Image Credit: Missha on Flickr

Bad news. Good news?

Every August or September, Google seem to enjoy shaking everything around a little.*

In the last few weeks there has been a significant change to their organic search results algorithm – which basically means that a single domain can be returned multiple times for a keyword search on the first page. Malcolm Coles wrote about this last week.

And then at the top of the search engine result pages (or SERPs, if you speak in acronyms), there will be an equally severe adjustment in their paid search policy. Basically, Google used to protect brands by forbidding advertisers to use trademarked terms within their ad copies. Not anymore. From 14 September, resellers in the UK, Ireland and Canada will be able to use brand terms (iPhone, Easyjet, Nike and so on) in their adverts, pushing up their quality score, bringing down CPCs (costs per click) and generally making the whole thing much more competitive. There is a Net Media Planet blog on this (disclaimer – I work there) – if you want a little more detail.

Treated separately, both of these stories are interesting, newsworthy and will have consequences for advertisers and site traffic. Taken together, they add up to something of a little more.

Control of their trademarks gone, brands will lose out to resellers in the paid search listings. But if they do see their amount of paid search traffic drop, though, they will have the opportunity to claw it back by dominating the organic results. Google have taken with one hand and given back with the other.

Some thoughts:

• Paid search on profitable keywords/brands will become much more competitive and brands might well see sales impacted
• SEO Managers working for big brands will have the opportunity to dominate the first page of the organic search results for important keywords
• The user search experience might be affected. I suspect Google anticipate that the paid search results will compensate for the lack of variety further down the page. Will it?

So, these are a few of the changes to look forward to in the next few months. I’m sure that SEO’s will already be finding ways around these changes (they always do).

And, in the meantime, here’s a video about what might be coming next. I’m not quite sure what to make of it.

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* Of course, Google is always changing, fiddling, tweaking and rattling about their algorithms. At certain times, though, their changes are more significant. See this article on their recent Mayday Change, and another on the famous Florida Update, back in the day.

As the South African World Cup draws towards its end, I thought that it would be useful to have a look at what Google Trends has made of the competition.

The Players

It’s a simple process. I’ve just pulled out the names of five players – Robert Green, David Villa, Lionel Messi, Arjen Robben and Diego Forlan – who I feel have had (for one reason or another)  notable tournaments. And this is what Google Trends comes out with:

(Click image above to enlarge)

It all started off with a big spike for Robert Green after the USA game – testimony to the awfulness of his error and, quite probably, the fact that people knew little about him. They had to type his name into Google to find out more.

The most hyped player, Lionel Messi, has had consistent attention all the way until Argentina’s exit the other day. David Villa’s popularity has rocketed up in the past week with his cluster of goals, as has the Uruguayan, Diego Forlan’s. Villa’s spike after his goal against Paraguay just about beat Robert Green’s earlier on in total number of global searches.

It’s interesting to note that, in comparison, barely anyone has been interested in Arjen Robben, the best Dutch player – despite the fact that he has scored two goals in four games and been an important part of a team that might win the whole competition.

The Coaches

(Click image above to enlarge)

Here’s the same exercise performed for a handful of manager/coaches: Vicente del Bosque, Diego Maradona, Fabio Capello, Raymond Domenech and Bert Van Marwijk.

It’s plain to see that Maradona is the most high profile coach on this list – followed by Fabio Capello, who has about two thirds of the global interest. Raymond Domenech, who presided over the French shambles, briefly rivalled the two of them in interest but has now slipped off into obscurity while – interestingly enough – no one seems to be too interested in searching for information about the coaches of either of the finalists – Vicente del Bosque of Spain and Bert Van Marwijk of Holland.

So. If we consider Google Trends to be reflective of general interest in a topic, then, these graphs suggest that it is far better to let the players and coaches get on with it – with less of the microscopic scrutiny – rather than whipping ourselves up in the usual frenzy.

As if.

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Here are the Google Trends results for players and the Google Trends results for coaches – in case you’d like to try some different ones.

Image credit: Shine 2010 on Flickr

Foreign wars and General Elections

From a young age I was told by my father that foreign wars existed to teach Americans geography. I suppose what he was trying to say is that Americans tend to limit their interest to their own country, unless something is at stake.

It’s clear enough that as the General Election campaign drags on, British politics will stay under the magnifying glass at home. But are people in the US taking as much interest in our TV debates, blogs, partisan newspapers and politicians as we took in Obama’s and his election 18 months ago?

Nick Clegg and John McCain

Here’s a useful graph from Google that suggests that they are. Collecting together data from the past month you can see that the search terms “David Cameron”, “Gordon Brown” and “Nick Clegg” are generating around about the same interest in the US as is “John McCain.”

Click on the image below to enlarge

No Cameron, No Brown

In fact, in the days following the first leaders’ debate on 15 April, the first mass-search data for Nick Clegg was recorded and in the days that followed he remained – off and on – more popular than the old republican.

This suggests a couple of things. Firstly that Clegg was relatively unknown across the Atlantic a week ago, and – secondly – that people have been interested enough in him to type his name into Google.

12 days after that first leaders’ debate Nick Clegg is still generating more searches in the US than Gordon Brown or David Cameron, which in itself is a curious fact. In fact, Google searches for Cameron and Brown have tailed off completely – leaving Clegg and McCain up there on their own.

Perhaps we don’t need to have wars to get Americans interested in other countries after all. A General Election might just do.

