I was struck by this recent SEMPO report which Greg Sterling picked up on the other day. Bottom line is that as the economy suffers and most media is in retreat Search is still projected to post 9% growth. OK it’s not the 20+% growth we have been used to seeing but it does point to Search being perhaps the only bright spot in a bleak landscape.  The fact that search is bucking this trend speaks to the effectiveness of search as a way to reach advertisers, national or local.

You can read the entire report here.

_________________________________________

Mar 10, 2009 at 9:06am ET by Greg Sterling

SEMPO’s new report, due to be released this week, cuts its forecast for search advertising. The results are based on a survey of almost 900 agencies and search marketers. According to the Wall Street Journal, the report scales back previous growth projections considerably:

[SEMPO] says North American search marketing spending will increase only 9% to $14.7 billion in 2009 from $13.5 billion a year ago. Its previous estimates, made in early 2008, called for the industry to grow at more than twice that rate this year, from $15.7 billion in 2008 to $18.8 billion in 2009. The new forecasts call for the industry to reach $19.8 billion in 2011, down from a previous estimate of $25.2 billion for that year.

But even as the economy hits search spending fairly hard, other media are faring worse. Search, widely regarded as the most efficient form of online advertising, is still benefiting from advertiser and agency budget shifts to online:

Search is continuing to steal from traditional ad budgets, according to the survey. More than a quarter of advertisers reported that they were shifting budgets into search marketing from print magazines. Nineteen percent said they were shifting their budgets into search from print newspaper advertising.

The paradox of these shifts is that they express a simplistic view of consumer behavior, which has become increasingly complex and relies on many sources of information and ad exposures, both online and offline. However, many marketers are starting to see with greater clarity the convoluted consumer path to conversions. Search remains perhaps the critical component of online advertising; however a search-only strategy is somewhat myopic.

Here’s an excerpt from findings from Atlas’s (Microsoft’s) recent “engagement mapping” report entitled The Long Road to Conversion: The Digital Purchase Funnel:

The large number of ad exposures consumed prior to purchase may come as a surprise to marketers who are used to discussions of frequency that revolve around site  or campaign metrics. Measuring only the last ad in a  conversion history conceals the true length of the relationship an advertiser has with each consumer. When we focus our view on individual converters’ histories and apply the funnel concept to their ad consumption, we discover that their histories are much longer and richer than typically assumed. These results confirm other research showing that advertising reaches consumers from multiple advertising campaigns and across channels . . .

Yahoo’s increasingly integrated search and display platforms are consistent with this more sophisticated consumer behavior model. And the SEMPO report apparently does find some interest in search retargeting accordingly.

We’ll explore the findings of the SEMPO report in more detail after we have a chance to review it

The Kelsey Group gathering has just finished in LA and our team there had what sounds like all together too much fun hanging out with the great and the good at the show. It was apparently well attended and given how hot the whole local online space is nowadays that’s hardy surprising.

There were many sessions of note but I though this post about the local session given by Chris LaSala from Google was particularly interesting. The ideas he addresses are fascinating and exciting. He outline a world where you will be able to search for local information and not only find basic information like addresses and phone numbers, but local content even down to information about availability of inventory in your local shops. It’s a great idea and one that has been tried by several companies in recent years. The problem that those folks ran into and Google discusses here is that small business don’t have the time in there day to get this stuff done and do the million other things they have to do. The information that Google wants is out there but it’s not online and getting it online is going to take time.

This is a problem that we have been working with for a couple of years now. We make sure that as much information about our customers as we can manage get put in the right places online and we work to ensure that information gets found by people searching for the goods and services offered by our customers. We don’t as yet have a way to publish what the current stock levels but we are looking at adding more and more of this kind of information.

The ideal world Google is discussing in this article isn’t here quite yet…but we are helping to build it one local business at a time

Google Cozies Up To SMBs For Digital Content

by Laurie Sullivan,

Imagine searching on Google for rare coins or Topps baseball cards. Aside from listing the brick-and-mortar address, directions and phone number, the search query might return the suggested retail price and the quantity in stock at each local store.

That’s the picture Chris LaSala painted this week at The Kelsey Group conference in Los Angeles. The Google director of local marketers and strategic partner development said the biggest problem the search engine faces in reaching that goal is the lack of digital content serving local markets. “There’s a vast array of content specific to local markets, but the majority isn’t available in digital form, so getting access to it isn’t easy,” he said.

Small and medium businesses (SMB) have been reluctant to give Google access to digital content that is specific to local markets. Basically, it’s because they don’t have the time to turn hard copies into bits and bytes. “Getting the SMB to give us access is something we need to get better at,” he said. “We aren’t even close to where we need to be.”

