No More Botox In Adwords – How This Will Affect Google

For those companies wanting to use the word Botox in their Google Adwords (PPC) advertising campaigns, this is no longer possible.  If you type a phrase such as ‘botox courses’ into Google you’ll see no Sponsored Links at all.  A veritable desert of adverts, which looks quite strange compared to the norm.

For some time, Google had been awkward about allowing advertisers to use the word ‘Botox’ in their adverts.  At that time advertisers could use keyword phrases that included the word ‘Botox’ but couldn’t actually use the word in their adverts (although some advertisers were allowed, for reasons that Google never explained).

But none of that matters now because the playing field is totally level – no advertisers at all are allowed to use the word ‘Botox’ in their campaigns.  The reasons for the ban on Botox appear to be related to the medical nature of the product, not helped much by legal cases related to its alleged misuse.

Historically, Google has always called the shots when it comes to what advertisers can and can’t do with the Adwords system and although Google is really annoying sometimes, it’s rare to see it completely ban a keyword phrase from being used by advertisers.

So where does this leave companies who are providing Botox-related services or products?  This depends on how much foresight they’ve had.  If they’ve got poor natural search engine positioning or are doing little else in the way of marketing, they’ll find themselves with a big hole in their enquiry levels.   A hole that could mean the end for some companies.

Let’s look at this from the viewpoint of the companies that provide Botox-related services and products.  Their options (online) are:

1. Go to the competition (principally Bing and Yahoo) and use their PPC systems to try and pull in traffic.  Unfortunately, the challenge here is that those systems have paltry levels of users compared to the mighty Google so although some clicks could be gained, they’re going to be minute in comparison to what was possible with Google Adwords.
2. Rapidly look at their organic SEO to see what can be done to enhance their Google positioning.  This will be extremely painful for those companies that have had their heads in the sand for so long, assuming that PPC will forever bring them business.  Those that had no concept of sales risk management will have a nasty wake-up call.
3. Get more into other forms of online visibility raising.  For example, banners on relevant websites, becoming more active in online forums, on Twitter, and email marketing directly to potential customers.

So, limping away from Google Adwords advertising, licking their wounds, what’s going to happen with these companies and how will that have a negative impact on Google?  Here are some thoughts:

1. Companies will get better at organic SEO and other online visibility activities, will get their levels of business back, and will tell all their contacts about how they don’t need to spend money on PPC advertising anymore.  That will raise the awareness of PPC alternatives with other companies/contacts, who may well decide that PPC represents too many eggs in one basket, they’ll start to look at other forms of online visibility, succeed at it, and that leads to less PPC revenues for the likes of Google.
2. Those companies that decide to use PPC on other systems such as Bing or Yahoo will become less loyal to Google, may even start using those search systems more, and so take eyeballs away from Google.
3. Some advertisers that have had their Google Adwords Botox visibility taken away by Google will fight against the system and may refuse to click on adverts themselves (on principle).
4. Those companies (such as Custwin) who use PPC as one of the methods to help clients gain more business, will start to advise clients to focus less on Google PPC (or PPC in general), which takes revenue away from people like Google.  Multiply that up by several companies similar to Custwin (that have had clients go through the same challenges), and you start to see dents appearing in the Google revenues.

At the end of it all, Google stopped the use of Botox in Adwords for reasons that they consider to be best.  What this proves though is that advertisers are very much at the mercy of Google decisions and so, as always, it’s vital for any company to have in place a good mix of marketing activities, online and offline, so that any such storms can be weathered.

Website landing page impact – Mercury Engineering

It was completely by chance that I stumbled across the website for Mercury Engineering (http://www.mercuryeng.com/) and it’s been a long time since I saw a website landing page that gave such a strong impact.

Upon landing on that website you get a Bing.com effect with a huge picture dominating the page.  That picture appears to be what must be hundreds of Mercury Engineering employees standing against a background of equipment and what looks like a project they’re working on.

The biggest impact is that it instantly sends out a message that the company is large (in terms of workers).  For someone who is going to potentially consider that company to supply services there can be no doubt that the company has the resources necessary.

