Richard Falconer

Crooked Tongues Screenshot

Online marketing can be a frustrating business.  It’s difficult for big companies to be passionate enough about their product to actually sell it well.  When you find a site that really does and you know it’s got a big future.

I was talking trainers the other day and was recommended Crooked Tongues. I’ve spent a bit of time (not to mention cash) on the site now and although there are some pretty basic SEO problems that haven’t been taken care of  it doesn’t really matter. This site is built around the product – trainers.  Selling them almost feels like a necessary afterthought but undoubtedly they must be selling tonnes.

So, where are they getting it right?

So many places but it basically boils down to giving a shit about the stuff they sell.  They are talking trainers on the site, not just making conversions.  Take a look at the top level navigation.  It’s not category pages; mens, womens, kids etc. Instead the top priority is given to news, editorial, on show, forum etc. with a single link to the ecommerce store.  This goes against the grain of what almost every other site is doing.

Crooked Tongues is exactly the sort of site that Matt Cutts has said should do well in search results and it appears to be doing just that.  Their budget must be small compared to the big online sports retailers but they do pretty well in the few searches I made.  It has plenty of good content and is very engaging, it’s not just another e-commerce site.

Granted, it’s selling a product that people really care about but the lessons here can be passed on to any site.  The passion and understanding that you have about your product is transmitted in so many ways. For example, writing a quality blog and linking to it prominently on your site is a great way to send the message that you care about your product.   Interacting properly with your users (they are users who buy things, not just customers) via forums and social media is huge.

Sales in social media is a secondary effect.  Interaction should happen because you care about the user and the product you are selling.  It’s very obvious to users when a blog/tweet or facebook page is an afterthought.  There may be some benefit to it but the real benefit only comes when you actively engage because you care.  In this case the prominence of the blog, forums etc.on the site is really important.  I would go so far as to say that the day it changes, you’ll know they’ve sold out.

Imagine if you did the SEO and other online marketing equally well? Maybe they are, I’ve not looked too hard into it but I like to think that’s how I would run my online store.

I’ll retract all of this if my trainers don’t arrive tomorrow

Google yesterday launched its new social offering, Buzz. How many social sites now share the same name? Surely they can’t all be happy?  Unlikely….

First off, Yahoo! named one of the social features Yahoo! Buzz 18 months ago. Yahoo Buzz is a Digg clone where users can vote for articles. It also feeds into Yahoo! Updates which is the Yahoo version of what Google has named Buzz in that it is based around its email service (Gmail) and has similar functionality. Yahoo is likely to be displeased about Google using the exact same name.

Yahoo released a statement during the launch of Google Buzz with an update on the current status of Yahoo! Updates. No mention was made of Google’s presumably intentional name theft and the email, which can be read here, appears to be an attempt to gain some attention during the launch of Google Buzz.

At Buzz.com there is a site that begs further questions over the name “Buzz” for a social website. It is owned by AT&T and has not yet been publicly launched yet. On the homepage it says “Want to know the best places to go or businesses to call? Let buzz.com help you tap your social net for business recommendations from the people you trust most – your friends and family.” – sound familiar? Yes, another potentially big player on the social media scene. How serious they are will be put to the test with Google stealing their name from under them.

Again it seems highly unlikely that Google didn’t know about AT&T’s little adventure into the land of social media. I’d like to check how long the site has been there in that state but archive.org has become unbelievably slow or simply doesn’t work of late. Either way, there is no way someone in Google wouldn’t have at least looked at what was at buzz.com, checked who owned it or at the very least done a Google search for “buzz” where the site sits on the first page – I smell a deliberate attempt to undermine their competitors.

It gets murkier too, as I found this article from only a couple of weeks ago.  It seems that Buzz.com is AT&T’s version of Yelp, which you may remember Google is reputed to be trying to purchase for $500m.

OK, the title is a little dramatic but I stick by the sentiment.  Google made changes to its search results today that are biased towards American sites in the UK results pages.

