We posted a while back on Google’s February 2011 algorithm update. Known as ‘Panda,’ the update rolled out in the US in February, followed by the UK and the rest of the English speaking world just a couple of nights ago. This April 2011 rollout has given Google 2 months to incorporate some feedback as well and essentially tweak the algorithm further.

Google rolls out hundreds of algorithm updates in a year but only ever announces the biggest. Panda had already affected rankings and search visibility on 12% of websites in the USA and a similar impact was anticipated in the UK.

Any major update, no matter how prepared you know you are for it, leads to bated breath. So yesterday, we spent some time running in depth checks on a lot of our clients and were thrilled to find a host of improvements across many. We haven’t been stung by Panda and it has, in fact, been a great thing for us.

What’s it About?

Well, we discussed a bit of this in a bit of detail in our previous post on the topic, but to sum it up it’s essentially about content. It’s a clichéd and overused statement and but the old “content is King,” adage is one that Google really wants to make us believe with this change. The algorithm punishes not only duplicate content, but just generally low quality (perhaps even ‘unoriginal’) content.

Why I  Love Panda

I’ll be honest. My relationship with Google is love-hate at times. There are things the search giant does that really get my goat (like Google Instant, which slows my browser down and is impossible to turn off in Firefox). But I love Panda. Undoubtedly, that’s the work geek within me appreciating a bit of recognition for webmasters I know put a lot of time and/or money into creating unique quality and keeping their site fresh. But in addition to that, as a search engine user (and not just a SEO) I want to see high quality sites delivered. I don’t want to have to sift through twenty rubbish results before finding something decent irrespective of what I’m searching. Now, this update by no means eradicates spam. But what it does do is rewards high quality content thus incentivising people to create more organic, natural and thought out content – essentially to start catering to their human audience in their content and not to over-focus on the search bots!

The Winners and the Losers

Yes, we love it. But in any update there are winners and losers and some big name websites have featured on the lists. This post on Searchmetrics is a great summary detailing those hardest hit and those who benefited the most in the update.

Puttluck is the first ever golf app to use the iPhone 4’s gyroscope. Tecmark has spent over a year developing the game for Steve McGuinness – a PGA professional golfer and co-founder of Mobile Golf Games Ltd.

 

The game features Wii-style motion controls that utilise the iPhone’s built-in gyroscope and is powered by an advanced physics engine.

Puttluck is controlled by swinging your iPhone, imitating the motion and technique used with a real putter. With 9 real holes from the world’s best courses, Puttluck will test your ability to judge the lie of the green and the amount of power required, as well as your ability to execute the putt you just visualised in your head.

The game’s features include arcade and tournament modes, spanning 9 genuine holes from some of the world’s top courses. Players can access live leaderboards and participate in competitions through the Puttluck website.

Leading golf accessories supplier Black Widow are sponsoring the game from its launch. They will be contributing prizes worth £500 for Puttluck competitions. Competitions will run in tandem with major golf tournaments, starting with The Masters 2011 which began today.

You can download Puttluck from the App Store for just £0.59.

We’ve been shortlisted!

Tecmark has been shortlisted for the upcoming How-Do Awards, in the ‘SEO and PPC Agency,’ category.

The category is one of 16, with other categories awarding magazines, radio programmes, newspapers and social media agencies amongst others.

The winners of the awards in all 16 categories, will be announced at the ceremony on 26th May 2011. We’ll certainly be there!

Developed in partnership with game designer Sanjay Purswani, Good Shot is the latest mobile game from Tecmark.

Inspired by the legendary NES game Duck Hunt (1984), Good Shot is a 2D shooter just as visceral as its 8-bit predecessor. Combining polished graphics with an amusing storyline and a reassuringly direct touch-screen interface, it’s definitely not as easy as it looks, but all the more rewarding as a result.

Good Shot is based around a story mode which puts you in control of a bumbling, pie-obsessed hillbilly  who still lives with his long-suffering ‘Ma’. She needs ducks for her notorious home-baked pies, so you load up your 12-gauge and head on out. Along the way, you meet the local flirt, and slaughter some flying pigs in a rather inspired dream sequence. Waddle we think of next?!