I’ll admit that I’ve never been a big fan of splash pages that act as a barrier, making people then click on another link to enter the full detail of the website.  In this case though, the splash page is totally justified and does exactly what it’s intended to do – get across the impression of company size.   Thankfully, once within the website so much more has been done so well that it wasn’t a case of ‘nice face, shame about the rest’.

Well done to Mercury Engineering for creating enough of an impact to make me want to blog about them.

Man and van Canterbury – why businesses fail

It’s obvious that the best way to source a product or service is to ask around for personal recommendations.  That’s what was done recently when looking for a man and van to do a house move.  It didn’t come up with any decent results so Google became the next port of call.

The original phrase typed was ‘man and van Herne Bay’ but the search results were so poor that it was considered ‘man and van Canterbury’ (bigger area) would get better results.  How wrong can you be, and what a perfect way to demonstrate how backward many businesses are.

Having typed ‘man and van Canterbury’ into Google, there were many Sponsored Links results, plus the naturals.  As PPC experts, the first focus was on the Sponsored Links to see what was there and there wasn’t a single advert that referred to Canterbury – but several other more generic or ‘outside the area’ adverts displayed.   Lesson number 1 for all those advertisers: wake up – you’re wasting budget and probably haven’t a clue why!

Having seen how inept the average PPC advertiser is, it was the turn of the natural Google results to come up with the goods.  Top of the list was www.manandvankent.co.uk, which looked really promising until clicking on it brought up a message of ‘The site manandvankent.co.uk has been disabled. Please contact support’.   It’s always good to see that Google are providing a quality service allowing such rubbish to be top of the search results.

The next search result led to http://services.vivastreet.co.uk/removals+canterbury, which had a few small adverts so inadequate that they weren’t worth exploring further.

The following search result (http://www.helpiammoving.com/removal_companies/CT.php) didn’t have anything local enough, even though the page was supposed to be about Canterbury.

A few chuckles came from the site http://www.alternativetransportservices.co.uk/, which was a really cheesy, noisy website in geezer speak using phrases such as ‘Get cheap moving products & services for the geeza’s and the birds too..cheap cheap’.   OK for a laugh but utterly useless in the search for ‘man and van Canterbury’.

The search went on and on – poor result upon poor result ended up with the thought of “so how do all the genuine man and van companies in Canterbury actually get business?”.   This applies to many types of businesses in various areas.  It’s not hard to get good natural Google positioning for a business that’s geographically focused.   For a man and van business in the Canterbury area it would be a piece of cake to get plenty of enquiries purely on the basis of the surrounding search results being so poor and irrelevant – even if not in top Google position.  Equally, PPC adverts would also get great results because there’s no competition that refers to the Canterbury area.

This is just one example of why businesses fail and covers 3 areas of failure:

1. Those businesses that advertise with Google Adwords but do it inefficiently will find themselves with irrelevant clicks plus campaigns that gain impressions but few clicks.  That marketing investment will largely be down the drain.

2. Those businesses that appear in the natural Google results but aren’t switched on enough to realise that they could be cleaning up because of the poor competition around them.  How much effort does it take to type in the phrases that apply to your business and take a good look at what appears in the search results and then decide how to beat that?

3. Those businesses who aren’t at all focused on being visible within Google when people type phrases related to their type of business.  Those are the ones sitting around with time on their hands, accepting that the economy is down, or there’s too much competition out there, or whatever other excuse is convenient.

In all three cases above, businesses that fall into those categories deserve to wither and die.  While no-one expects companies to be experts in how to win business from their websites, it’s not rocket science to write down a few notes and work out where business isn’t coming from, and then to start investigating how to turn that round.

How many man and van services that cover the Canterbury area will be sitting around with no work in a weeks time?   There’ll be a few without a doubt but who knows who they are because they’re invisible to those of us who typically turn to the web to find such services when there’s no personal recommendation that comes up trumps.

