More than 75% Small to Medium-size Businesses Advertise Online

The downturn in the economy has accelerated the pace of online advertising for local advertisers. This has been captured by The Kelsey Group, a consultancy.

For the first time since 1999, when The Kelsey Group began tracking the advertising behaviors of small and medium-sized businesses through their Local Commerce Monitor study, the penetration of digital/online media has exceeded that of traditional media among Small to Medium-size Business advertisers.

The percentage of SMBs using digital/online media increased from 73 percent in August 2008 to 77 percent in August 2009, while that of traditional media decreased from 74 percent to 69 percent. Compare today’s digital/online penetration with LCM’s findings in 1999, when only 17 percent of Small to Medium-size Businesses were using the Web to advertise or promote their businesses

The Long Tail of Search is getting longer

As consumers become more experienced with search and number of websites, videos, etc that Google indexes into its search grows exponentially, consumers are now making more detailed queries.

The consumer no longer searches for cars, but now adds make, model, location and even price to get closer to an actionable result.

Or in the case of travel the search is not just Hilton Head, but condo, oceanfront, near golf, traveling with teenagers. This delivers a more manageable 3,390 results in Google.

Hitwise has recently released its research into this trend and is reporting, the length of search queries has increased over the past year. Longer search queries, averaging searches of five to more than eight words in length, have increased 9 percent between February 2009 and February 2008.

Searches of eight or more words increased 20 percent. The same time period showed that shorter search queries — those averaging one to four words long — have decreased 2 percent.

Searches of two words comprised the majority of searches, amounting to 23.47 percent of all queries.

Hitwise - Percentage of US Clicks by Number of Keywords, Feb 2009

Blurring Boundaries Brand Advertising and Direct Marketing

Those of us who have been engaged in online advertising and marketing have long believed that direct marketing via search engines and on websites can deliver brand messaging as well as response.

This position has now received further support from a new executive brief by IBM Global Business Services, based on an in-depth study by the Institute’s research team, reports that to compete in the new era of advertising will require a fundamental change in media companies’ capabilities.

Introducing the study, the authors say that the distinctions between advertising and marketing have blurred, as new forms of communication combine the ROI-characteristics of direct marketing with the brand characteristics of traditional advertising.

To adapt and succeed, says the report, companies must move beyond traditional advertising to combine granularity of targeting and measurement with cross-platform integration, greater insights, open collaboration and digital processes.

The study identifies four primary trends that are blurring the boundaries between traditional brand advertising and direct marketing:
• Consumer adoption of new distribution formats – Consumer behavior has changed forever: They are more digital-savvy, willing to provide personal information in return for perceived value, and increasingly ready for permission-based advertising.
• A shift in advertiser spending – Spending is moving from traditional advertising toward measurable, interactive marketing. Combined with spending contraction in the new economic environment, this requires smarter advertising, and doing more with less.
• Digital migration of platforms – Traditional boundaries are fading, creating opportunities for innovative business models for content platforms.
• Emergence of new capabilities – Moves, by both new entrants and existing players, are driving new types of industry innovation, challenging existing business models and accelerating the pace of change.

This combined with the transition of the consumer from audience to participant

It all starts with the domain name

The domain name RealEstateSearch.com is being sold. This is a high quality domain name. So, let’s look at what impact a domain name like that would have on ranking in Google. And, how you could leverage your investment.

According to the Google Adwords traffic estimator, consumers type the keywords in this domain name “real estate search” 9 million times each month into the Google search.

If you bought these keywords, this would result in roughly 240,000 consumer visits each month to your website nationally. Based on the cost of keywords, this would be quite an investment.

So the question becomes how does Google “natural” or “organic” search handle the domain name “realestatesearch.com”?

Recently at a search marketing meeting the discussion was about SEO. Google engineers confirmed that Google does look at the domain name keywords as it factors the relevance of the match.

Google places the exact match site nearly always at the top or at least in the top 10 of search results. Type in the keywords from your own domain name and you will see this demonstrated.

For those who understand “subdomains”, this would also work if the consumer typed in “Boise real estate search” and the domain was localized using subdomains; so the domain name would read: boise.realestatesearch.com.

There would be no argument that being at the top of the search result is one of the challenges of search engine optimization. Because, 89% of Google clicks occur on that first page.

So with the right search engine optimization you can feel good that you made it to page one. Let me close by telling you what research into actual search records showed could happen if you made it to the top spot. You could experience as much as a 1,400% in traffic by ranking #1.

My counsel is to pick your domain name carefully so to match the keywords your targeted audience would most likely be using. And use more than one domain name to target your potential clients more specifically.