Mike Dobbs

If you’ve conducted a simple search within Google lately – which, let’s face it, you probably have – you may have noticed a new and different variety of result type.  This type of result, one that has been labeled as “One Box”, “Snippets” or “Short Answers,” is becoming more persistent within the engine.  And no matter what Google decides to officially name these types of quick results, you can expect to see more of them in the future.

Whether you want to calculate a simple math equation or solve measurement conversions, Google is streamlining your answers. For example, if you have air travel plans, you can search Google for your airline flight status.  If you are interested in music, you can query your favorite music artists or songs. You can also search for new movie showings or times, and dates of birth or death.  Given the volume of these one-off searches, Google is aiming to increase user satisfaction by speeding up its delivery of the basic information we seek.

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In last week’s post about Google Places, we took a high-level look at the platform and what it offers to businesses looking to improve local visibility in Google. In today’s post, we’ll continue to explore Google Places in terms of user interaction, extra features, as well as some limitations it presents for marketers seeking to optimize hundreds or thousands of locations.

First off, let’s take a look at all of the ways consumers can interact with businesses in Google Places.

How users interact with Google Places

It should now seem clear that maintaining local information through Google Places will improve control of a brand’s visibility in Google Search, including:

Web Search (Universal Listings)

These predominant local “universal” listings, often seen through a standard web search, significantly influence the local visibility for brands, aiding direct search traffic to the brand’s website (via the A, B, C links seen below).  Plus, users clicking on the link just below the main hyperlink –perhaps seeking details like user reviews, hours of operation, directions and more — will be sent to a corresponding Google Place page to get the information, in contrast to the brand’s website.

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2010 is shaping up to be the year of local search, with so much focus on mobile and social check-ins, geo-targeted tweets and a general shift of consumer behavior that makes them more inclined to post and search content with more geo-relevance. According to Google, web users spend one million hours browsing its Maps and Earth products everyday.  Amid this flurry of local updates within the industry, the Google Local Business Center (LBC) has recently changed its name to, “Google Places”.

The update is a fresh way to bring more attention to this Google platform.  In addition, the new management platform aligns with their original concept of Google Places, announced in September 2009.

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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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