There are two difficulty settings in the story mode, and you unlock arcade versions of each level as you progress through the game. Be warned, the arcade mode will suck you in!

You can have a quack at the game for free by downloading Good Shot Lite, or buy the full version from the App Store for just 59p.  For screenshots and more, visit www.goodshotgame.com.

…and more to the point, why does it matter?

So, congratulations. You got to number one in Google for your prized keyword and you’re getting thousands and thousands of visitors a month.

SEO job done, surely? The team can pick up, pack up, pat themselves on the back and go home, right?

Wrong.

The rankings is just the beginning. What really matters is what these thousands and thousands of new website visitors do once they arrive on your website. And that’s where your conversion rate comes into play.

What’s a Website Conversion?

That depends on your website.

What do you want your website’s visitors to do?

Conversions are essentially actions you want traffic to your site to take on your website and commonly include:

• Website registrations
• Purchases
• Enquiry submissions
• Brochure downloads
• Quote requests

Before you even embark upon a SEO campaign, you should have a clear idea in your head of what you want people do to once they are on your site and the site itself should be optimised to encourage those conversions.

Conversion Rates

Your conversion rate is essentially the percentage of visitors who “convert,” and carry out your nominated conversion actions.

Conversion rates vary based on:

• What you consider a conversion
• Your industry
• How easy your site is to navigate
• How trustworthy your website
• Your calls to action
• The keywords delivering the traffic

Why It Matters

What use is a load of traffic that turns up at your website, has a quick nosey around and then disappears elsewhere to buy services or products from your competitors? Not much.

Chasing rankings blindly is pointless. Everything in SEO should be geared towards ROI, which means getting your users to convert to sales or leads. Chasing rankings for poor converting, irrelevant or unsearched keywords isn’t going to help you to generate more leads or sales. By the same token, achieving rankings for great keywords and then sending that traffic to a website that confuses users will deliver equally poor results.

Monitoring Conversions

You can monitor conversions through the free (and incredibly awesome) Google Analytics. There’s comprehensive e-commerce tracking as well a host of other goal types you can monitor. Analytics can tell you not only how many conversions you received in any given month, but which keywords and traffic sources that delivered those conversions.

The internet has made it possible for people to say pretty much whatever they want about any brand or company they want and to an audience that could potentially be huge. Forums, blogs, review sites…. they all allow and even sometimes encourage users to share their own experiences with companies.

That’s great for users – to a point. If a company is bad news, we’d all be in agreement that consumers have a right to know. But review sites have been open to abuse for as long as they’ve been online. Former employees, disgruntled clients and even competitors could write whatever they want about your brand online.

What makes this such a big problem is that these websites will often show up highly in Google – and if someone is writing about your brand on that site, a Google search for your company name could return negative commentary listings on the first page.

A fine example would be that of oil giant, BP. Typing ‘BP oil,’ into Google shows up news results from the massive oil spill of 2010 more than 6 months on.

Why is it a Problem?

We’re a nation of Googlers. Despite its market share dropping to just over 60% in the USA, Google still has almost 90% of the market in the UK. Consumers with access to the internet (so almost all of them, surely?) are armed with information about your company. A quick search engine search on a company you have never heard of would be ‘due diligence’ to many consumers, before parting with their cash. And if the top ten isn’t particularly favourable to your, for whatever reason, that could be enough to sway someone against becoming your customer.

Remove Negative Google Listings – Is it Possible?

You can’t just call Google and request the removal of listings that contain negative commentary. They won’t oblige.

There are things you can do such as responding appropriately to reviews on the websites that are rankings. You can also start engaging in social media to build a more positive and prominent brand for yourself online.

For help building a positive brand online and in the search engines, contact us about our online reputation management services.

Tecmark updated this research in August 2011. The most up to date version can be viewed here: Tecmark Mobile Internet Research August 2011.

We all know mobile Internet is growing. Many of you are a part of the growth, checking sports scores, browsing holidays, catching up on the news or even reading posts like this on your Smartphone. Whether you’re sitting in your lounge, standing around a supermarket or commuting, mobile devices are proving more popular than many thought possible for accessing the Internet.

With that in mind, at Tecmark we carried out some research of our own with a focus on the UK internet visitors. We took data from a number of websites in a number of different niche areas that gave us anything between 0.5 million and 1.5 million total website visits per month and we assessed how many were accessing these various sites from mobile devices.

