Shake The Tree

Nathan Safran, Conductor’s Senior Research Analyst, recently wrote up this great post on how Google is using G+ info on rankings.

Personal Brand Management in the Google Age

Now – if Google would go about releasing profiles for Google Apps domains….

Note: this post originally appeared on the Conductor Blog.

One can often tell a great deal about where an industry’s technology is headed by understanding both the size of the opportunity in the space and the operational inefficiencies that plague it. The greater the opportunity (the more at stake) and the greater the operational inefficiencies, the higher the likelihood technology will step in to fill the gap. This can be expressed formulaically as: market opportunity *operational inefficiencies=technology trajectory.

The opportunity in SEO is indisputable: according to Comscore, monthly worldwide searches have reached more than 26 billion per month. With 92% of all search engine clicks occurring in the natural search results the opportunities for brands to reach consumers are limitless–provided they are visible in the search engines.

The operational inefficiencies in SEO are equally indisputable: surveys have shown that up to 40% of an SEO professional’s time is wasted on low-impact operational activities. The industries inefficiencies can be traced back to it’s origins as a discipline amongst techies and web developers. Home grown tools have long been the tool of the trade—born from a lack of better options, they have, until now persisted as the de facto operating system for SEO practitioners.

Here at Conductor we believe that is all about to change. We believe we are at an inflection point in SEO: the size of the opportunity in natural search is simply too great, the inefficiencies too profound, for Marketers not to be primed to be ready to do things differently. As a long-time Marketer I have seen this phenomenon occur in many industries, both online and off.

Our years of helping SEO professionals at many of the world’s largest brands succeed in natural search gave us the rich background to understand their pain points and inefficiencies. From this foundation we created Searchlight, a SaaS SEO technology platform that automates many of the manual and time consuming tasks that hold back the SEO. Searchlight gives the SEO professional unprecedented insight into their natural search visibility and is redefining SEO as a practice. It is already used by many of the world’s largest and most successful brands such as FedEx, Monster Inc, Travelocity and Siemens to manage billions of dollars in natural search assets.

We are delighted to announce today our partnership with e-consultancy on a new study titled SEO Trends: Issues and Opportunities that will provide insight into the move to metrics and technology and shed light on the rapid maturation of the SEO industry that is happening right before our eyes.

A few of the key findings:

• 3 out of 4 SEO professionals state that SEO metrics have more influence on business strategy decisions than 12 months ago
• 65% of organizations expect an increase in their SEO budgets this year
• 9 out of 10 search marketers overwhelmingly find value in the SEO platform as it offers improved information gathering and analysis in such capabilities as rank tracking, automated alerts and on-page functionality.

Download the study here to understand how the SEO industry is rapidly evolving to metrics, tools and technology.

(and of course, as always, your feedback and comments are greatly appreciated.)

Seth

Charlie Sheen’s latest quote:

“Did they expect it to be like a normal interview?” he added. “Did they expect it to be just conventional and boring and whatever else? No, man, it’s — we’re shaking the tree.”

(emphasis added, but I’m sure he and his two live in girlfriends are regular readers.)

Adotas’s Gavin Dunaway recently decided to speak with several search industry veterans to get their take on Google and social search. For the first interview, Gavin and I spoke about the market forces Google has created, the emergence of the social search engines, and how marketers should react.

Read the full article on Adotas:

I originally wrote this post on the Conductor.com blog here:

Yesterday we saw one of the more colorful Google doodles roll out – and today we understand what they’re up to. Google’s answer to Microsoft’s Bing ‘Discovery Engine’ is Google Instant – their extension of Google Suggest to include actual results.

What is Google Instant? As users to the world’s most used search engine are typing to find their latest car insurance, consumer electronics, and directions to their local Starbucks (as if those are needed) they’re now getting different results as they type.

As an example – typing car insurance, you’re may get seven different sets of search engine results (SERPs) before you get to the final listings.

The Fundamentals of Google Instant

1. These are all Ajax based search results that are now displayed real time, but definitely different from the “Ajax SERPs” spotted in the wild late 2009.
2. It seems like they only appear as you’re logged in – but that may just be part of Google’s roll-out plan. (update – since we wrote this, they’re now appearing in non-logged in sessions).
3. It is present on the home page and results pages – and while related to the Suggest keywords, you don’t see the effect when typing browser query fields. It will be interesting to see if/how Google attempts to integrate this feature into the combined search field and address bar (the Omnibox) in their browser Chrome.
4. The corresponding links go through gateway URLS – Google redirects to the ultimate pages.
5. You can turn it off.
6. Paid listings change too!

So what’s the impact?

