blog. Search Advisors

Google Insights for Search is a fantastic new tool from Google for keyword research. This is yet another blow to the many keyword research tools out there. One of my favorites out there is Keyword Discovery. This, however, is definitely much better in terms of visual representation of search data. You can mash up Google’s data any way you like and even drill down by location.

I Love Data

I was a curious about recycling data, since Tuesday Refresh Phoenix brought in the people behind Earth911.org. They had some really interesting data about the extreme seasonality of their site, so I thought that data would be reflected here also. Google, and Earth911.org’s data definitely corroborate each other. We can see that people are more interested in recycling on Earth Day. That’s obvious, but what was interesting to see was the marked decline in recycling interest in December. It makes sense, that people are too busy to even think about that during December. It seem, though, that people make up for it by recycling all that trash generated from the holidays because we can see a sharp increase in “recycling” searches starting after Christmas. I wouldn’t doubt it, either, if that was on the resolution list of many Americans.

Going International

Earth Day is an American occasion, so of course we can expect to only see that spike in the US data in April. It is interesting to see that there is an international disinterest in reycling in December. The data between the US and the UK is also interesting. It seems people in America have become significantly more concious of their planet in the last year. The UK, however, has always had a significantly higher interest in helping out the planet.

Check it out for yourself … Google Insights is way too much fun to play with.

I watched the Dr. Horrible video again today and remembered how much I love it. It also got me thinking a lot about social media, how that gets done right and why search is becoming more and more dependent on it.

What good is search if no one knows what to search for?

Search is a great way to drive traffic, both on the paid side, and organic side. What happens, though, when no one is searching for what you’re selling? Demand generation … and that’s where social media comes into the game. I found out about this little gem from a friend on Twitter. Then I saw another friend “fan” it on Facebook. Then I watched it again today because someone mentioned it on Twitter and I remembered that I hadn’t seen the final installment, which I enjoyed thoroughly. Professionally produced content has had difficutly on the Internet and considering the length of this feature it’s interesting how and why this has seen so much buzz. Let’s quantify this “buzz” a little more.

How successful has the Dr. Horrible video been?

Calculating “success” with regards to social media is difficult, but here are some Dr. Horrible stats as of yesterday. I would love to see some numbers from a company like Sometrics or BuzzLogic.

Search results for “dr. horrible’s sing-a-long blog”

• Google: 68,800
• Yahoo: 217,000
• Live: 25,000

Google News results for “dr. horrible”: 2,279
Facebook Fans: 57,374
MySpace Friends: 11,859
Twitter Followers: 7,775
Diggs: 3,381
Cumulitive views for YouTube search results for “dr. horrible”:  629,769
Hulu Views: 2 million*
*according to this Chicago Tribune story. We do know the site was down pretty much the night it went up.

The Conclusion

It seems that the Dr. Horrible guys have done it. Has it been a financial success? Only they will know. It just goes to show you that making something successful on the internet isn’t just about search, or blogs, or MySpace. It’s a combination of all those, and making sure you’re available to people where they want you to be.

My One Complaint

They should have made the video available everywhere, not just on Hulu. Again, it’s about being where your audience is. They could have received a lot more views if they used a service like TubeMogul.

More Interesting Info

Production took 7 days.
The budget was in the “low six figures.”
The feature is 42.25min in length.

Too many people I talk to these days still don’t know what a conversion rate is. Your website’s conversion rate is the ratio of how many people come to your site and “convert” divided by how many people simply visit. So, if 100 people visit your site and two purchase something, or fill out your lead form, your conversion rate is 2%. Generally speaking, a 2% conversion rate is average depending on the industry, price point and what you’re actually asking people to do.

You can define a conversion however you like. A lot of publisher sites don’t have a “conversion.” They make money on page views and so they don’t define one. A website is a direct marketer’s wet dream, you should ALWAYS define a conversion. If you’re a publisher, at least establish a metric that indicates more engagement. Registrations are still valuable, are they not? You can send out sponsored emails, newsletter updates, etc. Email marketing is one of the cheapest forms of marketing. Take advantage of that.

Now that we have some sort of goal established, how do we get people to that goal? What factors go into whether someone will convert or not?  Here’s a few …

• Improve your traffic quality
• Lubricate your funnel process
• Tell your visitors what to do
• Improve your offline advertising efforts
• Give people a reason to come back

I think I’ll drill into these in a later post, but for now think about what you’re trying to get people to do. Define a goal for your website and use every aspect of it to drive people to that goal.

The whole .me event last week got me thinking about personal branding. It seems to be the craze these days and we can see proof of that by how unprepared GoDaddy was for the onslaught of traffic they recieved.

How valuable really are personal brands?  There are lots of things that go into assesing the true value of a business, but ultimately the value of a business is what someone is willing to pay for it. Lots of people have spent years building personal brands. These are usually tied in with some sort of business venture like photography, or web design. People establish loyal readers, dedicated followers and active participants in everything personal branders put on the web. This takes lots of individual investment, but is there any true equity in it? Would anyone purchase another person’s brand and is that even possible?

We have to assume someone is trying to sell their brand to get out of the business, maybe go on sabatical for a year, or retire, or move onto something completely different. People don’t sell businesses just to work for someone. They have to temporarily, during the trasition, but not in the long run. So this brings into question, why would anyone want to buy a personal brand if the person who built that brand was no longer active? That audience, or client base, has been painstakingly built on a relationship, if not a promise from said person. If someone else comes in and takes over, how loyal is that audience or client base going to be?  Not loyal at all.

