Website Clinic: Call For Submissions

Googlers often participate in live site clinics at conferences, giving advice about real-world sites and allowing webmasters to learn by example. Now Google's Search Quality team is excited to host an online site clinic on the Webmaster Central Blog. In future posts, the Search Quality team will be looking at some user-submitted examples and offering broad advice that you can apply to your site.

This site clinic will focus on non-profit organizations, but chances are that the advice will benefit small business and government sites as well. If you work for a non-profit and would like your site considered, read on for submission instructions.

How to submit your site:

To register your site for the clinic, fill in the information requested on this form. From there, the team will determine trends and share corresponding best practices to improve site quality and user experience. The analysis will be available in a follow-up post, and will adhere to the public standards of webmaster guidance. Please note that by submitting your site, you permit the team to use your site as an example in follow-up clinic posts.

There are a few guidelines:

1. Your site must belong to an officially registered non-profit organization.

2. In order to ensure that you're the site owner, you must verify ownership of your site in Google Webmaster Tools. You can do that (for free) here.

3. To the best of your ability, make sure your site meets the webmaster quality guidelines. The team will be suing the same principles as the basis for their analysis.

All set? Submit your site for consideration here.

The site clinic goes live today and submissions will be accepted until 11/18/2010. Stay tuned for some useful webmaster tips when the sites are reviewed.

Google TV Ads Strategy Guide

Promote your business on TV

Google TV Ads allows businesses of all sizes to advertise on national television. TV advertising is a compelling medium, but if you're new to TV it can be difficult to understand how to set up ads and campaigns to ensure success. This handbook has been designed as a guide to understanding:

• Whether television is the right advertising medium for your business
• The TV ad creation process and best practices
• How to create and manage successful TV campaigns
• Methods to track and analyze TV campaign performance

Why TV advertising?

By exploring the world of television ads, you are considering one of the most compelling and powerful media outlets available today. With the average American watching over 150 hours of television per month¹, television allows advertisers the opportunity to engage with audiences while they're consuming entertainment and information. Television allows you to convey your message through sight, sound, and motion while building credibility and trust in your brand. Read success stories from small and medium sized businesses that have used television advertising to grow their businesses.

This Strategy Guide offers tips, tricks and information needed to set you and your business up for success as a television advertiser. We hope you find it useful enough to keep handy as you develop your business' television strategy and campaigns.

What you can expect with TV advertising

• Television allows you to reach a wider audience than any other advertising medium. Television advertising helps to expand on the benefits of your products or services and build a trust in your brand while generating awareness and demand.
• Unlike search advertising, which prompts ads based on a user's actions, television ads are placed within TV programs and generate new awareness and demand amongst a wide audience.
• TV ad campaigns require time and commitment in order to drive results. Typically, ads should air for no less than 3-4 weeks to get your message through and register an impact.
• TV can be used effectively as an extension of search campaigns to drive new customers to your website. Read our case study on ooVoo, a video chat provider that drove exponential growth in web traffic and searches through television ads.
• Google TV Ads currently only offers nationally targeted advertising in the United States. We do not currently offer local TV inventory, so if you are a local only business, national television may not be the right medium for you.

Google Instant and SEO – Thoughts About How It Changes Things

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Google Instant changes behaviors in search, and thus SEO can change as well. Originally, I posted a list like this in 2008 about Google Suggest – and it is revised here.

1. We May See More Traffic to Regional Sites. People regularly enter “cheap gas” and “best dentist” in search engines – without qualifying the searches at all. Organic results tend to send people to national portals, but suggest-driven search gets them closer to well optimized, regional sites. A search for “cheap gas” without Google Instant offers gasbuddy.com at number one organic result, while a “suggested” search for “cheap gas houston” gives houstongasprices.com.
2. Google Instant Drop Down a new micro “SERP”: Those who make their way into the suggest feature get a “better than #1″ position.
3. Google Instant Results May Change Long-Tail Search Optimization. Those of us who believe in doing long-tail marketing may find an decrease down the tail from search, and a greater need to develop segments of our site to serve those long tail queries. Searches that used to come in with two word phrases may now have 3-4 words, which helps with medium-tail optimization, but longer phrases previously further down the tail may be “clipped.” This will concentrate search terms so that Adwords bids will rise and competition increases in a sort of “cluster” effect.
4. Google Instant SERPS offer More Impact for Trademark Blocking in PPC. If your trade name is offered in Google Instant results, and you’ve filed a trademark complaint form, the results page will be free from paid competition giving you a better shot at the traffic through organic or ppc links.
5. Google Instant Can Improve User/Searcher Skills Forever. With Google Instant constantly popping up when you go about your daily queries, many who never really thought of keyphrases will now start to think about them. It will be a constant reinforcement of our efforts to think about how consumers search. We may have to adjust our planning to meet these enhanced skills.
6. Google Instant Can Be an Ad-Hoc Negative Keyword Tool. There are other ways to be more comprehensive, but Google Instant can help to identify negative keywords you may want to enter in your campaigns. And I saw some negative phrases with higher index numbers that never showed up in Google keyword tools.
7. Dramatically Reduced Spelling Error Opportunity. While many of us set up adgroups to capture spelling errors, this will have a decreasing impact as people start to use the suggest feature as a live auto-correction. Typo-campaigns may get less traffic.
8. Hijacking Google Instant May Become a SEO Technique. It may become possible to hijack Google Instant so that competitive phrases are strategically flashed to the user. For example.. if you sell “abc widget” then a suggest of “abc widget fails miserably” could be used to divert traffic.
9. Better Searches Offer Improved Analytics Information. With the user making clear choices among those available, we’ll have better information about what is enticing and engaging to the users. Vague, high volume two-word searches are always confusing when we’re looking to make decisions, and this might just help us plan better.
10. Google Adwords Impressions will change. We’ll need to consider how the rules of 3-seconds’ delay, clicks etc. It’s hard to yet predict what is happening.
11. Users will do more exploration. When users don’t fully know about a topic, this can change how they approach search. Searches for “corneal transplant” can see many new avenues about the procedures, treatments, etc and spend more time in these sub-categories.
12. Content Creation for SEO may cluster around Google Instant suggestions. If a given suggestion is offered more often, it makes sense to design content for that phrase and special derivatives. If someone is searching for “Lasik Surgery” – content optimized for “Lasik Surgery Risks” would tend to get a lot of clicks it might otherwise have missed. But considering personalized search here, we cannot precisely predict what will be searched for.

