Keywords can’t just be plucked out of the air and if you are selling SEO services to your clients you need some understanding of how we choose relevant keywords and why this is important.
Google’s February updates to search quality.
photo by Shawn Collins
Google’s search quality updates for February seem substantial but aren’t anything to worry about too much if you work in SEO or use SEO, most are irrelevant for most people, several are only for Korean search. At White Label SEO we have to understand them though and work out what effect each will have so we like to share our learning with you.
A quick run down of the important changes though, ‘more coverage for related searches’, this means that alternate searches will be shown more often: most often for very short keyphrases that bring up to many results. What you may find though is those searches that Google does suggest for very general searches will be firstly easier to compete for than the general searches and will importantly start getting more traffic so look out for them.
Next is Google’s change to make sure they correctly identify official pages, this should be fine unless for your SEO you have purposely tried to convince Google that your site is an official site for another business or brand. You can also take advantage if you aren’t appearing for your own brand though but you do of course still need to make sure your brand, and ideally location, are well displayed.
Another change to mention quickly is Google have again updated their algorithm to serve up fresher results more often, they did this in January and so are presumably tweaking it. As we mentioned last month though make sure you add regular updates to your site but also update pages to show they are still current.
Lastly the most important change, for locally focused businesses especially, is that Google are improving how they pick up on a page or document with a local focus: this means that if someone is searching for a business in a location or searching for a service that they are likely to need locally to their location, such as dog walking or babysitting for example, then more local page are likely to be identify and served up. Google are also now apparently better at realising when a search is looking for something locally as well so more searches will be treated this way as well as being more likely to be shown the most relevant results. For SEO if you are a business with a local focus, this includes within a single town or city or even mentioning a couple of cities (such as adding Chichester near Portsmouth), as well as if you are county-wide, such as Sussex, state-wide or even nationally, make sure you include your location on the header or footer of every page on your site and ideally the header, as this also can help keep people on your site by confirming you are local to them.
Google’s January search quality updates: what they mean for SEO
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At White Label SEO we understand that Google especially and other search engines are forever changing how their search works and this makes a massive difference to how we do SEO. Back in 2003 when I first worked with SEO most people simply stuffed pages with barely any meaningful content with keywords and got away with it: now it is the details that count.
Google release a monthly update on their blog of changes to the quality of their search results: there is a run down of those that are important for us at White Label SEO and which can give you an advantage, or disadvantage if ignored.
First on the list for January’s changes, released in March, is that Google are working to make results fresher. This makes more work for site owners but can give an advantage, it certainly means that you can get more relevant traffic to the right pages on your site or a client’s site. People searching too often get served up with pages that are out of date it seems because they come up high for relevance, Google want to change this so freshness is a bigger factor. Important though is that fresh doesn’t mean new; a page can be refreshed by updating it, as a result you can improve rankings and keep your inward links by updating pages. Of course new content is important as well and it isn’t clear to what extent Google looks at the publish dates sometimes included in a URL: these potentially may be useful if you have fresh content but a hindrance once content gets older.
Google are apparently also putting particular effort into freshness on recurring events pages, so if you have an annual festival or expo it will now be easier to get the pages for the next one to appear above those for a previous year, often difficult if older pagers have more links.
Also for our White Label SEO services we pay attention to how Google use their auto-complete option, the latest update is that it is now quicker to come up: this means that people are less likely to finishing typing and instead choose a suggestion or use the results that have appeared already. Often searchers aren’t quite sure how to put something they are searching for: this helps create the long tail of keywords with people searching for dozens of terms for the same thing: when Google start suggesting one term to them all though based on the first word typed suddenly less people use Long Tail. What we can find is that our White Label SEO customers not only need new keywords but that those keywords that worked in the past suddenly stop working.
We find even more though that misspellings are not working anywhere near as well as they used to. This has been a long-term trend but again in January Google have improved spelling correction further: this means if you mis-spell you are more likely to get a result for what you meant to type. This drastically effects misspelled keywords which could suddenly stop getting any traffic, clients who rarely check that old keywords are still performing may be wasting space for mis-spelt keywords with no traffic.
Importantly though Google have made changes that mean that a lot of Proper Nouns that came up as misspellings before and which Google gave other results for now don’t: this means there will potentially be some long tail keywords getting more traffic than before.
