Over this past Thanksgiving holiday, you can be assured that Google is thankful for the fountainhead of the idea that its founders had 10 short years ago, and for the raw talent and intelligence of its engineers. As revealed in the latest search engine market share report from Nielson/Net Ratings, the world’s largest online search company commanded a record 61.2 percent share of all U.S. searches in October 2008.
This year, it’s safe to assume that consumers have furiously searched online travel Web sites for the lowest possible prices, especially since the Los Angeles Times is predicting that Thanksgiving travel will decrease by 10% in the United States. As consumers cut back on purchases in a given industry, they turn to search engines to discover the best deals. Therefore, it is paramount for travel and tourism businesses to shift marketing dollars to mirror this consumer behavior.
An interesting article published on Friday by DMNews reported that Google and one of the world’s largest consumer good companies, Procter & Gamble (P&G), have been exchanging employees in order to stimulate new ideas, share information, and learn new disciplines. The juicy tidbit I extracted from this article, however, is just how incredibly vast the opportunity is for online advertising – especially Search Engine Marketing – to capture greater percentages of real-world marketing budgets.
As a full-service Search Engine Marketing company, we pride ourselves on staying on top of current trends throughout the online search landscape. Unlike other advertising channels, Search Engine Marketing enables businesses to ascertain online consumer behaviors and marketing trends though detailed search data, and then correlate their findings with real-world developments.
Specifically, we can effectively target consumer sentiments for our clients by analyzing changes in the search frequency of popular search terms. Armed with this intelligence, we focus our content and optimization efforts for our clients’ Web sites around these relevant keywords. We are able to increase the actual relevancy of the sites, resulting in more qualified visitors and higher conversion rates.
As a full-service Search Engine Marketing Company in Portland Oregon, we at EngineWorks offer complete SEM services for our world-class clients, including robust Social Media Marketing (SMM) strategies and campaigns. Now that I have been professionally managing several of these campaigns, I’ve come to view Facebook – my only social-media outlet before joining EngineWorks – quite differently.
A quality Search Engine Optimization (SEO) company will place your business in front of potential customers during various stages of the buying process and no where is this process flourishing more than when people are checking up on their friends. On Facebook, friends are shown “news feeds” on each other, tracing their every Facebook move. Many businesses are using Facebook to enter this conversation, monitor customer satisfaction, and deliver focused advertising.
‘Hi, we’re OneRiot - a social search engine that finds the pulse of the web.’
That’s the lead-in to the content on this new venture’s About Us page. And, I perceive that it sets the tone for what this new online search company is all about.
They go on to claim, “Like other search engines, we keep a running record of the contents of the Internet. However, unlike other search engines, we prioritize that information based on its current popularity with our community. This makes OneRiot’s search results relevant, fresh, friendly, and pulsing with the real-time energy of the web.”
Last month, eMarketer reported that an August 2008 study by Internet Retailer found that Facebook is currently the social media site of choice for retailers across our country. The article titled ‘Retailers Get Social with Facebook‘ revealed that almost one-third of the U.S. retail companies responding to the survey have a Facebook page established for their business.
Google has released a 22-page guide for Webmasters called The Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. Interestingly, this valuable resource guide details many of the strategies and techniques that we at EngineWorks have been recommending to our clients since the inception of our company. In fact, highlights pertaining to the information we provide during our professional optimization engagements can be found in the ‘Best Practices’ section within this new starter guide.
In an article published last Friday, eMarketer announced results from a study that validates what could ostensibly be common knowledge to those of us in the Internet space. The brief piece titled ‘Businesses Hit the Web for Travel’ reveals that a September 2008 Equation Research study sponsored by Business Travel News found that frequent business travelers (those who flew more than six times in the past 12 months) preferred to book their flights, accommodations, and car rentals via travel Web sites, rather than by phone or e-mail.
Juggling the critical elements of Search Engine Optimization requires a great deal of effort and skill. You must research the best keywords, create useful meta tags, develop effective interlinking, track your visitors, craft strong content, consider user experience, seek out quality links, and on and on. But if you can control this high-wire act, the outcome can greatly improve your Web site’s presence across the search engine landscape.
An interesting article from Vertical Measures, LLC titled ‘An SEO is Not a Link Builder…And a Link Builder is not an SEO’ details the numerous strategies that can be employed to achieve high rankings in search engine results. The author gives a quality overview of the type of results a business can expect from an SEO campaign. He succinctly defines SEO as ”the process of modifying a website’s content, and structure to maximize the chances of a higher ranking within search engine results” and warns you’ll be disappointed if you expect it to be a magic bullet for all your site’s problems. Successful SEO campaigns focus attention on three main disciplines: quality content, well-optimized structure, and link building.
