What Does Boris the Spider Know About Your Website?

Warning: this article might make you itch. It talks about spiders; creepy, crawly spiders. They’re crawling around your website right now, but before you call the exterminators – it’s OK! Those spiders are supposed to be there – they’re Google’s software spiders and they’re helping you out.

You see, when you search on Google you’re not actually searching the web – you’re searching Google’s gargantuan index of the web.
To create the index, Google uses spiders or crawlers, so called because they crawl all over the web (get it? – spiders, web – clever eh?)spider
When you initiate a search, Google’s clever software searches its own index to find every page that includes the words you used in your search query.
How does Google decide what results to show? They ask questions (over 200 of them!) such as ‘how many times does this page contain those keywords in your search query?’ Or ‘do they appear in the title of the page and in the URL?’
The clever thing is, Google’s software spider (let’s call him Boris)… …finds all the possible pages, and checks up on how they measure up to these questions and returns a result to the searcher, giving the best possible pages on the results page in under half a second. Told you they were clever.
That’s why we need to make sure that, as advertisers, we provide Google (or more correctly Boris the Spider) with all the relevant information.
Google’s stated aim is to provide the best search engine experience in the world. When you type a query into their search box, Google is desperate to provide you with a set of results that are highly relevant to what you are searching for.
This is why, when you advertise using AdWords, it is vitally important to make sure that, when Boris comes a-crawling, he can understand exactly what each of your website’s pages are actually about – if he can’t, he will just ignore you and crawl on by. Boris is clever – but he’s not intelligent, and when he crawls all over your web pages (let’s say you sell flowers), he doesn’t understand that flowers, blooms and bouquets are all pretty much the same thing.
Vocabulary is not Boris’ strong point, and we have to help him out, which is why if you want your ads to show when someone searches for “wedding bouquets”, you call them exactly that on the web page and not “wedding flowers”.
Of course, you should have another page on your site ready for the person who searches for “wedding flowers” – however, on this page you call them “wedding flowers” and not “wedding bouquets”.
It’s worth checking that your webmaster understands this as well, because Boris not only looks at the page itself but the coding behind it.
Far be it from me to accuse web designers of being lazy, but if you’re sending AdWords traffic to a page all this stuff really does matter.
Let’s carry on with the florist example for the time being. Ideally you would want your flower-related ads to be served for as many ‘flower” terms as possible, but of course not all of them.
If someone searches “Tim Flowers”, they’re probably looking for the former England goalkeeper, rather than a nice wedding bouquet.
Refer to the article in the January Circular about negative keywords if you need to, because in this instance “Tim” should be one of them!
A logical structure is the key to a successful AdWords campaign. So, your home page might talk about flowers in general, but then, logically, you would have a landing page for wedding flowers and then another for anniversary flowers.
These are simply additional pages on your website created specifically to drive AdWords traffic to.
In order to help yourself, you have to help Boris too. Is this tedious and a lot of work? – Yes, it is.
Is it worthwhile?
Yes, it is. By being this fussy on The Scottish Shutter Company website, we generate over 100 leads per month. Remember Nigel’s wise words – “do the hard work to make the selling easy”.
Relevancy isn’t all that Google is looking for; they’re also searching for an authoritative site – one which not only provides the search visitor with exactly what they are looking for on the landing page but also provides a lot of additional and related information.
It’s for that reason that there is a bit of tension between AdWords and squeeze pages – in short, AdWords doesn’t like squeeze pages.
A squeeze page is a page that you send traffic to and when someone lands on a squeeze page they can only do one of two things – exit using the back button of their browser or comply (squeezed) by providing their details.
Squeeze pages are ideal if you want to send traffic to them from an email or direct mail campaign – just be very careful if you are trying to drive AdWords traffic to them.
You see, as an AdWords advertiser, Google wants you to be educational and informative – if you start off by immediately asking for personal data (a name, and email address, a telephone number) before you have provided any value in return then Google simply sees that as data (or information) harvesting. Because they’re trying to provide the best search engine experience in the world, Google doesn’t want users to feel misled by our ads.
They expect us to be upfront and honest, providing the visitor with the information they were searching for in the first place and allowing them to make an informed decision as to whether or not to engage with us and provide some personal details (otherwise known as an opt-in). This is permission based marketing. Once we have provided some initial value, the visitor gives their consent for us to provide them with more information – usually in the form of a brochure, or white paper on the very subject they were searching for.
Instead of a squeeze page it is far better to embed your chosen landing page into your existing (authorative) website – especially in the eyes of Google.
You’re providing highly relevant information to the visitor, but also giving them the option to navigate around the rest of your site if they so wish.
In fact, one of the draw backs of a true squeeze page is that it is usually a single, isolated page. If the visitor leaves, after choosing not to fill in your form and not being given the option to go anywhere else, Google sees this as a bounce.
Simply put, the visitor did not find the site relevant to their search: The more visitors you have like that the more Google decides that your site is not relevant, despite all the effort you’ve put in to make it so, and poor old Boris gets squished.
You don’t want that on your conscience, do you?
david-browne