You may think you know everything there is to know about your brand, but what if you don’t? This short article illustrates how Google Trends can be used to find out the level of brand competition a company faces. Using the tool Google Trends can help you find out if there are other companies or products out there who use the same names you do. Google Trends shows you the geographical volume and distribution of searches for your name, which will help you find out if you need to take action against brand competition and brand confusion. With the information from Google Trends you can then go back to the search engine and do a search for your brand with regional modifiers to see who it is you're competing against. Identifying your competitors regionally can help you understand why you may have low conversion rate in these areas, as well as help you determine a suitable course of action to eliminate the brand confusion against your competitors. Read the full article

Seven SEO experts give their prediction on the development of search. In this part they dig into the interface on search result pages and whether search will become our own personal portal page. To a large degree the experts agree that in the future, search will be presented in a more interactive way that will include all kinds of different formats as opposed to now the simple text title and abstract and URL, and that the social nature of the web as well as personalisation of the search experience will help make search stickier. Among other interesting subjects discussed by the experts are semantic search, personalised search, and contextual search. Read the full article

Both clients and search marketers tend to forget the impact online search campaigns often has on offline conversions. According to this article, two recent studies have shown that online research often result in offline spending. In fact, people researching online tend to spend an average of 41% more in-store than consumers who had not been exposed to online advertising. Likewise, 82% of local searchers follow up offline with an in-store visit and out of these, 61% made purchases. Read the full article

Universal search is Google's new way of displaying search results that blends results from various vertical search engines into one list. Do a search for "Pepsi add" if you want to see an example. Universal search means we can utilise social media sites to increase visibility in the search engines as social media sites tend to have high rankings and to push competitors down in the search listings. Like the article says, why pay for paid advertising that only offers a little blue box with a little text, when you can have images, videos, and more in the organic listings? Read the full article

Gain insight into important guidelines of social media optimisation. According to the author, the concept behind SMO is to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines, and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs. The guidelines in this article are meant to ensure that you approach your social media optimisation efforts in a way that lets you get the most our of social media. Read the full article