As a search engine marketing company, I (we) take a vested interest not only in local search (meaning North America), but how search is doing around the world - how its growing, what others are doing and where its going. Search in North America is huge, of course, and we always here about how the hispanic market is an up-and-comer in the search space. But let me ask you, what about Asian-Pacific?

Let me hit you with a fact from a study that just came out: Asia-Pacific receives 5 million more searches then North America monthly. Here’s a chart that breaks down searches, based upon region:

You don’t here too much about the Asia-Pacific SEO/M market. I rarely see any talks about SEO in Asia, but Asia-Pacific countries represent a HUGE amount of searches every…single…month. Here’s the kicker: We can all agree that GOOG is the authority when it comes to search engineering in North America. They’re getting pretty good at it in the US of A. And for my fellow SEO’s who target alternative Google engines, you can attest to the difficulty in ranking in a “foreign” search engine, rather then to Google’s TLD. Having said all that, why haven’t you started to lay the ground work for an SEO force in Asia-Pacific?

Here’s a supporting chart:

Baidu and Naver (NHN Corp.) are killing it. They’re bringing in tons and tons (and tons) of search traffic, but you never hear about them. C’mon…Baidu is even getting more traffic then MSN Live.

There’s a huge opportunity to start working with Asia-Pacific businesses: 搜索引擎營銷.

Charts Source: Marketing Charts

How do you use word of mouth marketing for you business? Are you even using it? Do you know the power of it? Of course, you’ve heard that its the best form of marketing and you get the highest qualified leads by doing so. I ask you then, how come you’re not doing more of it? How come you’re not focusing your attention on it?

You can reform word of mouth marketing into “building relationships”. Marketing and building a client base, especially in the SEO business, should be formed more on relationships. The ‘SEO pitch’ is wearing thin on a lot of CEO’s now. They don’t want to hear it, because you’re the 4th company that’s called them today and they’re happy with their PPC campaign. Since you can use your word/mouth to market, you have an open line of communication with that business owner (relationship) - and can relate to their needs and wants, offering a solution that isn’t “sales-y” in nature.

A recent study, showcasing word of mouth marketing online:

Almost 80% of online users trust other consumer’s opinion. Interestingly further, after newspapers, online users trusted opinions posted online. That’s 3rd. …waiting for that too sink in.

Why aren’t you utilizing the myriad of features online today to harness COMMENTS, TESTIMONIALS or OPINIONS for your ecommerce store, lead generation website or service related company? If you run a service related website, offer testimonials, pictures (when they’re warranted), opinions and phone numbers from others who have used your service. If you’re selling a product, make sure you have a way (directly underneath the product) for previous customers to say what they liked and (hopefully not) disliked about your product. Your mind is the only limit to get the customer interactive with their opinion on your website.

Moving forward… a little more reinforcement:

Undergoing a word-of-mouth marketing strategy is essential for marketers, especially in the SEO space.

So, what types of word of mouth marketing are there? Lets name them:

* Buzz Marketing: Using high-profile entertainment or news to get people to talk about your brand.

* Viral Marketing: Creating entertaining or informative messages that are designed to be passed along in an exponential fashion, often electronically or by email.

* Community Marketing: Forming or supporting niche communities that are likely to share interests about the brand (such as user groups, fan clubs, and discussion forums); providing tools, content, and information to support those communities.

* Grassroots Marketing: Organizing and motivating volunteers to engage in personal or local outreach.

* Evangelist Marketing: Cultivating evangelists, advocates, or volunteers who are encouraged to take a leadership role in actively spreading the word on your behalf.

* Product Seeding: Placing the right product into the right hands at the right time, providing information or samples to influential individuals.

* Influencer Marketing: Identifying key communities and opinion leaders who are likely to talk about products and have the ability to influence the opinions of others.

* Cause Marketing: Supporting social causes to earn respect and support from people who feel strongly about the cause.

* Conversation Creation: Interesting or fun advertising, emails, catch phrases, entertainment, or promotions designed to start word of mouth activity.

* Brand Blogging: Creating blogs and participating in the blogosphere, in the spirit of open, transparent communications; sharing information of value that the blog community may talk about.

