A Spammy Start Up
Recently TechCrunch posted an article /a> link nofollowed the Sequoia-backed start up Milanoo for ranking using paid links:
Here’s what Digital Due Diligence found: For a number of very valuable keywords in Google search,, Here’s how Milanoo ranks for “cheap dresses” (position 2), “evening gown” (1), “cheap wedding dresses” (1), and “summer dresses” (2). Digital Due Diligence partner Doug Pierce (who also served as an expert in the New York Times J.C. Penney expose), writes that those four keywords alone have an equivalent cost of nearly $200,000 per month in Google AdWords.
It’s a red flag, explains Pierce’s fellow partner Byrne Hobart
The article left a fairly foul stench in the air which is hard to get over.
Risk Analysis vs Risk Creation
These folks claim to do due diligence for investors, which essentially means “risk analysis” and “risk management.” But then to market themselves, they throw active investments under the bus for self promotion. And now they have done so repeatedly. It is not an isolated incident, but rather a pattern of conduct.
To be frank, that form of marketing from an outfit claiming to do SEO risk analysis can be described using no other word than this: sleazy.
Just Another Form of Competitive Sabotage
An outing like the above is typically driven (at some level) by a competitor looking to take down a competitor. And such a high profile outing literally can destroy lives. It is a high stakes game of public relations. The media outlet gets a story, the expert gets quoted, and the competitor gets torched.
If I was an investment firm I would never spend a single Dollar with Digital Due Diligence. Why? Well they may do a valuable service on some project you are funding them for, BUT if you fund them at all you are encouraging more outing in the future and more risk for your own future investments.
Outing is Anti-Innovation
Eric Schmidt has stated that /a>. Markets are rigged to /a> /a> /a>. If you are an investor you are betting that you can take smart calculable risks & disrupt markets. But SEO outing is yet another layer of unknown risk which harms all start ups while rewarding existing market leaders: the exact opposite of innovation.
Even if you encourage your own investments to be ultra-conservative you still have no protection from this sort of activity.
A competitor could easily buy a bunch of links for one of your sites (they could even pay cash for a gift card while traveling & use that to buy links from a clean browser with cookies cleared on a public wifi connection, making themselves untraceable). After throwing a few hundred or few thousand Dollars at setting up the site, they can then leak a tip to Digital Due Diligence, who will then leak it to TechCrunch or the NYT.
Why This Sort of Outing is Horrible for SEO Professionals
The core issue here is professionalism. Should we let people who screw other people over get ahead while trying to paint themselves as the good guy? I don’t see how there is any hope left for the industry if that becomes the new normal. Every time there is a high profile outing SEO investments become perceived as being more risky and the whole of the industry looks less professional.
Double fail+++
An Example of Two Interpretations of Google’s Guidelines
The last time I had any significant experience on this front the SEO police asked who Google should “come down on” for our affiliate program passing link juice. That made our affiliate links no longer pass link juice. Shortly after a Google search engineer publicly stated that affiliate links should count and the same SEO firm that threw us under the bus mentioned they were thinking about bringing their affiliate program in-house so they could do the same thing they outed us for. A few years later it was highlighted that /a>.
In other words, Google claims their guidelines to be black and white, but a particular technique can be fine for some, spam for others, and worth funding on an industrial scale if Google gets a piece of the action. Is it any surprise that /a>?
Just Say No!
The above sort of activity is just like Google and Microsoft leaking each other’s security flaws publicly to try to screw each other over. Out of such exchanges nobody wins, but everyone looks a bit more like a used car salesman, as we further /a>.
With the rise of such SEO diligence projects, how long until the primary business model & main form of diligence being done is funded “research” to take down competitors? Is this market even worth participating in if we let it devolve to that point?
These sort of folks who throw the whole of the SEO industry under a bus for self-promotion should be shunned by the industry. If our industry is to have any sense of fair, just, and reasonable meritocracy to it then this behavior can not be condoned.
Google Implies Local Demand Based on User Location
It appears that Google has just dialed up /a> in a big way.
