Google rolled out Instant yesterday, a service that suggests search phrases as you type and the search results mysteriously appear and change as search terms gets longer. And all this without you having to hit the grey SEARCH button!

“Technological feat” echoed one analyst, “Game changer” said another, “Cannot be mimicked by competition” came from another corner (if you were following search engines closely it was the other way round for the last several months).

Google claims that “the typical; searcher takes 9 seconds to type in a search query and we saw many example of searches that took 30-90 seconds to type” (emphasis is mine). Instant can save 2-5 seconds per search as the claim goes on.

A research report last year concluded that usually two searches burn enough energy to make a cup of coffee. Is the Instant search greener or otherwise? But that is a topic for another day.

How will Instant impact the search engine businesses specially those that rely on Search Engine Marketing of pay-per-click advertizing and those that depend on their ranking in organic search results?

Since search results appear while you are typing in your query, it is possible that the paid ads will change as the query length changes (understandable). However what you see is that the ads change even with suggestions that appear mystically (in the words of Marissa Mayer not mine) before a user has completed typing in the query!

An example below illustrates this point. I started with the keyword “send money to india”

Google Instant: Search Query suggestions

Next I hit the space bar in preparation of completing my query. The mystic element comes into play:

Google Instant: Search Query Suggestions

Notice the suggestion (in light grey) just next to the query. I have not hit the search button signaling Google to fetch the results.

If you see closely you will notice how the ads from paid search have changed in the two scenarios just by hitting the space bar invoking the mystical element.

Just to complete this point see the example (below) when only the first two search terms were entered (still no jabbing of the SEARCH button)

Google Instant: The first 2 search terms

The presence and order of appearance of both paid and organic listings change as the search query is typed in or just space bar is hit.

End of the Long Tail?

SEM advertisers who rely on the long tail may be in for a surprise, as they may see fewer visitors clicking through while their Click Thru Rate may not have dropped significantly.

Reason – it is not unlikely that a searcher will stop on seeing the results after typing in first 1 or 2 terms (or by hitting the space bar). Consequently it is likely that 1or 2 words long keywords (typically known as Head) will become more expensive to buy simply because results from these will appear first no matter whether the searcher has signaled her intention to begin search (by hitting the search button). The Tail will disappear unless the searcher has waded through the unintended results pulled up by the search engine!

Is this a subtle way of passing control from searcher to the search engine?

Do people type in more than 1 or 2 keywords? Google has claimed that over 54% of all search queries they see are more than 3 words! Hitwise places this at 35%. Clearly in the Google’s claim it must be these  longer search terms that take between 30 -90 seconds.

How does this play with another stat from Google that 1 out of 5 queries each day have not been seen in the last 90 days if at all! Will be interesting to see how Instant will handle those.

Finally the size does matter….in Google’s case shorter the better!

The year 2010 started with an earth shattering earthquake in Haiti forcing 1.5 million to find a shelter. Then a devastating earthquake hit Chile in the small hours of morning on Feb 27, displacing 2 million.

Exceptionally heavy rainfall caused massive floods and landslide displacing 250,000 people in China.

Then came once-in-500 years flood in Pakistan affecting 20% of the country’s population and displacing over 4 million (the number is still rising!)

Moscow battled a fire that forced it to declare emergency!

UN has warned that it is battling donor fatigue in mobilizing funds for relief operations in the flood beleaguered country.

Is world getting desensitized  due to the high frequency of high impact disasters?

Search trends on these 4 disasters this year on Google Search Insights throw some interesting results:

Worldwide Search Index for the 4 search phrases on Google

Note the intensity of search interest! The timelines show striking spike of interest in the first two disasters of the year, but no sudden spurt of interest for the rest of the three….

Do earthquakes grab our attention more?

Floods in China and fire near Moscow do not even show up relative to the first two!

Is anyone even interested in the 3 relatively “unsearched” disasters?

Google’s answer is again interesting:

Floods in Pakistan: 4m displaced

Predictable! Expect more given the scale of disaster?

Which City is more concerned with floods and massive mudslides in China?

Who is concerned?

Checking interest for earthquake in Chile and Moscow fire just for comparison:

Who has shown more concerned?

It may not have escaped your attention that Australians have searched more on these natural disasters than any other city followed by London (UK). Interestingly the people from the Down Under did not show that level of concern for the earthquake in Haiti!

Maybe this low level of concern worldwide (do you think search trends reflect the issues at the top of people’s mind?) is reflected in muted response to fund mobilization for flood relief!

If you remember the media coverage, both traditional and on internet, was far more intense for the first two!

Now that you have established yourself and become familiar with your home market, its time to expand to other geographies. You look at the market research reports and realize that there is a tremendous growth potential. Poring over the new country demographics you decide on the best location for your store and set up shop. The market research report also advises you to setup a local website in that geography. You take your SEO optimized website and put it through Google Translator or through a local translation agency and presto your Search Engine Optimized local website is ready. Well that was quick & easy - wasn’t it? That cost even lesser than the cost of registering the local domain.

But is my site really optimized?

International SEO is a complex process as it involved several variables like the local language and the local search engines. Most of the SEO companies optimize for Google - what do you do in China - there is no Google? What do you do in Japan - where mobile internet is the norm and Yahoo is the most preferred search engine.

International SEO needs to be an important element in your online marketing strategy for the new geography. Now why go through the entire process of keyword selection and web page optimization with an SEO agency? Say for example you are a website selling ‘car insurance’.  The correct translation of this into French would be ‘assurance voiture’ where ‘car’ equals ‘voiture’ and ‘assurance’ equals ‘insurance’ which does see a small number of searches.  However, most search volume is for ‘assurance auto’ where ‘auto’ is an abbreviated form of ‘automobile’.

Few companies take time to research their global export or marketing programs. Research does not have to be expensive and time consuming. For example say you want to check if the geography that you are entering has an appetite for videos. You have an entire library of videos but they all happen to be in English – it will take another 3 months to translate them or redo them with local characters. A quick method would be to create tags in the local language for the video – and add in local subtitles to the videos. Watch the viral effect of the videos – for the number of views and comments that people add to it – this can be basis for you to actually spend time and money recreating the video.

Some of the common mistakes made by Fortune 500 companies in the international arena.

1. Directly Translating keywords

2. Using a dot com

3.Same URL’s for different language pages

Listen to our free webinar on International SEO where we look at some of these mistakes and look at some of the best practices for optimizing your international website.

http://www.regalix.com/index.php/international-seo-101

Riding the Marketing Highway

If you searched on the keyword “oil spill” (937M+ results) on Google you will discover that BP is bidding on the keyword to hit the top spot. Their ad tells the curious that the link will provide information on the spill and BP’s effort in helping.  BP did not stop at this one keyword but extended it  right into the realm of the long tail with keyword like “deepwater horizon explosion causes” (down to 2M+ search results). The company extended its paid search to News (ok), Books (?), Shopping (??), Discussions (not bad) and if you are in map section searching for “deepwater horizon oil spill” you will find the BP ad pointing you in the right (?) direction!

BP bidding on the keyword oil spill

Why is EzLocalJobFind.com paying for the keyword - oil spill on Yahoo??

BTW the keyword “oil spill lawsuits” brought up 16M hits  on Google with Beasley Allen as the sole advertiser (they claim on their website -www.oil-spill.com to have filed a class action lawsuit on the oil spill).

Other lawyers are following suit…putting out paid ads on Bing:

Clearly BP is rushing to Google paid search as better alternative to its own PR in a desperate attempt at opinion damage control. Having failed in the social media (read BPGlobalPR on Twitter that gained 146,000 followers in 4-5 weeks; BP Corporate Twitter feed has 13,000 only)

Fake BP GlobalPR Feed

Not for the first time

Companies have turned to Search Engine Marketing  for purposes other than pure marketing in the past also.  November last year Google put out a paid ad on the keyword “Michelle Obama” on image search, offering their apology over offensive search results.

