“Online Advertising Soars” – we have shown in previous NetNews how internet advertising spend overtook radio advertising, then cinema. It is now exceeding national newspaper advertising, as widely reported this month. (see (2) below)
In our own business, more and more clients and prospects approach us, not about issues on their web site, but to ask us to manage the promotion of their site, including creating the Pay Per Click programmes, and the site ranking improvements they need to achieve.
These actions give measurable, trackable results, and form an increasing part of their overall marketing approach. We hope that you are among those businesses now using the web in this way – if not, or if help is needed, please contact us to explore how best you can do this.
1. NET ISSUES
Important issues that could impact on your website approach
Improve your web site ranking
Pay Per Click is assuming greater importance, and we manage PPC programmes for an increasing number of businesses. However, it is critical not to rely solely on this, but, over time, to work to improve the position of your site in the Search Engines, and get the maximum flow of visitors from “natural searches”.
On our own site, we find the sharpest improvement comes from using a mix of the available levers, and we have tested this over many years, but especially the past nine months. Sharpest increases in traffic have come from:
- getting more non-reciprocal links in place – we have used both paid, and free directories.
- in managing PPC Programmes, we always try to maximise the number of clicks achieved for the client's budget - means we may not bid aggressively on very popular (ie high cost) terms but spread our bids over many low cost but still highly relevant terms.
- adding new site content – Google values sites which show continual changes in their content – we have added new pages with details of new services and capabilities.
- getting new, good quality reciprocal links. Google like to see a flow of new links – we check the Page Ranking, and the quality of the sites involved in every case.
- it is related links that matter – often not easy to judge this exactly – where we accept less closely related, we group them separately, and keep them to a small percentage of our total inbound links.
Finding time to manage these points strongly, is not easy for any business – NCS has many tools we use to help ourselves and our clients - please contact us if you think we can assist.
2. NET HAPPENINGS
News, themes and trends from the Internet – home and abroad
Technology enablers still developing strongly…
Text messaging - 32 billion text messages were sent in 2005. In Q106 this increased further to reach a record monthly total of 3.16 billion for March.(mda-org)
Broadband – 3m broadband connections were installed in UK in 2005 – only 5 countries worldwide now have more broadband lines than UK - China, US, Japan, Germany and France.
Mobile web use - recently announced (May06) dotMobi high level domain to deliver web services to mobile devices, is likely to accelerate trend to using mobiles to access web sites.
Web Usage – wealthy individuals (ie earning £75k+ pa) now spend 104 minutes online daily – very close to time spent watching TV (107 mins) (ipa/nma.co.uk)
Online Shopping Update - UK figures showing strong growth…
- Annual % growth in online shopping is higher in Clothing than in Event Tickets.
- Actual sector growth figures for 2005 were: Clothing 36%: Computer Software 36%: Home and Garden 32%: Jewellery 27%: Event tickets 26%: Furniture 24% (comscore.com)
- UK online shopping is now growing 5 times faster than offline. (Verdict Research)
Internet Advertising – continued shift away from traditional media…
- Internet advertising spend continues to soar – expected to grow by 39% in 2006, versus a decline 9% in national press advertising.
- Digital advertising now has a bigger spend than Cinema, Radio, Outdoor, Consumer Magazines, or Business-to-Business advertising. (ft/groupm)
3. NET TIPS
Some hints you could consider
Show your offer – put your products/services on the landing page – don’t make your visitors watch a graphics display, then go through an “Enter Site” stage – let your products hit their eyes as soon as they land on your site.
Don’t be flash – be careful that your web pages aren’t loaded up with too much movement, especially rapid movement – apart from annoying many site visitors, it can hamper visibility, and be in conflict with The Disability Discrimination Act (see next item).
Accessible Designs – the Disability Discrimination Act now requires sites to be accessible to the disabled. We can point you to tools to check your own site accessibility, and provide help thereafter if you have a problem.
East-West not North South – web sites increasingly use the lateral PC screen space - this reflects trend for users to have a wide screen view in their own browser.
We now design sites that will “flex” to fit the browser of each visitor – if they use a high screen resolution (ie sites designed for lower resolution browsers appear in the centre of their screen) your site would occupy the full screen width – if they use a lower screen resolution in their browser, your site will sense this and still occupy the full width of their screen. Please contact us if you wish to pursue this further.
4. NCS FOCUS
News and services from NCS that might help
Web Site Availability – significant site downtime is unusual, given the high quality site hosting process we use. However, we have checked and validated a number of tools to enable site owners to track performance, and have trialled these on a number of sites – just contact us if this would be useful to you.
NCS Property-related web services – over recent years we have built a strong competence in handling web-related property promotion and development – for further details, just click here
5. NET NOTHINGS
You probably already know that:
Google is King – in fact they power 75% of UK searches – way ahead of Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Ask UK. (nma.co.uk)
There will soon be more digital women than men – although last year women spent less time online per week (11 hours) than men (9 hours), women’s usage is growing much faster – by 2007 they are predicted to be spending more time online than men. (eiaa.net)
Developments in web marketing, site design, and web services
Social Networking and Mobile web use remain the two liveliest
issues in Web marketing currently - good use of both is a platform for getting better value from your site. In the next issue, we give an action check list on Social Networking, so this month we lead on Mobile web use – I hope the article and the rest of the content help you win more users for your site.
1 NET ISSUES
Significant issues that could impact on your website approach
Using Mobile access to bring more visitors to your site
Use this approach to increase your site traffic through Mobile web access:
a) Scale of web usage - using mobiles to access the web has stepped up sharply over the past year - according to Scoot UK, web traffic from mobile devices increased by over 4000% in the last 18 months. Apple hold by far the greatest share of this - their devices now handle more than 70% of mobile traffic on the web.
Even a year ago nearly 70% of i–phone users visited web sites via their phone on a daily basis.
b) Most popular uses - the most popular use of mobiles on the web is for email (59% of users); news headlines (46%) and social networking (41%)
c) Web brands – the most popular web brands were Google (55%); Facebook (42%); BBCNews (40%); E-bay (30%) and YouTube (77%)
d) Trends - Gartner reported in May that, worldwide, smart-phone sales increased by 85% year-on-year, so web usage trend seems likely to continue growing.
Clearly website owners should consider carefully the extent of the need to tailor their sites to suit mobile phone visitors, and how best to do this.
e) Our Approach - NCS assesses the degree of mobile relevance for all sites we develop, especially potentially high usage sites, e.g. information only sites, forums, social networking, sites addressing young user market.
Lower priority sites e.g. within certain industrial/commercial sectors will be identified also with, typically, a different technical solution being offered. Optimal domain usage, i.e. whether .mobi is best option, or whether non mobile domains will be adequate, are considered also.
f) Technical solutions - the optimal technical solution will be considered, e.g. for simple sites– the existing web site will often suffice for majority of mobile phones, with minimal content change needed, and .mobi use not needed.
For complex sites, e.g. for mobile-relevant sites with high content levels, (e.g. offering a wide range of products) a .mobi domain may be appropriate; the text content may need simplification; use of the flash/javascript content of existing site may need removing and image formats may need changing.
We will consider with clients the optimal level of search spend, once the site is up, to achieve the necessary level of visibility for the site.
g) Cost - the cost of specifying and developing fully mobile-friendly sites depends on the profile of individual sites. In some instances an effective solution can be delivered for minimal additional cost, as all requirements can be incorporated within the basic site specification.
In other cases it may be necessary to radically tailor the site content for mobile visitors - effectively a separate, mobile - orientated site is needed, although it can detect the mobile device and serve up a different set of pages suitable to them.
Under all options we closely tailor the price to reflect the work needed, with maximum re-use of existing content.
2. NET HAPPENINGS
News, themes and trends from the Internet – home and abroad
Mobile web usage - UK web traffic from mobile devices has increased by over 4000% in the last 18 months. Apple hold by far the greatest share of this - their devices now handling more than 70% of all mobile traffic (scoot.co.uk).
Social Networking - Facebook remains dominant – in the US 50% of the population is now on Facebook (Dreamgrow.com) – followed by YouTube and Twitter.
Online Shopping Update - UK online shopping is growing at 18% pa – the UK is Europe’s leading e-retail economy, with online sales likely to reach c£75bn in 2011 (imrg.org). By contrast, overall retail sales have actually shown falls in recent months.
Internet Promotion – double digit growth in online advertising spend is expected in 2011 – being driven by higher social media use, video, and display advertising. Paid search and mobile show strong growth also (nma.co.uk).
3. NET TIPS
Some hints you could consider
Use correct anchor text - when you put links to pages on your site, use terms for the clickable link which are the terms people will use when searching in a Search Engine for that activity. e.g. if you are a golf equipment e-tailer, and want to link to your new products page, don’t use “our new products” for the link, but describe the page more specifically, for example, “latest golf hybrids and drivers” – Search Engines attach far greater weight to specific terms like these.
Having said this, it is also important to vary the anchor text in your links – so don’t put the same text in all your links.
Get a long tail – long tail keywords are those which have several words, not a single word as the search term. Recent research (axandra.com) has highlighted that long tail keywords are much more likely to result in a sale than more general ones and often have less competition from other sites.
Thus, you will get both better conversion rates and more visitors if you focus on long tail keywords, rather than a single word, for your keyword.
Get on top - research (optify.net/axandra.com) has confirmed that if you get to the top positions on page 1 of Google, you not only get more clicks (the top 3 get 60% of the clicks), but you get a higher click through rate. Optify conclude that if you you double your site promotion spend to get to from 2nd position to 1st, you might triple your visits for that keyword.
NCS has 10 years experience in Search Engine marketing, so please contact us if you need help with this.
Think Firefox – the lastest Statcounter browsers statistics show that by May, Firefox held a share of 42% of browser usage - Internet Explorer was below 25% with Google Chrome increasing to nearly 26%. Clearly, Web owners need to check that their sites operate effectively with each of these browsers.
4. NCS FOCUS
News and services from NCS that might help
New Sites – we have launched a number of sites since the last newsletter – just visit our News Release page for a sample or click on our Portfolio page to see a much wider selection of our work.
Content Development - Google are reducing the rankings of shallow content sites, ie sites with minimal content. So be wary of relying on a minimal, passive, brochure site, to gain the search engine ranking you need. We have massive experience developing content for sites across a wide range of sectors – just approach us if you think your content needs enhancing.