* Referral Programs: Creating tools that enable satisfied customers to refer their friends.

Src: WOMMA

WOMMA has a nice list of case studies too. I’d recommend going through all the case studies, grab some starbucks or Juice it Up, and let the creative juices flow.

You know you’ve seen it. Time and time again, a great ranking in the search engines but when you click onto the site, the site just wreaks of usability issues and bad design. Everyone appears to know, understand and acknowledge the basics of search engine optimization: Add keyword within Title tags, add descriptions to your meta’s, acquire on-topic powerful links, but how many Ecommerce Mom and Pops focus on their design, usability and conversion percentages?

Let’s take a look at this statistic:

Wow, that’s pretty interesting. 81% of online retailers are converting under 8%. Just think if you could raise 1% on your conversions - how much revenue would that be monthly/annually?

If you’re having a tough time obtaining ideas to make your site convert higher, I’d propose looking through this chart:

Wouldn’t it be nice to convert your visitors at 25%? Lets put our head around that figure a little differently: 1 in 4 people visiting your site purchase a product. Maybe its time to put down the SEO Book and start focusing on why people aren’t buying stuff on your website. You’ve got a nice traffic flow from the “Big 3″ (Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia…ooops, I mean MSN LIVE), but now its time to roll up our sleeves, get a little dirty, and bust out with our A/B split testing tools.

If you’re having difficulty channeling new ideas to make your visitors convert, go through the list above and visit each site. Here’s a guideline while popping each site into your browser:

1. What do you like about the site?
2. What don’t you like about the site?
3. What call-to-action methods do they have in place?
4. Are they offering any types of discounts, free stuff or special offers?
5. Does their web design flow nicely?
6. Can you purchase from a product page effortlessly?
7. Is the checkout process seamlessly integrated that a baby could purchase products?

That’s a good start. I’m sure you’ll find other areas on your site that are lacking in which these websites are very strong at.

If usability and navigation through your website seems to be a troubling factor, I’d like to draw your attention to the Father of Usability: Jakob Nielson. His website might not be flashy, but he has been playing around with usability integrated with web design for 10 years and definitely knows what visitors like and don’t.

Another good site to get in touch with for usability and building higher conversions is Future Now Inc. Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg published an amazing book a couple of years ago about converting for several large online brands and have an excellent track record of boosting conversion rates up tremendously.

If you’re not converting visitors-to-buyers by 8%, don’t settle for sub-par conversions. Ask yourself what you can do to make your website stand out from the other sites within the search engine result pages and convert higher. Because 1% boost in conversions means daddy’s getting a new car after the Christmas rush.

With most people thinking of Octoberfest, Halloween and Thanksgiving, you should be taking this time to revamp your online marketing for Christmas. Christmas is a huge time for many industries and verticals. Some online business rely on the Christmas season to generate more then 40% of their annual revenue. That’s a big chunk of the pie.

Predictions and forecasts for this holiday are reaching $42 billion, why are you waiting until the turkey has been carved to start your Christmas marketing push.

Here are a few of types:

1. Seasonal Trends: Keyword Discovery Seasonal Trends has great reporting that shows you seasonal reports of past keywords. That kind of keyword data is invaluable when setting up a PPC campaign or focusing for you organic rankings.

2. Landing Page Optimization: October would be the ideal month to tweak, test and turbo charge those landing pages. Jump over to Marketing Experiments and see what you’ve been missing. Add some color, pictures and new copy writing to those organic and PPC landing pages. You want to make sure you’re getting the highest possible ROI on those pages - work on those CONVERSIONS!

3. Pull Data from Last Year: If you have data from last holiday season, start plugging that information into your marketing campaign.

4. Long-Tail Keyword Pages: Find out the hot items in your industry and start developing long-tail pages for them. By doing so now, you give the search engines ample time to index those pages and get ranked. Long-tail pages will convert extremely high - don’t neglect them!

5. Christmas Specials: Its cutthroat out there! You need to have your head above the sea of your competitors and offer specials. Maybe 10% off over $50. Maybe Free Shipping. Maybe a free Christmas Teddy Bear with every purchase. Give your web visitors strong call to actions so they don’t hit the back button and go to your competitors.

That’s it for now. I’m sure we’ll visit this topic in the near future and I’ll offer a few other tips to make sure you’re progressing nicely into the holiday season.

Being an individual that is very social and likes to get out and have a good time, I’ve been to my fair share of clubs and bars here in Southern California. And there are A LOT of them out here. Since there are so many, a lot of club owners, promoters and “Beer Name Here” Girls find ways to bring you back. One way I see more and more often is harvesting your phone number and email.

A majority of the time, scantily clad girls either walk up and down the red rope or they’ll be inside the bar jumping from one group of people to the next, flirting for your Name, Email and Phone Number. At the end of the night, they walk away with 3-4 sheets filled with 50 names on each sheet.

Email marketing via clubs/bars has been around for a while, which in case, I still don’t see them utilizing that form of marketing to its fullest, but the most recent form of advertising or enticement is mobile marketing.

Almost every other day, I get a text from a promotions group in Newport Beach letting me know what’s happening tonight or the following day. They’ll promote an array of stuff like 50% off food, select DJs playing, grand openings or “Text Back for VIP list”. I’d say the best part of all the promotions is getting on the VIP list. If you don’t get to a club/bar before 10:30pm, then you’ll be stuck in line for 30-45 minutes (unless you flash a Benjamin to get in). Needless to say, waiting in line sucks.

At any rate, marketing to this young, select group I’m in with cell phones is excellent. Our demographic is always texting texting texting. I’m curious why more bar/club owners don’t utilize this in-house or hire a promotions company to start doing this. Could easily be trackable with an array of methods to show ROI. Regardless, I see this as a very strong marketing medium for clubs, clubs and promotion companies now and in the future.

I was reading a recent way to gain traffic over at SEOmoz via DIGG comments. They discussed how you can get a pretty decent amount of traffic from commenting on to-be front page DIGG articles. The tactic is to make sure you’re the first one to make a comment before it hits the front page. Seems like a decent amount of traffic can come from this type of “marketing”, by looking at the post.

I recently tried a little different twist. Any blogs or forums that were on the front page of DIGG, I’d write a comment on the topic on the actual page. This resulted in about 50 unique visitors over the course of a week. Not too bad, and nothing compared to what the SEOmozzer did, but nonetheless, it was a decent way to get a few more eyeballs checking out my site.

Give it a try, especially if the site is within your niche. You just might get a little business from it.

I was reading MarketingVox (which by the way is one of my favorite websites) and saw that Guy Kawasaki has launched a new social/viral/”place Web 2.5 word here” website called Truemors. The site harbors your rumors. It’s kinda cool, kinda “why”. I mean really, how much validity does one post have over another? Yes, I know it has the down/up arrow to combat that, but even so - “Hey Frank/Sara/Dan/Delana/Michelle/Harrison…could you please give a little boost to my recent Truemor?”.

I do like the fact that no matter where you are, you can email, text message, submit on the site, or even call in your rumor and it will be posted. Another plus to this site is the logging in: You don’t have to.

You can leave comments on each individual Tremor, which is kinda nice, but also opens up the possibility of spamming, even if its on a small scale, which is ok and ultimately can’t be avoided if you want a social-type website.

All-in-all, I like the idea, I just would like a little more clarification on what makes a rumor, a…true…rumor. If there is such a thing.

- Adam

PS - Everytime I say “Truemors”, I can’t help but think of Tremors, which by the way, was an excellent movie.

Stone Temple consulting and marketing put together an amazing report on different analytics programs. Its a great report and really shows the variances of the top web analytics online today.

SEM Inc. is designing our own, in-house analytics program. Our program will track all the goodies like unique visitors, sessions, click-paths, browser types, screen resolution, etc., but what’s really exciting is the metrics portion of the analytics program. We’ll be tracking conversions not only from PPC ads, but from organic click-throughs too.

We plan on offering this to all clients and might even make a copy of the program to be built out like StatCounter.com, which is user-friendly and will track everything.