Some Small Business Looking to Increase Ad Spending in 09

Ad-ology has released results from a Small Business Marketing Outlook survey it conducted. Perhaps surprising to some, it found that in 2009, a quarter of small business owners plan to spend more on advertising while another 60% plan to spend about the same as they did this year.

When broken down by media type, over half of small business advertisers plan to spend the same or more on the following:

• Online advertising (69%)
• Yellow Pages (54%)
• Newspapers (51%)
• Direct mail (51%)

Other key findings include:

• “Knows my company/line of business” is the top attribute small business owners look for in a media advertising sales rep. “Delivers what they promise” is the second most desirable attribute.
• 52% of small business owners surveyed agree with the statement “you can gain market share by marketing while your competitors are cutting back.”
• 74% believe their company “must be one of the first 2-3 that come to a customer’s mind” when they need what the small business owner is selling.
• More than half of respondents plan to spend the same or more time and money on their Web sites and email marketing in 2009.
• The majority of small businesses are not using other emerging media: 77% do not use online video, 83% do not podcast, and 82% do not use mobile advertising.

While many small businesses appear to be budgeting more for online advertising in, some Adsense users are reporting decreases in revenue in late 08. I'm curious to if the trend in 2009 will be to seek more innovative online promotion methods.

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Why people don't trust your blog

I'm always returning to a state of trying to figure out how to reinvent my blog. Why's that? Well I think the biggest problem is that I'm a lazy blogger. After a lull in the action, I let weeks, even months go by with no posts and I start thinking how I can get into the groove of blogging more.

Here are some of my thoughts from this morning: I just read a really good article on WebProNews titled People Don't Trust Your Blog. First off, it has a nice graph on the types of information sources and the level that people trust them. Emails from friends are at the top while corporate blogs are at the bottom. It's wicked information for anyone in marketing. Richard MacManus dissects the report a bit, but here is where it takes my thinking:

- This is no wonder when I see an ads telling me that Ford is now the same quality as Honda and Toyota. You can't keep promoting on a blog or you are just trying to sell me. Consider a conversation with a friend who just got into the insurance industry and he/she keeps hounding you to sit down and look at insurance packages... that's an annoying friend.

- Have you ever had a know it all friend. A friend that just spews out useless facts about stuff you don't care about? Come on, we all have. They are annoying too. I think a good blog has to have useful information that I can rely on. From the real estate space, Norm write a great blog. I don't read it regularly because I'm not always thinking about real estate. But whenever I want information or stats, I always start with Norm. It helps me that the blog is always focused and on topic

- Ever had a friend that isn't genuine? You grow tired of them don't you? A blogger needs to care. Respond to comments and be real. When people voice a concern, listen to them. Nothing worse than someone that doesn't really care.

- Ever had a good friend that doesn't keep in touch. They don't work hard enough or at all on your friendship. This goes hand in hand with the point above. A good blogger needs to post regularly and cross post. They need to stay in touch one way or another. (I need to embrace the micro post).

Ok, I need counseling now. But that was cathartic. I go through this like people trying to quit smoking or lose a few pounds. I'm like a yo-yo.

I have to say how surprised I was to see corporate blogs at the bottom of the pile. The whole idea that made corporate blogging more popular was for companies to be more transparent and engage the customers in a genuine fashion. So the thought today - can you be more like a friend and less like a company with your business blog?

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More on the Death of Search Ranking

There was a lot of talk at the recent Pubcon about changes in search. Bruce Clay did an interview describing why ranking is dead. While it's arguable whether or not you can say ranking is dead, search engine changes have changed the search marketing game. Recent changes in personalization will have a dramatic affect.

You can see some of the search personalization changes in Google's search results now allowing users to delete results they see and promote ones they like. An example below:

I expect the tool will affect the results that user flags themselves, but Google's entire community of searchers will also have an impact on the search results based on overall blocking and promoting.

How does this affect you? As a search marketer your web presence(s) have to add value. The content needs to be clear and valuable. Moreover, your overall reputation matters more and more. This tool directly affects your search reputation but reputation is many things. It's how people rank your site, it's how they vote on comments you make in communities, it's what you say about yourself and what others say about you. Not only do you need to manage your online reputation now, but you have to pro-actively build it and promote it.

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Trulia Critics - Right or Wrong?

Today Glen Roberts at Inman News reported on a debate that was stirred up by Galen Ward of Estately (there's some link juice Galen...). Galen asked why does Trulia show up in search results above the original source. His answer:

"In this case, two reasons: the original source doesn’t even display the address on the page (dude - MLS rules are stupid, but they usually let you display your own property’s address at least - you gotta fix that!). But the much more common reason is that Trulia blocks Google from following their links."

So I agree the first reason is brutal. The real estate industry needs to help themselves. Some brokers and agent use solutions such as the Point2 where property listing have their own search engine friendly URL that can be indexed (such as this example from Jay Thompson's site).

But the second reason I neither find offensive nor accurate. As Galen explains, Trulia uses 302 redirects that prevents the flow of link juice to the source site. It helps their pages maintain authority. I don't find it offensive because these sort of things are common with any general online advertising arrangement. If you complete a link exchange with another site, you purchase a follow or nofollow link. Nofollows are designed to send traffic, not search authority. Realtor.com has been doing this sort of thing forever, they rank way higher than Trulia, so why the stink now? (see the link to http://www.npreco.com/ from this listing on Realtor.com) So secondly, I don't find the evaluation completely accurate because I don't think it's the main reason Trulia ranks higher. I have a couple of points here:

The NoFollow Reason

Rudy seems to admit SEO is reason for the nofollows. It's debatable in my mind whether or not it would be detrimental for Trulia to link out in their search results. Linking out to relevant sites can help a website's trust. Rudy also states, "Let’s be honest, most broker or agent websites would not rank better than they do currently if we removed the nofollow in the outbound links (99.9% of listings pages have no page rank or page rank 1)". That's true for the most part, but links from main search result pages like Denver (PR 4), would see value - I just couldn't let that one go. But while Galen suggests the redirects are an designed to block PR from flowing to other sites, the specific intent of the method. Rather than a practice to prevent other sites from receiving value, it's design is to help large sites flow page rank to deeper levels in their site hierarchy. By controlling this flow of link juice, Trulia's primary motivation I suggest is to push page rank deeper through their site.

Real Reason's for Truila's Search Success

More importantly, these nofollows (or 302 redirects) are not the main reason for Trulia's search dominance. There's a few big ones in my opinion:

1. First they've done some great marketing and promotion now that's resulted in a PR 7. That's and achievement and not many local sites can top that. Even RE/MAX.com is only a PR 6. This has nothing to do with redirects or nofollows, and everything to do with a lot of buzz and exposure.

2. Secondly, they have great site architecture for SEO. The page titles, content and heading tags all have the right keyword terms. It's consistent whether you are looking for Colorado, Denver or Bear Valley Denver real estate. VERY few real estate practitioners do a good job of this.

3. While there are other reasons, the third and last one I'll mention is that they have a widget strategy - a much more brilliant and interesting thing to talk about than the 302 redirects. Trulia has built several useful widgets that relevant real estate sites like Jay's can use. You'll see at the bottom of the widget there are 2 built in links. One link goes to the Trulia home page, helping out that PR 7. The second link is a deep link into Trulia. Since Jay's site is a Denver real estate site, the Trulia link goes to their Denver page.

So now Trulia has thousands of relevant links form real estate websites linking to their home page and deep linking into their site. Note that there isn't a nofollow on those widget links (of course)! Good for Trulia! It's a brilliant strategy. They have to build tools that add a lot of value (or perceived value) to execute on such a strategy. Also note that they've done some solid business development work and have authoritative sites like RIS Media using their widget's and linking back to Trulia.

