“The overwhelming majority of US Internet users research online to find local products and services, according to the “User View Wave VII” from BIA/Kelsey and ConStat.

The most common online tool used for local research was search. Nearly one-half of respondents used Internet yellow pages and 42% checked comparison-shopping sites before heading to local businesses.”

This also makes the case that you shouldn’t only settle for search engine marketing as there are plenty of hubs out there as well as search engines that can drive solid business. Are you doing any comparison engine marketing? Yellow pages? These hubs are also a great place to put some marketing dollars although I would suggest first making sure your search engine marketing strategy is in place and as optimized as possible before moving toward other hubs online. Nevertheless, it’s important to try other sources of traffic to see what kind of results you can get.

Really interested in Local Search Marketing? Check out these articles that can help you:

- Google Adwords Adds Click to Call on Mobile Ads

- Local SEO is One of The Top Places To Be in 2010

- Google Adwords Tip for Local Search Marketing

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“A survey conducted by BIGresearch for the Retail Advertising & Marketing Association (RAMA) found that in-person communication was social media users’ top impetus to start an online search for a specific item. Social media users were even more influenced by face-to-face word-of-mouth than average adults.”

Read The Story at eMarketer —–> Spurring Social Users to Search

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Looking at our analytics, our branded keyword is the keyword that drives us the most traffic and actually, the keyword that also converts the best. I think that will probably hold true for most e-commerce sites or service related sites that drive a good amount of traffic to their website and their brand becomes what is being searched from word of mouth or simply a user wanting to get back to the site and typing the address in Google or just the site name.

Jennifer makes some really good points in her post that started to make me think, wait…maybe we should be bidding on our brand term. Our mentality, as she states is that of many, is hey, we rank #1…well we own the whole page for it but theres no use I guess to bid on it while we drive the traffic free to our site. But what happens? Not all users click on organic results as there are those who do click on paid results and for almost every keyword, even that of your own site, you have sites such as BizRate, eBay, Amazon, and others bidding on those terms.

“…In addition, keep in mind that only 70% of users click on the organic search results. Considering that, the inverse translates into considerable missed opportunity. In other words, if your brand is not present in the paid search listings, you could be missing out on 30% of your potential traffic and revenue. Bidding on your branded terms eliminates that risk and allows you to dominate the search results page and capture all of your potential traffic.”

So, what if a user is trying to get to your site, but its one of those 30% that will click on paid ads and lands on a BizRate comparison site? Did we just lose that user to save .10 cents or whatever the cost of your branded keyword is?

Also, in the physcological sense of things, some users do tend to give more importance and credibility to websites that have both organic and paid search listings.

Another great reason for bidding on your branded term is you literally have control to change the message of your business within seconds.

“Finally, bidding on your branded terms will allow you to leverage your brand to cross-sell or test new brand messaging. For example, let’s say that your company wants to change its unique value proposition. Obviously, such a significant change would impact all of your online and offline marketing. Given that, you would want to test any proposed messaging changes before moving forward. Bidding on your branded terms allows you to do exactly that. You can quickly and easily leverage your branded PPC efforts to rotate ads using your current value proposition versus the newly proposed one to test which one resonates best with your customers before pushing to a broader market.”

Something we didn’t touch here but on a quick note, if your brand keyword is trademarked, as ours is, you can contact Google and let them know you dont want advertisers bidding on that term.

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Eric Enge talks about this today in his post on SearchEngineWatch. He list the following as methods of over optimization:

1) Pages that have identical page titles and H1 headings.

3) Having pages with great visual experiences above the fold, and not finding text until well below the fold.

So, how do you know if you’re over-optimizing your website? Well, there isn’t a way to be 100% sure but as the Google model goes, it just has to be natural. If you have 100 keywords in your meta-tag, that will not be looked good upon to the bot.

Make your on-site optimization as natural and clear as possible. Don’t cloak and fill it with a bunch of crap that will eventually lead nowhere. Good optimization will be the result of:

1) Good clean on-site optimization.