What Google’s new Privacy Policy means for SEO
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The rights and wrongs of Google’s new privacy policy are neither here nor there for those working in SEO or benefiting from SEO on their websites what is important is how Google’s increased access to data will affect things. Those using the Google toolbar already have a lot of data collected about their browsing habits and Google use this to identify good sites and poor sites. Google as we know now use things such as how long a person spends on a site and how many pages on a site they look at to gauge whether a site is good quality and also whether it is relevant to the original search term they used.
Google’s new privacy policy means they will potential follow a lot more people’s browsing while they are logged into a Google account increasing the amount of data they have and also therefore probably how important the ranking factors that rely on this data are overall. So this means good quality content to make pages sticky and good navigation to get people exploring your site will continue to become more important. The way Google’s panda update works though it will spot other factors that indicate a good or poor website, it may now do this more quickly.
With Google’s new privacy policy meaning they now also use data from Youtube and Blogger this could also have an important effect for SEO, Google’s spiders can only look at where links are and not how many people click on links. Youtube’s links are almost completely no follow but Google may already still pay attention to them and if they can judge how many people are actually clicking on a link then this is likely to become a ranking factor. The same may be true with Blogger blogs, this means that blogger outreach to Blogger sites may become much more valuable for SEO, even if you only get no follow links they may have value but you will need to make sure that they are relevant to the Blog, or with Youtube to the Video, in question to make sure you actually get those clicks.
Category: SEO Comment, SEO News /
Tags: blogger SEO, google privacy policy, no follow links, privacy policy SEO, search engine optimisation, seo, Youtube SEO
How SEO can target a ‘Most Wanted Response’
Businesses should look at what SEO does for their bottom line, image by Ken Teegardin
Marketing companies worth their salt deliver to their clients’ bottom lines, why then should SEO be any different especially for White Label SEO services provided via a marketing agency or other marketing company.
Too many SEO companies offer positions in Google results or set amounts of traffic but for most businesses this isn’t worth much and it is the lack of knowledge of many marketing managers and business owners regarding SEO services that mean these SEO companies get away with it.
SEO though is ideal as a medium to provide measurable results in terms of most wanted responses from the traffic thrown at a site. If you want to you can have huge amounts of traffic everyday: this can be done by finding keywords that people are searching on in vast numbers and no one is competing on. Simply put these keywords, whatever they are, on to your website and maybe get a few related links and there you go, unfortunately if the keywords have nothing to do with the subject of your site your conversions to a most wanted response are likely to be zero. Despite this many companies don’t measure what traffic is doing once it is getting to their site and pay out to a SEO company based on traffic numbers only.
Usually you won’t be having totally irrelevant keywords put onto your site, most companies would raise objections quickly enough. What SEO companies may do though is go for keywords that are on the face of it relevant but given some thought may be either ambiguous or more often be people searching for information or something a little different: for example Dyson vacuum cleaner isn’t a good keyword for a store selling a range of hoover bags. What are ideally needed are keywords with a clear buying intention: things like ‘good value hoover bags’, or ‘free delivery hoover bags’.
At the same time though keywords can surprise, those you think would lead to sales all the time may rarely do so and some slightly less obvious keywords may be ideal, especially with the right landing page in many cases. The only way to tell is to track clicks. A good SEO company will be able to come up with the same kind of reports for a client that any Marketing agency would to show effectiveness: on a website this means showing what keywords lead to what outcomes. This includes linking keywords directly to sales volumes on e-commerce stores but also looking at what pages people end up on.
Contact us is a good page for people to get to, it often means they have sent an e-mail or used the phone number though it can be difficult to track from here. For some sites though a customer getting to a contact us page will be a ‘most wanted response,’ others could be that a customer spends at least a certain amount of time on a certain information page, visits a certain number of pages or spends a certain amount of time on the site. By agreeing these ‘most wanted responses’ with clients in advance as measurements the client can more easily get what they want out of a project; it also makes things simpler when working with a white label SEO outsourcing company to deliver SEO services to a client.
