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eMarketer estimates in its latest forecast that Google continues to dominate the search advertising market with 74% of total U.S. search ad market share. In 2012, Google was reported earning an estimated $12.79 billion in ad revenues, and is expected to reach $14.39 billion in 2013.

Microsoft earned an estimated 660 million dollars in net U.S. search ad revenues in 2012 and is expected to reach 890 million dollars in 2013, accounting for 4.6% of total U.S. search ad revenues in 2013. Based on an assessment of Microsoft’s decreasing traffic acquisition costs (TAC), eMarketer originally estimated their earnings to reach $1.41 billion in 2012 and $1.84 billion in 2013, but new data shows that despite the decreases in TAC, according to eMarketer, initial costs of acquiring search traffic were far higher than expected. This new information led to the downward revision of Microsoft’s estimated ad revenues.

Yahoo! continues to take second place behind Google in U.S. search ad market share, and is expected to earn $1.27 billion this year, and account for 6.5% of total U.S. search ad revenues.

eMarketer estimates that advertisers will spend almost $19.49 billion on search marketing in 2013, a 12.4% increase over 2012.

Interested in search marketing? Leverage Digital Media is a professional SEO company in Tampa. Call us today at (866) 611-6267 or submit our contact request form to see how we can help your business.

In their 2nd Annual U.S. Mobile Path to Purchase Study, xAd and Telmetrics concluded that consumers are reaching for their smartphones and tablets earlier and more often in their search for local goods and services. They also found that key factors like local relevancy and promotions highly influenced consumers’ purchase decisions.

Mobile Used Early & Often

The study reports 45% of consumers that are searching for local products and services will reach for their mobile device first when starting a search, and 49% will use a desktop device. However, when it comes to the mobile user, 54% of all mobile users will look to an additional media source at some point in their purchasing process, while the remaining 46% will use their mobile device as their sole primary search tool.

Additionally, it was found that half of mobile users will use their device at the start of the search process with 1 out of 3 using their mobile device throughout the entire process.

Mobile Conversions Impacted by Device and Location

Local relevancy was a top motivator for consumer purchase selection, as 1 in 3 smartphone users and 1 in 4 tablet users utilized their devices to search specifically for contact information such as an address, phone number, or driving directions. The study also concluded that 60% of mobile users expect businesses to be within walking distance or a 5 mile driving radius.

Mobile users who participated in this study were found to have high purchase intent with 60% of smartphone users and 53% of tablet users completing purchases related to their mobile search. 74% of smartphone users completed transactions offline or in-store, while 54% of tablet related purchases were made online through a mobile device or PC, and 22% of mobile users completed transactions directly through their mobile device.

Leverage Digital Media is a SEO company in Tampa that specializes in mobile search and design. If you would like more information on how we can help you increase mobile traffic and conversions, please call us at (866) 611-6267 or submit our contact request form.

Since her arrival as Chief Executive Officer to Yahoo, Inc. almost a year ago, Marissa Mayer has been struggling to end their 10 year search deal with Microsoft, which started in 2010, for a more lucrative partnership with search giant and former employer Google, but Microsoft has no intentions of letting Yahoo out of their deal.

Under the terms of their contract, Yahoo is obligated to utilize Microsoft’s Bing search engine for search Yahoo Bing search dealresults on Yahoo sites. Yahoo and Microsoft also have a revenue guarantee which expired and was extended for an additional 12 months (U.S. only) on March 31, 2013.

This arrangement allocates 12% of the revenue received from Yahoo’s search advertisements to Microsoft. In return, Microsoft guarantees Yahoo a set amount of revenue for every search query made on a Yahoo site. Although Microsoft’s revenue guarantee is worth $12-$15 million a quarter, according to the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo’s revenue per search has been its worst since they partnered with Microsoft.

In February, Mayer said the partnership between Yahoo and Microsoft was not delivering. “One of the points of the alliance is that we collectively want to grow share rather than just trading share with each other,” Mayer said at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco.

In a recent regulatory filing, Yahoo disclosed their desire to terminate their arrangement with Microsoft, but will either have to wait until 2015 (the halfway mark of the contract), the sale of Bing to another company by Microsoft, or revenue-per-search dipping below their agreed threshold to make any moves.

If Yahoo and Google do eventually partner, this partnership could have a tremendous impact on search as we know it.

Leverage Digital Media is a Tampa SEO company. If you would like more information on search engine optimization, please call us at (866) 611-6267 or submit our contact request form.

In Kenshoo’s recent Global Search Advertising Trends report, it was found that global paid search ad spending continues to rise. So much so, that year over year growth for global paid search ad spend in Q1 2013 reached 15%, and in the U.S. alone paid search ad spending grew 24%. A majority of the increases in paid search ad spending can be justified by the fact that consumers are increasingly looking to their smartphone or tablet for search and purchases instead of their laptop or desktop, which has forced marketers to invest a greater portion of their ad spending into mobile.

Kenshoo also found that in the U.S., there is a significant gap between paid search ad spending and distribution of clicks. In Q1 2013, tablets and smartphones accounted for 20% of paid search clicks but only accounted for 14% of total paid search ad spending. Smartphones in particular accounted for 9% of paid search clicks, but only made up 5% of total paid search ad spend.

In the U.S., desktop search still commanded the most ad spend and clicks by a healthy majority at 86% and 81%, respectively.

Leverage Digital Media is a PPC company in Tampa. For more information on paid search advertising, please call us at (866) 611-6267 or submit our contact request form.

Early last week, Facebook released their new targeted ad feature, “Partner Categories.” This new feature allows advertisers to zero in on a target audience based on their purchase behavior by utilizing information from large data companies including Acxiom, Blue Kai, Datalogix, and Epsilon. This new partnership has better positioned Facebook to offer advertisers the opportunity to fine tune their campaigns and get more relevant advertisements in front of the right audience.

With partner categories, Facebook is able to deliver highly targeted ads based not only on the information provided in users’ profiles, but also based on users’ online and offline buying habits.

For example, a local grocer wanting to promote a new line of cereal for children can now show ads to users who have shown to be likely buyers of children’s cereals.

This benefits both users and advertisers. For users, this presents a better experience because they are provided with ads that are highly relevant to both their interests and buying habits. For advertisers, this allows delivery of ads that are more targeted, and should theoretically provide a better return on investment.

Want to learn how to enhance your social media marketing efforts? Give us a call at (866) 611-6267 or submit our contact request form.

Bullish on Mobile

Mobile is growing so fast that analysts are having to revise their predictions. Why is this? The need for more convenience due to our busy, on-the-go lifestyles combined with increasing demand for instant access to information, products, and services.

In fact, because of the increases in mobile device usage, many U.S. businesses are feeling the pressure to step up their mobile advertising efforts, which in turn, has forced analysts to revise their original predictions only 4 months into the year. In December of 2012, eMarketer projected U.S. mobile ad spend to reach $4.4 billion in 2013, a far cry from their recently released projection of $7.29 billion. These numbers keep rising, and analysts have predicted that mobile ad spend will reach $27.17 billion by 2017.

What This Means to Your Business

Implementing a mobile marketing strategy is no longer an option for most businesses. It has become a necessity. If you have yet to adopt a mobile marketing strategy, here are three reasons why you’ll want to start now:

1. Low Cost

With relatively low costs, mobile advertising provides the opportunity to reach a highly targeted audience at a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising.

2. Large Audience

As of December of 2012, in a survey conducted by Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, it was found that nearly half of U.S. adults own a smartphone device and over 50% of them use it to access the Internet. According to BIA/Kelsey, mobile local search will surpass traditional local desktop search in 2015, which presents a huge opportunity for local businesses.

3. Competitive Advantage

Mobile advertising is still in its infancy, and has the potential to grow astronomically. If the above predictions come to fruition, the future of web usage will be dominated by the mobile industry. So instead of trying to play catch-up in a few years, investing in mobile advertising now will give your business an advantage over your competitors.

In sum, the mobile industry and the number of U.S. consumers that use mobile devices to conduct searches and make purchases is growing, and growing fast. With relatively low costs, the potential to attract a large, highly targeted audience, and the competitive advantage of getting in early, business owners and marketing professionals can no longer afford to ignore mobile.

Leverage Digital is a web design and SEO company in Tampa. If you would like more information on mobile web design or need help with your mobile marketing strategy, give us a call to speak with a digital marketing consultant at (866) 611-6267 or submit our contact request form.

Google’s rel=publisher tag provides Google with information that can be used to determine the relevancy of a company’s site by linking a company’s Google+ page to the company’s website. Implementation of Google’s rel=publisher tag is really quite simple to do, and can be done in four easy steps.

Step 1: Create a Google+ Business Page

If your company does not already have a Google+ business page setup, you will need to create one before implementing this tag. If you already have a Google+ business page, you may proceed to Step 2.

• In order to setup a Google+ Page, you will first need to sign in to your Google+ account (if you don’t already have one, you can create one here).
• Once you are signed in, click on the Pages link, which can be found under the More category on the left, and select Create New Page.
• Then choose Local Business or Place category. Enter your company’s phone number and select Locate. If you don’t see your company’s name on the list, click Add Your Business to Google or Look Up a Different Number if there is another number associated with your company.
• After you have selected the appropriate company, you may then enter or edit your company’s information. Once you have verified that all the information is correct, select Create and your new Google+ Page will be available for use.

Step 2: Add the Rel=Publisher Tag

Add the rel=publisher tag within the head tag of your homepage or the most significant page on your website. The HTML to insert into the head tag should look like this:

<link href=”Your Company’s Google+ Page URL” rel=”publisher”/>

Once the above HTML has been added to your website, you will then have to create a link on your Google+ business page that points back to your website. This link should be the exact URL for the page that the above link was added to.

Step 3: Request Verification

After the appropriate links have been added to both the company’s website and the corresponding Google+ business page, the final step for adding the rel=publisher tag is to request verification from Google. This is Google’s way of verifying that the Google+ page can be trusted. To go through this process, you must first meet the requirements listed on the Google+ page verification request form, and then complete and submit the form.

Step 4: Test

Once the above steps have been completed, test to make sure that the rel=publisher tag has been implemented correctly. This can be easily done through Google’s rich snippet testing tool. If the rel=publisher tag is implemented correctly, this tool will display the markup as it would appear in the Google search results.

Leverage Digital Media is a Tampa SEO Company. If you have any questions about implementing the rel=publisher tag or improving your SEO strategy, please call us at (866) 611-6287, or complete our contact request form.

Google Authoriship

In order to explain the benefits of Google Authorship, we must first discuss what it is. Google Authorship is Google’s attempt to establish authority of published content on the search engine results pages (SERPs) by linking it to an author’s Google+ profile or company’s Google+ page. In Google’s eyes, content that is claimed by an author or brand with an active, trusted, and verified Google+ account is viewed as more credible than content that is published anonymously.

What Google Authorship Can Do For Your Business

So what does this mean for your business? Higher rankings and more visibility.

Rel=Author

Google Authorship features two distinctly different markup tags which you can use to link published content to a verified Google+ account.

These markup tags are known as rel=author and rel=publisher. With the rel=author markup tag, Google links published content to the author’s Google+ profile from within the SERPs.

Confirming that Google Authorship does benefit rankings, Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt was recently quoted as saying, “Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.”

One hidden benefit of Google’s rel=author tag is when a visitor clicks the back button to return to the SERPs after reading an article for an extended period of time (roughly 2 minutes), a “More by…” link will appear directly below the originally clicked link which provides searchers with more relevant articles from that author, as seen in the example above. This increases the likelihood that a visitor will click on another article published by the same author.

Rel=Publisher

The rel=author markup tag is great for building authority as an individual, whether writing content for a blog or as a contributor for a publication. However, as a business owner or marketing executive, you may be questioning how Google Authorship can benefit your company. Unlike the rel=author tag which ties individual articles to one’s personal Google+ profile, the rel=publisher tag attributes a company’s Google+ page to that company’s entire website.

When a searcher conducts a search query utilizing a company’s name and location, a page summary will show up on the right-hand side of the SERPs for that company. This summary, which takes up a good portion of the page includes the company’s logo, name, address, phone number, hours of operation, and the most recent activity on the company’s Google+ page. Some of the benefits of the rel=publisher tag include better brand awareness, increased visibility, and a visual aid on the SERPs, which helps to increase click through rates.

Though still in it’s early stages, Google Authorship will play an increasingly greater role in the near future for increasing rankings and boosting click through rates in Google organic search. So, if you haven’t already incorporated Google Authorship into your SEO strategy, now is a great time to start.

Leverage Digital Media is a Tampa SEO company. If you have any questions about Google Authorship and improving your SEO strategy, please call us at (866) 611-6287, or complete our contact request form.

It is often perceived that content should be optimized for search engines, but in fact for better rankings and a greater ROI, content should be optimized for your target audience. We call this customer centric SEO.

Customer Centric SEO

Customer centric SEO is used to not only increase search rankings, but also attract, engage, and motivate your target audience to perform a desired action through your website.

How is this done? Here are 4 steps to walk you through the process of how to employ an effective customer centric SEO strategy.

Step 1: Identify.

Are you aware of your customers’ needs and wants, and are you providing content that addresses them? If not, you may want to take a few moments to step back and evaluate what your customers truly desire. Identifying your customers’ needs and wants will enable you to put together a content strategy that will provide potential customers with information they find useful, such as why your business can fulfill their needs better than your competitors.

Step 2: Attract.

To attract your target audience, determine which keywords are the most effective. Questions like, “what do my customers care about?” or “what are some of the concerns that my customers have?” are good examples of where to start off. Remember, your choice of keywords should be directly correlated with what your customers are looking for. After you’ve chosen the right combination of keywords you can then provide information that your customers will find of interest.

Step 3: Engage.

Once you’ve captured your target audience’s interest and understand their needs, you then have the ability to provide them with valuable and useful information that keeps them engaged. In providing your audience with compelling and useful information, they will start to view your brand as an authority or thought leader in your industry. As a result, you will gain their trust and help to build your brand’s credibility, and when your audience can trust your brand, they will be more inclined to do business with you.

Step 4: Motivate.

Calls to action (CTAs) are great tools for your business to use to help motivate potential customers to perform an intended action, such as to schedule an appointment, fill out a contact request form, or make a purchase. Whatever the desired action may be, CTAs are absolutely necessary to motivate your customers to act.

Whether you’re looking to improve an existing SEO campaign or looking for tips to create one, these 4 steps will help your business employ an effective customer centric SEO strategy.

Have more questions about customer centric SEO in Tampa? Call us at (866) 611-6287, or complete our contact request form for more information.