Sex toys, crime statistics and the Artic Monkeys.

Words I never thought I could unite in one blog post. Take a moment to consider where this could go…

Nothing quite so sensational, I’m afraid, but interesting nonetheless.

Anyone who knows my geeky side will know that I have a penchant for Google Maps Mashups (If you don’t know what they are, take a quick Google Maps mashup detour. Just remember to come back).

They don’t need to be all bells and whistles, fantastically designed or integrated. It’s the idea that always fascinates me. The imagination and breadth of subjects poured into Google Maps mashups seems to be infinite.

We can't help ourselves - we have to know!

I’ll produce a list of some of the best ones at a later date, but for now I’ll share three that have caught my eye recently. And perhaps shed some light on the cryptic start to this post.

The Sex Map from LoveHoney.com – If you’re at work reading this, don’t worry there aren’t any images here that you don’t want your Boss or Tech guys to discover. LoveHoney is an online retailer of adult toys, lingerie and associated paraphernalia.

They have been really clever with their Google Maps mashup. They have tied together sales data from their own site, data from the UK Census, competitor and manufacturer accounts, and internet traffic monitoring services, and mashed it together with the Google Maps API. The end result is an amusing, yet fantastic bit of linkbait, which no doubt has brought a few extra pennies to the pot from inquisitive visitors.

Oddly, I felt somewhat disappointed to find my home town ranked only the 530th sexiest place in the UK. What goes on in Upminster (ranked #1) is anyone’s guess though?!

The Drugs Map – okay, not just drugs, but all kinds of crime, be it robbery, homicide or car theft. Crimereports.com say the U.S. site was created to help law enforcement agencies make crime data accessible to the public. It standardises the data from the different agencies and enables individuals to monitor what is happening in their neighbourhood, right down to their specific street or block.

I think this is a great example of how technology can be utilised to harness disparate information, organise it and communicate it in an easy to understand way. The participating organisations should be commended for supporting the scheme.

My one concern would be how obsessed a worried user could become with monitoring crime outside their front door. However, on a more practical note, it would be a useful evaluation tool when house hunting.

And finally, the Rock & Roll Map. Whilst not a big buyer (or listener) of music, I’ve always been appreciative of good album cover design. So I found it interesting to discover this Google Maps mashup the readers of UK music mag, Word Magazine, have been putting together.

The Google Maps mashup plots the locations of where iconic album cover photographs were taken. Whether its ABBA at Barkaby Airfield, the Beatles at Abbey Road, or The Verve lounging in Richmond Park, flicking through the list is a quirky and fascinating tour of music’s historical landmarks.

These are just three of the thousands of Google Maps mashup examples out there – and I’m sure there are many more brilliant than the ones I’ve chosen here. If you’ve seen any, let me know. I’ll be featuring more mashups here at a later date.

Have you built a Google Maps Mashup you want to share? Seen one you loved, but secretly wished you’d had the idea yourself? Or maybe you’re just rueing the day you skipped programming class and have to wait for the day when Google can make a simple wizard, so you can build one of these cool things yourself? Whatever, just get in touch.

Related posts:

1. I see Aliens in Google Trends
2. Google Profiles in UK Search Results

Today I noticed the new Google Profiles section inserted into the UK search results (see screenshot below).

When the new plans for  Google Profiles were announced last month, it was mentioned that they would insert up to four matching results in a Profiles section at the foot of the first page of the SERPs (for a search on a name). The roll out was due to start in the U.S., but with no announced timetable for the rest of the world.

Well, it seems the UK is ready. I noticed my face staring out at me from the screen over breakfast this morning.  Now at mid-morning, it had disappeared – that is until I login into my Google Account via Gmail. Now I’m there looking out at me again. So it seems the Google Profiles are being tested through account holders in the UK, before a likely launch in all results.

It will be interesting to see how the use of Google Profiles develops, not just here in the UK but generally as a global product offering from Google.

There is still time to go grab your own Google Profile vanity URL – get it before it’s gone!

Related posts:

1. Google Profiles to take on Monster.com in job market?
2. What next for I Spy Search? Jim Brigden new CEO
3. Is Search Marketing Really That Important?

Is Search Marketing Really That Important?

I was asked that question in a rather indirect way recently. It wasn’t exactly said outright, but the pained expression at the mere suggestion of doing it, told me all I needed to know.

The answer, in short, is Yes. Whether you’re a multi-national corporation, a high street retailer or a taxi service in Leeds, if you want to trade on the web or you want people to know who you are or what you do or where to find you, then yes, you need to be doing it. If it’s your business, you can’t leave this stuff to Lady Luck. Especially, as it’s highly likely your competitors are already doing it.

Okay, makes sense. Anything else good about it?

Plenty. In this economic climate, if you want a business online, you should certainly be looking to make it an integral part of your marketing mix.

