Search Engine Tips – Protect your SERP

Whenever someone searches for your brand name using a search engine, they are also being shown 9 organic results on the search engine results page (SERP) that may not be your site and maybe even another 9 paid results for competitors bidding on your brand name, which means you could be competing with a total of 18 other results that aren’t your site!

To ensure the searcher a) comes directly to your website and b) doesn’t see any negative entries that can creep in to the top 10 results, it is important that you use as wide a range of branded content as possible for the search engines to spider and rank. Taking your position at number one in the SERP organic section as red, below are other methods to ensure you dominate your brand searches.

Paid search top result

It may seem strange to bid on your own brand name when you already have top organic position but with clicks likely to be as low as 5p to 20p per click you should view it as an investment in online real estate. Eye tracking research shows that people’s eyes start at the top of the SERP and as you go down the page fewer and fewer people look at that area (see the research here).  By having two entries at the top you are increasing the likelihood of a click and forcing other results further below the fold. You are also blocking anyone else bidding for the top paid spot on your brand name.

Put your blog on a sub domain

Google views sub-domains as separate entities to the main site which gives you a great opportunity to get a 2nd entry in the organic results by naming your blog something along the lines of http://blog.domain.com

Create a Facebook page

A well populated and linked to (e.g. from your main website) Facebook company profile should see your Facebook profile be shown high in the rankings. To set up a business profile go here http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php

Wikipedia page

Although the terms state that you are not allowed to write an entry about an organisation you are associated with, let’s be honest, it happens all the time. There are too many corporate entries for it no to! Google loves Wikipedia and ranks it’s page in the top 5 for countless search terms. Set up your own page to benefit from this love! Go to the home page here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page and click on ‘create account’ in the top right to get started.

Google Universal Search

Google is always trying new ways at presenting the web’s information, and it is rare to be shown a SERP that doesn’t have either some results from Google News, Product search, blog search or all three! If you don’t have one, get a Google account and start using the submission and feed features to make sure Google is picking up your press releases, blog posts and displaying your products.

Twitter

As we touched on in a previous post about Twitter’s integration in to the fabric of search, Twitter accounts are only going to become more prominent in the SERP, not less. Make sure you have an account and link to it from your home page to show Google how important it is.

YouTube channel

Following the same theory as Facebook and Twitter, a profile on such a large and heavily linked website will be shown highly in searches for your brand name if combined with a respectable amount of content and a little linking from your own site to the channel’s home page. Create an account here http://www.youtube.com/create_account?next=None

What about page 2?

How often do you go beyond the first page of Google? Probably rarely if ever, and that’s the same for the majority of searchers. The truth is, if you’re in position 11 to 20, you’re going to get crumbs, if you’re not in the top 20, you’re nowhere!

Increase your ROI with negative keywords

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25% all of searches are totally brand new
If you advertise through search engine pay per click and use nothing but exact matches you will be running a very tight ship but you will also be missing out on a lot of potential (and relevant) traffic from keywords you haven’t thought of. With 25% of all searches thought to be completely unique (i.e. they have never been used by anyone ever before) you can’t possibly cover every single search term as an exact match.

Spending time to build up your negative keyword list will:

• Save you a lot of money!
• Increase your click through rate
• Increase your quality scores
• Increase your ROI

Use a combination of match types
On the other side, if you use broad match and phrase match keywords you run the risk of seeing your advert triggered alongside a keyword that isn’t actually related to your site. For example, if you bid on ‘web banner design’ as a phrase match you would also be shown for ‘FREE web banner design’. Common sense may suggest you change it to an exact match but you would then miss out on ‘GOOD QUALITY web banner design’ etc. Negative keywords act to prevent this from happening and don’t be surprised to find your negative keyword list is much larger than your keyword list (for one of our campaigns we have just under 400 negative keywords).

Finding your negative keywords
When it comes to finding your negative keywords the first step is to think of the situations you don’t want to have your advert shown with:

• You don’t offer that service e.g. ‘Free’
• You don’t want your advert to be associated with that keyword e.g. ‘porn’
• You don’t want to be shown at the research stage of the buying cycle e.g. ‘reviews’
• You don’t trade in that region e.g. ‘Sheffield’
• Etc.

A lot will come from common sense and your own industry experience. For example, amongst our own no brainers were ‘free’, ‘sex’ and ‘adult’. But don’t just stop there. Others will be less obvious (and some positively bizarre) and require you to use keyword research tools.

Google’s keyword tool
From within your AdWords account simply run the report using your most generic keywords (e.g. ours would be ‘web hosting’ etc) and from the list it generates pick out those you do not want to be shown for and add them as a negative keyword (e.g. ‘adult web hosting’).

Microsoft’s keyword mutation
It may sound like a zombie version of one of their products but it is in fact a really useful tool which shows you common misspellings and pluralisation of keywords. For example the keyword “Messenger” comes back with 35 different ways people spell it including ones you couldn’t guess at (e.g. “messemger”).