PPC for restaurants – amazing first day results

It’s not often we boast about the results we get for clients but today surprised us enough to share the success.

The client came to us by referral, as most do, and their concern was that their restaurant wasn’t visible in Google when people looked for them.  They’d often get enquiries on the phone and people would say words to the effect of “we had a job finding your details in Google”.

So, thinking that there wouldn’t actually be that many people searching for them, we set up a PPC campaign focused on their restaurant name, the intention being to expand it out to other phrases that would bring business into them.  It was probably the simplest job we’ve ever done.

We looked at the statistics for the first day – 46 clicks on their advert.  Wow! We weren’t expecting that to happen.   We rang the client and said that their original clicks budget probably wouldn’t be enough over a month and asked their views.  They were ecstatic to say the least, and had taken 20 bookings during the day – much higher than usual.

And the cost of those clicks that led to all those bookings?  £7.51.   Does make all the print advertising look a bit expensive in comparison!

The point of blogging about this is not to say we’re brilliant – this was actually really easy to do.   But that it’s sometimes surprising what can be achieved with PPC advertising and that Google invisibility can be turned round overnight and put serious revenues onto the bottom line.

How stupid are so many UK businesses?

We’re coming up for the Kent 2020 exhibition in April 2010 and it’s started …. the stream of emails and phone calls from companies trying to sell exhibitors their services.  This could be printing, exhibition stand stuff, gimmicks, whatever.

Like local political party reps at election time, they come out of the woodwork expecting to gain business.  To be frank, it’s insulting, opportunistic, and in today’s climate, just plain stupid.

The winners in business in the future will be those that create an ongoing, but non-invasive awareness of themselves.  Does Custwin want to buy new exhibition popups etc. for Kent 2020 this year?  No.  Would we need to next year?  Possibly.   Would we be adverse to getting a blog feed, Tweets, or an occasional email newsletter from companies who supply such products, over the months?  No, we wouldn’t be adverse.   In fact, it would help to build up trust, it may even lead to us meeting the suppliers at some point, and it’s got a much stronger potential to turn into business for the suppliers at some stage.

Taking another subject, a company was pitching chocolate fountain hire for the Kent 2020 exhibition.  As a cold introduction to 100 people it’s possible that very few may respond.  But as a warm drip feed over a longer period of time, the percentage of buyers will increase.  HOW that drip feed is implemented is a subject all of its own but it’s not rocket science.

The focus here happens to be on an upcoming business exhibition but the principle applies for any type of business that wants to gain new clients, particularly at times of the year when those potential buyers are more likely to need such services.

Those businesses that don’t embrace the concept of drip feeding their message into potential clients will soon find themselves losing out to their competitors who understand what makes potential clients tick.

Top Companies for SEO

As we start 2010 there appears to be an upsurge in companies saying that they’re good at all things ‘web’.  Some say they’re the best at SEO, others say they’re the best at PPC, and then there are those that say they’re the best at social media.

One company emailed us saying that they were top of Google UK for the phrases ’search engine marketing’,  ’pay per click London’, and ’search engine optimisation London’.  That sounds good on the surface but such claims open companies up to closer scrutiny.

While we wouldn’t take it away that they are in fact top for those phrases, we would take issue with their claim of ‘Being number one for each in Google.co.uk demonstrates we are the best in search’.   So let’s look at this a bit deeper – two of the phrases include the word ‘London’ and the other is ’search engine marketing’ (which, although a good result to get, probably isn’t the first phrase that people think of when looking for search engine optimisation companies.  No, they’re more likely to be searching for something like ’search engine optimisation’.  If you type that phrase into Google UK a completely different company is top and the ‘best in search’ company doesn’t show up until page 2 of results.

So, top marks for being highest for ’search engine optimisation London’ but reduced marks for thinking that people wouldn’t think “so what about if we take ‘London’ off that phrase and see where you are?”.

Of course, there are so many phrases related to SEO that people may type into Google, and few companies would try and optimise for too many of them.  The point here though is that while it’s great to get top positioning in Google for certain types of phrases, to broadcast to people that you’re ‘best in search’ is quite daft when you’re not top for the most obvious phrase, which is ’search engine optimisation’.

