• Spending on paid search advertising was up by 7% in Q4 ’11 from Q3 ’11. This is after a sizeable increase in spending in Q3 ’11. This holiday season, spending in the consumer electronics sector, as well as continued investment in business analytics and information management solutions, drove modest growth. Q4 ’11 paid search spend was up 28% from Q4 ’10, which was a strong quarter a year ago.
• On a full year basis, growth in 2011 for paid search was up 21% over 2011 spending—just north of what we expected at the beginning of the year, when we predicted 15 – 20% growth.

The chart above shows how spending has increased since 2009. Ad spend for our clients has been normalized such that Q1 ’09 equals 100%.

• North America, powered by the U.S. and Canada, saw strong spending growth in the quarter, which was up 11% quarter-on-quarter and 18% year-on-year. Growth annualized was 10% for North America—the bottom-end of our 2011 forecast range from the beginning of the year.
• In EMEA, growth was down 8% quarter-on-quarter, but up 9% year-on-year. Overall, paid search spend growth for the year was 22%, which was slightly below our 2011 forecast. We attribute the deceleration in spend to the general macro-economic slowdown in the region.
• APAC continues to be where the major growth opportunities exist for the high-tech industry. Quarter-on-quarter search spend growth was up 8%, while year-on-year growth was up over 100%. With a 97% annualized growth rate, we are seeing continued investment in Japan, China, India, and the ANZ economies.
• On a global platform basis, advertiser increases in spending on Google were up 8% from Q3 ’11 and up 27% year-over-year, while spending on Yahoo-Bing was down 1% from Q3 ’11 and down 18% from a year earlier. Spending on Baidu, which commands the majority of market share in APAC given its dominance in China, grew 19% quarter-on-quarter and 185% year-on-year.

For the first time since mid-2010, the 2 – 3% quarter-on-quarter CPC inflation has subsided, at least temporarily. Changes in consumer behavior, combined with more effective advertising strategies and improved matching algorithms, are key factors in this trend.

Actionable Insight:

Paid search spending in 2011 was up 21% from 2010. For 2012 we recommend that global advertisers plan for budget increases of 18 – 22% for paid search, with a regional breakdown as follows:

• 18 – 20% growth in North America
• 15 – 18% growth in EMEA
• 40-plus % growth in APAC

All of this information and more is available in our latest report – Covario’s Q4 2011 Global Paid Search Spend Analysis, which is now available on our website.

You are reading a post from: Covario Actionable Insights
For more information on Covario please visit our corporate site.
Copyright © 2012 Covario Inc. All rights reserved.

Fourth Quarter Provides Strong Finish to 2011 Paid Search Trends

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Like their Earned Media counterparts, Social Media Marketers primarily prefer beer, but not to the same extent. While almost half of Search Marketers preferred beer (45%), we found that Social Marketers were closer to a third for guzzling the brew (38%).  These Socialites also have a slightly higher preference for premium beers than Search Marketers.

Following their love for beer was Cocktails at 32%; a close second.  Of the Cocktails, the shocker was how much Vodka was favored to the other drinks.   At 46%, Vodka beat out the second place Bourbon (20%).   All the other cocktails paled in comparison to the supremacy of Vodka and Bourbon.

So, what really made these social marketers differ from their search counterparts? Their love of wine!   We saw that the Socialites drank twice as much wine as the Searchers (30%  vs 15%).

With only slight differences from category to category, it seems that Socialites were far more even in their drink choice than the Searchers.  And they appear to be more social, since the Socialites drank an average of 2 drinks each and talked a lot more with each other versus Searchers who drank an average of 3 drinks each, leaving less time for networking and spending more time in line to order another drink.

Actionable Insight #1: The actionable insight following this event is clear – if Searchers want to appeal to the Social Influencers, all they need is equal parts Vodka, Wine and Sierra Nevada.   Plus, the Searchers will need to grab another drink for the Socialites, when they get another drink for themselves.

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Copyright © 2012 Covario Inc. All rights reserved.

What Fuels Social Media Marketers?

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We just tested this concept, and this is how we did it.  The Covario Organic Search Insight(TM) technology recently started virtually querying the search engines for natural search results by using cloud computing.  The cloud allows us to make a query from a virtual server in London or Singapore or Mumbai.  We tested a set of 1,500 keywords to see how the search results would vary from a search query that originated from the U.S. (Dallas to be exact) versus locally in three major cities – Beijing, London and Singapore.  The results were astounding.

Singapore and Beijing

• In total, 82% of the rankings stayed the same, but 18% or the rankings were different  in these two cities from queries conducted locally, versus those done from the US.
• Bing had the most movement at 28%, while Yahoo had the least with 8%. Google was at 22%.  This means that Bing’s algorithm is actually more sensitive to localization than Google’s.
• There were nearly identical movements up and down. However, 6% of the URLs we were showing as ranking in the Top 50 from Dallas “disappear in the cloud.”

The overall average rankings did not vary – BUT, there is significant chaos below the surface at the individual keyword level.

United Kingdom
The changes in the United Kingdom are even more significant.

• Only 42% of the rankings stayed the same – the cloud produced different rankings for 58% of the keywords!
• Again, the percent that increase versus decrease is roughly equal, however, an average of 26% of the keywords fall off the Top 50 results when analyzed locally.
• And, Bing again has the most sensitive localized algorithm – 66% of the rankings moved.

For Covario customers, know that Covario’s Organic Search Insight is now “cloud enabled” – and we are leveraging the system to ensure accuracy in ranking results on a global basis.

If enterprises are not leveraging technologies that are using the cloud to obtain localized results, then the ranking metrics may be wrong more often than they are right.

ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS

Actionable Insight #1: For marketers looking for internationalized results, it is critical that they employ the methodology Covario is  using in Organic Search Insight – namely cloud computing to retrieve localized results.  Otherwise, advertisers are fooling themselves.  If rank reports are pulled from U.S.- based servers – they are going to be reporting success or failure incorrectly more often than not in the U.K., and one out of four times in APAC.
Actionable Insight #2: Bing is the most locally sensitive of the search platforms.  If we believe that the difference between the Dallas-based results and the cloud-based results is a sign of the relevancy of localized  (TBD), then Bing actually does a better job at localizing.  This is important for mobile SEO, as mobile is the most sensitive to local results.

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For more information on Covario please visit our corporate site.
Copyright © 2012 Covario Inc. All rights reserved.

Outlook for Managing Global SEO Programs: Cloudy!

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Marketing is complex. Our client laughed as she explained that every year that she has given speeches and presentations about marketing, it gets more and more complex.  And yes, CONTENT is king – and consumers are in control. She talked about driving consumer-generated content with which her company wants to be associated and how the consumer has become his/ her own channel.

The big question for her marketing team is, “How do they communicate to each individual consumer with an overarching concept?”

She continued and talked about how her department is structured to find synergies between paid and earned media using the G.R.O.W. construct: Grassroots – Results – Organize – Widespread. One of the goals of this construct is finding ways to make social media programmatic.

In terms of trying to measure the increased complexity of marketing, she commented that people are looking at all the usual metrics and data, but that it is not integrated. Only by pulling metrics together can one create a clearer picture.

In order to do this with products that are not sold to the consumer but are instead important components of end products, our client explained how her organization has created a Value Point System to measure the effectiveness of online media.  And by tracking digital activity in this way, now allows for fair comparisons across product lines, geographies, business units, etc.

The analogy used to explain the system was “a party”. Knowing how many people attended “the party” versus how many were invited constituted the traditional way of measuring success. With the Value Point System, her team can now see how many people showed up for “the party”, stayed, with whom they spoke, and whether they ate, drank, and/or danced. This way, her organization can measure ENGAGEMENT across different types of “parties”.

Using this system, her organization has managed to increase ROI by several 100%. The company is now working to extend the system to other media.
Wrapping up, our client state that successful digital marketers must be strategists, publishers, aggregator, analyst and innovator – all at the same time.

You are reading a post from: Covario Actionable Insights
For more information on Covario please visit our corporate site.
Copyright © 2012 Covario Inc. All rights reserved.

