The Reciprocal Consulting Blog

Google+ Hangouts just keeps getting better. Did you know you can livestream your hangouts over YouTube, and even on your own website?

It’s true. All you need is a computer, a Google+ account, and a webcam. Then you can plan, schedule, and broadcast your very own Hangout. You can use your Hangout for anything you want. Here are a few ways you can use Google+ Hangouts:

• Hold a series of classes or workshops
• Host a webinar
• Answer customer service questions in realtime
• Take care of customer service issues with multiple people having the same problem at the same time
• Make an important announcement about your business
• Introduce a new product or service
• Conduct private business meetings
• Present awards, promotions or other honors across great distances

I’m sure you can think of other uses for Google+ Hangouts. The cool thing about Hangouts is that they are free. Instead of paying for meeting or webinar meetings, you can have them on Google+ for free. And you can livestream them over YouTube or your own website – again, for free.

Innovative online marketers are always trying something new and always testing the latest technology available to them. Google+ Hangouts is still new enough that you can be on the ground floor.

We’ve been saying for over a year now that SEO has changed dramatically for the long term. In fact, it has changed so drastically from what it used to be that it is hardly recognizable any more. Much of the advice we’ve given over the years no longer is valid. And it’s Google’s fault.

Now I’m no doomsdayer, and I’m not one who typically jumps on the SEO-is-dead bandwagon. We go through this about once a year, at least. And now there is someone else asking the same old question: Is SEO dead?

Nell Terry makes some good points, and I agree for the most part. Google isn’t changing things around just to target the SEO industry, however, they aren’t trying to make it easy for us either. They want us to get discouraged, maybe even give up. But that’s only because so much of SEO has become nothing more than spam, and Google has a valid economic interest in getting rid of the spam.

I particularly like this paragraph:

I think many techniques are outdated – think keyword placement, strict numbers games, community optimization. It’s about creating a presence in your industry and making a name for yourself in order to climb the SERPs.

What this says, and I agree, is that SEO tactics you were using two years ago probably aren’t going to work today, but that’s not a bad thing. SEOs will just have to learn to adjust. But here are three things that I think are still important, and probably always will be:

1. Great content that doesn’t stray off topic – it must be focused
2. Social signals are a big driving force today
3. Your reputation as a content producer is paramount

In light of these three hard truths, if you are an online content producer, it’s time to start thinking about author reputation. Start today.

If you haven’t heard of AuthorRank yet, allow me to be the first to let you in on the secret. Google is planning some big changes in how website content is ranked. In fact, the plan is already underway. The key is your reputation as an author.

Five years ago, or even three years ago, Google didn’t have the resources available to be able to separate content according to who wrote it. Now they do. That big resource, which you’ve likely heard of by now, is Google+. If you want your author reputation to expand and grow, then you should join Google+ now.

Google+ is often billed as just another social network, but I assure you it’s not. This is Google’s flagship search engine marketing arm.

More and more, Google is ranking content by the reputation of the person who wrote it. That means more than simply having an article rank well for your name when someone Google’s your name. It also means that when someone Google’s a specific key phrase, if you’ve written about that topic and you have a credible reputation according to Google’s AuthorRank algorithm, then you’ll rank for that key phrase. This is the new search engine optimization.

AuthorRank is a big deal. If you want to learn more about it, give us a ring. The future begins now.

Google+, of all the social networks, has more notification triggers that allow you to connect with other users. They’re all easy to use, and I’d say that the social service owned by the largest search engine is adding more notification triggers every day.

Here are 15 Google+ notification triggers, hence 15 reasons to use Google+:

1. Share a post with another G+ user – Simply sharing a post with someone will notify them that they are on your mind.
2. Mention them in a post – Type “+” and the user’s name with no break in between. They’ll be notified that they’ve been mentioned in a post.
3. Share a post, be in a circle – If you’re in a circle that someone is following and you share a post, then they’ll be notified.
4. Comment on a post they created.
5. Add them to a circle – Simply adding someone to one of your circles will notify them that you are interested in them.
6. Comment on a post they’ve commented on – If a post is really popular, you’ll get a lot of notifications. I sometimes mute posts because it just gets to be too much.
7. Tag someone in a photo – Upload a photo and tag them.
8. Tag one of their photos – If someone else uploads a photo and you add a tag to it, they’ll be notified.
9. Suggest new people to add to their circles – The equivalent to an online handshake.
10. Suggest a profile photo for them.
11. Start a conversation with them – Type “+” and their name with no break and start a conversation.
12. Send them an invitation to an event – Events are one of the latest features to be added to Google+, and they’re growing in popularity.
13. Comment on a photo they’ve commented on.
14. Comment on a photo they are tagged in or that they tagged.
15. Perform any activity on an event they created.

