When it comes to online business Wales is lagging well behind its UK neighbours. Google recently provided figures which show that only 60% of Welsh small & medium enterprises (SMEs) have their own website and, of these, a paltry 33% are set up for ecommerce. With more and more of Britain’s shopping taking place online, Welsh business could suffer if it fails to modernise.

Fortunately the Welsh government and Google have now teamed up to help Welsh SMEs get online and get profitable. The 12 month programme will organise over 1000 free e-skills seminars and free consultations across Wales, equipping local businesses with the skills they need to improve their online presence.

According to the Welsh Minister for Business, Enterprise, Technology and Science, Edwina Hart: “We want Wales to be a truly digital nation…We welcome this initiative to help companies gain maximum benefits from using and exploiting digital technologies to innovate, grow and access new markets, driving business growth.”

“Digital technologies and online services have the potential to revolutionise the competitiveness of business and I hope as many as possible take advantage of the expertise on offer from Google.”

Meanwhile, Adrian Clark, chairman of Cardiff & Co, agreed that: “Getting online is one of the most important marketing tools for businesses…You don’t need a huge investment to win a share of the online market but you do need the skills.”

These skills do seem to be lacking in Wales but, if you know where to look, there is a whole seam of skill and knowledge to be found in the country. In fact, part of the Google initiative involves linking web novices up with top digital agencies and online marketing services across Wales.

The year-long programme will also see the popular Google Juice Bar touring the country, bringing online business experts to less web-savvy companies from Cardiff to Caernarfon. The Google Juice Bar will be offering complimentary 1-2-1 sessions that will show SMEs how to increase traffic to their websites and build a profitable business online.

This year is seen by many to be the year that Wales goes live. The project will kick off in Cardiff on March and will tour South Wales for a further 3 months before taking on online business in the rest of the country for the rest of the year. If you’re in the South this March, make sure you attend the Google Juice Bar launch event on the 6th.

In the meantime, you can improve your web presence and online skills using your own initiative. The first step is to source great advice and real expertise to help you on your way. Liberty are the largest and fastest growing online marketing agency in Wales, with a wealth of knowledge and specialist online marketing services designed to get your business booming online.

To find out more about how we can help and our online marketing services, call the Liberty team today on 029 2076 6467.

For more information on the initiative, please visit the Getting Welsh Businesses Online (GWBO) website by clicking here.

If you are one of the many people who has been annoyed with recent Google changes, such as personalised search and auto-correction of your searches, then you’ll be glad to hear that you can now choose to turn them off…

In a post on the “Inside Search" blog, Google says “we've received a lot of requests for a more deliberate way to tell Google to search using your exact terms. We've been listening, and starting today you'll be able to do just that through verbatim search.” 

When you use Verbatim Search (found in the left hand menu, under the ‘More Search Tools’ option), Google uses the exact words you enter, without making changes and without showing results that they think you will be more likely to want.

Google lists the things that Verbatim Search turns off, including:

• automatic spelling corrections 
• personalised search results, using information such as sites previously visited.
• synonyms in the results

See the full list here.

If you want to learn how Pay Per Click advertising works and see what makes Google AdWords one of the most popular advertising platforms in the world then join us at our latest joint training course with Marketing Tom Media.

On the 3rd and 4th November in the ESIS conference centre in South Wales, Gareth Morgan, Managing Director of Liberty and Alun John of Marketing Tom Media, will be teaming up to offer another 2-day Pay Per Click Masterclass.

The course will look at everything from the history of search engine advertising and the theory behind Pay Per Click, to advanced AdWords uses, such as the display network and ad extensions. Attendees will be shown how to choose keywords, structure an account, write adverts, pick keywords, manage bids, and a whole lot more!

This training will benefit those new to AdWords as well as existing advertisers that want a refresher or a look at additional options.

Full details and a booking form can be found here. We hope to see you there!

Of the numerous and varies tests that Google keeps performing, this has to be one of the more interesting ones - snippets of information from Wikipedia, all neatly boxed up alongside the search results:

We stumbled across this yesterday and could only get this to work in Chrome, whilst not signed in. This must mean that it is in beta testing and they are likely monitoring click-through-rate to see if it's something worth keeping.

Google has suffered criticism from webmasters and the SEO community in recent years, due to them keeping people on the results pages more and sending them through to websites less. It has also been long thought that Wikipedia receives favouritism in the search results. This is going to fan the flames on both accounts, as users can find more information without leaving Google and Wikipedia gets another first page ranking.

A recent study has shown that Google may be falling short of Microsoft's search engine, Bing, when it comes to the helpfulness and relevance of their search results. The study looked at just how many searches made using the search engines actually resulted in a visit to one of the suggested websites. The findings were very interesting; around 80% of searches conducted on Bing resulted in the user visiting a link provided by the search engine. Meanwhile, over at Google, searchers made use of the links provided by only 67% of the searches.

This brand new research has been conducted by the web tracking firm, Experian Hitwise, who concluded that both search engines showed room for substantial improvement in terms of the number of search results that users actually go on to explore. Researchers at Experian Hitwise believe the high percentage of searches which did not lead to a website visit shows that both search engine services could stand to enhance the precision and usefulness of their results.

The results of Experian Hitwise's study could suggest a number of things. While it is possible that Bing, and its related search sites, are simply more likely to come up with the link or answer that searchers are looking for, the results of the study could also mean that people using Bing and Google are using the two search engines in different ways and for different reasons. This may account for different patterns of use and may mean that the disparity between the two does not necessarily reflect badly on Google.

The comparative success of Bing over Google in this section of the search engine market, however, looks as if it could be mirrored by the state of the companies' respective market shares. In July, Google's US search market share dropped to 66.05%, a drop of 2%. Searches conducted through Bing on the other hand experienced a 1% increase, taking their share of the market to 28.05%. The most substantial growth, however, was recorded by the Bing-affiliated Yahoo, whose shares in the market ballooned by 4% to achieve a 15% share of the market. Interestingly, and perhaps relatedly, searches conducted on bing.com itself dropped by 2% to 13%.

It seems that Google launches a new service or upgrade to its infrastructure every week! The latest addition to its services, Google+, has left many scratching their heads wondering what it’s all about - especially seeing as most people can't access it yet. That's why we have put together this brief guide to Google+ and what it means to businesses looking to market themselves on the social media networks...

What is Google+?

Google+ is the latest attempt by the search engine giants to create a social network designed to rival Facebook. Launched on June 28, 2011 as a private Beta, the project was led by Vic Gundotra, Google’s SVP of social media.

Google+ could have many possibilities especially for social media marketing. The network is a series of social products including:

• Stream – A newsfeed service
• Sparks – A recommendation engine
• Hangouts – A video chat service
• Huddle – A group newsfeed
• Circles – Friend management service
• Photos – Photo albums and photo sharing

Many more features such as Games and Questions are expected in the very near future.

So, why the name Google+? Google want Google+ to be an extension of the main Google search engine. It’s actually designed to be an enhancement of Google which may explain by they opted to alter the Google navbar to incorporate a link to a user’s Google+ profile. You can also see a new icon displaying the Google+ notifications the user has received. This is very much designed to emulate the Facebook notification service.

Social media marketing is big news on Facebook and Twitter, with many companies building branded pages and online communities in a bid to win more business and increase online exposure. Google+ looks set to be the next in line to get attention from big business and it could work out to be very lucrative for the search engine moguls.

Why Use Google+?

Okay, so Google have launched a social network. You may be wondering why you should use it. After all, you’ve got the Facebook and Twitter accounts. Why move to or use yet another social network?

The only way to find out how good a service is rated, is to ask the users themselves. When questioned why somebody should use Google+, users answered that Google is a much cleaner way to share data with friends, Google integrates well with Google’s cloud products such as Docs and Calendar, and the whole interface and sharing processes seem to work faster. Users also described Google+ as being a more grown up alternative to Facebook and Twitter allowing for more control and a more organic experience. Because each component is broken up into separate areas, this reduces the distracting features that you get with Facebook for instance. After all, does everybody want to know how many virtual sheep you just bought for your virtual farm?!

How to Start Using Google+

Right now, you need to be invited by a friend to join Google+. This restriction will be lifted soon and it’s best to have your invite sent to your Gmail account so that you can use this account to sign in to your Google+ area. Once you accept the invite, you will be asked to create your Google+ profile, entering personal information such as your name and date of birth. Setup is very straightforward and once you are set up you can start inviting your friends to Google+ too. You may choose to use Google+ to sort the wheat from the chaff – so to speak – building a network of your closest friends or work colleagues.

Google+ Circles – Categorising Your Friends

Understanding what Circles is all about is one of the most essential parts of mastering Google+. Instead of finding friends or following people, Google+ allows you more control over who can see your content.

You can choose to drag and drop friends into groups, for example, a family group, or a group for close friends. You can also create a Business circle and plonk your boss and colleagues in there for easy sorting and sharing. Once you have created your circles, you can get more granular controls by clicking on each circle and setting its individual settings. Circles allows you to share different things with different people and also gives those in your circle a better experience, as they don’t need to filter through so much content in order to see what they want.

Google+ Stream – Sharing Data

Google+ Stream is very easy to get the hang of especially if you’re already a Facebook user. It’s really just a newsfeed that you share with your circles. You can choose to share anything from a status update to a video or photo.  

The differences between Google+ Stream and Facebook are few. The main difference is that instead of a ‘like’ button you can choose to ‘+1’ a post or photo.  Status updates are also very similar to the Facebook updates.

Google+ Sparks

If you are stuck as to what to share on Google+ first then Sparks will lend a hand! This content recommendation engine finds the most interesting and relevant articles and videos across a wide range of subjects and genres. If you can find it online then Spark can reference it and find the latest information on your chosen topic.

Google provides an automated list of subjects, but you can customise this as you wish, ensuring that Sparks only retrieves the data that you want to see. Spark content can also be shared with your Circles.

Google+ Hangouts

If Google+ is to have one killer feature then Hangouts may just be it. This interesting twist on the conventional group video chat feature has received a very positive response from the current Google+ community.

You click on the ‘Start a hangout’ button and invite friends to ‘hangout’ with you online and to join a live video stream. Other friends will also see your open hangout and choose to join in if they wish. It’s a great way for up to ten people to chat via video link and because it’s not available on Facebook, this could be the one feature that attracts the masses to Google+.

Photos

Google+ also includes a fully-fledged feature for photos and photo albums. Powered by Google’s Picasa (as you would expect), Photos allows you to display photos uploaded by friends, share your photos, and to organise them into albums. You can also view photos in slideshow format and tag yourself or a friend in any photos you can both access. You can also drill down to other information such as what type of camera was used to take the snap.

Google+ and social media marketing

With its clean interface and sharing features, Google+ is great news for those wishing to promote their business through social media marketing. Google+ keeps some of the best features of Facebook, but also allows users to filter out unwanted information and to tailor news feeds to their exact needs. This means information overload is a thing of the past and that companies can design their Google+ pages and campaigns to drive clear messages to those interested in specific services and products.

But before you start to build your company’s Google+ page it’s worth knowing that Google is going to release a dedicated Google+ platform for businesses. This will take some time to build, but is set to have some interesting and useful features. This feature is expected to be released in Beta format in the next few weeks.

As with any social media platform, the social media marketing opportunities are many and it’s only a matter of time before companies large and small start to make use of Google’s new communication and sharing medium. Once the communities start to grow and the service gains momentum, there’s no telling how big Google+ may become. But one thing’s for sure, with the Google name attached, it’s sure to be a threat to Facebook and Twitter.

Google has released its first Analytics Benchmarking Newsletter, which highlights data collected anonymously from hundreds of thousands of Google Analytics accounts that opted-in to sharing data.

Comparing data from 1st November 2010 to 1st February 2011 against the same period 12 month prior, some very interesting changes are taking place in the way people use websites. A couple of highlights…

People are spending less time on websites. They are also visiting slightly less pages. From an average visitor looking at 4.9 pages in late 2009, we are now seeing 4.5 page views per visit. Average time on site is down from 5 minutes 49 seconds to 5:23. 

Bounce rates have fallen. Even though people are spending slightly less time on sites, they must be finding what they want as bounce rates have dropped by 1.2%, from an average of 48.2% to 47%.

UK websites enjoy high quality traffic. Sites in the UK see a higher than average number of pages per visit and lower bounce rate than those in France, Brazil, China, Japan and the US. They also see an above average time on site, second only to US websites.

Search engine traffic is up. Traffic from search engines grew over the period by 1% whilst traffic from referrals fell by 1.6%. This will probably surprise a lot of people as there is a growing belief that social media sites are sending more traffic than search engines.

If you have Google Analytics installed on your webite, but don't quite know how to work out if your site is performing or not, then give us a call. We'l happily run through the figures and tell you if there are any things that you should be concerned with. The number for our search engine marketing team is 029 2076 6467.

If you are logged into Google then along with the +1 badges that are now showing up in the UK results, you may start to see this strange looking test:

Google has changed the order of the green URL and black meta description in the search results. This isn't just for organic results, it is also being applied to the Pay Per Click ads:

As Liberty is on the Google Engage for Agencies programme, on Wednesday, our Pay Per Click advertising manager Chris had the pleasure of attending an event at their UK HQ.

The main focus of the event was to understand how best to improve the visibility of small businesses online.

There were some very interesting topics discussed and some great insight into search trends. Here are the highlights from Chris’s notes on what Google was saying:

Changes to AdWords

There are quite a few changes in AdWords ad extensions this week. You will soon be charged for clicks on your location extensions, such as people using your advert to find directions to your premises. Google realises these are useful and lead to more interaction with your business, so want you to pay for it.

Video extensions will be the next big thing for AdWords extensions, where videos will be playable from within the sponsored ads section of the search results. This is currently a beta test and only rolled out to major film companies for the time being.

Google is removing the £5 activation fee for new AdWords accounts. This is great news for small businesses, providing less of a sticking point – it’s even better if you have an AdWords voucher, meaning you really can now try it for free!

The Google Checkout button is being removed from the ads, though it will still be seen within the Google Products shopping results.

Getting British Business Online

This is a big focus area for Google and Getting British Business Online is something they want online marketing agencies to help them push. In the UK last year, 17pence in every £1 was spent online – which highlights why a new or small business without a website needs to seriously consider an online presence. For one-man-bands or those dipping their toes into the web, the great part is that after a simple registration process, you will get the following from Google:

- Free. co.uk domain for 1 year
- Free easy-to-update website for 1 year
- Free email address @yourdomain
- Free support

If you or any small businesses you know want to take advantage of this then let us know and we will happily point you in the right direction.

How big brands are being innovative

Using Google AdWords with other Google tools - like Trends & Insights - can help you find and attract cheap traffic that your competitors aren’t targeting. See this great example from Converse.

Is YouTube the next major destination for online shopping? Check out how fashion retailer French Connection turn videos into ecommerce opportunities via links within product videos.

Other interesting facts

The number of people making decisions in stores has halved, which is mainly down to product reviews online. Your potential customers have the ability to browse the web almost everywhere – via pc, laptop, mobile and tablet. The key message on the day was make sure you and your products can be seen and make sure you manage your reputation online.

Also, 1 in every 3 Tweets now has a YouTube connection.

Yesterday we made a discovery regarding one of Google's advanced search parameters. When you do a Google search, if you exclude a keyword by putting a minus sign in front of it (e.g. -keyword), you are not only excluding results that contain that particular word in their on-page copy, but we also now believe that it also excludes any webpage with at least one link pointing to it with that word in the anchor text.

Liberty team member Steve made this discovery when he responded to a tweet by Rand Fishkin, founder of SEOmoz. Rand had seen the "Weirdest SERP" (which stands for Search Engine Results Page) for the search query ["johnnie walker" -johnny] and couldn't figure out why the third result was ranking (here is a screenshot that Rand posted). The third result was an Edinburgh web design company that didn't have the words "Johnnie" or "Walker" anywhere in the text on its homepage, let alone the full phrase, yet it was ranking for that keyword. Steve examined the site's backlink profile and assessed that the site had quite a few in-bound links pointing to it with "Johnnie Walker" in the anchor text. It turns out that Johnnie Walker is a member of staff at the company.

Steve offered this explanation to Rand, and while he thought that the "anchor text likely helps" with its high ranking, he believed that it "just doesn't seem like it would be enough for such a tough-to-rank SERP."

This was a fair enough point. A typical search for ["johnnie walker"] in the US would show Johnnie Walker whisky's official website, Wikipedia pages for the whisky brand as well as the BBC Radio DJ and other pages talking about and relating to the two. While some of them had spellings of both "Johnnie" and "Johnny" on the page, others only had the former. So why are all of them removed when the word "Johnny" is excluded from the search query?

The answer lies in the anchor text of in-bound links pointing to the pages. Steve's next step was to look at the backlinks of the official site's homepage, the relevant Wikipedia pages and other sites that ranked normally for ["johnnie walker"] (i.e. without excluding the keyword "Johnny"). He discovered that other sites were linking to those pages - perhaps naturally - with the incorrect spelling of the whisky and the radio DJ: "Johnny Walker." Regardless of whether or not the word "Johnny" appeared within the text on the page, if the word appeared in the anchor text of at least one in-bound link to the page, Google would remove it from the results if "-johnny" were included in the search query. Therefore, sites such as the Edinburgh web design company were ranking for the ["johnnie walker" -johnny] search because they didn't have the word "Johnny" appear in either instance: it doesn't appear in the on-page text, nor does it appear in the anchor text of any in-bound link pointing to the page.

What is interesting to note is that in its Web Search Help section, Google explains how the keyword exclusion parameter works and claims that:

"Attaching a minus sign immediately before a word indicates that you do not want pages that contain this word to appear in your results." (Our emphasis)

Perhaps this statement needs updating - it is potentially misleading, as "pages that contain this word" suggests that the word must be visible and apparent somewhere on the pages, whether it is somewhere in the copy or in its META data. Obviously, the anchor text of any in-bound links are not actually contained within the page - they appear elsewhere on the Web.

So what does this all mean for businesses? Is there any way to take advantage of this discovery? Sadly, not that we can currently think of. Only an extreme minority of people use minus keywords when conducting searches - those who do are often SEOs, perhaps conducting research and therefore using advanced search parameters to make deductions. However, for those purposes alone, it is still something to be aware of as it could affect the results and conclusions of one's research. If that is the case, it can affect a business via its in-house staff or the online marketing agency that it employs.