There's just one space left on this Thursday's web surgery: Creating and Managing a Google Adwords Campaign
As well as being a great introduction to Google Adwords and how it can help your business it's also an opportunity to meet and network with some of our other customers.
October's SEO surgery is now full but don't worry, there is another SEO surgery scheduled for January.
There's been a lot of blogging and Tweeting in the last few days about the launch of the new Google Instant service. But what is it?
Google Instant's aim is to improve the user's search experience. By providing results as quickly as possible, Google hopes to reduce the amount of time you spend searching down to just a few seconds.
I don't really have a problem with the speed of Google and the other search engines. My feeling, which is shared with all of the gang here, is that the search results chopping and changing all the time gives us a bit of a headache!
Google have, apparently, tested this new service to death and are happy with the new user experience. This would explain why it's one of the few Google services that hasn't been made available as a public beta.
It's obvious that more Ads will be displayed as a user enters their search phrase. The longer the user types the more Ads will inevitably be displayed. Google have stated that an impression will only be tracked if an Ad is displayed for three or more seconds. This could have a dramatic effect on impression counts, click-through rates and an Ads quality score. We'll be keeping a close eye on our campaigns to see what the reality of this is.
Will people stop seeing my Ad? Potentially, yes.
We run a campaign for Baby Sleep Answers. They do very well in the natural results for "baby sleep" and we back this up with a Google Ad. If you type "baby sleep" and don't press enter or hit the search button, you'll actually be presented with a list of companies offering "baby sleeping bags". That's because this is what Google thinks you're going to type!
So should Baby Sleep Answers start advertising against "baby sleeping bags". They don't sell baby sleeping bags so they'll never get any kind of conversion. There'll be a poor quality score unless we build some sleeping bag specific landing pages. It would be an expensive exercise and the answer, at this stage, should be no, do nothing.
Using the example above we are shown 7 different SERPs pages on the way to the results for "baby sleep". As one types the characters e, e, p the page for sleeping bags sticks (for more than three seconds? Try it!). How many of those people will visit one of those sites listed?
Sadly it's impossible to tell at this stage because we're trying to guess at human nature. The only measure website owners will see is a decrease in their referral traffic from Google (organic).
Google would argue that while we might see a decrease on some phrases we could see an increase on others. Google anticipate an increase in natural traffic for long term phrases (three, four, five keywords). People won't have to type in the full search phrase you see!
So what should a site owner do? The above example gives us a starting point. If we start losing traffic to "baby sleeping bags" websites then we have to start competing against their content. In the case of Baby Sleep Answers we could build a highly optimised "baby sleeping bags" page that talks about the product and describes how it fits in with the site's approach. We could undertake an off-site SEO campaign to push this new page up the rankings.
But this all gets very expensive and the position at the moment has to be to wait and see. Just now, Instant is only available to logged in users. It'll be interesting to see how long it takes to become the norm on Google. When it does, we'll let you know.
Steve Gerrard has joined us as Operations Manager to cover for Denise who is about to depart on her maternity leave. Steve will be your first port of call for all support and project issues.
Steve commented, "I'm absolutely delighted to be joining the Silkmoth team. After 24 years in the print industry it's a welcome change and big challenge."
We'd all like to wish Denise and her husband Tony, the best of luck for junior's imminent arrival.
Find out more about Silkmoth's latest developments.