WSI Blog - Internet Marketing Tips and Strategies

Search engines have finally surpassed the Yellow Pages (print versions). Think about....when was the last time you opened your Yellow Pages? The shift in how we find products and services we want is being dominated by search.

The graph below from webpro news, shows that search engines have finally surpassed the Yellow Pages.


Why have search engines overtaken the Yellow Pages and why are they more effective:

• Yellow Page ads often appear next to your competition. (Search engine ads do as well most times, but you can differentiate your business with proper targeting (keywords, location, niche markets), good landing pages, social media, and more).
• An optimized, well planned website, you can differentiate yourself from your competitors. It's hard to tell which company is a better fit for you when looking at Yellow Page ads.
• It's difficult to determine what business came from your Yellow Page ads vs. your other marketing mediums. Yellow Page ads are costly and provide low measurability.
• Using web analytics you are able to track the how, what, where, and when of your online marketing campaigns.
• Establishing a content marketing plan, your website will become a resource and asset to your business.
• Search engines deliver quicker results and allow you to quickly gather more information about the products and services you are interested in. The Yellow Page process is just that....a process that takes far too much time to gather the information you need to make an informed choice.
• Search engines allow us to compete on a level playing with bigger brands. This is not possible with Yellow Pages without having a large marketing budget. Using long tail, niche keywords in your search marketing efforts, you can drive affordable traffic and new leads for your business.

As many people may know, Google has always worked hard at their ability to deliver the most relevant search results for their users. This is in large part due to their advanced Search Algorithm that helps determine where a website should be positioned in their search engine results page (SERPS). But with the rapid rise of "live web" or social media sites, the web tends to be dominated by social bookmarkting sites as well as viral videos, and sometimes, not in a good way (at least not in Google's eyes). This has lead to the beginning steps of Google changing their algorithms again, which is going to be a good thing for your business and when searching on the major search engines.

These new steps by Google are an attempt to prevent what we call "Black hat SEO" - the unscrupulous optimization (spamming) of a website by using often illegal methods such as page hi-jacking, cloaking, link blasting, and other methods. As Google gets smarter in dealing with the search spammers, they get smarter in terms of getting around new Google updates. Everytime this has happened in the past, we have been able to adjust our Search Engine Optimization methods to ensure compliance with Google. And now, we are adapting again to Google's attempt to stop "Live Web" spamming and how they look at incoming links.

The upcoming changes by Google will lead us into a new era of search called Personalized Search Optimization (PSO). This new search focus will be dominated by great content on a website, effective blogging and social media, quality videos and podcasts that engage your audience, and basically your site will be ranked on how well your site effectively personalizes content to your audience. People will no longer be able to "trick" the search engines to achieve a high ranking, you will have to develop great content and use advanced search engine optimization and social media marketing to effectively market your site on Google.

Also, search rankings in Google will be heavily influenced by Google Analytics - tracking the conversion rate of your site and goals, bounce rate, and more. If you aren't using analytics now, you better start or have a Certified Google Analytics Consultant at WSI help you set this up and manage this for your business.  Google is going to be using the data from analytics to determine the relevancy of your site which will affect your search engine positioning amongst other things.  And if you have a Google Adwords PPC campaign running, and you have a low click through rate or poor conversions, Google is going to take this into account as well as to how your site will rank organically.

These changes by Google are all about delivering quality search results and a quality user experience to Google users. We all want to search for a product or service and have it deliver exactly what we want without having to skim through page after page of irrelevant websites. With these new changes and Personalized Search Optimization (PSO), the user experience will increase dramatically, but it will make it that much more difficult to drive quality traffic to your site without the help of an expert.

For more on this topic download our Whitepaper on the upcoming changes for Google in 2009.

Google Changes for 2009: What They are and how they affect us? (67 KB)