Summer
2005, Must be the Season of the Niche
By Jim Hedger, StepForth News Editor, StepForth Placement Inc.
June 22, 2005
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The summer of 2005 is going to be an interesting one. The world of search
will be fundamentally different by Labour Day. From the recent changes
at Google (the effects of which will be shown over time in the core algorithm),
to the introduction of several unique types of search engines, dozens
of fresh ideas and innovations are finding their way onto our monitors
each day. The landscape of the search environment is going to alter its
appearance before the leaves change colour in mid-autumn. These changes
should serve to solidify the market for a number of new niches in the
search-marketing sector.
The environment has already shifted in substantial ways. For the most part,
these shifts seem natural and in most ways will be enormously beneficial
for search engine users, advertisers and marketers. It is a bit overwhelming
though. The introduction of so many new features, tools and types of search
in such a short time period makes it difficult to phrase thoughts about
the future of search, even three months down the road.
In the last year we have seen the introduction of new types of search tools
such as local search, vertically themed engines, video search, and desktop
search appliances. The four major search engines and about a dozen well
placed competitors have spent the year collectively inventing, innovating,
acquiring, and coping from each other. Not only are these new tools very
different from the general search engines of previous years, the quantity
and number of sources these tools draw references from has grown. As Andrew
Goodman points out at Traffick, the number of places a search-generated
reference might appear has also grown with Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN furiously
creating new real estate to display them on.
For search engine users, the environment is evolving in what appears to
be a beneficial way. Information continues to become more accessible as
the mainstream search engines learn to better sort results with stricter
relevancy standards. Local search offers users an experience combining the
Yellow Pages, comparison-shopping and instant mapping. Vertical search engines
cut a lot of static out from results by honing in on industry and interest
specific search results. Personalization features like desktop search applications,
toolbars and mega-storage search-friendly Email accounts can save hours
of looking for information.
Search engine users appear to endorse the new tools and features by adopting
their usage. A recent Harris Interactive survey commissioned by iCrossing
shows that consumers are rapidly adapting to make use of the various new
types of search.
According to the survey of 2139 US adults over April 19 – 21, 51%
use the Internet for shopping with 80% of them using the ‘net to compare
prices. Local search is gaining a presence with nearly 50% of users looking
for a local shop to purchase goods researched over the Internet. 54% of
searchers use the Internet to find people and businesses instead of the
phone book with most looking for personal contact information. By the end
of the summer, it is reasonable to expect this trend to have a major effect
on the services offered by search marketers and the expectations of their
clients.
The search marketing industry is already a highly stratified environment
with paid search marketing and organic search optimization defining the
two basic search-systems influencing the environment.
Those focusing on paid search marketing have spent the last year learning
to take full advantage of new places for ad placement created by the Big4
and their competitors. They are also learning how to best use the application
programming interfaces offered by the major search engines to target their
clients’ advertising based on geography, time and season. There has
been a rationalization in keyword prices over the past six months with a
general lowering of keyword click-bids but concerns over click-fraud continue
to grow.
Click-fraud in the pay-per-click market is said to be on the rise but a
highly professional niche is growing to address the problem. Since last
year, several firms have established PPC
Fraud analytics and detection services.
Anyone with a high ad-spend should consider the advice offered by these
firms
Another interesting paid-search niche is the growing Pay-per-call billing
model in which advertisers pay a flat-fee per call as opposed to a bid-fee
per click. Currently offered by AOL and MIVA (formerly FindWhat), Greg
Stirling from the Kelsey Group predicts the pay-per-call model could grow from its
infancy today to a $4billion industry by 2009. According to Stirling’s
study of the industry, major online publishers MediaTracks and ZiffLeads
are changing their business models to promote pay-per-call. Kelsey says
the pay per call model will help drive live-leads to businesses that tend
to be more valuable than electronic leads as there is immediate personal
interaction between the potential buyer and the vendor. As it is easier
to track telephone connections than it is to trace an individual over the
Internet, pay-per-call is also promoted as a solution to click-fraud.
Serving the most obvious paid-search niche is the legion of smaller firms
existing in, or jumping into, the search-advertising arena. From the major
traditional media publishers such as the New York Times or TimeWarner through
the AOL network to long-term players such as Kanoodle and MIVA, a significant
number of Internet users are being delivered paid-advertising that matches
the topic or context of the document the ad appears on, for fractions of
the costs of Google and Yahoo Search Marketing advertising.
Over on the organic Search Engine Optimization side of the industry, several
major changes that happened in the past twelve months are showing their
effects today.
The first has been the introduction of new forms of search such as local
search and vertical search tools. In both cases, unique databases are used
to extract search results, even when the service is offered by one of the
major search engines. Google local for instance draws its original results
from the Yellow Pages based on zip codes instead of drawing results from
its general database. The vertical search engine Become.com has its own
spidered database and its own propitiatory ranking algorithm known as Affinity
Index Ranking. By expanding the number of databases search results are drawn
from, the search firms inadvertently create new niches and services for
SEOs to specialize in.
A second trend over the past year is the flattening out of Google traffic
numbers and the subsequent increases MSN and Yahoo have enjoyed. Today,
the combined traffic driven by MSN and Yahoo exceeds that from Google. That
might not sound like a huge shift. Two years ago however, Google drove almost
85% of organic search traffic by feeding results to practically everyone.
For the past year, MSN and Yahoo have created their own spidered results.
This has led to a relevancy challenge between the major search engines.
New and unique algorithms are starting to take hold across the search landscape
with MSN, Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Become, and others using engine specific
algos instead of drawing results from a competitor. This trend leads to
specialization within SEO shops with different staff becoming expert in
different engines. For example, Google just updated its core algorithm and
is examining documents within websites with an ever-expanding view of a
website’s historic existence. This shift has led to a major shift
in link-building strategies and has pushed many SEOs to review their techniques.
Thing is, what works at Google won’t necessarily work with MSN, Yahoo,
or Ask Jeeves.
As search engine users become more adept at finding the best search service
for their specific need, the range of options for search advertisers in
both paid and organic search marketing systems is increasing. Users are
starting to adopt more sophisticated means of search and in turn search
engines and ad firms are becoming more sophisticated. As the knowledge necessary
to conduct a full fledge search engine marketing campaign has increased
exponentially, specialization of services is taking shape both in SEM shops
and in the world of freelance tech-workers. Established SEO and SEM shops
are hurrying to catch-up. Those entering the field might want to think about
niche-market SEO and SEM services. The environment is ready to support them
and for those with well-developed expertise, that environment is only getting
more resource-full.
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