Posts tagged search marketing
Google 99.9% sure it will shut China site: good news for Yahoo and Bing?
Mar 15th
Talks with China over censorship have got Google nowhere fast and the search engine giant is now “99.9%” certain to shut its Chinese search engine, according to weekend reports. But what will its China exit mean for other search brands and furthermore, search advertising?
If there were a set of traffic lights blocking Google competitors wishing to expand in China with a red light, it’d now turn green – or at least yellow.
There are more than 380 million internet users in China and the search engine market is now estimated to be worth over $1.5 billion. And it’s still growing! At a phenomenal rate, actually. From 2006 to 2010, it is expected to see a compound annual growth in excess of 30%.
But the Chinese internet market is still relatively young, and as the rest of the nation starts to get online, the size of its search market is set to rocket. Is it really a good idea for Google to get out?
Google seems to be holding its search engine to ransom. It’s annoyed it can’t get what it wants, but what Google is perhaps failing to realise is, if it exits China, it will lose a massive slice of the potential search marketing pie and could open the road for Yahoo to overtake it in the usage stakes.
Yahoo and Microsoft are on the path of assault and Bing is already doing incredibly well. Imagine if it goes into China and cleans up, picking up where Google left off. There’s a whole search worked out there, censorship or not, there’ll now be a huge gap in the search market in China.
Even though Yahoo has been present in China for some time, it has never enjoyed the popularity it would like – but China remains somewhat of an untapped market in an economy that is crying out for reform and change.
Google tells you all those keywords you forgot
Jan 4th
Google has posted this one-minute guide to using its Search-based Keyword tool.
The tool was launched just over a year ago in beta. It allows paid search advertisers to see what keywords they may be missing out on based on searches on their site.
Millions of people use Google each day to find products and services by searching on various keywords and by marketers including all keywords that are relevant to the brand or product in their campaigns, they can ensure they are reaching a wider range of potential customers.
To help marketers do this, they can use the search engine’s Search-based Keyword Tool to quickly identify relevant keywords which aren’t yet included in your AdWords campaigns – here’s how it works:
Forget SEO and PPC, display advertising is hot for 2010
Dec 15th
Google has made a number of acquisitions in the past month which it will next year be using to its full advantage as new players enter the search marketing war.
Online display advertising, viewed by many marketers as inefficient and time-consuming, has been a bit of a hard sell in recent years, but next year, Google is aiming to change all that.
Hundreds of thousands of advertisers use search advertising — short, highly relevant text ads alongside search results on Google and other search engines — to grow their businesses. Thanks to a decade of innovation, search advertising is an open platform that allows businesses to easily connect with customers.
But now, Google is expecting the “if you build it, they will come” model to pay off.
Display advertising, such as videos, images and interactive ads, connect users with products, services and ideas that interest them. For advertisers, display ads are vital in boosting awareness and sales. For websites and online publishers, they help fund investments in online content and the web services that we all use.
But with a multitude of display ad formats, and thousands of websites, it often takes thousands of hours for advertisers to plan and manage their display ad campaigns. With this complexity, lots of advertisers today just don’t bother, or don’t invest as much as they would like, which is why, for 2010, Google has made it a whole lot easier.
The search engine giant rolled out a new version of its DoubleClick ad exchange in September to open display ad buying to more marketers believing that if it could make it as easy as possible for people to buy display ads, the network can grow.
Display advertising is an important part of any digital marketing programme.
Marketers spent $7.7 billion (£4.7bn) on display ads in the US alone last year. Even though spending will be up 5% this year, according to marketing research company eMarketer, it’s still tiny compared to the search advertising market.
So far though, Google is only just get started when it comes to web display ads.
Improved display technology will make ads more appealing to web users and, therefore, more effective for more marketers. Google knows that advertisers, big and small, are looking for measurable results - and consumer data that will help them target potential customers.
And don’t forget about Google’s purchase of AdMob in November – the mobile ad service will let Google draw analysis from consumers’ phones, as well as their computers, and enable the company to provide insight on which display ads are most effective and which delivery formats perform best.
The AdMob buy and an October launch of Campaign Insights, a data compiling tool that helps marketers track how often consumers are searching for terms and which ads they click, is part of a broader strategy at Google.
It believes that by growing the display advertising pie, everyone will greatly enhance the web experience for advertisers, publishers, and ultimately users. But will display ever take over search…or social media?
SEO tips for Bing
Dec 2nd
Think you have a good SEO strategy for Google? You better adapt it for Bing
Following yesterday’s news that Microsoft’s Bing is gaining share on Google (its searches are up 7% for October), I thought I’d look into the company’s stance on search engine optimization (SEO) – you know, now that people are flocking to the site.
Microsoft’s stance on SEO doesn’t appear to be all that different from Google’s, however, users won’t get the same results on both Google and Bing, which is how to two can coexist in the first place.
The real difference is in how the results are presented, and not as much in how the two determine quality and relevancy. Remember that Microsoft’s Bing is the “decision engine”.
Bing and Google have separate algorithms, but both like quality, relevant links and good content, as opposed to deception and spam.
In a white paper for webmasters, Microsoft says: “There have been no major changes to the MSNBot crawler during the upgrade to Bing. However, the Bing team is continuously refining and improving our crawling and indexing abilities. Note that the bot name hasn’t changed. It will still show up in the web server access logs as MSNBog.”
Bing separates results into categories, which has so far worried some search marketers, but Microsoft says good SEO will work just as well with this set up.
Bing also has the explore pane, which corresponds with the categories in the SERPs. In some ways, this is similar to Google’s recent addition of “search options.”
Look at the keyword phrases you want to rank for, and see how Bing breaks it up. Let’s say “mobile phones” for example. Bing gives you categories like shopping, brands, buying guide, providers, accessories, images, videos, and local.
With Bing, it’s not about getting to the top of the results, it’s about getting to the top of the right set of results. Having quality and relevant content is the best thing you can do. Incidentally, this will probably help your cause in Google (and other search engines) at the same time.
“Ultimately, SEO is still SEO. Bing doesn’t change that. Bing’s new user interface design simply adds new opportunities to searchers to find what the information they want more quickly and easily, and that benefits webmasters who have taken the time to work on the quality of their content and website design,” says Microsoft, as quoted on Webpronews.com.
Curious About What Bing Looks for in Links?
Rick DeJarnette of Bing Webmaster Center recently posted a pair of blog posts looking at what makes some links good and some bad:
- If you don’t feel you can endorse the quality of the content at another site, you shouldn’t be linking to them
- Don’t seek links from sites whose content isn’t worthy of your endorsement.
- Links to and from your site should be relevant to your site (or at least the page you’re linking from/to)
- Focus on quality, not quantity. Few highly relevant links are better than a bunch of crap links
- Avoid “bad neighbourhoods” like dedicated domains or IP ranges that do nothing but set up meaningless link exchanges.
- Avoid hidden text
So that’s where Microsoft stands on SEO practices. Remember that when you are thinking about SEO and how to rank higher, the rules as they were set out on Google when we first starting talking about SEO have changes. Search engine marketing is about to become a whole lot more complicated.
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