Page Load Speed

As Mike Calabrese posted last week, page load speed has a definite affect on conversion rate. Numerous studies have shown that faster load times increase user retention and activity.

There have been whispers over the last few years that page load speed would be added to the ranking algorithm, and it’s looking more and more like a possibility. After all, it already is a factor in the calculation of quality score for AdWords.

Before yesterday I might have put this probability at 80 percent, but Google just announced that average page load speed now appears within their webmaster central dashboard. I’d say its nearly a certainty now. Look for this to take effect as soon as 2010.

What You Can Do Now

• Head to Webmaster Central and see how your site stacks up. The report is called “Site Performance” and can be found in the “Labs” section
• Follow recommendations from Google. Some common fixes include enabling gzip compression, minimizing DNS lookups, and combining JavaScript and CSS files
• Download YSlow for Firefox and put your site through the test
• Start saving for a faster host and content management system!

W3C Validation

W3C validation is all about using proper web grammar in your markup. Achieving full W3C validation is not all that easy, especially for many eCommerce stores on complex platforms.

The SEM folks weren’t positive about whether or not this already was a factor until Matt Cutts cleared things up earlier this year. At the moment, whether or not your website validates according to W3C’s standards is not a factor.

Google’s reasoning for not factoring this into search rankings is that there is a bit of a disconnect between compatibility and validation. In short, they would rather a site is compatible in all browsers and mediums, than if it just validated. After all, Google.com does not validate…

What You Can Do Now

• Head to the W3C Validator and see how your site stacks up
• Don’t go nuts investing time and money in validating, but if your site has a ton of errors compared to your competitors, you may want to take some action

Web References

If links to your company’s website counts as a “vote”, shouldn’t a mention (without a link) on NYTimes.com mean something? That is the idea behind a web reference. Basically, it would be another factor that determines “buzz”.

Google already factors these link-less references for their local results, so to assume that it will be utilized for regular search rankings at some point isn’t that much of a gamble. That said, this data may end up being useless when viewed on a wide scale. You can imagine a scenario where site A’s difference in web references over site B is pretty proportional to the difference in links.

What You Can Do Now

• Generate discussion! Essentially anything you would do to build links would work in building web references

Social Media Factors

If 2009 was the year social media took center stage for the user, 2010 is already shaping up to be the year it gains some traction with the search engines. No one denies that Twitter and Facebook hold some valuable information in the user-generated content found within those sites. The problem is sorting through the muck.

The big two have made efforts to rank statuses and tweets internally with features like Facebook’s “Like” and Twitter’s “ReTweet.” These may end up being a precursor to determining the importance of an individual status message, which could pave the way for incorporation into the ranking algorithm.

In a sense social results are already included in Google results within their social search experiment. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this implemented on a grander scale, as seen below:

What You Can Do Now

• Get Social. Build up a following of customers and friends and start communicating
• Include links to your company Twitter and Facebook page on your website, encouraging people to connect

Click Through Rate

CTR is a gigantic factor in the AdWords quality score algorithm. Google values well written ad text very highly for paid ads, and though it isn’t yet a ranking factor, they may very well be tracking CTR for organic results already.

Including CTR as a factor makes sense. If 95% of searchers skip the first result for a particular query, Google could assume that the first result is not as relevant as originally determined.

What You Can Do Now

• Spruce up those titles and meta descriptions!
• Make sure to include some of your unique value propositions like free shipping, or brands carried

Search Wiki Edits

Search Wiki is the Google feature that allows users to shoot results to the top, make comments, or delete them all together. It is on by default for all accounts and caused a bit of an uproar when first launched for fear that Joe User could influence results.

Google was quick to state that edits made by users only affect that user’s results. However, with Search Wiki being live for just over a year now, you might imagine that they’ve amassed a large amount of data. If an alarming amount of people delete a result for a particular query, shouldn’t Google take action themselves? Maybe Search Wiki data isn’t used to determine all out result removal, but rather fits into the algorithm as a small adjustment.

What You Can Do Now

• Provide valuable content!
• Take inventory of your pages in the index. Are there old or unwanted pages? Perhaps some pages aren’t included that should be?

In Conclusion

Keep in mind that my probability percentages are just my best estimates, and I could be dead wrong. However, many of the action items above are great things to do for your site at anytime, regardless of whether it will have an affect on your rank.

Update

I wanted to quickly add another factor that I’m not sure how I left out! That is:

Bounce Rate

Google is more than capable of tracking bounce rate from a search result page. You can imagine a scenario in which a significant portion of searchers bounce off the first result and stay on the second for a particular query. One could hardly blame Google for ultimately bumping the second result to the first spot for this.

Smart webmasters keep a close eye on their bounce rates because a high bounce rate should raise a number of red flags. Some of the factors that contribute to a bounce include slow load, irrelevance, perceived untrustworthiness, or the lack of a clear next step.

What You Can Do Now

• Dive deep into your analytics and see which landing pages from organic traffic have a high bounce rate
• Start reading Avinash Kaushik’s blog, Occam’s Razor. Avinash once called bounce rate the “sexiest web metric”. Here’s a good post to start.

Read on for a link to the sandbox version, and some early thoughts on how it might affect your rankings.

On Monday afternoon, the Google Webmaster Blog announced the debut of “Caffeine”, describing it as the “next-generation architecture for Google’s web search.”

What Has Changed?

Google is publicly saying all the changes are under the hood, in an effort to speed up crawling and indexing. Some power searchers are saying there is more weight placed on fresh results, no doubt a response to the real-time search of Twitter, and I might have to agree. As far as I know, it does mark the first time Google has used a code name that actually sort of describes the update (see: “Vince”, “Florida”, “Big Daddy”, “Fritz”).

Now is probably a good time for an update too, with Yahoo and Microsoft making deals, Twitter’s real-time search getting plenty of press, and Google dropping 4 percentage points in overall market share since January (its lowest total since July of 2007).

So What’s the Strategy?

“Caffeine” will be fully implemented soon enough, so how should it change your SEO strategy?

At Groove Commerce, one of the simplest SEO recommendations we make is to keep your website fresh with new content. That may be done by adding new products, writing blog posts, or updating stale content. In short, don’t let your site expire! When “Caffeine” goes full-time, the effect of keeping your site updated may be even more noticeable.

Take a look here to see how your rankings are affected. If your rankings are up, Hoorah! If they’re down, well, you could always anonymously submit feedback every day.

Meta Descriptions and Page Titles: Ad Copy for Organic Search

With your ad copy on AdWords, you’ve got 95 characters (130 if you count the display URL) to differentiate yourself from the competition, who may well be positioned above you.

For organic search, Google typically shows the first 150 characters of your meta description. Couple that with your optimized page title and keyword rich clean URL’s, and you’ve got even more room to make an impression on users. Just as with AdWords, you may not be able to appear at the top spot for all of your key terms. So if you’re just letting Google grab a random snippet from your site as the meta description, or even worse, duplicating the same description across the whole site, you could be missing out.

Let’s cover some of the simple tips to increase your site’s click through rate in organic search:

1. Start Small

No one expects you to overhaul all of the page titles and meta descriptions on your site right away. Head over to your analytics and find your top landing pages from organic searches. Using Google Analytics, you’ll want to view non-paid search engine visitors, and drill down into the landing page dimension.

What you’re now looking at is a list of the most popular entrance pages on your site from organic search. Take a look at what Google is displaying for these pages in the SERPs. How does it stack up against the competition?

A variation of this would be researching your most important products, and adjusting title and descriptions for those pages.

2. Set up Dynamic Page Titles and Meta Descriptions

Most content management systems allow some form of dynamic title and description generation. This is perfect for large sites who couldn’t possibly be expected to create unique titles and descriptions for every page by hand. For an eCommerce site, having your product page title generated from the “[Product Name] from [Company Name]” formula cuts right to the chase, and putting the most important text first generally fairs best.

As for the meta description, having your CMS pull a snippet of the product description is perfectly suitable, especially for your less important pages. For the most important items, feel free to write up an enticing 150 word description by hand.

