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

On the official Google blog there is a new announcement that the Beta version of an encrypted Google search is ready for use by general web users.

In a nutshell, by visiting https://www.google.com (rather than http://www.google.com) an encrypted connection is put in place which means third parties are not able to see the search terms you use and search results you view.

Immediate differences between the standard and more secure versions of Google are highlighted in the blog post: “The service includes a modified logo to help indicate that you’re searching using SSL and that you may encounter a somewhat different Google search experience, but as always, remember to check the start of the address bar for “https” and your browser lock indicators: Today’s release comes with a “beta” label for a few reasons. First, it currently covers only the core Google web search product. To help avoid misunderstanding, when you search using SSL, you won’t see links to offerings like Image Search and Maps that, for the most part, don’t support SSL at this time. Also, since SSL connections require additional time to set up the encryption between your browser and the remote web server, your experience with search over SSL might be slightly slower than your regular Google search experience. What won’t change is that you will still get the same great search results.”

The article also states “Google will still maintain search data to improve your search quality and to provide better service. Searching over SSL doesn’t reduce the data sent to Google — it only hides that data from third parties who seek it. And clicking on any of the web results, including Google universal search results for unsupported services like Google Images, could take you out of SSL mode. Our hope is that more websites and services will add support for SSL to help create a better and more consistent experience for you.”

This has been implemented after Google suffered recent criticism over data security when it collected information from open Wi-Fi connections. How the general public will react to encrypted Google search and how large the uptake will be is anyone's guess, though it is easy to see, even within a day of release, that this will make life more challenging for website owners and search engine marketers.

Early tests show that in the website analytics data, the referrer field isn’t complete when vistors come from the https version of Google. This means that the more people use encrypted search, the less you know about where they came from and the keywords used to bring them to your site.

It looks like Google has listened to recent feedback that many Pay Per Click account managers, including ourselves, have passed on regarding the quality of broad match in AdWords. For a while now we have been concerned with the way Google uses broad match keywords as many clients have been appearing for totally unrelated terms, due to Google believing the words were related. An example being a Solicitor client of ours bidding on the broad match keywords “immigration lawyer” and appearing for the search query “homeoffice”.

In the interest of only exposing clients to traffic that is relevant, we have started shying away from broad match and sticking more with “phrase” and [exact] match terms. Either that or spend half our time adding in scores of negative keywords. This might not be needed now, as Google has announced the introduction of ‘modified broad match’ on its blog, here.

By placing a + sign in front of the words, you can now tell AdWords to only show your advert for very closely related searches. The blog post states that “close variants include misspellings, singular/plural forms, abbreviations and acronyms, and stemmings (like “floor” and “flooring”). Synonyms (like “quick” and “fast”) and related searches (like “flowers” and “tulips”) aren't considered close variants”.

This is a big step in the right direction and something we look forward to working with.

In the first case of its kind, a UK citizen has just been fined £1000 after one of his tweets landed him in hot water.

Back in January, upon hearing the news that Robin Hood Airport was closing due to snow, angry Twitter user, Paul Chambers vented his anger by posting: "C**p! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your s**t together, otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!"

Whilst the airport themselves didn’t take the joke seriously, the police did and this week he was fined £1,000 due to the post being "grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character”.

On top of the fine, Mr Chambers was given a criminal record and also had his computer confiscated. This hasn’t stopped him using the micro-blogging site as since he has commented on the judgment with "I'd like to thank the CPS (Crown Prosecution Service) for their level-best efforts in f**king up the life of an ordinary citizen. I love Britain."

Mr Chambers is now considering launching an appeal, something which other Twitterers, including well known user Steven Fry, have said they would help fund.

The growth of Liberty Marketing over the past few months has been so dramatic that we have brought in another new member of staff. The latest recruit is Nathan Jeans, whose primary responsibilities will be SEO copywriting, article creation and press release distribution.

With a business and marketing degree and a postgraduate diploma in newspaper journalism to his name, Nathan promises to have an interesting mixture of skills that will really benefit Liberty and its clients. Having worked most recently as a freelance writer, Nathan has produced articles for The Guardian and The National Geographic, as well as countless articles for numerous sport magazines, where football, cricket and darts were particularly well received. When not working, Nathan particularly enjoys partaking in the afore mentioned sports, with the exception of cricket, where apparently his technique lets him down!

Managing director, Gareth Morgan commented, “We are delighted to have Nathan onboard. I have worked with dozens of external copywriters over the past few years, but it’s great to actually have someone in-house who can get to know the ins and outs of the company and our clients, and produce copy that represents the ethos and professionalism we have here at Liberty. I have had a good look at his past work and am very impressed by its creative and personable nature. I really do see a lot of good things ahead for the future.”

A client of ours just received an email with the subject "Google AdWords: Ads stopped running", which looked like it was a warning from Google:

In case the picture is hard to see, the message within the email is:

Hello,

Your Google Adwords Account has stopped running this morning.

Some of the ads have stopped running today (Monday, 12 April 2010).

If you want to get your ad back up and running you need to optimize the campaign to improve the CTR. The link below has some helpful tips, but, in a nutshell, you need to look at your keywords and your ad text. Make sure your keywords are jighly relevant and then make sure that each keyword in the ad group makes sense in terms of the ad text associated with this ad group (usually this means you need to create more ad groups with a smaller number of keywords). Having a tight connection between keywords and ad text helps improve CTR, which should fix your problem. 

Click here to get your ads back up.

Please note: if you do not verify the status of your account and notify us if your ads do not appear online, we cannot help you.

The spelling errors and grammatical issues didn’t really convince us that this was Google and after a few seconds of investigation we were right. When the mouse hovered over the link it tried sending us to adwords.google-rs.com.

Whilst phishing emails like this one certainly aren’t new, they aren’t that common in the Pay Per Click world and this is one to watch out for. This particular client had their account temporarily suspended by Google last week due to “potential unauthorised access to this account”! A coincidence?

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.

TimberTech Products Ltd, a composite garden decking supplier, approached their new website developer in late 2009, seeking assistance with their Google AdWords campaign.

The Pay Per Click advertising was being managed by another company but TimberTech wanted to improve the return on investment. The website developer brought in Liberty to assist in setting up the campaign.

Within a few hours of the Pay Per Click ads being re-worked, the levels of traffic showed a dramatic improvement. In fact, for the exact same daily spend, traffic was up over 50% and the quality of traffic was noticeable improved.

The changes meant that the number of sales enquiries saw a real jump and Liberty was brought in to help manage the campaigns each month to keep the adverts working as hard as they can.

The business has attributed its impressive recent growth to the Google Adverts and is currently seeing a large uplift in monthly sales!

“We would like to say thanks to the team at Liberty for their advice and assistance. Our website enquiries have grown significantly and we are enjoying more sales than ever before. We are more than happy to recommend them to any business needing Pay Per Click advertising management and SEO advice.”

 - Jason Cole, Managing Director, Timbertech Products Ltd

Outsourced Pay Per Click management from only £99 a month

If you run Pay Per Click advertising or outsource this to another agency then why not speak to Liberty? We can reconfigure your campaigns so that they work a lot harder and manage them each month so that your site enjoys the maximum traffic for the minimum spend.

We have a track record in running hugely successful  Pay Per Click advertising campaigns on the Google AdWords and Microsoft Adcenter systems. With our fees starting at only £99 per month (plus VAT) there really is no need to manage your adverts in-house.

Twitter, the popular micro-blog, will soon be introducing an advertising system that allows businesses to place sponsored messages amongst Twitter search results.

Following the very profitable example that Google set with its AdWords system, Twitter will allow third-party advertisers to buy their way into the search results, via a 140 character advert.

According to an article on All Things Digital, from the Wall Street Journal, the social media website will launch the new advertising platform within the first half of 2010.

The report states that “Ads will be tied to Twitter searches, in the same way that Google's original ads were. So a search for, say, 'laptop', may generate an ad for Dell. The ads will only show up in search results, which means users who don't search for something won't see them in their regular Twitterstreams.”

Initially, the advertising will be sold through agencies, while Twitter works on creating a self-serving model. Eventually, the plan is one where anyone with a website can purchase an ad, just like they can on AdWords.

Twitter has long sought a revenue model, especially since becoming one of the most popular websites on the web. Over 50 million tweets are being written every day, yet the business has received criticism as it has been unable to create a profit from this popularity. It is no surprise that they turned to Google for inspiration, as the majority of the multi-billion-dollar revenue that the search engine receives is from the sponsored listings served through its AdWords system.

Over the past few weeks, Google has been softly launching a test program which allows businesses in two US cities to purchase 'enhanced listings' in the local results (the map that appears at the top of the search results).

By taking an enhanced listing, a business owner agrees to give Google just $25 a month and in return, their business appears in the search results with a “View Website” link next to their name. At present, with there only being a handful of businesses that are testing the system, these listings stand out so will likely get a good click through rate.

The internet marketing community is debating whether this is a good thing or not. Whilst many people feel that Google is selling far too much of its real estate and is devaluing the natural search results, others feel that this is a good opportunity for smaller, local businesses to advertise on the search engine.

By offering this service at such a low monthly cost, Google should be able to convert a lot of one-man-bands that either could not afford Pay Per Click advertising or did not understand how the system works. There are hundreds or thousands of these businesses in each city, so the amount of extra revenue for Google could be considerable.

How the general public will react to this is uncertain. Up until now, adverts have been clearly defined above and to the right of the search results, separated from the natural listings. People tend to trust the natural listings as non-commercial and websites appearing due to merit. Even though the enhanced local listings will display the word ‘sponsored’ next to them, mixing them up with normal results is likely to confuse and even anger users.

There is no news yet when this will be rolled out across the rest of the US and then the UK, though with recent amount of changes that Google has introduced to its search results, it probably won’t be far off.