Understanding the value of higher organic search rankings

Understanding the value of higher organic search rankings

Search Light Digital has written an interesting article highlighting the percentage of clicks each organic search ranking is likely to get. The results exclude PPC data and take into account 19,434,540 clicks from 36,389,567 searches. The main findings of the study are:

1. The top search result will get around 42% of total natural search clicks.
2. Second place will get around 12% of clicks, followed by 8% for position 3, 6% for position 4 and 5% for position 5.
3. The top result on page two will only get 0.7% of total clicks

Therefore, if your site is not in the top three results for your relevant search phrases, there is a good chance you won’t be clicked on at all. You need to optimise your content, title and description tags for the relevant phrases that you want to be found by. Nearly 50% did not click on any search result at all, which further demonstrates how important it is to write effective titles and content.

It is also important to monitor and improve your online reputation by generating link bait and building links to your site: this will increase relevant traffic (if done correctly) and can help to improve your search results in the long run.

Also worth a read is an article by seomoz which takes into account PPC and natural search data. According to the study, 11% of clicks are on the top PPC result, and 39% of clicks are on the top search result. This is a good indication to be using advertising for immediate search visibility if your natural search rankings are not doing justice.

SEOmoz Quiz produces some interesting SEO Tips

SEOmoz have created an interesting quiz which highlights some very important things we should be thinking about. A few of us took the test here, and did pretty well, but were surprised about the randomness of some of the questions! You'll see what we mean, take the test :)

Some of the more interesting SEO tips and stories we found out from the SEOmoz questions I have listed below:
1. Yahoo! is considered to be the best source for aquiring competitive link data (forget about using link commands at MSN or Google, or the comparative trends off Alexa).
2. TrustRank is Yahoo's answer to PageRank for link analysis.
3. The following domain extensions are seen as the 'most important': .edu, .mil, .gov. Interesting.
4. Spam sites or blogs that link to your site will could still give you some positive 'link juice'.
5. Having the same content on www. and non-www. site URLs can have a negative impact on your rankings.
6. Meta keywords are NOT important!
7. A 'one-size-fits-all' approach to Meta descriptions are worst than leaving the Meta descriptions blank. Always customise them on a per-page basis.
8. If your deeper pages have a weak page rank, link to those pages from strong, internal pages.
9. On-site content duplication is a big no-no for search rankings.
10. Having big, integrated sites on one trusted domain is much better than having sites with various microsites on different domains.
11. As slick and lovely as Ajax can look, from an SEO point of view there are no 'new, spiderable, linkable URLs'.

Plenty of food for thought...

SEO surprises, tips and insight in SEOmoz report

Search engine marketing is often seen as a snake oil science in which people like us charge people like you to apply SEO voodoo to a website in the hope that more visitors will turn up. In fact it is less of a science and more of set of negotiations around an arms reduction or trade agreement; experiments certainly but in a landscape which shifts as participants make moves.

Within this landscape there is almost unlimited advice and opinion and the sheer number of websites that offer their two-pennyworth make it hard to see what is shared opinion or just gossip. One of the few clear voices in this field is SEOMoz; full of tools and reports that while not giving us the answers, certainly help you think about the questions.

A recent study (April 2nd 2008) for example assembled a group if experts and asked them to rate the most important factors in SEO. The results are fascinating. Here are just a few of the conclusions we have drawn from them:

1. External links matter too: make sure they help extend a visitor journey.

2. Keywords in titles matter most.

3. META keywords don't matter as they are ignored by most engines

4. Internal cross-links matter: think continuous visitor journeys.

5. Link reputation spreads within a site: aim to generate links to all important areas, not just the home page

6. New domains will struggle more than old ones

7. Link names matter and should contain keywords: especially inbound links (hard to fake)

8. Trust and authority are becoming more important than link reputation.

These and almost 100 other findings affect the ways we should be building and marketing successful sites. Clients are going to need help to see the woods for the trees.

Read the full report Search Engine Ranking Factors (subscription required) or talk to us about it.

Using simple timed hosted surveys to get customer feedback: a mashup

Spent the Easter weekend reading Avinash Kaushik's Web Analytics: an hour a day and experimenting with a simple survey tool called PollDaddy. I love hosted 3rd party tools but they can be frustrating because they rarely do exactly what you want. Time to put my Javascript coding head on and see whether I could mashup PollDaddy into what I wanted.

Avinash makes a great point when he argues that good web analytics must include qualitative as well as quantitative data. We can use Google Analytics (or similar) for the later but how to do the former? I wanted to be able to use a survey to ask my visitors some simple questions but I wanted more than a fixed feedback link. What I really wanted was to ask only those visitors who had committed some time to a site to be asked for their responses.

PollDaddy is a really great Web 2.0 survey engine and is simple to set up and deploy. My project was to write some Javascript (including cookies) that would count the number of pages that a visitor had seen and after a fixed number show a striking but discrete alert asking for their feedback. The visitor could either click and have PollDaddy's survey appear or cancel and not be bothered again.

Like most weekend projects this took a few key steps:

1. Sign-up for a PollDaddy account (free for the number of survey responses I expect to get)
2. Find code on the web for the bits of Javascript I needed: cookies, overlays, integrating style sheets
3. Build the prototype locally on my home machine
4. Debug until it was right
5. Upload the Javascript code to some of my own hosting space
6. Test the remotely hosted code with pages on my laptop
7. Integrate the code within my test shop The Market Quarter
   
8. Debug again to remove a name clash between Shopify and my CSS
9. Document here and on my own blog www.jonathanbriggs.com
   

Anyway, it works. I look forward to getting some feedback from Market Quarter customers. What iseven better, is that this simple approach can be applied to any other other site where customer feedback would be useful. Time to approach some of our clients...

Creating my online persona

User personas, scenarios and journeys are central to building great websites and exceptional user experiences. Here at the OTHER media, my role as Content Strategist encompasses the creation of user personas. Basically, I imagine and describe the likely characteristics of our clients’ current audiences and audiences they could attract.

Being creative in this way is good fun (much like when you got to write short stories about magic glasses or something equally random at primary school) but more importantly personas are vital in shaping your site; its tone of voice and its usability. So how would I describe myself as an online persona?

The online grazer: Sally Smith (aged 28)

Sally lives in London and works for a web design agency. She is internet savvy and not afraid of buying items online or internet dating. She regularly uses Hotmail, YouTube, Facebook and IM to keep in touch with her friends. She showed her dad how to use IM, but draws the line at Facebook; some things should remain sacred! Sally shares videos and links on del.icio.us and Stumble Upon (between you and me, she uses these bookmarking sites because her memory is too rubbish to remember the URLs of good sites).

Sally is a bit of an internet grazer, as her internet usage varies: sometimes she is online a lot after work and other times she goes days without logging on; it all depends on the social calendar. Sally goes to a regular jive class; loves DCI Gene Hunt and is currently listening to David Bowie and Roxy Music (the 80s suddenly seem really great).

Hi i'm Kunal and here they call me Google Boy

Hello!

I've been at the OTHER media for nearly 2 years and i'm an online marketing analyst. The majority of my time is spent looking after our clients' Google Adwords campaigns, but in recent months my role has started to focus more on analytics - and more importantly how to interpret the data in a useful way.

Having a real interest in the the online world on things like Google, Digg, Youtube, Facebook etc makes a huge difference when you come to work, and I can't wait to see how the next big thing (mobile) starts to play its part.

On a day to day basis my role is pretty varied. I look after our PPC campaigns for a number of clients on Google, MSN and Yahoo!, as well as helping clients understand their results better through reporting and training.

I'll be back soon to chat about whats happening in the world of Google :-)

First blog post from Theresa!

OK, I'm a newbie - go easy on me....

I thought I'd start out by just talking about my role here at tOm (our nickname for the OTHER media) and my day in general. My role is a varied one, something that can be frustrating - because you can get pulled in so many directions at once - and at other times enjoyable. It does mean that I don’t ever get that ‘same old, same old’ feeling.

One half of me is the project manager for 2 of our most interesting clients, BAFTA (British Academy of Film and television Arts) and Action for Blind People (well I think so at least). And the other half heads up the mini marketing team and spends her time looking at ways to improve our service offering to clients.

Our office is pretty busy most days and there was a real vibe of 'getting things done' today. Sometimes it can feel as though you're never going to be ready to launch a project or wrap up that proposal, but somehow, today - it all seemed to be coming together.

The new BAFTA search interface (the project that launched today) is an interesting piece of ‘beta’ functionality that’s been created with the intention of engaging visitors and drawing traffic through searches on movie and tv trivia - film stars name etc…
The first release contains basic records of all BAFTA winners and nominations, the next phase planned is hookup with IMDB and provide a bigger scope of information.

The site only launched in November last year and it was a pretty big step for BAFTA. It’s their first real communication channel with the public and over the next few months, those public conversations will hopefully develop into something that film and tv buffs really enjoy. I’m finding it really interesting - they are keen to experiment and actually understand the whole concept of one to one communication and engagement.

Ok, that wasn’t too bad for a first post.
I’m going to skive off over Easter but I’ll post something next week about the new and shiny OTHER media website – coming soon to a monitor near you :)

Experimenting with Google Checkout Discount Vouchers

I have a personal project in partnership with market traders at London's Borough Market (near the office). We have set up an online store called The Market Quarter which sells gourmet French food. It is a great place to experiment with ideas that need to be proven before we offer them to clients of the OTHER media.

The big idea this weekend was to create and test some discount vouchers through Google Checkout (who I have chosen to process payments for the site).

Setting up the vouchers was easy (£5 off orders over £30 and £10 off orders over £50) and I created paper vouchers to be given out at The Market Quarter's two real world shops. I also promoted the voucher codes on www.hotUKdeals.uk which means that anyone will be able to try them out.

I will report back here on the results of the experiment.

the OTHER media marketing harder with blogs

Welcome to a new blog from the OTHER media marketing team: Theresa Austin, Kunal Ramchandani, Sally Smith, Alex Barnett and Jonathan Briggs.

Six months ago we changed the way we helped our clients market their sites. We have had some big successes and thought it was about time we started to share these with others in the marketing and web communities.

So today, we launch this new blog. We'll tell you about what we are doing, the new tools and techniques we find and the results we have generated.

Let us know the questions you would like our team to try and answer. Tell us when you think you have found a better way of achieving great results. We look forward to starting many big conversations!