Mike Dobbs

Business locations have unwittingly joined a world of local social gaming. The use of “check-in” technologies, and buzz around this new kind of social activity has blossomed thanks to the recent growth of sites like Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, MyTown and Brightkite. These are just some of the technologies out there that create social utility and a bit of fun around the everyday places we visit.

Through GPS functionality, mobile browsers and apps have empowered consumers to share their daily adventures, longitude by latitude, tweet by tweet, at any given second in time.  For example, Foursquare allows its users to quickly find a location, check in and supply content that is relevant to their geographic location.  For places of business, a user may want to inform his or her social community in real time of his or her location and thoughts about the spot.  This might include a traditional status update, advice or a review of the location itself.

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Image by moralehazard via Flickr.

Hello, Real-time Search

If Google’s newest blended results feature is any indication, the rapid pace of search innovations shows no signs of slowing. The feature, dubbed “Latest” by Google, incorporates real-time data sources into search results.

Google’s algorithm may trigger this blend of universal search type for any given keyword, but most notably for timely phrases like “health care reform,” “Olympics,”“Brittany Murphy,” or other terms being frequently and actively used in real-time content generation.

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One way to effectively mix SEO and PPC: Stay ahead of the curve and utilize new innovations that enable you to weave micro-formats and RSS feeds into search listings.

In an iMedia Connection article published today, Mike Dobbs — Group Director, SEO at 360i — outlines 10 tips for combining SEO & paid search in your digital marketing programs. We’ve provided a brief summary below, but you can read the full article over on iMedia’s Web site.

While search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search are often seen as independent processes by digital marketers, the consumer sees a search results page as a single experience, and research shows that paid and natural search do impact eachother. Here’s a look at 10 key force-multipliers that leverage search results pages to maximize the impact of both your PPC and SEO efforts:

1. Follow proven SEO best practices
There are many standard best practices, but avoiding duplicate content is a vital SEO rule for retailers. Duplicate content is a term used in the field of search engine optimization to describe content that appears on more than one webpage. Embracing the “canonical tag” is an elegant solution for avoiding duplicate content.

2. Evaluate your paid search campaign structure against your own site architecture
Following your site’s architecture when setting up your campaigns and ad groups can help reveal untapped opportunities for your paid search efforts. Do you have an ad group for each of your product categories and promotions? Walk through your site map and compare it against your PPC campaign to make sure you cover all the bases.

3. Take a holistic approach to PPC bidding and ad creative
Running paid ads that include timely promotions and a call-to-action alongside natural search results for your brand can actually increase overall click-through rates (CTRs) on natural search listings, providing higher ROI across your search efforts.

Results of a SearchIgnite study showed that natural search clicks were 17 percent higher on days when paid search ads were running, garnering more “free” clicks simply by running paid search ads alongside natural search results. In addition, total conversions and revenue on both paid and natural terms dramatically increased on days when paid search ads were running.

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Google’s new Sidewiki tool is a browser-add on that allows web surfers to contribute information next to any webpage. The Sidewiki appears on the browser sidebar, where a user can read entries or add their own comments to the content of a page (see example below). Not unlike other Google experiments, such as Knol or SearchWiki, the tool is founded on a concept of user-generated content (UGC).

Google’s new Sidewiki tool lets users comment on webpages.

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Yahoo! recently rolled out a new Search UI with a three column layout (previously, Yahoo! Search had only two columns). Their roll-out of this display should be reaching completion, riding the coattails of their new homepage redesign. Despite the planned deal to integrate with Microsoft’s Bing engine, Yahoo! is clearly committed to innovating in search. In this post, we’ll go over some of the new features of the updated interface.

Above: The left column is new. Let’s dig into what it offers.

“Intelligent Search Results”
The top of the new left-hand column includes the addition of “Intelligent Search Results.” According to Yahoo!, these results are determined based on three factors:

1. Natural Relevance – Is the domain relevant in natural results for the keyword or phrase?
2. Domain Popularity – Does the domain have high traffic volume?
3. Paid Search – Is the site running paid search ads that appear for this query?

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With the latest Google search announcement of its BETA Caffeine engine, what can marketers expect if Google flips a switch or starts a transition to a newer “next-generation” infrastructure?

Now that Google’s sandbox beta engine has stabilized – it was previously too volatile to run comprehensive and accurate testing – we’ve evaluated rankings for a sample set of 40 retail keywords. We looked at ten major retail brand names (keywords), ten retail head terms (single keywords), ten retail torso terms (two-word phrases) and ten retail long-tail phrases (four-word phrases) and compared the search results on the first three pages of both engines (standard Google and “Caffeinated” Google).

40 Retail Keywords Used in the Analysis

Six things stood out to us as notable differences that could impact marketers when Google makes the switch.

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For Searchers

Google recently launched a suite of new search options. Googlers will now see a new “Show Options” link after completing a search query. At the moment, it’s a fairly subtle gateway into their additional tools, providing searchers with a way to further segment relevance off an original search keyword.

The options available break down into two types – 1) options that help searchers segment and further filter results to find what they’re looking for and 2) options that help searchers visualize the keyword results in different ways.

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