Some might say Google has had things far too much its own way. That looks set to shift as Twitter and Facebook begin to move towards fulfillment-orientated advertising. Look at the latest developments.

In April, Twitter announced its own form of keyword based advertising. This enables advertisers to target people who have tweeted or commented using a particular keyword. It’s been known for some time Facebook has been working on its search engine capability. Facebook already offers “search typehead ads” and is also testing ads within its new Search Graph feature.

Does Google at long last have some serious competition?

What does it mean for advertisers?

Businesses have been complaining about the ever increasing cost of Adwords clicks. Arguably many of these business don’t get the value they should from Adwords because their campaigns aren’t optimised. A good example is companies obsessed with making sure they are appear in the top position for their main keyword, pretty much guaranteeing much higher click through rates. Yet, depending on your market this can actually be lower quality traffic. Remember a CTR isn’t a conversion.

It has taken Facebook and Twitter some time to be able to harness the interest and demographic information they hold to be able to offer more than brand display type advertising.  With Adwords becoming expensive for many, and restrictive in use, then it’s my guess is at least some advertisers  will be quick to evaluate alternatives with Facebook and Twitter appealing to different kinds of businesses.

But I would urge some caution.  It seems unusual to talk about institutional behavior in relation to online searches, but many have grown up with Google being the search default and the go to place to find something to buy.  Users are, at the current time anyway, in a different frame of mind when they use social networking sites and this is reflected in their behavior.  But what I would say is that although searches internal to Twitter and Facebook will be different to those performed on Google, the data they hold on users, levels the playing field.

My guess is, some online businesses may start to look at how they apportion their online advertising spend with a view to reducing costs.  But in some sectors, Google will remain the preferred option. My take is, you need to understand your customers and their buying decisions before getting distracted with alternative search platforms.

And will Google be worried?  Users social relationship with Twitter and Facebook give it particular appeal for some markets.  And with businesses continuing to be extremely cost conscious my guess is that more competition is good for advertisers, but will have Google looking over its shoulder.

Success on Facebook boils down to your ability to know your target audience and tap into their personae.  Put another way, you have to know your target audience  well enough to be able to engage them in social media based conversations. You may even be able to turn them into advocates for your business – as in when people share your posts or recommend you to their friends. Finally, you may even generate some business. Maybe not today, but somewhere further down the line.

Social media tools such as Facebook can certainly get people to use promotion codes, participate in competitions, submit photos and answer questions. You see psychology plays a big part. People need to feel your company is human. That it has a personality.  That’s why your Facebook page must be run by a human and not software. Does your target audience like you? Will they engage with you? Will they share your stuff? A share isn’t quite a recommendation but its close and people will often ‘like’ what their friends share.  ‘Likers’ are loyal (and sometimes lazy..they don’t often edit their likes).But don’t take that as a signal you can bombard people with your posts.

There are different ways to get started on Facebook. Ads can be helpful to build up an audience quickly. Facebook advertising is cheaper than Google Adwords and is good for finding people with demographics and interests that suit your business.  One thing I would pass on to you is that any advertising campaign needs to be carefully monitored. So don’t make the mistake of just throwing ads up.  You’ll find that your ads appear inconsistently – they ebb and flow so daily monitoring is important. Different ads bring different results (image, text, questions, polls) and it will depend on the type of business you run.

Generally speaking location based businesses do well, because communities like to share more. But overwhelmingly businesses that ‘get it’, eventually thrive – even on a small scale.  A word of caution. Facebook won’t help a poorly targeted or branded business. These types of businesses struggle to build their own identity on Facebook as elsewhere.

With a drop in Google rankings, usually comes a drop in traffic.  A key step is trying to pin down the day your rankings and traffic dropped. Once you have a date you can then compare that to the list of algorithm updates to see if the two tally in some way.

Here Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools can be your best friends. They’ll help you map out trends and pin down sudden drops in traffic.

Start by going to the Traffic section of Google Analytics to see if there are any fluctuations. If that fails to give you any clues, drill down to individual keywords. Start with those that were ranking the highest / bringing you most traffic before the drop. For less established sites or sites that don’t get much traffic go to Search Queries in Webmaster Tools. Here you’ll be looking for sudden drops in impressions.

Much has been written about the Panda and Penguin Updates. If you do find a correlation between a Google algorithm update and your rankings dropping you’re likely to have content or linking issues.  Now, even big companies have fallen foul of these updates so it’s no disgrace. But as a small company you should have more control over your links and content.

Therefore with evidence that either a  Panda or Penguin update is to blame you should be looking for either content or linking issues.  A checklist might include:

• Thin or duplicate content
• Content that’s not copied but not original
• Poorly written content
• Poor spelling and grammar
• Low quality link sources
• Artificial anchor text

This list isn’t exhaustive.  There are tools to speed up your analysis including CopyScape.

However if you can’t link your lower rankings to changes Google’s made, don’t panic. There is a danger you make random changes that actually make the situation worse. Rather it’s better to take 30 days to go over the checklist above by which time your rankings may have returned anyway.

Now, at some point, I believe nearly all sites will suffer a drop in Google rankings, if only because none of us has a crystal ball. The question then becomes how to best defend your-self against future Google changes? Protect your interests by diversifying sources of traffic. That means when Google sneezes your business is less likely to catch a cold.

As I have mentioned before, Google is working towards Enhanced Adwords Campaigns. Phone numbers have got caught up in this as Google sees another opportunity to make money.

From April 1, Google Adwords with phone numbers included will be disapproved. You must now use its Call Extension feature. What does this mean in practice? Well Google says it wants to give users a more consistent experience across devices. Using the Call Extension feature means a “Call” button will show on ads appearing on smart phones. On other devices a non clickable phone number appears. Confused? It certainly doesn’t produce a consistent user experience so you can be left in no doubt that Google is simply implementing a monitisation opportunity targeted at mobile ad engagements.

The “Call” buttons will appear on smart phones across Google.com/.co.uk search, Voice search, Google Mobile App or Google Maps for Mobile. On every other device a non-clickable phone number is displayed. Using the Call Extension feature Advertisers are charged every time someone clicks on the “Call” button.

Google has quality considerations in mind too. If you are using a Google forwarding number it will only show if you receive a minimum number of clicks but it’s now free to use one.

You can use a Call Extension in place of a Location Extension or use both, and both will display. Just bear in mind the ad displayed on a mobile will always feature the “Call” button as long as your ads meet Google’s quality requirements.

From a business point of you need to consider whether these developments are likely to impact your business. Remember location extensions suit businesses with physical locations and who interact with their customers such as local based businesses. On the other hand, Google’s tip is that Call Extensions are likely to suit companies who operate nationally.

Some companies will now have to re-think their approach to including phone numbers in their pay per click ads and the impact this could have in their PPC budget. It may be easier to leave them out altogether.  However one question remains which is whether the new button for mobile devices gives advisers’ conversions a boost just by being there.

One thing separating internet marketing consultants from their clients is that consultants are much more likely to be concerned with the inner workings of Google search. But I believe small business owners can benefit from developing an understanding of how it operates.  That way you are more likely to connect the online strategies you use and how you implement them with the end results!

Google clearly believes there is some benefit too. After releasing their interactive infographic the ‘Story of Send’ they have followed it up with ‘How Search Works’. The good news is the format makes it very easy to understand. Google clearly had a wide audience in mind. However they have not missed the opportunity to provide information for website owners on how Google deals with spam and what they can do if Google isn’t happy with their site.

So how does Google search work?

It’s useful to break down Google search into 3 elements :

• Crawling and Indexing
• Ranking Pages with Algorithms
• Spam Fighting

Let’s look at each briefly in turn….

Crawling and Indexing

Google has to find each page first before it can rank them. This is the process of the Google Bot crawling over 30 trillion web pages – quite a feat. And the number of pages is obviously growing all the time. When it finds pages it then files them away. This is called indexing.

Ranking Pages

For many Google watchers this is where the real magic happens. Google uses more than 200 ranking signals to decide what to show and in what order. The new Google infographic reminds us what’s used to determine rank. Essentially Google is looking for clues to assess what pages mean.  Some elements are semantic search. Others are based on quality factors such as spelling and ‘freshness’.

Spam Fighting

Google clearly sees some benefit to sharing with the world just how gigantic its spam fighting mission is. You can even see live spam being removed and can click on the factors that indicate the presence of spam, such as unnatural links and even hosting environment. As a website owner you should be impressed with the large increase in spam notifications but perhaps also slightly worried. You can see live Google spam being removed here.

 Summary

Getting a better understanding of search should leave you with few illusions about how important it is to produce quality, customer centric content. Google’s quest to improve the search experience is relentless. If you understand that, you’re much less likely to disappoint Google.

From the very beginning you’ll be inundated with sales calls and emails.  Some of the approaches to handle your marketing – whether it’s leafleting or Facebook Marketing or Adwords – can be very tempting. Especially when you’re faced with special offers and cut price deals.  After all small businesses are always under pressure to conserve capital. But when it comes to internet marketing 99 out of 100 calls you receive will be too good to be true because they are. Cheap services can end up costing you money and damage your online presence. It can be hard to recover and will cost more in the long run.

