All entries for September 2006

Problems with Location based Search Marketing in the UK

The strongest growth in search marketing in the US has been in location based advertising. All the main search relevance advertising channels, Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing (was Overture) and Microsoft Search Marketing offer this service.

If a business offers a service in a specific geographic area it makes sence for their Adverts to show only to searchers who are in the area.
The searcher sees only adverts that are relevant to their query and some will be local. If a plumber bids on local cities in the West Midlands and someone from Coventry sees thier advert the word Coventry will appear under the display url. So this combines the advantages of relevance advertising, displaying only when the user is searching on the subject, with the Yellow Pages.

When I search here at the University and find location triggered Adwords the location shows as Warwick. The University is actually on the edge of Coventry but this is understandable. When I do the same from my Coventry home from a fixed IP ADSL broadband link it shows up as London!

Why is this? It turns out to be a limitation of the BT wholesale ADSL network. Their backbone ATM network can only resolve an IP address location dowm to three central hubs nationwide. Since BT’s ADSL has the majority of the UK’s broadband connections this is bad news for fixed line location based search marketing.

The Cable competition, Telewest and NTL, now combined as one joint company, do provide the correct location information down to the City and Town. (I am an NTL customer with their Analog TV service but unfortunately they will probably never upgrade my area to digital and offer broadband cable modems.)

Google Local and competitors will allow promotion alongside their Maps.
This will still work and allows users to look up restaurants, etc., where they plan to travel to.

True location based marketing in the UK will probably be delivered using mobile devices such as PDAs and smartphones as these really do need to know your location at all times to connect calls.

Robert McGonigle : 27 Sep 2006 22:19 |  Tags: Adwords Internet Search Location Based Search Overture |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Location information on every page.

Writing about web page http://www.wmccm.co.uk/WMCCM/DesktopDefault.aspx?tabindex=9&tabid=2916

For the last three years I have been advising our SMEs that they should add their location information onto every page of their websites.

Often engineering customers, searching for a supplier to solve an immediate problem, will find many results from China, India, Eastern Europe and the US. If they are looking for a local company they will either use the ‘pages from the UK’ button if they have the option or add some location information.

The .co.uk, .org.uk & .me.uk high level domains have taught British searchers to add UK. They might also add Midlands, West Midlands, Birmingham, etc.

Recent changes to the WMCCM site made it clear that our own site failed the location information test. The best, long term, solution will be to add this to the Site Banner default style but this will take time. (The bottom of the page on www.wmccm.co.uk , and other ASP.NET sites can be a an indeterminate place.)

I have tried three approaches on the public tabs.

A single line at the top. This is my preferred approach being closer to the eventual solution. This is seen on the Case Studies Tab at http://www.wmccm.co.uk/WMCCM/DesktopDefault.aspx?tabindex=9&tabid=2916

Using a html panel on the left. See the Showcase Tab, http://www.wmccm.co.uk/WMCCM/DesktopDefault.aspx?tabindex=7&tabid=3142

In a larger panel in the centre pane as in the Directory Tab, http://www.wmccm.co.uk/WMCCM/DesktopDefault.aspx?tabindex=2&tabid=15

What do you think?

Robert McGonigle : 15 Sep 2006 10:42 |  Tags: Internet Search Search Wmccm |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Using Blogs and RSS feeds to Update Web Pages

Many small companies only change their website every two years or so. This is because they do not have the skills to change or to upload their sites using web tools and must use external web developers.

Most web developers do not want to make minor changes and have been developing techniques within their designs to allow the site’s owners to add content using database entries, etc.

This is a test of using the RSS feed link from a blog as a way to add text to a web page. The previous entries on this blog use html markup and these markup tags have been displayed in the web page.

This test panel has not used any markup.

Robert McGonigle : 07 Sep 2006 17:18 |  Tags: Blogs Change Webpages RSS Feeds |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Internet Search Growth and Market Share

Writing about web page http://www.wmccm.co.uk

There are two ways of measuring the growth of the search markets, survey panels and web-server log data. Both these have been revealing significant growth.

Neilson//NetRatings Survey Panels report 55% annual growth to Dec ’05 against a 3% growth of US searchers. Hitwise, from their ISP & 500,000 web-site logs data, report Google’s UK searches were up 77% in the year to Nov ’05. Most indicators show Google gaining share with all the competitors holding position as they grow.

The search ranking sites differ as to the absolute market share of Google.

ComScore Networks and Neilson//NetRatings have Google at 43% and 48% respectively in March ’06 using survey methods.

WebSideStory using webserver log data has Google up at 55% in the US and 75% in the UK, Feb ‘06. Hitwise supported the UK figure showing 75% in March ’06 also using webserver data.

Two main differences stand out.

1. That Google is stronger in the UK is clearly shown in WebSideStory’s comparative data.
“Even more so in the U.K. than in the U.S., when people think of search, they think of Google,” said WebSideStory, Chief Marketing Officer, Rand Schulman.

2. The web server log file data shows a stronger Google share than the panel based surveys.

There are two possible reasons for the difference between panels and web server logs. Some panel results show unique visitors per day/week/month and underreports search volume. This is not true of Neilsons/NetRatings who project total daily search volumes. The pure server log file results will underreport visits to sites that don’t employ SEO professionals such as news and TV sites. Hitwise also use Internet Service Provider data to fill in this gap.

John Battelle in his book The Search, characterised Yahoo! as taking the human, contemporary, approach to Google’s technical, academic approach. Yahoo! has focussed more on Big Brother and reality TV shows. This supports an underreporting of Yahoo! referrals in server logs.

This analysis confirms that UK engineering companies should concentrate on Google.

This is supported by search engine referrals to www.wmccm.co.uk

Robert McGonigle : 06 Sep 2006 14:26 |  Tags: Internet Search Search |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem