IncTechnology.com > Searching the Internet

Track Comments about Your Business Online

Minda Zetlin — 2009-10-28T10:17:57-05:00

A few weeks ago, a Twitter user tweeted that she was planning to try Zitune, a restaurant in Los Altos, Calif. David Auerbach, the restaurant's co-owner got an e-mail alert from a Web-based service Trackle, calling his attention to the tweet. As he often does, he sent a response thanking her for visiting Zitune and asking how she'd liked it. Soon, they had a dialogue going. Then she asked if Zitune's chef (and Auerbach's brother-in-law) would like to be interviewed for her video blog.

"The restaurant business has been tough for the last year and a half," Auerbach says. "Having a blogger or video blogger write anything about us, any extra PR we can get is a huge plus. And Trackle found it."

Trackle is one of a new crop of online services that helps you "listen" for keyword mentions on social networks and around the Web, and will send an alert when someone mentions your business or product -- or your competitor. Services like Trackle go way beyond Google Alerts and other news alert services because they monitor microblogs such as Twitter, social networks such as Facebook, and the blogosphere, as well.

"Increasingly, it's consumers, not news outlets, that are putting out information other consumers use," says Blake Cahill, senior vice president of marketing at Visible Technologies, which both tracks keywords and interprets the resulting data. "Consumers have as much impact on your brand as you do." The majority of consumers check user reviews before making a major purchase, he notes.

But if knowing what customers and others are saying about you online is absolutely essential, it can also be very time-consuming. "You can spend a lot of time doing searches on Twitter and Facebook and Google and so on to find out who's talking about your restaurant," Auerbach says. "It's really helpful to get a daily update where everything is all in one place."

For Veronica Sopher, executive assistant at Ben Bridge Jeweler, looking after the company's social network presence is only one part of her job. She uses Social Mention among other services to follow Ben Bridge, but also flag mentions of "ring shopping," so as to find and start conversations with brides-to-be under her Twitter handle @BenBridgeGirl.

"I talk with them in a girly fashion and find out what wedding dress they're dreaming about or ask them to send me photos of the ring they're considering," she says. "My strategy is not to make sales with tweets, but to raise brand awareness and present a more personable side of what is often perceived as a cookie-cutter jewelry retailer." The advantage of a service like Social Mention, she adds, is that it also flags the company's name all over the Web, so if, for instance, a non-profit organization thanks Ben Bridge for a donation on its website, Sopher can follow up with a friendly e-mail.

Picking the right service

Most every small business can benefit from some online tracking of its name and product mentions around the Web and in social networks, but picking the right service can be tricky. Services range from completely free to a minimum charge of $500 a month -- and most seem to fall at one extreme or the other. The pay services will aggregate thousands of mentions according to metrics like "sentiment" (whether people are mentioning you in a negative or positive light).

Here are some popular choices:

Social Mention, a free service, allows you to search the Web, as well as Twitter and Facebook for keywords, and can list them in a once-a-day e-mail alert as well or get a "Realtime buzz" widget for your website.
Trackle tracks keywords across the Internet and social media, but also tracks many other items, such as weather in your location, local news, real estate values, and even crime in your neighborhood. You can get email alerts, or any of the company's "tracklets" can also be used as widgets.
Viralheat alerts you to mentions with some analytics and a new option to filter results by location. It's a rare moderately priced pay option, with plans starting at $9.99 a month a month to track up to 10 keywords or phrases.
Visible Technologies has plans starting at $500 per month for up to 20,000 results and offers analysis to help you get the sense of what people are saying. "Small businesses can do a lot of tracking with free tools," Cahill notes. "But as brands get popular and the volume gets big, it becomes difficult to follow all those mentions."

Whichever service you use, experts agree, it's important to not only listen to what people are saying, but respond promptly. "Social networks can help bring a problem to the surface faster than it would otherwise," Cahill says. By letting users know you're working to solve the problem you may find some of your critics turn into defenders, he says. But, he adds, "Once you start engaging in a dialogue with customers on a social network, you have to be genuine, you have to be transparent, and you have to keep at it."

"I try never to go 24 hours without checking what people are saying about us and posting," Sopher adds. "Once you have a presence in social media, it's like adopting a puppy. You can't ignore it."

Bing, Twitter, and the New Search Landscape

Michelle V. Rafter — 2009-08-27T16:35:51-05:00

Move over Google. There’s a new search in town.

Live search’s the name and finding data online in real time is the game.

New options for combing the Internet to find up-to-the-minute information and recommendations on websites, blogs, and social networks are lessening the stranglehold major search engines have on the search process.

Two practitioners of live search are Bing, the revamped search engine Microsoft rolled out in June, and Twitter. Google and Yahoo are countering with improvements of their own that take the public’s growing fascination with social media into account.

Search engines new and old use proprietary mathematical formulas to crawl websites and return results, which explains why your company’s pages may rank higher on one compared with another. Even though they’re all a bit different, small businesses don’t need to do custom search engine optimization (SEO) work for each and every one -- it’s not worth it, says Danny Sullivan, a search engine expert and editor of SearchEngineLand.com.

Here’s what else you need to know to navigate the new search landscape:

Bing

Ten years ago, people used search to find information stored online. Today they’re just as likely to use it to make a decision, like what brand of smartphone to buy or where to go out to dinner. Microsoft retooled Bing to be better at providing results for decision-based queries, says Melissa Powell, a Bing senior product manager. Microsoft research found 30 percent of all queries dealt with travel, shopping, health, or location, so Bing was designed to bring information from those categories to the top of a results page, Powell says. The company also partnered with information sources such as WebMD and the Mayo Clinic so when you search for health data “You get it from a trusted source instead of a sea of blue links from TrustMeJoe.com,” she says.

