On the 10th of January Google included content from Google Plus, the newly launched Social Network, into their search result algorithm. Calling it “Search, plus your world”, it marks the true beginning of social search. You can still perform a global search, which omits all social results, which therefore presents you with two options: global and personalized (It does not appear that this feature has been fully rolled out in the South African version of Google at the time of writing, although I did come across it last night on Google South Africa). Some of the features of Personalized Search include an indicator of the total number of personal results in your search as well as the results themselves accompanied by a blue icon on the left. Additionally, Google included Google Plus Profiles in Search and People and Pages.

Having all the Personalised content from Google Plus mentioned above weaved into search result pages might not be welcomed by everyone. And at first glance it might seem to completely change the way we approach SEO. A lot of us in the field of Search Engine Optimization have been preparing for the day that search gets social. The option to switch between Global and Personalized results however, came as a surprise. Users can choose whether or not they want to use personalised search. This essentially means that current SEO practices still play the same role as always.

One cannot, however, predict the changes Google will make in the future, and tapping into the SEO potential of Personalised Search will play an increasingly important role in a Search Marketing campaign. Google might require us to be logged in at all times to use any of its features, including search. Even if this happens, I believe traditional SEO will remain alive and well. In its core, SEO is about optimization for the user, to optimize websites in order to facilitate and improve the search experience. This will always remain relevant.

A passion for interior decorating established Blind Designs in 1975 in South Africa. Blind Designs was born in 1975 in South Africa by an entrepreneur Rob Harvey. They initially started with 3 types of blinds which were Roman, Roller and Vertical Blinds but within 4 years they had added another product to their catalogue. In 1994 home owners started to decorate their houses like never before. Due to the fact that the home owners started to do interior of their houses themselves, Blind Designs catalogue had grown to 9 products by 1989.

The Next Step: Online Marketing

Blind Designs realised in 2009 that launching an online marketing strategy could have a magnificent impact on their business. They approached SAbest and we launched their Google Adwords (Pay per Click) Campaign in February 2009. Just 7 days after launching their campaigns, they had 192 visits and 20% of the visits were from Google Adwords and 6.67% from non-paid adverts. 72% were new clients visiting their website through Google.

We initially started only with Pay per Click advertising, but after a successful year of Pay per Click campaigns and remarkable return on investment, Blind Designs launched search engine optimisation on their website in conjunction with their Adwords campaign.

We started their search engine optimisation in February 2009. Within 8 months of optimisation, we managed to get them to the top listing on the first page of organic searches when searching their most competitive keyword: Blinds.
SEO especially, builds complete brand trust and awareness, as people perceive companies that rank on the first page of searches as the market leaders and the most trusted in the industry.
This meant optimum visibility online in all searches.

The Proof Is In The Pudding:

You will notice in the block below the difference in visits from 2009 when they started with Pay per Click right through to 2011 when they also added search engine optimisation to their online marketing plan. This also shows the impact the two products combined have on each other, and on customer trust and brand association.

Visits
Campaigns

PPC:Feb 2009 – Feb 2010: +20%
SEO:Feb 2009 – Feb 2010: +6.67%

PPC: Feb 2010 – Feb 2011: +20.58%
SEO: Feb 2010 – Feb 2011: +21.88%

PPC: Feb 2011 – Aug 2011: 24.37%
SEO: Feb 2011 – Aug 2011: 24.73%

This clearly states the value of doing Pay per Click and Search engine optimisation together. The performance of various keywords, and their conversion rates are closely monitored and adjusted according to the results achieved.
Focused landing pages were created for the Pay per Click campaigns, ensuring higher conversion rates as the captive audience got the information they were looking for immediately, with substantial call to action areas. Their average conversion rates from Feb 2011 – Aug 2011 was 12.07%. Other advertising campaigns expect an average of 1% conversion – and the trackability is minimal.

The Future Of Blind Designs:

Due to their online visibility, Blind Designs maintained a steady growth of 5% annually, even through the recession period.
The brand has become trusted as word of mouth is backed up by online presence – and will always be viewed as one of the market leaders for blinds in South Africa.
One last word from Paul O’ Brien is that Google Adwords should form part of every company’s strategy to some agree.

Presence is not enough. No one will visit your website if they don’t know it’s there. Optimising your website to ensure it’s picked up by search engines – an absolute essential necessity. You need to be SEEN.

With Search engine optimisation (SEO) you not only build brand awareness, but more importantly, you gain trust within your industry. The higher the ranking of your site in the search results, and the more frequently your page appears on the results pages, the more visitors and sales you’ll have, because you are targeting people who are looking for your product. Being listed on top of search engine results also almost automatically cements your company as a market leader.

