More Brands Lose Brand Rankings As Google Takes Action – Music Magpie Just One Casualty

With the release of the new data in SearchMetrics.com we can confirm that there are a number of people that will be suffering from a huge headache this week following the loss of their own brand search terms, a clear indication that they have received a penalisation from Google. With

The post More Brands Lose Brand Rankings As Google Takes Action – Music Magpie Just One Casualty appeared first on SEO Blog by Dave Naylor – SEO Tools, Tips & News.

Google Search Redesigns Stock Quotes, Drops Competitor Links For First Time Since 2000

Google has launched a new stock card result that is a lot larger, is more interactive and has dropped the links to competing financial sites. Here is the new stock card you get when you search Google for [yhoo]: Compare that to the old one: As you can see, the links to the competing stock […]

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Excelling (Again) At Excel For Search Engine Marketers

On Thursday, March 13th, I will be presenting on the Extreme Excel Excellence panel at SMX West with John Gagnon and Brett Snyder (moderated by Chris Sherman). In the session, we will be delivering power-user tips for marketers using Excel, and Chris has raised the bar very high for us to deliver…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

SEMPO State of Search Marketing Report 2013

The State of Search Marketing Report, produced by Econsultancy in association with SEMPO, looks in-depth at how companies are using various digital marketing channels, including paid search, search engine optimisation (natural search) and social media marketing.

The report follows a survey of over 400 respondents from both companies (client-side advertisers) and agencies, collected in November 2013.

The findings covers the signficance of different technologies and trends across paid search, SEO, social media, digital display, email and mobile marketing. The study, SEMPO’s ninth annual State of Search Marketing Report, also contains spending, resourcing and the untapped potential in digital marketing.

The 52-page report includes the following sections:

  • Significance of different trends and technologies
  • Budgets
  • Objectives and metrics
  • Resourcing
  • The growth in digital marketing

Key findings include:

  • Mobile plays an increasingly important role for marketers but significant dedicated budget is yet to be set aside
  • Social media is important, but respondents question the value of Google+ for SEO
  • Budgets set to grow and are flexible but most split money in a siloed fashion
  • Measuring ROI remains a struggle for social and mobile
  • Few companies adopt an experimental approach to digital marketing

Table of contents

  1. Executive Summary and Highlights
  2. Foreword by SEMPO
    1. About Econsultancy
    2. About SEMPO
  3. Methodology
  4. Findings
    1. Significance of different technologies and trends
      1. Use of digital marketing disciplines
      2. Search engine optimisation integration
      3. Paid search trends
      4. Search engine optimisation trends
      5. Digital display marketing trends
      6. Social media marketing trends
      7. Mobile marketing trends
      8. Email marketing trends
    2. Budgets
      1. Spend on digital marketing
      2. Breakdown of digital marketing spend
      3. Expected change in budget for 2014
      4. Separation of digital marketing budgets
      5. Flexibility in paid search budgeting
      6. Flexibility in search engine optimisation budgeting
      7. Flexibility in digital display marketing budgeting
      8. Flexibility in social media marketing budgeting
      9. Flexibility in email marketing budgeting
      10. Flexibility in mobile marketing budgeting
    3. Objectives and metrics
      1. Current success with digital marketing
      2. Ability to measure ROI
      3. Objectives and metrics for paid search
      4. Objectives and metrics for search engine optimisation
      5. Objectives and metrics for digital display marketing
      6. Objectives and metrics for social media marketing
      7. Objectives and metrics for mobile marketing
      8. Objectives and metrics for email marketing
    4. Resourcing
      1. Time invested in digital marketing research
      2. Testing new technology
    5. Where is the growth in digital marketing?
      1. Untapped potential in paid search marketing
      2. Untapped potential in search engine optimisation
      3. Untapped potential in digital display marketing
      4. Untapped potential in social media marketing
      5. Untapped potential in mobile marketing
      6. Untapped potential in email marketing
  5. Appendix – Respondents Profiles
    1. Type of organisation
    2. Respondent roles
    3. Business focus
    4. Business sector
    5. Type of agency
    6. Geography
    7. Size of company by revenue
    8. Size of company by number of employees
    9. Revenue per region

 A free sample is available to those you want to know more about the report.

Live @ SMX West: Best Practices For Mobile SEO

For years, debates raged about what constituted “best practices” when it came to mobile SEO. Early on, the discussion focused on whether it was important to have a separate site optimized for mobile devices. That proved to be a major challenge, as it required detecting and optimizing…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Local Answer Box: A Work in Progress or TMI?

