If you are a small to medium-sized business owner, chances are by now you have jumped into social media in addition to search engine optimising your website and even running paid advertising campaigns.

The biggest problem that we see for small businesses is their approach to content. Many small business websites have a lumpy approach to content, whereby a lot of effort goes in to content when a website is launched (or re-launched) only for the website to be subsequently updated sporadically. It is for this same reason that many organisations struggle with social media; setting up a social media channel like a Twitter account or a Facebook page is very easy, what is far harder is keeping that channel populated with engaging content on a continual basis, particularly when resources are scarce.

However looking forward into 2012 and beyond, having a content strategy is going to be as important to most organisations as search engine optimisation or pay per click advertising has become. The big reason for this is that the search engines are being adapted to the fast-moving web ecosystem of news, blogs and status updates that we have today. Take the Google Panda update as an example; this update to the Google search engine aimed to lower the rank of “low quality” web presences such as link farms and screen-scraping sites to improve the quality of search engine results. Google does this by using an algorithm that identifies signs of website quality. One of these qualities is recency of publication. Therefore, if you are not actively publishing new content on your website on a regular basis your web pages and website as a whole will have reduced visibility in search engine results over time.

Your search engine optimisation will not necessarily save you either, as more traditional search engine optimisation techniques like on-page tactics carry less weight in influencing search engine ranking.

It may not be just small businesses that may be affected by this; many organisations have the concept of ‘evergreen’ content. Take for example an emergency service, that may have produced content on practical tips on firework safety. This content although seasonably relevant, would fall in the search engine results as it gets older if the content is not subsequently revisited, updated, optimised and socially flagged.

Therefore, if you are going to make one resolution for 2012 to help your business succeed online, set some time aside to put a content strategy in place. Look at simple ways that you can make your website up-to-date, such as sprucing up that News and Events section, planning a press release schedule or publishing a series of short interesting articles that cross-link to your products and services. Get your social channels in hand, selecting the ones you know you can commit to keeping up to date and that you can productively engage with.

Having a plan will help your keep your content production on track, whilst getting your social media in order will increase your visibility through a wealth of channels including social networks, search engine results, apps and mobile devices.

If you are user of web analytics software, particularly Google Analytics you will have had a busy few months; lots of new features have been added to the new version of the product, but there have also been some changes that will affect the data in your reports. Last month, I wrote about the change in the way Google Analytics records the close of a session. This came into operation in August and caused much consternation amongst webmasters and website analysts alike.

Two months on, and Google have made another change under the hood and this time both webmasters and search engine optimisers are up in arms. The change this time is that when a signed in Google user visits a website from an organic Google search result, all web analytics services, including Google Analytics, will continue to recognise the visit as an “organic” search, but Google will no longer pass the query terms that the user searched with to reach the site to the web analytics service.

This means that if you use a keywords report from your web analytics software to demonstrate the success of search engine optimisation efforts or improve your website, you will in the future be faced with incomplete keyword data. Considering the number of web users that regularly use Google services such as Gmail, Calendar, Reader, browse in Google Chrome or have joined the Google + social network, this is seen by webmasters and search engine specialists as presenting a significant problem.

There has been a lot of commentary in the blogosphere as to why this has been done; after all, its seems like an insane change to make considering how fundamental this information is to many people. The bottom line is that as a website owner or digital marketer you now face a new challenge, so what can you do about it?

1. Don't take this as a snub to your profession

This change does not undermine the importance of search engine optimisation as an industry. Granted traditional on-page SEO has less weight in influencing search engine ranking today. However, we are now publishing more, varied content than ever before, be that web page copy, geographic place information, video and social media campaigns. All of this can be returned in search engine results and all this content has the potential and need to be copywritten and optimised with measurable ends in mind.

2. Change the way you demonstrate results

What will need to change is how webmasters and search engine specialists prove their success. However, aside from a web analytics keywords report there are plenty of tools available; search engine ranking reports produced by tools like Web Position readily provide up-to-date information on how well a website or web page ranks against chosen keywords and demonstrate your search engine visibility or saturation relative to competitors.

