On Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2012, Google made its most radical and forward step into true Social Search with the launch of Search, plus Your World. Your World, as described in the official Google blog post, changes search results for individual users in three key ways:

Rich Snippets structured markup code is a way to help publishers provide information about their websites to Google. While Google has admitted that Rich Snippets do not increase or have an effect on search engine rankings, the additional information provided by a Rich Snippet can be the difference between a user clicking to a site or passing it over (possibly for another listing that does provide Rich Snippets?). To better gauge the effectiveness of Rich Snippets and how click-through-rates (CTR) are affected, I decided to run a test to prove and confirm the significant difference (if one existed) on user behavior with Google Rich Snippet data.

Paid Search Series Introduction:

Here in New England, the leaves are turning colors, the temperature is getting colder, the air is feels crisper and the amount of daylight is getting shorter. As every seasoned New Englander knows, these occurrences are early indicators to one thing (no, not time for a tropical vacation), the holiday season!

Each holiday season, brands are willing to spend millions of dollars on comprehensive multi-platform holiday advertising campaigns in order to deliver their message most effectively, persuading consumers to ultimately do one thing; buy their product!

Search has become a leading marketing channel and consumers are actively searching for product information, reviews, specifications, pricing and availability. According to Google 42% of consumers research online and then purchase online. Additionally, 51% of consumers research online and then purchase in store. This trend will continue throughout the 2011 holiday season.

Google Makes Search Secret

On October 18^th, Google announced that they were going to start using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) Encryption – most easily recognized by the “s” which is added to the “http” at the start of the URL and often a “padlock” symbol indicating that you are accessing a secure server – to serve their search results to logged in users.  This change will impact several different areas within the search arena, most notably, as brands look to extract data from their website analytics to help them make smart SEO decisions.

What the change means for brands

With this change from Google, a brand will no longer have visibility into the keyword phrase that generated any given click through.  This is very valuable information for SEOs and online marketers alike, as it is used to inform the website owner which keywords are driving successful interactions with their clients, rather than just driving traffic.  Google is not planning on restricting this data on the paid search side – and most online marketers should be tracking these clicks with a third party tool which would deliver this information anyway – but this will allow Google to show it’s paying customers that the product they are paying for is working – or not working – for them and optimize accordingly.  While Google mention that websites will still be able to get “an aggregated list of the top 1,000 search queries” from the Google Webmaster Tools, this does not allow them to focus their efforts on those terms within the top 1,000 that actually drive positive customer interaction.

We often find ourselves working with brands that have a real concern about using coupons due to coupon frauds. The challenge is that traditional coupons are difficult to track which makes them hard to measure.

That was then. Today, electronic coupons can be an answer, specifically through QR-codes.

What is QR-Code?

Mobile and smartphone usage has been growing very rapidly merging the gap between physical and digital work. Customers use their phones for everything from price comparison to coupon and deal hunting. A QR-Code is a bar code that can contain any text, numbers or URL. It can be placed on product labels, billboards, tags, websites, etc. By using a smart phone and QR-code reader, a user can uncover the encoded information that is linked in that code. The code can be placed everywhere and be used for a variety of reasons.

It was a typical Wednesday late afternoon, more work to do than I could possibly get done that evening, and I should have already left for to join the kickball team.  It crossed my mind that I should stay and keep working, but I committed to the team I would be there and like a typical Catalyst Team member we do not back out on our commitments to our clients or teammates.

I packed up my work and was on my way to join the team that I was sure was anxiously awaiting my arrival, not because of my expertise on the field but I had the roster of players and score sheet.

Upon my arrival, there was an eerie absence of any Catalyst team members.  There was a slight chill in the air and I thought maybe they were huddled up somewhere thinking through strategy for that night.  I waited a little more time and still no team members and this odd loneliness feel over me.  I had let the team down and perhaps I was too late and they could not play, but knowing the Catalyst Team, I knew something like this would not stop someone from Catalyst, when out of the misty cold air I noticed a group of people walking towards me with a stride and confidence to their walk that could only be Catalyst.    I was right, they were all together, drinking, I mean thinking.  They were throwing back a few ideas on how we would win that night.  You could sense this humble arrogance, like no one is going to beat Catalyst, not at our game.

Overview
Should advertisers run paid search ads on their own branded and trademarked search terms? The answer is yes. Even when a brand already has high organic rankings on those terms? The answer is still yes.

Catalyst online analyzed the impact of activating paid search campaigns on branded/trademarked search terms for brands that already had high organic rankings on those terms. The results were quite clear: the brands received a significant lift in clicks, and click share, when appearing in both organic and paid search results. The increase in clicks didn’t just result from the paid ads, clicks on organic ads also increased.

In a separate study, Google conducted similar tests which supported our findings. In fact, the results from the Google test were even more dramatic.

Quantitative results from Catalyst’s research and Google’s test are included in this POV.

If you are a marketer of a product or service with great demand, and at this time of the year you still haven’t considered optimizing your website for visits from mobile devices, you are missing a lot, in other words, you’re losing customers to competitors by the minute.

In 2012 mobile searches are projected to grow some 20% in relation to those 14.4M searches made in 2010. We recently released a POV on Mobile SEO with this and other interesting data. One of the best ways to leverage that traffic volume, as we stated in our POV is to offer a unique experience that engages searchers for higher conversions.

In this post we’re not going to tell you the power of mobile marketing is, but we want to present a situation that exemplifies how your abandonment rates on mobile visits may increase, when your visitors can’t find the information using a mobile device because it’s not presented in a format that answers to the channel demands in terms of usability.

Situation: Daniel left his house on a Saturday morning for some tennis match with his friends. He forgets to order a cheese table for a family gathering on Sunday. After the game, at 2:00pm, it’s too late for him to order by phone for next-day pick up at a local business.

“Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow,” -Aesop

According to Wikipedia “Linguistic semantics is the study of meaning that is used by humans to express themselves through language.” As our entire business is based on language, this is something us search engine folks should be interested in.  The search engines certainly are.

Google’s first attempt at utilizing the semantics of keywords and terms in their algorithm came in March of 2009, when they announced that they were going to be using new technology which would allow them to make associations and correlations between words.  Bing made a similar attempt at adding semantics by acquiring Powerset which was supposed to add semantic capabilities to their search engine as well.

If you had a chance to read my last post on SocialRank, you’d know that SocialRank is the new PageRank. Not in the sense that PageRank is dead, but rather that SocialRank is what PageRank was meant to do – measure content authority and creditability.

The difference between the two is that PageRank is the measurement of URL popularity. It started out with Google seeding a few authoritative URL’s which then they passed a portion of it’s rank to other urls through links. SocialRank is the measurement of human popularity. It too must be seeded, then passed through social interactions such as follows, comments, tweets, likes, etc. SocialRank likely won’t fully replace PageRank, but rather it will overlay a social graph on top of the link graph to personalize results and reduce spam.