The chart below shows the predicted increase in spend for the US – it’s fair to assume the UK market will follow the same trends.

According to the report interactive marketing will near $55 billion and represent 21% of all marketing spend in 2014 as marketers shift dollars away from traditional media and toward search marketing, display advertising, email marketing, social media, and mobile marketing. This cannibalization of traditional media will bring about a decline in overall advertising budgets, death to obsolete agencies, a publisher awakening, and a new identity for Yahoo!

Although the figures are pleasing it’s hard to see how PPC spend can increase much further in developed markets. Most clients we work with running maximum budgets to gain every click possible and a lot of markets are already saturated.

Natural search on the other hand has huge potential because of the large disconnect between the amount people are happy to spend on PPC and the amount they spend on SEO. In some industries brands are spending 10-20 times as much on PPC as SEO and yet natural search drives over 75% of all search traffic.

SEO drives 75%+ of all search traffic, yet garners less than 15% of marketing budgets for SEM campaigns. PPC receives less than 25% of all search traffic, yet earns 80%+ of SEM campaign budgets.

The big difference between PPC and SEO is the ability to easily broad match across loads of keyphrases – with SEO you need to work on difficult things like building up trust and expanding content using an intelligent site structure. It’s far easier (and perhaps even cheaper in the short term) to just buy keywords than to create tens of thousands of optimised landing pages.

Via Marketing Pilgrim

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SEO & PPC budgets set to double by 2014

Forgetting even about the recent Google brand update the main advantage of being a brand is that thousands of people will search for your website every month. Take into account the fact that these visitors might convert at for example 5% rather than your usual 1% and your brand status can literally make the difference between success and failure.

For example a site which gets 500 brand visitors a day will make 750 sales per month from brand search netting £15,000 profit on a modest £20 profit per sale. This same site could do the same with traffic from SEO but that would need 5 times the traffic to generate the same sales figures.

There are a load of different ways to build a brand from TV/press advertising, social media and offline PR but the easiest way is using the clients website and online marketing strategy to help visitors believe that the site is a big brand, even if they’re not quite there yet.

Put simply, everything you do and every message you convey on your site has to say that you are the experts, the number one company in your industry and can be trusted and relied on 100% to offer great service and great products.

One of the great ways to do this is with SEO – most people think the most reputable sites are at the top of Google so the more traffic you can send the more trusted you become. Of course first impressions count which is where the onsite branding comes in. There are two types of site, ones which are happy just to shift products and ones which have a quality feel to them. The difference might not be obvious initially but once you spend some time on the site and have a good look round a brand site you can see the attention to detail, design and usability.

Of course not every brand has a decent website but if you want to compete on a higher level within your industry then building an amazing website which has more content, more features, more tools and a better design than every other site in your industry is essential for you to become a brand and take over.

Anybody can knock up an ecommerce site for next to nothing but without the attention to detail required to actually build a brand that site will never become an industry leader.

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Building a brand

Here are the top 10 converting websites for May 2009*. These are based on Nielson Panel data and are calculated by user to final conversion. Conversion-rate data is based on visitor conversion rates, not session conversion rates: i.e., No. of unique customers/No. of unique visitors.

1. ProFlowers 38.6
2. Office Depot 28.0
3. Online Retail Total 25.6
4. Vitacost.com 25.0
5. Quixtar 23.4
6. Blair 23.4
7. Roamans22.6
8. 1800Flowers 20.5
9. Woman Within19.6
10. Spiegel 18.20
*Source: Nielsen Online / Marketing Charts

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Top retailers by conversion rate

Latitude has carried out some research to see whether search volumes for a host of suggested terms have increased since Google Suggest was launched in the UK towards the end of March.

From the image above (you can see the full scale interactive version at Google Insights for Search) you can see a big jump in search volume for the suggested terms between March 29th and April 4th – right when Google Suggest was rolled out.

Based on these statistics, it can be estimated that search volumes have developed in the following way between March and June 2009:

• Car Insurance Quotes – up by 64%
• Car Insurance for Young Drivers – up by 103%
• Car Insurance Compare – up by 52%
• Car Insurance Comparison – up by 9%

There was a big jump around Christmas too but that was the same the previous year – the March/April jump didn’t happen any other year which means it’s not a seasonal thing.

Of course correlation doesn’t imply causation and there may be other Google features at work here such as the related search results displayed at the bottom of the search results (although these tend to reflect branded search terms at present).

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Does Google Suggest impact search volumes?

It seems they are relying on TOS that say any link has to be from “Your Site” in order to be eligible for commission and Amazon is keen to enforce that.

“Your site” means any site that you will link to the Amazon Site (and which you will identify in your Program application)

This sets a worrying precedent because Twitter has potential with affiliate marketing (as long as you do it right) and there could be a lot of other networks following Amazons lead.

I’m also wondering how this works with people who read an RSS feed via Google Reader or a similar service – they are not following a link from “Your Site” so will the commission be honoured?

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Amazon Will Not Give Commission To Affiliate Sales Via Twitter

The focus this year is on “instantly actionable Tips, Tricks, and Tactics. Two days jam-packed with priceless hints and secrets to give you the edge over your competitors” – personally I think it’s going to be a great event and well worth the entry fee.

Speaking at the event will be the following experts:

• Richard Baxter
• Jane Copland, Ayima
• Tom Critchlow, Distilled
• Will Critchlow, Distilled
• Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz
• Ben Jesson, Conversion Rate Experts
• Lucy Langdon, Distilled
• Duncan Morris, Distilled
• Dave Naylor, Bronco
• Rob Ousbey, Distilled

Make sure you book this into your schedules!

