Just been watching Dragons Den and listening to the guys from Servicing Stop getting £100,000 investment (if I remember correctly) from Deborah Meaden in return for a 30% stake in the business.

It seems like a good idea but they are missing a big trick with their search engine marketing – the site is optimised (see the footer links) for things like Ford Service but there are no geographical pages!

They need to set up pages targeting “car service Leeds” in the natural search results and work with each garage to register with Google Local / Maps to get listed in those results too. There is so much local search volume around this industry that the potential is huge – I’ve worked on a friends garage site before and even a couple of good rankings in one small town can drive a steady stream of business. Multiply that across hundreds of locations and the potential is huge.

Search volume for servicing cars and models is small but if they can rank for the geographical modifiers across every town in the UK the site could drive thousands of leads every single day.

From the BBC overview (video highlights available too):

Essex brothers Oliver and Toby step into the Den with a spanner mascot who they hope will not put a spanner in their works.

Their pitch is for a nationwide car servicing network doesn’t stall however as they report a year one turnover of £1.5m based on their ability to undercut main dealers by between 30 and 50%.

Microsoft and Yahoo are joining forces in an effort to compete with Google in the search wars. Yahoo algorithmic results will be powered by the Microsoft / Bing algorithm and the paid results will be powered by AdCenter.

The announcement is good news because it’s clear that the two companies can’t compete with Google by themselves. I doubt it will make much difference in the UK because Yahoo has a very small market share as shown in the Hitwise data below.

The only drawback is that rollout is expected within 24 months following regulatory approval by which time Twitter or Facebook will probably have more search volume.

• Microsoft will acquire an exclusive 10 year license to Yahoo!’s core search technologies, and Microsoft will have the ability to integrate Yahoo! search technologies into its existing web search platforms;
• Microsoft’s Bing will be the exclusive algorithmic search and paid search platform for Yahoo! sites. Yahoo! will continue to use its technology and data in other areas of its business such as enhancing display advertising technology.
• Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers. Self-serve advertising for both companies will be fulfilled by Microsoft’s AdCenter platform, and prices for all search ads will continue to be set by AdCenter’s automated auction process.
• Each company will maintain its own separate display advertising business and sales force.
• Yahoo! will innovate and “own” the user experience on Yahoo! properties, including the user experience for search, even though it will be powered by Microsoft technology.
• Microsoft will compensate Yahoo! through a revenue sharing agreement on traffic generated on Yahoo!’s network of both owned and operated (O&O) and affiliate sites.
• Microsoft will pay traffic acquisition costs (TAC) to Yahoo! at an initial rate of 88% of search revenue generated on Yahoo!’s O&O sites during the first 5 years of the agreement.
• Yahoo! will continue to syndicate its existing search affiliate partnerships.
• Microsoft will guarantee Yahoo!’s O&O revenue per search (RPS) in each country for the first 18 months following initial implementation in that country.
• At full implementation (expected to occur within 24 months following regulatory approval), Yahoo! estimates, based on current levels of revenue and current operating expenses, that this agreement will provide a benefit to annual GAAP operating income of approximately $500 million and capital expenditure savings of approximately $200 million. Yahoo! also estimates that this agreement will provide a benefit to annual operating cash flow of approximately $275 million.
• The agreement protects consumer privacy by limiting the data shared between the companies to the minimum necessary to operate and improve the combined search platform, and restricts the use of search data shared between the companies. The agreement maintains the industry-leading privacy practices that each company follows today.

Lots of people think that the SEO industry has an image problem but here in the UK we don’t really see it that way. I meet with clients all the time who have had a bad experience with a particular SEO company in the past but they always blame the company, not the industry.

Nobody I’ve ever met in the UK has described what we do in a negative light while in the US everybody seems to paint SEO’s as scammers.

There are two types of people who make a lot of money in this industry, ones that are very good at SEO and work in a small team on their own projects and the others who have managed to take their SEO skills to the corporate level.

Just because you are great at SEO doesn’t mean you are great at the business side of things. Watching the “top 51 search marketers” insulting a potential client with a six figure monthly budget and then being celebrated on the worlds biggest SEO blog made every SEO in the UK cringe while most in the US thought it was very funny.

What does that tell you?

I’ve finally joined FriendFeed you can follow me here.

Google Analytics has one major drawback for ecommerce sites – it only gives credit to the keyword or referring source a visitor clicked on the last time they visited the site.

This “last click” approach is what makes a lot of large ecommerce sites choose multi touch attribution analysis products such as Omniture and Coremetrics over the more user friendly and easy to use Analytics interface.

The main problem with “last click analytics” is that a large number of sales are credited to direct traffic & brand keywords (organic or PPC) simply because they were the last method used to find the site before a purchase was made.

In truth users often carry out a number of long tail product searches and generic keyword type queries as they research a purchase and then visit the brand site by searching for it directly after they have made the decision to buy. By not tracking the research phase of the transaction a lot of credit is taken away from the SEO campaign when in fact it’s often SEO that drives branded search.
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Today we are very softly launching SEO Meme – an SEO news page powered by Twitter & Tweetmeme. The site displays popular SEO, social media and internet marketing related content with the most tweeted content making it’s way onto the homepage.

While the site has potential there are a few glaring errors caused by spammers and Twitter bots that re-tweet everything related to certain keywords. Over the next few weeks we will be totally blocking everything from Twitterfeed which will remove a lot of the spam. We will also be removing services like PRweb and other press release sites from the mix.

The goal is to become a passive social media site rather than an active one. This means that we are not going to be powered by votes like Sphinn and Digg because that relies on users actually bothering to vote for things. We want to display content based on the actions people are already taking without asking them to do anything different.

At present the site is powered by Tweetmeme and we are working with them to increase the quality of stories by improving the spam filtering.

All feedback gratefully received – please add the site to your favourites and take a look each day.

First of all let me get one thing straight – I like Twitterfeed. It’s a perfect way for me to publish my feed to Twitter.

The problem arises when people start to publish other peoples feeds to Twitter. For example the people who think automatically tweeting the Mashable or TechCrunch feeds will somehow make them appear popular or the Twitter bots whose sole purpose is to syndicate the Google News results for a query such as “internet marketing”.

If you are lucky enough to be in Google News all you need to do to get 50+ people tweeting a link is use a popular keyword such as “SEO” or “affiliate marketing” in your title and the tweets come rolling in. All totally useless.

Because Twitter has no way of filtering duplicate messages the search results (and aggregators like Tweetmeme) are polluted with dozens of identical tweets.

Twitter could fix this in an instant by removing Twitterfeed tweets from the search results or creating a duplicate content filter but they don’t seem to be doing anything about it.

Recently we’ve been expanding our service range to include a lot more in the way of conversion rate optimisation and usability testing, as part of this we spent a lot of time investigating various tools that allow us to conduct usability tests without the expense of panel testing.

One of the tools we’ve started to use is ClickTale which (rather amazingly) produces a video of how your visitors browse through the website including mouse movement, mouse clicks, scrolling, data entry in forms and pretty much everything they do in a particular session.

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Wordpress is fast becoming the best CMS in the world thanks to the range of fantastic plugins that are available to do anything you like. I don’t normally blog about plugins but the new Analytics360 plugin from MailChimp is fantastic.

As you can see in the screenshot below it brings Google Analytics data into your Wordpress dashboard and overlays your blog posts on top of the data. Clicking on the orange dot brings up details of the blog post and number of page views that day.

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