Fascinating stuff, it’s basically insights into consumer behaviour and advertising from numerous sources (Google included).

It’s particularly good for going back to basics and breaking down all the technical jargon about online marketing, but it is also reaffirms the power of the internet in helping drive business. For example, I was reading Speeding Up in the Slowdown (Google, Nov 08);

“The slowdown will fuel online growth. Consumers value the information and opinions they can find online. As household budgets get squeezed it is likely that consumers’ use of the Internet to find the best deal will accelerate.”

It’s a good reminder that people shop around; they bargain hunt, compare products, look for special offers, read reviews… in other words, your online presence and reputation is getting more and more important.

The key message is that people use search engines to find this information. In fact, Google report that 73% of users find search engines an important resource when researching a product, ahead of personal recommendations (63%).

So, are there any reviews of your product when you run a search? Do you have special offers that consumers can find easily?

Make sure there’s no slowdown in your business plan for 2009 by having a quick read through Speeding Up in the Slowdown to pick up some handy hints - and on that note - Happy New Year!

In my mind, they are becoming more and more popular, especially for smaller businesses, for two very simple reasons.

Firstly - for the consumer - they provide the results quickly (when was the last time you dug out a Yellow Pages, lugged it onto your lap and leafed through to find the right section?) and they offer so much more information - links to websites, maps and directions for starters.

Secondly - and here’s the crucial bit for SMEs - they frequently appear on the first page of search results. This means that for businesses who would normally struggle to have such a high natural ranking, they have a very cost effective way of reaching target audiences.

Run a search on a business and look at the results - how many of them online directories?

Don’t forget that as well as general directories, there are also more specialist online directories emerging that feature well on local searches. These are dedicated to a certain type of business, ranging from accountancies through veterinary care practices, and offer a great opportunity for SMEs in a specific industry sector to be found online.

There are also opportunities for enhanced listings within any directory, so it’s worth shopping around. You can check out some of the single industry sites here, or hunt around on Google or Yahoo!Local to see what may work best for you in your local area.

“Search is the most popular online activity”

New research has shown that using a search engine is the main reason we log on to the internet across the country.

So if 80% of us are logging on to use a search engine to track down what we’re looking for, making sure you can be easily found online becomes crucial if you need to reach these people.

There are a whole range of strategies out there - here are just a few - but whether it’s through optimising your website, taking advantage of paid-for search advertising, or getting a listing on a directory that ranks well on searches, don’t miss out on someone who may be looking for your product or service. They may even be looking right now…. Why not do a search for your business and see how easy you are to find?

“The number of small businesses who have their own website has grown over the past two years, which indicates that small firms are becoming increasingly internet-savvy. Despite the onset of an economic downturn, all small firms should look to the internet to maximise their sales and increase efficiency.”

 There you have it; straight from the small business’ horses mouth – make sure you have an online presence.

The survey they carried out found that 70% of small businesses now have their own website, which is an increase of 25% from 2006. I still think all businesses need one – no matter what size you are. It is, after all, your shop window these days as the internet is part of life for customers now.

Even if you don’t have an all-singing, all-dancing website, you could always set up a splash page to tell people where you are and what services and goods you are selling. It’s worth remembering that the web is not just a tool for marketing, it is a business tool as well, and even the smallest business can benefit from having an online presence.

Who is it looking at your website?

There are some good recent stats from 2008; according to the Internet Advertising Bureau, there are now 32m people online, which accounts for 65% of the total adults in Great Britain, and 76% of internet users are now going online every day or most days.

The most popular online activities are as follows:

• Using email - 29.9m
• Sourcing info on activity/interest - 24.5m
• Site of a particular brand or product - 22.6m
• Compare prices - 20.8m
• Travel plans - 17.8

Other than email, you could argue that the four remaining activities all drive online spending. 21.3m people now shop online in the UK and spent an average of £661 each in the six months before August 08.

All very interesting information, but how does it relate to you?

Don’t forget that you can target your online ads to try and get a share of this market. For instance, research shows that women aged 25-34 spend more time online than men of the same group and even back in 2007, the over 50’s account for nearly 30% of time spent online.

You can turn consumer behaviour to your advantage. For example, why not try and find out if your target audience searches at a particular time of the day and gear your adverts towards them?

There have been mixed reports about the growth of online shopping. In general, all the new figures show the stats are higher than the same period last year, but overall, it hasn’t increased the rate it did in 2007. No surprise there, given the economic climate, but what all the figures do show is that more people are turning online.

