The category of print publishing that has arguably been least devastated by the ravages of online audience migration, and also therefore has retained a higher proportion of its advertising revenues, is Niche Publications. But the end is nigh.
The perceived wisdom to date has been “The more niche the better”. Print publications with an audience of just a few thousand targeted readers have continued to attract advertisers who have little choice if they want to reach that finely tuned demographic.
Revenues for traditional publishers have been squeezed and squeezed until there’s nothing left to squeeze. Many newspapers have been closed or sold off and now exist on a minimum cost base scrapping for the last few display advertising pounds and dollars that have been earmarked for print. Classified advertising died a long time ago. Although many Niche Publications have survived, they are now under threat like never before … and they don’t even realise.
The niche “publications” that will grab their ad revenues tomorrow are already being assembled in big numbers on Facebook. Facebook marketers are growing targeted audiences in every conceivable category and with the power of Facebook advertising they will, in future, whenever they decide their audience has grown to a suitable size, unleash their products of unsuspecting print publishers. Who will do two things:
1. Try to emulate their new competitors, but it will be too late.
2. Try to buy their new competitors, but it will be expensive and they may be unable to do so.
Is it too late already? Who knows, maybe. What can they do? Put their very best brains to Facebook. Spend the months necessary to really understand the subtleties and nuances of the different elements - audiences, usage, advertising and marketing strategies, pages, communities and lots more. Or, they can ask an expert to help them. Like me.
Unconvinced? Here’s a case study. Let’s take Angling as an example. One of the best “niches” because it has a large and loyal user base, but is very specific. To date there has been no highly targetable online audience outside of specific search phrases typed onto Search Engines. But that happens only when there is already a need. Or in other words, when a successful marketing campaign has created a need. And TV and Radio is useless for niche products. The only option has been niche print titles. There have been few online options for brands that wish to create the need, as they can do with the “eyeballs to advertiser” print model.
You will find a range of niche publications in your market. To say that the vast majority of them are vulnerable is an understatement. I looked hard and couldn’t find a single one with an effective Facebook Page strategy.
Here’s the new competition. More than 6,500 Likes, all anglers and growing like crazy. I know this because Searchvista have developed their Facebook Page strategy. Once we repositioned their Facebook page as a “Facebook Anglers Forum” their likes grew from 43 to almost 7,000 in just a few months.
The owners of these new Pages with all of their Likes can now “speak” to their 6,500 Likes thru their Facebook wall. Just as though they had Facebook friends using a standard Facebook profile. But here’s the rub. Unlike with a Profile, the Page Likes can be targeted through Facebook ads. And they can hit these people wherever they go on Facebook. Even if those people clicked to Like the page once and have never been back. By clicking that Like button, you sign up to receive ads forever from that Page owner. And guess what these page owners are now starting to do? Of course, sell these eyeballs to interested advertisers who will reduce their spend in print.
Which is how Facebook will achieve massive advertising revenues over the next decade. A huge amount of the revenue siphoned from what’s left of print advertising.
Now CC Moore may or may not decide to monetise that audience by selling it to third party advertisers. But there are thousands of similar audiences being assembled solely for that purpose. In smart ways, at low cost, very quickly and very effectively. And these “niche publications” of the future will surely see another sizeable tranche of niche print publications go to the wall.
If you need advice, get in touch.
Nothing amazes me more than the incredibly poorly implemented campaigns that we regularly compete with in Google Adwords. OK, some campaigns are implemented at a very high level by the end user. The user establishes a basic campaign and pays through the nose for ineffective “head” keywords that don’t convert to business. But they save some money by not paying a search marketing agency like SearchVista. In the process they make Google very happy … and wealthy. But at least they get some some leads so that’s fine. I can live with that.
