Compare SEO and social media as marketing channels

You may have seen the recent string of posts about SEO vs. Social Media, starting with this effective, but poorly argued controversy-bait, which was excoriated by Elysia Brooker and Hugo Guzman, then followed up with a more nuanced view by Darren Rowse. While I'm not particularly interested (nor do I think there's much value) in re-hashing or arguing these points, I did think the topic warranted attention, as it brings up some excellent points marketers should carefully consider as they invest in their craft.

The search for information and answers has been essential to humans since time immemorial. And there's no sign that our latest iteration, web search, is losing any steam:

Even as we've reached a maturity point with broadband adoption and online population, searches are rising. We're not searching less every month; we're searching more.

Search is an intent driven activity. We don't search casually (much), we search to find answers, information, goods and services to consume. The power of search marketing - whether paid or organic - is simple: Be in front of the consumer at the time of consumption. There's no more effective time to be present and no more effective way of knowing what is desired. All the social graph analysis in the world won't tell you that Sunday evening, I got fed up with my current selection of footwear and, after some searching, spent a few hundred dollars on Zappos. But being front and center when I queried mens puma shoes brought them some nice business.

Social media - whether it's Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Reddit, StumbleUpon or something else - is about connections, interaction, discovery and distraction. We hardly ever use these portals as a way to find answers, though they certainly may provide plenty to unasked questions.

Social media marketing advocates often make the case that social is how we find out about new products on the web, but, at least so far, the data doesn't back up this assertion:

-
ATG Study on How Users Discover Products via SearchEngineLand

However, I am strongly inclined to believe the claim that social media is how we find out about new content on the web, particularly when we're not seeking something in particular (as with a search). Blogs, pictures, video, research and the like are surely seeing an increased share of their visits from social, and that branding exposure is definitely valuable.

Some recent GroupM Research helped to shed the light of data on this supposition, noting that:

The click-through rate in organic search results for users who have been exposed to a brand's social marketing campaign are 2.4X higher than those that haven't; for paid search, it showed a jump from 4.5% to 11.8% (in both cases, this is for branded queries)Consumers using social media are 1.7x more likely to search with the intention of making a list of brands or products to consider purchasing compared to those who do not use social media

Ben Yoskovitz talked about this value in his recent analysis:

Based on the information in this report, it’s reasonable to argue that social media marketing can increase the quality of leads (and not just the volume). It’s possible to hone in on, and understand intent through search and how social media exposure affects that intent. And as people are exposed (and I would say involved with – since exposure sounds like you’re just broadcasting stuff at people, which isn’t what social media is about) to social media their intent is more focused and driven towards lead conversion

That's the kind of social media marketing value I can get behind. Get exposed to potential customers through social so that when they build their consideration set, search and purchase, you'll have a leg up on the competition.

It pays to understand the bias of this flare-up's instigator, and I've got plenty of compelling data myself to see his perspective. Last weekend, I started publishing content on a personal blog - no domain authority, no links and little chance of performing well in search. But the results from social media - Twitter, Facebook and Hacker News in particular - are fairly remarkable:

The search traffic demand, all 78 visits, was generated from the articles that went popular on Twitter & HN. The site itself still doesn't rank for its own name. Yet, social media sent 22,000 visits over 9 days. No wonder bloggers, in particular those that monetize through advertising, sponsorships and other traffic-driven systems, have a proclivity for investing in social traffic. Perhaps it's not so crazy to suggest on Problogger.net, a site about growing blog traffic and improving monetization, that social can be "better" than SEO.

I'd still argue that overall, referring traffic of all kinds sent from social, particularly from the largest network (Facebook), is only a fraction of the visits Google sends out each day (unless you're in the business of appealing to the Facebook audience biases - I was a bit frustrated with how the data was clearly manipulated in the reference piece to fit the story). But, social does eliminate some of the inherent biases that search engines carry and let content that appeals to social users flourish no matter the site's ability to grow its link profile, make content accessible to spiders or effectively target keywords.

Now let's look at an example on the opposite end of the spectrum - conversions for a B2B product.

SEOmoz's PRO membership may not be a good investment unless you're a marketer actively engaged with SEO, but given that both the search and social traffic our site attracts likely fall into this intent group (interested in SEO and likely to be in web marketing), a comparison seems fair.

First, I did some prep work in our Google Analytics account by creating an advanced segment called "social traffic" that contains any referral source with "twitter," "facebook," "stumbleupon," "linkedin," "flickr," and "ycombinator" - these represent the vast majority of our social media sources. Next, I compared this traffic quantitatively with our search referrals over the past two weeks:

Social Traffic - 26,599 visits from 30 sourcesOrganic Search Traffic - 102,349 from 20 sources

I then compared the percent of these reaching our landing or purchase pages for PRO membership. Here's organic search:

 

And here's social traffic:

Here's what I see:

4.5% of organic search visitors considered a purchase1.3% of social traffic considered a purchaseWhile I can't disclose full numbers, I can see that a fair number of search visits converted vs. zero for social.

In fact, looking at the entire year to date traffic to SEOmoz from social sources, it appears not 1 visit has ever converted for us. Social may be a great way to drive traffic, build branding and make a purchase more likely in the future, but from a direct conversion standpoint, it doesn't hold a candle to search. To be fair, I'm not looking at full life cycle or even first-touch attribution, which makes this analysis less comprehensive, though likely still directionally informative.

Given the research and data here and in the posts/content referenced, I think we can say a few things about search and social as marketing channels:

There shouldn't be a VS.: This isn't about pitting web marketers against each other (or perhaps, more accurately, themselves, since our industry survey data suggests many of us are responsible for both). There's obvious value in both channels and to suggest otherwise is ideological nonsense and worse, self-defeating.Search Converts: $20 Billion+ isn't being wasted on Google's search ads - that sucker send intent-driven, focused, conversion-ready visits like nobody else on the web.Social Has Value: Those exposed to a social campaign are better customers and prospects; making social not only a branding and traffic channel, but an opportunity for conversion rate optimization.SEO Is Hard in the Early Stages: Without a strong link profile, even great content may not perform particularly well in search results.Segmenting Search and Social is Key: Unless you separate, analyze and iterate, you're doomed to miss opportunities and falsely attribute value. I'm particularly worried about those marketers who invest heavily in social to the detriment of SEO because the immediacy of the rewards is so much more tangible and emotionally compelling (He's following me on Twitter! We have 200 Facebook fans!) - make sure appropriate effort goes where it can earn ROI; it's our job.

For another interesting (and more social-media biased) perspective, check out Search vs. Social from Bradford Cross.

I'd love to hear more from you on this topic, too. 

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Yahoo!-Story

Improve your rankings, traffic and profits today. The SEO book training program offers:

Over 100 training modules, the topics such as: keyword research, link building, website architecture, website monetization, pay-per-click-view tracking results, and more.An exclusive interactive community ForumMembers only videos and ToolsAdditional bonuses - like data spreadsheets and money saving TipsEvery order is risk free, and with the best selling SEO book as a free bonus

But more importantly,....

 

Listen, what our members say about the # 1 SEO Gemeinschaft.Hier are some of our recent thread topics:

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The future of search - Tim Mayer keynote at PubCon 2010

 Tim is the former head of the search product and company at Yahoo.

The future of search

-You specify a query and get back to search a result.Predictive - search engines are able to connect personal profiles and of your friends, recommendations for other plausible actions and transactions your check history, traditional search.

5 Key trends that will influence search

Growth of the mobile queries. By 2012, mobile queries 1 in 5 will be search.The largest categories of mobile search just now are information, local and product lookup. Growth in apps, not browsers. The majority of the time people spend on the phone, browser accounts for 50% of the face Zeit.Nur a few years ago, took browsers 70-80% of the time face.We see a strong migration to apps.Is difficult. We find going to have possibilities more our privacy "Inputs" from the past to current searches to incorporate effects.For more context.Be returns more results within the location with the increase in the local."Vertikalisieren" SERPs.People are starting to go straight to the brand sites, i.e. Amazon, etc. to search, and less for search engines to wechseln.Suchen you for search engines to begin to integrate more about these results.

Opportunities for service providers

App detection is the key to the satisfaction of our customers in the Smartphone Ära.gerade now, it is difficult for people to identify, what apps are really the best and most effective for achieving their objectives.

It is a huge opportunity for technology to the gap between apps and Suchfelder.In of the future, we can see aggregators that determine, which is really the best search tool use when you perform a search, either app or HTML page and use the automatically to return results depending on the query and context.

Opportunities for publishers

Mobile advertising demand at a very fast rate, so prices still pretty langsam.Es is an opportunity for

First mover app in a new category on new Plattform.Epicurious was the standard recipe app iPad.Es are other ways to capitalize on existing trends in new platforms.

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Should you buy an exact match domain name?

According to Matt Cutts, said one recently PubCon searches Google on why accurate domain so well rank does. For example, if you have a Web site on blue widgets.com, it can rank a little too good for the keyword phrase [blue widgets].

