So as you can tell; in between the launch of new search services, and updates to their existing search algorithms, to ensure relevant, up to date information is made available to Google users, it has been a busy year so far for the search engine giant; and an even busier one for any SEO agency focusing on organic search optimisation, to ensure high ranking positions in Google’s listings are maintained.

In their quest to ensure that the legitimate sites that are striving to provide up to date information, are rewarded by achieving high-ranking positions, Google’s continual shifting of the SEO goalposts has had a profound affect on a number of legitimate sites and their position in Google’s search result listings.

Singhal’s focus in his keynote speech was on allying the fears of the SEO agency representatives who attended SMX, and to try and maintain positive relations with their London-based audiences. In the SEO agency Q&A session that followed, Singhal was particularly keen to dispel any fears that the changes to Google’s organic search algorithms, which don’t generate them revenue, were in order to encourage advertisers to use alternative platforms such as Google AdWords. In answer to this question, Singhal was clear in his reponse: “no revenue measurement is included in our evaluation of a rankings change”, he insisted that the focus of any changes to their unpaid search algorithms relates purely and simply to the relevancy of results.

Google indicated that last year 20,000 ‘experiments’ were conducted on their algorithms; the Panda and more recent Penguin updates have formed an important part of these experiments, relating to relevancy and improving their signals, in their desire to provide up to date, relevant information of a high quality to Google search users. The job of any SEO agency is to keep up to speed with the latest changes, updates and signal revisions, to ensure high ranking positions are maintained.

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As a digital marketing vehicle, Facebook is being widely adopted by marketers on a global scale; it’s an easy to use tool that will increase brand awareness and online reach, especially if you throw in a few ‘bribes’ to increase the number of likes or interactions; but when it comes to search marketing, Google and platforms like their Google AdWords portfolio, still holds the monopoly, proving much more effective at increasing revenue and driving sales.

According to a recent study, the reach of Facebook is, obviously, less than Google, and although it holds captive audiences who engage in protracted interactions, in the UK the average Facebook session last 25 minutes, the purpose of the engagement and the motive is vastly different to the way users interact with Google; you go to Facebook to catch up with friends, be nosy, write witty updates, it’s not often, or likely, that people will go there looking for an answer to a query. That’s where Google AdWords comes in, and that is why Facebook’s individual ads are less effective, according to a recent WordStream study.

The research conducted by the search management specialists found that the average click through rate (CTR) for ads featured on the Internet is 0.1%, on Facebook this is halved at 0.051% but conversely, Google are sitting pretty with an average CTR of 0.4%, fairly compelling figures for marketers everywhere.

In addition, WordStream found that Facebook has an Internet reach of 51% amongst all users, while Google has 90%, with a more sophisticated range of advertising formats at it’s disposal; as well as Google AdWords, it includes text, image, video text overlay and mobile web game, Facebook on the other hand is limited to sponsored display and stories.

So while the battle for social supremacy rages, Google can feel safe in the knowledge that their overall web reach is almost twice that of their arch social rival; and this is unlikely to change at any point in the near future.

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“First, and most important, you can now see up to 90 days of historical data. If you click on the date picker in the top right of Search queries, you can go back three months instead of the previous 35 days [...] top search queries data is normally available within 2 or 3 days.”

The historical query data specifically reports on the searches conducted, that then directed traffic to a business’ site, from an organic Google SEO Optimisation search. The data provided by Google, gives marketers a useful insight into the search query terms that are most frequently used by returning, and potential customers, who access their website and services, providing invaluable information that can inform future SEO Optimisation strategies:

“Finally, we’re now collecting data for the top 2000 queries for which your site gets clicks. You may see less than 2000 if we didn’t record any clicks for a particular query in a given day, or if your query data is spread out among many countries or languages. For example, a search for [flowers] on Google Canada is counted separately from a search for [flowers] on google.com. Nevertheless, with this change 98% of sites will have complete coverage.”

The report can be accessed in Google’s webmaster tools, however the information is only made available to the authorised owner of a website, by simply going to ‘Your Site on the Web’ from the dashboard menu, as Google explain, this information is immediately available to the site owner: “you can now see basic search query data as soon as you verify ownership of a site”.

