A few of the team here at Outrider had the opportunity to attend Think Auto with Google Australia last week. The purpose of this blog post is to highlight some of the key points of interest from the session.

For those that couldn’t make the event, here are the presentations, speaker videos and photos.

General:

• Many of the speakers revisited the same concept about the growth in consumer power online, particularly with the growth in social media and review sites

• A large proportion of auto-based search queries are review/comparison based (“There are no dud cars, only dud decisions!”). Think of the BBQ conversation with your mates – you want them to feel you have made a smart decision on your car purchase, based on your needs

• We all know about the acceleration of online video consumption, which applies to automotive as much as (if not more than) other verticals. 2 years ago, one-third of new car buyers were watching video during their research period, this has risen to half

• Auto-related mobile searches are growing fast – 180% month-on-month growth in Sept ’11 compared to Sept ’10. The growth in desktop auto-related search volume is slowing

• On that same point, it was estimated that last year 1 in 15 auto related Google searches were done on mobiles, This year, that number has risen to 1 in 7, while next year it’s predicted to be 1 in 3

• Car brands are starting to sell new inventory online in Europe, and online sales are growing(eg. eSeat and Ford UK). Consumers can reserve the car of their choosing for a small fee(For Seat, it’s 100 euro). It was claimed that Australia is a few years behind, but that this is an imminent development here too

Branding:

• Brand intimacy is the holy grail – if your consumers feel a “personal, close or warm friendship, relationship or understanding” with your brand, then you’re in a very strong position

• Why is brand intimacy so important? According to ‘The Australian Report’ from STW Group:
  • 92% say big companies need to get in touch with ordinary people
  • 80% believe there are few big businesses with the human touch
  • 75% say big business is cold & impersonal

Brand intimacy process:

1. Build communities (for shared ideals, ideas, interests and passions)
2. Create value – people will talk about a brand if its meaningful (meaningful brands give people tools, products, services and experiences to facilitate their needs and aspirations and make them feel totally awesome eg. Liquid Mountaineering – The Infinity Run
3. Make it personal (send the right message, to the right person, at the right time, in the right way – ‘High Tech, High Touch’, John Naisbitt)

Brand quotes:

“People only really want one thing: an experience that makes them feel better about themselves”

Hugh Mackay

(The Mackay Report, What Do Customers Really Want?, March ’04)

“Your brand is a value provider, NOT a content provider”

Steve Jobs

SOLOMO (Social, Mobile, Local):

• 90% of consumers online trust recommendations from people they know

• 77% of YouTube, Twitter and Facebook listings are not controlled by the brand => you don’t own your brand!

• Both professional and consumer reviews are considered helpful – strive for both!

Netpop Research Aug ‘11 – ‘The Role of Internet in New Auto Purchases’:

1. 77% say friends, family & colleagues are an important source
2. 79% say Consumer Ratings/Review sites are important
3. 48% watch online auto videos during research
4. 65% of those watch online version of commercial produced by manufacturer

Key social take-aways:

1. Social is not a destination, it’s part of the consumer’s buying process
2. Be brave with your brand
3. Listen, and let your consumers speak (facilitate with the +1 button)

• New car buyers are looking for more local info, from both manufacturer and dealer sites. Recent data suggests 1 in 4  buyers access/locate dealer sites via a mobile

• 53% say auto information is hard to access on mobile devices – mobile optimised ‘destination’ is key (ie. app, mobile site)

• Mobiles should have NFC within 2 years, which could potentially make them even more powerful tools to consumers when researching new cars in person

• The Toyota Shopping tool app was forward thinking – allows you to take a photo of the window VIN number, and pulls in the car info

So there were definitely some interesting ideas raised, and good to see so many familiar faces at Think Auto – if you were there, please share your thoughts with us in the comments below, or on the Twitter hashtag #thinkauto!

The past couple of weeks leading up to ad:tech Sydney have been all about planning and preparing for the exhibition and the conference sessions. And like any other exciting event, the two days arrived in style and we were there amongst our fellow industry players, on the 9th and 10th of March. Positioned right next to Google, we represented Outrider with a stunning exhibition stand that highlighted the meaning of our business: “experience relevance” – and what better way to do this than a beach theme! The inspiration of the wave of course came from our slogan – “Make your way to the top”

Oh and the Harley Davidson was a nice touch to let attendees go into the draw to win a 2 people ride around the coast… just wanted to congratulate the winner again, Danielle Wilmot!

