Pew Internet has released a chart showing Internet usage for various purposes, for each age group.

The results are pretty revealing.

For example, there's pretty much no difference in usage for buying products. Ages 18-64, run 60-69%. Then it drops off a bit, but even 74+ it is over 50%.

The popularity of using the Internet for health info is stunning, getting the 3rd highest percentage of usage in every age group. This is in the 80-89% range up to age 64, then drops off but still above 50% for those over 74.

The most dramatic (and obvious) differences? Percentages who listen to music and who IM drop like a stone as the groups get older (except 65-73 year-olds are more likely to IM than 56-64 year-olds for some reason).

Here's the entire chart:

Generations 2010: What Different Generations Do Online

The reason I keep writing about social, local and mobile issues is because there is so much action on them right now.

And a lot of that "action" is buzz being created by marketers. Sure a lot of it is "real" but a lot of it isn't.

One area where it mostly ISN'T real - as we've repeatedly said - is in using social media to drive sales.

There's a new study that supports that, with a great analogy:

If you go with the theory that you should market where the people are, then you should be running off to market during church services.

Buying things from retailers is maybe 10th on the list of things they want to do on Facebook.

Here are some more recent statistics on how people are using smart phones.

Google: 50 Percent Of Those Exposed To Mobile Ads Took Action

In short: Lots.

Here's a direct link to Google's YouTube video report:

Understanding Smart Phone Consumers

Here's a great short history of the war between Google and Spammers, showing action and response over the last 10+ years.

Google Told You So

And their conclusion is the same as mine (my article from one year ago).

Basically, the war is over. Spammers can't keep up.

Of course that is an exaggeration but it is also good news for legitimate businesses.

Most of you can compete for online business.

IF you understand marketing and the Internet and IF you take intelligent steps over time.

In the vast majority of cases, Internet Marketing is never going to be a "Get Rich Quick" proposition.

But it IS a game you can win.

The first test a website has to pass is getting visitors to stick.

This is reflected in a statistic called "bounce rate" which usually means just the percentage of visitors who leave the site without clicking through to a second page.

It reflects both the quality of the site and the quality of the visitors.

It's a judgement factor what an acceptable bounce rate is for a particular entry page.

This article asks what is certainly a rhetorical question:

Should Your Paid Search Account Care About Bounce Rates?

Because of course, any time you pay for a click, and that person bounces, you wasted your money.

Of course there is such a thing as reality and you are never going to get 100% of visitors to stick - let alone convert and purchase or become leads.

It is an intelligent article but some of these numbers, we consider eyebrow raisers:

20% or less is amazing

20-30% is fantastic

40-60% is fairly common

60-70% is common for keywords that are a bit ambiguous (TV Sets, Laptop)

70% or higher – something needs to be fixed

In most situations we consider in most situations, anything over 40% is a red flag and serious evidence of work needed.

No matter what your bounce rate, it can be improved. But it's true, it isn't always the most important thing to be working on. If your bounce rate is under 40%, almost always you should be more concerned about increasing time-on-site, conversions, or just flat out increasing the amount of traffic to the site.

While this is a promotional video, it provides a rare look inside a Google Data Center and answers some questions about them.

Google's Secretive Data Centers

High tech, as you would expect.

Here are some eye-opening up-to-the-minute statistics on the value of showing well on local searches on smart phones.

The short answer: Very valuable indeed.

43 Percent Walk Through The Door

And "2011 The Year of Mobile" is just getting started.

(Heaviest usage as expected is for dining, followed by entertainment and retail.)

The latest Gold Rush is of course to Social Media - Facebook, Twitter and the like.

Are these moneymakers?

This article attempts to make a convincing case that the answer is "YES":

Why Walmart Spent $300 Million

It has links to two supporting articles. The anchor text makes it look like these are studies showing the rise of Social Commerce. They are just more assertions with no statistics to back them up.

Here's the REAL study:

Search Sends More & Better Traffic

The study is for mainly entertainment related sites, where if anything, you'd expect Social to play a bigger role.

So the real answer is:

Sometimes, maybe for you, and maybe in the future.

As we keep saying, check out Social Media, try them out, see if you can make them work for you. Don't EXPECT them to be huge or to save your bacon.

And pay attention to what is going on. The Future is coming at us awfully fast, in the digital world. There will be new things tomorrow....

Google has quietly rolled out a series of small but useful enhancements to Search:

Instant Preview now supports Flash for MOST previews.