Covario INFLECTIONPoint 2011 Recap: Day #2 Keynote – Cross Media Optimization, Join the Party!

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First, it is unacceptable to have any type of technical crawl-ability errors in a website.
In 2007, when we launched Audit Score v1.0, nearly 85% of all the websites we analyzed had what would be considered MAJOR technical issues.  Rendering errors, URL structures that were too long or used dynamic parameters, and/or navigation structures that were opaque to crawlers.  All were so common that a good site technically tended to rank well.  Not any longer.  This time, the number of sites we looked at that had significant technical issues fell below 20%.  In addition, the sophistication of the search engines to crawl sites has improved as their crawlers have improved.   However, there were two technical factors that popped out of the analysis

Do NOT use session IDs in the URL.

• Advertisers who do this are severely penalized by the engines.

Page load time is a huge factor in SEO.

• Advertisers must work with their IT departments to make sure page load times are as fast as possible.  If you go to your website now and watch a load time bar for more than five seconds while the page renders, you can pretty much assume that the search engine crawler is there “looking impatient, tapping its watch, or drumming its fingers.”

Second, content development processes have improved markedly.
In 2007, having a high-value keyword in the URL, title tag, header tags, or body tag was a winner!  This is now largely ubiquitous.  Much like with technical issues – having the keyword in the URL  is still correlated strongly with high ranking.  However, this is only a third as impactful as the last time we did a big write-up on this subject four years ago.  Optimized SEO content is no longer avant garde – it is de riguer.

Lastly, links are everything.
Not surprising, but this may add some quantitative insights.  We look at four factors, including:

1. raw count of internal links,
2. raw count of external links,
3. having keywords in the anchor text of the referring pages for external links, and
4. the quality of the links.

Link quality is correlated with ranking 10X that of the raw count of external links, which are in turn are 3X more impactful than internal links.  Having keywords in the referring anchor text of an inbound external link was a surprising weak predictor of high ranking.  This is considered a big factor by SEO experts, but the numbers say it has at best marginal impact.  Now, having a few key links to high value sites is worth the effort.  For an advertiser—the one thing to take away from this analysis is to incent SEO people on building the “critical few” links, not incenting them to “build, build, build,” or trusting that a high link count is valuable. It is not.

So, it leads me to this…  Where would I focus to drive up my Score?

Audit Score that is!   I would focus on link building and overall maintenance of the technical and content infrastructure – as it is now a must to have systems in place that keep websites up-to-date.  You don’t even get a chance to run the race if the systems are not crawl-able and content is not well optimized.

ACTIONABLE INSIGHT #1:

The only sustainable way to differentiate a website is through building a few key links.  Advertisers should spend their time building scalable processes to research these links for each keywords on a global basis, search engine by search engine, and language by language.

ACTIONABLE INSIGHT #2:

It is not possible to differentiate a site on content or crawl-ability.  The maturity of the market is such that being well optimized for on-page factors is a necessity that does not create lift, but rather the lack thereof causes ranking degradation.

You are reading a post from: Covario Actionable Insights
For more information on Covario please visit our corporate site.
Copyright © 2012 Covario Inc. All rights reserved.

Betting on the 2011 Search Bowl: Where Would I Focus to Drive Up Your Score?

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To help you get started I’ve provided 4 basic optimization tips that will enable you to keep the wheels moving while you figure out this new landscape.

