Posts filed under 'News and Views'
Been browsing round the results today, and noticed a couple of changes not noticed before.
1) It was only a matter of time before they included it, following the development of Google Checkout, however right next to the-direct-group.co.uk result was a banner for Google Checkout.
However just because they can I have to say, they shouldn’t. One of the best things about Google is the fact that it has always been impartial without lending weighting one way or another (apart from factors such as Bid Price/Quality Score etc), however this really is a break from the norm, and one that I wholeheartedly disagree with (no doubt this will lead to a rath of people redeveloping their e-commerce platforms to incorporate Google Checkout)
2) Google joins the Web2.0 Personalised Search club. Whilst doing a site:example.com on google noticed the ability to ‘note this’ on the results.
No doubt more to come from Google in the coming months
April 24th, 2007
According to a recent report by the British Market Research Bureau (BMRB), only 19% of adult internet users have downloaded a podcast in the last six months (this is a rise of only 2% on the 2006 figure), this despite a surge in use of podcasts over the last year.
The study also stated that for those users who had ever downloaded a podcast, 72% weren’t interested in them, 38% didnt fully understand them and 18% wanted to know how to download them first.
Such figures, I feel do reflect the public perception of Podcasts/Vodcasts with many directly associating them directly with i-pods, which may in itself be reflected in the above figures. Whilst such technology is useful in tech-savvy environments, whether podcasting is suitable for mainstream marketing at this point is certainly up for debate.
March 23rd, 2007
According to a recent report by E-Consultancy in conjunction with Clash Media, 82% of digital marketers see online lead generation as a growth area in 2007. The results were published in the ‘Online Lead Genereation (B2C) Report’, which questioned a number of marketers about how the Internet is and could be utilised to interact with potential customers.
Nearly 75% of respondants working for across the line organisations said their organisations are generating leads online with the intention of then converting them offline. Suprisingly, only 44% of marketers believed their organisations were fully exploiting online lead generation as a means of growing their B2C business. This was in comparison to 47% of respondants stating that their business wasn’t effectively exploiting online lead generation.
The research was carried out in association with Clash Media, and was conducted with around 400 marketers throughout Q1 2007.
To read the full report please visit the e-consultancy website - or visit the Clash Media website
March 23rd, 2007
I have read a lot recently regarding personalisation in particular from Google, and much has been debated within the SEO community itself on various forums such as SEW, Threadwatch and Cre8asite as to the ongoing effects of introducing personalisation.
In general, whilst the delivery mechanism of such a drastic change in focus will remain the overiding factor in determining whether such a change works to Google’s benefit (and delivers us consumers the results we expect), the effects of such change will provide us Search Engine Marketeers with new challenges.
However in my opinion such a change can only be good for the industry. Gone are going to be the days where results were based on the number of “number 1 terms” and campaigns will be judged by what they physically deliver to a client in terms of ROI, bringing it inline with other forms of advertising both off and online.
This should in turn make us search engine marketeers/engineers start thinking like more traditional marketeers, and rely on a variety of marketing techniques in order to ensure ROI on the websites. In my opinion not a bad thing, and I doubt that other forms of advertising will ignore those that can deliver such results. That and the use of PPC will probably increase in popularity as advertisers endeavour to ensure constant visibility in key areas.
March 6th, 2007
Gord Hotchkiss featured a very good interview with Google spokesman Matt Cutts regarding a multitude of SEO issues including localised search, personalised search and the future of SEO, and in particular Matt’s perspective on how he sees personalisation of Search affecting SEO in general.
One comment in particular stood out
“Matt: I think that it’s natural that some people would be worried about change, but some of the best SEO’s are the SEO’s that are able to adapt, that are able to look down the road 4 or 5 years and say, “What are the big trends going to be?” and adjust for those trends in advance, so that when a search engine does make a change which you think is inevitable or will eventually happen, they’ll be in a good position. Personalization is one of those things where, if you look down the road a few years, having a search engine that is willing to give you better results because it can know a little bit more about what your interests are, that’s a clear win for users, and so it’s something that SEO’s can probably predict that they’ll need to prepare for. At the same time, any time there’s a change, I understand that people need some time to adjust to that and need some time to think, “How is this going to affect me? How is this going to affect the industry? And what can I do to benefit from it?”
Of course, the big question is how the lack of a monolithic set of search results will impact the reverse engineering that is typical in SEO. How do you reverse engineer something that’s different for everyone who sees it? Which begs the question, “does personalization mark the end of black hat SEO?
I wouldn’t say that it’s necessarily the nail in the coffin, but it’s clearly a call to action where there’s a fork in the road and people can think hard about whether they’re optimizing for users or whether they’re optimizing primarily for search engines. And the sort of people who have been doing “new” SEO, or whatever you want to call it, that’s social media optimization, link bait, things that are interesting to people and attract word of mouth and buzz, those sorts of sites naturally attract visitors, attract repeat visitors, attract back links, attract lots of discussion. Those sorts of sites are going to benefit as the world goes forward. At the same time, if you do choose to go to the other fork, towards the black hat side of things, you know you’re going to be working harder and the return is going to be a little less. And so over time, I think, the balance of what to work on does shift toward working for the user, taking these white hat techniques and looking for the sites and changes you can implement that will be to the most benefit to your user.”
Source: Gord Hotchkiss - Search Engine Land
Certainly worth a read - the full interview can be found on Gord Hotchkiss’ blog and the SearchEngineLand website
March 5th, 2007
According to recent report by Hitwise, people visiting search engines accounted for 13.3% of the total UK web visits, nearly 2% greater than the number of visits to Adult websites for January 2007. The marke share of the UK’s internet visits to the search engines increased by nearly 21% year on year in January. This compares against a 14% decline for adult sites.
Whilst many organisations in the UK are taking their search engine marketing/advertising strategies very seriously, there is still some reluctance to embrace online. However as convergence technologies become more mainstream, the use as a maintream advertising source can only continue to increase significantly.
March 1st, 2007
Over the last couple of months you have probably heard of link baiting or social media optimisation. If you haven’t time to get reading. Since then a number have posts have appeared regarding the subject, however none as good as “Andy Hagans Ultimate Guide to Linkbaiting and Social Media Marketing“.
In the guide Andy covers all aspects of Linkbaiting including why, how and what to linkbait. Of particular interest was his bit on linkbait hooks as covered below
“News Hook. The news hook is when you are the first to scoop a story; everyone who carries the story will then (theoretically) link to you as the original source. To get a scoop you don`t need to have insider information (though that doesn’t hurt); you can just be the first site to publicly predict something or to reach a controversial conclusion. Bonus points if your scoop is ‘true’ too then many later-proven-to-be-false scoops will make other bloggers and writers hesitant to reference you again.
Resource Hook. The resource hook occurs when you make an extremely helpful piece of content that everyone will naturally want to bookmark (like this one!). This may be my favorite hook, because as opposed to the news hook, it encourages people to link to and bookmark it for a long period of time. Content that sits there and naturally obtains trusted, relevant backlinks passively? Isn’t that the original white hat SEO wet dream?
Contrary Hook. The contrary hook is when you refute a common myth in your niche. Most little areas of the blogosphere hold certain beliefs to be self-evident; all SEOs know that META tags are dead; all Web2.0 designers know that writing validated code is the right thing to do. Calling these people wrong will usually incite them into talking about you, and linking to you.
Humor Hook. People love to laugh, especially at people in their industry or niche. And most niches have so little levity that almost anything will get you a chuckle and a link. You can even directly cite influential people, and if done in a gentle way, they’ll generally be flattered into linking to it.
Tool Hook. A good link bait tool has one of two characteristics: 1) It is actually useful; or 2) It feeds bloggers’ egos. (Very few examples can do both.) Firefox plugins, free design templates and financial calculators are all examples of tools that have received thousands of valuable backlinks. None of them are too hard for a decent programmer to create.
