The formal press release on the Microsoft site is here with their associated website for the concept available here.

Just Tell Me The Bare Bones!

For the uninitiated and those who can’t be bothered to trawl through the official press release (which is most of us to be honest), here’s a synopsis of the deal:

• Microsoft’s Bing Search Engine (Bing) will now be the search engine on all Yahoo! sites.
• Yahoo! will provide the relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers, namely the big corporates.
• Each company will maintain its own separate display advertising business.
• Self-service advertising for both companies will go through Microsoft’s AdCenter™ platform (the equivalent service to Google’s AdWords).
• Microsoft will compensate Yahoo! through a revenue sharing agreement on traffic generated on Yahoo’s network.
• The term of the deal is 10 years.

(Credit goes to Stan Schroeder of Mashable for this summary)

In an even simpler nutshell, what this means for the majority of my blog readers is:

• If you currently use Yahoo’s search engine as your search tool of choice; in the future, the results you will see will be generated using the technology that presently powers Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
• If you currently advertise on Yahoo! using their pay-per-click Search Marketing service, then from this day forth, this will be provided by Microsoft’s equivalent to Google’s pay-per-click advertising product Adwords™, namely AdCenter.

So What?

“So what” is a fair question to ask!

Ultimately I suppose what Microsoft and Yahoo! are trying to do between them with this deal is make a significant dent in Google’s share of the search market which now dominates the world’s total internet searches to the tune of some 60% and as far as we Brits are concerned, some 80%.

But quite frankly are they going about it in the right way?

My Twitter and Facebook buddy, Graham Jones, argues in his blog post of earlier today that both parties in this deal are mistakenly focusing upon “search” and are trying to compete ‘head on’ with Google by attempting to beat them at their own game.

Instead, he argues, ‘search’ isn’t the issue. People aren’t looking for an alternative ‘search’ tool. Google is the cool tool of choice for most people with no real reason to change.

Sharing, Not Search

Instead Internet users are now looking for ways to share information, collaborate online and build communities. Google know this, which is why most of the funky features they are bringing to market are geared towards this and it’s recently gobbled up the likes of YouTube whilst rolling out useful services such as Street View.

Twitter knows this which is why it’s growing exponentially and Facebook knows this which is why it’s just added another 50 million subscribers to its existing 200 million global user base.

It seems the powers-that-be at Yahoo! and Microsoft are once again misinterpreting trends.

Both Graham and I could be wrong, time will tell; but I’m not getting the oven to ready to cook and eat my hat if we’re both wrong, just yet.

What’s your thoughts?

The client wanted to know if it was a “good deal” or a complete rip off. So I asked him to forward their proposal to me for comment.

This was an interesting exercise on two fronts. Firstly, because I was happy to give our client some honest advice with a view to helping him out: if I thought it was a good deal they were offering, I’d tell him. Secondly it allowed me to arm myself with more information about our SEO competitors with respect to how they package and present their services and their prices.

On the face of it, £75 a month for a first page listing of a website on Google sounds a good deal. After all 80% of UK searchers use Google and everyone knows that if a site isn’t on page 1 of Google’s SERPS it has a significantly reduced chance of being found and visited. So surely getting on the first page is good and £75 per month isn’t really that much is it?

Hang on a mo’ though before everyone gets carried away! Let’s dig a little deeper here and see what these guys are actually offering. Experience has taught me that “good deals” like this inevitably fall-short of what the client expects from the arrangement in the long term by which time their money has been wasted.

I examined the client’s forwarded proposal which consisted of a single email with a couple of small paragraphs and a four point bulleted list extolling the virtues of their services and the benefits of a page 1 listing on Google’s SERPS. Not particularly impressive or informative in itself.

There was nothing in there about the technique or strategy the company would be using, an important factor if the site owner is to be reassured that the deal they are entering into isn’t going to damage any existing Google listings they may have. Secondly it transpired that their “promise” only applied to one keyword phrase that the site owner nominated themselves. So in other words, for £75 per month this company promised a page one listing for only a single phrase irrespective of whether that phrase had been correctly researched or not.

An incorrectly researched phrase could be too broad or poorly targeted which at best would only attract “browsers” not “buyers” and at the worst would attract the wrong type of visitor altogether.

Thirdly it became apparent that the site owner was locked into their services if he wanted to maintain his page 1 position for his nominated phrase. Once the site owner’s contract ended with the SEO company, so does his page 1 position. That is to say; throughout the duration of the site owner’s contract with these guys, there was no ranking history being established with Google. If the client wanted to move to a different SEO company at any point the whole positioning process would have to start again.

So on behalf of our client I prepared a list of questions that would explore and hopefully address the points I’ve raised above. The client sent off my questions and a short while later, back came a reply.

As I suspected the strategy to be used was Pay-per-click (PPC) using Google Adwords™.

This allowed them to promise a page 1 listing and accounted for the loss of the position at contract end as well as the lack of positioning history. In a nutshell these guys were only selling one PPC advert marketed against one keyword phrase for £75. This advert is no doubt part of a high spending PPC account containing many different adverts for a whole list of different clients, which they run under their own name.

From the SEO company’s point of view it’s not a bad business model and I can see plenty of opportunities for making profit from individual site owners. However from the site owner’s perspective it offers little value. £75 per month for one phrase in an Adwords campaign that does not allow the site owner to manage or access themselves is not good value. The lack of effective keyword research could lead to a wasted campaign delivering little or no results for the site owner’s. For any Adwords campaign a wide range of keyword phrases need to be researched with individual adverts being written for segmented groups of phrases.

So if anyone calls your business with “good deal” promise, dig a little deeper before you sign-up. Be sure that your expectations match what will be delivered in the long term.

To demonstrate what I mean, try searching with the keyword phrase “commercial photographers in Leeds” (note the geographical modifier phrase for “Leeds” within this search term).

In response to this query, Google throws you a set of results for web pages it feels are relevant to the search term and the location you’ve specified i.e. “commercial photographers” in “Leeds”.

At the top of my page screenshot you’ll see a block of results which are taken from the Local Business Center database for businesses that Google deems to be applicable to the root search term (the “commercial photographer” bit) within the location modifier (the “Leeds” bit).

So far so good!

Google has now announced that it’s taken this concept one step further by rolling out its local search results without the need to type in the location modifier phrase in the search term i.e there’s no need to include the “Leeds” bit I’ve given in my example.

To do this Google is assuming that it knows your location without you having to tell it. It does this by reading the IP address that you are using with your computer and automatically assigns a broad location to it according to the location that the IP address is registered to.

To see what I mean go to Google and search with “Commercial Photographers” as a stand alone phrase.

As you’ll see from my results screenshot below, part-way down the page (why these results are presented part-way down the page is unclear) you’ll see a block of results for “commercial photographers” near “London” (circled Red). The “London” bit is where Google thinks I am based using the the IP address that my ISP has assigned to me.

As someone located some 180 miles north of London in West Yorkshire, this is clearly wrong for me and as such these results as they stand are no use to man nor beast.

However in this block of results (circled in Green) you’ll see a “Change Location” link which when clicked prompts you to enter a postcode or a town. After resending the search query, the results block is modified accordingly with ‘Leeds’ results and you are conveniently asked to “Remember the location” for future use.

So What Does All this Mean?

Well apart from it being a cool feature of Google which in effect allows you to customise the search results you are presented with and it being another indication of how the “search market” is going more local; it does have some positive implications for the average business owner.

It means that you have a greater chance of your localised business being found in the search results. However you do need to lay your stall out first: if your business is not already listed in Google’s Local Business Center or has a basic, unclaimed listing; then it’s time to get it padded out and updated with more details about your business which should include a link to your business website. This service is free, so there’s nothing to lose and everything to gain but increased exposure of your business on the web.

To get your business listed on Google’s Local Business Center, or to claim an existing basic listing, visit: www.google.com/local/add and sign-up.

However, before we all get too excited about this latest innovation I’d say they need to improve upon that default IP address location facility and why on earth do they feel it necessary to place the results block halfway down the page?

What I’m talking about is the verb “to google” which means to search for information using a search engine, not necessarily Google: and as such is now considered to be common usage in that the term lends itself to any search using any brand of search engine.

The best example of this concept is the verb “to hoover”. Meaning ‘to vacuum’ (carpets etc). People say they are “hovering” irrespective of the model of the vacuum cleaner they are using to clean their carpets. Other examples include the noun “kleenex” which refers historically to tissues manufactured by the company Kleenex: as in “Please pass me a Kleenex!” You get the idea no doubt. This blog post offers more examples.

Anyway, I seem to be going ‘off message’ for this post somewhat. What I am talking about here is the results you get when you ‘google’ your own name (note the use of the term as a verb there btw)

The results you get are quite interesting. If you’re like me and your first name is spelt a little out of the ordinary and you are very active on the web with your own website, social networking sites, profiles and posts etc: then you’ll probably get shed loads of results that occupy several pages before they dovetail off. If you’re not, then you may get limited, but perhaps still equally as interesting results.

What this technique does, is tell you what the web is recording about you. Some of this is what you may have posted, but more interestingly; it could be what other people have said about you.

A bloke named Jim Killeen went ahead and turned the idea of Google-ing your own name into a documentary entitled “Google Me” staring Jim Killeens imself. Here’s the trailer:

If you haven’t tried it before (I’m sure you have). Google yourself. After all there’s nothing on the tele.