In addition to the search terms that subsequently directed traffic to your site, the report also provides information such as the impressions; the number of searchers that had visibility of your site in relation to a particular query, and clicks received; the number of searchers that actually clicked on your site pages, in response to their query.

This same information is made available for each of the top queries, out of the 2,000 that are now reported in relation to Google’s organic SEO Optimisation search result listings, and the subsequent clicks through.

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On Friday 27th April, Google pushed out it’s latest update to their ranking algorithm, which according to reports, Google claimed was a “limited” update, that should not affect a high percentage of sites.

The close proximity of the algorithm refreshes indicates that the focus for Google on providing up to date, relevant content for it’s search engine users remains at the forefront of their search strategies. In the past, Google’s Panda updates have taken place every six weeks; the frequency of this latest refresh indicates that the Search Engine Optimisation UK landscape is subject to change, not only unexpectedly; but also far more rapidly than it has perhaps in the past.

Google’s recent update is just one change to their ranking algorithm, of over 500 documented by Google each year, but it is one of the most significant. According to a Search Engine Optimisation UK news site, Google published a statement, making it clear that their Panda update continues to be subject to iteration, and the close proximity of the two latest Panda refreshes, certainly indicates that this is the case, and it is a process they will continue to repeat for the foreseeable future:

“We’re continuing to iterate on our Panda algorithm as part of our commitment to returning high-quality sites to Google users”.

It’s a year since Google first announced that they had pushed out their Panda update; penalising what the search engine perceived as “poor quality content” affecting the established ranking position of certain websites, with the aim of ultimately encouraging the publication of a better class, and quality, of information on the web.

Currently Google provides comprehensive monthly reports on the updates and changes made to their services at Google HQ, utilising over 200 different devices to ensure they are continually publishing relevant content for their users, but Panda remains one of the most significant to date for Search Engine Optimisation UK.

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As Google explained in more detail in their ‘Inside Search’ SEO Help Blogspot, the purpose of the update was to “help searchers find sites that provide a great user experience and fulfill their information needs” as they go on to note, the Penguin Update was intended to penalise anyone propagating low quality content, and featuring high up in Google’s rankings:

“Google has said before that search engine optimization, or SEO, can be positive and constructive—and we’re not the only ones. Effective search engine optimization can make a site more crawlable and make individual pages more accessible and easier to find. Search engine optimization includes things as simple as keyword research to ensure that the right words are on the page, not just industry jargon that normal people will never type.”

According to Google, the Penguin Update was intended to “help the “good guys” making great sites for users, not just algorithms, to see their effort rewarded”, imposing penalties on those that appear to be adopting black hat webspam techniques, and looking to increase traffic to their site by taking advantage of “shortcuts or loopholes” that would enable a site to be ranked higher than “they deserve to be ranked” according to Google.

The Penguin update was expected to affect up to 3% of all search queries, much less than the 12% who felt the effects of the Panda changes, targeting anyone who deliberately goes against Google’s SEO Help guidelines for publishers, or who uses the techniques mentioned, in order to spam their search results, as they go on to explain in their web post that announced the impending changes:

“We’ve always targeted webspam in our rankings, and this algorithm represents another improvement in our efforts to reduce webspam and promote high quality content. While we can’t divulge specific signals because we don’t want to give people a way to game our search results and worsen the experience for users, our advice for webmasters is to focus on creating high quality sites that create a good user experience and employ white hat SEO methods instead of engaging in aggressive webspam tactics.”

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Currently, only search queries that exactly match those assigned to an AdWords campaign will trigger an ad being published in the results listings.  With the existing system, any close variants are not considered to be a search query match by AdWords, and it does not take into account the similarity in the users intent and the semantics of their search.

Google has announced that with their changes to the Google AdWords interface, advertisers will no longer need to include hundreds of variations of a search query, such as misspellings or plural forms, as this will now be done automatically by Google AdWords:

“We know users are happier when they get search results that reflect their intent and help them achieve their desired action, even if it’s not a precise match for what they’ve typed. So we’re extending this behavior to ads”.

But with Google’s new matching behavior for phrase and exact match keywords, this has been re-addressed.  Ads will now be judged on their relevancy based on less prescriptive and exacting measures, by understanding the intent of a users search and linking ads to them accordingly.

According to the Google AdWords blog, the existing rate of search queries that are misspelt is 7%, and although currently Google’s ‘organic search systems’ will pick up on misspellings and compensate for them, suggesting close variants for search queries, this did not extend to their AdWords platform until now:

“People aren’t perfect spellers or typists. At least 7% of search queries contain a misspelling, and the longer the query, the higher the rate [...] Even with perfect spelling, two people searching for the same thing often use slightly different variations, such as “kid scooters” and “kid’s scooter” or “bamboo floor” and “bamboo flooring.”

According to the results provided by initial testing phases, on average their new matching behavior update has resulted in advertisers seeing an increase of 3% on Google AdWords search clicks, with comparable CPC’s.

The interface will appear in the next version of the Application Planning Interface (API) due for release later in April.  With the latest update, matches will now include “plurals, misspellings and other close variants,”  by default, but advertisers do have the option to opt out if they prefer to retain closer control of the key words associated to their Google AdWords campaigns.

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According to the post published on Google’s Investor Relations blog last week, speculations in markets such as their mobile platform, web browser and broadcast site have proved to be lucrative for the world’s most popular SEO Optimisation search engine:

“We also saw tremendous momentum from the big bets we’ve made in products like Android, Chrome and YouTube. We are still at the very early stages of what technology can do to improve people’s lives and we have enormous opportunities ahead.  It is a very exciting time to be at Google.”

Google has reported it’s revenues at $10.65 billion for the first quarter in 2012, ending March 31, demonstrating an increase of 24% when compared with the first quarter of last year.  Although the revenues are quoted on a gross basis, and do not include the deductions made from traffic acquisition costs (TAC), according to Google: “in the first quarter of 2012, TAC totaled $2.51 billion, or 25% of advertising revenues”, still netting Google over $8 billion for the first three months of the year alone.

Google also announced plans to create a new league of non-voting shares, as a bonus for existing share holders, creating a two for one split on their current share options.  CEO Larry Page indicated that the future at Google retains a focus centering around the small group of decision makers currently sitting at the top of Google’s board; with a long-term view of future strategies and development remaining the primary concern for the SEO Optimisation organisation.

Founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page vindicated their decision to retain operations within a small group of share holders in a public letter published earlier this year, explaining their decision to continue a “founder-led approach”:

“After careful consideration with our board of directors, we have decided that maintaining this founder-led approach is in the best interests of Google, our shareholders and our users. Having the flexibility to use stock without diluting our structure will help ensure we are set up for success for decades to come.”

Although in the same letter Page and Brin indicated that they have no major acquisition plans, it seems likely that they will be looking to make some big ticket purchases with their healthy profits, watch this space; if the first quarter figures are anything to go by, 2012 promises to be yet another lucrative year for the global search engine giant.

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The importance of these changes, targeting Google AdWords campaigns at a local level, should not be underestimated.  With the rapidly expanding SmartPhone and tablet markets, users are online more than ever with their portable devices.  The death of traditional print media formats such as the Yellow Pages signals that the way people are searching for information is changing, and according to Google, 20% of queries relate to local searches:

“It’s no surprise that local campaigns are a focus for many businesses–from finding directions to looking up a phone number, more people are going online to find local information. In fact, more than 20% of searches on Google are related to location, and people often act quickly on local searches. Research shows that using smartphones, 88% of people who search for local information take action within a day.”

In addition to reaching out across the web to target audiences within a given location, with the changes made to the US Google AdWords portfolio, advertisers are now able to produce locally relevant ads far more efficiently than before, eliminating the need to produce individual ads per location, as the Google AdWords blogspot post goes on to explain:

“To help you easily create a custom ad title, text, display URL, and/or destination URL for all of your locations at scale, we’ve developed location insertion for location extensions. You’ll no longer need to create multiple ads for multiple locations–this new feature automatically inserts the city, phone number, or zip code of your local business into your ad text.”

