SoLoMo – the way online search is changing

Social

Local

Mobile

Another buzz term from Web Marketing industry but this time highly focused on holistic approach to online and offline marketing which we find very appealing.

In recent weeks perfect case study how SoLoMo concept can be used for the benefit of everyone show cased at “The Big Egg Hunt” in London. Event organised by Action for Children and Elephant Family in cooperation with Fabergé. Voluntary egg patrols have been created, hospital egg news make in to Facebook and Twitter and as fight with “baddies” continues we learn about eggs reclaimed by the Met Police in main stream media. All this to generate more money for charity in a fun way – SoLoMo in it’s best!

Time to find out how you can leverage this online marketing concept in your own business:

Google is a leader in web technologies and concepts there is no difference with SoLoMo. Some of the Google services allow SoLoMo concept to exist in the first place and span together your online activities. The most important is business tool Google Places. Recent updates from Google search Team show us how important this area is for Google delivering good search results.

Google ‘Venice’ Search Results Update

From February, Google are relying more heavily on main search rankings as a signal for your associated Google Places listings, meaning if you have strong natural rankings in Google’s main index, your local listing in Google Places will have higher positions.

Top 5 Google Places Ranking Factors

Having the same city in your description as the search is associated with a 1.42 improvement in rankings.
Having at least one photo, and having ownership of listing verified is associated with a combined 1.18 improvement in rankings.
Having the search category (or synonym) in the business name and/or description is associated with a 0.75 improvement in rankings.
Having a secondary business category that is a broader category than the search category is associated with a 0.68 improvement in rank. i.e. secondary category is “restaurant” when search is for “surrey pizza.”
Having 5 or more Google reviews was associated with a 0.31 improvement in rankings.

As we touched reviews we can not overlook little stars more and more often popping up on Google. Some of these are unfortunately irrelevant but some from services like Trip Advisor, Qype, Yelp and Trust Pilot have significant impact on our day to day purchasing decisions.

QR Codes

These are essence of SoLoMo marketing – funny looking square images which you can get printed on any of your marketing materials or even displayed on interactive display screens on public transport or in local pub.

Use them in your leaflets, flyers, etc.
Put posters in your shop window for local passers-by to scan.
Try OKNO.co.uk to create free QR codes and short links.
Try Likify.net for more advanced “Scan to Like” Facebook functionality (also works with Twitter Follows).

Listening to the Social Noise, Locally

Just like listening to your local radio station, use twitter as a tool to listen out for all recent tweets people have tweeted using your local area hashtag. For example search twitter for #croydon (to see what’s happening in Croydon, right now!).
Try TweetDeck to make your own social listening hub, and listen to more than one hash tag simultaneously.
Events may prove to be good way of communicating with people focused on particular subject. Football Equipment producer and local pub can both generate business from Euro 2012 or London Olympics events. For one business “Local” means their town for others country make sure you recognise where your “Local” audience is.

Facebook/Twitter Location Access (mobile)

Use it in your posts to promote your whereabouts.
Use your own Facebook Page as a location setting to promote your business name within your status updates.

The times small business was able effectivly keep the fort on the top of the results for “short tail” keywords is over. But world of web offers now huge opportunities to explore impossible to explore layers of knowledge. Similar to businesses for users search world is also changing rapidly from:

- 10 blue links with bit of text in 2006 through to

- Universal Search Pages in to

- Personalised Search Result Pages with microformats and even further into

- Augmented Reality Search

Business web marketing become rocket science over last few years we are now on approach to make choices in our business setup. We may soon need “profesional internet researches” to show us our way around. Similar to the way we institutionalise profession of librarians to help us search for books about 120 years ago we may soon need graduates in “Internet Searches”.

The last advice for businesses is connected to overall perception by potential customers. Make sure you monitor your business performance if you realise you have more leads from website than from other sources is time to focus on web. Do not delay investment and make sure you investing wisely.

Enjoy Easter!

Which is better SMX London or SES London?

Facebook Timeline Becoming Mandatory (How to Opt Out)

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Last year we posted about the brand new Facebook profile layout “Timeline”. Back then it was an opt-in feature however, in the next few weeks it will become a mandatory update. If you don’t like it you can opt-out by sending a request to delete your Facebook profile.

As much as everyone complains about new Facebook updates and layouts I’d have to say this is one of the worst. It’s not just a small change it’s a whole new profile design and if you use it to its full potential, a new way for Facebook to gain more information about you. It also means that some unwanted or purposefully forgotten updates could reappear.

What do you think? Will you be boycotting Facebook, or have you found a real opt-out?

Let us know in the comments ( :

New Google Privacy Policy 2012 (60 in 1)

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Google managed to update it’s Privacy Policy model today. This is what you can come across when you login to Google from today (if actioned this message will disappear)

GoogleNet is almost here?

Over the years company took over a lot of businesses many with existing customers. Online services from YouTube, DoubleClick to Feedburner and many more had there own set of legal documents in place. During last 12 months we can see extra effort in bringing all these services in to one manageable system. This of course is not very smooth operation and Google managed to upset few people and institutions in the process. However difficult gradually whether we like it or not we are closer to Googlenet then ever before.
Google claims is managing currently over 60 privacy policies and is willing to replace them from 01/03/2012 with one which will serve everything from searching to sharing and browsing (You can read new policy here). Of course we can imagine all this is to do with cutting budget measures but we must mention recent advance of https in Google’s infrastructure as one of the elements which will show interesting results in the near future especially for online marketers. From beta version and english based only service Google over ssl is now spreading to other languages

Encrypted search available on new regional domains. Google now offers encrypted search by default on google.com for signed-in users, but it’s not the default on our other regional domains (eg: google.fr for France). Now users in the UK, Germany and France can opt in to encrypted search by navigating directly to an SSL version of Google Search on their respective regional domains: https://www.google.co.uk, https://www.google.de andhttps://www.google.fr. [more about Jan 2012 Google update here]

We can soon expect many comments from legal and from technical gurus about one Privacy Policy changes from Google.

There are no shocking statements here but we must remember this page https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/ is perhaps now guarding Privacy of the biggest human database in the world!

Keyword Tool shows up as Untitled in Google SERP

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If you Google Keyword Tool today instead of the usual “Google AdWords: Keyword Tool” title showing up in the SERPs a less helpful and informative “Untitled” appears.

Going to the page reveals that the page title is not blank or set to untitled.

Any ideas why this would happen? Let us know in the comments!

UPDATE:
I found another!

While search in for “diamond football international” I found the title “nbsp; | &nbsp – Diamond Football International”. I now think Google is changing the way results appear in the SERPs, instead of just the content from the title tag appearing as the result title it take content from other sources including the H1 tag of the page and content from other pages.

Google Algorithm Changes 2012 – Results :-o

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It always makes me wonder how some companies perform and I’m jealous when I see all their operations are glossy and smooth. If I forgot to email customer or project schedule is off by few days I blame myself and feel low. I think how on Earth others are able to be always 100% on the highest level of performance – silly me – of course they not! I should learn this already after 14 years in business but somehow I fall in to this same trap over and over again. Recent well commented Google search improvement post get my extra attention today from end user point of view.

Days like today just give me this extra confidence schedules, implementation dates and always growing lists to do is not only my problem. Last week Google announced latest updates to their algorithm:

More relevant sitelinks. [launch codename “concepts”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] We improved our algorithm for picking sitelinks. The result is more relevant sitelinks; for example, we may show sitelinks specific to your metropolitan region, which you can control with your location setting.

All great, smooth I love this open cards policy where they work hard on communication with users and developers to let you understand what they completed, worked on. On official search blog they say “We improved”. On Google UK I see:

of course as you can see I was so shocked I visited landing page. “Good” – I think viagra content is not there

a bit of hesitation and Ivisited cached version. Oh, Noooo! 08/01/2012

Is there, is official – black-hat trick works and on I assume improved sitelinks algorithm too!!!

From one site I’m frustrated to see legitimate very resourceful website with UNESCO logo on explored by spammers. This is charity based organisation – What is wrong with you people? – Disgusting on multiple levels.

On the other hand on the back of my mind I remind myself my today’s concern how all this glossy and 100% confident PR bit from Google Search Blog is far from reality- good remainder – even for huge company with lots of cash and human resources each day list to do gets longer and job is far from being completed!

Does Site Links update needs another update? How about scaning sitelinks content on Google servers before serving them to the end user?

Do you know black-hat technique used on ihcn.in? Comments always welcome. Maybe Matt Cutts or someone from quality search will post here one day ;-)? Never mind I am going back to work my list to do get longer and longer!