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.

What's Next, the Social Media and online marketing event will be returning in a few months and will be a lot bigger and better than the successful event earlier this year.

On February 6th 2012 in the University of Glamorgan ATRiuM building in Cardiff city centre, members of Liberty will be speaking, exhibiting and having a general mingle and chat with visitors.

Visitors get to choose from a wide range of seminar topics but can only fit a few into the day. If you are attending then make sure you come see the seminar that Gareth from Liberty is putting on. For an hour, you will learn numerous useful internet marketing tips, including how to:

• Create a Content Strategy that will make all future SEO work and Social Media campaigns a lot easier
• Find long-tail keyword opportunities and questions that your target market need answering
• Become the industry leader in your market by following simple processes

This will be the seminar that ties all social media marketing, search engine marketing and content marketing topics together, so should not be missed by anyone looking to make an impact online.

More information is on the site: http://whatsnextevent.co.uk/blog/social-media-speakers/gareth-morgan/

See you there!

Gareth presented this week at the annual Science and Discovery Centres Marketing Managers Conference. The keynote speech focussed on the importance of content and how great articles, blog posts, images and videos can make SEO and social media campaigns a lot easier.

Here's a link to the slides:

http://www.slideshare.net/MrGarethMorgan/content-strategy-how-to-become-the-industry-authority-online

Or you can view them below:

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!

In SEO, the goal for a number of businesses seems to be to rank for their industry's main keyword. It may be an absolute dream for a small shoe shop to optimise its website for the keyword "shoes" for example, but the reality is that it may be nearly impossible when the competition is made up of big-name brands such as Office, Barratts and Schuh, whose budgets and resources will be far greater in comparison.

This may seem obvious, yet we occasionally meet businesses who think this type of goal is realistically achievable and the best course of action. Beyond that, there are some marketers working for big-name brands who care so much about the 'head' term that they risk neglecting other keyword areas and search terms, which could have a potentially damaging effect on their overall SEO efforts.

The head term vs. the long tail

To highlight the difference between the head term and the 'long tail' (the rest of the searches related to head term), we used the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to work out the difference in search volume as a percentage.

According to the Keyword Tool, [shoes] on exact match (i.e. Google users typing in the exact phrase "shoes" into Google with nothing before or after it) is searched for 165,000 times per month in the UK. This statistic alone sounds amazing - imagine being on page 1 of Google for that keyword and receiving a share of the visitors! But how many people use Google for any keyword containing or relating to "shoes?" The answer: 9,140,000 UK searches per month!

This is the broad match figure: according to Google's definition, broad match includes "synonyms, singular/plural forms, relevant variants of your keywords and phrases containing your keywords."

To give you an idea, this will include other high-volume keywords...

- "wedding shoes" (49,500 UK searches per month)
- "shoes online" (27,100)
- "cheap shoes" (18,100)

...All the way down to the really specific searches:

- "discount womens shoes" (58 UK searches per month)
- "buy ladies shoes online" (22)
- "uk online shoe store" (12)

If you compare the keyword [shoes] on exact match to its broad match version (e.g. the Long Tail), [shoes] occupies only 1.8% of the entire share of searches in the market:

Therefore, someone chasing [shoes] and nothing else risks missing out on 98% of the market searching for shoes using Google.

The risks of chasing the head

We recently heard of an example of an independent shoe shop that only sells ballerina pumps, whose website coincidentally ranked well organically for "shoes" searches relating to their location (e.g. "shoes london"). Although this sounds great on the surface and would have been great for general exposure, it was actually quite useless to them. Using them as an example, they probably found the head term for their industry & city to be:

- Not specific enough: If someone is searching for shoes, are they looking for tennis shoes, running shoes, kids shoes, ladies shoes, boots, trainers, sandals...? Unless they happen to be looking for ballerina pumps, the site appearing for their search would have been worthless to them, unless they sold all types of shoes imaginable.

- Harder to convert: For the above reason, it is much harder converting this type of traffic into customers, especially if it is not what they are really looking for. Likewise, it would be a surprise if they were unable to convert people searching for "ballerina pumps in london," for example - the type of product they sell twinned with their location.

- More expensive: In this instance, if the ballerina shoe shop were to use Google AdWords and target national traffic, the approximate CPC (cost per click) for "shoes" is £0.65, according to their Keyword Tool. However, "ballerina shoes" and "ballerina pumps" are £0.47 and £0.36, respectively. The latter two search terms may get fewer people searching for them - due to their specificity - but they are cheaper, more specific and therefore easier to convert for this particular shop/website. They could effectively be spending less money in advertising but earning more back in the sales they receive from this type of traffic.

Grabbing the tail

As the long tail is generally a less competitive sector of the market compared to the head term, it is usually a lot easier to target and chase this type of traffic.

So instead of going all out and aiming for "shoes," time can be spent building links and writing content that targets the long tail searches, examples of content including advice articles, news stories, top tips and how-to guides. Go for enough of them and combined they might actually thwart the head term in terms of volume. Not only that but they will likely draw in a better quality of traffic to the website, who will be more likely to buy the products or services on offer to them.

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.

A recommendation made by the Advocate General of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) could lead to restrictions on bidding on competitors' brand names and trademarks in Google AdWords.

The adviser recommended that the ECJ should rule against Marks & Spencer for bidding on keywords such as "interflora" as well as variations including misspellings of the trademark and phrase versions including "interflora flowers."

Interflora, who started taking legal action against Marks & Spencer over two years ago, has been unhappy that M&S were paying Google to appear in the Sponsored Links section of the search engine results for its own name. They argued that as M&S' adverts bore no relevance to Interflora, they were taking an "unfair advantage of [their] brand, in breach of trade mark law."

Evidently, the Advocate General agrees, stating that a brand should be allowed to stop a competitor from advertising on its own name as a keyword "in the case where that ad does not enable an average internet user, or enables the said user only with difficulty, to ascertain whether the goods or services referred to in the ad originate from the proprietor of the trademark or an undertaking economically connected to it or from a third party." In other words, if an advert could be confusing and has nothing to do with the brand keyword being searched, then they should not be targeting that particular keyword. After all, a searcher may think that M&S' advert appears when they've searched for Interflora because they're associated with each other or working together.

The potential ruling's implications

The Advocate General's ruling may be non-binding, but it is a signal that the ECJ is likely to lean in that direction and rule in favour of Interflora and against M&S. If so, this landmark case could affect online advertisers throughout Europe when it comes to competing with their competitors' names on Google AdWords.

Bidding on competitor brand terms is not new. In addition to being a practice where one brand might attempt to sway potential customers from another brand, the number of impressions a keyword receives can also provide a valuable insight into the strength and popularity of a brand on a day-by-day basis. For example, as this is typed, Confused.com, Gocompare.com and Comparethemarket.com are all bidding on each other's names:

Bidding by accident?

Perhaps the biggest implication is the ruling's effect on accidental brand term bidding. This will be an issue for phrase term brand searches (e.g. "interflora flowers," "confused.com car insurance," etc.) or if a brand's name contains or is made up of a generic product/service keyword.

For example, if M&S' advert appears for the keyword "interflora" then it is obvious that they are bidding directly on their competitor's name. However, if the advert appears for "interflora flowers," is it because they are bidding on that keyword or because they are bidding on just the keyword "flowers" on broad or phrase match? What about companies that have keywords in their name, such as flowersdirect or Flying Flowers?

The above screenshot shows Interflora's ad showing for a search for "flying flowers," probably because they bid on the keyword "flowers."

Admittedly, Flying Flowers may not be trademarked, but what if it were? Will advertisers be expected to add every single trademarked competitor to their negative keyword list, or only bid on exact match and therefore require an extensive exact match keyword list? Will Google step in and automatically discount popular brand and trademark names and variations? Would it even be able to, without the need to acquire a mammoth list of trademark names?

The impact on Google

Speaking of Google, the ruling will have implications for them as well.

Any restrictions on keywords will result in less money being spent by advertisers, and a restriction on this scale could make a significant dent in the amount they earn from AdWords. If advertisers stick more to exact match keywords, if they are worried about bidding on trademarks via broad and phrase match, they could see even more of a drop-off in the amount of keywords that advertisers bid on.

Is it wrong to bid on competitor brand terms?

Obviously Interflora is pleased by the Advocate General's recommendation, wanting "to protect [their brand] for our customers, florists and the future." But what do others think of the recommendation? Patrick Altoft of BlogStorm argues that it's "a win for common sense. Loads of people bid on competitors trademarks but nobody in the industry really likes it." As mentioned previously however, bidding on a competitor is more than just stealing their traffic: it can give real, accurate data on how many people search for a brand, so this information will be lost as well, with marketers having to rely on Google's Keyword Tool and Google Insights instead.

Evidently it will come down to this: those who benefitted greatly from bidding on their competitors will be unhappy with the recommendation, while those who were taken advantage of (such as Interflora) will consider the potential ruling to be fair and will help them to get the clicks that they feel they deserve.

Either way, it will certainly change the landscape for PPC advertising in the UK and Europe.

When Google Instant was introduced a few months ago, there were assumptions early on that the introduction of Instant would have a negative effect on 'long tail' keywords (longer, wordier keywords which receive less search volume), encouraging those making it their SEO or PPC strategy to target these types keywords to change their ways. The general argument was this: if someone is halfway through typing a phrase and they're presented with results, they could be distracted and click on an earlier result, meaning that they will have searched on a shorter phrase.

Fast forward to the present day and the conclusion for many still seems to be to focus on root/head terms more than they might have done previously, and it's true that some long tail has seen a drop or even a plummet in search volume (just look at the month-on-month patterns on "[type] insurance comparison site" searches on Google's Keyword Tool, compared to "[type] insurance comparison" or just "[type] insurance").

Even recently, one of the speakers at the recent SES London event talked about how Google Instant "is cutting off the long tail," as mentioned by an attendee's tweet.

However, one thing we've noticed is that the long tail isn't dead. Far from it. In fact, we've seen some long tail keywords achieve the same or higher search volumes than shorter, less wordy keywords in the same industry since the introduction of Google Instant. Recently we undertook some keyword research for a website targeting "young driver insurance" keywords. What surprised us was how "cheap car insurance for young drivers" had the same number of searches per month as "car insurance for young drivers" (18,100 searches on exact match, respectively).

We also noticed that "cheap car insurance for young female drivers" - a very long keyword - had a respectable 1,000 searches each month, which is more than many other shorter keywords in the same industry.

Notice the differences between them? Our long tail keyword terms have "cheap" in front of them. If we take young drivers for example, a demographic which is often hit with expensive insurance, it is understandable that the young driver's mentality is to start their search with the word "cheap" - perhaps their intended search was "cheap car insurance" and that'll do.

However, as they start to type that phrase...

..."cheap car insurance for young drivers" might catch their eye. They're a young driver, so this suggestion will appeal to them.

Add "for"...

...and more suggestions are thrown up. If they're a young student or a 17 year old in particular then one of the other suggestions might catch their eye instead.

Add "young"...

...and "...young female drivers" is a suggestion. This might explain why that keyword in particular has a surprisingly large volume of traffic - searchers fitting that demographic might not have intended to search on that keyword originally, but after seeing it suggested to them, combined with the fact that it fits their demographic, they've pursued it and chosen it as their search term.

This suggests that the long tail hasn't died off at all, as might have been previously assumed, but what it does mean is that the long tail has potentially changed its form. The start of the tail (i.e. the first few keywords that a searcher types into Google) has become more important, and therefore businesses targeting certain keywords should try to understand the psychology of their customers/searchers. As seen in our example, the young drivers after insurance were searching for "cheap car insurance," not just "car insurance."

However, it can be argued that this hasn't been caused by Google Instant, but by Google Suggest (a.k.a. Google Auto-Suggest), which has been around for years, predating Instant by quite some time. Either way, the most important takeaway is to identify what a potential visitor might be thinking, looking beyond the obvious and expected and trying to think more like the customer - something a bit of keyword research can really help with.

Google has acquired the UK financial price comparison site BeatThatQuote for £37.7m.

The acquisition, which took place yesterday, suggests Google’s desire to strengthen its position in the financial services market. Previously, it has tested mortgage Comparison ads in the UK, allowing searchers to use Google itself in order to compare mortgage rates.

BeatThatQuote, which was founded in 2005, offers loan, mortgage, credit card and insurance comparison services and is in direct competition with major aggregator sites such as Confused.com, Moneysupermarket.com and Gocompare.com.

This development must be worrying for UK financial comparison sites – made up of some of the biggest and most successful sites in the UK – who may be concerned that Google could promote BeatThatQuote’s or its own stature on its search engine, with a greater bias over competing sites. Although Google has most likely acquired the comparison site for its software, which it can then use and fine-tune to better its own Comparison Ads, The Guardian reports that Google may continue to run BTQ as a “standalone brand,” before steering the comparison site towards “increasing tie-ups with the search engine itself.”

Perhaps one of the more interesting and unusual aspects of the acquisition are the observations made by Aaron Wall of SEO Book, who – through conducting some SEO and link analysis – has identified that BeatThatQuote is actually currently violating Google’s guidelines, through grey and black-hat SEO techniques, including buying links that pass PageRank. Was Google aware of this before the acquisition? Will it now penalise its own site? Only time will tell.

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!