According to Google, the three big features will be:

1. Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;
2. Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,
3. People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community.

Google has not provided a single universal search experience for a while, so the first of these three features is not as significant as it would seem. The second and third however are a different story.

Profiles in Search

This is probably going to the most significant feature in terms of actual user adoption, and it is also in line with the steps that Google has been taking towards becoming a key identity provider online. Search is as much a destination in itself as it is a directory, and Google is close to filling the same role as portal sites like Yahoo! used to in the 1990′s.

Adding the profiles to which the user is connected and those they might want to add to their Circles is an important piece of social functionality for Google+. On sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, the people search tools have been one of the tools driving the growth of their users’ networks.

Making Google+ profiles more visible in the results and autocomplete also creates social proof for uncommitted users that Google+ is used, and I suspect will encourage people to use it more.

People and Pages

The third feature being introduced with Google+’s closer integration with Google’s search results is the inclusion of personal profiles as  results in search, outranking older, more active and ostensibly more linked-to web properties. The importance of personal Google+ profiles in search was hinted at earlier with Google’s replacing ‘+’ with quotations for marking a word as exact match.

Google+ on a logged out vanity search

Considering how Google has used YouTube, Google Places and a number of other services within their search results, this should not have taken anyone by surprise.

How well Google+ profiles are performing in search compared to other web properties has certainly drawn criticism, although not much astonishment, from the more cynical commentators online.

There is a positive side to the performance of Google+ content in search, and that is in reputation management. It is another way to get content ranking for a brand or name that could outrank less than favourable results and bury them.

With More Social Content comes Greater Transparency

As well as the new social features, Google also announced a number of changes to their interface to give the user greater control over their search experience and to create more transparency in how the social content is used in search. The search engine also made it easy for users to remove personalised results, which feature is accessible through a toggle button:

That means no results from your friends, no private information and no personalization of results based on your Web History. This toggle button works for an individual search session, but you can also make this the default in your Search Settings. We provide separate control in Search Settings over other contextual signals we use, including location and language.

Crowding the Social Bandwagon

The most interesting reaction to Google’s Search, plus Your World came from Twitter, who seemed understandably annoyed. Even though the two companies parted ways, Search, plus Your World became an opportunity for Twitter to state their concerns on how as a “result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone” to find the breaking news and event information that Twitter has become known for.

Google+ could become a competitor for Twitter as a realtime news provider and aggregator by displaying breaking information inline with organic search results, and it is interesting to see Twitter publicly take a shot at Google over this. However, it has been a while since their content agreement expired without renewal, leaving Google’s realtime search tools dead just as Google+ was being launched.

With Search, plus Your World, it seems that Twitter is concerned that Google might be able to revive the functionality of realtime search, without having to enter another deal with their own social network.

Social without the Site

For Google+ to pay off for Google, it does not need to replace Facebook or Twitter. To succeed as an identity provider it just needs profiles, and for its users to remain logged in while using other Google products.

The search results themselves are shaping up to be the most important part of Google+, with the addition of everything from friends, personal photos and shared content, to potentially realtime updates on subjects of interest (Remember Sparks? Maybe they will come into this at some point). Google+ is not about being a destination in itself, and frankly, it does not need to be.

Initial reactions to SSL Search were mixed

SSL search has been live for over a month now, and for some industries, the percentage os search terms ‘not provided’ keeps on going up. Ironically just as data driven decision making becomes more important to marketing professionals, one of the more valuable sources of information has become compromised.

Keywords are far more revealing about what a visitor is trying to do, what their interests are and how they describe products or ideas. Segmenting traffic by the words they used to arrive on the site can reveal a lot about how effective a campaign is through changes in campaign terms, identifying returning customers through navigational terms like the use of brands and URLs as queries, and also the success or otherwise of search optimisation campaigns.

Read all of Google’s secure search and missing data on MarketingMag.com.au

Rank first in Google! Or Last, maybe.