A picture is worth a thousand words, so…
Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there and there and there and there and there.
The Struggle Real Businesses Face
The big problem with this IMHO is all but the spammer (who is now busy working on “local” signals) loses. Legit online-only pure plays are simply wiped off the result set. The searcher gains nothing by seeing State Farm agents 5 times in the search results. Even the local business which has a new windfall of business is simply overwhelmed with leads, meaning they likely have (at least relatively) poor customer service until they hire up.
To a small business, a sharp rise in demand can be every bit as damaging as a sharp fall in demand.
But should small local businesses hire aggressively, they could be only /a> away from needing to prune staff. Maybe some day Google decides to limit the results to show 1 agent per parent company, and then the agents end up fighting out each other (much like affiliates had to fight each other on bids in AdWords to be the 1 that shows up).
Given that some of the agents ranking page 1 have less than a dozen inbound links & links from only a few unique domains, it won’t take long for some new “local” players to come online.
What Makes a Search Result Good?
A lot can be said for getting users where they need to be quickly. When it works it has great value. But when it doesn’t work, it makes the market less efficient. Value chains exist for a reason. Sometimes a brand (or an individual agent of brand x) is not in the best position to act as an unbiased advisor.
As a consumer buying car insurance, I don’t care that my agent is local. In fact, if I live in an expensive area I may want my insurance provided from someone who lives in an area with a lower cost of living so they can provide the services (while making a comfortable living) for less. For the last decade I have been insured from a company in another state (USAA in Texas). Location had precisely 0 impact on my decision making.
What mattered to me was that they had great rates. Which is precisely what almost all insurance commercials promote.
Geico spends nearly a billion Dollars a year pounding that message into the minds of consumers.
The problem is that almost all the big brands promote the exact same message. They are the cheapest. Save with them. Etc. Online pure plays that provide quote comparisons provide a valuable & value-add function in this marketplace, but they have simply disappeared from Google. They aren’t local enough to hit the local signal, they aren’t brand enough to hit the brand signal, and since they are not the end brands they can’t justify /a> thinking that what they don’t get back in direct ROI can be written off to “brand.”
Ultimately the end user loses (or at least until Google creates their insurance flavor of “comparison ads.”)
This Stuff is Everywhere
This stuff is even happening on search queries where there is absolutely no implied local intent & no need for a local provider. General discovery & topical queries like “web designer” or even informational background searches like “SEO” now bring up service based sites with a local presence.
Leaving Off On a Positive Note
1 day doesn’t make a trend, but if this stuff sticks ranking local sites for big keywords just got really easy.
- If you know SEO and live near a big city, a second office location might soon be a profitable decision.
- If you are a local business who thought SEO was too complex or expensive, that excuse may have just been removed from the marketplace.
- If you run a bespoke consulting styled business & ran into a windfall of demand don’t forget to increase your rates & be more selective with who you work with. Working all the time leads to burn out. Trust me I know that all too well.
- This is another example why it can be a great idea to mix and match your businesses…such that if one jumps out of nowhere or another one tanks you are still fine. Having multiple projects is one of the few ways you can really protect yourself from the likes of Panda & updates like this one. Running multiple businesses allows you to lean into your side gigs when your main one drops off, and push harder on your main gig when it is really humming along.
The term “competitive research” conjures up all sorts of imagery like expensive tools, shiny buttons, cute charts, and fancy (sometimes foolish) language about precise insight into a particular site or marketplace.
In reality we know that such claims are usually best taken with a large grain of salt. Most competitive research data is scraped from search engines and then has custom filters applied to it. Such filters can actually be a detriment to the data because, in desperate attempts at differentiation, tool-sets routinely use metrics which get overly convoluted with custom values and such that the final product because overhyped and underwhelming.
Some tools make up for their sampling errors by allowing you to upload your keywords & data directly into their database. The problem with this is that you are putting keywords which were “below the radar” into a database that your competitors may be using. Why just give away your data to the competition like that? Talk about working against yourself!
