Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

Danny Sullivan's last day at Search Engine Watch is today. He posted his farewell on the blog. It's kind of sad to see him go, but I'm sure he'll continue with great things at Search Engine Land. Search Engine Watch was the very first site I remember reading when I got into this industry back in 1998. Back then, there weren't a whole lot of other options like there are today, but even so, Danny always provided a high quality resource with reliable information about search engines and SEO (even before it was called SEO). If you're feeling nostalgic, check out Danny's post about a decade of writing about search engines.

I look forward to seeing what comes of Danny's new venture as well as what becomes of SEW with Elizabeth at the reins.

I knew they were holding out on me...now Microsoft is offering $200 credits with new account signups. If you're not already advertising with MSN and $100 wasn't enough to entice you, maybe this will do it. Be sure to use the promo code DM-2-1106 (expires 1/15/2007)

I love to read stuff like this. ROI Research conducted a study to try to quantify the impact that online searching has on offline purchases. There's obviously an impact, but it's a lot harder to measure if someone does their shopping research online and then goes down to their local store to make the purchase. Interesting findings from the study:

1. In this category, for every $1 dollar spent online, the average search-user spends $2.56 offline. This shows that Search has the ability to influence an incremental 3 times the dollar value of e-commerce transactions by reaching consumers who shop in traditional channels. Interestingly, the factor was even higher for existing client customers with a ratio of 3.37x spent offline vs. online.
   
2. Frequent searching correlates with higher spending. Those who search up to 10 times annually spend an average of $1,789 online while those who searched 31+ times spent an average of $2,943 online. Similarly in off-line transactions, those who search 10 or fewer times spend an average of $2,219 through retail locations, while those who search 31+ times spend an average of $3,839.
   
3. Search influences 20-30% of purchases made at retail locations.
   
4. By indexing the influence on purchase of Search we are able to quantify the amount of money spent as a result of Search. For the client's Online Purchasers, 48% of money spent online and 34% of money spent at retail locations can be attributed to Search. Among general consumers, Search accounts for 49% of online purchases and 42% of retail purchases.

Read more about it

According to Bill Tancer of HitWise Google is on track to overtake Yahoo as the biggest Internet property sometime in Mid-2009. His analysis doesn't include YouTube, and assumes that Yahoo will continue to loose ground and Google will continue to gain at the same rate. The truth is, both companies will be doing a lot to jockey for that top spot...so it's hard to predict when/if Google will overtake Yahoo. All signs point to an eventual dethroning of Yahoo, but only time will tell. Some people see it happening as soon as 2007. It's definitely possible, but Yahoo will certainly go down fighting.

As a sidenote, HitWise's numbers don't appear to be in line with the data cited in the MarketWatch article, so I guess it depends who you ask.

I haven't done much with Google News, other than search the news, but I think it's interesting that they now offer Google News sitemaps that allow news sites to designate which news articles they want indexed by the Big G.

I haven't been watching the Google Blog too closely lately, but I just noticed that Google Base turned one year old. I haven't been too impressed with the lack of integration of Google Base into the main Google results, but Google base is very useful to promote product catalogs, etc. I also notice a bunch of real estate listings from Google Base. Maybe they're doing more with it that I'm just not noticing.

They also mentioned it on the Google Base Blog, man those guys have a blog for every one of their products, don't they? On the blog they mention that GBase listings show up for used cars and recipes. Who knew?

Last year I wrote about how Cyber Monday isn't real. I just saw another article today that talks about that very issue. Cyber Monday is really a lot more hype than reality. Yeah, people will be shopping online next Monday (I've already started my online Christmas purchases), but it's not really the biggest shopping day of the year. It give the "media" something to talk about and it sure sounds cool, doesn't it. The other interesting thing I got from the article is that Black Friday isn't really living up to its name anymore. It used to mark the day that retailers were finally making a profit--in the black. That's not necessarily the case anymore, but they still call it that for old times' sake. Besides, the day after Thanksgiving is the biggest shopping day of the year, right?

Wrong. According to that article, the day after Thanksgiving was only the sixth busiest shopping day of the year. December 23rd was the busiest! I've been shopping a day or two before Christmas and I can attest, it was crazy! Maybe it's because all the online shoppers who procrastinated realize they have to go to an actual store because they can't get their stuff shipped to them in time.

Anyway, even though I just feel like I've been living a lie my whole life about this black Friday thing, it's good to finally know the truth, and the truth is, this is a huge time for shopping--online or off, so retailers get ready, 'cause they're a comin'.

Here's the full article on Reuters

While we're talking about search engine market share...ComScore just came out with their October U.S. Search Engine Rankings

Here's a blurb from the release:
comScore Networks today released its monthly qSearch analysis of activity across competitive search engines. In October 2006, Google Sites captured 45.4 percent of the U.S. search market, gaining 0.3 share points from the previous month. Yahoo! Sites maintained its second place ranking with 28.2 percent of U.S. searches, followed by Microsoft Sites (11.7 percent), Ask Network (5.8 percent) and Time Warner Network (5.4 percent).

