Spotlight on search: page title changes & SEO-friendly blackouts

Search: PPC & SEO, Spotlight on search — By Jamie McGrath on January 18, 2012 5:17 pm

PPC

Ad Group impression share coming soon

Impression share is a great metric to find out what share of the search market you are taking for your campaigns. The problem with it has been its granularity; it’s a very top line statistic that’s based on your campaign structure and could be for a wide range of keywords with different competition and cost per click levels. This can make it difficult to ascertain which keywords are causing lost impressions by budget or rank.

Google is to introduce Ad Group impression share, likely to roll out from the 30th January onwards. This will offer a deeper understanding into the competitive metric and enable you to find out which Ad Groups could be causing lost impressions. This could still be an issue depending on your Ad Group structure; you may still have a wide range of keywords in each ad group. I would advocate as best practice, and to get a more accurate picture of impression share, grouping similar keywords together and separating them out across different Ad Groups as well as separating them by match type. It may seem like a lot of work, but with some Excel wizardry and AdWords Editor in hand it shouldn’t be too laborious.

The ultimate goal of structuring your keywords like this is so that you can put a market context against each term to see what share of the market you have taken for a specific term and if there is room to scale the keyword further.

Automated rule limit increased

Automated rules have been a time-saver for many PPCs since they were introduced, although it is a contentious subject and not everyone would agree that automating account optimisation is the best strategy. I personally think that it boils down judgement – when and where to use automation. I wouldn’t use automation on my top performing campaigns, ad groups or keywords that are essential to business needs. It’s only common sense that you would take the time to use your human eye in these areas. But there may be other areas of your account you can automate: campaigns with smaller budgets, keywords with low search volumes or enabling some promotional ad copy when conversions are low, for example.

Google has now announced an increase in the number of rules you can create per user from 10 to 100 and also included the functionality to easily undo a rule, should it not have the desired effect.

SEO

Page title changes in SERPS

Page titles are one of the first places an SEO will look to optimise. Generally a page title should be concise, descriptive and unique. In practice though it can sometimes be the opposite, with long keyword-stuffed page titles. Google has been testing its own algorithms which help generate an alternative page title for a given web page to display in their search results. They have found that by using an alternative title based on their algorithms the page title becomes more relevant and subsequently increases the click through rate of a search result.

I would advise using  Google Webmaster Tool’s HTML suggestions to highlight page titles that are too long, too short, duplicated, missing or non-informative. Fixing these issues and making the page title more relevant and useful will give it a better chance of appearing than Google’s alternative title.

Protest blackout the SEO-friendly way

The protest blackout of websites against a proposed anti-piracy legislation is well under way, and if you’re thinking of joining in, here are a few tips on making sure you do it in the most SEO-friendly way:

1. (Imperative) Return a 503 header response for all URLs on the domain taking part in the blackout

2. Make sure the robots.txt file doesn’t return a 503 response if only blocking part of the site

3. Do not attempt to block your website from crawlers using robots.txt – this could have long-lasting effects

4. You will notice the crawl rate drop, this is normal when delivering a 503 response and your crawl rate should resume to normal within days

5. Monitor Google’s crawl activity closely in Webmaster tools to make sure it has started crawling the whole website again.

These steps will ensure that your website doesn’t suffer long term effects of duplicate content, 404s, dropped URLs and the like!

Tags: google, ppc, protest blackout, search, seo