Let’s remember that these custom metrics and estimates are typically extrapolated off of scraped data, or data purchased from IP’s, or data from custom toolbars, all of which are data samples. So it is kind of like; scraped data +/- data extrapolations + in-house data + custom metrics = final product.
It is reasonable to assume that the more custom or guesstimated layers you build off of occasionally unreliable data (waves at Google’s keyword tool and SERPS) the less and less targeted that data is. Moral of the story is, “choose wisely young jedi”.
Getting Useful Data for Free
Now that we’ve set the expectation stage (don’t expect tools to be a push button, slot machine win) you might feel like paying hundreds or thousands a month for these kinds of tools is a bit much. Sometimes yes, but multiple data points certainly have their advantages and it’s not that the data is junk by any means, it’s just that the data shouldn’t be relied upon as if it were scientific. The data can most certainly be helpful but it comes down to ROI for you and your specific project(s).
There are many tools you can use to get lots and lots of decent keyword competition data for free. We aren’t going to be covering free trials, just tools that give you what the have for free or tools that give enough useful data inside of a free version of their product.
If you are in the competitive research stage, you’ve probably already got a topic in mind. So we’ll assume that you are doing competitive research on the keyword “camping equipment”.
Accessing Free Tools
You could do a specific bookmark folder which encompasses links to your free tools for easy access. The first things you will probably look at are:
- the SERP for your keyword
- age of ranking sites
- links (total links, links to domain, links to page, edu/gov links)
- domain age
- domain name (brand, exact match, both, none?)
- signals of trust (key directories, dmoz, twitter)
Those data points can easily be accessed with /a>.
SEO For Firefox
SEO for Firefox is a free firefox extension which will give you important SEO metrics quickly, from a variety of reputable data sources. Typically, you might want to aim for in at least the top 3 given all the stuff that could be included in a SERP like:
- a map
- Google products
- Google images
- Google shopping results
- YouTube videos
- News results
- Real-time results
- and so on…
You can get a pretty good initial glimpse of the competition metrics within a few seconds. This is clearly a brand-heavy SERP and it is reflected in the SEO metrics. Here’s a screen shot of what you’d see for a particular domain:
All things considered this is a pretty strong domain. It’s a brand, has lots of links, .edu links, also ranks highly in Bing-powered Yahoo!, and has a PR 6 to boot.
Another cool thing about SEO For Firefox is that you can export the results into a .csv file for further research, processing and comparison. If you don’t have a copy of Office for Mac or Windows already then, in keeping with the “free nature” of this post, you can use /a>.
SEO Toolbar
Maybe you know the sites you want to research already or maybe you want a graphical, side by side comparison of up to 5 sites in your market. You can use our /a> to accomplish this quickly and efficiently. If you click on the green arrows on the right side of the tool bar, you are presented with a GUI for the processing of up to 5 sites at ones (screenshot below)
The comparison feature gives you access to key, relevant SEO metrics side by side for up to 5 sites.
So by now you should have a spreadsheet or three containing relevant data for the top sites on a particular keyword
Link Tools
Now that you’ve gotten some of the higher-level metrics out of the way, you can dive into examining the link profile of a competing site.
You can use free tools (or free versions of paid tools) to look at the links from a competing site, tools like:
- Yahoo’s Site Explorer
- Blekko’s SEO Tools
- Open Site Explorer
- Majestic SEO
While it’s a good idea to get data from a variety of sources, and run them through a tool like /a> to get a full(er) picture of things, you can get some juicy data for free.
When doing competitive research for a keyword I want to know what the anchor text profile looks like. When I am doing competitive research on a domain there are other relevant data points like top pages, most linked to pages, and total number of unique domains linking at the domain or page (whichever is ranking).
Blekko and Open Site Explorer are the ones I use for targeted and quick anchor text distribution views. Yahoo! generally ranks the best links first and allows for a CSV export, Majestic’s free account gives limited data on referring domains, top back-links, and top pages. So for the purposes of looking at anchor text, I prefer Blekko and Open Site Explorer.
