I am a fan of innovation, so long as you are innovating to solve a problem. We live in a different time than our grandparents. There has been more innovation in the last 20 years than the previous 100 years. This has put everyone in a distructive path to try and re-invent wheels that are not broken and are focusing on problems that don’t exist.

Being an SEO consultant, the one that annoys me most is search engines. With the success of Google, everyone is on the bandwagon of making a search engine and making everyone rich.

If you want to build a search engine, focus on RESULTS. Don’t worry about things that people don’t care about or need. Everytime I see a new search engine pop up on the radar, that tells me there are a whole bunch of investors who were sold a load of crap and are about to be very disapointed. There are image search engines out there, guess what, Google does it better. There are video searche engines out there, guess what, Google does it better. Bells and whistles are worthless. Google’s dominance is there for only one reason, their results.

You want to build a better search engine? Beat Google in results and visitors will come…it is that simple.

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Full Discloser: 24 hours ago, I was anti-twitter. I thought it was worthless. Another waste of time to bog down productivity at my office. Add this to hundreds of emails, Facebook updates, I will be lucky if I get 2 hours of work out of people.

I had a conversation with some of my co-workers (@ecrunner, @CobraKai817, @imnotadoctor) about my view point and I will admit, I was stumped in some respects. As a result, I decided to open up my mind and try it out. In 3 hours of use, and of course, the install on my iPhone, all of my suspicions were true. I was obsessed with looking at updates, equally (or more so) than my email. I also find myself obsessed with gathering a following, for apparently no reason at all.  I was disappointed to see that most of the tweets are totally useless, a complete waste of my time to even process. I would say 85% is worthless and I just don’t need to see it, 15% actually meant something.

If you are following 50 people, and all 50 of them are tweeting 5 times a day, you have to scan and process 250 of these tweets. That is nuts! How on earth is this not a waste of time? By following them, you have given 50 people full permission to spam you whenever they want, about whatever they want.

Could you imagine if you were getting these in email format? If you were following someone you did not really know, but you were doing so because of their field of expertise, what if this person emailed you to let you know that they were going to bed? Wouldn’t that be a little creepy?

This is what sparked this post. Think before you tweet. There is so much garbage that people are posting that is totally useless information.  Before you tweet, think if you would take this same information and email blast it to all your contacts. Is the information that good?

I do believe twitter cab be truly useful but there must be twitter etiquette. Laws, if you will, that prevent people from posting useless garbage for all your followers to read.

I DONT need to know….
1. When you are leaving the office
2. That you are watching a Laker game
3. You just ate a hamburger
4. You are going to bed
5. THE LIST GOES ON.

What I do want to know about:
1. Something in the news
2. Something related to my field of expertise (or yours, which is why I am following you)
2. If you are in San Francisco, who knows, I may be there.
4. If there is a good band playing in SD
5. THIS LIST ALSO GOES ON.

People just need to think about the effect that their message has on their followers. If you have 300 followers, do really think they all need to know that you are about to go and have dinner with the family? I mean, come on, that takes an awfully large ego to twitter that.

Think before you Tweet.

Now, I am going to log off from my computer and watch TV, but before I do, I better let everyone know, logging on to twitter now….follow that.

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I just read an interesting post in Tech Crunch, why advertising is failing on the internet (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/22/why-advertising-is-failing-on-the-internet/), and while I disagree with part of the authors statements, what does ring in my ear like a siren is how sustainable is the current method of operation?

Now, I know I am a mere SEO consultant, however, my opinion is that the internet has to change, there is not choice. Most of the places you go to on a daily basis (news papers, tv, social) does not make money. An economy like this will eat companies like this up and spit them out. Here is a quick breakdown that backs my argument:

Social sites - How long can huge sites (with most of the internet traffic) like facebook, youtube, Myspace, Twitter, etc., keep failing to make a profit? Facebook, which has roughly the same page views monthly as Google, did $437 million in revenue in 2008 compared to Google who did more than $20 Billion in 2008. That is a 40x metric. Guess what audience – you better start clicking on an ad from time to time or prepare to pay for site usage. The bottom line is advertising most likely wont pay off the same way as it has in Search.  When companies start to get bigger, and have to make numbers to appease shareholders, these business models will change. I can guarantee it.

