Google and the other search providers continue to evolve their advertising offering and find new ways to charge for their valuable real estate.  Here are three examples that are either live now or will be very shortly.

Sitelinks

Site links are very relevant to Pay Per Click (PPC) advertisers with multiple offerings or different locations such as a hotel chain. Product extensions show upto four sub-links below the top placed advertiser on Google. These sub-links can be derived automatically from Google Places (formerly Google Maps Local) or the links entered manually by the advertiser. Not only does it take up more page re-estate but also allows searchers to make decisions before they click (and cause you to be charged by Google) and then to be taken to the most relevent pages on your website straight.

Finding the right keywords is the basis to a profitable marketing campaign.   By “right” I mean those keywords that your future customers will type into their favourite search engine and click through to your website.  After readying about you and your solutions they then either buy something or contact you for more information via webform or phone.

Internet marketing professionals like us at WSI access expensive research tools to help us with selection of the correct keywords for your campaign (as well as, of course, the excellent tools that Google provides to everyone for nothing). 

However, this research works on the premise that the “seed” keywords provided by the client are correct.   The client is often so close to their product that they may not be the best judge of what searchers (by definition uneducated in the solution) may be searching for.

We know the many searcher type their question into the search engine.  So if you website is all focused on your solution you are relying on Google, Yahoo and Bing to having sufficient insight to know that your solution fits with the searchers’ problems.  Not the best basis to build a business case for investing in a search engine optimisation campaign....

Recently it was announced by Google that it had spiced its secret list of ingredients further by adding yet another.  The new one is "site speed" which it had been testing for several months as part of its webmaster tools.

This is good news for website owners who have invested in a good quality website and will penalise those who have purchased a low cost or "free" site builder for their business website.

Here is a chart of performance of a slow site (slower than 70% of other sites).  Ideally the line should be in the blue section showing less than 1.5 second page load times.



 

And one that Google says is a fast site (faster than 97% of other sites)



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