I-COM Blog feed

How to feature your company on Google Maps

2010-03-11 08:37:24

As more mobile-devices connect to the internet and GPS becomes ubiquitous, delivering search results specific to your location is the next logical step for search engines. Personalisation of search is an obvious way to provide results that are more relevant to each individual customer's needs. Google knows where a user's computer is from, IP information, details you have provided about your user account, as well as data from previous searches from your computer or device. As search becomes more personalised, it makes sense to locate your business geographically and Google has provided a useful interface - albeit with a few quirks - to make this process relatively painless and ensure that company owners have control of the information which is presented about them on Google Maps. Claiming a Listing With Google Local Business Centre Visit http://www.google.com/lbc and login using a Google account. Click "+ Add new listing" Add details - Be sure to add as much detail as possible. The following fields need special attention: Company Name - this should be the registered company name. While it is tempting to sneak in a few keywords, if a competitor complains, you could have your listing reviewed. Only write in here your company name as it appears with Companies House. Telephone Number - the main number should be a geographically located number. Non-geographic numbers (mobile, 0800, 0845, 0870) cannot be used for verification. Put any other contacts in the "additional telephone numbers" box. Categories - You have to select at least one category that fits your business, these are generally quite poor and have an American slant. For example, all legal options refer to Attorneys. Use one official Google category, more if you can, but fill in the rest of the options with categories of your own creation that explain your business processes. Claim your listing - There may be another company with similar details or someone else at your company might have claimed the listing previously. Elect to claim the existing listing or create a new one. Both will require further verification. Further details - Fill this in as thoroughly as possible. Add at least one image. Company logos are ideal, as well as photographs of the premises or from the premises representing the company. Also upload any video you have regarding your company. YouTube is the second most popular search engine in the UK and as it is owned by Google this is a great opportunity to connect your company with any video which is already online. Validate your listing - The telephone call is instant once you have clicked the button and is an automated service. Only use this method if you have agreed it with the person who answers the phone. I recommend postcard verification. Why You Should Verify Your Company Listing Once verified you'll be able to see some more information about your site: Number of times your site appears on Google Maps (known as impressions as it is in Adwords) Clicks coming through from Maps and local search. How complete your profile is and if there are any details missing. Special notices - time limited text notices about your company Keywords / top search queries Google Local Business Advanced Features Verifying accounts - while a sensible way to make sure you retain control of your own business (or the business you represent), verification can be a real pain. Getting people to pick up postcards and return the information on them has been going on for about 3 months with one of my clients so far and their 6 locations are still not fully registered. If your company is large enough to have 10 or more outlets you can create a bulk locations file and upload it. It can take a while to go live but it is quicker in the end.

