Chicken Little - Google Link Bombs Extinguished!

Sometimes I find myself somewhat amazed by the ability of a small community to sensationalize change, even when the change is relatively minor. The recent announcement by Google that it has changed it’s algorithm so that link bombs will no longer work seems to have generated a higher level of discussion than really necessary.

For those who don’t know what a link bomb is, basically it means using off-site links to make a site rank higher for a keyword that the site itself is not targeting. For example, typing “miserable failure” into Google used to bring up President Bush’s official page on the Whitehouse website. Searching for “liar” brought up Tony Blair’s website. This was achieved by many sites all linking to the target site (the Whitehouse page) using the same anchor text (”miserable failure”).

On Jan. 25th/07, Google made what appeared to be a small, quick announcement that they had made changes to the algorithm so link bombs would no longer be as effective. On checking former link bombs, for the most part, this change seems to have been quite effective - the target sites are no longer appearing in the top position for the link bomb terms.

NLC looked at the change, figured out what Google was probably doing, made a note, commented in Search Engine Land about the limitations, and moved on. That’s life in Search Marketing.

However, the amount of buzz generated by this (seemingly relatively minor) change has been quite surprising.

There seems to have been quite a lot of speculation about how Google is doing this. In this thread at DigitalPoint forums, some theories presented are that anchor text in general will now be less of a ranking factor, similar inbound anchor text to a site may be discounted, or Google may be hand picking which sites should rank for what. This article surmises that sites which link to Google search results pages might now get a ranking boost.

On the other hand, Graywolf points out that some less controversial “link bombs” (such as Adobe ranking for Click Here) are still working.

Well, no-one outside of Google knows exactly how search results are generated. However, as Search Engine Roundtable points out, the answer could be clearly available in a patent filed by Google last year.

In this patent, Google states that:

“Importing the related bit vector from a target document URL1 into the phrase A related phrase bit vector for document URL0 eliminates the reliance of the search system on just the relationship of phrase A in URL0 pointing to URL1 as an indicator of significance or URL1 to the anchor text phrase.”

Put into plain English, this basically means that link bombs can be easily defused by comparing the anchor text on the linking page to the topic of the page. If the topic of the page has nothing to do with the anchor text, the target page may no longer rank highly for the linking term.

This means that there is a good chance that anchor text may be depreciated as a ranking factor when it does not match the subject of the target page. Looking at the Adobe example, it is possible that this depreciation is not enough to counter the sheer force of an overwhelming amount of links, especially from trusted sites.

What does this mean for legitimate SEO? Simple - make sure that your anchor text matches the subject of your page. This is standard “best practice” for linking, anyway, so nothing much should change for most sites. Everyone take a deep breath now, and relax - this industry has seen far bigger changes than this minor tweak, and there are more are on the way. We’ll be sure to mention when something really serious happens.

Mediasurface and Google recently announced out-of-the-box integration of Google GSA and the Morello content management solution. Which raises the question - how well does the GSA play with other content management systems?

We’ve been fortunate at NLC to have experience in both Google GSA deployments and the roll-out of content management solutions, frequently for the same customer. Our team is working on a formal whitepaper that will discuss best practices for GSA implementation in a CMS environment. This is a preview of two key observations.

Integration Challenges are CMS Specific

While some broad observations can be made about CMS/GSA integration, many of the details are specific to the content management solution. I’ll try to outline our thoughts with a broad brush and use specific examples involving RedDot CMS to make the discussion tangible.

Anticipating Collections

The GSA allows administrators to create search “collections.” Creating a collection allows users to easily narrow their search. Rather than searching across an entire intranet or website, they can narrow their search to a specific content source. For example, an intranet user seeking a bereavement leave form might opt to search the forms collection, rather than the entire intranet.

The CMS integration challenge is that the collections are configured in the GSA based on patterns in content URLs or other naming conventions. Two examples:

A News collection might be defined as all content with a URL that contains the directory /News/ such as intranet-site.com/news/.