If it’s introduced to the UK, location targeting with Google AdWords will help marketers and advertisers to reduce the costs of reaching out to new customers via the web, using postal code targeting to develop campaigns that are relevant to local users, enabling brands and companies to engage with potential customers by targeting content, tailored to their geographic location.

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The fourth annual survey from the world’s largest online social media magazine, Social Media Examiner, surveyed more than 3,800 digital media marketing specialists, and reviewed the existing social landscape, for marketers focusing within this field, in order to drive sales.

Their ‘Social Media Marketing Industry Report’ found that, outside of social, advertisers and marketers indicated that PPC came way down the list of key marketing strategies.  According to the report, Search Engine Optimisation features in second place to email marketing, with 65% engaging with SEO, and 87% utilising email marketing as part of their overall strategy.

Online advertising, such as platforms like Google AdWords, came in at sixth place, with just 38% engaging with PPC to drive sales, although it is worth noting that 68% of the marketers who participated in the survey noted that they are planning to increase the amount of time and money they invest in SEO, down from 71% in last years report, while 9% indicated that they do not have any plans to use SEO in the coming months.

43% of digital media marketing specialists responded to say they intend to increase their focus on PPC platforms, raising the question why SEO and PPC does not perform a more integral role for social media marketers currently.  The key for Google will be to orientate social media marketing specialists towards their existing portfolio of online advertising tools, and limit the divergence between using social media to drive sales, as opposed to paid advertising services.

The survey also found that Facebook was the number one social networking platform of choice for digital media marketing, with 92% reporting that they adopt the social platform within their social advertising strategies.  Google+ featured pretty low down in the ranking of social media dominance, coming in at sixth place, with just a 60% adoption rate, although participants of the study indicated that Google+ is within future scope for their social media marketing strategies.

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Google argues that a scatter-gun approach with one all encompassing campaign, intended to reach as many people across a range of demographics as possible, narrows the range of potential customers that will engage with their products or services.  By focusing instead on tailored communications that are designed specifically to attract the attention of their target markets, down to the individual user, advertisers will maximise their marketing budgets and the success of their campaigns.

For example, Google cites the promotion of landing pages and ensuring their relevance to a product, will improve PPC Management for advertisers: “seamlessly link your audience-relevant creative message to a landing page on your website with content pertinent to the product or service the audience is interested in”.

In the post, Google encourages a renewed approach to PPC Management and the way advertisers target users, customising content and focusing on relevancy, arguing that they will see an improved success rate when it comes to their AdWords campaigns.  Making ads “more helpful” and improving the overall user experience is key to their approach; after all, Google stand to benefit from their advertisers adopting a user-centric approach; they want their search engine to be a purveyor of relevant, useful and up to date information:

“Make audience specific recommendations, differentiate yourself from the competition, and provide new information. For example remarketing ads could show complementary products that an existing customer may need. If you’re targeting new users, feature positive testimonials and reviews to highlight your good reputation.  Make better use of audience targeting by addressing different stages in the buying cycle within your ad.”

In the announcement, Google also identified personalised ads as a key agent in securing improved click through and conversion rates when it comes to Google AdWords campaigns.  ‘Audience Targeted Creatives’ as Google refer to them, stimulate performance by focusing on the individual needs of a particular user:

“Personalize ads based on the product or service your audience would be interested in. If you’re remarketing to a user who browsed your site, match your ads to content they viewed. For example, if a user viewed a variety of smart phones, you could show ads promoting individual phones, phone plans, or phone accessories.”

For Google the key to evolving the way their broad base of advertisers engage with their PPC Management products is to maintain a continued focus on the individual user, after all the power ultimately remains with them, whether they use Google, click on an ad, engage with a brand or product, it’s their attention that search engines and advertisers are striving to attract.

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For example, March saw changes rolled out to the way that Google scores news groupings, as explained in Google’s own words via their official Blogspot post: “this subtle change slightly improves our scoring system, leading to better ranking of news clusters”.  March also saw changes made to the way sitelinks are examined for their relevancy, with an update to the offline process that decides what links will be displayed to users in relation to a given search result:

“Sitelinks (the links that appear beneath some search results and link deeper into the respective site) are generated in part by an offline process that analyzes site structure and other data to determine the most relevant links to show users. We’ve recently updated the data through our offline process.”