Curious.

I do not know Google? ;)

More likely is that Matt would make any concrete statement, one way or other. "Yes, exact match domain rank better!", is not something to be said, is likely.

Second is the implication that exact match domains are a problem.

Exact match domains are name, as the name implies, domain names that match the keyword criteria.i.e. hotels.com, shoes.net, planetickets.org etc..

Is it a good idea, this strategy for SEO?Ask 10 different SEOs and you'll probably get 10 different answers.

On the positive side, an exact match can target specific keyword phrase helfen.Ihre link text and domain name game is natürlich.Der domain name likely in Google search results, which highlighted the listing more visibility. Ranking can be benefits, depending on whom you questions.

On the negative side, "an exact match only" helps enter keyword targeting.It can be too generic for broader applications, such as brand building sein.Genaue match domains may be styled, and not worth a Prämie.vorhanden are, after all, many domains ranking # 1 the exact match, it is questionable how much SEO benefits actually offer especially, because Google push brand holds.

So why would Matt mean exact match domain name may be a problem?

It is understandable that some in the SEO community - maybe a SEO work on client sites or those who have no exact match domains and others see ranking above you - would have an interest in a noise about the contest.If you make enough noise webmaster, Matt Cutts feel a need to respond.

The supposed ranking makes exact match is probably a red herring. the problem to Google the hinting is exact match more spam, thin affiliate or other low value content than other types of domains cannot be involved in.In other words, it is a quality signal.

If it does - and I'm not would say it is - then, might consider the reason Google closer exact match domains, not the fact that a domain, the matching a keyword is somehow evil.

Because it is not.

There is nothing wrong with an exact match domain have.

Aaron covers this question in a previous post why exact match domains are as important as many SEO's believe.

In conclusion it hangs.

It comes to business Grundlagen.Wenn try to build a unique brand and resulting keyword stream, is an exact match domain name then an obstacle rather than a help View1 are forever with generic searches in the competition are. keyword domain name not especially memorable.

The premium, an exact-match domain name commands, in the aftermarket sold may not value es.Sie need no exact match domain-name too good rank, so get the money a new $10 domain names to rank better spent kann.Oder be Alternatively, could an existing site that already buy domain ranks well for your keyword, and other, for similar money than inflated exact match.

Finally, if you compete with a clear market leader, then generic is much helfen.besitzen to you, i.e. searchengine.com of Google which box.you can sleep to lose an opportunity to differentiate your offer to the market leaders in its brand overlooking werden.Denken Blekko vs searchengine.com.

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Tools to forecasting and monitoring competitor traffic

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Today we're going to break down a number of different tools and resources for getting insights into competitors traffic data. We have looked at a handful of tools here and will break them down one by one as to their strengths and weaknesses, as well as the validity and usefulness of the data provided. Ultimately we just wanted to share with you some other information sources out there that you can add to SEOmoz's list of tools that are great for competitor analysis (my personal favourites being the Linkscape Visualization and Comparison tool as well as the Competitive Link Research tool).

However, I have had a number of clients asking me for a better view of overall market size and what kind of traffic their competitors are getting. Despite the fact that this has, unfortunately, at times meant crushing a few dreams about who a genuine/realistic competitor is or should be (i.e. NOT mashable if you are a new site) it can be tricky to find meaningful predictive data even when you know who your competitors are.

Initially I wanted this to be an experiment testing out a number of services and running them against Analytics data to compare like for like and find which sites provided the most accurate information. I compiled Analytics data from 25 websites with hopes of comparing the real numbers (from Analytics) against the predictions of the other tools to try to find which was the most reliable across a number of sites from different sectors with a range of monthly traffic from ~1,000 monthly visitors to over 48,000,000 monthly visitors.

The idea was to report on data across a number of these platforms for average monthly visits, total yearly visits, geographical visits and so forth. Unfortunately, there were many fewer tools that provided this data than I initially anticipated and it quickly became clear that we weren't going to be able to compare apples to apples and there is no substitute for internal data... but through the combination of some of the below tools you can get a good idea of what sort of traffic your competitors sites are getting.

So, the experiment was a bit of a failure, but I learned more than my fair share about the tools so let's have a look at which tools are available and which tasks/comparisons they can be used for. I'm hanging on to all the data I collected and at a future date (if I ever hear back from some of the data sources) I will post a follow-up/re-do of the experiment.

It is worth pointing out that a number of these sites suggest they can provide better data if you claim the site(s) in question. I cannot testify to the accuracy of this because we have not looked into this (and could not feasibly claim the data for all 25 sites), also, all comments are based upon the free version of the tools as we did not have paid access to any of the tools.

Strengths:
Alexa is good for comparing different sites traffic and for monitoring general traffic trends. It can be quite useful for comparing one site to a competitor site (up to 5 sites at a time).
The index is massive and contains some data about all of the 25 sites we tested.

Weaknesses:
Not so great for the smaller sites. As you can see below, you won't get any of the traffic charts for sites ranked outside of the top 100,000 (which means if you Alexa thinks you are getting any fewer than 10,000 visits per month you're unlikely to glean any great information.

Accuracy is a serious concern. This does taint the usefullness of the tool in general.

The numbers reported are not helpful for predicting traffic on their own.

Accuracy:

We want to keep this all anonymous but let's just say one site that we know gets 10-20,000 visits per month had an Alexa rank that was more than 5 times better than a site that we know gets 75,000+ visitors per month. And this was not just a one-off event.

I would have to seriously quetsion the reliability of this tool. It didn't seem to be too bad at predicting the trends for a single site but the charts are extremely difficult to make any real use of. The information on bounce rate seems fairly accurate (give or take a few percent) but the trends for bounce rate seemed much less accurate (e.g. the ups and downs did not seem to correspond with similar peaks and valleys in Analytics).

Perhaps most interestingly it seems to be skewed in favour of sites within the search marketing space. Sites in the search marketing space that we looked at regulary outranked sites receiving more than 10 times as much traffic on a monthly basis.

How to best use Alexa?
The tool is interesting for comparing similar sites or sites within an industry. I would like to recommend the tool but based upon my experience and this particular data set I would have to say I would be very cautious about using this to make any meaningful suggestions or estimates on traffic data. It is a great concept for a site but does not seem to have been particularly accurate.

The most accurate data seemed to be the data from the visitors by country (the order was fairly accurate and the percentages we looked at were not to far off). To the extent that this data would be useful to have for your competitors this would be one good use of Alexa data.

The insights for audience demographics could also potentially be extremely valuable, though accuracy will always be a question.

Cost:
Free. Options for site audits for $199

Strengths:
Useful interface.
Speak the right language (unique visitors, visits, etc).
Ability to compare multiple sites
Data is easy to understand and well presented.

Weaknesses:
Accuracy
Somewhat limited number of sites - many sites that it classifies as "low sample sites"
Cost of "Pro" option  

Accuracy:
Again, accuracy is a serious concern here. The data was off in some cases by as much as 2,000% for monthly visits. The accuracy seemed to be a bit better for the peaks in traffic and some of the general trends we looked at, but was certainly not reliable enough for us to suggest reporting competitor traffic based upon this information.  

How to best use Compete?
It should come as no surprise that Compete is best used for comparing competitors. The scale of the data is way off but some of the trends seemed to be fairly reliable. I wouldn't advise reporting any numbers from this data (as they do not seem close/reliable at all - often off by a factor of 2 or more), however the trends are reliable. The information could be meaningfully used to look into seasonal trends between competitors. The demographic information (again, not being able to comment on the accuracy) would also be quite interesting but would require registering your site.

I can't very well recommend the PRO services as I was not able to gain access and was unwilling to pay the cost just for the blog post. I would be extremely interesting in looking further into some of the referral data and the keywords data but this is not available as part of the standard free toolset.

Cost: Free. The PRO membership is $499 per month.

Unfortunately we struggled with ComScore. We were unable to get a login or sneak a peak at any of the data. Thus, obviously we cannot comment on the validity of the data, only some of the offerings.

Strengths:
N/A

Weaknesses:
N/A

Accuracy:
N/A

Best use of ComScore:
ComScore offers a number of reports and insights into markets including reports on Local market size, as well as information about valuable/important keywords in an industry. It would be very interesting to find out where this data was coming from and how good it was, but we were not able to achieve this in time to publish this information.

Cost: N/A
Costs were not listed on the site, but rather suggest contacting ComScore directly.

Strengths:
Sites also visited data is good
Keywords searched for can be quite valuable
Audience interests data interesting

Weaknesses:
Accuracy
Lack of data for small sites

Accuracy:
The accuracy was really mixed. For many of the sites AdPlanner provided much better data than some of the others, however, they were still off by miles for some sites - off by as much as 1000%. Again, the data on this in general tended to be better than many of the others, but given the occassional "big miss" I would not be comfortable using this data to make traffic predictions for a client.

