New regulations mean that from March 2011 companies will be subject to strict advertising rules as the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) extends its power over online marketing. In 2008 there were over 4500 complaints about internet marketing communications that the ASA did not have the authority to deal with. They will now be able to force marketers to remove any content or online advert found to be in breach of its regulations, giving the consumer much more protection.

False claims and misleading statements on websites, as well as untrue price comparison sites will be under the ASA’s control. These new regulations will give the ASA the capacity to position their own adverts in place of those of noncompliant advertisers. Companies that flout these rules will receive substantial negative publicity from the ASA which can damage an advertiser’s reputation.

Marketing statements on Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites will also be covered by the new regulations. This means that marketers will have to be careful to ensure that no offence is caused and that no misleading statements are used. Using foul language or sending malicious comments from official company accounts will result in complaints and possibly fines from the ASA.

Internet giant Google has provided extra funding for this extended remit and is completely co-operating with the ASA to help make the Internet a much safer place for the consumer. These regulations will provide an interesting challenge for marketers as some will have to change their current practices to comply.

A SURPRISING trend has come to light as the internet continues to develop. Retailers that succeed online are rarely the same as the successful giants found on the high street. Conversely, in our city and town centres we visit familiar shops with long established brands whose digital presence are often significantly newer, smaller and – crucially – a lot more profitable.

Well over a decade ago when online shopping began in earnest, the vast majority of businesses at the forefront of their offline markets concentrated on where they were doing well, and perhaps failed to see the possibilities for the future. These days, when shopping for clothes on the high street, Top Shop and Marks & Spencer remain omnipresent, with an established footing in almost every city. But online, it’s ASOS.com and Net-A-Porter that shoppers prefer.

So why is it that Play.com and Amazon sit comfortably at the top of the ecommerce pile, enjoying huge market share, while Zavvi, which was formerly Virgin, went out of business in very quick time, and HMV’s foray into the online world in no way reflects its dominance of the high street?

The online and offline markets differ greatly. Many of these large, established, offline giants stumbled into the world of online retail assuming the transition would be simple. This has been far from the case. Offline businesses often have to push their message onto consumers and convince them of their need for such products, and convince them to visit stores in order to prove they are the best-placed supplier. The internet features a ready-made market and, so long as your business is at the top of the search engines for popular search terms, you can capture the individuals already interested in your offering.

In reality, it is often a lot less expensive and less risky to attract business via the web than it is in the physical world. Yet many firms really struggle to capture an online audience which is anywhere near as profitable as what they are used to. This is usually down to the adaptability and attitude of the management.

Not only are different skills needed to succeed in ecommerce, but a different attitude is key. Many offline businesses simply do not set themselves up to win online. Trying to transfer traditional customer service approaches and pricing onto the web just doesn’t work. While a consumer might be willing to pay more to browse around a department store and receive one-on-one service, more often than not, on the internet, they want lowest cost and quickest delivery. So long as your website looks reputable and you appear in the search engine results, or are well positioned within the social media networks, you will start carving up a share of the market.

The other factor holding these bricks and mortar organisations back is their ability to change direction quickly. Decision makers within the large retailers are often slower to adapt to new consumer trends, which simply doesn’t work in the digital world. This isn’t completely their fault as an online store can open a new department in a matter of days or even hours, but how long would it take for Marks & Spencer to open up a section of brand new products in just one of its stores? Whereas a 50% off sale can be orchestrated within hours and start impacting profits almost immediately online, a high street retailer has to plan such events well in advance and can’t produce the point of sale items and advertising campaigns in such a short timescale.

There is hope for the traditional retailers and a way they can fight back – by combining their offline brand power with the new online marketing strategies.

The advantage that offline retailers have over new internet start-ups is existing marketing budgets and recognisable brands. Where they fail is to put these two together in the same way as an online marketer would. If they were to fight their internet competitors on their own turf – the search engines – and price themselves more competitively they would be able to use their brand recognition to not only attract a far greater share of traffic, but also convert a lot more of it too. If this were to happen, then it wouldn’t take long for the lists of most popular internet retailers to start filling up with brands that we’ve recognised for decades.

 

Article originally published on WalesHome.org: http://waleshome.org/2010/06/why-do-high-street-giants-stumble-online/

2009 was a landmark year for online marketing. The first six months of the year saw online ad spend overtake television to become the UK’s largest advertising sector for the first time. It was predicted that this trend would continue into 2010.

A recent report from the Internet Advertising Bureau, PricewaterhouseCoopers and the World Advertising Research Centre, has found that online ad spend in 2009 went on to surpass predictions, reaching £3.5 billion (a total increase in spend of 4.2% over the year). Online advertising has continued strengthening its position as the largest advertising sector into 2010 and has proven itself not to be just a blip, caused by recession-hit companies looking for cheaper ways to advertise, as was suggested by some academics in 2009.

The report shows that spend on paid search (Pay Per Click advertising) rose by 9.5% to £2.15bn in 2009. One of the consequences of this increase is that businesses using Google AdWords and MSN Adcenter to market a business are now competing against more bidders for advert positions and clicks.

One of the most surprising results from the report was the 140% increase in video advertising. This is partly due to companies using the internet to distribute their television adverts and also due to many hoping that a video released on the internet may go “viral”.

The increase in online advertising is thought to be due to the changing habits of UK citizens. The Internet is increasingly becoming a vital part of 21st century life and people are spending more time surfing. The changes in consumer habits towards mainstream Internet use has resulted in innovative marketing from companies that have had to re-think the way they advertise. As the results of the study show, many companies are completely restructuring their advertising strategies to include far more online advertising and turning their backs on the increasingly expensive, hard to track, traditional means of promotion.

Recently we published three posts about SEO and online marketing jargon (read them here). In this post, we take a look at some of the more unusual SEO slang that you may have come across.

Algoholic - Someone who pays close attention to search engine algorithms in order to improve and optimise their website(s) accordingly.

Bad neighbourhood - A phrase made popular by Google, linking to “bad neighbourhoods” can have a negative effect on a website’s search engine rankings. Known web spammers and link farms are examples of bad neighbourhoods, which the search engines recommend avoiding.

The Big G - A nickname for Google, which highlights its importance and relevance as the biggest search engine and also as the main rule-setter in the SEO world.

Caffeine - The codename given to the latest version of Google’s search engine, which is due to be launched after Christmas. Previous other codenames Google has given its updates include Vince, Big Daddy and Florida.

Dofollow - When the nofollow attribute was introduced in 2005, the term “dofollow” started to become synonymous to regular, followed links, those that pass on a SEO benefit to the search engines.

Google Bowling - The act of sabotaging a competitor’s site by intentionally trying to incur them a penalty and therefore banning them from the search engines. For example, if Site A is aware that buying links from a dodgy site is bad practice, rather than buying the links for themselves, they might buy them  for Site B - a direct competitor - in order to get them into trouble with the search engines. A major worry years ago, Google now claims to have ways to find out how links are acquired and even who has acquired them on your behalf.

GYM - The initials of the three main search engines: Google, Yahoo! and MSN (although MSN’s search engine has recently been renamed Bing).

Keyword cannibalization - An issue with a website’s architecture whereby a number of pages on a site are competing for a single keyword term or phrase. This can be confusing for the search engines as they will not know which of the pages to show in the search results for the relevant keyword.

Link condom - The method of providing a outbound link but purposefully not passing on an SEO benefit. For example, a website might reference a link that it knows to be dodgy for the purpose of a research article, in which case it could add a link condom to it (such as the nofollow attribute) so that the search engines do not think the linking site is willingly acknowledging a dodgy site in order to help its rankings, otherwise the linking site itself might get into trouble.

Link juice - The passing of trust and authority from one site to another.

Link love - The effect that a website will rank better in the search engines if it has numerous high quality inbound links pointing to it.

Spamdexing - The method of deceptively modifying web pages to increase the chance of them ranking higher in the search engines. The term is a combination of spamming and indexing.

Spider trap - A set of web pages that cause a spider, crawler or robot to get trapped. An example of an intentional trap would be one that stops spiders from collecting email addresses from a website for the purpose of sending spam emails. Also known as a crawler trap.

Splog - A spam blog, which has little to no use to human visitors and has been created solely to spam the search engines. Not to be confused with “spam in blogs”, which might concern a genuine blog with human readers that occasionally receives spam in its comments sections.

Stickiness - The act of reducing a website’s bounce rate and therefore improving its “stickiness”, meaning that a visitor will be more inclined to stay on the site and access other pages before moving on, rather than leaving straight away.

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.

Small business advertisers are investing more money in online advertising even though overall advertising budgets have been reduced, a recent report has shown.

The latest edition of the Local Commerce Monitor study by The Kelsey Group and ConStat has revealed that while small businesses have spent less overall on advertising than this time last year, they have increased their spending on online/digital advertising in the past year. In fact, for the first time ever, online media has overtaken traditional media in the way that small businesses are choosing to invest their advertising funds.

According to the report, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in the US decreased general advertising spending by 23.5% from August 2008 to August 2009. Of the total advertising undertaken by SMBs, online advertising rose from 22% to 36.8% over the same period. Over 300 SMBs were surveyed in total.

The overall reduction in advertising expenditure can easily be attributed to the ongoing economic downturn, with businesses worldwide trying to cut unnecessary costs and limit their spending.

So why the big increase in online marketing?

Apart from the ever-growing popularity of the Internet, particularly in Web 2.0 and social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, many avenues of online advertising can be tracked for increased value. For instance, Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising campaigns can be reviewed and amended according to their level of success, providing the advertiser with more flexibility and assurance in how they spend their budget and how their adverts are seen by their target market. Organic Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) may be more of a long-term strategy, but it, too, can be monitored in order to analyse its worth and success. In any case, observing prospects and conversions is certainly easier to manage through online advertising than through other mediums, such as print or television advertising.

Incidentally, the report found that in the last twelve months, more SMBs are using PPC and SEO as part of their online marketing campaigns. With the large increase in online advertising spending and with BBC News reporting today that the current recession may finally be coming to a welcome end in the UK, it will be interesting to see the progress and presence of online/digital marketing twelve months from now.

Freed & Co Solicitors approached us to help with their online marketing and SEO (search engine optimisation). They were having a new website developed and wanted to come up on the first page of the search engines for a mix of local and national keywords.  Their original site was built as a flash image, so had not been indexed by any search engines and didn’t contribute towards the marketing of the business.
 
How did we help improve their online marketing?
 
SEO copywriting – As the site was being developed, we advised them on the keywords to compete for. We then created new copy as well as amended existing copy, so that it held these keywords in the right places and presented the company well.
 
Inbound link building – A link building campaign took place for a number of months, to help give the site credibility within the search engines.
 
Pay Per Click advertising – A small but focused Google Adwords campaign was set up to bring in some quick traffic and new enquiries.
 
How has this helped the business?
 
Within a month of starting, website traffic was over 300% higher than it had ever been before and online enquiries had started to come in. Within a few months the website could be found on the first page of Google for national keywords like "property development solicitor" and local ones like "commercial conveyancing Cardiff" and "solicitor in Cardiff" and they had their first introductions as a result of this SEO work.

This is a follow up post to Confusing search engine marketing and SEO jargon made simple (A-F), where we hope to help demystify the world of search engine marketing.

Gateway pages – A website or web-page that exists to attract search engine traffic and re-direct it through to another site. Gateway pages (also known as doorway pages) are an example of black hat SEO and are frowned upon by search engine companies.

Googlebot – The name given to the spider used by Google to crawl over, and index, web pages.
 
Google dance – The changes seen in Google results, often around the time of a change to the algorithm or update to the index. The Google dance is something all SEO professionals will be familiar with and is often a time of great stress as rankings can shoot up and down quite dramatically.

HTML - Stands for HyperText Markup Language and is the programming language in which web pages on the internet are written.
 
Hub – A web page respected as having expert content, that links out to other sites of the same subject.
 
Inbound link – Hyperlinks coming into your website from others are inbound links. Important to search engine optimisation, as the more inbound links a website has from relevant, good quality sites, the more likely it is to rank highly and increase search traffic share.
 
Keyword – The word or phrase that a user submits into a search engine query.
 
Landing page – The first page a person lands on after clicking on a Pay Per Click advert or search engine listing.
 
Link bait – Content that has been created to attract in-bound links from other sites. Common types of link bait include informative articles, videos, audio, downloads, blog posts.
 
Link farm – A group of websites which exchange links between one another. Link farming is an example of black hat SEO and if discovered, can lead to a website being penalised by the search engines.
 
Long-tail – A more targeted search made using a number of words. Whilst a broad search might be “Mercedes coupe”, a long-tail example would be “Used black Mercedes CL500 coupe”. The amount of people using long-tail searches to find information is growing, so website owners need to be aware of both the broad and long-tail keywords used in their market.
 
META data – Information held within the HTML make-up of web-pages that describe to search engines what that page is about. The META title and META descriptions need to be written well as these are displayed to users within the search engine results, and should contain keywords the page is targeting (as should the META keywords list, obviously). META data are also often referred to as META Tags.
 
Monetisation – The process of turning a normal website into an income producing one. Placing adverts or becoming an affiliate are two of the most popular ways.
 
Natural listings – The web pages displayed on the left hand side of the search engine which are not labelled as “sponsored listings”. Search Engine Optimisation is the technique used to bring websites higher up in the natural search listings.
 
Nofollow – An instruction that can be placed on a web-page that tells search engines not to follow the links from the page. Nofollow can also be applied to individual links.
 
Noindex – An instruction that can be placed on a web-page that tells search engines not to index that page.

I recently spoke at an event, teaching small business owners some of the basics of search engine marketing and optimisation. A few times I used basic industry terminology which created a sea of puzzled faces. Hopefully the following list of the more common terms will help clear up any confusion caused by SEO jargon.

Adwords – The name for Google’s Pay Per Click advertising system. Businesses that use Adwords will find their adverts displayed on the Google search results labelled as “sponsored listings”.

Affiliate – A person or business that doesn’t sell products or services, rather existing to send traffic to retail sites and take a commission or fee for any sales generated.

Alt text – A description given to an image on a webpage. Not often shown to users unless their browser cannot show graphics but important to search engine optimisation as search engines use these tags as a factor in determining keywords.

Anchor text – The blue, underlined text displayed for a hyperlink. Placing your keywords in anchor text of links pointing to your site has a positive impact on SEO.

Black hat SEO – Techniques used to trick and manipulate search engines into ranking a webpage. Examples include cloaking, gateway pages and keyword stuffing. Black hat SEO is frowned upon by search engines and can lead to a site being penalised or banned from search results.

Bounce rate – The number of visitors who leave a site without visiting any pages other than the one they land on. Shown in a percentage in website analytics tools, for the majority of sites the lower the bounce rate the better.

Canonization – Strangely, search engines see http://www.yoursite.com and http://yoursite.com as separate sites, which can lead to duplicate content penalties. Canonizing one of these URLs tells the search engines to only focus on one, and can lead to improved search engine rankings.

Cloaking – To cloak a website is to show one version to the visitors, and another to the search engines. Cloaking is an example of black-hat SEO and if discovered on your site, could lead to a falling out with the search engines.

Content Management System  (CMS) – The software that many websites come with which allows people to easily add to, and update, content such as text and images. Blogging systems are a good example of simple, user friendly CMS.

Conversion rate – The percentage of visitors who reach a goal. Conversion goals include signing up to a newsletter, making a purchase, filling in an enquiry form, clicking an advert, etc.

Cost Per Click (CPC) – The amount of money each click costs a Pay Per Click advertiser, which can range from a penny to over £10, depending on the competitiveness of the keyword.

Duplicate content – Content on a website that is a copy, or very similar, to content that search engines have found elsewhere. Web-pages containing duplicate content are less likely to outrank the originals in the search engines.

Ecommerce – Selling products online. Many of the most popular sites on the internet are ecommerce based. Some sell a wide range of products, like traditional department stores, while some stick to one or two specialist lines of product.

Free For All (FFA) – The name given to web pages that allow anyone to place links on them. These pages are not very well respected by the search engines as a lot of the links are low quality and point to spammy websites.

A follow-up post for terminology starting with letters G-N will be made soon.

Kingswood Associates, the property finance and commercial mortgage specialist, asked Liberty Marketing to improve the ranking of its newly launched site at the beginning of 2009.

We already had a working relationship with Kingswood, managing their Pay Per Click advertising and email marketing, and now were responsible for greatly increasing traffic from the natural search listings.

The process involved a lot of on-site and off-site work, including:

SEO consultancy – We provided keyword research to find the phrases that could be competed for, would bring in traffic and would fit in with the business objectives. We then worked with Kingswood to build an online marketing strategy based on the main keywords chosen.

SEO copywriting – Amendments were made to many pages and entirely new ones were created to give the site more strength in the search engines. Keywords now feature more prominently where needed on each page and within the site structure.

Inbound link building – An intensive, on-going link building campaign has been in place where the site is connected to relevant directories and websites. The link building service generates direct traffic as well as helps push the site up the search results.

How has this benefited the business?

Within a few months the company has gone from barely being found on the search engines to coming up on the first page of Google for many local terms such as “mortgages Cardiff”, “mortgage brokers Cardiff”   and “buy to let mortgages Cardiff” as well as some competitive national phrases such as “residential mortgage broker” (coming in the top 5 listings out of over 3 million results).

Having such a large presence on the search engines has led to thousands of new visitors coming to the site over the past few months, and new mortgage enquiries every day of the week.

There is now enough traffic that the Pay Per Click advertising spend has be greatly reduced, meaning that Kingswood is now enjoying high levels of traffic and enquiries but is actually spending far less money on marketing.