Why is Play.com no.1?
Following on from recent articles on Google optimization, I’m going to look at how to do a competitor analysis. But in our example today, we’ll see that there are some subtleties to the three rules I’ve covered.
If you search for ‘dvds’ on Google, you’ll see that Play.com is no.1. The site: command reveals 546,000 instances of ‘dvds’. The link: command gives 1,460 sites linking to Play. All good so far, except that Play.com doesn’t validate on W3C at all, but the code’s reasonable enough for Google to index.
But if we look at the no.2 entry on Google, we see it’s Amazon.co.uk. What’s surprising is that Amazon has an amazing 10,300,000 instances of ‘dvds’ listed on Google, and 126,000 sites linking to Amazon (Amazon were one of the early pioneers of affiliate marketing).
So if we turn to Alexa we’d expect to see Play.com running with much higher traffic right? In actual fact, Alexa’s comparison shows the opposite.
Play.com appears to score more weakly on all conventional SEO (search engine optimisation) wisdom. We’re left with two possibilities, either Google is manipulating the results (possible, but unlikely), or there’s a further reason for Play.com’s success.
The reason is relevance. Relevance is a cornerstone of Google philosophy, and one of its benchmark is keyword density. Keyword density is a measure of how many times a keyword occurs relative to the other words in the website. Amazon’s problem, is its breadth of product (problem in inverted commas!). So, whilst it has a lot of dvds, it also has an awful lot of other things. Amazon’s keyword density for ‘dvd’ is only 1.83%, whereas Play’s is 2.86%, which is enough to give it edge.
How to win on Google - Part 3
3. Volume - size is everything
Yesterday I spoke about how Google works out what’s important and what’s not. Ultimately, volume is the final arbiter, almost regardless of the first two points. We’ve seen sites that are pretty poor on standards compliance, and hyperlinking, but are at the coveted no.1 slot, courtesy of overwhelming popularity.
So for example, if you’re pitching against ebay, or the BBC, no matter what you do on content, and hyperlinking, you’re not going to win the pitchwar unless you generate higher traffic.
But how can you know what your competitors are doing on traffic?
Let me introduce you to Alexa. Alexa is a traffic ranking company, they give you a view on relative traffic, rather than absolute traffic, you can see how you’re performing relative to a customer, but it won’t give you absolute figures. If you’re fighting for a no.1 slot on Google, Alexa will tell you immediately what the score is with volume. Alexa will plot your site against your competitor, so you can see exactly what you need to do to achieve a Google win.
How to win on Google - Part 2
2. The power of the hyperlink
Ok, let’s assume you’ve got a site full of rich content, properly styled, and fully indexed by Google. Let’s also assume you’re changing your content on a regular basis, so Google knows your site is relevant and up-to-date.
When you search for ‘offshore content’ on Google.co.uk, Google will return 28,800,800 results. How does it determine the No.1 result? (It’s Webreality in case you were wondering).
One of the principal ways Google weighs the value of sites is the number of sites linking to your site. You can check how many people Google thinks are linking to your site by running the link: command. Type the following into the Google search bar:
You’ll see that there are currently 188 sites linking to Webreality.
But all links are not equal. A link from Webreality on your site is good (Webreality has a PageRank of 5/10), but a link from bbc.co.uk would be even better (BBC has a PageRank of 9/10).
PageRank is Google’s system for ranking web pages. Webreality’s PageRank is actually quite high for a provincial web agency, and as we link to our clients (and they to us), we can usually start our customers off with a PageRank of 4/10.
So your next step is to run the link: command and see who’s linking to you. After that you need to talk to me about building your Google footprint.
How to win on Google - Part 1
I’ve spoken to most of my customers about how to get to the top of Google, but here’s a quick refresher course for those of you who’ve missed it. Part 1.
1. Content is King!
Google has been founded on principles of legitimacy and relevancy. In simple terms, if you’ve got good content you will start to rise to the top. If you’re a Webreality customer, you are lucky, you are using reWrite, and we’ve produced a site that is W3C compliant, and will therefore be fully indexed by Google.
You can check to see how well your site’s been indexed on Google, by typing site:yoururl.com into the Google Search box. This tool is also handy for checking indexing on a particular keyword, (site:yoururl.com keyword). So a search of content on Webreality’s site looks like:
site:www.webreality.co.uk content
I’ll be writing future articles on how-to write good content for Google, but for now, it would be worth thinking about developing a content strategy for your company. You won’t get Google wins without it.
Community and Blogging
Last year, when we authored and managed the Elect Jersey website, we saw the power of blogging. For the first time, Jersey voters had a voice that went beyond the official media, and with over 2000 unique visitors a day, it’s no exaggeration to say that the site influenced the electoral outcome.
We used Community Server as the engine for blogging and forum management on Elect Jersey, and we are currently in the process of integrating Community Server into reWrite2.0.
A blog (web log) is like a personal on-line diary, but crucially it lets your audience interact directly with you. I think it’s going to play a vital rule in building community around business, or rather business around community.
Yesterday, I spoke to David Warr at Cooper & Co, about his goals for his business. David runs a highly successful coffee roasting and distribution company. David has extremely deep product knowledge and a passion for sourcing coffee from ethical sources (ethicalpartnership.org). He now plans to use blogging as a tool to share his vision and build a community of customers.
But blogging also gives you a razor-sharp insight into what to do when things go wrong. Last year Krytonite, the leading manufacturer of bike locks, suffered from a blog that detailed how to pick the lock with a Bic pen. Krptonite’s slowness, and failure to engage is well catalogued on Steve Rubel’s blog.
I’d strongly recommend Jeremy Wright’s Blog Marketing as essential reading.
Opening Post
I’m the MD of Webreality which is a web agency in Jersey, Channel Islands UK. We are a team of 6.
I want to use this blog to engage with new and existing customers. Webreality is different from many agencies, in that we sell a service rather than a website. We host all of our client websites in Jersey, and the sites are powered by our own content management system, rewrite.
Jersey’s a great place, with £200 billion under management at any one time, this small 9×5 mile island 14 miles off the French coast is an amazing concentration of excellence. This concentration of resource, and the flux of labour, means that service providers operate at a very high level. Webreality and its peers are often pitching for national brands, but the decisions are still often made offshore. As a consequence, we’ve got quite good at what we do.
Because most of our customers are on ongoing contracts with Webreality, we’d like to use this blog as a means for interacting more directly with you. We’re driving development of rewrite hard, and this should provide you with an opportunity to respond directly to us.
I’d also like to use the blog as an opportunity to share our latest thinking on eMarketing and search engine optimisation.
Your comments will make this extremely worthwhile. So thanks in advance.