How to best use Google Ad Planner:
The data about other sites visited as well as keywords searched for (with affinity) could be extremely valuable. As well as some of the other metrics reported on and audience interests. However, the traffic data is not particularly meangingful and is not to be relied upon.

Pro-tip: The data tends to be better when site owners have granted permission to analytics to publish data, I know we all love open and friendly, but this isn't the sort of thing you neccessarily want to make easier for your competitors to find.

Cost: Free.

Strengths:
Trends around Keyphrases and keyphrase groups
Regional information
Trusted source

Weaknesses:
Difficult to read the data
No hard and fast numbers about traffic
Hard to compare entire sites to one another

Accuracy:
You can bet that the accuracy of this data is going to be pretty good given that the data provider has access to more data than anyone else on the internet. However, the fact that the numbers are normalised and more designed for keyphrases and search terms and trends than for traffic data means that the search volume will correspond perfectly with the traffic to a site.

How to best use Google Insights:
Google Insights could be quite helpful for finding the most valuable pockets of keyphrases and keyphrase groups. This could be particularly valuable when looking at a competitor site and trying to figure out which of their keyphrases are driving the most traffic. Further to that point, it could help you see which of the keyphrases within a keyphrase group might be the most valuable.

Cost: Free.

Strengths:
Good for illustrating magnitudes of difference between sites
Allows comparison of multiple websites
Includes regional information

Weaknesses:
Not good for comparing sites fairly similar in size
Does not have information for smaller sites when logged in
Accuracy imperfect
No numbers*

Accuracy:
The data seems to be more accurate when only trying to compare traffic from search, it does not seem to do as well in picking the winning recipient of overall traffic. Given that these trends are Google Trends this is reasonable and still paints a fair landscape for an SEO's needs.

When comparing websites with drastically different traffic numbers the rough visual estimation appears to correspond quite well with the observed analytics data as well.

It's a shame there are no actual numbers for the data, but that would just be too easy.

How to best use Google Trends for Websites?
Trends is great for broad information gathering. It gives some insite into similar searches when comparing sites, and in general it is unlikely that you will find better comparative data out there without direct access to your competitor's analytics account. However, Trends does not provide numbers and thus can only be used to venture a guess at what sorts of numbers competitors are pulling in.

When two sites are relatively similar in size Google Trends does not always pick the winner in terms of monthly traffic correctly. For example, one of the sites we tested received around 7.5m monthly visits whilst another received around 8m and Google ranked the 7.5m website higher. However, it is worth noting that the 7.5m visitor site received considerably more volume from search than did the 8m visitor site so from an SEO standpoint this data is probably quite accurate.

Edit 22/11/2010 at 13:47 GMT:

Thank you very much to Jest for pointing out that this information was originally written and summarised when logged out of Google. When visiting the site logged in it does provide data (i.e. numbers/ranges). This information makes the tool considerably more valuable. I must point out that I have not had time to run this across the entire data set, though it is worth pointing out that even with the information the data looks to be off on a few of the sites I have checked. It is not as far off as the data for the same sites using AdPlanner, but still considerably far off (e.g. reporting 140k visits for a site that receives ~320k unique visits daily).

Unfortunately we were not able to get data from HitWise in time. The HitWise team was very helpful, responsive and agreeable and we will share this data once we have gotten our hands on it. However, we had not received the data back on the websites in the study in time for publication.

Strengths:
N/A

Weaknesses:
N/A

Accuracy:
N/A

Best use of HitWise:
HitWise, similarly to comScore works on a reporting basis insofar as you speak to them about the types of market reports you would like or you can create custom reports. Whilst we obviously cannot comment on the accuracy of the data the services offered look to be better tailored to an SEOs needs than do the reports offered by comScore. However, generally speaking HitWise will not work with agencies which will be a bit of a bummer for some of you.

Cost: Free-$695+ per report
The range in cost seems to be fairly large. Whether the data warrants the pricing structure cannot really be judged without looking at the data, though they do make some data freely available through their website.

Strengths:
Traffic Numbers that are easy to follow
Design and display of information
Demographic information (when available)
Media Planner Tool

Weaknesses:
Unreliable
Lacks data for small-medium trafficked sites
Accuracy
Inability to compare sites

Accuracy:
Definitely the biggest shortcoming of the Quantcast data is accuracy. As with some of the other sources the traffic data is estimated and is nowhere near accurate on the sites for which Quantcast had any data. Data was off by as much as 10 times the actual analytics data for some of the sites. Again, I cannot say that I would recommend sharing any of the data with a client as an accurate predictor of a competitor's traffic.

Best Use of Quantcast:
Although the data is not particularly reliable for the traffic data some of the other tools the site has to offer seem quite interesting and worth further investigation. The demographics information is also particularly interesting because it provides a reference as to how the data compare against the internet average. This sort of data could be particularly valuable for analysing a market by compiling data across multiple sites.

Cost: Free.

Strengths:
Data Includes sites of all sizes
List of Keyphrases and rankings for thos terms
Most accurate numbered data of all tools looked at

Weaknesses:
Data imperfect
Pay to get full data lists
Data only for Google traffic

Accuracy:
The data was not perfectly accurate, though generally speaking SEMrush did not miss the mark for any of the sites we tested the same way a number of the other tools did. This is, obviously not to say that this data is infallible or that there won't be some issues with some sites, but the data was surprisingly accurate. As with some of the Google data the information reported is just the Google SE traffic, but this is our main area of focus and was quite accurate when drilling down into that specific area of traffic within analytics.

Best Use of SEMrush:
Although imperfect, this tool came the closest to providing accurate data that I would at least with a word of warning, be willing to share with a client about potential expectations or about where there competitors may be traffic wise. Most importantly, the add-on options and ability to see the keyword lists and how the competitor ranks for these terms is extraordinarily appealing to me.

Cost: Free-$499 per month

I hope that the findings from all this research will be valuable to you. At the end of the day it is an incomplete study and I look forward to following up on it when I have another big chunk of time and if/when I get access to comScore, HitWise, Compete PRO and SEMrush Pro. For the time being I would rely most heavily on SEMrush for predicting traffic and estimating how well a competitor is doing, but all of these tools add something to the ever growing toolbelt even if it may be for a purpose other than that which I was hoping they would achieve for me - we all know I love to misuse tools and I'm sure I will come up with some creative ways to use these insights.

Thanks a lot and look forward to any feedback you might have in the comments below or feel free to contact me on Twitter.

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Tools for competitive intelligence session - PubCon 2010

 A quick summary of the content from a competitive analysis session PubCon 2010 with Matt Siltala, Michael Streko, Michael Gray and Andy Beal.

Matt Siltala

Things to identify about the contest:

Hubs.PRWeb search, Digg or news site search to see what is being said about your competition is, what you do and even what keywords you go after to check. You can make a spreadsheet of the keywords that your competitors provided are check the local review sites to see what specials are offered.

Tools.Verwenden you AuthorityLabs side by side with attack keywords and identify areas, competitors.

Social media.Can social media for Firefox plugin, Knowem, Talkin, Twitter search/lists, image search, to identify SEO for Firefox plugin.

Follow "link: www.competitor.com" together with the social media for Firefox plugin, to identify the best content.

Competitors to identify keywords. What your competitors may use can better than convert your keywords.Test you with AdSense.stellen sure keywords having enough good content on your site to your competitors.

Michael Streko

Visit find ways, the "next move" of the company:

Search your code.Check from their "robots.txt".You could a test site ","Images", a new product or domain etc.Google to see search http://dotheyfolloweachother.com possible partners.Check people in your competitors narrow organization to.Follow are your business on LinkedIn.com its own Facebook page."When someone leaves, call immediately and find out, why.Know, links to ThemRead your content, be not afraid, e-Mail-a website, link to a page, the old content has and request a new link to your better version of the content.Incompetence to your advantage.Become an affiliate of your competitors sites use find out "Earnings per click on" get a good idea of traffic.Non Internet bonus tactics: call your opponent and go through the process.

Michael Gray

Blekk0.com - use with "/ AdSense = XXXXXXXX" with the AdSense code or analytics code and sites.Use to see TinEye.com, get a list of competitors where an individual has other profiles and popularity of content.Use shows whether you are legitimate.Quarkbase a Google search for "created on" "submitted" or "discovered by" or "written by" to determine what content is submitted and of wem.Identifizieren competitors with a connection establish the pattern content "Sneezers" when new content promoted/submitted wird.versuchen, helps you in the district to erhalten.TwitterCircles.com to identify you.

Andy Beal

Find customers Erfreuliches.Pochieren clients, promote your alternative to improve your own products and services to this same issues.Look for all negativity from competitors employees or clients to vermeiden.Schlag on the spark of fuse.Use Twitter leuchtet.Verwenden custom parameters to the search.twitter.com and competitive searches einrichten.Falls X staff speaks with Y Z keyword verfolgen.Exportieren employees as RSS.Profitieren from private Twitter lists.DomainTools.com/Registrant-Alert/ and / spy on competitors will let you mark alert to find out, when you are registering new domains.Oodle.com/job spy on the job Angebote.Nachschlagen helps you competitors name and create an RSS feed then aggregate multiple opponents to.

