This is a great infographics on SEO Tutorial, perfect for summarizing the latest main Search Engine Optimization techniques, courtesy of Datadial.net.

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Further to my post

I see the Murdoches (or the Ruperts?) are on it again.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/4347438/James-Murdoch-says-apps-cannibalize-newspapers

Sales of newspaper apps for devices like the Apple iPad are cannibalizing sales of physical newspapers, James Murdoch, head of News Corp’s operations in Europe and Asia, said on Friday.

Wherelse, in New Zealand APN seems to have a good grasp on the online/offline coexistence concept.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10686779

Brendan Hopkins, chief executive of APN, which owns the New Zealand Herald, yesterday told potential investors in its $150 million bond offer that the company was not interested in creating pay-walls.

“In the main we are an advertising company, 80 per cent of our revenue is from advertising.”

But Hopkins said the company hoped to build up its iPad application to allow differentiation between premium content and grazing.

APN launched its nzherald application in June and so far 24,000 had been downloaded for free.

Hopkins said he hoped to begin earning $1 million to $2 million from the application next year.

We all know what happens when an online searchers encounter a paywall. If I remember correctly, the number is above 80% of bounce rate. (quotable source needed here. Anyone?)

Instead of paywalling the news item, James Murdoch, why don’t you leverage the online space to build up a premium community with more-thorough demographics data and charge the marketers more to advertise to these people? They are prime market and advertisers would salivate over the opportunity to target the exact people that fit their products.

Apples don’t fall far from the trees, eh?

Hot off the press, Google just updated the way it presents local business in search overnight.

It now emphasises the local business results on certain keywords (e.g., “auckland hotels”, “car repair”, “supermarket”, etc) while others such as “life insurance”, “cpu”, “ad agency” and so on remains unaffected.

Links:

- Official Google Blog.

- Matt McGee

- Pariswells.com

Google updates local business results in search

Source: http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/5-quick-impacts-of-googles-new-local-search-results/3757/

My first impressions:

1. I don’t like it. It screws up my organic search results and places unwanted locations that I probably wouldn’t care about (e.g., search for “banks” showed one listing as in Onehunga, which is 15-20 odd kms from where I live and work). Organic Search is now also cluttered with biased results simply because some businesses have the resources to put their branches on the map. What about businesses where we can buy stuff online? Especially where they don’t have physical stores? Searching for shoes, perhaps?

2. Google should have fixed Google Places facility first before doing this. Up to now, bulk verification still takes a long time!

3. Reviews on the search results? This is a big can of worm. As I am a cynic, I firmly believe that those who cares don’t matter and those who matters don’t care. We all know that bad experience would multitudely spur reviews while customers who get good experience normally don’t bother to scream out. Reviews will be unfairly biased to businesses. Can Google be sued for defamation due to inaccurate representation through the reviews?

Google, if you are listening, if you want to mess up with the Paid Search space, that’s fine. But Organic Search results was fine as it was!

A lot of excitement these last 2 days as Google Webmaster Tools got supercharged with the long wished-for Organic Search impression numbers.

Google Webmaster Tools - Organic Search Impressions/volume and CTR

What it means is that you can gain insights on:

• The clickthrough rate difference for different organic search rankings on the keyword you are targeting. This may be very different for each keyword types: brand, generic, product-specific as well as different product types.
  

  CTR distribution by organic search rankings

• Analyse why your #1 ranked listing does not get the CTR that you are hoping for (i.e., unattractive Meta description and Title?)
• Search volume spikes around certain events and/or marketing (TV ads, print ads, campaigns, etc)
• Confidently analyse the real search volume for different keywords (if you are ranked within the top 10) and concentrate your SEO on the best-searched keywords.

However, further use of the tools revealed the following weaknesses (but since the tool is provided for free, I could not complain):

• Data only available back to 15 March (a month ago). Further backdating could not be done. Is it because the data recording on Google only started on that date, or is it because GWT only retains data for the last 30 days?
• No CTR graph available.
• No data-by-day export is available. I was hoping that I could export the search volume and clicks on a by-day basis and plot my CTR graph manually, but unfortunately this could not be done.
• Data is aggregated across any Google search. It does not separate searches on Google.com, local Google (e.g., Google.co.nz) and local search (e.g., Google.co.nz NZ-sites-only). As a result, you would most-likely get a variety of rankings for each keyword. However, the CTR is marked independently for each rankings as well as an average value provided. But it would be nice if you are able to just focus your investigation on certain Google domain.

OK, it’s not a cheat. But for now, it feels almost like it :)

Long Tail Keywords

Long tail is a term first coined by Chris Anderson (Wired Magazine, 2004). Typically long tail keywords may account for a large portion of the organic search visits, and can exhibit higher conversion rate by up to 200%. But how large is this ‘portion‘?

Interestingly, it has been proven a number of times that search does not exactly follow the Pareto principle 80:20 distribution (i.e., “80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers) – (Chris Anderson, Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Duncan Simester).

Instead, in a long tail distribution, typically the most frequently-occurring 20% of items represent only less than 50% of occurrences. In other words, the least-frequently-occurring 80% of items are more important as a proportion of the total population. In the graph below, the tail becomes bigger and longer in new markets (depicted in red) such as Internet retail. In other words, whereas traditional retailers have focused on the area to the left of the chart, online bookstores derive more sales from the area to the right.

Traditional vs. Long Tail

An interesting insight by Alan Mitchell on PPC long tail:

The Performance of Search Phrase by Number of Word

Due to the volume of keywords, targeting long tail keywords require a hollistic sitewide approach. Rather than manually targeting different search phrases on different pages, an example of smarter and cost-effective long tail keyword SEO on a template level is shown by WordPress by serving server-generated virtual pages via permalinks for every important phrase (e.g., tags, article titles, etc). Recording the performed site searches by your users also provide you with intelligence on what content/phrases are deemed important without you having to perform a manual keyword research.

There are other variations of targeting the long tail keywords. But the principles are the same:

1. knowing what your users want.
2. actively generating content on that topic/phrase using the easiest way possible, be it automated and/or manual.
3. ensuring such contents get indexed.
4. SEO on the content template.

As the search technology evolves, I personally expect targeting long tail keywords will get even easier. In fact, long tail keywords are probably the real future of search.

Further to my post before:News Ltd John Hartigan lashes out at bloggers

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt has told a group of editors that he is confident that newspapers will find new ways to make money online by harnessing the vast reach of the internet.

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Tripartite Skills

The success of a consultancy depends on three skills:

1. Smart = identify opportunity, recommendations; The dream
2. Passion/Aggression = push through, suggest, seek approval; The Drive
3. Discipline = action; The Reality

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First Rate announces exclusive New Zealand and Australian partnership with SearchIgnite.

New Zealand Online Marketing scene just about to get a bit busier.

How do we apply ethics to business, especially in making sure the staff can function as best as they can?

Let’s start with three different outlooks:

• Consequentialism: derives the rightness or wrongness of an act from the consequences. “The ends justify the means”. How you do things is not as important as why you do it.
• Deontology: derives the rightness or wrongness of an act from the character of the act itself rather than the outcomes of the action. You are right or wrong based on how you do things.
• Virtue Ethics: focuses on the character of the agent/person rather than on the nature or consequences of the individual actions themselves.

What do these all mean? Consider the act of telling a lie. Each of the concepts above would have a different interpretation on the rightness or wrongness of telling a lie:

• Consequentialism: telling a lie is wrong, but sometimes it is required for a greater good. For example, to protect a person from torture by saying “No, I have not seen him”.
• Deontology: telling a lie is wrong and is a sin from a religious point of view, regardless of the reason.
• Virtue Ethics: emphasises less on the rightness or wrongness of the lie, but looks more into the character of the person. The outcome may be different between a priest and a murderer.

How would these affect your business leadership?

Take for example your staff selection. Different types of people may suit different staff position. Let’s imagine a decision maker (CEO; or judge, marketing strategists, etc):

• Consequentialist: Would emphasis on results. A frivolous person may simply set long term goals and hope they are achieved. A wise person may break the goals down to milestones and monitor the milestones. Staff will most likely be relatively free to do their jobs. If there are no parametric rules (e.g., boundaries), system abuses may happen. Staff of creative/strong-leadership/effective-slacker background may highlight themselves with achievements. Industrious/highly-technical/heads-down type of staff may be slightly lost in directions at times due to the relaxed control. Key to success: milestones and periodic evaluations.
   
• Deontologist: Would emphasis on how things are done based on his value of right/wrong. The person may choose to closely monitor activity progress, and insist on things done in his/her way. At times, focusing too much on how things are supposed to be done may result in forgeting why things are done. Also, rigid framework may limit creativity and becomes a barrier to business evolution/growth. Staff of creative/strong-leadership/effective-slacker background may struggle with this type of leadership and relationship may be marred with conflicts. Industrious/highly-technical/heads-down type of staff will be very productive according to the leader’s master plan. Key to success: never forget the purpose of every action, have an external team to recommend creativity and evolution, careful staff selection.
   
• Virtue Ethicist: Would emphasis on staff characters. The person would spend a large effort in making sure the staff are as trustworthy as possible. Usually very trusting nature to the staff, and some which may become an ‘inner-circle’. In the extremes, a “my guy can’t be wrong” view may develop and become a fertile breeding ground for cliques and favouritisms, something that is very counterproductive to teamwork. Key to success: advisory roles filled with honest/trustworthy and impartial people to balance the very-subjective nature of virtue ethicist, continuous introspection to ensure the virtues are upheld uncorrupted.
   

Spotted today in the NZ Herald: Kiwi Data Warehousing Soars.

What does  mean to us?

If anything, recession taught us something by looking at the trends faced by the advertising industry. Most pronounced in the offline advertising, companies are rushing to cut their marketing budget by a large amount. They chose to hunker down in the bunker waiting for the artillery barrage of credit crunch to pass away before poking their heads again.

Interestingly, some went exactly the other way around into panic buying mode. They base the sales on percentage concept, where if the conversion rate goes down then in order to maintain the sales volume the base audience number must go up. This “panic sales defense” move lead to massive increases in marketing spend that returns no sales increases.

Why exactly these things happened?

The primary cause is that a lot of businesses, especially in the “calm New Zealand where time forgets”, neglect the importance of information. In particular, a lot of them do not bother to try to know their customers. For most conservative businesses, any sales is as good as the other. For instance, a lot of businesses spend tens of thousands of dollars on their websites without bothering to spend a few hundred dollars to get good analytics software such as Google Analytics.

But knowing your customers is paramount to your marketing efficiency. Google Analytics, for example, can be configured to attribute your sales to where the customers are coming from. With this you can recognise which source is valuable and which is not so that when it comes the time to cut down some marketing budget you can be sure you are cutting the right one.

Other useful analysis include customer behavior, such as what do they buy, what are the most favourite products (= promotion opportunities), what are they searching for that made them leave your shop (= product gaps), etc. Social media such as Twitter and Facebook also allow you to engage your customers to gain their trust, and most importantly, feedbacks. Not only that, they also form a free 3rd party data warehousing, where you can conduct data mining to see what people are talking about in relation to your, or your competitors’, products.

With free tools such as these and storage data space becoming cheaper every day, data warehousing and data mining should become a common business practice. It should even be a crime to run a business without thinking about who your customers are.

If you can snipe your enemy from a distance, why blindfold yourself and charge with a short rate inefficient scatter gun?