Search Engine Marketing & Optimisation

Update July, 3rd 2009: Added 12 local SEO & search resources suggested by readers in the comment section and on Sphinn + some newly researched links.

The most obvious trend when it comes to SEO is “going local”. Ever since Google introduced Google Maps and Local Business Center and later added local search results to Universal Search displaying them on top of everything else businesses everywhere strive to be there. Additionally the proliferation of smartphones and netbooks accelerates this development even more.

You have to perform in local search and on sites that enable users to find local businesses in their respective area. Classic SEO is just not enough anymore for small business owners and location based big business.

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SEOptimise will be at the Online Marketing Show this week at Olympia in London, so make sure you come and visit our stand.

The exhibition is hosted on Tuesday 30th June to Wednesday 1st July and promises to be one of the UK’s top online marketing events. Plus you can still get entrance passes at the show and follow the event on the official @OMS09 Twitter account and #OMS09 hashtag.

SEOptimise will be on stand A138, we’ll hopefully see you there!

What’s the most important issue today? The death of Michael Jackson? No, it’s more of an distraction. Most probably the economy, your health or family still matter most to you. You got distracted anyways. Last week another issue was more important than anything else it seemed. It was the election in Iran or rather the ensuing backlash.

Now I don’t mean to say that the Iranian election wasn’t important. It was perhaps one of the more important issues lately compared to the misguided swine flu craze or todays celebrity death.

What’s more striking is that the US government was keen to make the point that the Iran issue was so important that it asked Twitter to postpone its scheduled maintenance.
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Google are now including a 4th match type in their search query reports: “Broad Match (Session Based)”. I think it is great to have some reporting about the search history issue so I quickly got to work to see how this match type performed.

A Broad Toad by Pixieslayer on Flickr

I ran a search query report for one of our accounts and then I compared “Broad Match” with “Broad Match (Session Based). Here are my results:

• Just under 2% of all broad match queries were session based. As speculated in my last post I think this number will depend a lot on your vertical and how much you bid per click.
• Click through rates for session based broad match are ridiculously high. For the account I tested the average CTR is 64%! This illustrates the importance of having an advert that is different from the competition.
• The average cost per click is about 10% higher. I think this will be another thing that varies quite a lot depending on the account. For the account I checked the average CPC is normally very close to the CPC bid; I think the cost per click for Session Based Broad Match would be propotionally higher if you have a larger gap between average CPC and max CPC.
• The conversion rate is 14% lower. O’ dear. And I was going to say that things weren’t as bad as I thought.
• Because of the higher CPC and the lower conversion rate the cost per conversion is nearly 30% higher. Cost per conversion is a major KPI for this account. For standard broad match keywords it is just under the target figure. For session based broad match it is well over.

Hello, Google? Richard Fergie here. Can I have my account back?

Thanks to everyone who took part in last week’s is social media future proof online poll, we received a great response and the results are now in!

We have published all results below, along with any comments and our own conclusions for each question. If you are reading this in an RSS reader or email please click through to view online.

Question 1) Which social media website is most likely to still be around in 2020?

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Try searching for yourself, that is for your username.

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At lunchtime today we took part in the Oxford Science Park summer event. We played giant beach volleyball, winning our only game, and bungee darts where we were useless and didn’t score a single point between us!

Unfortunately we have photographic evidence too!

Bungee Darts - Richard and Stuart

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Today is the final part of our is social media future proof online poll series. So far we’ve collected some very interesting results, which we will write-up next week.

Back in March it was reported that social media networking is now more popular than email usage. With Google Wave coming later this year, we’re asking if social media networking will completely replace email by 2020?

Thanks for all of your votes this week and if you missed any of the questions they are all listed here. As always, please leave your comments here and tweet us at @seoptimise.

Bleak future: Minority Report

In 2020, a little more than 10 years from now, SEO will still exist. As long as people will search something there will be professionals who make search more effective and things more findable. Of course the SEO industry will evolve. It will change significantly more than once. How?

Can we predict the more distant future of SEO beyond guessing the trends of this or next year?

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Today is part four of our social media poll series and this time we are asking what the main goals of your social media marketing campaigns are:

As always, please feel free to add your comments and tweet us at @seoptimise. And if you haven’t voted on our previous questions please view them all here.