Really putting your money where your mouth is!

Concerns about online privacy and limits to data sharing have dominated the social media waves over last few weeks. First Zuckerman blazed away with Open Graph, relegating any concerns  about privacy to something very old fashioned. He then made a quick U turn and promised to simplify privacy settings on Facebook  (whose security settings are not less daunting than setting the winking clock on a old VCR -if you are old enough to remember).

Then the shoe dropped loudly with a research report from PEW  Internet revealing than 71% of youngsters (ages 18-29) have changed the privacy settings to limit sharing information about themselves. 47% of this age group removed unwanted comments from others from their sites and 41%  turned to anonymity by removing their names from photos/tagged photos.

Quite the opposite to being social!

This undercurrent has been simmering for some time. Previous surveys conducted by CareerBuilder and Microsoft have established that young job seekers were being rejected because of content on their Facebook pages or online photo albums. In fact college grads have been creating profiles with incomplete names or fake alias just to escape the unwarranted  attention from Recruitment Managers or overzealous Admission Officers. (See the blog post on Hiring in a social world…)

Social Media: Enjoy responsibly

But wait the research report from PEW shows something else, something far more deep-

“There are good reasons to be more vigilant. Online reputation matters; 44% of online adults have searched for information about someone whose services or advice they seek in a professional capacity. People are now more likely to work for an employer that has policies about how they present themselves online and co-workers and business competitors now keep closer tabs on one another. Those who are dating are more likely to research their potential mates online. And even neighbors have become more curious about finding information about one another online. Yet, even those who are careful about their own disclosures have to stay on top of the identifying material that others may have posted about them on social networking profiles, photo- and video-sharing sites, Twitter, and blogs.”

So now you have to be watchful not only from your current and future employer(s) but also from your neighbors, advice seekers or (if Google Goggles goes mainstream) from casual passersby in the street lest their Driods dredge up information about you from social networks !!!

A 1984 gone wild?

Hard to reconcile this trend with huge response to services like Bliipy and Swipely?

Maybe demography is the answer.

Last January Microsoft commissioned a survey  involving 2500 Recruiting Professionals, HR and consumers.  The results were startling for job seekers in the US.  Three out of four said that reviewing online information has become a part of the formal hiring process. 79% said that they research on candidates online, Googling or trolling Facebook or YouTube and picture sharing sites. A whooping 70% admitted that they have rejected candidates based on what they saw in the online profiles!!!

Law Governing Equal Opportunity

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination against a job applicant or an employee because of the person’s race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information. Title VII goes further to prohibits discrimination against an individual because of his or her association with another individual of a particular race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

Is the act of rejecting an applicant based on his/her social media profile an act of denying opportunity without any sufficient cause? Is EEOC aware of this widespread practice?

Never asked  Don’t tell?

On the question that whether the recruiting manager had conveyed the reasons for such rejection to the candidates, 80% responded positively. However, according to another report in the media not many applicants were aware of the reasons why they had been dropped!

Moral Police at Play?

Going into the reasons of rejections, the survey found that 55% filtering were filtered out due to “inappropriate” photos & videos, 58% on lifestyle and… here is the kicker- 43% due to inappropriate comments by friends/relatives.

So if you happen to be active on social media, the recruitment apparatus will come after you with a giant magnifying glass.

In another survey June last, Career Builder found the following reasons why employers disregard candidates after screening:

35% of employers reported they have found content on social networking sites that caused them not to hire the candidate, including:

Reasons for rejection

So more candidates were being dropped because of photographs from spring breaks or a dislike about boasting of binge drinking, than by more disturbing issues from employment perspective.

Social Media policy or covert surveillance by HR?

Does this smack of overtones of hypocrisy from HR managers? If HR is so concerned with “the right image” of their company, are they also keeping a tab on online activities of their current employees, to check if someone from the herd is not indulging in the same actions for which the future employees are being screened out?

Maybe we will have to wait for another survey from Microsoft to get an answer to that one.

Protection or?

