Does economic uncertaintly push online ad spend into SEM?

According to SEMPO (the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization) it does.

Apparently money is shifting into search and away from print and classified at an increasing rate. The reason for this I'd surmise is that search is being seen as a way to follow consumers rather than just trying to put an ad in front of them. It's now widely accepted that most markets have a need to be active in search so it's natural for spend to shift towards it.

Key findings from the SEMPO study are:

• The North American SEM industry grew from $9.4 billion in 2006 to $12.2 billion in 2007, exceeding earlier projections of $11.5 billion for 2007.
• North American SEM spending is now projected to grow to $25.2 billion in 2011, up significantly from the $18.6 billion forecast a year ago.
• Marketers are finding more search dollars by poaching budget from print magazine spending, website development, direct mail and other marketing programs
• Paid placement captures 87.4 percent of 2007 spending; organic SEO, 10.5 percent; paid inclusion, 0.07 percent, and technology investment, 1.4 percent.
• Google AdWords remains the most popular search advertising program, but both Google and Yahoo sponsored search spending has decreased from a year ago

Here's how the spend is shifting:

Shifting to search is great for all the SEO agencies out there but is also going to make their jobs a lot harder as they have to work for their money to get clients to the top of the listings. As competition grows, so it becomes more difficult to get dramatic improvements in position, some SEO agencies have had an easy ride in recent years and that's going to get harder.

Other developments will also affect SEO such as the introduction of semantic search technology (as announced by Yahoo recently). Developments such as this could change the rankings entirely and again will mean the agencies have to stay ahead of the game and work hard (not a bad thing).

Top online marketers rate SEO and behavioural ads

Marketing Sherpa has quizzed 420 top digital marketing experts about what they feel are the most effective methods for advertising online and which give the best ROI.

Search engine optimisation came top, this is not surprising as the ROI is incredible. Some changes take such little effort and can return such amazing gains that SEO will always be the top in a survey like this.

Second came behavioural targeting for adverts, slightly more surprising this one as I wasn't aware the technology was quite there yet to get a better ROI than other ways of advertising such as paid search.

Paid search (or PPC) showed quite a drop in confidence in delivering ROI, however marketers said that the biggest increase in budgets would be in the paid search arena.

And the biggest trend in measurement for this year was voted to be the integration of search and email analytics with your standard onsite analytics thus completing the tracking of the customer journey. Integrating offline and online campaign tracking came second here, now that's a holy grail and I don't believe will be truly possible for a year or so longer.

Interesting study; more available here.

Top marketing opportunity... SEO??

A report has been released by Anderson Analytics as the results of a survey of the Marketing Executives Networking Group (a 1,700 strong network of marketers at VP level or higher). The survey asked what marketing concepts these executives thought were going to be the top trends and concepts in 2008.

Worryingly, when asked which marketing concepts they felt were going to be most important the second highest answer turned out to be SEO!

Now, I don't know whether marketers are unsure what search engine optimisation is or perhaps this was a particularly 'offline' group of marketers, but SEO is already hugely important and in my eyes if you haven't grasped that yet then it's a bit late. Saying that it will be the second most important concept next year is amazing to me. It's been part of my life for 12 years and is really just part of the routine I go through for any digital project.

Here's the rest of the list:
If you had to ask me what some of the concepts I thought were important for next year were (in digital), I'd say:

• Offline/online translation (getting your offline campaigns translated in a seamless manner onto digital media, something that really isn't being done very well at the moment)
• Viral (campaigns should always be thought of as viral if they touch the web)
• Widgets (cross pollination of marketing campaigns online using widgets)
• Social media (yes, it's huge this year, but next year should see it mature and the launch of OpenSocial will make it more important than ever)
• Banners (controversial one this but we are now at a stage where banners should become more like widgets and really start to become properly engaging, whether this will happen I'm not sure as most agencies who design banners aren't particularly forward thinking)

Underpinning all of those, and every other online marketing concept, should be SEO.

What do you think the key concepts of 2008 will be?

Is Yahoo catching up in search?

Okay, so Google are still miles ahead on market share in the search world. Below is the latest graph from Compete.com showing just how commanding a lead they have.
However, Compete have some interesting insight into quality rather than reach. Quality in search is rarely discussed and whenever it has been Google has always been assumed to be in the lead there as well due to their massive research and development capabilities.

That may be the wrong assumption though!

Compete have looked at a metric they call search fulfillment. They came up with this because even though there are many searches taking place on the major engines, not all result in a click on a result and a referral. In fact, according to their data out of approx 7.5 billion monthly searches only 5 billion result in a referral.

So, if Google looks like the leader from a search volume point of view, how about from a fulfillment point of view. The graph below shows an interesting picture...
So Google is not getting the referrals the volume suggests it should.

Yahoo seems to do really well from this which I find strange as the relevancy of results in Yahoo never seems as good to me as Google. Of course there are many other possible reasons for this, a couple being that the figures may exclude clicks on paid links and that Google returns much more useful snippets in the results than any other engine often negating the need to click through.

Of course Google's figures could be vastly inflated by all the agency types, SEO's and webmasters out there who perform daily searches to check their sites rankings without ever clicking on anything. It would be really interesting to understand those volumes!

Social crowd sourced search results

A new search engine has launched to not much fanfare and pretty stealthily called iRazoo. It's interesting to me as it's doing a similar thing to Mahalo in that it's using the input of users to qualify search results.

Rather than go down the Mahalo route where specialists are paid to put together search results, iRazoo is allowing users to recommend a search result while they are surfing. When users click a search result it's opened in a new window, this could annoy a lot of users as pop-ups (even user activated) are generally a no-no these days. That's purely a user interface issue though and I'm sure they will change it if they get enough feedback requesting it. There's a bar across the top of the new window asking whether you recommend the site and allowing comments to be left as well.

As an incentive users are able to earn points for their recommendations. However you need many thousands of points to get any meaningful prizes (camera or mp3 player) and so it could take quite some time.

It's an interesting concept and one that could work quite well if it was designed with the user in mind. At the moment it's a fairly clunky and unwieldy process with the pop-up windows and the bar across the resulting websites. A few small changes could fix that though and a bit of usability testing, and they may need to do this to gain traction with users.

Of course, it is possible to game the site a little by recommending your own websites, but I'm sure (or at least hope) they will have thought of that. If they can gain the much needed traffic and signed up members then it should even itself out anyway.

The idea of the 'crowd' providing intelligence to search results is a great one and in my opinion beats the Mahalo idea of specialists. Crowd wisdom is a far better way to measure the value of something and as such this could have potential with a little better execution.

Startpages: ethical SEO or akin to search engine spam?

Google's Webmaster Central blog has an interesting post detailing their position with regards to the practice of creating startpages. Startpages are webpages with a lot of links about a specific topic. The startpages are hosted on a startpage domain and each separate startpage is maintained by an individual webmaster. The links on startpages are usually ordered by categories related to the topic of the page.

Great! They're useful starting points on the web containing a load of links and content relevant to what you are looking for.

But, can this practice be misused to spam search engines? Yes, of course it can. Create yourself a load of startpages with links into your own websites and services, make them keyword rich and highly optimised for search engine crawlers. There you go, a load of doorway pages which don't sit on your own domain and therefore don't get looked on as SEO spam.

A winning formula for unethical SEO's everywhere. This practice already exists and I'm amazed that Google hasn't taken the opportunity to frown upon this practice in this article on their blog! They do mention that link farms are against their guidelines, but no mention of whether they'll be looking to filter them out or not.

Most savvy web folk will know better than to try that, but there are bound to be some who will see Google's endorsement of startpages as a sign that they can try some less ethical practices to gain traffic and SEO link equity.

Niche portals; is it really 1997 all over again??

News out today that the founders of online travel site Lastminute.com are launching a new site. Mydeco.com aims to be the online hub for the budding decorators and diy'ers out there who currently don't have a home on the web to call their own.

Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane Fox are coming together to launch this new venture, it's the first thing they've worked on together since Lastminute. The site aims to be a one stop shop for people looking to improve their home, and as well as advice and tips it will sell items such as furniture.

Word is that £5m in seed capital has been raised which should see this venture take off!

I reckon it's a winner. If you get the social aspects of a niche site such as this right and do the right deals with third party suppliers then you will be on to a winner. Traffic shouldn't be a problem as relevant terms drive huge volume from SEO and the £5m will go a long way towards getting them an audience.

I say back to 1997 as a friend and I ran niche portals such as this (based around forums) for fun back in those days. Maybe it's time to dust off carmechanic.com...

Spannerworks mapping the web for brands

Spannerworks are a great agency, I use them for SEO currently, but my relationship with them goes a long way back (a start-up I worked for built sites for their Chief Exec many years ago). Plus they're the local boys made good in the web world as possibly the most successful Brighton based new media concern.

So it's great to learn that they are still breaking new ground by launching innovative new products. Their latest offering is called Network Sense, and it's being touted by them as 'giving companies critical insights into the relationship between their brand and social media networks, such as blogs and wikis, and online communities such as MySpace and Bebo'.

Sounds like a very smart move to me! The buzz around social media and reputation is huge at the moment. It's also a topic very close to my heart as I used to program intelligent search agents designed specifically to track reputation, buzz and commentary on large companies when at that same start-up many years ago. Great to see this all coming full circle!

Personalised search: how will SEO fare?

Personalised search is going to be big! That's my prediction since I started using the feature on Google recently. It's made a huge difference to the quality and relevance of results I receive and made finding the information that appeals to me a lot easier. The idea of personalised search is that it learns from your searching and clicking habits so it can return results that are more likely to appeal to you. I've found that after a few weeks of use the amount of search engine spam that appears in the top 20 results has dwindled significantly for the majority of searches I perform, that alone is worth switching the feature on for!