Microsoft’s keyword group detection
Another nifty tool from Microsoft. This one shows keywords that are related or similar to your keyword. For example “web hosting” brings back results for “dedicated hosting”, “domain hosting”, “isp” and “conference calling”.

Google analytics (GA)
One of the reports with GA shows you the searches used to find your web site. You can split these out in to ‘paid’ and ‘non-paid’. Scrawl through the ‘paid’ list and pick out any keywords you spot you don’t like the look of.

Google suggest
A recent graduate of their labs, this nifty tool offers search suggestions for you to choose from. From this list you can jot down some more negative keyword ideas. Follow these instructions to turn on Google suggest (currently only enabled on google.com and not google.co.uk).

Why you shouldn’t click here

When determining which keywords your site should be shown for and how high you should be ranked, one of the variables the search engines analyse are the keywords used in the anchor text.

By using the anchor text in links coming to you from other sites AND the links connecting your site’s pages (which means you have some control over this) the search engines are able to build up a picture of your site’s subject and your ‘authority’ in that field.

Anchor text and SEO
When you link from one page to another in your own website or you link to someone else’s website using non-descriptive terms such as ‘click here’ or ‘find out more’ as the anchor text you are not providing the search engine’s spiders with information about what that page is about. As a result you miss out on taking advantage of one of the most important SEO ranking factors (see what I did there?).

To see this in action follow this link which shows how Adobe tops the rankings for the search term “click here” without a single mention of it anywhere on the page (the same goes for all the sites on the first page).  This is 100% down to thousands of websites using something along the lines of “To download Adobe Acrobat Reader click here”.

Anchor text and usability
Getting in to good habits naming your anchor text also improves your site’s general usability. Research conducted in to how people read online content shows people don’t, they scan. Visitors look for visual cues as to the page’s topic and what they need to do next. Linked text stands out and draws the eyes, but non-descriptive links tell the user nothing and they will continue scanning elsewhere.

Getting the best of both worlds
At INSTA Host when we link to another page we use descriptive keywords for both the reader’s benefit and for our SEO. For example…

“INSTA Host, the award winning uk Host,  is pleased to announce the launch of Windows  Hosting.”

Anchor text tips
When you are linking to a page make sure they are…
- Descriptive
- Short
- Written for the user and not the search engines
- Part of the sentence and not tacked on at the end

How to structure your Google AdWords account

If you have ever set up an AdWords account and been overwhelmed by the stats or found it difficult to understand what they are telling you, it may be down to the way you have set up your account rather than what it is saying.

A well thought out Google AdWords account benefits from improved quality score (QS), lower bid prices, higher ad positions and more effective reporting/ analysis.

A Google AdWords account has four levels:
1. Account
2. Campaign
3. Ad Group
4. Keyword

How you structure each level at the set up stage will impact on both your account performance and the ease at which you can analyse results. It will also remove the often tedious and lengthy process of having to restructure the account further down the line.

How to structure the account
Campaign: A product or service
Ad Group: Search themes surrounding the campaign
Keyword: The keywords associated with the ad group theme

For example, if we apply this to Heart Internet…

Campaign: Domain names
Ad Group: Cheap domain name
Keyword: ‘Cheap domain’; ‘cheap domain names’; ‘cheap domain UK’

We would then run an advert tailored to the ad group/ keyword. For example, if someone searched for “Cheap domain names”, our advert would be as follows…

Cheap Domain Names
Domain names only £2.59/year
.com only £4.99. Register now
INSTAHost /cheap-domain

Why structure the account that way?
1. Increased relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group (QS benefit)

2. Increased relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query (QS benefit)

3. Adverts tailored to the keyword see a major increase in click through rate

4. Easier to adjust bids and distribute budgets to the keywords that are the strong performers

5. It is easy to run reports at each level without unrelated products or keywords skewing the numbers

6. Conversion tracking cost per acquisition statistics are clean at each level (e.g. if we had grouped ‘cheap domain’ keywords with ‘bulk domain names’ at the ad group level the conversion figure doesn’t tell us which generated the most sales)

7. It informs your SEO efforts through the impressions metric (i.e. which keywords are the most popular?)

insta Google apps

You can now setup your domain name to use Google Apps in just one click. Google Apps are a suite of free tools from Google that help you stay connected and be more productive, they include:

- Gmail – Fast, searchable email with less spam
- Google Talk – IM and call your friends through your computer
- Google Calendar – Organize your schedule and share events with friends
- Google Docs – Share online documents, presentations, and spreadsheets

To setup Google Apps for one of your domain names login to our control panel, click “Manage Domain Names”, select the domain you wish to update and then click “DNS Management”. On this page there is a new section called “Setting DNS for Google Apps”. Click the link in this section and all the settings will be made automatically for you.

To find out more about Google Apps visit: http://www.google.com/apps/