Blekko
/a> has a link to SEO data and Links data, as shown below:
The Links selection will bring up a Yahoo! Explorer-like list of links, the SEO link option brings up a bunch of SEO data like:
- links to the domain
- links to the page
- anchor text information
- links broken down by geography
- external links
- pie-chart, graphical representation of link data points
- and other non-link related, but helpful, data (crawl data, site pages, etc)
The data is free, you get the data they offer without registration requirements.
Open Site Explorer
/a> is a quick and easy way to get the type of data we are looking for in this example (anchor text profile).
They currently have a 30 day trial and offer 3 plans:
- Free, No Registration – limited to 3 reports per day, shows up to 200 links and top 5 link metrics for a given criteria
- Free, Registration Required – no limit on reports, 1,000 links returned, top 20 link metrics for a given criteria (anchor text, top pages, etc)
- PRO – part of subscription to SeoMoz, up to 10k links, no limit on metrics
- CSV export available for all plans
If you know the sites you want to look at, and the keyword(s), you can likely get away with just using it as a guest. However, the free but registered plan does give you a bunch more data. What I like in this example is that you basically type the domain name in, hit enter, then click on the anchor text distribution tab and the anchor text data is right there:
You’ll see the actual anchor text, the number of domains linking with that anchor text, and the total links with that anchor text in them (good way to spot site-wides from one domain). In this example, our target keyword is not in the top 5 (or 20) with respect to anchor text occurrences. This domain is a large brand though, so you’d likely want to make sure you could build an authoritative and useful site about the topic in order to overcome Google’s love affair with brands.
Checking the On-Page Optimization
Though I believe the link data and domain data to be mostly paramount, the on-page criteria follows closely in the importance department.
This is pretty self-explanatory and you don’t really need a full blown tool for this. Basically you’ll want to look at things like the title tag, meta description tag, and the on-page copy itself.
You can do that pretty easily with just your eyeballs, but the SEO Toolbar also has a feature where you type the keyword into the box in the upper-right, and click the highlighter:
In this case I used 2 words, and they are highlighted in different colors:
This can give you an idea of how the site is using the copy to say, scream, or shout what the page is about. Sometimes you’ll find that sites might just be ranking for a keyword or phrase based on the authority of their domain. If they are ignoring the on-page and off-page (links) for a keyword, it could signal to you that this might be a keyword worth pursuing and a keyword you can reasonably expect to rank for.
Making it a Process
Competitive research is just one piece of the puzzle, as you know. I find that breaking the entire process down into manageable chunks can help each process be more productive and efficient. This would be my process when researching the competitiveness of a keyword. While there are other pieces to your SEO research you should note that you do not need to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on fancy competitive research tools off the start.
Save the money you might spend on tools on link development, content development, and content promotion.
Search & Social Influence – eMarketer
Reuters posted an /a> yesterday entitled, “Is SEO DOA as a core marketing strategy?” and trust me, I know better than to respond and fuel attention to a writer who is either naive or trying to stir up the bee’s nest with a contrarian title. I suspect there may be a bit of both in this situation. Basically, the article makes the argument that entrepreneurs “may want to reconsider pouring money into search engine optimization (SEO) as their primary marketing strategy” based on an ill conceived post by Chris Dixon “SEO is no longer a viable marketing strategy for startups”. The reason I am posting about another “SEO is Dead” diatribe, is that with the right context, I would agree.
Before you think I’ve turned coat away from SEO, read my comment in response to the Reuters SEO is DOA post:
If you don’t want prospects, customers, investors, marketing partners, job candidates or journalists to find your content via search, then by all means – don’t even bother with SEO.
As a standalone tactic, (which is not the same thing as core) SEO is not what it was a few years ago and that is a valid point.
As others in the article state, SEO works in conjunction with other marketing, advertising and public relations tactics to achieve business goals. To work best across disciplines, SEO needs to be a core principle in online marketing since it affects discovery anywhere something can be searched on – including social networking and media sites.
