Exclusive Concepts Blog

Email Thursday – Synergy: Email and Web

Andy — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:21:24 +0000

Today is Email Thursday and I'm your presenter, Andy. Today’s topic is Synergy: Email and the Web.

One of the most elemental practices for effective marketing strategies is to make sure that your efforts in the marketing realm compliment each other. Now, this may seem obvious, "Andy, tell me something I don't know." But, you'd be surprised how many companies I run into that don't seem to apply this simple and straightforward approach to marketing. I'll visit their website, see an add in a Google search and receive an email and often it feels like I am communicating with 3 different companies.

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Many of our customers come to us for this very reason: they want synergy amongst all of their outbound marketing communications. When performing an audit and analyzing their current (or proposed) marketing strategies, we'll find discrepancies in their voice, tone, look and overall messaging. Perhaps their site will be designed with a prominent left nav bar and a certain color scheme and their title tags will have the name of the business and a tagline. Their PPC and SEO will be focused on selling a particular brand or category of products, none of which are prominent on their site nor can they be found anywhere in meta data on their site. Their ads will point to a page that is buried within the structure of their site and will be promoting a brand that they don't have in-stock. Their email strategy, if existent, will perhaps utilize an old template that bears no resemblance to the current look and feel of the site and it may not even tell you much or anything about what the company sells or does.

In the age of digital marketing, ADHD and congested Information Superhighways, it is imperative that your outbound marketing efforts all be in-line with each other: that they all have the same look, feel, tone, messaging, value proposition and general branding. Right now, branding is as important as ever and email plays a strong part in that.

A simple glance at an email from jetBlue and their current homepage yields an obvious relationship between the 2… heck, they have the exact same graphic. What this shows is solidarity and synergy between their outbound communications: a consistant, similar and continued experience when "traveling" from one medium to another. The near seamless integration of graphics and messaging makes you feel not like you are crossing from one communication medium to another, but rather that they are both an extension of a greater brand experience, one with a bit of a warm, happy feel if you ask me. With colors reminiscent of sunsets, blue skies and clear blue water, the themes and tone are clearly carried through all outbound communications. Talking about it kinda makes me want to go on vacation…

At Exclusive Concepts, we offer Optimized Lifecycle Email Marketing for our clients who are looking to maximize their revenue through this unique and ever-growing channel. If you are looking for a way to get a lot more revenue from your e-mail approach, consider our Optimized Lifecycle Email Marketing service to augment your other marketing efforts. We’ll show you how it works if you’d like – just give us a call at 800-504-4324.

Thank you for listening – have a wonderful Email Thursday!

Conversion Wednesday – 3 Things to Keep in Mind While Testing

Exclusive Concepts Blog Team — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:12:36 +0000

Welcome to Your Daily Concept – Get Smarter Every Day. Today, is Conversion Wednesday.

My name is Chris C., and today I’ll be reminding you of three things to keep in mind while testing your website.

The big things to keep in mind while testing are:

Your future website vision
Everything is constantly shifting
Throw out assumptions

Lets get into what each one of these mean.

The first is: Have a future website vision.
Know where you are and where you want to be. Use testing as steps towards where you want to go.
For example, if you know your site works great for methodical shoppers but you want to open up your funnel and appeal to a broader customer base, design a few tests to improve a spontaneous shopper’s experience.

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Next, remember that everything is constantly shifting online
The web moves so fast and we constantly need to keep up! It’s important to understand that your vision will change and that it’s a good thing.

Your website and the reasons for visitors arriving on your website are constantly changing. Try not to view your testing as a way to create standards for marketing, design, or copy on your website. Instead, view it as a constantly changing entity. Remember, this is a long term process and reinforces why having a future vision is so important.

Every website is unique. Yes, even yours! This why we test. If there was one, universal formula for a website, everyone’s sites would look the same…

Which leads us to: throwing out assumptions.
When designing a test, don’t assume that an idea won’t work. Just because what is being proposed in the test isn’t an industry standard doesn’t mean it won’t perform better. Sometimes the changes that have the best impact on your website can seem counter intuitive.

During testing, don’t get frustrated if your assumptions are wrong. Even if a test doesn’t deliver desired results. The tests that don’t perform the way we expect them to frequently tell you something new about your users. Apply what you have learned to your vision for your website. Tests that don’t get desired results help you understand more about your business and can make your future website vision even better!

Every site is unique, so trust your users! They are the ones using your unique site, which makes them all unique as well.