If you have Quick Scroll installed (either as a Chrome extension or as part of Google Toolbar) you can click on a highlighted area within an Instant Preview to go directly to that section of the page.

Instant Previews can now be used on mobile devices, Android tablets, iPads and the Opera browser.

Previews support additional result types, including .doc and .ppt files; and video results now have a playable interface.

"Dictionary" has been added to the left-panel. It'll serve up definitions, examples of the word in context from news, related phrases, synonyms and more. One click on the translation tool then brings you to Google Translate.

Good stuff.

With many clients in many industries, we can see the state of the economy reflected in common patterns of traffic volume and other statistics we monitor.

Last fall we predicted recovery starting in earnest at start of 2011. We also said it would be a more brisk recovery than most were predicting, but still long and slow, and that it would be spotty (industry to industry).

All of those predictions have proven true. Most recently we see the relatively fast start for the year tailing off. A lot of people who were starting to shake loose some $ for marketing initiatives are now having second thoughts.

A lot of companies would like to get something going but are still having cash flow issues. And that is an issue that ripples through an economy. If Joe is slow paying Bill, there's a good chance Bill will be slow paying Bob.

Economic statistics news is a mixed bag as well.

The answer as always remains being smart with your money and DON'T stop marketing. At the end of this there'll be two kinds of companies - the Quick and the Dead.

Two excellent articles about website content.

Toward Content Quality

Make Your Content Make A Difference

Read, Listen to the Wisdom.

Internet Advertising spends rose to an estimated $26 Billion in 2010, after dropping (for the first time since its been tracked) in 2009

IAB: 2010 Online Advertising Worth $26 Billion, Search 46 Percent

Spending on Search was $12 Billion, up from $10 Billion.

We can confidently expect that trend to continue, as Google changes on Local search in the Fall of 2010, cemented the necessity of using Click Ads to supplement Organic Search in very many cases.

Display ads was the other big winner, no surprise.

Notice email advertising is down by 1/3 and all but gone in terms of share of budget.

Chrome really got the Browser War action going with its fast cycle time, literally 6 weeks to new versions.

Firefox has responded to this releasing version 4 but now also has sped up their cycle, as this article makes clear:

Mozilla Introduces Aurora

Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 9 and is pushing it out to consumers right now, but also is already making noise about IE10.

Only Apple is sleeping in this area. Safari 5 is now 10 months old and there is not even a peep about a version 6.

What's up with that? I'm sure their reasoning is, if you are using an Apple computer, you are using Safari, and no one is going to decide to buy or not buy one based on the browser.

And they just aren't trying to push Safari further into the PC world for the inverse reason: No one is going to decide to switch to Apple because they loved the Safari browser experience.

You know what? I think they're right.

If you are into Internet Marketing at all, you've probably asked yourself that question.

Google spokesman Matt Cutts gives a good answer:

How would a non-optimized site outrank a site which has done SEO?

A great overview of what rankings are about and the limitations of traditional site SEO.

National Search also has its wrinkles.

There are two main points:

1. When competing nationally, you often REALLY have to pick your fights. There are search terms where you'd need a 100,000 page website to show up on page one on a Google search. So you look for "The Sweet Spot" - the search terms on the fringes which don't have anything like as much traffic, but they are relevant, and it is realistic to show up on page one with a reasonable effort.

THEN you start working on moving those high on Page One and to get the next more competitive terms ranking.

2. There are many subjects where you are competing against local businesses, and that is a tough row to hoe. Google has flat out stated if you aren't located in the local area, you aren't going to show up in a local search (where someone includes a location in their search phrase, or Google assumes it because many people searching on the term would be looking for a local business).

Of course there are few absolutes in Search, and this isn't one of them. But with any truly competitive search phrase, it may be monumentally hard.

Do a search for "water damage Tampa" and not one business located outside Tampa Bay shows up on Page One. And believe me, the Service Magic and Switchboard.com's of the world would kill to rank for a term like that.

In fact you have to get well onto Page Two before the first such shows up, and that is Yahoo Local. So these national companies are stuck doing advertising to drive traffic, and running expensive click ads.

Since Google made its major changes to Local Search last fall, websites like those have just fallen clean off the organic Search map.

So it goes back to #1 - find less competitive search terms, where you can pick and win a fight against local companies if that is vital to your effort.

Of course "pick your fight" can apply to local companies as well, but it is MUCH rarer.

Its no surprise to chronic Internet watchers. Differences between age groups are disappearing in many areas of Internet usage.

