Today, more than ever, businesses and consumers use the Internet to search before purchasing. There is an abundance of third party data from the analyts to back this up, not to mention your own life’s experience.

The implication to businesses is that investing now in the search channel (paid and organic) to market your products and services on the Internet is critical to your business’ future success. In fact, according to Pew Research, 58% of Americans Have Researched a Product or Service Online, 21% as recent as yesterday.

To emphasize this how important this is, let me cite a quote from Jim Jansen, Senior Fellow, Pew Research Center  “Many Americans begin their purchasing experience by doing online research to compare prices, quality, and the reviews of other shoppers.”

The pew project found that in September of 2010, 21% of study participants said yes to the following statement: “I used a search engine to conduct product or service research yesterday” This was up from 15% in September of 2007, 13% from Feb 2005 and only 9% in February of 2004.

This increase reliance on search engines has likely accelerated this trend in 2011.

Search has become much more deeply integrated into our work and personal lives, especially as it relates to shopping, finding places to eat on the run, scanning bar codes in brick and motar stores and within seconds, finding out if the same product is available at a better price close by. Amazing Amazon Bat Man! As you can imagine, not all businesses are supporters as broad adoption of this kind of capabilities is changing the rules of the game as it relates to pricing and its impacts on margins, but like it or not, that is the world we compete in. 

To make the conversion more personal, think of how you use search engines and mobile applications to make your shopping more efficient and effective. I believe that if asked today to provide a response to the statement: “I used a search engine to conduct product or service research yesterday” that the number of yes response today would be as high as 25% or perhaps even more. Even if searchers ultimately end up making their purchase in a store, many of us start our fact-finding and decision-making on the Internet. Your personal experience will likely corroborate this.

Further evidence of consumer reliance on search engines in making purchase decisions was recently presented at a HubSpot webinar called the Science of SEO, during which Dan Zarrella presented data showing over 50% of survey respondents asked “How often do you make purchase decisions based on information found through web searches?”  Well over half responded once a month which jives with the data from Pew. You get the idea.

The implication to businesses is clear. If your website does not rank on first page in either the natural (organic/non paid) search results, or the pay for placement search results, then it is likely not to be considered. Studies have show that as many as 75% of searchers never navigate beyond the first page of the search results.

With over half of shoppers relying on search engines to inform a purchase decision at least once per month, businesses who want to remain competitive need to factor in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as part of their overall Internet marketing strategy.

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Terrific Time For Traffic – More Than Ever Search Before Buying is a post from: Internet Marketing Blog | Online Marketing Blog |

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The following How Search Works video featuring Matt Cutts, Google Search Quality Team Lead, provides an excellent overview how the Google search engine works in relatively non-technical terms. Matt specializes in search engine optimization issues and is well known in the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) community for enforcing the Google Webmaster Guidelines and cracking down on link spam which impacts the relevancy of Google search results, resulting in a less positive user experience.

Matt Cutts also advises the public on how to get better website visibility in Google as well as webmaster issues in general, and is generally an outspoken and public face of Google. Matt Cutts is to SEO as Ben Bernake is to Wall Street.

Video Transcript – How search works, by Matt Cutts

Hi my name is Matt Cutts I’m an engineer in the Quality Group at Google and I’d like to talk today about what happens when you do a web search.

The first thing to understand is that when you do a Google search you aren’t actually searching the web. Your searching Google’s index of the web or at least as much of it as we can find.

We do this with software programs called spiders. Spiders start by fetching a few webpages and then they follow the links on those pages and fetch the pages they point to and then follow all the links on those pages and fetch the pages they link to and so on until we’ve indexed a pretty big chunk of the web. Many billions of pages stored across thousands of machines.

Now suppose I want to know how fast the cheetah can run. I type in my search, say “cheetah running speed” and hit return. Our software searches our index to find every page that includes those search terms. In this case there are hundreds of thousands of possible results.

How does Google decide which few documents I really want? By asking questions. More than 200 of them like how many times does this page contain your keywords? Do the words appear in the title? In the URL? Directly adjacent? Does the page include synonyms for those words? Is this page from a quality website or is it low quality or even spammy? What is the pages Page Rank. That is a formula invented by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin that rates a web page’s importance by looking at how many outside links point to it and how important those links are.

Finally, we combine all those factors together to produce each pages overall score and send you back your search results about half a second after you submit your search.

At Google we take our commitment to delivering useful and impartial search results very seriously. We don’t ever accept payment add a site to our index, update it more often or improve its ranking. Let’s take a look at my search results:

Each entry includes a title, a URL, and a snippet of text to help me decide if page has what I am looking for. I also see links to similar pages, Google’s most recent stored version of that page, and related searches that I might want try next.

And sometimes, along the right and at the top of the search results are ads. We take our advertising business very seriously as well. Both our commitment to deliver the best possible audience for advertisers, and to strive to show only ads that you want to see. We are very careful to distinguish your ads from your regular search results. And we won’t show any ads at all if we think they won’t help you find the information that you’re looking for., which in this case, the cheetah’s top running speed is more than 60 mph.

Thanks for watching this How Search Works Video and I hope this made Google and search engine marketing in general, a little more understandable.

For more information, see www.google.com/howgoogleworks.

How Search Works Video by Matt Cutts of Google is a post from: Internet Marketing Blog | Online Marketing Blog |

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We all know that to Google and its loyal users, relevancy of search results relative to a user’s search is the most important aspect of the search engine user experience. If users are not able to find what they’re looking quickly and efficiently using Google, they’re likely to try one of the other competitive search engines such as Microsoft  Bing or Yahoo! which is now powered by Microsoft algorithms or perhaps one of the emerging new search engines such as blekko.

In fulfillment of its quest for relevancy and to maintain its dominant market share by continuing to satisfy its users, Google recently rolled out the Panda algorithm update in attempts to weed out what Google and many of its users consider to be low quality content otherwise known as Web SPAM.

What’s interesting about the Google Panda algorithm update is that after the rollout, Google was able to evaluate its efficacy using results from data gathered through the Personal Blocklist Chrome extension. Using this data, Google was able to evaluate how aligned its Panda algorithm update results were relative to the opt-in user data collected through the Chrome Extension. The results are what many would consider impressive.

This evaluation of Panda algomithm update evaluated sites on Chrome users blocklist compared to sites whose ranking (position within search results) were negatively impacted as a result of the implementation of the Panda algorithm update. According to Amit Singhal, Google Fellow, what Google found “If you take the top several dozen or so most-blocked domains from the Chrome extension, then this algorithmic change addresses 84% of them, which is strong independent confirmation of the user benefits.” According to Amit, though opt-in user data collected from the Chrome Blocklist Extension was used to evaluate the efficacy of the algorithm update, none of the user data was considered in the design and implementation of the algorithm update.

Time Clean up the SPAM (or to you Monty Python lovers, Bring Out Your Dead!)

The key take away for website owners, SEO consultants, webmasters, content creators and anybody interested in having their web pages rank higher in Google for the long term is the need to create quality, unique content and perform different optimizations as recommended by Google and the other search engines based on content relevancy relative to your targeted keywords.

If you have a website that’s about “affordable Internet marketing services,” then that website content should be about Internet marketing topics and the content should be materially original. The content should also contain useful (though subjective and very difficult to directly measure) information so that not only search engines rank the page well, but users find that information both relevant and useful.

As an aside, some of you may be aware that Google can validate relevancy of content, even for high-ranking content, by measuring how long a user stays on a particular webpage based on clicking on a search result. If your site is ranked number one for “affordable Internet marketing services” and users click on your site and then, within a few seconds, clicks back to the Google search results then clicks on the number two site and then stay on that second site several minutes, Google is able to capture this data and factor it into relevancy evaluation of the search results and make adjustments. Of course user time on page after clicking a search result is just one of hundreds of factors that Google uses in its algorithm to determine webpage relevancy, and ultimately, ranking in the search results.

If investing in content generation is part of the plan to promote your website, business, product, service and/or brand, and you want to reap the rewards from Google, then quality matters, and like it or not, at over 2/3 of the market share of US searches, Google matters!

Google Focus on Quality Validated by Chrome Extension is a post from: Internet Marketing Blog | Online Marketing Blog |

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The process of Submitting your website to Google is quite simple.

1. Navigate to the Add your URL to Google
2. Enter website address in the URL input field
3. Enter comments in the comments input field
4. Enter the optional characters in the image which is a mechanism used by Google to distinguish between sites submitted to Google and by individuals and those submitted to Google automatically through software. Note that this input field is optional
5. click the submit button

Only the top-level page of your website needs be submitted to Google and then the Google web crawler will discover linked pages that collectively comprise your website. According to Google, the comments entered in the add your URL to Google form do not affect how your page is indexed or used by Google once submitted.

If you are a procrastinator, fear not as new domains, once registered, generate what is called whois records that include the domain name and name servers which get communicated to Google who adds the new domain information to the queue of web address to crawl. That is not to say that submitting your URL won’t expedite the process getting your website listed on Google faster to bring more natural search traffic sooner.

Google does have the following disclaimer listed on the Add your URL to Google page: “We do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear.” In my experience, it is rare that Google will exclude any unique and useful content from its database but like most things in life beyond death and taxes, nothing is guaranteed.

As the next step in managing your website positioning within Google, navigate to the Google Webmaster Central and login to learn more about tools and techniques to enhance your search positioning and Google search referral traffic.