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I have an other Sprint Triathlon!

This morning I have a Sprint Triathlon (700 courtyard swimming, 18 mile bike, 4 mile run) referred to the Tri for real. On the positive side, I had an actual race this year. On the minus side, I broke all the rules preparing for a triathlon: I have only four hours sleep the night before, I worked out the day before and I trained for a short time after the return of Kilimanjaro. So how did I do?

In 2009, I graduated from the same race in 2: 03 (two hour and three minutes). In 2010 I finished in 1: 53: 02. I my time from last year ten minutes shorn!Yay! I am here then:

Sweaty, but glücklich.Danach, my wife and I ate a delicious breakfast at Stacey's Cafe in Pleasanton.Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, co-owner restaurant, so have I today my geeky side with my physical page work.

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Recapping Google's new two-factor authentication

Announcement, I wanted to post about Google's new Two-factor authentication. Two-factor authentication is something you have (such as a phone) and something you know (such as a password). It is kidnapped or otherwise abused a big deal because if your account or business contact two factor authentication has these accounts now less likely to phishing attacks. It is a nice Google authenticator application on Android, iPhone and BlackBerry is running:

For the "something you have" Google provides many ways to authenticate:
-SMS, for example for mobile phones
-VoIP phone call, e.g. for landline phones
Authentication apps for smartphones, which do not have a signal or abroad Android., iPhone and BlackBerry phones are supported.
one time/Single Use Codes that you print out as a final fallback and put in your wallet, desk or safe.

This announcement has a few bonus Features.Hier some extra good things that make me happy:
-Two factor authentication offered on all mail accounts "in the next few months," according to TechCrunch.
-Sie can use a specific browser cookies to authenticate for 30 days per browser.Get bugged with a login message on a computer you use every day, such as your computer at home.
-Google Android authentication app open source and open source according to this page will soon be the iPhone app.
Drew Hintz mentioned in the TechCrunch comments, people take the Google authenticator app RFC 4226, used so much of this work is open stuff and could build.

Drew does a great job debunking misconceptions in the TechCrunch comments:
"Random commenter: Google wants my phone number?"a (fuegen_Sie_zu-Viel-Daten-Verschwoerung_hier) "
"Drew: actually, can the app if you to prefer not to provide a phone number"

Overall, this is a great starten.Ich have you seen the pain protect a hijacked account can cause, over and over and over again quickly not only with a Kennwort.So as you can, add an additional layer of protection with two-factor authentication to your Konto.Zwei factor authentication: it's not only for world of Warcraft more.

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Is Google the recommendations try links paid?

Improve your rankings, traffic and profits today. The SEO book training program offers:

Over 100 training modules, the topics such as: keyword research, link building, website architecture, website monetization, pay-per-click-view tracking results, and more.An exclusive interactive community ForumMembers only videos and ToolsAdditional bonuses - like data spreadsheets and money saving TipsEvery order is risk free, and with the best selling SEO book as a free bonus

But more importantly,....

Listen, what our members say about the # 1 SEO Gemeinschaft.Hier are some of our recent thread topics:

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Get out there and vote!

If you are a U.S. citizen, have you voted yet? You can find your polling place by searching on Google for [where I vote] or [polling place] or [where you vote]. We give you a map:

If you are at all worried that the polling station sound incorrectly Google gives up a link voting place Locator to your state of the left side of the screen.

I want all my U.S. citizens readers to vote today be scanned.the choice in 2000 came to a few hundred votes in Florida, so your voice absolutely traffic.you make a difference will feel good today and if you in the next few years a complaint, you are able to start with be "Hey, I have in the last election and I think..."

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Day 1: E-Commerce and shopping cart optimization recap PubCon 2010

Speakers:
Rob Snell, managing partner, gun dog supply
Khalid Saleh, President and founder, Invesp
Paul Boisvert, Director product management, Yahoo! small business, Yahoo!
Ethan Giffin, CEO and founder, Groove Commerce

Khalid Saleh

Tests to also walk checkout security can assure customers actually backwards start and reduce conversion rates.

Process of the CRO

Where StartImplement optimization with a FrameworkImprove in iterations to plan

4 Number of conversion optimization

No more "anywhere start" ApproachNo more brute force OptimizationNo more "best practices" No. more "test, test, test!"(Part of conversion optimization, but not the end of CRO is tests)

Items evaluated in a good CRO framework

Visitors (visitors have categorically different personas: spontaneous, aggressive, caring, logical, etc.)Confidence (value proposition, consistency, continuity) buy stage (locate information and research) FUDs (fear, uncertainty, doubt) incentives (urgency, clarity, upsell) commitment (promoting return visits and purchase)

Paul Boisvert

Good design = right content, right place, right time, proper treatment

Good design makes 3 things:

1. Odors – when visiting the site is "Scent" helps users, on the way to stay and offers end Accomplsih to help you achieve a strong measure of consistency from the beginning.

2. Tells

Content should address buyer of personas, as offered by Bryan Eisenberg:

CompetitiveSpontaneousMethodicalHumanistic

New research suggests that people on multiple persona types fall, and some are longer activated at different times.According to branding and intention of "Captain Kirk" you need to enable persona and stifle the persona "Mr. Spock" to get your visitor to sales.

Get media mentioned on your site.Can rub off the reputation of the other credible organizations on your reputation.

3. Sold

5 Steps for sale drive

Start practices (not leave in the kind of testing outside the box practices) test with best before LaunchingMeasure LaunchRun A/B/n or MV TestsImplement winner, revise and repeat steps 2 through 4 until the sale of business, retirement or death

Ethan Giffen

Focus on site search

Important facts about site search:

Visitors who want to search with website engage.Conversion prices of people who use site search 3-5 X higher interact for good website SearchAverage conversion rate of visitors of the site search value order of people interacting with site search are 25-50% higher than average CustomersMuch easier than the same on product pages to double

Ways to fix your site search:

Check the top 100 queries. review top 100 searches with no revenue - insert into your Web site search and see what you get. verify you the top 100 searches with no Ergebnisse.Genannt are similar products otherwise? facing important words of product description? selling the product currently online, if you could? is the site search does not offer alternatives for the last year's discontinued models?

Select a provider (unless you're a large retailer, you should probably use a 3rd party product such as Nextopia or SLI)

Do not try it yourself bauen.Hat the SS universal search for other forms of content have to? provides the SS filtered search one navigation element? the SS provides solutions for spellings or synonyms? the AutoComplete function provides the SS? what kind of coverage offered by the system?

Which attributes you want to in the data feed? what attributes are important to visitors and to integrate them in the search result feed? forgotten not configure for "Did my..."Queries, synonyms, direct hits/increase (where do they appear always a particular page for a specific term first)? what if no result in SS? is there more you can do to help the viewfinder?

Rob Snell

Your site's position:

We are ExpertsThis product is what you should buy from us WantYou

Did this by:

Humanization of experts through images and content.Adding "Expert" on product descriptions and PPC ad text, so you search results.Blogging (half to demonstrate expertise) released the actual test results and not shy to off ManufacturersEndorsing specific products through OthersBeing cheap tick to publish product SpecificationsTelling things (i.e. not "cheapest", but it means "Contest") plainly list the benefits purchase with ThemAnswering customer questions very quickly

The above things do increase in sales resulted from $10 M.

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What is SEO really?

Lisa Barone wrote an interesting piece titled "SEOs are responsible for rankings or money?". At a recent SMX Conference posed Matt McGee 'SEO is about rankings' SEO myth. Lisa was relieved when the Panel came to the conclusion that SEO was really all about the money.

I agree, but then all business is ultimately about money.We could say race is all about money, but it's also about Engineering.Es involves skill, excitement and play to win.

So, what is anyway SEO these days?

Back when started SEO SEO SEO was genannt.Es was probably best by those who described it as a form of hacking Act.

The first search engines were not very clever, so it was relatively easy to figure out your Sortieralgorithmen.Es was a time when Infoseek's algorithm was almost entirely based on keyword density and keyword position.

While this still hacking was ultimately about money, it was as much a game than anything else. I am sure many old school of SEOs remember those days with a sense of nostalgia.It was rather a pure technical trace back.

How search engines got more demanding and more money online, the nature of the game changed flowed.SEO transported over technical hacking an exercise in making connections.

In Google's early days, you could buy some high PR links - or begging for you - and that was enough top ten to you in most areas of the keyword ranking.Buy a few more, if you really hard wanted. soak the long tail with auto gen, exactly how your competitors are doing were, and it was auf.Einige may say game we have incomplete links of this stage but the Sun is setting on this approach.

These days, requires a holistic approach.The search engines, Google in particular became more and more oblique, what means systematic technical approaches are less effective than once raises waren.Dies the question - what is a client rent a SEO do exactly?

BTW: For those who want to read deeper a history of SEO, read this excellent Danny Sullivan interview one of SEO knows more than most of the story.

Ever had trouble to tell people what you do?

I worked out a brief response, which is easy to understand for non-technical people. When people wondering what I do tell me I you, "I am a drug dealer".

It is not true, of course, but I only find is easier for people to understand it.When pushed, I'll a declaration which is universally guaranteed that the response "huh" meet to start in detail any SEO, Internet advertising and Web publishing models?.

Often, they'll conclude: "so you Web sites in Google, then rank?".

"Well, that's part of it" is my answer.As I explain further I'm still not sure I was making progress, so figure it's time everyone had other drink and talk about something else.

The SMX Panel is correct. SEO is not just about ranking websites, it is as much mehr.Einige SEOs, me included, use SEO as part of a business strategy a strategy that is only so much about the publishing, domain names, brand building, marketing and traffic acquisition.It goes to metrics, tracking, write conversions, split run testing, AdWords, AdSense, search, manage and change the light bulb in the Office when it blows.The community is that it is aligned around to the search ecosystem. except for light bulb.

Some SEOs focus on very specific areas.It is your responsibility not to take a site in search engines to achieve desirable rankings.Their work ends there.I suspect such a role is always like search engine companies like Google extend their tentacles in every corner of the Web and search inevitably follow consultants less frequent.

Ten different SEOs questions you do and you'll probably get 10 different answers.The laity will probably unfortunately understand none of this.

If in SEO now starting out I don't envy you your challenge.If you're reading this and you're a SEO veteran, please feel free to you add your comments below.Your advice to start what is?

Here's mine.;)

It helps to understand the big picture first.The reason that engage people in SEO is ultimately about money verdienen.Sogar a non-profit make money SEO, by saving money you would have spent on some other marketing channel.

Want people, people with you want your site to finden.Sie but than their competitors to verbinden.Sie people want so you were your these people into buyers, convert their services or your ideas can. If a website were only say ranked - No one searched for keyword terms or who were not directly applicable to the objectives of the company, then the SEO work is largely nutzlos.Es doesn't count if a site indexed in Google no one via a search in Google, visited, then is appears.when the bandwidth everything what has happened that the costs have risen is visited Google's Spider and overview pages and the ROI for the SEO spend is dire.

So is not SEO rankings.

The rankings have something tangible qualified visitors to get traffic Verkehr.Dieser übersetzen.In which means this WINS most cases, must do more than rank, a site that needs a Web site visitors ansprechen.Ein visitors clicking back is not really a Besucher.Besucher raise the SEO must first you verstehen.Was want? what problem do you have?

As soon as the SEO is intention visitors - and do this, can by itself, and testing sites against alternative - direct you then turn visitors around the site to the visitor into something else, i.e. a customer, Subscriber, a Leser.Einige could say this about the job description goes always notes from the search query a SEO, a SEO on this part or not functioning, must it verstehen.Wenn client benefit a positive of a SEOs see work you are unlikely to keep paying for the services.

So, Yes, SEO on Geld.Aber is also about the long process of money is made.

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Interview by Rich Skrenta

 Rich Skrenta has been at the core of search longer than I have been in the SEO market. He is famous for launching sites like DMOZ and Topix. His most recent project is a search engine called blekko, and I recently had a chance to chat with him about blekko, the web, and marketing.

Blekko just launched publicly today. Be sure to check out their search engine, all their SEO features, and the Blekko toolbar.

Most start ups fail. And yet you have multiple successes under your belt and are going at it again. If you could boil success down to a few points, what really separates what you have done from the statistics?

Paul Graham said that the most important thing for a startup is to not die each day. If you can keep existing, that's survival for a company. Generally I like to keep costs low and hire carefully. Also, the first idea doesn't always work. We had to pivot Topix several times to find the right model. For blekko, we just want to make a site that a segment of people will find useful. If we can do that we'll be happy.

It seems openness is a great marketing angle to use online. Why do you feel that it is so under-utilized by most companies?

It feels counter-intuitive to take all our your company IP and secrets and just put them all out there. Little companies also tend to be insecure and want to be appear to be larger and more successful. They want to put on a big company face to the world, but being honest and transparent about who they are and letting the public see "behind the curtain" can often win people over better than a facade of success.

From my perspective, it seems your approach to marketing is heavily reliant on organic, viral & word of mouth strategies. What is broken with the old model of marketing? Is its death happening slower or quicker than you expect?

The internet and social media have made word-of-mouth stronger and stronger, and in many ways they eclipse traditional marketing channels now. This started with blogging and has accelerated with Twitter and Facebook. Everybody is media now. You used to fly around and do a 2 week media tour to launch a product. The aperture to get in the trade press was small, there was a handful of reporters you had to go pitch. Now there are thousands of people who have audience for every trade niche, so it's easier to get the word out about something new. But it has to be genuinely interesting, or your message won't get pickup.

A lot of people who are good at programming make ugly designs. Likewise many people are either programmers or marketers. What formal training or experiences have you had that have allowed an engineer to become such a sophisticated marketer? What strengths do you have that allow you to bridge the disciplines so well?

We joke that we have always made ugly web sites. Fortunately I was able to hire a good designer for blekko and he's been doing a great job taking our early ugly versions and making them a lot more attractive and workable.

I read a lot of stuff about marketing and positioning that we're trying to apply at blekko. I'm a big fan of Trout & Ries. I loved Kathy Sierra's stuff when she was writing. There is some fantastic material also in Kellog on Branding. We also worked with some great positioning consultants that tested various ideas on focus groups to see what would resonate with users best as a message. Every product has a bunch of features, but you want to find the one to talk about that's going to stick in people's heads the best.

I noticed you baked many social elements into your marketing strategy (friend us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter) as well as baking many social elements into your product (personal slashtags, allowing people to share their slashtags, etc.). There is some talk on the web of apps or social stuff replacing search as the center of the web, however from a marketing perspective I see much higher traffic value in search traffic. Do you think that one day social and apps will largely replace global search? Or do you feel it will generally continue to play a secondary role to search?

Social media can drive tons of attention, awareness and traffic. But the search box is the best way to navigate to stuff you want. Now what will drive those results - if I type in "pizza", what should I get? The answer can be very different depending on whether the results are coming from the web, Yelp, or Facebook. So I guess my answer is that I still see search being the core way to navigate, but I think what gets searched is going to get a lot more structured and move away from simple keyword matches against unstructured web pages.

A good number of the social sites are doing redirects for security purposes & to some degree are cannibalizing the link graph. Do you feel that links from the social graph represent an important signal, or that most of that signal still gets represented well on the remaining link graph?

There is very definitely signal in social graph links - potentially more than in the web graph. In 2000, a hyperlink was a social vote. Most links were created by humans and represented an editorial vote. That's no longer true - the web today is inundated with bulk-generated links. To the extent that humans can be separated from bots, there's more true signal in social graphs. The challenge is to get enough coverage to rank everything you need to rank. Delicious had great search results for the corpus of links they knew about, but it wasn't nearly big enough to be comprehensive. Facebook and Twitter are certainly a lot bigger, it will be interesting to see if they start to apply their data to ranking and recommending material from outside of their own sites.

When Google was young Sergey Brin at an SEO conference stated that there was no such thing is spam, only bad relevancy algorithms. When I saw some of your talks announcing Blekko you mentioned that you never want to see eHow in your personal search results. Do you feel that spam is largely down to a personal opinion? If you had to draw a line in the sand between spam & not spam, how would you characterize the differences?

Search must serve an editorial function. You can call this editorial position "relevancy", but that's hiding behind the algorithm. Of course someone wrote the algorithm, and tinkered with it to make some sites come up and others not to come up.

The web has grown 100-fold since 2000. There is most definitely spam out there. Let's take a clear-cut example, like phama links being injected via exploits into unpatched WordPress blogs. Then there is gray-area stuff, like eHow.com. Some people like eHow. Some don't. That's why we let users develop their own /spam filters.

Eric Schmidt mentioned that sharing their ranking variables would be disclosing trade secrets that could harm Google. Yet you guys are sharing your web graph publicly. Are you worried about doing this impacting your relevancy in a negative way? Or do you feel the additional usage caused by that level of awareness will give you more inputs into your search relevancy algorithms?

When I first moved to Silicon Valley I worked in computer security. In security there's an idea that "security through obscurity" isn't very good. What this means is that if you have some new encryption algorithm, but don't let anyone see the details of how it works, it probably is full of holes. The only way to get a strong encryption algorithm is to publish all of the details about how it works and have public review. Once the researchers can't punch any more holes in your algorithm, only then is it good enough to trust.

We see search the same way. If this magic 200-variable equation is so sensitive that if it leaked out the results would be completely overrun with spam, well then the algorithm doesn't actually sound that strong to me. We'd rather work towards a place where there can be public review of the mechanisms driving ranking, and where many eyes can make the spam problem shallow.

