International Digital Marketing

Will 2012 be the year of Google?  Android continues eating Apple’s pie across the world, Facebook’s constant changes drive frustrated top influencers to Google+, Google analytics is  the most widely used web analytics tool with market share of 80%, and Google continues in its no. 1 position in search.

Google search: where are we right now?

Google has come a long way. Few years back the search giant was reluctant to invest in social, especially after not so successful attempts with Orkut and Google Buzz. Yet step by step the company has become more ambitious and seen the potential social has.

• 2009: Personalized Search : Ranking based on user’s history, clicks and location
• 2009: Social Search : Results based on user’s social connections
• 2010: Google Real time:  Integration of Twitter feed into the results
• 2011: Google Plus: Google social network + addition of Google+ pages for business
• 2012: Search plus your world: Personalized, Social, G+ and authors in the search result

What is “Search plus your world”?

Search plus your world is Google’s attempt to finally unify the search, social and its own G+. It means that Google has integrated the algorithm of social search, personal search and personalized search in one algorithm. This latest addition in search mix finds the content that the users shared in Google plus (photos, videos, posts, articles, etc.) together with the traditional web content. To search information of a contact, you only need to search for it in Google and you will get the social network results first.

The change to the algorithm has already been implemented, but at the moment it is only visible for people who are logged in Google.com and do their search in English. Google is planning to roll it out shortly to the rest of the world.

How Search plus your world will influence SEO?

Let’s be honest. Google owns 90% of the global search market so if Google says jump, we jump. So if Google says we need +1 buttons and a G+ page to improve our ranking, so be it. Logically, not only Google will show personal Google+ results for users, but the search engine ranks higher the pages that feature +1 recommendations and +1 also appears both in the paid and natural listings. As with Facebook “like” button, +1 is a social proof that the content is worth seeing and sharing. More recommendations you have, more likely users are going to click your page (and more likely Google is going to like it…sorry I mean “plus” it).

A very important change in the new search is that the personal results will appear first. How does this affect traditional search? Well, let’s say that if first 10 results are personal, they will already kick the traditional search results from the first page. Annoying!

What comes to Adwords, some experts say that Google is stupid to play with its biggest income channel and the change may be negative for the search giant. Yet when you think about it – if your real ranking is out of your control and depends on random users and their opinions, how much are you ready to pay to secure your place on top? The change might actually  push the Adwords bids very high creating more income for Google.

Regarding Adwords’ look and feel, I am curious to see what Google will do because the way they appear right now is likely to be different compared to the personal results. Maybe Google will create its own version of Facebook’s “sponsored stories”. Let’s see.

Goodbye Google ranking?

 Some people say that this is the death of Google ranking. Not necessarily, but it means that we have to stop focusing only in numbers, excel sheets, visits, clicks, conversions and results.We have to start concentrating also in people.

It is true that right now the effect is still very small, since penetration of Google plus is still low. You may think that it does not really matter that people see personal, social results when at the moment not so many of the users are in Google+. Maybe, but in the future it will. Therefore it is a good idea to start thinking about your Google+ strategy, to set up a Google+ page for your brand, and to start building your fan circle. Once the social results start to matter, you already will have a fan base and plenty of +1 recommendations to stay on the first page.

Meanwhile, it is not worth ditching the current SEO strategy and efforts. Google’s search project sounds good, but at the same time it has few downfalls. First of all: privacy issues. With the new search whatever we do in Google+ is visible in Google search for our family and friends, and if people add Google+ friends as carelessly as Facebook friends this might have serious implications. Secondly, Google is about relevancy, but what my friends (bless them) say in Social Media is not always very useful. This might alienate users from Google search and they might start preferring other search engines.

Let’s see if Google’s sneaky plan to integrate personalization, social and G+ into search will be successful, or whether it will be like many of its projects: ambitious … but rubbish.

Earlier this week Google launched revamped sitelinks, changing the way these are displayed and organized in search results. Sitelinks are links that appear under certain search results and ads. They are Google’s way to allow users save time and find information they are looking for by analysing the link structure of your site and displaying the shortcuts under your main URL.

From user perspective sitelinks give them a quick overview of the website’s content and help them to access quickly most relevant parts of the site. From brand or company perspective the sitelinks allow webmasters to showcase areas of the site that normal users are not aware of.

New Google sitelink structure

Google changing the sitelink structure is nothing new, since the search giant has been experimenting with sitelinks for years. When Google launched these years ago they were only a single row of four links and since then the sitelinks have been shown in different ways from bullet points to separate results, until the company ended up with the current structure. Google increased the maximum number of sitelinks per query from eight to twelve showing title, URL and a small description of the page.

Google sitelinks impact on SEO

Previously there was no query-specific ranking of the sitelinks, but each site had a fixed list of sitelinks that would either all be visible or not at all. With the new structure, sitelink ranking and selection can be different for each query showing even more relevant results.

With more relevant – and more visible – sitelinks the CTR for your brand searches is likely to increase. Unfortunately the separation between the top domain and other domains is also clearer. It means that if sitelinks appear for the top result, then the rest of the results below will be from other domains. Not your website.

This is why it is very important to get the displayed sitelinks structure, title and description right. Check which sitelinks appear under your brand website. Are they the ones you want to appear, do they lead to main parts of your site and is there some important page missing? Is the title or description wrong or boring?

To manage sitelinks, login to Webmaster Tools where you can ask Google to remove sitelink you want. Google will then pick another sitelink however you cannot control which one will replace the current one. Please note that you can only try 100 times.

To modify the title, find out where Google pulls it from – it can be anchor text, footer, page title, headings or main body. To change the description, change the meta description tag of the page.

Google sitelinks impact on PPC

The AdWords sitelink structure remains still the same showing up to four additional destination URLs on the search-based text ad. However, the big difference between the organic search sitelinks and ad sitelinks is that you can control and edit the ad sitelinks while with organic sitelinks you have to rely on Google’s judgement.

This is why even if your brand has more visibility on the search results page with new Google sitelinks structure, it does not mean you should abandon PPC. Sitelinks will bring more clicks, but if competitor decides to bid and place text ads with more appealing sitelinks near your brand you might lose quality leads. Remember AdWords bring most of Google’s annual profit and this might be one of the reasons why Webmaster Tools does not allow you to choose your organic sitelinks.

Change for the better?

Depends on your ranking, displayed sitelinks and whether you are a brand, reseller or price comparison website. For brands this works out fine as long as the sitelinks are checked and optimized, since it gives them a higher visibility over the latter.

Happy to hear whether this has affected your search results or PPC campaigns in a negative or positive way.

E-commerce, M-commerce, now T-commerce…just like Smartphones, the amount of “tablets” such as iPads is increasing across the globe. In 2010 Apple sold 14,8 million iPads and the Analyst IDC estimates the number of tablets, not just iPads, to reach 44 million in 2011. Meanwhile, according to Forrester, many retailers report that over 50% of their mobile traffic is now coming from the tablets.

What is very interesting is that a study by e-commerce platform provider Shopatron, supporting more than 800 brand stores in 35 industries, claims that the conversion rate from tablets is much higher than conversion rate from mobiles or even PCs. According to the study, the average conversion rates for non mobile optimized pages (iPhone, Android, iPod…) was an average of 0.37%, yet the average conversion rate from iPad was a whopping 2.04%. For some of the e-commerce stores the iPad conversion rate was double than the conversion rate from personal computers.

Are tablets better for e-Commerce than Smartphones?

Smartphones used for investigation

Consumers are using mobiles to investigate before buying a product, but not for actual transactions. Currently 6-8% of the retailers’ traffic comes through mobile, but only 1% of the final purchases are done by mobile.

This is mainly because, unless the web is mobile optimized, transactions through mobile are not very user friendly, especially if the user has to fill up long forms. Instead, Smartphone is ideal for users to investigate products and do a pre-purchase at any time in any place. Consumers access mainly the product price, availability and client reviews. During the weekend consumers dedicate 30% more time on investigation than other days per week

This reflects in the number of searches. According to the Google Mobile, in Q1 2010 mobile search queries from Smartphones on Google grew 62% over the previous quarter. Concerning the m-commerce, Google mobile searches on shopping-related keywords grew 2500% in the past three years.

To enhance users mobile shopping experience, here are some tips on how to mobile optimize your site.

Tablets used for purchases

Let’s face it: tablets are bigger and with a bigger screen the shopping experience is closer to the familiar PC e-commerce experience. The buying process is also much simpler. It can actually turn out to be much richer and exciting with a touch screen giving the user a bigger possibility to interact with the brand and the store.

And of course, another reason is that there are far too many non mobile optimized sites. A webpage that is unpleasant to browse in a mobile looks slightly more appealing in a bigger tablet screen. Still not optimal, but better.

Tablet users want more precise and up-to-date information than mobile users with all the details of the product, purchase process and delivery. To give users what they want, make sure that the page is “tablet optimized” and the shopping experience as simple and pleasant as possible. Make sure the “shopping basket”, product price and image (and discount if applicable) are always clearly visible. Also test the page in different tablets and check that the content is easy to navigate. Include user reviews and comments and optimize the user journey by making payment and delivery fast and effective.

