Google has changed. At least when viewing results from the US, Finland, Greece, Romania and others:

It’s odd that in the UK, France, Hong Kong and other more civilised countries, we’re still seeing the old interface that suddenly looks a little dated:

What’s of particular interest is that the URLs are now being displayed above the page excerpts. The same applies to the AdWords ads.

Yesterday:

Tomorrow:

One other noteworthy change. At a higher resolution, you can see that there’s been a definite move to the left hand side of the browser.

Old and stale:

New and vibrant:

Prediction: people will either love it, hate it, not notice or not care!

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There are more myths of Search Engine Optimisation than any other field of online marketing. Too many companies follow bad advice, act on incorrect assumptions and miss out on an abundance of Google-originated targeted traffic.

Once the optimisation of the website is complete, mistakes often continue, with an astonishing number of businesses and individuals incorrectly measuring the results of their labours.

The following is a list of factors to consider when trying to gauge the results of your optimisation efforts.

Realistic expectations:

Time – don’t expect newly optimised pages to start ranking in first place a few days after uploading the changes. Even though new content may be indexed relatively quickly, it can take weeks, months or even longer for the full impact of the changes to take place.

Moving target - Google change their ranking factors on an ongoing basis, and both you and your competition are constantly adding new content, adjusting and reoptimising your websites. The result is a constantly changing environment. Never forget that rankings may rise or fall as a result of changes made by your competition. You can’t always take the blame or credit for the results.

Data depth – traffic from Google drying-up or exploding tomorrow means nothing. Short-term fluctuations are meaningless, as are small data samples. Looking at a trend over the last two weeks is as pointless as celebrating a 200% surge when you only get 4 visitors a day from Google.

Quantity vs. quality:

Quantity of traffic is meaningless. You may start getting an additional 200 visitors a day from Google, but if they’re looking for something that you’re not selling, then nothing has been achieved.

Ultimately the number of targeted visitors you get from Google is all that matters.

If most Google-originated visitors are leaving within a few seconds of arriving, then you’re either attracting the wrong people or the page they’re landing on isn’t working correctly.

Keep an eye on bounce rates, pages per visit and time on site to get a feel for what’s working and what isn’t. But be careful – see below.

Don’t blend your data:

Food blenders are great for making sauces, soups and smoothies, but blend everything and you end up with baby food.

The same applies to your SEO data.

When analysing organic keyword performance, you might notice a reasonable number of visitors for a targeted keyword that has a high bounce rate. With a little Analytics kung fu you should be able to isolate the page/s where this is occuring and then address the issue accordingly.

It’s important to remember that the data in your Analytics account is by default for the website as a whole. So if KEYWORD 1 has a 50% bounce rate, that might be spread across a number of pages, some of which are performing well, while others perform poorly.

Making decisions on keyword bounce rates has to be based on individual pages.

Get funky with Analytics:

Google Analytics allows you to quickly and easily segment your organic traffic from the search engines, and using Advanced Filters will identify which keywords are producing more than 50 visitors a day with bounce rates below 50%, for example.

Judicious use of these features will allow you to recognise two important data streams:

- traffic that should perform well but doesn’t – requiring optimisation of the relevant pages for conversion (aka the visitor experience)

- targeted, worthwhile visitors from Google – ultimately the true measure of success for your SEO efforts.

Don’t get distracted by…

- Rankings for specific keywords. These can change with alarming regularity, and never forget that results will vary according to location, search history, user settings and more. Ultimately the number of targeted visitors you get from Google is all that matters.

- The number of backlinks. Yes it’s a factor to take into consideration, but ultimately the number of targeted visitors you get from Google is all that matters.

- PageRank. If you’re still obsessing over this then there’s little I can do to help. Try to remember that it’s 2011. Ultimately the number of targeted visitors you get from Google is all that matters.

Notice a theme?

Ultimately the number of targeted visitors you get from Google is all that matters.

