Now that there seems to be some sort of union in Yahoo’s future, blessed or otherwise, I felt the urge to pass along some advice to whoever the happy couple might be. For, in all this talk about the impending nuptials , the clear objective is to survive and compete in the business of attracting the attention of prospects online.
I offer this advice on behalf of users, because frankly, I think that’s the only perspective you should be interested in. I’ll explain why.
Why Search is Essential
First of all, there’s a lot of talk about how a Microsoft – Yahoo deal would give you the biggest chunk of the online ad network space, and this is true. But I hasten to add: don’t forget search. Google has stumbled in rolling out another significant revenue channel that holds up against their search business, yet they’ve still dominated. That’s because the importance of search has been understated up to this point. Here’s why search matters.
Search is the thin edge of a wedge that is marking a fundamental change in advertising. And it’s fundamental because it’s initiated by the prospect. The importance of that sometimes gets missed by marketers, who start looking at search as just another weapon in their arsenal.
Search is important because of expressed intent. That puts it in a whole different league than all other advertising, online or off. Behavioral targeting is effective, but it’s still intrusive and interruptive. We ask for search results. That’s a different level of engagement, a different balance of control and a different mindset on the part of the prospect. It’s the first place that balance shifted from the marketer to the customer, but it won’t be the last. Search is forging the way, but customers will demand that level of control and relevance to intent in more commercial communication from corporations. So, for all the talk about ad serving networks, it’s vital that the new duo gets search right. All the truly effective revenue channels will lead from search and the new principle of prospect initiation, including the vast untapped mobile and local markets. You can’t afford to screw it up.
Users come first, Advertisers will follow
Secondly, all you should be focused on is one thing, and that’s meeting the expressed need of the user. Don’t talk to me about balanced ecosystems or serving the needs of both users and advertisers. While as an advertiser I appreciate the consideration, as a user I call it hogwash.
Search cannot serve two masters. One has to prevail. And it should always, always, always be the user. Users are the prospective customers, and without them, the equation doesn’t work. Get users and the advertisers will follow. And those advertisers will play by the rules laid out by the users because they have no choice. Google gets it (probably due to the philosophical bent of Google and an inherent suspicion of advertising) and you’ll have to get it too to compete. So those ads better be highly relevant and in the user’s interest if they appear. If they’re not, don’t show them.
If you pay attention to nothing else, please pay attention to this one point. It’s vital to your success.
Church and State: Antiquated Concept?
The final piece of advice is not to be so set on holding on the divide between Church and State on the search results page. This is one hold over from the offline world that may be due for rethinking
The concept of the Church/State divide came from the fact that advertisers will always push their advantage. That’s one reason why you can’t have a balanced ecosystem. Advertisers have always had a much louder voice that gets heard more often. So in traditional channels, the only answer was to divide up the page (or other real estate). Advertisers had free reign over some sections, but they had to keep their hands off others. Consequently, we’ve learned to largely ignore the real estate given over to advertisers. The success of this Church/State division has been questionable in the past, but it’s a relic of journalistic thinking that somehow became entrenched in the world of search.
But if you pay scrupulous attention to my first two pieces of advice, you don’t have to worry about Church/State. The fact is that in search we have expressed our desire for relevant information, and if that information is commercial in nature, and it matches our intent, than we’re open to it. At Enquiro, we’ve looked at interactions with search advertising in minute detail, and while people will self report an aversion to advertising in general, in the midst of a task, relevance trumps all. If an ad is the closest match, it will succeed.
This opens the door to mash up editorial functionality with commercial messaging in a richer way. As search becomes better at determining intent and delivering richer results, the opportunity exists to seamlessly integrate commercial messaging with other information in a user-centric way. But user trust is paramount. Let the user set the rules of what’s acceptable.
So, whatever happens, this is the advice I would give. There’ll be a lot on your mind in trying to navigate the new union, so I’ve kept it simple. You can thank me later.
Roberto in Florida wanted to know how Yahoo Search Assist can be leveraged as part of a search marketing strategy. Well first off, for those of you who don't know what Yahoo Search Assist is, here is a quick review of Yahoo Search Assist. In essence, Yahoo Search Assist is a real time query suggestion tool that helps users refine search queries so that they can find what they are looking for in "one search".
When Yahoo began their person-powered search engine back in 1994, it was mainly two people's guide to their favorite links on the Web. When Yahoo launched the new Yahoo! Search on October 1st they included a new feature designed to help users find what they were looking for in one search. This new feature as you may have guessed is Search Assist.
With the new Yahoo Search, Yahoo became the last of the four major search engines to offer blended search. Yahoo Search Assist expands on a person's query to suggest additional relevant searches and concepts for the searches they perform. So how can Yahoo Search Assist be leveraged as an SEO tool? Well first things first, Search Assist is not meant to be an SEO tool, it is meant to improve the search user experience. Having said that, there are a few ways that you can leverage the tool as part of your search marketing strategy toolkit.
How You Can Use Yahoo Search Assist as an SEO Tool
As a Keyword Analysis Tool - Well in terms of search strategy, Yahoo Search Assist can provide a little insight into phrases that are related to specific user queries. For example let's say that you perform a search for "las vegas wedding" in Yahoo. (I'm using this example because I recently got married in Las Vegas…) With Search Assist on you get additional options such as "las vegas weddings, las vegas hotel weddings, las vegas wedding chapels, las vegas wedding packages" etc. You can scroll the list to find additional phrases. In addition you can use the "explore concepts" feature to find additional keywords for your campaign.
Long-Tail Optimization Tool - Using Search Assist can help you optimize for long-tail key phrases that you may have otherwise overlooked. Search assist may provide you with alternatives to popular "head" phrases that you may have no hope for ranking for. Why not focus on the long-tail and improve conversions with long-tail optimization. (Conversion rates tend to be better with long-tail optimization, you simply don't receive as much traffic.)
Understanding the User - Search Assist can help you understand your search user as you can learn more about how and what users are searching for. While it's unlikely that Search Assist factors in seasonality, you can get a better understanding of phrases that users may be using to find information. After all search and thus SEO should be all about the user. As Yahoo stated when they launched Search Assist, "One thing we've learned since launching our own algorithmic search engine back in 2004 is that at the end of the day, people really don't want to search; they want to get things done." It's all about giving the user what they want.
So here are three ways that Yahoo Search Assist can be leveraged as a tool for your search marketing efforts. I hope that answers your question Roberto. Keep them coming.
This week Yahoo unveiled a new feature. It doesn’t really change the search game that much in terms of competitive functionality. If anything, it’s another case of Yahoo catching up with the competition. But it may have dramatic implications from a user’s point of view. To illustrate that point further I’d like to share a couple of stories with you.
May We Suggest…
The feature is called Search Assist. You type your query in and Yahoo provides a list under the query box with a number of possible ways you could complete the query. This follows in the footsteps of Google’s search suggestions in their toolbar. Currently, Google doesn’t offer this functionality within the standard Google query box, at least in North America. Ask also offers this feature. Because Yahoo is late to the game, they had the opportunity to up the functionality a little bit. For example, the suggestions that come from Yahoo can include the word you’re typing anywhere in the suggested query phrase. Google uses straight stemming, so the word you’re typing is always at the beginning of the suggested phrases. Yahoo also seems to be pulling from a larger inventory of suggested phrases. The few test queries I did brought back substantially more suggestions than did Google.
It’s not so much the functionality of this feature that intrigues me. Its how it could impact the way we search. I personally have found that I come to rely on this feature in the Google toolbar more and more. Rather than structuring a complete query in my mind, I type the first few letters of the root word in and see what Google offers me. It leads me to select query phrases that I probably never would have thought of myself. Sometime ago I wrote that contrary to popular belief, we’ve actually become quite adept at paring our queries down to the essential words. It’s not that we don’t know how to launch an advanced query; it’s that most times, we don’t need to. This becomes even truer with search suggestions. All we have to do is think of one word, and the search engine will serve us a menu of potential queries. It reduces the effort required from the searcher, but let me tell you a story about how this might impact a company’s reputation online.
I Wouldn’t Recommend That Choice
Some time ago I got a voicemail from an equity firm. The woman who left a message was brash, a little abrasive and left a rather cryptic message, insisting that I had to phone her right back. Now, being in the search game, getting calls from venture capitalists and investment bankers is nothing really new. But I’d never quite heard this tone from one of these prospecting calls before. So, I did as I usually do in these cases and decided to do a little more research on the search engines to determine whether I was actually going to return this call or not. I did my quick 30 second reputation check.
