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In a major cost cutting exercise the government is to close up to 600 websites in a bid to save over £100m per year in running costs. Some of the numbers being quoted are quite amazing, the Business Link apparently cost £35m last year.

A report from the Central Office for Information, published today, found that £94 million was spent on the construction and set up and running costs of just 46 sites. The Government also spent £32 million on staff costs for those sites in 2009-10.
The most expensive websites were uktradeinvest.gov.uk which costs £11.78 per visit and businesslink.gov.uk which costs £2.15 per visit, according to the COI.

Clearly this is going to cause a huge shakeup in the UK search results, firstly due to the fact that 600 sites with a lot of traffic will disappear (we can be quite sure that 301 redirects won’t be applied) but secondly due to the sudden loss of the most trusted links available.

Sites that rely on lots of .gov.uk links could suddenly face large drops in rankings once these sites stop working.

What will be interesting is to see how many SEO companies start replicating the content of these doomed websites for clients and then contacting everybody who has linked to a particular .gov.uk site suggesting they link to their sites instead. it could be a very big opportunity to get links.

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Government closing 600 UK sites good news & bad news for SEO’s

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1. Using a Non-SEO to Manage the Campaign

Kind of obvious really right? Maybe, maybe not. Although “hard” SEO skills may not be necessary, but an understanding of “basic” SEO definitely is for any serious brand. Doesn’t matter if the actual SEO is being carried out by an external agency – in order to align the brand and it’s strategies you need someone who understands both – an SEO Manager needs to understand both. Lack of understanding, or even lack of interest in knowing can not only slow the businesses SEO strategy, it can have negative effects.

An intuitive or intelligent individual can go a long way in improving your campaign – and be able to tell all the bullshit apart from real advice – as Rae so decently pointed out.

2. Assuming That They Can Do All SEO in-House – on Budget

SEO isn’t not a fixed skill, which once you have done it for a couple of years, then you know it all. It is an ever changing, ever moving set of goal posts. In house teams that are tiny, or haven’t been built organically based on skill, seldom have the time to research or play with unrelated categories. At the same time, unless you are a pure online player, the access to resources and broad skill bases may be limited.

If you are a big brand, and want to do real SEO in house on a budget, I wouldn’t advise it – you could hire a full time SEO agency for the cost of 2-3 staff – and have access to advanced skills and the benefit of their experience day to day with other campaigns. Not saying that it is impossible to have a full in-house SEO team – all I am saying is if you have never done it – plan this strategy with care.

Back in 2007 High Rankings Interviewed Danny Sullivan on the subject – many of the responses still hold true in my opinion.  If you are intent on running an inhouse team – at least set up some decent processes for SEO .

3. Not Treating SEO Like a Real Revenue Channel

Sounds surprising right? In my experience, 7 out of the 10 Big Brands I have worked with didn’t have SEO KPIs, Strategies or Plans in place. It was something delegated to an in house tech, or to an agency, often with dismal results. This happens when you don’t give the channel the respect it deserves.

SEO is actually more than a series of link builders and content writers, it is a full blown Marketing Discipline, that needs strategy, thought, research and focus on.

4. Not Separating Brand Traffic and Sales from Generic Keyword Sets

To me this is the biggest failure. Looking at “SEO” revenue as a whole and then assuming that the channel is healthy is quite myopic. Brand traffic in most cases is a given including those sales as part of the ROI is not the best way to judge the return on investment. A clued up Big Brand would value the revenue gained from Generic Keywords.

Some brands (especially those in highly competitive industries) do this really well – while more traditional Big Brands don’t in my experience.

5. Not Involving The SEO Team

This a massive process issue in many businesses. From full marketing plans to press releases, from product release to PR disaster, the SEO team should be involved or kept aware of at every stage. There are often first mover advantages in SEO, especially PR. Not giving your own team the edge means you are actually working in detriment of the brand in the long run. For example, one brand I worked with had a policy of distributing their Press Releases before they were published on the site “PR” Section. The result? A third party site that auto publishes press releases got into Google News first and made it next to impossible for this brand to get in that space.

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Common Mistakes Big Brands Make in SEO

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I’ve been thinking for a while now that, as an industry, SEO agencies are really suffering because of the word “optimisation”. It’s just not the right word.

