One of the current subjects of discussion in the web marketing community is Google’s addition of the Google+ social networking service to its tool chest of products. Google+ is of interest to web marketing, and particularly SEO practitioners, because of Google’s apparent intention to include the Google+ ‘likes’ directly into its organic search ranking algorithm, which will shift the search ranking results away from general internet relevancy towards a more Google proprietary relevancy. It also means that the determination of whether a website ranks well or not will directly relate to the number of people using the Google+ service, and what kind of people they are, ie, what age are they, what social background, and what they think about Google.
This is a concern not just because of the discrimination involved, but also because, in spite of Google’s attempts to fend off anti-trust actions against it with its ‘consolidation’ of its privacy policy over the last week, to join Google+ you basically have to entirely open up your life to Google. Google says that by letting them know every search you do, every person, phone number and email account of everyone you know, it will be able to provide an increasingly personalised service, anticipating for you what you are really interested in, and skewing the information Google decides you want to see. Anyone who has read George Orwell will now be screaming ‘1984!’ (it could also be Fahrenheit 451?). In Google’s new terms and conditions, they say using any of their products will become subject to their new privacy policy, which basically means you are allowing them to know literally everything about you. If you don’t want that, you won’t be able to join Google+. (more…)
Another of our success stories, the Garagedoorsonline.co.uk (GDO) ecommerce website is surging ahead with record visit and page view rates in January 2012, as well as with its Google organic search rankings. Visit rates look to top 52,000, with over 400,000 page views (a 7.7:1 ratio) and 2.7 million hits. Freetimers works its SEO and web marketing on a continuous improvement basis with this client, and not only does it have the most sophisticated ecommerce site in its field, it also has a huge admin system that is best in its class and offers our client unrivaled functionality to manage their business. Our continuous improvement has also worked a treat with the visits up 117% and page view stats 146% increased over this time last year, even in the current economic climate.
The site currently achieves top 5 rankings for its products in just about every location in the uk (for some 30,000 search phrases), in addition to having some 80% of its more generic search phrases ranking in the top 10, in a hugely competitive and cut-throat market. The site is one of 10 for this client, and the other major sites are all improving to similar extents.
If these are the sorts of results you need from your SEO or Web Marketing, then you should be speaking to us (as long as you are not a competitor to GDO!).
Many business owners and managers in the UK and elsewhere tend to view the online marketing of their business and products as a one-off requirement that is fulfilled simply by having a website designed for them, and placing it on the Internet. Unfortunately, those who do actually think this way couldn’t be more wrong!
The essential facts of the Internet immediately destroys this view about web marketing:
In our last post we dicussed our local seo work, and in the last month we have another great example of how quickly success can be achieved in substantially improving our client’s Google search engine results (ie SERPS).
In this case our client, a dental practice in Leicestershire recommended to Freetimers, had a website that was not achieving much at all in terms of first page positions. His web developers had done some very basic search engine optimisation, but so limited it did not come close to encompassing what the practice was trying to target. To make up for the lack of organic search results, the client was paying another fairly high priced agency to undertake a Google Adwords campaign, and also getting quite poor value for money.
Our plan was to re-optimise the site, adding some targeted landing pages as well, and then to operate a monthly process of link popularity building, on-site SEO, and current refering content on a continuous improvement basis, to a much lower monthly budget that the client could easily afford. The SEO marketing plan was locally focused, and whilst it would target search phrases related to Leicester and Leicestershire to begin with, it would evolve to expand coverage radially outward from that location.
We are now 6 weeks into the plan. First our search engine marketing research identified approximately 450 search phrases to target. Note here it’s not one phrase, three phrases, 10 phrases or twenty phrases, quoted by most SEO practitioners, but 450. To date (ie after only 6 weeks) we have achieved 61 No 1 positions on Google, 142 top 5 positions, and 198 top 10 rankings. These ranking improvements include both local market results, and generic search phrase results for some of our client’s most important target markets, so we are confident these results will deliver massive business benefits.
We are only just beginning too! Our work will not stop with search engine rankings, but will evolve within our client’s budget to cover all aspects of Internet Marketing, including enquiry conversion rate improvement and assistence with social media.