We took our data from September 2009 right through to January 2011. We were pretty sure we would see an amazing growth over that period in terms of the percentage of a website’s users that are browsing from a mobile device and we were not wrong!

Key UK Mobile Internet Usage Findings

The PDF can be downloaded from the bottom of this page, but let us sum up for your our key findings.

• In September 2009, just 0.02% of all UK web traffic originated from a mobile device. In January 2011 this figure was a staggering 8.09% (representing a growth of over 4000%)!

• iPhone traffic accounts for around 4.5% of all UK website traffic – not just mobile traffic!

• iPhone traffic accounts for more than half of mobile traffic.

• More people browsed UK websites in January 2011 from an iPad than from all Android powered devices put together. In fact, that’s been the case since September 2010, just over 3 months after the first iPad was launched in the UK.

• In January 2011, Apple devices accounted for more than 70% of all mobile traffic in the UK.

• If growth continues at the rate it did for the latter part of 2010, by June 2011, 13% of UK web traffic will be of mobile origin.

Download the Tecmark Mobile Internet research paper

The iPad 2 announcement was widely anticipated, as were many of the features revealed. In fact, the biggest surprise was that Steve Jobs himself was up on stage unveiling this giant iPhone 4 new tablet. But what are they key features?

• A5 Dual core CPU, twice as fast as the current iPad
• Front and back camera
• Face time
• Rear camera HD video capable
• 590g in weight
• Same battery life as existing iPad
• 33% thinner than original iPad
• GPU 9 times faster than on original iPad
• iPad 2 thinner than iPhone 4
• Available in black and in white from day 1
• Gyroscope
• To be shipped with iOs 4.3 (Airplay and personal ‘hot spots’)

And when will it go on sale? Well, launch date is 11^th March 2011 in the USA and 25^th March everywhere else.

And how much will it set you back? Well, the prices are staying exactly the same as the current iPad.

Initial Thoughts

It all seems a little ‘rushed.’ A summer launch was widely anticipated but in actual fact it’s to be in the shops in the US in little over a week and internationally 2 weeks later. It doesn’t offer anything (except snazzy ‘smart cases’ which accessories companies won’t be thankful to Apple for) than the iPhone 4 doesn’t really.

So it does seem a little like a ‘big iPhone 4.’ Except it’s not bigger in every way. It’s thinner. As far as tablets go, though, on paper it’s streets ahead of any other device on the market. So if you’re a tablet user, you won’t find a better one.

There’s no denying that Apple have enjoyed great success with the current iPad and Apple fanatics are sure to be queuing up outside shops ahead of its launch.

Will you be joining the queue?

These days, organisations of all sizes are talking about social media strategies. Social media is becoming an increasingly important marketing tool, without doubt. It can help you engage your customers better or get more insight into how they behave, and it’s also a platform you can use for things like PR and recruitment.

At the moment, however, many businesses don’t really have a clue what to do once they’ve signed up for Twitter and Facebook.

Here’s a couple of examples from 2010 of how not to do social media:

• Coca-Cola ran a Facebook campaign for its Dr Pepper brand, in which users allowed their status box to be taken over by the company. This backfired when a Mumsnet user saw her 14-year-old daughter’s Facebook page had been updated with a message that made direct reference to a hardcore porn film, and Coca-Cola had to pull the campaign.

• During the British general election campaign, the Conservative party unveiled a website called Cash Gordon, designed to embarrass the Labour Party. It was supposed to capitalise on user-generated content pulled in from sites like Facebook and Twitter by handing out ‘action points’ to people for their participation. It was set up so that any Tweets containing the hashtag #cashgordon were republished in a live stream on the site. It all went wrong when a few pranksters realised they could hijack the site by including HTML or JavaScript in their Tweets. The hijacking led to the site showing porn, expletive-filled rants, Rick Astley videos, malware links, and redirecting visitors to the Labour party site. Voters were definitely engaged, just not quite how the Tories had anticipated.

Social media can go wrong, but learn from the mistakes of others – don’t be put off. Most organisations can benefit from developing a social media strategy, so if you haven’t already included this in your business plan, you may want have a re-think.