The Google algorithm is based around 2 things, the easy bit which is on-site optimisation and the hard bit which is link-building. Anybody can optimise a website but in most industries link-building is 90% of the algorithm.

There are of course some very complex SEO issues to consider when building a site and planning architecture but once there are done then most agencies have very little scope for changing things. Anybody who has worked with a large company understands that getting architecture and code changes is a 6-18 month timescale for all but the smallest sites.

When you think about optimisation you think of small tweaks and changes, you don’t think of 10-15 days per month researching quality link sources and phoning/emailing hundreds of link prospects in the hope of converting some into live links.

Reading a thread over at b3ta you can see how most people assume that SEO is something a good developer should get right at the build stage but not many people seem to understand the sheer amount of effort required to build enough good quality links to get rankings.

In an ideal world like the one Google thinks we live in you could rely on just creating good content and links would suddenly come flooding in. This simply isn’t the case, unless you have perhaps 10 years to wait before you get visitors.

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Search Engine Optimisation is the wrong name for it

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Now that Google Caffeine is 100% live & following up from the recent May Day update I thought it would be good to talk about some of more advanced aspects of long tail SEO.

First of all Caffeine is a new infrastructure rather than an algorithm update so it’s not related to the May Day changes. What Caffeine does is increase the freshness of the Google index by increasing crawl capacity and also decreasing the time it takes to get the crawled pages live and searchable in the index. For bloggers this might not be a big change for new pages because blog platforms normally ping Google and get indexed in a couple of minutes anyway – for the rest of the web this should make a big difference and open up the door for much fresher long tail results.

The May Day update basically means that some sites with thin content and a lack of internal links are no longer getting the authority benefits they used to. Google is showing more relevant pages instead which is certainly a positive step.

What is the Long Tail?

Long tail SEO describes the thousands or millions of search terms that individually generate very little traffic but collectively generate a large percentage (perhaps 70%) of a sites overall search traffic. Long tail doesn’t mean keyphrases with 4, 5 or 6 words in the phrase – these may fall into the long tail group but that isn’t always the case. We have some very large 4 word phrases that send thousands of visitors per month and they are classed as short tail terms.

The best way to classify the terms is to look at the chart below from SEOmoz which breaks search traffic into 3 buckets:

• Short tail – 18.5%
• Mid tail – 11.5%
• Long tail – 70%

These figures are approximate but as long as we are consistent it doesn’t matter too much what we choose.

The next step is to do some analysis to measure your current short, mid & long tail traffic numbers so that you can monitor each month how things improve. We set this up as an advanced segment in Google Analytics as well as an Excel chart and find that the following figures tend to give the percentages we want for most websites.

• Short tail – keyphrase with 100 or more visits per month
• Mid tail – keyphrase with 6 to 99 visits per month
• Long tail – keyphrase with 5 or less visits per month

You need to run some figures for your site until you get the percentages in the chart above – don’t forget to remove brand searches.

Segmenting long tail traffic

Visualising millions of keywords that each send a handful of visitors every month is an impossible task so we need to try and segment the data in order to try to improve the numbers. The best way to do this is to split the site into the same sections we have create for our multiple sitemaps above and for each section analyse & monitor the following:

• Number of pages indexed
• Number of landing pages receiving > 1 visit per month
• Number of keywords sending visitors to the section each month

Long & short phrases

Having said that long tail doesn’t necessarily correspond to the number of words in a keyphrase it is still very important to track and monitor the distribution of words in your keyphrases every month. You should do this in two ways, by setting up filters in Google Analytics but also by exporting all your keyword data to Excel and running a pivot table query to show figures such as conversion rate vs keyphrase length and visitor or revenue numbers vs keyphrase length.

Measuring Indexation

The best way to measure indexation on large sites is to split the site into sections and create a different xml sitemap for each section. By doing this in Webmaster Tools you can quickly visualise what pages are getting indexed and which are not.

If you find that a particular section has an indexation issue then we need to diagnose what’s going wrong. This get’s a bit technical but the best method we have found is to create a script to check the indexation status of each page as follows:

• Check to see if the page is indexed using the info:http://www.site.com/page.htm command on Google
• Check server logs to see how many times the URL has been spidered in last 30 days
• Use SEOmoz API to find total links to the page & mozRank

Once we have this data we can look into what might be going on & try to fix it.

