First Rate has taken the top prize for the IAB Australia Awards 2011, in the Organic Search (SEO) category for our client Focus Property.

The awards were held last night in Sydney and we’re all stoked to have claimed the top prize amongst a high calibre of entrants. Judges commented that our entry was

“a very well laid out entry with a nice focus on the right aspects of SEO. The point of differentiation is that they ticked criteria for SEO but went above and beyond focusing on Longtail strategy.”

Award Winning Case Study: The Power of Longtail, Focus Property

The state of play

Focus Property is Sydney’s leading property management firm. Currently managing over a 1/4 billion dollars worth of residential real estate with in Sydney’s CBD. Focus Property enlists services such as sales, letting and property management.

Our client operates in a highly competitive market with many large and established players, such as Ray White, LJ Hooker, Run Property and the Carrington Group. The competitors had strong presence in not only the property management segment but also the sales and letting segments.  Focus Property realised that an increasing amount of new business was being generated through the web as buyer behavior evolved, especially through the search engines.

The Strategy

First Rate was engaged to help improve search engine visibility and drive qualified organic leads and increase footprint. While there was a significant traffic available for head terms such as “property management”, these would not be best for converting into high quality leads. This is because they were generic and at the research phase of the buying cycle rather than being brand focused in their search queries.

First Rate discovered Focus Property had service offerings in 118 suburbs that had sufficient volume to blanket the long tail search market.  Long tail local keywords were focused on because collectively the volume of these keywords was large and anticipated that conversion rate and lead quality would be greater. This was consistent with focus on generating high quality traffic. Personalized landing pages were created for the target suburbs, giving more personalized pages and relevant content. Suburb pages were created and optimized for terms such as “<suburb> property management” and variants of that. This would then result in high quality localized leads.

Tactics

Content would be needed to target the identified keywords for example, “Bondi Property Management” and no 1 for virtually all terms relating to suburb name, property management as above. Working with Focus Property, we created pages for each of the 118 target suburbs, containing information and photos specific to each suburb Information was sourced from a number of locations such as the Australian Bureau of Statistics. This created rich content for the search engines, as well as creating a relevant, personalized landing page experience for prospects as originally forecast.

Results

We saw not only a significant increase in unique visits and visits from organic search but also an increase in ranking for head and secondary terms securing the head term as ranking number 1.

• In 12 months traffic jumped from 481 visits per month in Dec 09 to over 3300 unique visits per month in Dec 10.
• Monthly visits from non-paid, non-brand organic search increased 15 fold (from roughly 110 visits in Dec ’09 to over 1,700 visits in Dec ’10).
• #1 ranking in Google for head term “property management” achieved in early 2011.
• Top 5 rankings for a variety of secondary terms.



Get in touch with our team for more information about the power of longtail or SEO.

experts@firstrate.com.au

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Q Ltd the digital marketing group (ASX:QXQ) has launched Great Promotions, a comprehensive digital promotions service built around a powerful promotions platform that will streamline all aspects of a company’s digital promotions’ campaign.

The Great Promotions technology platform is designed to add an interactive element to sales promotions and lead generation campaigns by facilitating online games, competitions, scratch cards, instant win and a range of other customer experiences.

Great Promotions Features

• Microsoft Certified thereby meeting exacting standards of security and stability
• Underwritten by Lloyds of London
• State-of-the-art security centre with 24/7 monitoring
• State-of-the-art, highly secure firewall
• Encrypted off-site backup
• High frequency security audits
• Fraudulent entry protection and hack-attempt monitor
• Indemnity insurance up to $5,000,000.
• Secure and stable system, tried and tested over seven years
• Able to process hundreds of transactions per second
• Multilingual capability
• Robust and scalable
• Fast Delivery

How to Get Started

Working alongside our sister company Market United, First Rate we will create a performance-driven campaign that will create massive market exposure.

Contact us today for a no-obligation demonstration.

Here’s some examples of the types of competitions we can run:

The platform is designed to help marketing departments and agencies with all aspects of digital promotions including design and build, hosting, legal and fulfillment, campaign management and reporting services.

Jon Ostler, CEO of Q Ltd (Sydney) said he is excited about the launch of the Great Promotions platform and service.

“We identified an opportunity in the market to not only provide a suite of advanced promotional tools but also to help corporations who need a fail-safe solution that meets all their privacy and data protection requirements and other legal obligations relating to promotions,” Mr Ostler said.

The original technology platform was developed by Keyway Worldwide who have operated and developed it successfully over the past seven years powering many high profile promotions including: Weet-Bix, Microsoft, Woolworths, NRMA, Jacob’s Creek and Pirelli.

“Q Ltd has worked with Keyway for many years and so when the opportunity arose to purchase the technology Q Ltd snapped it up, along with securing the system’s creator and technical director Stephen Dolier.”

The Great Promotions platform is incredibly reliable as it’s externally audited and holds ISO/IEC 27001:2006 certification. The platform is pre-approved by all Australian state regulators, and a number of promotion underwriters including Lloyds.

“All too often big brand promotions are run on systems that are vulnerable to fraud and hacking, fail to scale to peaks in traffic, have inadequate redundancy and backups and do not meet high enough standards of data protection.”

Mr Ostler believes that the need for trustworthy and intelligent promotional technology platforms is becoming more of a priority as the scope for promotions evolves.

“With the ongoing growth of internet and mobile usage, we believe that every promotion will have a digital element and that advertisers will recognise that a truly successful digital promotion requires specialist expertise and robust technology,” Mr Ostler said.

The platform’s list of features is extensive including: Instant Win, Scratch Cards, Rank & Win, Q & A, Trivia, Leader Board, Sports Tipping, Interactive Games, Unique Entry Codes, Coupons, Tell a Friend and Social Media Integration.

-ends-

About Q Ltd
Q Ltd (ASX:QXQ) owns a group of specialist interactive advertising and digital marketing communication companies. Each company is a leader in their area of expertise. The Q Ltd Group provides an integrated spectrum of interactive advertising and digital marketing services needed to interact with today’s digital consumer.

Q Ltd provide: Digital strategy & planning services, creative & technical development, search marketing & performance marketing, media sales (display, email, mobile, performance & data) and digital publisher representation. Q Ltd companies include: Thinq, Market United, First Rate, 3D Interactive and QEDigital (The Performance Network, The Great Sites and Great Promotions).

Q Ltd has offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth & Auckland. www.qxq.co.nz

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One of the questions presented to me recently was how far Google accounts for search intent in presenting search results to users.

As we know, users search with different intent, either because they are at different points in their buying process (researching options, researching products, comparing prices, or looking at websites to buy from) or because they are simply looking for information as opposed to buying.

For the purposes of this discussion, I will define “high commercial intent” as being equal to a higher likelihood of users actually looking for a site to buy from. Likewise, “low commercial intent” I will interpret as users only looking for information.

Investigating Commercial Intent in Organic Web Searches

Using Microsoft adCentre Lab’s online commercial intention detection tool (4/11/10 – appears to be currently unavailable), I carried out a simple experiment using 8 keyword phrases to investigate whether the commercial intent presented by Google.co.nz top search results actually matches the commercial intent that is likely to trigger the keyword search in the first place.

The results are as follows:

The four graphs in the first row use keywords that most likely are not too commercial, whilst the four graphs in the second row use keywords that are likely to be more commercial.

With the first three graphs in each row, the red and yellow lines are not too far apart:

• Where the search query (red) commercial intent is clearly defined, the average site commercial intent (yellow) is always on the same half of the vertical axis.
• Likewise, when the search query commercial intent is ambiguous (gran turismo 5, avatar dvd), the average site commercial intent hovers around the halfway mark of the vertical axis (0.5 probability) due to Google presenting sites with a diverse range of commercial intent (Query Deserves Diversity?)

However, the last graphs in each row look rather anomalous:

“Life Insurance”:

• Personally, I think the search query commercial intent should not have been that high (the Microsoft tool gives a 0.90 commercial intent probability; something which I disagree with). Could this mean that this is an anomaly and the Microsoft detection tool is…wrong? (* gasp *)
• Google seems to agree with me. The resulting yellow line has a very low commercial intent due to most of the blue lines also showing very low commercial intent.
• Therefore, if we assume the query’s assessment was wrong (i.e., we assume that the “life insurance” query should have a very low commercial intent), the adjusted result would be perfectly in-sync with the other graphs as analysed above.

“Buy avatar dvd”:

I agree with the assessment tool’s assessment, from the query to the websites in the search results. Furthermore, Google provided a variety of websites in the results, including those with very low commercial intent:

• Where can I buy Avatar DVD? – Yahoo Answer
• Best price for Avatar DVD – Hubpages (I have to agree the title tag may have misled Google a bit).
• 5 Reasons not to buy Avatar on DVD and Blu-ray Today – Geekadelphia
• Avatar to DVD, Blu-ray on Earth Day, but no 3D version this year – cnet.com
• Avatar on DVD (and 3D DVD) – Avatar Blog

As such, the average score becomes very confused and thus not in-sync with the query’s assessed commercial intent. In short, I’m not entirely sure what is happening with Google here for this particular query. Comments welcome.

Commercial Intent Factoring – Conclusions

In a nutshell, I think it is a very valid to assume that Google seriously (albeit not heavily) factors in the commercial intent of the web pages in its organic web rankings.

However, considering that even when the search intent is clearly defined, we still see 1 – 3 websites at the opposite end of the spectrum within the top 9 results. Google therefore also tries to inject the QDD factor (Query Deserves Diversity) into the search results at the same time.

Implications for Search Engine Optimisation

With SEO, the implication would be whether we are satisfied with only being associated with a certain level of commercial intent, or whether we should try to capture both ends of the search funnel at the same time.

There are instances where it would be worth trying to capture as many users as possible, by utilising a site structure and SEO content architecture that can be associated with both types of search intent (non-commercial as well as highly commercial).

As for this research, in itself it can be improved with a wider set of search queries.

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