Bing’s redesigned results page includes a left-hand column that displays related results and a list of a user’s older searches show up in a left-hand column -- upgrades to the interface made based on how people actually search, Powell says.

Small businesses can use the discussion forums on Bing’s Webmaster Center to hash out search-related issues with other webmasters, Powell says. “We’re taking a transparent approach with webmasters to get the most out of Bing,” Powell says. Microsoft’s also opened up Bing’s application programming interface (API) so software developers can create their own Bing-based apps.

An early example of what those apps could look like is BingTweets.com, a mashupMicrosoft created with Twitter that fuses search results from both services. Bing is also powering search on Facebook. “Folks spend a lot of time on Facebook and this makes it easy to search where you’re spending time,” she says.

Twitter

You might not think of Twitter as a search engine. But more people are using it to ask questions and get answers from their network of followers. “It’s the lazy way” to search, says Sullivan, the search engine expert.

Twitter’s taken several steps to play up its search function. The network’s Search window now has a prominent spot on a user’s main page -- in the right-hand navigation column under their @replies and Direct Messages. A new Saved Searches function lets you perform a keyword search once, hit a “Save this search” button and store the search term under a Saved Searches link that opens to show a constant stream of real-time comments on the subject. Twitter also redesigned its front page to emphasize its search capability, listing the most popular search keywords at any given moment across the bottom of the page.

By using keyword searches or hash tags -- another popular Twitter device for tracking what people are talking about -- a small business could follow conversations happening about their product, service, or industry. If you’re a business that rents houseboats you could follow people asking about houseboat vacations and reply to one of their comments with information they could use in planning a trip, Sullivan says. While the majority of Americans and small businesses still don’t use Twitter, “there’s an incredible adoption rate,” he says.

Google

None of this means small businesses should stop caring how their companies show up in Google and Yahoo searches. Live search may be in the spotlight, but Google’ still No. 1 and coming up with its own innovations to keep it that way. That includes improving localized search and mapping tools, and integrating video into search results, Sullivan says.

Google and Yahoo now search blogs, so if your company doesn’t have a blog, it’s a good time to start one, Sullivan says. “Companies are rushing toward Twitter and forgetting what a blog can do. If someone’s searching on a topic you could have your blog show up in the search results.”

Over the next few months, Yahoo plans to roll out a redesign of its Yahoo Search results page. New search tools will let you limit results to certain type of content – only videos or message boards for example – or restrict results to Yahoo partners or other sources you know and trust. Another advanced search feature will figure out what you’re searching for based on your past queries.

As search engines evolve to cover all kinds of content, small businesses do too. If search results are expanding to cover things like video, companies need to make sure they’ve got something that’ll show up in results.. It doesn’t have to be expensive. Even posting a short clip from a webcam onto YouTube on a subject you know about is another way to ride into the top results on Google, Sullivan says.

Many small businesses don’t realize Google, Bing, and other major search engines have local listings. Your company will show up in searches regardless. But if you go into the search engine’s index and fill in additional details and keywords it could help push you up in the results, Sullivan says.

How to Hire an SEO Consultant

Michelle V. Rafter — 2009-04-24T13:34:39-05:00

In four and a half years since Sarah Shaoul started a website for BlackWagon, her children’s boutique in Portland, Oregon’s trendy Mississippi Avenue neighborhood, she’s worked with four search-engine optimization consultants. Believe her when she says a search engine optimization (SEO) specialist that’s a good fit for a small business is hard to find.

The first SEO expert Shaoul used was her business partner at the time and didn’t know as much as he claimed. The second SEO consultant did some great work but never really grasped her store’s high-end business concept, and after he raised his rates she couldn’t afford him any more anyway. Then there was the guy who stopped returning phone calls -- he checked in eventually to say he’d changed his business’ direction and no longer did SEO work.

Shaoul is happy with her current SEO advisor, but only because they spent considerable time up front hammering out exactly what the specialist was going to do. Says Shaoul: “Every time we hire someone we gain a little more insight.”

According to Internet marketing experts, Shaoul’s experience is par for the course for small businesses looking to hire outside SEO help to promote an online store or just improve their standing in Google searches.

In many cases, small businesses don’t know where to look for SEO specialists, or once they find candidates, don’t ask the right questions to separate the good from the bad. “A lot of people approach it like it’s magic,” says Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Land, an SEO industry news website. “But really it’s like finding a dentist or plumber. You’re hiring another service professional, someone to do a very specific job.”

Where to find SEO candidates

Small businesses like Shaoul’s are barraged by cold calls or e-mails from consultants promising to improve their rankings in organic or paid searches. “99.9 percent of the time you should ignore them,” Sullivan says. “Those kinds of pitches tend to be from low-cost, low-quality people.” Good people are too busy working they don’t need to make cold calls, he says. Instead:

Ask business acquaintances who they use, or get referrals from your professional network on LinkedIn, Sullivan says.
If they recommend someone who’s too busy or pricey, ask that person to recommend someone. “They may know someone who’s starting to build a client base” who’d be willing to work for less, he says.
Look up SEO consultants through a local or national SEO trade group, such as theSearch Engine Marketing Professional Organization. The national group has a searchable database of members on its Website that can be used to find SEO contractors by their specialty.

Once you’ve identified prospective candidates, check out testimonials or case studies on their website. If there aren’t any or if they’re very old, stay away, says Kent Lewis, president at Anvil Media, a Portland, Ore. interactive marketing agency. Ask for three references, then ask for three more to get an even broader perspective, Lewis says.

Proposals and fees

When you find someone who clicks, work up a proposal. SEO and search engine marketing specialists offer a broad range of services, everything from performing website assessments to optimizing sites for keyword searches to undertaking an extensive paid search campaign. It also helps to have a budget in mind going into negotiations, Sullivan says. Being as specific as possible about both will help an advisor come up with a game plan, he says.

While overall SEO fees depend on the kind of work that’s done, fee structures can be all over the map. SEO professionals may charge by the website page, hour or project, or ask for a set monthly retainer to cover a pre-determined amount of work. Some even take a small percentage of whatever revenues are generated from their work, according to Lewis, the Anvil Media executive.

Other advice from the pros:

Beware of guarantees -- Anyone who guarantees your website’s position in paid or unpaid search engine keyword rankings. If they make guarantees, they may be using “black hat” methods to bend or break generally accepted SEO practices to get those results, methods businesses should steer clear of, Lewis says. Guarantees “are smoke and mirrors and most of the time if they don’t make it they won’t make good on their promise,” he says.
Use a local -- Hiring a hometown SEO specialist could be helpful if it makes you comfortable, but it’s not necessary, according to SEO experts. Regardless of where they’re located, it’s smart to check with the Better Business Bureau in the consultant’s home town to see if they’ve received any complaints.
Find someone who understands your business -- Share what you’ve accomplished so they’re not suggesting things you’ve already done, says BlackWagon’s Shaoul, who learned those lessons the hard way. Have your company’s Webmaster or Website developer sit in on meetings with the SEO consultant to translate jargon, Shaoul says, “so you can focus on what you do well.”

Can Video Help Searchers Find You?

Minda Zetlin — 2008-05-26T10:13:35-05:00

How can a small company build visibility for a product or service in a big marketplace? Uploading video to websites such as YouTube can be a surprisingly powerful tool for gaining visibility in search engines. Businesses who've tried it report this strategy offers huge advantages over simply the hosting video within their own website.

"In our small software company, we use video to generate leads that will bring us new business," reports Michael E. Williams, director of marketing at BillQuick Software

BillQuick Software. It wasn't always that way. Before Williams joined the company about a year and a half ago, instructional videos were hosted on BillQuick's site, as part of its support content. "A lot of time and effort goes into creating those videos," Williams says. "Keeping them behind a firewall on a support site is ridiculous." The problem is that search engine "spider" software can't look behind the firewall to see how many times a video's been viewed. Since viewings lead to search engine a prominence, without this information, the spider won't give the video a high search ranking.

So when the company launched BillQuick 2008, Williams used TubeMogul to upload video to a variety of video-sharing sites, including YouTube, Brightcove, and Metacafe. "We started seeing a tremendous amount of viewings," he reports, more than 2,500 viewings in one day. The reason is that the video drew search engine prominence. "If you typed in 'BillQuick 2008,' the video would come up higher than our own site," he notes.

Getting video SEO right

Uploading content to sites like YouTube is a start, but there are many additional methods for leveraging video's to lift search engine rankings. Here are some of the most effective:

1 Take advantage of text. Most search engines can't tell what content is actually contained in the video, so they use the accompanying text to determine its relevance. Most people don't put much thought into the text that accompanies videos, so this step alone can provide competitive advantage. Carefully craft the text that accompanies the video, the title of the video (which should be relevant but short), and the video's keyword tags.

Don't neglect the actual video filename. "A lot of files are called things like 'video1.wmv,'" notes Suranga Chandratillake, CEO of the video search engine Blinkx. That's a wasted opportunity, he says, because many search engines also consider the actual name of the file when determining a video's relevance.

To truly take advantage of the power of text to boost video's search engine optimization (SEO), consider providing a transcript of what's said in the video. In fact, that's the only way to gain search engine ranking for a privately hosted video, says Aaron Wall, author of SEOBook.com, an online SEO resource. "That way, the search engines have the text to rank against," he says.

2. Build traffic to the video. That is, to the video hosted on a service, so the search engine will be able to track those viewings. "If you have a popular blog or newsletter for customers and you can use those things to link to the video, that helps a lot," Wall says.

One effective way to build traffic to a video hosted on YouTube or another service is to embed a link to the video on your site, rather than hosting it at all. This has the added advantage of saving you bandwidth and giving viewers a better experience at the same time. "The video sharing sites have better load balancing than you do, so the video loads really quickly," Williams says.

Some businesses, he adds, might hesitate to embed a video with the YouTube logo on it. But Brightcove and some other services offer the option to embed a video link with no logo, and will even allow you to customize the video player appearance to match your site, he says.

3. Provide quality content. This doesn't necessarily mean spending a ton on production. For instance Printable Promotions, which provides promotional giveaways such as reusable grocery bags, achieved significant search engine prominence with videos shot using the video feature of an inexpensive digital camera.

"I make sure to add value," explains Stacie Long, operations manager. "I'm not talking about price, or saying 'Buy, buy, buy!' I'm giving you information about the product." For instance, one popular Printable Promotions video shows how to fold the reusable bag into its own inner pouch, making it easy to carry in a pocket. "A still picture wouldn't really explain it," she says.