Now think about how you can use these 15 notification triggers on Google+ to market your business more effectively.

Google is more than just a search engine. The big media company also has tools to help content producers come up with ideas for blog posts and other content – both on and off of your websites. Here are 6 ways you can use Google to come up with more content ideas.

1. Google AdWords External Keyword Research Tool – The AdWords External Keyword Research Tool was designed to help potential advertisers come up with ideas for targeted keywords in their ads, but it has become a great tool for webmasters to use in discovering new keywords to use in their content strategies.
2. Google Suggest – When you search Google you’ll see drop-down suggestions in the search box. These are actual phrases that searchers have used. They are the most popular searches related to the one you are trying to make, and Google Suggest shows these to you as you are typing. Take note. They are wonderful keyword suggestions for your content marketing.
3. Google+ Trending Topics – Join Google+. On your content stream you’ll see the top 5 trending topics on Google+.
4. Google Alerts – Google Alerts allows you to keep tabs of specific keyword phrases that are important to you. You’ll get an e-mail notification every time one of your keywords is mentioned anywhere online.
5. Google Trends – Recently, Google merged the old Google Trends and Insights for Search into one all new product – the new Google Trends. You can type in a keyword and see how that keyword has trended over time. You’ll see how many searchers searched for information on that topic by geo-location and other important metrics.
6. Google Zeitgeist – Google Zeitgeist is a Google report that tells what searchers looked for each year. This annual report is a great tool for coming up with new content ideas.

If you want to come up with new content ideas, try one of these Google services. Or try them all. They’re free.

If you’re on the back side of life, or approaching it, then you likely remember the old TV commercials featuring the Pepsi-Coke blind taste test. Well, Bing – the search engine – has something similar going on. In their own version of the blind taste test, Bing takes Google on and, according to its own study results, is winning.

I find this quite intriguing. I think the results depends on your search queries. I tried it on what I consider very low results search queries. That is, these are non-popular search queries that likely aren’t searched often, but when they are searched for they are searched for by a specific niche market individual who knows what they want. Bing won a round out of five and there were two draws.

Two draws! I think that’s something to brag about, if you ask me.

I suppose it’s possible that on more popular search queries, Bing could very well win. Perhaps they’re targeting the more popular search queries.

But anyway, if you care to take the Bing blind test, you can head on over to the Bing It On website and take the test for yourself.

This is an aggressive marketing tactic. But will it result in Googlers converting to Bing? Only time will tell. If it does, Bing could become a major player in the search engine war. But if not, I guess we’ll just all be stuck with Google for a little while longer.

Custom URLs are the way to go. If at all possible, if a social network or web property offers you a custom URL, take it. And I mean, if you can get it before someone else does, hop on it FAST.

Google+ is the latest social network to offer custom URLs. Unfortunately, they’re not available for everyone just yet. But when Google finally announces that anyone can have the custom URL of their dreams, you should get there as fast as you can to get yours. Especially if you have a common name like John Smith.

The great thing about custom URLs is that they are custom. There is only one. No one else can have the URL that you have and you can brand it so that it enhances the benefit you get from participating in a social network.

Facebook has had custom URLs for three years now. If you search for someone by name on Facebook and they have a custom URL, you are more likely to find the person you are looking for. The person who owns the username URL on Facebook has a bigger benefit from everyone else using Facebook with the same name. Google+ is soon to share that benefit.

So, the Google+ benefit is about to get better. And what are those benefits?

1. Better SEO
2. Reputation management
3. Social networking tied to search engine marketing
4. Branding
5. Unlimited personal power

Google+ is about to get better. Don’t stay away from it for too much longer.

It seems like more and more I am reading SEO doomsday reports. Some SEO or Internet marketer I’ve never heard of starts squeaking about how Google is killing SEO with its recent algorithm changes or merging of services. Here’s the problem: Google has been making algorithm changes for over a decade. This is nothing new.

And Google has added and taken away services almost as rapidly. This is nothing new.

I think SEO has a long life ahead of it. Yes, there will be changes. There will be adjustments. These are a part of life. If you want to survive online, then you’ll have to learn to adjust to the adjustments. But don’t blame Google or the search engine optimization community. Things change.

That said, I do think search engine optimization is getting harder. One of the reasons for all the changes is to kill SEO spam. As spammers get smarter about their tactics, the search engines have to get smarter about theirs. And when they do they make it harder for all the rest of us. Even legitimate SEO professionals.

I’ve learned to see this as a natural and necessary part of the SEO business. Every profession has its hazards and one of the hazards of the SEO profession is constant change. We just have to keep plugging away and getting better at what we do.

We said it would happen and here it is. Google+ is being integrated into the SERPs as “discussed on Google+.”

This isn’t quite how we envisioned this would happen, but it’s not surprising. Google is constantly surprising us with innovations. The fact that Google+ has finally been integrated in the search results is enough proof that you should be using this new social media service. If you haven’t signed up for your Google+ profile yet, now is the time to do so.

I think it’s just a matter of time before you see nested Google+ comments in your search engine results.

Imagine searching for a particular topic and finding out that a couple dozen of your Google+ friends have mentioned that topic on comments to another person’s post. You may see their comment in your search engine results along with the original post on which they commented. If they all commented on different original posts, then perhaps you’ll get a list of those along with the nested comments.

There are a lot of ways this could be rolled out. Google is saying it’s a test, and it may very well be. But tests generally lead to practices – if they go well.

Keep an eye on Google+. I think you’ll see more Google+ content appear in your SERPs real soon.

In a recent interview with Eric Enge, head of Google’s webspam team Matt Cutts outright says that local businesses can escape the thin content rule using just a few sentences on a web pages about a particular store location in a particular city.

Here’s the scenario: Let’s say you own a chain of restaurants and that you have restaurants in 100 cities across the south. So you build a separate page on your website for each city. Instead of publishing the same 2 or 3 paragraphs about each location on every page, which would not be helpful to visitors and not be good food for search engines, just write a couple of sentences about each location that is unique to that location. That’s not thin content, Matt Cutts says.

Here’s the actual exchange between Matt Cutts and Eric Enge:

Eric Enge: Let’s switch gears a bit. Let’s talk about a pizza business with stores in 60 cities. When they build their site, they create pages for each city.
Matt Cutts: Where people get into trouble here is that they fill these pages with the exact same content on each page. “Our handcrafted pizza is lovingly made with the same methods we have been using for more than 50 years …”, and they’ll repeat the same information for 6 or 7 paragraphs, and it’s not necessary. That information would be great on a top-level page somewhere on the site, but repeating it on all those pages does not look good. If users see this on multiple pages on the site they aren’t likely to like it either.
Eric Enge: I think what site owners may argue is that if someone comes in from a search engine and lands on the Chicago page, and that is the only page they see on the site, they want to make their best pitch on that page. That user is also unlikely to also go visit the site’s Austin pizza page.
Matt Cutts: It is still not a good idea to repeat a ton of content over and over again.
Eric Enge: What should they put on those pages then?
Matt Cutts: In addition to address and contact information, 2 or 3 sentences about what is unique to that location and they should be fine.
Eric Enge: That won’t be seen as thin content?
Matt Cutts: No, something like that should be fine.

That should clear up any confusion for local businesses with multiple locations within their city or chains with multiple locations across multiple cities who want to have a web page for every location on their websites. You can escape the thin content rule if you do it with finesse and have unique content about each of your locations.

Rumors have been flying that Google was about to introduce a new tablet to compete with the Kindle Fire. Well, I’ll kill the rumors right now. It’s happened.

But what does this mean for content creators?

