We wanted to recommend to you what we believe to be the most important priorities for online marketers regarding the efficent management of your SEO strategy in 2012. Below is a list of what we think are the most important priorities:

1) Google + One

The impact of Google + one and most recently “your world” will be hugely significant for internal online marketing teams not just because of the massive resource Google are investing in this roll out but also the likely impact on personalised SEO results, your internal content distribution and how it will impact your Paid Search performance.

2) The growing internationalisation of Search.

As the Uk Search marketing hits saturation point and the economy slows, ambitious online businesses will be looking to their agencies to provide Search expertise in the new emerging marketing frontiers, not just multilingual expertise but also expertise in how Baidu works in China and or Yandex for targetting  Russia. The 2012 Olympics in London will surely prompt more brands to consider the potential of international Search.

3) Mobile Search
Traffic growth through mobile search has been prenomenal in the last 12 months which was further strengthened by the healthly tablet sales at Xmas 2011, approximately 1.2 million sales in Xmas according to a recent Econsultancy 2011 Xmas sales report. Enabling your website to be compatible with all mobile devises and understanding what customers’s mobile search behaviour are key priorities for 2012.

4) The impact of SSL Search restictions
Google’s analytics update in October 2011, restricting access to Google analytics via SSL referred traffic , has had a very disruptive impact on how non-branded SEO traffic can be accurately measured. While so far the impact on your SEO trafffic is likely to be only in single figures, ‘not provided’ traffic is growing and when this update rolls out in the UK the impact is likely to be more severe.

5) The Cookie Law Directive
Perhaps overlooked but hugely significant for SEO management is the Cookie Law Directive.  If the cookie law goes head this will have a severe implication on tracking and measurement

6) Content
The panda update in 2011 reinforced the absolute need for website owners to build authoritive, indepth content including references, review and comments. Content will need to be not only good enough to be linked to but also needs to good enough to encourage sharing

7) Social and SEO working side by side
The growing importance as an algorithmic SEO ranking factor of Social signals will require a fundamental structural need for Social Strategy to be closely aligned with your SEO teams internally

Integration of Search with Offline behaviour
As searching behaviour becoming more mobile, there is a growing need to understand how other forms of marketing, particularly TV viewing habits, are impacting the search performance of your customers. Google’s roll out of Google TV and the $100 Million investment earmarked for new TV channels proves that they believe the integration of TV will be a natural entension of Search

So what do you think? We welcome any comments

You can sometimes feel and sense the emergence of a new Social Media site which may be a game changer. For online retailers Pinterest is one such site which deserves your attention.

So how does it work? the website works like a bulletin board of images allowing you to post, or pin your interests, compile them and share them with your friends. It is really simple, compelling and the design is fantastically addictive.

So should you be using it? If you base your decision on traffic growth and are reliant on images and friend recommendations to contribute to your sales process then yes, this makes commercial sense to add the pin on your product pages and track any impact on your analytics. But if you are looking for solid empirical evidence about conversion data as yet it is still early days to draw conclusions about its potential.

I have compiled 3 excellent articles from Econsultancy’s blog regarding pinterest’s commercial potential:

Pinterest role as a referrer for retailers grows:

http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/8832-pinterest-s-role-as-a-referrer-for-retailers-grows-infographic

Boticca one of first retailers to add Pinterest to social sharing tools

http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/8700-boticca-one-of-first-retailers-to-add-pinterest-to-social-sharing-tools

Demographics of Pinterest users:

http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/8796-revealing-the-demographics-behind-pinterest-s-user

Alternatively you can call the Barracuda Social Media team to discuss your requirements- 0207 593 1838

Search is all about working the long tail, right? Well not if Google has it’s way. Since Google makes a lower CPC on ads clicked from long tail searches, they’re keen to reduce it – as this fantastic infographic from SEOBook illustrates:

Infographic by SEO Book

Over on the official Google blog there’s a great video that shows the evolution of Google, the product launches, the changing search landscape, and some hints at what lies ahead.

There’s also a great timeline that showing the Google search story:

The timeline includes important developments such as:

Universal Results, which returns results including images, videos, and news, in addition to webpages, helping you find all different kinds of information in the same place.

Quick Answers, which are more than just a list of links to websites, but actual information such as flight times, sports scores, weather and so on.

The Future of Search, where Google is looking to make search quicker and more convenient. Developments in this space include Google Instant or Voice Search (from your mobile).

Here’s the video

Google+ is the newest social media service on the block (see our post about how to set up your business’ Google+ page). Whilst it’s still small (50m users) what makes it interesting is fast growth, and that it’s made by Google. And no brand who wants to do well in search can afford to ignore a new product from Google.

Because there’s no doubt that Google are going to leverage their dominance of search to force brands to adopt Google+ as a platform to engage users. We’re seeing the first instance of that this week as Google launches Social Extensions.

Google+ Meet Google Adwords

Social Extensions are a way of linking your AdWords creatives to your Google+ page. This means that all your +1s — from your Page, your website, ads and search results — get tallied together and appear as a single total, published on your AdWords ads.

What this means for your campaigns

There’s no doubt that advertisers with a lot of +1s are going to get a better Click Through Rate, an improved quality score, the chance to rank more highly and an opportunity to reduce CPC. This is because all the people using Google search will see all the recommendations that a brand has had, right there in the search results page.

