Digitalhound - Profile

Hi Steve,

There are a whole host of changes going on with the SERPS primarily to do with falling ad revenues. Very recently it was reducing the snack pack from 7 to just 3, removing the right hand side ads and increasing the number of above the line ads to 4 to further drop organic rankings further down the page (I wrote about this on our blog http://www.digitalhound.co.uk/blog/ a while back).

The most recent developments with Adwords for instance has seen Google switch to a 30-30-80-character format from their 25-35-35-character ad format of the past 15 years. In reality, this will mean pushing the organic search results even further down the page and with consumer attention spans being what they currently are, advertisers who have trialled the new format are already reporting a 20% higher CTR than before, making Google laugh all the way the bank!

Whilst advertisers may be celebrating this new move, sadly I feel that it is cynically motivated to try and force more companies, some of whom can ill afford it to undertake a traffic paying model if they want to survive over the long term.

Seems like their 'business plan' is to get you to click through to the redirected site in the hope that you might suddenly decide to buy one of their affiliate products.

We've been hit by some of those too and a lot of these sites redirect to alibabaexpress.com. With the porn ones I'm guessing that this to swell (no pun intended!) their traffic numbers, so that they can sell advertising on their sites or they might have Adsense installed and hope that you click on one of the ads.

It's high time that GA gets this sorted out though!

Thanks Steve, couldn't agree more!

Google Analytics is a great free tool and will do a lot of the 'heavy lifting' for you but it is also renowned for being hacked and stats can be skewed as a result.

For instance, we use GA on our own site but have also had deploy 81 filters to weed out spam traffic from dubious sites originating mainly from Russia that redirect you to affiliate offers etc. - we were hit last night from this traffic2cash.xyz URL with the following-

New Users -75

Bounce rate -100.00% 

Pages / Session-1.00

Avg. Session Duration - 00:00:00

And as you know, time on site is one of the metrics that Google uses to determine ranking.

We also use clicky.com which in my opinion is a far superior product as it's not only hacker-proof but it tracks and anlayses your traffic in real time, is FREE up to daily page views of 3000 and does a whole lot more besides.

I'm off now to do a bit more tweaking...

Like many have alluded to, having an 'all singing & dancing' website (if such a thing were possible!) does depend heavily on the type of industry that you're in. As your website is your shop window online, you have to be prepared to test and tweak constantly to cater for seasonal variations, trends, new content, calls to action, imagery etc.

The trick is to have a website that is functional, informative, has an easy to follow navigational structure and converts well. Tools such as Crazy Egg offer a free 30 day trial where you can monitor how your site was found, what content and page section held your visitor's attention most, and the ones that made them beat a hasty exit and a whole lot more besides.

Business websites are a living, organic entity (at least they should be) and are never meant to be in a 'finished' state especially from a search engine standpoint as Google does love sites that are updated constantly.

Paying close attention to what your visitors are doing once they visit your site through GA and other tracking software is crucial in determining whether your site is as successful as it should be as well as giving you the opportunity to address weaker performing pages and sections of your site.

So, 'pretty' site or not, informed change is the only constant that underpins whether a site is successful or isn't.

Hi Angela,

Didn't mean to come across as being wholly cynical although Christmas seems to start earlier every year - Mince pies were available in our local Co-Op from the 1st week in September!

Being a digital marketing agency though, we're constantly having to adapt, to offer our clients the best current advice as well as tailor our ranking and marketing strategies to coincide with and take full advantage of seasonal fluctuations in the SERPS.

Darryl...

Hard to resist, so here goes:

https://www.facebook.com/digitalhound1

http://google.com/+DigitalhoundCoUk1

https://www.linkedin.com/company/digitalhound-ltd-

https://twitter.com/digihound1

Many thanks!

Hi Steve,

Here is my take on the SERPS since the latest algo update:

1. Most of the results that you seeing now are either personalised or geo-targeted when browsing privately - this is to do with location servers from which the data is being pulled from.

2. The phone numbers are listed under the map results for the top 3 listings featured on the map.

3. From an SEO standpoint, the key for us in being able to get our clients featured on that map & although that real estate seems to be growing smaller by the day, it is still an area that continues to drive significant traffic numbers.

4. YES! there are far too many ads above the fold but what is still significant is that the click through rates for PPC hasn't gone up dramatically since the new SERPS format has been rolled out.

My guess is that this new format is being trialed particularly in advance of the Christmas season to entice more PPC customers when ad spending really does hit the proverbial roof and is therefore likely to stay at least in the short term.

Darryl...

That's good to hear! Have you checked in WMT whether all your pages are indexed now? If that's the case, then I would suggest that this current low error rate is likely to stay.

Cheers,

Darryl...

Hi Andy,

As Steve says, you will definitely want to verify both.

Although, it is definitely worth considering specifying a preference in WMT especially if you are building links to just the one canonical domain.

Here's a link that's worth looking at Set your preferred domain (www or non-www) which throws further light on how/why etc;

Cheers,

Darryl..

That makes absolute sense! Good luck with it.

Darryl...