1. It doesn’t cost a great deal to get started
2. It can grow with your budget
3. You can be incredibly targeted with it
4. You can limit wastage by only paying for action, not exposure (Pay-per-click)
5. You can get people to your website for free (SEO – apart from your time resource obviously)

How many of your other marketing activities can have that said about them?

Hmmm, so what should I be doing first?

If you read the media today, then apparently the most important thing you should be doing is signing up to Twitter and Facebook to look after your online brand reputation. That’s great, and a topic for another day, but perhaps not your most pressing need.

If you’re being smart about your marketing – and you need to be in this tough economic climate – you’ll already be looking at your marketing activity and checking what is working and what isn’t.

To do this, you’ll need to be very clear on what your objectives are. Ultimately, for any business, there will be a financial objective, so perhaps you’re be looking at which marketing activities are bringing in the greatest return on investment in terms of sales.

Or, depending on your business model, there may be other types of interactions you’ll be tracking – such as subscriptions, job applications, podcast downloads or sales leads. Or you may just be interested in visitor numbers (if supported by display advertising) or trying to raise your brand awareness levels.

The important point here is the need to measure your goals. The old adage applies…

‘You won’t know you’ve got there, unless you know where you’re going’

With some marketing activities it’s hard to measure the impact. Print advertising and PR are two prime examples. There is no direct link to a transaction, so you need to find alternative ways of monitoring, such as econometric tracking.

With search it can be much simpler. A web analytics package, such as Google Analytics, Intellitracker or Web Trends, can tell you all sorts of information about the visitors that come to your site, including what they did whilst they were there and where they came from. If you can tie this into your transactional data, you’ll have a very clear idea of the return on investment.

So is it Pay-per-Click (PPC) or Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) that I should be doing?

It depends on your situation really, but potentially both.

If you have a brand new site, it will take a while for it to get listed in the search engines and for you to start seeing free traffic arriving. Paid search (PPC) can be used in the interim to bring visitors in immediately. Great if you need to raise awareness or generate revenue quickly.

If you’re on a tight budget and are not relying on immediate revenue streams from your website, then you can park the PPC and concentrate on SEO. This approach is often utilised by smaller businesses that generate revenue offline and are looking to reach a wider audience via the web.

In an ideal world, paid advertising should be a short term solution for your business, good for building immediate presence and then supporting specific campaigns, whilst SEO is your focus for long term success.

For bigger brands, using PPC for continuous traffic driving has become an expensive business. It’s easy to rely on PPC traffic from Google et al to provide all your new business, but in the long run it’s not a great way of reducing your cost per acquisition.

To avoid this, you need to ensure you devote time and resource to ensuring your site is continuously optmised – it’s not a ‘do it once and it’s done forever’ deal. The effort is worth it though, as the SEO costs are usually considerably smaller than your PPC expenditure.

In future posts I’ll be looking to answer the common questions:

Should I do my search marketing myself or should I outsource it?

How do I choose the right search marketing agency?

If you have any comments on this article please do feel free to share them here. Likewise, let me know your thoughts on the two questions above.

Related posts:

1. Top 10 It’s Digital Marketing Posts of 2009
2. 10 Insider Tips to Win a Search Agency Pitch
3. What next for I Spy Search? Jim Brigden new CEO

Competition for a job is usually fierce at the best of times, but in our current economic climate it’s become considerably more challenging.

With the announcement this week that unemployment in the UK has hit a 12 year high of nearly 2 million, the job market is flooded with people chasing a smaller pool of vacancies (approx. 500,000 according to PM Gordon Brown).

Whilst watching the news recently and pondering how these unfortunate people would be able to set themselves apart from the competition when it came to job interviews, it occurred to me that perhaps the biggest priority would be to be spotted in the first place. How do you stand out in the crowd and avoid being lost in the pile?

Then in an odd leap of thought, I noticed the similarities with search marketing and specifically SEO.

Think about it – millions of people and their CVs trying to be noticed by recruiters = millions of webpages trying to noticed by searchers.

So if a Search Marketer can apply SEO techniques to a webpage, can you take any of those learnings to optimise your chances of being discovered?

I think you can, thanks to online recruitment.

Most job sites nowadays have a CV database, where job seekers can upload their CV and make it searchable by recruiters. This can speed up the process of being found, open you up to wider selection of jobs and generally take some of the difficulty out of job hunting.

But with so many people potentially in the database how do you optimise your CV to ensure you get noticed? (for the sake of this post, I’m assuming you have employable skills that a recruiter is looking for)

The answer is all to do with the content of your CV.

To illustrate my point, I’ll reference what I wrote in an article for Jobsite.co.uk in January:

It is up to you to make sure your CV contains the correct information and key words that are going to make the recruiter take notice. The searching technology may be ground-breaking but it is only as good as the information you put into it.

And that’s a key point that many job seekers forget. There needs to be a mindset change from the traditional CV. The Word document you once used to hand over to employers needs a little more thought – in a nutshell, it needs to be optimised for search.

To continue from the article:

When you use Google or Jobsite, you type in words to describe the thing you are looking for, such as ‘books’ or ‘sales jobs’. Pages are returned in the results that contain these words. It’s exactly the same with your CV. To make sure you’re found you need to ensure you include the right words that recruiters are searching for.

For example, if you’re an IT programmer, you may mention in your CV: ‘For the past seven years I have worked on several large scale projects, utilising a variety of different programming languages.’

A recruiter with your CV in her hand might be very interested in you, liking your experience and your abilities. However, if she is searching online for an IT programmer with specific skills such as .Net, C++ and Java, there is no way she’ll be able to find your CV because it does not explicitly state the skills. You may have those skills, but the search engine cannot guess that – you need to include that information.

Another common mistake people make is not considering the variations on their CV keywords. In search marketing, you’ll do this as a matter of course – whether its optmising meta tags or on-page copy or building ad campaign keyword lists, you’ll think of all the alternatives. For example, when using the terms Search Engine Optimisation or Pay per Click, you’ll also use the alternative terms PPC or SEO.

A final piece of advice, which I’ve given previously in a forum discussion on Econsultancy.com, would be to be careful of keyword spam. In search marketing, we’re all aware of the consequences of trying to cheat the system, but it can apply to job hunting too.

From my Econsultancy comment:

Make sure your CV contains the relevant terms for your skills and job titles. Don’t spam it – that will put people off – just ensure the words are included in your text.

Having seen CVs full of spammed keywords, I can ensure you it is off putting and is more likely to negatively influence the recruiter, rather than make them want to congratulate the candidate on their ‘ingenuity’.

So for me, it seems there are some pretty solid parallels between SEO and preparing your CV for job hunting. Hopefully there are some useful learnings here for anyone who has the misfortune to suddenly be in the position to need to apply them.

No related posts.

If you’ve never seen the Google Zeitgeist, I’d recommend you take a look. It makes fascinating reading (at least for me).

In a nutshell, each year Google will collate all the search data and produce Top 10 lists for things like Most Popular Searches and Fastest Rising Searches. There is an obvious bias towards the U.S. in many of these but they do also produce localised Top 10s for countries around the world.

If you select United Kingdom from the list of countries here, you’ll see the top searches on Google.co.uk.

What was interesting for me was to compare it to the Zeitgeist from a few years back. Take a look at the difference between the searches in 2002 and those in 2008.

What a difference six years makes.

Providing these two lists are directly comparable (sourced both from Google, but the UK list was found here), there are some interesting observations to make.

For a start the internet and it’s use is wildly different between the two years. Back in 2002, the number of people online in the UK would have been significantly smaller.  The use of broadband technology considerably less too.

Looking at the list I would suggest that the way we use the internet was different too. It would appear a much more ‘one-way’ activity – to look up news on the BBC, book flights on the new cheap budget airlines (easyJet and Ryanair) and find out the latest celebrity gossip (with Kylie Minogue and Britney Spears it may have been more about the image search ).

Jump forward 6 years and the technology has moved on quickly. More people are online and the take up of broadband internet access has jumped dramtically.

Whilst we’re probably still interested in our celebrities (though it’s probably more Cheryl Cole than Kylie or Britney nowadays), there has been a significant move towards interaction and communication with the web and those using it.

Pretty much every top search term in 2008 involved user generated content – the obvious ones being the social networking sites, Facebook, Youtube and Bebo – but also increasingly the news websites, including the BBC. Where once these sites simply provided the news they now accept comments from users, as well video clips from those that witnessed the newsworthy event.

Three other observations:

1. the inclusion of Jobs into the Top 10 is a reflection of the current economic downturn and the inevitable redundancies. In addition, some of the uplify can be attributed to the increased awareness of the internet as a job hunting tool. High profile TV campaigns, such as the one run by Jobsite, are drawing jobseekers away from the traditional methods, as they begin to appreciate the benefits of moving to the online approach.
2. 7/10 search results in 2008 are navigational searches (typed with the intention of going to a specific site), compared to 4 in 2002. Could this be the effect of the high brand awareness  of these now established online brands? Interesting, the BBC is the only one to make the list on both occasions.
3. Amusingly, the 9th most popular term on Google was ‘Yahoo’. Why is it that people use a search engine to find another search engine? I think that says a lot about Google’s dominance in the market and it’s position as the ‘starting place on the internet’.

It will be interesting to see how the list looks in 2009 – what, or specifically who, will we be searching for this year?

Related posts:

1. For Google size is everything
2. Google causing global warming?
3. Google Profiles in UK Search Results