Clearly unbridled (and unreasonable) use of social media by the “moral police” is tilting the playing field away from those entering into the job market. No wonders young college grads have started camouflaging their online profiles, hiding their full names, shying away from Facebook and shunning Twitter out in favor of more private and inaccessible SMS and text messaging.

Maybe it is time for lawmakers to step in and beef up the Civil Rights Act to prohibit discrimination based on content found through online trolling and social media interactions without a strong probable cause.  Bar hopping in the college, or frat party photos should not disqualify a candidate. For then almost no one, including many of the hiring managers practicing such filtering should have been allowed to hold his or her jobs.

Action to extend the Employment Laws is going to be critical because the same survey found that 83%  of hiring managers surveyed in US believed that this trend is going to increase in the next 5 years. Without some protection of Law the future candidates will be even more vulnerable as social media expands and reaches deeper into every aspect of our daily existence.

You can download the full report (87 slides) commissioned by Microsoft here.

Last week at  Search Engine Strategies show in New York City, Yusuf Mehdi,  the Search Boss at Bing, admitted that Microsoft neglected the long tail of search “We missed the boat early on that the focus was about the long tail,“. He went on to say “… it turned out the long tail was much more important.” This, of course,  caused a ripple in the media and everyone weighed in with their own angle on this revelation.

For those of us, neck deep in the thicket of search engine marketing this did not come as a surprise.  For the word on the street has always been that Google’s had (and still has) the biggest lead on indexing of the long tail keywords. Their gargantuan index has helped Google’s ranking algorithm to match the queries exactly to the desired content, much faster. It also helped small advertisers by providing them an an affordable way of  generating leads through paid search in the face of stiff competition.

Everyone believed  that Yahoo tried to play a catchup unsuccessfully a few years ago.  Now it looks like  the long tail fell into Bing’s blindside too.  This is interesting if you consider that as far back as in 2006 Google search mandarins had let out that every year they had seen one out of four queries coming straight out of the blue.  Mehdi bumped this up to 33%!

Clearly this immense diversity in search has been growing at a phenomenal pace and customers using search engines have been literally shouting at the top of their voices. Apparently not everyone was listening!

Long tail keywords work in interesting manner. They do not help as much in discovering new content as  assisting in discovering information in new and different ways.  This nature of the long tail has been a boon to  advertisers in optimizing  their paid search very effectively, enabling them to generate lead volume at manageable cost of acquisition (check out our white paper Flick of the Long Tail)

The Long tail went out of focus after a brief period of limelight when Chris Anderson analyzed data from AOL web site hits. Last year Avinash redrew attention to its charms through his excellent blog post.

A little noticed development (maybe because it slide under the radar) was Google’s attempt to limit use of long tail keywords for bidding. The Help on Adword Search Center states (emphasis are mine)

“A keyword can have low search volume for a variety of reasons, including a lack of relevance to users’ searches because of keyword obscurity, specificity, or a significant misspelling of the intended keyword.”  Google attributes this changes  to “… helps AdWords serve ads more efficiently and reduces the volume of keywords on our system” (overstrained infrastructure?). They go on to say… “It takes very little search traffic for a keyword to be unsuspended, and for business practice reasons we don’t disclose our keyword traffic thresholds.”

Maybe forcing most advertisers to bid on high impression and highly competitive keywords is one such business practice?

So after establishing their supremacy in long tail keywords, is Google current move to suppress long tail a move to strengthen the search giants bottom line…the proverbial Chinese Long March or will turn out to be the Long Walk of Navajos!

Question: With Google ceding  the territory and Bing not focused on this segment, who will step in?

Perhaps this is an opportunity for Tier II search engines who have been waiting in the wings  or for an entirely new kid on the block!

The two and half hour social media boot camp at Four Seasons, Palo Alto, drew participants from both large and small companies in the Bay Area. The group had strong representation from Business-to-Business and Direct to Consumer companies.

Not surprisingly majority of the participants were already experimenting with Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin YouTube and blogs. They talked about issues ranging from privacy yet effective communication to measuring ROI, to challenges in content generation & distribution and wondered if the channel was right for them.