Certainly the big search engines have hundreds of human raters that help identify spam and train their algorithms. These are contractors that are the knowledge workers behind the scenes. As a little startup, we asked ourselves how we could get many more people helping us to make our results better, and also be a lot more open about the process. Formerly we had experience running a big crowdsourced search site with the Open Directory, where we had 80,000 editors classifying urls. What if we could get 80,000 people to help us curate search verticals, identify spam, and train classifiers? That would be cool.

You had a blog post comparing pornographers to SEOs. Do you feel the SEO game is mostly adversarial? Or do you feel that paying attention to the SEO industry is a great way to quickly improve the quality of a search product? Or both? :)

I think my comparison noted that pornographers have often been early adopters of new technology. :-)

There is aggressive seo, and then there is what I call appropriate discoverability. Aggressive seo can go over the line - if someone hacks your server to add links, that's borderline criminal activity. But if you have great content and it's not showing up, that's a shame. After we sold topix to the newspapers, we spent some time evangelizing seo within their organizations. Think of all of the movie reviews and restaurant reviews the US newspaper sites collectively have. Wonderfully written material by well-paid professional journalists. But you don't see their content anywhere for a restaurant or movie search. That's a shame.

Recently Ask sorta rebranded away from search & towards more of a QnA format, and Yahoo! bowed out of search through a Bing partnership. Are the cost scales that drive such changes just a legitimate piece of the business model, or were those organizations highly inefficient? How were you able to bring a competitive product to market for so much less?

I was a fan of Ask's Teoma technology, and what Jim Lanzone had been doing with the site. And Yahoo was delivering very high quality results, and had interesting initiatives like the BOSS apis and SearchMonkey. This was all great stuff. I'm disappointed that they lost heart. Running a big company that has been around for a long time is not an easy job.

From an SEO perspective I think that Google tends to have a large index, but crawling so deeply likely allows a lot of junk into their index. Bing seems to be a bit more selective with their crawling strategy. How would you compare Blekko against the other major search engines in terms of depth? Do you feel that relevancy boosts offered through vertical search (via your Slashtags) allows you guys to provide a similar or better experience without needing as large of an index?

Our crawler tends to go into highly ranked sites more deeply than poorly ranked sites. We have a 3 billion page crawl, and so we need to choose the best content to include. This starts at crawl time - should we crawl this url or that url? There are a whole set of heuristics which drive what crawl budget an individual site gets.

The web keeps getting deeper and deeper - the challenge is how to return the good stuff and not sink. This is why we believe human curation needs to be brought back to search. Only by curating the best content in every vertical can the most relevant results be returned.

Amongst SEOs the issue of "brand" as a relevancy signal has been a topic of heated debates. How important do you feel brand is as a signal of relevancy & authority?

One of the things we look at is how natural the pattern of mentions of a site looks. Real brands tend to have a natural pattern of mentions on the web.

You had a blog post a few years back titled "PageRank wrecked the web." How do you feel about paid links? What editorial actions do you guys take when you find paid links?

If links have an economic value, they're going to be bought and sold. It's that simple. What happens in our ranker is that we classify different sources of signals, and then let the machine learning figure out what the signal is telling us. Is this a good source of anchortext? Or maybe a certain class of links even has a negative contribution to rank, if what the links are telling us doesn't correlate with the direction we want the ranker to be going.

How hard is it to detect paid links? What has been the most challenging part of launching a world class search engine?

The whole thing has been hard. Search has so many sub-components, and even things that sound trivial like DNS turn into big projects when you need to scale them up to billions of web pages.

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David Pogue keynote - PubCon 2010

David Pogue is the tech columnist for the New York Times and a very sharp-looking person who this morning by the way, spoke through a fit of laryngitis.

Highlights of David Pogue's keynote called: disruptive online tech

David highlighted "Megatrends" Tech interruption.

Mobile applications

All today's tech highlighted interest centres around app phones, which create a whole new category of technical Pogue really a few

Dragon Dictation is distributed free of charge, but has, were to analyze hundreds of thousands of conversations in the value data to the speech pattern and accumulate help with the development of their paid products.

Ocarina http://ocarina.smule.com sold 1.5 million copies at $1 je.Die is app really sensitive breath and touch, so it "instrument can be played like a wind". You can hear the melodies played by others, real time are all over the world.

Augmented reality

TwittARound can point your phone at a building and allows you to see, that is from this location tweeting.

Retina is to coordinate the color blind people an app allows colors notwithstanding its borders.

Phone calls

The world wants free calls from your cell phone to any other phone.Currently, the solutions like Skype, line2, and Google voice are very close to providing this, but none of you have a complete solution.

We see a huge drop landline phone service in the last three Jahren.Wir are close to free phone service anywhere always.

Wireless access anywhere

Right now, the Wi-Fi solutions are expensive, include any consuming electricity or uncomfortable (coffee shops, anyone?).

MiFi offers 4 hours on a charge, 5 people can be online at once, and costs $40$ 60 per Monat.Noch again, this is a game changer close to, but there is still space go.

Web 2.0

Last year, Microsoft bought 1.2% of Facebook for $240 million.Wikipedia.YouTube.Flickr. all large and disturbing.

Web 2.0 is similar interests to connect to people.

DoMyStuff.com can you list the stuff you want done and people will bid to see who do it the cheapest.

Prosper.com can their business plans with the possibility of users, microcredits by other users get pitch.

GoLoco is a car-pooling database linking car spooler, who want to travel.

E Petitions.com a petition about to starten.Es anyone can care what the British Government and people to see.

Who is sick? shows the locations and progressions of the disease in a geographical area, almost like a weather map.

Take away

Anything metal splinters adds future alles.In on previous Version.Technologie small progress in real time tech development be replaced always something in the Technologie.Alles all-in Echtzeit.Der peoples expectations are drastically ändern.Wir television on TV live in an age where leave write phone messages, E-mail, and even concepts such as privacy are phasing out of some people in in favor of more immediate solutions.

We have, unlike for working with these trends to unterrichten.Wir need to learn the next generation, how credible stay and remain as sane.

Well done, David.

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Localization unique records and the future of search

Google's US ad revenue is roughly 15 billion & the size of the US Yellow Pages market is roughly 14 billion. Most of that money is still in print, but that shift is only accelerating with Google's push into local.

Further, cell phones are location aware, can incorporate location into search suggest, and on the last quarterly conference call Google's Jonathan Rosenberg highlighted that mobile ads were already a billion Dollar market for Google.

Google has been working on localization for years, and as a top priority. When asked "Anything you’ve focused on more recently than freshness?" Amit Singal stated:

Localization. We were not local enough in multiple countries, especially in countries where there are multiple languages or in countries whose language is the same as the majority country.

So in Austria, where they speak German, they were getting many more German results because the German Web is bigger, the German linkage is bigger. Or in the U.K., they were getting American results, or in India or New Zealand. So we built a team around it and we have made great strides in localization. And we have had a lot of success internationally.

I have been saving some notes on the push toward local for a while now, and with Google's launch of the new localized search results it is about time to do an overview. First here is Google's official announcement, and some great reviews from many top blogs.

Some of the localized results not only appear for things like Chicago pizza but also for single word searches in some cases, like pizza or flowers.

Promoting local businesses via the new formats has many strategic business benefits for Google

assuming they track user interactions, then eventually the relevancy is better for the end users allows local businesses to begin to see more value from search, so they are more likely to invest into a search strategy creates a direct relationship with business owners which can later be leveraged (in the past Google has marketed AdWords coupons to Google Analytics users) if a nationwide brand can't dominate everywhere just because they are the brand, it means that they will have to pony up on the AdWords front if they want to keep 100% exposure if Google manages to put more diversity into the local results then they can put more weight on domain authority on the global results (for instance, they have: looked at query chains, recommended brands in the search results, shown many results from the lead brand on a branded search query, listed the official site for searches for a brand + a location where that brand has no office, etc.) it puts eye candy in the right rail that can make searchers more inclined to look over there it makes SEO more complex & expensive it allows Google to begin monetizing the organic results (rather than hiding them) it puts in place an infrastructure which can be used in other markets outside of local

Off the start it is hard to know what to make of this unless one draws historical parallels. At first one might be inclined to say the yellow page directories are screwed, but the transition could be a bit more subtle. The important thing to remember is that now that the results are in place, Google can test and collect data.

More data sources is typically better than better algorithms, and Google has highlighted that one of their richest sources of data is through tracking searcher behavior on their own websites.

There are 2 strong ways to build a competitive advantage on the data front:

make your data better starve competing business models to make them worse

Off the start yellow page sites might get a fair shake, but ultimately the direction they are headed in is being increasingly squeezed. In a mobile connected world with Google owning 97% search marketshare, while offering localized search auto-complete, ads that map to physical locations, and creating a mobile coupon offers network, the yellow page companies are a man without a country. Or perhaps a country without a plot of land. ;)

They are so desperate that they are cross licensing amongst leading competitors. But that just turns their data into more of a commodity.