Award Hook. No official awards in your tiny niche? Why not host them yourself? You can either have a more legitimate award with significant organization and actual prize money like the Bloggies, or you can basically nominate everyone in your niche and hope that half link back to you out of enthusiasm for the community, as with the Search Awards. Both tactics work well. The reason is simply that people like positive recognition and they LOVE rankings. Awards get linked to because they help to legitimatize other people it helps the winners when they promote you. Ah, human nature
Giveaway Hook. Anyone who has been to an SEO conference recently (or any other conference for that matter) is stocked for life on pens, highlighters, key rings, and loads of over freebie junk. Companies fight to give trinkets away at certain events because, when directed towards the right audience, giveaways are a great way to drive sales and get a return far better than any ordinary advertising. The Internet is no different. Text Link Ads gets a lot of love around the blogosphere because they offer a free coupon for new clients. Aaron Wall seems to give away an AdWords coupon every other week how else can you get such branding, traffic and links with a $50 piece of paper?
Research/Statistic Hook. Sometimes just compiled numbers, or any kind of scientific survey, will get a lot of link love, especially in an under-studied area. And while a scientifically-conducted study with valid methodology will often get better links, the (sad?) truth is that almost anything can pass as ‘research’ on the Internet.”
Source:Andy Hagans Ultimate Guide to Linkbaiting and Social Media Marketing
Well worth a read…
February 20th, 2007
I had some time for the Did-it/SEO isn’t rocket science/is dead argument being argued in the online marketing arena over the last couple of weeks, in no small part due to Dave Pasternack’s recent article, however Mark Simon’s (Did-it’s Vice President of industry relations - Crisis Manager perhaps) recent foray into the domain, only serves to enflame the situation and highlight every aspect they are trying to argue against. I will however state that the response of the SEO community as a whole hasn’t been that well handled, and if the industry is to be as well respected as more traditional sectors such as Offline then really such character assassinations should be very few and far between.
Mark Simon’s recent post on Mediapost merely served to highlight why Did-its recent campaign is nothing more than a PR stunt, and in my personal opinion merely highlighting the changing trends of online marketing from merely search engine focussed to offerings including Online PR & Social Media.
To read the Mark Simons article click here
And the fuss it`s caused - http://www.threadwatch.org/node/11507
However his post did raise a couple of interesting and valid points most notably
“That doesn’t mean that it’s curtains for SEO firms. They’ll still be in high demand as experts on information architecture and site usability. They’ll help clients build sites that their searchers are really looking for, and that their searchers can use. They’ll cease to have value in reverse-engineering the engine algorithms, but they’ll still have value in helping clients create truly relevant Web sites. “
I can’t help but agree to certain parts of that comment, however whilst the algorithm is still manipulatable, the services for “optimisers” will still be required, and until search engines can factor in something that is not in any way open to “abuse” or the general public change the way they use the web, the market will always be “buoyant”
The overriding factor that will determine whether or not the benefit outweighs the investment. Whilst traffic from search engines such as Google remain the primary source of traffic and the ROI from organic search high, the value an SEO’er will remain at a premium.
February 13th, 2007
Recent articles by both Gord Hotchkiss and Andrew Goodman both investigated the reasons why Search Engine Marketing firms werent being acquired for large sums. Gord argued that much of this could be attributed to the fact that SEM firms were deemed too tactical and lacked the skills to segment and profile applicable demographics. Andrew Goodman went on to say he agreed with Gord assessment however his analysis of the “current reality” was incorrect.
To a certain degree I have to agree with much of what Andrew Goodman had to say. For example:
True, a big law firm that serves big corporate clients almost never acquires a small firm that has some specialty they’d like to add. And that’s the closest analogy with the notion of, say, the world’s largest ad agency acquiring my very small SEM agency. The law firm just hires new associates or recruits partners with different skill sets. Is that because the small firm is “too tactical”? Or just too narrow/small to have the marketplace leverage to *force* a buyout? If the little guy starts actually taking the big guy’s customers, that’s when the big guy takes notice.
