Seasonal SEO – as the name suggests – is a highly targeted form of search engine optimisation aimed at achieving rankings on a topic at a specific point in the year, these typically being key buying times such as Christmas, Easter, Valentines Day or any period that might be important to a particular company’s activities.

We’ve recently developed a seasonal SEO programme for the Beamish Wild Ropes Activity Centre, based on attracting visitors during the school summer holidays. Following some on-site and off-site SEO work the site is now ranking 1st page (on Google.co.uk) on a selection of client-specified keyterms, including;

“summer fun for kids North East” – 7th

“summer fun for kids County Durham” – 1st

“summer holiday activities Durham” – 5th

“family fun in County Durham” – 6th

“family days out in County Durham” – 7th

The preparation required for a seasonal SEO campaign varies between websites, and can range from weeks to months in advance, depending on the keyterm topic, competition and general search proficiency of the website in question. Organic SEO – as ever – depends on various external factors so it’s always best to plan ahead as much as possible by phasing in the campaign over a number of weeks to help ensure that you hit the rankings you target at precisely the right time. Getting the timing wrong can have far-reaching consequences – there’s no business benefit at all in reaching the 1st page when no-one is searching for the keyterms anymore.

Seasonal SEO campaigns should be linked in with your company’s wider marketing strategy, and have the ability to seamlessly shift to the next relevant target when required, while always retaining the core SEO focus of the website throughout the year.

Interested in a seasonal SEO campaign for your company website? Get in touch with Green Media to find out more.

Sticking to what you do best on your company website is a good mantra for SEO.

As always, keep in mind that the main aim of Google (and the other major search engines) is to enhance the user experience, and they do this by ensuring the user finds what they’re looking for as quickly as possible. Therefore the top ranking websites for any search will always be the ones most applicable to the search term, naturally. Search engines thrive on clear topics and obvious authority on a given subject, and this is borne out in the rankings.

For instance, if your company offers a wide and varied set of services, you can be sure that there are competitors out there who are just offering one of those services. Depending on the quality of the websites and other SEO factors at work (such as off-page issues, link-building, domain name, domain age etc), the dedicated website will generally rank higher than the multiple service one, as the search engine will class it as more of an expert on the subject.

So, if your website is diluted with several different and disparate topics then you’re likely to find it tough to rank highly on any keyterms consistently, as search engines will struggle to pin your site down to a specific subject.

To avoid being lost in the search engine ether for this reason, think about topic themes and consider the natural connections between the different elements of content on your website. If all of the sections on the site can’t be naturally linked to each other then they shouldn’t be on the same website in the first place, at least if you’re expecting any decent level of search engine performance.

Green Media has been providing SEO solutions to companies since 2000, across a massive range of sectors and industries, for a multitude of performance requirements. Get in touch on 0191 275 9777 to find out how we can help improve your performance on search engines, delivering more traffic, sales, brand exposure and a clear return on investment.

The new third generation iPhone went on sale at the weekend, and while it proved to be an instant success with customers and critics alike, it seems that Apple might not have thought through the long-term SEO potential of the product – and has gone for a subtle yet drastically-sudden name change today.

Originally titled the “3G S”, the new iPhone is now known as the “3GS”. Apple hasn’t made any official comment on the change, but it’s plain to see on their website that it has happened.

What’s in a space character?

If the move is down to pure search engine motives, then perhaps Apple have made an unnecessarily knee-jerk decision as searches today for the old-style “3G S” are returning iPhone-dominated results on Google, Bing and Ask. (Only on Yahoo was the iPhone denied top-spot, perhaps understandably by the Three/3 mobile phone network official website.) Considering the millions of digital column inches that will be written about the 3GS in the coming months, the product will surely tighten its grip on the search term – space character or no space character.

Conversely, doing a search today for the new “3GS” name brings back a similarly iPhone-heavy set of results across the board, with some high-ranking references dating from several weeks ago, pre-empting Apple’s decision. Perhaps, when all is said and done, it wasn’t very clear that there was a space in the first place…

Either way, it’s interesting to see that maybe SEO can now impact on product launches of even the world’s most marketing-savvy companies.

We relaunched the HLA Services website in May, with a specific brief to improve search engine performance. The client came up with a wish-list of twenty-five keyterms – only one of which was ranking at all on Google at the time – covering the various specialist areas of the business.

