What is likely to happen in 2009?

Many of the trends likely to have an impact in 2009 have already started, but what are our predictions for some of the key developments this coming year?

1) The economic slowdown focuses attention online: there is little doubt that the economic impact of the ‘credit crunch’ in 2008 will have a significant impact on business in 2009, particularly in the US and Europe. Progressive companies will still need to maintain and grow their business in the face of any downturn and therefore even if marketing spend is cut back, the focus on online marketing will be greater, due to the measurability and proven cost-effectiveness of this form of advertising for many businesses. Search advertising will still see an overall growth in spend and market share of online advertising and despite some companies withdrawing from this sector, many others will put more spend into this targeted advertising to support their business.

2) Analytics becomes more mainstream: partly because of the widespread uptake of Google’s free Analytics tool and partly because of the greater need for advertising spend to be effective in 2009, the use of website statistics or analytics is expected to become more common, even for small companies. However, the interpretation of the data and the way that understanding can be used will still be the most important aspect of this trend, but companies can now access much better data on their online activities which in turn can help to improve their website and marketing strategy to get the most from their online spend.

3) Yahoo won’t survive in its current form: it seems inevitable that Yahoo’s ongoing saga that was the source of much news coverage in 2008 will come to some sort of conclusion in 2009. Whether this is with Microsoft eventually coming back on the scene and buying Yahoo’s search business, or some other form of takeover by another leading online brand, it’s likely that Yahoo won’t be able to survive the next 12 months in their current form, despite ‘ or maybe because of ‘ the change in their CEO. It would be a shame for Yahoo to lose more search market share, as Google needs a stronger competitor, but with the economic problems in the US, it’s hard to see Yahoo surviving much longer as a key player and we can expect more developments here sooner rather than later.

4) Video becomes the new marketing tool: as mentioned above, with the growth and impact of ‘universal’ search, video is now playing a more visible role within search and in 2009 this is likely to see a bigger impact in the business sector. Companies need to think about ways they can effectively use video to drive traffic and new business to their website, as it is becoming a more widespread medium and one that can play a bigger role within search and advertising channels. The ‘optimisation’ of video will be as important as the production if the effort of creating videos is to reap the rewards expected, particularly against the massive growth of user generated video content on sites like YouTube, but the creative use and marketing of videos will become more mainstream this year.

5) Reputation management becomes a core service: we’ve covered this issue before, but with the increasing growth and focus on user-generated content sites – such as review sites, blogs and comments on social networks – the need for companies to monitor what is being said about their business and brands, and to respond effectively to that content, will become a bigger requirement in 2009 as more businesses realise the potential dangers as well as the advantages of this trend. Online reputation management will therefore become a service in much demand from PR companies and search engine marketing firms, as web content is monitored and responded to in a more effective manner.

Links are an essential but often overlooked factor when it comes to online marketing.

Whether your website is just starting out, or even if it has some maturity, it’s well worth regularly reviewing the state of your link health. Having a strong profile of quality, relevant inbound links will do wonders for your visibility, helping you to rank well in search engine results as well as driving traffic directly to your site.

Get those links

Some popular ways to get inbound links include:

Directory Submissions

There are still some prominent directories where you can submit your website link. Some of these, such as the Open Directory (DMOZ) and Yahoo Directory are also used by the main search engines, plus there are many industry-specific and business directories in the UK. Some leading directories request a reciprocal link or charge for a listing, either as a one-off fee or a recurring annual charge. However, there are many directories that still offer free listings, although as each submission is checked by a human editor, these submissions may take some weeks, or months, to be accepted.

Requests for Links from other websites

Find a relevant website, find the right contact and make your request. It’s usually polite to send the link code out with your request. Some sites will link out to other relevant sites for free. However, most will want to charge and some will want a reciprocal link. If you are paying for your link, get some assurance about traffic to the other website first. Link building this way can be a very labour intensive method, so be prepared for the long haul.

Forums and Blogs

The key to using these channels successfully is relevance. Only post blog comments which relate to the overall theme of the blog. Otherwise, attempts to promote websites in this way can have negative effects.

Similarly, forums will not appreciate obvious promotional comments which do not contribute to the discussion threads. But if you have something relevant and useful to say, a signature link may be all that’s needed to send some traffic through.

RSS Feeds and Syndication

If you can write original, informative and readable copy on topical issues, then other websites and feeds may be interested in carrying your articles and content. As the author, links to your biography and/ or your site are normally offered.

Press Releases

Press releases can be very successful in the online environment too. Well written copy can drive relevant traffic to your website for a specific promotion, or even counter negative publicity. You can read more about Press Releases on our website.

What not to do…

Indiscriminate links are not advisable – poor quality links, such as those bought from link farms, will do nothing to enhance your quality ranking with search engines or drive relevant traffic to your site. There is also some debate about the value of buying text links and whether Google can identify and penalise these.

