6S Marketing Blog


Snap-a-Bug Live Chat

Written by Kelly Robertson
on Tuesday, August 24th, 2010

It happens all the time – you contact a company for more information but no one’s available to help you. You’re either met with a long, complicated automated voice system or relayed a message to call back during business hours. It’s frustrating!

In August, we started to experiment with live chat functionality on the 6S site to provide live support to visitors browsing our site or anyone looking for more information about 6S.  We chose Snap-a-Bug as our live chat software for a number of reasons including ease of use, information captured about our web visitors, and integration with our customer relationship management (CRM) software Salesforce. Read More…

What Every Canadian Business Should Know About Facebook Places

Written by Chris Breikss
on Monday, August 23rd, 2010

Facebook Places CanadaGood News! 6S Marketing can help you claim your business on Facebook Places Canada.

In early September, 2010 Canadian businesses will be able to claim their Place on Facebook. Ultimately, your business is going to be added to Facebook and the information should be accurate. Keep reading to find out how you can control what information is listed on Facebook about your business and how you can reach more customers. Read More…

The Facebook EdgeRank Algorithm

Written by Jonathan Becker
on Monday, August 23rd, 2010

Facebook. Beyond its immense social networking power, its 500 million members, and the fact that its homepage is now the most frequented web page on the entire Internet, Facebook is a place where people share content; lots of content. Over 360 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook every single year. That’s around 1 billion individual posts daily, over 694 thousand posts every minute and just over 11,500 posts every second (for those who are counting). Oh, and it’s increasing all the time. Read More…

The Gap takes over Groupon, and Crashes Site

Written by Kelly Robertson
on Thursday, August 19th, 2010

The Gap took over the localized social site today by rolling out an international groupon deal for $25 for $50 Worth of Apparel at Gap. Within minutes of the deal going out to Groupon members, the site crashed. Read More…

Official Launch of Google AdWords Enhanced CPC

Written by Kelly Robertson
on Thursday, August 19th, 2010

Over the past few months, a new feature called Enhanced CPC bidding has slowly been appearing in Google AdWords campaign settings. Today, the new automated bidding feature was rolled out across the AdWords system to all advertisers.

What is Enhanced CPC Bidding?

Enhanced CPC is a new automated bidding tool that takes into account your campaign’s historical conversion history and automatically adjusts your keywords Max CPC bids based on the probability that your ad will convert, due to their conversion pattern in the past. This new tool will help to decrease your campaign’s overall cost-per-action and result in campaign managers spending less time manually adjusting CPC bids.

Read More…

Why Use Google AdWords Search Funnel Reports?

Written by Rachel Addante
on Tuesday, August 17th, 2010

In March, Google announced the addition of new Search Funnel Reports within AdWords.

These reports provide further insight to advertisers as to how keywords and campaigns work together to create transactions and conversions and are definitely recommended to check out. Here’s why: Read More…

Is Google Losing its Way With Maps?

Written by Simon Lewis
on Wednesday, August 11th, 2010

We all know how useful Google maps are. For me, when I am going somewhere I haven’t been before, I tend to look it up on Google maps. I even use the Streetview feature to see what it looks like so I can recognize it when I arrive. Google has worked hard to add more features and push the maps tool across a variety of platforms. However the strength of maps is the data that it contains and recently we have been coming across a lot of incorrect data. Read More…

Respond to Negative Reviews in Google Places and Maps

Written by Chris Breikss
on Thursday, August 5th, 2010

Now you can dispute or respond to negative reviews in Google Places and Maps. On August 4, 2010, Google added the ability for verified business owners to respond to reviews publicly on Google Places pages. Read “Respond to reviews for your business on Google Place Page“.

Of course, you can respond to positive reviews too and Google published a guide on “How to Respond to Reviews in Google Places“.

Google’s Long Term Search Plan

Written by Kelly Robertson
on Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

Amit Singhal, one of Google’s chief engineers who has been with the search engine since 2000, recently gave a talk about his aspirations from when he started at the search engine.  Functionality created over the years such as Google Maps, Earth and Google Books were steps aimed at achieving Google’s goal of making all information universally available.

