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.

Howells Solicitors is one of the five largest law firms in Wales, specialising in residential and commercial property conveyancing as well as various legal services for businesses and individuals. The firm approached Liberty at the end of 2009 to discuss how we could help them become a market leader online.

The problem

Howells was not appearing on the first page of the search engines for any of its keywords and was receiving very little website traffic. The number of enquiries being generated by the site was only a couple a month and this needed to improve dramatically.

The solution

We offered an intensive online marketing strategy which included:

- Pay Per Click adverts on Google AdWords
- SEO copywriting, where we re-wrote sections of their site to better incorporate keywords
- Inbound links were built to their site from other legal resources
- Google Local listings were set up for their five offices

The result

Within a few days their site started climbing the search engines and within a month traffic had more than doubled. The website can now be found on the front page of Google for hundreds of local keywords, including “solicitors Cardiff” and “Solicitors South Wales” but also many national terms, such as “commercial lease solicitor” and “lease solicitors”.

These results, along with a controlled Pay Per Click spend have meant that now, six months on, traffic is still rising each month and there are numerous online enquiries each day.

Testimonial

“From working closely with the team at Liberty Marketing, we have found that Search Engine Optimisation is a brilliant tool for increasing our enquiries and a lot more cost effective than previous print campaigns that we have undertaken. We specialise in several legal areas of law and have found that Liberty can deliver enquiries to us through our website in all areas. We also have the ability to target specific areas that we would like to concentrate on with minimum fuss. The website is now a brilliant tool to use to gain business.”

Tristan Lewis, Business Development Manager, Howells Solicitors

In essence, SEO (search engine optimisation) is two areas: keywords and links. Whilst most people who have a website have thought about keywords and most website designers will help include these in the important parts of your web pages, links are often an afterthought, if considered at all.

This can be good news for your businesses as if you haven’t bothered seeking out links then your competitors probably haven’t either. If you start getting the type of in-bound links that the search engines like, then your site will soon start to rise to the top of the search results, bringing you much more traffic and enquiries.

Why are links so important?

The search engines need to be viewed as a popularity contest. Just because your website says that you sell cheap widgets doesn’t mean Google believes it. You need other websites to point Google towards yours, with each link acting as a vote of confidence. This means that Google finds your site more often and pays more attention as other sites it trusts are telling it about yours.

Where should you get links from?

There are many different types of link and it is important to build a diverse link profile, so seek links from a wide range of sites. Here are a few of the more common areas:

1. Directories. Directories list and link to other websites. It is a good idea to request links from popular general directories, such as DMOZ and Hot Frog, as well as niche ones that specialise in listing sites from within your industry. Quality is key with directories, so if it looks like a site full of spammy listings then move on and find another.

2. Blogs. Commenting on other blogs is popular in the link building world as you can choose the text displayed in the link and the page on your site that it links to. Blog comments can also bring high quality traffic but you need to leave a valuable comment and not spam them with some meaningless drivel.

3. Link requests. Send an email to other websites asking them to link to yours. If it is someone you know, such as a supplier or friend, then they will probably not hesitate to help. If it’s an unknown website then you may need to provide a reason why they should, e.g. an interesting article or special offer they can link to.

How do you find these links?

There are numerous ways of finding links but we only have a few hundred words here to try and describe what can be a full time job. Have a play around with these search strings and vary the words to find an array of sites that are easy link targets (substituting the word ‘keyword’ for your keyword or keyphrase):

If you are looking for directories then try typing this into Google:

keyword “add URL”
keyword “submit site”
keyword “suggest website”

Want to find relevant blogs? Try these and see what comes up:

keyword “add comment”
keyword “powered by Wordpress”

The entire ranking algorithm that Google uses is based on the concept of link popularity, so focusing on this area can bring in huge improvements to your search engine rankings. By doing nothing but building links, we have helped many businesses reach very high Google rankings for very competitive keywords. It really does work, so best of luck!

Last week saw PubCon, an SEO and online marketing conference in Las Vegas. Each year thousands of professional web developers and marketers meet up to hear about the latest changes in the world of search engines and PubCon 2009 offered a lot of information for them all to think over.

One of the most prominent speakers at the event was Matt Cutts, head of Web Spam at Google. Whenever Cutts speaks, search engine marketers listen, as there are very valuable insights into the ways Google works and the possible changes in how they rank websites.

Even though Liberty was not in attendance, we have kept an eye on what was discussed and have chosen to highlight a few of the points which were discussed as potential future rankings factors.

1. A website that loads quickly = good

The time it takes your web pages to load could have an effect on how Google ranks your site. Cutts said that while a site with slow pages won't necessarily drop in the rankings, one which acts quickly could rise. This is good news for businesses that invest in quality websites and hosting. This is an SEO factor that you have complete control over and if you give users a better experience, then Google could recognise this by rewarding your site a more prominent position in the search results.

2. Repeating keywords in footer links = bad

Cutts was asked to review specific websites and on one there were many keyword rich internal links which he viewed negatively. Many of these links were from the footer and to deep pages within the site. If you have a website where you have stuffed keywords into the anchor text of your footer then this may be something you want to re-address.

3. Blocking the Internet Archive = bad

Sites that block the home of the Wayback Machine can be viewed as waving a spam flag at Google. Many websites choose not to let the Internet Archive index their site, something that Cutts believes is the type of behaviour associates with spammy websites. You may want to check to see if your site is blocking archive.org and if you have no legitimate reason for this, get the block removed.

Whilst neither of these two negative factors is enough to get your site Google slapped, it’s always sensible to follow best-practice guidelines as it may only take a few of these spam indicators to push your site from one that is ranking well to one that is never seen in the search results again.

On that topic, another comment was made, regarding domains that have been banned from the search results – that it may be easier to write it off and start again. It looks like Google engineers may not be able/want to sift through websites that have been penalised, looking through on-page SEO and link quality, so re-inclusion requests may go unanswered. If you have been involved in black-hat practices then you might have more luck starting a new domain and trying again with a little less trickery.

This is a follow up post to Confusing search engine marketing and SEO jargon made simple (A-F) and More confusing search engine marketing and SEO jargon made simple (G-N).

Outbound link - Hyperlinks leading out of your website to other websites are known as outbound links.

PageRank - The value given to a web-page by Google. Ranging from 0 to 10 (with 10 being the best), the rank is primarily made up on the basis of in-bound link quality and quantity.

Paid link - When a website pays another website, search engine or directory for a link. Although not a black hat SEO technique per se, Google frowns upon such practices, however commercial sites must pay in order to appear in the Yahoo! Directory. Also known as Pay For Inclusion (PFI).

Pay Per Click (PPC) - The advertising system where businesses pay for each click their advert receives. The adverts are mainly displayed on search engine pages and once clicked, the user will be sent through to the website belonging to the advertiser.

Reciprocal link - When two websites exchange links with each other, this is known as reciprocal linking. An activity that used to be more popular than it is today, since the search engines started discounting the value of reciprocal links. Also known as link exchanging or link partnering.

Robots file - The robots.txt file is stored within a website and tells search engines what they can do with the website, such as the pages not to show in the index and links not to follow.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) - The process of improving a website’s rankings in the search engines and therefore its traffic volume.

SERPs - Stands for Search Engine Results Pages and is simply the results you see when you perform a search query.

Social media - A term used to describe a variety of websites where people meet to share information and often express their opinions. Blogs, forums, video hosting sites, user review sites and wiki's, are examples of popular social media sites.

Sitemap - A page on a website that lists and links to all of the other accessible pages on that website. Useful not only for users but for the search engine spiders.

Spider - A search engine robot that jumps from website to website, via hyperlinks, for the purpose of scanning information to add to the search engine’s database.

URL - The Uniform Resource Locator, or more simply, the address of the webpage.

White hat SEO - Techniques used to improve website rankings that confirm to best practice guidelines and do not try to manipulate or trick the search engines into ranking a specific site.

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.

Google is showing a growing fondness of social media sites, Twitter in particular. Pages from the micro-blogging site are being displayed higher and given more respect than ever before. Twitter is now a viable way for businesses to place their brand at the top of the search engines, but only if they treat the micro-blogging site with the same SEO rules that are commonplace in the rest of the web marketing world, namely keywords and links.
 
Most of these tips are based on keywords use and how to maximise your twitter account for your main keywords. Doing so will help it rank in the search results independently of your main website. Remember, Twitter uses the nofollow attribute on its out-bound links so they do not help with the SEO of your main site. Twitter shouldn't be used as a way of getting lots of free links to your site, but as a way of finding traffic and directing it there instead.
 
Here's five quick SEO tips to bear in mind when using Twitter:
 
1. Use keywords in your account name
 
If possible, then keywords should be included within the Twitter account name. This is easier said than done as with only 15 characters to choose from and most of the popular word combinations taken, it can be hard to select something that fits and is available. Take a look on the Google Keyword Tool to see what people are searching for and try to pick keywords which  receive a fair amount of searches each month. Include one or two of these in your account name and you are already off to a strong start.
 
2. Make the most of your bio
 
Choose a handful of your most important keywords and make sure they are included within the Twitter biography section. You have 160 characters so can construct a nice meaningful, keyword-rich sentence or two, which the search engines will be sure to look at when evaluating the page.
 
3. Always tweet with your keywords in mind
 
When posting ("tweeting") messages into your Twitter account, try and include your main keywords at the start. It is important to place them here as only the first 40 characters or so are displayed within the search engine results. Remember that even though we are trying to grab the attention of Google, Yahoo! and Bing, it will be humans that eventually read the content, so make sure that in addition to your keywords, each tweet contains a valuable message that will draw people back to your main site.
 
4. Follow people from within your industry
 
An important factor in SEO is relevancy between web-pages. If there are Twitter accounts that are already well respected by the search engines for a topic that matches yours then it will be worthwhile following them. Search engines will spot the link and see that the pages are related, something they will take into consideration when deciding where to place your account within their index.
 
5. Now go tell the world
 
Just like with your website, an important factor in the ranking of a Twitter account is the quality, and quantity, of the links pointing towards it. Can you add some links to your Twitter account to give it a healthy boost up the search engines? Place a link to it from your website or your company blog. Add a link from the signature or profile page of a business forum you contribute to. Seek out some Twitter directories and list your account amongst them.

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.