Google itself provides Google Webmaster Tools. We have long been advocates of this product, seeing it as the unsung hero of the Google toolkit. For a while it has provided a Google Analytics-style search queries report that shows the volume of search queries for which your site ranks, your average position and your click through rate (CTR). This can be seen as similar to a search engine ranking report, but is also as good, if not even better than the Google Analytics keywords report as you are not only seeing keywords that result in click throughs, but keywords that do not. The good news is that Google Webmaster Tools reports are now available through the new version of Google Analytics, found in Traffic Sources > Search Engine Optimization; if you already have Webmaster Tools running on a site with a Google Analytics profile, you will simple need to validate the Webmaster Tools profile.

3. Change the way you think about SEO and insight

I can understand the appeal of the keywords report. You can see the number of visitors you are getting as a result of keyword combinations and the conversion rate for visitors using those keywords. Clients new to web analytics are certainly blown away by this when they first see it. However is the use of certain keywords to find your site going to influence whether a visitor converts on your site?

Often visitors come to a website using one set of keywords, only to use different keywords on the site itself. What about if a visitor arrives at your website and the copy does not tell them what they want to know? Or they do not like the price of what they are looking for, or the delivery charge is too steep? Has a visitor seen your email newsletter? Or have they interacted with you on a social platform? Maybe they are pushed for time to look for a product or service? Conversion decisions can be influenced by a wide range of factors, and in today's complex online ecosystem with numerous advertising channels, social media, and mobile and geographic contexts, I would argue that keyword use alone does not give us enough insight.

This is why Google have been adding tools like multi-channel funnels to Google Analytics, so you can review the relative importance of all your marketing channels in bringing visitors to your website in the run up to conversion. Just like viewing one metric on its own does not give you insight, looking at one marketing tactic also does not give you the true insight you need.

I am not saying that Google's change is trivial, and it is presenting another challenge in producing reliable information from web analytics reports. However, content optimisation is an activity embedded across all online marketing tactics which is only increasing in importance. What webmasters and search engine specialists need to look at in the light of Google's latest change, is which reports now communicate your success transparently and if you are a Google Analytics user, how you can use the new reporting features to illustrate true insight to clients.

What has changed?

Recently Google has made a number of improvements to their Google Analytics product. However, in August a significant modification was made; they changed the way Google Analytics records the end of a session from:

• More than 30 minutes have elapsed between pageviews for a single visitor
• At the end of a day
• When a visitor closes their browser

To:

• More than 30 minutes have elapsed between pageviews for a single visitor
• At the end of a day
• When any traffic source value for the user changes. Traffic source information includes:utm_source, utm_medium, utm_term, utm_content, utm_id, utm_campaign, and gclid

When this was announced in the Google Analytics blog, it was estimated that users would see a less than 1% change. However in the days following the release many users were reporting more significant changes in their reports, with the issue being slightly confused due to bugs that were discovered and subsequently fixed.

What does it mean?

Now if you are not a web analytics ‘statto’ or as a busy business owner only have time to give your reports a quick review, then you may not realise the full implications of this change. Modifying the way a session is calculated brings about a fundamental change to the way your website traffic patterns are reported and how much your data is affected will depend upon your online marketing and website usage pattern.

For example, with the close of a browser not ending a session, additional visits will not be recorded in the cases of a user closing the browser or a browser crash and the visitor returning back to your site within 30 minutes. This has the potential effect of reducing the number of visits, whilst increasing time on site and number of pages viewed. This sort of change seems logical and is welcome.

However, a more interesting issue relates to the new way that sessions are closed; when the traffic source information changes. This is particularly going to affect websites using different types of online marketing tactics, such as ecommerce sites and may be exacerbated by users’ browsing tactics. In a tabbed browsing world, it is not uncommon for web users to be looking for products via keyword searches in a search engine in one window, clicking through paid advertising in a second window, whilst reviewing comparison sites in a third window. Each of these means of reaching a website has the potential for changing the traffic source information for a visitor in Google Analytics, potentially signalling multiple visits from one visitor within a 30 minute period. This could increase the number of visits recorded to your site, increase the number of return visitors, and increase the bounce rate whilst decreasing time on site, pages per visit and for the conversion junkies amongst us reduce your conversion rates.

