Welcome back Rankers. Interesting Article that’s come out of TechCrunch this week and thank you very much to Texas TimTam on Twitter aka Grace for pointing out this story to me. It is a story on the 20 most expensive keyword categories in Google Adwords. This is a report put together by a company called WordStream who have a service that allows you to automate a lot of the process of running an Adwords campaign. Interesting phrases here, these are all American and you can see they’re American because two of the top 10 have to do with Attorneys and Lawyers. That wouldn’t be the case in Australia, of course. Certainly no surprise with the top three all finance related and these are going to be expensive in the US. A few surprises in there as well but just remember, if you are targeting an expensive keyphrase, whether it be in Adwords or organic search, make sure (this is especially true if you’re in a large country like the US) that you drill down to local regions. Quite often if you’re a small business trying to go up against the big guys, you’re only servicing a small area and in the case of Australia you might only be servicing a 15-20km radius that you want to move around in. You can do that with both search organic and search in Adwords. With organic you do that by making sure your Places and your Maps are set up properly and of course it’s easier to do in Adwords. Ranking for geo located phrases is often, in fact almost always, easier than non-geo location phrases. So, thank you Grace for that story.
We’ve got a question from lbig on Twitter as well, and he’s asking about “What’s a good time for a page to download in milliseconds in Webmaster Tools?” What he’s talking about there is, if you go into Webmaster Tools under Diagnostics the crawl stats, you’ll see some interesting stuff here about the Google bot’s experience when it visits your site. This is a new client that has just come on recently. You can see where they’ve come on here. This is pages crawled per day so once they came on as a client here they start to get their site crawled a lot more, that’s about 1 ½ times to what they were getting crawled. Of course because of that more kilobytes have been downloaded per day by the Google bot. Then we’ve got this ugly spike here in Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds) and what this is saying is that it took 17,744 milliseconds for this page to be downloaded. Now, that’s bad by anyone’s standard. Then if you go into the Labs section and look at site performance you can see that spike coincide with the graph. Why that happened was because the client was on a shared server, sharing the server with a thousand other sites, so we’ve moved them off that now of course. One of the main things to do with looking at site speed and site performance and time it takes to download a page in milliseconds is compare it against who your competing against. If you want to get on the front page and your not on the front page then make sure you look at the front page then go to webpagetest.org compare your site, put your competitors site in. If they’re faster than your site you’ve just go to beat their metrics, you don’t have to beat Google, just theirs. You don’t have to worry about what’s a good time or what’s a bad time. If you’re the best in a bad bunch, great but chances are now everyone’s getting pretty slick about their page speed and their download times and their server speeds.
Finally today, just a little bit more on Google+. Excellent blog article out by a guy called Glen Gaye and it is talking about the experience of Adwords and social advertising and Google+. What Glen points out is that Google+ basically represents the first opportunity where search advertising experience will now follow into the social advertising experience. Meaning that up until now the only social advertising was in Facebook. With the advent of Google+ and there’s more and more people, I don’t know how many millions are on there now, but certainly I’m spending a lot more time on Google+ than what I am on Facebook and Twitter, just because of the experience. What Glen points out is a very interesting thing in that Google can target Ads to you in search based on your preferences and those sorts of things and that advertising experience can now follow into a social environment which is Google+ and that’s the first time that’s happened. Of course, there’s no ads yet in Google+ but that’s Google’s business so there will be eventually. There’s a couple of things missing from Google+ which they have said they will be rolling out and these are the things that are going to make it a pretty amazing sort of tool. One of the things that was missing recently was William Shatner, well he’s now on. He got booted off and he came back on. One of the things that is missing is the ability to find people by keyword search, so ability to find people by what you’re interests might be. Like you can, say on Twitter, when you can follow people on Twitter. Apparently that is coming in. I’ve already seen a little bit of spam but the thing is with spam on Google+ is that if you abuse the terms and service you’re stuffed because your Google profile and all those Google services that are attached to that profile, like your mail, like your apps and a bunch of other things, they are gone. So, if you abuse the terms of service in Google+ then basically Google’s got you by the proverbials and you’re going to lose a lot more than just your Google+ account.
That is it for this week’s show. Today I’m off to the Gold Coast, to the conference Professional eBay sellers alliance. If any of you are going to this conference I hope to bump into you up there. Se you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.
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