If a business isn’t optimizing for improved findability, one needs to wonder what they’re hiding from?
For some reason, there’s a set of people in the biz media that like to focus on a small segment of opportunists making big claims with no skills about SEO vs. the thousands of professionals that are making a huge impact on companies’ bottom line. The fact that there are a few misrepresenting the whole is no different than any other industry whether it’s PR, legal or car repair. Making the effort to understand /a> can help those who are not practitioners, but in a position to write about it, see the difference between the exception and the rule.
I’ve been providing SEO services since 1997 and like other industries, SEO has changed. Stand alone SEO only makes up a small percentage of our current consulting engagements. Most of what we do includes SEO as an element working in concert with social media, content marketing, email, PPC, social advertising and online PR. Companies that want us to “just optimize” their site are met with questions about how much revenue they’d like to grow. Then we work backward from those goals and develop the appropriate strategy and mix of tactics, which often includes SEO.
Masterful SEO practitioners possess a unique set of skills ranging from technical to creative. As technology and consumer behaviors online have changed, so have SEO best practices.
Search as a means of discovery is massively popular. Google sites alone handle over 88 billion queries per month. The sheer volume of content being produced can possibly be filtered in a qualitative way by personal recommendations on social networks. Search plays an essential role for people that need to find answers whether it’s on a standard search engine like Google or Bing, the internal search engine on Facebook or YouTube, or on mobile devices. In fact, search engines are the /a> destinations on smart phones, not social networks.
For many businesses, SEO is absolutely the most viable core marketing strategy. And that strategy often includes working in concert with other marketing tactics such as PPC, content, display and email. SEO and nothing else is a disadvantage compared to SEO that is amplified by a robust social media and content marketing program.
As long as there are consumers in need of search engines, there will be a demand for expertise that helps brands surface their relevant content where people are looking. If a company’s target audience is prone to use search for information discovery, then building a website with search in mind is absolutely a best practice. As I mentioned in the Reuter’s comment above, if a website isn’t optimizing content so prospects and customers can find easily find their content, what are they hiding? What’s the point of having a website?
If you’re a client side SEO practitioner or if you work at an agency as an SEO, what is your mix of stand alone SEO projects vs. SEO working in concert with other marketing?
Secondo alcune indiscrezioni circolate sul web nei giorni scorsi la News Corp di Rupert Murdoch è intenzionata a cedere MySpace e sembra sia in attesa di alcune offerte già entro la fine della settimana. La stima del valore di MySpace si aggirerebbe intorno ai 100 milioni di dollari, circa un quarto di quanto Murdoch sborsò nel 2005 per acquistare il popolare social network per la cifra record di 580 milioni di dollari.
Una valutazione che fa comunque sorridere se paragonata all’attuale valore di Facebook che si aggira ad oggi, secondo le stime di General Atlantic che ha acquistato un blocco di azioni della società di Palo Alto per un valore complessivo di 2,5 milioni di dollari, attorno ai 65 miliardi di dollari.
Dopo un periodo di grande popolarità tra il 2005 e il 2007, MySpace ha conosciuto un rapido e irreversibile declino, surclassato dalla crescita esponenziale di Facebook.
Incapace di rinnovarsi e proporre nuove funzionalità più sociali rispetto all’impostazione originaria del sito, MySpace non è stato in grado di tamponare l’emorragia di utenti che hanno preferito migrare verso la piattaforma di Zuckerberg, più moderna, semplice e immediata nell’utilizzo.
I tentativi di riposizionamento su nicchie specifiche di mercato nell’ambito dei gruppi musicali e delle celebrità si sono rivelati un fallimento ed hanno snaturato lo spirito con cui il social network era nato, contribuendo in maniera significativa alla sua perdita di consensi.
MySpace è stato il precursore di un era ed è innegabile il suo contributo nell’aver introdotto nella mentalità del popolo della rete quelle funzionalità sociali che oggi fanno parte integrante della vita digitale di molti di noi. Peccato per come sia andata a finire.
