Tom Bright
Internet Marketing Specialist

Google announced this week that they are encrypting searches for users logged in by default. What that means to the search industry is that search queries won’t be available for reporting within Google Analytics, nor will they be available from referring search URLs. The data is available at a roll-up level, however term-level detail for visitors to your site that were logged into Google will NOT be available.

Danny Sullivan  over at Search Engine Land reported having spoken with Matt Cutts (Google engineer extraordinaire) and Matt estimates that the overall impact will be in the “single-digit” percentages of all Google searchers.

While this sweeping statement and generalization of impact may give some people a sense of security, I believe we need to stop and give pause to the potential impact to this change.

The vertical you are targeting and your demographic could greatly affect how your data gaps may appear. People in a more technology-driven vertical may see larger gaps, as users in that vertical tend to be the first in adopting a technology or tool like Google+.

The folks at Search Engine People have a great graph of searchers per month that utilize Google: 1 billion. So, we have a baseline estimate.

Google uses a unified log-in. So if you use ANY Google service, such as Google+ or even Gmail, you log in. Out of convenience you stay logged in. Google+ announced it’s at 40 Million users recently. At the end of 2010 Google announced that Gmail (their most-used communcations app) and other business apps are available to 3 Million businesses and 10 million students.  Based on an article last year by the BBC, estimates place Gmail usage at 170 Million  users.

Another part we need to look at is the mobile market. Based on an estimate in July, the overall user estimation is 130M in July with 500K + being activated a day. Every Android phone that searches with Google will be encrypted and their queries will not be available.

Just examining usage from Gmail alone places 17% of that estimated 1 Billion users squarely within the sites of potential “logged” in user accounts. Adding another 130 million users for Mobile, allowing for some overlap, the estimate can easily be well over 20% rather quickly.

If you use Gmail as a business service like we do here at Parallel Path, then you stay logged in all day long. Any time you search for something, no one will know what you searched for. This has huge impact potential for verticals such as B2B or Technology, where potentially large chunks of users use services from Google on a daily basis as a way of life.

Something tells me this “single-digit” exposure Matt Cutts is estimating could be a bit more when you step in and start looking closer by vertical. We will keep you posted on what we notice!

Bryan Connally
Staff Internet Marketing Specialist

Some background info on Google +1:

• - Google has stated that “+1″ for websites will be used as a social signal to help determine a page’s relevance for a particular search query and ultimately its ranking. This will likely be rolled out in a controlled manner so that Google can ascertain how the new signal might be manipulated. It is therefore unlikely that it will have much effect on the rankings in the short term.

• - Google has also stated that the “+1″ for websites may cause “Google to crawl or recrawl the page, and store the page title and other content, in response to a +1 button impression or click.”

• - A page’s +1 activity will show up visually within the SERPs which could potentially increase the click-through rate of individual search results. In the beginning, Google only showed +1 within the SERPs to users that were logged into their Google accounts and had opted into the +1 program. In recent days, however, the +1 has begun to roll out for all users, regardless of whether they are logged in or not.

• - There has been some indication that Bing will be using the +1 button as a ranking signal. This, however, is very preliminary and may change.

Risks & Benefits:
As in the case of the Facebook “like” button, the Google “+1″ button does not have a negative counterpart. On Facebook, there is no way to “unlike” or “dislike” something. The same goes for “+1″. There is no “-1″ option so the downside is minimal to nonexistent. Therefore, there is no potential risk for a small subset of disgruntled customers to hijack the technology for their own means.

One risk of the technology is that if a brand were to implement the button and subsequently attain very few +1s relative to their competitors, this could be used as an indicator by search engines that a site is less relevant than others within the same comparison set  (at least against those competitors that are participating).

Another potential risk associated with the +1 button is forcing users to choose. For many users, the Facebook “like” button is the method for sharing web content in a social manner. Very few users are going to both “like” and “+1″ something. It is redundant. The negative risk in this scenario is that involvement with either one is diluted across twice as many social technologies as before. It is our feeling that Google will normalize growth rates for Google +1s and Facebook Likes to compensate for this, so the risk is again minimal. We tend to believe that a site  not participating is probably more detrimental to rank than diluting overall involvement.

David DuBois
Search Engine Optimization Specialist

June 20, 2011 – The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) made an announcement that it would open its list of generic top-level domains (gTLDs) to anyone willing to dish out the $185,000 application fee. Registration for these domains will be open from January 12 to April 12, 2012, and will be able to end in almost any word, in any language, such as .hosting.

The decision to release the gTLDs comes after years of discussion and deliberation between businesses, governments and the online community. The Applicant Guidebook has gone through seven revisions to integrate more than a thousand comments from the public.

“ICANN has opened the Internet’s naming system to unleash the global human imagination. Today’s decision respects the rights of groups to create new Top Level Domains in any language or script. We hope this allows the domain name system to better serve all of mankind,” said Rod Beckstrom, President and Chief Executive Officer of ICANN.

Unleashing the global human imagination doesn’t come cheap. In addition to the $185,000 application fee, the application itself is several hundred pages long.

There is an annual fee to ICANN for $25,000, along with the cost of running the domain suffix, which can be anywhere between $10,000 to millions of dollars.

Additional fees, including set-up, maintenance, legal fees and security evaluation fees add another $50,000 to the price tag.

The cost of acquiring your own domain suffix doesn’t make sense for most companies.  “For us, the domains seem expensive and offer negligible value,” said Jeff Brown, spokesman for Electronic Arts, Inc.

Competition for some domains may end up in an auction, sending companies into a bidding war for the most sought after domain extensions. Winners will also be determined by their financial and technological capabilities, as well as their intentions for the domain.

For businesses, having a web address that reflects their name can benefit both branding and security. The question becomes: what domain extension will businesses and trademark lawyers go after? Would Claussen go after .claussen or claussen.kraft? Are their lawyers filling out the ICANN application right now, trying to be the first to purchase .pickles? Perhaps the new influx of domain extensions will make it more difficult (and expensive) for firms to decide how to establish their web presence. It will also make it more confusing for Internet users, most of whom search for brands using the dot-com extension, and are mostly unwilling to change their search behavior.

In April 2011 there were more than 211 million domains in the world, with more than half using the dot-com suffix. There are currently 22 possible domain endings, all of which you can acquire affordably through a domain name registration company like Verio.com. You can also check if your desired domain name is available by using Whois, a domain name lookup tool that tells you who owns a domain, for how long and when it expires.

Those who are considering applying for a gTLD to benefit their Search Engine Optimization efforts, think again. Because the Search Engines don’t use the gTLD as a ranking signal, there are minimal SEO benefits.

“A website would be much better off investing their resources into measurable online marketing campaigns, rather than spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a domain extension,” said John Schoofs, Director of Web Analytics at Parallel Path, Inc.

Unless you are in the business of buying and selling domain names, the costs heavily outweigh the benefits for acquiring a gTLD. Small and midsize businesses should consider sticking with the dot-com extension and allocating their marketing dollars through paid search advertising, SEO and Social Media efforts.

We will have to wait until next January to see the effect that these new gTLDs will have on the Internet and search, but as for now, don’t ditch the dot-com.

Tracy Earles
VP of Marketing

Search marketing is much more difficult than five years ago. Why? And why should it matter to you? Can’t a company run its own search marketing campaigns?

The main reason that search marketing is more difficult is that it is more competitive. Advertising dollars are fleeing traditional media, like TV or print, and moving into online media. Take a look at these advertising expenditure numbers from TNS Media Intelligence compared to Google financials:

These ad dollars have come to online marketing, particularly to search marketing, because it is both effective and so much easier to measure.

This shift in marketing spending to online tools is driving up the competitiveness of two key portions of search marketing, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and search engine optimization (SEO). There is increasing demand for a limited resource, clicks or eyes, making the price go up. Clicks, and their resulting revenue, are more expensive; SEO-driven rankings are more challenging.

Not only is there more demand for clicks, but Google and the other engines are designed to extract the maximum amount value for each click. This is why it makes sense to have an agency manage your PPC campaign. More specifically, there are several advantages to using an agency to run PPC, rather than trying to do it yourself:

1. Keyword research. You probably think you know the best keywords to use to drive profitable clicks. To us, this list is just the starting point, because the list likely consists of the most expensive keywords. We continuously run experiments to develop a broader set of keywords to drive click costs down.
2. Experience. We know all of the engines, how they work (or don’t), and how they’re changing. Our search marketing specialists train constantly to ensure they’re taking advantage of the latest tools and techniques. We also know what has worked for other clients that we can leverage for your benefit.
3. Changing PPC landscape. As mentioned earlier, the search engines are constantly working to extract the maximum value for a click. That means that, even if you’re running a finely tuned PPC campaign, the landscape is constantly changing. For instance, as new advertisers enter or existing advertisers change their tactics, they will affect your PPC performance. PPC campaigns require constant monitoring and improvement.
4. Contacts. Even the best-run campaigns can be surprised by unexpected search engine behavior. When something unexpected happens, we have quality contacts, be it representatives with the search engines themselves, bloggers, or business contacts, who we can call quickly for answers, rather than wait for boilerplate support replies.
5. Peace of mind. It is a huge benefit to know that your PPC campaign is being run professionally and that it’s working as it should.

It’s not just PPC that requires a professional agency to maximize performance. SEO is an even more difficult challenge for the non-professional. Why?

While search engines provide tools and guidance to help advertisers maximize their paid search performance, they offer no assistance to help companies maximize their organic search results. The search algorithms employed by all of the major search engines are constantly changing and are a closely guarded secret because these algorithms are the core of the engines’ competitive positioning. They are constantly changing because the engines are always trying to present the most relevant results to searchers, and search behavior is changing (i.e., people search differently and for different things now).

In addition to this changing search environment, the search engine optimizer must also deal with competing companies who constantly attempt to decipher the algorithm and take advantage of it. These dynamic search and competitive conditions require us to pursue the same kind of constant study and experimentation in SEO as we do in PPC.

In the same way that ad dollars have flowed into paid search, driving up the cost of clicks, investment in SEO management has increased as well. That means that, for a given keyword, there is a constant ‘arms race’ for results page supremacy. If you’re not constantly investing in SEO, then you’re doomed to slide down the results.

So, can a company run its own search marketing campaigns? Sure. But a search marketing agency, that does nothing but work to maximize search return on investment and can leverage the experience developed from a broad range of clients and campaigns, will always be able to deliver superior performance.

Lora Baker
Internet Marketing Specialist

For a Technical Writing class back in 1996, one of my homework assignments involved looking up eight different well-known phrases on six different search engines. This was before the days when students all had laptops, so I trudged over to the library to start my assignment. I wasn’t even 100% certain what the internet was, and had no idea what a search engine was, but even back then it was not hard to figure out. All I remember about the assignment was this; after five fruitless searches on five useless search engines, I came to my last one – Yahoo. Begrudgingly, I typed in www.yahoo.com, and was astounded to find that every single phrase on my list produced a list of results on Yahoo. My world had been forever altered. From that day on, any research or information that I needed came from Yahoo or later, other search engines.

Internet-savvy companies probably used Yahoo even back then to sell products. Thirteen years later, search engines have changed the way that most companies market themselves and their products. The internet has gone from an almost unknown entity to become the number one way most people find information. As a result, many companies have found that online marketing is an excellent addition to traditional marketing methods for introducing their business to the world.

There are two main methods utilized in Search Engine Marketing (SEM). The first method is Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Marketing. With PPC, businesses bid on keywords (or phrases) through search engine sites (such as Google and Yahoo), and these keywords elevate that business’ ad about their product to the first page of the search results so that their ad will display on the top or to the right of the natural search listings, in the “Sponsored Listings” sections). Each time someone clicks on their ad, that business is charged a ‘click’ charge based on their keyword bid and the competition of the keyword. For example; Percept Technology Labs, a hardware testing and compliance lab, bid on the phrase “consumer electronics product test lab.” Anytime someone searches for the term “consumer electronics product test lab” on Google, Percept’s ad appears on the top or to the right of the natural search results.

The other method frequently associated with SEM is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Search Engine Optimization involves designing an entire page on your website based around one or two keywords, phrases or topics. The goal of SEO is to have your website appear on the first page of the search results in one of the top natural search listings. When a user clicks a natural search listing (as opposed to one of the sponsored search listings), there is no cost to the company. The trick of SEO is building your website the right way, and then changing it often enough so that the search engines continue to find it relevant to the keyword(s) you are targeting. Research has shown that close to 70% of searchers will click on a natural search result, while the other 30% click on Sponsored Search Listings. This statistic alone should encourage companies to focus on SEO along with PPC.

What is so important on the search results page (particularly page one), is real estate. The more times that your company name displays on this results page after a relevant keyword to your company has been typed in, the more likely a customer will click to your site. So, for Percept Technology Labs, if a user searches on “consumer electronics product test lab,” the ideal result would be to appear not only in the sponsored listings, but high in the natural listings as well. If the user sees Percept at the top of the page, and then again in the top of the natural search listings, the likelihood of that user clicking on a Percept link climbs upward of 85% (? -help here please). Displaying in both the sponsored listing as well as the natural listing shows the relevancy of your company to the keyword that the user searched on.

Today, Yahoo still exists as a search engine, although it’s not the premier engine that it may have been back in the late 90s. The search engine concept has definitely changed the way that companies increase their customer base. As companies struggle to increase, or even maintain business in a weakening economy, internet marketing is an important aspect of a complete marketing effort. By using both PPC advertising and Search Engine Optimization in your internet marketing efforts, you are giving your company the best exposure you can on the internet.