What is the verdict?

It is no wonder then that there were so many complaints when this change occurred, as webmasters found that the data on their traffic patterns had significantly shifted coupled with the subsequent complication of how they are going to accurately compare their current and historical data.

As much as in the immediate term this change in visitor tracking poses challenges, looking forward this change is a valuable one to businesses using Google Analytics. Firstly, it is an attempt by Google to make the data that is recorded about sites more reliable taking into account modern browser usage patterns. Secondly, this change accompanies the introduction of multi-channel funnel reports in the new Google Analytics interface. These reports will help marketers understand the paths that visitors use to visit their website in the run up to conversions and as a result better identify the value marketing tactics have in influencing customer decisions.

I’ve come to the conclusion in the last few weeks that some bloggers and journalists just shouldn’t be allowed near numbers.  They clearly don’t have any sort of grasp of statistics or how to do a comparison.  Their memory or knowledge of the history of their subject is woefully inadequate.  However by thinking about how they misunderstand statistics we can understand our own websites better.

What they do have is a headline in mind and they try to force the numbers to fit.  Here are a three of the variations I’ve seen:

Google+ Fails to beat Facebook – the argument here goes Facebook has 700 billion trillion gazillion users and Google+ has only 20 million.  At no point does the article point out that Google+ launched only weeks ago and is still in beta.

Google Fails because Facebook has more time on site per visit or pageviews – here the mistake is comparing Apples with Oranges.  They’re not comparing Google+ with Facebook – they’re comparing Google (primarily search) with Facebook.  If the time on site for Google was the same as Facebook I’d be concerned.  The point of a search engine is to get you to the good information quickly.  The point of a social network is to interact with your community.  These are two different tasks and the meaningful metrics are radically different.  Once we know how Google+ stacks up against Facebook this would be a valid comparison.

Google+ is just for men - All new social networks tend to be picked up by certain groups ahead of other groups.  Network analysis of social networks has shown that people with an interest tend to invite people with the same interest.  They have also shown that many interests have either lots of men or lots of women involved.  One early mailing list system found that for the first few months most of the lists set up were created by people who were interested in lizards.  Every day new lists for lizard lovers of different types would be added.  Then some amphibian and bird themed lists crept in.  Then they reached pet lovers and at that point lists for all kinds of interests appeared as people with pets and other interests signed up.  Social networks take time to grow and diversify.

While reading about Google+, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Bing, Apple, Microsoft and all the other companies and services beloved of pundits ask the question: Do the Numbers Make Sense?  What would good numbers for Facebook or Google be?

Then think about your site.  What would good numbers for it be?  Are there factors that skew the numbers just like there are factors affecting the big players?  Can you alter some of those factors or do you just have to understand them?  Is a number bad or good in your context?  As otherwise all the numbers are just Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics.

It would be safe to say that at time of writing, Facebook is in its heyday with countless brands flocking to the social network to launch their campaigns and embedded web presences. However, at the same time the press is already starting to prophesise its demise on the back of notable losses in users in both the UK and the US during May 2011.

What is actually playing out is a natural part of the product lifecycle curve, where after rapid growth you then see a period of maturity, followed by a period of decline. Facebook has been phenomenally successful through these introduction and growth phases, and as a result has become a sensible choice for brands when selecting a vehicle to implement their social media strategy. However, if Facebook has reached critical mass and the level of maturity, the product lifecycle model indicates that the only way from this point is down. If that is the case, Facebook is at a critical point in its evolution. What's more, if it does not retain its position as the dominant social platform, where will that leave brands' social media strategies?

