Google’s Local Business Listings are now regularly shown within the main search results if a user searches for a local business, alongside a small map. In addition, viewing results on Google Maps provides more information and additional advertising options through Google AdWords, all of which should be used by a localised business to target their potential customer base. Google is now adding new features to this service to help advertisers gain more local business.

We first covered the value of Google’s local business listings and their increasing prominence in Google’s ‘universal search results’ back in our June 2007 newsletter. The local business listings service has developed further since then and remains an important area for companies who are targeting a localised market to gain a prominent listing. Achieving a high ranking in the 10 businesses listed in Google’s main results can be difficult, particularly in a competitive market, but if searchers click through to the more detailed business listings, or search directly within Google Maps, there are additional ways to achieve visibility and to attract searchers to your website.

One of the main ways to achieve good visibility is through the use of a local business advert, which is created as part of a Google AdWords campaign. This allows advertisers to create a specific advert to appear on Google Maps searches, with a small icon, address and contact details. In addition, Google has now announced some additional new features for these adverts to help companies attract prospective customers faster and to gauge how well their adverts are performing.

The first addition is that Google’s local business ads will now feature new interactive links within the panel that is displayed for the business. These panels are designed to provide more information for users and to connect them to the business quicker with a link to their website. Now users will be able to see more information from this panel and to take additional actions, such as a “Get Directions” option, a link to “Street View”, and “Save to My Maps” which allows users to personalise their search results.

In addition, Google AdWords will also be adding a new interaction report for local business ads in the near future. This report will help advertisers to assess the activity through the local business ads and their return on investment, with such information as how many users opened the info window and clicked on each of the new interactive links. Google says that Maps users are often looking for different information than Search users so that these new interactive links and the reports should help customers connect with a business faster as well as help the advertiser understand how to better target Maps users versus Search users.

If your business could be benefitting more from a Local Business Listing on Google, contact us now for more information on this feature and we’ll be pleased to help. We can create optimised listings and Local Business Adverts to help raise your profile and improve your visibility to your target market.

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.

These were our 5 predictions for 2008 that were made in January last year, together with a review of what actually happened:

1) ‘Universal search’ becomes a significant optimisation issue: the inclusion of all forms of search results – such as images, videos, news or maps – within the main search engine listings has become more prevalent over the year, particularly on Google. This has created many opportunities for companies to achieve visibility within the search results in new and more creative ways. Local business listings have been the most effective method for many companies who target a localised area, so much so that Google has had to control some of the more extreme methods by companies trying to get listings within these results. Video sites like YouTube continue to attract huge traffic volumes and videos do appear within Google’s search results, when applicable. Google has also introduced new formats for PPC adverts although these remain limited to the content network and have yet to be offered within the main search listings.

2) Personalisation gains ground: the impact of personalisation has yet to be understood as no figures have been released by Google, or other websites that offer this option, to show what the levels of uptake have been. However, at the end of 2008 Google introduced the Search Wikia option for logged in users, so that search results could be adapted to suit user preferences and notes could also be added to listings. There were also hints from Google that this data may also be eventually used to determine search engine rankings which is likely to attract abuse of the system. We believe that personalization is still in the early stages of development with the vast majority of web searchers being aware of, or using, this option, although it is likely to gradually increase usage within the market and to become a more significant issue for search engine optimisation.

3) Behavioural advertising becomes the next ‘big thing’: this is still expected to become a key service for advertisers but has still to become a mainstream function, partly due to the technology still being developed and data being collected, as well as the privacy issues that are raised once individuals realise how their data is being used to target advertising. The huge mass of data that’s being collected by search engines and other major web properties should provide highly targeted advertising opportunities but the balance between this and privacy concerns is still to be determined.

4) Content targeted advertising becomes the new PPC battleground: Google has made further improvements to the content advertising network for PPC advertisers in 2008, most notably with the introduction of Placement advertising, and with the use of display and video advertising options. This sector has not become a battleground as other PPC services offer weak alternatives, but with better data and reporting on Google’s own service, the content network has become a more accountable resource to extend the reach of this targeted form of advertising.

5) Mobile search finally becomes serious: the launch of the Apple iPhone at the start of the year and the new Google-apps phone some months later has marked the start of the mobile Internet in earnest. The range of applications seems to be limited only by ideas at the moment and so as these type of phones gain market share and become ‘the norm’, then companies need to seriously think about focusing part of their online presence to the mobile market. This has yet to happen in any significant volume but the signs are there and examples can be demonstrated.

The end of November saw the introduction of Google’s new SearchWiki service. This is effectively an extension of their personalized search service and allows searchers to customize their results and add or view notes on the listings. It may herald the start of a new phase of adaptable search listings or it may simply be an early reaction to the competitive threat from Wikipedia’s planned search results tool.

If you have a Google account and are logged in when using Google’s search engine, the new SearchWiki service enables you to modify the Google search results to suit your preferences. You can change the order of the search listings, add or delete listings, and add commentary notes against individual results. The changes are stored in your Google account for future reference so it can be a useful time-saving tool if you search for certain topics repeatedly.