Without Social Extensions enabled, AdWords ads only show +1’s from people who have +1’d that ad’s landing page. This limits the likelihood that someone who sees the ad will have a friend or contact who’s recommended it.

Seeing the effects

It will also be possible to report on the results of your ads when social extensions are included, thanks to a new +1 annotation segment in the user interface.

The segment breaks out ad performance metrics into three categories:

• Impressions with personal annotations – (impressions where the viewer has a friend or contact who has +1’d your brand.)
• Impressions with basic annotations – (impressions that included an anonymous count of people who +1’d your brand)
• Impressions without any social annotations

How to add Social Extensions

In order to start including Social Extensions on AdWords creatives just click the Ad Extensions tab in your account and select Social Extensions from the drop down menu and choose new extension.

All you need to do is add your connected Google+ Page URL and click save.

That’s it

Social Extensions are an easy way to link a brands Google+ page with their AdWords creative. Those that are linked will have a positive boost in campaign performance, since searchers viewing the SERPs will be able to see which brands have had lots of recommendations.

Although they weren’t initially available, as of last week any business can now set up a page on Google+.

To get started, you’ll need to already have a personal Google+ account. Just go to the Google+ Create A Page tool. Here’s what it looks like:

Admin rights

On here you need to kick off by adding basic information such as your brand name and your URL. As the page creator you will also be the admin. At the moment no-one else gets to be admin, and you can’t transfer admin rights to anyone else.

Personalised URLs

At the moment you don’t get to choose a “vanity” URL like you can for your Facebook page. It is however important to get the name of your page right, because if you change it you will have to restart the verification process.

Getting the right category

You have to choose to put your business into one of five categories:

• Local Business or Place
• Product or Brand
• Company, Institution or Organization
• Arts, Entertainment or Sports
• Other

What local pages offer

For local businesses there are some extra options including adding a phone number, an address and working hours, with the intention that people can use a Google+ page to find and visit a business. In this way it’s quite similar to a Google Places page.

You can also Act Like A Page

In the same way as Facebook, you can choose to use Google+ as your business page rather than as an individual, to do things like sharing photos and videos, links, and to conduct hangouts.

Using 3rd party tools

At the moment it’s not possible to post updates to your Google+ page using tools like Tweetdeck, since Google haven’t yet released the API for Google+.

Following

Unlike Twitter, Pages can only follow people once they have themselves been followed. but not until they’ve been first followed.

You can have more than 1 Page

As a business you can have more than one Google+ page. For example, you might want one for a number of different products, models or sub-brands; and a corporate one too.

Following a business

In order to follow a business, users must add it to a circle (purple in the diagram below), and not +1 it (orange), which may cause confusion.

+1 ing a page

Google say that a Google+ page will reconcile all the +1s that a brand has had, be that on a Google+ page or any URL or product on their site, giving an overall indication of popularity.

Getting official

Google plans to create a new icon similar to Facebook’s Facepile to encourage to following of business pages:

There’s already a badge maker page although its currently a bit thin on the ground. Google plans to also create a Verified Name programme for well known brands.

Direct Connect

Google have added a new feature to the search results called ‘Direct Connect’, which allows users to search for a business’ Google+ page by just adding a ‘+’ to the start of the brand name.

Verifying a page

To stop anyone creating a page for a brand, Google has introduced a verification process that ties a page to a website.

In order to do this you need to use:

• Rel=”publisher” on at least the homepage of your site to link to your Google+ page
• A Link from your page back to home page or main page of the site

Google also suggests using the new icon from the badge maker page. For more information about the verification process take a look here.

That’s it

Google+ pages are an exciting way that brands can make use of the fastest growing social network, and one which will undoubtedly have increasing impact on SEO. Good luck setting up your page, and let us know how you get on.

Barracuda were happy to welcome the Marketing team from Twitter recently.

A couple of years ago, PPC and SEO were all about driving traffic to websites and converting it into sales. With the rise of Social media the game has become a little more complex: Facebook PPC often leads to a Facebook landing page, promoted Tweets bring your traffic to your Twitter profile page. And with YouTube advertising, from promoted video, video overlays, companion ads, pre-roll and so on, it’s often your YouTube branded channel page that is the final destination of this traffic.

Since this traffic is leading to offsite ‘events’ it is highly important to be able to measure the benefit. And this has got a whole lot easier thanks to an easy integration between Youtube and Google Analytics.

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Ever since Google revealed last year that page load speed would be a ranking factor, there has been a scramble amongst site owners to speed up their sites.

For Google to take page load into account was always inevitable, since a slow site represents a poor experience for users, and Google is all about improving user experience.

Now it seems like everyone is trying to ‘sell’ a solution to slow pages, from web hosts to CDNs. Google themselves have just started offering to host your pages on their index. But what action can you yourself take to speed up your site?

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More and more of consumer time is spent online. And more and more of that is spent watching online video.

But there’s been a lag in the amount of TV ad money that has made the shift to online.

Google recently debuted findings at the IAB Digital Video Conference of some research which looked into what the barriers were slowing that shift, and how they were finally giving way.

The research used focused groups of individuals in both agency and client teams, and asked them questions about what they’d been up to in the last 12 months. The full findings are here, but here’s a brief overview.

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