On the face of the statistics, you could say that this concern is not well-founded. As I write this, the Facebook statistics page states that the social network has over 750 million active users, so with that many members, you cannot be wrong? Well, if you look at the statistics a bit further, maybe not. They currently state, 50% of active users login on any given day. That is still an impressive number, but did you know that to be classed as an active user, you only need to have logged in once in the past 30 days? Also, much as we have seen with Twitter, activity is skewed by heavy users. The Facebook statistics page claims that there are more than 250 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices; any commuter would believe this figure judging on the amount of Facebook time that is had on public transport. However, it goes on to say that users that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users. This all sounds great if your audience profile includes younger mobile users, however if you are a brand aiming for the more mainstream audience that has now gravitated towards the service, you really need to find out more about its Facebook usage profile and be measuring meaningful engagement and return on investment metrics to understand if Facebook is the right channel for you.

New users is one story, but in the product lifecycle existing users play a big part at the maturity and decline phases. Facebook has other challenges to face up to if it is to stop bleeding existing users. Firstly, there is the issue of privacy, where it has a checkered history, the most recent issue being the implementation of facial recognition software. The younger Generation Y audience is far more accepting of sharing information, but this mindset does change over time, whereas Generation X who is the newcomer to Facebook is more concerned about what information is publicly available about it. Secondly, there is security. Despite Facebook being viewed largely as a walled garden from the perspective of the average user, it has its fair share of problems with applications creating spam and trying to operate malware within its walls. Granted all of this can be reported and policed, but this is not going to inspire confidence amongst less proficient users and encourage greater engagement with Facebook which therefore affects the brands that advertise within it.

Clearly, Facebook is an amazing success story and a big player within the sprawl of social channels available today. However, if you are putting together your social media strategy, take a look behind the headline numbers and understand your audience profile when selecting your platforms for execution. This will give you the confidence that you are engaging with your audience in the right social space whilst minimising the likelihood of having to start it all over again elsewhere.

It had to happen, social media is finally being put through the wringer like search engine optimisation and link building before it. Whilst journalists have recently had a field day prophesising the demise (or at least a threat to the dominance) of Facebook, businesses are also getting wise to the claims of social media ninjas in the same way they have got wise to get-ranked quick search engine marketers and dodgy car salesmen before them.

All of this can only be a good thing. For a long time, social media has been surrounded by an enormous amount of hype. What businesses and public sector bodies want is to employ social media strategies that generate positive returns and service uptake. The way to do this is to move your thinking away from the brands to thinking about social media strategically.

You can start by asking yourself six key questions:

• What are my business objectives?
• Who am I talking with?
• What is my competition doing?
• What are my resources?
• How do I equip my organisation for social media?
• How am I going to measure success?

Once you have these questions answered, then and only then should you start putting a plan into place which includes choosing the platforms for execution, be that micro-blogging services like Twitter, public social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn, content sharing networks like Flickr or Youtube, or more staple tools such as forums or email marketing.

If this still feels like a step into the unknown, there are plenty of social media strategists that can help you. Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz published an excellent post summarising the expertise you should be looking for from a social media expert. As you will see, whilst knowledge about social media platforms and software tools is important, you should also be looking for intelligent insight into tactics, audience psychology and measurement techniques and practical ideas around the type of creative that contributes to successful social media campaigns.

We have already helped a number of our clients dovetail social media into their integrated campaigns through their web presences. If you need help with your social media strategy, why not contact us today to discuss how we can help you? Alternatively, if you want to do it yourself, we also offer a half day Social Media Marketing course to give you practical advice and a toolkit so you can create your own social media strategy. Ninja suit not required.

The rise of mobile devices and online maps has opened up a whole new area of search – local search. In April 2010 Google said a fifth of all searches are local searches.

When I’m planning a holiday, I now use Google maps to find attractions to see, public transport to get around and cafes for a quick snack. When I’m there, I’ll find Wi-Fi hotspots (my favourite has to be in the Gardens at London’s Natural History Museum) to find things I’d not planned for.

So it’s vital for businesses to get themselves onto the map and public bodies to boost their service uptake by connecting locations to services. It’s also vital that the right places are connected; I once walked for nearly two miles to a nature reserve to find the visitor centre marked on the map was the administration buildings and not the entrance!  The entrance wasn’t on the map - it was on a side road a mile and a half back the way I’d walked.

Here are seven ways to make sure you’re accurately represented in the search engines local index.

Is Your Contact Information Search Engine Friendly?

