Get More from Search - Trends in Search & Social Media

It’s the everything’s-on-sale season. And, maybe it’s your mother’s birthday, your colleagues’ first child, or your anniversary that is just around the corner. Stressed with all the gift giving trips? Know what you want but don’t want to traverse around town trying to find the perfect size, color or model? No need to opt for the gift that states “I didn’t have time for anything personal” gift card.
Instead of having to deal with the stress of running from store to store, determine instead to visit your favorite retailer or Web 2.0 local search websites. Large retailers and some malls across the nation are starting to provide product availability via their websites and data feeds. This feature’s real appeal is that ready-to-buy consumers get instant verification of product availability in local stores. Despite search’s tremendous research-to-purchase value, most purchases still take place offline – in the local store locations. In fact, recent studies show that 92% of post-search purchases are made offline.
Local search sites that integrate this feature will greatly enhance repeat visits by their users – conceivably, every time they’re looking for a specific item, they’ll visit the local site to find it at the retailer with the product stocked.
The more that people utilize local search, the more exposure local businesses will receive, along with the greater possibility for foot traffic to their web and brick-and-mortar stores, which in turn will provide a better return on investment for their advertising dollars.

Everyone’s turning toward the Internet to advertise for their products and services. And with good reason. The idea of online advertising is enticing. Once an online ad campaign goes live, your company has the potential to reach millions of people – almost immediately. As the statistics and case studies are showing, advertising on the Internet can be an important step for just about any company. But is it the right time for your company to shift away significant budgets from traditional advertising to focus your gains on the virtual landscape? Don’t fail to plan: jumping in without proper planning will most certainly not yield you the best return on investment.
Even though your company may be a relative newbie in the online realm, your customers almost assuredly aren’t. Savvy web users demand well-organized, easily navigable and searchable sites that make them feel more than comfortable that your business deserves their dollars and their trust. Becoming a repeatable destination for your prospects and customers means good site architecture including persuasive copy and navigation, as well as a stellar customer service policy and easy access to your inner workings – i.e. your employees – even though transactions take place or are facilitated online.

Thus, the first step is to either establish or recreate your web presence to capture the interest of your advertising respondents. In traditional advertising, what your audience sees in print or on TV must be backed up by the product on the shelf, the customer service agent on the phone or the information package delivered to their door – otherwise, there’s “no deal.”

Similarly, your web site performs that function of engagement with intent to develop a mutually profitable relationship. So unless you’re a very small business and your sales cycle dictates only in-person and/or phone conversations with prospective customers, before you advertise – get your company’s face to the world ready to capitalize on every dollar you spend. And don’t try to go it alone – there are numerous third party consulting services available that will analyze your site, reorganize your value propositions for the best ROI, rebuild your site architecture and plug in the latest verbiage and persuasion wisdom to prepare you for the new prospects that will show up at your virtual door due to your online ads. The best ones have the case studies to prove their value. Don’t just redesign your site – make it appealing to your knowledgeable audience, and then you’ll be ready to rack up the profits.

A few of our favorites include: http://www.futurenowinc.com (persuasion architecture), www.marketingprofs.com (free and inexpensive articles, case studies and seminars for online marketers), http://www.marketingexperiments.com< (for learning what really works), and http://responsys.com (full marketing and email services lifecycle marketing).

Fox is streaming its prime-time shows on MySpace.com, Cars.com is sponsoring six NBC shows on NBC.com for the fall and Google is buying YouTube.com. It looks like more people are looking at the internet to bring them more entertainment. They have already used it to play games, get updates on the news and weather, and now as companies look toward the future it seems to be toward streaming video. Could this mean soon we will be watching the new movies over the internet instead of going to the theater or watching your favorite sports team online? New advertising campaign will most likely feature streaming video in some aspect whether it is the ads for the television shows or marketing a new product on the internet instead of on the television.

