Author Archives: Mike

Simple Page Speed Improvements For WordPress Sites

published by on 6th November 2015 under Conversion (CRO), Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Simple Page Speed Improvements For WordPress Sites

 

Google has been using Page Speed as a ranking factor for several years now, and they kindly provide a tool called PageSpeed Insights that you can use to analyse the PageSpeed performance of your website, both for desktop and mobile users. It is a great little tool that gives your web-page a score out of 100, and more importantly provides a list of suggestions for things that you should do to improve this score.

 

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International SEO with rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x”

published by on 23rd October 2014 under Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

international-seo- relalternate-hreflang-1

Don’t miss out on search traffic

Does your business have identical or very similar websites targeting different countries and/or languages? In Australasia, it is a very common situation for businesses to have one site for New Zealand, and another basically identical website (with perhaps just currency and pricing changes) for Australia.

While this is great, it can cause some SEO issues. Effectively you have duplicate content. For example the two pages:

  • www.example-biz.co.nz/catagory-a/product-x
  • www.example-biz.com.au/catagory-a/product-x

most likely contain almost identical information about this product, except that one has the price in NZD and one has the price in AUD, and they may have different shipping costs. While it is very unlikely that Google will ever punish you for this “duplicate content”, you may very well miss out on some search traffic unless you take some extra steps to optimise things a bit.

By default, each of the two example pages is considered completely separately by search engines. They will both need to earn some links to help with their search rankings. While Google is pretty good at showing the .co.nz version of the page to people searching from New Zealand, they aren’t perfect at it. I have seen situations like this where a search for a specific product name returned the Canadian version of the page, even though there was a valid NZ version of the same product page available (perhaps the Canadian page had more links and was outranking the NZ page even though I was in New Zealand).

 

increase organic traffic

Adding code to tell Google what you want

It is possible to tell Google (and other search engines) that you have these types of alternate pages, just by adding a little bit of code to the <head> section of each page. For our example pages above, the code to add would be:

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en-nz” href=” www.example-biz.co.nz/catagory-a/product-x” />

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en-au” href=” www.example-biz.com.au/catagory-a/product-x” />

NOTE: the same two lines of code would be added to both pages.  The two lines together tell Google, these are two alternate versions of this page, and I want you to show the first version to English language searchers from New Zealand, and the second version to English language searchers from Australia.

Searches from other countries

But what about people who search from another country (perhaps the United States) and what about searchers from New Zealand who don’t speak English (perhaps a tourist from Japan)? If you have the resources to create translated versions of your pages in different languages, then you can add them to the list of alternates:

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”de” href=”www.example-biz.com/de/catagory-a/product-x” />

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”ja” href=”www.example-biz.com/ja/catagory-a/product-x” />

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”es” href=”www.example-biz.com/es/catagory-a/product-x” />

Where the first version is to be shown to German language searchers, the second version is to be shown to Japanese language searchers, and the third version to Spanish language searchers regardless of where in the world they may be searching from.

“Catch them all” syntax

The syntax also allows for a catch all, so if none of the above language and location groups work for a specific searcher, send them to the default catch all version of the page.

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x-default” href=”www.example-biz.com” />

So is it really worth the hassle to implement this change on your website? One of our clients has seen a 60% increase in their organic search traffic since they implemented this change a few months ago. Your results may vary, but yes, I believe it is worth the hassle.

Want to learn more about how to implement this hreflang syntax for your website? Google provides a great resource here or contact us here at FIRST for assistance. Also take a look at our post regarding 5 things to consider for your international SEO strategy.

Is Your Business Advertising on Facebook?

published by on 30th July 2012 under Social Media Marketing

Advertisers put billboard ads up in locations where there is lots of traffic – so that lots of people see their ads,  right? Did you know that about 1 in every 5  web pageviews is on Facebook? – A staggering figure.  That has an enormous potential audience for any business, and unlike roadside billboards, with business advertising on Facebook you can be very selective about which Facebook users your ads are shown to, to make sure you are getting the best bang for your buck.

The Basics of Facebook Advertising

If you haven’t already got one, you’ll need to create a Facebook page for your business.

Facebook ads

Once you have a Facebook page, you can easily create Facebook ads by clicking the “Create an advert” link which appears on the right hand side of just about every Facebook page (just above the ads), or at the top of your page’s Admin Panel (under the “Build Audience” drop down).

Although your Facebook ads can send visitors directly to your website, it is generally recommended to instead use your ads to promote your Facebook page.  If you can get people to “Like” your Facebook page, then every time you share something on your page it can show up in your fans’ news feed.

Pros and Cons of Advertising on Facebook

Pros

  • Facebook offers a huge audience, with over 900 million users (around 2.2 million in New Zealand), around half of whom access Facebook on any given day.
  • You can target your Facebook ads to very specific demographic groups. You can choose the geographic location, age range, gender, and interests of your target audience.
  • You can set either the total amount you want to spend on an advertising campaign, or you can set a daily budget limit.
  • You can run your ads on either a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) or CPC (cost per click) basis.
  • Facebook will recommend a suggested bid range, but you are free to bid outside this range.

Cons

  • The shapes and sizes of ads that you can create is very limited compared to AdWords. The marketplace ads have  just one small standard size of image available (100×72 px), 25 characters of headline, and 90 characters of ad text.
  • The ads are shown on the right hand side of Facebook pages and usually don’t attract very high click through rates (CTR).