Category: SEO Comment /
Tags: click through, converting keywords, high perfomnce keywords, most wanted response, seo, white label seo
Will Google’s ‘Search Plus Your World’ force brands on to Google Plus platform
photo by Shawn Collins
At White Label SEO Outsourcing we have been monitoring the Google Plus Social Media platform’s value in general and for SEO since its launch, we feel if it is worth doing it is worth doing well but haven’t been convinced that it is worth doing at all yet. The inclusion of Google Plus results though in Google’s Search Plus Your World search personalization feature though may change this: though how much isn’t quite clear.
When I signed up for Google Plus it was tough to find many people I knew, except other SEO experts, and even in desperation looking for bands and brands to add to my circles there were few who had made the leap: in part because of the delay in Google offering brand pages. Now though Google seem to be trying to force brands to set up pages and get on to Google plus with the changes they are making to search.
For those of you with a personal Facebook page that has a few details and photos added, perhaps by others, that don’t fit with the professional profile you want Google’s new Your World search could be ideal as you can now start with a fresh Google plus page that will not only come up ahead of Facebook but also almost any other result. This also means that as a brand you could find that a Google plus post about your bad customer service may start coming up before your homepage and this may force you to set up a brand page to ensure that it comes as the top result.
For those of us working in SEO Social Media has for some time been coming closer and closer to home to the point where it is almost a part of SEO with no follow links from Twitter, Facebook and others probably worth more than we realised in the past; we may now need to really make sure that Google Plus results are optimised with landing pages, or posts and keywords included as much as on other websites. We may need to start treating Google’s Your World search almost like a separate search engine in fact and a Google Plus page as a separate website optimized just as well as a client’s main website so those using Your World search find a client’s Google Plus page rather than that of a competitor we thought we had already vanquished through the main Google results.
So will White Label SEO Outsourcing be setting up a page on Google Plus? Not yet, I have a personal page and so we are monitoring Google Plus and Google Your World through that but despite what different people may say it isn’t clear just how much of an effect it will have, when consumers start signing up en masse to Google Plus we will know.
Category: SEO News /
Tags: google plus, google search plus, google search plus your world, google your world, search plus your world, seo, white label seo
White Label SEO’s 2012 SEO predictions
Google-Panda set to emerge further in 2012, photo by Fortherock
At White Label SEO we keep up with the latest developments in SEO, especially changes to Google’s Algorithm, this allows us to give the best service to clients via private label SEO and SEO reseller agreements: maximising traffic, avoiding penalties from Google and ensuring that traffic is relevant and valuable.
Everyone who works in SEO should understand what the Google Panda update means, that includes anyone selling SEO to their customers especially to established sites who have seen traffic and rankings drop. The Google Panda update is ongoing as it learns to spot good sites and bad sites based on feedback by real human testers and looking at what bad sites have in common.
It has been a year and a half since Google started using Panda but it has remained relatively minor as a factor for rankings, until 2012 that is. At White Label SEO we predict that Google will start using Panda as a more important factor in ranking in 2012 having collected enough data for it to be reliable. This means that those sites that have seen some falls in rankings and traffic may now see these fall further and some sites unaffected before may suddenly find that traffic drops. The number one rule here is to play a straight ball with Google and create a good site first and foremost if you want good rankings, this certainly should strongly feature high quality content.
One of the things about the Google Panda update is that it has made good quality content more important than ever and there are a few reasons for this; for a start Google is better than ever at spotting spam articles filled with too many keywords with too much density. The Google Panda update though means that Google now look at how long people actually look at a page for and ascertain a lot about how good a page and a site in general is from this: this means no more nonsensical spun or automatically generated articles.
Whether we create content or a business make their own content it must be sticky, i.e. it must keep people on a page for as long as possible. Ideal for this is Video and so in 2012 you will see more and more websites using video on pages, often with a transcript below for the search engines to read. Good quality written content will still be important of course and we recommend for all of our clients a mixture of content types, we however will put an emphasis on quality more than quantity.
Google Panda is understood to look at how long people stay on sites based on information collected in a number of ways including through Chrome and the Google Toolbar but they also look at where they go after clicking through from Google to a page. If visitors to your site not only spend merely a few seconds on your page but then go back to Google straight away to click another link then this is bad, what is good is if they browse a few pages of your website. A high browse rate is of course more likely if you have good navigation and a professional looking website, other factors such as making it easy for people to understand what your site is about straight away also make your site more sticky.