So the two days were filled with mingling with attendees and exhibitors, which gave the team the chance to be part of the excitement!

For more of our funky pics of our team and the exhibition, check out the photos on the Outrider Australia Facebook page.

Google Places & Local Search

I also wanted to cover off the topics which I discussed on the second day of the conference. The first was the Impact of Local Search and Google Places. This presentation was held amongst the exhibitors and in the beginning, I didn’t think I’d have an audience except for a few friends, but at the end I was glad to have a variety of people who attended the session… so for those who came along, a big Thank You! Here are some of the key takeaways of this session:

• Google Places is not just about getting yourself on the map, but it’s about letting people to know what your business can offer consumers in their location.
• Local search has been around for sometime (Google introduced Local back in 2004), but really the whole thing spiralled into one of today’s buzz words because of maps going mobile, and the current enhancement to localised search in the SERPs.
• 17% of Google SERPs show Google Maps – hence there is opportunity to take advantage of this unique position where your location can drive you brand awareness and traffic.
• It’s not just about adding your business location to Google Places… it’s about optimising your listings to include custom details such as open times, photos, videos, description and of course adding the social aspect of getting customer reviews. All of these additional attributes can help improve the visibility of your maps listings in the SERPs.
• For businesses that have multiple store locations, use bulk uploads to alleviate the stress of adding one location at a time; but still make sure you optimise the additional custom tabs so you can take advantage of localised search results.

These are only a few tips that will help you get started with your local SEO strategy, but here’s the whole presentation:

Mobile Location Marketing

On a similar note, I also presented at one of the last conference sessions of the day, amongst a panel of 3 mobile development experts, on the topic of – What are the Real Opportunities of Mobile Location Marketing? As the first speaker, my presentation was primarily focused on defining the concept of location-based marketing and how this benefits users/businesses in the mobile space. Some of the key takeaways from this session include:

• To keep it simple, mobile location marketing is the promotion of goods/services via a wireless mobile device. The info that’s provided through this device is usually specific to a location and is personalized to what the user wants at a specific time.
• The evolution of location-based marketing has only been around for a few years and yet it has taken off in countries such as US and Japan due to the high usage of mobile phones. Foursqaure being one of the main catalysts to this form of marketing.
• Who does this benefit? …well from a user’s point of view, apps and location-based websites allows people the opportunity to find information or incentives quickly when and where they want it.
• Businesses of course can take advantage of this demand (43% of Australian’s use smartphones) to get in front of their consumers when they need their information and build customer loyalty.
• 1/3 of searches on mobile are with local intent, so how does your business get found on mobile:

• Check-ins – most common ones in Australia are Facebook Places and Foursqaure (although the question was asked if Foursqaure would live on? Thoughts?)
• Google Places – using things like Hotpot to give mobile users directions to your store but also coupons for taking the effort to find it.
• Search Engines – using “open times” and other custom attributes to give away enough information for consumers to find your business.

Check out my part of the presentation:

That’s all the info for today, but if there are any questions about either presentations or ad:tech, contact us.

A long time ago, a wise chap once said to me, “always follow the money”.

Admittedly, it was my older brother speaking and he had just thrown a few pennies down a steep hillside, but the principle still holds true. In corporate terms, change is almost always driven by financial considerations. Sometimes, the consumer wins out because of it… and sometimes changes are made “for our convenience”, but not for our benefit.

In all the breathless excitement over the recent changes to Google SERPs with Places adopting a more prominent position on the page, I’ve seen little analysis or explanation of the “why” – beyond a bland generic “Google are just trying to produce more usable results”.

Wellllll, they are more usable, but the target of the improvements is not necessarily for desktop / laptop users. Recent research by Morgan Stanley (1) has indicated that within 2 years, shipments of smart phones (think iPhone) will cross-over and start to outstrip the shipments of PCs. Smart phones are already predicted to be bigger shippers than what are described as “feature phones” within the year.