Andrew Barron tried to auction off his Twitter account a while back, to find himself in the middle of a community outrage.

Lots of times businesses fail after they’ve been sold, for reasons extremely similar to what I’m referring to here. Could anyone else bring the thunder like Gary? Would anyone else be able to tweet like Scoble, or jump like Shaler? No, they wouldn’t and the community those personalities have built would eventually dissolve. The buyer would end up with nothing for his purchase except a stale blog.

I wonder how the Digg community would fare a Google takeover?

Google stock price fell 9 percent today after they missed earnings. According to an AP article …

The number of paid clicks on the Web sites operated by Google and its partners during the second quarter fell 1 percent from the first quarter, the first sequential downturn that the company has ever reported in the category. The 19 percent year-over-year increase in Google’s paid clicks also was the company’s lowest ever.

This is perhaps different than the previous paid click data debacle because the company’s Chairman, Eric Schmidt described the economy as “challenging.”  Despite all that Covario reports that paid search spending is up 52% year-over-year.

The web is only going to get more and more attractive to brand advertisers, just as it has for direct response people. The accountability, timeliness and dynamic nature of the Internet make for a much better communication channel than anything else out there.  I’m going long on GOOG.

Many many years ago (1923) Claude Hopkins wrote an essay on advertising and it’s still extremely relevant today. Supposedly David Ogilvy has read it over and over again. This is the first I’ve read it, but we follow these exact same principles when developing paid search campaigns for clients. The Internet allows for immediate feedback on the performance of an ad spend. There’s no reason advertisers shouldn’t be taking advantage of that, but far too many people set up a search campaign and then do nothing. This is just another reason companies should use a dedicated specialist when doing any sort of marketing, especially online. For anyone relatively interested in advertising this is a must read.

There are two ways to leverage Facebook apps. Here’s a quick summary …

Performance Based (ie: Slide)
I found myself going into the anatomy of a Facebook app on this post.  I’ll save that for later because that’s going to take some time.  I just want to stick to good example of different types of Facebook apps for this post.

The first and most obvious, is Slide and RockYou. They build Facebook apps to get eyeballs, that’s it. Their goal is to get as many installs as possible, so they make apps that are going to become popular, and the people behind these companies are smart enough to have figured out how to do this on a repeatable basis. They build whatever they have to build to make it work, and then slap their logo on it.

What does this do though? It extends their brand, engages users and makes them some money at the same time. These companies specialize in widgets/apps, so this is their main business model. I’m not sure how much traffic spill-over someone would get from something like this, but it wouldn’t matter if you could get enough installs to see a return form either an affiliate program, or advertising.

Brand Play (ie: Pandora)
Then there are sites like Pandora that use Facebook to extend the functionality of their main application. I personally love the Pandora app. Every time I favorite a song, or start playing a station it tells my friends about it and posts it on my profile. I’m proud of the kind of music I listen to and want people to know that. I also hope that I can spread the word for some of these lesser known bands. I’m using Pandora and their Facebook app to do that.

This isn’t necessarily going to get Pandora the amount of installs that Slide can get with their apps, but it’s worth the effort. Media today is about being everywhere, from Radio to TV to the Internet.  And within the Internet, it’s about being on Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, etc … really wherever you see your audience being and wherever your budget allows.

Are there apps out there that wouldn’t fall under these two catergories?

There are tons of applications and websites that help people do all sorts of SEO stuff.  All of these at least let you monitor your organic ranking for certain keywords.  I’ve included some oldie-but-goodies in this list as well as what look like some up-and-comers.  I don’t have experience with all of them, but on the face of it they all look like decent tools.  Just about all of them have some sort of free trial.  If anyone is reading this yet … what do you use?  Is there anything better out there?

RavenSEO - $??.??
SEOMoz - $49.00/mo.
Rank Monitor - $??.??
Zoom Rank - $7.95/mo - $19.95/mo
Agent Web Ranking - $26.00/mo or $240/yr - $88.00/mo or $800/yr
Digital Point - FREE
HubSpot - $3000/yr to$750/mo
SEO Book Plugin - FREE
Web Position - $149 - $389
SEO Elite - $167
Axandra - $199 plus $9.99/mo - $399 plus $9.99/mo
SERank - $59.95 - $99.95
WebCEO - $199 - $389
SEOToolKit - $299.95 - $494.95

Coherency in Landing Page Testing - Common sense advice that lots of people don’t follow.
Gooruze - Internet marketing social networking site.
Why Social Media Needs to Understand SEO - Read this.
Impact of the SubPrime Mortage Crisis - Very cool data vis.
Shopflick - Online Video Shopping (I had this idea once … I swear).
Velocityscape - Need to scrape the web, check these guys out. They’re the ones behind SpyFu
OkCupid - Online dating where you create the personality tests. Cool idea.
Start Conference - A conference for entrepreneurs.

Google has finally let it’s customers see actual search volume on specific keywords. This is extremely helpful, giving search marketers insight into which keywords can throw their clients more volume, and which keywords they can take advantage of.

Look for keywords with a good amount of volume and low advertiser competition. Although, I’ve never found Google’s Traffic Estimator to be very reliable, so who knows how this is going to pan out in a real world situation with a new advertiser. At least Google’s becoming a little more transparent with their search data. I like that trend quite a bit.

External AdWords Keyword Tool

Note:  Their external keyword tool still only gives you a bar to estimate search volume. If you’re an actual advertiser the tool will give you specific numbers.