Almost everyone is aware that mobile usage has been on the upswing for the past few years, and more and more search activities are being conducted via smartphones. Since consumers are going to handheld devices to find products and services, it behooves companies to target the mobile market and focus on the unique opportunities to be found there.

Enter Pure Oxygen, a real pioneer in the field of mobile ad optimization. The firm provides consumer brands and marketers independent analysis, tools, and strategy to improve results across mobile web, search, social, sms, apps, and more.

They have created a tool for checking out webpages on mobile devices, the Mobile Site Analyzer, currently in beta, which checks content for optimal delivery on multiple platforms including iPhone, Android, and Blackberry.

Pure Oxygen also provides consultation services for more sophisticated analysis of mobile friendliness, and they help increase conversion rates and ROI derived from mobile channels.

There’s a surprising number of companies which are ignoring mobile optimization and ad targeting — apparently expecting their regular internet marketing via SEO and PPC advertising to automatically distribute their marketing message via mobile as well. This is a very poor assumption, since traditional internet media does not automatically translate onto mobile platforms, and there’s a plethora of mobile-specific channels which would fail to be exploited under this lack of strategy. For instance, mobile apps can be a terrific source of referrals and promotion, but they must be properly engineered and could be offered through iPhone app store, Android/Verizon app store, and Amazon’s appstore.

I recently pointed out how Google is treating mobile-friendly sites differently than sites without mobile optimization, and this has significant implications for websites’ performance as mobile usage continues to grow. For many local companies desiring to appear and rank in local search results, the need for mobile optimization borders upon necessity — it could well be, ahem, “oxygen” to them!

Anyway, congrats to Brian on the launch of Pure Oxygen Mobile! I think this new venture is targeting a great niche, and will provide just what many companies need.

Those familiar with Natural Search Blog may remember some of my similar past work here outlining laser graffiti ads on buildings, roofvertising, marriage proposals in Google Maps, “earth art” geoglyph ads, and sponsoring town names as an Ultimate Local SEO tactic.

It’s not surprising to see guerilla marketing tactics finding their way into Google Maps. Not only does Google itself seek to introduce disruptive technology innovations, but I expect that as Satellite and Aerial photos may get more frequently updated in such interfaces we’ll be bound to see a whole lot more efforts from people trying to get messages conveyed through the Maps interfaces.

The real question I’m left with, is if Google resells ad space on pictures of people’s rooftops and billboards, would they owe anything back to the original property owners?!?

In this scenario, it is imperative that a site owner with a fairly new site maximizes her chances of retaining as many visitors to her site as possible by giving them an opportunity to communicate with her site through a comment on her blog, leaving feedback or collecting the visitor’s email address.

This will allow her to sell products/services on the backend through email marketing. This is where website optimization techniques coupled with solid SEO strategy can pay huge dividends in the long run.

Website optimization basically deals with improving a visitor’s experience on your website and increasing the conversion of casual visitors into customers.

Internet marketers have long realised the power of squeeze pages through which they collect email addresses and then sell products/services through email marketing repeatedly. They also know the concept of “The money is in the list” as each email subscriber is a very valuable proposition.

Many a time, sites ranking well on the SERPs can be attributed to the diligent efforts of a search engine optimisation professional. But rankings are not an end in themselves. They are just the means to the end. Better visibility helps a site gain more visitors. But the crucial aspect lies in converting the visitors into customers. Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is an important aspect of SEO that is hogging the limelight in the present.

It would be worth the effort for SEO professionals to atleast propose to site owners the effectiveness of retaining visitors and/or upsell/downsell products and services once the site has attained good visibility on the SERPs. Let us consider a few techniques that can be employed in the light of what is being discussed.

1) Undiluted Focus:
If you are selling a product or service, you can be in a situation where you are selling many distinct products or services. This will result in specific money pages (inner pages) which highlight the particular product or service in question.

The page that describes the benefits of the product or service should focus completely on just that and should not diverge to talk about a related product or service.

Remember that prospective buyers will buy benefits and not features of a product or service. So it is important to highlight the benefits clearly on the money page.

