Announced by Google on March 25 that Google is providing a way for websites to opt out of having their content that Google has crawled appear on Google Shopping, Advisor, Flights, Hotels, and Google+ Local search.

Basically, Webmasters can choose this option through Google’s Webmaster Tools.

If your website contents have already been crawled and being displayed on Shopping, Advisor, Flights, Hotels, or Google+ Local search pages, and now you want them disappear from Google radar, Google promises to remove them within 30 days when you use that opt-out tool.

Unbelievable! Anybody in the search engine marketing world would need that?

Come on! It’s crazy. Who wants to opt out from being displayed on Google? I mean how much do I wish to have my contents being displayed and ranked on the first page of Google search results page. Especially those results page of shopping, flights, hotels and Google+ Local search pages. (Google+ Local was Google places before, in case you didn’t aware it.)

Go search Google for “cheap air tickets” for example, see how many search results are being displayed? 52 million! Google even add a search box directly on top of all organic search results. That tells us that Google itself is making money by attracting clicks on that search box there. Because flight niche is just too hot and too rich.

The same situation for shopping, hotels and Local search! Every business owner would love to beg for that display on first page of Google search results, even if it does cost big. For hot niches like hotels, people spend $10 or higher per click to display their ads on Google search result pages.

And the funny thing about Google shopping is, the way I know that to display the products on Google Shopping is by placing advertisements there. Not aware that Google will automatically crawl and display products from any eCommerce site on their shopping channel. Woo…I wonder what eCommerce sites would avoid such free ride on Google Shopping.

However I understand that any website will have some sort of contents that only available to maybe registered users. And I wondered if they could put some meta tag code to tell Google bot to avoid crawling or indexing those pages, would it be easier than having whole website being opt out of Google search results using that opt-out tool?

Original contents from DelphineZhu.com - real estate marketing, social media marketing, mobile marketing, app marketing, SEO and more

The goal for search engine marketing is to rank website for keywords chosen. We all know that it involves tons of work and effort from SEO the website itself to pick the right keywords, all the way to build network of linkings in order to push the rankings.

Although we put a lot of effort, there will still be no guarantee of ranking even if we do attain rankings for certain keywords today. What is even worse, the cost of acquiring new customers, by keyword targeting, is rising as more and more SEO marketers compete for the same group of keywords.

According to a Harvard Study a few years back, it can cost five times as much to acquire a new customer as it does to keep a current customer. Isn’t it wise to lower the cost of new customer acquisition, but how?

The goal is to increase the conversion rate, i.e. ROI. If you did a lot of PPC Adwords or similar, you must be familiar with conversion. And you know that if you want to run a successful Adwords campaign, you got to setup groups of ads to target different groups of visitors using different groups of keywords. In marketing world, it is called segmentation. The more specificly and accuately you segment your audiences, the higher conversion your PPC ads campaign will get.

In organic search marketing world, segmentation is also the key. Segmentation in another word is “knowing the customer”. Did you really know your customers? How would you segment your customers?

Most of the time, certain customer can be segmented into several different groups depending on how you segment your market. The most common segmentation is by demographic (age, occupation, education, race, religion and so on), occasion (that is when this group of people buy things from you), and benefit (that is what benefit this group of people are seeking for).

Now it becomes easy to understand why segmentation is the key to increase the conversion, thus to lower the cost of new customer acquisition. Because individuals at their ages are seeking for certain product or service that will only solve their individual problem or meet their individual need. If you deliver the right message (benefit) at the right time (occasion and demographic), people will likely be interested in what you offer.

Take a look at your website structure and landing page. Did it address segmentation? Could it be not segmented enough? Has it gone too broad? Are you talking about benefits a lot when you should be focusing on occasion?

Talk to Vancouver online marketing consultant and seek advice on how to properly structure your website to increase conversion.

Original contents from DelphineZhu.com - real estate marketing, social media marketing, mobile marketing, app marketing, SEO and more

Why? Because organic search engine still reigns.

Natural search results, which are also known as organic search results, are critical to be successful in marketing online. After all, people are easily giving up after just one or two clicks when searching for something on the internet.

According to iCrossing, of all the organic search visits, 95.8% were on Google’s first page and then left for other search terms; only 2.5% of them went to the second page; and the remaining 1.7% might go further to third or forth pages.

