Do any search on Google and you may see pictures, videos, or a map with local businesses come up in the search results. This may be what you see, but essentially all you are looking at is the information that Google trusts the most. According to Small Business Search Marketing, “that’s why TRUST is, was and always will be the #1 ranking factor in SEO.” Everything you do online actually has the same goal…build up your trust!

Business owners tend to forget that their websites not only have to appeal to humans, but also the search engines that crawl them. Search engines can be very loyal and just like humans will put their trust in something that others are buzzing about. For example, the more trusted sites you have linking back to your website, the more the search engines will decide to trust you. When they decide that you are worthy of trust they will crawl your site more deeply for information, index your site faster and make it easier to rank for competitive keywords. That’s not to say that having sites link back to your website is the only way to build trust, it’s important, but there are numerous ways to build your trust in the eyes of search engines. One of the hottest right now is Social Media Marketing. Having a solid plan for this is arguably the #1 way to build trust among the search engines as we head into 2012 and beyond.

The most important thing to remember when building trust is to never take those tempting shortcuts that are constantly sticking their ugly heads out and trying to convince you that it’s ok. Plain and simple, trust takes time to build. Whether it’s trust amongst your fellow man, or trust amongst your fellow search engine, it takes time. Too many times I have seen businesses make the choice to take short cuts with their online marketing decisions. It always comes back to bite them in the end.

For more insight check out The SEO Success Pyramid.

Image courtesy of http://www.istockphoto.com/

In the world of Google Places there are all kinds of interesting things going on behind the scenes. As one who helps people with their Google Places listings as oppose to someone who uses Google Places to help promote my business, the word interesting really does describe one of my predominant feelings about it all. But the word interesting can quickly vanish and be replaced by a dozen other adjectives that may not be as forgiving when you are looking at it through the eyes of a business that relies on Google Places to help generate revenue. Mike Blumenthal asked people to come up with words that best describe Google Places last year. The results were interesting to say the least. My personal favorite was Bipolar.

One of the hottest topics on the Google Places Help Forum as of late has been all things to do with reviews. Because of this, Vanessa, the Community Manager, has created an excellent “Technical Issues with Reviews” page that covers everything from why your review responses aren’t showing to why your reviews disappeared altogether. This trouble shooter of sorts is really informative, gives advice on how to fix an issue, and at the very least gives you peace of mind with a particular situation knowing that Google is aware of the issue and working towards a solution.

Last week as I was reporting a duplicate listing to Google I came across a really interesting response from Google that didn’t seem to be covered in the review trouble shooter. With this particular situation, one of the duplicates had “stolen” all of the reviews that the client had worked so hard to get. I found the response from Google to be very interesting (see Mike’s post to replace interesting with any word you see fit). Here is an excerpt:

“I can try merging your two listings instead; however, there is a chance that reviews may be lost and your ranking might still fluctuate during this process.…”

First off, I’m very excited just to have an open line of communication going with someone at Google. I actually communicated with this employee for 2 days over 6 different e-mails. The employee was offering up genuine suggestions that were not your typical cookie cutter responses that we have grown to know so well. This employee even finished the e-mail with “Please free to reply directly to this email, should any issues arise.” So although this communication is great, it felt like the blog title suggests; one problem solved (duplicates will merge) but another one created (possible loss of reviews). It seems that when it comes to merging duplicate listings that have reviews, we are taking a risk that some of these reviews are going to be lost, possibly forever.  I went on to ask the Google employee if the reviews that may get lost will ever return and this was the response:

“There isn’t any way of telling before the update occurs and maintaining reviews is not something we can guarantee. Reviews can sometimes be dropped from Place pages during reconciliation of data issues.
Unfortunately, we’re unable to specifically address each instance of this, but we are working on long-term solutions to resolve most of these cases.”

So remember to ask your clients to post reviews for your business all over the web in places like City Search and Insider Pages. It’s never a good idea to have all your reviews on Google Places and this is yet another reason why. In the end we just have to remember that we don’t live in a perfect world and Google Places is no different. We need to take the bad with the good and have faith that Google is constantly working to improve itself.

In 2012 online ads in the US will eclipse print for the first time ever at $39.5 billion versus $33.8 billion. The forecast for print advertising such as newspaper and magazines is not fairing so well and is expected to keep declining as more businesses allocate more of their advertising budgets to online endeavors.

Spending on TV remains mostly unaffected by the growth in online ad spending although the gap between the two will continue to shrink. eMarketer estimates TV will spend $72 billion in US ad dollars in 2016, $10 billion more than online ads.

Overall it looks like a promising year for the ad industry as a whole with total US ad spending to grow by nearly 7% to reach $170 billion. eMarketer attributes the continued growth to national election campaign ads and mobile ad spending. The total US ad spending is expected to reach $200 billion by 2016 with online ads representing one third of all media ads that year.

Are you tired of doing a Google search only to land on a page that has an entire army worth of ads occupying the top part of the page? Does this make you feel deceived and taken advantage of? Well if you do, you’re in luck. Google has just announced a tweak to its algorithm that will be designed to penalize sites that are saturating the top half of their pages with ads. (Wow, I sounded like the Sham Wow guy there)

The change comes from customer complaints indicating that it takes away from the user experience when you click on a result and have trouble finding what you are looking for due to all of the advertisements. Google posted this on its Inside Search Blog:

“Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.”

According to Google, the algorithm change should only affect about 1% of global searches which means that users can expect to see a reordering of results in about 1 out of every 100 searches. That sounds like a small number and one might be quick to disregard the risk of using pages that are top-heavy with ads, but experts agree that it is always better to play it safe rather than ending up buried in the search results.

Google’s advice “continues to be to focus on delivering the best possible user experience on your websites and not to focus on specific algorithm tweaks.” This change is just one of over 500 that we can expect to see by the end of the year so fasten your seat belt.

Some examples:

Below is what the search bar looks like as you are doing a search that includes personal results:

And you will see a separation between the numbers of personal versus public results:

The new feature will be great for people who are interested in finding privately shared content amongst their friends as well as public content without having to go to multiple places to do your searching. However, there are growing concerns because privately shared content may appear to be public when in fact it is not. Also, there is the possibility of people having more information shared amongst friends and family than they had initially intended.

Google has come under a bit of fire from other social media related companies such as Twitter. They are arguing that this new feature is leveraging Google’s search results to favor its own content and push out competitors. This is because Search, Plus Your World is currently only showing personal results from its own social media network, Google+. So why are results from the others such as Facebook and Twitter missing? According to Google, “Facebook and Twitter and other services, basically, their terms of service don’t allow us to crawl them deeply and store things. Google+ is the only [network] that provides such a persistent service, of course, going forward, if others were willing to change, we’d look at designing things to see how it would work.”

Several blogs are being written on this new development from Google in an attempt to better understand its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. As for the privacy concerns people have, it really just comes down to a simple piece of advice; don’t share anything that you would regret if it found its way into the
public domain. It will be very interesting to see how this new feature evolves. To hear about it straight from the source, check out the Official Google Blog.

Facebook now commands a whopping 800 million users. 200 million of these users joined up in 2011 alone. Twitter recently hit the 100 million active users mark with one out of every five users living in the United States. LinkedIn has recently reached 64 million users just in North America.

It’s not often that you find a nearly 100 percent consensus among business owners regarding a particular marketing strategy, or any subject for that matter. However, a recent study by Booz&Co and Buddy Media discovered that just over 95 percent of businesses surveyed said they were going to increase their social media marketing budget, with the remaining percent saying that they would keep their budget the same.

In light of these social media statistics I wanted to share a great info graphic that was created by Dream Systems Media. Click on the link below to check out some amazing stats. Some will come as no surprise while others will really get you thinking. Enjoy!

http://www.dreamsystemsmedia.com/blog/index.php/social-media-statistics-of-the-day/

People looking for information about local businesses said they rely on the internet, particularly search engines over all other sources. Printed newspaper as well as websites of newspaper companies was the second most popular choice that people use to find information and news about local businesses. Word of mouth was a high scoring source as well.

About 60% of adults say that they get news and information about local businesses other than restaurants and bars. When they do:

47% say they rely most on the internet, including:
•    search engines – 36% rely on them
•    specialty websites – 16% rely on them
•    social media – 1% rely on social network sites or Twitter

30% rely most on newspapers, including:
•    printed newspapers – 29% rely most on that
•    newspaper websites – 2% rely on them

22% rely on word of mouth from family and friends

8% rely on local TV, either broadcasts or the websites of local stations

5% rely on local radio

Keep in mind that some of the statistics in the bullets exceed the total due to the fact that respondents were able to fill in more than one choice. For example, someone could have selected Twitter and social websites in addition to search engines.

This study is yet another reason why businesses need to be taking advantage of as many opportunities as possible to enhance their online presence. 2012 is expected to see more people than ever before looking for information about local businesses online. It’s a very exciting time in the rapidly growing world of online marketing and 2012 is set to be a great year for those who take advantage.

The top spender on the list at over $174 million owns Ask.com, Match.com, Citysearch and several other companies that are all buying long-term non-used inventory from Google. Fascinatingly, in the sixth spot is Microsoft Corp. who spent over $70 million on Google paid advertising this year and also happens to be one of their biggest rivals. Some other major spenders on Google include insurance agencies, State Farm $54 million, Allstate $50 million, and Progressive at $46 million.

Remember that although this data was strategically collected, it is only an estimate, only Google knows the exact numbers.

Check out, “Google: Behind the Numbers” from BusinessMBA.org for some mind boggling stats.

A two year study by retail marketing firm RevTrax discovered that “for every $1 of e-commerce revenue generated from paid search, marketers can expect to see approximately another $6 of in-store revenue.” To put it in another way, paid ads have a 6:1 impact on offline sales over e-commerce. RevTrax concludes that companies who use multiple channels that don’t include in-store sales into the ROI calculation are potentially “undervaluing the paid search channel by as much as 85 percent.” Another interesting find from the study is that 40 to 50 percent of business acquired through paid search was new customers. This goes to show that people searching paid ads aren’t just existing customers looking for a deal.

According to Greg Sterling of Search Engine Land, “This is the first study to conclusively show the offline impact of paid search at this kind of scale, based on actual behavior rather than consumer surveys and self-reported data.”  It’s important to point out that these results do not include organic search ads; this study solely measured the impact of paid ads.

I think the important thing to remember is that there are huge benefits to using paid ads, but keep in mind that paid ads are only one piece of the puzzle when it comes to increasing your online presence.

At a recent Google function, a representative of Google encouraged the use of onsite “review stations” where customers can leave a review on your Google Places listing upon finishing their interaction with your business. I was surprised to hear this, mainly because I have always thought that Google put a lot of emphasis on ensuring that reviews for a particular business didn’t come from the same IP address. If Google is recommending that a business generate a chunk of its reviews from a single location, this must not be the case. According to Mike Blumenthal: “Clearly if training, sales and support at Google all say it is OK, then it must be OK to have on site workstations for the purpose of generating reviews. And one can infer from all of this is that the review filter would not block the review based on location (IP) alone”.

The implications of this revelation are vast, with several positive and negative outcomes that could result from using this review obtaining tactic. To get some perspective and wisdom on the situation from the Google Places Godfather himself, check out Mike Blumenthal’s recent blog post. Make sure to read through the comments at the end of the article as well for some excellent feedback on the issue.