If I was a real estate agent or broker, I probably wouldn't use the widget's and give Trulia that link. And if you consider their nofollow policy on their listings and result pages, it's not really a fair link exchange if you're using a widget :-) But my bottom line is - it's all negotiable! If brokers care about SEO for their own site, they can negotiate a removal of the nofollow. If it's not negotiable, a broker doesn't have to send their listings.

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Real Estate SEO - Franchises Missing the Boat

Well isn’t this blog neglected! To tell you the truth, over the past couple of months, I’ve been writing business plans, grant proposals, research documents, project and technical requirements and I have to say that I haven’t had a lot of gas in tank to write for this blog. I think I have to learn the art of micro posting!

So what has awakened me from my slumber? I was reading an RIS article by Glenn Houck this morning on SEO. After leading the Homegain charge for many years, Glenn certain knows a lot about SEO but he keeps things pretty simply in this article. SEO in real estate really gets me going because so many companies are completely missing the boat. This short article reminded me of a post Joel Burslem made listing his 10 favorite real estate search sites. The new Century 21 Canada site was one of them. I have to admit that I like the look and I like the map search implementation but this site missed the SEO boat totally. Let’s back up a bit because really, why does this matter...

Search engines (google) are like today’s phone books. In the old days, you picked up a phone book, flipped to the yellow pages, found the appropriate category (real estate) and searched through the listed ads. The differences are the following. In a search engine there are too many pages to produce a book. Flipping virtual pages just wouldn’t be practical either so you search by topic rather than flipping to a yellow page topic. So the first important point to make here is that websites need to ‘tell’ a search engine what their topic is. What Century21.ca has done is the equivalent to telling the yellow pages to make a topic called “Century 21” rather than ‘real estate’. In fact, it’s like they’re also trying to say, “we transcend real estate so don’t put us in that category at all.” (it’s the only logical conclusion I can make)

Ok, so on to the second point. With a search engine, it’s like having one big phone book rather than many small local phone books. So for large businesses that have many offerings or many local business offices, they can have an ad or listing for each relevant one. I’ll clarify using Century21.ca again. Not only should they be listed under the term ‘real estate’, but they should have relevant listings for terms like ‘Ontario real estate’ and ‘Toronto real estate’ and ‘Scarborough real estate’. It’s like having many yellow page ads. So building on point 1 – not only do you have to identify the category you should be listed in, but you need to identify other sub categories and make all of your yellow page ads (in this case, web pages) discoverable so they make it into the phone book.

The 3rd point in our comparison is that content in search engines is sorted differently than phone books. Because searching is fundamentally different than flipping through pages AND there is simply too much content out there (or yellow page ads in our metaphor), you can’t sort stuff in a search engine in alphabetical order. So the way a search engine sorts content is by relevance and popularity. If people talk about your business offline, you get word of mouth advertising. If they talk about it online, they link to it. A link is considered a popularity vote as Glenn notes.

A copyright notice at the bottom of Century 21 Canada shows WheretoLive.com Inc. so I assume they were contracted to build the site. If it was 1999 or 2001 I can understand a large corporation missing the SEO opportunity, but in 2008, this stuff should just be common knowledge and standard practice. There’s certainly enough information about SEO published online! Search is the way people find information today and unless a website is generating traffic, it’s a billboard in the middle of nowhere. SEO is not something that some geeky kid jumps in and performs on website. SEO is a philosophy for technical design architecture. Beyond that, SEO principles should permeate a company’s marketing so offline and online efforts all help more people find those yellow page ads.

Search engine optimization may be old news to some people and some may think that it’s a web 1.0 way of thinking. But, it still sits at the core of how we define ourselves in the online world. Because content is organized by the popularity of the documents, it is the most fundamental way we manage our reputation online. When I search for real estate in Canada, not only will I never find the content on Century21.ca, if I was actually looking for their site to show up, I would conclude that they don’t have a high enough reputation (and thus quality of content) for me to bother.

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