Mobile is here and no-one can deny this is the way of the future.

For some time, we’ve spent much of our discussions regarding mobile convincing clients this was going to be the next big thing – but now the conversation has shifted from “why should I?” to “how should I?”

Previously, many advertisers rejected mobile; writing it off as a fad or just a tool for social engagement. This has led to companies refusing to allocate budget to the development of any mobile properties, citing a lack of visibility or ROI. However, according to a recent report by the Australian Marketing Institute, almost 40% of Australian marketing executives expect their marketing budget to increase in 2012, with advertising campaigns increasingly targeted at mobile devices.

So, what’s changed? Lots.

Mobile devices have become smarter and more sophisticated, allowing users to do more with greater ease. They can click on an ad and be dialled into the advertisers call centre with just one click. They can manage all their banking through a basic app. Essentially, they have their world in their pocket.

Advertisers can leverage this ‘ease-of-use’ to learn more about their audiences habits and advertise and promote their services to complement these habits. For example, many high street retailers are leveraging the power of Facebook’s mobile app, by offering shoppers a discount when they ‘check-in’ to their store. They can then use this as a database for enticing shoppers to keep up to date with store offers and exclusive deals. Banks are offering their customers calculator tools to show their monthly repayments on a home loan or car loan, or how much money they can make on a term deposit – all on the go. And with the emergence of ‘Mobile Wallets’ such as Google Wallet, the sky is the limit.

With mobile use increasing at a staggering rate, the challenge for advertisers is to be continuously innovative to satisfy users’ needs. Below are some key do’s and don’ts for any mobile strategy:

Do:

1. Create a “Mobile Friendly” site – your audience will appreciate it and Google has started to penalise advertisers with non-mobile friendly sites with poor quality scores in the Adwords campaigns
2. Invest in mobile – not just in advertising dollars, but especially in staff – mobile is here to stay and the sooner you have dedicated resources the better!
3. Embrace flexibility – from systems compatibility (e.g. building for iPhone or Android) to customising user experience – you must keep an open mind and test, test, test.

Don’t:

1. Spam or Overload. Whether by email, SMS, pop-ups or otherwise – just don’t do it. We hate it, OK! (Oh, and let us unsubscribe if we want).
2. Don’t forget a call to action. This is a general rule in marketing your product through any medium, but it’s crucial for mobile where users can easily be diverted to something else more interesting. Plus, telling users what to do might just help your bottom line….
3. Don’t forget about screen size. We all suffer from fat finger syndrome, so help us to get where we want to go.
4. Don’t just think about selling – it’s also about engagement, learning and getting leads. The sales will come, believe it.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and online PR are inextricably linked, more so now than ever! When used in tandem, the two share many synergies in driving exceptional results online.

Branding

Public Relations, at its core, is about building a favourable public image, while SEO seeks to improve a brand’s visibility in search. Both disciplines essentially share the same goal online – to raise the profile of a company by establishing trust, authority and reputation with key audiences.

While well-optimised content provides a powerful form of brand awareness and reputation management for online PR, brand and reputation correlate with strong search results, making the two inseparable.

Coverage

A key component of any PR campaign is generating positive media coverage. SEO plays a vital role in ensuring media releases, articles and announcements have better visibility online. Google’s Universal Search provides additional exposure via news, blogs, reviews, videos, images and more.

Similarly, off-site SEO involves generating coverage via inbound link acquisition.

Online PR is the key to building quality, authoritative, editorial links, through media relations, blogger outreach, industry partners and social engagement.

Leveraging both disciplines to create and distribute high-quality content is key.

Audience

While PR involves managing communications between an organisation and its publics, search engines provide the key means in reaching these audiences online. Whether they’re journalists, bloggers, influencers or brand advocates, active within news sites, blogs, forums or social communities, PR and SEO work hand in hand.

For both disciplines, social media plays a fundamental role. Not only are Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn powerful communication channels, both Google and Bing have confirmed the use of social signals within their algorithms.  Creating engaging content and participating in conversations not only encourages ‘likes’, ‘tweets’ and ‘shares’, it generates positive coverage, brand awareness and links -, a win-win all round!

Using SEO and online PR in isolation is no longer enough, as one will not survive without the other. A holistic, integrated approach to online marketing is essential in maximising performance online.

Last Thursday Google announced a significant change to their ranking algorithm which aims to return “fresher” and therefore more relevant search results for approximately 35% of search queries.  Following the recent “Caffeine” infrastructure change, which provides a much faster and larger indexation of the web, this freshness update provides more timely and recent results.

Google said:

‘We completed our Caffeine web indexing system last year, which allows us to crawl and index the web for fresh content quickly on an enormous scale. Building upon the momentum from Caffeine, today we’re making a significant improvement to our ranking algorithm that impacts roughly 35 percent of searches and better determines when to give you more up-to-date relevant results for these varying degrees of freshness’.

Which types of searches will be affected?

Google giving prominence to “fresh” content is nothing new. QDF (Query Deserves Freshness) is an algorithmic component which promotes newsworthy, topical content for queries requiring frequent updates, such as breaking news and hot topics. Previously impacting just 17.5% of search queries, this has essentially doubled, with fresh content now getting rewarded more than ever.

As different searches have different “freshness” needs, this algorithmic improvement is designed to better understand how to differentiate between these types of searches and the level of freshness required. These include:

• Current Events, News & Hot Topics – For events, breaking news or hot topics, you want to find the latest information immediately. This change will return high-quality, real-time content which may be just minutes or seconds old. Major brands, celebrities and a variety of news sites have already been rewarded with greater search visibility.
• Reoccurring Events – For events which take place on a regularly recurring basis, such as annual conferences, federal elections, company earnings or the Olympics, this change will ensure you see the latest information ahead of content from previous years.
• Frequent Updates - For information which changes often, such as the best SLR camera, Mazda car reviews, the cheapest flights to NZ, or other ecommerce/ transactional queries, this change will ensure results are accurate and up to date.

For example, a search for “earthquake” in the US now returns relevant content about the latest earthquake in Oklahoma, just a few hours old:

Evergreen content, which includes historical or long-lifespan content requiring no or few updates, will not be affected by this change.

What does this mean for Search?

While this change is yet to be rolled out internationally, a number of key actions have been identified for your organic search campaigns:

• Identify relevant industry-specific keywords which may require “freshness” updates
• Closely monitor rankings and traffic for search terms likely to be affected
• Incorporate industry-specific “Trends” and “Hot Topics” within your keyword research process
• Regularly update content to keep it fresh
• Include news, articles, blogs, videos and reviews as part of your overall content strategy
• Use RSS Feeds to promote content, there is a strong correlation between “freshness” links and RSS
• Include timestamps within XML sitemaps
• Implement time tags if using HTML5
• Encourage social sharing, it is believed social engagement may influence which content is displayed.

If you focus on addressing these areas, when it comes time to being rewarded, chances are you will be up for it.

You may think your Internet Marketing Agency is just another supplier. But your search marketing agency can be so much more than that. If you want to get the most out of your search dollars or your internet marketing specialists, you need to make your chosen search agency a seamless extension of your business – a partner.

1. Your Search Agency Needs Help Only You Can Provide

No matter how good your search agency is or how much experience they have, they can’t do their job alone. They need information, and the only place they can get it is from the people working in the various departments of your company.

Your branding and product/service development departments can keep the search agency in the loop about upcoming products that will need visibility, descriptors to use with keywords, the kind of content (writing) styles to use, and how to interact with clients.

The PR, marketing and sales departments can keep your search agency updated on current conversion rates (which keywords, pages, referrers, and techniques worked best), products/services to focus on or push, and big news items the company has that could be used to generate content, build links, and increase visibility.

