An SEO Experiment

In early January 2010 HSTinCanada.com went live after some educated estimates and two weeks of design & testing with a single goal in mind – obtain visitors from search engines. After operating for two months with 50+ articles and a variety of links from other websites, the website has cracked the first page for a handful of key search phrases in Google. What is unique about HST in Canada as a topic in general is that it’s going to receive plenty of news coverage for an extended period of time. Back in the summer of 2009 I launched a quick website for a news topic that was in the news headlines for a week. With $15 dollars invested for hosting and the domain name, www.westkelownafires.com launched and recorded 7000 page views over the course of a few days, with 90% of the web traffic coming from search engines. Ever since that SEO Experiment, I’ve contemplated the potential for what might be called “opportunistic web development”. Then the next opportunity presented itself…

Starting from scratch with a brand new domain and using the wordpress platform, a website was born with the intention of being a neutral resource for a hot topic with varying opinions and feelings. The proposed Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) is coming to British Columbia and Ontario on July 1st 2010, and while it has a number of implications for businesses and citizens within these provinces, it presented a unique opportunity for a website. It was going to be on people’s minds over the next several months, and the media coverage it will receive will only intensify as groups, businesses and governments become more vocal.

For starters, any successful website must serve a valuable purpose. In the case of HSTinCanada.com there was a distinct gap in available information online. The provincial government’s in support of HST have the pros related to the HST explained on their websites. The anti-HST government websites & groups have all of the negative aspects of HST explained. There was no single source that talked about both the pros and cons of HST, so the content strategy for HST in Canada was easy to establish. Secondly, as the goal was to obtain search engine traffic, an assessment of the competing websites and an estimate of how much search volume exists was undertaken. Overtaking the competing websites isn’t insurmountable and the number of HST related search engine queries is promising.

After being live for nearly 2 months, HSTinCanada.com is on track to serve approximately 30,000 ad impressions in March 2010. With further improved search engine rankings, this topic has the legs to serve 1 million ad impressions from search engine traffic alone before July 1st, 2010.

The message here is two fold. For web publishers and businesses of all kinds, a niche website built around a current event or relevant topic optimized for search engines can gain a strong audience over the course of  a few months. Think outside the box – sometimes your current website isn’t ideal when reacting to an evolving situation. Web development is more accessible now than ever, and a ground-up website build might not cost as much as you think. Perhaps a tax advisory firm or an accounting office should have launched a website like HST in Canada – once you obtain the audience you can display whatever ads you want, even your own. Not only that, publishing web content around a certain topic solidifies your identity as an authority on the topic – trust = sales. Forgive me, but the second part of this message is blatant self-promotion – if you think there’s an angle you can use to amass an audience related to your business and want some advice on it’s potential and how to execute, please get in touch! I love doing this stuff!

Bring your print materials online

I’m not much of a print guy. I can’t track how many times a person looks at a brochure, nor can I tell what pages interest a person the most. Most importantly, it’s hard to track if a lead came specifically from print collateral or not. I’m not arguing the importance of the various forms of print advertising, but in comparison with the web it can be hard to track the direct benefits a print campaign has.

But, that print material does have a rightful place online. Once it’s online, you get all the tracking benefits that come along with it. Convert that piece of print material into a PDF and link to it from your website. People love the portability of a PDF, and there are ways to track what pages of the PDF are viewed, or if the PDF is printed, etc. You can link back to specific parts of your website from within the PDF, and the best part, you can actually prompt the person viewing the PDF with a form, asking for contact information in order to follow up with the lead. So you can delete those tear-off sheets as you move online.

So if you have print materials just sitting there, get them online! Track their performance and generate some leads. And beyond those benefits, search engines are getting better at indexing PDF content, so bringing that PDF online might actually end up pulling more traffic to your website!

$15 and 7000 page impressions later…

Throwing www.westkelownafires.ca up was an interesting endeavor. It took an evening to get the domain and blog up and running, and around 10 minutes of time per blog entry. All considered the website probably absorbed 8 hours of time and in the first week of being live managed to obtain 5,000+ page views, almost entirely through search engines.

This ended up being an interesting project for me. It was a great test to find out just how fast a website can be live and indexed. The domain was active almost immediately after purchase (which isn’t always the case), and it took 24 hours for the search engines to index the site and include it in the rankings for “west kelowna fires” and similar search terms.  A number of first page rankings created peak traffic on July 23rd, reaching 1,500 page impressions in a single day.

