Search Engine Tigers

As I mentioned previously, Danny Sullivan’s new company announced that they were going to be running a local version of their new SMX conference series in Denver in September, following on from the one day SES conference that was held there last year. I mentioned that I’d noticed that there was no SES local scheduled for this year, so the SMX conference was filling that gap. Today I noticed that a link for SES local has gone up on their website, in the list of upcoming conferences, with a conference listed for Denver in September this year, but as yet no specifics bar the phrase

“Returns to Denver September 2007″

So what does this mean? Are we going to have dueling conferences in Denver in September? Presenters and attendees forced to make a choice between one or the other? Will one follow the other? Will they be at different ends of the month? Or is is just simply that that page was created at some point in the past with the assumption that there was going to be a repeat conference, and someone pulled the wrong version of the html out of the repository?

It’s most likely the latter, given that I don’t see there being head to head conference competition, or at least not at this point, while people are still trying to get along, and Danny is involved with SES conference organization (at least through SES-SJ in August). The other big giveaway? At the bottom of the SES pages they list all of the cities that they’re having conferences in… no sign of Denver there.

* Toronto * Tokyo * London * San Jose * Chicago * New York * Munich * Paris * Miami * Dallas *

“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”

-Albert Camus

Everything in life is a choice, some more extreme than others (personally I don’t like coffee, but I would choose that over the other option). I was in the book store the other day, and I saw that they were running a 3 for 2 sale, so I picked up a copy of the Dalai Lama’s book on science, and since I’ve been getting into walking lately, and I live about 20 minutes from the Appalachian Trail, I picked up a copy of Bill Bryson’s “A Walk in the Woods”. This left me with one book to pick. There was quite a selection, but none of the choices really leaped out at me. There were fiction books, factual texts, autobiographies, and business books, but I couldn’t choose one. After looking through the piles of books for a few more minutes I noticed one called “The Paradox of Choice” by Barry Schwartz (nope, not that Barry Schwartz). For someone having an issue with choice, it seemed like the perfect… well… choice.

The premise of the book is that as available options increase, choice itself becomes harder. Should you get the relaxed fit jeans, slim fit, baggy, button fly, zipper fly, etc, etc. For a consumer, knowing that they got the perfect item that they were looking for is tough. Then you have all of the issues of brand differentiation (real and imagined). It’s tough for a person to make a decision and know that they made the right one, or at least one of the best available ones.

Schwartz splits consumers up into 2 categories, maximizers - those who make sure that they thoroughly evaluate all options before making a decision, and satisficers - those who go for an option that looks good when they find it. Obviously for smaller purchases / decisions, the majority of us fall into the latter, but for larger / more involved decisions there’ll be a lot of variance.

So how does this apply to the topics on this blog? Well, from a local perspective there’s a wide variety of choices for a consumer. If you want to find a local business, where do you go? Do you go to a search engine – Google, Yahoo; a specialized search engine solution – Google Maps, Yahoo local; an IYP – superpages, windstreamyellowpages; a vertical search site – limousines.com, 1800Dentist; a local site – citysearch, askCity; others – Craigslist, insiderpages, etc. At the moment there’s no clear winner in local search, and with the variety of choices, with no ‘killer solution’,the satisficers (and for this relatively small decision that would be the majority of users) go with whatever looks good to them.

So for a small business what should they do? Should they just stick with their website or go out and get their data distributed out to all of the potential locations that the end user may look at? The answer is that they most assuredly need to do the latter. As Justin Sanger of Local Launch said at SES in Chicago last December

“… It’s about business information online. It’s a different way of thinking. We must cleanse, enrich and optimize content. Think: Atomization – separate and spread. Managing and dispersing biz info is the local search marketing tactic of our time. The new local search landscape requires new thinking.”

So small businesses should take note of the proliferation of choice, and get their data out to as many end solutions as possible, so the satisficers and maximizers both will find their information wherever they end up doing their search.

Last year, Search Engine Strategies (SES) did a local search show in Denver. It was a one day show, and was far enough away that it didn’t make sense for me to attend. This year SES didn’t schedule one, must not have gone down too well I thought. Well, today Danny Sullivan’s new Search Marketing Expo announced SMX – local and mobile, which will run for 2 days – September 19th – 20th, in Denver, CO. Programmed by Chris Sherman and Greg Sterling, it should be interesting, and given that it’s 2 days may attract more people from this coast.

I’m trying to verify some click charges on one of my accounts, so I tried to log in to Yahoo’s Panama. Here’s what I, along with everyone else in the office, have been seeing for the past 15 minutes.

Fantastic… Hopefully it’ll be up again soon…

Update: as is typical, it was up by the time this post was published…

Looking through one of my Google AdWords account I saw the new quality score displayed. As Yahoo had put in a little shaded in bar showing your quality score on a 5 point scale, Google decided they’d get in on the act. Instead of 5 non-defined points, Google went for 3 vague descriptive words:- “Poor, OK, and Great”. One interesting this is that they show you what the minimum bid for a particular keyword is. As you can see in this example culled from one of my accounts, the “Great” keyword has a min. bid of 4 cents, the “OK” keywords have a range of 6 cents to 20 cents, and the “Poor” keywords all have a 30 cent min. bid.