So, while testing, keep in mind:

Your future website vision
Everything is constantly
Throw out assumptions

No matter what your testing results tell you, remember tha tyour users determined the results. The whole point in testing is to understand more about your customers. If they are telling you that something is working, you should trust them.

We think about these items constantly during our Conversion Booster service. Conversion Booster is an Exclusive Concepts full-service testing option . We do the work for you by gathering your analytics and determining optimal changes for your site to maximize conversion rate. Then, we test those changes in an AB or Multivariate test and present you with the winning combinations! Its that simple. Give us a call at 1-800-504-4324 if you're interested in learning more.

We would be honored to perform a free seasonal conversion audit on your qualified website today.

If you have any questions about conversion booster, website testing, or website optimization, be sure to let us know. Email us today at: blog@exclusiveconcepts.com.

Thank you for your responses and have a great conversion Wednesday!

PPC Tuesday – The Holiday Pre-Season

Kevin — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:38:40 +0000

Hello and welcome again to another episode of Your Daily Concept, Get Smarter Every Day. Today is PPC Tuesday.

Today is the last day of August, Tuesday, August 31st 2010

My name is Kevin and I will be presenting today’s topic which will be The Holiday Pre-Season.

We here at Exclusive Concepts have already begun to prep our clients for the upcoming Holiday season and the increased traffic, competition, and business that comes with it.

But as we look ahead we should keep in mind that there are other Holidays coming up that can provide your business with a sales boost as well as provide a testing ground for the “Big One”. So today I thought I would offer some helpful hints for the Pre-Season Holidays of Halloween and Thanksgiving that can be carried over into the primetime.

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The first holiday hint is to take some time and freshen up your ad copy. Take advantage of the season and work some holiday themed ad copy into your text. This will allow you to stand out from your competitors and engage the searcher on a personal level.

While your testing some new ad copy, why not try a special holiday offer? This can be a percentage off or a free shipping offer with a fun holiday coupon code.

One last tip for your ads is to make sure that you have taken full advantage of your ad extensions within your AdWord’s campaigns. Product Extensions, Site Links and all of the other ad extensions weren’t available last year so ensure that you are giving yourself a “turkey” leg up on your competition this season.

You will also want to make sure that you are aggressively bidding for the first page and that your budgets allow for you to do so. Halloween and Thanksgiving gives you the benefit of seeing how not only your customers react but also your competition. If you notice that your competitors are making adjustments now you can be assured that they will be doing the same come December.

Lastly, update your site with a holiday theme. If you have a mascot why not find a clever way to get them decked out for the holidays. Not only does this carryover the messaging of your text ad but returning customers will remain engaged with the site because you are keeping things fresh! One side note on holiday themes that I will make is to ensure that you never lose the site’s overall messaging and the main goal of driving sales.

Those are just a few helpful holiday hints for your pay per click campaigns. Remember, Halloween and Thanksgiving allows you to experiment and test your ad copy, landing pages, seasonal sales, and measure how your customers respond to your site during these holidays.

You can then take these lessons learned and ensure that you are in the best shape for the Big Game in December and have a happy holiday season yourself!

That’s going to wrap up today’s PPC Tuesday. If you are looking to grow your revenue through your pay per click campaigns why not give us a call. We offer Profitable PPC as a service to our clients.

If you would like to learn more call us at 1 800 504 4324.

SEO Monday – Google Realtime Gets a Homepage

Tim — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 20:59:07 +0000

Welcome to Your Daily Concept – Get Smarter Every Day. Today, is SEO Monday.

My name is Tim, I’m an internet marketing strategist here at Exclusive Concepts, and today I’ll be talking about the new Google Realtime Search homepage.

For those not familiar, Google Realtime Search lets you see up-to-the-second social updates, news articles and blog posts about hot topics around the world.

For a while however, there was no way to search these realtime results – they would simply populate in the standard Google results pages if you just happened to be searching for a hot trending topic.

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Now, Google has finally given Realtime search a home at www.google.com/realtime

Basically, you can type in any keyword and see the very latest results streaming from facebook updates, twitter updates, blog posts, news articles and various other social media outlets.

There’s a number very useful applications for Google realtime, including getting up to the minute updates on breaking news, getting a wide variety of opinions on a specific topic, following events you’re interested in – and doing so all in one place.

You can even refine your Realtime search results based on things like location and time – in addition to having the ability to follow full conversations people are having about the particular topic you’re searching on.