1. Test now, benchmark later: Consider the new Yahoo/Bing marketplace as the wild, wild west and anything goes. As with any major change in the search landscape, advertisers start off by reacting emotionally, which makes it hard to benchmark performance. I predict some will crank up CPCs to ensure they are in top position, and don’t lose traffic volume. In contrast, some passive advertisers may just bid on branded terms until the marketplace becomes less volatile. In addition, since the holiday shopping season has been in full swing, traffic patterns are abnormal. What you should do is follow in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark and explore this new uncharted region. Test an array of tactics to get the feel of performance, such as aggressive bidding, content match, or expanding your long tail terms. Do this all while closely monitoring performance. If you notice that one of your tests are not performing well, then back off or try a different approach. Whatever you do, this is not the time to be timid. The new Yahoo/Bing combined marketplace represents 33% of the US search market place; therefore, you don’t want to miss out on a chance to be a pioneer in this new marketplace.
2. Benchmark and set expectations in Q1 2011: As I mentioned above, the landscape is too volatile to get a good understanding right now.  As advertisers are making emotional reactions to the change in landscape and cranking up bids to ensure they are in top position expect that this will create an initial rise in CPCs. This should start to normalize in Q1 after the holiday seasonality subsides. When you do start to benchmark, although it may seems obvious, I would recommend just picking a few metrics to look at, that way you don’t waste time analyzing the data. I suggest picking metrics that will allow you to have greatest amount of actionable insights into your SEM program, such as CPCs, Click Through Rate (CTR), Conversion Rate, or CPA.
3. Adjust campaign settings to block traffic from syndicated search partners: The AdCenter UI gives you the ability to choose whether to have your ads displayed on the Bing/Yahoo core search network, Bing/Yahoo syndicated partners, or all of the above. Traffic from syndicated partners has been known to have higher CPCs, and lower performance. I would recommend starting with just the core search traffic at first so you can establish a baseline and understand the new landscape. Once you have a handle of how your campaigns perform in this new environment, then gradually open it up to the syndicated partners.  (NOTE:  If you need assistance on adjusting your targeting settings the PPC Blog has a good tutorial on how to target core Bing and Yahoo core search networks.  )
4. Utilize your web analytics to measure performance by search engine: One of the disadvantages of the Bing/Yahoo migration is that you are unable to monitor the performance of users on Bing and Yahoo independently from one another. We all know that users behave differently on each search engine, and it is important to review performance and the site level. Despite having this setback, your web analytics tool will be the best resource to understand how traffic from each search engine is performing. The best way to get this information is to review performance by referrer domain. This allows you to analyze how the traffic from each search engine is performing once it gets to the site. Also, depending on how your analytics is configured, you will be able to view the queries broken down by search engine.

Bonus Tip:

Create duplicate campaigns with different targeting settings
: Despite not having the ability to manage bids of Yahoo and Bing independently you do have the ability to segment your traffic.

You have 3 options -

1. all traffic (Yahoo/Bing and syndicated search partners),
2. syndicated partners only, or
3. Yahoo/Bing only.

To have greater control of performance, I would recommend creating a duplicate campaign with campaign settings that include only syndicated partners for one, and only Yahoo/Bing for the other.  I know it’s double the work, but it will enable you to fine tune your bid and budget settings to ensure that you are receiving the most optimal performance.

If you consider the Bing/Yahoo migration as new media source and apply some basic SEM best practices you will be able to easily ride the BingHoo wave and stay ahead of you competitors.

Finally remember that not all campaigns are created equal, so if you are feeling concerns about performance, then test it out on a few campaigns before rolling it out globally. I’m interested in seeing how the migrations affects everyone, so please leave any observations that you experience and/or any tips in the comments below.

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For more information on Covario please visit our corporate site.
Copyright © 2012 Covario Inc. All rights reserved.

4 Basic Optimization Tips to help you survive the BingHoo Migration

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The adoption of HTML5 is advancing rapidly.  Buzz surrounding the language’s 5th major revision is ongoing and widespread.  It’s being used to create interactive content, improve web semantics, and strengthen user engagement.  Leading these efforts are big players like YouTube and Apple.  And with the release of Internet Explorer 9, all major web browsers now support most HTML5 features.

So how can online marketers take advantage of HTML5?  How can it be used to your lift SEO results?

Online marketers can leverage HTML5 for SEO by creating new forms of content like interactive versions of print catalogs (copy heavy) or enhanced rich media presentations.  Interactive content can be used to drive link-building campaigns, generate brand awareness, or even improve an online shopping experience.  Another SEO benefit of HTML5 is improved website crawlability.  Updating HTML structural elements, although not directly related to search engine rankings, can improve crawl efficiency and lead to indexation benefits.