One of the many new reports on consumer behaviour has once again shown that using search engines has become the number one choice for finding local businesses, over and above using printed directories. What’s more, the findings suggest that a large majority of local searches then result in action - either a phone call, a shop visit or people contacting the business online.

The argument is there for all to see – make sure you have an online presence and see how it can help drive business your way.

Is this going to be the future for promoting yourself online? For SMEs only just catching on to the idea of having a website, yet again it may seem impossible to keep ahead of it all. What exactly does Web 2.0 mean and how does it affect you?

Web 2.0 describes the changing nature of the internet and how we are now sharing, developing and evolving the ways we interact – or put simply, it’s like a new version of the web.

The ways businesses are building their online presence is changing; they are interacting with consumers via social networking sites and sharing ideas rather than simply advertising their product to a blanket audience. What’s more, they’re doing this with an amazing number of people at the same time and generating conversations amongst consumers from across the world.

This blog has already begun to offer its opinions on all the changes, and no doubt will do so in the future, but advice for now is not to panic if Web 2.0 seems incomprehensible to you. You’re not alone. We’ll help break it down and its worth remembering that you shouldn’t forget the basics – the importance of local search, having a website, looking at the already proven and measurable ways of getting your message across - so make sure this is in place first before you take on the next hurdle.

Do a search on Google for a business or service and you would expect to find websites that link to these search terms.

In actual fact, the websites often appear towards the bottom of the first page and instead, your eye line is drawn towards maps showing the locations of local businesses, sponsored links and advertisement, and business listings from the local area.

So if you’re a business looking to target these potential customers, what this means is that SEO will only get you so far in drawing people to your website. When internet users today are demanding immediate and relevant results, they won’t spend long looking for the information, so appearing on Google maps or being one of the sponsored ads presents a priceless opportunity.

Ah, but is this expensive, I hear you cry? As we’re always telling SMEs with tight budgets, online advertising has one key advantage over others; you can find out exactly what gives you the best return on investment and measure its effectiveness, so even in these tough economic times, you’ll be amazed at how online marketing can help generate cost effective leads for you.

And without the backing of big marketing budgets, any online advertising campaign should take advantage of this to exploit your strengths and weaknesses.

Unfortunately, running your own campaign on Google or Yahoo! can be quite time consuming and complicated to monitor. To maximise effectiveness and get the best return on your advertising spend, you need to have the ad-creatives that attract the consumer to click on the ad and then to phone or visit your business, and you need to ensure that your campaign covers all the various goods and services that you offer where you make most of the profit.

Most SMEs are great at running their own businesses but do not have the time or necessary skills to set up and run their campaigns but there are some great resellers of these campaigns who can help you through this potential minefield for a fairly low fee.

Consider:

• Time: Set your ads to run at specific times to suit you

If you run a typical 9am – 5pm type business, you may find you are wasting money by running ads that appear after work hours and missing any calls that come through.

Similarly, think about when your target market will be searching; for example, if you’re a recruitment agency, you would expect people to be searching outside of work hours

• Locality: Through IP settings, set up your ad campaigns to target people searching in a certain area

With 9 out of 10 people searching for businesses or service in a certain area, make sure your ads reach the people who are looking for you at that exact same time they are searching. You can read all about local search here.

To make sure you get the best attention try and find the Authorised Resellers of both Google and Yahoo! as the search engines themselves have picked them specifically for their honesty, integrity, and transparency of charges as well as their skills.

With traditional marketing – such as advertising in the Yellow Pages or in a magazine - it’s always been difficult to judge which particular advert has been effective or whether it’s actually generated any tangible leads.

But that’s the beauty of online marketing and web analytics; you can evaluate exactly what works, and more importantly, what doesn’t.

It’s certainly nothing new, but free packages like Google Analytics are incredible simple to use and are helping more and more SMEs with tight budgets spend their money wisely. They can show you exactly what a customer does once they get on to your site, where your visitors came from and which pages are attracting the most attention.

As Google AdWords provide a good way to advertise specific goods and services you offer to people searching, you can also quickly evaluate and optimise your online Adword spend to work out which keywords are drawing in the crowds and what makes the most money for you.

So take some time out to make sure you are getting value for money – it’s easy to forget that you can always counteract a lack of budget through spending wisely.

Google has certainly shaped the way we search for information in the last decade; it has dominated the market, Google Adwords advertising has transformed how businesses can target their consumers and now Google Maps will be a huge source of information for users and business owners alike.

Can anyone envisage anything that will have such a big an influence on shaping our search patterns in the next 10 years? Various predictions have been circulating:

• - will social networking sites increasingly shape how people search for information about people and organisations?
• - can rival search engines, such as Yahoo! or even the new kid on the block, Cuil, challenge Google?
• - will comparison sites be used more and more to help us drill down on how products and services compare across the board, not only in terms of price but also consumers’ reviews?
• - finally, one of our predictions: will local search dominate our thinking? (particularly that of mobile local search, which you can read all about here.)

For SMEs, it’s a fast paced environment to keep up-to-date with and will be even more so in the coming years as technology improves. It’s important to think ahead about how your consumers may be searching for you in the future, so take that time out now to consider how best to market your business.

We’ve found that hotels have topped the charts, with over twice as many searches as any other category. Rather surprisingly February proved to be the most popular time to look for hotels, with 10 of the 14 towns and cities being swamped in this month. Perhaps we can speculate whether our nation has been sweeping their Valentines off their feet despite the doom and gloom of the credit crunch?

The rest of the top ten searches can be found below:

A survey carried out last year suggested 62% of us already conduct research on the Internet before booking a restaurant and online reviews are increasingly shaping our decisions. This may come as no surprise, but what about being able to go online to book a table at your favourite restaurant?

Livebookings’ reservation service could transform the way we search for and find restaurants. Although the concept is not a new one, it can only be a matter of time before consumers catch on and real-time restaurant booking becomes the natural next step in a search. Gone would be the days when you can only ring to book at certain times of the day to suit the restaurant in order to check availability.

Some of the restaurants listed on our website, eatsomewhere.co.uk, are already offering this service (see Thai Edge) and it’s not difficult to envisage more and more making the transition to an online system. So will it take off? Surely you only have to look at how popular booking a hotel room or a flight online has become to realise the potential. Soon, our nights out at our favourite eatery will begin with just another simple online experience.

Infoserve speaks with over 10,000 SMEs a week, but there’s a worrying lack of understanding about what can be achieved with online advertising, not only in terms of its effectiveness but also in terms of its value for money. But if we’re talking about return on investment, then online advertising is second to none and it offers more control and flexibility than ever before.

This report should go a long way in helping SMEs realise the potential of internet advertising - you can read a general summary here

In the UK, internet advertising has grown faster than any other mainstream advertising medium, making it larger than press classifieds and paper directories.

Why? Well, with online ads;

• you can receive detailed feedback, including how many people have seen your ads and whether they have clicked through to your website
• you have the option to only pay when someone does actually click through to your website, meaning you only pay for direct leads
• you have tight control of your budget, ensuring you only spend what you can afford
• you can monitor the best results so that you can drill down on the best keywords that generate the most potential customers for you (which also helps when you’re considering sponsored links and how best to optimise your website)

There are so many different advertising opportunities – many of them very affordable for small business - so if you’re looking for ROI in the current economic climate, it’s definitely worth investing online.

It’s easy to forget that even five years ago, it wasn’t obvious to most people to turn to a search box on the internet to find what they are looking for. Now, search is the most natural starting point for so many of us.

For Udi, it was all very obvious;

“It was very clear that to have an information revolution, it’s not enough to store the information and move it around, you have to find it.”

And what’s more,

“We are finding that user expectations grow. The kind of searches people do now are more complicated than the kinds they were doing five years ago. People expect a lot more from us.”

So, what are the predictions about the future?

For Udi, its universal search that is “more in-depth, easier, and allowing you to control more of what you’re looking for, giving you more input, finding more things”.

For us, we think local search will continue to develop and in our eyes, the shift to mobile devices will change and shape user experiences the most. The biggest challenge will be keeping up with these expectations.

You can read Udi’s interview here

The figures may come as a surprise given the credit crunch and reports that high street spending has been falling, but whether it’s the online discounts or the offer of free delivery, online shoppers are obviously bucking the trend. The report even predicts that within five years up to 50% of all retail spending would take place online.

Whether it’s through online advertising, increasing your visibility on search engines or improving your SEO for your website, have you got a plan in place?

Dave Naylor’s followers are watching it closely already.

Offering to deliver greater relevance in search engine results than Google and Microsoft Search, it’s a bold promise. Watch this space?

Not only has he predicted that by 2010, mobile phone are expected to outnumber PCs by three to one, he also believes mobile users will be demanding local information the most.

This means:

“We have a perfect storm brewing between user demand, advertising desire for targeting and mobile evolution that’s going to make this an incredibly rich arena for the next few years.”

You can read more about the growth of mobile local search here.

In August last year, Nielsen Netratings announced that 7.4 million Britons (23% of Britons online) visited at least one of the ten most popular national newspaper websites.

In the last month, there are some distinct difference of opinions over which is the most popular online newspaper, but one thing is for sure, now that the internet is a source of information for breaking news, newspapers now have no choice but to put everything they publish online.

This also creates an interesting future angle for online local newspapers;

With more and more people searching online for local information, and seeing as local papers are often seen as a resource for this (whether it’s community events, classifieds or what’s on at the cinema), do you think we are going to see local newspapers and Local Search engines merging?

We could even take it one step further; would this combination ultimately replace the traditional forms of print media and be a perfect one-stop-shop for us?

You can read the top tips here

(Or click here to find out more about Yahoo!Local in general)

For many search engine optimisation (SEO) campaigns or online advertising accounts, getting traffic through to your website is the number one priority. Actually targeting specific customers – such as those local to you - however, requires a more tailored approach and local search is one way to ensure you are reaching exactly the right people.

Local pay per click (PPC) campaigns, such as a Google Adwords, is one option. Here, you can target potential customers who are searching on your doorstep, e.g. “Restaurant in Leeds” because ads will only show on searches carried out within e.g. 10 miles of your business.

Another option is to be listed on Local Search engines. With paper directories and phonebooks becoming a thing of the past, more and more potential clients are turning to online directories, so perhaps look at sites like Yahoo! Local or industry specific websites, like www.eatsomewhere.co.uk, for ideas.

Alternatively, local SEO is proving to be a very a good long-term strategy for increasing your online presence. It’s just a question of thinking about how people may search for you and gearing your website towards this, e.g. “Restaurants in LS1”.  It’s definitely worth reading this article here from Hitwise about postcode searches, which also highlights the potential for SEO and how people are searching.

Without doubt, it’s one of the biggest dilemmas facing search engines today. A classic example is when someone types in “glasses” into Google - are they meaning opticians or crystal glassware specialists?

Very few people carry out one word searches anymore because they know they won’t be able to find what they are looking for. Typing in the exact term, e.g. “waterford crystal”, is one option assuming you know what you are looking for, but it’s clear that people are becoming wiser as they get more and more frustrated with irrelevant search results.

Changes in search patterns are showing that consumers are learning smarter ways of searching, moving to more specific four and five keyword searches. And as we have continually championed, more and more customers are using local search, looking for a business within a location. Marchex’s report sums it up:

“Consumers are increasingly relying on local search to make decisions about where to spend their money and time offline. In fact, 86 percent of Internet users search for local products and services, up from 70% in 2006, and more than 90 percent of the transactions resulting from these searches are completed offline.”

So, with nearly one in nine people searching in a particular location, can anyone tell me why businesses wouldn’t chose to tailor their marketing to local search? Surely this is becoming the most obvious strategies for businesses. All that remains to be seen how well the search engines keep up with demand and drill down on exactly customers are looking for.

These places where you collect friends, post comments, images and videos, and share them with the world, have been great success stories and who gets bought by whom for the largest sum is hot news.

This success hasn’t gone un-noticed and social media is now an integral part of many a website. Building your online community is building for success is it not? Users want to get involved, be part of a site and part of a community!

It’s not just about collecting friends and posting videos though, Social Media takes on many different forms. Take Amazon for example, their user review system is an integral part of their site. They rely on the contribution of their users, and if we’re looking at buying something we don’t know a great deal about, it’s encouraging to see several people rating your intended purchase as fantastic or the best buy!

Amazon is fortunate though; they’re a re-seller, they’re not selling their own product so it doesn’t effect them if something gets a terrible review. People are writing reviews on Amazon even if they haven’t shopped there; there’s an inherent drive amongst the new breed of internet users to ‘be heard’ and have their ‘voice’!

The Amazon business model is not harmed by allowing users to speak their mind and cast their opinion; on the contrary it’s an invaluable resource for the shopper. But what happens when we try and move this review model into a local search arena?

They’re trying. Yahoo!Local and Google Local have both added a business review element to their local offerings in the US and now the UK as well. Neither Yahoo! nor Google make their money from providing a local search solution; they’re a search engine/portal and do not have the right geocentric data to offer a perfect ‘local’ solution. Their core business is not selling advertising solutions to SMEs. This is why we at Infoserve now work in partnership with Yahoo! Local selling featured listings and providing them with geocentric business data for the UK.

