I am preparing my Search Analytics talk for Search Engine Strategies on December 7th at 10:30 in Chicago – which includes smart folks likes Jim Sterne and Matthew Bailey on the panel. This is the outline in which I am asked to talk: “Cut to the chase! Use analytics tools to get the specific answers you need about your search marketing campaign’s economic performance, your users’ on-site behaviors, and how to look for major red flags in traffic patterns. This slate of experts will keep you focused rather than poring through hundreds of pages of meaningless statistics.” I know this is the usual promotional event pitch, and that’s OK

I am preparing my Search Analytics talk for Search Engine Strategies on December 7th at 10:30 in Chicago – which includes smart folks likes Jim Sterne and Matthew Bailey on the panel. This is the outline in which I am asked to talk:

“Cut to the chase! Use analytics tools to get the specific answers you need about your search marketing campaign’s economic performance, your users’ on-site behaviors, and how to look for major red flags in traffic patterns. This slate of experts will keep you focused rather than poring through hundreds of pages of meaningless statistics.”

I know this is the usual promotional event pitch, and that’s OK. The easy response (presentation) would have been a focus around the magic, one can pull out of behavioral data in conjunction with search data. And that would be OK as well. I was, however, reading an article from Jacques Warren [1], who as a web analyst is as smart as they come, and during the post he concludes the following:

“Google organic accounted for 65% of all visits, 89,5% in December, 87% in January, and 84% so far in February. That’s only one search engine (and its various properties)! In a word, we LOVE Google.” [2]

I decided to use that as my outset and I in particular focused on what I bolded above (the capital letters are his). Before I move on, let me be clear that this is not a bashing of Mr. Warren, by no means. His post, and specifically the above comment, in combination with my talk in Chicago, just happened to trigger something in me, to finally utter my concern around the unfair relationship between content owners and search engines. This includes, what I believe to be a set of unhealthy search success metrics, or for some people, even a naïve belief in a search engine friendship.

Any other person, might just agree on how fantastic the traffic influx from Google is, in the above example, and continue to thrive on the euphoria of that - and perhaps even apply additional search engine optimization processes across multiple search engines and aggregators in regards to new content. But doesn’t this seem wrong to you, that we celebrate yet another winner of the Google organic search lottery ?

If I ran a business where most my revenue, if perhaps not all of it, depended on visitors to my site, I would be very dissatisfied to the extent of concerned by the fact that my life was in the hands of a random search engine.

To marginally illustrate my point, but mostly for us to continue the debate, let’s have a look at Figure 1 and Figure 2, and the apparent question that’s comes with those two data sets, such as; which of the below two trends would you describe as more successful (forget all about the usual ‘it depends’ and just assume that all the stars are aligned to your satisfaction).

My point is that, in the scenario of monetization being most successful around returning visitors (as we see with a lot of content owners), figure 2 is the more successful trend. AND the accompanying suggestion could very clearly be that by the introduction of Search Engine de-Optimization one might be able to force such a pattern. One action could actually be to remove some of your content from search engines all together! Drastic, yes, and this is certainly not for everybody, but think about it twice, before you conclude that I am completely crazy.

Conclusion
It seems fair to debate whether or not search engines and other content aggregators extract too much the webs value, leaving less for the content creators (originators) - if this is true, one should introduce tactics such as Search Engine de-Optimization to destress the dependency!

I’ll prepare myself for the bashing and first hit in this blog post – it might mentally prepare me for Chicago. So there you go! Dear search engine, I don’t Love you anymore. - and it’s not you, it’s me that changed

Cheers
/ Dennis (@dennismortensen)

[1] If you are coming to Chicago Jacques, Diet Cokes are on me!
[2] You can replace Google with any other content aggregator and the above critique still rings true

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Search Engine de-Optimization ..and the bogus celebration of yet another Google organic search lottery winner

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Title: Web / Social Media Analyst Description: Responsibilities Play a lead role in monitoring social media, site traffic and customer experience feedback. Work closely with the usability/analytics manager to support data gathering and reporting to improve internal and external company websites and online applications. Social media monitoring duties include working with public relations teams to identify and monitor key social media sites that discuss topics relevant to Freddie Mac’s activities and reputation

Title: Web / Social Media Analyst Description: Responsibilities Play a lead role in monitoring social media, site traffic and customer experience feedback. Work closely with the usability/analytics manager to support data gathering and reporting to improve internal and external company websites and online applications. Social media monitoring duties include working with public relations teams to identify and monitor key social media sites that discuss topics relevant to Freddie Mac’s activities and reputation. Track usage of Freddie Mac-sponsored social media, and provide reports to management and PR on traffic and trends. Provide guidance on social media norms and best practices. Support web traffic reporting and analysis using Omniture SiteCatalyst toolset to build and maintain summary dashboards and reports. Required Experience: Required: Experience in analyzing / interpreting / reporting web traffic data to support online site optimization, search engine optimization…
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Web / Social Media Analyst

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Title: Director, SEO Analytics & Feed Optimization Description: MTV Networks Global Digital Media Group is seeking highly qualified candidates for the position of Director SEO Analyst and Rich Media Feed Specialist.

Title: Director, SEO Analytics & Feed Optimization Description: MTV Networks Global Digital Media Group is seeking highly qualified candidates for the position of Director SEO Analyst and Rich Media Feed Specialist. The ideal candidate must be able to excel in a cross functional team by working cross department, and throughout a network of brands to provide comprehensive Natural Search Engine traffic referral reporting and analysis. This position is also responsible for supervising the implementation of Digital Distribution initiatives across all MTV Networks digital brands as they pertain to search and search engine optimization. In this role, he/she will assume responsibility for managing specific digital media distribution related programs, which currently includes mRSS, RDFa Tags, and Paid Inclusion Search. Required Experience: SEO Analytics The Director of SEO Analyst is responsible for providing accurate and timely reporting and analysis of Natural Search…
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Director, SEO Analytics & Feed Optimization

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A lot was announced, and promised to us in the last 24 hours though the practical effects will take several months to play out.  I don’t want to repeat what everyone else said – though I do need to establish the main points before offering my own thoughts about it. One of the more significant announcements came from Google yesterday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco where  Marissa Mayer Showed Off Social Search and Social Results From  Social Networks intergrated into Google ( but, only those reachable via Google Profile) via Twitter , meanwhile Bing is pulling recent status updates from Facebook and Twitter. For one thing, these developments are an indication of the  convergences of Search and Social Media  ( noted that earlier this year , about 6 months ago) where I said: ” ….Just want to close out this post by observing how much “convergence” was taking place at Search Engine Strategies this week – Social Media, Search Engine Marketing and Web Analytics have d e-facto, merged; while the conference is called “ Search Engine Strategis ” it’s really more the intersection between Social Media, Search and Analytics -and so, who can say that Art, Social Networks and Web Analytics are also, not converging.” As information is coming to us in a combined form, skills to handle it and act on it will change, perhaps, with unintended results

A lot was announced, and promised to us in the last 24 hours though the practical effects will take several months to play out.  I don’t want to repeat what everyone else said – though I do need to establish the main points before offering my own thoughts about it.

One of the more significant announcements came from Google yesterday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco where  Marissa Mayer Showed Off Social Search and Social Results From  Social Networks intergrated into Google (but, only those reachable via Google Profile) via Twitter, meanwhile Bing is pulling recent status updates from Facebook and Twitter.

For one thing, these developments are an indication of the  convergences of Search and Social Media  (noted that earlier this year, about 6 months ago) where I said:

” ….Just want to close out this post by observing how much “convergence” was taking place at Search Engine Strategies this week – Social Media, Search Engine Marketing and Web Analytics have d e-facto, merged; while the conference is called “Search Engine Strategis” it’s really more the intersection between Social Media, Search and Analytics -and so, who can say that Art, Social Networks and Web Analytics are also, not converging.”

As information is coming to us in a combined form, skills to handle it and act on it will change, perhaps, with unintended results. One example of unintended results, and I’m pulling this from left field, literally, is the new FCC Blogger Disclosure rules – @andrewhazen spoke  about upcoming FTP rulings at a local meetup tonight. Hazen mentioned the FCC could not monitor what everyone was saying even if they wanted to.

But that’s not exactly true, and is less true, every day.

Take Google SideWiki – Google opened up commenting about any website (as long as you have the Google Toolbar installed and updated) and people questioned weather Google could police malicious or brand damaging comments, but you hardly hear a peep about anyone complaining yet about bad comments (Google appears to be suppressing the appearance of  most of the comments or not many people are leaving comments, period) but Google would not have released the SideWiki if it didn’t have the means to police it.  Same thing with the SearchWiki, a year ago.

With the recent investment of the CIA in Visible Technology Social Monitoring tool (and Visible Technology is sponsoring the conference I’m speaking at in London next month, Monitoring Social Media 09) AND the convergence of digital information into Google, it could be means to monitor not just FTC Blogger violations, but any activity deemed significant and worthy of study.  I’m not necessarily saying this is a bad thing – perhaps, it’s beyond good or bad, it’s probably an inevitable evolution – but still … do we realize the real web will be crawled for behavior trails, due to possible threats, and those threats will erase any privacy we still have left?

In another way, the merging of real time data into search results will make them richer, but also, more variable – which will both disrupt Search Optimization, and open up new opportunities to rank quickly, drive traffic to sites via waves of fabricated news.  Chances are, Google will quickly develop counter measures, though the inclusion of real time search will open up many new holes for spammers to exploit search engines.

Contextual Search will grow richer, and be able to be targeted against waves of new information, with ad targeting capability  quickly developed – providing new ad inventory and new ways to get flooded with information we don’t want, along with nuggets of what we do want and need.

At the same time, Social Media (in that real time data from Twitter and Facebook updates) being merged into organic search results means many more search results, playing into Google Caffeine, which was just released a few months ago, to handle real time data, and display it along with more static search results in a faster way – all this pointing to the ability to quickly display and monitor results in real time.

You can even see another piece of Google’s thinking and evolution in the latest update to Google Analytics that was just released on Tuesday at the Emetrics Summit DC with  Google Analytics Now More Powerful, Flexible And Intelligent including Email Alerts on changes in your analytics data.

But Web Analytics data is just one form of data that email alerts can be made from, and the current form of Google Alerts could easily be updated to include not just mentions of a selected keyword or keyword phrase, but of pattern – any pattern – including patterns that would be interesting to the CIA or to FCC and FTC.    I’m not even saying this is a good thing or a bad thing – but it is the logical implication of where this is all going.

On the positive side, due to the melding of all the various streams of information (and Google Wave shows promise, from what I understand of it – of inter-operating on several streams of data in one operating environment – even if those streams of data were never designed to inter-operate with each other) marketing, public relations, social media and search jobs and disciplines are about to get super charged.

Social Media, which has been looked at, for the last 2-3 years, as and interesting and experimental approach to marketing and public relations – will suddenly become a cash cow – how can anyone in their right mind ignore Social Media,  now when all this new Social Media inventory is suddenly dumped into Google, along with all the new possibilities to run targeted ads against it – and Google evolves into a real time social search engine?

Steve Rubel wrote that  The Age of Social Search Dawns today, in his personal lifestream (another sign that everything is converging) – here’s what he said/wrote:

During the first fifteen of years of the Internet’s gestation, we searched the web unassisted. In the second era, we’ll do so with the curated assistance of our social networks – and be able to spot trends from friends. As we wrote in our search white paper earlier this year…

“However, on the whole, social networks are becoming a key way for people to find content that’s meaningful to them. In response, all of the major networks are building out search tools that could, conceivably, threaten Google.”

Well, Google made it clear they’re not waiting around to get beaten. This is the opening salvo of what will be an all out social search war in in the next few years. Watch this space.

