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Keywords

Are We Nearing The End For The SEO Business?

Most people have a love hate relationship with SEO. Even people not overly familiar with the Internet know that getting to the top of the Google rankings will get them more business. Some people think the complete opposite and go as far as saying that it is bullshit. Most large companies spend a fortune on influencing search results and there is no doubt that done well it drives sales or at least business leads. The landscape of the web is changing though and many factors are starting to come together that could make it less important in the future. For the last couple of years people have been going on about social search without really knowing what it would look like but I think we could be very close to a tipping point especially as Google the world’s biggest search engine starts to go social.

See the problem that Google has is that the results getting to the top of the search results were not always the best ones (It’s a mixture of ads, content farms and people who hire the best SEOs). The tide has changed though and thankfully even Google are putting humans at the center of their algorithms which is something I said needed to happen a year ago. This isn’t going to happen overnight and humans don’t always get it right but there has been a feeling for some time that search could be a lot better. It will probably end up being a good healthy mixture of spiders crawling the web using Google’s hundreds of signals mixed in with the collective knowledge of man kind. For the end user it is a great thing because search will only improve.

So where does that leave SEO? I wouldn’t say it’s dead by any stretch of the imagination. Most websites still get at least 70% of their traffic from Google so appearing at the top of the rankings remains essential. I think SEO will have to evolve to include some social signals. Everything on the Internet can be gamed and no doubt people will find a way to game things like the +1 button. For the most part though we will rely on our networks of trusted sources and the search results of people that I know and who have found value in results before I find them. That is a lot harder to game and thankfully things like incoming links and the way you position text on a page will become less important as the entire web becomes more fluid and mobile. I’ve nothing against SEO in the slightest and indeed we are doing some ourselves at the moment but I do think it is an industry where it’s practitioners will have to evolve pretty rapidly over the coming years. What do you think? Is SEO going to evolve or will it die off completely?

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Digital Marketing Tools Transform Radio Advertising

Companies who don’t even advertise online are now using digital marketing tools to shape their offline marketing campaigns. A client of ours was recently preparing a national radio campaign advertising their new service. They run these radio ads once per quarter and while discussing their possible use of the web we suggested they do some keyword research before writing the script of the radio ad to see exactly what words and phrases their target audience were using to describe their products and services.

This told them two crucial things

1. What words were being searched for most often right now by their target audience (google keyword research tool) and more importantly
2. what words were trending into use and what words had become tired and were trending out of use. (google trends)

This allows them to align themselves with the phraseology and terminology of their audience as it changes, and helps them to appear as leaders to their market. It also allows them to get a jump on search engine optimisation and start being found for these words before their competitors.

When we set up the digital marketing institute about 2 years ago the field we are in was typically called “online marketing”. With some keyword research we saw that the phrases online marketing was static (usually the first sign of a coming decline) in terms of it’s usage where as the phrase “digital marketing” had made huge leaps and even if it’s growth slowed significantly it would still pass out online marketing as the phrase to describe the industry.

Language is not fixed it evolves and changes over months and weeks. Think of a cartoon in the newspaper, it’s funny today but in a few weeks time it looses it’s context and relevance.

AdWords Split Testing - New Tool from Google

Google has announced the AdWords Campaign Experiments, or ACE. This tool helps you to optimize your AdWords account by letting you accurately test and measure changes to your keywords, bids, ad groups and placements. As part of our ongoing effort to improve the AdWords experience, Google is this new tool and inviting advertisers to participate in the beta programme.

AdWords Campaign Experiments is a tool that allows you to accurately test and measure changes to your keywords, bids, ad groups and placements.

Today, the most common way to measure the impact of these types of changes is to do a simple before-and-after analysis. However, this type of analysis can often be complicated by events that occur during or between the before and after, including holidays, weekends or changes to end user behavior or advertiser behavior.