It’s always fun when Google releases new “answers” like the local Answer Box to see them going wrong. It shows the limits of the current technology and gives some idea how it works. Leave it to Phil Rozek to find an unusual example of it not working quite right and have it give an answer to […]

Google: “We Are Taking Action Against French Link Network”

Google have clearly upped their ante when it comes to the penalisation of link networks over recent months with a number of popular link selling platforms being found and destroyed and they have done it again with the news that they have identified a French network that is in breach

The post Google: “We Are Taking Action Against French Link Network” appeared first on SEO Blog by Dave Naylor – SEO Tools, Tips & News.

10 blue links: are they dead or alive in search?

What are blue links?

These are the organic search results in a SERP, not the ones that have been paid for. 

In fact searching for ‘blue links’ in Google brings up an entirely organic SERP.

If you were to scroll down all the way, you would in fact see 10 blue links.

10 blue links

I first heard the phrase ‘10 blue links’ within the much more sensationalist quote “10 blue links are dead”.

In 2009 Yahoo stated that “people don’t really want to search”. They want quick access to the information they’re looking for, rather than scrolling through a list of links to web pages like a librarian slowly browsing a tray of index cards.

Yahoo began showing different page layouts, featuring maps, images, aggregated reviews and very quickly the layout of a SERP became a completely altered landscape

I talked to Search Laboratory’s head of SEO, James McCann for his opinions on the matter of ’10 blue links’.

I always interpreted the ‘ten blue links’ as referring to the more rigid Google of old. This is when Google had set results (displayed universally), which refreshed once a month, ten of which were on the prime first page. These were the days when someone could definitively say they were number one or number three for this term or that term.

In that case the days of ’10 blue links’ certainly are dead especially in relation to the rigid Google of old.

Current SERPs

Here’s the current Google SERP for ‘Nike’.

With paid ads, news results, multiple sitelinks, related searches and a Google+ box this only leaves room for six organic results. More and more similarly rich elements are being added to the SERP all the time. Hence the cries of “10 blue links are dead”.

However, this may not entirely be the case. Bing announced in 2012 that it would adopt a ‘more than 10’ approach to its SERPS and to this day Bing has kept to that promise.

Searching for ‘Nike’ on Bing reveals 13 organic results. Other more general searches like ‘best steak restaurants in London’ (it’s nearly lunchtime) reveal 10 organic results.

With two paid ads and a local map with related search results languishing somewhere down the bottom, this looks on the face of it like a more ‘organically oriented SERP.

Here’s the same search on Google:

Here you can see six paid ads, a map and three local search results all filling up the above-the-fold portion of the screen. However, if you include the ‘authored’ results, there are 10 blue links in the Google SERP.

Further complications

James Mccann ran his own test for me, in which he searched for the same term on Google, five minutes apart, in two different locations using different Google logins.

The results for ‘sheds’ show two completely different SERPs, with only two results appearing in the same position.

As you can see, a web page has absolutely no guarantee that it will appear in the same place in the same SERP twice.

Organic link distribution

Conductor has recently published its own survey of organic link distribution revealing that nine out of 10 SERPS have nine or more organic links.

It seems that the idea of organic ’10 blue links’ may be alive and kicking in the non-rigid Google world.

73% of SERPS have exactly ten organic results, so there is still significant opportunity for small businesses and brands to appear in the organic listings.

Although don’t think for one minute that Google and the like are relinquishing a little more control of the SERP space to organic search, as the following chart reveals more than half of search results pages have nine or more ads.

56% of search pages now have nine or more paid ads and paid search ads will of course only continue to grow in number and size. 

Even the most casual of searcher realises that they have formed a subconscious blindness to sponsored search ads. Especially the ones at the top of the SERP in the coloured box.

Marketers realise this too. As searchers seek out organic results and search engines continuously tinker with the SERPs themselves to offer a more intuitive experience (it of course pays for Google to serve its users with the most relevant content possible for fear they might wander to a competitor), SEO becomes a more vital tool than ever.

For some tips on SEO check out Andrew Girdwood’s post SEO is D.E.A.D.

Spoiler: it’s not actually dead by the way.

The Hard and Fast Rule of Guest Blogging

My girlfriend is a professional athlete and trainer working from a Gym near my home in London. Though she doesn’t know a thing about SEO (amazingly I’ve resisted the temptation to even discuss the mechanics of what SEO is), I do think she’s a naturally clever marketer. Take a look at this guest post, written […]

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