I hear this question occasionally… being so deep in data and the results of good campaigns vs. “others” I am well past ever questioning it.

Yes – It Works and is getting better and harder at the same time. Competition does that! The increase in mobile device use is also a major factor that many businesses are increasing ill prepared for.

GroupM just published some research on search detail and value.

Buyers are more likely to click on your search result!

To quote: “The Web is influencing more than $1 trillion of in-store sales, and search is the number one online channel for driving that revenue,” said Chris Copeland, CEO, GroupM Search. “This new understanding of the retail shopper represents a behavioral shift. The intent shown in search provides brands an opportunity to maximize their online revenues and encourage and cultivate greater in-store sales.”

Eighty-Six Percent of In-Store, Retail Buyers Search on Generic versus Branded Keywords… these findings are consistent with the results of research we have conducted in multiple industries around the important role search plays in a consumer’s path-to-purchase.

My favorite: 10 percent of shoppers report using tablets during the retail shopping process. 10% already from tablets. This is a brand spanking new baby still!

For more at Business Wire

Business Insider just did a post on 21 things that went bye bye (or at least seriously started to contemplate the end… they fudged the meaning of obsolete just a bit).

What else is near the end or at least in for radical change? Here’s a few of my picks:

• Downloads – streaming will wipe this out very quickly.
• Hybrid cars – 2 drivetrains equals a poor ROI.
• Broadcast media – TV, Radio supported by advertising in the current format – gonzo.

As an aside: What does this say about the much ballyhooed impartiality of the press of the world? When the common man no longer unthinkingly eats the pablum served up by the press, especially when the common man is looking to spend his money, what does that say about the public’s perception of the so called “church and state” separation between the advertising and news departments?

The review section on the Google Local Business Center has a serious affect on your sites ranking there. Google is recognizing, responding to and supporting this major change by rewarding businesses that have reviews with better search engine positioning. But what is the result of this change and how will it affect SEO?

A more recent phenomenon is the way people are using and relying on social networks like Twitter and Facebook to get informed opinion on everything they might be looking for information on. I think we have to face the fact that crowd-sourcing is growing like crazy.

Social Search

John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing has just written an article, Will Customer Opinion Overtake Search? discussing the effect of the newly launched Social Search services that all the search engines have just started up.

He brings up some thought provoking ramifications of what happens if social search and reviews keep growing in the manner that they have been.

The opportunity lies in the amount of people who are watching video on YouTube. On YouTube your video has the ability to reach more people, quicker than any other video distribution site.

The challenge is in standing out from the sheer volume of hundreds of videos posted to YouTube every hour, of every day.

If you’re fortunate enough to have a video go viral, the amount of traffic and business you can get could power your company for many months. The majority of videos do not reach this holy grail of marketing, so the effective strategy is to promote your video on YouTube to gain both the most viewers, and traffic to your website.

James Harrison at JameSEO just wrote an article outlining 20+ video promotion tips for YouTube. It’s a solid checklist to follow and will give your videos on YouTube a strong SEO promotion boost and it is a great advanced addition to our earlier article on YouTube SEO.

For context: I’m firmly in the less advertising is better camp. I think that we’re bombarded past all reason at this point with advertising and honestly I think the overuse is making all consumers more and more resistant to advertising. Yes it still works or business wouldn’t do it, but how many consumers are with me on the idea of seeing less advertising?

Putting on the business hat though: Show me that it’s killer effective to run forced ads and I have to be there, using it for my business and for my customers. We gotta eat, right?

YouTube has been doing some limited testing of pre-roll advertising; pre-roll ads run before the content that you want to watch. People don’t like them much and I have to wonder what the long term effect would be if they rolled them out, en masse tomorrow?

I’ve given up on “regular TV.” We unhooked the cable and only use our AppleTV and DVD’s for entertainment. What that’s done is educated me that commercial free entertainment is much more enjoyable. After a year, I cannot watch regular TV and enjoy it. I want to be entertained, not have to watch commercials for stuff I’m mainly not interested in…

Makes for a conundrum – I have to market to grow my and my customer’s business; advertising is a big part of that. How do we make advertising less intrusive and more targeted to when people are looking for a product or service?

This is one of the big reasons I love SEO, Video and PPC advertising. They reach people when they are wanting more information -now- about that product or service – no intrusion!

Here’s a customer appreciation promotion that I received by email today – they were also texting me about it at the same time.

Epic Marketing Fail

Here’s the text of the email I sent them to the return address on the email.
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Re: Rogers Customer Appreciation Event

Why do you have a splash page? The instant I get to those – I’m out. Thanks for not respecting my time!

Why all in Flash? Did anyone in the management team realize that smart phones don’t use flash? Fail!

Stunning Fail. Marketing at it’s most disconnected. I’ll blog about it though, so thanks for the fodder.

For whoever is in the trenches and gets this, pass it on to your bonehead upper management. That’s who it’s meant for, not the hard working people who just did their best implementing a flawed plan.

Isn’t it time for real telephone competition in this country?
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Rogers enjoyed being the only cellphone company in Canada to have the iPhone until very recently. Sending a promotion to smart phone users that they cannot see on their cellphone is not well thought out, is it? It says, “We appreciate you so much that we’re willing to give you stuff in exchange for marketing to you more, but we won’t let you see it on your kick ass cellphone – we forgot that Flash doesn’t work on the iPhone… hehe!”

What a bunch of maroons. (Bugs Bunny reference there…)

My email’s response? I got a bounce back saying that email address is not monitored. Go here or there so “we can ignore you even more!” Meh.

The CRTC needs to be abolished. They prop up this sort of incompetence with price fixing, so the big companies in the cellphone business can make large profits, no matter how bad they are or how much their service blows! Competition is the only thing that will make them do a better job.

It’s crap.

It’s uncomfortable to have this ilk creating one image/experience of what I consider a valuable, high ROI business. Sometimes I’ve encountered business owners that are now convinced that SEO is just a big scam. That’s unfortunate. We work hard at SEO and we pride ourselves in the results we get for our clients.

That can make it tough to hear someone dismiss our work out of hand without giving you a chance. I’m getting thick skinned and all zen about it.

The damage it does to small business owners is more what bothers me. Local SEO can provide the highest return on investment of any marketing. Further, this ROI is going to grow drastically over the next few years as the internet becomes even more useful, more used and more sophisticated.

Every business niche has fierce competition. That’s the “game” of a free market economy. I’ll bet your business has some low ball, poor quality, “promise much and under deliver” competition that you lose business to. Invariably that customer ends up coming back to you. Then you have to clean up the mess or explain to the customer who went with the low price, why that low price meant the product or service they got – sucked. And why yours won’t. You almost always, get what you paid for!

Matt McGee has written a short post about a fallacious SEO offer he got over at Small Business SEM. Worth a giggle.

James Harrison at JamesSEO just did a 3 part article on how to use browser IP addresses for useful redirection. Great explanation, check it out.

Geo-location is starting to be used in many ways. You are seeing it being used a lot on smart phones for way finding, for notifying friends where you are (and how long until you get to them…), for finding shopping and restaurants, for finding specials and sales… and there are more uses. GPS location, IP location, and Cell Tower triangulation are facts of life now. It’s getting easier to find out where someone is.

• What does this do to privacy?

• What does this mean for how much and what information corporations have about us and our habits?

• Is there any public discourse as to how, why and when this tracking should be limited? Or are the corporations just running amuck with this, and governments are complicit because big brother wants to know exactly what you’re doing as well?

One web browsing factor that people in the SEO business have speculated about for years is page load speed. My first encounter with this was when I first started in SEO ten years ago.

I got a job as a “web associate” and inherited a very large and expensive website. Really expensive! It was one of the first iterations of a website done completely in Flash (1.0). It looked cool and had some interesting graphics and unique navigation… OK it totally sucked.

Worse than that, most people were on 33.6 analog modems (…’member those? those strange sounds back and forth as they would hook up over the phone lines?) The site was slow. I mean dead dog slow. 20-40 minutes to load the front page slow! Really abysmally, totally stupidly slooooowwwwwwww.

I’d get into work and face a barrage of hate email from customers who wanted to use the site and were less than thrilled with it’s cool factor. People had little to no filter on their language in those emails… I quickly learned to not read my email in the morning!

Once the political will inside the corporation found the fortitude to admit the site was a certified POS, we redesigned and rebuilt it. I SEO’d it and re-launched to get 10,000 times more traffic inside 3 months. The usability of the new HTML website was the major contributing factor, but I also saw from the server logs that the search engine spiders came indexing far more often after we relaunched. They liked it better too!

Highly recommended reading! Check out Emily Mace on Site Speed Becoming a Ranking Factor