Read the report:

Generations Online in 2010

Some strikingly accurate reasons why you need to pay attention to the Local Data out there on you:

6 Reasons Why Local Data Will Rule in 2011

Notice it refers to Social and Mobile. SoMoLo = the intersection of Social, Mobile and Local = the hottest space in the marketing world right now.

Bing's market share is now over 30% of U.S. search, a continued trend which this article ascribes to possibly Bing being superior. Except the stats they quote show nothing of the sort. We have a different idea:

Browser Wars and Search Engines

Browser Wars (Part 2)

Exactly as I predicted, Microsoft is now rolling out IE9 as an automatic update. Millions of people will suddenly find that a) they are now using IE9, and b) their default search engine is Bing. Many of them will leave it at that.

Bing has announced a new "Business Portal" - essentially its version of Google Places. Is this anything more than a rebranding? We'll see.

Meanwhile, Google fires back with better handling of penalty situations, and now incorporating user site blocking information into its algorithms.

Stay tuned folks. I know where I'm betting my money.

Here's an amazingly thorough write-up on how Google's Autocomplete (search suggestion) feature works. From Danny Sullivan, one of the most respected of Google Watchers:

How Google Instant's Autocomplete Suggestions Work

Google is fond of saying that all you really need to do for SEO is have great content.

Except of course that isn't really true, as many videos and articles from Google themselves point out.

Yes, you need fresh, original, relevant content to rank well.

But there are three other categories of issues that do affect rankings to a greater or lesser degree.

Inbound links is one.

A second could be called signals - the clues that Google looks to cue it in as to what a page is about. That is the title tag, use of bolds and underlines, internal links, headlines and sub-heads, and the like.

The third is purely technical matters. There are many such. But the first rule is, if you have great content and a large enough website, you should look into possible technical issues that may be confusing Google, making your site hard to read, or giving it the wrong idea.

Of course the most extreme example of that is building a site all in Flash. You just aren't going to rank well.

Material buried in sub-directories, many links deep from the home page, is just not going to be considered important. Google now considers blog pages to be much less important than other pages on a website, all other things being equal.

Failure to use 301 redirects when you redo a website, can cost you rankings for months while Google gets it all sorted out.

Google can be confused by finding the same page under several different URLs. This can be a problem with dynamically generated pages. Google has written quite a bit on this subject and offered up more than one remedy such a the "canonical" tag. So they must think this is important.

One specific instance of this is www versus non-www versions of URLs. Usually no big deal. But if doing a site:{domain name} gives much different results depending on whether you include the "www" then you are probably dealing with such a technical issue and better deal with it (most easily probably by rewriting the non-www version using "mod rewrite" (if you are lucky enough to be on a Unix server).

Sorry for getting a bit technical there. If you need to deal with these issues, you can find lots of detailed information online, and plenty of people who know how to handle them.

The main thing to know is this (quoting myself for emphasis):

If you have great content and a large enough website, you should look into possible technical issues that may be confusing Google, making your site hard to read, or giving it the wrong idea.

We spent the last two days discussing two more difficult local search situations, where you are probably going to end up spending money on click ads to close a gap. Not every goal in organic search is realistically achievable.

But there are a large number of situations where you can completely dominate your territory in local search.

Sometimes that involves a lot of work and building a very large site.

Sometimes it is easy.

There are really only a few major factors:

1. A single, or a small number of location names that everyone uses to describe the area.

2A. A limited amount of competition within that area, for what you sell or offer, OR

2B. People are willing to travel the entire geographical area for what you sell or offer.

The classic situation where this doesn't work is the dentist in a large metropolitan area. There are hundreds of dentists, and people rarely will travel more than 5 or 10 miles from home or work for a dentist.

A counter-example is a hardwood flooring company. There may be hundreds of them in a large geographical area, but people don't care that much where you are located, since you come to their home anyway.

This is not a black and white situation but shades of gray. The more your search situation is in the direction of this scenario, the more possible, even easy, domination becomes.

What's YOUR local search situation?

Just how important is site speed?

VERY important.

Take a look at this infographic.

THREE SECONDS and over half of them are gone.

There are many contributing factors to page load time. In my experience, the single most common problem is cheap hosting services.

This is NOT a place to save money.

Some of these statistics are simply unbelievable:

12 Mind-Blowing Statistics Every Marketer Should Know

1. 78% of Internet users conduct product research online.

4. 40% of US smartphone owners compare prices on their mobile device while in-store, shopping for an item.

7. 84% of 25-34 year-olds have left a favorite website because of intrusive or irrelevant advertising.

Read 'em all.

If you are in a metropolitan area consisting of one large city, or a bunch of small cities, selling a product or service for which people will not travel far, and with lots of competition - you have a tough situation.

Tampa Bay has a population of 3 million people. The city of Tampa itself only has about 300,000. Many smaller cities may have only 10 or 20,000. So people by default put "Tampa:" or "Tampa Bay" into their searches. The same might apply on a search for most anything in Chicago.

What is Google to make of such a search? It knows that someone probably isn't going to travel very far for a dentist. So if you search for "dentist Tampa" or "Dentist Chicago" it is going to give preference to dentists located near downtown Tampa or downtown Chicago.

That makes it very difficult for a dentist in, say, Clearwater, to compete on organic search.

The solution is to find all the smaller location identifiers. These can be a zip code, area code, name of a smaller town or neighborhood, even a street name.

The reason is that many people if they see no one nearby showing up in the search results, will hit the back button and narrow their search term.

Make sure you dominate for every one of these.

Don't neglect the major area identifier. Do all you can to rank for that. But make sure you dominate on the narrower location terms. Then also use click ads if economically feasible for the wider area.

That's what works right now. The fact is that when Google changes their algorithm, it can change people's search habits. People are learning to get more specific on their search locations in certain situations, but that is very much in the works - and some will never learn.

About six months ago, Google made major changes in how it deals with local search situations. People are still in process of changing their search habits as a result.

Two new browser releases are off to a fast start. Firefox 4 (with 50 million downloads so far) and Internet Explorer 9 (market share already over 3%).

As we've discussed one of the big questions is how that will affect search engine usage.

Here's a very interesting report on exactly that:

Battle of the Browsers: Impacting Search Share

No surprise, Chrome users are highly likely to use Google. And no surprise, of the various browsers, IE users are lest likely to use Google.

But a majority of even IE users search on Google.

IE users even search on Yahoo more than they do on Bing.

Pitiful.

As promised, here is the first installment on different local search situations.

First situation: You are located in a rural, small town or ex-urban area, and your customers come from the surrounding area.

If there is only one town of any size in the area., chances are people will put that town name into their searches. Another possibility is to search on the County name or some other geographical identifier (such as a Valley name), or possibly an area code.

This is the easy one. You only have one or two geographical identifiers to work with. If you asked a resident of the area how they would describe where they are located, that's the answer to how people search, right there.

Optimize for that one or those couple of locators and you'll usually be in business.

The only hazard is the area may be fragmented with a bunch of small towns of similar size. In that case you may be need to run click ads (run in your entire service area) to pick up some searches.

Internet Marketing divides sharply into Local and National (or International).

Are you selling your goods or services to EVERYONE or just in your area?

But not all Local is equal to all other Local.

We can distinguish at least three different situations which require significantly different approaches.

That is because of the way Google operates these days (since last fall's changes), and because of people's search habits.

The first is the significant preference Google gives to how close a business is to the searcher. Including assuming they are looking for someone nearby in many cases, even when they don't include a location in their search phrase.

The second is, what locations DO searchers put in for a search. That depends on the area, and it depends on the search. People will cheerfullly travel much farther for some purchases than for others.

When you add all that up it breaks down about like this:

1. If you are in a small town or rural area, not near a major metropolitan area, that dictates one approach.

2. If you are in a metropolitan area consisting of one large city, or many small cities, selling a product or service for which people will probably not travel some distance, and with lots of competition, the approach is quite different.

3. Other situations require a third approach.

Think about that, and we'll get into the details starting tomorrow....

For years we've been lecturing on the importance of addressing the Two Big Things in Internet Marketing:

1. Getting the right visitors in volume to your site.

2. Delivering the right visitor experience once they get there.

This isn't exactly rocket science, is it? And yet we were a lone voice in the wilderness. There were the SEO evangelists - Rankings as God. The SEM experts - skip the rest, do more and better click ads.

Of course both paid at least glancing attention to Landing Pages. No mention of what happens once they get past the home page.

Then you had Useability Experts. Not Visitor Experience, or User Experience mind you. Useability. {Shudder}

Last year you started hearing the occasional article, that maybe you should pay attention to CONVERSIONS (results) rather than to Rankings or Unique Visitors or whatever metric.

Please people. It isn't that hard to understand.

Get lots of real prospects to your website.

On every page of your website, fan their interest, build trust, encourage and make action easy.

If you do that, the Internet will work for you.

To whatever extent that isn't occurring, there's your unrealized potential.

Have at it.