Oxford House Menswear is a clothing retailer based in South Wales and offers plus sized items under its OH Big Man brand. The business has used Pay Per Click advertising to generate sales for a number of years and recognised the potential and importance in improving natural search engine rankings.
 
OH Menswear engaged the services of other local SEO companies before speaking to us and was disappointed with the results. Undeterred, they were recommended our services and in mid 2009 asked us to help develop their SEO with the goal of significantly greater website traffic and sales.
 
How did we improve their online marketing?
 
Keyword research- We explored the keywords used by their target markets as well as the levels of competition for each one. We then made recommendations on where to concentrate efforts so that a large return could be made quickly.
 
SEO advice - Once keywords were decided upon we advised on ways the site should incorporate them, both in the makeup of the page (titles and meta data, etc.) and within areas of the body copy.
 
Inbound link building - A link building campaign took place where we sought in-bound links from sites related to clothing and e-commerce.

What did this do?
 
At the time of writing there were over 7 million web pages indexed on Google for "XXL Shirts" and OH Menswear have been sat in the first position for a number of months. They also appear on the first page for a number of other important keywords such as "large mens clothing" and "Ben Sherman XXL". Coming up high on the search engines for these keywords has brought in a lot of new, high quality traffic and has meant that the business could greatly reduce its Pay Per Click advertising spend.
 
How has this helped OH Menswear?
 
Online marketing is now a crucial part of OH Menswear. Sales have been growing month on month throughout 2009 and last month sales were up 82% when compared to the same period in 2008. This is remarkable when you look at the market they are in, one where most retailers are currently posting losses and the highest profile competitor, High & Mighty, recently went into administration. The business has actually had to take on additional premises to cope with the increase in orders from within the UK and, for the first time, from various countries around the world.

We manage the pay per click advertising campaigns for a number of businesses and often see a problem with the way they have been set-up – no use of negative keywords.

Using negative match means choosing the keywords you DON’T want your ads to appear for. When running a pay per click campaign, such as Google AdWords, it is vital that you include negative keywords, especially if the keywords you are bidding on are broad or phrase matched.

Negative match will stop the advert being shown if the keyword is featured in the search query. By stopping your adverts from appearing for phrases that are not relevant, not only will you no longer be paying for clicks that you do not want, but as your overall click through rate will be higher, your advert quality score will improve. A higher quality score means you will start rising up the advert rankings without having to pay more for each click.

An example of how negative matching can help is for a business that sells DVDs. A look at the Google keyword tool shows these as the top search results for “DVD” last month:

dvd = 24900000
dvds = 5000000
dvd player = 1830000
dvd players = 1000000
dvd recorder = 823000
dvd drive = 450000
dvd for sale = 368000
dvd sale = 368000
dvd software = 301000

As you can see, a lot of the searches containing the phrase “DVD” are not made by people looking to make a purchase. Having an advert appear for the search “DVD recorder” would not be a good way for a DVD disk retailer to get the most out of their online advertising budget. By placing the keyword “recorder” as a negative, it will prevent the advert for ever appearing for this search term again.

Negative keyword match is put in place simply by placing a minus/dash symbol in front of the keywords. The initial list of negative keywords that would help this shop improve their pay per click advert performance would look like this:

-dvd player
-dvd players
-dvd recorder
-dvd drive
-dvd software

Use the Google keyword tool to find the searches that your adverts appear for and see if there are any you would rather they didn’t. Use negative match to exclude these keywords and you’ll soon start seeing an increase in click through rates and an improved return on investment.

If you want to improve your click through rate (the frequency with which people click on your Google Pay Per Click adverts) then you should consider Dynamic Keyword Insertion, using this syntax: {keyword: }

The idea behind Dynamic Keyword Insertion is simple. When keywords in a search term appear in the heading or body of an AdWords advert they appear in bold. Bold adverts attract more attention so people are more likely to click on them. As are adverts that contain the exact keywords that a person is searching for. Wouldn’t it be great then if every pay per click advert contained the exact keywords being searched for in bold? They can…

Instead of creating hundreds of separate adverts for every synonym and plural of a keyword, try using Dynamic Keyword Insertion. Group keywords up and place the syntax in the heading. This makes Google automatically use the searched keywords as the title of your advert, improving the likelihood of the searcher clicking on your advert and visiting your website.

Make sure you only use this for keywords grouped together and ones that share the same landing page on your site. Otherwise you run the risk of sending searchers to pages that aren’t relevant, which they’ll just click away from, wasting your budget.

Using Dynamic Keyword Insertion also improves your AdWords Quality Score. As one of the determining factors in calculating Quality Score is the click through rate (CTR) of an advert, the use of the Dynamic Keyword Insertion syntax will lead to better positioning of your ads without you increasing your spend on each click.

Advanced Dynamic Keyword Insertion techniques:

You’ll notice a gap in the syntax {keyword: }. This is for you to place a default heading, to be shown should the search term be longer than the 25 character limit. The full syntax should therefore look something like {keyword: Default Keyword Here}

Capitalising the K and the W will make all keywords displayed begin with a capital letter, another factor in high click through rates: {KeyWord: Default Keyword Here}

Try using the syntax within either lines of the advert body copy instead of, or as well as, the heading.

Before deciding to roll it out to the rest of your ads, or deciding to cancel the experiment, remember the golden rule – measure the results.

SEO (search engine optimisation) has become a mainstream marketing practice used by businesses large and small, all over the globe. Most companies recognise that to take advantage of the keyword searches within their markets they need to outsource their SEO to a specialist online marketing agency. What a lot of these businesses aren’t aware of is that there are two different types of search engine optimiser: white-hat (ethical) and black-hat (unethical). Choosing a black-hat SEO could mean techniques are used that go directly against what the search engines favour.

If black-hat is bad, then why does it exist?

There are two main reasons why SEO’s aren’t all using white-hat, best practices techniques to improve client rankings:

1. Black-hat SEO can work. It can bring in quick results but the downside is it opens your site up to long-term risk. If you have agreed to pay a search engine optimisation to get you to the top of Google then white-hat techniques can take months, whereas using some unethical tricks they could have you there a lot quicker. The problem you’ll face is that once Google spots that these methods have been used to manipulate the search results you will soon find your website has been penalised or even dropped from the index altogether, resulting in plummeting traffic levels.

2. Black-hat SEO is easy. A lot of research is needed to stay ahead in search engine marketing. At Liberty we spend tens of hours each month and thousands of pounds each year on researching and testing the latest techniques. For many companies this isn’t an option, so they choose to stick to old black-hat techniques that they know inside out.

What black-hat techniques should you look out for?

The most common types on unethical optimisation include keyword stuffing, cloaking and invisible text.

Keyword stuffing – When keywords are used in too great a volume.  You will no doubt have seen this on websites where the same keyword is repeated over and over in a piece of copy or where a long list of keywords are bundled together at the bottom of a page.

Cloaking – Presenting one version of a page to the search engines and another to the visitor. If you’ve ever searched for something and found yourself surprised that the website you clicked on is for something completely different then this is probably an example of cloaking.

Invisible text – Making the background colour and the colour used for the text the same. You can only see the text if you select it so although it looks like a big open use of colour, it’s trying to trick the search engines into scanning a whole load of extra copy.

Despite it being common knowledge for years that these techniques could get your site banned, many SEO companies still use them. If you see examples of these in use by your potential online marketing agency then run a mile.

Probably the most common mistake I see on websites is that the pages are all created in the exact same way. Many sites will have the same page descriptions or keywords across their whole site, rather than using each pages as separate way of competing for keywords. If two pages are talking about different topics, but appear to be optimised for the same keywords, then it is likely to confuse the search engine spiders which they should rank. Treating each page separately is one of the strongest ways of increasing the search engine friendliness of your website.

What should you do?

Create a list of the keywords you want to be found for and then assign each web page with one of these keyword. When you have decided upon your list of main keywords and the pages that best represent each one you need to really optimise that page for the keyword. To do this you:

- Make sure the keyword features in the URL of the page (if you have a static site or use a CMS system that allows URL re-writing)
- Place the keyword in the page Title tag (close to the beginning)
- Make sure the keyword features in the start of the meta keywords list for the page
- Put the keyword in the meta description of the page (close to the beginning)
- Write the body copy so that the keyword features for around 5% of the text
- If you can then you should put the keyword in the H1, H2, H3 tags
- If an image is on that page then add the keyword to the image Alt text
- If possible, add the keywords into the links that point to that page from other places on your site

By following the above pattern for each page you will have the start of a strongly SEO’d site, and therefore better chance of ranking for your keywords than the many businesses that write the same page titles for their whole site, or are trying to optimise every page for the exact same keywords.

Online marketing intelligence company, Hitwise, has recently released a report showing that the number of words being typed into search engines is growing. It seems that internet users have taught themselves that the longer the keyword phrase, the more relevant the websites shown in the results.

The report, based on search engine usage in the US, shows a continuing rise in the percentage of people typing in over three keywords when using Google and the other search engines.

This is good news for smaller businesses, as one and two keyword phrases are often very competitive and dominated by larger, well funded, and well optimised competitors. Optimising your site for longer search phrases can bring in very targeted traffic and is much easier to rank highly for.

How can you start taking advantage of these “long tail keywords”? Head over to the Google keyword tool and type the your main one and two keyword phrases in your market. In the results you’ll see some of the related long tail keywords that people search on. Some of these will be much more specific to what you offer and will still have a nice level of traffic. Work out which ones are worth competing for and start optimising your web-pages, your copy and your in-bound links for these words. If you don’t know how to do that you can always call us (029 2076 6467).

Another in a long line of great internet marketing tools from Google is Insights for Search.

It allows you to see search trends for keywords across the globe. You can filter results by country and search term and it has an indicator of news related to chosen keywords, so you can see the effect the media had on search volume.

This is the kind of toy that digital marketers and webmasters play around with for hours, but is it of any use to the small business owner?

Almost certainly. It can help you identify large areas of traffic and see if the number of people looking for what you offer is growing or shrinking.

Pretend you run a magazine and website that reviews cars but you don’t really know where to best spend your time. Using the Google Insights for Search tool will allow you to see the kind of cars that people are interested in exploring further, and therefore the ones you should dedicate more space to. For example, search on “BMW” and add “Mercedes” as a second search term, filter the results to the UK in the past 12 months. The figures show that a lot more people in the UK search for information on BMW models than they do on Mercedes. You now know that, everything else being equal, reviewing BMWs would make your site appeal to a larger audience that one that reviews Mercedes.

You can use this tool to get an idea of where a market is heading and can see if your business is keeping up. Keywords surrounding Payday loans have risen almost 300% in the past 12 months. If your business offers other types of loan then is this an area that you should consider expanding into? If your business already offers Payday loans but your enquiry levels haven’t risen then shouldn’t you fire your marketing team?

One word of caution though. As the tool is still in BETA testing phase I’d take the figures with a pinch of salt and not bet my entire marketing budget on the results shown.