Other points to remember:

• Text links are the best option, with the text of the link being a relevant keyword or phrase that relates to your site content.
• As well as providing link value, good links can also attract additional visitors so make sure your links in point to relevant content on your website. You might get visitors initially but they won’t hang around and may not ever return,
• Do not use spam techniques to request links by email or spam blogs: you want to promote your site not get blacklisted, or worse…

Link building is an ongoing task since other websites will come and go and so do their links to your site. At Web Search Workshop UK we can help you with link building campaigns and Press Release services, so please contact us now to find out more.

The growth of blogs, forums and community websites like MySpace and Bebo allow individuals’ opinions about your business to become highly visible in the results of the main search engines. Here we summarise some simple steps you can take to monitor what people are saying, action you can take, and what to avoid!

When it comes to checking what people may be saying about you, or your business, here’s a rundown of the most useful research methods:

1) Searching Google and other search engines for your brand name is the simplest way of monitoring the most visible content – to make sure you don’t miss any changes, setup automated Google Alerts to notify any changes by email.

2) To dig further, try searching news, blog search tools, and popular communities – here are some useful links for this:

• News Search: Google News / Yahoo News
• Blog Search: Technorati / Bloglines / Google Blog Search
• Communities: MySpace / del.icio.us

3) Use RSS feeds to make monitoring simpler – tools such as RSS Mix allow you to merge several feeds into one – so you can have a single feed monitoring a range of sources for items containing your company name, or another phrase of interest.

If you do come across negative comments about your business or actions online, here are some steps you can take:

Saturating a search for your brand – Issuing regular, optimised press releases or writing articles on other websites is a great way to ‘saturate’ search engine results for your brand name. This makes it difficult for negative content to achieve a good ranking. Press releases can also be used for other purposes such as improving your credibility, or targeting time sensitive searches generated by news coverage, or a product launch – we provided an introduction to online press releases in our June 2005 newsletter.

Stopping negative comments advertised with PPC advertising – If someone is using Google Ads (AdWords) or another pay per click network to advertising negative comments about you, it is possible to make registered trademark a ‘reserved keyword’ that advertisers cannot target with their keyword lists or advert text – we discussed this in more detail in our May 2005 newsletter.

Contacting the individual – Although this often increases discussion, there may be times when you do want to contact the individual making the comments. Whether an informal note, or a cease and desist letter, the most appropriate way to send this is through a private channel – phone, post, email. Keep your communication polite, and think about how your comments may look if taken out of context and posted online.

When attempting to counter negative comments to it is also very easy to ‘put your foot in it’, such as:

Joining the public argument – Joining a negative discussion about yourself in a forum is a great way to light its fire – with the volume and intensity of discussion likely to build following your entrance.

Pseudo posts – It can also be tempting to add some positive spin to a discussion through a make up character. This technique is used successfully by skilled PRs, but you need to carefully consider you message and character, plus many communities have user histories, without which your character may look suspicious.

If you would like to find out more about online reputation management, or have a problem you would like us to review, please contact us now for more information.

Having been in existence for 10 years as Ask Jeeves, the fourth most popular search engine underwent a major rebranding at the end of February by dropping the image and name of ‘Jeeves the butler’. Supported by an extensive advertising campaign, the search engine is now simply called Ask and has relaunched with an extended range of search services.

Ask Jeeves was founded in 1996 and built its reputation as a plain English search engine suitable for users who were not familiar with using search tools. The ‘Jeeves’ butler represented a personal service for users and the image of this search service was built around the iconic image. However, having been acquired by InterActiveCorp in 2001, the strategy has changed and Barry Diller, head of IAC, has justified the removal of the Jeeves name and character as “baggage, that niched or segregated us.” The aim is now to compete with, and take share from, the established search leaders – particularly Google.

Supported by extensive cross-media advertising, the new Ask search engine represents more than just a name and image change as the search tool now offers an improved range and depth of functionality. These advances include a customisable ‘toolbox’ on the right of the search results pages which offers direct access to around 20 different search tools, including an updated image search, maps and local search, weather, dictionary and desktop search.

The main advantage of the new ‘toolbox’ is that it appears next to the search results, giving users the option to narrow-down their search, whereas, on the other search engines the main point of access for these features is above the main search box before proceeding to the search results pages. For most people this requires some forethought as to what type of search would best meet their requirements, whether that might be using the directory, maps, shopping, or academic resources. Often in practice, however, it is the case that a user only decides to narrow their search once they have seen what results appear initially.

Within the standard web search results, a binocular icon appears against most results, which allows users to ‘hover’ their mouse pointer over it and view a thumbnail image of a site before they decide to click on it. This is not a new feature but one that could make a difference as it may help to substantially decrease the time wasted clicking through to sites before deciding to they’re not what you’re looking for. Having said that, users will decide whether the small image tells them enough about the site that they may want to visit.

Ask also claim that the underlying core search functionality has also been upgraded. Their search technology comes from the Teoma search engine, which has now been fully absorbed into Ask and no longer exists as a standalone search tool. The whole look of Ask is cleaner, following the Google model, and ultimately the quality of search results will make a difference.

The reliance on a large number of sponsored listings is being reduced, which is good, although there are no signs yet that the Ask ‘spider’ is becoming more active and this search engine still takes a long time to index new sites or changes to existing ones. However many millions of advertising dollars are put into attracting people to try this new look search tool, the long-term outcome for Ask will depend on their comparison with Google’s quality of results and their ability to change people’s search habits.

If you’d like to know more about the new Ask search engine and how it could impact your search engine marketing activity, please contact us for more details.

And so what of 2006? As before, the rate of change over the past 12 months has been very fast and the Internet search market is significantly different to that which we saw 12 months ago. However, here are our predictions on what we might see coming up this year.

1) Internet growth continues: the increasing use of broadband and both consumer and business spend online will continue to fuel the growth of Internet business in 2006. We are likely to see some high spending entrants into the market this year, probably in the travel and shopping markets, plus the football World Cup in June will also provide another big impetus to the use and awareness of the web. Consequently, as the bigger companies start to dominate their markets, new entrants will find it harder to build share in the mainstream sectors and will need to focus budgets on niche sectors.

2) Search marketing gains recognition: yes, the secret is now out and search marketing will grow as a significant discipline of both online and general marketing strategy. Consequently the market will become more crowded, both with optimised sites and also in the area of pay-per-click advertising spend. As a result, companies will need to measure the results of this activity in more detail and channel their advertising through the most effective channels to achieve the best market share for their available budgets. The focus on website content and conversion rates will also become critical as user comparisons with others in the market – based on areas like price, service and presentation – will make all the difference.

3) The PPC market gains a new channel: the expected launch of MSN Search’s PPC tool in the Spring will add another level to this market and seriously undermine Overture’s share of the US and UK markets. The level of control being offered to advertisers by MSN’s new tool will be replicated and expanded upon by Google Ads (AdWords), which is compiling a huge amount of information on search usage patterns and traffic statistics.

4) Another big year for Google: there will be more new products and services launched by Google in 2006, although to make many of these work it will also need to encourage changes to search usage and techniques in a market that can be very conservative based on habit. We predict that Google will launch its own web browser (or acquire Mozilla’s Firefox browser for its own use) in the summer to challenge Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and to take some publicity away from Microsoft’s launch of its next operating system, Vista.

5) Online viral attacks: we don’t like to predict a doom laden event, but a big viral infection across networked computers is probably overdue. Computer users are now more wary and anti-virus packages are more widely used, so the next big challenge will be to stop a browser based virus spreading across the web at a reckless speed. This could strike in the second half of this year as Microsoft fails to block a potential exposure in the security of Internet Explorer.

Both Google Ads (AdWords) and Overture have recently extended their pay-per-click advertising programs to allow website owners to display adverts on their site that are relevant to their page content. These ‘contextual adverts’ are branded as Content Match by Overture and AdSense by Google, who provide information on some of their partners and an example of how these adverts work are displayed.

Our experience has been that, although contextual adverts can generate high volumes of impressions, they do not currently create a significant amount of traffic or conversions as the main PPC adverts displayed in search listings. This is mainly because the adverts may be displayed when users are not actually searching for a product or service, or are not directly related to the content page where they are displayed.

Google attempts to recognise this with its variable ‘smart pricing’ structure, which can discount contextual adverts if they are less effective. Within Overture it is up to the advertiser to assess the worth of contextual adverts when making bids. Another factor to consider is whether you want to retain a high level of control over which websites you are being associated with, so with both campaigns you can decide whether to include the contextual adverts in your PPC campaign or not.

On the positive side, contextual adverts can extend the reach of your campaign at a very reasonable cost, so may well be suitable if you are looking for maximum exposure or if pay-per-click is proving a very effective medium for you. If you are already running a PPC campaign, or are planning on setting one up and would like more information about the role of content targeted adverts, please contact us for more details.

Search Tip ‘ searching for people

If you’re searching for information on a famous person, the US Ask Jeeves site can be a good place to start. They provide a short biography and a number of links to further information on a wide range of famous people at the top of the search results. Although still quite US-biased, it does well for David Beckham and Michael Owen, although Wayne Rooney has yet to make an appearance!

Google has also become a place to search for information on anything and anybody! Googling’ a person is apparently now widespread in the US but has yet to catch on here. Another technique is ‘neighbourhood research’ to find out snippets of information about your neighbours by searching a post code on Google!

Staying with Overture, if you’re running a pay-per-click campaign on this
tool, you may be surprised to know that not all of its partner search engines
display results in the same way. Here’s a chart to show how different bidding
positions can get you the most exposure: