Category: Google

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Google Shopping – Why You Should Be Using It

Rake It In With Google Shopping
Rake It In With Google Shopping

If you are selling online you need to be using Google Shopping. Yes, I know creating the data feed is a major pain in the neck, but there’s no reason why you can’t start out small.

Choose your top 20 products and get those into a data feed and you’ll find out that Google Shopping ads in AdWords really work. There’s nothing like strong success to help you know that you need to add 20 more product and so on.

It is cheaper and gives you better control if you can build your own Google Data Feed. Some new shopping carts even create it for you with minimal additional massaging on your end.

If you really can’t get the hang of creating your own data feed, you can use a service like Lexity to build the feed and then add a percentage to clicks you get in Google and Bing using their data feed.

Either way with Google putting Google Shopping elements mixed in with organic results, and the fact that several Google Shopping items can appear at the same time as well as your own regular Google AdWords program, you can really start to blanket your market and boost online exposure for your store.

Don’t let time or trouble hold you back. The benefits from using Google Shopping are real and the return is big!

Need help with AdWords? We’re in the top 6% of all Google Partners for performance. Check out our services and pricing.

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Global SEO Tips Part Two

ELooking at Global SEO
Looking at Global SEO

Continued from Monday…

  1. Make sure to use the correct meta tag for language in the header like this – <metaname=”language” content=”spanish”>
  1. Make sure to localize the content of each site. For example in the UK organization is spelled organisation. It is best to have a country native read the content and help to make edits based on how people really speak in that country – even English for the UK and Australia.
  1. This was an interesting tip I found: “Local hosting: If you have ccTLD or set the geo targeting in Google webmaster tools, local hosting does not have much of an incremental impact in most countries as a geo signal. However, it still helps hugely in some countries especially China.” http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2334892/international-seo-tips-what-are-the-game-changing-factors Google goes on to say: “We do, however, recommend making sure that your website is hosted in a way that will give your users fast access to it (which is often done by choosing hosting near your users).”
  1. “HrefLang” XML sitemap: Many websites have problem with a different country page ranking in a country. It may be caused by the fact that your International website is using ccTLD and cannot set the geo targeting or the local site not having enough links from local websites. “HrefLang” XML sitemap was created to help those website owners. Basically, it maps the URL of the page ranking with the URL of the page you want to rank instead. It even works across domains. Once you match the pages one to one for each of the country/language combinations, and indexed by Google, you will quickly see the right pages replace the old ones in each market.” For more great info on this topic visit this wonderful resource page http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2334892/international-seo-tips-what-are-the-game-changing-factors
  1. Metadata – language and country code: You should place “content-language” meta tag indicating the language and country in the <head> section of webpages. It tells engines the target audience by language and country of the created page. The code looks like this: <meta http-equiv=”content-language” content=”en-us”> You change “en-us” for other language and country such as “en-uk” for U.K. English and “de-at” for Austrian German. While Google doesn’t weigh this signal as heavily as geo targeting, it still helps with other search engines. You can read more on this topic here: http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2334892/international-seo-tips-what-are-the-game-changing-factors
  1. Work on getting some local links for each new country specific website. If you don’t have any, Google will most likely not show the domain in the search engine results. Start first by linking the US parent website to all new global sites. Then see if you can get local business partners and chambers of commerce to link to the new local site regionally.  Setting up LinkedIn and social profiles for the staff at the new location may be helpful as those links will point back to the newly created region specific website, but look for additional links as well.
  1. Blogging for these small regional websites may be very important for slow link building growth which would be good for Google.
  1. Make sure to set up Google and Bing Local pages for these new websites. Again the links from these social and map properties help Google to understand that these are like new branch offices for you.

Need help with your strategy to get more visibility on the Web? Check out our services at www.McCordWeb.com today!

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Global SEO Tips for Spin-Off Websites Part One

ELooking at Global SEO
Looking at Global SEO

Do you want to reach more customers? Do you have office in far flung countries? Are you not sure how to go about doing SEO for multiple countries?

Here are my tips for global SEO.

1. Get a separate country specific domain so that you look like a real resident. Make sure in the contact information you list the local office and phone number. You can also reference the US information as well but at the website footer and in the header only the country specific address and phone number should be used.

2. Preferably, for country websites that are not English speakers, the website should be in the country’s native language. However readers will assume that when they call they will be speaking to someone fluent in their own language. If your staffing does not allow for this, then leave the website in English, but use the local address and local phone number.

3. Google will not identify websites in other languages as duplications of your own site penalizing you. Which is good news. However for the English speaking countries, you should use the meta tag for Canonical URL just so Google does assign a penalty.

“You might have avoided setting up a .co.uk counterpart for your .com site for fear of Google deeming this as “duplicate content,” since there’s not much of a language difference. However, Google now supports using the rel=“canonical” link element across different domains. This means you can have similar content on both the .com and .co.uk extensions of your site, and use the canonical link element to indicate the exact URL of the domain preferred for indexing. This will make duplicate content a non-issue. Also, keep in mind that this is not required when using different languages. Google does not consider foreign language translations to be duplicate content. But keep in mind that it is something to consider for multiple locale sites in the same language.” For more great info visit this page. 

5. If you decide instead of doing new domains to do subdirectory domains, then make sure a sitemap is done for each subdirectory domain and feed it to the Google Search Console using a different URL in the account. Or for new domains, make sure to implement the Google Search Console, create a site map and select the targeted country in the Google Search Console.

Check back on Wednesday for more tips for Global SEO.

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Should You Be Owned by Google or Microsoft?

My Outlook Calendar
My Outlook Calendar

Oh how I love all things digital. I love having a smartphone to connect on the go. I love collaborating with my assistant using Microsoft’s OneDrive, I love to share things with my writers in Google Drive, I love Outlook, and I love the Google Calendar. But at some point in time you have to decide who will “own” you.

My conundrum is that I love Windows 10’s Cortana. I want to use her as my personal assistant more and more, but she does not interface with my Outlook email application. Cortana adds any appointments I ask her to make to my online OneDrive calendar and not my Outlook desktop calendar.

Google’s online calendar on the other hand, does not connect readily or easily with Outlook. Oh sure, you can let Google get its hooks into your entire business process with Google Apps and get syncing into Outlook, or you can buy Companion Link which acts as a bridge between your Google Calendar and Outlook. Which is what I did, but now I am having an increased problem with duplicate appointments appearing now in both calendars when I sync.

Oh how I want to streamline things, yet stay uber connected – my way and without all the privacy issues connecting to Google brings. I want the best of Google and the best of Microsoft all rolled into one super connected platform that connects with my desktop, Android tablet, and Android phone as well as my laptop all together (but just my calendar for now).

For the next 30 days I will try to calendar all my appointments solely in Google and then the next month solely in OneDrive. I’ll let you know how it goes the good bad and the ugly. So today, my test starts! Welcome to the world of Google!