Questions? Feedback? powered by Olark live chat software
Oct 31 2011
posted by

Why My Search Engine Use Is Dwindling and Why Yours Will Too

Some days I pretty much live online. When I have a question, need a phone number, am bored, I go online to find what I need. Online behavior has supplanted many things that simply used to be.

I no longer have a use for phone directories, or for that matter phones, and my online content consumption has done away with my need for a newspaper and television.

Recently, however, I’ve noticed a shift in one very specific aspect of my online behavior, one that will have growing significance for marketers, and that’s in the area of search. Was a time when I would conduct dozens, sometimes hundreds, of searches using my search engine of choice. (I’ve been at this a while so for now it’s Google, but there was a time when a tool called AltaVista rocked the house.)

My use of search engine technology is slowly being replaced by the use of apps that provide me with answers relevant to my personal needs. My guess is that while you may not have taken note, you’re doing less and less in search engines and more and more in answer engines.

This trend highlights the marketers need to go beyond SEO and PPC and move even deeper into the worlds of social networks, mobile marketing and app based local marketplaces.

Apps inside social networks are providing answers. Apps inside social bookmark sites are providing interesting reading. Apps in content curation tools like Storify are providing relevant context for content. Apps on mobile devices, such as Yelp’s, are helping you find bars and restaurants. Apps using QR readers are helping you find deeper information on companies and products. Apps are providing you with sports scores, movie times, videos and images.

One of the elements of the new iPhone 4S that is getting a great deal of buzz is the Siri app. This app, billed as your personal assistant, is a potential game changer. A great deal of the buzz is still over the coolness factor and all the things it can do for you, but I think the real issue is what it doesn’t do for you – it doesn’t give you search engine results.

Think about how the world of search changes if Siri and the third party tools that one hopes Apple and other innovators create becomes habit. Right now the Siri app gives you answers that are personalized for you without giving you thousands of search results. If Siri gets very good at this kind of thing, people may ditch search engines for all but pure and competitive research.

Since Google’s primary revenue engine feeds on advertising in search, the trend of moving to apps that bypass Google altogether is a tremendous threat and I think it’s safe to say you can look for this kind of answer engine technology on a host of Android phones in the near future.

So, what about you, think about it a minute, are you moving your search behavior to apps? What does this mean for your business? What does this trend suggest for you in 2012?

Filed Under: Duct Tape Marketing, Social Media Tagged With: , ,
Aug 19 2011
posted by

Getting the Google Plus Conversation Right

If you still haven’t joined Google Plus click here – 150 invites

Google Plus conversations

Benson Kua via Flickr

One of the most interesting things about Google’s new social network, Google Plus, is the conversation that participation generates.

Some still attribute this to the newness factor, but it’s one of the things that really makes Google Plus exciting right now.

Posting is different

One of my first observations is about the kind of content that attracts the most interest. Simply republishing blog posts is not necessarily the best way to generate conversation. Publishing a somewhat divisive opinion contained in a blog post is. Posting images and videos is. Posting opinions is. Posting observations is.

There are essentially three ways for people to interact with your content on Google Plus. They can +1 it, share it and make a comment on it. In my experience so far, people +1 something as a way of saying – I like that. They share as a way of saying I want people that I’m connected with to see that (it’s one way people fill up their own stream.) They make comments when they want to agree or disagree or in response to a question.

Because of the way the entire content and conversation package is displayed on Google Plus the comments are a bigger part of how the conversation ends up then they might be on the more traditional blogging format.

Experiment with content

Noting some of the differences stated above has me playing around with getting the mix right, but I can say it’s a work in progress. Sometimes you make a simple observation and find the conversation wanders into considering your own mortality.

Here are a handful of posts that show the different kinds of engagement for different kinds of content with the engagement numbers for each.

Here’s where I asked people what they +1 or share – questions draw comments for obvious reasons – +4, 5 shares, 39 comments

Here’s where I suggested that we need prepare students better for the reality of a digital world – opinions can draw all three – +18, 17 shares, 26 comments

Here’s where I uploaded a photo that contained an interesting reflection my beer glass made on the bar – +38, 3 shares, 29 comments – including one telling me I was old and thought my life was over, but pretty amazing to think that an image, uploaded in real time would draw this much conversation – images draw lots of +1 and get comments if they are odd, but don’t draw many shares unless they are magnificent (photographers are finding a real home here)

Here’s a repost of a short YouTube video about giving referrals (another interesting thing about G+, videos, even ones you’ve previously posted elsewhere, do very well) – +31, 25 shares, 24 comments – short, inspiring videos can draw lots of attention.