Actionable Insight #1 – Improve Page Segmentation and Crawlability
Websites are structured with HTML, so computers can interpret and display the content in a standardized format across many different devices (desktop machines, mobile phones, tablets, e-readers) and software configurations (web browsers, operating systems).  HTML5 provides an opportunity to make this process more efficient for these device platforms and search engines.  From an SEO perspective, increased search engine efficiency leads to faster and deeper crawl paths.  This is particularly important for large and complex websites.

Improved tags in HTML5 more accurately describe the various elements on a webpage.  Using these tags can help search engine crawlers parse the page more efficiently. These new tags reinforce webpage content by using more specific semantics for elements including the header, footer, and navigation.  Until now, search engines were forced to dissect and evaluate webpages by generic identifiers like div tags.  Note that I am not degrading their capabilities in regard to page segmentation.  They do a fantastic job.  But there is always room for improvement, and we should embrace any opportunity to enrich crawler productivity and capitalize on our limited amount crawl equity.

Examples of new HTML5 tags include:

• <header> defines the header
• <footer> defines the footer
• <nav> defines the navigation
• <article> defines the main content
• <section> identifies a general segment or division
• <aside> identifies supplemental content

Actionable Insight #2 – Deliver Exclusive Content and Features
Delivering compelling content helps fuel link-building campaigns and can be used as a tactic for competitive differentiation in the congested online marketing space. Providing new content and features for visitors often results in simultaneous SEO benefits.  Search engines continuously evaluate online demand for various forms of content and update their results accordingly.   Leveraging HTML5 for content can help marketers achieve an enhanced and distinct level of brand exclusivity for visitors and search engines alike.

Arguably the most influential HTML5 addition is the video tag.  The impact that video is making on web marketing is extraordinary.  Although the web is already saturated with videos, the new tag will help cleanse the multimedia elements by introducing a standardized delivery mechanism.  It’s reported that more than 50% of web videos already use HTML5.  If you’re concerned about visitors using older browsers that don’t support HTML5, Adobe already released a solution.

Drap and drop and geolocation are two more additions to the HTML5 suite.  Thinking specifically about eCommerce websites and online retailers, envision visitors simply dragging products into their shopping carts.  Then using the geolocation feature to automatically estimate shipping costs or recommend nearby store locations.  These additions would be great for usability and would defiantly increase the wow-factor in otherwise lackluster eCommerce websites.

My favorite example of HTML5 at work is Google’s interactive experiment The Wilderness Downtown where a variety of technologies are integrated to provide a personalized and just-plain-cool web experience.  Simply enter your childhood address and enjoy a choreographed show of the neighborhood you grew up in.  All made possible with HTML5.

The possibilities are endless.  I hope the previous examples illustrate the potential in creating exclusive content and features using HTML5.  So while search engines tweak their algorithms to mirror online demand for interactive content, online marketers can supply this content in the most efficient method available.  That method is HTML5.

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For more information on Covario please visit our corporate site.
Copyright © 2012 Covario Inc. All rights reserved.

Lift SEO with HTML5

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I began the webinar by reviewing my list of top priorities for search marketing in 2011.

For paid search, 2011 will be the Year of Facebook.

• Covario’s clients are planning for major increases in their budgets for Facebook advertising in 2011.  I estimated (and both Gary and Robin agreed) that advertisers are planning to spend about 10-20% of their pay-per-click (PPC) budgets on Facebook next year.  So if a firm has a $10M PPC budget – they are planning on $1-2M for Facebook throughout 2011. (Note: this budget is NOT coming out of PPC.  It is coming from display or offline budgets, or as an incremental override to the overall digital budget, specifically increasing the shift toward digital more aggressively.)
• We are currently seeing 2011 PPC budgets increasing at a 15% rate over 2010.  And 2010 budgets are up 18% over 2009.  So growth remains robust, however, it continues to be tapered off from the previous 25% hypergrowth annualized growth rates.
• I commented that the completion of the Bing-Hoo integration will have no significant impact on PPC market share – in U.S. or in EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa).  The U.S. (Note: double check this is for the U.S.) market shares will remain roughly 80% Google, 20% Bing-Hoo.
• We expect Yahoo to lose market share in APAC (Asia, Pacific Islands, Australia, China) – as Naver goes to an internal system and Yahoo-Japan moves to the Google platform.  In China, Google is going to lose market share to Baidu – as has already begun in 2010.