That was true across the big three search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing), with at least 95% of traffic from each originating from the first page of results after a nonbranded search. Less than 2% of search-referred traffic came from clickers persistent enough to look for results after the second page.

That’s why businesses owners are willing to invest big in search engine optimization so they will appear in those results and benefit from the huge portion of clicks that go to the top hits.

Note: The market share of organic search visits between three major search engines: Google 74%; Yahoo 13%; Bing 13%.

Original contents from DelphineZhu.com - real estate marketing, social media marketing, mobile marketing, app marketing, SEO and more

What’s the word to better describe “Email deliverability”? – “Inbox placement rate” (IPR)

I think this better explains what marketers mean when they say “delivered” – because anywhere other than the inbox is not going to generate the kind of response that marketers need. The problem with the term “delivered” is that it is usually used to mean “didn’t bounce.” While that is a good metric to track, it does not tell you where the email lands. Inbox placement rate, by contrast, is pretty straightforward: how much of the email you sent landed in the inbox of our customers and prospects?

Now let’s come back to how achieving a high inbox placement rate is like search. If you run a web site, you certainly understand what SEO and SEM are, you care deeply about both, and you spend money on both to get them right. Whether “organic” or “paid,” you want your site to show up as high as possible on the page at Google, Yahoo, Bing, whatever. Both SEO and SEM drive success in your business, though in different ways.

The inbox is different and a far more fragmented place than search engines, but if you run an email program, you need to worry both about your “organic” inbox placement and your “paid” inbox placement. If you are prone to loving acronyms you could call them OIP and PIP.

What’s the difference between the two?

With organic inbox placement, you are using technology and analytics to manage your email reputation, the underpinning of deliverability. You are testing, tracking, and monitoring your outbound email. Seeing where it lands – in the inbox, in the junk mail folder, or nowhere? You are doing all this to optimize your inbox placement rate (IPR) — just as you work to optimize your page rank on search engines. One of the ways you do this is by monitoring your email reputation (Sender Score) as a proxy for how likely you are to have your email filtered or blocked. The more you manage all of these factors, the greater likelihood you will be placed in inboxes everywhere.

With paid inbox placement, you first have to qualify by having a strong email reputation. Then you use payment to ensure inbox placement, and frequently other benefits like functioning images and links or access to rich media. With this paid model, there’s no guarantee to inbox placement (don’t let anyone tell you otherwise), just like there’s no guarantee that you’ll be in the #1 position via paid search if someone outbids you. But by paying, you are radically increasing the odds of inbox placement as well as adding other benefits. There is one critical difference from search here, which is that you need good organic inbox placement in order to gain access to PIP. You can’t just pay to play.

Original contents from DelphineZhu.com - real estate marketing, social media marketing, mobile marketing, app marketing, SEO and more

Every business tend to brand its uniqueness against many other competitors who provide same or similar products or services. For the purpose of SEM (Search Engine Marketing), branding sometimes may go conflict with all the marketing effort to get traffic with high relevancy.

For example, a video conferencing company spends all its marketing efforts to brand themselves as a “video communications” company, just because their competitors do conferencing. But the problem is their customers do not see them as a “video communications” company. Their clients want video conferencing, and that’s what they see them as.

Keyword Search SEM

So when they put “video communications” as their main keyword to SEO their pages and hyperlinks, they got problem: their prospects couldn’t find them easily on search engines. That is a big mistake. A severe marketing mistake!

The correct way to both brand their business and to better SEM, they should add keyword modifier to their main keyword “video conferencing”. One way of doing that is to put location, i.e. county, zip code, into the main keyword.  “video conferencing Vancouver”  is a good keyword modifier sample. To add words which describing your quality is another great idea. For example, they can use “best video conferencing” or a combination of two as “best video conferencing Vancouver”.

Overall, it’s not an easy job to find those keyword modifiers which are both relevent to your services and attracting as many highly targeted traffics as possible to your site. It takes time and efforts in investigating and splitting test.

To employ a SEM expert to do the job for you will save you huge amount of time and money, if you don’t know how to do them yourself.

Original contents from DelphineZhu.com - real estate marketing, social media marketing, mobile marketing, app marketing, SEO and more