I’ve been thinking about what would be a nice infographic to make, one which actually had some use, next to getting the link attention for which many of them were made. One I did think of is an overview of all the Google acquisitions, since Google is currently buying more than a company a month. Well, someone beat me to it: scores.org. They made a nice overview which, in contrary to others, also tries to look at the usefulness of an acquisition. Judge for yourself (after the read more)… (more…)
State of Search
Posts About ‘Business’
State of UK Search: Guava and Econsultancy Launch 4th Annual Report
Yesterday afternoon was a hot one in the city. I was making my way through Soho Square towards the Groucho Club, for the launch of the fourth annual Search Marketing Report and I was pleased to see that Soho Square was packed with media types catching the afternoon sun and chucking back champagne. When I say pleased; I really mean jealous, (don’t you people have work to do?) but I took this as a good sign that perhaps things are really bouncing back for digital media.
I got to The Groucho (quick celeb check… Lenny Henry, Ross Kemp, Danny Dyer) and was greeted by our Econsultancy hosts; Senior Analyst, Jake Hird, Research Director, Linus Gregoriadis and a very nice Guava Champagne cocktail from the sponsors (nice touch Guava!) We chatted about the report and the general state of the industry (consensus – search up, display down), as the room filled up and the cocktails went down. Guava’s Martin Dinham began to round us up, so we took our places. Now in it’s fourth year this report, (from over five hundred respondants), is rather extensive and now includes social media; so I’ll highlight a couple of points that stood out for me. (more…)
Google wants us to know they make the US money
It’s not a secret that Google has a high influence on many companies world wide. Many (smaller) companies rely on Google Advertising and on Google search for their business. And there are many sites out there who make money out of Adsense.
Last week in the US it was National Small Business week. A reason for Google to tell the world once again how important they are. And they decided to throw it in their with quite the air: “Google’s U.S. economic impact” was the title of their post. In this post they explain how much money Google is making the US. They even set up a special page where you can not only download the report but also look at different states to see where Google has the most impact.
A look at the map show us for example that Google generated $863 million of economic activity for 25,000 Minnesota businesses, website publishers and non-profits in 2009. In the ‘homestate’ California Google generated 14.1 billion dollars. In total Google ‘made’ the US over 54 billion dollars in economic activity. (more…)
The scope and limitations of SEO
Over the past few weeks I’ve had several discussions with fellow SEOs, especially over at the (excellent) SEO Training Dojo, about what exactly the scope and remit of SEO is supposed to be. These debates were often sparked by a preceding discussion on valid SEO KPIs – what metrics we measure as indications of SEO success.
Some SEOs, which I’ll call ‘purists’, stick with a tight definition of SEO, placing the emphasis firmly on the first two words of the acronym: search engines. These purist SEOs see their scope as delivering targeted search engine traffic, and that’s where their remit ends. Turning this traffic in to actual conversions is a different discipline – conversion rate optimisation.
Can you buy your visitors?
Money is what makes the world go around. And money could also be the trigger for many to take a step they otherwise might not have taken that easy or to get the attention of those who are otherwise hard to reach. So if you want traffic to your website, but it isn’t going fast enough, why not throw in some money?
Its a concept which many sites have tested, with different success. Some ‘bought’ traffic by paying for advertising, others have tried to give away stuff to get visitors to come back to their sites. Microsoft is probably the best or at least the biggest example of a site, in this case even a search engine, trying to ‘buy their way in’ by throwing in hard cash for every search with their cashback program. The most recent one going this way is real time search engine Leapfish, where you can win $100,000 in cash and prizes if you help the search engine reach the 20 million searches they want in 2010. (more…)
State of Search radioshow – episode 6: E-Bay, Twitter ads, site speed and more
This week the guest on the show is Dennis Goedegebuure. He is ‘a dutchman in San Jose’, working as SEO at E-Bay. He worked for E-Bay in the Netherlands and made the move to the US four years ago.
In the first part we discussed the background an SEO needs. A college degree is not necessary for working at an agency, working at a company like E-Bay however you probably will need that degree to grow within the company. Also the discussion goes on about how and if you can teach SEO.
In the second part Roy and Dennis discussed some E-Bay and Marktplaats issues like the frames issue with Marktplaats and the way a big company works with media and external statements. Also Twitter Ads, sitespeed and more was discussed. One interesting part (in the final part) was the way you adress people you work with in the US compared to Europe.
The shownotes are below, all the links can also be found in the special delicious feed.
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The future of publishing, or is it?
Last week the Times announced that in June readers will have to start paying for content. Is this the start of a new era in publishing? It might be. Many are very much opposed to the steps Rupert Murdoch is planning to take when it comes to paying for content. Still, there are not many who have an answer to Murdoch’s problems: how do you make money with newspaperwebsites? We now know that advertising won’t give us the answer, but what will?
The video below is a brilliant video, which does not give us the answer to the big question, but it does point us in the right direction: Listen to your target audience. Be sure to watch the entire video, it really is brilliant.
Suze Orman tells Google how to earn money
Suze Orman is a internationally known finance expert who made a lot of money over the years. Google must have thought she could learn its employees about money and decided to ask her to talk to Google employees. The video of her speech you can find here. Learn what Googlers learned about money. It sounds like a money-scheme or just ‘save money’, but listen good, you can actually learn from it.
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