Measuring number of landing pages

Again, this needs to be done by splitting your site down into different sections, you can do it in bulk but that doesn’t give the right data. The key is to use this method but to add a filter to only show the landing pages from the sub-folder or category you want to analyse.

The final result of your analysis should be a chart that looks something like the one below, taken from one of our ecommerce clients.

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How to Measure & Analyse Long Tail Search

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Most people have probably heard about the May Day update which has either dramatically increased or decreased traffic depending who you talk to. Initially the talk was all about how sites had lost traffic but there are now a number of people coming out to say that traffic has had a big increase.

We’re seeing either no change or a dramatic increase in long tail visitors since the update.

The update seems to have been quite straightforward, Google has increased the emphasis on quality and is giving smaller sites a chance. Large sites with thin content and a lot of trust no longer get a free ride just because they have a keyword match.

I’m heading off to Sweden today for the EPiServer Partner Summit so don’t have much time to write – however I strongly suggest you read this post about the update to find out what’s going on and how you can benefit.

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May Day Update increases long tail traffic

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Ever since the famous AOL data leak of 2006 people have been endlessly quoting the same old figures when asked for amount of clicks a particular ranking gets.

Recently the data has become a lot more accurate thanks to the release of click data in Google Webmaster Tools and a new study by the Chitika ad network.

From the AOL data we can see that first place gets 42% of traffic, compared to just 11.9% for second place. That seems too high to me.

Next up we have a study by Neil Walker showing 46.37% for first and 29.43% for second – this is based on Webmaster Tools data across 2700 keywords.

Finally we have the Chitika study which shows that first place gets 34.35% compared to 16.96% in second.

There are no real conclusions to be drawn from this, other than first place always gets the lions share of visitors. I would like to see a study purely on non-brand keywords and also some kind of study on keywords with AdWords and keywords without AdWords to see what affect that has on CTR across the results.

Our main observation from client data is that first normally gets about twice the traffic as second which is a pretty big jump.

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Google Organic SEO Click Through Rates

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The original PageRank model used a random surfer model and assumed that people moved randomly throughout the web. Crucially every link on a page had an equal chance of being clicked as all the others.

PageRank can be thought of as a model of user behavior. We assume there is a “random surfer” who is given a web page at random and keeps clicking on links, never hitting “back” but eventually gets bored and starts on another random page. The probability that the random surfer visits a page is its PageRank.

The problem with this is that all links are not equal – some are much more important than others. In 2004 Google created the Reasonable Surfer Model which attempts to algorithmically determine which links are more important than others.

Systems and methods consistent with the principles of the invention may provide a reasonable surfer model that indicates that when a surfer accesses a document with a set of links, the surfer will follow some of the links with higher probability than others.

This reasonable surfer model reflects the fact that not all of the links associated with a document are equally likely to be followed. Examples of unlikely followed links may include “Terms of Service” links, banner advertisements, and links unrelated to the document.

The patent for this model has been recently granted which is why it’s been getting a lot of attention in the SEO industry.

This patent is interesting because it shows how, even in 2004, Google was trying to figure out which links were more trustworthy than others. The factors they were looking at included a lot of common sense things such as the list below, as well as user data collected by toolbars.

• Font size of anchor text associated with the link;
• The position of the link (measured, for example, in a HTML list, in running text, above or below the first screenful viewed on an 800 X 600 browser display, side (top, bottom, left, right) of document, in a footer, in a sidebar, etc.);
• If the link is in a list, the position of the link in the list;
• Font color and/or other attributes of the link (e.g., italics, gray, same color as background, etc.);
• Number of words in anchor text of a link;
• Actual words in the anchor text of a link;
• How commercial the anchor text associated with a link might be;
• Type of link (e.g., text link, image link);
• If the link is an image link, what the aspect ratio of the image might be;
• The context of a few words before and/or after the link;
• A topical cluster with which the anchor text of the link is associated;
• Whether the link leads somewhere on the same host or domain;
• If the link leads to somewhere on the same domain,
• whether the link URL is shorter than the referring URL; and/or
• whether the link URL embeds another URL (e.g., for server-side redirection)

What is Google doing now?

