Web Marketing Strategy Update

I was catching up on SEOBook author Aaron Wall’s blog the other day. In this post he talks about how the new Google Toolbar 4 for IE suggests spelling corrections and keyword queries based on the search patterns of other searchers.

On the face of it you might think that’s rather mundane and pretty uninteresting news.

But you’d be wrong.

The key point Aaron raises is that these (semi) auto-correction features will effectively narrow down the range of search queries to the most common keyword phrases.

Here’s a simple example to help you visualize what that means (made up, so not factually correct, but illustrates the concept).

Queries from people without Google Toolbar who want to buy shoes:
“buy shoes”
“buy shoe”
“buy shose”
“shoes buy”
“shoe buy”
“shose buy”

Are all “corrected” by Google Toolbar search and spelling suggestions, to become:
“buy shoes”

The effect will be twofold:

1. Reduce the effectiveness of targeting mistyped, misspelled or otherwise imperfect search queries
2. Increase competition for the more mainstream keywords and thus drive up CPC

The latter reminds me of what happened years ago when Overture (now Yahoo Search Marketing or something, I still remember them as Goto!) started aggregating search terms for bidding purposes. It was sold to advertisers as making it easier for them to bid on many more related keywords, e.g. ebook = e-book = ebooks.

Whilst that was true, the bigger picture was that it pushed up bid prices by increasing competition across the board. Prior to that, it was possible to bid on thousands of less popular keyword variants for just a few cents and thus still get good traffic.

It’s possible that this is a backdoor way for Google to get the same revenue increase in Adsense without actually forcing it on advertisers — they’ll just find their ads on less popular terms aren’t bringing enough traffic because they seldom get searched.

But more importantly, focusing on a smaller set of keywords impacts Google search itself in some major ways:

It’s an easy way to help ensure searchers find what they are actually looking for more often, making for happy users. That maintains Google’s popularity, which in turn leads to more ad revenue.

Able to completely pass over it in many searches, Google would dramatically reduce the traffic it sends to content designed specifically to target poorly typed searches, making it pointless to create.

This would go a long way to reduce search engine spam, since this is the tactic most spammers use. But unfortunately, it’s also a tactic used by many small sites that aren’t able to compete head-on with bigger sites in their niche.

Assuming they can get enough surfers using the toolbar, this may actually be a master stroke by Google.

The truth is, right now, thanks to Adsense, Google makes a lot of money from spam sites. So if they really clamped down on the spam, they’d see a drop in profits (unhappy shareholders), unless they could somehow increase Adwords revenue in another way at the same time …

In addition to all that, presumably returning results for the same few queries over and over would enable more caching of results, reducing the number of actual searches Google has to make, thus reducing overhead (perhaps freeing up resources that can be used to improve relevancy? We’ve seen with Google Analytics that even the mighty Google can run out of resources).

Aaron reckons the new toolbar may also help train searchers how to search (leading to better search queries), but whether it does or doesn’t, I can’t see it being much of a factor. Perhaps I’ve misunderstood him, but as I see it, the searcher’s queries are being intercepted by the toolbar’s auto-suggesting anyway, making it largely irrelevant whether they are capable or poor searchers.

He also mentions Google locking-in users with the Toolbar (making it awkward / undesirable to switch once used), which I’m sure was the plan from the outset. The delay in roll-outs is just Google investigating the best ways to pull it off, considering what kind of useful (or quasi-useful) services they can offer that will lock in users whilst also enabling Google to collect even more data for use in other areas of its business.

In Google Toolbar 4 they’ve given users the ability to add their own bookmarks (more useful data for Google’s evaluation of sites, in addition to that from logging the sites you visit), which can then be accessed from wherever they log-in to their Google account. And to help ensure the popularity of the toolbar, Google allows users to create their own buttons to customize it however they want (some websites are already offering Google bookmark buttons).

Who’d have thought a simple little toolbar thingymajig could potentially benefit Google so much, eh? But then, that’s the whole idea … after all, they’re such nice people, right?

In talking about the SEM ramifications, Aaron winds up with:

If you have not yet started a Google account (or a few of them) it may be worth creating some such that you can leverage them down the road. Older Google accounts with longer search histories may be trusted to weight the end search results more than new accounts (similarly to how Google typically trusts old domains more than new ones).

I think you’d need a hell of a lot of accounts to make much difference!