The new Google AdWords qualification is worth taking. The exams are much better than before in my opinion.

Drum roll…

This can’t come soon enough in the UK!

Whilst there are ways of doing this currently, all should be in the shade of doing it this way if it works well.

Can’t wait!

Now, I have not really ever wrote about Google Caffeine. This was deliberate as I wanted to see how it panned out. And well… it seems to have done exactly what Google said it would i.e. provide a better and more up to date way for them to index. This brings all sort of advancements, but the main one is speed. Quicker indexing, quicker response, etc.

Did Google Caffeine change things for us greatly? No, not really, but the landscape has changed for Google to build upon, which is the part that does change things a great deal.

Tried Google Instant yet? Now that is a big change for all of us. Instant was in many ways made possible by the Caffeine update and it will greatly affect the way we access Google’s search results. Add this to the personalisation elements that have been happening for the last few years and the way we search and, most importantly, what we choose to access once we have searched has changed a great deal in this time frame.

Try Google Instant for yourself (currently you need to be signed in to your Google account). Did you type less? Did you type more? Did the top results that occurred half way through your query help you? Did it alter the way you typed the rest of the query? Will you turn Google Instant off? Did you use the suggested search less or more? What did you click on? Lots of questions and all of the answers can change each time we search.

Anything that changes the way we search will clearly affect those people who have a view on how best to affect the way Google orders their results. But that is it, we in the SEO world try to affect the way Google orders its results and not how people search. We can never affect that.

So for me Caffeine was and is always something that I had to watch and learn from, not worry about. The May Day update was the big news that happened around the time Caffeine was launched because that directly affected the way I need top think about SEO. As long as Google delivered Caffeine in the way it was meant to happen (with no mess ups that affected search results) then I was and still am prepared to watch how things develop. Sure, quicker results, quicker indexing, more ways to slice and dice the results (Instant), more pages indexed, but nothing that should affect the order of results.

Will Instant change what gets clicked? Yes. Can you affect it from an SEO perspective? No. Can I learn from it over time? Yes.

Oh, and by the way, I am only taking about SEO here. Now PPC, that is a totally different matter… Head term guys, watch your budgets and ROI! Remember Google search is all about being the best and getting ads clicked. If you view every change through these eyes life becomes far less complicated.

Lastly, tried Google Realtime yet? Caffeine at work again.

Getting this message on Google AdWords?

I have noticed that there are literally thousands of searches for this term on Google, so I though I would put up a page that could get found for people looking for answer to this problem.

There are many reasons why you could be getting this message on your keywords within AdWords. If you stumble across this page and want some advice add a comment with full details and I will do my best to help.

A nice new match type in Google AdWords called ‘Broad Match Modifier’ was launched in the UK this week.

Basically, it turns ‘broad match’ into something that is a lot more usable and less at the whim of what Google consider a ‘good’ match for your keyword.

With the new (ish) ‘search query’ reporting you can now get, using broad match has become a little more usable with the ability to modify (or turn off) the extent of your broad match keywords, after maybe using it during some of the initial stages of a campaign. This enables you to get ‘real’ keyword data with the ‘search query’ report and then use this to go after worthwhile AdGroups, etc.

However, some of the ‘broad’ match keyword grouping is somewhat dodgy and even the most scientific use of the match type always left me feeling a bit like I was donating money, relevancy and shedding quality.

Well, the ‘Broad Match Modifier’ really does help in many respects… how does it work? Well, you need to put a ‘+’ sign before one of your broad match words to ‘modify’ it. By modifying it, Google means that it will treat that word somewhat less broad than it used to. Here’s an examples…

The keywords ‘glass desks’ would result in:

* Broad match will probably show for ‘perspex desk’, ‘desk’, ‘black glass descs’, ‘writing table’ etc.
* The modified match ‘glass +desk’ would match all the above apart from ‘writing table’ (yes, including the misspelling and pluralising of ‘desk’
* The modified match ‘+glass +desk’ would match the words ‘glass desk’ (and misspelling and pluralisation) within a sentance e.g. ‘black glas desks’, ‘glass desks’, etc.

Both ‘exact’ and ‘phrase’ matching are not affected and still work in the normal way.

All in all a good addition to the AdWords PPC tool kit and will save a good amount of time and wastage it you need to use broad match for any set of keywords for a specific campaign.

Another video from Hal Varian, the Chief Economist at Google. Pretty straightforward stuff, but no one (and I repeat no one) presents this kind of thing better than Hal. Take time to watch.

Sorry for the lack of posting recently. What with one thing or another, I just haven’t had the time to get some done. Maybe it is the temptation to just micro blog things now. Still, no excuses.

As you will have noticed I put up a box on the top right a while ago offering a free SEO assessment (from a top UK SEO no less… self proclamation is it really needed or worthwhile?). Well, we have got to the stage now where I am getting about two or three enquiries per day for this; thank you! Every person who submits a request gets a personalised assessment back. Some are brief and some are somewhat longer (depending on my current time pressures), but all of them should add some insight and value to the SEO situation for the site concerned.