For starters, if you write e-books, then there’s one more readership market for you. I expect the Google Nexus 7 to grow into one of the top 3 tablets on the market – right next to the Kindle Fire and Apple’s iPad. The price is right in line with the Kindle Fire at $199, which means that the Nexus 7 is competing directly against Amazon’s tablet and less so against Apple’s.

But a tablet is more than just an e-reader. You can also watch videos, listen to music, and play games on it. And with Google Play providing the content, consumers have access to everything their counterpart consumers with competitors have.

So Is This A Marketing Opportunity For You?

I see every new technology and device as a marketing opportunity. You should too.

I think it will prove to be a great opportunity for video marketers. Videos are some of the most enjoyed content on tablets and since Google owns YouTube you’ll no doubt see a lot of that on the Nexus 7. In fact, the Nexus 7 comes equipped with all of your favorite apps including YouTube, Chrome, Google+, and Gmail.

Have you noticed that one thing is constant at Google? That one thing is, Change. It comes at us daily.

Why does Google make so many changes so often?

I think Google has one goal in mind. To make its search products better. By doing so, they’re aiming at making the Internet better. And of course to increase their profits. That’s a given.

One of the latest changes at Google is the incorporation of Google Local into Google+. If you own a local business and you have a local listing, then it makes sense to also have a Google+ account now that these two services are tied together. The recent changes are pretty much forcing us all to succumb to Google’s dominion.

Another recent change at Google (Google Local specifically) is the removal of stars from business reviews. As Mike Blumenthal says, this change will result in fewer reviews on your Google Local listing and you will have to focus on the quality of your content and authorship markup. You should be doing that anyway.

If that isn’t enough, Google has also recently announced that Webmaster Tools is being completely integrated into Google Analytics. So if you want to use Webmaster Tools you’ll have to have a Google Analytics account.

What do you think about these changes? Are they good or bad? Will you start using, if you aren’t already, Google+ and Google Analytics?

Have you ever wished you could broadcast a video online in real time to an audience of thousands of eager watchers? It won’t be long before you can.

I like this idea. It’s about as sublime an idea as I can think of. But what does it take?

1. First, it takes a Google+ account. If you haven’t signed up for a Google+ account, then I’d suggest you do so. This is only going to get better.
2. Secondly, you need a YouTube account. If you don’t have one, sign up for one now. Remember to sync your YouTube account and your Google+ account by using the same login address.
3. Start a Google+ hangout. Invite people. Enjoy the hangout.

The Google+ Hangouts on Air hasn’t been rolled out publicly yet, but when it does go public, you’ll then be able to have a recording of your hangout post automatically to your Google+ stream and your YouTube account. Then, you and the other participants, as well as people watching the recording after the event, can discuss it. That’s powerful video marketing.

In fact, it’s the most powerful video marketing ever. After all of that, you’ll be able to share the video on Facebook, Twitter, LinkIn, and wherever else you have a social media presence.

Google+ Hangouts is already a powerful feature of the new social network owned by Google. When you add the ability to record your hangout and have it post automatically to YouTube – well, you can’t beat it. It isn’t exactly realtime (thought the event itself is), but it’s just one step away.

An SEO company conducted an experiment with a well done control test that sheds some light on the connection between organic search rankings and social media promotion. The conclusion is that Google+ promotion increases search rankings. I think there may be some nuances this test doesn’t touch on, but it looks pretty reasonable to me that they’ve drawn the right conclusion.

I have noticed that Google+ is a good reputation management tool.

If you look at the results of the study, they seem to indicate that acquiring new Google+ followers is the best activity for increasing one’s search engine rankings, but that could be misleading. The results are based on gaining just 100 new followers. Would the results be the same if the number of new followers were 1,000? How about 5,000?

Next in line for increasing search engine rankings is getting +1s. It actually makes sense that getting more +1s would increase search engine rankings. This doesn’t surprise me at all.

That Facebook promotion actually does increase Google rankings does surprise me a little bit. But I’m glad to see that it happens. Facebook has done a lot to make itself a walled garden so a lot of your activity isn’t measured by Google. Evidently, Likes and shares are.

