Has this been a busy week or what? We’ve barely had time to dissect the new Google Social Search from last Monday and now the big G is hitting us with even more announcements. Why the sudden spurt of new products ? Is Mr Schmidt planning something? Is Google feeling threatened by ‘Bing’ ?
These questions will have to wait, for the time being lets see what has happened;
| Google Dashboard | See what data Google collects from your all your Google products, manage them in one simple place | Official Release | Test it here |
| Google Commerce Search | Hosted ecommerce platform by Google delivered via SaaS using cloud computing. (paid service) | Official Release | See it here (video) |
| Adwords Ad Sitelinks | New Adwords feature that allows advertisers to create sitelinks in the adblock | Official Release | Read our report |
| Google Music Search | New vertical search results for music that lets you listen and purchase directly from SERP | Official Release | Test it here |
| 2 free Google Webinars | – Think2010: Four Winning Moves for 2010 – Holiday Webmaster Webinar |
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| TBA? Adwords new “Automatic Matching” service | Still hot gossip at the moment, Google Adwords testing a set and forget service to run your campaign | First report | Further confirmation |
top search queries - Google webmaster tools
Checking the Google webmaster tools today we noticed the keyword sorting feature appearing in the ‘ Top Search Queries’ dashboard.
The three drop down menus will allow webmaster tool users to segment the top search queries by;
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2 new Google webmaster labs tools
Breaking news, Google announced 2 great new additions to the Google webmaster tools.
The tools are located under the new ‘Labs’ menu heading in your webmaster tools console.
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Google Conversion Room released a free online guide titled “Make your website work – Ten ways to convert visitors into buyers“, this booklet is a great supplement to our e-Commerce SEO guide posted not long ago.
While the 28 page booklet was launched towards the UK market, the tips offered are universal to successfully convert visitors to sales. The language used in the booklet is easy to understand and written for business owners and non technical users.
The 10 tips offers before and after examples and really simple steps to test, analyze and implement.
Head over to the Google Conversion Room blog and check out this e-book, even if you are a seasoned marketer, spending the 10 minutes to read through the tips will be refreshing.
Next time you perform a search in Google, note how many results appear on page one?
Out of millions of hits there are only 10 results on page one. as research indicates 89% will click page 1 results. and 4% on page 2, 6% page 3.
In the world of Search Engine Optimization competitor research plays a very important part to a successful campaign. By knowing who is on the top 10 result, and digging deeper to find out how they achieved this, you will be able to budget and plan your campaign. To be on page 1, you have to beat the other 10 results.
In the world of online business, knowing your competition is the key to success. From knowing who your top competitors are, why they are at the top and finding out when a new competitor appears will help your business grow and prosper.
Knowledge is power, here are some great tools I use on a daily basis to help my clients and to spy on my competitors. I will be covering each tool in separate posts to keep reading at a minimum.
My company ( Clear-A-Face ) sales a fast acting acne removal cream, recently a new competitor ( Super Clear-A-Face ) has launched a similar product claiming to remove acne twice as fast. Been a smart business man, I want to know what this new competitor is up to and how they are marketing the product.
Imagine if you had a personal assistant that was scouring the internet for information about your competitors 24hrs a day, 7 days a week. No overtime pay, no holiday leave and best of all , they work for free and deliver their research to you without fail, everyday.
Google Alerts
This is Google Alerts. A free service provided by Google which delivers to you in the latest customised topics from ;
Use this great tool to gather intelligence about your competitors products, their online marketing efforts and the markets interests on your competitors products. There are of course many other websites that offer a similar service, but to be able to see the news from Google’s eyes is great for SEO.
Using Google alerts I can setup as many campaigns based on keywords related to my competition.
Google News alerts will let me know if my competitor appears on major news networks or official press releases
Google Blogs alerts for possible product reviews by their customers, or any new competitors on the scene.
Google web search alerts to inform me of their SEO / online marketing efforts. I will see when their new website has appeared in Google’s index, any new pages they may have added, websites selling their products, websites possibly been used for link building purposes and research websites / forums dealing with acne.
I can also find out what products are gaining popularity by following discussions and forums found in my alerts.
You can really build a great overview of your competitor’s SEO and marketing strategy, the markets interests and awareness in your competitors products. Any interesting alerts should be bookmarked and filed for reference. After a few weeks you should have enough data to make a calculated decision whether this competitor poses a serious threat.
If you are reading this, stop. Click here and setup a Google alert campaign for your own keywords. Currently I have Google alerts tracking keywords such as SEO, SEM, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, Google Caffeine, Caffeine, Goobinghoo, lil engine, li’l engine, little engine.
I really can’t stress how useful this tool is, if you are already a Google Alerts user let us know how you have benefited.
As always if you have any questions feel free to post them in the comments section, or discuss it on our forum. Please pass on this article if you found it to be useful. ( http://bit.ly/Gripp )
In the next few posts I will be introducing competitor research tools like Google Ad Planner, Real-time search monitoring and link analysis, keyword scraping tools.
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