LaSala estimates that Google has indexed about 10% of the available digital content geared toward local markets. “If you look at Main Street USA–the barber, the church, the synagogue and the sports shop–you might get the hours of service and address,” he said. “But wouldn’t it be great if you find out if you could get an Alex Rodriguez rookie card? If you knew it was in the shop and the costs, you could go down to the store and buy it. This is just an example of where we are today.”

LaSala admits that Google hasn’t done as good a job in serving the SMB market as it would like. Many of Google’s products don’t meet their needs. Citing a Webvisibility study, he said 40% of SMBs go to the Internet first when they look for local data, yet less than half spend less than 10% for online ads.

Aside from getting SMBs to provide more content in digital format, the biggest challenge has been to support them as advertisers. He suspects that while the features in AdWords drive success, they also hinder success, too.

While the AdWords’ platform lets businesses choose a host of advertising options, SMBs don’t have time to pick keywords, design ads, decide on budgets for cost-per-click (CPC) campaigns, and pick sites they want to advertise on. “It’s all these things the SMB doesn’t have time to do,” LaSala said.

LaSala admits there’s a gap between the design of the platform and the ability for them to carry out the campaign. Improving the gap might mean making Google Maps more intuitive or offering bundled services.

There are plans to roll out new bundled services and APIs for SMBs that should align better with the philosophies of smaller companies, LaSala said. The sales force has seen a makeover, too, because Google has learned that selling into the SMB requires specific talents to understand the market.

“We’ve retrenched with a smaller group of partners,” LaSala said. “Google’s not immune to pressures of effectively using the resources on our team, so we narrowed the scope to the partners that we think log the highest opportunities.”

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=102383

I have just read a very well thought through article about how to measure SEO performance. It’s written with traditional SEO done to large sites by SEO specialists but the metrics it speaks about are also relevant for the kind of large/small business SEO that we specialize in. To condense the article to it’s essentials it asks the following questions:

· Are your pages indexed by the large search engines? Ours are submitted and indexed every day

· Do you have back links pointing to your pages? We have an enormous number deployed

· Do you rank well for query term that you care about? We test and adjust to maximize this all the time

· Does your site make money? In our world that means do your marketing dollars make your phone ring….our testing indicates a resounding yes to this metric.

You should ask the same question about your website, enjoy..

March 17, 2009 · by Jill Kocher

Measuring success in search engine optimization can typically be done in four ways. “Indexation” measurements will determine if a search engine has properly identified all of your site’s pages. “Backlink” measurements will show the number of internal and external links that point to your site as a whole. “Rankings” measurements will show where in the natural search results your site appears for given search words or phrases. And “traffic and revenue” measurements will show the keywords used to find your site, revenue generated per keyword, the percentage of visitors that purchased products and so forth. This article will explore each of the measurements, which we refer to here as “metrics.”

Indexation Metrics

Indexation is the first critical step to natural search performance. Pages that aren’t indexed have zero chance of ranking in the search engines. However, more indexation isn’t necessarily better because that could indicate that identical pages in your site are duplicated in a search engine’s index, which will decrease a site’s ability to rank because the pages are, essentially, competing against themselves.

What is the “right” indexation number? Most ecommerce sites can only guesstimate based on the number of products they offer. For example, if a site offers 50,000 products but only has 5,000 pages indexed, there’s likely a barrier preventing a search engine from fully “crawling” a site. Conversely, if that same site has 500,000 pages indexed, there’s likely a duplication issue. The site will then have issues with self-competition and split-link popularity, both of which hinder a site’s ability to rank strongly.

Indexation is measured by performing a “site:” query in the major engines. For example, type [site:www.yourdomain.com] into the Google and MSN Live search boxes, without the [brackets]. For Yahoo!, just enter the URL into Yahoo! Site Explorer. These site queries measure how many URLs are indexed in each engine. Compare that number to the number of pages that should exist to determine actions required and progress made.

A complete list of the queries available in Google, some of which are also available on Yahoo! and MSN Live, can be found at http://www.google.com/help/cheatsheet.html.

Backlink Metrics

Measuring “backlinks” will show the number of links pointing to various pages across a site. Generally, the more external links that point to your site, the higher your site will rank in natural search results. However, measuring backlinks varies among the search engines.

For Google, enter a “link:” query such as [link:www.yourdomain.com] in the search box. This is a measure of how many backlinks are coming into the entire domain. However, Google only gives the true measure of backlinks in its Webmaster Tools, which anyone can access once they have a Google account.