Needless to say, you should avoid the depressingly common practice of putting tags on videos that may boost SEO prominence, but have little or no relationship to the video's actual content. "Some people use tags of popular search terms such as 'Britney Spears' to bring viewers to a video about their product or service," Chandratillake says. Blinkx is fighting back, he notes, with voice-recognition software that can actually tell what's being said in the video. "If we find a video where the tags talk about one thing, and the video is actually about something else, it will be penalized in relevance," he says.

4. Track your results. TubeMogul provides details analysis of how many times a video is watched, and YouTube has a similar feature. Williams also recommends adding a query string the URL link from the video to your site, so that you can tell when traffic arrives from a particular video site. By using this system, Williams learned that the video hosted on Sclipo, a video sharing site devoted to instructional videos, had a higher clickthrough rate than the other sites, though a lower number of viewings overall.

And Long found a useful new search term. "We sell reusable grocery bags that people can put their logos on," she says. That's how she'd always thought of them, but by reviewing YouTube data she discovered many viewers had searched "supermarket bag" instead. "I had not thought of using the word 'supermarket,'" she says. "I now know to update our product pages so they have the keyword 'supermarket' in them."

SEO for Blogs: If You Build It, Will They Come?

Minda Zetlin — 2008-04-25T12:13:54-05:00

Printable Promotions has only had a blog on its site for a month or so. But it’s already made an impact on the company’s search engine rankings. “I did a Google search on ‘reusable folding grocery bag,’” says Stacie Long, the company’s operations manager. “The YouTube video of our product that we posted on our blog came up third or fourth.”

For many small business leaders, blogging can engender feelings of envy and frustration -- envy over legendary blogs that draw thousands of daily page views and frustration from the sneaking suspicion that no one out there is reading their own postings. Search engine optimization (SEO) can change that.

“Blogging is a great way to drive users to a site,” says Kelly Cutler, CEO of Internet marketing firm Marcel Media. “It can also help with stickiness, which is an important goal these days. It’s too easy for users to bounce away from your site before they’ve done something valuable like sign up for your newsletter or fill out a form.”

How can you improve your blog’s ranking on search engines? SEO is a complex science, but here are some principles that will help:

Make it crawler-friendly

Search engines dispatch software called crawlers (or sometimes “spiders”) to roam the World Wide Web in search of sites that might be of interest to searchers. One important SEO strategy is to have your blog be easy for the crawlers to find.

“Make sure the software is set up so that posts don’t get buried ten levels deep in your site,” advises Jill Whalen, CEO of High Rankings, an SEO service. “They should be easy to reach so search engines can crawl them.” Whalen also advises using SEO-friendly blog software. “WordPress is probably one of the best for that,” she says.

It’s also smart idea to include links in your posts, both to your own website’s product pages or other information, and to outside websites as well. Why? It’s links to your site, not from your site, that drive search engine rankings -- but, Whalen notes, one often begets the other. “It’s a good way to get linking back and forth,” she says. “Other site owners usually check who’s linking to them, so they get to know who you are.” When linking to outside sites, make sure the links open in a new window or tab so that users don’t automatically leave your site whenever they click on a link.

To keyword or not to keyword

Since all searches start with keywords, it seems obvious that including the pertinent keyword as many times as you can in a blog entry should help bring traffic. Not so fast, experts say. “Don’t force keywords into content where they wouldn’t normally be,” Cutler cautions. “That creates a bad user experience, which means people won’t use your blog, and then Google won’t index your blog.” In fact, Marcel Media usually refrains from even telling client bloggers what the top keywords are for their sites. “Blogs are usually better done without that kind of research in mind,” Cutler says.

Instead, she tries to identify blog topics where preferred terms come up naturally. “One of our clients is a hospital and we’ve identified specific areas they want to focus on. We’ve invited doctors who specialize in those areas to participate in blogging. We’re not trying to build content around keywords, but because those doctors work in those areas, we know the keywords will be used.”

If you do decide to do keyword research, Whalen recommends Keyword Discovery or Wordtracker to find what keywords your customers are searching. She also notes that Google’s AdWords offers information on keyword searches that is free to use, even if you’re not an AdWords customer.

But, she advises, don’t just go for the top terms. “Very competitive phrases probably have many sites optimizing for them,” she says. “So you want a phrase that’s less competitive, but still has some people searching it.” If that phrase is specific to your business’s unique value proposition, optimizing on it can be a very powerful tool.

Content is king

“A mistake I’ve seen a lot is that companies think Web 2.0 is like regular advertising space,” Long says. “They treat it like a billboard.”

Instead, make sure you’re providing content that will entertain, amuse, or inform your readers. One way to build traffic is to comment or react to the news of the day as it affects your particular business. “If you’re a bookseller, you might blog about the current lawsuit by J.K. Rowling to block publication of a Harry Potter Lexicon,” Cutler says. If you use this strategy, she adds, “Keep it short, to the point, and keep it opinionated. Don’t just republish news.”

Understanding the connection between blogging and search rankings can inspire busy executives to take the time to blog, Cutler notes. “What I like about blogging is that it stays in the spirit of the Internet, but lets you accomplish SEO goals in the background,” she says. “Content and linking are two of the most powerful Internet marketing tools --and blogging lets you use both in a non-advertising way.”

Does Business Need Its Own Search Engines?

Mary O. Foley — 2008-04-25T11:58:59-05:00

Type in “seal” on Yahoo or Google, and you’re likely to get results ranging from Navy SEALs to marine mammals. But if you’re a business looking for industrial seals, it might take a while to find relevant results.

