

You’ve probably heard people talk about the ‘long tail’ of search many times, but the key challenge for most businesses is how to exploit it. A well optimised e-commerce site could pick up visits on literally thousands of long-tail search phrases every month, but it’s less obvious how a service-based business might go about this. Fortunately, there is a great chunk of search traffic you can easily capitalise on – question based search.

Question based search is exactly what it says on the tin – a situation where a user types a question into Google, rather than the name of a product or service. The type of search often indicates the user is in the research phase rather than ready to buy/sign up, but this isn’t always the case (for instance, many users will search for something like “where can I find a ….”). Either way, if you are thinking long-term, you’ll gladly take the extra traffic (and potential leads) that ranking well for these particular terms can yield.

In order to succeed with a question search strategy, you need to break the process down into 4 steps :

1. Identify your customers questions
2. Decide which questions you’d like to answer
3. Answer the questions
4. ‘Convert’ the searcher into a lead

Identifying Questions

There are many places where you can look for questions that have already been asked – although you’ll be competing with other websites, you’ll have the benefit of knowing that those questions are definitely of interest to people. Some ideas for finding questions would be as follows :

1. Look at your analytics search phrases ; the chances are, you’re receiving the occasional visitor on question searches already. Another way to use your existing site data is to use your internal search data – which you can also track through many analytics packages.
2. Do a google search for a broad term, and then select ‘discussions’ from the options menu on the left
3. Search websites such as Yahoo Answers, as well as any industry specific forums individually

I did a search on Google for the word ‘accountant’, and clicked discussions – an encouraging 700,000+ results. Yahoo Answers alone had over 4,000 results.

Also, don’t forget about the questions that may never have been asked – you could raid documents, textbooks and even exam papers here – an accountant, for instance, might find that many of the questions in their tax textbook would be of great interest to small businesses.

Filtering questions
Given that finding enough questions to answer won’t be a problem for many businesses, selecting the best questions to try and answer is probably the key challenge. You’ll want to consider several factors in this,  but some of the more important questions you should ask yourself are as follows:

1. Can I actually answer the question? (be honest with yourself!)
2. How long will it take to provide a good answer? (again, be realistic)
3. Is there likely to be any value in attracting this type of visitor?
4. What competition am I up against?
5. How often do I think this question may be asked?

By filtering with the above 5 criteria, you should get a large number of questions that will be likely to offer a reasonable reward in respect to the effort expended in answering. You can then pass the list to your staff / content writers or perhaps even work down them yourself in an effort to create some genuinely useful content.

Answering the questions

Now, depending on available resources, this part could be the easiest or most difficult. Factual based questions are likely to be among the quickest to answer, while complex questions may need a good writer to explain. Either way, you’re going to need a section of your website where you can actually put these answers. Some of the places you could put this content are as follows:

1. FAQs section
2. A knowledge base system
3. Your blog
4. A traditional ‘articles’ section

If the system you choose has the flexibility to allow users to ask their own questions, you should try and take advantage of this, since you’ll be getting content ideas  for free via this route.

Getting a conversion

Probably most important of all – you’ll need to get these visitors to convert. Often providing different ways of converting will be your best bet here.

If you think you can convert your customers straight into leads, then by all means push a ‘get a free quote’ or similar message at the customer, but if this isn’t the case then you might want to consider pushing a softer conversion type. Newsletters, mailing lists, white paper downloads etc might not make you any money right now, but they all provide you with a means of building your customer database, and hopefully an opportunity to sell your services to these visitors in the future.