Perhaps some of us remember the groundswell of outrage against Microsoft back in the roaring 90’s when they tried to bundle their browser with the operating system and then pitifully claimed it was necessary for innovation. Us techies knew better, and the unrestrained arrogance with which Microsoft manipulated technology for market share in ways big and small made us both angry and jealous at the same time.

Google’s recent decision to block keyword data for organic user searches has conjured up some déjà vu of those bad old days and makes me wonder if they have finally begun to cross the line in a way that will hurt them. Consider this:
• The reasons for the stated move are to “protect privacy” but this is clearly a joke since ad words users will continue to have full access to keyword information to help their ad campaigns
• Experts agree that there is nothing preventing Google from protecting privacy on logged in Google searchers vs. those searching anonymously.
• Google claims that this blocks less than 10% of the organic data as less than 10% search while logged in. However this is a number Google is doing everything to increase so this is an incredibly weak and transparent argument.
• By making it harder to get reliable data on organic keyword searching, Google is giving the entire online community a not so gentle push toward its paid advertising platform, where google makes over 75% of its revenue.

But beyond the utter hypocrisy of this move, I wonder if Google has finally shot itself in the foot in the sacred realm of Search engine results. Is it just possible that if this trend of making it more difficult to manage organic results continues, it may decrease over time the actual relevance of organic search results? Google has thus far managed brilliantly to make search results more relevant while increasing the focus on their paid advertising (Panda bear anyone?) But if this is an attack on agency’s gaming the system it remains to be seen whether Google will continue to serve up relevant results in a world where everyone is guessing at where to put their organic time and money. Heck Google this year already stole most of page one with their own web properties and left us scavenging over the bottom 4 results in many cases so it is clear they’ve decided that they know best what users want to see and where they want to see it. But with 70% market share arguments about virtual monopolies doing bad things come to mind and while it may not yet rise to the level of illegal, it may finally deserve a label of unwise.

In fairness, right now this change mostly effects SEO agency geeks like myself but mark my words, a continued march down this road begs for a stopover in Redmond where Larry and Sergey may want to chat with Bill about how to avoid the long antitrust arm of the Justice system and the danger of the search engine upstart. Can you say LINUX?

A quick look at the face of Google’s search engine page these days will tell you that we’re not in Kansas any more. As if the Panda changes weren’t enough, Google has gone and removed one of my favorite tools, the “Wonder Wheel”. No explanation from Google but probably because they wanted to clean up their page and only guys like me (Internet Consultants) were really using it anyway. But more importantly, the fallout from these changes has made it more challenging for all of us to manipulate the search engine game. Odds are you better be adjusting your overall SEO strategy and quickly or you will be left in the proverbial SERP dust heap faster than you can say BMW.

1. Local Results – Yes Panda made it clear, it’s all about local now. Now google’s map takes up real estate where Pay per click ads used to go and Google local business results (map pins) dominate the first page when they exist. All of this means it is more important than ever now to have an ‘Optimized” business listing on the major search engines as Google is dedicating good organic real estate to this that used to be available for good old fashioned SEO competition. The spots Google is giving to general organic results on the first page can be as few as only 3 and mostly below the fold.
2. Regional results – Because google uses your location to prioritize local results for you, a business in the next town may not be seen on page 1 anymore. The local results are dominated by matching businesses that are in the same town as the searcher! This is highly problematic for local business and worse for businesses that compete regionally or nationally with local businesses. Ie. Internet shoe retailers, Online Pet Supply, etc…
3. Google Preview – by clicking the little hourglass next to a search result, I can preview the landing page of the site without ever leaving Google’s search results page. This has made it more important than ever to have a colorful, enticing and relevant landing page or searchers will not even click on your listing.
4. Google reviews – Google is now scraping reviews it finds into the places page for your business. So even if you don’t know you have a Google places page, Google is pulling potentially nasty comments about your business from around the web into your listing and of course folks believe 90% of what they read online… you get the picture…

So the game has changed, and as always, we change with it. In my next post I’ll talk about the effect of these changes and what you can do to recover.

So I guess the word has gotten out about the what a miracle Internet marketing can be for many kinds of B to C companies. But folks in the Manufacturing and Distribution sector are asking a different question. Many of these folks have no intention of ever selling to anyone other than other stores or tradesmen. And they want to know exactly what I think a digital marketing strategy is going to do for them, given that so many of their historical contacts have no inclination to use the web to find business. Some of the comments I get are interesting. “We’ve been around for 40 years Rich, and trust me, the guys that buy from me ain’t going on the internet!” Or perhaps, “I sell exclusively to registered tradesmen, or distributors, these guys already all know us…”. Or one of my personal favorites: “It’s all about personal relationships, nobody is gonna buy our product because they saw our pretty website, they buy it because I get in front of them and Sell it!”.