Performance Tips

  • Ad creative gets stale quickly on Facebook. First recommends updating your ad images frequently to prevent CTR from dropping off too much.
  • Target your ads as precisely as possible to avoid spending money showing your ads to people who aren’t really in your target audience.
  • Create multiple versions of ads to test which ones work best.
  • Test the landing page your ads send users to. Creating a dedicated landing page for your ads may significantly improve the conversion rate.
  • Test features such as “Sponsored Stories”. We have found these to work very well in some markets, and very poorly in some other markets. Test, Test, Test.

Sponsored Stories are special types of Facebook ads that utilize Facebook’s social nature. These ads are shown to the friends of Facebook users who interact with your page, app or domain when they:

  • Like a Page
  • Like or comment on a Page’s post
  • RSVP to a Page’s event
  • Vote on a Page’s question
  • Check in to a place
  • Use an app or play a game
  • Like or share a website

You can choose which types of sponsored stories you want to sponsor to best suit your marketing needs, and it is worth testing them as they can have higher click through rates and conversion rates than the standard ads.

While it is relatively easy to setup and run your own Facebook ads, getting some expert help can make a huge difference to the results your advertising campaign achieves. For example, FIRST was recently able to help one of our clients who had been running their own Facebook advertising campaign, to halve their CPC and triple the CTR that the ads were receiving, ultimately meaning that we were able to produce significantly improved results with the same monthly budget, and helping them to achieve their growth targets much faster.

Contact us if you would like FIRST’s expert help to set up or optimise your business’s Facebook advertising campaign.

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Google Tweaking AdWords Quality Score Calculation Algorithm

published by on 5th October 2011 under Search Engine Marketing (PPC)

AdWords quality score changes

This week Google announced that they are rolling out changes globally to the way AdWords Quality Score is calculated.

What is AdWords Quality Score?

Most people who have had even a cursory look at Google AdWords understand that it operates on a Cost Per Click (CPC) basis, and if an advertiser is prepared to spend more money for each click they receive, their ads are more likely to be shown at higher positions, and are therefore more likely to be clicked on by searchers. What is less well understood is that it is not just your maximum CPC bid that determines the ranking order of different advertisements – the other major factor is Quality Score.

Why would Google care about the quality of the advertisements they show – surely they should just show the ads that will make them the most money? Well that might work well in the short term, but if this was how it worked, spammy advertisers would be able to make their ads for porn or gambling sites show up regardless of what searchers were actually looking for, which would pretty quickly annoy a lot of searchers, and convince them to stop using Google and look for a better search engine.

As an AdWords advertiser, every time someone does a search that matches one of your keywords, your quality score for that keyword is calculated. The three main factors that determine quality score are:

  • Clickthrough Rate (CTR) – based on previous historical evidence, what percentage of searchers for this keyword choose to click on your ad.
  • Relevance – how relevant is the keyword to the ad text you have, as well as other relevance factors such as geographical relevance.
  • Landing Page Quality:
    • How relevant is the content on your ad’s landing page to the search query?
    • Is your content original or are there hundreds of other sites with the same information?
    • Does your site load quickly?
    • Do you annoy your visitors with lots of pop-up or pop-under advertisements?
    • Is your website easy to navigate around?

How Have the Quality Score Calculations Changed?

Basically the weighting of relevance and landing page quality have been increased. This will make it harder for advertisers to achieve high ad positions for keywords that are not highly relevant to their websites, and should help to improve the quality of the ads that Google users see when they do a search.

And don’t forget that Google announced September 21 that mobile optimized websites have started to factor into landing page quality (and thus Quality Score) also.

Do you need help optimising AdWords campaigns for your business? First Rate is a Google AdWords Certified Partner with years of experience managing AdWords campaigns for many of Australasia’s leading businesses. New AdWords functionality is added all the time and it’s therefore important to have people who know their stuff working on your account! Contact Us.

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New Google Voice and Image Search Features

published by on 11th July 2011 under General

Google recently announced that they are adding several interesting new ways to be able to initiate a search.

Google Voice

One is the ability to be able to speak your query. Now this has been available for quite a while on Google Mobile, but has only just now been added to the standard web search functionality. We can see this feature being very popular with people who aren’t great at typing, and also when searching for words that you are not really sure how to spell.

voice search

Google Search By Image

The other new search functionality that was announced is called Search by Image. This allows you to start your Google search by providing an image rather than typing in or speaking your search. There are several different ways that you can tell Google what image you want it to search with:

  • Drag and drop a picture from a web page or your computer onto the search box.
  • Upload an image from your computer.
  • Copy and paste the URL of an image on the web.
  • Or if you install one of the new Chrome or Firefox plugins, you can simply right click on a picture in your web browser and choose to search for that image.

I can see myself using this feature extensively for researching travel destinations. I’d love to hear your ideas for other interesting uses of Search by Image in the comments section below.

Both of these new search features can help to make it easier to find certain types of information, and it is interesting to note that they both were available on your cellphone before they made it to Google’s standard desktop search.

Our research clearly shows that the percentage of website visitors coming from mobile platforms such as the iPhone, iPad and Android phones is growing at an amazing rate. The future of the internet is clearly mobile. If you have a website, is it mobile ready?

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