Here’s another one that’s just an image from a photo shoot for a magazine – okay, it’s a pretty cool photo, but look at the conversation – +56, 1 share, 48 comments – again, another case of an image drawing +1 and comments, but not as many shares.

And lastly – Here’s where I created a graphic that stated something that the early users of Google Plus were all thinking, but I was one of the first to capture it I guess – The brutally honest guide to naming circles on Google+ +78, 2029 shares, 96 comments – one of the most shared images of all time mainly because it contained a powerful insight and the timing was right.

Here’s my advice

Shares are probably the most important if you want to build your audience and get more traffic. Thoughtful insights, useful videos and valuable how to content is what people share. +1s may help some day in search and comments are an important sign of healthy followings, but shares are where it’s at.

Traffic generation

Google Plus is often in the top three spots, and more than once the top spot, in daily traffic to my site. And yet, traffic from other social networks has not dropped. So, making the effort to get your posting on Google Plus right – meaning tailoring it to the Google Plus conversation – is not only worth the effort in terms of traffic, it will certainly be worth it one day in terms of search and is already worth it today in terms of stimulating conversation.

Filed Under: Marketing Strategy, Social Media, Web Marketing Tagged With: ,
Aug 12 2011
posted by

Author Highlighting Is a Google Must for Bloggers

Today’s post may seem like an under the hood, techie kind of tip, and it is that, but it also outlines something content producers and bloggers need to be aware of.

In an effort to place more emphasis on the original authors of content and perhaps further eliminate duplicate content, Google has begun placing great emphasis on an anchor text attribute – rel=”author”

An anchor text attribute is just more information contained in the HMTL code of a link. In this case the use of the author attribute in conjunction with content, such as a blog post, signals search spiders that this is the original author.

So a link to my about us page with attribute would look like this:
a href="http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/about/" rel="author"John Jantsch

The reward for using this attribute has started showing up in search results with the image of the author placed to the right of the results in a growing number of instances. The Google author program kicked off formally a while back with a limited number of well-know bloggers and journalists and is slowly rolling out to others. (Here’s the official Google announcement)

The images Google is showing next to the selected articles are drawn from Google Plus profiles and link back to the author’s profile page. Some people have noted, incorrectly that this is a further extension of active Google+ users into the search results. The author program was actually in place prior to Google Plus and drew originally on the old Google personal profiles. In fact, some of the higher profile authors chosen have very limited Google+ activity.

author highlighting with rel author

Going forward a Google+ account and profile will be part of the deal for those that want to have their images included on original content, but use of the rel=”author” attribute in a very specific fashion is what will ultimately get your content chosen.

The video below, featuring Google spokesperson Matt Cutts, outlines the path Google hopes you’ll take to include the rel=author attribute.

Basically here are the steps:

  • You need to have a link on every page of content that points to the author’s about me page, on the same domain, using the author attribute in the link.
  • The author’s about me page should also point to their Google+ profile.
  • To close the loop, the author’s Google+ profile should point to the author’s about me page.

How to get the author attribute in your links

  1. Go back and put a byline on all pages with articles and add the link to your about me page
  2. Read more about various ways to implement from Google help
  3. On WordPress blogs – you have plug in options, but my advice is start with this post on author highlight from Yoast
Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: , ,
Aug 6 2011
posted by

Weekend Favs August Six

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from Flickr.

Image Karen Eliot via Flickr

Good stuff I found this week:
Qwerly – tool that lets you mine the social data of your leads and customers and add this data to make your email and marketing materials more personal

Postagram – this iPhone and Android app lets you instantly create and send high quality postcards based on your Instagram or Facebook photos. Imagine visiting a client and then sending a thank you card with an image from their office.