That’s what business-to-business (B2B) vertical search engines are all about: allowing companies to search for products and partners on a search engine designed just for them, experts explain. “It’s a vertical search engine like Google, but filters have been added to give a specific context to the search,” explains Guy Maser, senior vice president of marketing with GlobalSpec, a B2B search engine designed for engineers and scientific users. “When you search for ‘seal,’ you get industrial seal.”

The opportunities for B2B vertical search in many sectors remain relatively untapped, but they are clearly there, experts say. Outsell Inc., a Burlingame, Calif.-based research firm specializing in the publishing and education sectors, estimates that the market for B2B vertical search could grow to $1 billion in North America alone by 2009. Meanwhile, a China-specific B2B site, Alibaba.com, is already worth as much as $10 billion in market capital.

“Everybody goes to Alibaba…. It has 90 percent market share in China,” notes Mark Cordover, CEO of IT.com, an IT-sector B2B search engine. And here in the U.S., Cordover says, the need for an IT space alone that provides context, news and peer networking is “enormous.” Meanwhile, GlobalSpec’s Maser reports that the site has grown by over 50 percent annually in each of the last five years.

Contextual searching: just the beginning

If the idea of a B2B search engine calls to mind a sector-specific online phone book, you’re on the wrong track, experts say. A contextual search engine is only part of the value added at GlobalSpec and sites like it. Visitors can key in product specs and search the product catalogs of over 128,000 suppliers. They can read newsletters tailored to their exact business needs, learn of trade shows, and access the “CR4” social networking site for engineering/science professionals. Combining context, news and community, says Maser, “is our view of vertical search.”

IT.com’s Cordover agrees. “This is not a pay-to-play model…. We are trying to give visitors community, news, and relevant searches,” he says.

“There may be some overlap between directories and B2B vertical search engines, but a directory is the most limited and primitive form of bringing businesses together,” explains Chuck Richard, vice president and lead analyst of Outsell. “A good vertical provides news and much more…. It’s not just a look-up device.” Richard adds that directories that only list paying companies “will not be successful.” The better model, he says, is like Google’s, where there is some information about every vendor, but expanded information about those that have purchased ads.

B2B verticals could grow even faster, Outsell’s Richard observes, if they coached their advertisers -- sometimes small, niche providers -- on how to polish up their websites so that prospective clients can easily find the information they came for. “The pages have to match the search terms, or the sale opportunity will be lost,” Richard says. “Sometimes you see this, where the search engine drops you into a really poorly designed home page.”

Pricier ads reach optimal market

Generally, ads placed on B2B search engines are pricier than those placed on Yahoo or MSN, but those ads are reaching a highly targeted market. ‘The more targeted and niched the market, the more people are willing to pay,” says Outsell’s Richard.

At GlobalSpec, advertisers can take out pay-per-click ads, but most opt for ads running between $2,000 and $10,000 to appear in the site’s many tailored newsletters. “Those who pay in this range get ads that really establish them in this market,” Maser says.

The future looks bright for B2B, Maser says, especially in those sectors that can present something unique to their potential users: and stay a step ahead of the big search engines. “Google, Yahoo and others are still trying to find ways to offer more refined contextual search, so you can’t count them out as competitors,” notes Maser.

SIDEBAR: Players in the B2B Vertical Space

While there are potentially hundreds of B2B vertical search engines, here are some to watch:

GlobalSpec -- The engineering/scientific sector search engine boasts a spec-checker, news and a social networking site.

ThomasNet.com -- This industrial products site features access to news as well as industry-specific searches.

EDN.com -- Owned by Dutch publishing giant Reed/Elsevier, this electronics design site features a search engine, news, and “strategy.” Its engine is powered by Zibb, which also powers other sector-specific Reed/Elsevier sites.

IT.com -- An IT-based site that allows searches of companies, webcasts, and news.

Zoominfo.com -- A site for corporate recruiters/job hunters, it features corporate profiling, individual profiling, and job listings.

Tech Talk: Search Helps Customers Find Filters

Elizabeth Wasserman — 2008-03-31T10:28:33-05:00

Water Filters Direct sells water filters for refrigerators, water softeners and reverse osmosis systems directly to businesses and consumers over the Internet at WaterFilters.net. Jamin Arvig, director of business development, tells how the company, started in 2002 in Zumbrota, Minn., increased the conversion rate for sales to online customers by 11 percent by deploying a custom search engine.

Elizabeth Wasserman: Why did you decide to use custom search?

Jamin Arvig: The search tools we had used in the past. .were okay during the stage we were in. We used tools that just did have limitations. They didn’t have customizable features for one. And, for two, they tended to get bogged down as our site grew. As we had more and more pages and we wanted to have more and more capabilities in the search, it became necessary to move to Google Custom Business Search Engine. I think it was cheaper too. It’s $100 a year. It provides great functionality some of which we haven’t gotten into yet. It gets more into the custom features and refinement capability with the search and Ajax and XML programming abilities. For now, we’ve taken advantage of their basic set, which is much better than anything else out here. Their basic set includes a search of a number of sites. So we can actually tie together our blog, forum and our main website, or other peripheral sites or even any other water filter resources on the Web. We can tie all of that together and if someone searches on our site, it shows search results from any of those pages. That’s very useful. It shows up as a very professional list of results.

Wasserman: What does it help your customers do?