Now the topic of the West Kelowna Fires is a touchy one, but this concept, maybe we can call it opportunistic search optimization, can play a valuable roll in business strategy. Let’s say it was a different topic, a topic where homes aren’t threatened by fire and thousands of people aren’t forced out of their houses. It should also be a topic that will live longer than a month or two. Let’s say the topic is the Pine Beetle – just as devastating to our forests but at least it’s not threatening human life. You can bet your bottom dollar the situation is going to get a ton of media coverage from radio and television. And let’s assume you run a landscaping company that can easily adapt to offer services that will protect trees from the beetle. You throw up a website, pinebeetleprotection.ca, and talk about the entire story. Why the public should be concerned and what they can do to protect the trees on their property. I’ve heard of a number of solutions, from nets covering the trees to pheromones that repel the beetle. Whatever the case is, you help the site visitor understand the threat, and subtly offer your services. It’s really not as far-fetched as you might think, and I’d be more than happy to lend a helping hand.

Compete.com reports on Bing

Compete.com recently released it’s June data, and in the email announcement they designate an entire article to Bing. Reading my previous post, without basing my thoughts on any real numbers, I did have a feeling Bing was off to a great start in comparison with Live Search. Microsoft has managed to stir the pot, and Compete.com helps us gauge just how shaken the search industry is.

For starters, Bing managed to drive a 58% increase in traffic to Microsoft Search sites soon after it was announced. That’s quite a feat in itself, but as Compete points out, that’s not the most interesting part. The interesting news is that when looking at Google, Yahoo and AOL, it was Google’s search audience that was most likely to go check Bing out. This might indicate that Google searchers are more likely to consider other search options. Could this be a chink in Google’s armor? Looking at this Compete Graph, it very well may be…

Not sure, then Bing it!

Bing Search

It’s amazing how web technology has influenced our vocabularly. Some brand names have become verbs in the dictionary. Google it, Facebooked – and now, Binging? On May 28, Steve Balmer unveiled a new search service dubbed “Bing”.

It’s fairly safe to say that Microsoft has been struggling in the world of search. Live Search was never really branded well, nor did it generate the buzz Bing has already amassed. After reviewing search engines, Microsoft found that only half of searchers are successful on their first query. One quarter of the time, people have to re-search  what they’re looking for with a new query. 15% of the time, they abandon the search altogether. So, how does Microsoft plan to correct this “search failure” with Bing when Google’s approach was simply a powerful suggestion tool?

In part, they will have a focused part of the Bing service dedicated to shopping, local, travel and health. Health, for example, is reported to search only a handful of trusted websites. Having so much information at our fingertips can actually be dangerous to our own health. Afterall, we’re not doctors – just because we read a list of matching symptoms doesn’t always mean you have a particular ailment, misdiagnosing yourself can be a huge mistake!

Bing Travel is also an interesting portion of Bing (ironic that when you search for Bing Travel in Google, TechCrunch and Facebook rank ahead of the actual search engine). None the less, Bing Travel does a decent job of simplifying the organization of travel online. It brings flights & hotel bookings together, and puts cars and cruises right on the homepage. It even has pre-packaged vacations for you to peruse, courtesy of Orbitz. The flight price predictor is also an interesting feature, although I can see how a feature like this could end up being called the “weatherman of travel”. No matter how much data you have available to you, you won’t always be right. But if it is right, travel from Vancouver to Toronto will be relatively cheap early July!

Finally, many have cited Bing Image Search as a huge jump beyond Google Image Search. It’s definitely pretty cool, how it displays hundreds of photos on one page, but only loads them if you scroll to make them visible on your screen, Blackberry style. You can look at 400 pictures on one page! You can change their icon size, you can preview slightly larger versions without clicking through. But it still comes down to relevance – search for something with a number of possible outcomes (why not Bing), and see what you get. I get Bing cherries, Bing Crosby, Anine Bing – everything but the Bing Logo I was hoping for. So, I had to re-enter my query, the exact thing Microsoft said Bing was out to solve!

Will Bing become a verb like other web based brand names? I don’t think so. We use the phrase Google it because we all associate Google with search. “Hey, did you Facebook those pictures you took when you were camping?” Fairly self explanatory. But Bing? Binging? Binged? The search platform has some strengths, and has already grabbed some market share in the search engine world. But because there’s no one single thing Bing does extraordinarily well, I just can’t see it gaining the status other, more focused brands have achieved.