Forrester put out a great white paper entitled “The Best and Worst of Paid Search in 2009“. It is a good read, but mostly data-driven. The bottom line is simple, are you doing the 5 things that they did the entire study off of? See below:

1. Does the keyword appear in the paid search ad title and description? - This is a no-brainer but often overlooked. They are searching a particular keyword on purpose, make sure you deliver that keyword.

2. Does the ad copy “pre-qualify” clickers? You don’t want ad copy to totally distract visitors, however, you don’t want to falsey drive people into your website as you wont convert them. Try and be both compelling, but also, try and explain what it is you are going to offer them before they click.

3. Does the ad contain a compelling call to action? This is a no-brainer and often overlooked. Put a specific promo in your ad copy like “Free Shipping”, “Free Download”, etc.

4. Is the landing page content relevant to the keyword? This is another often overlooked issue. If someone typed in ‘Purple Widget’ are you selling a purple widget on your landing page? You better be!

5. Does the landing page employ Scenario Design practices to aid user experiences? Is the page usable? Does it have the call to actions necessary to convert a customer?

If you think of all the above items before launching a paid search campaign, and execute on them, your campaign is 300% more likely to be a successful one!

Google continues to widen their reach when it comes to offering its own services to visitors. Google used to simply be a search engine that would organize and serve information from across the web to its audience. Times are changing, quicker than I have ever seen, and Google wants to be in control of more transactions online. Many of their efforts have not come into fruition…yet, but they could very easily. They now serve up movie times (sorry Fandango and Hollywood.com). They started to offer up MLS listings (sorry real estate search sites) It was recently announced that they are going to compete with Lending Tree by offering up loan quotes to their audience. They are one of the main reasons why the Yellow Page books are glorified doormats with the efficiency of their local search platform. The list goes on.

In many ways, what they have done is good, as it puts the competition on its toes. But I am starting to lose sleep (and I am sure many other are) in the fact that they could turn a switch and be the only business, in business, for many industries. How, you ask?

80% of people find business, ideas, movies, restaurants, plumbers, through the search engines. Google owns almost 70% of the search space. So in essence, they control which sites people go to 55% of the time. They decide where people will go, what companies they will do business with. That is some really crazy power.

What if Google decided that CitySearch was too close of a competitor to Google Local? If they removed them from their index, Citysearch would be impacted to the point that the probably wouldn’t be around in 2 years. Citysearch is not, and never will be a destination website, they are only used when someone needs to find something in a particular city. I would venture to guess that a lions share of their traffic comes from the organic and sponsored results from Google. If Google removed them, Citysearch dies.

Google could do this same thing to many huge online companies. Wikipedia, gone without Google. Local.com, gone without Google. Lending Tree, gone (or at least severely impacted) without Google. I could create a list of thousands of companies, big ones, that would die if Google decided so.

What about retail? I don’t know how you can quantify it in terms of actual dollars, but Google decides where billions of dollars are spent online. With the exception of Amazon and some big offline brands, Google, for the most part, dictates where someone is going to make a purchase. If they decided to form a true competitor to Amazon, they could and within a year in business would probably have the same revenues as Amazon.

This is a monopoly. Quite possibly the biggest monopoly the world has ever seen. A monopoly way beyond a search engine. It is a monopoly on business in general. The government must see it, investors must see it. Google could very easily be a threat to business more than it is an asset.

What would your business do if Google simply did not let you or your competitors compete? I get sick just thinking about that.

I ran into a very interesting article by Danny Sullivan (article referenced below) and he poses a very obvious (but so far not really talked about) question. What is Real Time Search? His argument is, and he is very right, that there is a huge difference between real time search and simply fresh results.

Real-time search means - a message, within seconds, that occurs. When someone tweets, the content of the tweet is real time, the link they submit may not be. If someone posts the following tweet:
“Wow, this new car Tesla put out is amazing! http://bit.ly/12345 ”

The Real time result portion of this article - “Wow, this new car Tesla put out is amazing”

Fresh results means - Fresh results might be news from 4 hours ago, the most recent blog post from your favorite seo consultant, a new car Tesla is launching that they talked about last week. So in the above reference, the link about Tesla may just be a fresh result, certainly not a real time one.

Real Time results are actually a little spammy. They have little value at all as it stands now except for gauging what could be important in real time. So Google or another search engine could use “the real time chatter of twitter” to gauge what is IMPORTANT in real time, not necessarily what IS real time. So, if there was chatter in twitter about Tesla, the importance of seeing the recent news about Tesla would be the real time result, not necessarily the base content of the subject matter.

Check out Danny Sulivans post, it goes really indepth Click Here

Ok, I have to admit it, I was a late bloomer with Twitter. where most of my colleagues have been on it for more than a year, I just adopted it about 2 months ago. At first, I was a little disappointed with it, but with some cool software tools like Tweetie, and filters, I started finding it very useful to get information out to whoever wanted to hear it.

The problem is that there is still a lot of “spam” out there that people need to start controlling. You need to look at twitter as a way that you can mass email all of your followers at once. Knowing that most people follow tens if not hundreds of people, be selective on what you tweet. For me, I ask myself 2 very simple questions before I tweet:

1.
“Why is it that people follow me? Is it my good looks, personality, or my opinion on post-war baseball card collections? Probably not. They are most likely following me because of my knowledge as an SEO consultant, Advertising CEO, or something like that, so I am going to make sure that most my tweets are based around this premise.

2.
“Would I send this message that I am about to tweet out in an email form to everyone in my contact list? Would it have value to them or would I be wasting my time and start losing contacts?”

Stick to posting messages that are based off of why I am following you. Lets all fight to keep spam off the airways. I follow about 100 people, and I really wish it could be highly-valuable content whenever one of those people tweets.

##Danny DeMichele is the CEO of eVisibility.com##

##Misc Danny DeMichele page here##

So you have probably heard of it, but Bing is Microsoft’s answer to winning back some market share from the ever dominant Google. Many have tried to take a jab at it and have failed. This time, I believe, Microsoft may have something here.

I know, we all love Google. I am a HUGE Google lover. I think the issue we face now is too much dominance and while I think that Google is probably better than Bing as far as results go, I will never truly know until I jump in there and try it, without looking back, for 1 month. When you are so used to something, no matter how good other things are, it is hard to make a change. Not seeing the familiar Google layout will take some getting used to, but it is the only way I am ever going to really know if I like something else.

So there it is, as of this moment, I will not use Google until July 4, 2009 in which I will post my notes/feedback on Bing.

##ADDITION TO POST##

Just found this, thought it was interesting and in support of my argument. Techcrunch found that most people prefer the layout of Bing, however, they still wont switch. Goes to show, you are really going to have something substantial to move people away from the familiarity of Google.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/25/study-suggests-people-prefer-bings-design-to-googles-but-still-wont-switch/

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