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No surprise, thousands of Google Watchers are feverishly running tests to find out everything they can about Google Instant and how it changes things.
Here's one: Google Instant has a blacklist.
If you start to type in certain words, it will not show an instant result, or a possibly undesirable result, until or unless you hit enter.
If you type b,i,t,c,h when you hit "h" the instant display will disappear. Same thing with "murder" though on "murde"
it will give you a link to click on for "murder" listings.
Interesting, eh? And sensible, I think. It may have taken them quite a bit to work this out.
How fast can things move on the Internet?
After Google announced Instant, a college kid sat down and programmed and launched YouTube Instant.
It took him five hours work.
It went completely viral and within ten days he had a million visits and a job offer from YouTube.
Since about January, Google has been testing "Store Views" which is an extension of Street Views. You would be able to take a digital walk into the store from the street.
Of course, Street Views has been dealing with a lot of heat, mostly from European governments talking about criminal charges for privacy violations. Probably why Google has been playing this very low key. There has been no official announcement about it at all.
But they are sending out photographers to take photos, and they currently have at least one photographer working in Tampa.
Here are a few links to information about it:
Google Photographers FAQ
Apply To Be Photographed
Search Engine Land Blog from February
The are two problems with spam and spam filters:
Receiving unwanted email.
NOT receiving wanted email.
Unfortunately in the continuing battle with spammers, there is no perfect solution.
However, if we host your website, we can make adjustments if you are having a problem with either of these.
1. If someone's email isn't getting to you, we can "whitelist" their email address or all email addresses in their domain, so they automatically go through on our server.
2. We can adjust the settings on the spam filter so it rejects more or fewer emails.
3. We can have it delete rejected emails or pass them through but marked as SPAM.
The amount of spam that gets through shouldn't be huge, and most of that should end up in your junk folder. That's about as good as you can do unless you use an authentication service where their email address has to be validated the first time they try and email you. But that can annoy people you want to communicate to you - such as prospective customers.
In any case, if you are having issues with your email, contact our Customer Service Manager. We'll do what we can to improve the situation.
Google has been so busy with changes and improvements, Google Watching has become almost a full-time job.
A slight exaggeration.
One recent announcement is a security enhancement that is being rolled out to work across many of Google's products and services.
It is called Two-Factor Authentication (link is to the announcement in regard to Google Apps).
The basic idea is if you have to both HAVE something (a street address, a particular phone number, etc.) and KNOW something (a password) it makes it much harder to hack into your accounts.
Matt Cutts talks about future use with other services / products.
So the secret is out of the bag:
There are many areas of SEO and website design that are as much an art as a science
From the Official Google Webmaster Blog.
So if anyone GUARANTEES you top rankings in a certain amount of time, what does that say about them?
(Hint: They are con artists.)
More along the same line, from Google's CEO.
I've a long article about the USP, but it is worth bringing up again.
Even if you have a unique product or service, something no one else is offering, you still have to tell people about it in a way that communicates.
Sometimes this is obvious. More likely it is obvious only after someone has thought of it. Like the iPhone "There's an app for that" commercials.
There are a couple of things people usually miss, trying to come up with a USP.
First of all it has to be UNIQUE. Just Google your competition, if they are all saying "top quality" one way or another, that is NOT unique just because you come up with a different way to say it.
It has to be unique in the eyes of your prospective buyers. That you think it is different doesn't count.
Secondly it is supposed to be a SELLING proposition.
It has to be desirable to the potential customer - desirable enough to get them interested in buying.
Again, just because you think it is cool, or something the consumer SHOULD want, doesn't make it so.
Sometimes you have to survey prospective buyers. It often works to survey your sales force. What are the things they say to prospects that seem to resonate the most, that help to close them on buying from YOU, not your competition?
You can look through your testimonials or interview happy customers too. You can also use click ads (Google AdWords) to test ideas and wordings.
A good USP can make just a TREMENDOUS difference in your marketing effectiveness. It's worth putting some effort into.
Microsoft has announced the release of the next generation of Internet Explorer, IE9, in Beta (for use by anyone and everyone prior to general release).
They've been losing market share and currently are barely over 50% worldwide, with Firefox and Chrome having almost all the rest of the browser market.
They are fighting a losing battle on this. Perhaps IE9 will help them. We'll see.
It would be difficult to over-estimate how huge a factor TRUST is in your marketing and sales efforts.
You know all those sales that didn't close? The people who didn't respond to your make-them-an-offer-they-can't-refuse offer?
Do you really think your marketing wouldn't have worked or the sale wouldn't have closed, if people believed what you said?
We live in a world full of sharks selling smoke-and-mirrors, proudly coming up with new ways to fool people. Everyone knows it.
What would it take to make your prospective customers trust you?
Think about it. There may be nothing more effective you can do to expand your business, than to solve this.
1. Don't be BORING.
2. Make people WANT your product or service.
3. Build TRUST.
4. Do it well enough and smart enough so you can afford to CONTINUE your marketing.
Google uses various clues to decide how important a topic or page is on a website.
Here's one: How many clicks does it take to get there from the home page?
The more clicks, the less important it must be.
Don't try to have too many links directly from your home page though.
Google might just decide NONE of them are important.
No question, Google Instant will change how people search.
But how?
One change will be when a location is typed "plumbers New Orleans" or "New Orleans plumbers." Until now there has been little reason to do it in one order or the other. The tendency has been to put the location first as that is more natural language.
Now the reverse behavior will often reward with faster searches, especially when you are sure what the main search phrase is going to be.
Because of personalization, as soon as you type "plumb" Google starts serving up local plumbers in its click ads and map listings. One more letter and it starts giving suggestions for specific locations in the area.
I can get "plumbers Tampa" organic listings with 7 key strokes - p,l,u,m,b,e and two down arrows.
The reverse will probably turn out to be true where you are unsure of the best search phrase.. Put "Tampa" first then start typing in the likeliest phrase. Use suggestions or back up as needed.
In local searches this will also probably mean an increase in the percentage of clicks on paid and map listings.
Here in Tampa Bay it probably will mean a higher percentage of clicks on "Tampa" searches as opposed to individual localities in the area such as "Clearwater" or "Largo".
Stay tuned.
Now that Google Instant has been live for two days, data is starting to accumulate on how it affects things.
But we are FAR from through the learning curve on it. We'll be monitoring our clients' stats daily for a while, and reading the blogs so we can get on top of it as rapidly as possible.
About 30% of our click ad campaigns have seen a very noticeable increase in impressions and clicks since the launch.
First impression: It will lead to a rise in traffic for many well-optimized websites and click ad campaigns. The degree it affects things will vary widely. In cases, it will increase or decrease impressions and/or click through rates without affecting the amount of traffic.
Over time, it will lead to a change in search habits that will mean changes in how sites are optimized or how click ad campaigns are run - but won't change any fundamental principles.
Pretty vague. Mostly I'm saying, this isn't the end of the world (or the end of SEO, as one article put it).
But it is the biggest change in search we've seen in years.
One article on the subject (not all facts are correct in it): Google Instant - 10 Things Marketing Teams Need to Know
Yesterday morning, the Internet Marketing community was all abuzz over a major change in Google search: Google was displaying results as fast as you typed, without waiting for you to click.
Later yesterday, Google officially announced "Google Instant".
Google once again leap frogs over the competition to deliver a major improvement in the search experience.
Of course, not everyone will like it, and you can turn it off. But it will mean faster search. And that continues to be of top importance to most people. How long does it take me to find what I'm looking for?
How will Bing/Yahoo respond? Stay tuned.
I'm continually seeing - as I'm sure you are - magic bullets for your marketing. Get to the top of the Search Engine Rankings in 15 minutes for $5.23. Read this 123 page book and learn the 11 secrets of marketing success. Learn how to get rich with this 2 hour seminar.
Well sure, there are going to be the occasional successes with that approach. Those are the ones that were all set, just missing one piece of the puzzle.
The vast majority of the time, making marketing work is a lot of work AND takes a number of tries and a length of time to succeed.
If you think about it, that MUST be true. If marketing was easy, everyone would one of these three: successful, lazy or stupid.
Of course I'm talking about the situation most people are in: no unlimited stack of dollars to spend on marketing.
Even when you are smart, hard-working and knowledgeable, most of the time, it still takes a lot of persistence to get all the pieces working right.
I'm not trying to paint a doom-and-gloom picture. I just want you to be realistic in your expectations. In fact, be optimistic: THIS time it is going to work. But if it doesn't, the next time go at it with equal enthusiasm and energy.
You'll get there.
Really, this should be "Part 0" because being a good client - which is to say getting real value for your marketing dollar - starts with something assumed in part 1: If your marketing provider is a professional, then....
So step 0 is an idea: there is such a thing as a marketing professional.
Since most companies and people selling marketing are NOT professionals, they have a vested interested in obscuring this fact: that there is such a thing as professionalism in marketing, and there are people who know and practice it.
Oh, they may be few and far between. That fact is driven home to me every day as I drive down the road and 3/4 of the billboards I see violate the most basic rules of billboard design - which anyone can find out in 5 minutes on the Internet. Or watch TV commercials for Fortune 500 companies with completely inane taglines like "reinventing forward."
I just made that up but I bet it sounded familiar. Of course you couldn't say whose tagline it is. It is just reminiscent of other pablum taglines that communicate absolutely nothing, convince nobody, but did earn some branding agency six figures to come up with them.
Us small business people need to be smarter than that.
And it starts with just that simple little thought:
There is such a thing as professionalism in marketing.
Go find some for YOUR company.
It's the 12th anniversary of Google - started in 1998.
Imagine if AT&T, or Ford, or Germany, or the Republican Party had started only 12 years ago.
Do things move fast on the Internet, or what?
One reason market research gets a bad name is because of bad research.
I'm reading a book "Hey Whipple, Squeeze This", by Luke Sullivan, a big-agency copywriter, and a disciple of William Bernbach. From the start he rants about marketing being more art than science, and about research killing good ideas. It was Bernbach who famously said:
Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.
When you look at what exactly Sullivan complains about - and he complains in detail - what he is complaining about is BAD research. Meaning research based on methodologies that don't work, or are improperly applied or misused.
Like focus groups.
It's as though someone complained that all vehicles are bad, because some of them are of poor quality.
I think what is going on here is marketers who don't know research don't distinguish between one form of research and another.
Let's stamp out bad research.
We've now completed moving all remaining websites onto our dedicated servers, and it shows in the uptimes.
Our average up-time for our premium hosting website clients, for August was 99.997%, or an average of only 1 minute outage for the entire month.
No website experienced more than 25 minutes downtime total. No website has had ANY downtime since we completed the moves.
You're welcome.
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