Tweets and retweets can also increase search engine rankings, but only by a smidgen. The only thing that surprises me about this is that the results are much lower than expected. I’d have thought that Twitter promotion would do more to increase search engine rankings.

Finally, simply acquiring new Twitter followers not only doesn’t help, but there was a slight decrease in search engine rankings. That’s another surprise. But this might not have anything to do with Twitter. If no other social media activity took place, then the slight decrease in search engine rankings might have been as a result of that lack of activity.

Given these results, it seems to reason that if you engaged in Google+, Facebook, and Twitter promotions simultaneously, then your search engine rankings should improve relative to the amount of activity engaged by your competition. Nice test. I’m glad someone undertook it.

One of the good things about Google is that it is constantly updating its indexing and ranking practices to make its search engine better. This of course has some drawbacks. One of those drawbacks is that the search index itself will never be perfect.

Chris Crum at WebProNews illustrates how Google’s freshness update doesn’t always return the most relevant search result for a particular search query. By the same token, freshness also means that Google won’t always return the most recent search result possible for any given search query.

That last point is mentioned in this 10-point list on SEOmoz.

Google’s freshness update makes it more difficult to engineer effective search engine optimization campaigns. But I wouldn’t use that as an excuse not to try. I’m just saying that freshness makes it more difficult to guess how Google will react to the ever-changing landscape of content marketing.

For any given query, Google could return the most relevant-but-dated search results, the most recent search results that come close to matching, or a mixture of the two. We hope that most of the time it will be a mix.

While freshness changes things for Internet marketers and SEOs, it doesn’t change a lot. Our job is still to write the best content we can create about the topics we are writing about. If we do that well and we can beat the competition, then we should get search engine rankings for the short term as well as for the long term.

Google has always had it out for webspam. After all, it dilutes the search engine’s search results and makes it difficult for real quality content to rank as high as it should. That’s why webmasters should kill the spam before Google does.

Yesterday Google announced another algorithm update that will address some of the ongoing webspam issues. In January, the company addressed content quality with an algorithm that punished web pages with too many ads at the top.

It behooves you to keep an eye on what Google, and all the search engines, are up to so that you don’t run afoul of their policies. By keeping your site “clean” – or free of spam – you increase your chances of ranking well for your keywords.

Many an innocent business owner has found herself slipping in rankings because of some algorithmic change that addressed a problem that the business owner didn’t know was a problem. You might think you are following search engine guidelines only to discover that the practices you’ve been engaged in are practices the search engines don’t favor.

The best way to protect yourself from algorithmic changes that make your site good today and not-so-good tomorrow is to follow the search engine blogs and stay up-to-date on their policies. But if you can’t do that – admittedly, it is nearly a full-time task – then hire an SEO firm that does keep on top of industry changes and tries to steer clear of objectionable practices.

SEO is ever-changing. It requires daily practice and daily monitoring.

Incrementality is a term that is associated with how many PPC ad clicks are caused by a lack of similar organic results. In other words, if you have a PPC ad that targets a specific keyword phrase and you receive 100 ad clicks in the absence of an associated organic result, 50 of those are said to be incrememntal if they are not replaced by clicks on organic results when those organic results are present.

Let’s take a concrete example.

Let’s say you are targeting the keyword phrase “red banana.” If you have a PPC ad that you run periodically targeting that phrase and you get 100 clicks a day on that ad when there is no organic search result for your landing page, we’ll consider that your base of comparison. Now, let’s say you have an organic search result that appears alongside your PPC ad. If you get 50 clicks on the organic search result when it is present and 50 clicks on the PPC ad, then you do not have any incremental clicks on the ad. However, if you only get 25 clicks on the organic result and 50 clicks on the PPC ad, then 25% of your ad clicks are said to be incremental.

Google recently performed a study concerning incrementality on ad clicks.

The interesting thing about this study is that it shows that 50% of ad clicks are incremental when the advertiser has the top ranking for the targeted keyword phrase. If your organic result is in the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th positions, then advertisers’ incrementality rate is 81%. The incrementality rate is 96% for advertisers whose organic rankings are in the 5th position or lower.