What’s New with Google+ – Official Google blog featuring updates, release notes and announcements for the increasingly popular Google+ platform

Filed Under: DTM Favs Tagged With: , , ,
Jul 8 2011
posted by

Everything You’ve Heard About Google+ Is Wrong

Google+ ProjectNow, before my buddy Chris Brogan, who currently seems obsessed with Google+, gets riled up, let me explain that title.

It’s not that any one specific thing being professed is wrong, it’s just that it’s probably wrong for your situation. See, that’s the problem with any set of experts going on about this new tool or that new tool – They can’t possibly know your objectives, your constraints, and your resources.

So, no matter what’s being said about how to use G+, or Facebook or Twitter or blogs for that matter, you have to decide how to apply it to your world in your own unique way. You have to determine what to leave in, what to leave out. (Nod to Bob Seger)

You will find that you can come to rely on the advice and tutoring of someone that seems to break things down in ways that you can apply (I would like to think I qualify for that designation from time to time), but don’t blindly jump in and do what all the other kids are doing just because someone said that’s the best practice for some new tool.

In your quest to determine if G+ or any new tool makes sense for you, let me leave you with one powerful point of reference – first look for ways to use new tools to create a better, deeper, and richer, experiences with and for your existing customers – if you can do that then the time and resources put into any new shiny object will pay off.

Filed Under: Duct Tape Marketing, Social Media Tagged With:
Jun 29 2011
posted by

Google+ Offers Great Business Potential

News in the online world this week has been dominated by Google’s unveiling of their long anticipated social play dubbed Google+. Headlines wonder if this is their answer to slow Facebook’s growing dominance in the social space.

The company is rolling Google+ out in limited trial, so it may be a while before everyone can gain access.

My view is that no one thing can slow Facebook, they’ve simply grown too large and too important for too many people. Facebook is a social network, built from the ground up for that purpose, by a company that does nothing else.

Google+ is a form of social network, built by a company that turned search into an ad platform and realizes that if they don’t tap people’s social, local and real time interactions as part of search, the cash machine will be at risk.

However, at first glance I think Google+ has a lot to offer businesses and I could see a few of the features of Google+ being baked into the Google Enterprise offering.

A lot of business folks are still leery of mixing Facebook’s personal profile with business. Google+ might just offer business folks a way to start a pure business play, fresh and away from the the more personal aspects of Facebook. Of course this only works if business people embrace the Google+ approach.

The major difference with Google+ is that it’s not a place to hangout, it’s a set of tools accessed through your existing Google account and delivered through a toolbar that also gives easy access to all of your Google tools.

Google has produced a series of 11 videos that highlights the features on Google+

Below is a quick overview of the key features of Google+

Circles

This is how Google wants to let you organize your network. The idea here is that you have many different circles – business, friends, family, coworkers, etc and calling them all friends and sharing everything with all is a fundamental flaw in the Facebook network. Facebook does have grouping, but I think circles could make it easier for people with large personal Facebook networks to segment their business activity much more easily by moving all business networking to this different platform.

Hangouts

Essentially this is group video chat done right that uses HTML5 instead of flash. This tool lets you tell your circles that you’re online right now if they want to jump in and do video chat. My guess is this will be very popular with friends and family types and could poke a hole in Microsoft’s new baby Skype. The business application, teams to interact, groups to collaborate or people to quickly present new information, is immediate. This might be one the best features.

Sparks

This is the Google+ sharing function that let’s users identify and share stuff related to topics they care about. It’s much like a bookmarking tool with social sharing in your network added. This could be a great way for a business group to highlight, distribute and discuss important industry news, research or competitive analysis.

Instant uploads

Google+ has a strong mobile side to it – something that Google is obsessed with and rightly so. Instant Uploads takes your photos and videos, shot on your mobile device, and automatically uploads them to YouTube and Picasso via an Android or iPhone (coming) app.

Huddle

Huddle is a group text chat feature and should also have strong business application as a way for a group of folks trying to come together on something to all get on the same page (or is it steam?)

Filed Under: Social Media, Web Marketing Tagged With:
May 26 2011
posted by

The Complete Small Business Marketer’s SEO Toolkit

Business owners and marketers don’t necessarily need to become SEO experts, but they do need to equip themselves with enough knowledge, data and access to simple SEO tools to allow them to understand how and why one site ranks higher over another, what’s holding a site back and the most important ways to quickly analyze any page they land on.

