Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

It comes as quite a surprise to many of us that Danny Sullivan is Leaving Search Engine Watch and SES. Maybe we shouldn't be so surprised, but Danny's Search Engine Watch was THE first site I remember finding back in early 1998 when I hopped online and tried to figure out this whole SEO thing. In fact, nobody called it SEO back then, it was just search engine submission, or site promotion, or who knew what to call it? Anyway, Danny has done a lot to really build this industry and although I'm sure SEW will continue strong without him (due to the strong base he's built), it will be weird to not have him be a part of it. Best of luck, Danny!

According to the Yahoo! Search blog Yahoo is updating their index, so you could see some big changes in your Yahoo search position. I did a quick spot check and didn't notice any huge changes for my sites or clients' sites, but I see at least one site that has improved significantly with this update.

I find it fascinating to compare keyword search trends to other non-search related statistics to see how they correlate. Today, Bill Tancer from Hitwise compares searches for "homes for sale" with existing home sales as reported by the National Association of Realtors. I find it particularly interesting since one of our clients is a Utah home builder, who targets some of the same keywords (even though Bill's data is for existing homes). The good news is that although searches have dipped pretty signficantly (as have actual sales of homes), it's on the upswing according to Hitwise...which is promising news for realtors, home builders, etc. Certainly there are regional differences based on the local real estate markets, but the overall trend nationwide appears to be upward.

As a sidenote. I hope Bill/Hitwise continue to come out with more of this type of analysis...this is good stuff!

According to a New York Times article, academic researchers (who the data was originally intended for) are somewhat reluctant to use the AOL data after all the fuss that's been made about privacy issues. Meanwhile, us online marketers have no qualms about mining the data for useful and humorous findings.

Is there a touch of irony in the fact that I can't quite find the time to finish reading my latest book, Getting Things Done? Hopefully I'll get around to it by next week...

This one focuses more on crazy users' searches...AOLpsycho - pretty interesting approach--kind of more Web 2.0-esque, letting users tag and make comments about users' search data...and SEO Sleuth is more of a keyword/domain tool similar to others I mentioned before.

Has Google stopped growing? Danny Sullivan analyzes ComScore's numbers to see if Google has really quit growing while Yahoo grew a bit, according to the ComScore numbers.

Bill Tancer adds his two bits over on the HitWise blog, offering some insight into the issue based on HitWise data.

It looks like Google may have hit a plateau, or (gasp) even slightly declined in terms of search marketshare. Nothing much to worry about, however, we're talking maybe one percent drop max, so Google is still the big kid on the search engine playground. Besides, the numbers are far from conclusive, and a couple weeks worth of data (or even a couple months) is nothing to bet the farm on.

Stuntdubl offers up 12 Different Types of Links and How To Get Them. One of the things I've always liked about Todd's post is that he offers practical solutions to link building and other SEO topics. Once again, he comes through with another very useful article about different types of links, the value of each, and some tips on how to obtain these links. Good stuff!

From the Official Google Base Blog...three new columns for stats on impressions, clicks, and pageviews...

More on Click Fraud from BW...the writer seemed much better informed than most "mainstream" press about SEM issues.

I've been thinking about creating a list of all the top SEO/SEM blogs I read on a regular basis. There are so many blogs out there these days, it's hard to know which ones are worthwhile. Rand at SEOMoz just beat me to it when he published a list of his top 50 blogs in the search space...don't forget to add SEOMoz on the list (they humbly left themselves off).

I don't fully agree with the order of the list, but it looks like most of the blogs I subscribe to are on there. I really respect the time and effort it takes to keep a blog updated regularly with fresh, intelligent content. I realize my blog is often just pointing to other people's blog posts, but why reinvent the wheel if someone else is saying it better than I would, anyway?

Another list of search blogs I saw today was this one from Barry Schwartz.

Aaron Wall and Andy Hagans offer up a pretty good list of good and bad ways to acquire links...

Just watched this sweet documentary on how Cambrian House snuck onto the Googleplex and handed out 1000 free pizzas to Googlers. I'm surprised I hadn't heard about this before now, pretty clever idea.

I always suspected Matt Cutts and GoogleGuy were one and the same...and I guess everyone else knew it, but he never came right out and admitted it...until now.

from MediaPost...Google is still king of consumer awareness and satisfaction, but Yahoo is slipping down close to the ranks of MSN and Yahoo. I have no idea what these numbers mean, but to me it's just another survey telling us that everybody loves Goog.

Another tool using the AOL search data. This one from SEO Blackhat gives an estimate of clicks by position based on the Overture tool's estimated monthly searches. Very cool concept. I'm not sure how accurate it is, but their methodology seems fairly sound.

A lot of people are taking the AOL search data and putting research tools online. I downloaded the data and had one of my guys putting it into a database so we could analyze it, but then I realized that there are a lot of these tools popping up that we can use.

Here are a few tools I've seen for analyzing the data in one way or another:
http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/suggest.php
http://www.askthebrain.com/aol/
http://www.dontdelete.com/
http://data.aolsearchlogs.com
http://www.aolsearchdatabase.com/
http://czern.homeip.net/aolsearch/index2.php
http://aoldb.unwieldy.net/index.html

And I'm sure many more to follow...

One thing I find interesting is to see how many sites searchers click on during the research/shopping phase. I haven't seen or calculated the exact number or average sites per search, but a lot of those searchers clicked on several sites for the same keyword search. Obviously it happens, but here we have a good chunck of actual searches broken out by user so we can see how people search.

One finding that's being discussed on EarnersForum.com points out the huge difference in clicks on the first listing compared to the second (and all others below that). Also interesting was that the 10th spot proved to be clicked on more than the 9th spot (as I had suspected was the case), but not a very big difference. I think some people assume the 10th spot gets a ton more clicks than the 9th.