The most important part of this step is making sure that there are no duplicate page titles or meta descriptions on your site. And how do you check on this? By making sure you…

3. Monitor Your Google Webmaster Site Profile

Your site’s profile within Google Webmaster Central contains tons of useful information. You can view external and internal linking data, check for sitemap and crawl errors, and view duplicate title and meta descriptions. Even if two of the most inconsequential pages have duplicate titles and/or descriptions, your site technically “has errors”, according to Webmaster Central.

4. Include Your Unique Value Proposition

Do you offer free shipping? Next day shipping? Buy one, get one free? There’s no better place for this than in your page title or meta description. Let’s use our page title generation formula from before but add your UVP: “[Product Name] with Free Shipping from [Company Name]“.

5. Write For The User, Not The Robot

In the old days, webmasters used to pack their page titles and meta descriptions with keywords to game the system and appear more relevant to the search engines. Not only has this tactic been made ineffective these days, it can even cause your site to be penalized.

Write your titles and descriptions for the user, not the search engine robots. Don’t even consider keyword density. An enticing search listing should naturally include relevant keywords.

Do you have any tips for optimizing meta descriptions and page titles?

Consider the following scenario. A customer finds your website through a pay per click ad and purchases a smaller ticket item from your site. When the customer receives the item when they expected, and in good condition, they develop a trust with your site. A week later, they head back to the site directly and make a larger purchase. A pretty likely scenario, in my opinion.

With AdWords standard reporting this registers as just one conversion. However, by doing the following, you will be able to rightfully get credit for the sale as a conversion, which will help considerably in determining effectiveness.

Head over to the reports tab within AdWords and create a new report. All of the reports are capable of showing multiple conversions per click, except for the Search Query Performance report.

Open up the “Add or Remove Columns” option and select the 1-per-click and many-per click options for conversions and cost/conv check boxes (as seen above).

Once the report is all set, take a look at the results, and you’ll see two different cost/conversions and total conversion counts. In my opinion, this many-per-click conversion metric is more useful in determining your return on ad spend because it accounts for the likely occurrence of a repeat buyer coming from pay per click advertising. And since you paid for that first click, why shouldn’t you assign the credit of the conversion to its original campaign?

So why isn’t this the default? Consider non-eCommerce conversions like newsletter sign ups or capturing contact information. With these goals, getting unique information from each conversion is the only valuable result, and thus we have no need to track many-per-click.

How To Use kl.am

Judging by the home page design of kl.am, the people at Raven are aiming for simplicity.

Now at this point you can enter your long, unwieldy URL and shorten it, in the same way you would with other URL shorteners like TinyURL or Bit.ly, or you can take advantage of the features that make kl.am great by clicking Kustomize.

One option is to create vanity URLs. This is a feature that is available in some other services, and works fairly simply. Without “kustomizing”, a shortened URL is given a random set of characters as the sub-folder of the kl.am domain, such as http://kl.am/du. With a vanity URL, adding a keyword to replace the characters is possible, so long as it hasn’t been taken yet. Naturally, the domainer in me went out and grabbed http://kl.am/ecommerce for our eCommerce blog . Now in instances around the net where someone may link to our site with our shortened URL, we receive the benefit of keyword rich anchor text.

Underneath the vanity URL option is a feature that separates kl.am from the pack. Campaign tagging is a tool that can help organize online marketing efforts to easily measure effectiveness and ROI in Google Analytics or other analytics programs. In the past, one would have to head to Google’s URL tagger to add the proper tags, then to their URL shortener to shorten the long URL. With this built in to kl.am, things get a lot easier.

Why Use kl.am

Tagging kl.am URLs allows Google Analytics and other analytics services to group your efforts. So when the big boss man wants to determine whether your latest social media campaign is paying off, you can pull solid numbers from Analytics, across many different sources. For example, by choosing the default campaign name variable in kl.am, “Social Media”, any visits to your site via that url will be marked as part of the Social Media campaign in the Traffic Sources -> Campaigns in Google Analytics.

Lastly, by creating an account at kl.am, you’ll be able to track all of the different URLs you’ve shortened with them. kl.am tracks how many clicks, referring sites, clicks by hour, and tweets including your link.  Hmmm… The above campaign appears to be an absolute bust. Back to the drawing board! .

The new Skittles.com home page features nothing but a navigational widget in the top left corner and a look at the (uncensored) live Twitter search stream displaying any Tweets containing the word “skittles”.

That’s right, I could tweet about a bag of skittles giving me food poisoning for three months and it will appear right on the Skittles home page. Or I could Tweet George Carlin’s 7 words you can’t say on TV, with a “skittles” thrown right in the middle, and appear right on the home page.

And its not just the home page. That navigational widget takes you to Skittles’ videos, pics, product information, and friends. Though I probably shouldn’t say Skittles’ videos, pics, product information, and friends, but rather, their YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia, and Facebook pages. Through some nifty web development, the Skittles team were able to simply replicate the pages on these third party services underneath their navigational widget. Pretty clever, I’d say.

So, Skittles. Was handing over your entire site to the unapologetic, uncensored, and completely democratic web worth it?

Of course time will tell, but before today I had never been to the Skittles web page before. In fact, since I don’t watch much television, I don’t know the last time I even encountered the Skittles brand. Had Skittles launched a more traditional new web page today, the rest of the world and I probably would not have even noticed.

Who knows, maybe the next time I’m at the snack counter at the movies, I’ll actually put some thought into my decision, instead of simply asking for my go-to, the Kit Kat. And maybe in that crucial decision mode, my mind will run through the options, and spend a bit longer on Skittles.

With a gigantic 80% of the global market share according to Net Applications, its easy to forget that there are some areas of the world where Google is not king. For instance, Russia and South Korea use Yandex and Naver as their respective top search engines.

The same goes for Japan, where Yahoo leads the way with 51% of the market share, with Google coming in at second with around 39% of the share. In an effort to overtake Yahoo, Google Japan has engaged in some shady practices. On Monday, the Asiajin blog reported that Google Japan was making use of the Pay-Per-Post service known as CyberBuzz to promote one of their new web gadgets. The service pays bloggers to write glowing reviews and link to a product, essentially creating fake buzz around the net.

After making the rounds and being substantiated around the net, one was left to wonder if Google would punish Google, and how this would even be possible. After all, about a year ago, Google essentially removed any blogs that utilized the pay-per-post system from their index.

On Wednesday night Matt Cutts used Twitter to state that Google Japan had been penalized for buying links by dropping their PageRank from a 9 to a 5. He added, “I expect that to remain for a while.”

My immediate question was, So What? PageRank’s overall importance in the Google Search Algorithm has been downgraded substantially since the early days. And even if it was as important as it once was, so Google Japan will now rank lower when one searches for “Search Engine”? I don’t have the numbers, but I’m sure a vast majority of Yahoo and Google traffic is via direct type-in or bookmark traffic.

Ultimately my guess is that if anything is effected by the PageRank change, it will be Google’s secondary services like Gmail, News, Chrome, Maps, etc. These are the services that probably see a good deal of search referral traffic, and being a subset of the parent google.co.jp domain, their trust level will decrease, and appear lower when one searches for “maps” or “news”.

But wait, the absurdity of the whole thing rears its ugly head again when you consider that PageRank is a Google formula, affecting only Google and its search networks. So these secondary services will appear lower only in Google’s own search results. This might be effective, if it weren’t for the fact that the programs are already advertised on the home page and within sponsored search results anyway.

Make no mistake, a PageRank drop from 9 to 5 would be devastating to an eCommerce store. So by slapping Google Japan for buying links, Google is setting an example: do not buy links. Unfortunately, I doubt a PageRank slap will have nearly as much effect on Google Japan as it would for any other normal website. While I’m not sure what they could have done to truly appease the masses, this was simply a PR move for Google (and I don’t mean PageRank).

Both @AdwordsPro and @AdWordsProSarah are Google AdWords Professionals answering questions from curious users.

Some bits of info:

Does my search partners CTR affect the overall ad group Q S (quality score)? That’s lower, much lower, than Google Search.

Correct. QS data is only collected on Google.com when the users search matches your keyword exactly

how much data do you need to analyze a new AdWords account? Mine needs serious help but only ran ads for 3 days as a test.