Moving into the future, Amit says there are several functionalities he dreams about implementing one day in an effort to make information accessible and less of a process to retrieve. Read More…

Google Image Sitemaps – Get the Picture!

Written by Simon Lewis
on Thursday, July 15th, 2010

We all know how important images are on your website. They can add colour and further explain your content so that users have a more rounded view of what you have to offer. Google is also aware of the importance of images and has for a long time included images as part of universal search results. The image below shows how someone looking for ‘pictures of soccer jerseys’ is presented with results from Google’s image search library. Read More…

MailChimp Adds Social Pro Add-On

Written by Chris Breikss
on Monday, July 12th, 2010

Back in March of this year, Kelly at 6S blogged about her favorite new toy Flowtown and how it integrates with MailChimp.

Tomorrow it looks like MailChimp is adding a service to it’s offering that includes features and functionality that are very similar to Flowtown, but built right into MailChimp. MailChimp announced in their blog today that it is launching Social Pro that “syncs your email list with the social graph. We’ll show you what social networks your subscribers are on, who’s following you on twitter, rank subscribers by influence, and more.” They have created a humourous little video (is that Ethan’s voice?). Watch the video below and check out all of the new features of MailChimp Version 5.2.

New Search Query Data in Webmaster Tools

Written by Rachel Addante
on Monday, July 5th, 2010

Over the past several months, Google has rolled out some great new tools within Google Webmaster Tools, particularly in the top search queries report.

Top Search Queries Report

The search queries page provides information about Google web search queries that have returned pages from your site. In April of this year, Google updated the top search queries report to provide much more data. Previously the search queries report only showed top search queries and the average position which your site pages appeared in for each particular search query. The report has now been expanded to provide a breakdown of the clicks, impressions and click-through rates (CTR) that a particular search query received, as well as which position your site pages appeared in the search results.

Read More…

6S Talks Travel Cookies with CBC News

Written by Chris Breikss
on Friday, June 25th, 2010

CBC news interviewed 6S Marketing President, Chris Breikss yesterday about how travel websites use cookies to alter pricing to consumers looking to book travel online.

Facebook and SEO: Like Bait the New Link Bait?

Written by Chris Breikss
on Friday, June 25th, 2010

This is a very interesting article from All Facebook about speculating how Facebook could be starting to take on search. Sites that use the Facebook Open Graph (TripAdvisor, Yelp, Yellow Pages, etc.) are now starting to show up in Facebook search results.

Facebook Unleashes Open Graph Search Engine, Declares War On Google

While there was a lot of speculation about Facebook’s search strategy, the company has confirmed with us that “all Open Graph-enabled web pages will show up in search when a user likes them”. Earlier this week we published about the new Facebook SEO that’s possible via the Open Graph, but now it’s clear that this is the beginning of Facebook’s internet search strategy. The race is now on for publishers to optimize their sites for Facebook’s search engine.

Under this system “link baiting” will give rise to “like baiting”, which is how Facebook determines the relevance of information. This has become a full scale attack on Google on all fronts at this point as Facebook has officially entered the internet search market. While many of the details of the Open Graph were initially revealed at f8, it wasn’t clear what Facebook’s complete strategy would be and how big of a threat this would be to Google.

Read More…

SEO for YouTube Videos using Video Sitemaps

Written by Chris Breikss
on Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010

Check out this great article by Yoast on SEO for video content. With Youtube being the #2 search engine after Google, it’s easy to understand why this topic is becoming a more important part of SEO.

SEO for YouTube Videos using Video Sitemaps

This is topic is particularly exciting for the SEO community because Matt Cutts (from Google) recently mentioned in a Web Pro News interview that Google is considering returning the videos of websites that use an XML video sitemap higher in result page rankings than those sites that do not; pretty exciting if your website has a lot of video content! (the part about video sitemaps is at 6:05). Read More…