In the ecommerce world, Google Realtime search could present a great opportunity to find additional exposure to your products, highlight your promotions, generate product reviews and much more depending on how creative you can get.

To learn more about Google Realtime search you can visit the official google blog – or you can just go to Google.com/realtime and start trying it our for yourself.

That’s it for SEO Monday – I hope you enjoyed the update and I hope you have a great day.

Wildcard Friday – Make Phone Calls Using Gmail

Tim — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 20:16:49 +0000

Welcome to Your Daily Concept – Get Smarter Every Day. Today, is Wildcard Friday.

My name is Tim, I’m an internet marketing strategist here at Exclusive Concepts, and today I’ll be talking about Google Voice and how it now allows you to place and receive phone calls using Gmail.

Since this is Wildcard Friday, I thought I’d diverge a little bit from the marketing side of things and take some time to update you on a cool new Google feature.

Two days ago, or Wednesday (August 25th ), Google launched the ability to make and receive phone calls using Google Voice – which ties right into your Gmail.

You can make and receive calls and text message for free anywhere in the US – and all international calls are charged a relatively small fee.

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In addition to the ability to place and receive calls and text message for free, Google Voice has a number of other cool features.

For instance you can:

Use a single number that rings you anywhere
Get transcribed voicemail messages delivered to your
Share voicemails
Screen callers
Make conference calls
Video chat for free
Much more

If you want to learn more about making calls with Google Voice, you can visit www.google.com/voice – or you can visit the Google Voice blog at googlevoiceblog.blogspot.com

That’s it for Wildcard Friday – hope you enjoyed the offbeat update, and I hope you enjoy your day!

Email Thursday – When Your Offer is Too Good

Andy — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 16:02:25 +0000

Today is email Thursday and I’m your presenter, Andy.

So I'm not sure how many of you have heard of Groupon, but for those not familiar with the service, Groupon offers a daily coupon to their customers through email. Groupon uses your geographic region to specify the deal for you since they are almost always coupons for local businesses like the salon down the street or a restaurant offering 65% off your next meal. Well, this past week, Groupon branched out and ran their first national campaign with Gap where if you purchased $25, you got $50 worth of Gap clothing, good for in-store only. At the same time Groupon sent this mailing, Gap sent a similar deal to their email list.

Now, according to the gentleman who runs the email marketing program for Groupon, this offer was getting responses at almost 10x the normal response rate. In fact, Groupon was seeing their LIST SIZE increase by over 2000 per minute. That's 120,000 users every hour who are now on the Groupon mailing list. The offer was so good that people felt compelled to inform their friends, neighbors, co-workers, siblings etc. about the deal. In addition to Groupon's 10 million North American users, they atttribute the success of the campaign to their Twitter handle, Facebook page as well as @earlybird. As the response rate climbed, the traffic was so great that Groupon couldn't handle the traffic and their site went down. So what did they do?

They directed the traffic to an overflow page that read

"We've got good news and bad news... The bad news is that the site is currently unavailable because we are experiencing unusually high demand for today's GAP deal. The good news is that if you give us your e-mail address here, we'll notify you as soon as the deals are available again."

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Brilliant. So, not only was their site down because of the overwhelming flow of traffic and the number of new users singing up and showing interest in the deal, but they were still able to capture email addresses as signups even though the site itself wasn't functioning. Once the IT crew solved the issue and either opened up more bandwidth or the traffic subsided enough to begin processing the backlog of signups, a follow-up email went out announcing that the coupon was now available again.

The end result was the above email when they tell you that the deal is once again available for purchase. They thank you for your patience and sign off in a very personal way. This is a very smart approach to a problem that even though they anticipated, executing properly was just as important. It could have been very difficult to keep prospective customers interested and engaged with the brand if they tried to visit the site to sign up and simply received a timeout error. But some forward thinking and best practices proved that "By day’s end, 441,000 Groupons were sold, bringing in a little more than $11 million." Not bad for a site that sells coupons.

At Exclusive Concepts, we offer Optimized Lifecycle Email Marketing for our clients who are looking to maximize their revenue through this unique and ever-growing channel. If you are looking for a way to get a lot more revenue from your e-mail approach, consider our Optimized Lifecycle Email Marketing service to augment your other marketing efforts. We’ll show you how it works if you’d like – just give us a call at 800-504-4324.

Thank you for listening – have a wonderful Email Thursday!