The meeting minutes collection might be defined as all documents with a filename that includes the word “minutes.” This would capture www.intranet-site.com/020806/minutes-annual.pdf and www.intranet-site.com/grand-opening/postmortem/minutes-what-went-wrong.doc

Many content management systems do not by default publish content with easy to interpret naming conventions or directory structures. It is not uncommon for a CMS to organize content within the CMS and eschew directories almost completely.

For example, a default RedDot implementation would publish all web content as static HTML files within one directory, using consecutive numbers as filenames – http://www.intranet-site.com/89.htm, http://www.intranet-site.com/90.htm, etc.

You cannot build Google Search Appliance collections if there is not intelligible pattern in the publication URLs. Which means you must anticipate the collection framework when designing the RedDot publishing scheme. You might decide to impose the use of appropriate directories – news, forms, policies, events. Or you may encourage content contributors to manually name each page with a consistent naming convention (for example all the names of all French-language files might end “_f” or “_z.”

The take-away: Plan your CMS publication approach and naming conventions to support the collections you intend to create within the Google Search Appliance.

Google Tags

Google tags can be incorporated into HTML files – these tags are interpreted by the GSA. For example, you can use Google tags to exclude content from being crawled or indexed by the GSA.

Well there are other mechanisms for preventing the GSA from indexing content you would like to keep out of the index – say payroll.xls or offshore-banking.doc – the tags are particularly useful for improving the ease with which search results can be interpreted.

Much like Google.com, the Google Search Appliance returns a summary, or text snippet, with each link on the search results page. One value for the tag is “snippet”. You can prevent the GSA from including content in the search results summary using this tag.

Navigational elements, such as breadcrumbs, should be marked as non-snippetable (yes I made that word up). This makes it considerably more likely that the GSA will return suitable page descriptions. Within a RedDot deployment, the following syntax ensures the GSA does not return breadcrumb text:

The Take Away: Think hard about what content you want the GSA to return as summary information from each page and incorporate Google Tag planning when creating your template architecture.

Other Topics

Our forthcoming whitepaper will delve into a broader range of questions including:

• Directory crowding - how do you prevent the GSA from eliminating much of your content from search results?
• Personalization - how do you best ensure the GSA allows people to find the content they’re authorized to find - and make sure they don’t find content they are not supposed to see.

If you are interested, drop me an email at rwoods @ nonlinear.ca and I’ll send a copy of the paper to you when we’re done.

Think that the ‘bread and butter’ of marketing is TV, radio and print?

Think again. Now, more than ever, traditional media vehicles are receiving smaller and smaller portions of the proverbial budgetary ‘pie’, as marketing budgets get reallocated to ‘new media’, primarily the Internet.

As a recent article by ClickZ reveals, many so-called ‘traditional’ media types such as outdoor advertising have already been outpaced by the Internet. In fact, spending on radio advertising is expected to be overtaken within three years by internet media! And instead of investing dollars into print classifieds or magazines, advertisers are now investing in the online versions of these publications.

Although the actual share of overall ad spending is still a quite measly 7%, as advertisers begin to realize the ROI from these activities, we predict that this percentage will increase even further. The fact that just last year the Internet share of marketing was only 5.8% clearly indicates a strong upward movement.

Another article by BtoBOnline echoes the growth of online marketing spending. Although overall marketing budgets are on the rise, online tactics are experiencing by far the largest increase. A survey revealed that while only 62% planned to increase their overall budget in 2007, close to 76% of marketers planned to increase their online marketing in 2007, up from 73% the previous year.

It is quite clear that online marketing is gaining a larger piece of the pie.

However, the online marketing ’slice’ is further divided into smaller portions to meet a variety of online tactics. Web site development still receives the largest share of the budgets, with other important tactics being email, search and webcasts. Banner advertising and sponsorships will be allocated limited budgets.

Clearly, there are many mouths to feed. The question is: Will there be enough pie to go around?

Sometimes, clients ask us whether it is a good idea to create multiple sites, put some relevant content on them, and then have these sites link back to the main site. With all the hype about link building, clients are excited about the possibility of creating multiple related sites and linking them all to the main site, thus (the theory goes), creating many “links” to the main site, and improving their search rankings.

For example, if their main site is “widgets.com”, they may create “redwidgets.com”, “bluewidgets.com”, “smallwidgets.com” and “reallybigwidgets.com” (or sometimes just subdomains are used). Next, some “widget” content is uploaded to the new “satellite” sites, and each page links back to the main page - “widgets.com”. The theory is that Google will index these new sites, and will count each one as a “link” back to the main site, thus increasing rankings for the main site.

Does this really work?

To understand whether or not this strategy is effective, we have to understand how Google “values” links. The very first thing that absolutely must be understood is that all links are not equal. And if you think about it logically, this makes perfect sense. Would you rather have a link from someones’ subject-related homepage, or an article found on the New York Times website? Guess which one Google trusts more? It’s all about reputation, even when dealing with search engines.

Given that all links are not valued equally, let’s examine the “multiple-site” linking strategy. For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to use the PageRank system to explain the concepts here, although you should be aware that PR is not a measure of a links value and I am using it here only to keep the explanation simple.

Let’s say you have a business at “widgets.com”. You feel you need links to your site, so you create “bigwidgets.com” and “smallwidgets.com”, put some content on them, and then link back to your actual business - “widgets.com”. You then realize that you have to get links into the new sites so they can begin ranking, and pass on a ranking boost to your “actual” site (we are assuming that you already understand that a site with no links in to it has no “link love” to share).

So, after doing some link building, your new “satellite” sites have a PR of 2 (after all, you can’t spend much time on these satellite sites since you have an “actual” business to promote). And then you strike it lucky - a site with a PR 6 decides to link to one of your satellite sites. Does this mean that your main site will benefit from your satellite sites’ increased prominence?

Probably not! The satellite site will still only have a PR 2 (PR 3 if you are lucky) to pass on to your main site… regardless of the fact that higher prominence sites are linking to it. You could have had a PR 6 site link directly to your main site, which may have increased your sites reputation and ranking, but instead the link value was spent on a satellite site that retained the majority of the link value for itself.

The owner of this network believes that they have created new “links” to their website, which will help their main site rank better. But what they have really created are speed bumps that slow the incoming value of external links. Each satellite site serves as a little black hole to suck the value out of your inbound links.

This strategy can be very problematic for businesses that choose to use it. Recently, we came across a business which has only an online presence that does not even rank on the first page for it’s own name. I’m just not sure how this can this be helping the core business.

So, to sum up, the best thing you can do for your core business is to, well, concentrate on your core business. It’s easy to get distracted with what seems like quick fixes and “tricks”, but over the long term, the slow but steady & reliable tortoise always wins.

In 1857 Queen Victoria decided to place the capital of Canada in a remote lumber village called Ottawa situated where the Rideau, Ottawa and Gatineau rivers meet. One-hundred and fifty years later, the city has become famous for the world’s longest skating rink (five blocks from our Ottawa office), for an excellent NHL team (dramatically superior to those Maple Leaf bums) and, as of three days ago, as the home to Microsoft’s competition for Google Analytics.

The good folks at Microsoft are not announcing many details. But Ian Thomas has acknowledged that they are in alpha trials of a hosted web analytic solution that has Google Analytics in the cross-hairs. Microsoft purchased DeepMetrix in May of last year and is using their LiveStat product line as the framework for the new offering, currently code-named Gatineau.

What we do know about Gatineau

• The product is in alpha stage and is having its tires kicked by a very select group of invitees. Ian Thomas invites anyone interested in becoming a beta tester to let him know.
• There is a significant team committed to this project. DeepMetrix had a staff of about 35 when it was acquired and we expect half of that number were developers. Apparently Microsoft has quadrupled the development team since the acquisition. This suggests that something like 70 developers are coding away on Gatineau.
• When Google launched its analytics offering, it was immediately swamped with requests and had to take drastic steps to limit accessibility. Microsoft is likely to release Gatineau to a small group initially – I would expect key advertisers – to avoid these scaling challenges
• DeepMetrix is actually located in Hull, the small city facing Parliament Hill across the Ottawa River and the Ontario/Quebec divide. But then Hull was amalgamated with the town of Gatineau in a spate of provincial foolishness. And now Microsoft is stuck with a code name based on this unfortunate political decision. Sigh.