In most business types companies/people can say they’re the best and sometimes it’s difficult to prove.  For those providing SEO and PPC services though, the evidence is there for all to see on page 1 of Google and it’s a brave company that makes claims about being the best if there are holes in their online visibility.

The future of those in the web industry

The web world evolves very quickly and those of us within the ‘web’ industry itself may benefit from looking inwards at how things are likely to change in the near future.

There was a time when a one-man-band could say to potential clients that they were experts at website design, programming, SEO (including PPC advertising), and more.   This is actually an impossibility.  They could be ‘ok’ at a mixture of all those and be stronger in some areas but they couldn’t profess to be experts at everything because there’s just so much to stay updated with.

In situations where a web company has a few members of staff and each one has an expertise in a certain area, then such claims of being a ‘one-stop-shop’ for website success could be justified.  But the majority of the web industry are one-man-bands or two to three people working together.

Looking at what makes a website successful, there are, in the Custwin view, a few important factors:

1.    Analysis (including statistical evidence) of how well a website is performing compared to the levels of traffic going to that website.  Recommendations for change would come out of that analysis.

2.    Website design and development expertise that converts recommended changes into results on the live website, or initially creates the best possible website in the first place.

3.    Strong skills in promoting the website through ‘mainstream’ channels (i.e. SEO, including PPC where appropriate), and in analysing the results from that promotion.

4.    Expertise in building on the website strength through blogs, Twitter, and so much more.

When you consider those four factors above, particularly how much expertise is needed for each, then it’s clear that one or two man companies/individuals can’t be at the top of their game in all those skills.

In our view, the future for companies and individuals working within the web industry is simply one of two things:

1.    Success through honesty and complementary relationships

2.    Failure

Failure will come to those companies or individuals who don’t have the required skills to give a client company success from their website, but at the same time, don’t find a way of gaining access to those skills.  The end result will be a company that has a website that generates mediocre results.   A company website with mediocre results will lead to that company being more receptive to good quality advice and the incumbent provider of web services will lose that business in time.   They will also not gain any positive referrals from their ex-client because they will have been seen to have failed through not getting results.

The successful companies or individuals in the future will be those who are fully honest with their clients.  For example, if a company approaches a web developer and says they want a website that’s fantastic, the web developer has two choices:

1.    Go ahead and provide a great website.

2.    Say that they can provide a great website but focus the attention of the potential client on how that website will be promoted and analysed once it’s been created.

Many web developers won’t risk option 2 because they fear that the potential client will go to somewhere/someone that offers all the expertise under one roof.   The savvy web developers though will make it clear to the potential client that they’re really good at what they do, but although they have some knowledge of SEO etc. they would utilise the skills of trusted contacts to ensure the website gets the best possible results.

Turning this round the other way, there are numerous SEO companies or individuals who make great claims about achieving search engine positioning  but they don’t focus on whether the website is strong enough to warrant being promoted in the first place.  The end result there is that a website may well be highly prominent in the search engines but the numbers of people who actually make contact with the client company are relatively small because people just don’t get on with the website itself.   In this situation, the SEO company or individual should have the honesty to say to the potential client that they can definitely help but the client would be better off focusing initially on website strength.   At Custwin we’ve had many situations in which we’ve either passed potential clients onto our own web developer contacts or back to their own web developers, noting that we’d be happy to help promote the website but not until it’s been made stronger.

Companies are getting wise to the pitfalls of websites.  Most have had their fingers burnt and they increasingly have an expectation that whoever they deal with needs to get them strong results from their investment.   For those within the web industry who aren’t prepared to provide a full range of services, even if those services aren’t within their own levels of expertise (and so have to be outsourced to trusted contacts), then there can only be longer term failure ahead.

