Cavario conducted a survey during a webinar, whereby the 307 attendees voted for their highest paid search and SEO priorities for 2011. The results are illustrated in the charts above.

Other takeaways from the article include:

• Leveraging social media for scalable link-building efforts is a major initiative for advertisers;
• Lenovo has a big push for video in 2011, because video assets are 56X more likely to be ranked on the first page than standard text ads for Google and the interaction level with video is 7-8X higher than standard text listing;
• They estimate that their clients are planning to spend about 10-20% of their pay-per-click (PPC) budgets on Facebook in 2011. And this budget is NOT coming out of PPC-It is coming from display or offline budgets, or as an incremental override to the overall digital budget, specifically increasing the shift toward digital more aggressively;
• 2011 will NOT be the year of mobile search in the U.S. They expect to see mobile driving less than 5% of overall search advertising;
• They expect the emergence of Google TV will compel all advertisers to at least “test” this system in the second half of 2011, since the system works exactly like PPC; and
• 2011 will be the year when integration of search into other forms of media – essentially attribution modeling programs – will become far more mature and operational within the organizations and budgeting of most large advertisers.

What are your top priorities for search marketing in 2011?

Full story at Cavario »

Bing now powers nearly 30% of the search market share. So what does Bing consider as important for top rankings?

In Bing:

• Backlinks are less important: Comparisons between backlinks have shown that, all being equal, the top ten results in Bing have fewer backlinks than in Google;
• PageRank matters less: PageRank (PR) have shown that PR2 (even PR1) sites regularly appear in the top ten results on Bing, whilst this almost never happens on competitive phrases in Google;
• Fresh content matters less: As Google has only recently introduced the Caffeine update that rewards fresh content with better rankings, it would follow that Bing doesn’t quite have the speed of indexing that Google is up to, making fresh content a less relevant factor;
• Inbound anchor text matters more: Bing seems to put more emphasis on anchor text links that have the linking phrase in the title of the page;
• Page authority matters more: Page authority is given to top-level domains (TLD) of authoritative organizations (.edu, .gov, .ac.uk, etc.);
• Domain age seems to be a large factor; and
• Flash pages fare better.

Most SEO’s focus primarily on Google because it dominates the search market. So, is it worth applying a more balanced approach? Your thoughts?

Full story at Six Revisions »

iProspect, a search engine marketing firm, wanted to examine how impressions of various digital media assets – and combinations thereof – produced brand lift. The company commissioned comScore to develop and conduct research with the objective of uncovering the true effect of the digital media channels, and the effect of branding on customers’ purchase paths.

The research spanned organic search impressions, paid search impressions, online display ad impressions, and all combinations thereof, across 15 brands within five vertical industries: retail, insurance, banking/financial services, software, and hotels.

The research involved both real-time monitoring of Internet user behavior, as well as post-behavioral surveying of those users. Panelists were surveyed about the brands they had been exposed to via these various digital marketing assets.

Key findings:

• Paid search result impressions have the greatest impact on brand lift, both in isolation and in combination with other digital assets.
• In aggregate, paid search results generate 44 percent lift in likelihood to purchase.
• Within the retail vertical, paid search impressions create a 54 percent lift in likelihood to purchase.
• The combination of paid + organic search impressions produce the strongest brand lift across most of the brand metrics measured.
• In aggregate, paid search results + organic search results net a 73 percent lift in likelihood to purchase.
• Within the hotel vertical, paid + organic search impressions create a 147 percent lift in likelihood to purchase.
• Online display advertising is also effective at producing brand lift, but makes its strongest contribution when used in combination with search engine results. This combination produced a surprisingly high brand lift across many of the verticals studied.
• In aggregate, organic search results + display ad impressions net a 16 percent increase in likelihood to purchase.
• Within the banking/financial vertical, organic search results + display ad impressions create a 64 percent lift in likelihood to purchase.

Does your marketing strategy take into account the branding benefits of a combined digital media advertising strategy?

Full story and PDF download of study at iProspect »

Here are the first 10 out of 37 takeaways from the 3-hour marathon session, Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-Founder of SEOmoz, spent with Bulgaria’s top SEOs at the Webit Conference SEOmoz Master Class, in Sofia, Bulgaria, on October 29, 2010.

On Ranking Correlation Data

1. Correlation does not equal causation, but ignore it at your own peril. Data convinces clients & stakeholders better than opinions and anecdotal evidence.
2. Short, exact match keyword domains are best, if you can snag them. If not, go for hyphenated keyword domains as your next best option.
3. Differentiation opportunity for alt image tags–these had surprisingly higher correlation than other more popular on-page factors, like the over-optimized page title (I sense low-hanging fruit).
4. .gov & .edu domains… perhaps a bit overrated on authority, however they do tend to host quality sites. Overall, TLD’s don’t correlate especially well.
5. Number of linking root domains correlates even better than exact keyword match domain! News to me.
6. Metrics for predicting a site’s collective ability to rank pages, i.e. domain authority, are still not as reliable as page-level metrics.

On Google Instant

7. It does NOT mark the death of SEO or the long-tail. Google Suggest trained people to read ahead a long time ago. Case closed.

On Site Architecture and Related On-Page Conundrums

8. Map your site structure before doing keyword research (I suggest using an actual mind mapping tool for this); this forces you think like a user before thinking like an SEO.
9. Editorial categorization beats user-defined categorization (e.g. user tags), which can get complex & messy as it grows.
10. Workaround for minimizing click depth and elevating deep pages: link to a custom sitemap in your nav menu.

Read the other 27 takeaways at the YOUmoz blog »