That same research indicated that 48% of mobile browser users, use their phone for searches and that the real kick-off point for using a mobile phone as a browser behaviour is the point at which the user gets 3G. Despite all the years of mobile being seen as the coming technology, it really does seem that the train is pulling into that particular station at long last.

So, we have a massive uptake in mobile phone usage and people then use those phones to search, once they have the connection speed. This uptake is so big that SearchEngineLand reports a five-fold increase over the last two years (2). This, according to Mashable, equates to “tens of millions of people [making] searches through Google on mobile devices each week, generating hundreds of millions of searches” (3). In fact, mobile search is now so big, that according to Latitude, it is now bigger in its own right than Bing’s market share (4). That’s a phenomenal 78% growth in the first 9 months of 2010.

Are you starting to see a pattern yet?

People are using their phones more and more to search the web and those phones are much more likely to be smart phones with fully-capable HTML browsers (or in the case of the Apple iPhone, semi-capable, until it works out its differences with Adobe – apologies to all roll-neck lovers out there).

The next piece of the jigsaw puzzle is provided by Diana Pouliot, Google’s director of mobile advertising said that “one-third of all Google searches via the mobile web pertain to some aspect of the searcher’s local environment”. (5)

So…. you have a huge uplift in mobile searches, and 1/3 of all mobile searches relate to something local. From a user’s perspective, what do you do if you’re Google? You respond to this by making the main SERPs result more mobile and “local” friendly and putting the Places results slap-bang in the middle of the SERPs when you think it appropriate.

But wait… there’s more…

Latitude also give us the final clinching statistic (6) that click-through rates (CTR) on mobile search averages 1.32% rather than 1.1%. That may not look like much in percentage basis point terms, but in terms of the actual percentage shift, it’s approximately a 20% increase. When you’re serving millions or billions of ad views a day, a potential 20% increase in CTR should have your revenue team salivating with desire.

You’ve got more surfers, who want more relevant results and who are more likely to click-through on those changed results, earning you more money. So what do you do?

Simple really, isn’t it?

Sources:
1 – Morgan Stanley Internet Trends
2 – Search Engine Land – Google Mobile Growth
3 – Mashable – Google Mobile Search
4 – Marketing Week – Google Mobile Search
5 – Marketing Pilgrim – Google Mobile Local Spin
6 – ibid.

I like to drink coffee and fortunately for me there is no shortage of coffee shops in the area. Infact, there are no less than six coffee shops on the block where the Outrider Sydney office is located.

So to satisfy my curiousity I wanted to compare mobile search results on Google vs Bing when looking for “coffee shop cremorne” on the iPhone. How do the search engine results look and perform on iPhone and if I was searching would I actually find a coffee shop?

Google Search on the iPhone

Google results look familiar to the results that you would get on the web browsing from a laptop. Google’s text is small which allows it to fit more results into the screen. What comprises the organic results are websites, a block for local listings complete with map, clickable phone numbers and opening hours. There are also a few relevant videos and there is a block of paid ads at the very bottom.

Google helps the searcher out with the ‘Google Suggest’ query suggestion product making searches that bit faster.

Overall, Google performs well on the GUI front – its fast, easy to use and does look nice. But, apparently there is only one coffee shop in the entire area and I need to walk about 2 kms down to Spit Junction to get my caffeine fix.

But if I click on the ‘Local’ tab at the top I’m given a bunch of local listings, some of which are really helpful. So right now, the search is only partially helpful.

Bing on the iPhone

Visually, Bing looks a little bit bland and as a default the text size is fairly big – bigger than the results on a normal web browser. Also, for local searches Bing requires you to add your location.

Bing doesn’t have the rich local listings, maps, videos or related search suggestions that Google offer. When you click on a link Bing opens that link up in a new page which might be confusing to some people. You’ll see the ‘local’ tab but its not clickable for my localised search.

Results wise, Bing shows six organic results before I have to click through on the next page of results. Out of six results for “coffee shop cremorne” only one was relevant. The other five results thought I wanted to buy a coffee machine. Also, slight mispellings of suburb name totally throw Bing’s results. My search for a coffee shop would lead me to think that there is next to nowhere in Cremorne to buy a cafe latte!