For search campaigns I recommend about 2 weeks – but it has to do more with the number of impressions you get in that time

I have stopped ads on Google AdWords for one of our websites some time ago but still noticing 1-2 paid clicks a day on Google Analytics.

probably an issue with a campaign cookie. If users revisit the site directly/via bookmark, the cookie wont be overwritten

On a couple of occasions I’ve seen conversations continue past a simple Q and A as well. Even without any questions, I’ve found following these AdWords Professionals quite useful. Definitely a very cool use of Twitter by the Google AdWords team.

If you’ve never used Twitter and run a PPC campaign, add this to the list of reasons why you should have an account.

More searches + Less Likely Buyers + Higher Competition = More Wasted Ad Spend. Not good. Read on to find out what you should be doing to make sure your ad spend ROI isn’t headed the same way as the economy.

Organization

It can be very difficult to react to market changes without an organized PPC campaign. Each of our clients’ campaigns are set up in a way that allows us to adjust and tweak at the campaign, ad group, ad, and keyword-level. The control that an organized setup grants you is invaluable, especially in the early reporting stages.

Every eCommerce store is different, so there’s no right way to develop your AdWords strategy, but in general I like to break up campaigns by product and/or profit margin. This way, your cost per conversion is most meaningful. For example, looking at my Google Analytics data I can see that the average order value of a particular product group is $80, and the markup is around 100%, so a cost per conversion any higher than $40 is unacceptable. Now with that maximum acceptable cost per conversion in mind, I can tweak at each level, eliminating under performing ad groups, adjusting keywords, and changing ad copy.

Top Tactics for Tough Times

Google published a guide to AdWords just recently called Top Tactics for Tough Times (nice alliteration!). It lays out 6 points to help anyone running a PPC campaign during the economic downturn, though its not like any of the 6 points aren’t applicable during times of economic prosperity. Those 6 points:

1. Focus your ads on low prices and savings.
2. Use value-related keywords.
3. Make sure your ad groups are targeted and relevant.
4. Don’t waste money on irrelevant clicks.
5. Make it easy for customers to buy.
6. Focus your money on your high-performers.

1. Focus your ads on low prices and savings

Are you offering free shipping on all orders? That better be in your ad copy! If its not, add it and watch your CTR climb.

How about free shipping or a sale on a particular product? Set up an ad group or even a full campaign to correctly target your ad spend.

2. Use value-related keywords

I’m not sure if I like this tip actually, unless of course your products are cheaper than your competitors. Of course this all depends, but I find many campaigns are more successful when words like “cheap” and “discount” are set as negatives.

The frugal user that searches for “bargain widgets” is probably in research mode, so you may find your cost per conversion is much higher on those keywords. Your mileage my vary of course, as this is largely industry dependent.

3. Make sure your ad groups are targeted and relevant and
4. Don’t waste money on irrelevant clicks

These two are really no-brainers for a successful campaign no matter the economic condition. Generate reports in AdWords and weed out negatives. Use keyword research tools like the AdWords and Wordtracker to find alternate keywords.

5. Make it easy for customers to buy

Send your most specific ad groups right to the product page! An extremely relevant landing page not only leads to a higher quality score (which leads to a lower CPC, and ultimately a lower cost per conversion), but it gives your visitor exactly what they want, exactly when they expect it.

6. Focus your money on high-performers

Keep an eye on your daily budgets. Don’t let any campaigns that are performing for you come anywhere near their daily limit. If your campaign is set to deliver ads evenly throughout the day, and there’s a sudden surge of traffic on a keyword, AdWords may choose to hold back your ad to save the campaign from reaching its budget too early.

Any campaigns that are on the cusp of an acceptable cost per conversion could benefit from a small drop in your maximum CPC bid, as well. There’s no reason to be afraid of dropping your average ad position. Sometimes you just need to find that “sweet spot” for a campaign.

Tracking, Tracking, Tracking!

One of the greatest advantages of internet advertising over traditional methods is its track-ability. You will know exactly how far your ad spend went the day after. Sitting down once a month to discuss the success of last month’s advertising performance is unacceptable. Spend the time necessary to get your campaigns performing, no matter the cost.