3 Steps to Great Pay Per Click Ad Text

2010-03-09 15:09:01

With Google Adwords cost per click (CPC) increasing across the board, many advertisers are now placing their adverts in lower positions to reach their targeted ROI. This means that having the right ad text is key as advertisers cannot afford to either lose out on missed clicks which could have generated a sale or waste advertising spend on unsuitable visitors. The basics to good ad text are simple but all too often many advertisers get this aspect of their PPC campaigns wrong and miss out on the all important click. You can ensure you target your ad text correctly by following a very simple proces. Writing good ad text in 3 easy steps Keyword research All good ad text should focus on the most important keywords in your AdGroup. These keywords will either be the main drivers of traffic or will be the keywords that generate the most conversions or revenue. Product Research. Understanding your market and competition is key to writing adverts that target your audience and stand out. When reviewing your market to write ad text you should consider the following factors: Who is your audience? Are you targeting the quick sale with a low-value product or is yours an expensive luxury product with a long buying cycle? For example if you sell Office Chairs your target market may be price conscious small business owners. You will want price-focused, call-to-action-heavy ad text. If, however, you are targeting luxury products such as high end kitchens, a single sentence over both description lines (like in the example) may convey your advertising message more effectively. What do competitors' ads look like? Are other advertisers pushing prices or are they all focusing on free delivery? Even if you offer the same services as other companies it may not be worth mentioning them if all your competitors are doing the same thing. Making your advert standout is key to generating a good click-through rate. When looking at the search result for "office chairs" we can see that although many advertisers are offering discounts, none are pushing prices in their adverts. In this example, mentioning the price of your lowed-priced chair item in your ad text may bring better click-through rates than your competitors' ads. Where does your product sit in the market? Is it a luxury product? Is it a similar offering to your competitors? Is it the cheapest? Understanding these factors are vital when deciding on whether you can use your product's price as its USP. For example, if your product is the most expensive when compared to competitors' products then price is not a USP. Although price is a motivating factor, if your price is not the lowest and your markdown does not provide the greatest financial value, then opting to promote your product's USP may provide a better CTR. Writing your ad text. By this point you should have a good understanding of your product, market, competitors and what keywords are important in your campaign. With this information you are finally ready to write your ad text. Every ad text has 3 main components: Keywords: In point 1 we researched which keywords were driving traffic or sales. With that knowledge in mind, with few exceptions I would place that top keyword in the headline and first description line of the ad text. USP: In step 2 we sought to understand the market and where your product sits in that market. The main USP is often the price and if it is you should seek to place it in both the headline and in one of the description lines. If your product's price is not the most competitive, try to find another USP such as free delivery or product features. Remember to check if the product or service features you are emphasising are not in the ad text of your competitors; for example if every advertiser mentions free delivery in their ads, it may be of little benefit to include it in your ad text as well. CTA (Call to Action): An important part of any ad text is to give a reason to click the advert. Many advertising platforms ban the use of terms such as click here, but that does leave room for the use of other strong calls to action. If you have a few characters left at the end of your ad text include a CTA such as Buy Today or Buy Now. If you have more room, phrases such as Order Today and Get Free Delivery can often prove a strong call to action. All 3 ingredients have been used to create the Office Chair example advert below: Although there are many other factors to consider when writing good ad text, the above steps are the very basic ingredients for any ad text your write and are key to obtaining that all-important click.

Rumours of the Death of Google Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

2010-03-05 14:30:18

Last night's talk at MMU by James Hanson of MediaVest raised a number of interesting questions. Using IBM and Yahoo as examples of once all-powerful corporations who now have a vastly reduced market share, he presented a list of possible scenarios that might bring about the demise of the world's favourite search engine.Political Opposition kills Google China has already shut Google out but this will not kill them. Although China is widely regarded as next world superpower and Google has given up on them, they have not really dented the Google Empire. EU lawsuits over content hosting in Italy and France's ongoing struggle with Google Books show that there is not much political love from our continent either. However, this is still a long way from effectively killing Google. Services may be withdrawn but this will not affect the userbase.Social Media kills Google Twitter has real time search; Facebook has several million users. However, in my opinion both are limited in scope and Twitter is limited by the quality of its content. While they both have an enormous user-base, you only have to look at Friends Reunited, Friendster and Myspace to see how fickle the social media scene is. I would be surprised if Twitter and Facebook are notable platforms in 2 years time.Large Technology Firms kill Google Microsoft is still a massive power and a company with diverse interests but they seen to have come to a grudging acceptance of Google. This might change with the launch of Chrome OS although Chrome OS has more in common with Linux than Windows so Microsoft may not feel that it is a true challenger. Apple now occupies the helm of mobile internet devices and blocking Google's access to the iPhone could affect Google eventually. I consider this unlikely because although the companies have an uneasy relationship, Apple does not seem so blinkered as to shut off such an integral part of the Internet.Google kills Google Google currently has over 200 products online and has declared that they will buy at least one company per month throughout 2010. This suggests that they could spread themselves too thin. However, Google do not have a history of flogging dead horses. If a product is failing, they are unsentimental about resigning it, for example Google Answers. Google could alternatively make a massive misstep and launch a product that people hate. Buzz is an example of such a product. However, Google was quick to react and resolve the privacy issues. Also at this stage, Google do not seem out of touch with the products they are launching; compare any recent Google offering with Microsoft Songsmith. There is always the possibility that a new killer app will arrive and will cut out the need for Google Search and so undercut Google's largest revenue stream. However, with other offerings such as Google Apps, the corporation would still be able to operate without search. Additionally, Google would surely spot any killer search app and buy the company at an early stage. Conclusions After the presentation, Hanson took questions from the audience and revealed that he personally expected Google to be in an even stronger position in 10 years time. Sadly, although the talk presented a controversial title it was unable to provide any controversial opinions. I look forward to re-reading it with 2020 vision.