A day will come when most companies will understand that they have to ask certain questions of those who they choose to get involved in their web presence.  They’ll understand that a website is more than just the physical online presence but is about analysis of visitor patterns, promoting the website effectively, and more.  They’ll also understand that there needs to be an ongoing process of analysis and refinements and that a website is never complete.  The future winners in the web industry will be those who can provide guarantees that the client will benefit substantially from their online presence.   Such guarantees  can be effective by ensuring that a ‘team’ of experts is used, each focusing on their own type of expertise so that the client gets the desired result.  That ‘team’ may be made up of several individuals or companies but ultimately, responsibility would be on the shoulders of the main point of contact that the client company has.

For those in the web industry who don’t encourage potential clients to consider the bigger picture than their individual area of expertise, the future will be bleak.  For those in the industry who understand that nothing matters more than an online presence that gets results, and that tie-ups with complementary skills are vitally important, the future will be strong because the clients will gain the required levels of business, are likely to stay loyal, and are also likely to refer onto potential new clients.

Wasted money on PPC – Easter Peeps at Christmas

If there’s one thing that’s annoying it’s advertisers that are blatantly unaware of wasted money on their PPC advertising in Google.  Today brought yet another example …

Many of you will have heard of Peeps – marshmallow sweets full of sugar and stuff, very popular in the USA.  Some time ago while in the US, some boxes of Peeps found their way back home and were very much appreciated.   Fast forwards to 2009 and an idea pops into the head that it would be good to buy some Peeps because they were so well received before.   So, being in the UK, the natural search phrase to type is:

buy peeps online

The intention is to find a UK company that is importing Peeps and then reselling them.  Even at a premium, it’s not the money that counts, it’s a ‘must have’ buy in this case.

So, looking at the Sponsored Links in Google you see:

Ignoring the top result, the next two are adverts related to Easter.  There are a couple of points to make here:

1. Although Peeps are traditionally all about Easter, they’re actually made available for numerous ‘holiday’ type occasions throughout the year.  This begs the question of “why, when someone types ‘buy peeps online’ is an Easter advert appearing?   We’ll come back to this point.
2. Google is displaying two adverts.  Does anyone want to hazard a wild guess about whether those adverts are from separate companies or just one?  Apparently, according to Google, the PPC system isn’t supposed to allow advertisers to abuse the system and have more than one advert displaying under a single keyword phrase.  On the surface, SupaPrice.co.uk and Hot-Prices.co.uk are separate companies but it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to see that the adverts are very similar and when you click through to those respective websites, the content of them is remarkably similar as well.   This does kind of make a mockery of Google making big claims about ‘quality’ being an inherent part of the PPC system if the system itself is not intelligent enough to identify when two adverts are related to the same company.   This has long been the case and we’ve done it ourselves, very successfully, getting a client listed several times for the same keyword phrase, but getting three adverts visible at a time instead of the one when supposedly the system is intelligent enough to work such things out- fantastic for locking out the competition.  

Anyway, the purpose of this blog isn’t to highlight the significant flaws within Google’s perception of what is ‘quality’ and what isn’t (in Sponsored Links results) but is instead on point 1 above …

If interested in buying Peeps online and seeing an advert about Easter (even though we’re approaching Christmas 2009), there are two knock-on effects for the advertiser who is displaying their adverts:

1. The majority of people who search for such a keyword phrase (or probably many similar) are going to see the advert, think it’s irrelevant, and won’t click.  This has the impact of reducing the click-through-rate (CTR) of the advertiser, which means their advert positioning and cost per click will also be negatively impacted.
2. Those people who decide that they really want to get hold of Peeps (as was the case this time) click through on the advert (actually, both of the adverts) and find that the websites have absolutely no reference to Peeps at all.  Yes, they have references to Easter products but no reference to Peeps (wrong time of the year in this case).   The end result: clicks on both of those sites cost both advertisers click costs and they get nothing from it.

So, the lesson here is that anyone who has either in-house PPC people or is outsourcing their PPC and basically have people running it that are extremely lazy, and frankly, stupid, is losing money and damaging their PPC campaigns in the process.   So what’s the answer for www.supaprice.co.uk and www.hot-prices.co.uk, who would appear to be German owned?    Roll out the firing squad and shoot whoever is responsible for this embarrasment of PPC advertising that contributes to people saying “I never click on the Sponsored Links because they’re often not relevant”, while wasting the budget and success potential of the advertiser.

