We recently saw a job vacancy being advertised on one of our clients' websites. It caught our attention because even though it was a great role and one that the company really needed filled, it was hardly noticeable on the web. The company did not want to spend money on advertising on a job board, so the only way this job opportunity could be found was via the search engines.

We have been interviewing graduates for a number of trainee positions at Liberty over the last year and many of them have expressed their difficulty in finding a job advert that didn't have a horde of other candidates interested in the role. Just looking at reed.co.uk today, a search for marketing jobs in Cardiff displays vacancies that have had 50-100 applications already.

A search query to find rare jobs

Many people use search engines when looking for jobs, particularly when trying to find those that are relevant to their career and in their desired or current location. This is when we had the idea to create a customisable search query to assist job hunters in finding those vacancies that are hidden away:

[location1 OR location2 OR location3] [type1 OR type2 OR type3] [job OR jobs OR vacancy OR vacancies OR role OR roles OR career OR careers]

Simply copy and paste the above search query into Google and replace each instance of "location" with suitable locations and each "type" with the types of jobs you are interested in. If Google thinks a web page contains relevance to at least one of the locations, one of the job types and one of the words in the third set of brackets then it will appear in the results.

Here's an example for someone looking for jobs in and around Cardiff relating to search engine optimisation and online marketing:

[cardiff OR "south wales"] ["online marketing" OR "internet marketing" OR seo OR "search engine optimisation"] [job OR jobs OR vacancy OR vacancies OR role OR roles OR career OR careers]

For the above example, for a web page to appear in the results, it has to contain relevance to at least one of the two locations, at least one of the four job types and at least one of the following words: "job", "vacancy", "role", "career" or one of their plural forms. The words do not have to appear in that order - as long as they appear somewhere on the page, they will show up in the results. So in the above example, possible web pages that could show up include:

- cardiff + seo + jobs (e.g. "Cardiff SEO Jobs"),
- cardiff + "internet marketing" + vacancy (e.g. "Vacancy: Internet Marketing, Cardiff"),
- "south wales" + "online marketing" + role (e.g. "We have an online marketing role available. Based in South Wales, the company…"), and so on.

A few points to take into account

- The square brackets aren't necessary, as Google will show the same number of results whether or not they are there, but it makes it easier to keep track and make sense of each part of the query.

- If one of the locations or job types is longer than one word (e.g. "online marketing"), put quote marks around it, otherwise the query will not function properly and the words might be searched for separately rather than together.

- The search query is likely to bring up a lot of results, some of which might not be relevant, useful or current, but don't be afraid to dig deep and scan through numerous pages of results. Page 1 of the results might contain the most relevant results according to Google, but you might find something more suitable a few pages on.

- Other ways to reduce the number of results are to take out some of the location or job type criteria, which will also narrow it down more specifically, and to select "pages from the UK" below the search bar, which will also eliminate international jobs that might match closely to your location (e.g. South Wales, UK and New South Wales, Australia).

- It may look complicated but it's really a way to simplify the search process. Referring to the above example, it would save the user implementing individual searches for "seo jobs cardiff", "seo vacancies cardiff", "seo careers cardiff" and so on, as all of these and more would be covered in just the one search query.

This is completely customisable, so don't be afraid to experiment. We have only included a few examples of synonyms of jobs and have not taken into account words and expressions that might differ depending on one's career type (e.g. internships and apprenticeships). If you lose track of what you've done, just start over with the original search query and add, delete and amend as appropriate.

We hope that it helps in your job search. At the very least, you might find a new job board or recruitment agency site to keep an eye on or to send your CV to. However you could also find a job advertised on a website that very few people have noticed and applied for, like the one we found on our client's website.

Best of luck with your job search!

Something we’ve noticed a couple of times over the past month is Google AdWords showing completely irrelevant adverts.

One example we captured yesterday was when looking for local electricians. As you’d expect, lots of local electrician ads were shown. What you wouldn’t expect though is to see some of these ads when searching for “business directory” a minute later. Mixed in with a load of adverts for directories were a few of the electrician ads. When the page was refreshed, the adverts disappeared...

Why are adverts showing for searches that were performed minutes before?

Google is supposed to be all about relevancy and even rewards advertisers for having very relevant adverts. If the impressions for these adverts are being counted or having an impact on the Quality Score for that keyword, then this isn’t helping anyone.

It is no secret that Google is growing from strength to strength, not only improving its own search engine but also investing in video (YouTube), blogging (Blogger), browsers (Chrome), mobile phones (Android) and so much more.

In an editorial piece, The New York Times makes the argument that Google - in a position to place its fingers in many pies and look after its own invested interests - could potentially manipulate its own search results to its advantage, showing its own interests above those of the competition.

Whether Google decides to play completely fair or help itself is a contentious issue. Revealing its algorithm will force Google to do the former and play fair. This piece offers some possible solutions:

"Some early suggestions for how to accomplish [a fair editorial policy] include having Google explain with some specified level of detail the editorial policy that guides its tweaks. Another would be to give some government commission the power to look at those tweaks."

It is true that revealing elements of Google's secretive algorithm would clear this. For example, if YouTube were to rank higher than other video-sharing websites, it would be noticeable whether the ranking appears naturally or forced by Google.

However, there could be other wider implications of revealing the algorithm. Google's success so far is because its algorithm is a secret. Even so, as Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan points out in his take on the New York Times piece:

"Google constantly speaks at search marketing and other events to answer questions about how they list sites and how to improve coverage... Google is constantly giving interviews about its algorithm..."

Although the algorithm is a secret, Google helps webmasters, not by telling them outright what the algorithm is, but by telling them how they can help themselves with regards to how the algorithm operates, and why it displays the search results it does.

After all, what if everyone knew the algorithm? Google's Marissa Mayer explains (originally printed in the Financial Times but reproduced on Google's Public Policy Blog):

"If search engines were forced to disclose their algorithms and not just the signals they use, or worse, if they had to use a standardised algorithm, spammers would certainly use that knowledge to game the system, making the results suspect ."

We are reminded of an incident last year when a Google search for "ugg boots" displayed seven spam/fraud websites within the first page (top ten) results. In this instance, the websites used suspect, black hat SEO techniques to get to the top of Google for that keyword. Surely revealing the algorithm would only encourage such practices - both good and bad; white hat, black hat and everything in between - affecting the quality of the search engine results shown, and in turn damaging Google's reputation as (mostly) showing the most natural, "neutral" results. Otherwise, Google would have to invest much more heavily in moderating the results and weeding out those websites manipulating the algorithm, which is likely to be a larger number if the way Google operates is disclosed.

All of this is without even considering governmental intervention, as mentioned in the second half of the above quote from the New York Times piece. Some of the bigger sceptics on the WebmasterWorld forum have expressed their fears that, amongst other things, the government may suggest changes to the algorithm from which they themselves could benefit.

Whatever the outcome, although Danny Sullivan believes the First Amendment and the fact that Yahoo survived a similar incident will save Google from such a fate, it will be interesting to see what - if anything - transpires, whether such action would be seen as a necessity as Google continues to grow and dominate the search engine world as well as other industries.

One of the most common questions we are asked by our clients is “What kind of clicks can I expect when I am in position 1?” Another is “How many more clicks will I get at the top of the page, compared to the bottom?” Valid questions when choosing to employ an SEO firm and ones we’ve struggled to answer, until now.

We’ve spent some time this month and put our heads together to conduct a little research that we hope goes someway to answering these questions. As you surely know, page 1 on Google is the much revered promised land of Search Engine Optimisation, but did you know that by battling your way to the first position, your site could enjoy three times the traffic that a competitor in 3rd place receives?

We compared Click Through Rates for a dozen of our retained SEO clients by looking at their Google Adwords data, their Google Analytics data and our ranking tracking software. We compared traffic levels against where they were in the search results month on month for each keyword and the results averaged out as:

As you can see, there are drastic differences between the click through rates you can expect if your site shows at top of the Google rankings on page 1, or if you are somewhere in mid-table or towards the bottom of the page. Our research shows that if your organisation finds itself as rank 1, you can expect just over 51% of all people searching on that term to visit your website. This then falls quite dramatically...

Position 1 = 51.4%
Position 2 = 27.4%
Position 3 = 16.8%
Position 4 = 12.7%
Position 5 = 10.8%
Position 6 = 8.3%
Position 7 = 6.6%
Position 8 = 6.2%
Position 9 = 5.3%
Position 10 = 4.8%

Interestingly, the difference between the listings ‘below the fold’ (i.e. the lower half of the page that you often have to scroll down to) is quite small. Perhaps people click the first listing impulsively but when they get down to the second half of the page, take the time to read through the lower listings?

If you are carrying out SEO work or want to appear at the top of the search engines then hopefully this gives you an idea of what to expect. Compare these figures with the search volumes found on the Google keyword suggestion tool and you will have an idea of the visitor levels your site will receive.

Please bear in mind that whilst we ran this for a dozen sites, that’s still quite a small number and if we had the time or resources then we would have done more. Also, the figures varied quite widely depending on the market and the type of keywords involved.

Your CTR will obviously depend on how compelling your listing is in the search results, so spend time to ensure keywords are included within your page titles, meta descriptions and the URL (if possible), as these are the three things that users see in the search results. Also try and include words that will enhance CTR, such as “free trial”, “low cost”, “high quality” or whatever works for your target market.

On the official Google blog there is a new announcement that the Beta version of an encrypted Google search is ready for use by general web users.

In a nutshell, by visiting https://www.google.com (rather than http://www.google.com) an encrypted connection is put in place which means third parties are not able to see the search terms you use and search results you view.

Immediate differences between the standard and more secure versions of Google are highlighted in the blog post: “The service includes a modified logo to help indicate that you’re searching using SSL and that you may encounter a somewhat different Google search experience, but as always, remember to check the start of the address bar for “https” and your browser lock indicators: Today’s release comes with a “beta” label for a few reasons. First, it currently covers only the core Google web search product. To help avoid misunderstanding, when you search using SSL, you won’t see links to offerings like Image Search and Maps that, for the most part, don’t support SSL at this time. Also, since SSL connections require additional time to set up the encryption between your browser and the remote web server, your experience with search over SSL might be slightly slower than your regular Google search experience. What won’t change is that you will still get the same great search results.”

The article also states “Google will still maintain search data to improve your search quality and to provide better service. Searching over SSL doesn’t reduce the data sent to Google — it only hides that data from third parties who seek it. And clicking on any of the web results, including Google universal search results for unsupported services like Google Images, could take you out of SSL mode. Our hope is that more websites and services will add support for SSL to help create a better and more consistent experience for you.”

This has been implemented after Google suffered recent criticism over data security when it collected information from open Wi-Fi connections. How the general public will react to encrypted Google search and how large the uptake will be is anyone's guess, though it is easy to see, even within a day of release, that this will make life more challenging for website owners and search engine marketers.

Early tests show that in the website analytics data, the referrer field isn’t complete when vistors come from the https version of Google. This means that the more people use encrypted search, the less you know about where they came from and the keywords used to bring them to your site.

It looks like Google has listened to recent feedback that many Pay Per Click account managers, including ourselves, have passed on regarding the quality of broad match in AdWords. For a while now we have been concerned with the way Google uses broad match keywords as many clients have been appearing for totally unrelated terms, due to Google believing the words were related. An example being a Solicitor client of ours bidding on the broad match keywords “immigration lawyer” and appearing for the search query “homeoffice”.

In the interest of only exposing clients to traffic that is relevant, we have started shying away from broad match and sticking more with “phrase” and [exact] match terms. Either that or spend half our time adding in scores of negative keywords. This might not be needed now, as Google has announced the introduction of ‘modified broad match’ on its blog, here.

By placing a + sign in front of the words, you can now tell AdWords to only show your advert for very closely related searches. The blog post states that “close variants include misspellings, singular/plural forms, abbreviations and acronyms, and stemmings (like “floor” and “flooring”). Synonyms (like “quick” and “fast”) and related searches (like “flowers” and “tulips”) aren't considered close variants”.

This is a big step in the right direction and something we look forward to working with.

A client of ours just received an email with the subject "Google AdWords: Ads stopped running", which looked like it was a warning from Google:

In case the picture is hard to see, the message within the email is:

Hello,

Your Google Adwords Account has stopped running this morning.

Some of the ads have stopped running today (Monday, 12 April 2010).

If you want to get your ad back up and running you need to optimize the campaign to improve the CTR. The link below has some helpful tips, but, in a nutshell, you need to look at your keywords and your ad text. Make sure your keywords are jighly relevant and then make sure that each keyword in the ad group makes sense in terms of the ad text associated with this ad group (usually this means you need to create more ad groups with a smaller number of keywords). Having a tight connection between keywords and ad text helps improve CTR, which should fix your problem. 

Click here to get your ads back up.

Please note: if you do not verify the status of your account and notify us if your ads do not appear online, we cannot help you.

The spelling errors and grammatical issues didn’t really convince us that this was Google and after a few seconds of investigation we were right. When the mouse hovered over the link it tried sending us to adwords.google-rs.com.

Whilst phishing emails like this one certainly aren’t new, they aren’t that common in the Pay Per Click world and this is one to watch out for. This particular client had their account temporarily suspended by Google last week due to “potential unauthorised access to this account”! A coincidence?

Over the past few weeks, Google has been softly launching a test program which allows businesses in two US cities to purchase 'enhanced listings' in the local results (the map that appears at the top of the search results).

By taking an enhanced listing, a business owner agrees to give Google just $25 a month and in return, their business appears in the search results with a “View Website” link next to their name. At present, with there only being a handful of businesses that are testing the system, these listings stand out so will likely get a good click through rate.

The internet marketing community is debating whether this is a good thing or not. Whilst many people feel that Google is selling far too much of its real estate and is devaluing the natural search results, others feel that this is a good opportunity for smaller, local businesses to advertise on the search engine.

By offering this service at such a low monthly cost, Google should be able to convert a lot of one-man-bands that either could not afford Pay Per Click advertising or did not understand how the system works. There are hundreds or thousands of these businesses in each city, so the amount of extra revenue for Google could be considerable.

How the general public will react to this is uncertain. Up until now, adverts have been clearly defined above and to the right of the search results, separated from the natural listings. People tend to trust the natural listings as non-commercial and websites appearing due to merit. Even though the enhanced local listings will display the word ‘sponsored’ next to them, mixing them up with normal results is likely to confuse and even anger users.

There is no news yet when this will be rolled out across the rest of the US and then the UK, though with recent amount of changes that Google has introduced to its search results, it probably won’t be far off.

A few days ago, Google announced that they would be launching their new social media service: Google Buzz. It’s currently being rolled out across the world, with some users still waiting to receive full access to the service, while others have already been able to try it out.

How does it differ to other social media platforms?

Google has worked hard to differentiate Buzz from other social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, which it does in a few different ways:

1. Integration with email

Google has integrated its successful email feature Gmail into Buzz, giving it an advantage over even the most popular social media platforms, whose email functions – if they have them – tend to be poor. Google is confident that Buzz users will see the advantage of not having to log into both a social media platform and separate email account.

2. Fast, full screen photo presentation

Buzz offers a photo viewing feature, which allows its users to view large, high quality photos that fill the screen and can be scrolled through at a high speed.

3. Buzz places high emphasis on location

Google believes that location is an important indicator of how relevant information is to you. Buzz can work out your location and is even able to ascertain the name of the building you are in.

4. Only shows posts which will interest you

Google has used it extensive knowledge of algorithms to create Buzz and shows this off by claiming that it will filter out posts that are not of interest to you – even if they are by your contacts – and vice versa: interesting posts by people you don’t already know. Then, depending on which tidbits you choose to approve or hide, its algorithm will attempt to gear more relevant and interesting results your way, personalised to your tastes.

Can it rival Facebook and Twitter?

What’s interesting is Buzz’s integration of other social media platforms, including Flickr and Twitter, but not with Facebook. Perhaps a deal is in the pipeline between the two, but until then it almost suggests that Google is content to live in harmony with Twitter (after all, Google recently paid $25m to index Twitter’s content), but with Buzz containing similar features to Facebook, it seems like Buzz’s main intention is to topple the current social media king.

It’s no secret that Facebook is currently dominating the social media market, with an official blog post on the site recently reporting that it had reached over 400 million users. While a completely fresh and unknown social media platform may struggle to compete with such a giant already in place, Google’s advantage is in its brand, which is already popular and established in almost every other aspect of the Internet - if anyone is going to compete with Facebook and Twitter, it’s going to be Google.

What should businesses do?

It’s too soon to tell whether Google’s new venture will take the world by storm or end up as a failed attempt, but at the very least, it’s certainly worth taking a look at and registering a profile, even if simply to get to grips with the interface and reserve your company name. For those who already have a Gmail account, getting started is easy, with current contacts automatically becoming friends/followers and therefore eliminating the registration process - not every social media site can claim to start off with millions of users raring to go.

A court of appeal in Paris has ruled against the search engine giant Google, in a case brought to it by the Centre National Prive de Formation a Distance (CNFDI). The long-distance learning institution filed the defamation suit last year when the Google “suggestion” feature linked the institution with the word “scam”.

The “suggestion” feature was implemented to make searching easier for users of Google, by offering the most common search queries based upon popular past searches. When a user typed “CNFDI” into Google.fr, the first result that showed in the “suggestion” drop-down was “CNFDI arnaque”, which translates as “CNFDI scam”.

The French court originally agreed with Google’s claim that these search terms are generated automatically, by an algorithm that is based on user search behaviour. However, after months of decreased interest in CNFDI and a drop in revenue, the court sided with the institution and told Google to remove the word.

Google hasn’t been having a great time in Europe lately. Last year a Dutch website was sued by a BMW dealer that is was showing as “bankrupt”, due to the Google algorithm linking the two together. Last month the French government suggested that Google be taxed every time a user clicks on one of their ads and last week a German minister accused Google of being too powerful and a “giant monopoly” that should either become more transparent or face legal action.