What This Means for Marketers

Much remains unclear – how Microsoft will price Gatineau, its feature set, etc. – but the release of a Google Analytics competitor will have an impact on marketers:

• Low-end web analytics has become a commodity – Gatineau simply reinforces this trend. Expect two outcomes:
  • Many lower-end or under-financed web analytic firms will disappear.
  • The Gartner Group’s 2Q ‘06 MarketScope for Web Analytics report is probably correct that a “third wave of web analytics” will embrace cross-channel reporting and analysis.
• Competition for marketers able to interpret web analytics appropriately, design campaigns with measurement in mind, understand metrics-driven improvement, will continue to intensify. The gene pool is small and the demand is large.
• We expect the availability of tools combined with the difficulty in finding qualified marketers will drive a need for frameworks – guidelines for mapping objectives to tactics to traceable metrics. Our own Performance Framework addresses this need.

Finally, the entry of Microsoft into the space is not likely to clear the confusion that web 2.0 initiatives and AJAX-based sites have introduced to web analytics. Determining how to measure user behaviour – and using that measurement to improve results – is exponentially more complicated when users create and control content, or interaction happens at the browser not the server.

Our advice to vendors? If you want to survive in a world where the giants are giving software away for free, find a way to address the web 2.0 metrics challenge. Quickly

Have you ever used keyword research tools to find out the search volume of your campaign…

…Only to find that your actual click volume is much, much lower after the campaign goes live? This can be a bit of a problem if you are planning on a $30k per month budget, and it turns out that click volume is only $3k per month. What do you say to your boss/client/stakeholders (as the case may be)?

Think about it… if you’ve done your keyword research, and your total campaign is expected to have about 1,000,000 searches per month, and your average CTR is 3%, can’t you expect about 30,000 clicks per month?

Well… no, actually.

Say you are bidding on the word “online games” (we’re not examining targeting here, just search volume). The word “online games” has about 16,000,000 estimated searches per month, and for the purposes of this example we’ll assume that this is an accurate estimate. At a 3% CTR, you should expect 480,000 clicks, right? Wrong!

You have to take into account that you probably aren’t going to reach all of these searchers. This estimated search volume is (probably) across all engines. Are you running a campaign in every engine? Probably not, and therefore you are not going to reach all of these searchers.

Second, are you using geotargeting in your campaign? (if not, why not?) If you are targeting only searchers in North America, your pool of potential searchers is smaller again. Targeting just Canadians? That’s a few fewer (and more targeted) people.

Third, you also have to look at your budget. Are you really going to be able to show an ad every time someone does a search for all your keywords? Or perhaps your daily budget is enough every day but Sunday, and so your ad is not shown for every search that day.

Here are the numbers:

Let’s keep this very simple and say you are running ads only on Google search (not the search network) for “online games”. You are targeting Canadians, and you have stacks of gold bars for your budget (i.e. your daily budget is enough to show your ad for every search, every day). You expect a 2% CTR and are prepared to pay $3 per click. Therefore you have requested (and received) a $975,000 budget per month, based on the high search volume.

Google has around a 50% share of the search market. That means that about 50% of our total search volume will have the opportunity to show your ad. So for your 16,000,000 total searches for “online games”, we can therefore assume that about 8,000,000 searches will be done on Google, which you are targeting.

Remember that those numbers are for a worldwide market – of which North America counts for about 21.2% of people online. If we geotarget for North America, we should end up with about 1,696,000 searches for our ad to display on.

But you are targeting Canadians, and they number about 10.5% of the American population. That brings us to about 178,080 possible searches.

So if we assume you will have a 2% CTR, you can expect about 3,560 clicks per month at $3 CPC, for a total cost of about $10,680.

How do you explain the fact that you only spent about $11,000 when you got approval for $975,000? That’s quite a difference.