A far better approach is to learn the basics yourself. Do that rather than go for a cheap internet marketing package. Remember these companies basically take advantage of you not knowing your onions. I always tell clients marketing tools such as Facebook can easily be run in-house – you just need to know what you are doing.

So my mantra is. If you need hands on help, get knowledge first. Then you will be in a better position to know exactly what you are doing. In the long run this approach will save you a packet.

To help you get going I offer a 1 day consultancy with no tie-ins, no upselling and no jargon. This discrete, standalone consultancy package is designed to give you the information you need to improve your site. You will find out what your site needs and how to do it. Put another way it answers the questions ‘Who are your customers?’ and ‘How do you acquire these customers?’  It will detail keywords, SEO, Adwords, Facebook , Twitter and so on – all the elements you need to make your internet marketing a success.  Best of all it won’t tie up any of your time – you don’t need to be available on the day and I will email you the results.

To book me to help you, email me to check my availability.  I will email you back. We can then have a chat – you can brief me on your business. On completion of your one day consultancy I am then able to email you my analysis, guidance and notes.

It worries me some SEO people speak to clients about Panda proofing their website as if Panda was all done and dusted.

Panda is actually an ongoing filter. It’s been frequently updated by Google with the last update on January 22^nd. Google’s waited quite a while to release a new update but Matt Cutt’s says an update is on its way. And it’s likely to be significant. The logic being previous updates were almost monthly appearing just before Christmas and further back, there was 2 in November. This will be update number 25. Yes, 25. You see Panda (and its cousin Penguin) are best viewed as a work-in-progress. After all, Google is always looking to improve the searchers experience and the web is always changing.

For anyone not yet familiar with Panda – and there can’t be many surely by now – Panda is a filter concerned with the quality of content on websites and blogs. It was first introduced in February 2011. Its sole aim is to prevent websites with poor quality content reaching the top of the search results. Sites penalised by Panda have the opportunity to make corrections so it’s possible to recover if your website is caught out. It’s also true Panda doesn’t always get it right so any sites falsely penalised may see a correction with a future update.

Why should this concern you? If you’re serious about your online business you should be producing website content in accordance with Google’s guidelines. This won’t Panda proof your site exactly but if you produce quality content, written with your visitors in mind, you’re more likely to see positive results in your rankings. Think of it as insurance.

So what does this mean exactly? Well when someone types a query into Google – usually in the form of a question – they are looking for an answer. It’s your job to make sure your pages answer specific questions better than your competitors.

Nowadays this is even more important than keyword placement as Google is better able to understand semantic search. Your content should also be written to a professional standard – something spammy sites don’t care about. If you can generate positive responses in your visitors Google will notice. You’ll have a low bounce rate and visitors will stay on your site to read more content. By contrast, if you trick visitors to arrive at your page with misleading titles backed up by spurious SEO you will have a very high bounce rate and are likely to get slapped by Google in the not too distant future.

It doesn’t really matter if you believe Google is being over-sensitive.  For the sake of your online business you have to realise Google controls about two-thirds of the search game. Its success lies in the fact it returns the most accurate results, according to searcher intention. That’s exactly what searchers want. And if they don’t find what they are looking for in a snappy fashion they will go elsewhere.

Look at it this way. Selling links puts Google’s business in jeopardy because sites that don’t merit natural links end up skewing the search results. Seen in this light you can imagine Google’s taking this very seriously. Link selling or buying is a one-way ticket to a Google penalty.  And don’t think you need to be a commercial link seller to fall foul of Google.

As the Page Rank of our own website improves you’re likely to get requests for advertorial or guest posts.  Matt Cutt’s says any paid links must have the rel=”no follow” tag added or else Google will lose trust in your site. And the paid link building penalties don’t end there. You could also see a drop in visible page rank and the position of your pages in the serps change for the worse. As a very last resort you could even see your site removed from the index altogether. Ouch.

How do you know you’ve been slapped with a penalty for links? Webmasters falling foul of Google can expect a notification message in Google’s Webmaster Tools. If you get one don’t ignore it because it’s already a sign that Google has lost trust in your site. According to Matt Cutts it will ask you to look for possibly “artificial or unnatural links on your site pointing to other sites that could be intended to manipulate PageRank.”

If you run a small site it shouldn’t be too onerous to track down offending links. Google will get you in the end. And you have to question if you are running a business site why bother to sell links in the first place? It is after all a distraction from your business.

Whether you experience this as a Page Rank penalty, serps penalty or something else, doesn’t matter, you can’t get back into Google’s good books.  Investigate, then change what you need to and ask Google to reconsider your site. Matt Cutts says if you had a manual penalty applied i.e. by a real person, then someone will review your request.

Whatever you do, don’t assume your site is too small to get found out. Google is now recruiting webmasters and searchers in the fight against link manipulation: Google is now encouraging individuals to act as whistleblowers by reporting paid links.

You don’t need to be an SEO expert to determine if you are on the wrong side of a penalty. But making corrections based on what you find needs to be handled with care. This is what you should do.

1. Check Google Webmaster Tools. Google has been sending messages to webmasters via its Webmaster Tools platform. The first thing you should do is check whether you have a notice about your website having an unnatural link pattern. This means Google believes the pattern of sites linking to your site don’t look natural.
2. Even if there is no message you should be asking yourself whether you have bought, exchanged or swapped substantial links or whether you have a substantial number of your own sites interlinking. When Google sees 500 sites on one server all linking to each other it does start asking questions.
3. If you have a message in GWT then you have been hit by a manual penalty. What you do next is up to you but the best advice is a rigorous analysis of your links. It has been suggested that very large sites need to buy in outside help to do this. But the same can apply to smaller sites who have outsourced link building and who don’t have a clear idea of the strategy employed or the criteria used.
4. The next thing you should do is check the dates of Google algorithm updates.  The best source of this information is SEOmoz at http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change.What you need to do is to check your Google Analytics (or whatever tool you use) console to see if a reduction in impressions generally coincides with changes to Google’s algorithm. If there is a correlation then you can begin to suspect you may have a penalty. It’s also worth saying that there are many different levels of penalty so some are more easily overcome than others.
5. If you can map a drop in rank and traffic to Google activity then the details at SEOmoz should give you an idea whether you have link or content issues.
6. The Panda filter deals with content issues. If you have thin or boilerplate content or are guilty of keyword stuffing you may have been given a penalty related to Panda. Again the date of your traffic drop should help. Also ask yourself whether your content is meaningful for your desired audience and well written and edited.
7. If your links are from varied and good quality sources it may be that a Penguin update has applied a penalty for unnatural anchor text. I’ve written elsewhere about how this should be varied but the main point is that it should look natural. Vary your company name and keywords, and web address. See my blog about post penguin link building.

Being able to be accurate about the cause of a penalty can be a time consuming process. But if you don’t do the work or pay someone to do it, all your future efforts will be built on a house of cards.

The question I am asked more than any other is how long does it take for a site to bounce back from a penalty? Sadly there are no hard and fast rules. Evidence suggests you may not recover when your site is next crawled. Rather you may have to wait until the next applicable algorithm update.

All that’s changed with the launch this month of Google Adwords’ Enhanced Campaigns. This gives Adwords users one control centre /interface from which to manage their pay per click campaigns. Enhanced Campaigns will be rolled out to advertisers as an option over the course of the next few weeks. From there, all Adwords’ accounts will be converted around mid-2013.

An example will help relay the impact. You can imagine an Italian restaurant may want to show one ad to someone searching for Italian Restaurant at 1pm from home and another to someone searching on their smart phone in the evening within a mile of the restaurant. In theory, Enhanced Campaigns is designed to help advertisers reach the right people with the right ad. So now, without having to set up different campaigns Google says you can now factor in location, time of day and device type.

So what new features does this development bring?

Improved targeting

Bid adjustments will allow advertisers to alter their bids to suit their business.  Bids can be adjusted according to location, time of day and device. For example, a take-away coffee shop may want to find people searching for ‘takeaway coffee’ or ‘takeaway cappuccino’ on smart phones. Using bid adjustments the advertiser can choose to bid higher on people less than half a mile away and higher or lower again at different times of the day.

Improved Contextual Advertising

Enhanced Campaigns allow advertisers to display different ads on different devices. For example, a flower delivery company may show ads on smartphones with a click to call advert and have ads available to people searching on PC focused on their ecommerce site.

Expanded Conversion Reporting

Searchers can now take action on a website or blog in many ways. They can download an app, call you or complete a form. Many actions are possible. Enhanced Campaigns allows advertisers to track a wider variety of potential customer actions.

Now all this sounds good in theory. But just be aware Google often releases developments expecting users to suggest future changes. It’s likely then that we’ll see further ‘fine tuning’. Many commentators aren’t happy that tablets and desktops can’t be split within the new system.  This may not change, but we can expect refinements.