The other major paid search issues I brought up on the webinar included:

• 2011 will NOT be the year of mobile search in the U.S. We expect to continue to see mobile driving <5% of overall search advertising.  Gary and Robin concurred. They are planning to do some work in mobile – but it is not the thrust in their 2011 plans.
• We do expect that the emergence of Google TV will compel all advertisers to at least “test” this system in the second half of 2011. Since the system works exactly like PPC (i.e., through an auction model), search marketing will be involved.  This is a great opportunity for search marketers to extend their influence and expertise within their respective enterprises.
• And last, 2011 WILL be the year when integration of search into other forms of media – essentially attribution modeling programs – will become far more mature and operational within the organizations and budgeting of most large advertisers.  I discussed several of the projects Covario is doing now for clients to integrate all of their online and offline data to do attribution analysis and cross media reporting.

We conducted a survey during the webinar.  The 307 attendees voted for their highest paid search priorities for 2011. Here are the results, which largely conform to what Covario is seeing.
PPC Top Priorities for Advertisers in 2011 
(n = 307)

1. Social Media Advertising on Facebook, LinkedIn (46%)
2. Local Search Advertising Programs (18%)
3. Managing Impact of Google Instant (14%)
4. Mobile Search Advertising (11%)
5. Managing Impact of the Bing-Hoo platform integration (6%)
6. Video Advertising (YouTube, etc) (5%)

For organic search, 2011 is the Year of Social.

• Leveraging social media for scalable link-building efforts is a major initiative for advertisers.  Robin and Gary both indicated this is a huge push for their organizations.  Robin said Life Technologies is using social media as a major part of driving SEO results – both for link-building, as well as for unique searchable assets that can help the company occupy additional places on the SERPs in order to drive more traffic.
• And, 2011 is also going to be a year were FINALLY advertisers begin the process of tying together paid and organic results into a single management framework – so paid search programs are run based off of the strengths/weaknesses of their organic search programs. Gary talked about this more in his segment of the webinar.

Again, the webinar participants took a survey on their top SEO priorities for 2011.  Here is what the results were.

SEO Top Priorities for Advertisers in 2011 (n=307)

1. SEO/Social Media Program Integration (36%)
2. Link-Building Programs (30%)
3. Improving the Content Management Process (16%)
4. Automation of SEO Programs (14%)
5. Video SEO (3%)
6. Mobile SEO (1%)

Robin went next.

She hit the top issues her organization is working on in 2011

• Building awareness and crawl equity
• Aligning search more strongly with PR and communications
• Taking advantage of the opportunity to create a comprehensive taxonomy and content strategy
• Realizing less duplication of efforts

Note: This last point is key.  Like many large advertisers, we are seeing a move toward centralization of their global search efforts.  Robin termed this “less duplication of effort” – and the mechanism by which efficiencies are gained is centralized control.  Many organizations call this a Search Center of Excellence. At Covario, we see this consistently across most of our large customers.

Gary added a number of other key initiatives he is working on in 2011.

• Lenovo has a big push for video in 2011. The statistic came in that video assets are something like 56X more likely to be ranked on the first page than standard text ads for Google (Business Week article) and the interaction level with video is 7-8X higher than standard text listing.
• And Lenovo is going to be testing Google TV – they had done early tests in 2009 and 2010 – and will be continuing next year.
• Last, Lenovo is doing a lot of work in attribution modeling within PPC – both with other media types like display advertising, as well as across PPC and SEO.

There were many questions during the session – which can be heard on the podcast.

ACTIONABLE INSIGHT #1: Listen to this webinar podcast. It is a great wrap-up of the major issues facing enterprise level search advertisers in 2011.

ACTIONABLE INSIGHT #2: In PPC, 2011 is the Year of Facebook.  Expect advertisers to allocate the equivalent of 10-20% of their PPC budgets to social media adverting.  The budget will come from display or offline – not from the PPC budget.