Conversion Wednesday – The Golden No Nos

Dan G — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 14:28:17 +0000

Welcome to Your Daily Concept, Get Smarter Everyday.

Welcome to another installment of our Conversion Wednesday Series.

Our topic today is “The Golden NO NOs”

I’ll be your host today, my name is Dan G.

So last week we discussed “What You Should Do” in anticipation of the Golden Quarter. This week, lets talk about “What You Should Not Do”.

Show Your Holiday Cheer Don’t be a Grinch! Be prepared to greet your customers with holiday cheer. Whether you provide live chat, phone support, or do most of your follow-up via email, do your best to convey holiday cheer and provide great customer service. The holiday shopping experience extends beyond your website itself, don’t forget that.
Honesty is The Best Shipping Policy Shipping speed and reliability is a critical decision point for holiday shoppers, especially for those last-minute ones. So don’t leave your shipping information conveniently left-out or inaccessible. Make sure you have messaging, links, & graphics visible throughout the site. And like we mentioned last week, make sure you mention your shipping-cut-off dates before the big days. You might also want to indicate any products that require special shipping considerations. Bottom Line, just be honest about your shipping policy.
Don’t be Humbug, Deck The Halls! Faling to dress up your site just says “Bah Humbug”. And slapping a holiday graphic on your home page is simply not enough. Shoppers can enter your site on any page! Make sure each page on your site includes holiday messaging and ornamentation.

Research Your analytics to help make your strategic decisions on each of these fronts

Now that you know how to not be a Grinch, lets work on Uncle Scrooge. What other things should you not do, in anticipation of the holidays?:

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Don’t be too conservative with your Holiday Promotions
Don't Neglect Your Mobile Customers
Don't Ignore Your Established Customer
Don't Forget Your Last Minute Shoppers
Don’t Start Too Late, or you’ll be working on Xmas Eve!

On top of all of these, just try and make your site as seasonally inviting and simple as possible. The simpler you can make your site and the more inviting you can be, the better your site will convert.

So are you safe from the Golden Quarter No Nos? Do you need to make any changes to your holiday planning? Lets Recap:

Show your Holiday Cheer.– Don’t be a Grinch, the holiday shopping experience extends beyond your website itself, don’t forget that
Honesty is the Best Shipping Policy. – Don’t leave shipping information conveniently left out or inaccessible. Be honest and open about your Shipping Policy!
Don’t be a Humbug, Deck the Halls! – Slapping 1 or 2 holiday graphics on your homepage is not a holiday strategy. Make sure each page on your site includes holiday messaging and ornamentation.
Don’t be Too Conservative with Holiday Promotions – Don't be a Scrooge! If you build it, they will come. Don’t pinch pennies with your Holiday Strategy.
Don’t neglect your Mobile Customers – Mobile Devices are more prevalent than ever. Don’t forget to invest in a little mobile development this year.
Don’t ignore your Established Customers – What can you promote to get return customers back in your store? Discounts? Free Gifts? Make sure your holiday promotions are out there so that these customers remember your store when they start thinking about holiday gifts.
Don’t forget your Last Minute Shoppers – Think about ways you can cater to them (like shipping-cut-off dates) and make it clear that you are ready to respond quickly to orders.
Don’t Start Too Late, or you’ll be working X-mas Eve! – Don’t wait till its too late! Create a calendar and do as much early preparation of your holiday plans as possible.

And if you don’t have the time or effort to put into a full-blown Holiday Strategy Campaign, let us do it for you! We can test all of these ideas without making all of those pesky changes on your live site. We can design & test these holiday messaging strategies for you, procure and analyze their overall effect, and then present you with the winning holiday strategies for your site.

We call this service “Conversion Booster” , its ExclusiveConcepts full-service testing option . We do the work for you by gathering your analytics and determining the best seasonal changes for your site to maximize conversion rate. Then, we test those changes in an AB or Multivariate test and present you with the winning combinations! Its that simple. Give us a call at 1-800-504-4324 if you're interested in learning more.

We would be honored to perform a free seasonal conversion audit on your qualified website today.

The Buzz: Exclusive Concepts Free Audits – What Are They Anyway?

Nik — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 21:56:03 +0000

It’s such a great question and something that any e-commerce business owner should be all over. Anybody who’s been pecking around the online marketing world over the past few years has seen tool after tool for automated website scoring that can give you indications of everything from SEO domain scores to page speed verdicts. Those are great and we love them as well – but that’s what our audits are not – not automated, that is.