Submitting Your Website to Google is a post from: Internet Marketing Blog | Online Marketing Blog |

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Google search results with tweets integrated into first page results

I have heard about this coming and maybe this is old news, but this is the first time that I have noticed Twitter tweets integrated into page one search resutls for Google searches. This could certain alter the role that Twitter plays in search engine marketing and SEO. Since terms like interenet marketing services may not lend themselves well to video and image references being included in blended search results, maybe integration of tweets with those keywords in the tweet could provide another dimension of relevancy and timely information. This new approach provides savvy Internet marketers who use Twitter to promote their business, to get on the first page of Google, much like the opportunity that integration of the Google 7-pack does with the integration of local search results triggered on search of keywords likely to have location based intent.

Oddly enough, Google searches in the past would include Google 7-pack local search results, but in the instance of search results for Internet Mareking Services captured by the image above, it appears not to be the case as no local search results were included in the results. Does this meant that Google is mixxing things up in this regard, making sure to provide only one back door at a time (i.e. Twitter Tweet integration vs. Google 7-Pack) to the search results at time so as not to overly disrupt the delicate balance of the PPC-SEO-ecosystem too much at one time? Only time will tell.

Readers are invited to comment on whether this is old news or whether this is a new opportunity and incentive for search mrketers to step up their investment in Twitter to promote their businesses and their clients.

Twitter Intetgration into Google Search Results is a post from: Internet Marketing Blog | Online Marketing Blog |

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Each scenario has its own needs. For the lawyer looking for 6 figure clients, the cost of customer acquisition can be high. For example, lawyers and businesses selling leads to lawyers, bid for $25 per click from mesothelioma searches providing ROI (Return on Investment). Let’s do some quick back of the envelope math. Assuming a very conservative click to conversion rate of one in a hundred clicks resulting in lead captured. This would be $2500 per captured lead. A more aggressive assumption might be one captured lead per ten clicks which translates to $250 per captured lead resulting from clicks purchased from sponsored links on mesothelioma
searches.

Now taking it a step further, lets assume that a sales close rate of 1 in 4 leads. If we take the conservative click to conversion estimate of one in a hundred, with a close rate of 25% yields a cost of client acquisition of $10,000. If we assume the more liberal click to conversion rate of 10%, which is entirely possible with a well optimized and tested landing page strategy, the cost of acquisition drops to $1000.

While $1000-$10,000 seems like a lot for client acquisition, for a lawyer averaging fees in excess of six figures, the strategy of bidding $25 for mesothelioma provides ROI.

When bidding $25 per click provides ROI is a post from: Internet Marketing Blog | Online Marketing Blog |

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Local search was perfect for the task of finding affordable whiteboards since finding a local supplier meant avoiding the prohibitive cost of shipping two large whiteboards. In fact, the shipping costs in almost all quotes received were more expensive than the purchase price of the whiteboards themselve. The only relief from the shipping cost is to buy wholesale and pick up your shipment off the back of a truck. Since eBiz ROI only needed two whiteboards for the office, wholesale purchasing was not an option.

To provide the reader some persepctive, the eBiz ROI procurement team is comprised of determined web surfers from back in the days when Archie, Gopher and FTP where the hottest things since Commadore Commuters, Atari and 1400 baud dial-up bulletin boards. They searched way beyond local product search engines including searching the three biggest search engines and then proceeding to navigate directly to the websites of several national retailers who with comprehensive websites and robust ecommerce functionality and a local brick and motar presence. Surely these large national office supply retailers, with stores serving local markets in the 100 of thousands of consumers would have large whiteboards in stock locally. For heavens sake, eBiz ROI operates in the Capital District of New York State with faily substantial population centers in – Albany, Schenectady, Saratoga, Troy not to mention New York State government offices.

Long story short, local product search yielded no options for the methods employed. The eBiz ROI whiteboards were purchased at a brick and mortar store of one of the national office supply retailers who has several stores in the Albany, Schenectady, Saratoga, Troy sales district. The whiteboards were found only during a visit to one of the physical stores. Whiteboards that were not found usling local product search. The opportunity stems for the fact that this company has a great website and tons of qualified traffic, but there is no doubt that they would move more whiteboards in their stores nationwide if they could somehow integrate that large ticket item with their website and local product search strategy.

Granted, no one, including eBiz ROI, expects there to be a run on large whiteboards in the Capital District anytime soon, but with a fresh crop of entreprenuers popping up everyday, who knows? If you are going to invest in shelf space to inventory large whiteboards which are a medium to large ticket item among your available inventory, whny not efficiently market to your thousands of loyal Internet customers searching for your products online. Sounds like there is a local product search pony in there somewhere.

Local Product Search 2010 Opportunity for Capital District Retailers is a post from: Internet Marketing Blog | Online Marketing Blog |

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backlinks

Hmmmm, this is a immersive concept and I need to emphasise it’s not clear cut. But here is what I know in my research at the Backlinks clinic:

Authority – simplified

The more authority your site has the better you will rank on Google. Authority means that people trust you and your information. The good news is that authorities trusted by people are also trusted by Google. A great example is the .edu and .gov domain extensions. These domains imply they are authoratitive sources of information and it’s a proven fact that in the eyes of Google backlinks from these domains to your site will send authority to your site. Another great example is Wikipedia as the web pages here are largely authored by by tribes of people as opposed to a single source.

So it follows that authority is very heavily influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative content link to your site then you receive their influence and as far as Google is concerned you become more authoritative and so the trust in your site by Google increases.

How Google determines what is and isn’t authoritative is a guarded secret for solid reasons and aligns with Google’s thinking of “Do no evil”. The last thing the web needs is someone exploiting the formulae that Google employs in its efforts to try and bring some order to probably the most important technological asset of this period in history.

How not to get Authority and Backlinks

In the same vein it’s valuable to state some ‘black hat sources and methods of acquiring backlinks that Google not only disapproves of but appears to be moving aggressively to ‘classify’ as negative authorities. In no particular order of severity, the common examples are:

• Paid backlinks – places where people buy and sell backlinks
• Comment spam – entries that contain links on blog pages that are just not associated to the main theme.
• Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or otherwise
• Rapid backlink growth – there are a myriad of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t dumb. Any sudden rise in the number of backlinks is going to register on Google’s monitoring systems, specifically if it’s a brand new domain.
• Backlinks from unscrupulous sites – these are particularly henous as you are guilty by association – need I say more.

*There is another factor where I may be on shakey ground, but major press portals seem to get a lot of authority and I have definitely seen significant numbers of the same article over and over again on different portals with no penalties, I am still monitoring this, only as a percentage of the results I am seeing go against the consistent behaviors I usually expect to see. More on this is in a future article….

The link between backlinks and Google authority is a post from: Internet Marketing Blog | Online Marketing Blog |

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The data from 4,000 respondents showed that 31% of those surveyed rely on search engines as their primary source of local search information, with search engine share flat year over year. Print Yellow and White Page Directories were the second most common primary source of local business information for 28% of those surveyed, down from 30% a year earlier. So no, contrary to popular belief in certain circles, print is not dead. Coincidentally, the Internet Yellow Pages share of 21% grew share by 2% up from 19% last year, the same as the loss of share by print. Local search sites were primary source for 12% of respondents, up 1% from 11% in 2008.

Search by Mobile Internet users grew to 22 million in June 2009. This was up 127% over June 2008, a much steeper growth rate than search overall at 31% , In perspective, mobile search still a small percentage at .1% of overall search share. This will change as more and more users become equipped with smartphones (can you say iPhone) and wireless broadband data becomes ubiquitous. Imagine the location based advertising opportunities, where Starbucks ads can be sent to GPS-enabled mobile users within eyeshot of a Starbucks. As a consumer, this means the option of receiving coupons while in line waiting to get a coffee you were going to buy anyway.

According to the study, of the 22 million mobile searches, 32% were for local business information. The most sought after local content for mobile users included online directories (42%), followed by maps (41%), restaurant information (37%) and movies (30%). Mobile search will continue to grow and can present some interest local advertising opportunities for local entertainment.

Search Engines Remain Primary Local Business Information Source is a post from: Internet Marketing Blog | Online Marketing Blog |

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It is important to capture the local search traffic in your target markets. The users of local search, in many instances, are actively in market for the products and services that you and your competitors offer locally. Some of these local search users are poised to buy and would prefer a local supplier for immediate delivery to avoid shipping or a local place of business to address any critical issues should any arise.

For certain service professionals such as landscapers, cleaners, construction companies, doctors, dentists, lawyers, reactors and others, this is especially important because of their local target markets, which are by their nature, limited in number of potential customers. You can imagine the opportunity cost of having potential customers, who rely on local search to find needed suppliers, be connected directly to the local competitors whose businesses are visible via local search while not considering yours because it was no returned in local search results, and therefore, not even considered as an option to the potentially interested buyer.

Some of the more popular sites include Yellow Pages, Google Local and Yahoo Local. There are a number of other free directories that you can find and starting with a few big ones should show results.

With an estimated 74% of the US population using the Internet today and over 64% relying on search as their primary source of local business information, it is a must for businesses to make sure that they are found when people are looking for products and services in their local markets. Check out the Guide On HowTo Get Your Business Listed On Major Local Search Engines, Yellow Pages Sites and Social Local Networks for more information.

Free Local Search Submission is a post from: Internet Marketing Blog | Online Marketing Blog |

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