4) Solid inbound links

You also may be interested in reading Aaron Walls take at: Filters vs Penalties & Optimization vs Over-Optimization

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Now, to get real, you wont be able to stop fraud. The most you can do, at this point, as these online ID thefts get smarter, is minimize fraud which should be the goal until you have such few fraud issues that they wont affect your bottom line. So much time small businesses are focused on sales and the push of marketing that you need to put things on pause for a bit and make sure you’re looking at your fraud prevention methods to ensure you’re not shipping out orders to fraudulent customers. This is such an important and hurting issue to merchants because at the end of the day, you WILL LOOSE chargebacks on fraud for the most part.

So, what are some steps you can do to see if you’re order is a fraudulent one?

1) IP ADDRESS – The IP address of an order can be telling of fraud. Let’s say you have an order that is large and you’re weary about shipping it. You can tell by the IP address what country its from so if you have an order with a billing address (2nd warning) with a country such as U.S. and the order going to somewhere like U.K., Canada, Iceland, etc, you can tell by IP where the order originated. You can see that here http://whois.domaintools.com

2) BILLING ADDRESS – The billing address is an important element in an order because if an order has a shipping address that is different than the billing, there is room for concern. Nevertheless, millions of people shop for each other so its a common thing but it is something to look for. It is recommended by processors that for first time customers, you ONLY ship to them if they have the same billing and shipping. If you are dealing with major online fraud issues, implement this rule until you can see a decline in fraud, if not, just something to look for any weird signs.

3) AVS & CVV2 CODES – These two codes are very important in an order detail. The AVS is the address verification and the Cvv2 is the 3 digit number on the back of the credit card (4 digits for AMEX in front). Make sure you have a system in place that will tell you if these two will match or not match. If the AVS code doesnt match but the Cvv2 does, its to your discretion whether to ship order or not. IN THAT CASE, we call customers to make sure someone picks up.

4) PHONE VERIFICATION – This is one of the best ways to prevent fraud but its not 100% proven. Somtimes these thiefs have the nerve to actually put a number where they can be reached just for this purpose, but most of the time, if the number is legit and someone verifies the order, you’re good to go. Ask them to verify details such as cvv2, etc.

5) EMAIL ADDRESS – An email address COULD BE telling of a fraudulent order. Now this may just come from instinct or common sense, but if you look at an orders email, you can tell if it may be someones real email address or fake. You can also Google that email address as it may appear someone may have it on some report as a scam, etc.

I just came acorss this site, ScamBusters.org, and you can check out updated scams going on online.

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The release of this post and report card by Google tells us they do SEO as an important element and there is some sort of guidance Google wants to give SEOs out there, specially those who just start. Google did do a great job with the SEOs Beginners Guide which really outlines the basics and important elements of a website key…elements…for better optimization.

This SEO report card goes into search result presentation, URLs and redirects, on-page optimization. The way they did this is they went into 100 of Google products and based their report on that. If you want to see the report, check out Googles SEO report card.

This report can help you guide yourself through a checklist if you will and see if you can follow their report on your own website/s or that of your clients.

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PalatnikFactor.com will be covering Search Engine Strategies New York March 22-26. Search Engine Strategies is one of the best conferences to attend with great speakers and sessions.

Some of the sessions that will be covered:

-Achieving Success with Improved Ads Quality
-SEO Performance Marketing: Paid Search is Accountable So Why Not SEO?
-Link Building Basics
-Paid Search Super Tools
-E-mail Marketing and Search: E-mail Marketing Beyond the Open Rate

and Much Much More!

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So, what’s googles bief with Pagerank? Well, thats another thing for us to speculate on but basically the pagerank factor has sparked a sense of MISdirection in SEO, and thats where the confusion begins for webmasters and Google. While people are focusing on pagerank, Google may see that as people focusing on the wrong things when it comes to SEO. It’s all about LINKS if pagerank is a true metric of authority on your website. Why? Does Google give any pagerank based on on-page optimization, from what I KNOW, no. There may be some sort of calculation on there but IF THERE IS, its minimal to where it barely counts. So, how does Google get you to focus on natural link building, content building, etc. Tell YOU Pagerank means nothing and not to focus on it.

{Read the post: Is the PageRank Drop From Google Webmaster Tools a Ploy To Get SEOs Not Focus on PR to Build Links or Do They Think It’s Really Irrelevant?}

In yet another post from WebProNews today, an interview is conducted with Peter Norvig, Google’s Director of Research.

“Norvig said at SMX today that PageRank is still one thing that is “overhyped,” and that Google never felt that it was such a big factor. They have always looked at all available data, combining every available signal and tiring to figure out the best way to combine them.

Norvig also said that it may be time for some re-branding with regard to PageRank. There may be a different term in the pipeline. “There’s a technical formula that’s PageRank, which is the way of judging the links between pages, and that’s just one component of how we rank the pages and you get your final search results. There’s all these other things that come in, but they don’t have a catchy name. So some people apply PageRank to mean all the components that give you the final ranking, and that’s where we get confused. So probably we need some other term for that…We’ll get some marketing guys on it.”

So, is Google really going to get rid of the “PageRank” word to come up with another term to mean what pagerank means today? Will google come up with another tool or metric to try and get seos and webmasters to focus on something else?

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In a recent post by eMarketer, a great survey was done amongst some e-retailers which gives us a good picture of what is being prioritized and looked at in the past AND next few months for online retailers.

“Even in summer 2009, Internet Retailer and Vovici found e-commerce sites preparing to invest ahead of recovery to provide a better shopping experience. The increasingly consumer-centric focus of online shopping sites is now leading two-thirds of them to plan a site redesign for 2010, according to the researchers’ “Website Design Strategies and Tactics” survey.

Among those sites that will refresh their looks, better organization and updating of home, category and product pages are top priorities, followed by better search engine optimization.”

I have to say, as an e-commerce guy myself, the web design priorities on the first chart are pretty much on point with priorities we ourselves have been putting into place and giving more emphasis.

It’s VERY important to have your website homepage UPDATED. I see this as an issue in small online retailers but this is one factor that says a lot about your store. If you walked by a retail storefront and saw the same items on display and nothing changes after a few weeks or months, you would think that business JUST DOESNT CARE so why would I care? The aspect of a refreshed and updated homepage can go a long-way with a user that has come back to browse your website after a second time. This also goes for non-ecommerce sites for that matter.

The second priority on the list being Search Engine Optimization. Well…that is a focus many try to place but just aren’t sure how if they dont have an in-house team working on it or outsourced help. You must have optimized design in order to achieve the best rankings and that all starts with the very basics of SEO that sometimes companies get caught up in trying new strategies and forget to stick to the basics. Solid meta tags, image optimization with tags, navigation, INNER LINKING, etc.

In the coming weeks, I’ll discuss e-commerce web design further.

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“Recently, we announced new click-to-call phone numbers for local ads that appear on mobile devices with full internet browsers, like iPhone, Android or Palm Pre. This week, we’re bringing the same click-to-call benefits to national advertisers through phone extensions. Phone extensions allow you to add a phone number that will be displayed whenever your ad is triggered, regardless of the user’s location. Your number will appear as the last line of any ad text within existing or new campaigns. This enables customers to connect with your business by phone directly from the ad and can be especially useful if you have a call center to handle customer inquiries.”

To display your national business phone number on mobile devices with full browsers, follow these two steps:

1. Set up phone extensions and add your business phone number. Customers will be able to click to call your business directly from your ad.

2. Ensure that you’ve chosen to show your ads on iPhones and other mobile devices with full Internet browsers in your campaign settings.

“You can review how many calls you’ve received for each keyword, ad group, or campaign from the Campaigns page within AdWords.

Select ‘Click Type’ to see which clicks resulted in visits to your website or phone calls.”

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Let’s face it, when planning out a real marketing strategy for your business, specially online, you have to have your short-term strategy and goals, and your long-term strategy and goals. Short-term is always aimed at quick traffic and conversions, long-term is more based on branding, user base, etc. Us online marketers deal with different channels on a daily basis such as promoting our businesses through Pay-Per-Click (Google, Yahoo, MSN) or SEO (Google, Yahoo, MSN) or Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, Twitter, etc. You may think every business is doing this, but that’s not the case, and if you ARE already doing this, and you’re ahead and if possible, you should push these channels even more and integrate them as much as possible.

The idea for this post came from an article today posted on MediaPost by Kaila Colbin titled, “Why An Integrated Strategy Will Always Outperform.”