Quite a difference there. If all of the keywords manage to somehow come in at their minimum bid, or that multiple holds at higher prices, that’s 7.5 great keywords for the same price of 1 poor keyword. Now in reality that multiple doesn’t hold, but there is a differential. Looking at the average CPC for these keywords, the “Poor” keyword is costing us about 33% more than the “OK” keywords, now as to whether the “Poor” keyword is worth that from a conversion perspective, that’s a different story, but if you see this in your AdWords, that’s something that you do want to look at.

Now, I’ve looked through several campaigns, and it appears that “Great” always has a minimum bid of 4 cents. “OK” ranges from 5 cents to 20 cents, and “Poor” is 30 cents and up (I saw some as high as a dollar – naturally these were ones that had been labeled “Inactive for Search”).

Running some reports for various sites that I oversee I noticed a strange occurrence when using the site: command. Several of them that had previously had many thousands of pages indexed suddenly were only showing 260 pages indexed, the same number – 260 – was showing for all of them.

The first one showed me the following stats as the result of the query:-

So only 5 were showing, with the ‘click here to view omitted results’ text at the bottom. Clicking on the text didn’t show me the other 255, it instead showed me the following:-

Maybe it’s a supplemental index issue, I thought to myself. Flipping through the pages to test this theory I got deep into the 700’s, and I still hadn’t seen that piece of green text to inform me that I’d finally found the first supplemental result. Strange. Ok, on to the next one. The Site: command returned the following:-

Clicking on the ‘omitted results’ text gave me the following:-

Again, well into the 700’s and no sign of my first supplemental. So why is Google reporting 260? Why doesn’t it report either the total number of pages in the index (as it did for my other sites), or heck just even the number in the main index with an option to add in the supplemental?

Update: Google has admitted that this is a known bug, and will be fixing it over the next few weeks. There’s a write up on Marketing Pilgrim about it too.

Google announce this morning on the Webmaster Central blog that Google Webmaster Tools are now an officially released product and out of beta. This beta period has lasted since June of 2005 when it was known simply as Google Sitemaps. Since then they’ve added a lot of nice features from crawl analysis to the recently added link list. The big change with this announcement? You can now comment on their blog. If you’re not using Webmaster Tools for your website or blog you’re missing a great free resource.

released their annual Search survey this week, in it they aggregate the results of questionnaires filled out by 587 search engine advertisers and SEM agencies. This post is going to deal with details on the local portion of that survey, and focus on the responses from the advertisers, not the agencies.

The first local question asked on the survey was whether or not people had experience or interest in Locally Targeted Search Keyword Text Ads. 14% said that they’d tried it and were unimpressed, and 50% of advertisers said that they had no experience with geo-targeting, with 26% saying that they were interested in trying it out. If these figures hold, that’s a lot of advertisers that are going to be opening up in the online local market space…

The next question was about where the money was going, in other words, which engines were the most popular among those who responded. No shocker on the top 2 – Google & Yahoo, but MSN was not third, not even fourth, it came in fifth. Third & fourth places were actually taken up by 2 of the biggest IYPs – Superpages & YellowPages (given that I work with several IYPs that’s a good sign).

The last local specific question that I’m going to touch on (for more comprehensive results / more results you’ll have to join SEMPO to get the full survey) is that of how much more would people be willing to pay for better local targeting? Over 3/4 of respondents said that they’d pay no more than 10% of a premium (42% said no more than 5%). Of course that would depend on what the ‘better local targeting’ entailed. What can the engines do to improve their targeting? Well, I found out last week that MSN doesn’t just rely on the IP address of the searcher to place them, they also use their Passport system, which makes sense given that people have signed up for that service, so they may as well get use out of it. Yahoo does allow you to set your location by clicking on the local button on their main page, and Google has made it optional to add your location information, Maybe they’ll all start making this information required, and this will be where personalization is really going to improve local search.

Recently Sony and Walmart have hit trouble when they’ve been found out for generating reviews of their sites / products / stores that were not actually user generated, but were instead paid for by the respective companies. In the EU legislation has now been passed that declares this practice illegal. Will it only be a matter of time before that happens here in the US? Will this affect your linking / self promotion strategy?

“Businesses that write fake blog entries or create whole wesbites purporting to be created by customers will fall foul of a European directive banning them from ‘falsely representing oneself as a consumer.’ From December 31, when the change becomes law in the UK, they can be named and shamed by trading standards or taken to court. The Times has learnt that the new regulations also will apply to authors who praise their own books under a fake identity on websites such as Amazon.”

So you want to know what your competition is up to? You want to know what people are saying about your company? Well, on the web that’s easy enough to take care of. Simply go to Google Alerts, and set up some alerts. You can enter any text to search for, and when Google encounters it, it’ll send you an email (you can set up the frequency of the emails to ‘as it happens’, daily, or ‘once a week’). How well does it work? Well, I have the name of my company in an alert, and last Tuesday afternoon I got an email informing me that someone had written a blog post about a presentation that my CEO had given that morning… There are no restrictions on the text that you can enter, so feel free to keep an eye on what your competitors are up to, but also be mindful that entering text that’s too broad can result in a large number of emails.