Check that your key contact details on your website (ideally your home page and contact page) are accessible to search engines. Make sure they are in HTML and not buried in a graphic, Flash or other format. Ideally include your physical location and phone number.

Google Places

Get your free Google Places page. This lets you set your location, contact information, categories and opening times. If you’ve got multiple locations there is a bulk upload facility using a spreadsheet.

Bing Local

Bing may not get as many visits or send as many visitors to your site as Google, but its users are loyal and so if you’re serious about local search you’ll want to get your Bing Local  listing too. To do this you need to go to the 118 Information website and follow the simple steps to find your business there.

Claim your Profiles

There are other local search websites and directories. Some are new including Yelp and Foursquare, while others have been around in some form since before the web like Yell.com and Thomson Local. Not only does being listed on them give you more places where you can be found, it reinforces the information about where you are to other search engines and prevents someone maliciously cybersquatting on your location.

Check your Records

Many offline records, from company registrations to Yellow Pages listings, include your organisation’s contact information. Make sure these are up to date as the search engines may be checking these sources to validate the data they are using. This is especially important if you’ve moved premises as your old address can be listed instead of your current one.

Add a KML File to your Site

KML or Keyhole Markup Language files can be added to your site in a similar way to an XML sitemap. Instead of telling search engines about your web pages, it tells it about your places.  Like an XML sitemap, you can submit it to Google through Google Webmaster Tools.  There are a variety of tools you can use to make a KML file or we can help you with this.

Advanced Markup

To really help the search engines understand where you are, you can use specialist markup. Using the hCard / microformat in your website’s html to mark up locations is probably the best known way of doing this. 

Google, Bing and Yahoo came together recently to launch schemas.org which has many specialist markup formats you can use to make pages more search engine friendly. These include a basic place format along with specialist formats for local businesses, tourist attractions and civic structures from bus stops to zoos.

You can also add downloadable vCards to your website so visitors can easily download contact details to use. With these there is no need to cut and paste contact details from a web page into your contact list in your email or on your smartphone.

Earlier this month, one of our team had the fortune of a day out at our nation’s capital to attend the Internet World 2011 event. After a day of meeting, greeting, networking and learning, they returned the next day brimming with new ideas and brandishing what seemed to be a small forest-worth of flyers, pamphlets, and whitepapers (also known as bumf).

Now, when you attend an event such as this, it is great if you can identify one thing that stands out, that has legs, and this year it is Social CRM.

At this point, some of you are thinking that this is another buzzword thought up by some bright spark in a minimalist new media company which involved taking something that has existed for ages and making it ‘shiny and new’ by sticking the word ‘social’ in front of it. However, this makes sense, and if you have been spending the last couple of years getting stuck into social media you should be looking into it, today.

Social CRM is an evolution of the traditional concept of CRM (that’s Customer Relationship Management, to you and me). However, despite its name, traditional CRM is actually company focussed, it creates a process by which a company can organise its sales, marketing and support functions to target customers with communications in order to leverage more out of their wallet. However, the traditional CRM process is fundamentally one-way.

Your customers now expect collaboration any time, any place, any where, instead of simply having marketing messages pushed to them. Customers expect to talk with brands to solve their specific problems and shape their own relationships with those brands. This is a crucial difference between traditional and Social CRM. The pay-off is that brands that do this well will benefit from customers that act as brand advocates, open to promoting and recommending them through social channels which are an increasingly important marketing tool that can dovetail with other marketing efforts such as search engine optimsation.

The issue for many organisations is that there now needs to be a change in mindset. Many of you reading this will have invested a large amount of time and money building presences on social media sites. However, you now have to move away from Follower counts, Re-tweets and Likes to understand how you are going to manage the online communities that you have created and how you are going to create value from them. Failing to do so will send your social presence in decline and put back the progress you have made; now is the time to realise the CRM value of social media.

Google has been pretty busy over the past month or so, launching the Panda update to their search engine ranking algorithm and Google +1, not to mention their numerous April Fools pranks. However, an important release for many website owners is the beta of the next version of Google Analytics.

