English Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout Streamed live on 21 Oct 2016

English Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout Streamed live on 21 Oct 2016.

English Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout

English Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout Streamed live on 7 Oct 2016

English Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout Streamed live on 7 Oct 2016.

English Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout

Pound Shops Online

Poundland SEO

Being an SEO company we often find ourselves looking at spreadsheets of data which mean nothing to most people then identifying how website’s have achieved rankings in Google.

Today we have been looking at the Pound Shops Online and what surprised us most is the traffic volumes that are achieved for specific brand keywords.

Poundland.co.uk

Poundland on the high street represents AMAZING VALUE for money and has grown into a high street essential. Poundland’s first store opened in Burton Upon Trent in 1990 and there are now over 400 stores in the UK. In 2014 the company was floated on the London Stock Exchange and in 2015 Poundland exceeded over £1 billion turnover making this definitely a company to take note of.

This popular brand name which started off life on the high street now gets 301,000 searches per month alone for its own brand name. Comparing that to keywords like “sweets” which gets 40,500 and “stationery” which gets 27,100 it makes us take note of the consumer driven brand traffic. Even “Christmas presents” only gets 18,100 per month and the Disney film Frozen gets around 18,100 which mean consumers are hungry for bargains and hitting Google search for hot deals.

The keyword “pound shop” gets 18,100 searches per month and this is one of the biggest competitors to Poundland directly.

poundland.co.uk traffic

Looking in Google Trends we can see a steady growth which has really taken off in the last 4 years.

Poundland Interest Over Time

Poundland Regional Interest

Related Topics & Searches

This investigation clearly shows a huge growth online for the brand and it’s no wonder others are producing similar ideas as the concept becomes heavily profitable.

My Supermarket – www.mysupermarket.co.uk

In our research we looked in-depth at www.mysupermarket.co.uk which has an amazing organic profile with 35.9 thousand keywords being ranked in Google. Looking at the keywords achieved for this domain it is very clear that SEO techniques work well.

Below is a list of keywords achieved with more than 10,000 searches per month.

 

KeywordPositionSearch VolumeCPC
asda86120000£0.49
compare the market131220000£0.97
tesco groceries5368000£0.33
tesco groceries12368000£0.33
asda groceries5246000£0.21
asda groceries6246000£0.21
mysupermarket1201000£1.74
asda price guarantee9165000£3.93
tassimo1190500£0.36
tesco online1490500£0.49
my supermarket174000£3.52
asda online260500£0.31
tesco uk260500£0.40
lidl offers1860500£0.09
tassimo pods349500£0.49
morrisons offers449500£0.40
aldi offers549500£0.10
www.tesco.com1449500£0.72
tesco wine1249500£0.27
tesco online shopping740500£0.92
sainsburys groceries840500£0.60
morrisons online1840500£1.42
ferrero rocher640500£0.36
jack daniels340500£0.78
asda photo1540500£2.29
jagermeister940500£0.63
slim fast833100£0.62
asda online shopping633100£0.54
asda toys1633100£0.45
www.asda.co.uk833100£1.19
asda price633100£1.39
asda price733100£1.39
asda price533100£1.39
electric toothbrush1833100£1.08
pancake mix1827100£1.10
asda price check627100£3.10
asda price check727100£3.10
asda price check427100£3.10
asda price check527100£3.10
tesco toys1627100£0.20
aldi uk1027100£0.24
asda uk227100£0.62
supermarket127100£3.57
asdas822200£0.38
asdas922200£0.38
tesco shopping522200£1.31
grey goose522200£0.36
adsa722200£0.42
tesco offers322200£2.59
asda travel1122200£1.27
baileys422200£0.71
pampers622200£0.95
tesco grocery1122200£0.33
voss water918100£0.17
voss water818100£0.17
tahini918100£0.56
oral b electric toothbrush1518100£0.73
weetabix618100£0.15
asda birthday cakes418100£0.08
asda birthday cakes518100£0.08
supermarket comparison118100£0.99
veuve clicquot1518100£0.75
waitrose flowers1418100£0.45
passata818100£0.61
passata918100£0.61
berocca918100£0.53
aptamil818100£1.90
haribo1918100£0.34
pg tips1418100£0.48
rice pudding1918100£0.77
dorset cereals618100£0.74
southern comfort318100£0.76
asda shopping618100£0.30
price comparison218100£1.59
bacardi414800£0.71
cashback1714800£1.06
glenfiddich714800£0.60
disposable camera1914800£0.24
compare supermarket114800£2.40
pizza express offers1314800£0.21
waitrose online214800£2.92
vegetables1314800£1.49
lidle1614800£0.16
nakd bars1614800£0.70
maltesers814800£0.30
maltesers714800£0.30
sainsburys online814800£0.68
tesco flowers1714800£0.55
sudafed2014800£0.40
amaretto614800£0.81
kitchen towels1114800£1.02
tesco online groceries514800£0.32
tesco online groceries614800£0.32
ben and jerry s614800£0.44
tesco.co.uk814800£7.53
bargain pages1214800£0.34
toblerone614800£0.20
gripe water1814800£0.53
sainsbury online1514800£1.29
asda.co.uk812100£1.03
asda.co.uk712100£1.03
asda.co.uk612100£1.03
tescos groceries412100£0.50
aveeno912100£0.30
reveal magazine812100£0.00
waitrose wine2012100£0.22
asda cakes312100£0.12
morrisons online shopping1612100£2.15
www.asda1512100£0.56
bombay sapphire412100£0.66
aldi special offers1012100£0.23
rye bread1312100£0.37
rye bread1412100£0.37
tesco birthday cakes312100£0.43
tesco birthday cakes412100£0.43
asda bedding1112100£0.59
smirnoff412100£0.98
walkers crisps812100£0.16
cetirizine hydrochloride1912100£1.34
cow and gate1012100£0.97
lindt chocolate312100£0.42
glenmorangie1012100£0.61
tesco pharmacy712100£0.80
asda flowers812100£1.57
cigarettes412100£0.42
voltarol1512100£0.45
tesco wine offers1112100£0.16
stella artois312100£1.47
oral b1612100£0.44

Using Majestic SEO we can compare domains to identify the SEO activity.

 www.mysupermarket.co.ukwww.poundland.comwww.poundshop.com
ExtBackLinks1427044743811
RefDomains443120492
RefIPs314613280
RefSubNets260612179
ExtBackLinksEDU39500
ExtBackLinksGOV47220
RefDomainsEDU2500
RefDomainsGOV1540
CitationFlow462943
TrustFlow342517

The power differences can clearly be seen here showing SEO efforts in terms of backlink profiles. Another competitor which is following this platform is the 99p Stores.

99P Stores

Looking at the keywords for larger volumes that the 99p stores website achieves you can see Pound Land and Pound Shop appearing:-

KeywordPositionSearch VolumeCPC
99p store140500£0.07
pound shop1118100£0.24
99p stores15400£0.08
pound shop online123600£0.19
99p shop12900£0.09
99p12400£0.07
99p store jobs12400£0.35
online pound shop132400£0.19
pound shop uk51600£0.20
pound store61600£0.24
pound store71600£0.24
poundland store locator81600£17.46
the pound shop81600£0.18
99p store opening times11300£0.00
99p store opening times21300£0.00
one pound shop61300£0.37
pound shops61000£0.26
precision screwdriver set141000£0.72
pound shops online10880£0.23

An interesting fact to look at here is the cost per click for Google Adwords for the keyword “poundland store locator” which is a steep £17.46. When you Google this keyword you can see the result of SEO work to achieve ranking on page one:-

 

poundland store locatorTo understand where these bargain companies fit into overall shopping U.K companies online we are using Alexa ratings information. Alexa gives competitive intelligence and strategic insights providing us with a benchmark in terms of traffic.