Different ways of using ACE
Use ACE to experiment with any combination of bid, keyword, ad group or placement changes. You can test and measure a variety of scenarios including:

The incremental impact of adding new keywords to your campaign or changing keyword and ad group-level bids
The value of restructuring your Content campaigns to use more tightly themed ad groups
The change in volume by using different keyword match types
The value of using an ad group default bid versus keyword-level bids
And much more!

Visit this page if you want to apply to take part in this beta program.

What’s blocking the growth of digital marketing in Ireland?

It was startling last November to read that spending on online advertising in the UK had for the first time surpassed spending on TV advertising. This watershed was more incredible given how far behind Ireland is in terms of adoption of Digital Marketing. Spend is the ultimate litmus test of where an industry is in terms of its embrace of a particular channel. And while we await propper figures from the IAB I would like to gaze into my crystal ball and predict that spend on digital marketing in Ireland as a percentage of advertising budgets still won’t pass 10%.

Why do I make this prediction? For digital marketing to spend in Ireland to come anywhere near UK levels we must overcome 3 hurdles.

1. GRADUATES CAN’T WALK THE WALK
My own college education provided me with scant practical experience.(Not surprising since I studied history) It seems little has changed since I graduated in the early nineties. Recent marketing graduates who attend the Digital Marketing Institute courses know absolutely nothing about digital marketing. It isn't even covered in the curriculum of their marketing degrees. (Please Shout if its included in yours)
3rd level colleges and institutions need to urgently engage with the Digital Marketing Industry to bring expertise and practical skills into the classroom. Digital Marketing Institute has approach and is in discussion with several colleges with a view to getting graduates access to practical and relevant skills.

2. BROADBAND IS STILL A MESS
According to the governments Next Generation broadband consultation paper released last year, our broadband strategy has been very successful with broadbandtake-up in Ireland is nearly at 1.3 million subscribers. These broadband penetration stats are the most often cited by the government to prove that they are doing something about broadband. However these figures are pig in a poke and hide the awful truth about Ireland's broadband infrastructure.

There are 3 aspects to broadband infrastructure…Cost, Quality and Availability.

Cost is still at rip-off levels. Quality is so low it almost doesn't even constitute broadband and Availability is still hamstrung by Eircom bought and sold 5 times in the past 10 years; a fiscal basket case that is loaded with debt and not investing in infrastructure at anything like the rate that a smart-economy needs.

Even the sluggish and toothless Telecoms Regulator is finally coming around to the truth and recently admitted that the development of a high-speed broadband system might take between three and five years and may not be in time to satisfy the country's smart-economy requirements. Com Reg pointed to a recent New Zealand study which claimed that next-generation broadband could deliver a 1.3pc annual boost to gross domestic product.

Eamon Ryan, minister for communications says that the government is relying on the private sector to fund the development of broadband infrastructure. This investment did not happen throughout Ireland's boom times and it certainly wont happen in the downturn.

3. ADVERTISING AND PR AGENCIES STILL DON'T GET IT!
We are approached on a weekly basis by companies who tell us that their Ad and PR agencies simply don't get the web. The current constraints on advertising budgets and even greater need to prove that the spend is working creates a perfect environment for the use of Digital Marketing. Ad agencies are battling 3 things.

Lack of Skills.
Again like the graduates from earlier there was little investment in Education during the boom so people with 20 years marketing experience are floundering when it comes to the web.the Digital Marketing Institute is providing both scheduled and customised course and working closely with Advertising and PR agencies to re skill their staff.

Swimming against established networks.
Any ad or pr person can quickly book a radio ad or a TV slot or a print supplement, they have the contacts, they know what’s involved, they understand the time it takes and what they can charge and how much they can make. The Internet is a new channel for ad agencies who sat on the laurels of the celtic tiger and didn't prepare for the shake out. Staff in agencies looking to use the web have to forge new paths and networks in order to deliver value to the customer and revenue to themselves.
Ad agencies are floundering when it comes to establishing new lines of revenue based on Digital Marketing.

