Bing/Yahoo Launches Native Ads To Their Banner Ad Product October 11, 2015

Bing/Yahoo Launches Native Ads To Their Banner Ad Product

Not familiar with native ads? Native advertising is known when there are ads on a website that look like part of the website publisher’s content, but it’s an advertisement instead.

For instance, if you go on espn.com and you see a bunch of picture sqaures at the bottom of the story you’re reading that have headlines about who the wealthiest athletes are, what weight loss techniques athletes use, the best looking wives of athletes, etc, then you have seen native ads.

They look like they’re a part of espn, but they’re ads and when you click on them, you go to the advertiser’s website.

The internet marketing industry is split on the effectiveness and ethical merit of this technique, but regardless, Bing and Yahoo are launching a native ad product to small businesses. The native ads will function as part of their banner ad product.

The downside in the current moment is the lack of control that the advertiser has. Essentially Bing’s algorithm will determine which website publishers are a fit for your company’s native ad.

Advertisers and publishers are always trying to figure out how to make more money off their ads and the point of the native ads is to increase phone calls and other conversions from banner ads.

My opinion is that it’s possible the native ads could help the banner ad product, but it doesn’t change that the biggest potential of banner ads is including a “call button” where advertisers dont pay for a click or thousand views, they pay for someone pushing on the call button on their cell phone.

Read More
At Least 50% Of All Searches Are 4 Words Or More October 11, 2015

At Least 50% Of All Searches Are 4 Words Or More

Take note. For those business owners out there that think that there’s only 10 main keywords to target, your paradigm is about to change.

According to research done by KO Marketing, at least 50% of all searches done on Google, Yahoo, and Bing are 4 words or more.

Meaning that 50% of searches are not just “auto repair” or “flooring”. They’re 50% as likely to be “who does nissan brake repair ashburn virginia” or “average price of walnut wood flooring dallas tx”.

The search engines consider each combination of words to be known as a “keyword”. And if you change just one letter in the combination, they consider it a different “keyword” which is going to produce a different list of businesses that pop up on the first page.

The lesson here is that there are litterally an infinite amount of different keyword combinations potential customers could search for.

Each keyword is like a billboard and the more billboards you’re marketed on, the better. The goal is to pop up on the 1st page of a search engine for as many keyword combinations as possible.

Read More
Google Is Turning Into A Newspaper Classified Section August 24, 2015

Google Is Turning Into A Newspaper Classified Section

Years ago, Google used to have 82% market share, according to ComScore.

Meaning that 82% of all searches to a search engine went to Google.

Now the latest ComScore report has Google at 65% while Bing/Yahoo is at 33% (Bing aka Microsoft runs Yahoo’s search engine for them).

Most people aren’t stupid. They see that Google is becoming more and more like a classified section in a newspaper. It’s becoming nothing but ads.

My prediction is that because of constant shenanigans, that Bing and Yahoo will become more popular and more widely used.

The reason why Google triumphed over all the other search engines like Hot-Bot, Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves, etc is because their brand became, “we have the best organic results and best content”.

I think Google is being too short-sighted. probably under pressure from stockholders to grow profits right now.

But they’re losing their brand.

Google was once beloved in the webmaster, seo communities. Now they’re becoming despised.

I really think more and more people will start to see what Google is. A website with advertisements. That’s what Google is turning in to.

And i think more people will turn to Bing and Yahoo as viable alternatives.

Read More
Call-Only Campaigns Will Soon Lose Their Value August 23, 2015

Call-Only Campaigns Will Soon Lose Their Value

The idea of call-only campaigns is wonderful. Only paying when someone pushes on the call button on their cell that causes the phone to start dialing your number.

But the value will soon (and for a lot of industries has already) started to drop drastically.

If you’re familiar with pay per click advertising aka Google Adwords and Bing Ads, you’ll know the biggest factor in cost per click is what the competition is willing to bid per click.

Sadly, it’s inevitable that the cost per call in call-only campaigns skyrockets.

The reason will be because it’s pretty easy to execute.

Marketers that lack experience or don’t know what they’re doing will much rather pay for calls than clicks. So will small business owners that try and do pay per click advertising themselves.

Way easier to get calls from a call-only campaign to pay for clicks to a website.

Therefore, the future of search engine advertising is still with the website clicks.

Why? Because all the competition is going to be going to the call-only campaign route. Meaning the cost per call will go up and up.