Trust + brand awareness + more visitors = more sales.

So what is SEO? SEO (or Search Engine Optimisation) is the process of structuring a web page so that it is found, read, and indexed by search engines as effectively as possible. It improves the visibility of your website in search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.

These search engines use crawlers to follow links from one page to another and retrieve the contents. This is indexed and added to their databases. Search engines’ web crawlers rank sites according to their relevance to search terms, which is calculated using criteria such as the extent of keyword matches and the number of sites linked to a website. Done properly, SEO ensures that, when users search for terms relevant to your business, they will find your website every time.

Unique content counts. Having professionally written, relevant copy on your site (different from the content on other sites in wording, structure and topics) can provide a big boost for your site’s rankings. Frequency of content change is also a must – not small changes to existing content, but new content which shows that your website is active and dynamic.

You’ve spent hours working with a team of designers and developers to create your unique footprint on the worldwide web.  Days and weeks to conceptualise the exact image, content and portal you want to use to interact with the world out there.
But now – how will those millions of potential clients know about you?  What is the next step?  And where do you begin?

Two prevalent methods have given you the tools to do just that – get yourself known.

The first of these is similar to an online banner marketing campaign, except you can splash your adverts across many websites at the same time.  This we call Google Display Networks (GDN), and the adverts run across all the sites that have opened themselves up to this kind of marketing.  The beauty of GDN is that it creates awareness before people necessarily know about you and actively go looking for you or your products.

Furthermore, Google almost ‘tracks’ the user’s general application of the web, so if they are on certain websites often, and your advert is relevant to them, it will show to them when they go to other sites.  Kind of eerie, but from a marketing point of view phenomenal!

Having had said that, Display Network allows for a lot of awareness and positioning, but not necessarily a conversion to a sale or direct response.  People often see something, and then go in search of it later, which is why the second method is absolutely vital, we believe.

This second method is Search Engine Marketing.  This is also the most effective way of advertising online, as you have a captive audience that are ready to engage and interact with you.  The quickest way to get your product, brand or service ‘out there’ on Search Engine Marketing is by making use of Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising as it is immediate and guaranteed when managed correctly.  Besides this, Pay Per Click is flexible and can be changed and optimized real-time.

That said, however, to have a complete online visibility and presence, and to ‘dominate’ search engines cost effectively in the long run, is by optimizing your website and website content in such a way that your brand will be on the top of all major search engine listings.  This is called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).  Search Engine Optimisation is done over a period of time, and thus does not necessarily yield immediate success, but in the long run is the most cost effective way to market yourself online.

Our advice, then, would be to start with GDN en PPC, get results and increase the proverbial bottom line, and then proceed to SEO – and eventual online success!

So in the SEO industry black and white hat is like a swear word. Most SEO’s despise being classed by these. So how do you distinguish between a “black hat” and a “white hat” SEO?

According to Wikipedia black hat SEO’s are classified as follows – Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. White Hat SEO’s are then defined by Wikipedia as follows – White hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than attempting to game the algorithm.

Now as you can probably see from this there are flaws in these statements because what do you construed as an action to game the algorithm. Isn’t including your keywords in your page titles an attempt to game the algorithm? Who defines what is seen as white hat and black hat. Because of this obscure divide between “good and evil” it is really something SEO have a pet peeve with.

I do however think because of the nature the only way to clearly define black hat and white hat is by having a real person review it. Link buying is something that is considered black hat if it is only done to increase search engine rankings. Now this is a really interesting topic and we could debate it for hours but top SEO’s have all admitted that if you look at some of the most competitive search queries you would find that all the ranking websites have bought links in the past.

So now when you buy links for your company are you trying to game the algorithm or are you just trying to catch up? Well this really is a difficult question to answer and I won’t even try to but this just shows the obscurity of these classifications. I do however believe there are cases where you can clearly see a tactic that is trying to game the algorithm for “evil”.

Clocking for instance is something that has been extensively used in the past to game search engine algorithms and most search engines are really good at detecting this. But what about cases where there is a justified reason for using clocking? Clocking is basically when the page that a crawler sees and the page an actual visitor sees differs. What about situations where the website needs to first confirm information before it can show you it’s content? Is it then okay to serve different content to a crawler than to a real visitor?

In my opinion there is definitely cases where these tactics are negative and the aim is to make irrelevant content relevant to search queries but for the most part SEO’s are simply trying to have their clients rank for search queries that are relevant to their products or services. I believe this is where we should look for right and wrong rather than in the tactics that are used.