The final formula to find the click volume in advance ends up looking something like this:

You can also download a spreadsheet template that can help you figure out these calculations yourself.

Note, however, that this formula may not work for every campaign. In fact, it’s possible to see wide discrepancies between the numbers that are estimated using this formula, and the numbers that actually occur. This could be due to something simple, like ending up with a different CTR or CPC than you imagined. Or sometimes the keyword search volume can be culturally based - for example, people may be searching for an “apartment” in North America, but a “flat” in the U.K. Or perhaps search volume is higher on certain days, so your budget may not allow you to take advantage of as many ad displays on that day.

If you have any suggestions on how this formula can be improved, please let us know!

Apple wowed us all with the newest convergence breakthrough in the ipod-pda-phone device controversially named the iPhone. So what does this mean for us online marketers? A whole lot. But the topic of this article will not go into mobile marketing, but rather social marketing.

A recent post by Michael Arrington reports that Apple has filed lawsuit against bloggers who report on the new skin for Windows Mobile phones that look exactly like the iPhone interface. This is their effort to prevent the distribution of this skin, but they are simply employing the wrong tactic against the wrong people.

Like what your marketing professor told you, one unhappy customer will tell 10 others of the bad experience and in turn will tell 20 and so on. Imagine that, but a hundred times worse. The reach of bloggers is much greater than the regular customer. The article by Arrington is titled “Apple Bullies Bloggers, Again” and has over 113 comments in just one day. While Apple has an extremely strong brand, they too can feel the damage should the topic and discussions get out of hand.

There is talk about anything everyday on the internet. Social websites like Blogger, YouTube and MySpace makes the distribution far too easy. Many companies may be surprised that some of the top search results for their products are the forums and blogs that tell you all the reasons not to buy the product. The challenge is how companies respond in controlling the spread, re-patch relations and protect their image.

It will be interesting to see if Apple will secretly send out free iPhones to keep the disgruntled bloggers quiet.

Surprise! The latest release of the Google Search Appliance introduces a much needed – and deeply valuable - capacity for tuning search results.

The background

When Google initially released the Google Search Appliance and its little brother the Mini), they trumpeted its ease of use. No tuning required – simply drop it into your network, identify the content to be indexed and voila, your users have Google-quality access to corporate content.

In official blogs and FAQs, Google proclaimed that the Search Appliance “leverages the work of thousands of engineers to get the correct answer, right out of the box, with no ‘tuning’ required.” This, they say, allows companies to avoid the “tornado of search results chaos” that “tuning search in the enterprise can . . . set off.”

It’s a feature - honest

Analysts were not as enthusiastic as the good folks at Google. Tony Byrne, publisher of the Enterprise Search Report, noted Google’s expertise in redefining a bug as a feature when concluding:

Google’s assertion that their algorithms’ inherent superiority obviates the need to expose their black box is patently wrong…. It’s impossible to know a priori how well one system will work with your collections until you test it — and then tune it.

In a similar vein, Forrester Research named a lack of “control over query and indexing processes” as a key reason for not naming the Google GSA as a market leader in its 2006 Forrester Wave: Enterprise Search Platforms. The Gartner Group chimes in noting in their 2006 Magic Quadrant that the GSA “lacks the sophisticated tuning and customization capabilities” of competing vendors.

In short: The Google Search Appliance could not be tuned for specific enterprise environments – and analysts saw this as a barrier to its wide-spread adoption in the enterprise.

Our experience supports the analyst view. In two recent deployments, we found that the results returned by GSA’s algorithm did not match our clients’ view of the importance of the documents returned.

“Source Biasing”

So we were delighted by Google’s January 4 announcement that the latest GSA release incorporates “source biasing.” As this screen capture shows, source biasing allows administrators to instruct the GSA to increase or decrease the weight (they call it “strength”) of documents of specific types or found in specific locations.

(We’ve made a full size screen shot available as well.)