And with the competition of website clicks going down, the price per website click will go down as well.

Ironically, old school website clicks will have the highest upside.

Read More
Google Wants More Of Your Money August 23, 2015

Google Wants More Of Your Money

Make no mistake about it. Google is in the business of making money.

There have been 2 developments lately that show they’re getting more aggressive to do that.

For years and years, Google would display 7 businesses on it’s front page when someone was looking for local services or products.

But now, Google has shrunk the real estate from 7 businesses to 3. They’ve done this for all local searches.

Also, I’ve been noticing more and more national directories popping up in the regular organic section instead of local small businesses.

For instance, if I do a search for “wedding limousine service sherman oaks”, the following is what I get

-3 businesses from Google maps

-Yelp listing

-Yelp listing

-limos.com (big national limousine directory)

-limos.com

-weddingwire.com (big national wedding directory)

-local business

-local business

-local business

-local business

Why is Google doing this? It’s really simple. Google doesn’t want local small businesses to get their phone calls and sales leads for free. Google wants small businesses to pay for advertising.

I predict that Google will continue to be more and more purposeful about decreasing real estate and making it more difficult to rank organically through search engine optimization.

Read More
Coming Soon: SEO for Apps July 26, 2015

Coming Soon: SEO for Apps

For the last 10 years, the most important job for internet marketing companies working with local small businesses has been getting them real estate on the search engines so they can get calls.

But I predict that in the next few years, as more small businesses develop apps, that search engine optimization in iTunes and Google Play where apps are discovered and found will be crucial.

Especially for limo companies and taxi companies trying to compete with Uber.

If someone is looking for a “town car service” app on their phone, it’d be valuable to get your company’s app listed next to Uber’s.

Read More
Is Your Website Slow To Load? Google Could Soon Punish You July 26, 2015

Is Your Website Slow To Load? Google Could Soon Punish You

*This is only, currently for people accessing the internet with cell phones and other mobile devices.

Google is now testing putting a “slow to load” icon next to websites that will be slow to load on cell phones.

Obviously this would be bad for companies with slow websites, but you should be redesigning your websites so they’re responsive or mobile friendly anyway.

Over half of all people now access the internet from mobile devices. So really, it should be a no-brainer to make sure you have some sort of mobile website.

But now, if you don’t conform, Google is going to punish you for it.

Read More
Apps Will Soon Be In Search Engine Results July 26, 2015

Apps Will Soon Be In Search Engine Results

Coming soon to Google, Bing, and Yahoo: apps!

That’s right.

The way this is going to work is when you’re on your cell phone and you go on Google, Bing, or Yahoo and search for something, not only will you get links to websites. You’ll also now possibly get links to download apps that answer your search question.

They’re currently beta-testing, which means they’re experimenting on a small scale for now.

If this does get traction and gets rolled out, it’s going to be a big advantage for small businesses to be early adopters and get their apps entrenched in organic, search engine optimization listings.

One of the biggest drawbacks of creating an app for a small business has been the fact that the app is only valuable if people download it.

Well, if businesses’ can get their apps in search engines, there could be some real potential here.

Read More
Local Searches Could Be As High As 50% Of All Searches July 26, 2015

Local Searches Could Be As High As 50% Of All Searches

Noted internet marketing guru Greg Sterling recently wrote an article where based off of data from Google and comScore, he’s calculating that people that search for something locally could make up close to half of all searches on search engines.

This is huge to grasp.

For any small business that doesn’t actively market themselves on the internet because they think that the search engines are for big, nationwide companies, half of all people searching on the search engines are looking for LOCAL businesses.

Read More
Voice Search Not There Yet July 26, 2015

Voice Search Not There Yet

There have been some in the internet marketing industry making a big deal about how voice search is the future of our business. (aka Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, OK Google, etc.)

I think it has a ways to go though.

Search engines on computers and cell phones offer the benefit of choice. You can look at various websites and click on those you want to.

Voice search is limited in the sense that it doesn’t offer choice.

There are some industries where voice search can be more successful, like when customers have zero loyalty to a brand. Like taxi cabs. I would think most people could be Ok with asking Siri for a cab and talking to a random company. Or someone that wants to be surprised by calling a mystery restaurant.

But a lot of small businesses charge a decent amount of money for their products and services where consumers will want to do their research.

If there was a way voice search could offer the choice, then I think it’s use could get more wide spread.

Read More

    • © Customwave 2021