Last December I cringed when I read David Swanson, the CEO of R.H. Donnelley, state: "People relate to us as a product company -- the yellow-pages -- but we don't get paid by people who use the yellow-pages, we get paid by small businesses for helping them create ad messages, build websites, and show up in search engine results. ... Most of the time today, you are not even realizing that you are interacting with us."

After seeing their high level of churn & reading the above comment, at that point I felt someone should have sent him the memo about the fate of thin affiliates on AdWords. Not to worry, truth would come out in time. ;)

Making things worse, not only is local heavily integrated into core search, with search suggest being localized, but Google is also dialing for Dollars offering flat rate map ads (with a free trial) and is testing fully automated flat rate local automated AdWords ads again.

How does a business maximize yield? Externalize costs & internalize profits. Pretty straightforward. To do this effectively, Google wants to cut out as many middle men out of the game as possible. This means Google might decide to feed off your data while driving no traffic to your business, but rather driving you into bankruptcy.

Ultimately, what is being commoditized? Labor. More specifically:

the affiliate who took the risk to connect keywords and products the labor that went into collecting & verifying local data the labor that went into creating the editorial content on the web graph and the links which search engines rely on as their backbone. the labor that went into manually creating local AdWords accounts, tracking their results, & optimizing them (which Google tracks & uses as the basis for their automated campaigns) the labor that went into structuring content with the likes of micro-formats the labor that went into policing and formatting user reviews many other pieces of labor that the above labor ties into

Of course Google squirms out of any complaints by highlighting the seedy ends of the market and/or by highlighting how they only use such data "in aggregate" ... but if you are the one losing your job & having your labor used against you, "the aggregate" still blows as an excuse.

But if Google drives a business they are relying on into bankruptcy, won't that make their own search results worse?

Nope.

For 2 big reasons:

you are only judged on your *relative* performance against existing competitors after Google drives some other players out of the marketplace and/or makes their data sets less complete, the end result is Google having the direct relationships with the advertisers and the most complete data set

The reason many Google changes come with limited monetization off the start is so that people won't question their motives.

Basically I think they look at it this way: "We don't care if we kill off a signal of relevancy because we will always be able to create more. If we poison the well for everyone else while giving ourselves a unique competitive advantage it is a double win. It is just like the murky gray area book deal which makes start up innovation prohibitively expensive while locking in a lasting competitive advantage for Google."

You would never hear Google state that sort of stuff publicly, but when you look at their private internal slides you see those sorts of thoughts are part of their strategy.

The real Google guidelines should read something like this:

Fundamentally, the way to think about Google's perception of spam is that if Google can offer a similar quality service without much cost & without much effort then your site is spam.

Google doesn't come right out and say that (for anti-trust reasons), but they have mentioned the problem of search results in search results. And their remote rater documents did state this:

After typing a query, the search engine user sees a result page. You can think of the results on the result page as a list. Sometimes, the best results for "queries that ask for a list" are the best individual examples from that list. The page of search results itself is a nice list for the user.

After reading the above some SEOs might have a sigh of relief thinking "well at least this is only local."

To me that mindset is folly though.

Think back to the unveiling of Universal search. At first it was a limited beta test with some news sites, then Google bought Youtube, and then the search landscape changed...everyone wanted videos and all the other stuff all the time. :D

Anyone who thinks this rich content SERP which promotes Google is only about local is going to be sorely disappointed as it moves to:

travel search (Google doesn't need to sell airline tickets so long as they can show you who is cheapest & then book you on a high margin hotel) any form of paid media (ebooks, music, magazines, newspapers, videos, anything taking micro-payments) real estate large lead generation markets (like insurance, mortgage, credit cards, .edu) ecommerce search perhaps eventually even markets like live ticketing for events

Google does query classification and can shape search traffic in ways that most people do not understand. If enough publishers provide the same sorts of data and use the same types of tags, they are creating new sets of navigation for Google to offer end users.

No need to navigate through a publisher's website until *after* you have passed the click toll booth.

Google SearchWiki failed in large part because it confused users. Google launched SideWiki about a year ago, but my guess is it isn't fairing much better. When SideWiki launched Danny Sullivan wrote:

Sidewiki feels like another swing at something Google seems to desperately desires — a community of experts offering high quality comments. Google says that’s something that its cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted more than a system for ranking web pages. They really wanted a system to annotate pages across the web.

The only way they are going to get that critical mass is by putting that stuff right in the search results. It starts with local (& scrape + mash in other areas like ecommerce), but you know what they want & they are nothing if not determined to get what they want! ;)

Scrape / mash / redirect may be within the legal limits of fair use, but it falls short in spirit. At some point publishers who recognize what is going on will align with better partners. We are already seeing an angry reaction to Google from within the travel vertical and from companies in the TV market.

Ultimately it is webmasters, web designers & web developers who market and promote search engines. If at some point it becomes consensus that Google is capturing more value than they create, or that perhaps Google search results have too much miscellaneous junk in them, they could push a lot more searchers over to search services which are more minimalistic + publisher friendly. Blekko launches Monday, and their approach to search is much like Google's early approach was. :)

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SEO (usually) is created with the request.

The Conference was at a recent SEO is a question better, which get a geo-local page rank for your own specific brand + location (where you were against resellers and aggregators in the vertical competition). I was a bit tired at the end of the day, so I'm not sure if I put my point good enough it got over so I thought it would be useful, follow-up here....:)

If the above question was more fully sussed turns out that the main issue not rank but rather a demand war.Sogar with you + was all the aggregators that specific subtree simply not profitable, especially when compared with other offices in neighboring cities.

This is the core issue here: SEO meets demand, but not SEO create demand.*

* There are some exceptions as complex long B2B purchase cycles and people selling abstract products & services like art, but generally its true for most businesses.

If you sell a commodity product is similar to the other commodity products (or are 1 similar 1000 reviews on the Web - as an affiliate) rankings then a bit better for the brand that targeted the affiliate will lead you to more conversions for you.

But all this is built on the back of the arbitraging existing brands equity & consumer demand, create really new demand, and for sich.Sicher can some types of reviews certain products seem more compelling than others, but the way the need creating the above Organization needed has come queries and/or arbitraging competing brands of wider generic detection make.

If someone place just among us in the search results for "SEO book tools" with reviews of our exclusive domain Finder tool, our competition research tool and a few other tools we offer then you may make a limited number of incremental revenue for us, but if we significant incremental revenue wanted to create we have 3 ways

build our brand cross market trying to gain exposure on wider associated generic keywords

There are many ways to build brand, from public relations to additional products and features that write interaction on more events increasingly etc. offer on our blog, advertising, etc. etc.The good thing about creating brand exposure is the brand keywords tend to be the keywords with the highest rates of conversion... so if you create your brand you create an increase in traffic and an increase in conversion rates.

Mentioned when I lived in State College, Pennsylvania, that the guy StateCollege.com owned at one point, he on the parking lot of the football stadium advertising its domain name is a huge airship put up.He was sentenced to do it, but it was only a cost marketing... to do a cheap source of exposure.

As a regional office may you not able to do that much labeled but: you may be missing the budget for branded advertising & could some types of restrictions on the types of things you can do to gain awareness.

This is an area where the issue at the Conference could have done well people.They could have done marketing more aggressive cross within your organization and with other organizations.

Part of what created demand for this entire region / area was a huge theme park Art.So ran in theory could also have special offers with theme park offers you could have found discounts to frequent Besuchern.vielleicht, who went to this theme park and she sent mailers with seasonal discount offered.

If neighbouring branches were often sold out, and this branch was not then what could you have done is find out which customers are there common customers and among people are budget conscious... promote the idea of saving much of is the money more than value a bit further way among those.

Further segmentation could done business functions of tourists to trennen.Bieten are companies that holds meetings a discount on meeting rooms rental in convenient point, which is further away and those who can most of tourists in the venue with higher demand to load over, try the demographic targeting a strong option sein.Einigen areas keep annual Festival for certain alternative lifestyles.

Within the meaning of the cross marketing online were both SEOmoz Raven and aggressive when running conference discounts and/or offers free conference passes when the setup their higher tiered account levels one.

Coupons and loyalty programs help also this Front.Man could a petition of the local Chamber of Commerce to some kind of seasonal celebration or promotional hook for the city that most local businesses help your city would erstellen.Ist home of the cranberry? there must be some kind of hooks or angle.

The world is full of unique places and there is something interesting in your backyard enough if you are close.