The content on other people’s sites that links back to your page is important as well; if you or your clients have in the past tried using article banks to distribute articles in order to get links back then stop: this now has little value, duplicate content is generally ignored and this includes the sites it links to. What we now do for our direct clients and our private label SEO clients is to focus on getting just one link for each piece of content we create to distribute. This means getting a unique article on to a high pagerank website through directly approaching a blogger or other suitable site’s owner: they get quality content and our clients get a link back from a page that will usually only have one external link, thereby maximising its value.
Another trend White Label SEO Outsourcing predict for 2012 is the use of Social Media for SEO, as many people in related fields know, especially web designers, most major Social Media sites including Twitter and Facebook have no-follow links. A no-follow link basically says to a search engine ‘I am linking to this site but it doesn’t necessarily mean I endorse it’: this means that no value is passed through this link. However Google’s Matt Cutts has confirmed that Google does still look at links on Social Media sites and sees value in them. Google specifically look out for links from high profile users with lots of friends or followers who don’t constantly post links and Google therefore gives a lot of value to any links they do include. In 2012 then White Label SEO will be using Social Media for our clients to increase rankings as well as as a general Marketing and Customer Service tool.
We also feel at White Label SEO that 2012 will be a year for renewing keywords on established sites. There may be keywords and phrases growing in popularity and others fading in popularity and this is likely to be caused in part by the growth of mobile and voice search. With both types of search the way people search has changed, with mobile search people are likely to use much shorter phrases, often one or two word phrases, and with voice search people will go the other way and are in fact more likely to search in more complete sentences.
Category: SEO News /
Tags: Google Panda, quality content, SEO strategy 2012, seo2012, white label seo
An Introduction to our Website
White Label SEO Outsourcing has been born out of Trig-Point Marketing, a general Marketing consultancy business that trades separately. We had increasingly been completing SEO and Search Engine Marketing Work and working on a Referral and White Label basis with several clients so we have separated it out into a separate business. You may notice at first our own SEO isn’t great but if you want to see how quickly SEO can work keep on eye on our site and rankings.
Google semantic search, a threat or an opportunity for SEO?
Google's Amit Singhal, photo by Michael Dorausch
Google already uses semantics in its search, especially for the Adwords platform where ads can come up for related terms when chosen as broad match. Google does in organic search though use semantics when crawling sites to check whether sites are relevant even when the keywords may differ slightly. Also when seeing whether a keyword belongs on a page or has been artificially added to gain traffic for popular keywords, Google consider different related terms on a page as indicators.
As far as anyone is aware this uses a similar database or related words to Google’s keyword research tool: the terms associated here are we think the same ones it uses when crawling sites. Google though look set to take semantic search further and get a much better grasp of what people are searching for and deliver much more relevant results.
Semantic search may eventually affect the main results that are shown that will be based on the term as a whole and the algorithm will try to understand context: for example being able to decide whether people are talking about orange as a colour or a fruit and serving up only sites it deems to be on the same subject.
For a start this will mean that in SEO broad match search will lose a lot of value and exact match will be a far more valuable measure.
Short term though Google search executive Amit Singhal has announced that Google’s search algorithm will try to find a direct answer to questions and queries rather than just offer a list of results. It may well be that for some questions different answers will be offered and links to where they are taken from; there will then of course be a main list of results following.
For some questions though such as ‘What is the height of the Sydney Opera house’ an answer can be easily delivered and people will have no need to visit any sites. For some sites, most notably sites like Yahoo answers, this could see a big drop in traffic. For keywords that are related to questions and information searches, rather than a clear buying intention, traffic may fall.
At the same time though it is important to bear in mind that websites that provide answers that are easy for Google to understand may get more visitors where people do click to find out more from the site that best answered the question right then and there in Google.
For SEO it will be an interesting time as these changes come in; it shouldn’t as some people expect though be a disaster for SEO: far from it in fact as many sites will need to have keywords researched from scratch.
With dozens of old keywords no longer getting the same levels of traffic sites may need to change fast to keywords with a clear intention to visit a site to either buy or interact in some other way rather than get a simple answer. An area of keyword research may also spring up dedicated to finding questions to answer in page in order to appear top of Google through answering a question better than other websites.