Google and Intuit’s new alliance has spawned a revolutionary effort to bring more small businesses online. In Intuit’s QuickBooks 2007 product, set to release this fall, Google tools will be integrated into the software, allowing the 3.7 million small businesses who already use QuickBooks to access Google Desktop, Maps, Base and AdWords right from an icon on their home page. This strategy will encourage SMBs to enter search marketing in a quick, easy and familiar way – possibly speeding up search’s adoption. But will it cause other local online advertising outlets to suffer? Not necessarily.

This partnership could become a very positive injection for local online advertising because the more educated SMBs are the more willing they are to advertise online, the less education other ad outlets have to do. Online marketing offers great potential for small businesses who seek cheaper and more effective ways to reach the targeted, down-the-street consumer. Yet, the complexity of self-serve bidding models and create-your-own ad strategies have kept many at bay.

The fact remains that users only spend about 5% of their time online at major search engines – the other 95% is spent at the destination sites and with email. SMBs will still want to advertise where the users are spending more time and making local purchase decisions – making Google a must, but not the only place they’ll begin distributing their smaller yet highly influential marketing budgets. The more dollars that shift online the better. SMBs have been stuck in offline advertising b/c it’s familiar. With this move, online will be less scary and it should speed up online ad adoption for SMBs.

Search marketing now accounts for over 41% of online advertising spending, or $5.1 billion in 2005, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. A new report by JupiterResearch, “US Online Advertising Forecast, 2006 to 2011,” confirms that search overtook display ads late last year and that search will represent the leading segment of online for the next five years at least.

While many brands are indeed allocating larger budget percentages to online advertising, the growth is also fueled by more advertisers taking the leap from offline to online. Both factors will continue to drive search’s appeal upwards, with estimates of 20 to 33% growth anticipated this year.

Growth of this caliber can only be sustained by true value. In just a couple short years, the ubiquity of search as a research, shopping and navigation tool has become reality. When search ad placements are casually referred to as “search results” and are recommended by non-tech individuals, the true value of search reveals itself plain as day.

Ok, we all know we can setup an account and buy PPC advertising from Google, Yahoo! and MSN, but wouldn’t it be great if we could buy search engine positioning in hundreds of unique website search engines across the country and in industry specific markets where are users are?

Just think of it. What if there was one central website that you the advertiser could use to pick-and-choose the hundreds of sites, and specific keywords, you would like your URL to be displayed in? And they would be static URL’s. Not dynamic rotational AdWord content network partner sites which typically display irrelevant ads, but top tier websites with high page rank and low Alexa rankings. Buying a search listing in these sites means a static link to your site from hundreds of top sites on the web related to your business.

Finally, advertising in hundreds of engines all on unique domains with major SEO value and ROI for each link you buy. Hundreds of inbound links instantly created to promote your product or service – all easily administered from one site.

Sound too good to be true? Well, soon it will be a reality.

Vortaloptics is pioneering the roll-out of custom vertical search engines on thousands of websites across North America. Each search engine can be completely controlled by the website administrator to position links, advertisers and affiliates under the exact keywords the administrator or advertiser chooses. Currently the Vortaloptics network is comprised of over 500 individual websites but is growing daily with new customers in new markets.

Users win, because the search results of these websites are “shaped” to provide the exact content users are searching for. Advertisers win, because they have new vertical outlets from which to buy advertising. Site owners win because they have a better functioning website, relevant results in their own engine and revenue being generated from the links they sell.

Like newcomer PayPerPost, which enables advertisers to pay bloggers to post write-ups for a fee across national blog networks, Vortaloptics intends to empower advertisers with a single source for national advertising across a network of diversified website search engines. Combined, the anticipated traffic from these thousands of websites would equate to more then the major engines and the sites would all be vertical in nature – not generic. Better ROI for the advertiser, and better SEO for your efforts.

Stay tuned for the big announcement of a new search network with benefits that go beyond click-throughs. Visit our home page to get your own vertical search engine and become part of the network.