“…My friend Richard Cardran is one of those people whose insights are like a mini-MBA every few minutes. Twitter’s fine, says Richard, as is Facebook, YouTube, and all the rest of them. Where they really start to get exciting, though, is where you interconnect everything, where you start to leverage the network effects made possible by having access to so many different channels for relatively little cost.

And just as the social media foundation paved the way for the traditional media coverage, and just as the results of the traditional media coverage were then embraced and supported by the social media infrastructure, search is supported by all your other marketing activities.”

I was reading the comments on this article which I really suggest you reading the entire piece, and a very interesting comment by a user:

“It’s great to see that you SM and SEO gangs are coming to see what we brand marketers have been saying for a long time. Multiple media, used correctly, will outperform any single media every time. Jay Levinson (the guy who invented the Marlboro man) has said for years that it takes 9-12 touches before anyone will act on your behalf; and that any one particular target market member might see 1/3 of your outreach attempts. So, the math is easy (even for us marketers!); it takes 27-36 outreaches before you touch anyone 9-12 times. Doing over multiple channels works better, IF the touches are branded strongly enough that each one is recognizable as coming from the advertiser–poorly branded touches don’t count. Now the the fan frenzy over SEM and SM seems to be dying down, we’ll see that these are simply new channels to be added to the other marketing tools in the toolkit; each tool has its appropriate uses, benefits, values, proper uses, etc.”

I think that comment is right on point. ALTHOUGH, I DISAGREE with SEM dying down, I don’t see that as the case, but we do see more attention toward other areas such as conversion marketing, affiliate marketing, etc.

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As important as it is to promote landing pages, promote your brand, it is also very important to promote content. Within that content, there is always the possibility of converting the reader into a user, buyer, subscriber and so fourth.

WebProNews has a great example and illustration of this new feature. You can read the story at WebProNews @ —–> Facebook Launches “Promote your Post”

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This is NOT the first time we hear of this or that the New York Times covers a story regarding Google and their business practices regarding the indexing of websites. In September of 2008, I wrote a post on the New York times story, “New York Times Reports on PPC Arbitrage,” which also was a similar case of a website owner being un-indexed by Google for having a website which didn’t meet the Google guidelines because it was, in Googles opinion, an arbitrage based website only used for generating money from ads not giving any real value to searchers. Well…can’t we say the same about Business.com? A vertical search engine that basically runs Google Adsense to make all its money and if you really look at the business.com business model, it uses either Google Adsense or its own paid links to yield its results.

Should we be scared of Google? If we “compete” against Google or post ANY kind of threat which I dont see and believe sites such as Ejustice.fr pose any sort of threat, may that really be the reason for indexing? Is the do no evil really evil?

“Mr. Barella developed the site, including the search technology, with an investment of about €20,000, or $27,000, and help from a friend who is an engineer. Aside from a video interview in which an unsmiling Mr. Barella explains how Ejustice.fr works, the site is short on bells and whistles. Nonetheless, within a few months, it was attracting up to 20,000 visitors a day and selling a modest amount of advertising.

“We asked Google, ‘Why are you doing this? We have no more money,”’ Mr. Barella said. “They didn’t want to work with us, they didn’t want to help us, they didn’t want us to exist.”?

You can read the rest of the New York Times article @ ——-> It’s Not Just Microsoft Against Google

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Wired magazine has a post titled, “How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web,” which goes into detail on the algo, Google, Bing, etc. This is something that is constantly being worked on by these big companies who rule search, LITERALLY, RULE SEARCH. How crazy is that?

“This year, Google will introduce 550 or so improvements to its fabled algorithm, and each will be determined at a gathering just like this one. The decisions made at the weekly Search Quality Launch Meeting will wind up affecting the results you get when you use Google’s search engine to look for anything — “Samsung SF-755p printer,” “Ed Hardy MySpace layouts,” or maybe even “capital Burkina Faso,” which just happens to share its name with this conference room. Udi Manber, Google’s head of search since 2006, leads the proceedings. One by one, potential modifications are introduced, along with the results of months of testing in various countries and multiple languages. A screen displays side-by-side results of sample queries before and after the change. Following one example — a search for “guitar center wah-wah” — Manber cries out, “I did that search!””

Read the story on WIRED.com —–> Exclusive: How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web

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You can read and see the post at SEOMOZ.org —–> 5 Things You’re Not Doing (But Should Be.)

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