Customer service teams are also an ideal source for content, keywords, ad ideas, and other tools your search agency can use to improve the results of various campaigns.  You’ll make your search agency’s work more effective and improve your bottom line, just by working together.

2. SEO, SEM, Social Media and More

Social media and personalisation influence SEO and SEM more than ever before. Unfortunately, your SEO team can’t run your marketing department, and the marketing department can’t be your SEO/SEM provider. They have to work together.

Keywords and behavioural targeting can help people find your content through site search, and make it more appealing to the right audience. Your SEO, social media and other marketing will all be more effective when they’re fully integrated with each other.

3. Search Agencies Handle More Than Just SEO and Paid Advertising

The main reason you probably hired a search agency was to improve your search rankings, or run your PPC campaigns. But it can do so much more.

For example, your search partner can help push down a negative listing in the search results, when you’ve had a bad situation get worse, or when you’re simply looking to build up your reputation or authority. (We call this “reputation management”.)

They can also help you launch new products or marketing plans, either by adding to their existing keyword lists or starting a new campaign. You can target a specific audience, test certain pages, and get to know your ideal customers and their needs.

Link building strategies such as outreach and content placement programs can build connections and open the window to opportunities.

These are just a few examples of how your search agency could help you and your business succeed.

4. Make Changes on the Fly and Be Ready for Anything

Things move pretty fast in the business world, but online things can move even faster. So, if something changes, you need to be ready to act just as quickly (one example is using a news item or hot social network topic to market a particular product or service). But if your search partner doesn’t know anything about it, how can they possibly help you?

Working closely with your SEO/SEM agency also means you’ll know what they’re doing, what techniques they’re using and how things are going. You’ll always have a good idea where things are at, so you’re less likely to get a nasty surprise.

As you can see, treating your SEO and SEM agency as a partner rather than just a supplier gives you a huge advantage over your competition. How could you possibly pass that up?

Conversion Optimisation

When people talk about search marketing, they tend to talk about the keywords, ad copy and landing pages. Which is all good and well because afterall, these three levers are all key to improving campaign performance and improving overall ROI to your business. 

But we believe it’s imperative to not only develop a test and learn strategy by using only these three levers, but it’s just as important to consider the landing page itself – landing page optimisation.

Landing page optimisation can have the largest impact on your conversion rate. You’ve already done most of the hard work to ensure the highest quality users are driven to the landing page through an optimised search campaign. Now it’s about converting these users into customers.

When looking at landing pages specifically, people usually talk about AB landing page testing where you run two landing pages simultaneously in the SEM campaign to determine which landing page generates a higher conversion rate and ROI for the business.

However, AB landing page testing can be limited. It only allows you test two elements of the landing page. If you’re running two completely different landing pages (i.e., with different content and/or layout), you are unable to determine the key driver of any change in performance.  Was it the new layout that improved the conversion rate, or was it the change in key imagery on the page?

The easiest and most efficient way to optimise landing pages is through conversion optimisation. Conversion optimisation, also known as Multivariate Testing (MVT), is the systematic process of identifying and testing multiple variables on a landing page to improve conversion rates and ROI. This allows you to test multiple variables, such as, headlines, copy, images, forms, layouts, call to actions, all simultaneously whilst maintaining a control – your current landing page.

From a development point of view, conversion optimisation can be easier to implement than A/B landing page testing as you don’t need to create any new landing pages, you just need to input code onto the landing page that you’re wanting to test as well as the conversion page. It’s that simple.

When it comes to conversion optimisation, one of the most important things to remember is to plan. Don’t just jump straight into it and set up a test. You need to sit down and decide on a strategy and list of hypothesis that could improve performance. From here you should list everything you want to test and brainstorm ideas for each of them.

While it might seem tempting to test everything at once, you need to consider how much traffic your site and landing page receives and take this into consideration when deciding how many sections and variables to test at any one time.