Now the first thing I must say is that it is a beta, so Google has not included all the features that are in the existing version, particularly exports to PDF and emailing reports. You will also not find the much under-used, but very useful In-page Analytics report. That said, there are improvements that you may want to take advantage of, or you may simply want to stay informed about, so you can hit the ground running when this version is officially made available.

Visually, the interface has changed; with efforts to group together similar reports within the Visitors, Traffic Sources, Content and Conversions sections to make navigation more intuitive. You will also notice some re-labelling of the report names, which will be helpful to newcomers to the product in understanding what each report is attempting to tell you.

More importantly, there are significant changes to functionality, which will increase flexibility in working with Google Analytics and notably facilitates further types of reporting.

In the current version of Google Analytics, the Dashboard serves as a one-stop shop where you can place links to the key reports that you want at your finger-tips. However, if you are interested in a lot of reports, or you have different users with different data needs, a single Dashboard is a little restrictive. The new product allows you to have multiple Dashboards, allowing you to group similar reports in one place for example for managers interested in achievement against key performance indicators, webmasters reviewing content usage, and marketers analysing the effectiveness of traffic sources and attributing value to campaigns.

The graphing has also been improved, and you can now quickly plot individual rows of data on your reports, for example if you want to focus on specific keywords or campaigns, or contrast them against overall traffic or segment performance.

The true power of web analytics is the ability to measure performance against website objectives; Google Analytics calls this Goal tracking. In the current version you can track primary, process-driven goals that lead visitors to a specific destination, such as registering for a newsletter or completing a checkout process and engagement goals of time on site or pages visited. Many website owners that have come to our Google Analytics training offer downloadable files on their website, which previously they have had to track with either dummy page views or more recently as Events, however they could never be set as Goals. The new version of Google Analytics now lets you specify Event Goals so that you can report Events as website objectives, and ascribe different Goal Values to different Events if you require; for example you may want to attribute a lower lead value when a free whitepaper is downloaded compared to the lead value for a product brochure. This feature could also be used to demonstrate usage of interactive features as a Goal, such as time spent watching a video, or to track exits from your website to capture referrals and attribute value to those clicks.

The beta version of Google Analytics is gradually being rolled out to all Google Analytics accounts. I recommend taking a look so that you can plan how you can take advantage of this update to get better insights and more value from your website and online marketing efforts.

If you are serious about online marketing, chances are that email marketing is one of your staple tactics. If so, you will already have grappled with falling conversion rates as recipients have become ever more selective about the messages they are receptive to. If you are successful at email marketing, you will know that long-term success is achieved not by sending out more email, it is achieved by constantly reviewing your delivery success and open rates, increasing relevance to your recipients and refining conversion performance.

However, no matter how thoroughly you refine your email strategy and prune your house list, there is a worrying new trend that email marketers need to face up to that is whittling away at the earning potential of your house list; email usage in certain age groups is dropping, and for some age-groups, dropping like a stone.

Comscore recently released findings from their latest study on year on year change in use of email by age group in the US. This showed significant drops in usage in all age groups under the age of 55, except for the 18-24 age range who largely need an email account for job hunting, banking or other coming of age activities. The drop was described as ‘catastrophic’ in the 12-17 years age range which showed a 59% fall.

The continued surge in Social Media usage has largely been attributed to this trend and it is not just isolated to the US. Recent surveys of UK internet traffic estimate interaction with social networks amounting to as much as 25% of all page views. Facebook is currently responsible for the majority of those interactions. This is coupled with an average visit at Facebook of over 20 minutes. There is also a hard-core of social network users who leave one social network, only to visit another. It is therefore no wonder that we are seeing lower usage of email as a knock-on effect. Many younger internet users communicate solely through the messaging services of these social networks, seeing no need for an ‘old-school’ email account.

In short, these are more compelling reasons why organisations need to take a strategic approach to Social Media. We have already been told that social signals are starting to affect search engines algorithms. With internet users spending increasing time within social networks and migrating from traditional technologies such as email, we need to understand how to engage with our audience in a relevant way, translate this engagement to our business objectives and reduce our reliance on tactics that may be less profitable. For some marketers, managing that house-list might soon be a thing of the past.