Archive for the ‘Google’ Category

SEO Tip : Size does Matter when Optimizing your E commerce Website Product Feeds for Google Shopping

Friday, June 17th, 2011
Google Shopping Feed Optimization

Google Shopping Feed Optimization

Google Shopping is now commanding an increasing importance for online merchants, nevertheless  remarkably few web merchants optimize their shopping feeds in order to succeed with the product shopping search engine index.

Why is Google Shopping important ?

First of all, e commerce website operators should remember that positioning a product listing in the top 3 results for a Google shopping query often translates into a top position in Google Web results as well – see screen shot further down the page. By the way, this is the reason why – can you feel the shameless plug coming? – we have released Vidax a few month ago, a unique E commerce website redesign service (based on SEO Samba and SEOTOASTER) which takes care of all facets of product feeds optimization with an unique open source and pricing model. I especially recommend it if you feel strangled by fees on Yahoo store and other commercial E commerce solutions out there.

Why is size a critical product search ranking factor?

Back to the subject at hands; along with longer description in order to increase relevance, and the consistent use of MPN ( Manufacturer Part Number) which is bound to increase Google’s confidence in your web store product catalog information  (still optional but soon to be mandatory attribute), the choice of your product conditioning might make the difference between sales and no sales. Indeed, three options are given to users in order to sort Google shopping results; by default Google shopping uses product relevance, but users can, and do, sort on price; here we’re suspecting low-to-high is the most common setting picked by users out of the gate – hey, everyone wants a good deal, right? – So where is size coming in ? well if you sell regular size or a small number of units as packs of similar products then your price point is lost in the masses of products, and your listing does not get seen.

What should you do?

Well, you can follow three strategies concurrently;  first you still need to optimize products attributes with good description

E commerce feed optimization benefits

length, pictures and as many custom attributes as possible.  In addition, consider proposing both sample product size and smaller product conditioning, so that your price point gets to be lower than the competition and your product listing gets to be on top of the list whenever the Google shopping result page gets sorted on low-to-high prices.  Finally, you can cover it all by offering extra large packs so that you also come up first when shoppers sort their result pages on high-to-low price.

E commerce feed optimization benefits

Posted in Google, SEO software, ecommerce | Comments Off

SEO Agency in Australia Joins Forces with SEO Samba

Thursday, June 16th, 2011
Top Search Engine Rankings Website

Top Search Engine Rankings Website

Leading Search Engine Optimisation (as they spell it in Australia) agency Top Search Engine Rankings (TSER) from Sydney – Parramatta  to be exact – has joined forces with SEO Samba.  We encourage you to visit their website (that website got a SEO re design)  found at http://www.topsearchenginerankings.com.au and share this resource with your friends from “down under” in needs of both friendly and very effective Internet marketing services. Dallas Kelso is the leading guy over there, always excited about Internet technologies, he strikes me as the hard working “constant learner” kind of guy with a humble attitude, and that’s exactly the kind of guy you want to handle your Internet marketing strategy.  He has attended classes from Bruce Clay and participated to numerous discussions with other thought leaders in the industry.

The SEO company provides a number of classic marketing services to local Sydney and Parramatta businesses starting with personalized website’s SEO audit,  or search engine marketing strategy but also less commonly found white label services for SEO agencies and seo training services in Sydney. This white-label SEO service should be of particular interest to any marketing firm in the U.S or Europe looking for a reliable partner in Australia and Asia who uses a proven methodology and best of breed set of tools including the advanced and open source SEO CMS shopping cart SEOTOASTER and SEO Samba as white-hat seo software. Welcome on board to Dallas and gang !

Posted in Google, Local SEO, SEO Samba Corporate | Comments Off

Google Local Business Listing Ads Results Are In And They’re Not Good…So Far

Friday, December 4th, 2009

As part of directory’s traffic cannibalization strategy, Google had launched local listing ads a bit more than a month ago in the San Francisco, and San Diego markets. They announced today that they would no longer accept new sign ups and will discontinue the ads in Mid-December. What has been seldom reported is the kind of results that advertisers have seen when buying local listing ads.
A client of ours ran these ads for a month, the results you may ask?

About 0.05% phone conversions, plus 0.2% click to website conversions as this image tells us;

local business ad results

Note that in the meantime regular, unpaid local business listing outperformed the click to website conversion by 2.
I think these results are weak, and Google seems to agree. In a typical Google fashion, they offer this client a refund, and a $100 advertising credit towards Adwords. One can only admire the care Google takes to preserve relationships with small business advertisers. The fact that they came up with his ’compensation’ scheme and a form letter is telling however of widespread dismayed results for this advertising product (If anyone cares to share results to back this up?)
The question I, and probably a some folks at Google too, is why did that product not perform? Has Google already pushed the slicing and dicing of his 1st page SERP traffic to its effective limit?

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Posted in Google, Internet Yellow Pages, Local SEO, directory marketing | 2 Comments »

Google Local Business Center Ads or The Onslaught on Internet Yellow Pages and Directories

Friday, October 9th, 2009

The writings were on the wall for some time, with the (still limited) launch of Google Local Business Center Ads, Google is squeezing local directories, and yellow pages publishers out of valuable real-estate and clearly going after their business.

This is not for the lack of warning signs, Google hardly went through the back door, traditional directory and yellow pages publishers have known for some time that major online ad inventory carriers, Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Facebook have the upper hand over them. Given the fragmented U.S. market, most yellow pages, directories, and local search properties cannot muster enough audience to build a compelling advertising alternative, even on a local media level.

Maybe for a lack of better idea, a prevailing strategy among directories has been to develop revenues on borrowed time monetizing PPC market inefficiencies while building mostly easy-to-replicate reporting features that are hard to differentiate from a merchant perspective. The bad news is that managing PPC campaigns on major search engines for advertisers has already become an increasingly commoditized service, and competition is only getting heftier among traditional yellow pages and internet-based local search players.

Advertising markets inefficiencies tend to self-correct over time, merchants grow in sophistication, learn to replicate successful endeavors, and move away from local directory providers to become direct customers of the most popular search and social sites. Time and money spent educating local merchants about search marketing turns out to be self-defeating, as it eventually benefits competitive Internet media giants.

We are coming to the tipping point, what are the viable strategies for local directories now?

At SEO Samba, we are proposing to local directories to monetize the only part that search engines can not monetize; the organic results. We think it makes a whole lot of sense, and we welcome all directory marketers to join us and fight back.

Any other long-term viable strategy out there folks would like to share?

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Posted in Google, Internet Yellow Pages, directory marketing | Comments Off

There’s More to Google Wheel Than Meets the Eye

Monday, August 31st, 2009

Reading Google’s Mind Thanks to an Online Medium

That’s a pretty mysterious subtitle right? Imagine your ver own medium reading Google’s mind and telling you how the giant search engine is mapping your Web site to concepts in its mind.

Well, that’s my understanding of Google Wheel, the option released by Google last May. From what I read around the blogosphere, most think it’s a useless graphical representation of search results that looks into one’s Web site-related searches. However, when I dug into it, I realized that it wasn’t so much related searches that were used to reach your Web site and mapped in there, as much as a map of what Google thought of in terms of inter-related concepts surrounding your Web site. In a nutshell, “silos.”

I typed in our company brand into Google on May 26 and clicked the “Show Options” link. Here, I realized that somehow SEO Samba had been linked to the concept of “online mediums!!!” Funny, but not quite useful from our standpoint, since we provide a unique SEO software as a service that automates the execution of SEO best practices across vast numbers of Web sites.

Google Wheel

Google Wheel

On the next screenshot, I clicked on Google’s cache from my toolbar. Remember that, coincidentally, we’ve changed our homepage headers just a few days ago from “Predictable Search Engine Optimization Results” to “Maximize Organic Search Ranking Performance.” Obviously, Google has not updated their cache yet.

Google Options analyzed

Google Options analyzed

The updated homepage looks now like this;

google-wheel-analysis-3

However, it appears that using the word “predictable” in the H1 tag of our page has linked us to the concept of “online mediums.” Now that we’ve corrected what seems be the only reason why we would be linked to the “mediums” concept, I’ve decided to monitor Google Wheel and find out how it reacts.

On July 15 we see some changes with the wonder wheel’s related concepts for the query “SEO Samba.” The “online medium” concept, or silo, has disappeared, and Google Wheel related a more focused personae for our website.

google-wheel-analysis-4

Concurrently, we saw that our rankings have improved for SEO related queries on Google. However, the Google wheel then reverted to its former state, and as Google added back the same flawed related concepts to the Google Wheel, we saw our rankings slide for our seo focus queries.

On July 23, we see a new development with a brand new Google wheel a lot more conform to our market.
google-wheel-analysis-5

The conclusion, you ask? Well, we know for sure that:

• It took our site six weeks to temporarily get out of these unrelated concepts, or silos, and seven to see Google Wheel map some brand new concepts to our site.

Silos are probably built on a number of factors, but page content and wording does matter quite a bit. A simple word such as “predictable,” for example, can be misinterpreted by Google. Check out the Google Wheel to find out where your site fits into Google’s mind.

Posted in Google, Search Industry | 1 Comment »