First impressions - what is your website saying about your business?

2010-03-02 09:34:33

I get to speak with a lot of people that are less than happy with their websites. Most people's stories go something like we've had a new website developed but it's still not working properly. It's not generating any more sales or enquiries than it was before. Can you tell us why?" At the risk of sounding flippant, the simple answer is that something has either not been done or has been done incorrectly. But what is it exactly? What could be causing so many websites to underperform? To understand this we first need to identify what it is that a website needs to achieve in order to perform and generate results.Essentially, a site needs to: receive good levels of relevant traffic engage visitors convert visitors into customers Addressing these elements effectively is critical for a website to be successful. Failure in any one of these areas and the sites performance will suffer - which in turn will hit the company's bottom line. Points i) and iii) I shall be looking at in later posts but today I'm going to concentrate on engaging visitors - and in particular first impressions. Converting Visitors into CustomersIf, when assessing your analytics, you see results showing high bounce rates, or low site page visits, or low time on site, then there is an issue around visitors leaving the site far too quickly. They are not engaging with the site for some reason. Identifying what the issue is can be pretty straightforward. But identifying why this is the case is what we're after. In our experience, there can be a whole number of reasons why visitors are leaving websites quickly - they might feel they are in the wrong place, they might not be sure about how to use the website - in many cases it can be simply that they do not like the look of the site. On this last point, we are all told we shouldnt judge a book by its cover and that first impressions often lie, etc., but I'm afraid I do it and I would guess that you might do it too. Many of us tend to make judgements very quickly based on the feeling we get from the overall look-and-feel of a website. Some call it the 3 second rule, others the 2 second rule, or even the 1 second rule. However many seconds it actually takes, one thing's for sure - it's not very long. In times when internet users are becoming increasingly demanding and impatient, a website has precious little time to communicate to the user. And rightly or wrongly, we all make up our minds almost immediately based upon how well the site communicates to us. Am I in the right place? Does this feel like a company I can trust to do business with? These questions are being asked by visitors landing on your site and as visual communication is the most immediate, the site's look-and-feel, it's visual message needs to be absolutely spot on. Everything a company says or does communicates something about the quality or the values of that business, right from how the phone is answered through to the quality of company documents. All these go into making up the public image of the company. Potential customers are influenced either positively or negatively every time they come into contact with a company and will make their decisions based upon these experiences. A company's website is a crucial part of this and considering its importance in generating revenues, why then do so many companies put such little effort in getting it right? Yes, generating high levels of traffic to your site is very important, but if, on arrival, visitors are presented with a website that looks tired and out-of-date then they might well feel that, like the site, the company too is tired and out-of-date. They might question whether or not they want to do business with this the type of company. You may well have the best range of products on the web at the very best prices but present your visitors with a poorly designed site and you might put them off before they even get through the front door. Time and effort needs to be put into making your online image communicate exactly what your company is about. Simply throwing up a website with little or no thought to the message that is being communicated can often be the difference between online success or failure.First impressions may often lie - make sure yours doesn't.