Before I get into violently shredding some of these arguments, let me first acknowledge that all these folks have a point. The character of operations in the manufacturing and distribution chain has important differences from selling retail and your internet marketing plan had better respect that. And It is to a large degree, much more about relationships than fickle cost/brand driven consumer selling.

For instance, exclusive Trade relationships may prevent certain kinds of end user promotional activities, with manufactures bending over backwards to promote the brand without unfairly promoting one distribution channel over another. Delivery requirements are often different with large minimums required to make container shipping financially viable or to keep profitability on thin margins. Ecommerce solutions can be different too and may need to be “two-faced”, one for consumers, and one for tradesman. Or selling may be simply be too complex to ever be fully handled by a website, every sale may genuinely require one or many personal calls and visits. The list of considerations is long and different from industry to industry and business to business within those industries.

And what about those guys that have had their nose buried in Kelly’s blue book for the last 40 years? Will they one day after hearing the word “Google” one too many times, finally wander over to the computer and hear choirs of angels singing as they type in their first search?

Probably not…

But here’s the epiphany… are you sitting down? ”We’re not designing internet marketing for them! We don’t have to. You’ve build a whole successful business around servicing these guys using traditional methods. Keep it up as long as you need to and good luck!”

But real growth in your distribution channels will not continue come from these methods and unless you’ve been under a rock for the last 15 years, you already know and sense this. You’ve seen new competitors spring up and create huge online brands with products of lower quality. You’ve seen the costs of traditional selling go up without offsetting increases in sales or profit. Trade show attendance is down. And a new generation of wholesale consumer is taking over and he has more internet saavy than his father, and is less influenced by historical relationships. He wants value, and he’s going online to find it. And so you’re forced to look at an online marketing strategy because you don’t want to be the last guy marketing with a small army of salesmen and telemarketers to an ever smaller group of octogenarians, while the next generation, raised on all things WEB, starts to challenge the status quo and only finds your competitors on-line.

So now perhaps we begin to glimpse that the march toward a competitive digital presence for manufacturing and wholesale companies too, is all but inevitable. But can it be effective? In my next post I’ll talk about strategies for Supply chain industries that really work, even on yours…(-:

Perhaps some of you like my wife, take to cringing as you read this… “You mean I’m gonna get ads on my cellphone too? I already spend a half hour a day cleaning out the junk email my spam filter doesn’t catch…, now I have to do that on my cellphone?”

This knee jerk reaction to the latest frontier in digital marketing is understandable. But like anything new, people have to first learn about the system before they lose their apprehension over it. And in the case of mobile marketing, losing this apprehension has never been easier. Add to that the singular capabilities and effectiveness of this as a promotional vehicle for small business, and you like me will come away with the certainty that Mobile Marketing is here to stay.

Consider this:
• Mobile Marketing is an “Opt-in” system, much like signing up for an email list.
• Unlike in the email world, it is illegal to buy or sell lists of mobile phone numbers. You will never get a message from a vendor you didn’t specifically ask to get one from.
• If you don’t want the messages any more for any reason, you simply text “STOP” to the sender.
• Surveys done by various marketing organizations show that approximately 79% of Americans describe themselves as either neutral or comfortable with mobile marketing.

• There are almost 5 times as many handheld devices in use in the United States as there are computers.
• 95% of text messages are opened and read. (Only 20% – 40% for email)
• Text Messages are opened within 4 minutes on average. ( Email messages are opened in 48 hours on average)
• 89% of the major brands worldwide have plans to use mobile marketing.
• Mobile marketing is the only advertising vehicle in the world that allows you to segment your campaigns based on where the individual is located at the moment you send the promotion! This is essentially, the Marketing director’s dream!

I could go on… and I will! (In a future blog). There are definitely industries that are more appropriate than others for using this kind of marketing, and of course building your list of numbers is an art in itself.

But make no mistake, mobile marketing works, and it’s here to stay.