ACTIONABLE INSIGHT #3: In SEO, the major issue is integration of SEO with social programs for link-building.  Some 36% of the attendees indicated this is their top priority for 2011.

You are reading a post from: Covario Actionable Insights
For more information on Covario please visit our corporate site.
Copyright © 2012 Covario Inc. All rights reserved.

2011- The Year of Facebook: Top Priorities for Search Marketers… Social Media

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This trend might be a result of increased promotional awareness, general growth of online shopping, or a combination or both.  Regardless, let it be a reminder in the importance of leveraging seasonal search traffic.  Online retailers should prepare for seasonal SEO by setting expectations and optimizing their website for promotional events, thereby maximizing organic search traffic conversions.

Actionable Insight # 1 – Planning and Expectations
Online sales continue to grow as a percentage of total retail sales.  For search marketers this means increased opportunity as well as increased expectations.  Planning and managing search expectations during the volatile (and stressful) holiday shopping season will isolate additional search related opportunities and improve intra-department marketing collaboration.

Ask other departments, vendors, or partners what promotions they have planned for the holiday season.  The cohesive nature of SEO makes communication between various departments extremely beneficial.  For an example, the PR/Communications department might be announcing a holiday charity event or donation.  Search marketers could leverage this type of content by optimizing for Google News or other news feeds, resulting in an influx of sympathetic customers.  Vendors or partners might have industry insight for the most popular holiday items.  This type of knowledge will help prioritize seasonal optimization strategy (see Actionable Insight #2 for more on optimizations).

Setting search expectations can be a daunting task for online retailers.  However, just like holiday financial goals, expectations should be set for organic search traffic.  What questions will need to be answered in January?

• Did product feeds performance shift in parallel with general search referrals?
• Did conversion rates keep up with holiday related traffic spikes?
• Which holiday related keywords drove the most traffic?  To which pages?
• How are these goals evaluated? What SEO software is being used?

Expectations will vary depending on the business and seasonal sales elasticity.  Starting with some basic questions can uncover larger issues that need to be addressed.  Setting search expectations prior to the holidays may also help alleviate any unrealistic standards for search performance.

Actionable Insight # 2 – SEO Tactics & Execution
Seasonal SEO can be challenging because of the increasingly competitive online shopping space.  Recent industry developments have amplified this competition even more.  Google’s “Instant” search update has further inflated the importance of the top few search results.  Additionally, affiliate marketers create websites dedicated solely to promotional events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.  These sites can be hard (but not impossible) to outrank for promotional specific keywords.  Here are some ideas for gaining a competitive advantage this holiday season.

• Landing Pages:  A crucial element in any seasonal SEO strategy.  Create landing pages using unique copy, titles, and product descriptions.  Avoid dated URLs (i.e. /black-friday-2010.html).  Dateless pages preserve SEO value for this year and the next.
• Marketable Media:  Create unique content using various media types.  What types of captivating content can be promoted for seasonal search queries? Holiday related videos? Seasonal Apps? Interactive games or contests? Digital gift cards?  Google enjoys providing searchers with diverse set of results.  Hence, creating marketing material in various digital forms will increase a retailer’s search engine exposure while simultaneously building brand-buzz.
• Promotional Schedule:  Create a promotional event schedule using Rich Snippets Event Formatting.  The holiday event schedule should show up directly on Google’s search engine results page (SERP) providing a distinctive element to capture a searcher’s interest (also builds consumer anticipation around the brand).
• Product Feeds:   With online retailers flooding Google (and Bing) with products, unique product descriptions are more important than ever.  Most retailers simply use the standard manufacturer product copy.  Make your products stand out (to users and Googlebot) by writing seasonal product copy or including catchy product images.

Conclusion:
Trends indicate that online shoppers expect brands to embrace the holiday season with promotional events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.  Exceed their expectations by creating an accessible search channel for users and search engines alike.    Set expectations for seasonal traffic goals and means of measuring those goals.  Collaborate with other departments and outside partners.  Capitalize on SEO opportunities by leveraging exclusive, brand-specific content, using various forms of media.  Persistent SEO efforts will help online retailers navigate through a potentially stagnant holiday season by lifting traffic and boosting conversions.