So that leaves us a little closer to the answer: if ad agencies are the likely acquirers in the scenario where the target client is mostly larger enterprises, the only leverage a boutique agency has is either in their client list and growing cachet in their own right, or some expertise that the agency will take too long to develop in-house.”
From my own perspective, Andrews comparison there was spot on. From my own personal experience, traditional advertising organisations have been painfully slow on the uptake in terms of Search Engine Marketing, focussing on the potential challenges it presents rather than any long term benefits it can bring, as part of an integrated campaign. Much of this leads to an “ignorance” of search engine marketing, what it entails, and exactly how it fits in with both offline and direct activity.
Such organisations only start taking notice, once the figures become too difficult to argue against. Over the last year or so the number of organisations entering the online marketing arena has increased substantially, as a result of new startups, web development agencies moving into the search arena and offline agencies starting to take notice. One of the bigger acquisitions in the UK Search marketing arena this year saw Global Media buy BigMouthMedia for around £50 Million. However these acquisitions are few and far between at the current time.
However many of these acquisitons are still taking place between organisations within the Online marketing arena itself, and whilst there are a number of integrated agencies such as i-level and Connectpoint offering a full integrated marketing solution, these still tend to be the exception rather than the norm. Much of this IMO opinion is still down to some pessimism of an integrated approach and much has been said of who is better placed to deal with online marketing, ie is it the integrated agency or the boutique agency.
Much is made of search marketing and its fit in the marketing arena. It should however be considered that in comparison to traditional offline advertising, online (search) marketing is still very much in its infancy (Google only started in the nineties for example), and thus has still a considerable amount of evolving to do. It should also be considered that search IS evolving at break neck speed, with personalised search, online PR, convergance technologies (mobile/voip) and social media all having entered (to a certain degree) the mainstream over the last couple of years.
One thing is for sure, it is only a matter of time….
January 29th, 2007
There has been a lot written in the press recently about the increase in online sales over the Christmas period, most notably on the Trevor McDonald programme on ITV1. With over 10% of all christmas sales done over the Internet, the online sector is booming, but there is still an alarming number of Internet Retailers not aware of the fact that there is much that can be done online in order to increase their revenues.
I was reading Heather Hopkins blog (from Hitwise UK), highlighting a number of interesting trends
- December 2006 saw search engines account for 36% of upstream visits (those into a site (Retail only)), representing a 20% increase yer on year, which can be primarily attributed to Google and Yahoo UK (which combined contributed to 28% of the traffic alone)
- High Street retailers saw some of the biggest gains and continued to make gains against the purely online retailers. In particular HMV (58% increase on previous year), Waitrose (107%), John Lewis (23%) and Marks and Spencers (25%) saw significant increases in traffic volumes over this period.
- Marks and Spencers in particular saw a 70% increase in online trading (article here), however John Lewis (60%), Majestic (30%) and Threshers all saw significant increases.
With such significant figures having just been released, the effects of a successful online marketing campaign are obvious. Successful websites don’t just happen (well the majority of the time), they take a lot of planning in terms of pricing, positioning and brand awareness, not forgetting whilst keeping this all within defined KPI’s.
Online Marketing is evolving at considerable speed, and there are an increasing number of channels available to companies to advertise their products and services; Blogging, Online PR, Social Media, Mobile Search … the list goes on. However I have still found a reluctance not just from a client perspective, but also from some traditional advertising agencies to embrace online and how it can compliment and enhance an offline campaign, instead choosing to go with the tried and tested. Those companies that embrace emerging technologies IMO are the ones that in the long term are going to see the bigger returns.
For companies looking at embracing the web, shouldnt now be the time you look at the Internet as an effective marketing channel?
January 19th, 2007
Next Posts
Previous Posts