Start at the Top
One of the key goals of most people who attend the Diploma in Digital Marketing was summed up brilliantly by a student recently, he said "we want to be able to have an intelligent conversation about the web" We have adopted is as one of our own key goals in providing training in this field. Thankfully we are seeing more and more senior management from companies and agencies of all sizes attend our courses. All change comes form the top down and this key constituency of senior management and business owners are linchpins in the successful adoption of Digital Marketing in Ireland

The Digital Marketing Institute runs Diploma Courses in Digital
Marketing. (12 Week Part Time or 1 Week full time Boot Camp)
Advanced course are also provided.
Call Peter on 01 2711888
peter@digitalmarketinginstitute.ie
www.digitalmarketinginstitute.ie

Google Launches URL Shortening Tool

Google has launched a tool that allows users to “shorten” URL’s. (For readers not familiar with these types of applications, you might want to have a look at this description of URL shortening tools).

By far the largest player in this market is Bit.ly. And, of course, we have a local (Irish) player called Short.ie. Now Google has launched Goo.gl.

Bit.ly commands about 75% of all shortened URL’s passing through Twitter. So, should they fel under pressure? Well, the market is obviously of some interest to the larger players in the market (Google and Facebook together have just launched a URL shortening tool called fb.me).

Bit.ly have also gone on the offensive by recently launching Bit.ly Pro, which will allow companies to use custom urls for their links. The company also introduced a real-time dashboard to let publishers track how and where their content is being shared.

Here’s what Bit.ly have to say:

“Users and publishers benefit from the additional transparency that this private-label service provides. When you see a short URL like nyti.ms, you know the destination web site before clicking on the link. The service includes all the bit.ly features users and publishers have come to expect. Placing a simple “+” at the end of any bit.ly link (including these white-label, bit.ly-powered links) takes you to real-time information about that page and how it is being shared: how many people clicked on that particular link, where they came from, and more. For publishers, the new service allows them to keep their brand visible while maintaining access to bit.ly statistics.”

While this is a prime product to grow Bit.ly’s revenue stream, the company is not yet charging for Pro accounts. Like its deal with Twitter, this is meant to further cement its dominance over the URL shortening business. In November, the company shortened 2.1 billion links. That’s up from 11.8 million the year before.

As Twitter’s default shortening company, Bit.ly currently accounts for about three quarters of all short links on Twitter. Sites from AOL to Bing, Foursquare and The Wall Street Journal are among those in the private beta of the Bit.ly Pro program.

Click here for more news regarding URL shortening tools

Free SEO Tools

As we mention in our various lectures, whether they are on social networking, wordpress or any other aspect of online marketing, there is a vat range of digital marketing and SEO tools available. These tools can assist you in all aspects of your online marketing campaigns, from initial keyword research through to campaign delivery.

I recently came across a pretty excellent list of various SEO tools that kind ofbrings them all together.

There are three crieria required for these tools, and that is that

they are all useful for SEOs;
they are all web-based (no desk-top ones or FireFox extensions so far);
they are all free.

This list was collated by the folks in Search Engine Journal.

For the complete list, visit this page …

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Categories

Keywords

Are We Nearing The End For The SEO Business?

Digital Marketing Tools Transform Radio Advertising

AdWords Split Testing - New Tool from Google

Google Launches URL Shortening Tool

Free SEO Tools

TESTIMONIALS

“Ian Dodson of WebKitchen is someone I've been working closely with for the past few years. Ian first impressed me, not just with his expert knowledge of his space but with his sound business insights..."

SELECT YOUR INDUSTRY

WHERE DO I START?

AWARDS

Categories

Keywords

TESTIMONIALS

“Ian Dodson of WebKitchen is someone I've been working closely with for the past few years. Ian first impressed me, not just with his expert knowledge of his space but with his sound business insights..."

SELECT YOUR INDUSTRY

WHERE DO I START?

AWARDS

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