Happy 2007

It’s a new year (don’t they go quickly?). I’m not a big resolution person, but I do think the coming year is going to fantastic for Search Marketing both globally, and, more particularly, here in Ireland. I think more businesses are going to realise that ignoring Search Engines is a strategic error, and that a deeper appreciation of Search Marketing will be manifested in on-line marketing spends.

Some Fresh Ideas

Some of the projects I’ve been asked to look at have fantastic potential. (BTW I decided some time back not to identify future projects publicly). I’m really keyed-up for some of the projects I going to be working on this year.

I’ve also been doing quite some thinking about widgets and web services, which I think offer a great means to promote your site. I think we’ll be seeing quite a lot of new widgets this year (decent widgets can serve as great link bait).

Some of my vacation free time (almost an oxymoron) has been used up with keyword research – one tool I use has turned up some great keyword phrases with decent volumes that have mapped well to domains (and Google’s private domain registration services for $10 have me totally sucked in ). Ill be working on a few proprietary projects in the coming months whenever client work allows.

Finally a Freebie Offer

I post quite a bit over on the Google Webmaster Group (‘Red Cardinal‘) trying to help out others who have issues with Google. It’s all voluntary, and I get great satisfaction from just a little bit of typing.

It makes a lot of sense to thank the people who have read my blog and taken the time to comment. I really am grateful to everyone who’s been in touch or just dropped by. So to give something back here’s a little new year offer for you guys:

If you leave a comment with your URL I will do my best to respond with a review of your site complete with some free advice on how to rank better.

I’ll keep this open for a week or so (as I type this I’m a little worried no one will take me up – go on it’s free!).

Want to read more?

1. Another Great Free Online Maketing Offer
2. Free CRO Offer – Only 3 Days Remaining
3. Normal Services Will Resume Shortly

RSS is a really great transport for delivering your content to the widest possible Internet audience. Unfortunately it appears that no one bothered to tell Ireland’s top media and news organisations.

Today I spent a couple of hours in a client’s office checking in and catching up. I had previously worked with them re-engineering and formalising their business processes (yep, aside from the SEO I work as a business consultant).

We were talking about lead generation and market analysis and I suggested using a reader to pull in RSS feeds from the Irish newspapers.

I don’t personally read any feeds from Irish papers, but I knew that the Irish Times had a feed. I was pretty sure that Tom Doyle over at 2bscene had pulled this feed into a site he had created and promoted (a solicitors website which I think makes a great SEO case study – in fact so much so that I have already spoken to Tom about using in a forthcoming post).

Anyhow, I set up a Google account, loaded the excellent new Google Reader and set about finding the required feeds.

The Irish Times was the first site I hit, and I was delighted to see multiple feeds for various channels (news, property etc.). RTE.ie offered four news feeds, but the channels were a bit too broad for our requirements. From here on in things went downhill (fell off a cliff actually):

1. Unison.ie (Irish/Sunday Independent) – NO FEEDS
2. Sunday Business Post – NO FEEDS
3. Sunday Tribune – NO FEEDS
4. Irish Examiner – NO FEEDS

As a last resort I even tried Business World. You guessed it – NO FEEDS.

Disbelief is the only word that I can use at this point. Of all the Irish websites, I really thought that newspapers and media companies would understand the power of syndication?

To be quite honest, I suppose I shouldn’t really be surprised – the more time I spend looking at Ireland’s on-line ecosystem the more I see just how far behind many Irish sites have fallen. (And when I get the latest .ie stats from John McCormac over the weekend I plan on writing up an analysis of just how bad the situation really is.)

Want to read more?

1. Want Loyal Customers? Give Them What They Want How They Want It.
2. User Generated Content to Create New CNN Show
3. Another Distraction

It’s unusual to think that probably the richest and most powerful indigenous sector of the Irish economy is so poorly represented on-line.

I have been working with a company called The Real Dirtbusters, an industrial cleaning company, developing and optimising their on-line presence.

Their site went live around the third week in July and I have been watching the stats carefully to see how well the campaign is going.

One thing has surprised me quite a bit. Of all the pages on the site, one has seen more traffic and SE referrals than all others. That page was not created with SE’s in mind whatsoever but as part of the overall marketing plan for the website itself.

The page in question is the Clients Page which received over 35% of all hits on the site since July 20.

Checking the logs shows the following top 30 keyword conversions from organic Google search clickthroughs:

By now you should know the answer to the initial question I think.

However, what’s even stranger about this is that when you search for many of the construction companies in question, many of which are large corporations by anyone’s standards, you are often hard pressed to find their websites in the top 50 SERPs (if, of course, they have a website at all).

At least some of the searches made for these companies are likely to be potential home buyers looking for a particular development – very often you drive by hoardings or building sites which are heavily branded with developers logos and the like, so a subsequent search is likely to start with the developer’s name.

I can’t help but think that having better on-line findability may well increase company sales. And when the product is a new home with an average price of perhaps €400,000 the ROI on relatively small amount of Internet marketing could be exceptional.

As for The Real Dirtbusters? Well, although unexpected, these non-targeted key phrase hits are actually an added bonus. The clients page is often acting as a good landing page for the site.

This is evidenced by the average number of page views – the majority of visitors looking for construction companies looked at least one more page on the site – many looked a number of pages before leaving the site. So from a marketing perspective some of these searches are likely to result in the company’s visibility increasing in their key marketplace.

Is there a lesson that could be learnt from this? In a nutshell, publishing your client list on-line can be a great way to generate traffic to your website and increase the overall awareness of your company within your industry.

Want to read more?

1. We Clean Limited – www.dirtbusters.ie
2. 53% of Irish Companies Fail On-Line Search, Says Captivate Digital (Who Also Cannot Be Found)
3. YourCar.ie ‘Silly Stuff’ – More Like ‘Incredibly Offensive Stuff’

Based in Mulhuddart and run by Mick Kavanagh, Harry Mathews and Brendan Gaffney, the company provides cleaning services primarily to the construction industry. Even though you may not have heard of them, there’s a good chance you have seen their work firsthand if you were one of the 80,000 new home buyers last year. Well to be accurate, if you were 16,000 of the 80,000 or so new home buyers last year. Yep they clean about 1 in every 5 new residential builds in Ireland.

Back in January 2005 Brendan Gaffeny, who I had studied with at TCD (and climbed Kilimanjaro with), asked me to take a look at some business processes they were having problems with at the time. Having previously worked with process flow management I was happy to take a look. So started my relationship with Mick, Harry and Brendan.

Since then there have been countless changes to their business and they have developed a very successful operation that is the clear leader in their field. I reckon they have managed the business incredibly well over the last year or so. So much so that I think they will be very well positioned to increase market share in the event of any property market downturn (don’t even get me started on the Irish property market – in a word ‘crazy’).

Anyhow, they have asked me to put together a website for them, and, more importantly, perform the necessary SEO to get the site ranked for the keywords. Yesterday we went live with the first pages of the site and next week the online promotion of the site begins.

Want to read more?

1. Estate Agents sell MyHome.ie
2. Funda Ireland Pulling Down The Shutters
3. Happy Birthday Red Cardinal