Tablet, Smartphone or PC?

Why not all three? Whether you call it E, M or T, online commerce is increasing fast and retailers should compensate the decline in physical store sales by investing more in online reputation and sales.

Tablets are coming and offer very nice figures. PC still drives most of the traffic and sales. Smartphones maybe are less likely to be used for transactions than tablets, yet mobiles are considerably increasing the traffic to the actual POS. Besides of search and product investigation, users rely on them to find locations and deals near by, check opening hours, and compare prices online. The potential they have to drive sales offline and online is enormous.

By taking advantage of different channels and devices retailer can stay ahead of the competition, create strong online reputation and increase the number of leads. Therefore it is not wise to concentrate only on one channel, but to invest in e-commerce, t-commerce, m-commerce as well as mobile search.

According to a study by GroupM Search, 48% of the online buyers use combination of normal and social search during the buying process and the percentage is increasing constantly. Consumers search every day brands their friends know and like, and 30% base their buying decision on their friends’ evaluations, 17% on Facebook and 9% on Twitter.

There has been a lot of discussion of social search threatening traditional search. As people spend more time in social networks, especially Facebook, it is to be seen whether users prefer results based on traffic and SEO or the results based on content voted (liked) by other users and friends.

But what if the battle between traditional and social search is not limited to computers, but takes place in mobile devices?

Increasing Mobile Internet, Search and Social Network usage

The quantity of Smartphones and users accessing Internet through mobile devices is increasing fast around the globe and ITU believes mobile devices will surpass computers as the most popular way to connect Internet within five years. According to Strategy Analytics almost 530 million users used the mobile Web at the end of 2009 and the company estimates the browsing to increase to over 1 billion by 2015.

Meanwhile, according to the Google Mobile, in Q1 2010 mobile search queries from high end phones on Google grew 62% over the previous quarter. Concerning the e-commerce, Google mobile searches on shopping-related keywords have grown 2500% in the past three years. Currently Google’s gross revenue from mobile advertising is over 1 billion dollars per year.

At the same time, social networking is increasing around the globe. EMarketer forecasts that the amount of Western European Internet users who visit social networks at least once a month will increase 16.2% in 2011. The company also estimates that the quantity of regular social networking users in the region will increase to 64.4% (141.9 million people) by 2015.

Social and Mobile Search

The search giant Google used to avoid social results in the past, but now the company is becoming more convinced of the importance of being more “people centric”. Even if Google Social Search was introduced few years ago, the social media related content has had a neglected role in the search results. Yet this is now changing: the recent update integrates information from Twitter, Flickr and Quora all over Google’s search engine.

What is quite funny to notice is that while Facebook is not included in Google Social Search, Facebook does not show web results by Google either, but by Google’s competitor Bing.

However, whatever the situation in computer search might be, currently in mobile search Google is definitely the king. According to Pingdom, Google owns 98% of the global mobile search market.

This is a very interesting detail since while Google is still the underdog in the battle between Android and iPhone, at least most of Steve Job’s iPhone users will be searching on Google. Which means big mobile ad revenues for Google whatever the OS might be. Not bad.

Mobile social search

Google’s current position in mobile search seems unbeatable, however according to a recent study by Ofcom, almost 25% of the consumers in the U.S., Japan, France, and the UK already access social networks through mobile devices. There are also various apps that use geolocation to search, such as Facebook places, and apps that use geolocation and users’ reviews combined with augmented reality.

What is curious to notice is that while the whole world focuses on the competition between Google and Facebook while discussing social search, Bing has already gone a step further and integrated a social search feature to its Bing for iPhone App. The user can use their phone to search through their Facebook and Twitter accounts and see combined status updates from their friends. In case there is an instant answer for the search, the app shows it first before social results.

This is a very interesting idea, since this social feature allows the user to see information from the web together with the opinions from user’s social network. This increases the relevancy of the result and user experience, since the user can see with one quick look if the place is worth visiting or product worth buying without browsing further or visiting social network app or site. Also the information user finds is easy to share in Facebook, Twitter and email, which means users can share and ask their friends opinions in real time.

Could this be dangerous for Google? Yes. Google is not able to do this as long as it does not want anything to do with Facebook, which has more than 500 million users across the globe. Therefore this might be Bing’s opportunity to stand out, since users, who have their main friend base in Facebook, would not like the platform to be left out from the results.

Bringing social dimension to mobile search can be the next big thing if it is user friendly and well promoted. Whether it will affect Google’s current position as a principal mobile search tool, depends on its flexibility to accept that also results “liked” by Facebook users can be relevant. If not, other search engines or Facebook can take advantage of this default and challenge Google  also in mobile search.