This report is one of the ways in which MarketingSherpa tracks the latest trends in search marketing from over 2000+ agencies, companys and business owners to offer up insights and knowledge on what works!

Usually, MarketingSherpa combines both organic search and PPC search into one annual report, but this year for the first time, they’ve split the Report into two editions — this one dedicated to search engine optimization and a further one dedicated to pay-per-click search advertising.

Don’t have a full membership over at MarketingSherpa you’re thinking? Which might mean that their research and KB are not available for you and your clients? If that’s the case, then you can always download their 19 page PDF excerpt of same and look it over that way. If that depth and breadth of SEO factors interest you and you think that you’re going to learn more from the full 203 pages with 169 charts and tables on search AND social integration on marketing, budgets and metrics….then go for it! They’ve even got a 30 day free trial membership too for those of you who believe in market reasearch, MarketingSherpa is well worth the costs, eh!

Look, here’s one of their charts from the excerpt, that talks about SEO Maturity….

As you can see from the chart which asks the question “Please select the statement below that best describes the process your organization uses to perform SEO practices….” — and 46% have an informal while 34% have a formal process that they routinely perform! That’s about 80% of companies that have an SEO process in place of some type to perform SEO! That’s impressive to us as it means that more and more firms are looking to SEO to help drive new, targeted leads via website traffic! Great news for 2011, eh!

More? You want more? Okay, then how about these very interesting statistics….on the Perceptions of SEO at Budget Time. Contributors were asked this question…”Which statement best describes how SEO is perceived by your organization at budget time?”

As you can see, 24% said that SEO produces measurable ROI so let’s increase our budget liberally!!! WooHOO! And a further 43% said it’s a promising tactic and will eventually produce an ROI so let’s increase out budget conservatively….again all good things for us SEO practitioners to see ensconced in corporate mindsets, eh!

While space here doesn’t permit much depth on this Search Marketing Report, Ican tell you that the TOC for same runs 6 full pages and is chock full’a good stuff…so what’re you waiting for, anyways? Drop by the MarketingSherpa site to at the least download the Report excerpt and think about the value of the full report and access of ALL of their reports for the price of a membership! Solid business research from professionals, is how I’d describe such a deal…and it today’s business intelligence marketplace, a true winner, eh!

That is, for any search engine statistical numerical comparison, three word phrases drive more traffic to a website than any other number of words in the search phrase! And that is very very encouraging for us SEO practitioners, eh! How’s that? Well, let’s take a look/see at their report numbers…

Let’s look at the full sized graph, shall we?

As you can see, their sample is just over 40 million hits and for that statistically, they found that a three word phrase ranked up at the top for over 25% of those hits! The next top word counts were two-word (19%), four-word (17%), and finally one-word (14%).  Any query beyond five words will see dramatically lower traffic, throwing into perspective just how fragmented traffic from long queries really is….for those of you who think that a nine word long tail keyphrase has some “power” we note as they did, that such a length is well past the “sweet spot” eh, especially here for Canadian SEO campaigns!

So, if you’re thinking “long tail” and know already that such a search phrase does have a higher conversion rate, then I’d also think “three words” too, and offer up a shortened keyphrase similar search opportunity as well…no sense in missing out on these ones too, eh!

But they say this better than I do…here’s their own “raison d’etre” eh –

“The purpose of Alltop is to help you answer the question, “What’s happening?” in “all the topics” that interest you. You may wonder how Alltop is different from a search engine. A search engine is good to answer a question like, “How many people live in China?” However, it has a much harder time answering the question, “What’s happening in China?” That’s the kind of question that we answer.

We do this by collecting the headlines of the latest stories from the best sites and blogs that cover a topic. We group these collections — “aggregations” — into individual web pages. Then we display the five most recent headlines of the information sources as well as their first paragraph. Our topics run from adoption to zoology with photography, food, science, religion, celebrities, fashion, gaming, sports, politics, automobiles, Macintosh, and hundreds of other subjects along the way…and yes SEO news too!

You can think of Alltop as the “online magazine rack” of the web. We’ve subscribed to thousands of sources to provide “aggregation without aggravation.” To be clear, Alltop pages are starting points—they are not destinations per se. Ultimately, our goal is to enhance your online reading by displaying stories from sources that you’re already visiting plus helping you discover sources that you didn’t know existed…”

As you can see, via that SEO link, we’re at the very bottom as we’ve just as of today made the list…and the list is “sorted” according to the AllTOP algo and as they start to rank your SEO site higher, you climb the list! I don’t know honestly, if we’d ever worm our way up say much more than halfway…some of the other SEO practitioners we know personally on this list and they’re not only top-notch but work as hard — if not harder than we do on blog postings….

But, still, we’ve made the list! What a great way to enjoy a Thursday, eh…so bookmark this alltop SEO link and then settle back with a fresh Timmy’s and read….and learn….and SEO your site today!

I’ve already blogged here quite a few times on the YPG and their marketing of the yellow pages and their online directories to Canadian SMBs here  and here and here too. If you need some background then on this kind of corporate BIG firm thinking from a marketing viewpoint, then I’d suggest maybe that you click those links to read up on same.

To make my point here, I’d offer up the following evidence….

In their own words, the YPG folks have stated this new thrust into SMB marketing via full page adverts in major Canadian dailies, in the following pull-quote –

Yellow Pages Group has launched a new business-to-business print campaign in Vancouver, Edmonton and Toronto that touts its Video Broadcaster online tool to potential advertisers.

The full-page yellow ad that ran in today’s The Globe and Mail uses the tag line “We’re being watched” and drives small and mid-sized businesses to GetFound.YellowPages.ca where they can learn how the tool works and how much it costs.

Web banners and big boxes are also running on Yahoo.ca.

As you can see, they clearly state that their new site at getfound.yellowpages.ca offers up a full explation of both the program and the costs. They offer up a step-by-step program too on how to get a quote and sign up too.

So your video will be inserted into your yellowpages.ca site, and be available for all to see IF and WHEN they come to that link from a yellowpages.ca business search.

They also note that the “link” to your video will be “shared” across Social Media outlets too like FaceBook and YouTube for example. So, yes, I went there too to take a look/see…and honestly, I was impressed with the quality of the video I saw as well as the pricing, yet to me, that’s not the point.

So what is the point?

Well to me, who’s also involved in SMB marketing but from an online SEO slant, I already know that adding video about a client’s business can help turn web traffic into conversions. This is a given. But the mere addition of a video, even a great, well written and produced video to site without the SEO to get traffic to come to view same, is the “cart before the horse” type of strategy…IMHO!

To date, the company has made more than 15,000 videos for businesses across Canada.

Yellow Pages’ network of sites attracts over 9.6 million unique visitors each month, Marsolais said, adding that consumers are visiting the site to research potential purchases, which could translate into sales for the advertiser.

Well, yes, surely 9+ million visits a month is a fair bit of traffic…but when you compare same to any of the top search engines, who do about 10 billion searches a month, you can see that this is a teensy teensy bit of traffic. Yet, it is enough to think about attempting to get some conversions out of, for sure, and yes, it’s shopping traffic so the conversion rates are higher. But really, is this kind of addition of video or even still pix going to draw traffic?

Not in my mind it’s not. The only way we’ve ever found that such marketing tactics work for a SMB owner is if there is traffic to view same. Traffic that is in the “buying” frame of mind, who’ve found your site among others after a search and are comparing both tangibles concerning products/pricing that you offer on your site as well as an overall “feel” that they’ll get from a website visit. Videos can help, sure…but ONLY if there’s traffic…and until the YPG can add SEO to your monthly bill, I think that such a foray into online videos is like a wasting-of-time-idea, eh!

In fact, to just think back a couple of days, I’d say that our Canadian newspapers have a much better “shot” at marketing SEO to their advertisers than the YPG does to theirs….but the truth of that opinion, lies in the near future, I’d say.

You? What do you think of such SMB marketing tactics by old-world entities like the YellowPages Group?

Gannett are the folks who own many major dailys in various US cities along with radio and tv stations too — not to mention their USAToday paper, they will attempt to provide SEO services to various advertisers and other small/medium enterprise businesses in an attempt to become a one stop marketing shop in that pilot community.

Their site for same is called GannettLocal.com and from their home page here’s their raison d’etre –

With the power of Gannett, the company behind USA Today, The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com, we can jump start your advertising. What can we do for you?

1. Build traffic to your business and your website by getting you great placement on Google, Yahoo and Bing
2. Help your customers find you by getting your business on Google Maps
3. Ensure you stay top-of-mind through attention-grabbing advertisements in The Arizona Republic, the largest local newspaper in Arizona

As you can see, they’re attempting to sell marketing services to local businesses, to try to boost their revenues….but that’s not the real news.

The real news is, that they are NOT going to be providing any SEO services at all….that’s because the site and the whole search engine side of the business is powered by OrangeSoda, a Utah based SEO company with dozens of employees and clients too! Well known and respected, this Salt Lake city based SEO firm was founded only 4 years ago and has already risen to be among the ranks of the best performing SEO firms on the continent.

And it now also appears that another major Newspaper chain has just announced the same type of marketing strategy too. The McClatchy Company, the #3 US newspaper chain, is now partnering with WebVisible Inc. to provide the same SEO marketing services and here’s a quote from their Press Release –

The program has been so successful — advertising sales in March were roughly five times higher than the previous month — that McClatchy and WebVisible are planning to add new markets every month through the end of the year. The Anchorage, Alaska, and Charlotte, N.C., markets were among several that were recently launched. The next phase will include Boise, Idaho, Miami, Fla., and Sacramento, Calif. By December, the roll-out will encompass McClatchy’s 30 daily newspapers in 29 U.S. markets.

Okay, so what might that mean for us Canucks, you ask?

Well, we too have some major Newspaper chains (google for them to see who they are… ) and what I’m wondering is….who’s going to “step up” to the plate here first?

This is a pretty solid idea, from both a marketing future best practices premise as well as a solid partnership advantage that any “forward-thinking-for-new-business” canuck Newspaper Publishers should be able to grasp right away.

Think about it….ad reps are already out there selling display adverts and lineage to every single SMB they can find. What’s to stop them from simply adding in an online URL for that advertiser to go to learn more about SEO; how to drive new traffic to their website and by doing so, how to add value to their advertising campaigns at the very same time too, eh! Partnered with local SEO firms, any canuck newspaper can add value AND dollars to their revenue stream, by adding SEO marketing to their marketing mix!

The Newspaper partner would be seen as providing a new marketing thrust to their advertisers ROI. The SEO firm that provides the skillSet to enable the new traffic and conversions provides the advertiser with both LOCAL and web result new customers or clients.

And that sounds like a “WIN-WIN” situation to me!

Hello? Canadian Newspaper Publishers….are you listening here folks?

As we thought, the survey which encompasses chains, catalog firms, web-only merchants and manufacturing firms too, shows that overall, more than 50% of all attributable sales are results of Search Engine Marketing (SEM)!

WooHoo! Knew it! Kinda makes my day, eh…but let’s dig into those numbers a little shall we?

First, do look at the chart in it’s entirety…it asks quite a few SEM queries from all of the survey respondents and while I’ll only look at a few here, there are more than my meager items to note…you should — that is if you use SEM to market your own products to the web world, take a good read of the whole chart, eh!

First and foremost for our own SEO practice, is the survey asked “What percentage of traffic comes to your site via natural search?” This was pretty easy to suss, eh…as more than 25% of the respondents reported that at least 51% of the traffic comes from an organic SEO Campaign! That’s what we’re talking about, eh…the fact that in our opinion, natural or organic search campaigns have a better ROI overall than any PPC campaign at all! This is why over 4 years ago, we quit offering up any kind of PPC campaigns for clients. Yes, that was a policy that we invoked due to our own ‘feel’ of the whole PPC paradigm, replete in our opinion with click fraud, with higher than expected CTR costs and yes, with lower conversions, at least for our own then client PPC roster. So we gave up PPC and we’re happier — as are our clients who converted over to natural organic SEO campaigns too!

“Everything we see from the retail side indicates a considerable interest and investment in search related to the overall goal of driving more online sales,” says Shar VanBoskirk, a vice president and principal analyst who specializes in search engine marketing at Forrester Research Inc. “All types of retailers are focused on driving more web sales, and search is a terrific way to drive that online sales goal.”

As you can see, online SEM drives new traffic to your online store for products (and yes for services too!) and that’s paramount in understanding the “why shoule we spend hard earned dollars on an SEO campaign”  client positions we sometimes encounter.

So where’s the traffic coming from? i.e. which search engine carries the load?

“Google dominates the search engine landscape. 19.4% of respondents to the Internet Retailer survey say more than 90% of their search engine traffic comes from Google. 43.9% say 71% to 90%, 25.5% report 50% to 70%, and 11.2% report less than 50%. Yahoo has been the perennial second-place finisher. But a relative newcomer on the scene, Microsoft Corp.’s Bing, has been making inroads since its launch in June 2009, and it’s gaining increasing attention from retail marketers.

In the coming year, 43.4% of merchants plan to shift some paid search spending to Bing. That’s no doubt because Microsoft and Yahoo have agreed that Bing will become the search engine used on Yahoo sites, a switch expected to occur within a year. Bing will then become the clear No. 2 to Google in traffic.”

Again as you can see, Google is carrying the real weight of the traffic and we’d agree totally with those numbers. But traffic is one thing, which search engine provides the best conversions…that’s the real question — and it’s answered thusly –

“In terms of conversion, Google produces the highest conversion rate, says 69.4% of those surveyed, versus 14.3% for Yahoo and 11.2% for Bing. But some experts say Bing is performing better than those survey results suggest…”

Again, it’s Google….no matter who’s second or third…it’s still Google for al things SEM/SEO, eh!

This should be no surprise and yes, they still own the “top of the things-to-do” for us too in both on-page and off-page optimization pre-requisites, eh!

Don’t believe the survey or me? Just think, when was the last time you heard someone say “google it…” when a question arose in any setting?

My own answer is sometime today…Google just is…..eh!

With info therein on social rankings, rank relevance, where we all stand in the google scheme of things and much much more, means that anyone who ever thought about Social ranking needs to read this one!

Some of the latest stats on Google MAPS (ie LOCAL search) show that there are approximately 20% of all google traffic using same and that accounts for millions of searches a day….numbers that any SEO firm or a SME business owner needs to be aware of, eh! Make sure you look over his tables on “Who shares reviews with who!” to see just where the juice comes from and where it goes too!

Mike’ s own blog we’ve had up in our own canuckseo.com blogroll, at the bottom under the title “Understanding Google’s MAPS“ and a visit there every morning by ourselves is well worth the click-thru, eh! Mike knows his stuff and I like his take on “all things google…” and the back and forth tween his readership and him always brings out more information and tips too! I’d highly recommend that you get over there to see what I mean — and to help your own Social ranks too!

Copywriting can be a tough paradigm, especially in old-style traditional media. Add in the fact that most of us now use online searches and that means that a website will most likely convert traffic from ‘tire-kickers’ to ‘buyers of services/products’ based on the copywriting found on your website. This is a sad but true fact to learn and I’m so so tired of going to a “we’ve got the cat’s meow” of websites in our channel to read the home/landing page and seeing poor grammar, lousy adjectives and adverb usage, god awful cliches, malaprops, and more….all trying to turn a visitor into a customer or client….sigh!

Well the author of this .pdf, Brian Clark, a found over at Scribe among others obviously agrees with me, and wrote this pretty fair all encompassing report on “HOW TO CREATE COMPELLING CONTENT THAT RANKS WELL IN SEARCH ENGINES!” — go here to d/w your own copy, eh!

And what a great insight he has too! Brian says it best here in his intro –

“These SEO copywriters seemed to have magical word skills that allowed them to place just the right keywords in just the right places and amounts, and even in the densities that were just right for miraculous top rankings. And that’s all you needed . . . or at least that’s what was advertised.

There’s no doubt that the location and frequency of keywords is still critical. Search engines work by keying in on the word patterns people are looking for and returning relevant content. But that’s not all there is to it.

Here’s the deal . . . much of what determines the ranking position of any particular page is due to what happens off the page, in the form of links from other sites. Getting those links naturally has become the hardest part of SEO, which is why we’ve seen the mainstream emergence of social media marketing as a way to attract links with compelling content.

Put simply: If your content isn’t good enough to attract good, natural links, it doesn’t matter how “optimized” that content is…”

And that’s spot-on, eh! Please do take a good look at this report, and yes, while Brian does “pitch” his own services too at the end, you can make up your own mind on the validity of his offer…looks good to me tho! I like Scribe and their approach to copywriting….I do!

As you most likely already know, I like the site over at Marketing Sherpa, and while I know that their reports always cost something, every once and awhile, they publish an “excerpt” for a good one — just like their latest “Social Marketing ROAD Map Handbook” and you should definitely look over same via this download here…

It’s chock full of some great charts and images, offers up a complete TOC for you to look over and does present a couple of choice items to consider — if you’re in the social reputation arena. I like this simple note –

“Social marketing is maturing to the point where the mainstream is now in transition from the trial‐and‐error phase of the learning curve to the strategic phase. Marketers are learning to begin their social initiatives by researching the medium and monitoring target audiences to determine realistic objectives. Then and only then do they formulate tactical plans and roll‐out the social platforms required by the plan…”

If you read that with a eye on learning you should have a whistle that’s as “whetted” as mine! I went on to devour the whole except Report and yes, I’m ordering my own copy of the complete Report in 5 minutes!

THIS is good stuff…and I’ve clients who need this kind of solid Social rationale to get them to ‘buy-in’ to the whole online Social Reputation management game…and the Marketing Sherpa folks have helped me here big time!

And my reason for this posting is to tell you that you — that anyone — can go to YouTube and with a few very simple clicks, make your own online video too! As you know, we’re SEO practitioners, but that doesn’t matter a whit. Anyone can use this “create your own” service and here’s a pointer on how to do same…

First, go to this YouTube URL — http://www.youtube.com/user/SearchStories and view the opening vid and you can also look through some of the other ones made by folks just like us all….some great ones there, eh!

Once you’re ready to do your own, find this button and click same…to enter the create your own area…in the labelled area #1 Write.

Now the fun begins…you need only enter a search term in the first field, then adjust the matching drop-down for the Google area you want to search in…and then the YouTube online app will run that search and show you the results! If you come up in the search listings, great? Wait, only competitors say? Then adjust your keyword search term and try again…

Once you’re done with the six search terms, you finish off the search portion with the final item to search for…in our case as you can see, we put in our phone number to be searched for….a nice touch, we think!

Next step, you click the NEXT button and you are moved through to the #2 Add Music area where you then get to pick out a soundtrack to add to the background — again more fun! I listened to like a dozen or so, before I settled on the Sci-Fi Beat offering and that’s what you hear in the background of our own Search story.

And you’re done! Hitting that NEXT button will get YouTube #3 Preview and Upload area to to compile the video and then watch same. Happy? Click the Upload button. Needs some work? Click the BACK button to re-edit same…

It’s fun and it does require some real thought to get your own search terms to work for you, if you’re planning on doing up a promotional video for your business.

Our own CanuckSEO Search Story took us about 15 minutes to get it “right” and you can view it below or click here too — Our CanuckSEO Search Story!

My request was for a piece on SEO, aimed if possible for Canadian SME’s who want to learn how to do their own SEO campaigns, but if the piece wasn’t localized but still good, then I’d still consider same.

A very nice young man from California offered up a short piece on his own site’s SEO campaign and how it has helped his own site (a new and small online wine store) climb the ranking serps for his channel which would be “online wine store”, something that google alone shows more than 80 million hits on, in other words a pretty tough channel. His chosen tactic too, was fairly simple, in that he wrote articles, and sub’d them to various online directories (names not named to protect the innocent, eh!) and that while he’d climbed the serps somewhat via the do-follow links, he had no idea really on the efficacy nor efficiency of that tactic.

But I do — and telling our readers that such outmoded and outdated tactics work, is less than a good business practice!

First, I have to give this fellow credit! He is trying, and I understand that if you run your own online business, there is not a lot of leftover time to spend on all of the needed marketing tactics in an overall strategy to get your site up at the top of the serps for your chosen channel. That’s a given. But the method that he chose to use, is no longer of any long term or even mid-length term success, for the following reasons and here’s my shortened for use here, emailed reply –

“re: your tactics – they do work for like a day or two. But then the next set of articles is published in thousands of sites just like the ones you use – and the link  juice from your pieces is devalued. And then next day they’re devalued again…as as Google et al go to those promo sites  sometimes  many times a day for new content, the value of any piece on same quits having any impact in any SEO campaign in hours…and that devaluation increases in mere days and in weeks, you’re  not gaining any link juice at all. NOT the right way to think about SEO, IMHO…”

I will admit, that I seldom offer up this kind of spot-on advice to an SEO newbie, who’s trying his best to get his site up in the serps. But something about the tone of his SEO guest blog piece made me believe that he was being sincere, and was trying to get his site ranked. The fact that he had “bumbled” into some bad advice about SEO articles and their submission to other sites, was not surprising, as I read everyday in dozens of forums and blogs, comments by the same type of SEO newbie and how they heard that tactic A works best or tactic B is superior to all….sigh!

And this fellows response? Well, instead of me getting one of those “you’re a f*****g idiot”  brush-offs, he took the time to spell out what he’s found out on the web and what their $400 monthly SEO consultant had done in the recent past (not a thing it appears!) and asked for some guidance, so I wrote a long, email back, espousing what I think would help. At the same time, of course, I did comment that such a budget of $400 US a month is very very small, and the kind of SEO campaign you’d get from same is either outmoded, outdated or just not spot-on either. I don’t think he was happy with that news, but then I was just trying to be truthful, eh!

And guess why I gave them that big green checkmark up top?

Many of the marketing ideas I sent back to him in that lengthy email, he and his partner are already into and attempting to do!

• They have a spot on their site where they’re in the process of creating a ‘wine library” of info and videos and their own blogs and pix too!
• They realize that they need to create an online reputation by visiting and commenting on various top-quality wine forums and blogs and gaining backlink credit that way. Of course as these do-follows die out quickly for link-juice, the real reason is to create that reputation NOT for the backlinks, but that’s an allied winner!
• They know about ‘old school’ marketing too, via networking, local events, charities and non-profits etc etc. and they’re getting into same too!

All of this points me to the conclusion that Mark Aselstine, of Uncorked Ventures, is going to “get there!” Via his two emails, I can tell! And if you drop by to take a gander at their site [http://www.uncorkedventures.com/] you’ll see what I see too…two business owners working hard at starting a new online business…what can be better, eh?

Instead, just a quick potpourri of items….not the least of all is our inclusion as of today in Lee Odden’s TopRank’s BigList of Online Marketing Blogs! WooHoo! We made it to this listing of over 400+ blogs that cover online marketing ranging from SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (pay per click) to blog marketing, marketing with social media and online public relations! Here’s what Lee wrote when they added us to their listing –

“CanuckSEO — Long time internet marketing veteran Jim Rudnick writes with passion and flair about “Canadian SEO for Google Success!” as well as small business, local SEM and plenty of flavorful opinion posts on a variety of search marketing industry topics. Go for the tips, stay for the story telling and enthusiasm…”

We’re pumped about this! Muchly appreciated Lee et al…and we’ll try to live up to that review too!

Moving ahead this am, we must mention how pumped we also feel, in that our posting yesterday of the breaking news on the YPG groups purchase of CanPages and our own summation that included the phrase “paper is dead!” appears to be vetted by others too — all over the web!

One of our most favourite spots online for infographics is the fine DIYSEO blog, where they publish same occasionally. Go here to see the full sized version of their own take infographic wise, of how the various demographics of us all, are using both paper (yellow pages, eh!) and online searches to find a business or a service etc and what kind of numbers are being researched too!

Here’s their own intro to same — couldn’t have said it any better, eh!

“…In recent history, it was an everyday occurrence for people to find local businesses in print directories. However, the large shift in how people search cannot go unnoticed. Today, more and more people are using digital tools for their primary resources, and audiences are reacting in different ways.

It is pretty obvious that digital search methods will continue to see a lift in popularity while traditional search methods will decrease. Does your business have an integrated local search strategy for hitting your target audience?”

Drop by their site to see that — and many other infographics too!

And lastly this am, we thought that as many of you “do” PPC campaigns, that you might find the latest infographic on PPC — “The History and Evolution of Paid Search” diagrams pretty interesting. Even though we’ve not run a PPC campaign for clients in over 2 years, and hence have not bothered to keep up with that channel, the information was quite interesting and I see (do you) some further possiblities available here. Their own intro to same says –

“Paid Search has come a long way since its “official” inauguration back in 1996. Of course, paid search has presented itself in various formats since then and many providers have come, gone, purchased one another, and rebranded…”

Go here to see same over at GreenLight’s blog to see the full sized image and read more too!