So, from a user perspective, personalised search definitely looks like it is a good thing and the more intelligent Google etc can make it the more value it will add to the user experience. But the question I have is how will this impact on companies SEO (search engine optimisation) strategies going forwards?

The idea of a personalised search is that it learns from your queries and the results that you click on so it can return more relevant results to you. Initially, when you switch on personalised search you will get the usual results, ranked according to whatever search engines algorithm you happen to be using at the time. After a short amount of time you'll notice it begin to learn from your habits and present slightly different results. This means that you are overriding the search engine algorithm, but more importantly you are overriding a lot of the SEO efforts made by the site owners. SEO will still be key in bringing you to the top of the results in the initial searches, but as the personalisation kicks in the SEO efforts are going to matter less and less.

So, maybe site owners would be better investing in ensuring their websites are created in well formed code which adhere's to standards rather than link exchanges and copy writing specifically for SEO (as we know, search engines love well formed code)? Possibly... but SEO will still be an important method of ensuring you get good visibility in search engines. The factors that will probably (possibly, this is my supposition) become more important are things like well formed code, quality inbound (and outbound) links, pagerank (of course) and other factors that a good SEO can influence. Keyword density etc may be less important as personalisation takes hold of the web.

Personalised search is only going to get more pervasive as we move to a more intelligent and semantic web so this issue is only going to get more relevant to SEO's. I'd expect to see some new SEO theory emerging in line with the move to more intelligent search. A full-on semantic web however is another article entirely and could throw the whole SEO world upside down very suddenly...

Microsoft applies for search patents

Interesting news on Slashdot this morning that Microsoft has applied for a bunch of new patents in the U.S. relating to search engine technology. This is nothing new as the major search players have been patenting their technologies for years.

This latest bunch of patents includes ones related to improving search result ranking methods and classification of documents. Both good things if they advance Live search as I've never been too impressed with with Microsofts methods of ranking results.

The really interesting patents though are the ones related to linking related queries, optimizing search, identifying results that are spam, and using a Bayesian classifier to measure feedback from the user!

Linking related queries is something that no engine has done well yet, it would be really useful to get recommendations for other queries to try if your search ends up fruitless. Identifying spam results sounds promising too, the engines really need to find a way to filter out the abundance of irrelevant, spam type sites (especially those created by less than honest affiliates). Google has been slowly lowering the rankings of sites that solely offer lists of affiliate links so it looks like Microsoft will be doing similar.

Measuring feedback from the user using Bayesian technology is extremely interesting! Having a way to allow users to rate results and actually feed that back into the ranking system would be an extremely powerful addition to any search engine. Of course, it may also be open to people trying to manipulate results if it wasn't implemented properly.

It all sounds really promising though! I'd love to see some advances in the search market, it's about time they started to look at ways to improve the results for us users and it really looks like Microsoft are taking it seriously. It's great for the SEO's as well, if the spam filtering works then search engine optimisation will become even more crucial!

Google's blooming, will the ad spend down turn hit them?

When all others are predicting a downturn and slowing ad sales Google has turned in an amazing quarter yet again! Yahoo's quarter was less than inspiring, partly blamed on falling ad revenue, and other sources are predicting further slowing of ad spend but as yet it doesn't appear to have hit Google where it hurts.

Google have announced a doubling in third-quarter profit from a year ago with net revenue rising 70%.

That's impressive figures! So what is keeping it all steamrollering along? Well it seems to be PPC (paid search, Adwords). While the organic search results in Google are certainly getting worse, all the SEO's out there will testify to this) the paid links are booming, becoming easier to use for advertisers and becoming more relevant for users. All of this points to continued growth in this area.

Some are saying that even PPC will see a downturn, and yes, the volumes may drop a bit, but if managed correctly PPC is something that your company needn't slow down on. If you treat your paid search campaign as a cost of sale and always keep your average cost below a threshold where by you are still profiting from it then just keep going! Thats the beauty of paid search. You can monitor the results so closely and fine tune a campaign so much that any change in consumers spending can be adjusted for so that you don't lose out. It's a remarkable sales channel when managed effectively!

So while there may be a consumer slow down ahead the PPC revenue may slide a bit but I wouldn't see that causing Google any worries as it will always make up a sizeable chunk of their revenue. And with little competition coming from Microsoft and Yahoo (neither of their new paid search platforms are all that impressive) I think Google will continue to throw in record quarters for some time to come.

Ask.com launches mobile search

The latest to launch a mobile search platform is Ask.com. They're using the Skweezer technology which compresses and optimises web pages for deliver on a mobile device. The service also allows mobile users to dial numbers direct from links although at this stage they are saying it is ad free. That's a surprise considering the recent announcements and progression of mobile pay-per-click/call from the other big search engines!

Of course the use of Skweezer technology means all you webmasters better brush up on your SEO techniques for mobile devices!