On December 22, 2009, Engine Ready’s Brian Lewis and SEOmoz’s Rand Fishkin arranged for a holiday networking party for the local San Diego SEO community. About 35 internet marketers showed up at the Gordon Biersch Brewery in San Diego to join in some great networking, beer sampling and appetizer munching.

Rumor was that there were even isolated pockets of SEO related discussions going on … imagine that …

Engine Ready, EngineReady, Google, internet marketing, SEO

Engine Ready has announced that they have agreed to host a new monthly radio show on WebmasterRadio.FM designed to keep online marketers informed on the most up-to-date and successful search marketing strategies. The free show called “Best Search Strategies” will air the last Tuesday of every month at 2 PM Eastern time.

Engine Ready’s CEO Jamie Smith and VP Brian Lewis will host the shows and plan to discuss findings from the Engine Ready Research Team’s most recent studies on search marketing.

To listen to or download this first radio show, visit Webmasterradio.

Upcoming episodes will discuss:

• June 30th – Study Results on Keyword Assists and 800-number Prefix usage on websites
• July 28th – SEO versus PPC, which tactics bring the highest converting and most engaged traffic
• August 25th – Ad Position Study, which ad position in Google AdWords is the most cost effective

search marketing training

In order to target smaller geographic areas Google Adwords allows advertisers to select a custom shape or radius to limit who sees their ads. However, It doesn’t always work the way it’s supposed to!

Recently we decided to select a 10 mile radius (the minimum reccommended by Google) to geo-target a local business in downtown San Diego. After running the ads for few days we noticed that our ads linked to keywords with the prefix ”san diego” were not showing up in Google. We then increased the keyword cpc bid up to an expensive $20 a click, but they still didn’t show. 

When speaking to Google about this issue they searched “san diego (keyword)” in the ad diagnostic tool and found our ad showing up in the top 3 positions every time. Nevertheless it was not showing up in our local searches. They then contacted their technical team and found that there was problem with their algorythym. 

The Fix? Google suggested targeting no smaller than a 20 mile radius, or to target by a city. We decided to change our geo-targeting to San Diego City as it is closer to our target market. Immediately after the change our ads showed up in the top positions. 

Google Adwords Advertisers beware: Do not geo-target an area smaller than a 20 mile radius!

geo targeting, geo targeting problems, geo-targeting small areas, geotargeting, Google adwords geo-targeting

When asked what can be expected from Google search in 2009, Google’s Matt Cutts said it will be “The big year for the mobile phone.”  Matt Cutts Interview

I can definitely see this happening. Everywhere I look people are playing with their iPhones. I can name 4 people in our office alone that have purchased one in the last month.  Apple and AT&T are making record sales and I have no doubt that these mobile phones are going to be big in 2009.

So what does all of this mean for the future online marketing?  We have been told time and time again that mobile phones are going to be the new marketing media of the future. If 2007 wasn’t the “The big year for the mobile phone” then it was 2008. Or was it?

However, a big change did happen on December 8, 2008 when the Google team announced a new campaign-level option that allows AdWords advertisers to show desktop text and image ads on the iPhone, the T-Mobile G1, and other mobile devices with full (HTML) Internet browsers. These ads point to desktop landing pages so that it is unnecessary to create mobile landing pages or ads in mobile formats. This allows advertisers to display ads exclusively on these mobile devices, create campaigns for them, and get separate performance reporting. Google Mobile Article

 I see this change as Google’s first step in progressing mobile advertising. Now that advertisers can target mobile devices with HTML internet browsers the next step logical step would be to integrate the click to call function into full length Adwords ads. I also believe Google has big plans for the T-Mobile G1 to compete with the iPhone. Then what about Application advertising? My favorite iPhone feature is the applications function; but how would Google advertise on applications?  Maybe Google will create a type of application network similar to the content network. This would allow ads to be easily managed within the Google Adwords account. These are some of the changes that I hope Matt Cutts is talking about when he says that 2009 is going to be “The year of the mobile phone”.

g1, iphone, mobile advertising, mobile phone