International Search Engine Marketing and Arbitrage

Limited Competition in Secondary Markets

I recently took the AdWords professional exam again and the section I failed was international search. It is easy to do that because if you are primarily focused on the US market there are parts of search you can't appreciate until you see them. When I was in Canada about a month ago I noticed PageRank 4 pages dominating search results where you would need at least 100x the link equity to compete on Google.com. Some of the most valuable US keywords only have a couple advertisers in Canada.

In The Slums of Search, Gord Hotchkiss wrote:

At Enquiro we actually did studies and asked people why they were reluctant to click on sponsored ads. The most common response was that they didn't trust the advertiser. They felt that by clicking on the link they would end up on an affiliate or spam site and may get caught in a never-ending cascade of pop-up windows. Searchers were very wary. In the US, this attitude began to change as known brands began to adopt search.

If Google can't attract the right advertisers that also means that the organic search results in that geographic market are likely easy to manipulate. In many underdeveloped markets around the world, PPC offers greater opportunity than SEO because their is virtually no competition, but as the markets mature and margins get squeezed, doing SEO and owning a brand becomes more profitable than PPC. Either way you approach it, if you can compete on Google.com you should be able to dominate foreign markets. The only issue is scale.

Estimating Market Scale

Google offers an ad preview tool to show you what ads look like in various markets, and you can take advantage of their traffic estimator tool to estimate the size of a market.

If you are in a market dominated by engines other than Google (like China and Russia) then of course you have to use tools other than Google to estimate the size of the market.

How to View US Google Search Results

If you are international and do not want to get redirected to your local version of Google you can view Google.com's results by going to Google.us. While on Google.com you can append &gl=us to see the related US targeted ads. Another option to view international Google search results by using this Google global Firefox Extension or use Joost's plugins that turn off personalization.

How Google Makes Lazy US Only Advertisers Buy Foreign Traffic

While in the Philippines I have noticed that some $20 keywords (in the US) have few advertisers here, and many of the ads are for garbitrage websites. For example, one page advertising on student loans went to a page with stolen content, and had a page title about mesothelioma. If an advertiser choses US only search distribution but opts into the content network they are probably paying for exposure on that page.

When I switched Google to only search local pages the number 1 ranked page for online degrees was an off topic forum thread. Limited competition means great opportunity for those who understand the local culture and are able to gain international recognition.

Brand Keywords Create Your Long-term Sustainable Profit Margin

The Microsoft AdCenter blog posted that 35% of top search queries are brand related:

Approximately 35% of the top searches in the UK, USA and France are brand related, which gives you an idea just how brand focused our Live Search users are. If your brand is strong (and strong brands come in all shapes and sizes) include it in at least in one of your ad titles and try to get it in the descriptions too! We have often seen click through rates (CTRs) increase when brand names have been included effectively.

Brands are like attention...if your brand is healthy you have an endless number of streams of profit waiting to be unlocked. And brand keywords are easy to own because of the resonance.

if others outrank you for your own brand then your public relations stinks or you have major SEO issues
if others out monetize you for your own brand then your business model needs improved

Investing brand related profits into awareness related marketing helps reinforce your market position. Even if the ad return is at a break even point it still helps you by building additional attention that leads to additional citations.

Turn Your Ads Into Lies / Research on Shifting Public Policy

Call it Research & People Will Believe It

The Computers and Communications Industry Association published research on the value of fair use. The research is completely biased, to the point of being fraud:

Even by the woeful standards of the bespoke research industry, this study is a crock. It's not just bad; it's absurd. What the authors have done is to define the "fair-use economy" so broadly that it encompasses any business with even the most tangential relationship to the free use of copyrighted materials.

Even Smart People Buy This Junk

Google is a leading sponsor of the research. They know it is a lie, but one that fattens their profit margins, so why not help spread this one and spend a few dollars sponsoring the next one?

Cory Doctorow, who is brilliant, is helping spread this idea because it was the first such publication and he is emotionally attached to the idea. If you are the first person to create a value system that reinforces others values they are going to cite you day and night.

Marketing Continues to Blur into a Game of Psychological Warfare

As marketing and content merge, and as people become more aware of marketing, there are going to be a lot more non-profit organizations sharing research built around pushing lies that helps for profit companies. Some lies are damaging, others are not. Both smart and ignorant people will cast votes without understanding what they are doing. The machines that count votes promote information pollution and are amoral. Those selling sugar water to diabetics also sell safety water. Every dollar counts. As marketing advances, expect more people to play on your emotions using an ever-increasing complex and diverse array of techniques.