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SEOmoz Pro Seminar – London, October 19th & 20th

One of those authority factors is likely to be search volume – if one of the biggest keywords in the travel insurance industry is “post office travel insurance” then Google gives the Post Office a boost for that particular keyword. I would be amazed if Google wasn’t including this data in the authority & relevancy part of the algorithm for major keywords, the only unknown aspect is how much it’s being used.

I’ve been playing around with the Google Insights for Search tool and comparing it to various sectors that have seen a big impact after the brand update – in almost every case the brands that appear in the related keywords are the same brands that received a boost.

Travel insurance – Post Office and Money Supermarket are 1st & 2nd in the search results and also appear in the top & rising searches.

Car insurance – Confused.com jumped to 1st position this week and “confused.com car insurance” is the sectors hottest rising term.

Broadband – Virgin Media jumped apparently from page 3(?) to 1st place this week. “Virgin” & “Virgin broadband” are the most popular non-generic keywords in this sector.

Used cars – Auto Trader has jumped to 1st place and is also mentioned in 3 of the top 10 search results.

Credit cards – Tesco, Virgin, MBNA & Lloyds all rank on page 1 and all appear in the top searches

One interesting feature of Google Insights for Search is the regional variations – I wonder how long before Google starts regionalising the search results based on search volumes?

Google uses a number of factors to determine related keywords, one of the main ones is likely to be the keywords searched for in a particular session. For example if I search for “car insurance” and then 5 minutes later search for “confused.com” then the two keywords are probably related. If enough people carry out these searches then Google has to think about moving Confused.com up in the rankings for “car insurance”.

The key takeaway from this theory is that the more people you can get searching for your brand the higher you can rank for your major keywords. In a big industry that might be pretty hard but in a smaller industry the site that becomes a “brand” first could get a major advantage.

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How search volume data may be used to determine brand authority

In short when you leave a comment we now allow you to add a link to your profiles on sites such as Digg, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit & StumbleUpon as well as a link to your website.

The big change is that we now only allow registered users to leave links – if you don’t register you can still leave a comment but you can’t add a link. See below for a screenshot of how the new system looks:

You will notice the “More comments by” link at the bottom of the comment – this leads to your personal profile page with a live link to your website and other social network profile pages. To see an example check out Zoe Piper’s profile.

Once you have registered using the registration form you have access to a profile page which allows you to edit your details at any time.

The registration form allows you to add your Twitter & Facebook details – the rest of your information can be added once you log in. We use Gravatars to power the photos next to the comments – Gravatar is a free system and you can sign up here.

Why we are changing

The main reason behind this change is to encourage conversation – we want intelligent comments from regular readers and the best way to do this is to create a feeling of community behind the site.

My feeling is that if you read and comment on a blog on a regular basis then registering once is actually easier than typing your details every time you want to leave a comment.

In addition we are very aware of the fact that a blog post with hundreds of incoming links and hundreds of nofollow blog comments could be a very inefficient PageRank black hole and forcing users to register is likely to dramatically improve the signal to noise ratio of comments here on Blogstorm.

We won’t be going down the route of letting people leave dofollow comments despite the fact we offer live links from profile pages. It only needs one bad link to slip through the net and a popular blog post could be given a ranking penalty and that isn’t a risk we want to take.

Please try the system out – your feedback is appreciated.

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Cool new comment system on Blogstorm

At the time we concluded that brands were ranking where we would expect based on normal SEO factors but in view of the recent Google.co.uk brand update I thought it would be interesting to see the changes.

The interesting thing about this study is that in most cases the keywords are things that we wouldn’t expect many brands to actively be targeting so it’s a great test of whether Google associates brands with keywords without looking at the normal SEO factors.

As you can see a few of the brands have moved up particularly for major keywords such as “chocolate”, “credit cards”, “airline”, “mortgage lender” and “opticians”.

A good case study of how the brand update has affected the search results is to search for “hotels” and look at the results for Travelodge and Hilton. Neither of those sites even has the word “hotel” in their homepage title tag and they also don’t appear to have been actively building links either.

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Britains Top Brands & How They Rank On Google

The Google.co.uk results have been moving a lot in the last few weeks but without any real patterns (other than US results appearing for UK specific queries which is probably just an error). Today the results are full of authority websites which seem to be ranking higher than one might expect for competitive keywords.

In the past if you wanted to rank for a really competitive term it was necessary to carry out a lot of link-building and have good on-page SEO. Today Google seems to be letting authority websites rank based on internal linkage and trust even though they have comparitively few targeted external links.

The implications of this are huge for large brands because they have a much easier time getting top rankings. It also has an even bigger effect for anybody doing SEO for medium sized companies because there are a lot fewer places available on page 1 for competitive queries. In the past you had 10 spots to go after but now if Google places 5 brands on the page then there are only 5 spots for everybody else.

The key question everybody has is – what do we need to do to become a “brand” or an “authority site” so we can benefit from this? Nobody knows for sure but it’s clear that most of the factors required to gain rankings by being an authority site are likely to be totally unconnected with traditional SEO.

• Mentions in the mainstream media – how much does Google look at mentions rather than links in the authority algorithm?
• Links from mainstream media sites to your homepage – the best indication of trust Google has
• Buzz & mentions of your brand – again, how many people are talking about you?
• Search volume for your brand – how many people search for your brand directly?
• Traffic data – how many visitors do you get outside search?
• Related search volume – how many people search for “confused.com” and “car insurance” in the same session?

How has the brand update affected you today?

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Google brand update hits the UK