There are indeed a lot of internet consultants out there these days, and sorting out the guys who get results from the guys who don’t is a difficult task for any business owner to say the least. But if you’re a company with a healthy marketing budget, you might be inclined to go for a big firm. It would be reasonable to assume that their big ticket SEO services and staff of in house experts would be a safe investment in doing things the right way. A hedge against consultants who don’t deliver, or take shortcuts to get results…

Well read on friends, another myth is about to be busted…

A recent NY times expose revealed how JC Penny got scammed by their SEO firm, a larger and well established company whom they hired to get them on page 1 of Google for the 2010 Christmas shopping season. And they succeeded, in absolutely stellar fashion. JC Penny was on page 1 of google for search terms as bland as the word “dresses” to “furniture” often ranking as the number 1 result! In fact for hundreds of terms, JC Penny was at or near the top, pushing out brands with far more relevance.
The problem is their SEO firm got these results using techniques that Google does not approve of. These so called “Black Hat” techniques involve producing backlinks to your site from essentially phony or loosely related websites created mostly for just that purpose. Google has an internal group that polices this and had warned JC Penny about this several times in the lead up to Christmas, but Google took no action. That is until the NY Times showed them how grotesque the abuse really was. Within a couple of days, Google perpetrated what they call a “manual action”. By February of 2011 JC Penny all but disappeared from Google results for almost every keyword.

The link to the full article is here. It’s fascinating read about this murky world of link selling. Cheating at link building is a bit like cheating on your taxes…tons of folks do it but only a few get audited by Google. But when you do there is no appeal, you and your business are just digitally disappeared.

Here at WSI Net Marketing, we don’t need to put your business at risk to get results. You get the security of large company infrastructure too, but one that knows how to do it legitimately and quickly. It’s the way we work and we’re proud of it.

It’s not that I don’t want your business… definitely not.   But I often encourage potential customers who are trying to justify in their minds the costs of an internet consultant or a professionally run SEO campaign, to try a few things themselves if they are so inclined.   I don’t view this as giving away the store because there will always be a big gap between the level of results available to professional internet consultants, and those available to enthusiastic but cash flow challenged business owners.  What I find is that customers, who have some appreciation of just what is involved in getting so many elements to work together, only end up better understanding the value that a professional internet consultant brings, and ultimately end up appreciating the work I do for them even more.

So here without further adieu, are 10 easy SEO tips that kids can try at home.

1. Keyword research.  Really spend some time looking at what people are using to search for your business or industry.  Don’t assume you know already you might be surprised.  Search Google for the Adwords keyword tool and take it out for a spin.   The results are guaranteed to surprise you.
2. “It’s the domain name stupid…” Perhaps the most basic thing you can do to get your SEO on the right track out of the gate is to pick an industry relevant domain name.   Many folks of course are enamored of their own names but think like a customer:   If I want to find a local CPA,  I won’t be looking for you by name.  You’ll do better with Google if your site is named JSmithAccounting.com or  BilltheCPA.com than if you are BobBarker.com or BillJonesServices.com
3. Use the title tags on every page. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, then maybe you do need a consultant… But creating keyword rich title tags is one of the easiest things you can do to highlight to both Google and your customers the relevance of this webpage.  Most sites these days have a title tag on their home page but you’d be amazed at how many lack this basic information on other pages.
4. Strong Meta tags with specific keywords for each page.  Related to above for SEO purposes.  You have about 150 characters to use in the meta description.  Use them.
5. Content is indeed, King.  It’s a cliché I know but a sexy website and keywords without relevant and useful content will have prospects clicking away faster than you can say “lost revenue”.   A common rule used is no less than 250 words.   Make them count.
6. Update your site well and often.  The more often the better.   Why?  This has a benefit for both Google’s web crawlers and your customers  who will not return to a site that remains static for too long.
7. Good site navigation.  When a crawler is looking at a site, they need good links to reference and find your other pages.  The more relevant links to other pages in your site, the better.  Missing or broken links can relegate your pages to the junk heap of relevance, fast.
8. Use Images on your pages.   The ‘alt’ text field gives you a few more chances to work your keywords into these pages and makes your page more interesting to actual people instead of just web crawlers.
9. Keyword Rich Page URL’s. In addition to your domain URL, you should be including your keyword phrase in your page URL’s to increase your relevancy for that keyword.
   Instead of  http://wsinetmarketing.com/?pageid=123
   Use   http://wsinetmarketing.com/10-easy-seo-tips
10. Use Social Media sites like twitter and facebook to backlink to your site.  Not only do backlinks help you increase your relevance, but they will cause your site to get indexed very very fast.

Thanks for visiting my blog covering all kinds of topics related to the broad spectrum of digital marketing services and the industry as a whole. My name is Richard Casamento and I am an Internet consultant for WSI, (“We Simplify Internet”) a leading global provider of digital marketing services. My company does business in over 80 countries and has a network of thousands of individuals who help me provide a wide array of internet related services that really do cover the gamut of internet technologies and marketing strategies. Their focus (and mine) is to be at the forefront of emerging technologies and best practices in this space, and our large economies of scale allow us to provide the widest variety of services at a quality and cost level others simply can’t touch.

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- Rich Casamento.