Facebook continues to expand its offering on a monthly basis with recent releases like the Open Graph and “Like” button. They are now turning their attention towards local marketing. As with all of Facebook’s new initiatives, most of the online chatter is asking how Google intends to combat this and, more importantly, how it will position itself as a leading social decision making engine.

There is no doubt Facebook will put Google under pressure, but a lot of the claims regarding Google’s demise are wide of the mark. Although Google is losing market share to Yahoo and Bing, we shouldn’t forget along with their search dominance, they also have a 98% share in mobile and are banking on location based marketing for mobile being a considerable revenue stream.

In relation to search, there has been a lot of misinformation recently on how Facebook, Twitter and other social metrics are affecting search results. There is no evidence of metrics from these properties being used in the main algorithm however they may use social metrics when applying their QDF algorithm. Dave Harry has some great information on this subject in the post “The Evolution of Ranking Signals: Google is Getting Past the Link”. It discusses how Google can move towards behavioural data and social data. If the search engine results are based on those areas it becomes more difficult to rank a website based on spam tactics. You are not going to spam yourself (behavioural) and will not build a network of obvious spammers (social).

Google has its own social graph through user’s Google profile which, if connected to their Twitter, Flickr, Picasa and friend feed accounts, provides Google with plenty of social content which can then use to enhance a person’s search results. These ‘social results’ were rolled out recently in Google US and Google UK but are still in beta.

Alongside Google’s own social graph, it already has a wealth of information on users’ online behavior and tastes through their past search history. Personalised search means results are no longer the same for each user. They now include Google Maps, Google Places results, tweets, and forum results, all relevant to the user who is searching.

In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, explains that Google already roughly ‘knows who you are and where you are’, and from past searches what you like. Google’s goal is not to simply return a list of the best results for a given search, but to tell you ‘what you should be doing next’.

Search Marketing Expo (SMX) Advanced was held in London on Monday and Tuesday of  this week. It was the first time the event took place outside of the U.S and some of the brightest minds in search, social media and analytics were in attendance. Each session provided a wealth of information and pages of notes. The following is a quick overview from Kieran Flanagan (from our search team) who jotted down a few key points to share with all those involved in search marketing.

SEO

1. Twitter: Tweets are or will play an important role in SEO rankings. They are already a factor in Google’s QDF (Quality Deserves Freshness) algorithm, which aims to show recent content for trending topics. There is a great example of this in action during Tiger Woods return to golf, check out the full post here.
2. Facebook: The Google link economy is not in immediate danger from the Facebook “Like” button. At present only 50,000 sites have integrated this functionality, from 85 million root domains. This is 0.06% of all websites. The panel also discussed Facebooks issues with privacy settings as a potential issue if they did ever want to challenge Google with a search engine of their own.
3. Authority: It’s getting harder to rank internal pages in Google based on the domain authority alone. Google introduced a number of changes in January that favored niche websites. Internal pages should be part of a sites overall strategic link campaign. Links to these pages should be varied (including brand and long tail phrases).
4. The 301 Redirect: The 301 redirect leaks pagerank and cannot be relied on when moving domains. There was a lot of debate around this topic and if the canonical tag could be used instead of a 301 redirect.
5. Link Building: InfluenceFinder could be a great link building tool. It find’s the most authoritative sites in your market to get links from. There is a great review from WIEP.net on this.
6. Internal Links: Read Googles Reasonable Surfer patent. It’s an extremely important topic. It discusses the value of links. Not every link from a page in a link-based ranking system is equal, and a search engine might look at a wide range of factors to determine how much weight each link on a page will pass along. Really interesting read. Quick tip on this is, links at the top of a page are given more weight.
7. Microformats: Microformats will be extremely important in the future of search and organic CTR as it makes your free search listing stand out from the rest. Booking.com and Yelp are two companies who have integrated these. Here is a great post on this subject by Econsultancy.

PPC Tactics

1. Broad match should only be used as a research tool. It provides initial research for a campaign. Keywords should then be elevated in a tiered structure to phrase and then exact match.
2. Negative keywords should be an integral part of your overall PPC strategy. The use of negative keywords can improve all aspects of your campaign performance.
3. There were some really good examples of companies working with the Google Adwords API to build dynamic Adword campaigns. Great opportunities for complex accounts.
4. Session based targeting causes all kind of strange results for exact match reports. There were great examples given, using the Impressions Share report.
5. From research presented around multi touch point funnels, out of 30,000 transactions, only 9% were assisted, 4.5% started with a non-branded keyword and .9% started with a non-branded keyword and ended with a branded keyword. The overall study provided some interesting figures.

Check back for our follow up post covering Social Media & Analytics.

Comscore recently revealed Smartphone adoption in the EU5 (UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy) has grown 32% over the past year and some analysts project location-based mobile spending will top $4 billion in 2015 (currently $34 million). Net effect: mobile marketing is set to become a critical part of a brands overall marketing strategy.

Diana Pouliot, Director of Mobile Advertising at Google, recently spoke at a Mobile Marketing & Advertising event in Las Vegas, where she revealed one-third of all Google searches via the mobile web pertain to some aspect of the searcher’s local environment. This highlights the importance of “local-intent” when it comes to mobile advertising. This reference to the importance of local and relevant search through mobile devices was again referenced by Ronan Harris, Director of Online Sales, Google Europe, at last week’s National Digital Media and Marketing Summit.

With Google’s personalised web based searches now corresponding with a user’s online profile, the dominance of personalised marketing is set to be a huge factor on mobile devices.

Ireland’s Digital Media Future by Minister Eamon Ryan. from Cybercom on Vimeo.

Cybercom’s insights from the 2010 National Digital Media & Marketing Summit. from Cybercom on Vimeo.

At a recent Pubcon event in Las Vegas, Matt Cutts suggested that 2010 would be the year of speed and this would start to count as a ranking factor. Now even though there are over 200 ranking factors in the algorithm and each is weighted differently, it’s still something to keep in mind. There are a number of things you can do to improve the speed of your site:

1. Quality Hosting and Compressions – Maybe Google will come out with their own hosting package next year. But it will definitely pay to be on a quality hosting package and one that supports GZIP compressions

2. Use Google AJAX Libraries API – You can host your Jscript libraries on Google ensuring your code is directly served from Google’s network.

3. Don’t cripple your site with embedded media and Flash

4. You can replace existing GA code with their new asynchronous tracking.

5. Keep an eye on HTML and CSS – There is often a lot of code bloat in websites. It’s always a good idea to look through your code and look for opportunities to slim it down.

6. Finally you can test the speed of individual pages using Google’s page speed tool.

Hot on the heels of Google Analytics Intelligence, Google has now added another really cool feature Annotations. This is another great addition and makes it easier to share collaborative knowledge around change in traffic patterns. Annotations allow users to add notes against stand out traffic patterns.

If you are a large company that has multiple departments, trying to work out what caused a spike or dip in traffic can be a real pain. Now you can have one standard login and allow teams to add notes against relevant dates. This will allow you to match up any online or offline activity against changes in traffic. Pretty cool !!!

Adding to its list of recent developments, Google is currently trialling out interactive, local search ad formats in the US. The aim is to make search results as relevant and targeted as possible.

To achieve this, Google is looking to add value to search results by integrating more video, pictures, maps, and prices to enhance user search experience. Local maps will help in ‘localization’ of search results while more links within search listings will enable users to reach specific sections of a website instead of the homepage.

This move should help Google keep up with rival Microsoft’s Bing search engine and maintain a majority of the market share.

On the back of concerns from the newspaper industry (lead by Rupert Murdoch), Google has announced plans to limit free access to subscription based content. The First Click Free Programme will allow publishers to limit the amount of free content a user can access. If the user tries to access more than 5 pages from a subscription site, they will be shown a sign up page.

The announcement is a pretty significant move for newspapers who are looking for new ways to generate revenue at a time when both offline sales and ad revenue are dropping. At present publishers have struggled with a business model that will allow consumers to access the news whenever and however they want. The First Click Free programme may be a step towards more publishers charging for premium content.

Source: BBC News

The digital media landscape is a rapidly, ever-changing place, where new platforms rise and fall and the public’s usage can shift overnight. Considering just how quickly the different media channels can change, we decided to do a brief catch up on what’s going on right now.

Big news in the mobile world has come out in the last couple of days in an AdMob report, which confirms Apple‘s iPhone is now the most used smartphone device in the world. Exactly half of all smartphone traffic on the Internet is now coming from iPhones. This represents a 10% gain of absolute share since August. The iPhone’s competitors; BlackBerry, Symbian, and Windows Mobile, have all remained unchanged in the same period.

Ireland’s two most popular Social Media platforms have also seen dramatic changes in the last couple of months. Facebook continues to show impressive growth and now has over 1.1m Irish users at 1,128,220 people. Unfortunately things don’t seem to be on the up and up for Bebo, with their parent company, AOL, slashing jobs and cutting costs all round (including making the Irish Country Sales Manager redundant). So while Bebo still has big numbers, their relevance to an over 20 (or indeed an over 18) demographic is less than it was a mere 6 months ago.

In the world of search Econsultancy has released data estimating that the total UK Search Engine market will be worth in excess of £3bn for 2009. Within this, the paid search marketplace will grow by 12% to a value of £2.71bn, while the organic search market will grow by 14% to £376M. At the same time, however, an Econsultancy UK Search Engine Marketing Report shows findings that only 5% of companies are paying to advertise on mobile search listings. This figures shows no increase on last year.