Normally, I would just type in the name of the firm and see what came up in the top 10 results. Usually, if there’s strong negative content out there it’s worth paying attention to and it tends to collect enough search equity to break the top 10. This time, I didn’t even have to get as far as the results page. The minute I started typing the company name into my Google toolbar, the suggestions Google was providing me told the entire story: "company" scam, "company" fraud and "company" lawsuits. Of the top eight suggestions, over half of them were negative in nature. Not great odds for success. Needless to say, I never returned a call.
If these search suggestions are going to significantly alter our search patterns, we should be aware of what’s coming up in those suggestions for our branded terms. Type your company name into Yahoo or Google’s toolbar and see what variations are being served to you. Some of them may not be that appetizing.
Would You Prefer Szechuan?
My belief is that users are increasingly going to use this to structure their queries. It moves search one step closer to be coming a true discovery engine. One of the overwhelming characteristics of search user behavior is that we’re basically lazy. We want to expand a minimal amount of effort but in return, we expect a significant degree of relevancy. Search suggestions allow us to enter a minimum of keystrokes and the search engine obliges us with a full menu of options. This brings me to my other story. Earlier this year we did some eye tracking research on how Chinese citizens interact with the search engines Baidu and Google China. After we released the preliminary results of the study, I had a chance to talk to a Google engineer who worked on their search engine. In China, Google does provide real-time search suggestions right from the query box. They found that it’s significantly more work to type a query in Mandarin than it is in most Western languages. Using a keyboard for input in China is, at best, a compromise. So Google found that because of the amount of work required to enter a query, the average query length was quite short in China, giving a substantially reduced degree of relevancy. In fact, many Chinese users would type in the bare minimum required and then would scroll to the bottom of the page, where Google showed other suggested queries. Then, the user would just click on one of these links. Hardly the efficient searching behavior the Google was shooting for. After introducing real-time search suggestions for the query box, Google found the average length of query increased dramatically and supposedly, so did the level of user satisfaction.
Search query suggestions are just one additional way we’ll see our search behavior change significantly over the next year or two. Little changes, like a list of suggested queries or the inclusion of more types of content in our results pages will have some profound impacts. And when search is the ubiquitous online activity it is, it doesn’t take a very big rock to create some significant and far reaching ripples.
Earlier today, Yahoo announced the launch of their new Yahoo! Search to help make search more effortless for users and consumers. The official press release from Yahoo (YHOO) states that "the new Yahoo! Search was designed to better understand user intent and get consumers to the results they are looking for in one search."
According to research conducted by Harris Interactive specifically for Yahoo, consumers are suffering from "Web Search Fatigue" and that while 99 percent of online adult users use a search engine to find information on the Internet, only 15 percent of them actually find what they are looking for on their first search. To help combat this issue, Yahoo has released Search Assist to provide real time query suggestions as well as related topics and concepts. If you are logged into your Yahoo account, using Yahoo Search Assist, a search for Enquiro would return the following:
If you were not logged into your Yahoo account and did a search for "enquiro" you would receive the following:
Notice the "Explore Concept" option? It brings up phrases such as "eye tracking", "search marketing", b2b" all phrases that accurately reflect what Enquiro is about. Very cool. The Yahoo Search Assist and new Yahoo results page could be Yahoo's answer to Google's Universal Search as Yahoo has stated that their new results will include items such as images and video. The new Yahoo Search is designed to provide a richer experience for the search user. The update integrates audio, video, photos, shortcuts, consumer reviews, and local information directly into the search results, with special emphasis on Yahoo properties such as their travel portal travel.yahoo.com. Perform a search for "Las Vegas" or "New York" to see this in effect.
So what does Yahoo Search Assist Mean for You?
Well first and foremost it should mean a better search experience. This is providing that the results returned are relevant to your search query… and why shoudn't they be? Yahoo has done enough usability research to know that relevancy is what users are seeking. When they perform a search looking for information, they want the results that show up to be the most relevant in terms of providing a solution to their query. But what about user intent? How do they know that a user searching for "Las Vegas" was looking for the NBC television program vs. a user looking to spend a fun weekend in the City of Sin? Well according to Yahoo, with Search Assist available, users saw a 61 percent increase in task completion meaning they completed a successful search.
For website owners and search engine marketers, the New Yahoo Search means that user generated content will become more important in the genetic makeup of your site's content. You will need to incoporate the user of user generated content such as product reviews, site reviews or the like. The integration of user-generated content in Yahoo's results is a fairly innovative and impressive update that includes restaurant and hotel shortcuts. Again very cool.
Web 2.0 is taking place before our eyes. Yahoo was the last of the big 4 search engines to get on board with an actual change to their search offering. The release of this is interesting as it was only after mere days that Microsoft announced updates to their Live Search product. Both Google and ASK announced changed to their seacrh offering in May and June respectively. Just when you think you have a handle on Search, the engines throw us a slight curveball. I love it, because for me as a user of search I am getting a better user experience. While there is always room for improvement, this is a great step into Web 2.0 and Search 2.0
There has been speculation lately over the direction of the Yahoo Directory. What exaactly is the Yahoo! Directory you ask? The Yahoo! Directory is a human-created and maintained library of web sites organized into categories and subcategories. Previously we posted about the potential end of the Yahoo Directory, yet this is not likely to happen soon as Yahoo reaps a large amount of revenue from the annual directory submissions. So if the Yahoo Directory is not going away, just how important is the Yahoo Directory in 2007?
Fact: The Yahoo Directory is still one of the oldest and most important directories on the Web. Fact: There is an annual fee associated per listing per category in the Yahoo Directory. Fact: A link from the Yahoo Directory is simply just another link from another site.
While these are all important facts, how do you determine if being listed in the Yahoo Directory is important for your site and for your business? From an SEO point of view, being listed in the Yahoo Directory is not the thing that is going to push your site over the edge in terms of search engine rankings. In fact, submitting to the Yahoo Directory may not even be necessary. Check your referral stats? Does Yahoo drive a lot of referrals to your site? The question becomes is there any value in being listed in the Yahoo Directory? Let's look at some of the advantages.
Advantages of Being Listed in the Yahoo Directory
It may be beneficial to submit to the directory if Yahoo Slurp is having a difficult time crawling your site.
If you are launching s new site, being listed in the Yahoo Directory can be used to develop new site presence.
While they will probably deny it, being listed in the Yahoo Directory may have an impact on your organic listings in Yahoo. Even if it is a small impact, being listed in the Yahoo Directory may indirectly affect your organic listings in Yahoo!
Having a listing in the Yahoo Directory is a quality inbound link to your site. Depending on the category or page that you get listed in this could be a very effective addition to your external link inventory.
There is value in having a well optimized Yahoo Directory listing. For your "SEO-buck", $299 US per year is not that bad, but keep in mind that it is $299 US that you could be spending elsewhere. Whether a Yahoo Directory listing is of benefit depends on your site and on your site users. Does the average person who is looking for your product or service use the Yahoo Directory to find their information? If the answer is no, then you might not want to shell out the money to be listed in the directory.
Being listed in the Yahoo Directory is not important as it once was. There is however, still some benefit to being listed in the directory. The value of being listed in the Yahoo Directory may in fact be in the eye of the beholder as the value will differ with each and every site.
Considering submitting to the Yahoo Directory? Follow these steps.
How to Submit to the Yahoo Directory
As taken from Yahoo:
In order to add your web site to the Yahoo! Directory, you must first suggest it to Yahoo!'s team of editors, who visit and evaluate every site added to the Directory. To suggest your site for evaluation by an editor, please follow the process outlined below.
Step 3: Suggest your site from the link on the Directory category page most relevant to your site.
The Yahoo! Directory is made up of categories. To do a Yahoo! search to find the best category for your site:
From the front page, search on a term relevant to your site.
From the web search results page, select the Directory tab under the search box. This will confine your search to sites listed in the Yahoo! Directory.
Under the search bar you will see a list of "RELATED DIRECTORY CATEGORIES" and relevant sites from the Directory will be listed under "TOP 20 DIRECTORY RESULTS". You can review the list of Directory categories related to your search term and you can see various categories listed under the description of each site listed in Directory Results.
When you click on a category, you will go to that page in the Directory. You will see a "Suggest a Site" link located to the right of the search box on the Directory page.