The other week Google introduced a new ad position on their results pages, at the bottom of the page. Reporting in AdWords will only display two ad positions, top and other, grouping impressions on ads at the bottom of the page with those generated from ads to the side. The ‘Top vs. Side’ segment became ‘Top vs. Other’.

In the blog post announcing the launch the change was explained as providing benefits for the user experience without compromising the advertisers’ interests:

In many cases, we have found that displaying ads below search results fits better into the user’s flow as they scan the page from top to bottom. On average, this placement performed better than side ads in terms of click-through rate in our tests.

This change was not made without testing and enough data to give a clear indication of what the likely effect on the market would be. Ads have been seen in this position in a number of different markets prior to the announcement. Pre-launch testing is not all that surprising from Google and has been seen many times in the past.

Movement in the SERPS

Is there any value to the advertiser in appearing at the bottom of the search engine results page (SERP)? It is almost certain that, now that it is launched, Google found no problem for themselves, however their interests do not always correspond to that of their users, or customers. Adding ad positions below the fold has even attracted the attention of non-digital marketers, and how this change and the uncertainty it introduces would affect the perceived value of an AdWords click.

Click throughs by Average Position on the first page

Graph from Click Throughs in the Search Results

A lot of data has been graphed and blog posts written on how organic listings below the first two do not receive a lot of traffic. The difference between the click through rate of AdWords ads positioned above the organic results and those to the right is significant. Putting ads below the tenth spot certainly doesn’t seem like it would increase the number of clicks each ad could get. But maybe that is not the point.

Splitting ad positions between the top and the bottom of the SERP differentiates the two positions further than between the top and the side. The top results will appear less cluttered with fewer links, even with the addition of more Google Places content.

For the AdWords advertiser, the perceived and probably actual value of a top three position also increases. With additional ads moved to the bottom of the page, the amount of above the fold screen real estate available is reduced.

Differentiated Impressions

Like the introduction of above the fold bidding on the content network, creating further differentiation between advertising inventory in AdWords creates additional products. Moving some of this inventory below the fold creates a greater difference in value, and potentially intensifies competition for one class of product.

The cost for placements above and below the fold will change as a consequence of this. The cost of traffic for placements consistently appearing below the fold will probably increase. Decreased visibility will affect their click through rate (CTR), and as a result negatively affect Quality Score (QS).

Placements at the top of the page will probably benefit from this. What one position loses in exposure the other should gain. The Quality Scores for the top placements should improve, if they receive a greater share of the advertising traffic for any given SERP. To what degree this will result in a lower cost per click will depend on what, if anything, changes in bidding behaviour from the other participants in the market.

The most likely outcome from Google’s latest change to how AdWords ads are displayed is an increase in revenue per impression. Creating greater differentiation between advertising inventory will encourage advertisers to modify their tactics and spending to maximise impressions above the fold, possibly raising the average cost per click. Moving one kind of ad position to a position below the fold will increase the value and yield on those that remain above, while the almost inevitable decline in CTR and QS will increase their cost per click.

Update: Google announced in a blog post titled New ways to take action on top of page bid estimates new tools to automate bidding to appear specifically above the fold. While it is not like the options introduced with above the fold bidding on the content network, the effect is the same.

And for now, this is correct. Currently the only keyword referral data being replaced with ‘(not provided)’ is that generated by users who:

• Search through Google.com,
• While signed into Google accounts, and
• Click on an organic listing (AdWords keyword referrals are still passed).

Internationally the volume of organic search traffic that meets these criteria is very small, and does not account for much USA traffic either. There is very little available data at this point, and most of these assumptions are based on what people are seeing on their own sites (now that it is it is possible to start to measure the impact) and Matt Cutts’ informal estimate of the percentage of searches performed by signed-in users.

Important, not Urgent

Pay for traffic and get the data for free

The issue is not how much organic search traffic is ‘(not provided)’ now, but what this number might be in the future. SSL Search isn’t an urgent issue, just an important one. Google builds systems for scale, and has stated their intention to take this further:

As part of our commitment to provide a more secure online experience, today we announced that SSL Search on https://www.google.com will become the default experience for signed in users on google.com.

Making SSL Search the default for signed in users won’t be confined to just Google.com forever, and the number of users who remain logged in while using the internet won’t remain the same either. Most of Google’s popular services like Gmail, Google Docs and, optimistically, Google+ work better when you are signed in. Over time there will be more people searching while logged in, not fewer, and SSL Search is certain to be rolled out across more Google TLDs.

Won’t Someone Think of the Users?

It should not be a surprise that Google is working on making a more secure search experience more widely available. Google pays attention to Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and takes the user experience of search seriously. This culture is often reflected by the employees; for example, when SSL search was first introduced by Google in May, 2010, before being moved to https://encrypted.google.com/ in June, Matt Cutts posted A few thoughts on SSL Search on his personal blog on its introduction:

I believe encrypted search is an important option for Google searchers. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has asked for secure search in the past (see this post from 2009), and I credit them for helping to put this on Google’s radar. Another inspiration that helped to spark this project was Cory Doctorow’s book “Little Brother.” It was one of my favorite books of 2008 and while I won’t go into the book’s plot here, it’s a quick, fun read. “Little Brother” also makes a compelling case for encrypting HTTP traffic on the web.

Recently, a few ISPs in the USA demonstrated the value of encrypting search referrals for users by redirecting their customers’ search traffic based on the keywords they used to content the ISP selected. In fact, it is the value that SSL Search has for the user that means that Google is providing organisations such as schools a NoSSLSearch option.

Google’s commitment to their users’ privacy and HTTPS Everywhere means that their latest rollout of SSL Search for logged in users is a logical progression, securing their users’ search queries and protecting their privacy. Unless they click on an AdWords listing. If you are paying for clicks, those keyword referrals are still passed through to the advertiser.

Organic Versus Paid Traffic and Data

Despite the Internet’s tendency towards paranoia when reading the motives of large companies, there is actually a good reason why referrals don’t get passed from HTTPS to HTTP sites. As Thomas P from the Webmaster Central Help Forums pointed out:

Clients SHOULD NOT include a Referrer header field in a (non-secure) HTTP request if the referring page was transferred with a secure protocol. (Source: Hypertext Transfer Protocol — HTTP/1.1)

Following these standards means that sites behind HTTPS would still see keyword referrals. But this is not the case with SSL Search; what Google is doing is a little different. In a comment by Eric Wu on Google+, he suggested that Google is not using HTTPS as you would expect (follow the link, his explanation is well worth reading). Searching via https://google.com/ differs from the standards (unlike https://encrypted.google.com/, which still follows them) in two important ways:

• Organic referrals won’t be passed to sites entirely behind HTTPS
• AdWords referrals are passed to sites on HTTP

Both of these are odd behaviours, and seem at odds with the aim of protecting users’ privacy. Passing AdWords keyword referrer information to advertisers is not all that surprising once you think of Google as a business. Danny Sullivan pointed out on Search Engine Land in his Google Puts A Price On Privacy post that provoking a negative response from the people who made Google nearly $10 billion last quarter would not be good for business.

Information is valuable

As long as Google does not increase their number of users...

It is the loss of data due to SSL Search that concerns most online marketing professionals. Search referrals often indicate changes in how queries are structured, shifts in brand awareness and use, the effectiveness in offline campaigns based on certain phrases or words and give important insights into how language is used to describe products or ideas. Keyword referrer information is important for conversion optimisation and can inform ongoing IA development. As limited as the scope of Google’s initial implementation of SSL Search is, the fear that it will account for a greater share of search as time goes by is legitimate, and has real business implications.

In a number of blog posts Google has suggested that Webmaster Tools data can replace the information lost in Google Analytics, with Webmaster tools query data currently available in Google Analytics. However the information provided by Webmaster Tools is substantially different to the keyword data in Google Analytics. It is restricted to only 1,000 queries, and is reported in general terms. It is useless for assessing search queries of more than two words for any site that receives a decent amount of search traffic. Google Webmaster Tools gives an overview of what is happening within Google, but in its current form, it can not replace Keyword referral information.

This might not actually be a bad thing for Google. Information, especially information on user behaviour, is valuable. Google will still be collecting search data from those using SSL Search; the change simply means that they won’t be sharing anymore. At least not without being paid first.

Balancing Privacy and Business

Google has taken a compromise position on user privacy with this implementation of SSL Search. Even as they recognise the value of HTTPS Everywhere for users, Google has acknowledged that referral data has value for their customers (their advertisers, that is – those that don’t pay money are not customers). The result is a feature that does not really protect users’ privacy or encourage more websites receiving both free and paid Google traffic to implement HTTPS.

It is interesting that Google’s other SSL Search URL, https://encrypted.google.com/, handles referrers differently to https://google.com/. With clicks on HTTP URLs, https://google.com passes a HTTP referrer, stripped of keywords, but https://encrypted.google.com does not. When the destination is a HTTPS URL, https://encrypted.google.com passes referrer information as you would expect, but https://google.com does not, unless it is an AdWords link. There is a more complete post, with a chart, at Google Modifies SSL Behavior — and the Results Are Troubling.

To a cynical outsider, it would seem that the only objective Google has actually achieved with SSL Search is protecting their advertisers’ keyword referrals while earning favourable press for defending the privacy of innocent Google users from those nasty, evil, SEO scammers.

Whenever a brand throws out the old in favour of something topical it gets attention. It is bold, and both the professional and amateur media love it. In the end the numbers will either vindicate or invalidate the experiment, assuming they measure the ROI in a way that reflects reality. Everything else is speculation, informed or otherwise.

Facebook has got to be better than email...

As interesting as the lively debate between the social media exponents and eDM professionals was at the time, it just begged the question: ‘Why not just do both?’ After all, I am sure you won’t get tarred and feathered at your favourite morning coffee do if you dabble in the black arts of using stuff that works.

Social Media and Email: With, not Instead Of

How you can use a social media platform, such as Facebook, Twitter, et al, is different from the tools available with email, from users’ expectations regarding content and frequency to how the user can interact with the material, and the platform’s restrictions on what can be delivered in what form to whom.

To borrow from Mitch Joel, it is ‘With’ not ‘Instead Of’. Using both social media and email gives you more options, and increases the size of your potential audience. Connecting with customers across multiple platforms facilitates different interactions, and gives the customer the choice of how they want to connect with the brand. Maybe a Facebook fan that finds no value in your updates would actually love the email newsletter, or perhaps the Twitter account amuses them during their work day while they find eDM invasive. Giving the customer the choice can mean that when they opt out of one channel, they might still connect through another.

Building Audiences on Other People’s Platforms

Building eDM and Social Media Audiences

Facebook fans are not really yours; neither are Twitter followers. Without the accounts they are connected to, these audiences don’t exist. Unlike email. There is also little point in building different engagement strategies for multiple channels without cross-promoting them.

Competitions, surveys and other data collection or content driven special events can accomplish both of these goals:

• Making the brand’s audience aware of other touch points and
• Collecting contact details and other information through either a microsite or the brand’s main web presence.

The nature of eDM as a one way communication channel without the ability to demonstrate social proof makes it better suited to direct customers to a range of appropriate social media touch points, where most of the content would be published during the campaign. Cross promotion of the brand’s social media touch points and a call to action that would lead to further entries in the brand’s email database and CRM will generate better connection with and a better picture of the audience.