Arvig: We have a very large number of products. We have thousands of products. We try to maintain a very organized site as it is, for those who are browsing. So if they are looking for a refrigerator water filter, we have an easy way that they can find it while browsing. But when you have that many products, it’s really nice to have a search option. People like to search. I don’t have the exact stats, but I believe it’s over 50 percent who choose to use the search box rather than go through the traditional browsing method. If you have a good search results format, they can very quickly find what they are looking for. At the size our website is now, we didn’t have a choice. We need a search.

Wasserman: Were people having a hard time finding what they wanted in the past?

Arvig: Yeah. We’ve always had some search so we did try different search engines. At first, when we didn’t have it, people had a lot of trouble and it just wasn’t practical. But even when we had a search engine that wasn’t a very good one, people were having trouble. We were overloading our last search engine, the results were not correct. Even employees were having trouble finding the right water filters.

Wasserman: How did you set it up?

Arvig: The set up didn’t require programming or CIO work. The way the set up is is very simple. Google lays it out so a monkey can do it. It’s got a step-by-step process. You need some technical background. It’s not like you need to know programming. It probably took a couple of hours – not a big investment.

Wasserman: What have the results been?

Arvig: We do use Google Analytics, which is a nice tool for monitoring results. We noticed there was a decrease of our bounce rate -- when someone comes to your site and leaves right away that’s a bounce. Obviously we want to decrease that as much as possible. We credit a 4 percent bounce rate decrease from this custom search. Another thing we look for on Google Analytics for our website is the conversion rate. The conversion rate is, say 10,000 people come to WaterFiltes.net per day and we have a conversation rate of 10 percent, we would have 1,000 sales. Our conversation rate increased so that’s great. We credit the increase at 11 percent during that period following starting the custom search. It really does facilitate user friendliness, which is what we were going for. Our slogan is “Water filters made easy,” and we have to stand by that so we want to use the best tools possible.

Targeted Search -- How to Optimize It

Mary O. Foley — 2008-02-29T10:05:33-05:00

Christine Churchill likes knowing exactly who will be looking at the Google-based text ads she develops.

“If you’re targeting an audience over 55, you might make the type face of the ad a little larger,” says Churchill, the president of KeyRelevance, a Dallas-based search engine marketing firm. “If it’s for women, the ad and the website [being advertised] should carry more detail, and more content, because women prefer to read more details,” she says.

Until recent years, those purchasing ads on Google AdWords, Yahoo or MSN meant writing a one-size-fits-all ad and trying to come up with the best possible keywords and optimization data for that ad to get it the best exposure. But now, the major search engines are offering more customized options for ad placement, such as demographic targeting (age, sex, or ethnicity), geographic targeting, and contextual targeting.

Ads targeted by age, sex, ethnicity

Since 2006, Google has been able to place ads aimed at women on websites found to receive high traffic from female customers. Other search engines have since followed suit. The demographic targeting complements Google's existing contextual targeting functions, which have always allowed an ad for shoes, for example, to be placed next to a New York Times online article about shoes. Googles ads long able to target readers in just one state can now also target just Asian readers. or just adults with no children.

According to a Google spokeswoman, Google does this by plugging data collected by comScore Media Metrix into its search algorithm, and figuring out which websites are frequented by people meeting the desired category. Then targeted ads can be placed at those sites at the request of advertisers. But companies using the service say they also supply some data to Google as part of securing their ads.

The targeted offerings don’t cost companies anything more than other ads, according to Google. Companies are still charged on a “pay per click” fee schedule, where the company pays a set fee -- sometimes just a few cents -- each time their ad is clicked on.

For best results, know thy customer

As with any advertising, targeting the right consumer is the name of the game, so the options offer considerable opportunities for small to mid-sized businesses, experts say. But to get the most out of these offerings, you need to do your homework.

It’s important to refashion your website so that it can collect data on visitors, such as their sex and age, says Frank Travisano, CEO and founder of Impaxion Inc. and Linkateer, two Gilbertsville, Pa.-based providers of search engine optimization, design, and marketing services.

“It always makes sense to do this, for your business, so you know who’s visiting your website.” Travisano also notes that the website must include consent information, so that visitors know that non-identifying information may be shared for advertising purposes.

Armed with this information, your company can figure out which groups to target with its ads, and write or format them accordingly. Then they can be placed where you want them.

The downsides? Privacy may be one. “Hopefully, Google is just using the information [from advertisers] to better serve their ads,” says Travisano. Churchill adds that some of her clients admit to giving phony data to Google about their clients so that the privacy of their customers is protected. However, Google says it is mainly using comScore data, not customer data, to power its targeting.

But overall, those using the new service note that everyone stands to gain. “Google and the others get more dollars per click, and advertisers get a higher value per click,” says Travisano. “It’s a win-win.”

SIDEBAR: Vertical Search Engines

While most small businesses look to Google and MSN’s search engines for the biggest bang for their advertising buck, business-to-business (B2B) vertical search engines may be the up-and-coming place to go. Outsell Inc., a market research firm, forecasts that the B2B vertical search engine market will reach $1 billion by 2009.

What verticals can offer that the big general search engines don’t is context, notes Mark Cordover, CEO of IT.com, an information technology-specific vertical search engine. “If you’re an IT person, and you type in ‘soap’ on Google, you’ll get the kind you wash with, not something in the IT world,” he says, noting that SOAP in IT lingo refers to simple object access protocol. “But if you tell me you’re an IT person, you give me context that lets me give you exactly what you want.”

For this reason, vertical search engines are likely to grow in popularity. They offer businesses the chance to access the critical content they need faster than with general search engines. Also, they offer collaborative opportunities not possible in the general category, says Cordover. “Our users want peer reviews. They want to know who has used something, and what did they think about it. They can get that from us.”

What a Microsoft/Yahoo Combination Means

Anita Campbell — 2008-02-07T12:31:05-05:00

So Microsoft made an unsolicited multi-billion dollar bid for Yahoo. It is big news. Every media outlet, the entire blogosphere, your grandmother, and your hairdresser are weighing in with opinions.

But I am interested in just one question: What, if anything, does it mean for my small business?
I’d like to suggest that only two things really matter to small businesses in this proposed deal. Both point toward a Microsoft/Yahoo combo as being a good thing. Those two things are:

Would it mean a real alternative to getting found in the search engines, besides Google?
Would it mean another serious contender for a pay-per-click advertising marketplace, besides Google?

Hmmm. Isn’t it interesting that in both considerations a third party came up -- Google.

Therein lies the importance of this deal to the 27 million small businesses in this country, and the many millions in other countries.

It’s about competition, and providing a true competitor to Google. And that would be a good thing for small businesses.

Louise Story wrote in The New York Times recently that this merger is an unusual deal in that instead of limiting competition, as many mergers or acquisitions do, it may create more competition, not less. And I think that’s a key consideration, despite the comments of Google’s Senior Vice President, David Drummond, who wrote on the official Google blog:

“So Microsoft's hostile bid for Yahoo! raises troubling questions. This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It's about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.”

It’s hard to see how this deal would result in less openness and innovation. In fact, the case can be made that the just the opposite would occur.

Right now we essentially have one search engine -- Google. No other company in the search and PPC ad field comes close.

This deal might give two players that have struggled with their search engines the potential to combine search expertise and resources into something that actually might give Google a run for the money. Worst case, even if Microsoft acquired Yahoo and somehow made Yahoo search “less open,” we’d still be in the same boat: for all practical purposes, one search engine in town -- name of Google.

Don’t get me wrong. I am NOT in the “Google is evil” camp.

On the contrary, I think all small business owners should get down on their knees and thank Google for giving us a tool like the Google search engine. The Google search engine did more to level the playing field for small businesses to compete right alongside much larger, better-funded businesses, than any other recent innovation I can think of.

The same goes for the pay-per-click advertising marketplace. Google transformed the face of advertising helping small businesses run ad campaigns no matter how small their budgets. What Google did for small businesses by creating the pay-per-click marketplace was liberating and empowering. It stripped away all the middlemen that drove up so many costs of advertising. It made the ability to attract customers affordable for small businesses -- and gave us the analytical and measuring tools to prove whether the advertising worked or not. We no longer had to throw money at ads with a hope and a prayer, guessing whether we got a real return or not.

But things are very different now. Let’s face it, search marketing and pay-per-click advertising are growing up. They both have more importance in the business models of small businesses than they did when Google first introduced them.

Now millions of small businesses all over the world could not survive without search engines and pay per click advertising.

Blog posts and forum posts have become much more prevalent in the past few years about small businesses feeling at the mercy of Google, out of fear of losing the coveted Google search rankings. The sense of frustration and helplessness is palpable.

You see, if a small business’s search rankings go down, its business could literally fail. Small businesses operate on razor thin margins of success or failure. Make some inadvertent error, not even realizing the impact of a decision, and -- boom! -- Google drops the rankings -- or worse, removes the site from the search results. If that happens, there is no viable replacement today. There’s no advance notice and it’s next to impossible to find out why the action was taken -- the business owner is left to guess.

The alternative is to buy pay-per-click ads through Google, but that adds more expense. And if there’s only one pay-per-click ad market, there is no natural competition for bidding to keep click costs low.

It’s hard to see how so much power concentrated in one company is a good thing.

Would a Microsoft/Yahoo combo really result in a serious competitor to Google? It’s hard to tell. One school of thought says that if neither has done it up to now, what’s to say that the two companies squashed together will be any more successful?

That’s a good point and I don’t know the answer. Most acquisitions do not achieve their stated objectives, so the odds are not good. But I’d like to see them give it a try. If Microsoft / Yahoo managed to give Google a real run for the money, it could be a very good thing for small businesses.

Anita Campbell is a writer, speaker and radio talk show host who closely follows trends in the small business market at her site, Small Business Trends.

The Monster Dilemma

David H. Freedman — 2007-04-25T11:01:50-05:00

For business owners plagued by a dearth of candidates for key job openings, the Web was supposed to provide an ideal solution. Job-search sites like Monster.com can put postings in front of millions of applicants instantly. And newer business-oriented social networking sites like LinkedIn provide similarly fertile recruiting territory, supplying access to the contacts of thousands of people. On the other hand, anyone who's actually tried to hire someone through the Web knows the truth: You post an ad and are immediately flooded with hundreds of resumés, many from people whose backgrounds are wildly inappropriate. So much for the Web making things easier. It's enough to make you long for the days of print newspaper ads and snail mail.

But just as technology created the problem, newer technology aims to solve it. A new generation of hiring tools promises to screen out inappropriate applicants, allow the suitable ones to put their best foot forward, and even hunt down good candidates who haven't applied. As these new services get better at these tasks, they may well change the balance of power in the job-recruiting industry and could even redefine the way we think about jobs.

A shot at diverting a river of weak applicants is the chief advantage offered to employers by Protuo, a Woodstock, Georgia-based start-up that launched its service in January. Protuo isn't only a job-listing site; it also forwards its clients' listings to some 270 established job-listing sites, including Monster. But applicants can't respond to a Protuo posting unless they spend seven minutes or so filling out a survey that asks about experience, skills, workstyles, and job preferences. Employers can customize the survey by choosing from a wide field of prepared questions or by adding their own, and they specify which responses get a candidate's resumé past the screen. Has the candidate managed a technical project? Is he or she willing to move? The approach is modeled, to some extent, on the sort of compatibility gauging one encounters on a matchmaking site like eHarmony, notes Jennifer Gerlach, Protuo's co-founder and vice president of marketing. Gerlach went through the dating process on eHarmony just to research the technique. "I learned a lot," she says. "And I met some very, very nice people."

With online job postings sometimes pulling in more than a thousand applicants, the ability to winnow the flood could mean the difference between being able to retain control of the hiring process and having to bring in a professional recruiter--at a typical cost of $30,000 for a midlevel hire. The time and expense of dealing with a huge influx of resumés is all the more frustrating because much of the flow comes from online applicants who indiscriminately bombard hirers with resumés. You can try a keyword search on the resumés to narrow things down, but applicants have learned to load their resumés with them, often by pasting in phrases from the job posting. Even LinkedIn has suffered from inflation, as many users aggressively build networks of people they don't really know in order to make themselves appear better connected. "There's no value in a lot of these contacts," says LinkedIn user Chris Knudsen, who heads business development for podcasting company Podango in Salt Lake City. "It can just be someone whose card you got at a trade show." (A LinkedIn spokesperson commented via e-mail: "Anyone can join the LinkedIn network; however, the quality of your own personal LinkedIn network is the responsibility of each individual.") But a well-designed survey, contends Gerlach, allows users to skim the cream.

Fred Donovan, who runs Donovan Networks, a seven-employee computer network security firm, has been flooded with applicants responding to previous postings to Monster.com and other online job boards. He is currently conducting a Protuo search and likes what he's seen so far. "I can specify that I want to see only resumés from people who say they have 10 years' experience in negotiating sales and are familiar with the software development process," he says. "I'm seeing a small, better-qualified subset of the applicants." There must be something to the idea. Other hiring sites, including Market10, Jobster, and Taleo, are introducing their own approaches to automated candidate screening. And Monster is doing the same, making available--for a fee that adds about 20 percent to the cost of posting a job--the ability to direct applicants to a questionnaire designed to rank the suitability of candidates.

Sure, candidates can try to game these surveys by being less than truthful. But Gerlach insists that surveys can be designed to stymie such people by asking questions that don't have an obviously right answer--such as whether the person prefers to work independently or in groups--and by warning candidates that they can be rated as overqualified. Protuo, which costs hirers $44 to $295 a month depending on the number of jobs they're posting and is currently free to job seekers, also offers applicants a chance to do more than post a resumé. The firm invites users to create online portfolios that can include whatever documents, photos, videos, or other material that best represents that person's career to date. (Monster is currently testing a similar capability.)

ZoomInfo, in Waltham, Massachusetts, takes a different approach. It assembles profiles of potential job candidates from all available online data, whether or not they're looking for jobs. Starting with the same techniques that Google uses to gather Web data associated with a person's name, ZoomInfo adds the significant additional step of crunching the results to pull out the most relevant information, weed out data referring to other people of the same name, and assemble a professional profile. ZoomInfo has an R&D team of 35 working on the technology. So far, the company has assembled some 34 million profiles, and as far as I can tell, most of them are fairly informative and accurate. (Check out your own name to put it to the test.)

But somebody has to pay for all those scientists, and that somebody is you. The company charges $5,000 a user per year for the ability to dig up personnel profiles by company or industry. It sounds like a lot, but ZoomInfo's COO, Bryan Burdick, notes that if you get the right candidate for a single vacancy, the price is one-sixth that of using a recruiting firm. The company also offers less expensive, more limited searching capabilities aimed at smaller companies, as well as free access to searches on individuals. Many major executive search firms, along with some 500 other corporations, already use ZoomInfo, claims Burdick. "I can find personal information, professional backgrounds--and, sometimes, damning evidence--on tens of millions of people without having to go through 1.5 million Google hits on each one," says John Boehmer, managing partner at executive search firm Barlow Group in Norwalk, Connecticut.

Boehmer is quick to point out that as ZoomInfo-like services get better, and more companies get comfortable using them, corporate hirers won't need professional recruiting firms like his to turn up candidates. "It's commoditizing the front end of what we do," he says. "Eventually, everyone will know where everyone is and how to get hold of them, so we won't be able to charge for identifying and contacting candidates." Search firms will still be valuable for assessing candidates, he contends, though he acknowledges that new e-hiring systems could eventually eat into that end of the business as they get smarter and have more online data to work with.

For that matter, it's easy to imagine the not-all-that-distant day when online tools make it so easy to find people to fill a specific slot that the notion of permanent jobs becomes irrelevant for many positions. Why hire a manager for years when you can find a new one with exactly the skill set needed for the precise tasks at hand? That's not necessarily bad for employees: Think of an economy where top employees are constantly being sought out and bid over by companies that recognize them from their Web trails as the perfect short-term solution. And talented employees would be just as smart about whom they choose to work for--using similar services to weed out companies that aren't good matches for them. You'll want to treat those people well. If you don't, and they post that fact online, it could haunt you for a long, long time.

Contributing editor David H. Freedman (whatsnext@inc.com) is a Boston-based author of several books about business and technology.