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Image credit: 1Flatworld

Headlines and Googleability

Just a short one. I’ve blogged before about Googleability vs. Creativity in print and web headlines, and how search engine optimisation is currently doing to the English language more or less what Doctor Beeching did for the railways 45 years ago. This is an interesting case in point.

Yesterday evening the BBC News website published a piece on the government’s evacuation plans for Britons stranded due to Iceland’s volcanic eruption. The title for the article, impressively enough, was

‘Ministers mull volcano ash cloud flight chaos measures.’ (visual)

Yes. That’s one headline with seven nouns, leaving BBC News journalists looking like they had been instructed to shoehorn as many keywords into the headline as possible. Is it really necessary? Do the BBC – who already have such strong web-presence and brand identity – need to pander to the search engines in this way?

Still, perhaps one of the subs realised that they had got carried away, for when I looked this morning they had changed the headline to ‘Volcano cloud Britons could return via ‘Spanish hub’ – almost equally ugly, but at least down to four nouns. (Which is plenty).

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Image credit: atibens

Original story via @Sarah_Bakewell

Just as the English talk about the weather, everyone in digitaldom talks about SEO. A brief overview of search engine optimisation is included in this presentation along with a number of the most popular viewpoints.

As ever, comments welcome.

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Sources Used:

“Daily Mirror’s Matt Kelly puts SEO in its place” by Robert Andrews [link]

“Google’s secret algorithm revealed” by David Douek [link]

“How SEO is changing journalism” by Shane Richmond [link]

“A journalist’s guide to SEO” by Kevin Gibbons [link]

Nick Griffin and the lost and found

By now Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time has been well dissected.

I’m not going to add much to what has already been said aside from agreeing with the Times, who borrowed a nice descriptive line from P.G. Wodehouse, comparing the BNP leader to Roderick Spode, Bertie Wooster’s nemesis and all-round pantomime villain.

Or, as Wodehouse said:

‘Big chap… with the sort of eye that can open an oyster at sixty paces.’ [link to article]

But from a search perspective, the case is worth examining a little more closely.

Ever since Obama’s beautifully executed digital strategy prised open the doors of the White House, commentators have been speculating about the effect the Internet will have on the next British General Election, which is at the very most only 195 days away.

Some already seem to be suggesting that it will be the Facebook election and swung by social media.

And (interestingly) just this week Charlie Beckett speculated that guerrilla videos might have an impact.

But nobody has said very much about search, especially paid search.

Paid Search and Keywords

For those of you that don’t know, paid search refers to the paid for adverts (referred to as sponsored links) that appear at the top (known as the blue bar) or to the right hand side of the search results.

Paid search rankings are secured by bidding on certain keywords in the Google Adwords Platform. Traditionally they have been most used by advertisers who have used paid search (or ppc/paid per click) to boost their online sales and increase brand awareness.

Political parties should (and will) start to use paid search in the same way very soon.

By ranking at the top of Google’s search results for desired keyword terms, a party, a company or an individual can control their digital footprint far more closely.

Let’s take an example from 22 April this year.

Here you can see that three people are bidding on the keyword term “budget 2009”. The first is direct.gov an information site run by the government who are hoping to increase awareness of their site.

Secondly we have the Conservatives. Budget day is obviously important for them and they have put in place a paid search strategy to direct the maximum amount of traffic to their website.

Thirdly we have some clever marketing by Anne Summers, who drily advise searchers that: ‘There is no recession in pleasure.’ Very nicely done.

It is a useful case study that shows how a political keyword term can be integrated into a paid search campaign.

Throughout the conference season last month, all the major parties missed opportunities in paid search. Off the top of my head, here are some keywords which might have been useful to marketing strategists at Conservative, Labour or Lib Dem HQ:

“gordon brown speech”

“labour party conference”

“tory party conference”

None of these were picked up on. For parties that are desperate to get their message out, it must be viewed as an opportunity missed.

Now we come to Nick Griffin. His appearance on Question Time has undoubtedly been one of the political events of the month, and it has been particularly keenly watched online: followed on Twitter and analysed in the blogs.

Here are Google Insights into searches for the keyword term “Nick Griffin” over the last seven days:

And if you click here you can see the rising number of Delicious bookmarks that have been saved under “nickgriffin”.

So last night it was interesting (and thank you to @matthewncube for pointing this out) that Channel 4 had opted to bid on the ‘nick griffin’ keyword. Here is what their advert looked like:

By appearing alone at the top of the Google search results for one of the most popular keyword terms on the Internet, Channel 4 might have doubled or tripled their site traffic.

Along with social and traditional media and SEO, paid search marketing has a role to play in the construction of a truly holistic digital strategy. So far we have seen political parties (or perhaps just the Conservatives) dipping their toes into Adwords, but their attempts so far can only be described as a scattergun approach.

Paid search has the potential to make an enormous difference. Already this year Jason Calacanis has called it the most important industry of the twenty first century. For a quick visual indication of the difference that it can make to a website’s traffic, have a look at what happened to Spiralfrog on Flickr.

It’s possible to carefully study and collect keywords, to manage and monitor huge campaigns that include short and long tail terms as well as other misspellings and oddities. With such campaigns set up, the parties could increase the number of visitors that come to their websites (the centre of any digital hub) and they could also reinforce their message on the search results – over and over and over again.

The question is this: do any of the major parties have the ability to do this in time?

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image credit: the G on Flickr
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Update: Martin Belam has written a post on this subject. It’s good for further perspective.