And the winner is…

Currently, Google’s search results are superior and far ahead of Bing and at least they list one coffee shop in a neighbouring suburb on the main search result page. However, in real world terms, the average searcher would likely abandon both Bing and Google mobile search results and end up walking or driving around until they find what they’re looking for.

The other half of the story are local businesses who really need to get on board and obtain local listings on the search engines…of course, that is if they want to attract new customers.

I have worked on sites for multi-national clients targeting different regions and languages. The first question that always arises is “what is going to be the best way to localise my site?”

Everyone – this is a loaded question!

My answer is: get a ccTLD (country code top level domain such as .au) and/or have the site hosted in the country that it is targeting. Simple, right?

OK – this blog post is now complete…….

Oh, but wait, I did say it was a loaded question and it truly is because it is rarely that simple. This post hopes to cover off a fair few situations.

There are a number of ways, or indicators, that tell search engines what your target region is. The top two are:

1. Domain choice

2. Location of host

There are a number of ways to present regionalised sites to users aside from the domain/hosting scenario.

The key is to make the best choice for your business and do all the right things where you can, so the engines know what your intent is. What if the site is broken into sub-domains or is using folders to split out regionalised content and languages?

3. Language

I find that non-English speaking sites have a leg up due to the character encoding. If the site is written in German, then the target is Germany. Alas, that doesn’t always work either. If your site is written in French is that targeting France or French-Canadians?

4. Local Business Listings

5. Regionalised footer

Next would be local information. Use accounts in Google and optimise the listings in Google’s Business Centre and fill out as much information as you can, from addresses to opening times, and select the appropriate keyword categories.

Ensure you put local addresses and contact details on the pages of the site. The footer is usually ideal as this appears on every page of the site.

6. Inbound links

Another great indicator for the engines is inbound links, primarily links from sites in the same region. If a good number of Australian sites are pointing to yours, the engines make assumptions about your target region. This can work if you don’t have a ccTLD or hosting in the target country as an alternative strategy, but we all know how hard link building can be.

7. Google Webmaster

Google Webmaster Tools has the ability to set the location of site sections to help them understand the site’s geographic target. I wouldn’t wholly rely on this because it’s fallible and pretty reliant on your site’s architecture. That, and not all countries have an 80% Google market share, so addressing it with Google only will leave other engines to falter.

Now to tackle sub-domains and folders; there are pros and cons to this as well as the choice of a ccTLD.

Scenario 1

International site with ccTLDs hosted in Finland (or in target country)

Each site will factor in local search due to the choice of ccTLD. This is good for local search but is a management nightmare. Who’s responsible for content, global and locally? Is there duplication of said content and will this be a problem?

Pro – Localisation is much easier

Con – Each site has its own SEO equity and will have to build on this individually

Scenario 2

Global site with sub-directories, no ccTLDs and hosted in the US

This is a large site with a folder structure such as /australia or /au or something similar. There are still the same issues around content management. What about the affect of duplication of content on the same site? A product page for /au, /us, /uk etc…..

How are the engines to know what region this content belongs to?

Pro – This is a large, fresh site with lots of content. Site equity belongs to the one domain so off-site strategies will affect all regions

Con – Localisation can be difficult

Scenario 3

Global site with sub-domains, no ccTLDs and hosted in Finland

This is not much different than using sub-directories. While sub-domains will be seen as related to the parent site, they are still individual sites.

Pro – May be easier to handle language and localisation by segregation uk.mydomain.com, au.mydomain.com

Con – Each site has its own SEO equity and will have to build on this individually

So, what else can you do to help the engines along, particularly with Scenario #2 and #3?

8. Use UTF-8 Character Encoding

9. Ensure all domain redirects are handled appropriately. For instance:

www.mydomain.com.au–> 301 –> www.mydomain.com/australia/

10. Use the HTML or XHTML lang tag to specify the pages’ language en-au, en-us, en-gb

11. The use of keywords in the URL /en-au/ may be less understood than /australia/

There is really no perfect fit and a multi-domain strategy should be well thought out for any international SEO Campaign.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…