This allows Google partners to solve a new range of problems. For example:

• The GSA can be “biased” so that all PDF documents are given more weight than Microsoft Word documents (on the assumption that PDFs are final, approved texts and Word docs are working copies).
• You might have two customer data systems, one with legacy information and one with more recent data. The GSA can be instructed to decrease the weight assigned to the data in the legacy system. The legacy data would still be found when very specific searches are used – say “sales to customer x in 1978” – but more current information would be prioritized for simple searches such as “customer x address.”
• The Prime Minister (or President) might appoint a new Minister. This can lead to a sudden (and urgent) request that all press releases and speeches before the date of appointment be “de-prioritized” in favour of documents mentioning the new Minister. Assuming press releases are categorized in chronological directories, the GSA source biasing option now makes this straight-forward. Which is fortunate, as the new, new Minister will be making the same request in eight to sixteen months time. (FYI – yes, we know that Ministers are actually appointed by Her Majesty through her representative the Governor General of Canada on the advice of the Prime Minister but we did not want to completely baffle non-Canadian readers of this blog.)

By any other name…

We really don’t care if Google calls it tuning or biasing or configuring or weighting or a flexible relevance engine - we are just happy they’ve made the change.

A lot of our clients ask us ‘what is the optimal number of pages to have on my site for SEO?’ or ‘Is it better to have more or less pages?’ and variations on this theme. And we often struggle to answer these questions. Of course, the search engines do not speak to their preference on this topic, and who knows for sure if they even HAVE a preference either way.

Nonetheless, we get asked it quite a bit, so I wanted to attempt to address it.

My immediate gut reaction to the question is usually ‘yes’. That is because in my experience, bigger sites DO tend to have overall better rankings. But is this because of the sheer volume of their content? Or is it because by having a high number of pages, they are able to more easily apply SEO best practices and extract some benefits they wouldn’t otherwise?

There was an interesting discussion on the High Rankings Forum about this recently. There are many good points raised speculating whether larger sites rank better than smaller sites.

Based on my own thoughts and some of the ones mentioned in this discussion, I’ve summarized some key advantages I can see ‘larger’ sites having:

1) The potential to optimize for a larger ’search universe’.

If you follow the golden rule of optimizing for 1-3 keywords per page (max 5), then you can easily see how you would be able to target many more keywords with a larger site. If a 10-page site were optimizing all of its 10 pages, the highest number of search terms available for potential would be 30 (10 * 3). However, if your site has 50 pages, that number skyrockets to 150 keyword phrases, thus broadening your ‘net’ for capturing searchers. You might have heard about the long vs short tail keyword approach…the gist of it is that you stand to gain a much higher overall search volume by targeting a whole pile of less-popular search terms than targeting a handful of very popular terms.

2) The capacity to enhance your internal linking.

Google sees a page that is highly linked-to as being more important. If the key pages of your site have links from many other pages on your site, they are much more likely to be given the deserved prominence by Google. If your site only has 10 pages, then the highest number of links you can have pointing to any one page are 9. If you site has 50 pages, then the highest number of links a page can have is obviously 49 – much better.

3) Ease in testing what works and what doesn’t.

If your site only 10 pages, it is much more risky to test out various techniques on some pages because if you take a wrong turn and a page somehow drops in the rankings, you are sacrificing perhaps 10% of your site traffic (and potential leads). In this case, every page is a ‘key’ page on your site. However, if your site has 100+ pages and you test out some tactics on a few deeper pages in the site, and this results in some position loss, well you might not even notice much of an impact on your traffic or other metrics.

4) There is likely some fresh and innovative content.

A larger site tends to be larger because it continually grows. It has areas dedicated to new content such as new stories, announcements, releases, etc. The fresher the content, the more likely people are going to come back to visit it. And the more popular a site is, the more likely the search engines to see it as important. As sites begin to get traction due to their content, they explore other ways to keep people coming back and generate buzz about the site. What follows is often the addition of more interactive content such as blogs, discussion forums, etc. Sites begin to link to this content more heavily. Search engines like pages that have a lot of incoming links. And thus these sites get assigned more weight in the search listings.

Therefore, larger sites may have an advantage in the search engines. However, don’t despair if you fall into the ’smaller’ category – if you work at it (and maybe enlist the help of an expert), you can still be competitive with the bigger fish.

There is one TV commercial that came on during the holidays that drove my son crazy. It involved 2 parents jumping out of bed and dashing down the stairs screaming in excitement because a specific catalogue had been delivered to their home.

My son despises this commercial, with a passion almost unseemly for a child so young. Whenever this commercial comes on, even if he’s not in the room, he runs over to the TV, says “those people stupid (a word he himself will tell you is “inappropriate”), and promptly turns the TV off. He apparently feels just a little disgusted or annoyed by the behaviour of these characters.

Generally, I’ve found when a brand is marketing to a very wide audience, the promotion tends to get “dumbed down” so it can reach the broadest possible demographic. No business wants to spend money promoting a message that the target market doesn’t understand. However, sometimes this lack of targeting can be counterproductive, as part of the audience may be turned off or even mildly offended by messages that are clearly not relevant to their lifestyle. Just because Americans spend a lot of time watching TV, doesn’t necessarily mean that this is the best way to target them.

To really understand just what developmental level this commercial was targeting, you have to understand that my son is not yet 3 years old.

This example illustrates perfectly why small businesses can take advantage of the Internet, right now. Some companies are continuing to promote their brand to a wide, generally untargeted audience in more traditional, mass media outlets. At the same time, progressive, adaptable companies are taking advantage of the specific targeting and promotional relevance that the Internet can provide.

When watching TV or listening to the radio, you may be the subject of many ads that have nothing to do with you. Sometimes these commercials simply get filtered out, and sometimes they can become irritating, resulting in a negative experience with that brand. For example, growing up, I saw many commercials for diapers. These diaper commercials interrupted what I was concentrating on and interested in, and resulted in a negative feeling for the commercials and the brand(s) at the time. Whether or not this feeling carried on into my adult life is hard to say, but the fact remains that we use a cloth diaper service.

The very fact that a large brand is capable of marketing to a wide audience is also a weakness. When you target everyone, you can end up reaching no-one. The message can become diluted, resulting in a lower promotional effectiveness overall.

And this is exactly the opportunity that small and progressive businesses can take advantage of. Search Marketing offers the ability to specifically target a market that is:

1. Interested in the product
2. Dynamically targeted
3. Action-oriented, and
4. Potentially motivated to purchase

The visitor shows their interest in the product when they search for it, or visit a page that relates to the product. At the same time, Search Marketing is dynamically targeted in that the visitor that was a customer yesterday is not necessarily a customer today, and tomorrow’s customer is not necessarily a potential customer today - the target market is dynamic and changes with the passing interests of potential consumers. When a consumer searches for a product, they are taking an action to investigate the product, and they may or may not be interested in purchasing the product in the near future. Search Marketing can address these customers at the exact moment they are interested in that specific product.

Targeted correctly, a PPC ad for “peppermint tea” will take the visitor directly to a page that describes what they are looking for, and presents them with an easy way to get it.

Search Marketing allows marketers to directly target the exact demographic that wants to buy the product. It doesn’t matter if this demographic is young or old, male or female, homeowners or renters, educated or not. The only demographic that matters is that they are actually interested in buying the product.

At the same time, the product you are promoting online may or may not be the actual, specific product the customer is looking to buy. With Search Marketing, you can narrow the target not only from “herbal tea” to “peppermint tea”, but can also target “loose peppermint tea”, and “peppermint tea bags”, etc. Due to this highly targeted focus, ad dollars can be more effectively spent.

And here’s where it gets interesting: a smaller business can take advantage of the mass media promotional campaigns of larger companies. If a larger company is hyping a specific product, the smaller company in that space can use PPC to grab the customers who search for the product. If the larger brand is not using PPC, the smaller company can grab much of the new business.

Big brands are already beginning to wake up to the opportunities that Search Marketing presents. Many larger companies are running their own Search Marketing campaigns. As time goes on, they will learn how to improve their targeting, and really begin to leverage the power of online marketing to their advantage.

Until that time, there are still plenty of niches for smaller brands to take advantage of, if the target market is understood, and properly addressed.