One of the stories we touched on in SMTrends #76 was CPG’s finally “getting search.”  2007 seemed to be the year when Agencies, CPG’s, and the Engines all stepped up to test and promote the branding impact search has.  The cynics might say that this is the natural extension of brand online spending; there are not too many other proven tactics for clients to utilize, so eventually the money would flow to search.  I disagree with that and am pretty confident that brands could find a place to spend money in other places, if needed.  What has happened instead is that user behavior has evolved and opened the door for search to become a good ol’ branding vehicle.

It seems so simple, yet we all missed it.  For years Search has been used as navigational feature: For example, say I like Neutrogena Hand Cream. Instead of trolling through their website, it is much easier for me to use the search box as a way to get to the product page.  I call it “On Demand Navigational Search.” We look at descriptions for the best answer and to minimize wasting time on irrelevant pages.  For example, if you search for “sensitive skin hand lotion,” you carefully read the descriptions of the results and narrow your choices.  As you refine your search with several variations of this query, you continue to see Neutrogena products.  Then one day at work the following conversation happens:

Co-worker: “Hey Bill, my hands are so dry, any idea where I can find a good lotion for my sensitive skin?”
You: “Neutrogena seems to have great products for guys like us in search of skin moisturizer.”  

Didn’t branding just occur?

While this scenario may seem like a made-up newsletter fairy tale, it has been proven by several brand lift studies.  At the end of 2007, Google, Equiro, and Honda released a study that measured the brand lift from using search.  Enquiro looked at the impact on users when Honda appeared only in the top paid listing and also when they appeared in both the paid and organic listings.  These results are based on Honda occupying the top paid and organic positions:

-    There was a 16% increase in brand association for “fuel-efficient cars”
-    Consumer purchase intent increased 8% for Honda, while there was a decrease for companies that did not appear in both results
-    With branded queries, there was a 7% increase in purchase intent – Key takeaway here is to buy your branded terms

These results underscore the need of an integrated search plan as well as the impact that search can have on branding goals.

Article by Joshua Palau

With all the hullabaloo from the Mitchell Report and bulked up baseball players, Google has followed with their own bulking up – of enhancements for their local offering.

Both enhancements speak to Google’s commitment to local, as well as a strategy of leveraging their market share without immediately monetizing against it. The first is increasing the amount of local results from 3 – 4 to 10. In the old model, Google results included name, website, address, phone number and a snippet from a review. The new model condenses the listing to include more results and will still include name, website, and phone number. For advertisers this is good news, as they have more opportunities to be on page 1 of the local results instead of having to be one of the top 3. It still means that, regardless of if you are a local florist or a large hotel chain, it is important to not give up and to continue to optimize for the increased coverage.

The second enhancement is the introduction of a Local PlusBox in the paid search results. If you run a search on “New York Dentists” you will see a paid listing with a plus sign under the site URL. When a user clicks on that, the box opens to provide all of the necessary information to contact that dentist. This is currently being used with limited advertisers, but should be leveraged by any advertiser targeting local traffic. Interestingly, Google is not charging a CPC when the PlusBox is clicked, but only when a user clicks through to that site. It looks as though they are willing to forgo short-term revenue in order to get advertisers into the program. Since this allows users to contact the advertiser without clicking, it is important to have a unique phone number tied to your campaigns or this traffic will not be credited to the proper channel. There is also a possible future integration of GOOG-411 to help with this tracking challenge.

Article by Joshua Palau

If you’ve used Yahoo! recently, you may have noticed that some search results are being marked with comments such as “14 people bookmarked this page under: music - bands.” These comments represent Del.icio.us tags. Yahoo! is essentially marking listings of URLs that have also been bookmarked in Del.icio.us. Right now, these changes are currently only viewable to a subset of users; it is likely that Yahoo! will roll this out as a full feature in the coming weeks. Yahoo! does not currently use Del.icio.us bookmarking as a factor in its ranking algorithm; the benefit here is that these pages are being visibly marked with the Del.icio.us logo, along with information on how many people bookmarked that page. This not only adds visibility to the listing, but brings the popularity factor into play.

The recent Del.icio.us integration is similar to the way StumbleUpon listings are labeled in search results while the StumbleUpon toolbar is enabled. The Del.icio.us integration is also a reinforcement that, while Digg is known for providing the most value as far as both link building and traffic, StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us are great tools for making a page’s content more visible.

Article by Nita Taide

To stick with the local theme, AA|RF SEO founder, Rob Aronson highlights the 411 on Local Search in his latest ISEDB article.

Recession fears seem to be everywhere and now Yahoo! announces that they will lay off 1,000 workers. Wow…just wow.

In another move aimed at increasing their distribution, Microsoft announced that they will be providing the contextual and paid search results for The Wall Street Journal.