Just over a month into the project we’re happy to report a veritable avalanche of results;

• 20 rankings overall
• 14 Top 10 / 1st page rankings
• 7 No#1 rankings

So in a period of five weeks, from a benchmark position of one solitary keyterm ranking, the HLA Services website is now a powerful competitor on twenty prime industry search terms – in the top ten for most of them and the absolute top ranked website for seven of those.

Just to clarify, these weren’t keyterms that we cherry-picked ourselves to ensure a positive result – these were client-specified, highly competitive terms designed to generate more business.

Like our Lucion Environmental project, HLA’s SEO programme is a long-term campaign, so we’re aiming to take this even further over the coming months.

Does this sound like the sort of SEO performance that your business could do with? If so, get in touch.

Microsoft’s latest attempt to gain a greater share of the search engine market went unexpectedly into beta last week. Pitched as a “decision engine”, bing.com comes as the replacement for LiveSearch.

With a fresh look, stunning photographic background imagery and a reported immediate impact with users in the opening test week, is Bing the next big thing in search?

Nice touches, nothing groundbreaking

The homepage is undoubtedly good-looking, but how does Bing fare when it is actually put to work with a search? The results page looks more or less as you’d expect, with a couple of nice touches.

Related searches are bumped up to the top left, instead of appearing in the footer as you’d expect. This could be a slight time-saver if you’re not overly familiar with what you’re searching for, but it’s nothing you couldn’t get before elsewhere.

Each individual result, when hovered over, has a small pop-up containing a synopsis and various links from the same website. Presumably this is to offer as much information as possible before a user commits to a click. This doesn’t seem a million miles away from Ask.com’s thumbnail preview, which offers a sneak peek of a website on the results page. Neither are particularly useful, but at least Ask.com’s effort offers some neat visuals.

Both cases essentially miss the point of the results page and their own faith in the suggested websites – the fact that a site is appearing on the 1st page should be reason enough to click on it. Any in-depth pre-investigation required before accepting the search engine’s suggestion indicates it might not be what you’re looking for.

Advanced search offers a pleasingly flexible and straight-forward set of variables – including country and language – but these aren’t exactly daily requirements for your average web user.

Spammy returns rank strongly

The synopsis tool actually comes in quite handy as a few random searches show that while Bing is returning relevant websites, it often suggests very deep links or spammy findings. These absolutely need to be weeded out before any full launch, or there’ll be all manner of “optimised for Bing” results appearing – a sure-fire way to kill the user experience.

Loose PPC connections

Bing’s suggested pay-per-click websites seem decidedly fuzzy, which is odd given PPC’s highly manageable nature and in particular the sharp targeting available through Microsoft’s own Adcenter system.

A search for “email marketing newcastle” returns an accurate selection on organic – but a poorly irrelevant mix of hotel, job vacancy and football websites on sponsored search.

The same search on Google.co.uk returns a watertight set of paid-for Newcastle-based email marketing results.

Despite the apparently hapless targeting, Bing does repeat the top ranking PPC ads at the bottom of the page – meaning that those advertisers who are paying top dollar get a second bite of the cherry if their main ad is ignored. Good for advertisers, good for Microsoft’s pocket.

Endless images

When using the images tab, Bing doesn’t seem to limit the result thumbnails, returning as many as 1000 at a time. While this helpfully removes the need to click through multiple pages to find what you’re looking for, it also produces reams of loading thumbnails as you’re scrolling the page. Maybe that’s why every other search engine, ever, uses multiple pages.

“Verbing Up”

Google is so synonymous with the very act of searching online that it comfortably reached the brand nirvana of becoming an associated verb some years ago. While Google’s top brass have made noises in the past that this is something they’re not too happy about – it “dilutes” their other offerings apparently – it is surely the pinnacle of brand domination. This obviously isn’t lost on Microsoft, with Chief Exec Steve Ballmer openly stating that Bing was chosen as a name that can be easily “verbed up”.

First impressions…

So will we all be “binging” for our information in years to come? On the evidence of the beta, the answer has to be a pretty clear ‘no’. Bing needs to offer something that Google doesn’t, and at the moment it isn’t doing that. However, with a reported marketing budget of $100m to ease the full introduction, Bing is likely to be around for a while. We’ll see how it goes, but with such a glitchy opener and the absence of anything really new, or even useful, it doesn’t look very promising.

Of course the beta phase of any project is intended to iron out the creases, so perhaps the niggles mentioned above can be forgiven for the time being. Perhaps the full launch will be a little slicker…

All in all, it’s good to see that someone is taking a determined run at Google’s domination – it’ll certainly be interesting to see how the market leader responds in due course.

It’s been little over two months since we mentioned the SEO success of Lucion Environmental following the start of Green Media’s search optimisation programme, and we’re pleased to say that the results have got even better. Lucion’s website is now ranking on the 1st page on Google for every single keyterm that was targeted by the client at the start of the campaign.

Starting from a benchmark position of no ranking at all on the chosen keywords, the lowest ranked term is now 3rd. That’s quite a leap.

What’s more, Lucion’s Google PageRank is rising, underlining the increasing authority of the website and providing a sure sign that the programme is working as planned.

Take a look at the rankings;

“asbestos newcastle” – 2nd

“asbestos gateshead” – 2nd

“asbestos crawley” – 2nd

“asbestos northern ireland” – 2nd

“asbestos tyne” – 3rd

If you’d like your company to experience the same SEO impacts on the keyterms that matter, drop us a line.

Take a look at our newly updated portfolio pages, featuring a selection of Green Media work completed during May. The update includes the new website for elite specialised security firm Bulwark Group, email marketing for Ferrari and a search optimised redesign for the HLA Services website.

We’ve launched the new Beamish Hall Country House Hotel website this week, see for yourself at www.beamish-hall.co.uk

We’re also search optimising the site for a range of hotel, wedding, conference and dining keyterms, so come back soon to see the progress.

We started search optimising asbestos surveying and management specialists Lucion Environmental’s website during February, targeting a specific set of industry keyterms. We’re happy to report that we’ve already achieved 1st page results on Google searches that the Lucion site was previously unranked on, providing a greater presence where it matters.

Best of all as it’s a full twelve-month SEO programme, we’re just getting started…

Take a look at some of the results so far;

“asbestos newcastle” – 2nd

“asbestos crawley” – 9th

“asbestos northern ireland” – 6th

Contrary to popular belief, pay per click (PPC) isn’t about throwing money at your account until it gets to the top of your searches. This way you’ll end up spending way over budget for a lot of very general traffic, and your conversion/ROI rate just won’t stack up.

PPC also tends to be something that a lot of SEO “experts” and amateurs think is easy to jump into and get immediate impacts without any real knowledge of the systems or strategies that should be used, which more often than not results in poor performance.

However, PPC can be a really effective platform when it’s used to its potential. Here are some quick ideas to get your PPC moving in the right direction.

1. Use organic SEO priniciples

Think about how you create your keyword list – terms that are difficult to achieve on organic searches translate to being competitive and expensive to achieve on PPC. The answer? Go long tail and be specific – you’ll find that CPCs are lower and the quality of visitor is higher.

2. Cut poor performers out

If your campaign contains a straggler keyterm that’s generating nothing and getting a far lower success (clicks/impressions/positioning/conversions) rate than the others then get rid of it. Your Quality Score is based on the whole campaign and poor performers can drag the entire thing down.

3. Be creative with your ad copy

An obvious but often overlooked PPC issue. How to do it? Look at the competitor ads on any given keyterm, you’re sure to find at least a few that are basically saying exactly the same thing – avoid doing this at all costs. You need to make your ad sufficiently different to stand out, and get as many USPs in as possible to encourage a click. It’s amazing how much detail can be squeezed into those 70 characters.

4. Write lots of ad variations and use them all

The main PPC systems allow multiple ads to be assigned to campaigns, and they carry out their own “survival of the fittest” process to determine the most effective. The result? The best ads are shown the most. This is a great help to marketers, and there’s no excuse not to use it. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, get a load of ads written up and let them sink or swim on their own. Once you know which ad style works the best, refine and improve it even more.

5. Diversify with ad groups

Don’t lump all your keywords in together. If the scope of your campaign is broad enough, use ad groups to split it up. This will let you create more specific ads for each topic, and move away from being too general.

6. Make your display URL jump out

While the display URL is a fairly rigid element, why not try introducing capital letters to make individual words stand out more? Look at this example, it’s clear which one is more attention-grabbing;

www.freshredroses.com

www.FreshRedRoses.com

… a minor point? Maybe, but in a competitive market every tactic helps.

Green Media are Google Adwords Professional Qualified, which means that every single PPC campaign we create and manage is handled in the most appropriate and effective way. We employ all of the techniques described here, as well as some more advanced methods learned through years of experience to achieve the best results. Get in touch to find out how PPC by Green Media can help your business.