And importantly for marketers engaging with social media to for SEO help, Google have also made improvements to the way profile pages are indexed across a wide range of social platforms: “this change improves the comprehensiveness of public profile pages in our index from more than two-hundred social sites”.

Prior to publishing the list of updates that took place last month, at the end of March Google tweeted that they would be rolling out yet another Panda refresh, but caveated the post by saying that only 1.6% of queries would be “noticeably affected”, when you consider that Google handles more than an estimated 1 billion searches per day, that 1.6% is no small figure.  The changes were described in Google’s SEO help official blog post as “high-quality sites algorithm data update and freshness improvements” as they go on to note, the focus remains on keeping their data fresher:

“Like many of the changes we make, aspects of our high-quality sites algorithm depend on processing that’s done offline and pushed on a periodic cycle. In the past month, we’ve pushed updated data for “Panda,” as we mentioned in a recent tweet. We’ve also made improvements to keep our database fresher overall.”

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According to the post published on the Google AdWords blog spot yesterday, the launch of Google+ Pages in November of last year was intended to: “provide you with a way to post updates and news about your business, have engaging conversations with customers, and send tailored messages to specific groups of people”, it makes sense for Google to now take the step to bring their range of search, social and SEO products together, with the launch of their AdWords Page on Google+. As they go on to explain in the post, a range of industry information and various functionalities will be made available to brands and businesses that connect with their Google AdWords Page, making it an appealing option for many brand managers and marketers:

“We’re now excited to share that Google Ads will be joining Google+ Pages to provide you, our advertising partners, with the latest Google advertising product news, training, tips and Hangouts that can help make the web work for you. We hope it will become a useful resource for growing your business, reaching customers in the moments that matter, and making smarter decisions.”

By using their Google+ AdWords Page as a conduit for communicating the latest information about their SEO advertising platform, Google are no doubt hoping to further manifest their social platform in the consciousness of their advertising partners. The site has yet to firmly make it’s presence felt amongst the established social heavyweights, such as Facebook and Twitter, no doubt much to the irritation of the search engine giant, who has famously struggled to make an impact on the social media scene.

By promising anyone who connects with their Google AdWords page information on the “latest launches and updates for Google’s advertising solutions, including search, display, mobile, social, YouTube and Google Analytics” they are dangling a relatively large carrot for anyone engaging with their SEO solutions, who wants to keep up to speed with the rapidly evolving search and online advertising landscape.

As well as new releases, Google are also providing the opportunity to connect with their team of in-house AdWords specialists, who will provide “how-to information, best practices, and recommendations” as well as information on “upcoming training and events” and access to their Google AdWords product experts.

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“Google and other search engines should take steps to ensure that their websites are not used as vehicles to breach the law and should actively develop and use such technology [...] we recommend that if legislation is necessary to require them to do so it should be introduced.”

As a purveyor of information, the SEO help search engine giant has always maintained that freedom of speech on the internet is fundamental to it’s operation, and claimed that to roll out filters that would prevent Google users from accessing content that had been prohibited by law, would be costly and almost impossible to orchestrate.  The MP’s that have formed the select committee however have claimed that the arguments from Google are “unconvincing” and go on to note in their report that:

“Where an individual has obtained a clear court order that certain material infringes their privacy and so should not be published we do not find it acceptable that he or she should have to return to court repeatedly in order to remove the same material from internet searches.”

Specialising in SEO Help, Google will find the calls for a change in legislation, and the request for them to appear before the committee, yet another irritation from European quarters, as MP’s recently called for the world’s biggest search engine to revise the latest changes to their privacy agreements, implemented with their personalised search platform, that operates an opt out rather than an opt in policy, much to the consternation of European governing bodies, who feel that the changes to Google’s polices are an infringement of web users privacy.

The committee is also investigating how to manage oversees bloggers posting material that has been restricted for publication online in the UK, with recommendations that action should be taken against individuals if they flaunt British laws and subsequently attempt to visit the UK.

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