Just prioritise and remember that you can always create a second test, so start simple and concentrate on areas that will have the highest impact. Then watch the results roll in….

Recently, Google Analytics Blog made 2 announcements: Google Analytics will soon be able to provide real time data and Google has released Google Analytics Platinum, a  paid version of Google Analytics targeted specifically at corporate enterprises.

Real Time Reports

Up until now, Google Analytics has only been able to provide reports on visits up to at least 24 hours in the past. With these latest reports, which are being released over time, you will be able to see what you website visitors are doing as it happens.

You will be able to see the number of active users within your website, where they came from (traffic channel), and even the keywords used. Sent a tweet with a link to your site? Now you can see the exact impact as it happens.

To be able to get the full benefits of real-time reports, you will need to ensure Google Analytics installation has been correctly implemented as well as ensure all marketing channels (i.e. Display, CPC, E-Mail, etc) have been correctly tagged.

Unfortunately there are some restrictions to using the real-time reports, you must:

• Be an account administrator
• Not have any filters applied to the account.

If you want to try out the new real-time reports, sign up here: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/realtimeanalytics/

Google Analytics Platinum

As mentioned above, Google Analytics Platinum is primarily targeted at enterprises, although currently only available within the US, Canada, and the UK.  The cost will be a fixed annual fee, which is set by Google or through Google Analytics Platinum Retailers.

Benefits of Google Analytics Platinum include:

• Additional data available for reports, with the ability to view reports with billions of hits as oppsed to the current 50M, and the use of up to 50 custom variables to provide deeper insights into user behaviour
• Advanced analytics through attribution modelling of your various marketing campaigns
• Secure data with a Service Level Agreement of up to 99.9% in any calendar month, as well as you will own the data
• Your own personal account manager to assist with setup, technical and business training and general support.

So to get the competitive edge, it’s definitely in your best interests to ensure you’re leveraging these new Google Analytics tools as soon as possible. If you already are, do you have any feedback?

We’ve taken out 19th position in SmartCompany’s
Smart50 Awards, which recognise the fastest
growing SMEs in Australia!
Check it out

We are extremely proud to announce that FirstClick Consulting has been awarded position 19 in the 2011 SmartCompany Smart 50 Awards!

Out of the 500 odd companies that entered the awards, being given the honour of 19th place is flattering.

The Smart50 Awards recognise the fastest growing SMEs in Australia throughout 2010-2011.

Grace Chu, our humble CEO says, “We’re delighted to be recognised publicly again for our team’s fantastic work. We are fortunate to have an amazing team who has helped get FirstClick where it is today and we’re looking forward to taking the business even further in the future.”

Grace continues, “We got here through a combination of focus and commitment to our clients – and always remaining true to doing what we do best – and that’s making money for our clients.”

The awards night took place last night in Melbourne. And yes, our team was there enjoying the bubbles along with many other entrepreneurial  SMEs!

Earlier this year, Google Analytics released the Site Speed Report which allowed site owners to monitor page speed. Google happens to use page-load speed as one factor when ranking websites and measuring quality score. So now, as well as being able to track usability metrics through bounce rates, time on site and page views, you can also help identify problems using the page-load performance of individual pages.

Optimising  page-load time is not just for search engines

The benefits for your visitors when you optimise page load time are simple. The most obvious being visitors spend less time waiting and hence more time interacting, consuming pages, learning or reading, and, wait for it…. buying. There are plenty of research statistics that support these claims which is the reason why Google is so obsessed with making a faster web , furthermore making page load time a part of their search algorithm.

The studies conducted also show there is a longer-term, negative impact on site-usage with users likely to use the website less even after the load times have been improved.

Your website is your reputation. If a visitor finds your site slow, chances are they’ll move on. Too often I’ve visited a website where pages are loading so slowly that I’ve simply left and found an alternative, not sparing another precious second waiting (we are in the Digital Information Age after all and “business at the speed of thought” was a catch-cry from over a decade ago).