For Yahoo!, enter the domain into Yahoo! Site Explorer. Click on the “InLinks” tab and filter the results to show four different data sets: (1) all backlinks (internal & external), (2) only external backlinks, (3) only to the home page and (4) to the whole site.

For MSN, the “link:” query is currently disabled in MSN Live, so backlinks cannot be measured there.

How many backlinks should a site have? There is no way to estimate in the way we can for indexation, and the engines aren’t known for giving accurate, specific or detailed backlink data, unfortunately. The best advice for measuring backlinks is to watch the trend rather than be concerned about individual numbers. And more high quality links are always better.

Advanced Link Manager is a tool for scanning and reporting on backlink trends, including number and diversity of domains linking in, anchor text diversity, and a number of other reports.

Ranking Metrics

Rankings are a tricky metric to report on. Rankings (i.e. where your site appears in natural search listings) vary greatly between singular and plural versions of the same term. Moreover, personalized and blended search affect individual rankings so that no two people are likely to get the same ranking result. However, I suggest a couple of ways to attack this issue.

· Targeted. Choose a select set of keyword terms that you’ll target based on keyword research. These will probably include the trophy terms for which management aspires to rank. Use a subscription rank checker such as WebCEO or a free tool such as the Rank Checker plug in for Firefox to check the rankings for the terms you’re targeting. These tools will give you only the rankings for the terms you specify, for the domains you specify.

· Aggregate. Subscription tools like Enquisite offer the ability to track the page on which a term ranks for every keyword that drives natural search to your site. So, say that [widgets] drove 10 visits to mydomain.com. Enquisite would report which URLs on my site drove those 10 visits, and what page in the search results the rankings were on. The information can be sliced and sorted by keyword, URL, IP, date, engine, and more.

Traffic and Revenue Metrics

Natural search-referred traffic is a common measurement in most analytics programs. The “holy grail” for measuring SEO effectiveness is frequently a report combining URL, keyword, traffic, orders, and revenue. Such a report tells you which URLs are effective, and by omission, which are not. It tells you which keywords and keyword phrases drive traffic, and by omission which don’t. And it tells you which URLs and terms drive sales through natural search and which don’t.

Consider which pages were optimized and how, for which keywords. Those pages and keywords are the ones where you should expect to see growth. Only by performing large-scale programmatic optimizations, like title tags across the entire site, would you expect to see a site-wide increase in traffic. Most optimization efforts will improve performance for individual pages and keywords. Knowing which pages and keywords are most valuable to your business will guide those optimization efforts.

You can see the full article here

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/1014-Measuring-SEO-Performance

In this economy it’s tough to see really great companies having such a horrible time of it. Google is down to 325, newspapers with storied histories are dropping like flies (the mighty Seattle Post Intelligencer published its last print edition this morning) and media innovators in the local space like SpotRunner have just announced another large round of layoffs. Given this desolate landscape there is clearly a move towards value.

We work with thousands of local companies making sure they are clearly incredibly focused on maximizing their limited marketing budgets. Our typical customers are very sensitive to both the cost of marketing and the value they get from it. As the yellow pages collect dust at the back of closets local businesses still need to reach out to people looking for all over the nation our low cost high impact package which gets our customers new business through search. We do one thing really well. We get small business to the top of the search results for search terms they care about for a low monthly fee. It may not be as cool as TV advertising and it certainly doesn’t have the tradition that print advertising has, but it works and it’s affordable for most businesses.

How important is it that local businesses get to the front of search?….well there are several things driving this issue. First is behavior, people online search in a particular way. In search they go to the front page and typically select from the results displayed on that page. Very few ever look further than the first page…if you aren’t on that page then the chances are that online is not going to generate many customers for you. How big is the opportunity? Let’s look at the numbers: There is certainly a lot of search traffic going on. Reports differ but typically US search volume is in the 15-20 billion per month range and depending on whose numbers you believe anything up to 40% of those have some level of local interest. That’s a lot of search, lots of people looking for goods and services.

However if you take the number of people looking for things and divide that huge number by the number of locations and activities people are searching there may only be a few hundred people searching for any service or product in any location in any month. The good news is that those people are highly focused on finding what they are looking for and typically close to a buying decision and those intensely valuable searches are going to be spread between the companies on the front page of search.

In an economy headed for nuclear winter with local businesses looking to squeeze the last drop of value out of their marketing dollars our low cost high impact search visibility package is a great fit. We will focus on making our product the richest deepest most effective way for local businesses to get customers, it’s all we do and it’s what we do best.

Here at eLocal Listing we focus on small businesses in America, getting them found on the major search engines (the ones that rhyme with Poodle and BaaHoo) and we do a pretty gosh darned good job at getting thousands of our customers front page search visibility…. we typically score in the 80-90% region. Although many small businesses are in fact local offices of very large businesses (think of franchises and your local Starbucks) we have tended to work with the owned and operated rather than the small branches of huge companies. The obvious reason for that is that the large companies have huge budgets and phalanxes of very smart advertising folk who have this SEO search visibility stuff down tight.

So I was intrigued to read this post from the folks at Conductor.com which indicates that the big guys are really struggling at this. What they did was track the keywords the Fortune 500 are buying as ads on the search engines then they tested to see how the same companies rank in organic search results for the same terms. The theory is that if a company is prepared to pay for the top spot in search through the sponsored ads they should also be doing the spade work to get found in the organic unpaid part of search. Survey says …..they aren’t. Only 20% of the keywords tested also ranked well in unpaid search. Amazingly nearly half of the fortune 500 had low or non-existent visibility in natural search for their most advertised keywords.

Somebody get me Coke and GE on the phone!

You can read the full story here

The Nielsen Online research guys have just come up with some very interesting data on the growth of social media.Last year 67% of online users visited social media sites which makes those sites more popular than personal email.

Anybody with a college age kid will be painfully familiar with Facebook, but in 2008 it went mainstream with 30% of online users visiting it at least once per month. The social space appears to be maturing; the parents of the early adopters are getting in on the act, the fastest growing sector is the 35-49 group. The trend appears to be global with strong growth across Europe, many Asian countries such as South Korea have been heavy users for many years.

Figuring out how we can plug into this rapid growth to help drive customers for local businesses is firmly on our agenda and we’ll keep you posted on these initiatives as they progress.

Meantime even an old dog like me can learn new tricks, and (if you really want to) you can follow me on Twitter or swing by www.timjudd.com.

You can read the full Nielsen report here

I wanted to welcome you to the new improved eLocal Blog. It’s a place where our team can share insights into where we are going and and what we are doing to get there. This is a really interesting and exciting time in our story. As you may know we are highly focused on getting our customers great marketing value online. We do that mostly through our special flavor of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I found this very interesting article recently which talks about how even in very tough economic times SEO is showing strong growth. It’s an approach to marketing which works across the board. This article is more focused towards SEO for larger businesses. We specialize in delivering great SEO value for the small business which comprise the backbone of the US economy and we do it a price point most small businesses can afford.

Very best wishes

Tim

SEO Investments Expected To Grow More Than 20%
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=101301
As marketers begin to better understand how Web site optimization fits into overall campaigns, budget investments in search engine optimization (SEO) will grow at a higher rate each year, compared with other types of search marketing strategies, according to a recent report from eMarketer.

The report, “Search Marketing Trends: Back to Basics,” suggests that growth will decline for paid search from 15.9% in 2009 to 11.3% in 2013–while SEO growth will jump from 17.7% to 20.3%, respectively.

“Every company is losing some business because of the economy, whether they buy less, or not at all,” said David Hallerman, eMarketer senior analyst. “There is a greater focus on customer acquisition. Search is the best tool for that.”

Internet users generally find organic listings more relevant than paid search ads, so they tend to click on the search engine results more often than pay-per-click (PPC) ads, Hallerman said. But marketers should design campaigns that combine paid search advertising and SEO.

Overall, U.S. spending on search engine marketing will nearly double from $12.2 billion in 2008 to $23.4 billion in 2013. All four types of search marketing will gain more marketer dollars each year.

Successful deployment of both methods could mean higher rankings in search query results. Each offers benefits. For example, paid search’s effects are immediate, but marketers need to spend consistently for those sponsored-link ads to appear in search results. SEO effects take time, but marketers need Web site maintenance more than daily spending to sustain high organic results. How long it takes to deliver a return on investments (ROI) depends on conversions, Hallerman said.

While lots of data makes search more accountable than other ad media, too much data could overwhelm marketers and create confusion that clouds decisions, according to Hallerman. More important, the abundance of data makes Web analytics crucial for managing the process.

While marketers might see increased traffic as positive, if the search ad’s cost relative to its conversion rate means a reduced bottom line, the marketer would need to examine the strategy, including bids on certain keywords, keywords to bid on, and the search engine to place ads on.

“Far more marketers say SEO is much harder to gauge because it has far less metrics,” Hallerman said. “SEO is like public relations. You hope people will notice and buy the product. It’s a lot like tracking buzz.”