Welcome back Rankers. This story made me laugh this week and thank you very much to Mumbrella for bringing it to our attention. The NRMA, a very large insurance company in Australia, has in their terms and conditions for the use of their website that you may only link to their website if you have express permission from them and you’re not allowed to do it without permission. I’d hate to be their SEO, internal SEO, would be absolutely crying at those terms and conditions. However someone else’s suggestion in the comments of this story, Mumbrella.com.au, that perhaps it’s just an obscure form of link baiting where they’re trying to get people to link to them just to say how stupid these terms and conditions are. Well they certainly have got a few links from Mumbrella this week anyway.
I want to talk to you today about Social Media and how it interacts with Search. I’ll be doing a Webinar with Smartcompany.com.au towards the end of the month on this topic. Some of you may remember The Holla Agency did a social campaign for Razzamatazz, a stockings brand, here in Australia a couple of years ago. That went really well but what we did see with that when they were doing the social media campaign for Razzamatazz, we saw a big spike in brand searches. Presumably because people had heard about that competition or heard about that campaign and they want to find out more about it so what do they do? They go to Google and they do a search for it, it’s that simple. Everything’s about keywords, I was having this conversation with someone in the office yesterday. In our conversations, in what we do online, we zero in on phrases or keywords that make sense to us. For instance, this campaign that’s been put together by Bayer Pharmaceuticals this week, they launched it and it was a big story in B&T Marketing magazine yesterday, about the Sudoku challenge, the Australian championships. Apparently John Eales, the former captain of the Australian Wallabies which is a Rugby team, is Australia’s champion Sudoku player. Who knew? Not me! What they are doing is Bayer Pharmaceuticals is tying this over 50’s vitamin supplement to this Australian Sudoku challenge. Now, they’ve called it the Australian Sudoku challenge, which is fine, and they’ve got some good press for it when you do a search for Australian Sudoku Challenge. This morning there’s a lot of news items for it which is great but a couple of interesting things when it comes to keywords. If I type in Sudoku Australian the first phrase that Google wants to tell me is the most popular is Sudoku Australia then it’s Sudoku Australian championship. So that’s the one that I searched for because that’s the one that Google tells me is the most popular for what I’m looking for anyway, in my area right now and we get those news stories which is great. But if you go to these news stories say like the Sydney Morning Herald story, no mention by the way of the sponsor of this Sudoku challenge, but it makes a good story, they’re getting column centimetres. They’re not going to get a backlink though because your major media sites will not give you a backlink, the bloggers will, but the big press sites won’t. We’ve got the URL down there at the bottom of the page and we can see it’s called the Sudoku challenge. The problem is, here’s the site which looks lovely, that site does not come up when I do a search for Sudoku Australian Championship so these guys are missing out on search traffic that inevitably will come from people talking about this particular challenge if they’re interested in Sudoku. They’re not going to say “Oh, it’s called the Sudoku Australian Challenge or the Australian Sudoku Challenge”, they’re going to talk about “Oh it’s some Australian Sudoku championship and that John Eales guy is involved”. Even if I further refine my search we’re still not getting that target site come up, we’re getting the news items which is once again is great but remember with news items they’re time sensitive, over time they will disappear. Not only that but they will require someone to do a couple of clicks to get to the target page. This site should be coming up as #1 when people are looking for that information. I’ve been very specific and I’ve done a long tale search and I still can’t find this site. If we have a quick look at the code we can see Why. There’s some really obvious things that have been ignored as far as search goes. No description tag here, that’s a big no no, remember your description tag is your chance to tailor your sales pitch when the page does actually appear in the index. If we have a look at the page title itself, great, I know this is powered by Berocca focus 50+ but really you don’t need to put that in the page title, you’re giving away major search value there. Let’s face it you’ve got it all over the page, we can see what it’s about but once again, we’re not getting any phrases on here that relate to search. Australian Sudoku doesn’t actually appear on this page at all.
Even if you’re doing an offline campaign with billboards or whatever even television advertising, god forbid, if you’re doing something around a certain phrase or you’re using a certain catch cry or you’re trying to get people to think about a topic they’re not going to remember your exact message. A case in point, which many of you may have heard about is Sensis here in Australia did a very annoying television campaign and the main take away for most people was the phrase “Look at me”. Go and see if you can find that ad.
Basically, when you’re doing an offline campaign or a social media campaign have a think about how people are going to be talking about that, because they are going to be using keywords. They are going to say “Go and have a look for …” or if it’s on Youtube “Just in Youtube, just go in and type in the phrase ……” It’s what sticks in their mind, it’s the keyphrases, the keywords that stick in the mind from the social campaign or the offline campaign that you were doing.
That is it for today’s show. Hopefully that’s helpful to a lot of you and I’ll give you more details about the up coming Webinar with Smartcompany in the next week or so. We’ll see you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.
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