SEARCH CLINIC

Search Clinic on YouTube talks about the most cost effective way of online marketing

Simon Dye, Dr Search the Principal Consultant at the Search Clinic gave a lecture to businesses, professionals and students at the University of Gloucestershire for the 5th annual Gloucestershire Professionals conference in June 2009.More than 300 people attended the conference with over 60 attending Dr Search’s lecture on Online Marketing Tips, Strategies and plan the most cost effective tools for online marketing business.

Of the 12 seminars during the day Dr Search received the top rating with 93% of the attendees saying that he was relevant to their needs and 86% of attendees rated the content as highly rated.

This is the first of 11 videos on how to promote your website using the most cost effective elements of the marketing mix.

He compared search engine optimisation, pay per click, affiliate marketing, PR, outdoor, direct mail, magazines, newspapers, radio and television elements of the marketing mix.

Dr Search also looks at the search engines and changes that have effected their success on the past decade.

Please let me know what you think of the video. Have you found it useful? Was there anything else that you would like to learn about? Please contact Dr Search by clicking here now.

Please have a look at the other videos as they become live on Dr Search’s Search Clinic YouTube channel.

Yell’s long running chief executive and finance director both announced their departure after it reported a 26 per cent fall in annual underlying earnings.

Yell, the publisher of Yellow Pages, has been battling fierce competition from advertising on websites such as Google and eBay as well as the effects of the recession. It bought a directories group in Spain just before that country’s economy collapsed. Late last year it raised £559 million in a share issue to bring down some of its debt.

Dr Search has been helping a number of clients who were Yell and Yellow Pages advertisers improve thier marketing investments by switching their budgets into search engine optimisation.

The results can be remarkable.

Andy Turvey stopped his four figure yellow pages budget and let me optimise his main website instead.

The result? “I’m now getting all of my new business from my website now being found at the top of the search engines ahead of millions of my competitors”.

Do you fancy some of that for your business? If so, please just contact the Search Clinic.

Yell’s annual results showed that the company made a profit of £46.8 million against losses last year of £1.03 billion. Sales dropped by 11.5 per cent to £2.1 billion, though, which left left underlying earnings down 26 per cent at £620 million.

The company predicted that revenues would fall by a further 11 per cent in the three months to the end of June and then would continue to drop at about 15 per cent until the end of September.

Net debt had been cut from £4.2 billion at the end of March last year to £3.1 billion to the end of March this year.

It is a mistake to only focus on the location awareness aspect of mobile as its potential goes much deeper.

Mobile is a very personal device, the PC will often be shared but the mobile phone tends to enjoy a personal and monogamous relationship. It tends to be kept in close proximity at all times. A PC is turned on when needed a mobile phone is typically permanently on.

Whilst the web was about users surfing between brands, mobile offers the opportunity for a tighter, more valuable, relationship.

Search is replaced by one-off selection in an App Store. Organisations can now reach users at their point of need, pushing information outwards, and delivering services that are valuable at that precise time.

But the digital industry appears divided. Some argue that providing a web application tuned for mobile, accessible across many different handsets, is the most efficient and manageable solution. That is correct, it is, for the organisation.

Others understand that the future of mobile web is likely to lie in custom applications that the user chooses to download (thus removing future attention going to your competitors) and, crucially, fits in with the user experience of the handset.

A prerequisite to engaging the mobile consumer, is to provide an experience that is useful to them in their given context and fully meets their expectations in terms of usability.

The key to mobile engagement is to satisfy their needs immediately- by focusing on delivering utility and making life a little easier, better or more enjoyable.

Today we do see some blunt, early attempts at using geo-awareness. Websites and applications that try to combine the popularity of social media with the rudimentary functionality of recording where a user is, through the user checking in. Some, offer the potential for issuing reward vouchers based on location and other criteria.

Perhaps an interesting starting point, but hard to see how such applications really add value to the end user beyond a passing novelty. From an organisation’s perspective there is an intermediate brand now involved in the communication. This is undesirable and largely unnecessary.

So what could be done and what kind of applications really would drive deeper consumer engagement?