CompanyUK RankGlobal Rank
tesco.com321076
asda.com782819
sainsburys.co.uk1194659
waitrose.com38011046
aldi.co.uk40914990
mysupermarket.co.uk42013155
morrisons.com48117892
homebargains.co.uk155652354
Poundland.co.uk181769068
Poundshop.com6617139280
99pstoresltd.com16480391000

If you have never come across Alexa data before the lower the number the better, i.e. Tesco is the 32nd best website in terms of traffic in the UK and the Adsa is the 78th. Poundland achieves 1817th in terms of traffic which is very good when you compare this to the other 99p stores.

SEO Data

We have continued to investigate the websites looking at the backlink breakdown of follow and no follow links. We have compared the anchor text of the sites and where the links are coming from looking at all the referring domains.

Poundland.co.uk for example has links from Wikipedia and the BBC passing power and the most used anchor text keyword is “poundland” with 663 referring domains and 5,286 links in total.

New Backlinks

poundland-new-backlinks

Lost Backlinks

poundland-lost-backlinks

We compare the profiles of the websites that link to the Poundland website in order to see how relevant the links are. For example, looking at the website’s that fall under the topic of “shopping” there are 144 external backlinks coming from 136 referring domains.

The SEO profile of the Poundland website is very good in terms of search engine optimisation. We found areas that they lack in but as with everything there is always room for improvement and with SEO it is actually one companies opinion over another and no one can be 100% correct. We have been working in the SEO industry for nearly 10 years and with our knowledge and testing we trust what we find and live by it for ourselves and our clients.

We have not published actual SEO information on this article as it would be wrong to share it in the public domain however further information is available on request.

eyeblaster/addineyeV2.html traffic found on website

Today we happened to notice traffic on our site was showing the URL “/eyeblaster/addineyeV2.html” which caused us some concern.

The first thing we did was head to the server FTP and look for the folder “eyeblaster” which did not exist. We then realised this was some kind of attack using a potential insertion of code which was searching for an Adsense vulnerability.

We looked at the page that was generating the starting problem which was using Google Adsense.

On further investigation we found that this was aimed at the Adsense Ads, this needed to be prevented.

Eyeblaster is an online advertising company that is suggested to be malware which finds its way onto most computers. It functions using what is known as an iframe buster. This specific one is written by Media Mind who are also called Sizmek.

We investigated further to discover the company creates an ad-serving “EyeBlaster” script which loads various ads into one advert. A lot of online advertisers are now using this tool for their own adverts.

Preventing eyeblaster/addineyeV2.html

Option 1 – Robots.txt file can have the following added:-

Disallow: /eyeblaster
Disallow: /addineyeV2.html

Option 2 – Add to your .htacess file the following:-

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (eyeblaster|addineyeV2) [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.html? [R=301,L]

Option 3 – Create a blank file and place it in a new folder as below:-

/eyeblaster/addineyev2.html
/eyeblaster/addineyeV2-secure.html

There are some documents relating this:-

Stub files and iframe busters – https://support.google.com/dfp_premium/answer/1085693?hl=en

Stop YouTube Videos Showing Related Videos At The End

YouTube has made some changes recently and one of them is to automatically play related video’s at the end of a video.

There has always been the show related videos at the end of the video and many webmasters seemed to ignore this which could result in a competitor’s video being shown on your own website. With the new changes competitor’s videos could be played automatically on your website advertising them, this needs to be avoided.

Standard YouTube Embed Code Creates this:-

SEM Marketing Company - Chameleon Web Services

Click near to the end of the video and see what happens when it finishes.

Stop YouTube Videos Showing Related Videos At The End:-

SEM Marketing Company - Chameleon Web Services

To do this you simply add the code to tell YouTube that you do not want to display any related videos.

?rel=0

So to show as an example:-

OLD YouTube Embed Code

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/fKdCQzF4JZ0″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

NEW YouTube Embed Code

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/fKdCQzF4JZ0?rel=0” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

<hr>

Other Embedding Options You Can Use

To make a YouTube video play automatically simply add “&autoplay=1” to the video’s embed code:

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/fKdCQzF4JZ0?rel=0&autoplay=1 frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

SEM Marketing Company - Chameleon Web Services