The above company who thought needed rank better for "brand name" + "Your location" could have driven some additional incremental volume to rank better for the query stream related such as:

"Their product category" + "Your location" (sit down in front of more traffic stream associated by the generic...)Can also direct ads on other sites that rank also run and have relevant traffic of streams) creating a page focused on "Your product category" + "located near popular local attraction" (to come up with alternatives, people with the same intention search... Specifies boatloads of options that front for those focused content on specific business problems create) with ads on competing local brands including things like "free _ feature" or "up to _ % cheaper than brand X" (competing brands... arbitraging this can be effective, but easy playful & cause that blood + tears)

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Geordie Carswell interview

About a year ago my wife and I started to notice Google's increasingly aggressive push into demoting the organic results and extending AdWords ads. Based in large part on that we decided to partner with Geordie Carswell to create a sister site to SEO Book focused on paid search & contextual advertising - PPC Blog. I have been meaning to interview him for a while & just finally got around to it.

How did you get into pay per click marketing?

I started with Adwords around five years ago, independently marketing software apps and other consumer technology products. From there I continued running my own campaigns while blogging and doing one-on-one Adwords coaching in addition to other marketing ventures.

How has PPC changed since you got into the field?

When I started there were very few big brands doing PPC in a significant way and, at least in the niches I was working in, affiliates were dominating. That of course has flipped upside down in the last 12 months with brands dominating and affiliates being flushed out the bottom of the system.

I feel Google's implementation of various forms of Quality Score into the Adwords platform has been the highest impact spate of changes in terms of direct effect on advertiser performance.

On the platform options side, the growth of Facebook Ads as a PPC channel has also been hugely significant, notwithstanding the merger of Yahoo and Microsoft on paid search.

On organic search I feel that if you work on a big brand, SEO is mostly about information architecture & getting buy off from key players in your company. Whereas if you run thin affiliate sites you have to be quite clever with your link building strategies to build up enough authority to compete. In the same way I think PPC is likely much harder as an affiliate than as a merchant. Would you agree with that?

Well, to be perfectly candid, a pure-play affiliate effort on Adwords in particular is becoming nearly impossible over the long term as Google shows affiliates the door. There's still some room on Microsoft adCenter/Yahoo and Facebook, but the editorial squeeze is on there as well.

The affiliate play of the future would need to involve a recognizable, highly-branded site that "people have heard of" vs. one-off mini or article sites etc...

A lot of affiliate stuff seems to race toward 0 margins. I had one killer offer I was buying traffic for a couple years ago & I was paying about 25 cents a click for traffic that was worth about $6 a click. Within about 3 days someone stole my ad copy word for word and then when I raise my bid to $6 my ad still wouldn't show. How can an affiliate fight the trend toward lower margins?

That's tough. Highly successful affiliates by nature tend to be very good at finding a small sliver of inefficiency in a system and filling that gap. That tends to inevitably be a 'point-in-time' win that ends up competitively saturated.

Often, a lateral move running the same type of campaign on alternate PPC platform can work, but let's face it: competition eventually finds its way there as well, and there are only so many PPC platforms to run on. I strongly believe the best defense against the endless push towards lower margins is to test more than the other guy. Competition will always be there, but he who tests more and thereby extracts more margin wins in the long run.

In terms of leading people astray, how often would you say major search engines give self-serving advice that harms advertisers?

One of the biggest things we still see Google doing is opting advertisers into the Google Display Network (previously known as the content network) by default when creating new campaigns. I'm sure Google needs ways to generate interest in the Display Network, but they know full well that blending search and content campaigns together is a recipe for disaster and I'd like to see them step up and stop that.

Additionally, offers from reps to 'optimize' your campaigns (while well intentioned) have lead to a lot of unnecessarily broad campaign expansions that can truly destroy the profitability of an already-successful campaign.

Part of the problem comes from advertisers trusting Google a bit too much: Google is there to extract as much revenue as they can from their keyword inventory without permanently scaring away advertisers with unmanageable costs. An advertisers' job is to generate as much net profit from Adwords as possible. Those two goals are at odds by nature, so discernment is vital when evaluating why Google is offering something or making an 'improvement' to the system.

Google offers a number of automated optimization tools for advertisers. When does it make sense to use them? Who should avoid using them?

Most of the automation solutions offered by Google like Conversion Optimizer or Automatic Bidding really won't have much benefit to smaller advertisers who don't typically have enough paid click traffic to measure the results of using these offerings. That said, if you have a decent amount of traffic you can save considerable time using their optimization tools, particularly when fishing for new traffic and/or placements.

One area I would suggest some caution on however is the "New Keyword Opportunities" feature that shows up at the top of your campaigns interface. This is an awesome tool for Google to snag new bidders on additional keyword inventory in their system, but it can cost you a pretty penny if you just accept and add whatever keywords they happen to "recommend" for you. You really need to be careful with these and look at the expected avg. CPC amounts to see if you can afford to add what's being suggested. Burning through your budget unnecessarily on overpriced or untargeted keywords isn't fun.

You buy traffic on most the major platforms. What business models do you feel work best with each of the major platforms - say Google AdWords, Microsoft adCenter, and Facebook ads?

I think local, education, online dating, and mobile represent some of the best fit for Facebook. Other niches can be genuinely daunting uphill push on Facebook. With Yahoo and Microsoft now consolidated into the Adcenter ad platform, managing alternate campaigns on another network is now much easier and can't be ignored given the combined search marketshare Microsoft and Yahoo have put together. There's really no excuses for not running your campaigns on both Adwords and Adcenter in tandem.

Some people have been hyping Facebook as the next Google. Is it? Why or why not?

Well, I think it's more accurate to compare Facebook Ads to Google's Display Network. They're both considered contextual advertising as Facebook search hasn't really turned out to be a particularly lucrative opportunity yet.

When comparing Facebook Ads to the Google Display Network, I think the key advantage that Google has with Adsense is the topical blend. The blending of content ads via Adsense has gotten so good that in some cases even ad professionals have to look closely to determine if a link or placement is an ad or original content. Facebook doesn't really have this advantage, pretty much every Facebook user knows that those are ads in the right siderail, and unless the image in the ad is incredibly compelling, it's just going to be ignored. As Facebook builds out their contextual ad empire, it'll be interesting to see what options come up.

I don't think however that disgruntled Adwords advertisers looking over the fence at Facebook Ads will find instant success. It's a different beast from an ad server behavior perspective and it's also extremely competitive.

When you are working with smaller clients, what are some of the most common roadblocks they run into when they begin paid search advertising?

The learning curve is number one, closely followed by issues with account architecture and Google Quality Score. From what I've heard and read, the churn rate on new small business Adwords accounts is immense as people try it, fail, and then leave. Google has tried to fix this I think with the learning center resources and videos, but most new advertisers won't even get around to looking at those.

Part of the challenge is prepping clients for the fact that PPC is going to take real time and effort to be successful, and that time has to be budgeted and weighed against other demands. Obviously it's worth it in the long run for well-organized businesses who have optimized their websites for shoppers. Those who don't have a clear path to purchase or request additional info will find their PPC spend tends to go into a black hole.

When you are working with larger clients, what is the hardest part of paid search?

Many large companies have some sort of PPC campaigns running, but it's not a core marketing focus for them to the extent that it should be. There's almost a tendency to say "what we've got going is good enough" or "we're breaking even" and leave it at that. Some of the easiest ways for the marketing team to move the needle sales or leads-wise in a large organization is to exploit paid search to the fullest extent possible. Overpaying Google and accepting less-than-ideal sales performance from PPC is something too many large clients put up with.

This is a big reason we had such a great time building out the Adwords Tax Calculator on PPCblog. When you actually quantify what you're paying in overhead to straight to Google due to a number of completely fixable campaign tactics, it's really motivating.

You have been running PPC Blog's training program and community for close to 3 months now, and it has been getting strong reviews. What are some of the most important and interesting things you have learned from that experience?

It's been very interesting. I really felt prior to running PPCblog that there wasn't anywhere "safe" to discuss advanced tactics and observations about Adwords without Google either closely watching the discussion or directly hosting it. It's been great to share and compare real campaign data in a trusted environment like the one we have going there.

Another thing I've noticed is that the level of discussion and discourse is much higher when people are paying to participate. It weeds out a lot of noise and repetition. Additionally, I've also found that I'm using the custom tools we've developed for members far more often than I had originally thought I would, and that's been helping me save time while keeping up with the community and running campaigns.

How do you feel paid search and SEO tie into each other?

Personally I feel they're both essential 'legs on the stool' (email marketing I think follows closely thereafter). It always amazes me that SEOs will spend huge bucks buying links or doing biz dev deals to get traffic that's not 100% guaranteed to flow, but they won't spend a dime buying traffic directly with Adwords or Adcenter. When you see the amount of brand bidding that goes on with PPC, its a good reminder that if you're not buying even in the least of your brand's keywords, your competitors likely are. With organic results getting pushed farther and farther down the page each year, a two-pronged approach only makes sense.

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Thanks Geordie. You can catch his latest paid search thoughts on PPC Blog & follow him on Twitter @geordiecarswell. There is a free 7-day PPC starter course here, and on the PPC training program he is currently offering a coupon for 25% off for new members.

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