2) Strident Call To Action:
With the singular focus described above, the visitor is subjected to a single call to action that specifically sells that particular product or service described.

As a site owner, it is your responsibility to ensure that the visitor is asked to take action. If you sell blue widgets, have a big bold button that says Buy this blue widget now. If there is no clear call to action, there is a good chance that visitors will not take action.

3) In the case of visitor trying to move out of the sales funnel:
In the above example where you sell blue widgets on your site, there are many reasons why a visitor is unable to buy a product. The price point can be a major factor as the visitor feels it is too expensive. You cannot predict this until you find out.

This is where the application of a popular internet marketing technique can help you gain a deep insight into the makeup of a typical customer in your niche. If the visitor clicks the Back button or tries to close the tab or tries to type in a new web address in the URL box, then she is definitely not interested in buying your blue widget.

If you use a script that can sense this action, it can popup a special one time offer for the same blue widget at a discounted price. As a business owner, you are cutting your profit by a margin that you can afford. This causes the visitor to rethink and induces her to buy the product at a discounted rate. You are gaining a sale where there was none in the first place.

An increased incidence of the one time offer sales indicates that your produt price is more expensive for most visitors. You have to bite the bullet and reduce the price to attract more sales.

4) Information seekers:
Not all visitors are in a buying frame of mind when they visit your site. There are many seeking information on the blue widget that you sell. For users in reasearch mode, you must have a Resources page on your site which explains all the features of your product.

You can have a review of your product and your competitor’s product and show the superior/useful features your product offers compared to that of your competitor. You can also compare the pricing models. If you have a truly superior product in your niche, then you can certainly justify its higher sale price.

5) Optimizing your site for buyers keywords:
I would like to insert here the idea of optimizing your site for buyers keywords. During keyword research, you are prone to come across keyword phrases that specifically are commercially action oriented in intent. Some examples in our case can be “buy blue widget” or “blue widget software download” (without the quotes).

These clearly show the number of searchers who have done their research and review of the product you sell and are ready to buy. It is ideal to have pages on your site optimized for such buyers.

6) Collecting visitor email address:
You can also incentivize your visitor to submit her name and email address by offering an ebook download that explains the nuances of what to look for when buying a blue widget. For information seekers who have no idea of your niche and/or product, this is a goldmine of information. They would certainly subscribe to your mailing list to get their hands on this great resource.

Now that you have their email address (you have to make it double opt-in subscription process), you have obtained customers for a lifetime (unless they decide to unsubscribe) to whom you can sell products/services in the backend. These offers can be tailor made for just your email subscribers and should not appear on your main website.

7) Collecting Feedback:
At every possible stage of the sales cycle, encourage your visitors to submit their feedback either through a feedback form on the site or through a blog comment if you have an active blog on your site.

The feedback can be about the quality of your product or service offered, shipping and handling concerns etc. It would be ideal to have a 6 to 12 hour turnaround time to respond to queries/complaints.

Feedback is valuable to a business owner to streamline her sales funnel and address issues that she may not have imagined existed in the first place.

8. Use of Website Optimizer:
I have described at length the process of using Google’s Website Optimizer. You can use this as a standalone tool or from within your Adwords account.

Please note that when you sign up for a Website Optimizer account, Google will automatically setup an Analytics account (if you already do not have one) for use with your experiments to collect your experimental data.

Laxity due to Free Traffic:
Though this is not part of the methods actually used to improve conversion rate on a site, many a time, even owners of websites well entrenched at the top of the Google SERPs can be lax as they are getting free traffic from the major search engines.

If a site owner is driving traffic to her site using PPC, she feels the pinch as she is paying for each visitor. This is also the case with CPA (Cost per acquisition) marketing where marketers pay for each visitor to visit their landing page on which they make an offer in the form of a signup to a service for example. They get paid only if the visitor signs up.

It is common for such marketers to employ these techniques mentioned above to gain the maximum ROI for the $ paid to get their visitors into their site.

It is important to realise the value of each visitor to your website. As a website owner, you have to endevour to improve the visitor experience in every possible way and get them to communicate to you their delightful and/or woeful experiences on your site. This will ensure the success of your online business and put you head and shoulders ahead of your competition.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search marketing consultancy that offers both organic search and ppc marketing to its clients in New Zealand and Australia.

Why are social media costs so challenging to measure? Social media is about more than just ROI. Unlike areas of a business that have very specific and direct cost and revenue associations, social media costs are a combination of your goals, metrics, direct costs and time; of which, many of these may actually be soft measurements.

Along with hard measurements, social media costs include many soft measurements. I think of hard measurements as those that are very defined and clearly measurable. Let’s say that it costs you $100 to have an article written, or maybe you write it yourself, in which case you can calculate the amount of time for research, writing, editing and eventual publishing, based on your salary. We might even be able to regiment that someone will spend exactly 3 hours a day, 5 days a week responding to blog comments. Again, we can associate some hard cost measurement to these activities.

However, social media is largely associated with soft measurements, and therefore, is as much about the value of the activity as it is some ROI to be gained. Unlike the examples above, time is often hard to directly measure because, unless you have dedicated staff where you can directly associate 100% of their time and salary, social media activities will often happen when they happen, often in small chunks or bits of time.

Even then, time can still be a soft measurement. Social media success is based on networking, relationships and conversations, which often have to happen long before they are “needed.” To get some great content pushed out into the social venues may take time invested to build up rapport and connections with leaders within the venue. To drive fans, followers or links to your content or website takes time invested in participating within the venue; just like blogging success requires commenting on other blogs as much as it does writing great blog posts.

Sure, you can measure the creation cost of content used for social media activities, but your metric for success may be in inbound links to the content or improved rankings within the search engines. How do you directly associate that value to sales, leads and revenue?

Social media often operates on a soft timeline. While some activities are done with a specific time goal, such as tweeting a sale that ends tomorrow, many of the activities done today may not have a specific timeframe and could pay off immediately, in a week, a month or even 6 months or more from now.

If all this sounds challenging, you’re right. If all this sounds like I’m saying you don’t need to measure impact, results or costs of social media, then you might want to go back and reread the previous blog posts.

In fact, I’m saying quite the opposite. Because of the soft measurements and the incredible time suck that can come from social media – admit it, we’ve all sat down to take 5 minutes to read a blog post, tweet something or interact in some way, only to see an hour or more fly by – establishing metrics and measuring your social media efforts is critical. Without measuring results and the costs associated, you have no way to determine whether a certain activity or venue is valuable. Just realize that ROI may not be the best way to qualify social media activities. Social media is about connecting with your audience and that’s a value measurement.

Looking for some more thoughts on measuring social media? Be sure check out these great posts by Don Bartholomew, Social Media ROI Part 1: Framework and Social Media ROI Part 2: Research Approaches.

Natural Search Performance of Top Yellow Pages Sites in Google
(Click to enlarge)

One specific recommendation I make in the “Brave New World For Yellow Pages” article at Search Engine Land is to perhaps partner with sites which could expand information on many business listings. The three sites I mentioned, ShopLocal, NearByNow or Where2GetIt, all have some rich data which could easily be leveraged by a major IYP site into many, many more search engine referrals. Companies such as these could provide specific product inventory info for many local stores, along with comparison tools allowing price-conscious consumers to zero in on cheapest local providers.

Doesn’t it seem strange that an online yellow pages site hasn’t already provided product inventory information for shops?!? Well, they have, or at least some of us did in the past, perhaps before the concept’s time had truly arrived. At Superpages.com and BigYellow.com, we partnered very early on with a company which did this, called StoreRunner — a company which subsequently died during the infamous dot-bombs. We also partnered with some others, including MySimon, which is still around.

Superpages has an even newer incarnation of similar stuff in their current online shopping section which combines display of products from spidered online sites with similar products from eBay and product reviews from elsewhere. (Though the section is pushed down some in prominence on the site, and is perhaps not as well-supported as other sections.)

Yet, the local shopping app-killer needed by online yellow pages remains elusive. I don’t think any of them really connect the dots in a major way between more comprehensive product/services information about businesses with the business listings.

As a consumer, if you could use a yellow pages to search for actual products, model names and comparative prices in the stores in your local area, wouldn’t that be a step up from merely finding addresses and phone numbers? Wouldn’t it be great if you could consistently peruse menus from local restaurants while deciding which one you’re going to for dinner? (Amazon.com once experimented with scanning in menus from restaurants around a major city!) Yet, the costs and time in connecting this information to many businesses’ listings and business profiles has made most yellow pages companies avoid truly stretching to meet the challenge.

But, it’s not impossible. ShopLocal, NearbyNow, and Where2GetIt have all done this in one form or another.

The company which achieves a mixture of: robust business directory, combined with social media & reviews, combined with increasingly extensive product/service info about businesses — that’s the company which could win big in the local search arms race.

Flickr can still be a valuable source of internet promotion, and a great tool for the purposes of Image Search Optimization. Read on and I’ll explain.

It is true that Flickr has progressively enacted more and more policing and restrictions against people attempting to use their services for strictly business purposes. We reported last spring on how Flickr now Nofollows most links from users’ pages, and there are lots of cases of people getting their accounts suspended or deleted for breaking the terms of use.

On the surface, it can be difficult to differentiate why Flickr may allow a fan of old advertisements to scan and publish reams of commercial material, while a contemporary company could get their account deleted for displaying similar materials from their current catalog. Both content is commercial, isn’t it?

It may be that the contemporary company’s use is more blatantly intended to push their product into recreational site users’ faces, though.

I would say that in many cases, companies attempting to promote themselves through Flickr are guilty of doing so in a far too heavy-handed manner, and are too aggressively pushing themselves and their products through the medium.

If Flickr is approached from the perspective of engaging with the community in a highly cooperative manner, there’s far less risk of penalization. Engaging with the community of users in an honest way, and in a meaningful way that provides value will not result in banning. There are some great examples of companies and institutions who are doing it right: Ford Motor Company; General Electric; Smithsonian Institution; Concordia University; MTV; Whole Foods; Sony Electronics; Panasonic; Lucasfilm Ltd. (Star Wars); Dell; VH1; Yum! Brands; Nestlé; and more.

(Example of Commercial Use of Flickr)

It’s not hard to do this right, but many people are just too heavy-handed to accomplish it.

As a number of people noticed, even Barack Obama used Flickr effectively in his recent presidential campaign.

Sooooo, let’s just put it to bed: Flickr can still be used well for internet marketing purposes!

There’s undoubtedly some level of hypocrisy in Flickr’s (Yahoo!’s) interpretation and enforcement of their terms of use. Early on, my interpretation of their rules was that they intended to keep people from reselling their image-hosting services, primarily, and to keep them from using it as primary image hosting for large, commercial websites. However, they’ve later enforced a much broader interpretation, going after accounts which use Flickr primarily/only for SEO and marketing purposes.

Yet, Yahoo’s enforcement has been very inconsistent. Thousands upon thousands of people use Flickr for commercial promotion purposes, including: artists, photographers, real estate agents, universities, museums, models, and more. Even non-profit groups use it for marketing and promotion purposes — an identical type of use as that of commercial companies, even if it isn’t a for-profit use.

Further, a number of different parts of Yahoo! itself have leveraged Flickr for SEO and commercial reasons — a case of “do as I say, not as I do.”

Dan Heath presenting Made To Stick’s hallmarks of sticky ideas:
Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Stories.

Dan presented the main concepts from his book, covering why some ideas survive and spread while other ideas die. As with a number of SES conferences in the past, many attendees apparently decided that this last day of the conference would be of lesser worth, so the audience for this keynote was a lot sparser than on previous days. This was a shame, because, aside from the Orion Panel discussion, this preso was likely the one that would’ve been of the highest worth to marketers.

How do you introduce an idea so that it may catch fire and spread? What are some characteristics of sticky ideas that make them viral and persistent?

The classic antipollution ad campaign with the weeping Indian.

Many companies try in vain to introduce new ideas in the form of products and services, and it’s challenging to promote those ideas into the marketplace. So, how does one improve the chances that a worthy idea will catch consumers’ interest and spread? This is really the basic problem that marketing seeks to solve. Made to Stick analyzes the components of sticky ideas and provides methods for making concepts or stories viral.

The book was co-written by Chip Heath, Dan’s brother and professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. (I went to school with Chip and knew him to be a really savvy guy.) The brothers have received a lot of critical acclaim since the book published in late 2006, including positive reviews from Guy Kawasaki, major newspapers (it’s a New York Times bestseller) and various TV interviews such as The Today Show.

One really interesting exchange between them and Guy Kawasaki is as follows:

Question: “Can a slick marketer apply your principles and make a piece of crap stick—or does the intrinsic value ultimately decide stickiness?”

Their answer: “Slick marketers are already using most of these principles. We wanted our book to serve as an equalizer. Because you’re right—instrinsic value counts…” and “The problem is that ideas with intrinsic value don’t always win…” and “We can bemoan the fact that dumb ideas win out. But we can also reverse-engineer them. We can figure out the principles that make them stick and teach them to people who have worthwhile messages. Slick marketers know a lot of these principles already. Urban legends have them baked in. But no one teaches engineers or entrepreneurs or chemistry professors how to make their ideas stick.”

Dan’s presentation of the book’s highlights at SES was excellent and well-polished. Here’s a pretty good recap.

Search Engine Strategies Conference

This promises to be a great session, and I have some cool tips to impart on how to effectively communicate with one’s technology department staff in order to break down barriers, cut through red tape, and get changes deployed to bang up site traffic.

I happen to know what I’m talking about! Not only was I formerly an in-house SEO, but I was also the head of the technology department at my former company. You might think that heading up tech dev might’ve made it easy for me to get what I needed done, but I still had to employee multiple interpersonal skills in dealing with other parallel technical departments, and in communicating effectively with developers within my own team.

Now that I’m an external consultant, I’ve had to work with IT staff within dozens of other companies as well, so I have a very broad experience in dealing with many styles of technical teams.

I guarantee that this session will be well worth attending, because I’ve got a number of tips that will empower search marketers to get all they need out of their technical teams!

SES San Jose is well worthwhile, if you’ve never attended one. All search marketers should attend one! Typically, the SES conferences held in New York and San Jose are the two best-attended of the conference series, with many thousands in attendance. San Jose is particularly great because it’s smack in Silicon Valley, so it often has many more representatives from each of the various search engines in attendance.

And, who can miss the famous Googledance?!?

The Long Tail, if you don’t already know, refers to a theory promoted by a book by Chris Anderson titled “The Long Tail”, which describes a sort of niche strategy of business, such as employed by Amazon.com or Netflix, that sell a large number of unique items in relatively small quantities. The idea is that while you can obviously sell large numbers of a few popular items (the “head”), the cumulative, smaller number of sales of all your many less-popular items (the “tail”) might easily add up to a far greater total amount.

“Head” items shown in red, “Tail” items shown in blue

Here at Netconcepts, we’ve been promoting the Long Tail concept in relation to natural search marketing for quite some time, since we’ve witnessed how its application can directly improve a business’s overall sales numbers. Indeed, businesses often get the most sales per item for their most popular products, but those products are also often the most competed on the internet, and sometimes the hardest to promote as a result. Even in the cases of top online retailers, we’ve seen that greater bulks of traffic and associated sales may often come from the bulk of less-popular Tail products.

Elberse’s findings are based only on a limited study of music and home-video sales, so it seems quite possible that her study might be true only for the companies and industries from which her data originated.

At the end of the day, theory is all well and good, but actual sales figures are far more important. Netconcepts has working formulas, methodologies and software (GravityStream) which have worked time and again to help improve internet retail sites’ traffic and associated sales. The Long Tail approach has definite applications for Search Engine Optimization (“SEO”), and understanding the concept and making use of it in a search marketing plan effectively will result in increased profits.

For more information on how the Long Tail can positively influence online business, read our white paper, “Chasing the Long Tail of Natural Search“.

(See also mentions of this study by Greg Sterling and Rafe Colburn.)

I previously wrote about NebuAd, and I highlighted that one major hiccup I saw with their business model was consumer sensitivity associated with private data.

It appears that NebuAd is facing the consumer resistance I earlier predicted.