SEO toolboxBelow is a list of the tools many SEO pros turn to when they want to initially size a site up. By familiarizing yourself with and using these tools you can turn yourself into a much more informed consumer of paid SEO services as well as enable yourself to quickly spot competitive opportunities for your business.

In addition, you may find these tools helpful when sizing up the online presence of a prospect, vendor or potential strategic partner. None of these tools are 100% accurate or foolproof, but the next time a company pitches you on their awesome SEO services you’ll have the skills to snap a picture of how good they are at their own SEO.

Search Status Firefox Plugin – If you use the Firefox browser, and for the purpose this topic I think you should, you can install a number of handy plugins that give your additional information about the pages you visit. The Search Status Plugin will give you the Alexa and Compete Rankings, so you may choose to use this instead of installing either of the toolbars listed below. It will make it easy for you to learn about the number pages a site has indexed by the various search engines, the number of sites linking back to the site you are viewing and handful of other useful things like who the site is registered to, meta data, sitemaps, keywords and keyword density (gives you a sketch of what the site is optimized for.) This is the tool I use most often to get lots of info.  http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/

Alexa Toolbar – Alexa is a service that collects data on people surfing the Internet using the Alexa Toolbar. The key number they produce is called an Alexa Ranking. This is in theory an estimate at the amount of traffic a site receives. If you download and install the Alexa Toolbar in your browser you will automatically receive the Site ranking and other data on any domain you visit. The lower the Alexa ranking, the more traffic a site is said to receive. There is little true traffic accuracy to this number, but the fact remains it is one of the more widely used tools and if you use a range you can quickly assess the popularity of a site. I site that receives even a few hundred visitors a day will have an Alexa ranking under 1 million, for example. http://www.alexa.com/toolbar

SEOBook Toolbar – The SEOBook toolbar is a very robust tool that offers a full suite of stats right in your browser. http://tools.seobook.com/seo-toolbar/

Google Search Shortcuts – Google has a list of operators that you can use to do customer searches that will turn up lots of information on sites you are analyzing. You simply adds these search shortcuts in Google and you can slice and dice a web site up in hundreds of useful ways. I wrote an article that gives more detail on my top 10 Google shortcuts

Google Webmaster Tools – This suite of tools are mainly for spying on your own site in a way, but you need to get familiar with them. This is where you can get reports on the pages Google is crawling, where you might have broken links, the status of your site maps and any issues Google might be encountering with your site.  http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

SpyFu – As the name implies this tool aims at helping you understand what a site is doing related to PPC advertising and specifically AdWords. I shows the keywords they are bidding and shows a list of competitors for the same words. This tools helps you find competitors you didn’t even know you had in some cases because they are buying all their traffic and may not be showing up in organic searh. http://www.spyfu.com/

SEMRush – Tool that offers some overlap with SpyFu, but I really like the amount of keyword data that you can dig up for keywords and phrases and quickly find out who ranks well for those phrases. http://www.semrush.com/

Wayback Machine – This tool, run as part of Alexa’s offerings is both fun and informative. The Wayback Machine allows you to look at what any site in their archive looked like going back as far as ten years in some cases. I don’t know how much practical intelligence you pick up here, but you might see a pattern in how a particular business has grown and evolved in design, offerings, and message. http://archive.org

Username Check – As social profiles become an important online asset it’s become important to check the availability of branded usernames across the growing universe of directories and networks. Username checks make it easy to do so in an organized and efficient manner and may be a way for you to claim important industry usernames before a competitor does so first. http://www.usernamecheck.com/

There you have it, put these tools to work and you’ll soon know more about every site your visit almost instantly.

Filed Under: Web Marketing Tagged With: , , , , ,
Dec 1 2010
posted by

What Is Your Biggest Wish for 2011

wish

Image: avlxyz via Flickr

Yesterday the Google Small Business team kicked off a conversation about the hopes and wishes you have for your business next year. They are working on a project to help small businesses succeed in 2011 and they want to hear from you.

So, here’s the one question they have for today – if you had one wish for your small business in 2011, what would it be?

Head on over this blog post and fill in the form – should be interesting to see what themes bubble up repeatedly.

Filed Under: Google Small Business Tagged With: