Panelists:
Lauren Freedman, President, the e-tailing group
Stephan Spencer, President, Netconcepts
Amy Africa, President, Eight by Eight

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.

A focused, well-written blog can get readers hooked on the blog and promote repeat visits to the website or garner subscriptions via RSS feeds and email newsletters. These recurring communications will help to tie potential customers to your site, encourage natural link building and increase repeat visits. Journalists are also more likely to follow a blog or subscribe via RSS than to visit the corporate site repeatedly. So, several avenues of search optimization and online marketing can be addressed with a single blog entity.

From the SEO benefits of business blogging to how it can help your customers, Jeff covers the basics of “who, what and when” of blogging. Read the full article at Practical eCommerce here.

• Abandonment metrics - for uncovering why visitors are leaving your site prematurely
• Conversion metrics - for insight into your acquisition funnel
• Retention metrics - for boosting your customer retention
• Search engine metrics - for obtaining the best return on your search marketing investment
• Email marketing metrics - for achieving the highest response rates from your email campaigns

Is your web site successful? Is your online marketing — including your SEO, paid search ads, email campaigns — all working, and how can you find out? The answer lies in metrics. It’s hard to improve upon something you’re not measuring. You could drop $100,000 on a high-end web analytics package. But if you don’t have a staffer dedicated to making sense of all those reports and taking some sort action as a result, it’s wasted money. Better to spend $10,000 on a lesser web analytics solution and $90,000 for a salary to employ someone highly skilled in web analytics. In fact, you’d be surprised the powerful tools you can get for free (and yes, we’ll go over some of the most exciting ones during the teleseminar). However, right now your first investment should be in signing up for this teleseminar.

Speakers:
Stephan Spencer — Founder and President, Netconcepts
Avinash Kaushik — Author, Speaker and Analytics Evangelist

Speakers:
Misty Locke, Co-Founder and President, Range Online Media
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, NetConcepts
Pinny Gniwisch, Founder and EVP Marketing, ice.com

• 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

Is there a place in Wikipedia for you? Can you protect your interests within Wikipedia in a way that is appropriate and minimizes the risk of a backlash — now and in the future? Want to know the best ways to interact with the service? Want to learn some valuable lessons from a few Wikipedia marketing successes and failures? Then this session is for you!

Moderator:
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts

Speakers:
Neil Patel, CTO, Advantage Consulting Services
Jonathan Hochman, Founder/President, JE Hochman & Associates
Don Steele, Director of Enterprise Marketing, Comedy Central

Solution: Use buzzworthy anecdotes, video and catchy titles

Results: A 14-percent increase in blog-driven sales and spikes of 1,000 sessions per day after each post that contribute to repeat traffic

Steve Spangler, famous for creating a 30-foot geyser of Diet Coke by dropping Mentos into a soda bottle, not only has mastered the art of science, but also the art of blogging to optimize natural search results and increase Web sales. Founder and CEO of Steve Spangler Science, a multichannel firm that sells educational toys, Spangler says the overall goal of his blog is to convey information in a fun, thought-provoking way. From a simple site with science toys and experiments, Steve Spangler Science has grown exponentially by using fun stories, catchy titles and newsworthy blog topics to catch the eyes of reporters, search engines and, ultimately, parents and teachers.

When he sat down to write his first blog, Spangler didn’t think he had anything interesting enough to discuss. However, after hearing that Insta-Snow, a product his company sells, was featured as a popular “stupid product” on a “Good Morning America” review of e-tailer Stupid.com, Spangler found what looked like a promising topic. According to Stephan Spencer, president and founder of Netconcepts, the SEM firm that works with Steve Spangler Science, leveraging a hot news story is one way to help drive Web site traffic. Spangler’s Insta-Snow blog piggybacked on the interest generated by the current media coverage by describing the story of a woman who got out of a speeding ticket after using the science toy. Spangler says she told the officer she had just left a science training seminar and convinced him she could make it snow. The officer told her that if she could, he would let her go without a ticket. Spangler says, “Lo and behold, she made snow by the side of the road. Not only did the officer excuse her ticket, he [also] asked for the Web site so he could buy Insta-Snow for his kids. We knew when we heard this story, it was like gold falling into our laps.”

What was it about this story that worked for Spangler’s blog? The anecdote surprised readers while showcasing the product’s usefulness or wow factor. “Myself and my customer service team are trained to know that when we hear a great story, we could be very successful by sharing it with everyone through our blog,” he says.

Another solution for increasing Web traffic via a blog is to use catchy titles to attract the attention of news outlets for additional exposure. For example, when blogging about one of his latest group trainings in Florida, Spangler planned to title the post, “Teachers perform hands-on science experiments as inquiry-based learning progresses in Bravard County.” Spencer said that to be effective, Spangler needed to find a great picture and develop a powerful title. Together, they came up with, “Parents Beware: Teachers Gone Wild.” Spangler says, “This was great Google juice! The search engines picked up on it, and we got links back to it from all over.” The flashy titles are fed through RSS and XML feeds to drive clickthroughs, which very quickly becomes viral marketing. Spangler also participates in media activities that drive traffic to find him through search engines. For example, each week his relationship with NBC/Channel 9 in Denver provides video clips placed both on his Web site and on YouTube. According to Netconcepts, these have trememdous viral reach, as well as support both link building and search placement.

In addition to using his own blog to fuel SEO results, Spangler also leverages blog interaction to drive clicks and links via social networking. He helps teachers develop their own science blogs for interaction with students, which often leads them to link to his blog in their postings. Again, this link activity and the blog visits that are a natural part of the blog development process for teachers and students all lead to better SEO results for Spangler’s site.

For small-business owners trying to increase Web traffic and generate more sales, Spangler says, “Two things are of utmost importance: 1.) Make sure you have something to say and [that] someone wants to hear it. Find some niche area on the Web where people are talking about what you are merchandising, or thinking about merchandising, and talk to them directly; 2.) Always ensure your blog features your own distinct voice. When starting a blog, a lot of business owners will see it as almost a diet pill. To stay with the same metaphor, a diet requires exercise, eating right and hard work—not simply a pill.”

Adding a blog isn’t a quick fix if there are holes in your business or marketing strategy, he points out, “but if hard work is put into it, and it is given a chance to develop and find its place in the online community, the results can be breathtaking.”

—Kate DeBevois

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.