Video On Websites – From Fun To Business Generators

No, we’re not talking about normal corporate videos here, but something a little bit different.  We’re talking about combining your expertise with humour to generate brand awareness and new business.

In the world of website design, development and online marketing, those of us within the industry often witness very similar words coming out of the mouths of potential clients.  These words tend to be along the lines of “a website isn’t complicated to create, it’ll cost a minimal amount and it’ll look fantastic if you’ve used the logo created by the one-legged daughter of the bosses half-brother”.   That’s why a particular series of videos are particularly amusing to anyone who works within this industry. 

Those videos are all available on YouTube and there are many variations.  The examples below are probably the most perfectly matched to anyone in the web design/development/marketing industry.   Warning: the language is very ‘colourful’!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sU3KaT74JE&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfprIxNfCjk&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCjcwBGQtiw&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyTpzgAW5NA&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx14XCNNARw&feature=related

But let’s go beyond the fact that those videos will amuse most people working within the web industry and look deeper at what’s being achieved there.   At the end of each video there’s reference to the Xtranormal website, where such videos can be created.  When you go to that website, the best page to view is http://www.xtranormal.com/about_state/, which has a video you can play that explains how the system works and also allows you to download the product for free.

And pause …..

At this stage, the company that’s developed the video creation software has put an advert for their product at the end of each video that people create, which is free advertising.  They’ve also made it free for anyone to create videos of their own and through those people creating such videos and uploading them to sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and more, further people are seeing their brand name at the end of each video, and so want to find out how they can use the video creation software themselves.  There becomes an ongoing Xtranormal brand awareness and although most people would just use the free download to create videos, the more people using the system, the more potential there is to get people to buy into the premium edition.  This, of course, is a classic way to build new business – give away something for free and publicise it well, and then make money from premium subscriptions.

Let’s look at this from a different perspective though.  Let’s think about YOUR own business …

What is there that you could portray about your line of business, through the medium of such a video creation system?   Depending on your business sector, humour could be a great angle – even if you may think the nature of your business isn’t that exciting.   In fact, even better if the nature of your business isn’t exciting because if you can make people laugh in a way that’s not detrimental to the ‘real’ side of your business, then that could put you ahead of your competitors.

As an example, someone selling a service could portray that in an amusing way through such videos.   It’s not uncommon for many service type businesses to lose out to competitors purely on price but in reality the lower price services often don’t provide the benefits that the client actually needs.  A video could portray a discussion between a buyer of that service and the cut-price company that is selling the service.  It could be narrated with the buyer asking particular questions about what the service covers and the seller responding with comments about how poor the service actually is, but it’s cheap – to the point of mocking the buyer. However, the buyer doesn’t hear those words because they’re focusing purely on the cost of the service.

Through creating a series of such videos, including reference to your company as being ‘the good guys’ and publicising them effectively, brand awareness can be built and if you’ve made people laugh along the way then even though perhaps only 1 in 100 people will go on to buy from you, that’s still one more than would otherwise have done so.

On the other hand, if you look at those example videos and the Xtranormal software and still don’t see how you could use such systems to capitalise on the combination of fun and video, then feel free to contact us and we’ll give you some free pointers in the right direction.

Keywords Meta Tags RIP

Food that repeats on you for hours.  Re-runs of ‘Back to the future’. Incompetent politicians …

There are some things that never seem to go away.

Another thing that seems to have been lingering forever is the concept that Keywords Meta Tags are of any use at all in SEO.  So, just for the record, and for all those companies that have it in their heads that an important thing to do with SEO is to cram their code full of Keywords Meta Tags, there’s just one message …

The search engines take no notice of them at all.  None of those that are worth using anyway.  No, not even Google.   And if you don’t believe it, here it is from the horses mouth …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK7IPbnmvVU&feature=player_embedded