Links or Content? Nope, the Issue is Attention

WebmasterWorld recently had another debate on which is more important: links or content. But the debate is flawed. Links or content alone are just one type of asset. You might be able to profit from either for a while, but ultimately the real measure of relevancy and staying power is attention.

When you have a new idea can you spread it? You can do the most amazing thing in the world that would alter the course of history, but if you have no attention it goes nowhere. Days / months / years later somebody comes by and steals / repackages / reformats / relaunches your idea and is hailed a brilliant futurist. You wait in line for their autograph, and can do nothing but laugh or cry because you know you already published that idea, but unfortunately you did it at the wrong place or wrong time or you used the wrong headline.

An old site that already ranks well can see self reinforcing links for years until someone launches a better idea and owns that idea. But if ignored eventually someone will take the idea from you. If you do not have enough attention you do not have the margins needed to be sustainable and fight off competition. If you run a network without adequate attention it turns to spam.

A profitable SEO running a sustainable longterm website is an attention whore. They learn how ideas spread, what types of ideas spread, and how to format them to help them spread. They tap into the human ego and dig deep into psychology to help others want to help them. Marketers spread lies if the payout is high enough. Other times people accidentally spread inaccuracies, but that works too because people talking about it grants you more authority and reading the feedback forces you to learn more.

Some marketers are conservative and like to quietly build links and attention over time. Others like to see their name on the front page of the newspaper or Digg. Both ways work, but links are just a proxy for conversation and attention. Search engines follow people.

Once you have attention you can do whatever you want. Who cares if 90% of your ideas fail? You learn from every failure, content can easily be reformatted, and other good ideas come out of remains of past failures. You only need 1 to be really successful to be set for life. And if you keep trying to launch innovative valuable ideas then people are going to keep talking about you until you launch a success. And when it launches people will talk about it because you already have their attention.

AltaVista is a Leading SEO Site, According to Google

As noted in a recent WebmasterWorld thread, Google is reshuffling top ranking sites for single word queries (and shuffling their understanding of language and word relationships). I recently searched Google for SEO and was surprised to see the search engine Altavista coming in at #8 [screenshot].

Darren Rowse also emailed me to let me know that he saw the Matt Cutts blog ranking at #4 in Google for blog. As Google gets better at understanding word relationships even more traffic will go to the large authoritative websites.

Yahoo Keyword Suggestion Tool Blunder

Yahoo / Overture had the default status as THE keyword tool for about a decade. They lost that last year when Google started opening up their data a bit more. Now Microsoft is getting into the game offering more useful tools and more data. How does Yahoo respond? They stop supporting their keyword tool. No results, no 301 redirect, no rebrand, no description of why it is broke, no anything. Since my keyword tool is powered by their keyword tool I am getting 10 to 20 emails a day. How many people are not emailing? How much more traffic is Yahoo getting than I am? Tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of shareholder value are wasted each day with that move.

The best spot to market yourself is on your own site. As long as Yahoo continues to undermine their own assets without regard or thought their marketplace will remain inefficient, and each day they will continue to lose marketshare. They paid $350 million for Zimbra, but what are the odds of them not screwing that up? They have too many half done projects that do not gel together.

Off to Get Married

My flight leaves tonight to go get married. I will be back in the last week of October. I might post again before then, but I might not. I wish you well and will be back soon(ish).

BTW, Compete.com search analytics launches tomorrow. It is exceptionally affordable for its value. Be sure to check it out.

Quintura's Seo Book Search Cloud

Quintura recently made a search page for Seo Book. Their search service is likely going to be more useful for large publishers with millions of pages than it is on a personal blog, but give it a try and see what you think.

Their cloudlike visual search service is a great tool for finding related keyword modifiers used in competing sites, but I don't think we will see such technology front and center at the mainstream search engines anytime soon due to future advertising regulation which will make it harder to integrate ads and make search results more profitable than the current Google format is. Though I would love to see their technology integrated against social bookmarking sites and personal search history data.

Rank for Penis, Go to Jail

It seems politicians don't like this Internet thing too much. A 23 year old Polish man is facing 3 years in prison for ranking his president #1 for penis.

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