A typical application for a restaurant, today, will probably offer the ability to reserve a table combined with a location map and some generic content about the brand. But this does not really drive significant user interaction or show any thought for the end to end process.

Before arriving I would of course want to be able to book a table. But I also want turn by turn navigation to help me find the venue, or better somewhere to park. If I am delayed I would like the restaurant to know, automatically, so they can hold my table.

Once I have arrived at the restaurant I want the same application to become my menu, complete with specials for the specific restaurant that I am in, recommendations from my friends and actually, why not just let me order through it when I am ready?

Perhaps I would like to see what other dinners thought to the different menu choices in real time.

I want all of this through just one application.

That application now goes with me everywhere, and can receive notifications. This opens up a range of new ways for the relationship to develop, which may easily extend to beyond a place I just go to eat at occasionally.

Boarding the train of the future I anticipate my complimentary newspapers to be available online whilst I am on the train (yes they can pay for the subscription as part of my season ticket benefit). Before I board the train I would like to pay for my parking with a single press of one button. Payment can be taken via my pre-registered credit card.

The phone already knows where I am and when I return, so I can just pay for the time I use. Of course the same ‘train’ application is my season ticket, ad-hoc travel ticket, travel information and electronic concierge. One application extends and redefines my relationship with what was once just the train carrier.

Before I even arrive at the train station there are other new relationship opportunities. I may need fuel, a fact that surrounding service stations may find interesting.

The day of a real time reverse auction at individual consumer level is not far away. I would like my travel application to inform me of the best price that it has agreed for me.

Who provides the application? The manufacturer of my car, the petrol company, my mobile phone provider? The answer is who ever wants to own an ongoing relationship with me around supporting my travel. A very different, but viable, model that requires us to think differently about what engaging the consumer through mobile really means.

There are countless other examples; when the consumer is at home, at work, in a shopping centre, playing golf even! It is also important to remember that consumers maintain relationships with local authorities and other public services.

Mobile engagement provides opportunity for the public sector to improve efficiency.

The technology and the consumer are ready and waiting, how will your organisation engage them?

From: http://www.mycustomer.com/topic/customer-experience/engaging-mobile-consumer/107563?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+mycustomer%2Fall+%28MyCustomer.com%29

An increase in online advertising helped profits at Yahoo almost treble in the three months to the end of March.

Net profit rose to £200m from £79m in the same period a year ago.

The company’s takings were helped by its search and advertising partnership with Microsoft and sake of the Zimbra email service.

But after subtracting commissions paid to its advertising partners, Yahoo’s revenue slipped slightly to £750 million.

This was below analyst’s estimates – pushing Yahoo shares about 3% lower in after hours trading.

The firm’s chief financial officer, Tim Morse, said that its search advertising business “just didn’t seem to grow at the pace they had previously”.

However its display advertising business was strong, growing 20% year on year.

“High quality advertisers are coming back,” Mr Morse said. “We are still in the very early innings of this turnaround.”

Earlier this year, Microsoft’s plans to buy Yahoo’s internet search and search advertising businesses were been cleared by both European and US regulators.

The European Commission ruled that the deal “would not significantly impede effective competition”.

Under the deal, Yahoo’s website uses a Microsoft’s Bing search engine, and the two firms share the revenues.

Google’s Matt Cutts has finally confirmed that your site’s speed is a critical factor in Google determining your free results rankings.

Dr Search notes that Google’s Pay Per Click rankings calculations have been using a site’s speed for over a year.

Google’s site speed confirmation posting says:

You may have heard that here at Google we’re obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed.

Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.

Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs.

Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.

If you are a site owner, webmaster or a web author, here are some free tools that you can use to evaluate the speed of your site:

* Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
* YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
* WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
* In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We’ve also blogged about site performance.

* Many other tools on code.google.com/speed.

While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point.

We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you haven’t seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.

We encourage you to start looking at your site’s speed (the tools above provide a great starting point) — not only to improve your ranking in search engines, but also to improve everyone’s experience on the Internet.

Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer, Google Search Quality Team

Apple is to rival Google in the mobile advertising market with a new iAd advertising platform to be rolled out this summer.

The announcement follows Apple’s purchase in January of mobile advertising network Quattro Wireless for £196m, demonstrating that Mr Jobs is happy to put his money where his mouth is.

Yet the mobile advertising market is currently tiny, so the acquisition price paid for Quattro is small change for a company currently valued at over £145 billion.

However, analysts say that the potential for mobile advertising is huge and it could transform mobile commerce. Investment firm Piper Jaffrey is predicting a total in-application market for advertising of £450m by 2013, of which iAd could capture £250m.

Mr Jobs’s rationale is that mobile advertising can be tailored to the individual users needs and interests, in much the same way that Google has been able to use data from users of its search engine and gmail accounts to target advertising.

Apple could use the mobile phone user’s physical location as a hook for advertisers – for example Mr Jobs cited a Nike advert incorporating a nearest store locator. But information about a user’s interests can also be gleaned from the applications they choose to purchase.

Steve Jobs’s announcement comes at a time when rival Google’s own mobile advertising initiative has become hamstrung by the US anti-trust authorities.

In November, Google outbid Apple to purchase leading mobile advertising company AdMob for £500m.

“Google came in and snatched them because they didn’t want us to have them,” said the Apple head. Admob already operates on Apple’s handsets.

However, Google’s plans immediately ran into trouble as the Federal Trade Commission chose to review the deal. Months later, a decision is still pending.

The iAd initiative also seems designed to provide a fillip to the growth of new applications for Apple’s handsets.

The Apple chief executive said that 60% of the advertising revenues raised will be passed onto the application developers, creating a major new financial incentive for programmers to generate new functionality for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

“The revenue sharing opens the floodgates for a lot more free applications,” says Mr Wood. “This is an extremely astute move by Apple. I would expect both the number and the quality of applications to grow much more rapidly because of this.”

The rivalry between Apple and Google will partly be decided by the direction that mobile phone technology takes in the future.

Apple stakes its future on the continuing development of applications as the main forum for mobile software, whereas Google expects applications to be supplanted by a web browser that gives users access to the entire internet.

Google has stopped censoring its search results in China, ignoring warnings by the country’s authorities.

The US company said its Chinese users would be redirected to the uncensored pages of its Hong Kong website.

In January, Google had complained about a “sophisticated cyber attack originating from China”.

China accused Google of violating a “written promise” it made when entering the market to abide by laws requiring it to filter its search service.

A Chinese official was quoted by the state-run Xinhua news agency as saying Google’s decision to ignore the promise regarding its Chinese language search portal Google.cn was “totally wrong”.

Chinese government officials had warned Google repeatedly that it would face consequences if it did not comply with the country’s censorship rules.

In a blog post, the company said the Chinese government had been “crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement”.

It said there might be some service slowdowns and delays in getting search results while it beefs up resources to handle the re-directed queries.

One cause of the row was Google’s revelation on 12 January that it – and more than 20 other companies – had been the victim of a cyber attack that originated inside China.

During the attack Google lost some intellectual property and discovered that the attack was aimed at the GMail accounts of human rights activists. This attack led Google to “review the feasibility” of its Chinese operations.

It said the size of its sales team would depend on how many Chinese people can get at the Hong Kong-based site. Currently about 700 of Google’s 20,000 strong workforce are based in China.

While Google is the world’s most popular search engine, it is a distant number two in the Chinese market, which is dominated by Baidu.

However, because of the size and growth rate of China’s internet population, any loss of business there is likely to harm Google’s future growth prospects.

Analysts said that initially Google’s prospects would not be dented by shutting down Google.cn as it is responsible, at most, for 2% of its annual $24bn (£15.9bn) revenue.

China operates one of the most sophisticated and wide-reaching censorship systems in the world with an estimated 30,000 people directly employed by the state to run online marketing activities for the communist party.

The 30,000 are employed to monitor web activity and many automated systems watch blogs, chat rooms and other sites to ensure that banned subjects, such as Tiananmen Square, are not discussed.