I had the most extraordinary comment written on my blog earlier this week, the author having taken the time and effort to write a response amounting to more than 2,632 words. That’s five pages of A4 paper, single spaced using a 12 point font.
Unfortunately, the comment would appear (perhaps, possibly, allegedly) to be written by someone who is in some way associated with the reviewed service.
My question is this: how much did this comment help BT’s cause? And would it have been better to just bite your tongue when negative reviews are written about your business?
Perhaps he was trying to drown out the other comments on the posting? Unfortunately, it only served to make the blog article even more keyword rich, and it ranks happily in the top ten results for searches.
Perhaps he was trying to genuinely persuade us of the merits of his service? Then this side of the argument might be best left to the genuine customers who jump to your defense, or at worst case the marketing department.
It’s been a few weeks since Google started tweaking the UK search results, and a number of folk have been asking me about the changes and why they are taking place.
Matt Cutts, over at Google, has produced a useful video (see bottom of this posting) explaining that not all UK content is hosted on a .co.uk domain name. I think most Brits would have to agree with that assumption. And as a result, Google appears to be placing less emphasis on the top level .co.uk domains and introducing other content appropriate to the UK audience coming from other top level domains such as .com
So far so good, and I’d have to agree with the underlying assumptions.
However, it just doesn’t seem to be working well. And I can’t prove it, but it seems an awful lot worse at the moment.
I have two examples for you.
I wanted to get my hair cut in the neighbouring village of Bingham, Nottinghamshire and couldn’t remember the hairdressers name, so just used Google.co.uk to find a hairdresser in Bingham.
Google gave me as the top result the charming Trisha….. a hairdresser in Las Vegas. I’m not sure I would gamble on a haircut in Vegas.
And I suspect Trisha will be well confused if she looks at her web metrics and sees gaggles of visitors coming to her site from England.
Taking another practical example, I was demonstrating how Google localises the results based on your IP address, and did my neato-keen trick of searching for a generic phrase like Accountant.
A beautiful map of Rotherham appears, and I did the usual explanation of inaccuracy of British IP addresses and their impact on the Google results. I’m actually in Nottingham, but Rotherham is sort of nearby, so it is kind of accurate. Well not really, but I digress.
But then I was aghast to see within the top ten results for my “accountant” search was the US Department of Labor Statistics website and not a British statistic to be seen.
Surely the word “labor” as opposed to “labour” might have some bearing on the results?
There is a single occurrence of the word “British” on the high ranking page (”British Institute of Certified Public Accountants”) but surely this should have been outweighed by the bulk of other American references?
Or a Washington Zip Code rather than a postcode, or the US telephone dialling code?
Surely the fact that a US government department will have relatively inbound links from UK sites will matter?
2. Whilst I accept that a .co.uk top level domain name is not the single most important indicator of sites suitable for British tastes, I can’t understand what other signals are being used to deliver the best UK search experience.
3. Matt has indicated that there are no plans to change the current strategy of placing less importance on the top level .co.uk domain name. I’d like to encourage some feedback from UK users to say that Google is not giving the kind of search experience we expect. Matt Cutts is inviting feedback, and can I suggest we work on getting some appropriate examples to share with the team.
It is always difficult to find appropriate data to help you measure just how well your email marketing campaigns are going as compared to other companies.
You want data from British companies, from companies in a similar sector, and it needs to be data from other small businesses rather than big international corporate companies.
Sign Up To, an email marketing service provider, has produced some benchmarking data based more than 200 million emails sent over the last 12 months, sent by small and medium sized (SME) businesses in the UK.
There are always some difficulties in measuring email campaigns, and you need to take this data with a pinch of salt. Nevertheless, it gives you a yard stick to start measuring with.
Some quick findings:
There are wide variations in Open Rates of emails. If you are in a profession like accounting or legal practice, property, or sports and leisure then you might experience an Open Rate of just 13%
I’ve always said an Open Rate of 30% is very good, and indeed there are only two sectors achieving that level of success: Government, and New Media. Strange bedfellows, and hard to figure out what kind of synergy they might have.
There appears to problems with the email lists being used by Manufacturing/Industrial companies, with a Bounce rate of bad email addresses as high as 13%
Emails from the government are well received: the highest open rate, the highest click through rate, and very low number of bad addresses.
I recommend you read through the report to understand how the data was collected, and the method of analysing the recipients’ behaviour.
I had the most extraordinary comment written on my blog earlier this week, the author having taken the time and effort to write a response amounting to more than 2,632 words. That’s five pages of A4 paper, single spaced using a 12 point font.