So the question is, what do you need to do?

You need to address where exactly the problems are and installing the page-load tracking snippet for Google Analytics is a good place to start. Without getting too techie, it’s essentially adding a line of code to the Analytics JavaScript tracking tag that you probably already have. Google Analytics can then start to compile data for your report, showing the page load time, page views, bounce and exit rates, helping you find the problem areas of your site. 

Fix the problem!

Speed is affected by many factors and to fix some of these problems, you will need to have an understanding of what contributes to the overall performance of a page. Fortunately, there are resources already available online just for this topic that cover almost everything you need to know. A good start is to improve your vocabulary on some of the terms often used by those who will be implementing the solutions. Here are three of my favourites:

Caching

A “cache” is a copy of files from your website that is saved locally on a user’s browser. You may have heard of the phrase “clearing your browser cache”, well that’s the same cache I’m talking about. Many websites do not allow caching of their files for various reasons, so the solution for this one is fairly simple. Ensure files such as images, CSS, JavaScript and the actual HTML pages can be cached so those files can be served faster.

Compression

Images are not the only thing that can be compressed on the web. Your website’s JavaScript code and HTML can be compressed for size or minimised for efficiency. It may not be necessary to compress everything on your website, but it pays to know which files are contributing the most to the overall page-size so you can address them if necessary.

Latency

This word is a fairly important term which is not addressed enough in relation to page-load times. Simply put, there is a common misconception that file sizes are the main contributor to slow page load time. However latency can have more of an impact. Latency (otherwise referred to by many online gamers as “lag”) is essentially the time it takes for a piece of data to get from you, to the web server, then back to your computer again. Latency can be impacted by the webserver’s hardware, your internet connection, the network you are in, how many other sites are hosted and even the volume of people visiting the websites.

What now?

Since the impact of page-load is now more visible to site owners, thanks to the Site Speed report in Google Analytics, you’ll want to invest more time in tweaking your pages and server to the best of its ability. In some cases, you may want to review your webserver, or servers for performance issues. Get a good hosting provider which has scalable support, someone who can cope with increased traffic even when your site gets very, very busy. Other factors such as server location and transfer speed should also factor in when you’re selecting a good host.

In many cases, tweaking your page assets such as the images, banners, code and tracking tags might be all it takes to improve the performance of certain pages. Using Google Analytics Page-Speed Report, the data you need to tweak and optimise these pages has never been easier.

How fast are your page load times? And how many customers are you helping or hindering as a result?

Back in July, Google announced that they had plans to develop a new flight search functionality when they acquired ITA software, which tracks flight times and fares. Therefore, it came as no surprise this week when Google launched its new Flight Search feature in the US.

Integrating ITA data into search results isn’t something new. Bing and leading travel aggregator sites have been employing this tactic for years.  Even before Google acquired ITA, they had demonstrated they intended to dip their toe into the lucrative flight search market when they integrated scheduled flight data into search engine results pages (SERPs) back in May.

Currently Google provides flight schedules for popular flight routes in 10 languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Turkish, and Catalan.

Now when users enter a flight related search query in Google, they will not only be returned scheduled flight information, but be able to access additional info via a new ‘flights’ link in the left hand navigation.

It can’t be denied that this new feature will benefit the consumer, providing fast, reliable flight data at the click of a button. However it is not clear yet how it will impact search marketing strategies for both SEO and SEM.

This latest update again raises concerns relating to Google’s dominance in the market place and its ever aggressive development program.  Google is no longer simply the big daddy of search, but ever increasingly expanding its dominance into new sectors such as travel, music and its widely publicized  venture into the social sphere.

This development from Google will no doubt undergo scrutiny from within the industry and governmental offices globally, it will be interesting to see how it pans out over the forth coming months. At the moment Flight Search is still only available in the US, it is expected to be rolled out internationally hitting Australia in the next couple of weeks.