There were two reasons I started this service. The first was to keep myself fresh (you know what I mean) and ‘with it’ with new sites and situations to look at and analyse. The second was to, maybe, get some paid assignments out of it too. This is when the initial assessment is greeted with a ‘let’s talk further’. I am pleased to say that I have hit the mark with both of these goals so far.

So what has changed? Well, I would like to open these out a bit and maybe once a month use a particularly good (or bad) situation and write about it publicly. The good news here is that the public ones will be quite in depth (the ones that usually have a fee attached if the person/company wants me to go a lot further) and this (public) assessment will now be free. This will only be by agreement (if you ask for an assessment you won’t now suddenly find me dissecting your site in a live post) and also I will make sure the version that appears here is a little bit more truncated that the one you will get. Hey, we might even do some live video or screen cam ones.

Now, here comes my get out. If this takes off too much I may have to rein back on the amount that I can do and be more selective. But let’s see how it goes.

If you would like me to give you an SEO assessment overview of your site, just send your detail via the contact form. You never know you might be the first one to get an extended assessment for free and make it on to the site too.

P.S. as the name of the site suggests this site is (meant to) concentrate on the UK SEO scene. So, please don’t be offended, but I do ask for the sites submitted to be UK based (doesn’t need to be  hosted in the UK, but needs to be administered in the UK). However, if you have a site outside of this region and you think (or know) I couldn’t resist to delve further on the SEO side you are welcome to submit it and give it a try!

A large part of any process that involves getting good at something is the ability to still hone the basics. This is particularly relevant if you want to become an expert. Think of guitarists practicing scales, football players practising free kicks, etc. Even though their ability level has far exceeded these elementary drills, the need to perform them never goes away.

With this is mind watch this video. It will make you remember some fundemental parts of the Google pay per click system that you may of been taking for granted.

Enjoy…

Apart from being wonderfully creative with your title, and two lines of ad copy, the display URL is the only other place available to tweak your AdWords adverts in your favour.

As we all know ‘deep level’ split testing your adverts is a key element to maximising your results, and playing your keywords in the best way. What I mean by ‘deep level’ is looking at the whole picture with each advert and related keyword being looked at with all factors that affects your ROI. You don’t need me to tell you that, unless you are doing purely an awareness exercise or gathering data, wasted clicks are in the main – wasted money.

However, lets say that you have all of your key metrics (landing pages, keywords, ROI, PPC, ad position, etc.)under control and your campaign is running well; the display URL is a nice place to play with.

Don’t get me wrong you can mess up here, but in my experience, as long as your not stupid, you can play a little bit with this line and really only affect your click through rate. Hey (you ask), don’t you just affect your click through rate with all the other lines? Well, yes you do, but you also affect the dead clicks, the wasted clicks, etc. much, much more. Whereas the display URL (with all of its constraints) is just a pure let’s see if I can tweak my click through rate and get more of the good stuff (if your AdWords campaign is giving you ‘good stuff’ in the first place… yep, I obviously swallowed the thesaurus today… ‘good stuff’… I ask you…).

With Google rules of destination domain having to match display domain, you have three choices when it come to the display URL, which are:

1. Buy a keyword rich domain name and use this instead of your main site (not always an option)
2. Use words in the sub directory (e.g. after the last /)
3. Use words in the sub domain (e.g. before the first . or 2nd/3rd/etc. as well if you go deeper)
4. Various character and capitalisation things that you can do

So you can play with the above to see if some different combinations give your adverts a bit or an edge on all of those around you. The key here is the ‘all of those around you’ bit. If everyone is stuffing the display URL with keywords, then it may be better to go down the ‘neutral’ route and just display your naked URL (does anyone do that anymore?).

As said, in my opinion, this is a good ‘play’ area within any form of PPC that uses this structure and can help you to tweak that extra few percent of click through rate in your favour.

Here is a really interesting post from the official Google blog.

It goes into some detail about some of the user testing and eye tracking Google are doing. The post looks at some of the differences that have occured since Google introduced universal search into its search results.

Also, if you look at the search results heatmap you can see how important the top two entries are in Google’s search results. Also, you can definately understand why Google puts more and more sponsored results above the search results as well as to the right. It must be ever so tempting for them to lessen their quality guidelines to allow more and more ads to make their way to this sweetest of spots.

Lastly, if you don’t already, this is a good time to branch out into picture and video search engine optimisation. You are missing a big win here and youe definately are if any of the search terms you would like to be listed for have an inherant visual element (just like ‘how to tie a tie’).

P.S. if you want to do some of your own (not eye but mouse pointer) heatmaps and user tracking, visit ClickTale. They have a fantastic tool that allows you to see a Flash movie of how your visitors have interacted with your site (what they click on, how long them spend on the page, where their mouse goes, etc.). The entry version is free and I would highly recommend having a look.