When you say “Local Market Strategy”, most people think of local as at the city level. In search that means Google Local, using Geographic delimiters in keywords, Local Directories, etc.

But for large enterprise sized clients, a local strategy is one for a particular country. Multi nationals typically are faced with the decision:

Are they going to have one overriding strategy for all markets

or

Are they going to have a local strategy (including different products, pricing, etc) for each market (country) that they play in.

and how this question is answered has a HUGE impact on your Search Strategy (at least it should).

So I don’t know if you recall in the past when I mentioned that I believed Live to be the branding where Microsoft planned on competing with Google.  (See Virtual Reality - Microsoft Office Live).  Well, we should look at some of the things that they are doing from the User perspective.

Nice and clean, free of advertising, and links to other Microsoft places of possible usefulness. It’s very familiar, don’t you think?  Ever seen anything like it before from any other extremely successful search engines?

Image courtesy of rapidsharecinema.blogspot.com

According to the ComScore figures, growth in paid-search clicks happens to be slowing down.  Is it because of the economy?  Is it because of the “R” word that is being used in the United States?  Don’t know, but there was still growth in Google.  Certainly it may not have been huge growth like the numbers we are used to being reported, but still almost 3% growth year over year is substantial compared to the losses evidenced by the competitors Yahoo and MSN.  Yahoo paid clicks went down by about 3% year over year and MSN went even further in the wrong direction by a note-worthy 12%.  It all really does make that 3% growth in Google clicks stand out that much more, and lends that much more credibility to their reputation.

Andrew Goodman, of Traffick.com and Page Zero Media, and I are if not friends, well, at least peers with a mutual and healthy respect for each other both knowing exactly how long the other has been at this Search (whether paid or otherwise) stuff in this country. Over the years we’ve lunched, coffee’d and conferenced together.

And always, one theme has come up. When and why did Canada miss the boat when it comes to search and the Internet?

Coincidentally, Andrews post of today “When Registering Domains, Think Big”, he states:

Personally, I have a real problem with the .ca.

Now that you’ve forged your Foundation Friends, and are beginning to expand your authority by continuing to write excellent quality blog posts, while securing new friends and fans through the previously mentioned tactics, the concepts ‘Spheres of Influence’ and ‘Influence Ripples’ become tremendously important.

Source: http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/

Spheres of Influence & Influence Ripples … the Concept:
David Armano introduced the concept of Influence Ripples in 2006. His post Influence Ripples 2.0 shows how numerous bloggers with varied spheres of influence interact. Ultimately, networks become evident.

The concept is this, each person’s authority can be viewed as a circle (see above) on a 2-dimensional grid:

There is no sales tip in the world that will make your blog convert if it’s not a quality blog.

Next week I’ll write about How to get your Blog Traffic to Convert (part five in a 5 part series on Blog Strategy with a focus on clients). But before we can cover that, you must follow these basic principals if you want to your blog posts to convert:

The 10 Golden Rules of Blogging:

1. Start with an SEO friendly infrastructure. Word Press for example has so many useful plug ins such as Netconcepts SEO Title Tag 2.1 that make life (and Marketing) easier.

Image Courstesy Businessweek.com

HOLY SMOKES!  I am completely blown away by the moves of Yahoo this week, in an effort to stave off the Microsoft takeover.  As of yesterday for a two week trial, Google will handle advertising for a tiny piece of the searches carried out on Yahoo.  In fact, Google will place ads alongside 3% of the U.S. queries on Yahoo’s site.  GOOGLE SEARCH RESULTS ON YAHOO!!!  It would appear that instead of being eaten by the lion, Yahoo would prefer to throw itself into the dragon’s mouth!  I’d LOVE to hear what you all have to say about that, or what your thoughts on this maneuver are!  Doesn’t that actually reduce Yahoo’s perceived value as a search engine, having results served up by the competition?  Wouldn’t that also drive down the stock price, making it even easier for Microsoft to be able to pick it up?

Ever heard it said … “to have a good friend, you’ve got to be a good friend”?

Image courtesy: Prosoundweb.com

Well its absolutely true! A group of friends with similar interests but complementary skills is beneficial for all involved, especially where each works to help the others in the group. If each member is an authority in their respective realms, and truly respects the work and skills of the others, the whole becomes greater than the sum of the members … which tends to elevate the “authority” of each of the members.

Full Disclosure Confession: I don’t get the whole social networking phenomenon. Perhaps it is because I am a gentleman of a certain age. MySpace is mine and I have no real desire to share it with anyone beyond my other half… and my dog. I leave the Twittering to my parrot. I am not Facebooked as I have no overwhelming desire to make contact with my primary school cohorts. I am LinkedIn, but that’s about that.

And I actually don’t get it from a SEO/SEM perspective simply because there is far too much beyond my control which implicitly and necessarily implies I am a control freak. I am a control freak. And I like numbers that have relevance. Who. What. Where. When. Why.

Have you ever happened upon a blog, and thought to yourself “Wow the information on this site is fantastic … how does the world not know about it?”.

It happens often. The problem is; content alone is highly unlikely to be sufficient to build any significant authority. If half the battle is creating great content, the other half is all about who ya know. In the end, build a better mousetrap, and the world will not necessarily beat a path to your door!