What I don’t like to see is the shambolically implemented campaigns put in place by so-called search marketing experts who “take the money and run” and trade off the fact that almost irrespective of how badly your campaign is implementated, Google will find some leads for you. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great for SearchVista and for our clients, but I don’t like to see companies being fleeced and paying through the nose when their ads should be appearing in a higher position for a lower cost, thereby stretching their budget further and making their business grow more. And it’s all down to Quality Score. The only thing that winds me up more is the “We’ll get you to the top of Google for 3 phrases for only £100 per month” brigade. If you don’t know why that’s a scam the then contact me now. I’ll tell you how it works and you can stop wasting your money. Or I should say, how it doesn’t work for the customer!
What is Quality Score?
Adwords evaluates a ‘Quality Score’ for every keyword in a campaign by analysing several key factors to measure the relevance of keyword to ad text and to a user’s search query. Quality Score is updated regularly and is a hugely valuable weapon in the armoury of the successful search marketeer due to the close relationship between Quality Score and performance of the keyword within Adwords. Ad Creative for keywords with a high Quality Score appear in a higher position for a lower cost-per-click (CPC). So you could be paying 50p per click at number 2 position and getting 50 clicks per day (cost £25), whilst your competitor at number 3 may be paying £0.80 per click and getting only 20 clicks (cost £16). And all because you maximised your ad quality score because you know what you’re doing in Adwords.
Quality Score is calculated each time a keyword matches a user search query, ie every time a keyword has the potential to trigger an ad. A high quality score has the following benefits:
Generally, higher Quality Score means lower ad costs and better ad positions. It’s all about Google making sure that their all-important users see the most relevant ads.
The only way to improve Quality Score is by optimisation of your account. Make sure that all ad groups contain descriptive ads and that they all advertise the same thing and that keywords closely relate to the ads in any given ad group.
Organise campaigns by subject
Create separate campaigns for each of product or service. This facilitates effective management and development of campaign performance. Structure your campaign based on this goal.
Languages and locations
Make sure that you only target the languages and locations that are relevant for your business.
Create specific ad groups
Make sure that your ads reach targeted users by creating a dedicated adgroup for every product or service. Separate keywords into related groups. Create ads that pertain directly to those keywords.
Avoid duplicate keywords
It is incredibly easy to generate a situation where you’re bidding against yourself. A lot of these problems are caused when mixing Broad, Phrase and Exact match keywords and this requires careful planning. Or better still execution by experts like SearchVista.
Choose keywords carefully.
Only go for keywords that directly relate to the theme of your adgroup and landing page. It’s fine to include relevant keyword variations, along with singular and plural versions. Try to avoid broad match where possible once your campaign is well optimised.
Use unique URLs and dedicated landing pages
Destination URLs should send users to a specific landing page that is also optimised for the search terms. In an ideal world you would have a landing page for every single search term. Landing pages are great because having taken the time to build them, they then generally generate high positions in the natural search results, particularly if your website has a reasonable pagerank.
Include keywords in your ad text.
Including your keywords in the text of the ad is a very good thing for relevance and therefore for quality score. The keyword will appear in bold in the ad text which maximised clicks. Make your ads stand out however you can and use a strong call-to-action. Then test multiple ads to find which one work best.
And never forget that ultimately, it’s your landing page and your website that determine how well your ads convert to business, so make sure it’s designed with your users’ needs in mind.
Use Web Analytics to evaluate campaign performance
There’s no better way to work out what needs to be done to optimise a campaign that monitoring the whole process end-to-end. And for that you’ll need an analytics package such as Google Analytics. SearchVista deploy Google Analytics for every client routinely as part of our Paid Search management solution.
Try different bidding options.
If your campaign is eligible for the Conversion Optimiser, this feature can help you increase your conversions and decrease your cost-per-acquisition.
If you’re wondering why your SEO Agency hasn’t managed to satisfactorily improve your Google ranking, ask them if they have promoted links back to the site within a blog network. If they give you a blank look, see them off the premises (or phone) and call SearchVista. The value of a well constructed blog network cannot be overstated.
Website Authority is all important. And the only way that Google can measure this for a given keyphrase is to check out if other sites have rated the site by linking to it. So, by artificially creating a network of links back to your site from a network of blogs, you can guess what happens. And the more you add content to the network, the more authority the network is credited with.
A trusted site will have lasting impact for search engine result page positioning and Search Engine spiders will more frequently crawl your site.
The defining point for websites is the amount of authority or expertise they demonstrate in their particular niche.
The information you post on your blog network must be factual and accurate and it must contain all of your relevant keywords within anchor text of the links back to your articles.
Create blogs on different blog platforms using different user names. Passwords can be the same. It’s all about putting in the hard work and generating relevant and interesting content. Then submit the blog to search engines and in particular blog search engines. Comment on other relevant blog posts and generally get busy.
Next – use social media to thrust yourself into other conversations, contribute with helpful information, ask questions and make sure you think long term. Your authority building is not an over-night thing.
Start with Twitter, Facebook, and search for related blogs within your niche. Use Google’s Blogsearch and Technorati.
Google Local Business listings are completely FREE and they promote your business for various keyphrases in your local area. They also push your business name and they include a map and contact details. But many businesses do not take advantage. SearchVista deploy managed local business centre listings routinely for all SEO clients.
Google Local Business Centre
Optimisation for Google Local Business – is about providing as much information as possible about your business. The more info you produce, the more local directories you request, the better the quality of the data uploaded in terms of SEO and sales value, the better.
– Only business owners or authorised representatives may claim business listings on Google Maps.
- It is important, if multiple users will be updating the listing, to use a general email address for the listing (eg enquiries@searchvista.co.uk). And always use an email address within the main business domain. Don’t use a gmail or hotmail address unless that’s all you have - they don’t engender confidence in consumers.
Submit Your Listing
1. Visit the Google Local Website. You’ll need to make a Google account if you don’t already have one.
2. Log in to the Local Business Centre.
3. On the Local Business Centre homepage, click Add new business.
4. Fill out the basic information about your business:
- Company: This is the official/registered name of your business. The business name on Google Maps must be your full legal business name.
- Address (required): The address should look exactly the way you’d write it on an envelope. If your business services several areas, you can create one listing under a PO Box. Do not create more than one listing for each business location, either in a single account or multiple accounts.
- Phone Number (required): Make sure you include the area code with your phone number.
- Website: Provide your main website URL. Do not provide URLs that redirect users to landing pages or phone numbers other than those of the actual business.
- After clicking Next, you’ll =have the opportunity to provide the following:
* CATEGORIES: Enter several categories to describe your business, to make it easier for others to find when they search Maps. Google will automatically suggest categories as you type. You can enter up to 5 categories for your business and by using Custom Categories you can ensure that all of the relative keywords to your business are covered within a category.
* HOURS OF OPERATION: Select your hours of operation using the dropdown menus. This is optional but there is probably no reason not to include business hours.
* PAYMENT OPTIONS : Check the boxes next to the payment methods accepted by your business.
* PHOTOS: Use the photo uploader to add up to 10 images to your listing.
* VIDEO: To add a video, upload it to YouTube and enter its URL. You can add up to 5 videos to your listing.
* ADDITIONAL DETAILS: Use this section to add your own specific business information. This is another opportunity to add relevant keywords for SEO purposes.
5. You can see your listing as it will appear in Google Maps on the right side of your screen, and new information will appear as you enter it. When you’re happy, click Submit at the bottom of the page.
6. Google now need to verify that you are the actual business owner. Choose how you would like to verify your listing and click Finish. Google allows a maximum of 100 listings per account for manual verification.
If you select Verification by Phone, you’ll receive an automated phone call during which you will be given a PIN that can be entered into your Local Business Centre account.
If you select Verification by Postcard you will receive your PIN on a Google postcard which you can then use to verify your business listing in the Google Local Business Centre. It generally takes 10 business days for a postcard to arrive. Note that you can only receive a PIN at the business address you’ve submitted to Google Maps.
Once you have entered your pin, your listing will normally appear in Google Maps within the following 12 hours.
As you delve deeper and deeper into the wonderful world of SEO, it’s sometimes helpful to remember the basic tenets of successful on-page optimisation. It amazes me how often I see pages that have clearly been optimised, for example for main keywords plus geographic terms, yet omit to exploit the basic high value on-page elements. By way of a reminder, here’s a checklist of the things that you should ensure are covered off and revisited on a regular basis.
Create Accurate and Unique Page Titles
The HTML Title tag tells users and search engines what the topic of a particular page is. When your document appears on search results pages, the content of the Title tag will usually appear on the first line of your listing.
Always ensure that you create a unique title for each page on your site. Many Wordpress installations are pre-configured to generate a fixed title, or one based on a formula. But there’s no substitute for well-constructed titles written by SEO experts. Titles that are too long are truncated by Google, so check the length against the current number of supported characters.
Make use of the “description” meta tag
The description meta tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of the subject of the page. Whereas a page title may be just a few words, a page’s description meta tag might be a sentence or a short paragraph.
Description meta tags are important because Google might use them as snippets for your pages. Note that we say “might” because Google may choose to use a relevant section of your page’s visible text if it does a good job of matching up with a user’s query.
Having a different description meta tag for each page helps both users and Google, especially in searches where users may bring up multiple pages for your site.
Ensure that you have structured URLs
Creating descriptive keyword inclusive filenames for your documents leads to better crawling by Search Engine robots and also creates easier, “friendlier” URLs for those that want to link to your content.
Visitors may be intimidated by extremely long and cryptic URLs that contain few recognizable words. And remember that the URL to a document is displayed as part of a search result in Google, below the document’s title and snippet. Like the title and snippet, words in the URL on the search result appear in bold if they appear in the user’s query.
Make sure your site is easy to navigate
The navigation of a website helps visitors to quickly find what they’re after. It
also helps search engines understand what content is important. Although Google’s search results are provided at a page level, Google also likes to have a sense of what role a page plays in the wider website.
All sites have a home or “root” page, which is usually the most frequented page on the site and the starting place of navigation for many visitors. The navigation from this page, or indeed irrespective of where a user enters your site, must make it easy for the desired content to be accessed within two mouse clicks. Your home page should also contain a site map to allow the search engines swift access to all pages on the website, particularly those PPC landing pages that woudl be otherwise invisible. A breadcrumb trail is also a winner in terms of usability.
Offer High Quality Content
Purported by Google to be the single most important factory and the holy grail to which all sites should aspire. When all said and done, Google want to return the website with the richest content in the majority of its efforts to match user queries with indexed web pages.
Write Good Anchor Text
Anchor text tells your users and Google something about the page you’re linking to. Links on your page may be internally pointing to other pages on your site, or external, leading to content on other sites. In both cases, the better your anchor text is, the easier it is for users to navigate and for Google to understand what the page you’re linking to is about.
Use heading tags appropriately
Heading tags (not to be confused with the HTML Head tag) are used to present
structure on the page to users. There are six sizes of heading tags, beginning with H1, the most important, and ending with H6, the least important.
Heading tags make text contained within them larger on the rendered page, thus providing a visual cue to users that this text is important and helping them to understand the type of content beneath. Multiple heading sizes used in order create a hierarchical structure for content, making it easier for users to navigate and also achieving a positive hike on page score for featured keywords.
Optimize your images
All images can have a distinct filename and also an “alt” attribute, both of which you should take advantage of. The “alt” attribute allows you to specify alternative text for the image if it cannot be displayed in the destination browser. And apart from your users, the better understanding a search engine has of what your images are about, the more clicks on them you will receive from image search results.
Make effective use of the robots.txt file
Robots.txt is useful if you do not want certain pages of your site crawled, for example if they might not be useful to users when found in a search engine’s search results. Managing this file, or files (plural) if you have multiple sub-domains, gives you a fine degree of control of your website within the search engine indices.
Take advantage of web analytics
If you’ve improved the crawling and indexing of your site, you need to know what the effect has been. You can use analytics tools to:
• gain insight into how users reach and behave on your site
• discover the most popular content on your site
• measure the impact of optimisation changes you have made
Welcome to the new SearchVista website and the first SearchVista Blog Post. We’ll endeavour to share our knowledge of SEO, PPC and Wordpress development through our blog.