Towards the end of last year, the team at Exclusive Concepts challenged itself to jump way outside that automated comfort zone and asked: if we could put our best people in 20-30 minute meetings with qualified online retail stores, what kind of exceptional manual work could we present that could blow the owners of those companies away and deliver some serious “a ha!” moments?

The first step seemed easy. We needed to start by identifying what should be audited for a particular website. Since then, audit requests have come straight through our easy-to-use audit forms on our Advanced SEO, Profitable PPC and Conversion Booster service pages. If you haven’t requested one in the past, please do so – they’re free!

Next, we started and have since iterated some impressive audits that span our services:

SEO Audit: To prepare for an SEO audit, we require very little input from the party being audited. If you were being audited for example, we would look at your approach from Google’s perspective and compare your current activities against our seasoned school of thought called Advanced SEO. Again, this is an intensive manual process that is actually presented by a key specialist from our SEO team – the same experts you’ve come to trust through the SEO videos the SEO team produces and releases each SEO Monday. You can learn more and sign up for the SEO audit here.
PPC Audit: Knowing whether or not an online retailer is employing the most sound, profitable approach to PPC takes a look under the hood. We require access to AdWords at minimum. Our Profitable PPC approach hinges on doing a few very smart things incredibly well and making systematic improvements to profitability and scalability from that. We compare your current efforts against that approach, which we believe is the most optimal form of PPC for online retail. Though we do require a minimum monthly ad spend, it never hurts to request the audit even if you’re unsure if your ad spend makes the mark. If you do make the mark, just getting the opportunity to speak with our expert PPC managers (the folks who bring you PPC Tuesdays) is well worth the time – you can learn more and sign up for the PPC audit here.
Conversion Audit: For most people, you won’t believe it until it has been explained to you. The science behind improving the conversion rate of your site towards every visitor of your site is complex, but when broken down and analyzed, the opportunity and even next steps become shockingly apparent. Though the conversion audit requires a minimum amount of unique visitors entering your online store each month, it never hurts to ask us for an audit, just in case. We are constantly improving upon the industry’s technologies to ensure we can do more testing with less traffic by utilizing more intelligent parameters to determine winners of multivariate testing. We invite you to start your journey towards becoming an expert on this science by meeting with members of our conversion team to discuss your online retail site’s opportunity to improve its performance – and yes, this is the same team that brings you Conversion Wednesdays each week – learn more about and sign up to this unique conversion audit that is revolutionizing the way people look at their potential to grow, one intimate presentation at a time.

PPC Tuesday – Using Google Services to Boost Your PPC

Chris — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 14:11:31 +0000

If you have not updated your ads in recent months, then it’s time to take a look at how competitive your advertising is. Through ad extensions, which has been covered here before, you can now integrate other Google services to enhance your advertising. This is beneficial, allowing you to better qualify those who click on your ads.

As online advertising continues to grow, and begins to mature into a transparent and measurable advertising means, it is getting more competitive. Budgets are growing to compensate for the landscape becoming more competitive. Clicks that cost only $0.15 a year ago can now be as high as $0.75 with all else being equal.

As the click prices rise, a greater investment is required upfront, and with that, the advertising needs to perform at a higher level. It is not as feasible to test unconditionally without a result.

At the same time, the nature of search is shifting to include more well rounded results. Instead of the most relevant webpages being served, there is now a range of content, including pages, images, video, shopping, tweets, and map results.

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This integration has changed the expectations of searches. Instead of hoping to find the best site out there to answer the search, now the answers are found directly on the results page.

Also, by serving content from different sources, conclusions can be drawn on the best content to show based upon the search terms.

This has caused Google to extend the integrated results to the advertising. Instead of just a headline, some text, and a URL; ads now show additional content culled from other services, including Google Places & Google Merchant Center.

Google Places is an important, free service for any business with a physical location, or even those that without a location that serve an off-line market. Google Places allows business owners to control their listing in the maps, including multiple locations as well as create a profile page that can aggregate information about your business, including hours, and images.

Business owners that advertise, can link their Google places account with their AdWords, allowing specific addresses to show up based upon where the search is being conducted.For instance if you had stores in San Diego, Los Angeles, & San Francisco you can have a campaign target California and linked to your Places account ensuring that the most relevant address will be displayed based upon the searchers location.

