The convenience of a single interface for both Yahoo and Bing is likely bring in more advertisers.  Despite AdCenter’s reputation for delivering a higher ROI than Google, many have found it brings in too little volume to be worth the effort.   But once there is a joint interface, that will no longer be the case.  Those advertising on Yahoo will most likely be automatically transferred over to the new platform, so it will become very easy (and possibly necessary) for them to advertise on Bing.  So Bing not only gets all the current Yahoo advertisers, they should get and influx of new advertisers who may not  be current Yahoo advertisers, but are willing to try the new interface because they cannot ignore the close to 30% market share that Yahoo & Bing will have combined.  So my guess is that many advertisers who have enjoyed a high ROI on Microsoft will start to see more ads competing with them for their keywords, and CPC will go up and ROI down.

The impact on Yahoo should be similar, with an increase in CPC, but to less an of extent than on Bing.  Yahoo already has a lot more advertisers than Bing, so the impact of a few more advertisers should, in general, have less of an effect on prices.   How the results from Bing look on the page could have an impact, but it is difficult to predict what that will be, so we will have to wait and see.

Aside from my concern about a rise in CPC, I look forward to the new joint advertiser platform, even though it is probably close to two years away and still has to pass anti-trust scrutiny.  I am impressed with what Microsoft has done with Bing, and if they take the best of adCenter and Yahoo and add in a few new improvements and tools, it could prove to be a productive and efficient way to reach the 30% of search that anyone who is just using Google is missing.

If you look at the Tour Bing section, you cannot help but notice the emphasis on “Travel” and “Shopping”.  These are big money segments of search, with many advertising dollars spent, and a great deal of money to be made here.  If Bing can give the “consumer” a better experience than Google on searches like these, they may be able to increase their share of this lucrative traffic, and then possibly get more people to use Bing as their standard search engine.  So the question is, does Bing do a significantly better job than Google on these fronts, and how does it do in general?

General Search

That is a tough call.  It certainly does succeed in some areas.  It has a very pleasant design, with a nice layout of search results.  The 3 column design often seems less cluttered than Google.  This may partially be due to the fact that most Bing searches have less advertising than Google, so Bing’s right hand column is often blank, where Google’s is crowded with ads.   In my opinion, it has Google beat on visual appeal.

The left column, with its related searches and categories (depending on what you search for), is attractive and useful.  I prefer it to the way Google simply adds its related searches to the bottom of the results.  I also found the related searches to frequently be very relevant.  Clearly their semantic search technology is working well.   They are making a very nice attempt at giving searchers results that relate to the intent in their search, and not necessarily just the keywords they searched on.  I think this is an admirable goal, and it is well executed.

But they key to search is still relevancy.  And Google still has the edge here.  I did dozens of searches, and most of Bing’s results were good, but they occasionally gave less relevant or less trustworthy results than Google did, or failed to understand my query as well as Google did.  For example, on the search “flight boston to la”, Google knew “la” meant “Los Angeles”.  Bing gave me results for La Guardia, la+caruna (Spain), and most notably, it’s #1 result was for flightclubla.com – an online store that sells trendy shoes and baseball hats.  Oops.

Shopping

Bing does have some nice features when shopping.  For example, take a search on “canon sd1000″.  Above the results is a nice layout featuring an image of the product, links to user reviews, expert reviews, ratings, and a way to shop for it.  That is pretty useful information, and it is presented nicely.  On the other hand, the first link in the search results is for canonsd1000salereview.com, which is clearly a spammy result.  Google gives you the official Canon site first, Bing gives it to you second.  Then Bing goes on to divide the results on the page into categories like “Canon SD1000 Review” and “Canon SD1000 Accessories”, which also can be very useful.

With travel, there is a similar presentation for cheap tickets that takes you directly to Bing Travel – which I am assuming is a great way for Microsoft to earn money from this traffic.  I played with it for a while, and cannot say yet whether this is any improvement over simply using Orbitz or other similar services.  But it certainly appears to be putting the money in Microsoft’s pocket.

In conclusion, Bing is a big improvement over MSN Live.  It is attractive, and it’s related searches, image and video results are well done.  It can deliver shopping related information nicely.  How much market share it will gain as a result remains to be seen.  I estimate that it should experience some growth with the new changes and the promotional blitz that is bound to follow.  It now just needs to improve the relevancy and trustworthiness of its results to be a real threat to Google.

This has led many people, including myself, to wonder whether this could be a serious competitor to Google, or change the way search is done.  No doubt, there are some searches that will be better served by Wolfram.  That alone leads me to believe that Google could lose some search volume to Wolfram.  The question is how much, and what kind of searches.  I imagine the loss will be small, at least for now.  First, Wolfram is NOT a search engine.   Try doing a search on Wolfram for “top law schools” or “guacamole recipe” – it does not know what to do with queries like that (yet). Second, Google already has basic computational abilities built in like a calculator and measurement conversions (though few people seem to know about them).  Thirdly, I estimate that the number of searches that would be better presented by WolframAlpha is comparatively small, as they are limited mostly to scientific queries. Additionally, those types of searches do not seem likely to be the kind that attract a lot of advertisers, and thus would have a lesser impact on Adwords revenue.

But just the fact that there now exists a site that is actually much better than Google for some searches is groundbreaking.  For example,  if you search “mortgage 5% 30 years” on Wolfram, you immediately get presented with an excellent mortgage calculator.  That definitely beats searching “mortgage calculator” on Google and getting back a list of links to sites that are typically crammed with advertisements.   It is a great way to get direct answers to some questions without having to sort through a list of websites that may or may not contain what you are looking for. Though I am sure that the owners of those sites are not at all happy about the prospect of losing traffic to Wolfram.

Overall, this is an exciting development and a monumental achievement by the folks at WolframAlpha.  How it impacts the search landscape remains to be seen.  But for some, it will certainly prove to be an immensely useful tool.

The data shows up in the results like this.  A search on “redbones, somerville ma”, turned up the Redbones site at first, and Yelp third:

To me, this is a more attractive and compelling listing than the standard listings, and should result in higher click through rates, making this a potentially very significant develpment for SEO.  We will have to see how this affects the rankings, but  it certainly looks like an opportunity for sites that have strong reviews to increase their click through rate.  My guess is that Yelp and CNet are going to get a big boost from this, especially in the short term, until other review sites are included.  Definitely something to keep your eye on.

I used it first to import my keyword data from my server logs (you have to download your logs first).   The software apparently uploads your log files to their servers, then analyzes them.  So it took a couple minutes for this process to finish.  But in only a couple minutes I had all the keywords people used to find my site, with usage data, loaded.   You can then see how many visitors each keyword or phrase brought in, with a graphical representation that looks like the textbook keyword distritbution curve, with a perfect long tail.  You can now add additional keywords if you like from your other keyword research tools.

The beauty of the software is that now you can very efficiently segment the keywords into tightly themed groups with just a few clicks.  You can just click on a keyword or phrase, then a list of all phrases containing that keyword or phrase will pop up, and then there is a list on the right that will allow you to segment further by choosing other keywords.  Additionally, you can search for keyphrases containing certain terms and get a list of all of those.  Once you have segmented a group down to something you would like to create and ad group for, with just a couple clicks you can create an ad group in AdWords with those keywords (you need to link an Adwords account first).   Once you get the hang of it, is is far faster than messing with Excel and then manually creating ad groups.

There are also some handy workflow tools that allow you to see what things you are working on need attention.  You can quickly see which add groups have too many keywords, need an associated landing pae, etc. When you are juggling multiple accounts and tons of ad groups, this can be really helpful.

For agencies or individuals who do a lot of keyword organization and ad group creation, this looks like it could not only save a lot of time, but could also really help you to create highly targetted ad groups that could improve your Quality Score.