I should be clear before I continue that I’m no Google hater, in fact I’m a keen user and despite knowing that their results are little, if any, better (and sometimes worse) than other search engines, I find it difficult to change my habit of checking there first.  I also use and like many other Google products regularly and carry an Android phone.  Google is well embedded in my life.

So, on the same day that Google took a stand against China for it’s freedom of speech failures, it also decided that American English is the correct version of English and that your results should be given in American first.  Even on Google.co.uk when searching from Buckingham Palace.  I haven’t actually tested that but presumably.

So, a search for “utilisation ratio” (no, I don’t know what it means either) shows the following:

and provides the results for the American spelling, “utilization ratio” rather than the British English version, “utilisation ratio”.  But I typed with an “s”, why on earth would you assume I meant with a “z”?

Now, it’s good that Google tells us what’s going on but what is the point of insisting on American spelling?  Isn’t this just further filling the UK search results with less relevant foreign pages?

As has been well documented by the likes of DaveN, SearchCowboys and Kevin Gibbons, Google often includes irrelevant foreign sites for searches that require local results.  Even now the famous “tennis court hire” search on Google.co.uk produces 40% Australian results on the first page.  Okay, so there are probably more tennis courts for hire in one suburb of Sydney than the whole of the UK but that doesn’t matter, Google should aim for a top ten that shows the best ten local results. There may be searches where a couple of foreign options might be okay but “tennis court hire” isn’t one of them.  In the event that someone in the UK wants to investigate hiring tennis courts in Australia, they’ll probably specify that fact.

I digress. The “utilisation ratio” example doesn’t always hold.  For example Google doesn’t even think twice about “coloured contact lenses”, “aluminium windows” or “moustache pictures” before providing only UK spelling results.  It seems to be only terms with words ending in “-isation” that Google has decided to give the US version of and even then not for all of them. I’ve not figured out a definite pattern but it may be to do with the number results with a particular spelling.

Here’s a good one – type “urbanisation in the UK” into Google.co.uk and you get results for “urbanization in the UK”

Here are the urbanization results:

tiscali.co.uk/reference/encyclopaedia/hutchinson/m0006462.html
amazon.co.uk/Vikings-Ireland-Settlement-Trade-Urbanization/dp/1846820936
environmentandurbanization.org/eandu_details.html
h-net.msu.edu/~urban/teach/syllabi/morris1995meth1.htm
ensembles-eu.metoffice.com/cost/Exeter_Workshop/Presentations/Fei_Chen.ppt
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization
eandu.poptel.org.uk/
unhabitat.org/content.asp?typeid=5&catid=7&cid=2599

and here are the urbanisation results:

geography.learnontheinternet.co.uk/topics/urbanisation.html
environment.guardian.co.uk/flash/page/0,,2166176,00.html
uk.reuters.com/article/idUKL1929467820070330
independent.co.uk/environment/creeping-urbanisation-could-destroy-rural-england-in-30-years-506066.html
coursework.info/AS_and_A_Level/Geography/Human/Population___Settlement/Urbanisation_L110737.html
amazon.co.uk/tag/urbanisation
emagister.co.uk/revision_urbanisation_courses-ec170182305.htm
ft.com/cms/s/0/91d82880-f02b-11de-833d-00144feab49a.html

I removed the BBC results that appear on each page for ease of comparison.

I’m not sure about you but I can see straight away from the URLs that the second set of results are much better – quality newspaper articles and authoritative UK sites against Tiscali and an Amazon book about Vikings in Ireland?  At least it’s Amazon UK I suppose.

“parking offense” and “parking offence” are interesting as Google serves up different results but doesn’t seem to notice that they are just US/UK spelling variations.

Bottom line is I don’t understand what the point of this change is, if someone could explain it I’d be forever grateful.

In its defense, I’m sure Google didn’t mean to cause any offense so perhaps there’s no need to chastize it