Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

Went to see Seth talk about his new book, The Dip this afternoon. Seth appears to have a nice following here in the Salt Lake City area. The guy has got some incredibly simple, yet powerful ideas about marketing. I'll read the Dip tonight--it's short (only 70 tiny pages), but based on Seth's presentation today, I'm sure it will be good stuff.

Great job, Phil and all the rest of the WordMob gang. I don't know if we hit the numbers we were hoping for, but it seemed like a great turnout.

Seth gave a lot of good little nuggets of information, but I didn't bother taking notes since I saw a few people blogging at the event (like Phil Windley and I figured Chris would come through with a good overview. Seth's speech was great and I really liked the q&a -- probably my favorite question/answer was the high school marketing teacher who asked what three things he would teach his students. The answer: Get over yourself--no one cares about you, go sell stuff on ebay, and learn to tell a story. I think those are some good things for 17 yr old kids to learn (or 37 yr olds for that matter).

Also, most of the people I can think of to give my extra copies of the book were at the event, so if anyone's reading this and wants one of my 4 extra copies, drop me a line.

Labels: seth godin, utah

Google recently introduced a cool new trend watching tool they call Hot Trends. It ties in with Google Trends, but it shows a list of hot search keywords by date (only goes back to May 15 of this year) and then you can click on the word or phrase to see the trend page for that particular search term. Since Google controls the lion's share of Internet searches, it's nice that they like to share at least some of it with us search engine junkies. It's mostly news and blog search stuff, but very interesting to see what are the hot topics of the day.

Labels: google, google trends, news, search trends

According to TechCrunch, Google is acquiring FeedBurner for $100 million. It's not official, but being on TechCrunch, it's only a matter of time.

Great interview on CNet with Matt Mullenweg, creator of WordPress

Google made an announcement a couple days ago that they've released what they call Universal Search. Universal Search is basically a tighter integration of image, video, blog, news, and other search services into the main search results. Marissa gives more background on the concept here. For those of us paying attention to this space on a daily basis, it's not really anything too earth shattering. They've been integrating different types of results into the main search off and on for years. This announcement simply lets us know that they're serious about it and will continue to try to deliver the best results possible, regardless of whether it's a web page, video, product search, or whatever.

As a searcher, I think this is great--as long as they get it right. I don't want a bunch of irrelevant or useless stuff, but if it's what I'm looking for, that's perfect. As a search marketer, this emphasizes the importance of optimizing your presence in not just the Google web page results, but also in product search, local search, video, images, blog search, and everything else. Smart marketers are already using all these--now there will just be more competition for those top spots.

According to LeeAnn Prescott @ Hitwise searches for lower priced gasoline, hybrid cars, and other fuel conscious searches are down from the last time fuel prices soared like this. Have we given up on saving money on gas? Or did we all just realize that it's not worth using $3 of gas to drive to a cheaper place just to save $1.00? This is bad news for Gas Buddy and similar gas price watching sites.

Google Analytics offers a huge amount of useful data for analyzing your site traffic--especially when you consider the price (free). Google recently announced the release of their new and improved reporting system integrating the cool Measure Map technology into the Google Analytics interface (more from the Analytics blog). The result: the same great data in a much more user-friendly and usable format. I like what I see so far.

When I checked yesterday only about half of my clients' analytics accounts had been migrated to the new system. Login to see your stats to see if you're getting the new reports, or check out the demo.

Labels: google analytics, web analytics

Eric Enge over at Stone Temple published his interim results of his analytics study--comparing various analytics providers by installing multiple analytics packages on the same sites. It looks very interesting so far. Full results to be published in July.

Labels: web analytics

When you think of online auctions, what comes to mind? Of course it's eBay. eBay has firmly cemented itself as the only place to go when you want to buy or sell online. Technically, there are a lot of other auction sites, but based on the traffic market share eBay controls, they're pretty much the only game in town.

Check out the figures from HitWise


Yahoo is closing their U.S. auction site in June. They don't really say why, but it's pretty obvious they're fighting a losing battle and they are making a lot more from eBay as an advertiser than they ever did with the auction site.

Between eBay and eBay motors, they account for 94% of the traffic to auction sites. This is according to HitWise, which usually has pretty reliable numbers. I wonder how in the world gunbroker.com landed in the third spot? And where is Overstock Auctions? Overstock really pushed auctions hard at first. It's buried on their site now, but it's still up and running as far as I can tell. Regardless, that kind of market dominance is incredible! Microsoft might be close to that kind of dominance with their OS, but who else? Very few markets are dominated by a single company like that.

The crazy thing is that Google is on track to do the same kind of thing with the search market. Every year their share of the market just keeps going up and the other search engines can't keep up. I doubt Google will ever get to 90% of the total search traffic, but I didn't think they'd become as dominant as they are now, either.

Labels: auctions, ebay, hitwise

This interview with Adam Lasnik offers up some pretty good info. It's a long-ish interview, but if you don't have time to read it all, here's a short summary of my take on Adam's comments:

• * You're ok to have some paid links, Google realizes they'll never catch them all, as long as you've got a good mix of links, you're probably fine. (they still don't like them, but that doesn't mean they're going to get you booted out of Google).
  
• * Duplicate content penalties are very rare and we're probably all worrying way too much about this one, too. If you're a black-hatter stealing other people's content from all over the web, you might be in trouble, though.
  
• * Google indexes pages with crappy (non-validated) code just fine, and will continue to do so as long as universities and other fine institutions continue to publish great content within crappy code.
  
• * If your site is popping in and out of the search results regularly with every algorithm update, you might be living on the edge of Google's "quality guidelines". Good sites shouldn't see much fluctuation in the search results with each algorithm update.
  

Read the whole interview here

Labels: google

The top blog list from ebizmba.com offers up kind of a mash up of various ranking sources to determine which blogs are indeed the most popular. I like that it looks at several factors including inbound links, quantcast, compete.com, alexa ranking, and RSS subscribers. Cool.

Labels: blogs

The Adwords blog offers up some answers about Google Radio Ads. They let you bid on radio spots like we already do with Adwords, or you can secure a particular space by doing a "reserve buy". They say it's not remnant inventory and they have spots available all week and at all time slots. You could do some cool tests with this type of advertising. Sounds interesting...and they're taking beta testers for Google Audio Ads. And look, they've already got some case studies.

Labels: google adwords, radio ads

Hmmm. Well, I guess it's not a done deal that Seth Godin is coming to visit us here in SLC. He posted it on his blog and is taking bookings, so if he cancels, that's pretty lame.

Update: apparently Seth is now confirmed to be coming. So get your butt over to this signup page if you're going to be in the Salt Lake City area on May 24. You won't want to miss this one.

Labels: salt lake city, seth godin, utah