1. Keyword ordering will change search volume queries as first keywords results will frame and determine subsequent words. Keep an eye out, especially if your business is centered around longer-tail terms.
2. Certain demographics are going to be affected more – fast typers will be affected less as they fly by the variants, slow typers more as they have a chance to see and react to the alternatives (unless you’re so slow that you’re staring at the keyboard instead of the screen).
3. Your CTRs are going to go crazy for a bit. On their webmasters blog, Google has said that some of those results are going to be listed as impressions. The criteria are:
   • If you click on any listing on a page,
   • if you view the auto listings for more than 3 seconds, or
   • if you click anywhere else on the page.

   If you have systems in place that use CTR for marketing metrics, these will be out of whack for a bit.

4. Branding opportunities abound for paid search ads that do come up in those early queries.
5. Make sure you examine where you and your competitors rank for the words that start your key phrases. It may be time to focus a bit on those head terms.
6. When the query suggestion box is still extended normal results are pushed even further below the fold. When ads are present and the first result contains sitelinks, typically mid-page results are now being pushed even further down. It appears that initially Google displays a blue box describing the feature that takes a notable amount of space, but eventually stops displaying this presumably once users see it enough.

One quick quote from a user we watched searching:

“It’s changed how I search.   Instead of going to the second page of results, I now just refine my search term until I see the appropriate response.”

There’s a good chance that Google may dial these back – or at least tweak the frequency of change or the layout of the results. If there are more people who feel like that user than are discouraged by the flashing results, we’re likely to see these stick.

Stay tuned – as next up we talk about how this has started to impact the search industry.

Disclaimer – this post runs toward the technical, and has nothing at all to do about marketing.
You’ve been warned.

I love my MacBook Pro. It’s reliable, fast as hell, and I look really good holding it next to a black turtleneck. But there’s one thing that I just can’t give up – and that’s Microsoft Outlook.

I know – Google Apps, Mail, Entourage – spare me the fervent pitch to convert me – I just love my Outlook so much that I run VMWare’s Fusion on my Mac so I can alt-tab into my cozy little inbox-zero nirvana.

But there’s a big problem – Outlook often hangs while trying to connect to my corporate exchange server, especially when I’m on the go and using my Verizon mifi and don’t have the most stable of connections. It’s infuriating when it happens, leaving email in my outbox and failing to download the new items I knew were there. In the past, I’d tried to solve the problem like this:

1. Right click the Outlook taskbar icon and choose ‘cancel server request’. Occasionally this would work.
2. Hold down Control while right clicking the icon, and that would bring up the Connection Status option – where you could choose to reconnect. This helped sometimes, but usually the only way around it was to try my last option:
3. Reboot my VM.

Always worked – but what a pain in the butt.

The answer came to me, that maybe if I could just trick the network connection into thinking we’d rebooted Outlook might come back – and it turns out that’s the case.

Here’s what I did -

Resetting Outlook with IPCONFIG

Fire up notepad, and add the following two lines:

ipconfig /release
ipconfig /renew


And save that as ‘reset.bat’ somewhere in your documents folder. Then create a quick shortcut to the .bat file and pin it in your startmenu.

Now, when Outlook starts acting up – all I do is hit that, my connection is refreshed, which interrupts whatever infinite loop Outlook happens to be caught in, and I’m off to the races again.

Hope that helps.  If you have any Outlook on a Mac tips – please let me know!

Last week, the SEMPO NYC working group that I co-organize welcomed Yahoo and Microsoft to educate New York search marketers on the upcoming changes. Some good detail around the timeline, which really kicks off this month.

We’ve been seeing the “Powered by Bing’ results creep into the Yahoo SERPs, and we got some confirmation that it’s officially underway. Some other notes:

• We’re currently in a 25% testing mode.
• Through the next 6-8 weeks, that transition will move to 100% of the results.
• The order of the SERPs (and ultimately the paid ads) will be identical.
• Microsoft has a 10 year exclusive on the Yahoo! search technology, and we can expect to see some of that incorporated into the search results.

For some more info, take a look at this great blog post about the Search Alliance by Kathleen Evans and Luca Mihaly from Conductor’s Customer Success Team.

Just finished this:

Debuted it at the Conductor Searchlight Launch at espaceny.com

I seem to be in a ‘blog about books’ mode.  Which usually means I’ll carry something around in my work bag for a couple weeks until I get a free hour or two to dig in.   But I saw this today – and can guarantee I’ll be devouring The Art of SEO (Theory in Practice).  (If not only for the great content, the weight of this book would leave my shoulder shredded to bits.)

From some of the excerpts I’ve had a chance t read, this looks to be not only a ‘technical’ SEO book, but also a real ‘how-to’ around the business that goes into successfully driving natural search traffic (and conversions.)

Lastly, I know several of the authors from this book – and respect their work incredibly.

OK, enough already, here’s the link to the The Art of SEO
on Amazon.