Another implication of “Social Search” is that you’ll want choose your friends more carefully – or, at least, some of us will, because, to a large extent, you’ll be able to see their search results in yours, and vice versa – not exactly what your expected from search.

To some extent, that’s good for people who can produce or uncover valuable information to a community – you’ll want to be the friend to such an individual, and such individuals will be sought after, much as influential blogger are today, and rightfully so.    And as a result, blogging software will evolve to accommodate those changes, as will online newspapers, the first being the Huffington Post Social News – that is just now reinventing online news around social networks.

Finally, with everything going into the Search Engines – Search will finally eclipse, but not entirely replace, other forms of marketing, online and off, but … with the caveat that Social Search and Social Networking will have converged – and with it, comes the death of the current understanding of SEO.

Search Engine Optimization, as it is currently understood,and has been practiced, for the last 12 years, dies – as, shortly, within a year or so, no one will see the same results – personalization of search results will become the de-facto result – and Search and Social Media will merge into one discipline – where reputation management and online social monitoring will be it’s main components.

Instead of going after rankings – you’ll be going after reputations – stuff you can write about urls and segments, in locations who’ll see your listings – predicting what they will see, and how to write copy and generate new real time data to show up in Search Results becomes the new SEO.    Meanwhile, new tools will need to be developed to cataglog and rank reputation in Search.

And that’s good news for Social Media Monitoring platforms – who will naturally want to evolve to cover search.  Meanwhile, the competition will come from Google, itself, with it’s own reputation monitoring – and that reputation monitoring capability will be integrated into Google Analytics – which will, inturn, cause a shakeout  in the Social Media Monitoring platforms on one hand, and the merging of what was called Web Analytics with Social Media and Search – much as Web Analytics has now become absorbed into Data Intelligence functions, according to Eric T. Peterson

If you pay close attention to the marketing you see from Omniture, WebTrends, Unica, Coremetrics, and the other “for fee” vendors you’ve surely noticed a dramatic change recently. Nobody is talking about web analytics anymore; the entire focus has become one of systems integration, multichannel data analysis, and cross-channel analytics.

All the sudden web analytics is starting to sound like, gasp, business and customer intelligence.

Eek.

Since it’s late and since this post will be over-shadowed by the hype around Google Analytics releasing more “stuff” on Tuesday I’ll cut right to the chase: I believe that we are (finally) on the cusp of a profound revolution in web analytics and that the availability of third-generation web analytics technologies will finally get digital measurement the seat at the table we’ve been fighting to get for years.

Yes, Web Analytics will get the respect from CMO’s, finally, that we deserved all along – except, we’re not longer going to be called Web Analysts, as Web Analytics and SEO, as they were currently understood, are becoming obsolete.

And that’s what is being worked out right now, as I’m writing this.   A lot of change, a lot of convergence – some of it good, some of it, not.

But, like anything in life, the value is in what you make of it – nothing I said here, even the government’s inevitable monitoring of all the information we put out for them – is necessarily, bad.   But, then, our view of what we consider to be “freedom” and “privacy” are being transformed – almost, in real time.

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Evolution of Search Results turns Social

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This week I read more news on how Bing is gaining market share from Google ( see August post at TechCrunch ) and Gizmodo’s post last week and I considered why it doesn’t matter. Google is not mainly a search engine any longer – it’s diversified out to offer many products, much of it, extensions of it’s search technology , but which have morphed into something else.

This week I read more news on how Bing is gaining market share from Google (see August post at TechCrunch) and Gizmodo’s post last week and I considered why it doesn’t matter.

Google is not mainly a search engine any longer – it’s diversified out to offer many products, much of it, extensions of it’s search technology, but which have morphed into something else.
Meanwhile, Yahoo! wasn’t primarily known for search, all along.

With Bing focusing on taking away Search traffic from Google, mainly, it’s traffic Google really doesn’t care much about.

You’ll notice in both charts that Google Search and Yahoo Search have remained stable and more or less, at the same level for a few years, but many of the services Google provides (ie: Google Earth and Google Maps) have grown while Search stayed flat.

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Does Google care about Search anymore?

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