Total Searches:9,038,794
Total Clicks: 4,926,623

Click Rank1: 2,075,765
Click Rank2: 586,100
Click Rank3: 418,643
Click Rank4: 298,532
Click Rank5: 242,169
Click Rank6: 199,541
Click Rank7: 168,080
Click Rank8: 148,489
Click Rank9: 140,356
Click Rank10: 147,551

Very interesing stuff, indeed.

P.S. You can still get the data if you want to try sifting through it. The online tools are handy, but if you want to do any serious analysis of the data, you've got to do it yourself, anyway.

Google gets way too much attention on this blog...and on the web in general. How about a little Yahoo news?

Yahoo! is now redirecting all "site:domain.com" - type searches directly to site explorer. This is to highlight the new and improved features in the Site Explorer update.

Updates include:
* More information about sites you own, including:
o Last Crawled Date and Language for your Site URLs
o Subdomains of your site
* Feed submissions are much smoother. You can submit RSS, Atom and URL lists, and manage all of them from one place. For authenticated sites, you can also track when they were submitted and processed.
* UpdateNotification Web Service to notify us of feed or site updates, part of the suite of Site Explorer APIs you already know and love. Since these return the same data as the tool, we recommend using them for automated applications.

Try out Yahoo Site Explorer

It seems like an article about Google shows up in Business Week magazine every other week...well, here's another one.

Google is modern-day Napoleon - from the Economist

I think Search Engine Roundtable does the best job of reporting what's happening at Search Engine Strategies conferences and other SEO-related conferences. Sometimes the reports are a little hard to follow because he's typing them while trying to listen with one ear, but they are the most complete and insightful reports I've seen. I usually don't make it to these conferences, so it's nice to be able to catch a glimpse of what I missed.

Just finished reading the "Fictitious clicks" report from Google. Yeah, it's a good day to not be in the anti-click fraud business...especially if I'm one of the companies that Google used for its case studies in the report--ClickFacts, Click Forensics, and AdWatcher.

In short order, Google makes a very strong case against those services. To me, the most damning evidence was that the so-called fraudulent clicks yielded a conversion rate close to the rest of the campaign, and that last example of the AdWatcher report that claimed 12000 fraudulent clicks for a client's site, when they only paid Google for 6000 clicks for that same time period...oops! How could they possibly claim twice as much click fraud as clicks that even occurred? I don't understand how they could forget to check Google's numbers to see what they were actually charged for. Doh!

I like that Google didn't completely discredit the value of click auditing services, they just point out that the current click auditors' methodology sucks.

I found it interesting (a little cocky, but if it's true maybe it's just confident) that they said "to date, we have not yet discovered a single legitimate vulnerability as the result of a third-party fraud auditing report." But they leave the door open by saying that they would love it if a click auditing company would point out such a vulnerability so they can fix it.

All in all, Google does a good job of discrediting click auditing services (these three companies' services at least), but they don't really shut the door completely on the issue of click fraud. I'm convinced not to trust these third party companies, but I'm still not convinced that click fraud doesn't happen. It just tells me that the third parties aren't any better than Google at catching click fraud.

That being said, Google's actually doing the best at catching click fraud--it's everyone else who should take more of the heat when it comes to click fraud--yeah, you know who you are...you in the back who are just sitting there letting Google take the rap.

I'm sure the click auditors will come back with some kind of response--if they have one--but it might be too late to save their business unless they can come up with a more accurate method of tracking.

Michael's Analyis: Bottom line: "We still don't know."

Google has always claimed that the actual click fraud numbers are much lower than what third party click fraud trackers report. A new report from Google's click quality team examines the accuracy of these fraud cops' methodology. Google obviously has a lot at stake and if they can prove these guys' methods don't really work to detect click fraud, they can breathe a little easier (for now), the bad news is the fraudsters will gain more confidence and continue to find ways to exploit the system.

If you're really interested in this stuff (like I am), you can download the full PDF report here.

I still believe Google is the best at filtering bad clicks and not charging advertisers for them. Why is everyone talking about Google and click fraud? (Uh, yeah, I know they're the biggest search engine, but still). I think click fraud is a much bigger problem with Yahoo...and don't even get me started on second-tier PPC engines like Ah-ha, Kanoodle, and FindWhat...

One final parting thought, if this Google report is correct and all click auditing services suck, where does that leave us? Back at the mercy of the freakin' search engines again!?! Argh! Now what do we do?

Thanks a lot, Google!

I've seen quite a few search metrics services popping up lately, including HitTail, and 103 Bees. This new one, Enquisite looks interesting as well. This one brings together the actual search referral metrics from your site along with the position of your site in the search results. I haven't tried it out yet, but I'll give it a try.

PR Web announced that it was acquired by Vocus.

What does that mean for all of us PR Web users?

Here's what they say in the press release:

1. The Same Great PRWeb Service. You'll continue to use PR Web exactly as you do now. Without interruption of any kind, you'll enjoy the same great features and customer support you've come to expect. You'll continue to work with the same PRWeb editors and customer support staff.

2. New Products. Soon, you'll have access to additional web-based software options that will enhance your ability to generate publicity, increase your online visibility and measure your results. New products include a premium database containing hundreds of thousands of media outlets and journalists; news monitoring and analytics, an online newsroom and personalized email campaigns.

3. A Global Leader. Vocus, Inc. (NASDAQ:VOCS) is a global technology company with the resources and infrastructure to keep PRWeb at the forefront of SEO news distribution. Vocus and PRWeb will now be working together to create the next generation of online public relations capabilities.