Search results matching tag 'search engine optimisation'

Twitter Search Deal: Social Networking Now Mainstream

2643242 — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:24:00 GMT

It’s undoubtedly very exciting that Twitter has struck deals with Microsoft and Google which will see people’s tweets added to their respective search engine results.

In certain respects these are landmark deals – rather than a particular search engine trying to take market share off the other, what we’re seeing is two search engines clearly recognising the importance and influence social networking now has within the search marketing space.

The fact is social networking is now mainstream – that the search giants are now actively adding tweets to their search results underlines that.

This isn’t something that has happened over night, and many industry gurus will be quietly thinking ‘I told you so’ and breathing a sigh of relief after years of trying to convince advertisers to take social networking seriously.

In recent years we’ve seen ideas such as desktop search and search content ads fall by the wayside as search companies try to increase revenues and improve user experience.

This latest Twitter deal will be different as it offers something in search results that is incredibly useful to users - opinions, real stories and snippets of information that will help them to navigate the web better, purchase products/services that are right for them, and warn them off anything that perhaps sounds too good to be true.

The integration of tweets into search results needs to be done properly to avoid diluting the quality of search results. ‘Bing’ especially, has spent a lot of time improving relevance.

But for brands, the development means they'll have an even bigger job on their hands as user opinion spreads even further.

Author: Tim Cook, Group Account Director, CheezeDMG - www.cheezedmg.com, twitter.com/Cheezedmg

Adding value to the PPC equation

2517221 — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 08:17:00 GMT

Regardless of the techniques used to entice customers, a standard acquisition strategy generally has the potential to deliver prospects of both high and low value. On the positive side, prospects who are converted into active customers may prove themselves to be worthwhile targets because of the revenue they generate in the short and long term. On the flipside, other new customers may not allow such a fruitful relationship; they may take advantage of an introductory offer or only make a single purchase, costing more to acquire than the brand can ever hope to secure a return from. And of course, yet more customers will fall somewhere between these two extremes.

New customers delivered through investment in search marketing – both SEO and PPC – can deliver both types of customers. However, PPC, in its prime role at the entrance to the sales funnel, can be used in a much more tactical way, in order to encourage the acquisition of consistently higher-value customers.

Firstly let’s consider how PPC works. A good PPC agency will be constantly improving and enhancing the search terms associated with a brand campaign, to capitalise on those terms which are delivering the greatest responses. By adding another layer of insight to this process – namely identifying which search terms deliver higher-value customers - the campaign can then begin to evolve to appeal to a larger majority of these prospects.

It sounds simple, but there is the obvious requirement of developing a more detailed understanding of customer value, in order to clearly recognise and group new customers, and utilise this information within PPC activity. Value isn’t an exact science, and can be more about examining the potential a new customer can deliver to the brand, as well as considering other factors like risk and attrition. The brand may need to develop a communications strategy to successfully unlock value over the long term, based on customer insight and its own product and service portfolio. But if an accurate enough gauge can be created at the point of acquisition, the PPC campaign can develop to reflect the need to attract certain customer groups over others.

The brand will obviously benefit from the improvement in quality of new customers it acquires, and the PPC agency can use this in combination with other methods of campaign enhancement to improve its own performance; especially important if it’s working on a cost per acquisition model. If the average value of new customers increases, it can even lobby to increase the acquisition fee to reflect this.

Brands should investigate the opportunity to use PPC in a strategic and considered way. In doing so they can improve the quality of customers entering the sales cycle while simultaneously maximising their search marketing investment.

Google Wave – set to revolutionise online communication?

2618871 — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 09:55:00 GMT

When Google Wave was released at Google's I/O Developer’s Conference at the end of May it sparked considerable excitement. Now the novelty factor has worn off it's time to start considering the potential of this revolutionary communication tool.

The application itself is impressive, but the use of its API in allowing the possibility to create bots/extensions is what could really pave the way for a new ’wave‘ of web applications, and even the advent of Web 3.0.

Google Wave is a real-time collaboration tool, where you can experience changes to a conversation, character by character, by multiple users and with added functionality through extensions. It falls into the ‘collaboration tool’ category due to the many uses it offers - from straight communications such as email and instant messaging - to installing the wave on sites like wiki's, forums and blogs, creating content and encouraging interaction. So rather than having a set of emails, threads or instant messages; there will be just one ‘wave’.

A good way of describing how you would interact with these waves would be to imagine you’re sharing a word document with some of your friends simultaneously, where you can edit an itinerary, decision or line-by-line conversation with them - in real time. Doesn't sound too revolutionary does it? Google has put their own spin on it though, by introducing intelligent formatting, real-time translation, and integrating external tools like Google Maps, images, and soon, developer’s own creations. It wasn't so much of a product launch, but rather an API launch so they could educate the developers that will be producing these extensions for when Google Wave is officially released later this year.

With these extensions, users will be able to simultaneously run a 'wave' on a blog/forum/site and see changes made both in the application and the external locations simultaneously. If the take up of Google Wave is as substantial as expected, the way that content is delivered to web pages will be completely changed and with potentially dramatic repercussions elsewhere.

For search marketing, with Google Wave providing updates within a conversation on external sites in real-time, the content will no longer be reflective of the last time it was indexed, thus rendering search results and even text ads irrelevant. If a destination page's content changes, the ad will be less relevant and subsequently affect detrimentally the quality score and CPC price. Advertisers that would be susceptible to this would need to commit to increased levels of budget to ensure they maintain their positions if their quality score does fluctuate.

This would obviously affect certain websites more than others though and for search engines to produce relevant results, they will need to continually update and index sites. To take search to the next level, you would need the results to be switching positions in real time, as sites become more relevant than others.

For website owners, Google Wave could cause a change in the way users view their content - for example, being able to view articles, comment, take part in polls and interact, all through a Google Wave bot without even visiting the site. Google wants Wave to not only be the hub of all their products and communication, but also the hub for experiencing and contributing to content from the rest of the Internet. This could have a grave effect on display advertising, a crucial source of income to the running of many websites - and would prompt a sweeping shift of business models towards subscription models where users pay for content.

Google Wave will prompt a notable change in the way search engines index sites and produce results, simply because they will have no choice. Obviously, currently channels such as forums and wiki’s are changed often, but as Google Wave becomes widespread, search engines will have to think about how to adapt to these constant changes.

With Bing taking a couple of bites out of Google's market share and Twitter indexing updates, search technology over the next year could produce something of a cold war. Google has already started making changes to its search functionality including "search options" and Google Squared, and this will escalate between Yahoo, Google and Microsoft as the full launch of Google Wave approaches later this year. Bing's "decision engine" has woken Google up from a distinctly average innovative few years on its search front.

All of this has ramifications for companies using natural search, since to optimize their “crawlability” on Wave, sites will need updating once a day or even more.

Of course the scale of these changes is dependant upon take up, though anyone who has watched the Google I/O developer’s conference video would be surprised if Google Wave doesn’t become the next focus of online communication and collaboration and have a huge impact upon digital marketing.

Author – James Glick, Media Account Manager, CheezeDMG

Follow Cheeze on Twitter.com/cheezedmg

Re: Can new search engine rival Google?

2427028 — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 13:29:18 GMT

I think the key here is to wait and see.

It's early days yet and, while at first glance I'm not particularly convinced, Cuil are clearly trying to shake things up a bit.

As long as there are new alternatives to Google's near monopoly on all things search I for one am happy to see where they go with this!