They currently have a free trial that so you can play with the software before buying.   The pricing ranges from $300/month for small business, $500 for agency level, and $1,000/mo for enterprise level.

This is all easily done in the “Analytics Settings” page by clicking “Edit” next to the account you wish to edit, and then creating a Goal in the “Conversion Goals and Funnels” menu. Check out the Google help page on How to Setup Goals and Funnels for more details on how exactly to set them up.

Once Goals are setup, you can run reports to see which of online marketing efforts are paying off.  For example, you can go to the “All Traffic Sources” report, click on “Goal Conversion” and quickly see data on how referall traffic, organic search, or PPC are doing in regards to conversions and revenue per visitor.  To see the total amount brought in my each medium or source, you need to run a Custom Report.  Under “Metrics” in the custom report, choose an appropriate metric such as “Goal 1 Value” or “Total Goal Value”.  Under “Dimensions” choose “Medium” to see the totals for referall, direct, cpc, and organic – choose “Source” if you want to break it down by domain.  Now you have some essential data, and you can save this report and rerun it anytime you want.

1. Define your goals.  Are you looking to increase brand awareness, increase traffic, generate leads/sales etc.
2. Set up Conversion Tracking.  Without this, you have no idea whether or not your ads are generating revenue or that activity you are seeking.
3. Maximize your Quality Score.  Organize your keywords in to tightly themed ad groups linked to related landing pages.  It is better to have more ad groups with closely related terms, then a few ad groups covering a wide variety of terms. Use your SEO skills to optimize your landing pages so they are highly related to their associated keywords.
4. Test landing pages.  You can have a huge impact on the effectiveness of your advertising campaingns by testing versions of your landing pages.
5. Monitor your account frequently.  Run reports and see what kewords and ads are working and which are not.
6.  Analyze poor performing keywords.  Are they not relevant?  Do they have a low quality score?  Is the landing page relevant?  Consider moving them to their own ad group or removing them if they won’t convert despite a good ad, quality score, and landing page.

The above steps should keep you on track and ensure you are getting the best return on your ad dollar.

First, you need to know what phrases are common in your long tail.  They often consist of a variety of combinations of a few keywords.  One great way to find them is to use your server logs.  Use any good log analysis tool, (I like Deep Log Analyzer to see what terms people are currently using to find your site.  If your site has a decent amount of relevant content, you should have some traffic coming in using relevant keywords.  You can then see what words and phrases are being used.  Additionally, you can set up Google Analytics for free on your site and it will give you some great keyword data.  Of course, and especially if you don’t currently have much SE traffic, do some keyword research using a variety of tools like Google’s Keyword Tool or WordTracker. 

Look at what words and phrases are common in the long tail.  Often a great deal of the long tail will be made out of different combinations of just a few words.  Targetting the most popular of these words and prases will usually bring in the most traffic.

What you will need to do to optimize for these phrases depends on how competitive the landscape is and how many words you are going after.  In general, sites with the most keyword rich content do the best in the long tail.   Though  local business looking to grab more local traffic may only need to make sure their town is mentioned in the meta description and at the bottom of the page to suddenly rank well for queries that include the town name.    Consider ways to add more keyword rich content:

1. Make sure your pages have a good amount of TEXT.   If you can write a few paragraphs about your topic on each page, that is much better than just a few words next to a picture or video for SEO purposes.
2. Make more pages.  Sounds simple – and it is.  Make relevant, themed pages, with keyword rich internal linking.
3. Consider adding a blog.  A blog is the fastest and easiest way to add a great deal of content, and usually has very good internal linking built in.
4. Make sure to link to these pages internally with keywords in the anchor text.

Depending on how competitive your phrases are, you may or may not want to add specific pages with the long tail keywords in the title.  A good first step is to add some content, and make sure the most common words found in your long tail are found in the content.  If you find you are not ranking well for them, then consider adding dedicated pages with keywords in the title.