Promoting campaigns such as these should not be restricted to just eDM and social media. Getting the most out of it requires that other media is added to the mix, be it print, broadcast, SMS, MMS, PR, online display and promotional activity on the brand’s site. However it is executed, there should be two returns to the business:

• More information on the brand’s customers
• More points of contact with the brand’s customers.

Do Everything You Can Do Well

Limited access to resources and avoiding uneconomic channels are the only reasons that should affect what tools are and are not used online. There is no reason to abandon one kind of promotional activity online in favour of another. With so many ways to go online and consume information, arbitrarily limiting a brand’s options in how it can reach and be reached by its customers is not a winning strategy.

Brands in the Cesspool

Since 2008 if you talk about brands and search anyone familiar with search marketing immediately remembers Eric Schmidt’s speech to an audience of visiting magazine executives. The then CEO of Google stated that:

Brands are the solution, not the problem, brands are how you sort out the cesspool.

Since the Vince / Brand update and Eric Schmidt’s infamous ‘cesspool’ remark, a lot has been written about how Google treats brands in search. Sites directly linked to brands appear to have an easier time ranking, can occupy more space on the results page and can have an edge over aggregators competing for long tail queries including brand terms.

The crowded Search Engine Results Page

Constricted space in the first pageview of the search results page and the range of content being displayed, including places, headlines, video, products and information, place a premium on the top two spots. The range of content a brand generates can help to increase the area on the results page it occupies across some searches:

• User Generated Content
• Press Releases
• News Items
• Advertising and Marketing Content

Brands benefit from more than just the way Google handles and displays data. As significant as the Vince update and Google’s changes to their search engine results pages are, there is more to marketing brands in search than the mechanics involved.

Own Your Keywords

Your Brand Name is Your Castle

It takes time, money and consistent performance over time to build a brand. Being an Apple or a Coke isn’t cheap, and maintaining a market-defining identity is hard, as the Yahoo!s and Nokias of the world have demonstrated. The ability to lay claim to a collection of words, like iPod or Googling, is a very powerful marketing tool, and has a real impact on search.

Being able to dominate a search term or query space naturally tied to the name of the company is very powerful, especially if the company dominates its industry. Search is as much a navigational tool as one used for information discovery. Training a market to search for your products with terms that you create or control (now with additional help from Google) ensures it is harder to lose share of search.

Building a query space where the incumbent has a natural advantage over any invasion is very much a castle and moat strategy. Challenging the brand that ‘owns’ the query space can be costly, and challenging on the brand name itself prohibitively so.

Nothing is Really this Simple

Not all searches including a brand term are treated the same way, and not all brands are used alike. In most cases the name itself will return the brand’s main site at the top of search, but without an optimisation strategy, long tail queries with brand terms are still open to competition.

The brand’s custodians still need to consider optimising for phrases where a brand term is entered with other qualifying words. Long tail queries like these are still open to direct competition, especially in markets where the brand is used to describe a product or activity, or is used as a proper noun. It is the difference between a search for ‘Nokia’ and a search for ‘Nokia N9 prices Australia’. The latter is easier to optimise for, and there is more of a financial motive to do so. Even with no money to be made, fans will build out the brand’s query space and generate content that will populate the search results, as many companies demonstrate, such as Apple.

Not every brand is directly selling something. Some provide information or opinion, aggregate or organise information from other sources, represent an interest, a group or a franchise. Broadly speaking, most brands fall into one of the following loose groups:

• Representative (governments, interest groups, lobby groups)
• Product (Apple, Nike)
• Franchise (McDonald’s, Oporto)
• Informational (newspapers, TV stations)
• Portal/Search engines (Facebook, Google, Yahoo!)

How a brand manages competition within its query space and optimises both its main and micro sites depends on its business model. A brand that sells product through partners or retailers may not need to optimise for location or transactional searches. Brands whose business model depends on an ad model need as much traffic that is relevant to the advertisers as they can get. An entertainment brand with a specific product offering, such as a TV station or sports team, might benefit from a more focused approach, targeting product specific phrases and usage terms.

Most of the options available to these business models apply almost equally for non-branded participants in the market as much as for brands; the difference is in execution. Due to their very nature, brands can affect the search behaviour of the market through other advertising and public relations channels. By announcing new products or creating content and interest around new terms, they can drive search behaviour to terms that they have optimised for, with their primary touchpoints or with campaign-specific content.

Marketing a brand in search is different to optimising for general traffic and has its own advantages. Google seems to favour what it defines as an ‘entity’ and creating searches on a word or phrase of your own creation through brand identity and other promotional activity is a real edge. Brands take time and resources to create, but there is value in the result that goes beyond an algorithm update.

Why context matters in search

Creating relevant results pages is as much about the text the user types as their inferred intent. Categorising phrases and content by subject, linking queries through user behaviour such as search refinements and associations between queries, brands and other entities all matter.

What do you want to find when you type the word ‘pizza’ into a search engine? Did you want a recipe, a definition, the Wikipedia entry, or the closest Domino’s? What was the rest of the question; what didn’t get typed? Search engines are going beyond just looking at the short strings of text people type. More and more different cues are being considered from both the searcher and the sites they index to judge what is the best answer to the user’s question.

Read the full article here.

Generic versus Brand Searches

Creating a Generic versus Brand Search Rule

Brand search term rules are so important that Google Analytics uses ‘Generic Keywords vs Brand Keywords’ as an example name during the custom Multi-Channel Funnel grouping creation process. It is a very powerful tool, assessing the general performance of a search related campaign, paid or otherwise. Further segmenting search by paid and unpaid and adding both direct and referral traffic makes it even more useful.

Search, Direct and Referral Paths

Search marketing is a great opportunity to reach people without much awareness of your brand and change their behaviour. Online search is more or less a de facto collection of bookmarks, where people enter queries based on URLs, brand or product for sites they have already visited. Tracking queries by the presence of brand terms through Multi-Channel Funnels can reveal how often non-branded search leads to branded queries, direct or referral sales. This can be a great tool for selling the value of SEO internally by demonstrating its value in the customer’s product research behaviour.

Regular Expressions for the rules

Regular expressions are a great way to keep your sanity when you are building the rules for any group of keywords. For example, brand traffic is not just going to be attributed to the correct, proper name of the brand. Variations in spelling and construction have to be accounted for. As an example, for tracking queries on the brand ‘Greyhound Australia’, the regular expression would include the brand and its most common misspellings:

greyhound|grey hound|grayhound|gray hound

The same kind of regular expressions can be used in other rules, like product terms or search terms targeted in a focused SEO project.

Product Terms with or without Brand

Whether or not a search contains a brand term only really speaks to awareness. Brand terms alone don’t distinguish between navigational, informational or transactional queries. A search for just ‘Greyhound Australia’ is clearly navigational. The search lacks any other qualifying term and Google’s recent change to how sitelinks are displayed for some queries seems to indicate even they regard such searches as purely navigational.

Brand rules with and without product terms

Creating rules that label traffic using qualifying terms and traffic that doesn’t can make the difference between navigational and informational searches in the funnel clear. Differentiating between a search for ‘Greyhound Sydney to Canberra’ and ‘Greyhound Australia’ is the difference between seeing a funnel with two brand searches, and a funnel with a search for a product including a brand term and a navigational brand search.

Campaign Source Attribution

There are more online customer acquisition channels than search. Directories, display networks, guest posts, links and advertorial are all tools that can reach new customers or initiate research and purchase behaviour. Multi-Channel Funnels and custom groupings make it easy to see how they feed into other traffic sources.

Tracking more than search traffic

Adding rules for campaign URLs used in advertising or branded content and source URLs such as social media touchpoints make it possible to see how these activities drive customer behaviour. The ability to identify campaigns that drive sales both directly and through other channels make informed decisions regarding future activity easier.

Custom Groupings: Just Start Using Them

Multi-Channel Funnels make it easier to see what works, what doesn’t and how certain activities can lead to sales. The ability to differentiate between broad information searches and brand focused queries and identify how they are linked across different search mediums is valuable. Tracking conversions across campaigns and channels makes it easier to make informed decisions about social media activity, guest posts and display advertising or directory lists as well.

Plan how to integrate Multi-Channel Funnels with your current online activities. The process to get started can be as simple as:

• Create custom Channel groupings focusing on sources that matter:
  • To you
  • To the people you report to
• Create new Channel groupings from existing ones to monitor new campaigns and sources
• See what works, see what doesn’t, see what can be improved

What are your Must Have Multi-Channel Funnels?

The single most important thing I think Multi-Channel Funnels can give you is the ability to see what broad research behaviours lead to direct navigational activity, either as direct visits or navigational brand searches.

How are you going to use these new tools in Google Analytics?

Search for Campos Coffee

Update: As of the 12th, I was unable to replicate these results again which given the lack of official information on these changes, confirms it as an experiment. It will be interesting to see if and when these changes go live for real.

On Google+ Andreas M. Hahn posted an interesting screenshot. It was the result page on Google.de for his company’s URL, syncing.net. On this search engine results page, the sitelinks for syncing.net were in two columns, with title, URL and description listed.

After a few searches on Google.com.au, I noticed that the expanded sitelinks appeared on brand searches as well as URLs. In fact, the expanded sitelinks seem to only appear for search terms that can be considered purely navigational. The expanded sitelinks are no longer displayed once additional terms are added to the query, even if they are relevant to the site and the subject area. Well, most of the time.

Brand or Search Engine Result Page?

Search on a Webcomic

Some brands continued to display the expanded sitelinks even after additional qualifiers were added to the search. After entering a number of different queries across a number of different brands, some had the enhanced sitelinks appear on more searches than others.

It seemed that the brands most likely to display this behaviour were those I already interact with in some way through Google. Side-by-side comparisons between queries on a signed-in browser and on a ‘clean’ (not signed-in, fresh and cookie-less) browser appeared to confirm this. The range of queries that would trigger the extended sitelinks on the clean browser was significantly smaller than when signed into Google’s services.

Search Box as the Address Bar

Di Bella Coffee

This change seems to be in line with user behaviour. Search is taking the place of the address bar for a lot of people who are either returning to a site they know, or are searching on a name or brand they encountered elsewhere. Search is used as much as a navigational tool as it is for information discovery.

Google’s personalisation of search will make it hard to judge the effect the enhanced sitelinks will have, but it can at least be tracked for just brand and URL searches. It will be interesting to see how inbound traffic will be distributed by landing page over time for brand term. Now is probably also a great time to have a look at your Webmaster Tools profiles and remove any sitelinks you would prefer not to display.

Getting return on your rankings? on MarketingMag

How a query is structured can be as important as how many search for it. The words someone uses can indicate how close they are to buying or what level of information they need. Sometimes a general high traffic term is not the best if it is conversions you want.

In a paper called ‘A Taxonomy of Web Search‘ (PDF) that categorised search queries by the searcher’s intent into a number of groups, each indicating a different task. Matching your keyword strategy to customer intent instead of just looking for the words with the most volume is a powerful strategic tool when optimising for conversions.

In any organisation with a website, someone has received an email a little like this. It would have been sent from a Gmail address, and the letters ‘S E O’ are in the subject. The copy would mention whitehat, search, optimisation, link building and sometimes there would be a line a little like this: “Your site only ranks 12th for ‘keyword’”; ‘keyword’ being a single word that relates to your industry. There are a lot of variations on this theme, that try a lot of different approaches, but they all fail to make one point. Why is ranking for that one search term worth paying for? . . .

Read the full version of “Getting return on your rankings?” on MarketingMag.com.au