Google Local in the US came unstuck when they offered the user the ability to contact a business directly from the site free of charge via SMS. It wasn’t long before this service was withdrawn due to it being abused. Adding a social media elements is not without its problems, even for the likes of Google!

If you want to find a local plumber you really don’t want one that wears a Stetson, chews tobacco and arrives at your house on a horse wearing a pair of chaps! Ok, a little artistic license there, but we all want someone we can trust and can be sure will do a good job at a good price. Recommendations by word of mouth is how many of us would choose a tradesperson or business, but popping over to the neighbours and asking them if they can recommend where you can buy some sexy lingerie for the wife isn’t always possible! I jest, but for many services and products we’re interested in buying these days it’s just not possible to find someone you know who can point you in the right direction.

If I’m looking to buy a new LCD Display for my computer, I want to know how good it is and how reliable it is on top of the technical specification. With the popularity of user reviews this information is at my finger tips, and looking at the average score from multiple reviews allows me to make an informed choice on whether to buy.

It’s not without it’s pitfalls though! How do I trust the review of someone I’ve never met? It’s open to abuse is it not? What’s to stop me or you from writing a selection of bogus reviews on a product from one of my competitors?

If I’m looking for a restaurant online, I’m interested in what others have to say about their dining experience. If there’s only one review, and it’s highly negative, I’m unlikely to choose that restaurant. If there are several reviews, the majority of which are positive, then I’m more likely to visit that restaurant. But who’s writing the reviews?

Some websites are now trying to prevent abuse of their review systems by allowing the reviewers to be reviewed! They’re building an online community, users are making online friends with other reviewers, rating them on the quality of their comments. If I read a negative review from a user and that user has a large number of ‘friends’ that rate their reviews, then I can deduce that this is likely to be a genuine review, and someone who’s opinion can be trusted.

Here at Infoserve, our business model is based on selling local search solutions to SMEs. We offer a wide variety of excellent solutions, but as yet don’t allow users to post reviews of local businesses. Why not?

The sales pitch! When a potential client realises anyone can write a review about their business and they can’t remove or edit that review, they are understandably apprehensive. What’s to stop one disgruntled customer or competitor posting a highly negative review of their business?

The Holy grail of local search will be the product that offers the best possible results and experience for the users, and the best possible, cost effective, advertising platform for the business; a site which serves both the consumer and the advertiser in equal measure.

Reviews are great for the user who wish to make an informed choice about a service or product, but they’re a potential deal breaker when trying to sell a local search solution to a restaurant for example; they just don’t like the idea that they could be given a poor rating! Here lies the conflict of interests; we at Infoserve strive to provide the best possible local search solution for our clients, making sure the consumer can find them when they are actively looking for a product or service, and we do this very well.

However, one cannot exist without the other. Without high visitor numbers, we couldn’t put our clients in front of a large number of potential customers, and if we don’t offer the best possible user experience for people searching for businesses, they could potentially use another site. Our cityvisitor site has 4 million users each month so we certainly have the traffic, but can we improve the experience for our users searching for a local business?

With an ever growing database of 3 million UK business records, we offer the best local search solutions in the UK, but the holy grail is still out there, and we’re searching - pardon the pun - for that illusive perfect solution!

“Traditional media resent the widening imbalance between themselves and their digital rivals who have a free hand”, writes the reporter.

Compared to Google’s remarkably unregulated online presence, you can understand their frustrations. The article reports that Google’s total internet ad spending is set to overtake the TV sector in 2009 so it’s quite astonishing that competition law has not yet crept into our online lives.

Could some form of potential combination between Microsoft and Yahoo! created a significant competitor in the market and challenge Google’s supremacy? Has the recent Google and Yahoo! deal put a stop to that? With numerous commentaries on Google’s market share rising to an all time high however, the article is also right in saying that media buyers cannot afford to exclude Google from their online campaigns by relying on the smaller search engines.

Here at Infoserve, we are in the lucky position of having close relationships with both Google and Yahoo!, but if it’s one thing this article has proved, online advertising is rocketing. Advertisers’ investment in local internet advertising services are projected to grow from $8 billion in 2007 to nearly $20billion in 2011 so if you’re not on board already, now is definitely the time to take advantage of the online boom.