SEO News

It’s worth noting that the research was carried out before the July deadline, but it transpires that the largest proportion of both agency (43%) and in-house (56%) respondents still weren’t sure what impact Enhanced Campaigns would have on paid search campaigns.

However for those that did have an opinion on the matter, a higher proportion of both companies (29%) and agencies (35%) thought that the change will have a positive effect on their paid search marketing.

Do you think ‘Enhanced Campaigns’ will have a positive impact on your/your clients’ paid search marketing?

Respondents were also given the chance to expand on their answers and give reasons for why they felt Enhanced Campaigns would have a positive or negative impact.

Positive opinions from the agency respondents included easy management, simplifying and streamlining campaigns. The overwhelming reason for agencies to answer that Enhanced Campaigns would not have a positive impact was, like for companies, the lack of ability to segment devices, especially not being able to run mobile-only campaigns.

Specific examples include:

• “[This] does not allow us to set up separate campaigns for devices which is fundamental to our strategy and targeting – this is a very bad move!”
• “Segmenting mobile/tablet/desktop visits has enabled us to achieve efficiencies in our campaigns which we fear may be lost with the roll out of enhanced campaigns.”
• “‘Enhanced’?? No, dumbed down. Yes, you will have fewer campaigns, but this actually lessens intelligence gained from analytics.”
• “Mobile campaigns are already standalone with a defined bid strategy across key terms. Consolidating this feels a backward step right now bearing in mind we have context as part of the strategy. ROI will no doubt be affected.”

Econsultancy’s Crunch – Data, Analytics and the Rise of the Marketing Geek, takes place on October 10 at Truman Brewery, London. Crunch is the event for the analysts, strategists and boffins who turns raw numbers into insight, then revenue. This event is one of five that make up our Festival of Marketing.

For a couple of years the owner of The Regency Seafood restaurant couldn’t understand why so many Chinese people couldn’t get enough of his battered cod.

What’s the attraction?

Robert Savvides, although grateful, was also rather confused, so asked some of his dinners what they loved about the place?

As you’ll see in the video, a famous Chinese chef visited the restaurant, enjoyed the food and wrote a sterling review on his personal blog.

We’ve been unable to locate the exact review, but another blog post is currently doing very well in the Chinese search results. Here’s the blog:

Naturally, what does every holidaymaker do before they board a plane? They do a little research around the attractions, tourist hotspots and most importantly, they want to find out about local food!

So when Chinese people search in Mandarin for “best restaurant in Brighton” via Google.com.uk or baidu.com, webpages about this charming little chip shop top the search results.

Here’s the top result in Google.com.uk

And the result for “Regency Restaurant” in Baidu.com:

The restaurant is clinching the top spots in the SERPS due to a variety of Google’s ranking factors, unbeknownto Mr Savvides.

But the important element of this story is that international SEO can help many UK businesses to benefit from the growing Chinese tourist market. This could be a lucrative opportunity for the smaller business failing to compete with the bigger brands here in the UK.

The Chinese Market

So why else are his dinners predominantly Chinese?

Well, more and more Chinese holidaymakers are setting their hearts on the UK, which will see an enormous econimical benefit. Britain already welcomes 149,000 Chinese holidaymakers a year, which is relatively low compared with the 1.1m who travelled to France in 2012.

Therefore, it is estimated that the UK misses out on millions of Chinese tourists, costing the UK economy an estimated £1.2bn in annual spend. So there is still some way to go, but the trend looks set to continue.

In one study, the data showed that Chinese tourists are the biggest spenders abroad. Chinese tourism spending has increased almost eightfold in 12 years, up from US$13bn.

There’s no denying that China is a big growth market. As more Chinese people decide to holiday here, it will be a good investment to make your business visible to this audience. This is an opportunity not to be missed.

Which types of business can benefit?

The types of businesses that will appeal to potential overseas travellers will be those related to the tourist and travel sector, such as:

• Restaurants
• Hotels
• And leisure

These are the types of things that everyone researches before booking their holiday, so I advise that you take stock of your online property to see which areas need to be reviewed to make them accessible on the somewhat tricky territory of the Chinese internet.

How can digital marketing help?

The global nature of digital marketing and SEO can help to expose your business to the growing Chinese UK tourist market.

The internet in China has been colloquially nick-named “The Great Firewall” so it wasn’t a surprise when the freedom of the net report 2012 ranked China’s internet as one of the most restricted in the world.

Google is not blocked entirely, but users who search for banned words are blocked from Google for 90 seconds.

According to an article written by Henry Fong, CEO of Yodo1, “China probably has more social media users than Facebook has in the entire world combined”. China has several very active social networks, yet they’re not those used by the West.

Liang says this isn’t a hindrance, as the video has shown you. With our in house knowledge, we can put together the right strategy to:

• Identify and utilise the right digital channels to put your business in front of 538m users.
• Help you overcome the cultural differences to communicate with the audience.
• Take advantage of the “great firewall” whilst other companies are yet to explore ways around it.
• Pin point the right bloggers with Google authorship and authority.
• How to respect censorship laws but at the same time penetrate the market.

The growing number of overseas visitors is definitely something that the small business should consider because, as we’ve seen from this seaside chippy, even the most unsuspecting business may be pleasantly surprised.

Posted by tallen1985

SEOs can occasionally find ourselves guilty of focusing on just the following few things:

Quite often we are heard muttering that user experience isn’t really our problem. We are all about the above three points. However, as the job of SEOs continues to become broader, requiring a greater number of skill sets, I think user experience is something we can all work on. Besides, surely if we focus some of our energy on this, we are going to end up with much happier users, which in turn will result in higher conversions.

There are various ways to work on improving user experience, and of course, conversion rate optimization also plays a part. Today, I want to focus on one specific part of user experience — CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) — and why I think they suck.

CAPTCHAs ask frustrating questions

When you encounter a CAPTCHA, you are being asked the question,”Are you a robot?” It’s like asking a customer who is about to enter a physical store, “Are you a thief?” before you allow them to walk through the door. So we used to flood our users with these “questions:”

And from there we have now moved to this:

Literally every time I see one of the above it makes me wish that this was on a nearby wall:

CAPTCHAs act as a barrier between you and your customers

Back in 2009, Casey Henry wrote a great post on CAPTCHA’s effect on conversion rates. He highlighted the fact that with CAPTCHA turned off, a company’s conversion rate would increase by up to 3.2%. It’s worth noting that the CAPTCHA type used in this test was based on the more traditional word format. That 3.2% is a pretty big potential gain for a whole lot of companies.

Traditional Word Format CAPTCHA

CAPTCHAs are not a solution, they are a problem

At the beginning of 2013 it was announced that Ticketmaster was finally ditching its traditional CAPTCHAs. Ticketmaster proceeded with an alternative system by SolveMedia. The system presents users with an image or video, the user then has to type a phrase associated with that image. In the video version of the product, a descriptive phrase will appear which the user then has to copy into a box below. If they are not willing to do this, they need to watch the video for a certain amount of time (similar to YouTube advertising) before continuing.

Right now, companies are producing variations of novelty products aimed at helping us to stop spam from landing in our inboxes. Many products claim they are aimed at improving the user experience by making this easier for humans. They come in a variety of styles, ranging from completing a simple sum to those that are image-based or even gamifying CAPTCHAs (such as Are You Human).

Yet all of these “solutions” create the same problem. I, the user, am trying to complete a purchase, fill in a form, or even just submit a comment. And you, the website, keep putting this frustrating technological barrier between myself and my goal, just so you don’t have to sort through a few items of spam.

Another major concern is that these products aren’t particularly user-friendly for those who are blind or partially sighted. Some simply offer the same audio CAPTCHAs (and problems) that we have been experiencing for as long as we remember.

CAPTCHA is built for advertising, not users

The key difference for me with image-based products such as SolveMedia and Minteye is that they seem to act as another opportunity to push an advert in front of users. In some cases they force you to watch an advert just to progress to the next page.

Users don’t want to see adverts even when they are “subtly” placed around a beautifully designed page. Yet, more and more we are moving away from giving the user a choice about viewing an advert to the point where adverts are forced upon them (ahem…YouTube).

So people must be ditching CAPTCHA, right?

Despite statistics like those shared by Casey Henry, the fact is that the use of CAPTCHA is actually on the increase. Perhaps for many webmasters this is just becoming common practice, almost the norm. After all, it’s a quick fix that means we, as webmasters, no longer have to worry about dealing with spam.

Figures from Drupal’s usage statistics show that they alone have nearly 200,000 people using one of their variants of CAPTCHA. This is a barrier to a more fulfilled user experience that doesn’t seem to be going away.

https://drupal.org/project/usage/captcha

“CAPTCHAs are designed to be easy for humans but hard for machines”

…according to a study carried out by Stanford University into the use of CAPTCHA by humans. Yet, by testing more than 1,100 people, gathering 11,800 completed surveys, and studying 14,000,000 samples from a week’s worth of data from eBay, they revealed just how difficult CAPTCHA has become for humans.

The study showed that, on average:

With around 1% of the audience currently using audio CAPTCHA, this is potentially a huge market to lose.

So what is the solution?

There is a time and a place for CAPTCHA. For some sites, it may be unavoidable. However, any solution that is extremely effective rapidly becomes widely used, and as such, becomes a target for hackers.

There are some really simple solutions already out there that will help to reduce the amount of spam you receive but won’t interfere with your user experience.

Akismet

Akismet provides an effective defence that has no impact upon your users. It comes as a variety of plugins and is generally easy to implement on your site. Akismet monitors millions of sites, constantly learning new methods to beat comment spam.

The honeypot technique

Essentially, the honeypot technique is used to hide a field on a form from the user. If this field is then filled in, the chances are pretty high it was by a machine. The major downside to this method is that the form could be accidentally completed by a visually impaired user. Therefore, it might be useful to also label the field with something such as, “If you are human, don’t fill in this field”.

We still ultimately have the problem that whatever we do to ensure a user doesn’t fill in the form, a malicious script could perform its own interpretations by learning which labels mean that a field should be left alone.

However, the key benefit to this method is that the user isn’t getting punished by being asked to complete something that is irrelevant to their actions.

Is it time you ditched your CAPTCHA?

I think we need to focus on what creates a better experience for users by asking ourselves the following questions:

What do you think?

Image credits

http://gizmodo.com/5980361/ticketmaster-is-dumping-awful-captchas

http://www.richgossweiler.com/projects/rotcaptcha/rotcaptcha.pdf

http://www.maggiesnotebook.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Bang_Head_Here_25.jpg

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!