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I’m starting to feel that we’re about to enter interesting times.

This far, the history of the software industry has been relatively straightforward: growth of computer usage, growth of PCs, growth in internet usage.

All of which has been very good for software developers, with lower entry barriers, more customers and bigger opportunities.

Yet all of this may be starting to change, with the past few years seeing a number of market-changing developments.

We’re already used to…

1 – “Where can I buy it”

Your customers no longer have to buy out-of-date software from retail outlets, paying for shelf space, in-store advertising, packaging, delivery.

2 – “I want it now”

When your customer hears about your software, they can buy, install and start using it in less time than it takes to find a parking space outside a PC superstore.

3 – “Other options?”

Customers are no longer restricted to the number of applications stocked by their supplier. Choice is a great thing!

What’s started to happen:

1 – “Why should we pay that much?”

Thanks to Apple, customers are starting to realise that you can buy very good software for less than $1.

Yesterday’s PC bargain at $39.99 suddenly looks overpriced.

2 – “What cloud?”

The Cloud has become a reality. Like all great technologies, its main strength is that people don’t know it’s there.

3 – “Web in hand”

It wasn’t so long ago that accessing email on your mobile phone was cutting edge. Today my Dad has the internet on his phone.

What’s starting to happen:

1 - “The playing field is level but the rules are changing”

Apple’s App Store allows software developers to reach a huge number of people. But the hoops to jump through are awkward and restrictive. And you can forget your old pricing model.

2 – “It’s getting hot in here”

Go back a decade and selling software online was an opportunity to reach the world. Today, however, you’re also competing with the world. Standing out from the crowd has never been so difficult and more important.

3 – “The dumb get dumber”

AdWords is no longer an optional extra. You and your competitors are all doing it, and competition is intense. Unfortunately most AdWords account managers waste money and don’t realise it. You’re competing against people who spend too much, so your costs are higher, and your skills need to be sharper than ever before.

And so:

This isn’t the time to sit back and see what happens. You’ll get splinters from sitting on the fence.

The progressive software company needs to be tapping into all of the new opportunities long before they become the norm.

The industry is bloated and natural selection is underway. Make some noise.

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About once a week I’m asked what guarantees we offer for our services.

Sadly, in life and marketing there are no guarantees.

Yet of all our marketing services, it’s SEO that produces the most requests for a guarantee.

I could guarantee that you’ll be in the top-five listings for some of the keywords that we’ll optimise your website for.

So I can choose phrases with no competition, like “Who does Dave Collins think he is“.

I could guarantee that in the unlikely event we don’t achieve these positions for absurd keywords that no-one searches for, we won’t charge you next month.

Or I could just be honest and explain that we’ll make sure that your main pages are well optimised and correctly setup, but that ultimately much of ensuring your website ranks in first position for your chosen keywords lies beyond our control.

SEO usually works, and it often works very well.

But we won’t offer meaningless guarantees.

Update: Yes I do know this is a subject I wrote about less than four months ago in The myth of SEO guarantees, but the subject keeps coming up!

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It often appears that when companies grow beyond a certain size, no-one is responsible for actually caring about their customers.

There are people who care if unhappy customers mean a drop in revenue, but no-one who really loses sleep if a customer is getting a bad deal.

Software companies generally fall into one of two extremes. Their support is either outstanding or awful. Black or white.

I’ve experienced companies that do whatever it takes to make sure their customers are happy.

I’ve also experienced the other end of the spectrum; companies whose support is there to effectively fob-off unhappy customers.

I fully intended to name and shame the software company who have provided me with the worst support I have ever seen this week. But I won’t. There’s a recession on and it’s not the right time to sling mud, no matter how deserving it may be.

The bottom line is that I would have been happy with an apology and a refund. I understand that some technical issues are simply too obscure or complex to be worth fixing. But pushing the customer away with absurd claims and denials can be bad for business.

If you can’t fix it, say so.

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