While Google is careful to point out that individual advertisers will have differing results, this is a telling study. For one thing, it illustrates the importance of high organic search rankings. But it also says that PPC advertising is more important when your organic search rankings are lower.

If you had any lingering doubts that search engine optimization was still a valid form of marketing, you can put them to rest right now. According to WebProNews, search is up by 68% since 2008.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone really. While the hype these days is around social media, search is still getting a lot of air play.

The interesting thing is that Microsoft, or Bing, has gained the most ground in that time. Google has already increased the number of searches it gets. In fact, it’s share of the search market is almost 70%. Bing’s is just under 20%. And Yahoo!’s is falling.

For the first time in search history, Bing is actually No. 2 in terms of total market share. Yahoo! has fallen to No. 3.

And here’s another surprise: A few people are still using AOL.

What all this boils down to is that more people are searching for information online through search engines than ever before. That means that search engine optimization is no less important than it ever was. In fact, I’d say it’s more important now than it ever has been. And that will likely increase even more going into the future.

So let’s answer the all-important question: Why? Why is search growing?

I think it really boils down to one thing. More and more people are using the Internet. As the younger generation gets older that means more people enter into the information market. And older people are going online more and more each day as well. All that spells a huge increase in search driving up demand for professional search engine optimization.

Where people are searching there is a need for more information. That means you should be putting your marketing money into search. Even now.

For awhile webmasters were stuck on buying paid links. But link networks have pretty much gone by the wayside and I think the reason why is because their business model has been destroyed.

Google has built a great system for detecting bogus links. There are tell-tale signs that a link is a paid-for link and not a natural link. For instance, if you have the perfect anchor text for “viagra” on a website about pet ownership, then there’s a clear indication that you have a bought link.

There are other signs as well. Link sellers generally spin their content. So if you find articles online with similar content over and over again with a mix of irrelevant anchor text links, that’s likely a link seller’s page. Google Panda took care of a lot of those.

And then the big kicker. Google operatives.

Imagine trying to sell links to an unsuspecting webmaster, but that webmaster turns out to be a Google employee. Bam! You’re dead.

It’s much like the way drug dealers and law enforcement personnel work. The dealer tries to find strung out peeps to sell his drugs to, but he has no way of weeding out the real fiends and those playacting. Law enforcement actually has an advantage. They work undercover pretending to be the type of customer the drug dealer wants. When an offer is made, bam! Snagged.

Google has its undercover agents as well, and they’re pretty good. If you’re still buying paid links, you’re throwing your money away. You’d be better off buying content the old-fashioned way and marketing through high quality content that builds your reputation and your SEO.

Google now has a new service called Google Play. Go ahead, I encourage you to check it out.

The service has been available for a couple of weeks now, but just yesterday they added a link to Google Play on the Google black bar (for those of you logged into Google Plus). The big question: What does that mean?

It means that Google is serious about marketing Google Play. But should they be?

First, I’d like to say that the Google Play subdomain is quite colorful. Click the link and you’ll see. It’s got that Google simplicity the company has become famous for, but it’s quite colorful, which is a departure from most Google products.

Here’s where we get down to the gist of the service, however. And this is the simple part. There are really only 4 offerings:

• Music
• Books
• Movies
• Android Apps

This appears to be Google’s answer to the Apple iTunes store. But I hardly think it will compete. Apple fanboys are a loyal bunch and iTunes is quite popular. Those who are not Apple fanboys can go to Amazon – and most of them do. So what does Google Play have to offer that Amazon doesn’t? Nothing. Except Google Wallet.

And who uses Google Wallet?

I do like the fact that Google puts books on the same plane as movies and music. And of course Android Apps are pretty popular as well. If anything, this is what makes Google Play stand out more than anything. Android App lovers have one place to go for their favorite downloads. But there’s no PayPal option? Seriously? Come on Google.

If this is Google’s way of luring people into starting an account with Google Wallet, it’s a pretty feeble attempt. I’ll just go to Amazon. At least there I can use my own bank account or a credit card.

Nevertheless, as a producer of books, music, movies, or Android Apps, Google Play does offer another avenue for marketing your products. After all, someone will use it. And if someone uses it, then you should have your products in the store and market them.