Two other pieces of contact information that can be independently linked through AdWords are different links in addition to the primary landing page, and a phone number, for mobile click-to-call ad experiences.

One of the most important Google services for online stores is Google shopping. This free service delivers high-qualified traffic to specific product pages, based upon feeds that are submitted. Google also actively indexes ratings and reviews from different comparison engines to the point where they are aggregated and presented on a page that resembles a merchant profile. To manage ones feeds and align different reviews, Google offers their Merchant Services. Within this service is a setting to integrate with AdWords (requiring the AdWords Customer ID).

Once the link is established on that side, you can log into adwords and link a merchant account with a campaign. If a store has different merchant accounts, they can be linked to specific campaigns (though each campaign can only be linked to one merchant account). This first produced Google Product Extensions, which displayed a link below the ads that can be expanded to show a selection products, including their images and prices. This went a long way towards qualifying traffic, eliminating sticker shock.

More recently, Google has started showing reviews and ratings, once a small threshold was met (25 reviews with an average rating of 80%). This is a huge step to build immediate trust early on in the buying process. If your prospective customers can instantly get an impression of how you do business, you can set yourself apart from the competition by building up a stellar reputation.

Google’s ads reflect the changes seen through out search and will only continue to integrate additional data points. This will continue to better qualify your traffic, and make your advertising more effective in the long run. At the same time this will raise the cost of delivery. Overall the advertising is becoming more valuable.

I hope this video has been helpful!

To Learn More about Exclusive Concepts Profitable PPC product, or any of our excellent services in our suite of online marketing offerings including our Conversion Booster, SEO Foundation or Precision Email Marketing, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We have also launched our new Software As A Service destination, Conversions On Demand.com. Visit it today and see what we have to help your business.

Also, if you have specific questions about how your PPC Account is structured, sign up for one of our Profitable PPC Audits, they are quick and offer some great insight in how to optimize your campaign along with relevant recommendations.

Thank you, this has been Chris for Exclusive Concepts Daily Concept: PPC Tuesday. I look forward to talking to you next time.

SEO Monday – Google Showing More Results From Single Domain

Scott C — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 15:59:24 +0000

My name is Scott, an SEO Analyst at Exclusive Concepts, and today’s post will cover a new update Google has made to its algorithm, which will now show more results from a single domain on certain queries.

The new update to Google’s algorithm was announced by the company last Friday, August 20th, where they stated that for particular queries, users would now find it easier to find a large number of results from a single site. Normally in the past for these same queries, there would only be two results that would show, followed by results from other sites to give the user a variety to choose from. However, Google stated “For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, we’ll now show more results from the relevant site.” Let’s take a look at an example of what this new change looks like.

In this screen shot, we see an example of how popular search results used to display where a popular and relevant domain would hold the first two positions in search results, followed by other domains.

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However, the new change allows the a relevant and popular domain to yield many more results on the first page, which in this case is CNN.com. This is because Google has determined if someone searches for CNN, they are much more likely to find what they are looking for from the cnn.com domain versus other sites, which now have been pushed to the 8th position and beyond. You can find similar results from typing searches in like “Apple iPod” and “ESPN NFL” as well.

So what are the pros and cons of this new change? Well, if you’re a site owner whose domain is now showing several results on the first page, you obviously benefit from greater visibility on the coveted first page of results. In addition, this added visibility also means better brand management as you are in control of the pages that users will see when searching for your brand or product.

A downside of the change would be if your site wasn’t the benefiting domain, which would mean your ranking would drop. Lets use an example of an Apple iPod retailer that was originally #5 until this change was made, and has subsequently fallen to the 2nd page in search results since Apple.com commands 7 of the top 10 rankings for the search term “Apple iPod.” This means users would now have to click to the second page of search results to find your site, which means you will receive far fewer clicks which most likely means lower sales.

Another con might come from the user’s perspective where they don’t have the same variety of search results from different domains they might have become accustomed to.

That’s all for this week’s edition of SEO Monday and I hope its been helpful for your business. If your website has been impacted by any change to Google’s algorithm or you’d like to find how it can improve further for SEO, please contact us to learn more about our Advanced SEO service and request an Advanced SEO Audit for your site.

We’d also like to remind you that if you have a question or idea you would like to see covered on Your Daily Concept, to please send us an email to blog@exclusiveconcepts.com! If selected, we will email you and let you know when the video will be posted. Thanks for watching and please tune in tomorrow for another edition of PPC Tuesday!