As the changes you make only affect your own searches, it isn’t possible to improve your website’s ranking by using this service. You can, for example, move a website into the #1 position for a query, but no one else will see it in that position. However, when you vote to increase a page’s ranking, or make a comment about a URL, the comment, your username and, in some cases, your search query will be shown to other logged-in users. There’s currently no option for private annotation which raises some privacy issues, as people will now be able to see another user’s searching habits and there’s also no opt-out feature for users logged into Google.

Google say that users do have the option not to use the feature (by not logging into their Google account) and that they will watch usage closely through “user-happiness metrics”. Initial reaction about the service has been mixed, including negative feedback which has prompted some users to create a script that would disable SearchWiki. There is already a third-party solution which uses a script for Firefox browser users to toggle SearchWiki on and off.

Google has stated that their goal in offering this new service is to “empower users” and enables searchers to remember answers to repeat queries. They say that “it lets you add your personal touch to our algorithms.” It is suspected though, that Google’s true motivation is to counter any perceived threat from Wikia Search, and potentially to take advantage of users’ feedback to adjust its overall ranking algorithms.

Google can now amass an even larger dataset of user behaviour, including how particular users rank certain results, what results they don’t find relevant, and even what results should be there that Google’s spider hasn’t yet discovered. If the service becomes used by large numbers of people it means that users would now be performing much of the crawling, indexing, and ranking functions which also makes the system open to abuses.

Google claims that the changes made in the SearchWiki interface will have no impact on the traditional ranking of web pages. However, it’s still a possibility that Google will use the SearchWiki data as a factor for determining organic search rankings in the future. Even Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of search products and user experience, has said “some of these signals might be used to influence algorithms in the future”. The debate around this tool will therefore continue for some time to come but it may mark and important stage in the development of search technology for the future.

If you’d like to know more about Google’s SearchWiki and to see how this works, please contact us for more information.

As bandwidth limitations are becoming less restrictive, online video is increasingly becoming more popular, leading to a rapidly growing use of user-generated content sites such as YouTube. Google is also now including videos within their ‘universal’ search results, so that optimisation of videos to achieve high rankings and site visits is now vital. So how can your business take advantage of this potential new advertising channel?

SEO techniques for videos can help to ensure that a company’s video content attracts as much search traffic as possible, either from within sites like YouTube or as part of a general search that can drive traffic to a website or video. Of course, a business needs a compelling reason to produce and submit a video, such as for a product demonstration, a training guide or a graphic example of what the company can achieve, but this can increasingly be used as a good method of attracting web traffic and new enquiries.

The optimisation of video content can depend on the type of objectives required – such as using a ‘Monetised Video’, such as those used by professional video content publishers to directly generate revenue from a site, where the video itself needs to be protected and stored solely on your own site, or a Promotional Video, which is commonly used as a method of stimulating interest in a product or service and which can be placed in as many online locations as possible.

It is necessary to optimise for both first generation video search engines (older & similar to standard web search engines that rely entirely on metadata for indexing, such as AltaVista & Ask) and second generation ones (which not only spider textual metadata, but also extract meaning from the video itself, such as Blinx and Podzinger).? Therefore there are 3 different scenarios for video optimisation which need to cater for video search engines that crawl your site; for video sites that accept RSS or MRSS (Media RSS) feeds; or for video upload sites (such as YouTube).

Some of the main factors that should be considered for all these forms of video search optimisation are as follows:

• use appropriate keywords in the filename and URL
• optimise the title and description tags used in the video file, where possible, and on the page hosting the video file (such as when listing a video on YouTube)
• consider the surrounding text content and description on the page around the video
• link to the video from other web pages and locations with the appropriate keyword content in the text link.

In addition to these basic principles, the video should be submitted to the appropriate video hosting sites, directories and search engines – Google now offers a video sitemap option within their Webmaster Tools. In addition, the file should be provided in as many formats as possible to extend access. It is also recommended to offer a textual transcript of the audio and video content as well as publicising these multimedia files with appropriate RSS/MRSS feeds.

If you already have business videos available or want to consider using this medium to attract search traffic, please contact us now to find out more.

Microsoft have just announced a new incentive to try to encourage more users to conduct their online shopping through their Live Search engine. Cash incentives are being offered to shoppers through the new ‘Live Search Cashback’ scheme, so that listed products could offer users discounts of up to 10% of the sale price. (more…)

With the popularity of social networking websites – where people collaborate and exchange information online – it was only a matter of time before this power of human interaction is harnessed within search engines. This month has seen the launch of the alpha test version of the new Wikia Search tool, as well as reports that Yahoo! is testing the integration of del.icio.us bookmarking tags within their search listings.

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What do we predict will be some of the main trends this year? Here are our 5 thoughts for 2008.

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Since the content targeted network was first launched and provided advertisers with limited controls over what was happening with their adverts, Google has recently been developing and refining a much better range of tools and reports to control this option, which should make it a more appealing route for advertisers to test and develop.

A recent example is the renaming of AdWords Site Targeting, now called AdWords Site Placement, reflecting a couple of refinements to this service.

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Most webmasters will be aware of the great range of free tools made available by Google to help:

• increase website visibility,
• find and resolve issues that might stop search engines and traffic reaching sites, and
• monitor site performance in terms of traffic and popular content.

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