Note: If you try to click on "Suggest a Site" from a broad or top-level category, such as Education, Regional, or Entertainment, instead of browsing down to a more specific sub-category, you'll be told that your suggestion is too broad. So make sure you search for and find the most specific category that describes the subject matter of your site.
So Jerry Yang is no longer just the chief Yahoo, whatever that means. Terry Semel has vacated Yahoo's CEO office and Jerry Yang has set up shop there. At the same time, Sue Decker has stepped into the President's role. While Terry Semel's departure didn't come as a great surprise to anyone in the search space, Jerry Yang's appointment as CEO did raise a few eyebrows. In retrospect, the move seems to make a lot of sense but in the numerous conversations I've had on this topic in the last few weeks, no one mentioned Yang's name as Yahoo's possible savior.
With this move will come the inevitable speculation about how this will bolster Yahoo's chances of competing against Google. Just last week I was interviewed by Bloomberg TV and was asked about that very topic. At that time I mentioned that the biggest difference was the lack of corporate focus at Yahoo and the fact that focus, at least on the search side, has never been an issue for Google.
My belief is that there's a lot behind the scenes that we're not privy to which will explain Yang's appointment as CEO when it becomes public knowledge. My suspicion is that there may be an acquisition deal in the works and this is a "feel good" move to help shore up Yahoo's eroding stock price until the deal can be finalized. But whether or not that's the case, I did want to take a few minutes to make some comparisons between Google and Yahoo in light of Monday's news.
Sacred Cow = Balanced Ecosystem?
Search is the sacred cow at Google. More correctly, the search user experience is the sacred cow of Google. And it's the quality of that search experience that has driven the vast majority of Google's revenue and has put them in the position where they can pose a significant threat in virtually every information channel in the world.
Recently I was worried about search appearing to take a backseat at Google. With all the media hype surrounding Google's moves into other channels, I was worried that perhaps the corporation itself had lost sight of how important search was in their overall strategy. It appears my fears were misplaced. Matt Cutts was quick to comment on a blog post that search is still integral to everything that Google does and that the team was hard at work improving that search experience. Shortly after that, the personalization and universal search announcements began to roll out of Google labs. From everything I've been seeing, Google is more intent on improving the search user experience than ever and is using universal search and personalization as the hub that will drive a much more extensive user interaction with web content and information. Of course, a more efficient delivery of advertising goes hand-in-hand with that strategy.
I've always been a big believer in corporate sacred cows. These are the untouchable tenets that drive the overall strategy of the company. From everything I've seen, heard or read about Google the search user experience is Google's sacred cow. The company is focused on engineering the most effective and relevant connection between a user and their desired content. The advantage of the sacred cow if that it gives an unquestionable rallying point for the company and the company can focus on. All else is fair game but that single strategic foundation is what keeps the company on track.
Yahoo has no sacred cows. In all my conversations with the company there's a lot of talk about community and a balanced ecosystem. Those very terms suggest compromise. There are a ton of Yahooers (although, like the Yahoo share price, this number is eroding as well) who are passionate about their jobs and would love to see their particular interest elevated to the status of the corporate sacred cow, but they've become frustrated with the lack of support from the CxO level. Just last year, Sue Decker was quoted saying that Yahoo is quite content to be number two in the search game. In fact, their strategy was trying to hang on to their eroding market share. It was, in effect, a public capitulation to Google. That announcement hit Yahoo search team squarely in the gut. They definitely were not ready to give up on search.
Eric Schmidt = Terry Semel?
From the outside, it may appear that Eric Schmidt and Terry Semel served fairly similar roles. In both cases there are cofounders still actively involved in the business. The cofounders were incredibly young and lacked traditional "business expertise". And both Schmidt and Semel stepped in with a significant amount of past experience. But there the similarities ended. From the very beginning, Schmidt understood that while he served as CEO, Page and Brin were always going to take a very active role in running Google. And Schmidt stepped into his role with a tremendous amount of respect for the sheer intellectual horsepower that Sergey and Larry brought to Google. He never wanted to remove them from their decision-making roles. He understood that it was a key element in Google's success.