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For more information on Covario please visit our corporate site.
Copyright © 2012 Covario Inc. All rights reserved.

Seasonal SEO: It’s That Time of the Year

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Before we discuss our corroboration of Google’s use of mouse-drive data, let’s be clear about what search results can be influenced by mouse movements and presumably, click-through data. First, go read the patent filing. It’s important to understand that this particular Google patent is:

“A method & system for tuning search result relevancy by observing browser-based activities (mouse hovers over regions & clicks on links). Reordering of results in accordance with respective relevancy values. These relevancy values are used to determine and/or adjust content of a one-box result for search queries.”

Actionable Insight #1:

After reading the patent it’s easy to understand a bit more about Google’s search results tuning processes based on the different mouse activities the search engine monitors, which include, but are not limited to:

• Observing regions of mouse movement over search result pages.
• Hover periods; the length of time searchers spend between clicking or not clicking on search result listings.

Google’s search results tuning algorithms allocate different weights to different time periods. For example, hovering over one particular spot of a search results page for a longer period of time is equivalent to searchers forming a more positive opinion about the indexed listing.  So a searcher that hovers over a search engine snippet as if using the mouse to read the listing line-by-line infers a very high level of attention and consequently, more time spent over a particular spot on the search results pages.  (Actionable Insight #1.1: This is also another great reason to write compelling meta descriptions when optimizing your website.)

Actionable Insight #2:

Google doesn’t just use time and mouse behavior to tune its search results.  While the patent clearly indicates that search results are adjusted if hover time periods are greater than threshold values, coefficient values are also aggregated from impression data that details how many times and in what order one-box search results are clicked or not clicked. This is where the flaw in the algorithm can occasionally produce what could be considered suboptimal results.

For example, we recently had a client’s Sitelinks change as a result of surpassing the threshold values for mouse behavior. I know … Sitelinks are not exactly one-box results, but I believe it’s relatively safe to presume that Google Sitelinks are an evolution of one-box results and therefore kept turned by mouse-driven relevancy algorithms, as well are other on-page time-sensitive popularity variants.

The client’s Sitelinks had previously consisted of a series of popular entry pages, bargains and a free catalog. The free catalog Sitelink was replaced by a promotional landing page for a special limited-term offer three days after the content went live on the web … And there it remained in Sitelinks for 10 days after the special offer expired. The content remained listed in Sitelinks, due in part to its mouse-monitored thresholds set by Google.

Having expired event listings in Sitelinks does make for a good user experience, and Google makes itself very clear that its algorithmic search results are all about providing a good user experience. Toward this end, Google makes it relatively easy to correct its algorithmic Sitelink errors.

Google provides webmasters with the ability to remove Sitelink listings via Webmaster Tools, which is exactly what we did for our client in order to have a new Sitelink replace the expired sale page. This is just one of the many ways that Google relies on human intervention to mend the errors of its algorithmic ways.

Make sure your online business has similar access to each of the major search engines webmaster tools in order to be able to take similar fast action – should the need arise.

Actionable Insight #3:

Google’s tuning algorithms for one-box results are also based on coefficient data from “at least one other query-independent metric.” This is just Google’s way of reminding us all that there is more to its “secret sauce” for any particular search result that meets the eye – or in this case, a five-year-old patent filing.

I’d recommend you watch for variants of this patent in other Google search results pages. Who knows where you might see one-box algorithmic thresholds based on mouse-movements in the works? Just look to the left of the page to see what Google’s new Jazz interface if offering you for alternative results or glance to the top and left of the page for advertising positioning. These results listings, in combination with personalized and real-time search, could ultimately be influenced by something as diminutively elusive as a hovering mouse.

Related Resources:

• Google Patent: System and Method for Modulating Search Relevancy Using Pointer Activity Monitoring
• Bill Slawski of SEO by the Sea
• Ten Fallacies About Web Privacy
• Retargeting Ads Follow Surfers to Other Sites

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Google’s Mouse-Driven Relevancy Patent

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