WebProNews

Tag: bruce clay

  • Local Paid Inclusion And What Bruce Clay Said About It Ahead Of The New Year

    This week, Bruce Clay, a respected search engine marketing agency (whose founder WebProNews has interviewed many times) launched something called Local Paid Inclusion. The official description said:

    Local Paid Inclusion is a Google, Yahoo and Bing contracted service and is offered as an approved official program in cooperation with those search engines.

    Local Paid Inclusion promotes a local business’ profile page, like those found in Google Places, Yahoo Local and Bing Local, into a top position on the search result page for up to 30 keywords per profile page.

    This is a NEW program offered by Google, Yahoo!, Bing and 18 other major directories and indexes that places a business profile into a premium area above all other local profiles. Combine this with all of your other optimization programs to maximize your traffic.

    What this means is local businesses that participate can essentially pay for the top local ranking position!

    This caused some uproar among the SEO community, and has turned into a big, jumbled, confusing PR disaster.

    There was indication from Bruce Clay that a company called Universal Business Listings was involved, but UBL denied this in communications with Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan, who also shares a pair of statements from Google and Bing (respectively):

    “We are not working on any program that enables a site to pay to increase ranking in organic search results.”

    “Bing has no interest in paid inclusion into the local algo that artificially impacts ranking of algo results…. Microsoft does not have an agreement with UBL today.”

    The denial from UBL seems fairly fishy, considering that Search Engine Watch, which first reported on Local Paid Inclusion this week, spoke to them on the phone, and they reportedly said the service was on hold.

    LocalPaidInclusion.com, the landing page for the service in question, now redirects to a statement from Bruce Clay Inc on the matter. It says:

    Late Monday, we announced the service “Local Paid Inclusion,” which we said gives local merchants higher rankings in the Places and local search results in Google, Yahoo! and Bing. We believed that the service offering was finalized between our backend partner and the aforementioned search engines.

    So far, we have determined that it is not a released program, made even more complicated by statements of confidentiality agreements that put the kibosh on further discussion. Bruce Clay, Inc. has ceased to engage in Local Paid Inclusion while we dig into confusing and contradicting statements.

    We announced what we believed to be a legitimate program where Bruce Clay, Inc. was going to be one of several distributors of this service. Our understanding of this service was that it impacted the sequence of entries within the Places or local results in search engines. And within that separate area of the results, this service would validate local profiles, assuring those entries would naturally result in appearing higher in the local results.

    There was misinterpretation of the information surrounding this service; mainly that it would impact the organic search results, instead of only the local results. We take responsibility for an unclear message being announced in an untimely manner, where specifics of the program were not disclosed and the messaging was jumbled.

    Bruce Clay, Inc. also takes responsibility for the early promotion of the service Local Paid Inclusion without taking the extra steps to verify these contracts existed as we understood them. For that, we apologize.

    We believed at the time that the offering was valid and acted accordingly. We did not collect money at this time, choosing to only set up a notification contact list dubbed “pre-registration” for when the program formally released.

    Bruce Clay, Inc. has always been committed to ethical search engine marketing practices that work alongside the values of the search engines: to serve the end user and provide exposure to businesses. This program seemed to be a solid way for local merchants to validate themselves online and to have their companies be found.

    At this time, it’s our highest priority to be as clear as possible on this issue with the business and search communities. Bruce Clay, Inc. is prepared to openly discuss this matter as best we can with media and community to be as transparent as possible.

    We will make every effort to answer looming questions as soon as we know more, but please understand that we are forced to work within confidentiality agreements, and may be unable to talk specifics.

    We are currently working to better understand all of the contractual agreements in place, if any, with those search engines regarding this service.

    We also need to thank the various social communities and search marketers for their passion regarding this matter; the voices were heard loud and clear, showing there’s no lack of diligent, inquisitive and knowledgeable marketers and business people in our community.

    In the meantime, Bruce Clay, Inc. has withdrawn Local Paid Inclusion pending our further research into this matter. And the site LocalPaidInclusion.com has been taken down while this issue is resolved.

    Clay himself talked about Local Paid Inclusion in an interview with WebProNews in December.

    “There’s a group of people that remember the Yahoo Search Submit Pro, which is a process where you could pay them, and it would get you into the index,” said Clay in the interview. “What seems to be forming is the ability to create a premium, local entity, much like a Places type page,except across the various engines – their own respective ‘Places’ if you will. And that you create a premium account, and that the premium account would allow you to appear at the top of the local results.”

    “Now, those premium accounts have additional features,” he continued. “One would be the ability to put in a call tracking type system, where you could actually appear at the top of the local results and have a phone number appear there – and much like pay-per-click, if they click on that phone number or they call that phone number, there would be a fee paid to the search engine. So it’s a fairly similar concept to Search Submit Pro of years gone by. I’m pretty sure we’re going to see that emerge as a significant local resource in 2012. It is in the process, and we’re actually building a product around it, assuming all those pieces come to be in 2012. And I think that it has to be.”

    “I think there’s going to be a natural tendency for people to click more in the organic space, and the organic space includes…the Places type results,” he continued. “The local results. And those local results will get a lot of clicks. Or they will get a lot of interest, because a lot more local people are going to be doing searches. There has to be a way to monetize that. And I think that paid inclusion is actually the least intrusive, the most easily embraced, keyword-centric way to be able to do that.”

    “The way I envision it working is: there will be a base fee, there’ll probably be a fee added for call tracking…and the search engines are going to share that with a channel,” he said. “In which case you’re going to see a great many people encouraging (as SEOs) their clients to embrace a local paid inclusion program.”

    “The earliest adopter, if you can base it on history, will be the Yahoo and Bing environment,” he said at the time. “They’re likely to embrace it, and Google will watch it, and of course invent their own version of it that’s a little bit better in the eyes of Google. Now I think that the program will be somewhat similar across all of them to facilitate the ease of selling it. I don’t think anybody wants to be particularly different from everybody else…”

    Based on the statements Sullivan received, it doesn’t sound like the search engines are much interested in this at all.

    In the video, Clay then goes on to talk about his company’s other local business service “LocalWare,” which promises: local SEO, custom keyword research, content development, SEO-friendly CMS with “pristine code” to support local organic SEO, optimization of other online avenues such as Google Places, Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Yelp, et. and “Bruce Clay’s world-class online Seo training for you and your team.”

    WebProNews is communicating with Bruce Clay, and will have more details as they become available.

  • Google Panda, Google+, and Other Search Events of 2011

    It’s hard to believe that 2011 is drawing to a close, but it is. That said, if you could sum up the search industry over the course of the year in one word, what would it be? According to search veteran Bruce Clay, that word is “turmoil.”

    What do you remember most about the search industry in 2011? Let us know.

    Looking back at 2011

    The turmoil that Clay was referring to was largely because of Google’s Panda update. As WebProNews previously reported, Google rolled out its Panda update in an effort to target low quality sites across the Web. The impact of it, however, was extremely significant. Many people, such as Dani Horowitz of DaniWeb, saw their site drop dramatically and had no idea why.

    “We’ve determined, or at least convinced ourselves, that linking, the quality of your inbound link networking, is also part of the quality of your site certainly at a trust level,” said Clay. “Trust scores and components associated with the quality of how your site connects to everybody is part of the factor to determine whether or not you are a site worthy of ranking.”

    He went on to say that Panda was “disruptive” but that he thought, in the end, that it had helped Google’s search results.

    “Overall, I think that the results have improved,” he said.

    Google also released a “Freshness” update not long ago that was intended to index fresher content more quickly. From Clay’s perspective, this update really only impacts news content. Fortunately, most people seem to be hopeful about it.

    Another move, however, that Google made that did and will continue to have an impact on the search industry was Google’s move to encrypt search. If you remember, Google said it would begin encrypting logged-in searches that users do by default when they are logged into Google.com. For SEOs, this means that they will not receive referral data from the websites consumers click on from Google search results.

    Although Google claimed the move was done to protect user privacy, most SEOs – Clay included – aren’t buying into this theory, mostly because the move did not impact advertisers.

    “I really think that the intent there was more to allow Google to see what we are searching for themselves because they are now in the stream,” said Clay. “It’s sort of not a universal privacy issue [because] people don’t know, many times, that it’s an ad.”

    While Google announcements have primarily dominated the 2011 recap thus far, the yearly events do go beyond the search giant. For starters, social media is bleeding over much more into search. Clay told us that social media, and especially Twitter, has changed how people find sites.

    In other words, social media is becoming a replacement for the browser. Searchers look to their social networks for recommendations and reviews before they visit the brand sites. Clay said that this shift in behavior is still resulting in conversions even though the traffic is down.

    Speaking of social and search, Google’s release of its own social network Google+ was another significant move during the year. Clay told us that it doesn’t have a big impact on search at this point, but he suspects it will.

    In terms of the other search engines, Clay said that Bing has held its own during the year. Microsoft and Yahoo collectively appear to be growing in search share, but Clay said he thinks the reason is because Ask and AOL have lost some.

    Looking ahead to 2012

    Going forward into 2012, Clay has several predictions. For starters, he believes that Google Panda will continue. In fact, he said that the image should be changed to a polar bear instead of a panda because it would get meaner and more aggressive.

    “Google is in the business of making money,” he said. “Everybody needs to recognize that Google is a money generator.”

    For this reason, he believes that Google will also integrate Google+ into search in 2012. A few years ago, Google went from a “one size fits all” approach with search to personalized search results. In order to make these results geared more toward individuals instead of groups of people, Clay explained that Google+ would give the search giant this ability.

    “The best way to get your history is to just watch you and, I think, Google+ is that tool,” he said.

    “It is entirely within reason for Google, every time you login to Google+, for them to know where you are,” he added.

    As far as the other search engines go, Clay told us that Bing has good technology and that it would grow, especially in light of its partnerships with both Facebook and Mozilla.

    While some have already written Yahoo out of the search market, Clay said that Yahoo would remain a leader in the space. According to him, it’s out of the spidering business but not the search or algorithm business.

    “It’s kind of hard to criticize a company that only did a billion dollars in business,” he pointed out.

    In addition, Clay said that local search would continue to grow in 2012. Due to this growth, he thinks the search engines will begin to monetize it through a concept called local paid inclusion. He said it would be similar to Yahoo’s Search Submit Pro and that the companies would pay to get included in the top of the search results.

    Clay thinks the premium listing will have a call tracking system associated with it that would work like PPC ads work. For instance, if the number is clicked, the company pays the search engine. Based on past trends, he believes that Bing and Yahoo will offer this service before Google. He said that Google typically watches services from other companies and then develops their own version of it.

    Clay said we could expect this element as soon as January and believes so strongly in the concept that Bruce Clay Inc. is already preparing to offer services in this area.

    According to Clay’s predictions for 2012, the year looks to be just as interesting as 2011. Do you agree?

    What do you think the search industry will hold for 2012? Will it be as “disruptive” as 2011? Please comment.

  • If “Likes” Are The New Links, Content Quality Should Increase

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  • Is Ranking Number One in Google Losing Its Significance?

    As you may have noticed, Google has been putting a great deal more emphasis on local these days than in years past. That includes everything from the introduction of Google Places and Place Pages to automatically showing more local results for certain searches, as well as various other solutions offered to businesses at the local level, such as product inventory or tag advertising. Google caters much more to location-based search and local business search than ever before, and that trend is likely to continue. 

    Do you think classic organic search is losing importance? Share your thoughts.

    Local Rises to the Top

    WebProNews spoke with well-known SEO industry analyst Bruce Clay of Bruce Clay Inc. at PubCon about search trends and where the search industry is headed. Local is only one facet of this, but it’s a big facet.  "Certainly the enhancements have been gradual…now, anybody that has a local result, the first organic link is down below the fold," says Clay. "I never expected that to happen…the organic links, they’re gone. For the last four or five months, I’ve been saying that the new page one in the search results is really positions one, two, and three. That is page one. And I think Google agrees."

    "If you look at some of the results, our benchmarks have shown that commonly, there will be seven organic results on the first page, and sometimes as few as four results that are organic on the first page of the Google results set – right now," he says. "So does Google owe any loyalty to what is traditional organic? Of course not. Now, the argument I would say for Google, is that if they’re gonna throw up some local results, they’re gonna argue that those are organic, and that they’re more targeted to location, and therefore that they’re more relevant to the normal organic results, in which case they’re carrying forward with organic results. It’s just that they’re not organic like anybody in the SEO space has ever thought of before."

    So SEOs, webmasters and businesses really have to consider how the SEO game has changed in this way. You can’t expect people to go past the first page of results. It happens, but I’m guessing it happens less and less as people adjust their queries to find what they’re looking for when the results don’t provide it. The addition of Google Instant has only fueled this.

    Cracking the Local Code

    "It [local] has its own algorithm," says Clay. "It’s based on certain kinds of voting systems. We’ve been able to effectively get people into the seven-pack almost all the time. The difference is that the placement within the seven pack hasn’t been deciphered yet. It seems to be random. It is to some degree an accuracy of data factor, and to some degree it’s a review factor. So both of those will play."

    "I think that 30% (I think is the number right now) of all results show some sort of local flavor," Clay continues. "What we’re seeing is not so much that 30% have maps, but that the actual body of the search results change to have local sites intermixed. So if you look at a set of results and find positions one through ten, they’re all laid out. If I change my location (in the column, you can change where you’re at)…if I change it from California to New York, I get an entirely different set."

    "I noticed just going from my office in California to Las Vegas I got different results, even for terms like ‘search engine optimization’ which is not a shopping term per se, I had a different sequence in the top ten," he explains. "So clearly Google is using geo-location of the searcher to bias the search results. That’s happening in almost everything I see."

    The breadth of terms that Google thinks users want local results for seems to be expanding, or at least has expanded from years past. Google has an opportunity to increase its revenue significantly because of this, the way Clay sees it. 

    "We’re also seeing that local’s showing up more for short terms like one-word phrases like ‘shoes’," Clay points out. "You search for ‘shoes,’ you get a map. That’s just the way it is. And you search for ‘tools’ and you get a map. And things that used to just be ‘what is it?’ are no longer ‘what is it?’. They’re considered to be…if you’re looking for shoes, you’re obviously looking for a shoe store, and they’re sort of assuming that as they go. That kind of a behavior when you see it in search results is really what we’re facing."

    Bruce Clay Talks Google Going LocalGoogle’s Motivation? 

    "We’re facing a general shift towards local results, and Google is clearly motivated," he adds. "You would think, using shoes as an example, that there are only so many people that can bid on the word shoes. It’s a national term. If I go local, I have a hundred thousand different opportunities to sell shoes. Every region can have their own bidding on shoes, and people can make money and bid…it’s like local phone books. And it is. And everybody can participate and bid and get on the web."

    "And if I do geo-targeted then the return-on-investment’s gonna go up," he continues. "As I make more money, I’m more willing to spend more on my pay-per-click. So on a per-click basis, Google has an opportunity to make 50% more doing nothing more than allowing it to be targeted by location. So Google, perhaps at a greed level or a business level or a democratic level is actually able to make more money the more they promote it."

    What’s good for Google is also good for users though. The fact of the matter is that location does matter a lot, when you’re talking about relevancy. It’s one of many factors, much like social (which we’ll no doubt see a great deal of emphasis from Google on as well, going forward) that caters to the individuals searcher, and as location tracking is becoming the norm, these results can get pretty fine-tuned to where the user is at any given time. 

    Moving Forward

    "I think that local is here to stay," says Clay. "I think it’s big, and I think you either play in the local space and either figure out how to get into the seven-pack or you’re not gonna get the clicks, even if you’re number one."

    While there is no question that SEOs and marketers are going to have to continue to adapt to this ever-changing landscape, it may actually mean great things for people working on the web including SEOs, but also designers, developers, etc. 

    "It turns out that 92% of all businesses in the United States – serve a 50 mile radius from where they’re physically located, and that hardly any of these…are on the Internet," says Clay. "That means, especially when you couple it with the emphasis of Google to start doing local kinds of results, that means we’re going to see a massive influx of websites. Brand new websites are going to enter…they’re going to star showing up, they’re going to start ranking, they’re going to start competing. These are sites that have never been here before."

    "There’s going to be a multitude of web designers now getting involved, a lot of SEOs or wannabe SEOs are going to be getting involved," he adds. "We’re going to see a lot of people wanting a quick hit – ‘Hi, I built my site, how come nobody’s beating my door down?’ There’s going to be a little bit of a two steps back approach to SEOs – a bunch of people ripping us off. There may be some attempts at spam, although I think Google’s going to be fighting that."

    There will likely be new kinds of spam, as he suggests. 

    Read this for more interesting commentary from Clay regarding the search market in general. 

    Do you think this shift towards local is a good thing for Google? For users? Tell us what you think.

  • Is a Shake-Up Brewing in the Search Market?

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  • Is Google Indexing Your Content Faster with Caffeine?

    During SMX Advanced recently, Google announced that Caffeine, its big overhaul to its indexing system, was completely rolled out.

    At the event, WebProNews talked to Google’s Matt Cutts about it. Talking about how Caffeine affects webmasters, he compared it to having a limo waiting to pick you up at the airport, as opposed to having to catch a bus (the system before Caffeine). As much as Matt’s commentary is generally valued throughout the industry, it’s always good to hear commentary from people outside the company as well.

    WebProNews has interviewed Bruce Clay of Internet Marketing firm Bruce Clay, Inc. a number of times at various conferences, and he always has a lot of interesting things to say about the search industry. Hear what he has to say about Caffeine among other plenty of other things in the following interview:

    It’s been over a week since the Caffeine announcement was made. Have you noticed your content getting indexed faster? Comment here.

  • Examine Your Site’s Text, Reduce Chances of Search Engine Confusion

    Has it ever occurred to you that you may have keywords on your site that are misleading to search engines? Or that you need to take a look at all of the keywords you are trying to rank for, and think about the different meanings and contexts that those could be taken in that are unrelated to your actual product, and then eliminate other seemingly unrelated words that to a search engine could be misconstrued as an indication of one of those other contexts?

    At SMX West last week, WebProNews sat down with Bruce Clay of Internet Marketing firm Bruce Clay, Inc. who made some interesting points about understanding searcher behavior, intent-based search, and how that should affect keyword research.

    Note: We talked to Bruce about quite a few search-related topics, but this subject is focused on more toward the end of the video (about 20 minutes in).

    Clay talks about Google delivering more personalization in search results, taking into consideration things like how prior queries influence future queries. "Ranking is going to be less of a measurement," he says. "We’re going to be focused on more the traffic."

    "When I decide I’m selling a hammer, I have to actively go out of my way not to have certain things appear in my site, because the search engines could be confused about what I’m talking about….I don’t mean the Armand Hammer Art Museum at UCLA. I don’t mean a bowling ball…you know, the things that show up for hammer are all over the board," says Clay.

    "One of the things that I think is important, and that we’ve been working on is how do we actually do keyword research without knowing the behavioral aspects our personas that are actually going for our product? You have to understand personas now a little bit better – what kinds of things are they likely to search on, in sequence – before they type in hammer…so if they’re on an arts and crafts site, and then they type in hammer, I ought to understand that behavior in sequence, so that I can better do my keyword research and determine how I’m gonna put the words on my page. I don’t see a lot of people even thinking that way."

    Personalized search is nothing new. Google’s been personalizing search results for some time, based on various indicators, and it appears that Google is looking for more ways to deliver users a personalized experience (whether they want that or not).

    Between personalized search and other sources of information infiltrating search results pages, traditional SEO is becoming harder to accomplish, and Bruce says, even ineffective. That’s why it may become increasingly important to focus on relevant elements of the SERP for queries you hope to be found for.