Press Room - 2008
All You Need to Know About SEO
Scott Wilson, Pharmaceutical Executive
Published: November 2008
The Internet is proving to be the great leveler of enterprises big and small in the Web 2.0 business world of today.
The Internet has quietly revolutionized the world in this new century. Consumers are banking, shopping, and being entertained and informed rom their personal computers. This massive shift of consumers to the Web has relevance far beyond those in the media and entertainment industries. Today as never before, people are researching their health, their diseases, and their medications online. According to comScore, Inc., 61 billion searches were conducted worldwide on the Internet in August 2007; nearly half (43 percent) were medical or health related, according to Hitwise, an online competitive intelligence service. But although we see this shift of eyeballs to the Internet, drug marketing has been slow to follow. Those who have transitioned to online advertising have found a medium that moves at light speed and operates under rules far different from the traditional offline world. Great online content delivers targeted messages to your audience.
The Google Advantage
Paul Brent, Financial Post
Published: June 2008
Google has proven to be such a dominant search that Microsoft Corp. has been forced to introduce a plan to pay consumers to search the Internet in an effort to gain more attention. The pay-for-search model may gain Microsoft some eyeballs, but it seems unlikely the scheme will topple Google from its lofty perch.
Because Google is perceived to be the search engine of choice for North American businesses and consumers, companies pay big bucks to Internet search experts, or search engine optimizers (SEO), to ensure their products and services appear at or near the top of its search list. “Winning search in the dot-com space is getting so competitive for major keywords like golf or shoes, It is hard to win.
Inflate That Marketing Balloon
Rick Spence, Financial Post
Published: August 2008
The Internet is proving to be the great leveler of enterprises big and small in the Web 2.0 business world of today.
The other day I was trying to arrange a meeting with someone arriving from out of town. It made sense to meet near the airport, and I remembered a good restaurant at one airport hotel — but naturally I couldn’t remember if it was a Crowne Plaza, a Courtyard or a Comfort Inn, or a Days, Delta or DoubleTree.
So I Googled it. And I got a list of dozens of airport-area hotels in Toronto, along with one of those colourful little Google maps covered with red balloons. Each of those balloons was a marker representing one airport hotel, and they were lying on top of each other like so many old pieces of firewood. I worked my way through all of them, but never found the hotel I was looking for.
We ended up meeting downtown.
So what’s with these little red balloons? They’re an essential, but little understood, part of any small business’s marketing plan.
It’s called Google Local Business, and it’s a service tailor-made to small businesses looking to get found on the Web. It turns out I couldn’t find the hotel I was looking for because its management hasn’t figured out the opportunity yet.
RankHigher’s SEO techniques produce instant results!
Jim McElgunn, PROFIT magazine
Published: April 2008
Two weeks ago, I read the article “Google grabbers” (Handbook, March 2008) and immediately implemented two of your five recommendations.
In less than a week, the majority of the search keywords for our product, Stone-field Query, have shown up on the first page of Google, most of them No.1!
Needless to say, we plan on implementing the other three tips.
Online marketing: Google grabbers
Jim McElgunn, PROFIT magazine
Published: March 2008
His first experience of search-engine optimization left a bitter taste for Scott Wilson. He was shocked to find that the advice he had paid an SEO consultant $16,000 for did nothing to boost the Google rankings of his video-production company’s website.
The trouble was that the consultant had theories about the best SEO tactics, but no proof that they worked. That gave Wilson, president of Burlington, Ont.-based eMotionPictureStudios, an idea: to start his own SEO service that would recommend only those tactics proven effective by scientific experiments.
He formed an eight-person team packed with math, science and programming big brains that since 2005 has rigorously tested hundreds of propositions about what will land a site a top-30 Google ranking for a given search term. This project, unique in the world, creates one website as a control and then, say, nine variations on it to gauge how changing a single factor affects the ranking. Wilson’s team has identified more than 60 effective tactics, although he stresses that they won’t work if your content stinks.