This model dates back to 2004 and a lot of the factors Google wanted to look at are quite hard to figure out. For Google to look at CSS and try to figure out which links are more prominent on the page is pretty hard to do accurately.

The part of the model which is interesting is the bit about user data – Google has a lot of user data thanks to Analytics, Toolbars and also all the links clicked in services like Google Reader. Many people are noticing a boost in links that get lots of tweets, others are noticing that links from certain high traffic sites seem to pass more weight than similar links on low traffic sites despite having similar PR/mozRank etc

If Google really wanted to make their link algorithm trusted then looking at how many real users are clicking on links would be a very accurate way of doing it.

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Is Google’s reasonable surfer model no longer a model at all?

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First of all sorry about the lack of posts recently, if you want some SEO information take a read of the latest Q&A with Google to see what Matt Cutts thought of the Daily Express selling links.

Now back to the point of this post – to tell you all about a product we have been testing on some of our business to business clients sites. Anybody who has done B2B SEO will know that it’s a different ball game due to many factors:

• Not much traffic to go around
• You compete with consumer facing brands
• A lot of your visitors are sometimes not your target customers
• Products & services are normally more expensive so conversion rates are lower
• Every lead is worth a lot of money

With this in mind we have been trialling a product called Web Forensics which uses 9 databases of IP addresses to identify the businesses that are browsing your website and not filling in your contact form. Once you have this information you can call them up and turn them into leads – even one client a year will probably pay for this software many times over. You have to see this in action to believe how useful it is.

The software is a paid solution with rates depending on visitor numbers but we have negotiated a free trial for Blogstorm readers so you can see the software in action on your own website with no obligation whatsoever.

Here is the important bit – to get the free trial you need to email them via a special address which is freetrial@webforensics.co.uk – don’t contact them via the site otherwise you won’t get the full treatment.

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Business to business SEO tool Web Forensics lets you see visitors who didn’t convert

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Although we use a number of tools here at Branded3 I’ve never been a big fan of most of the SEO software available today. The market seems to be always slightly behind the times and although companies such as SEOmoz, Majestic, Raven, Enquisite (who are funded to the tune of $17m) and a multitude of keyword research and keyword spy tools have made great strides in the last 2 years it sometimes feels like we should have been here in 2008 rather than 2010.

Having said that, the sort of software that excites me isn’t the sort of software that small businesses need to perform mass market SEO, and that’s where solutions like DIY SEO (a recent recipient of $1m in funding) come in.

Whenever we get approached by smaller clients my first comment is always that they shouldn’t use an agency unless they are willing to spend a decent amount per month – for smaller budgets an agency just isn’t going to deliver results due to all their overheads.

As a rule we split budgets into the following camps:

• Up to £100/month – learn it yourself
• £100-£500/month – hire a freelance SEO
• £500-£1000/month – hire a sole trader type SEO company
• Over £1000/month – hire an agency

DIY SEO fits into the first bracket nicely at $49/month or $499/year and in my opinion, if you want a step by step way to learn SEO and optimise your site then it’s money very well spent. Yes you could try to learn everything from forums but the thing DIY SEO does very well is to list all the tasks so you simply can’t avoid doing them. The biggest thing that prevents people from succeeding at SEO is procrastinating and not putting in the hard work, especially people new to the industry.

I signed up with the service and entered a clients site and all the suggestions were sensible and useful. The link acquisition methods are never going to get the site ranking for really major keywords but even agencies struggle with that sometimes.

In the future I would like to see more advanced link acquisition strategies and also some integration with something like Majestic or SEOmoz to do competitor link analysis but that’s probably a bit beyond what most people who are new to SEO can manage anyway.

Verdict: Thoroughly worthwhile for the target market of people new to SEO

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DIY SEO Review

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NMA has recently released their annual Marketing Services Guide detailing the turnover and staff levels of 36 UK search agencies and it makes very interesting reading. The guide doesn’t split natural search revenue from PPC revenue in the main table but if you click on the company name the split is listed in the profile page.

What I find interesting is looking at the number of staff some agencies have in comparison to turnover, useful for figuring out how important search is to their revenue stream. It’s also interesting that a lot of “big” agencies that appear to specialise in natural and paid search don’t really make much money from it.

The list isn’t particularly comprehensive, I can think of quite a few that would make the top 20 on here.

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Turnover of UK search agencies

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