As usual, the numbers don't quite match up with each provider, but the overall leaders and relative percentages of market share are pretty similar. I think we all know who the top search engine is, anyway...

I'm a sucker for these press releases from Hitwise. They just sent me one about searches for food and recipe-related keywords. It's logical and timely with Thansgiving just a few days away that searches would skyrocket for those keywords...

Here's an excerpt from the release:

Pumpkin Pie and Dessert Recipes the Top Recipe Search

The most popular recipe related search terms for the one-week period ending November 18, 2006 were 'pumpkin pie recipe,' 'pecan pie recipe,' 'pumpkin cheesecake recipe,' 'pumpkin roll recipe' and 'sweet potato pie recipe.'

AllRecipes.com (www.allrecipes.com) was the top website receiving traffic from the term 'recipe' for the week ending November 18, 2006 with 36.9 percent of visits from the term. Food Network (www.foodnetwork.com) was second, accounting for 13.1 percent of visits from the term, followed by Kraft Foods (www.kraftfoods.com) with 8.2 percent of visits.

That reminds me, I'm in charge of making the pies this year...anyone know any good recipes for pumpkin pie?

Which search engine has the biggest market share? Well, Duh. The real question is, which search engine is the 6th largest? Bet you didn't know this one, of course, MyWay isn't really its own search engine (primarily Ask.com)...then again, neither is 4th place AOL (they use Google, of course). Still, I'm impressed that MyWay has 2.2% of the searches, I'd of never thunk it.

Also interesting is their estimated number of searches--over 6 billion total searches--wowzers that's a lot of searchin'.

Get the full breakdown from the press release

Ever since the Microsoft launched their new Adcenter platform, I've thought they were dumb to not offer a promotional credit for sigining up like Yahoo does. Even Google offers a free $50 or $100 credit if you sign up through an adwords professional. I was excited when I got an ad in the mail from "Steve" with a $100 promo code (DM-1-1106). Then today, I saw an ad for this offer for $100 credit for new accounts (promo code: BNR-100-1006). They may have been doing these for a while and I'm just slow to notice...it's happened before.

Anyway, it's a smart move that is sure to get a lot of lurkers to make the leap and finally set up an account with MSN. The only thing that sucks about this is that there will now be more competition on MSN, so bid prices are sure to go up. The cat's out of the bag. Bummer.

Note: it looks like both offers expire Jan 15, 2007. But why wait until January to try it out? Get on it, slowpoke.

In breaking news from a a Google Press Release, they announce the first joint initiative by the big three search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Live) to support a single sitemap protocol. What can I say except it's about time. This will really simplify the process of creating a sitemap so the search engines can find and index all the pages of a site. I'm not jumping up and down because right now the sitemaps don't really seem to speed up the indexing process for most sites, but the concept is sound and I have high hopes that it will help simplify the process of getting every page of a site indexed by the search engines.

I guess Yahoo and Microsoft just figured, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em--at least on the issue of sitemaps.

It didn't take long for Danny to find something to keep him busy...On Dec. 11, Danny Sullivan will launch his news site, Search Engine Land. It's going to be a search engine news site. Chris Sherman and Barry Shwartz join him in the endeavor.

He's letting users vote for their favorite logo, personally, I'm not crazy about any of them, but of those choices, I like #1 best so I voted for that one.

I've been listening to the Daily Searchcast lately, and I like Danny's commentary about the latest search engine news. He's very tuned in and connected in the industry, and he's been at this longer than anyone else I know, so he's got a unique perspective on things.

PubCon started today. I didn't end up making it down to Vegas this year. I was planning on it, but just have too much stuff going on. I couldn't pull away from it all.

I noticed that the blog coverage of the event has begun at sites like SERoundtable.com (who always provides good coverage). I saw some articles about the WMW conference in an email from WebProNews, and I noticed Lee Odden has posted some good reports of sessions he's attended. I'm sure we'll see a lot more feedback, reviews, etc. coming out of PubCon over the next few days.

This list of top searches in 10 different categories is on the Clickz site, but looks like they're getting their data from Hitwise.

Yeah, now that AOL has changed their business model and is going after ad dollars like everyone else instead of their old subscription model, they've got to do SEO like the rest of us to get their content indexed. Welcome to the club, dudes.

from washingtonpost.com

I think the whole blackhat/whitehat SEO discussion is getting a little old, but I like Tim Converse's breakdown of the SEO color wheel. He breaks it out into several different shades of gray, rather than just the typical black or white that people usually try to categorize SEOs. He makes some good point and even though it's just his opinion, he does work for Yahoo, so that's got to give his opinion some kind of clout.

Does it really matter what shade of white or gray you fall into? I guess the darker your shade, the riskier your position, but the truth is, marketers are finding success in all the various levels of gray, black, and white. In my opinion, the whiter you are with your SEO efforts, the longer lasting the effects will be. Sooner or later the search engines will catch on to your tricks if you're using tricky fads to fool them, but if you've got a legit site with real, relevant content, it's going to have staying power in the long run.