Newspaper sites - Newspapers, which are folding as quickly as a lawn chair factory (that was bad wasn’t it?), are turning to the online ad space, which just doesn’t make money for them. Before they could charge a subscription fee to at least subsidize the cost of delivering the content, no longer will that get that. Further, they received much more money per “view” than their online counterpart. Not sure If you have ever bought media space on a newspaper website, but rarely does the ad payoff. And with the ROI-obsessed online businesses, if it is not paying off quickly, it will be dropped.
    With newspapers going under, so will the very same businesses that have supported these newspapers. Traditional brick and mortar furniture sites, auto dealers and other local companies that used to rely on the local papers wont get the same exposure and will be effected greatly. And I can assure you that the local furniture store does not want to compete with a guy like me, they can’t win. Newspapers had their own eco-system of businesses. When newspapers go away, so will everything down the line.

Etailers – Online retailing has been completely turned over with the growing popularity of comparison-shopping engines. Forget Circuit City and Best Buy being across the street from one another, and have to compete in that way, now consumers can, in 1 minute, search for a product and instantly compare prices against most of the websites online.  This will force online retailers to continue to drive prices down to near-zilch margins and start a cycle of closures in the ecommerce space as well.  As referenced above, traditional retailers are going to have to make some major changes. These guys are going to be competing with ecommerce sites. Great (temporarily) for online retailers, bad for traditional business. And as much as online retailers don’t think they rely on traditional business, they have another thing coming. There is going to be a huge impact from the “out of sight, out of mind” scenario. How many times have you gone to a brick and mortar store, just passing time, saw something you loved, and went ONLINE to read more about it. Nothing will replace seeing and touching a product. For me, almost everything is originated in person, and then I go online to buy it. With this critical missing component to the retail ecosystem, we will all take a hit.

The Internet is going to change; you will have to change to. Get ready, this change is coming much sooner than everyone things. The current economy is forcing all businesses to look at what they do and how it is they make money. Making money is the ONLY thing in business. Stock prices, hype, a good CEO, it doesn’t matter. At the end of the day shareholders need to make money. The only way for shareholders to make money is for stock value to rise. For stock value to rise, the company needs to produce a profit.  These companies will be forced to change, and so will you.

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I finally did my own experiment this year. I always wondered what percentage of traffic one can expect from a specific ranking. There are so many theories out there. I have heard as high as 10% for a #1 spot and as low as 1%. Where do the major drops occur? Is it top fold? Page 2? Now, the following is by no means statistically accurate, but this gives you a ball park to start.

The data below is calculated very simply: taking the total number of searches using the google keyword tool and the traffic we received from a particular keyword and created a percentage. I took fixed rankings, meaning, there was less than a 2% fluctuation of the ranking in Google during the month, I checked 3 times a day every day:

Experiment #1 -
Domain: eVisibility.com
Search Term: Internet Marketing Company
Position: 1
Total Google Monthly Searches: 8100
Total traffic to eVisibility: 243
Percentage of traffic to eVisibility: 2.9%
Title Tag: Internet Marketing Company – Online Marketing Company – eVisibility

Experiment #2 -
Domain: DannyDeMichele.com
Search Term: Internet Marketing Consultant
Position: 2
Total Google Searches: 6600
Total traffic to domain: 55
Percentage of traffic to Domain: .8%
title tag: SEO Consultant – Danny DeMichele – Internet Marketing Consultant

Experiment #3
Domain: BuyVanitiesOnline.com
Search Term: Bathroom Vanity
Position: #2
Total Google Searches: 110,000
total traffic to domain: 3,446
Percentage of total traffic to domain: 3%
Title Tag: Bathroom Vanities & Bathroom Vanity Cabinets – Free Shipping!

Experiment #4
Domain: buycouchesonline.com
Search Term: couches
Position: #4
Total Google Searches: 60,500
total traffic to domain: 2,091
Percentage of total traffic to domain: 3.4%
Title Tag: Couches & Sofas – Sofas Furniture | Discount Sofas & Couches

Experiment #5
Domain: buyentertainmentcentersonline.com
Search Term: entertainment centers
Position: #13
Total Google Searches: 550,000
total traffic to domain: 123
Percentage of total traffic to domain: 0.02%
Title Tag: Entertainment Centers | Entertainment Center Furniture

Ok – so here are some preliminary findings, again, not conclusive, but a good start.

1. Page 2, what page 2? – the different between a page 2 listing to a page 1 is about 10x difference in traffic. That is a 1000% increase in a mere 5 spots. That is way more than I originally thought.
2. Title tag is everything – you can have #2 spot with a lower traffic than a #3,#4 spot. I know this is something a lot of people pitch that you should do it, not sure how many people actually focus on it.
3.  It appears as e-commerce keywords have a higher click through rate than information/service based words.

eVisibility will be performing an audit on 20 more experimental terms and placements over the next 30 days, be sure to come back and view the results. We will also be testing title tag effectiveness. How much can a great title tag effect click through. 25%? 50% 100%? Hopefully we will know in a month.

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It is my belief that all business will take a hit over the next 2 years, but it is in this time that the internet has a unique advantage to accelerate its already predicted growth to take a bigger chunk of market share from traditional business. My top 10 reasons:

1. Gas: ecommerce companies offering free shipping married to people who don’t want to use their precious gas will drive more online sales.
2. Price Comparisons: People are going to take advantage of the ease of use of comparing 50 stores online in minutes versus taking a weekend driving around the city.
3. Advertising Efficiency: Although there will always be a huge place for traditional advertising, with online advertising and a good analytics program, you can see exactly where every dollar goes. This is much more attractive to businesses in a down economy.
4. Less Big Brand Advertisers: Big advertisers will start cutting budgets, leaving plenty of open ad space for a flurry of little guys to come online. Its the little businesses that make up the internet, bring them on!
5. Previous Brand Reluctance: believe it or not, there were many manufacturers that were reluctant to let retailers sell their product online. I would imagine this restriction will dissolve as they are scrambling to find anyway to sell their products. If more retailers can sell more unique brands online, more buyers will come.
6. TV Shows: As brands slow ad spending dollars in the TV DVR world, Television shows will start to become more aggressive in showing their shows online, which opens up all sorts of online ad dollars. Online TV is protected from DVR’s as the site can decide to put controls on. More people watching shows equals more money for ads on those shows.
7. Investment Dollars: As more people go online, more money is made online. As more money is made online, more investment dollars will be thrown at it. The more investment dollars thrown online, the bigger online businesses get. The bigger they get….ah, you know where this is going…
8. Lower overhead: most online retailers’ overhead is significantly lower than traditional brick and mortar retailers. Because of this, prices are lower. If prices are lower, people can buy more things, and spread their dollars over a couple of businesses versus just one. Consumers saving money is a great way for them to spend more. Not only does this point help online, it helps the economy as a whole.
9. Less Taxes: Currently, if you purchase outside your own state, you save your state sales tax. In my case, this is 7.75%. That is a huge savings and enough of a reason for me to go online versus offline. In poor economic times, people will look for anything to save upwards of 7%.
10. Virtual Services: With people wanting to find the best prices on services, they are more likely to find more boutique service with lower overhead online and use that service virtually, versus in person. This will save them a lot of money and get the same talented person. (lawyers, accountants, consultants).

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