Semel, on the other hand, came from the Hollywood Warner Bros. power structure and was intent on making Yahoo the new entertainment giant. That strategy, however, had one fatal flaw. No one at Yahoo, least of all Semel, understood that media consumption was going to be an entirely different game online. Prepackaged bits of content, carefully packaged for easily digested consumer consumption, pushed out to us by a media giant was not how we were going to find our entertainment in the future. Now, we were completely in control and we would choose what, where and when we would watch. We didn't need a power channel pushing us content. We needed a better tool for finding the content we were interested in. The rules had changed and Yahoo didn't have a new version of the rulebook. No one had a version of the rulebook, because it hasn't been written yet. Larry + Sergey = Jerry + David?
Finally, to me the biggest difference between Yahoo and Google is in the day-to-day role of the founders. Sergey and Larry have never backed off from their control positions at Google. In fact one of the running jokes at Google is Sergey and Larry's tendency to swoop in, roll up their sleeves and bury themselves in the minutia of one particular item or project, much to the frustration of the team working on it. There is a Google wide conspiracy aimed at trying to keep Sergey and Larry's hands off of any important code. As frustrating as this micromanaging might be to the individuals involved, it does give Page and Brin an intimate knowledge of everything that's happening at the company. Their voracious intellectual appetite gobbles up this tremendous amount of detail and somehow digests it into strategic decisions that are very seldom wrong. Someone recently told me that one of the reasons that Brin has some challenges relating to the real world is that he's never been wrong in his life. He doesn't know what it means to fail.
David Filo and Jerry Yang, while still actively involved in Yahoo, have been quietly influencing from behind the scenes. They're easier going and not nearly as intense as Brin and Page. They suggest rather than demand. They stepped back, willing to let Semel run the show. In traditional wisdom, they did exactly what entrepreneurs and cofounders should do. They passed the torch on. But in this case, it didn't work. Yahoo lost its way. Brin and Page's nettlesome but much-needed day-to-day involvement kept Google on track. Yahoo was left to founder and flopped back and forth, never being exactly sure what it was. Even in the few hours since the announcement was made (as of the writing of this column) there is already been reports that this is exactly what Yahoo needs. Jerry Yang is recognized as a champion for the user experience on Yahoo and is stepping back into the CEO old role seems to signal a return to that fundamental principle. In my view, it's too little too late. If the user was really that important to Yahoo, why were they pushed out of the driver's seat in the first place?
I should have known as soon as I saw the speaker roster. Matt Cutts, Tim Mayer, Danny Sullivan, Michael Gray and myself on the same panel. Guess who got the lion's share of attention in the Q&A and after session scrum? Michael and I might as well have checked out early and hit the Google Dance before the crowds.The title of the panel at the inaugural SMX in Seattle was Search Personalization: Fear or Fear Not. As Danny often does, he set the panel up to generate a little debate: Michael Gray vs Google, Yahoo vs Google. I was like Switzerland, in neutral territory. Danny did get his conflict, with Michael taking a few shots at Google and Tim Mayer throwing down the gauntlet about the lack of transparency on Google's personalized search results.
Guess What? SEO's are not your Average Search User!
To be honest, I was a little taken aback that the audience didn't jump all over how personalization was going to change SEO. Most of the questions from the crowd centered on how you opt out of personalized search and why personalization wasn't good for them. I have some issues with that, which of course I'll share in this column:
- First, this crowd was trying to argue from a user's point of view. Okay, they're SEO's (this was the organic track) and most of them have been using search since Lycos was a little baby spider. Just how typical do you think these users are?
- Secondly, I question their motives. Do they hate personalization as a user, or as an organic optimizer? My guess is the later, but it just doesn't seem to be very noble to joust with Google because they're making your job harder. Far better to cry foul as a user than as a PO'd organic optimizer. Like somebody said to me after, do you really think Marissa Mayer is losing sleep because the Google user experience for SEO's isn't all they want it to be?
- This was a perfect opportunity to start planning for the new world of SEO, post personalization. There's a ton of value we can add, as smart, pro-active practitioners, but I didn't see anyone take the opportunity to delve into this. Perhaps the really smart ones were keeping their mouths shut, content to let their competitors bitch about the inevitable while they plotted their take over.
- I found everyone fixated on the current threshold of personalization on the page, taking comfort in the fact that it's only impacting a small number of searches. I reminded them that this threshold is a totally arbitrary one set by Google, and could (and will) change at any time.
- Everyone taking a siloed view of personalization, looking at the organic results in isolation. It's almost like they're assessing the amount of damage control required. I'm not sure they realize the import of personalization. This is a rule changer, a paradigm shifter. This is the new generation of search functionality. It changes the game dramatically. Whatever happens on the organic side will roll over to the sponsored side. It will drive universal search. It will drive everything.
- Finally, this is not just happening on Google. Microsoft's recent comments made it very clear they're thinking long and hard about personalization. Tim Mayer cautioned me not to make the mistaken assumption that just because Google was first out with personalization, they're the only ones working on it. In fact, Matt was quite delighted when he found an article in the Times Online where Yahoo VP Tapan Bhat confessed at the Next Web conference in Amsterdam that Personalization was the future of the Web, including search. You can define personalization in a number of different ways, but however you do it, it dramatically changes our online experience.
So, I leave you with this. I went into the SMX session with four fundamental changes I see emerging from personalization that SEO's and SEM's have to think about, right now. No one asked me for the slide deck after the session. There was not one question about strategies for leveraging personalization. Everyone was more interested in grilling Matt on why the opt-out link disappeared from the results page. Although I'm tempted to join the smart and silent search marketers, I think I'll make one last attempt to share this with the SEM/SEO community. Perhaps in a white paper, perhaps a future column. But I'm only going to do it if you're serious about pushing the envelope into this new opportunity. Drop me an email (gord@enquiro.com) and let me know. Otherwise, I'll just shut up and nod my head while you bitch about the fact that it's too hard to opt out of personalized search. You'll excuse me if I don't answer; you see, my mind is on something else.
Top of mind awareness is important. But generating awareness and maintaining this top of mind awareness can be difficult to do. For B2B marketers who are looking to create awareness about their solutions and services, being innovative and finding new methods to create awareness is key. An innovative method for creating top of mind awareness is through the use of search and mobile marketing.
The major search engines from Yahoo to Google have products in place to address the need of mobile advertisers. Look to both search giants to continue to improve their mobile search solution offerings. So why should B2B marketers use mobile search as part of their online marketing strategies? Examining the mobile solutions that Yahoo and Google offer may provide some answers as to why B2B marketers should incorporate mobile search into their marketing efforts.
Yahoo Mobile Search
Yahoo! has one of the largest audiences on the mobile Web. Through Yahoo! oneSearch and Yahoo! Go, Yahoo! reaches a substantial percentage of the worldwide mobile audience. Yahoo claims that Yahoo! oneSearch reinvents search to give consumers exactly what they want on their mobile device - instant answers. vYahoo mobile services enable mobile advertisers, publishers and operators to elevate business results.
Yahoo's mobile search solution fo publishers include items such as:
Yahoo! Mobile Ad Network
Yahoo! Mobile Content Engine
Yahoo! Mobile Media Directory
Yahoo! Mobile Site Submit
Yahoo Mobile Business Services is designed to enable:
Advertisers to reach the growing mobile consumer audience with innovative, highly-targetable placements that deliver results. Publishers to increase the discovery and distribution of their content to mobile consumers, and to generate revenue from it.
Network Operators to offer leading-edge customer experiences, and to participate in the growth of mobile advertising
As B2B marketers, Yahoo!'s Mobile Ad Services can be a great method for increasing top of mind awareness for the services and solutions that they provide. Products such as Yahoo! oneSearch, do in fact provide a better search experience that redefines search for the phone. B2B marketers who have not looked at mobile search as a means of creating top of mind awareness should indeed consider mobile search as an addition to their marketing efforts.
Earlier this week I spoke with Brad King who is the Senior Director of Yahoo! Search Marketing for the Travel Category. Yahoo Search Marketing recently released a case study in which they helped a Travel company called Pleasant Holidays to Optimize their search marketing campaigns.
Below are the questions I asked Brad, listen here on how to fully leverage the services of Yahoo! Search Marketing:
- Can you give everyone some background on the case study?
- What were the biggest pains put forth by Pleasant Holidays?
- Is this a trend for businesses in the Travel Industry?
- Can you tell everyone why simply measuring clicks is not enough?
- One of the major lessons was to look at keywords holistically; can you speak to what this does for an online campaign?
- Are you planning on releasing more case studies in the future?
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