Google Instant...

The Impact on Search Speed, Refining Searches and the "Long Tail" of Search

Google Instant does two things: it returns results more quickly and it predicts search queries as the user types.

While it's too early to predict the implications of this with any certainty, a few speculations come to mind. For one, searching on Google is going to become a much speedier process for the end user, who may now be less likely than ever to click through to the second page of results. Searchers will also be able to more quickly refine their search terms on the fly, which could either prove to be good or bad for site owners.

"It seems to me that the top three rankings will get even more value," says Ian Lurie, President of Portent Interactive and blogger at Conversation Marketing. "Also, long-tail search is going to be more important, since folks can just keep typing until they see what they want."

On the other hand, John Ellis at Search Engine Land wondered earlier if Google Instant would "kill the long tail" of paid search advertising by making it less worthwhile to bid on more specific, long tail keywords.

AdWords myths: understanding the AdWords auction

Over the past few weeks, we’ve covered a few common areas of confusion related to AdWords, including billing and spending, and keywords. This week, we’d like to wrap up this blog series by offering some helpful info on the AdWords auction.

If you have questions about how the AdWords auction works, a great place to start is with this introductory video from Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist.

Introduction to the Google Ad Auction

One of the most important factors in deciding your ad’s position within the auction is its Quality Score. To learn more about how Quality Score is defined, and how to improve it, you can visit the Search Ads Quality Getting Started Guide.

Finally, remember that if you’d like to understand how bidding can affect your ad's performance in the auction, you can use the bid simulator. It will provide you with click, cost, and impression data estimating how your ad could have performed over the last seven days had you used a different bid.

These resources should give you more insight into how the AdWords auction works.

This concludes our AdWords Myths series. We hope it’s helped clarify a few things you may have been wondering about AdWords.

Back to Basics: Fast Segments with Analytics Intelligence

Did you know that there’s a quick way to create advanced segments from automatic alerts? This is one of those “I can’t believe how powerful this is and yet so easy to do” features. Let me illustrate with an example from the Google Store site. A few months ago, on February 5, the Google Store received a surge of traffic from TechCrunch.com. We would not have noticed this extra traffic were it not for Analytics Intelligence. In the following screenshot, you can see that the store ordinarily receives between 0 and 221 visits from TechCrunch, but on this day, it received 1,918 visits.

What happened was that TechCrunch ran an article about Google scarves that were being sold in the store. But, here’s the tip I want to share with you. First, you can graph just the

relevant traffic simply by clicking the button on the alert.

And, you can create an advanced segment just by clicking the Create Segment link at the far right of the alert.

Now you can compare this traffic side by side with overall site traffic or with traffic from other segments. Check out this video to see how this works and to learn more automatic alert tips.

Back to Basics: Keyword/Landing Page Combinations

Via Google Blog: A friend of mine recently created several new landing pages that she hoped would attract traffic. She wanted to see at a glance whether people who searched on her top keywords were seeing the new pages. While she knew that she could use the Top Landing Pages report to analyze each individual landing page, she wanted to see keyword/landing page combinations in a single report.

There’s an easy way to do this. Go to the Keywords report under Traffic Sources. Look over to the right above the table and you’ll see Views: followed by a set of buttons. Click the Pivot view (5th button from the left). Now, look to the left, above the table, and you’ll see a Pivot by dropdown menu. Select Landing Page from this menu.

Voilà! The keywords will be listed down the side and landing pages will be listed across the top. You can now see how many visits you received for each keyword/landing page combination.

You can see up to five landing pages listed across the top of the report. You can scroll horizontally (across the landing pages) using the arrow buttons at the top right of the table.

The pivot view is also really useful for seeing at a glance how many visits you get from each keyword and search engine combination. To do this, you’d use the same Keywords report and pivot by Source.

Introducing the Google Small Business Blog

In recent Small Business series on the Official Google Blog, a handful of real-life entrepreneurs have shared their experiences building companies from scratch and embracing Internet tools that have taken their businesses to the next level. We’ve received fantastic feedback about these posts, and realized that there’s a healthy appetite among small- and medium-sized business owners who want to know all about the latest web tools and tricks. Fortunately, we have lots more to share with you, too!

That’s why we’re introducing the Google Small Business Blog, a central hub that brings together all the information about our products, features and projects of specific interest to the small business community. Rather than having to sleuth around in many different locations for details about templates for creating video ads on YouTube, tips for your employees using Gmail or how to respond to the business reviews on your Place Page, you can find all of this helpful information right here in one place.

Of course, we’ll continue to post relevant news about individual services such asAdWords, Apps, Google Places and YouTube on their respective “home” blogs, but feel free to visit or subscribe to this Google Small Business Blog to get everything relating to your small business needs. We’re starting small today, but who knows what tomorrow will have in store!