5 Reasons Blogging is Good For You (And Your Business)

2010-03-01 15:24:28

I recently advised a friend of mine to add a blog to his company's new website and, whilst it set back the go live date by a few weeks as the developer desperately tried to incorporate a blog into a vastly intricate Flash site (don't ask), I believe it will be worth it. As Social Media becomes more and more important to both SEO and the user experience, companies must ensure that their sites are in some way interactive. A website filled with dry, static content that never changes is little more than a glorified online brochure that's potentially years out of date - a website should offer users a much more interactive experience, and the easiest way to do this is through use of a blog. Blogging is good for your business because: It ensures your company website is regularly updated with fresh and interesting content about your specific niche. Blog content can be anything from company news to instructional videos, it doesn't have to be pure text; It's an opportunity to make a connection with potential customers, to showcase the personalities lurking behind that corporate facade; It gives you the chance to impart genuinely useful advice about your business or products, making you appear magnanimous and, if your advice is good enough, has the potential to make your website a destination for web users interested in your particular trade or niche; Blogs are a great way of increasing traffic to your website; if a particularly funny or interesting article proves popular, some of the visitors it gets are bound to turn into paying customers; And blogging is good for you because: It ensures you stay engaged with your niche - it forces you to stay at the forefront of your industry. If you're always on the look out for a great topic for your blog, then you're going to be trawling the latest news stories, changes in law and business legislation that may affect your business or your customers. The more authoritative your knowledge of your industry, the more likely you are to impress prospective customers. But Remember If you're going to make the most of your company blog, you must update it regularly. An infrequently updated blog can be damaging to your business, making you appear lazy, disengaged with your customers and your industry as a whole. Here are some examples of well maintained company blogs: SEOmoz, Pannone's Personal Injury Blog.

Why is website usability so important?

2010-02-23 09:19:42

So you've built your website, given it a fancy logo, maybe even written some content that will have Google hanging on your every keyword. Perhaps there is a Google analytics code uploaded in the HTML code so you can have a look at the performance of the website? You are on your way to getting 'Website Of The Year' right? Hold your horses... as my dad used to say.Having a fancy website with bells on could be the worst thing you could do if the website's usability is compromised. This is even more important for an ecommerce website that's main goal should be making the process as easy as possible for a customer, and if they aren't finding the navigation easy then they may just bounce off the site to a competitor.'Website usability is defined, making web sites easy to use for an end-user.' Let's look at some things we must remember when it comes to a user's experience:1) Where have you gone wrong?If you have built the web pages without a thought of what you are aiming to achieve from the website then this can be where you have gone wrong. Think about what you are trying to do; maybe it is to offer your services to customers, or give information to people? It is also a good idea to put yourself in the users' shoes! What are they looking for and where would they navigate to? You might be surprised what you find out.2) Draft up a simple navigation systemAsk yourself these three questions: Where am I? Where have I been? Where can I go? Then you will be ready to design your navigation system as if you are a user visiting the website for the first time. Go through the whole website from top level, and right through to the pages deep in the navigation. Think about how you will make these pages available to a user and a search engine.3) Brand ConsistencyA strong brand image throughout the website can show visitors that your website is a professional and high quality website. However, this can work both ways, and with inconsistent colours, typefaces, and page layout then a user can become disillusioned by the website and leave very quickly.4) Text linksAs an SEO consultant I know how important internal links are throughout a website, and using keywords as anchor text for your internal links is a good way to promote a page in major search engines. In terms of navigation and usability this is just as important. It helps a user to find his way through the website.5) SitemapLarge websites should always have a sitemap. The sitemap should contain a text link to every page on the website so that it can be accessed easily by search engines and people. If you have analytics running on your website then you can see how many people have visited the sitemap page to find their way around your website. This isn't a good sign, as people are finding it difficult to find the information naturally. Therefore revisit step 1.6) Homepage Logo, Search Box and Contact DetailsSite logos are great to link to your homepage from other pages as well. Users now often hover over them and use them to navigate around the website, this is especially true with the homepage logo on a website and the contact details. 7) FeedbackHave a page on the homepage that links to a feedback form or something similar. This should allow users to input information that can help your future development of the website. It could contain questions like 'Did you find it hard to find what you were looking for?' or 'What do you think we could improve on?'8) Simple Testing! If a user clicks on your website and then sees nothing that relates to what they entered the website for then you've done something wrong. Building your website in a way that enables users to access the information they want quickly and simply can actually be harder than you initially think, so try and keep it simple. If you test a website that is in development by asking someone who has not seen the website before to complete simple tasks locating information or making purchases and they have trouble navigating through the pages, then you have gone wrong somewhere. Remember, designs for your users, and not for yourself; remain consistent and keep things simple!

Copify.com: A Shortcut to Shoddy Content?

2010-02-16 16:12:12

You may already be aware of the Copify.com debate - if not then it's been summed up at Unmemorable Title. Copify is a Lancaster-based firm which advertises itself as a way to "source content quickly, easily and cost-effectively". It is a platform via which businesses seeking content (both online and offline) can find copywriters and vice versa, to write press releases, articles, website content, anything. The crux of the debate is the rates the site pays its copywriters - for a 'standard' copywriter 0.02p per word, for a 'professional' 0.04p per word and for a 'premium' copywriter 0.08p per word. Many copywriters took exception to such low fees via Twitter and other Social Media sites over the weekend, as well as the fact that Copify.com suffers from a fatally flawed business model - you shouldn't pay for copy by the word. Paying by the word can only lead to sloppy, ill thought-out copy, as writers will rush through jobs in an effort to get paid more money by accepting more tasks. A 'standard' copywriter will earn just 10 for a 500 word document, so you know that document is not going to be of an outstanding quality. Copify attempts to dodge this issue by saying that if a document isn't approved by the client, the copywriter won't get paid. However, what if the client approves a piece of copy that is just passable; that perhaps doesn't represent their business in the best light or is poorly optimised, and they just don't realise? Is that fair? Absolutely not. The client should be able to have confidence in the quality of the copywriter's work, and if that copywriter is paid on a by-word basis, that confidence disappears. It's just not good customer service. Another valid argument against the idea of paying for copy by the word echoes a point made at Unmemorable Title: paying by the word encourages verbosity. Copy should be tailored to the client's needs; as a rule it should be short, snappy and aimed squarely at their target audience. However, if you're going to get paid more for being overly verbose... well, I know what I'd do. A previous employer of mine paid its content writers on a commission basis, and I saw some pretty horrendous work approved and published such as documents that had taken just minutes to write with no mind paid to potential duplicate content issues. Sites like Copify.com are a complete quality lottery - you have no idea what you're going to get for your money. Good copywriting is worth investing in, particularly from an SEO perspective. Properly optimised and well-written copy has the potential to drastically increase your site's traffic, by displaying properly optimised tags and page text to the search engines, not to mention increased usability, by telling visitors to your site exactly what they need to hear. Copify.com is based on a good idea - a site which allows publishers and clients to directly contact copywriters, but if you ask me, their business model is all wrong. P.S. Also, Copify claim to possess "vast experience of working in online marketing", yet their website is sadly lacking in meta information I'll let you draw your own conclusions from that.

Some free link building tips that will help you to get to number 1 in Google

2010-02-15 08:36:30

OK so it may not be as simple as that but, as one of the senior SEO Consultants here at I-COM, I thought it was about time I shared some of my tips and tricks that I've gathered over nearly 10 years of Search Engine Optimisation and link building. While we all know that social media (microblogging, etc.) is fast becoming the new metric for Google to measure the relevancy and freshness of websites (and rank accordingly) it's still important to remember that links are still the life blood of the internet and a properly managed backlink building campaign can generate qualified traffic and better conversions. So, we're not talking about a link building free-for-all like the old days where 'the most backlinks wins' in the listings race - we're talking about quality links from on-topic sites, with authority and relevancy in a specific niche or topic. So how do we go about getting these types of back links? Well the simple answer is there are many different ways and over the next few months I will begin to give you some idea of the various methods and techniques that I've used (and still use) to find these back links.It's worth remembering that before you begin researching back-links it's a very time-consuming process - you'll need to set aside lots of time (and energy) to the process. You'll need to understand what makes a back link good or bad for your website. Think about it - have you got the time to do this? If not, are you better off outsourcing this process?Adrian's Link Building Tip #1Identify your competitors in the Google listings - then you can identify their back-link footprint (the number of back-links they have, the quality of those links and where they are). You will need to understand what keywords you want to your web site to be found for and who your main competitors are in the top ten listings. Here's what I do:Make sure you have a full list of the products or services being sold or supplied by the web site. From this I can check each of the keyword phrases in Google to find the top ten competitors. For example, if the web site is a law firm and it's based in Northampton, check in the top ten listings in Google for the keyword phrase 'solicitors in Northampton': Once I have a list of the top ten competitors for the keyword phrase "solicitors in Northampton" I can check the back-links to each of the individual competitor web-sites using Yahoo Site Explorer:Yahoo! Site Explorer is a tool that lets you access the information Yahoo has about a site's online presence. You can see which sites and subpages are indexed by Yahoo! Search, track sites that link into each webpage, and view the most popular pages from any site. Use Site Explorer to: Find which sites and subpages are indexed by Yahoo! Search Find inlinks or pages that link to any site or any page View the most popular pages from any site Yahoo Site Explorer only allows you access the information for 1,000 back-links. There are other methods to find out about competitor back-links but I'll save that for another day. With Yahoo Site Explorer you'll need to make sure that you click on the Inlinks button (highlighted in the images below) and that you change the drop down to exclude links from within the domain you're researching - otherwise Yahoo Site Explorer will show you all the internal links of the web site as well. Once you've done this you should have nice list of back-links to the website which you can export using the "Export first 1,000 results to TSV" link.Make sure that you import the TSV links using MS Excel. You'll now have a nice list of your competitors' back-links to help you find suitable inbound links; i.e. sites featuring the same or similar subject matter with well-written content that is not duplicated on other web sites. Also make sure that the links you pursue are on pages with a less than 100 links on them as Google doesn't like more than 100 links on a web page. Also, you will want to find the contact details for the webmaster or owner(s) of the web site. These are whole different tasks in itself and something I will discuss in some detail in the next few posts.

SEO Basics - Heading Tags for Topic, Style and Usability.

2010-02-11 15:58:41

In the good old days of self-taught web design and GeoCities homepages, I used to use heading tags to define font size. If I wanted BIG text I put

tags around it, if I wanted small text

, simple! I don't think I even realised what the H stood for. Now I work in SEO I realise the error of my ways, but happily, the sad death of GeoCities has removed my compulsion to go back and correct my sloppy coding.Are headings important?Yes. The reason they are important is simple. They provide a map of the content on the page both visually and in terms of usability. By default in html, the heading tags are bold and provide a line break. A page full of dense copy with headings is a lot easier for a user to scan in order to understand the point of the page. They also improve usability by enabling visitors to locate the section of the page which features relevant information to their query. This is great for disabled users who may want an overview of the page and also a great way of signposting your content to the search engines. How should you deploy them?Each page should have an H1 heading. If you don't have one, you will not be marked down, but it's such a simple way to show the topic of the page to users and search engines that it would be silly not to include one. Multiple H1s are not going to harm your page, but they serve to confuse the topic of the page. If you are changing your topic so much that you require a second H1, consider starting a new page.H2 headings should be used for each subsection of the page, and will obviously be a subsection of information on the main topic of the page as described in the H1. You can use as many H2s as you need to and if you want to add further subsections underneath your H2 then simply add an H3. You can nest as many headings as you like up to H6, but you should always make sure that you do nest them and don't skip numbers. Again, this is not critical, but it is good practise.What tools can I use to check them?Overlooking the fact that they inexplicably use the American spelling of the "analyse," this tool from UK company The Escape is great for seeing an outline of your page:http://www.the-escape.co.uk/tools/pageanalyzer/This tool puts your heading system into perspective showing you exactly what level you've decided your headings should be with helpful colour coding and points out if you've missed out a level. Try plugging in the addresses of a few of your favourite sites and see how they match up. I reckon I might offer my services out to these guys: