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.

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.

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).