Our Social Media Maturity framework below triggered animated discussion. With over 5508 (on a last count in December 2009) social networks and social sites, it soon became apparent that a structural approach will need to replace any tactical one.

Most of the participants have either moved into or on the verge of moving in from Level 1 to Level 2. Few were actively thinking ahead to step into the Social Leverage stage. Fewer still were thinking about the loosing control at this level when the social campaigns starts spreading wider and user generated content overtakes any corporate restrictions.

Social media commitments touch a much wider universe due to the channels relational nature.

The idea of eliciting firm commitment from all stakeholders met with lot of interest (and groans!)

Social Media Stakeholders

Execution of social media programs inline with the level of maturity provoked wider response. Everyone was in agreement with the changing landscape of buyer-seller relationship and its impact delivered through social media. With customers taking up the center stage in the process, businesses have to find innovative ways to interact with them at every stage of the buying cycle.

Social Media changing customer relationship

Several participants were curious about emerging area of custom social media applications as an effective vehicles to connect and expand the reach

social media custom apps

Platforms like Linkedin provide a perfect medium where businesses can setup Thought Leadership groups by bringing professionals together. Such groups serve to level the plying field effectively to the advantage of small businesses in the engagement process. Some companies, like Compliance Online have gone a step further and created their own social community for the maximum social leverage

Measuring impact of social media and ROI threw up another interesting round of discussion. While everyone was clear on the business goals, companies are still focusing more on channel level performance. This often happens as there is a tendency to equate social media with online marketing media and apply channel metrics to gauge performance. This is not accurate because social media is not of a homogeneous character (interaction on Facebook are not the same as video views on infotainment nature of YouTube). Then there is a clear trend that social media creates combined impact at the business level.

There was a wider consensus that traffic/views metrics, by themselves, are not indicator of ROI.

Are these your social media goals too?

While we agreed that not all business goals can be achieved for all companies through the social media, the field is wide open. Some companies are finding achieving one subset of goals easier while others find better performance from a different set. Businesses need to follow their likely target prospects to their favorite hangouts. The goal selection will firm up as more trends on industry/vertical emerge.

Another interesting feedback was on the ease of measuring key performance indicators. The general opinion was that this problem will disappear as better (and integrated) tools become available.

Do you agree?

Our next camp will be coming up soon! Stay Tuned!

Microsoft which has been known to make things simpler for the common user like in the case of the PC – this time it has done so for SEO. With the plethora of tools claiming to be better than the other Microsoft has gone ahead and introduced a free tool that open the doors to webmasters. There’s growing need for a free search engine optimization toolkit which is tailored to all the major search engines namely Bing, Yahoo and Google. Wasting no time, Microsoft’s SEO Toolkit is one such tool which has a lot to offer at one go allowing webmasters and web administrators to adapt their sites not just to Bing, but also to Google and Yahoo.

The IIS SEO Toolkit can be used to analyze web sites to serve to purpose of optimizing sites content, structure and URLs for search engine crawlers. The tool focuses on discovery and fixing of problems related to web-sites and their optimization with regards to SEO. The toolkit includes a web crawler which crawls publicly available site links and resources which are needed or viewed for site analysis.
“The free SEO Toolkit analyzer helps you increase traffic and visitors to your site, and as a result can increase the revenue you directly or indirectly make through your website,” notes Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president, Microsoft.

The Toolkit

The IIS Toolkit focuses upon search engine visibility and site quality. The reports generated by this toolkit simplifies finding problems which could be like a detailed information on slow loading pages or broken links, in-turn helping you to improve customer experience on your web site.
Once the tool is fed with the top-level URL of your website, it simply crawls just like the way any search engine does, looking into the HTML, links, content, etc of every page providing you with inputs from an SEO perspective with recommendations to overcome content violations such as duplicates,etc. Helping you to optimize and clean the site. Unlike Google webmaster, which puts out a code (a tracker) which needs to be embedded into the code of your Home page, this tool gets this information out in the open.

The tool also looks into managing sitemaps and robots.txt files. Sitemaps provide URLs for crawling to

search engine crawlers and the robots.txt files show search engine crawlers as to which URLs are excluded from the crawling process.

Extensions

The tool churns out many built in reports. It also allows us to create our own custom reports. Customization of reports can be done in two ways:

• By creating our own definitions of violations and warnings, so that when the IIS SEO Toolkit crawls your Web site, the reports include the new information that you want to collect.
• We can also extend the user console of the tool for new tasks in the site analysis, robots and sitemaps management tools.

A search engine point of view

The search engine counts the number of pages on the Internet that link to a particular URL and uses this number (no of pages) as part of the criteria to determine the relevancy of the content.
Ex: If 100 pages link to a certain URL which is talking about a certain topic, search engines will assume that the content on that has higher relevancy than a URL with the same topic and having only 10 links to it.

It is really important for us to drill down and look upon the case sensitivity of URLs that search engines look at. Search engines treat differently cased URLs as different actual URLs. This means to say that /image.aspx and /Image.aspx will never be treated as one and the same; these will always be treated as two different URLs by a search engine. Likewise, the incoming links do get distributed accordingly and hence not crediting the images page as being as relevant as it should be. Thus, it is very important to “find and fix” such differently cases URLs within the site.

Summary

The Tool is definitely power packed as it’s got a lot to offer the webmasters looking out for a cleaner, search engine optimized site. Apart from these mentioned capabilities, the tool provides an integrated set of tools that work together and focus upon better optimization of web sites and increase their relevancy. Identifying and fixing violations and content issues and fixing all the issues making the site highly relevant. Once a report is generated, it will show up in the list of the previous ones generated within the IIS admin tool earlier. You can always right click and re-run it by validating that no regressions have been introduced.

It’s been a while since my last posting and a lot has happened in the marketing world. I figured that with the recent spate of interesting developments, the timing would be right to post my next blog update. Here are some of the newsworthy developments in the blogosphere and my personal views on them…

Google and China – Starting off with the news that’s been dominating all the RSS feeds and blog posts…Will they or won’t they? Will Google finally take a stand and walk out of a booming market or will they bow down to the higher powers. While Google in the past had agreed to censor search results in accordance with government policies in China, it is no longer willing to do so. Miffed at the reports about hacking of personal email accounts of human rights activist, Google threatened to take its business out of the China market. However, as I write, the analysts are still speculating on what will be the outcome of this tug-of-war. While on one end, Google is talking about the right to free information and privacy laws, on the other end China is questioning the double standards by Google. Several cyber-security experts claim that “e-mail hacker had obtained the e-mail information by accessing Google’s own internal intercept system - a program designed to enable Google to collect user information in response to US government demands.” While I firmly believe in freedom of speech and information, I also wish that all the facts come out in the open before we make any judgments on this issue.. More details on this here. Also read Google’s official statement here

Pepsi and Superbowl – As we all get ready for the superbowl on Feb 7th, the part which interests me the most are its commercials. The ads make more sense to me than the actual sport, especially given its impact on the marketing world and also our pop culture. Starting from the Apple ad way back in 1984 to Doritos ad created by its fans in 2007, they are often the most talked about even years after the game. This year it will be no different! Given the recession last year and the companies that came out of it…there is a whole lot of curiosity on the ads that will be on. People are speculating about a gay dating site to web-hosting service to a well-loved animal protection group. One key player that has opted to stay out of the superbowl race this year is Pepsi..surprising but true! While analysts think it might be a recessionary cutback, the marketing folks at Pepsi say it’s not a budgetary move rather a strategic move.. Instead of usual Superbowl ad this year, they are investing close to $20M to believe it or not…a community! While analysts are claiming this to be a bold move, I personally think this is a sign of things to come. While it pays to have a boom-splash once in a while, but when it comes to reaching out to consumers and creating a dialogue with them, communities are the way to go. Read this article for more details

Look forward to your comments, views, suggestions and feedback.