Yahoo! chipped away at Google's dominant position in the US search market during August, according to new figures from comScore.
The search engine, which is in the process of switching its natural and pay per click marketing to Microsoft's adCenter platform, saw its share of queries from home, work and university-based internet users climb by three per cent last month to 2.72 billion.
Microsoft itself also recorded an increase in its share of overall searches. Its sites handled 1.74 billion enquiries during August, up two per cent on July.
Ask Network searches climbed two per cent to 598 million, while AOL remained unchanged on 366 million queries.
Nevertheless, despite the increase in traffic for its competitors, Google remained streets ahead of the pack in terms of searches handled with 10.2 billion – or 65.4 per cent of the total.
Earlier this month, the Mountain View, California-based company unveiled Google Instant – a new "search-before-you-type" system that predicts a user's most likely query and streams results in real time.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in Search Engine Marketing & Internet Marketing.
The new Bing iPhone app could make PPC campaigns more straightforward for businesses.
Microsoft’s search engine said that comparison shopping using the new app could make it easier for consumers to find the best deals on products and this in turn could be a good way to boost PPC marketing.
Research has revealed that 56 percent of iPhone users compare prices when making purchases and by searching using the new Bing feature, these individuals can find the best deals quicker and more easily.
It works by allowing users to take a picture of the item they are searching for and this will then link to a search results page – meaning typing in queries is no longer necessary.
"Bing is an important first step forward in our long-term effort to deliver innovations in search that enable people to find information quickly," commented Steve Ballmer, Microsoft chief enterprise officer.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – specialists in Search Engine Optimisation and Internet Marketing.
The new Bing iPhone app could make PPC campaigns more straightforward for businesses.
Microsoft’s search engine said that comparison shopping using the new app could make it easier for consumers to find the best deals on products and this in turn could be a good way to boost PPC marketing.
Research has revealed that 56 percent of iPhone users compare prices when making purchases and by searching using the new Bing feature, these individuals can find the best deals quicker and more easily.
It works by allowing users to take a picture of the item they are searching for and this will then link to a search results page – meaning typing in queries is no longer necessary.
“Bing is an important first step forward in our long-term effort to deliver innovations in search that enable people to find information quickly,” commented Steve Ballmer, Microsoft chief enterprise officer.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – specialists in Search Engine Optimisation and Internet Marketing.
Whilst many businesses understand that their analytics can provide them with invaluable data, few use the features of their analytics packages to full effect.
Once you have installed the necessary tracking code on each page of your website, then there are multiple options which you can configure to make the most of the data available. For instance, you can set conversion goals to check whether your visitors are performing the tasks that a) you expect them to and b) without abandoning processes part way through. This will allow you to rethink your strategy if visitors are not completing goals, and check that all your processes are working correctly for the users.
E-commerce tracking is a little more complicated, particularly if you have multiple products. In Google Analytics you will need to activate e-commerce tracking within your Google account, and then place specific code for each product on your site. Full details of this and an example are given within the Google Analytics Help pages.
So, check you are gathering the data that your analytics package makes available to you, and then monitor how your website is performing. If required, seek the help of web analytics consultants. As ever, it is by monitoring, measuring, and adapting that you will benefit the most from your own data.
Google focuses on relevancy, and as such delivering relevant results to a search is key to Google’s operations. However, it has become increasingly obvious recently that quality control is slipping in the search results in that search for relevancy. For instance, if you enter the search term “search engine optimisation articles” into the news section of Google, some of the top results that come back are auto-generated articles.
So, where does that leave you as a business when developing content? Should you go for quality or write your copy specifically so it does well for relevance on top terms? Is it more important to be top of the search engines or to create unique, high quality content that satisfies your users? Or can you find a balance?
If what you are seeking is to be number 1 on the search engines, then you can achieve this by focussing on long tail terms that consistently bring in targeted traffic, but where the competition is significantly lower than on the most obvious terms.
For instance, you may produce help guides or how to manuals, books or white papers, and invariably far less people will be optimising and bidding on the major keywords + those terms than just on the major keywords. Therefore, you can rank more highly in such searches and you are more carefully targetting people responsive to your call to action e.g. buy our book, download our white paper, read our how to guide etc.
Inevitably, you will need to prepare that high quality content to deliver to your website visitors, but the benefits should be commensurate with that cost. If you then encourage people to share your content on their social networks, bookmark it with Delicious, tweet it, create a backlink on their own website, as well as email the link to friends and colleagues, your content will spread to a far wider circle than if you just pursue top search engine rankings for highly competitive terms.
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.
It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).
Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a Lorem Ipsum passage, and going through the cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable source. Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance. The first line of Lorem Ipsum, “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..”, comes from a line in section 1.10.32.
Who would have thought it? A legal firm in Australia have just served legal papers through Facebook on a couple who had failed to respond to letters or emails, or attend a court date.
The judge in the case has allowed lawyer Mark McCormack to contact the couple, and serve repossession papers on their house, through a private message on Facebook after other attempts to contact them failed.
It will be interesting to see whether other businesses, aside from the legal profession, start to use social networks for debt collecting and so on.
If you hadn’t got the message yet that many of your local customers are seeking you online, this report should finally convince you!
Although here in the UK, there are still some dinosaurs who cannot understand why they would need a computer let alone access to the Internet, there are obviously globally more savvy punters who now use the search engines more than they do the Yellow pages to find local information.
There has been a big shift in the last 12 months in how consumers find the services they require. And most importantly, the number who then take further action eg make a phone call, email or drop into the shop is very high (from 66-72%).
If that isn’t enough to convince you that it is time to take not just your internet presence seriously, but also look at geo-targetting, mobile search, website accessibility for mobile devices, and consumer review sites, then your business may be one of the ones that is going to struggle as the recession bites and consumers look to the Net for the best value buys.