Secondo alcune indiscrezioni circolate sul web nei giorni scorsi la News Corp di Rupert Murdoch è intenzionata a cedere MySpace e sembra sia in attesa di alcune offerte già entro la fine della settimana. La stima del valore di MySpace si aggirerebbe intorno ai 100 milioni di dollari, circa un quarto di quanto Murdoch sborsò nel 2005 per acquistare il popolare social network per la cifra record di 580 milioni di dollari.
Una valutazione che fa comunque sorridere se paragonata all’attuale valore di Facebook che si aggira ad oggi, secondo le stime di General Atlantic che ha acquistato un blocco di azioni della società di Palo Alto per un valore complessivo di 2,5 milioni di dollari, attorno ai 65 miliardi di dollari.
Dopo un periodo di grande popolarità tra il 2005 e il 2007, MySpace ha conosciuto un rapido e irreversibile declino, surclassato dalla crescita esponenziale di Facebook.
Incapace di rinnovarsi e proporre nuove funzionalità più sociali rispetto all’impostazione originaria del sito, MySpace non è stato in grado di tamponare l’emorragia di utenti che hanno preferito migrare verso la piattaforma di Zuckerberg, più moderna, semplice e immediata nell’utilizzo.
I tentativi di riposizionamento su nicchie specifiche di mercato nell’ambito dei gruppi musicali e delle celebrità si sono rivelati un fallimento ed hanno snaturato lo spirito con cui il social network era nato, contribuendo in maniera significativa alla sua perdita di consensi.
MySpace è stato il precursore di un era ed è innegabile il suo contributo nell’aver introdotto nella mentalità del popolo della rete quelle funzionalità sociali che oggi fanno parte integrante della vita digitale di molti di noi. Peccato per come sia andata a finire.
Excerpt from:
/a>
Changing the Cost-benefit Analysis
In /a> I mentioned how the US government tried to change the cost benefit analysis for some sleazy executives at pharmaceutical corporations which continue to operate as criminal enterprises that simply view repeated fines as a calculable cost of doing business.
If you think about what Google’s Panda update did, it largely changed the cost-benefit analysis of many online publishing business models. Some will be frozen with fear, others will desperately throw money at folks who may or may not have solutions, while others who gained will buy additional marketshare for pennies on the Dollar.
“We actually came up with a classifier to say, okay, IRS or Wikipedia or New York Times is over on this side, and the low-quality sites are over on this side.” – /a>
Now that Google is picking winners and losers the gap between winners & losers rapidly grows as the winners reinvest.
And that word invest is key to understanding the ecosystem.
Beware of Scrapers
To those who are not yet successful with search, the idea of spending a lot of money building on a strategy becomes a bit more risky when you see companies like Demand Media that have spent $100′s of millions growing an empire only to see 40% of the market value evaporate in a couple weeks due to a single Google update. There are literally thousands of webmasters furiously filing DMCA reports to Google after Panda, because Google decided that the content quality was fine if it was on a scraper site, but the exact same content lacked quality when on the original source site.
And even some sites that were not hit by Panda (even some which have thousands of inbound links) are still getting outranked by mirroring scrapers. Geordie spent hours sharing tips on how to /a>. For his efforts, Google decided to rank a couple scrapers as the original source & filter out PPCBlog as duplicate content, in spite of one of the scrapers even linking to the source site.
Outstanding work Google! Killer algo 
Even if the thinking is misguided or an out of context headline, Reuters articles like /a> do nothing to build confidence to make large investments in the search channel. Which only further aids people trying to do it on the cheap. Which gets harder to do as SEO grows more complex. Which only further aids /a>.
Market Domination
At the opposite end of the spectrum, there are currently some search results which look like this
All of the colored boxes are the same company. You need a quite large monitor to get any level of result diversity above the fold. The company that was on the right side of the classifier can keep investing to build a nearly impenetrable moat, while others who fell back will have a hard time justifying the investment. Who wants to scale up on costs while revenues are down & the odds of success are lower? Few will. But the company with the top 3 (or top 6) results is collecting the data, refining their pitch, and re-investing into locking down the market.
Much like the Gini coefficient shows increasing wealth consolidation in the United States, search results where winners and losers are chose by search engines creates a divide where doing x will be very profitable for company A, while doing the exact same thing will be a sure money loser for company B.
Thin Arbitrary Lines in the Sand
The lines between optimization & spam blur as some trusted sites are able to rank /a> or /a>. Once site owners know they are trusted, you can count on them green lighting endless content production.
Scraping the Scrape of the Scrape
Many mainstream media websites have topics subdomains where they use services like DayLife or Truveo to auto-generate a near endless number of “content pages.” To appreciate how circular it all is consider the following
- a reporter makes a minimally informing Tweet
- Huffington Post scrapes that 3rd party Tweet and ranks it as a page
- I write a blog post about how outrageous that Huffington Post “page” was
- SFGate.com has an auto-generated “Huffington Post” topics page (topics.sfgate.com/topics/The_Huffington_Post) which highlighted my blog post
- some of the newspaper scraper pages rank in the search results for keywords
- sites like Mahalo scrape the scrape of the scrape
- etc.
At some point in some such loops I am pretty certain the loops start feeding back into themselves & create a near-infinite cycle
An Endless Sea of “Trustworthy” Content
The OPA mentioned a billion dollar shift in revenues which favors large newspapers. But those “pure” old-school media sites now use services like DayLife or Truveo to auto-generate content pages. And it is fine when they do it.
…but…
The newspapers call others scammy agents of piracy and copyright violators for doing far less at lower scale, all while wanting to still be ranked highly (even while putting their own original content behind a paywall), and then go out and do the exact same scraping that they complain about others doing. It is /a> played out on an infinite web where the cost of an additional page is under a cent & /a>.
And the piece of pie everyone is farming for is shrinking as:
- competition increases faster than the growth of the market
- Google mixes more verticals into the search results & /a>
- some of the media ad Dollars shift from buying media to building branded websites
Brands Becoming the Media
Rather than subsidizing the media with ads, /a>:
Aware that consumers spend someplace between eight and 10 hours researching cars before they contact a dealer, auto markers and dealers are vectoring ever-greater portions of their marketing budgets into intercepting consumers online.
As but one example, Ford is so keen about capturing online tire-kickers that its website gives side-by-side comparisons between its Fiesta and competing brands. While you are on the Ford site, you can price the car of your dreams, investigate financing options, estimate your payment, view local dealer inventories and request a quote from a dealer.
Search Ads Replacing the Organic Search Results
AdWords is eating up more of the value chain by pushing big brands
- comparison ads = same brands that were in AdWords appearing again
- bigger adwords ads with more extensions = less diversity above the fold
- additional adwords ad formats (like product ads) = less diversity (most of the advertisers who first tried it were big box stores, and since it is priced on a CPA profit share basis the biggest brands that typically have more pricing power with manufacturers win)
Other search services like /a> and /a> are even more aggressive with nepotistic self promotion.
Small Businesses Walking a Tightrope (or, the Plank)
Not only are big brands being propped up with larger ad units (/a> in the organic search results) but the unstable nature of Google’s results further favors big business at the expense of small businesses via the following:
- more verticals & more ad formats = show the same sources multiple times over
- less stability = more opportunities for spammers (they typically have high margins & lots of test projects in the work…when one site drops another one is ready to pop into the game…really easy for scrapers to do…just grab content & wait for the original source to be penalized, or scrape from a source which is already penalized)
- less stability = small businesses /a>
- less stability = lowers multiples on site sales, making it easier for folks like WebMD, Quinstreet, BankRate, and Monster.com to buy out secondary & tertiary competing sites
If you are a small business primarily driven by organic search you either need to have big brand, big ego, big balls, or a lack of common sense to stay in the market in the years to come, as the market keeps getting consolidated.
