Google to offer voice search on mobiles November 15, 2008
Category : SEO News, SEO News for Mobile , comments closedGoogle is finally catching up to competitors Microsoft and Yahoo for once. It is rolling out a new application for the iPhone that allows users to conduct searches with their voice rather than typing. Nice of Google to catch on to the voice-activated search craze. Microsoft and Yahoo have offered voice-enable search for some time. Microsoft through its TellMe service and Yahoo through its oneSearch service. Both work pretty well at converting speech into text and delivering relevant results. This is a feature that Google’s services have lacked for too long.
First to get Google’s version of voice search is the iPhone. The New York Times reports that the application will be available through the iPhone Apps Store as early as today, though that is not confirmed by Google or Apple. The Times notes that, “The Google system is far from perfect, and it can return queries that appear as gibberish. Google executives declined to estimate how often the service gets it right, but they said they believed it was easily accurate enough to be useful to people who wanted to avoid tapping out their queries on the iPhone’s touch-screen keyboard.” The application will be free for iPhone users.
How to maxamize Google Adwords November 5, 2008
Category : Traffic Building , 638 commentsGoogle AdWords is Google’s PPC (Pay Per Click) service, webmasters can create their own adverts and choose keywords. so when people search with keywords you purchase, they will see your advert either on top of the search results, as follows;
or over to the right of the results, (see below)
Your placement depends on your keyword bid result, That’s right you bid on search keywords using an auction like system.
The top 3 successful keyword bids place you at the top position (as above), the 4th and so on puts your advert on the right hand side.
You only pay when people click through to your site, and you have total control over the amount of click-troughs you buy or the amount of budget you spend a month. This is how Google makes its money.
Google AdWords is not just for product marketing, or campaign marketing or even, for just paying to increase traffic to your site, although it is all of these things.
In conjunction with Google Analytics, it can be an invaluable market intelligence research tool which can give you a critically important and timely insight into how well your website is performing.
It allows you to estimate over a period of time, what your conversion rate for arriving customers is and since you know exactly what you are bidding and spending to acquire customers, your ROI.
The general idea is as follows, you would essentially be using AdWords to seed interest in your site and then measure the results.
So lets say for example your aim is to sell 100 Widgets over a one month period, or if your not an e commerce site, your aim might be to sign-up 100 users in a month.
But you have just started your website and you don’t have any natural search traffic Google adWords can direct enough people at your website to allow you to work out your conversion rate, your conversion rate is the percentage of people who visit your site that buy something or sign up or whatever your measurement criteria is.
This is the real benefit of Google AdWords, targeted market and customer intelligence, and of course sales conversion
Tags: Google, AdWords, conversion rateAdwords PPC does not increase sales, what can I do? November 4, 2008
Category : Traffic Building , 2 commentsThe hard truth is that if your not making sales via paid PPC advertising the problem is with your website, not with PPC.
You must get your conversion rate up, your best bet is use Adwords to help you to do this, but dont spend all your money, use it to seed and test which keywords convert the best for each 100 users sent via PPC, then change your website home page or navigation, and test again with 100 PPC users, see if your conversion rate increases, rinse repeat
TIP Make landing pages, and point a PPC marketing campaign to it, measure a 100 or 200 PPC, landing pages convert better if targeted at that PPC keyword product or service sector
Tags: Adwords, PPC, adviceWhat is SERP? November 3, 2008
Category : Traffic Building , 918 commentsSERP (in the SEO world) is an acronym for Search Engine Results Page, it measures your organic search rank through a search website like Google or Yahoo, note: it is very common to have different SERP rankings between different search providers even using the exactly the same search keywords.
Whats is the difference between an organic search result and a normal search?
An organic search result is a non paid search result (it IS a normal search), for example if you paid for the search keyword SEO to place on the first page, via AdWords, then this would not be an organic search result, its artificially high.
Tags: SERP, SEO termsGoogle jumps to 60% search market share November 1, 2008
Category : SEO News , comments closedComscore as well as Nielsen Netratings estimated Google’s U.S. search engine market at more than 60% in July. While the market research firms have come up with substantially different numbers for their July report, both agree that Google now runs more than three times the numbers of searches of its closest rival and more than twice the searches of Yahoo and Microsoft combined.
Comscore and Nielsen Netratings posted market share numbers for Google at greater than 60% for the second time this year. However, while the April result could have been considered as a blip, the July result fits the pattern of Google chipping away market share from its rivals, bit by bit.
Nielsen Netratings estimates that Google was used for 60.2% or more than 4.8 billion of 8.0 billion searches started by U.S. users during the month of July. Comcast came up with a 61.9% share for Google and 7.3 billion searches of a total of a total of 11.8 billion. Both Yahoo and Microsoft keep losing ground: Nielsen puts the two companies at 17.4% and 11.9%, Comscore at 20.5% and 8.9%. Google’s market share gains appear to have accelerated in 2008, with much stronger growth than in previous years. According to Nielsen Netratings, Google had a market share of 46.2% in July 2005, 49.2% in July 2006 and 53.3% in July 2007. Over the past year, Google was able to increase its market share by almost seven percentage points – more than in any other 12-month period before.
Microsoft acquires Ciao Euro price comparison and shopping site August 31, 2008
Category : SEO News , comments closedIn an effort to put the Yahoo buyout fiasco behind them, Microsoft is moving forward aggressively to bolster its online search presence, given the very poor growth of its existing MSN / Live search platform developed in house, their growth depends almost entirely on acquisition.
Microsoft has reached an agreement to acquire Greenfield Online, the owner of Ciao, a European price comparison and shopping site. This seems to be in line with Microsoft’s strategy of focusing on building up focused areas of search.
Ciao also includes consumer reviews and ratings with its search results. They boast a multimillion-user-strong online community and see more than 26.5 million unique visitors per month across seven countries. So far, more than 5 million product reviews have been generated.
Ciao joins Farecast, FAST, and Powerset in Microsoft’s portfolio of search-related acquisitions for 2008.
“Ciao’s success has been led by a team of talented people who took a unique combination of intuitive technology and the insight that comes out of their passionate consumer community to become one of Europe’s leading shopping comparison sites,” said John Mangelaars, vice president, Consumer and Online, Microsoft Europe, Middle East and Africa. “This makes the company a fantastic asset to the future of our search offer. Integrating Ciao’s capabilities into Live Search will provide a strong launchpad for our commercial search offer in Europe and enhance our e-commerce offering on MSN.”
