Speaker:
Chris “Silver” Smith, Lead Strategist, Netconcepts

By definition, SEO refers to the process of optimizing a website with the goal of having major search engines (primarily Google, Yahoo! and MSN Live Search) return pages from that website in highly-ranked search engine results. SEO is almost always employed as a form of marketing, but it is a very specific form of marketing that takes place within the search engines.

Lately, some industry blogs have suggested that SEO has grown beyond its primary parameters, suggesting that successful SEO includes expanding into other realms of marketing. I don’t think that makes any sense. By definition, SEO - search engine optimization - does not include any form of marketing that goes outside of search engines. The use of the term SEO in such a way is disingenuous and confuses many webmasters and owners of ecommerce sites.

For more about this controversial topic, visit the full article on Practical eCommerce here.

If you prefer to read this interview, check out the abridged transcript.

This podcast is now available for you to listen to.

Matt was kind enough to agree to an interview, where he shared invaluable tips about Flash, syndicating content, the change to their supplemental results, and a lot more. His insight and advice is really helpful; he provides clarity on topics that can be really confusing.

If you prefer a written transcript, you can read the interview transcript with Matt Cutts on my blog. I invite you to listen to the podcast interview, which is available now.

• Making your site “search engine friendly”
• “Pay-per-click” search advertising
• Benchmarking, competitive intelligence and ROI analysis
• Trends in contextual, behavioral and local advertising

Creating a buzz — viral marketing

• Blogs, RSS feeds, forums, wikis and more
• Harness “word of mouse” to enhance your brand
• Identifying the “sneezers” who will spread your viral message

Web analytics

Speakers:
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts

If you prefer to read this interview, check out the transcript.

This podcast is now available for you to listen to.

I did a search via Google Trends to compare the magnitude of searches for “yellow pages” and “white pages,” and here’s the chart of these searches from 2004 to present:

(Trends in searches for “White Pages” & “Yellow pages“)

Notice that keyword searches for “white pages” seems notably consistent year over year, while searches for “yellow pages” seem to be declining. There are a couple of ways we could interpret the dropping trend for YP searches. On one hand, we could assume that people aren’t looking for Yellow Pages sites as much because they’re able to find businesses through other types of sites and directly through the search engines themselves. An alternate interpretation could be that users might be going to the Yellow Pages sites directly, through typing in the URLs or bookmarking them. Are people searching in Google for “yellow pages” less because the IYP (Internet Yellow Pages) companies are making progress in improving their brand recognition?

Let’s compare to see whether users are searching more/less for specific IYP brand names:

(Comparing searches for Yellowpages.com, Yellow Book, Yelp, Superpages, and Dex Online.)

Quite a few of those online Yellow Pages sites are showing gains over the same period. “Superpages” searches are relatively flat, while searches for “YellowPages.com,” “Yellow Book,” “Yelp,” and “Dex Online” all show increasing trends. So, could we deduce that this rising brand-name recognition among most of the IYPs has caused fewer people to need to research “yellow pages” sites? I don’t believe so, at least based on keyword searches in Google. Far more users appear to be seeking “yellow pages” than are searching for particular IYP brand sites:

(Comparing searches for “Yellow Pages” vs. IYP brands)

At the very least it would appear that the increases in IYP brand-specific searches do not balance out the dropping trend in searches for “yellow pages”—the magnitude in searches for “yellow pages” far outpaces combined brand searches for IYPs.

Searches by types of local businesses or organizations seem highly consistent and stable in Google, year over year:

(Google searches for popular types of local business/organization listings)

Now, I realize it’s dangerous to base assumptions off such a limited fraction of total Internet statistics, and I’m making multiple suppositions here. Google Trends only shows relative amounts of total numbers of searches by keyword sequences, so the stats don’t necessarily have a direct correlation to total traffic. There are so many variables involved that there could be multiple, combined causes for what we’re seeing here. These trends could be specific to only Google users and not to everyone. And, actual usage of IYP sites may not be reflected by keyword searches for “yellow pages.” Yet, Google usage comprises such a large percentage of total online searches, and user search behavior there does often seem to reflect the contemporary zeitgeist. So, I think we could make some valid and intelligent assumptions based on these graphs.

It’s my opinion that Google’s (and the other top search engines) innovations in local search combined with increasing inclusion of business listing data in the search engine results pages (”SERPs”) is causing users’ behavior to change. Users are finding more and more of the information they’re seeking directly in SERPs, negating the need to find Internet Yellow Pages. Google Trends shows that users are increasingly seeking “Google Maps” just as they’re searching for “yellow pages” less:

(Comparing searches for “Google Maps” vs. “yellow pages”)

Is this an actual indicator for increasing usage of Google Maps, while YP usage could be decreasing? At least from some independent reporting, user visits to Google Maps do indeed appear to be fairly healthy and increasing over time. Consider this June report comparing one month’s usage of Google properties, provided by Hitwise (”Percentage U.S. Visits to Custom Category of Top Google Properties“:

Use of Google Maps appears to be increasing. Why would users perform searches for “Google Maps” when they could just click on the “Maps” tab/link? Well, most large sites share the experience of having their own domain names and features searched for in the search engines, and Google itself is apparently no exception.

Now, it would be better to be able to compare actual traffic figures from the top search engines and Internet Yellow Pages, but all of them keep pretty mum for strategic reasons. The best we can do is to project estimates and look to companies who report relative audience share and traffic based off of sample sets of the total population of Internet users. ComScore has also reported on relative IYP vs. Local Search vs. Search Engine usage over time, but as Greg Sterling observes, it’s been a bit hard of late to interpret their relative figures compared with past stats.

My gut feeling is that the Google Trends graph for searches for “yellow pages” is likely representative of a broad behavioral pattern of Internet users who are going to traditional Yellow Pages sites less and less. If we project the pattern out in time, we can see that searches for “yellow pages” might reduce down to nil by as soon as 2011:

(click to enlarge)

Am I predicting the demise of the Yellow Pages and other local directories based off these projections? Not really! There’s too much investment in these companies for them to sit idly by as their market share and business foundations erode to search engine competition. The savvy companies are evolving themselves to stay relevant in the new paradigms. Sites like Idearc’s Superpages.com have been moving away from the “yellow pages” moniker by incorporating local search style components, social media characteristics, personalization, and partnering to develop major distribution networks. Local info publisher Marchex has developed a plan of bypassing search engines to large degree through local domaining, and sites like Yelp, Citysearch, Judy’s Book, and Local Guides have developed loyal followings through social media and user-generated content like reviews and sharing utilities.

Sure, all these types of sites are dependent upon referral traffic from the major search engines, as a Hitwise report on local search indicates. But, the major search engines like Google are unlikely to de-index all the business directory sites anytime soon, particularly since Google Maps has steadily enhanced its data with content supplied by many of these same local information companies. (Incidentally, that Hitwise report also supports my notion that keyword searches in Google for “yellow pages” may have a close correlation with overall IYP traffic - notice that downward trend.)

I think that classic Yellow Pages sites are going to decline, but the companies behind those sites may evolve and merge with other players so that they will survive in new incarnations.

Google’s announcement that they would automatically opt-in many of their ads to appear on the mobile platform seems somewhat controversial, since one supposes that a number of advertisers might not notice the change and might be irritated that their ads may now be running on an unanticipated platform. After all, many online retailers who advertise expect that some percentage of users clicking through would be placing online purchases, and mobile devices don’t effectively support transactions yet. Google’s patent for Gpay might pave the way for this, but it hasn’t launched yet.

On one level, Google’s act to opt everyone into this program might not seem all that bad—after all, advertisers are paying for exposure and referrals, too. Greg Sterling reports that Google’s opt-out policy during this trial period is similar to policies Yahoo and Microsoft have used in the past for new/underutilized programs. Since it can be reasonably supposed that CTR on mobile ads is likely relatively low, the cost to advertisers is probably low-to-nil, and Google’s motive is likely just a desire to get research data on mobile ads while also introducing many advertisers to the medium.

A New York Times article quotes Dilip Venkatachari, Product Management Director for AdSense, as saying that “the ads would provide a new source of revenue for publishers and could encourage more online sites to create mobile-focused Web sites. Like most other Google advertising systems, ad prices will be set through an auction and advertisers will pay when a user clicks on its ad.”

So, this should encourage more sites to create mobile friendly versions of their sites? While it’s an idealistic desire, the lack of standardization through the wireless devices pose significant challenges to large companies who are already challenged by making things simultaneously attractive, usable, cross-platform compatible, and optimal for search engines. Not to mention that devices such as the iPhone and Palm Treo for Windows are fast making it possible to view “non-mobilized” sites just fine, reducing any urgency that companies might feel about getting their content to work well for the new environment.

Interactive advertising on mobile is still very new, and there’s little research as to what’s effective and what works for consumers, much less developers. What many analysts are very sure of is that mobile search is likely to be particularly effective for locally-oriented businesses. As Paul J. Bruemmer reports, “While local search marketing is well established, local-mobile search marketing is barely getting started.”

Paul further voices a concern that many have expressed about the advent of ads on phones, a “General intolerance of advertising messages on a personal device.” At least thus far, I’m not hearing a lot of consumer complaints about this yet, perhaps because the ads are not all that obtrusive so far, and perhaps because internet users have already become so accustomed to seeing contextual ads.

For instance, check out these ads I found in Google when doing a search for “florists in Boston” on my Treo running Windows and Internet Explorer:

The ads are located down at the bottom of the search results, and they’re clearly labeled “Ad”, so I don’t find them all that annoying. I have seen one ad appear at the top of Google Mobile SERPs before, but it seems to be a very infrequent position for now.

Notice the ad with the URL that appears to be Google-hosted? I wonder if that’s one of the mobile landing pages that Google states that they may “adapt” for users who click through? This seems particularly odd to me, and it looks like the sort of thing where Google ought to spell out under what circumstances they’ll choose to automatically generate a landing page to “enhance” the user-experience. This seems very controversial to me, because Google is likely charging advertisers when they click through to those generated landing pages, and advertisers may not realize this, causing them to misinterpret effectiveness of apparent conversion rates.

Now, Yahoo provides advertisers with the ability to purchase similar mobile-friendly pages which I believe are intended for this very purpose, but I don’t think they automatically generate a page in the way that Google does—it’s voluntary. For instance, check out these ads for “shoes” from Yahoo Mobile:

When you click on a mobile ad in Yahoo, they provide an optimized mobile landing page. Here’s one that came up for me when I clicked on a Teleflora ad:

In some cases, Google is choosing to dump users onto the landing pages of the advertiser. For instance, here are ads for a “shoes” search in Google Mobile:

And when you click on the ad for Zappos, you get dumped onto their homepage which is not intended for mobile users:

I’m not sure why Google would land a user onto the graphic-intensive Zappos page in this case, instead of using their optimized mobile landing page. Perhaps Google Mobile didn’t think I needed it, since I’m running on a flavor of Internet Explorer? More likely, I’m supposing if the advertiser’s existing landing page includes a phone number, as every page on the Zappos site does, Google may conditionally choose not to automatically generate a more pared-down mobile landing page.

If you’re interested in seeing how your landing page or webpage might be automatically adapted by Google to appear for mobile users, check it out through this interface: http://google.com/gwt/n

Just from observation, Yahoo’s Mobile Ad Service appears broader and more robustly envisioned, allowing a variety of ad types for mobile, including Display Ads, Search Ads, and Video Ads. Yahoo’s promo copy reads “…click through to a promotional site, enable the consumer to find or call a store directly, offer a coupon, send an SMS message—the options keep expanding. If you don’t have a promotional site to link to, Yahoo can create one to your specifications.”

Since Mobile Search and Local Mobile Search are still relatively virgin marketing territories, Google can be forgiven some early program gaffes. But, online marketers may want to go and opt-out some of their current campaigns from running automatically in the mobile end since it could obscure some of their conversion data, particularly if the ads are intended to primarily drive online transactions. It would be better to set up separate campaigns with separate reporting and check to see if an optimal mobile landing page can be associated with the ad.

Also, for mobile ads, be aware that there’s theoretically greater potential for click-fraud. As I earlier outlined in “A Thorny Issue: Detecting Mobile Search Click-Fraud“, invalid clicks may be a lot harder to identify for mobile ads.

Listen to Stephan Spencer’s interview with Bryan Eisenberg for more about how to boost your site’s conversion rate.

But over time, I’ve heard other experts stating that their research shows that having ad presence for brands along with natural search ranking appears to enhance overall click through rates in a synergistic manner. And, with greater experience, I’ve seen a number of cases when companies really should be buying their own brand name keywords for ads!

I see that George Michie over at the Rimm-Kaufman Group criticized a recent Microsoft study claiming that some advertisers are wasting money by buying their own brands in paid search ads — and I think George was right to criticize this. Read on and I’ll elaborate…

I’ve seen a lot of cases where companies frequently don’t rank well for some of their brand-name combinations. Sure, one can argue that if their natural search optimization were done better, they might rank at the very top of the SERPs for those combos. But, I see cases where quite a few companies have products that are more typically purchased through particular department stores, resellers, or other distributors, and those other companies may have so much better search rankings that the original product creator is not likely to ever rank above them.

In these cases, I think that buying one’s own brand names in paid search makes a lot of sense!

For example, I love these Jhane Barnes clothes I can get at high-end department stores like Nordstroms — if you do a search for “Jhane Barnes trousers”, you get a search results page where the official Jhane Barnes site is only listed in the sixth position down:

(click to enlarge)

Now, I know that it’s likely that most of the Jhane Barnes sales likely happen in department stores, so it’s maybe not upsetting to them that they’re ranking lower than Neiman Marcus. Quite simply, Jhane Barnes (PageRank = 5) is not likely to ever outrank much more widely popular sites like Neiman Marcus (PageRank = 6) or Bluefly.com (PageRank = 6). Even if Jhane Barnes were to fix all of the SEO flubs that I see going on with their site, I’m not at all sure that they would overtake the Neiman Marcus or Bluefly pages that I see outranking them on that longer-tail search combination.

I’d bet that Jhane Barnes would make more money selling directly to consumers than selling through these distributors, though, and getting position higher on the SERPs would help with that. A paid search ad for their brand name would help insure they’d get up there. And, as a consumer, if I rapidly saw their official site when I came to this SERP, I might be inclined to click through to check their prices first, in the assumption that they might have just a slightly lower price than Neiman’s for the same item, or I might get discount offers from the later on.

Let’s look at an even more dramatic example, though. Let’s do a search for William Gibson’s newest book, “Spook Country”:

(click to enlarge)

Notice how the highest couple of links in the SERP is to the book’s pages at Amazon.com? The next is Wikipedia. The next two are, thankfully, the author’s own site. The two after that are to magazine and news sites, and so on. Now, you can buy the book through the author’s site, but it just has links off to other places like Amazon and Barnes & Noble to buy the book. But, how about the big publisher who manufactured and promoted the book?!?

Putnam Adult, the imprint of the book, is owned by the Penguin Group USA, the publisher. They’ve got their own online shop where this book could be purchased, assumably at higher profit for Penguin than if the book is bought through distributor book shops. The Penguin Group’s listing for Spook Country is all the way on the second page of the search results in Google — a place where practically no consumer is going to click to buy.

The Penguin Group USA website has a Google Toolbar PageRank of 7, but their pages are not likely to ever outrank the internet behemoths of Amazon.com (PageRank = 9) nor Wikipedia (PageRank = 9). They might even have considerable struggle with getting above The New Yorker (PageRank = 8), and The Los Angeles Times (PageRank = 8).

The best way to ensure that The Penguin Group’s page selling their own book makes it into the field of vision for online consumers would be to buy the keywords for “Spook Country” and “William Gibson” - ads in the sidebar or above the natural search results would undoubtedly drive up their direct sales, reducing how much they’d pay to the distributors.

Of course, to have me, a dyed-in-the-wool natural search expert endorse paid search may invite all sorts of criticism! I used to hear the paid search reps touting branded keywords as enhancing overall click-through, though, and I couldn’t help but be suspicious of their motives, since they have an obviously vested interest in increasing paid search purchases. However, I think that there are objectively logical reasons for using paid search placement for brand keywords, just like the examples shown above, and I think that there could indeed be a positive psychological effect on brand recognition when both natural and paid search placements appear on the same page. At very least, if you’re in both, you’re taking up more of the page’s overall real estate, reducing the space taken up by other parties.

I believe that a strong search marketing program has both paid and natural presence.

So, George Michie is right, though I don’t know that I’d go so far as to call affiliates “thieves” , since affiliates are frequently more facile, quick and efficient at targeting market niches that the bigger, product-originating companies have difficulty in catering to.