23 Musings

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).

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?

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!

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.

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...

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...

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.

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!

Paid search is a highly effective way of getting more people to your site and converting them to sales. The beauty of paid search is that through careful selection of keywords and optimisation of bid limits you can aim your adverts at people at varying points in their purchasing journey. By exploring the metrics and intelligence you gain from running a paid search campaign you can uncover your customers searching habits giving you a really good insight into how they find your products.

We've experienced huge growth in our paid search campaign, but when you delve into the figures you realise that you can be double counting sales from other sources (affiliates, banners, organic search) a lot of the time. This is all good however and as long as you are treating your online marketing activities as a cost of sale (and you're coming within your target limit) then it's working well for you.

There was a time where paid search results were scorned and seen as less trustworthy than the natural results. I would always scan and click organic results and rarely paid any attention to the paid results until that is I started running a paid search campaign myself. It was only then that I realised the value of paid results. Search engine marketing specialists spend a huge amount of time optimising campaigns to get the best results (and conversions) which of course means they are working hard to give the user the most relevant results possible.

In it's infancy, paid search was often something a company felt it had to do, and they most times dabbled in this area without much experience or advice. Nowadays the wealth of search engine marketing agencies add much needed insight and knowledge to campaigns, and as they are working to get you sales (or users, registrations etc) it's in their interests to do the job well.

Figures just released by Performics (a division of DoubleClick) suggest that we could see an increase in online sales of up to 53% this coming holiday season driven by paid search. Of course some of this increase is down to the increased sophistication of tracking and many sales are counted across other sources (affiliates etc again) but this really doesn't matter as it's just demonstrating how important it is to be involved in paid search if you sell a product online.

So it seems that paid search is becoming more trusted by the consumer. It would be really interesting to see figures from a search engine comparing the number of clicks on paid links compared to organic for a number of specific, high volume search terms! In my opinion, even if your website positions highly in organic results, if you have something to sell then you should be in paid too (or your competitors will be).

Paid search is a bit of a hobby of mine so I'll be posting much more on it in the future!

I run a large (50K a month) pay-per-click campaign and it's very succesful for us. We get an amazing return on investment and it accounts for close to 30% of all the traffic to our website. I've noticed a trend that's becoming more and more common in the PPC arena and that's guerilla or spoiler tactics.

As an example, travel company A sells holidays to Greece while travel company B doesn't, but does sell the Canaries. Travel company B starts bidding on Greek island keywords and using a creative that promotes their Canaries destinations, there by taking potential customers away from company A and possibly converting some to book a holiday with them.

Nothing underhand about the above, that's life in PPC, people will bid on terms that aren't related to their product in the hope of acquiring new customers for themselves.

However, I've noticed some more guerilla style campaigns going on now. Again these aren't underhand, but they are clever and I'm sure are proving effective for the companies running them.

One example is a company who are bidding on the catchphrase of a competitors TV advert. They are also outbidding the competitor so are top position all the time and potentially grabbing a lot of their customers. Now this is a great tactic, so many web users will type catchphrases from TV, so if your competitors are doing a TV campaign maybe it's worth having a dabble in some keywords related to it!

An example of the darker side of PPC is companies who bid on spelling mistakes of their competitors trademarks. Google of course does offer brand protection but that is a lot more difficult for them to enforce on mispelled words. This kind of guerilla keyword buying is extremely effective as so many people make mistakes when typing into search boxes.

The last example is people who buy misspelled domain names as keywords. Many people type full domains into Google etc (quite why I'm not sure, just use the address bar!) or into the search box of Google toolbar, so it's well worth them trying to appear in the results for a misspelling of a competitors domain name.

I'm unsure how the engines feel about the last two examples, whether they would allow it if they knew or could do anything about it. I get the impression from discussions with some guys from a search engine that they would stop this if they could, but it's very difficult.

I even know of people using almost identical tactics but in natural search and seo, it's becoming much more widespread than it used to be!

As a web professional I've been using search engines for years and have learnt to question the validity of the information contained in a large proportion of the results. My first job using the internet involved disseminating online information to pick out the good bits to populate industry focussed portals. Back in those days, when Altavista was the engine of choice (and it was .digital then) and the web was a much smaller place than it is today, it was much easier to find good quality information for a particular topic.

Today however there is much information, and more and more of it is becoming user generated so it is difficult (especially for the less web savvy) to discover information that you can guarantee to be accurate. Of course you can just head for a website of a company you know and trust, but are you then turning your back on what's known as the 'invisible web'?

It's impossible to verify so much that is published on the internet, so the user has to become sceptical. Trust only what you can verify through further research to be true. Information found on unknown websites can usually be backed up by a well known publisher.

I think the problem lies in people's trust of the search engines. Your average web user most likely treats the ordering of search results as a kind of endorsement, they won't fully understand how results are ranked according to relevancy of content.

Paid search is no better, with the practices of bidding on terms that may relate to your product but not actually be about it meaning that you can't always guarantee that the paid results are relevant to your query.

Introducing some kind of trust measure into the search engine algorithms would be impossible and would skew results wildly, so there is no solution that I can see, except to become more wary and be sceptical of everything you can't verify elsewhere!

Good report from Websidestory about the difference in conversion rates for paid versus organic search.

Obviously paid comes out as the top converting method, but whats a little surprising is quite how well organic search is converting for the studies participants. I'd imagined natural to be quite a bit lower based on the higher traffic levels we experience through organic than paid, but on specific terms (compared across paid and organic) paid proved to be on average only 9% better at converting.

Paid search had an average conversion rate of 3.4% while organic search averaged 3.13%.

Sadly we don't convert at 3.13% on anything but our brand related terms at the moment due to having an antiquated booking system to deal with...

More info from Websidestory here

Tim Armstrong (VP of Ad Sales) at Google was speaking at an IAB conference today and has announced what most had suspected. That Google would be keeping its focus on what it knows and does really well and that's search and being the starting point in users journeys online.

This makes perfect sense, Google have the best search platform (for the moment, still waiting for a new contender to take the fight to them) and dominate that market. To branch out into content and producing that content themselves would seem unnecessary.

Tim said Google viewed itself "as an operator of the Web" rather than a company that would produce original text, films or images.

Indeed, why would they want to create content themselves when what they have the potential to do is organise everyone elses content so that users can find and use it more easily. There is so much opportunity for Google right now if they were to follow the example of others and start using their own API's to create mashups of the services they already provide.

One well discussed possibility is that Google may make a move into becoming some kind of travel search/aggregator and they certainly have the tools to do so already. A combination of Base, Maps, some links into GDS's (global distribution systems used to sell flights and hotels), Checkout, Images, News and Groups used for travel reviews would see the all singing all dancing bookable travel site. So this is more the way I see them going, maybe not in travel but they have services begging to be combined in clever new ways, and each new service or development gives Google more opportunity to create ad revenue (and increase their loyal user base)...

Online ad revenue was also mentioned at the IAB event. Representatives from both Yahoo and AOL declared that there is no slowdown and all is rosy in the online advertising world. One wonders whether that is bravado in an attempt to get the subject off the table for the moment...