Some of the results are not so surprising – two-thirds of shoppers begin the shopping process online; one in five starting at a retail site (the most frequent starting point among all retail shoppers); one in 10 starting at a physical store. Close behind retail websites as a starting point for shoppers are search engines, which are themselves a significant driver of shoppers to retail websites (as are manufacturer websites). Surprisingly, only a negligible percentage starts its search by consulting a blog (2%) or a social networking site (1%)

According for Forrester Research, no activity occupies more of shoppers’ time online than search. Search engines play a pivotal role in the shopping process, providing a laundry list of options; and retail websites have emerged as a leading source for a bevy of product details.

There are some interesting findings about the shopper journey. Of the shoppers who start the shopping process with a search engine (18%), 37% move on to a retail site as their next step. Nearly half of the consumer electronic shoppers end up purchasing on the retail site, as do one-third of the computer buyers.

The study confirms that search engines and retail websites are the first or second stop in over half of the shopping processes evaluated. Search engines are the most frequent driver of traffic to retail websites, as well as to manufacturer websites and are the most frequently used tool for finding customer reviews, expert reviews/ratings, and third party product recommendations.

The writers recommend that retail marketers work to ensure that their websites appear in the organic and paid search results for all the specific brands, makes, models, features and functionalities associated with the products they sell.

Landing pages are also important. They should be designed to meet the degree of specificity about brands, makes, models, features and functionalities used in the shopper’s search.

The report also restated that the first rule of search marketing is still true “content is king.”

Including multiple and enlargeable product images or videos, to highly detailed and clear product descriptions, to thorough and easy-to-use product comparison tools, to user reviews and expert product ratings – any enhancements to website content will help the website rank highly in the search results, help answer the “tough questions” that shoppers seek to have answered prior to making a purchase, maximize the time spent on their website, and maximize the likelihood that the online shopper will buy – be it online or offline.

The beta users were reporting extraordinary gains in productivity – Mydeco said 8 x productivity gains in link building and we felt it was reliable enough for a limited release.

In order to highlight what we describe as the next generation of link building tools we embarked upon a project with eConsultancy. The project objective was to identify the most influential and relevant sites that were linking into eConsultancy.

So we broke it down into two parts. Firstly identify who had the biggest webmap. The was a a three horse race between Google, Majestic and SEOMoz. The idea was that InfluenceFinder would recrawl the biggest map and apply science to working out the best quality inlinking sites.

As we wouldn’t be allowed to re-crawl Google’s map we were left with a two horse race – which Majestic won by a long way.

In re-crawling the Majestic map for inlinks of Econsultancy we used decision trees and content signals to identify influential bloggers. From the 8,000 or inlinking domains we gound 2,700 blogs of which 200+ were considered influential and relevant.

The productivity gains were huge – no way would you have been able to pick out bloggers from a simple link map.

The lesson is simple – if you want to get actionable useful lists then you need more than a link map – you need science.

Come and get a demo!!

1) Buy a defunct search engine and rebuild it. Something like Cuil. Apple has $40b in cash and is a noted talent magnet. About 18 months would do the job.

2) Buy Yahoo Search – it’s a good search engine but I suspect somewhere in the Yahoo-Microsoft deal there is a clause to prohibit that

3) Build one from scatch – it’s not as if Apple isn’t used to running large data centres a la Google

4) Do a deal with Bing. Not ideal but stops Google receiving all the lovely usage data

Even if Apple did drop Google search what does it do about Google Maps which is still the best mapping application for the iPhone. And it’s maps where a lot of the new commerce will happen.

Good luck Apple.

Sanjeev Sharma did an excellent job for us and I’ve decided to publish his findings below in order to help other tools startups raise funds and help grow the market.

Feel free to re-publish to the data below with a link back to this post:

We adopted the following approaches to estimate the tools market size for Organic SEO, Online-Ad placements and Affiliate marketing:

Estimating the size of customer base

GOAL: Determine # of websites paying for Organic SEO, Online-Ad placements and Affiliate marketing

1. Determine # of Active websites = ~ 72 million (source: Netcraft, Feb 2010)
2. Assuming 20% Active websites pay for Online Marketing based on Pareto’s Rule we have 14.4 million Paying websites
3. Online Marketing Segmentation (based on US revenue data, Forrester 2010):

• Online Marketing = Interactive Marketing + Affiliate Marketing
• Interactive Marketing = SEM + Display Ads + Email + Social Media + Mobile Marketing
• SEM = Paid Search + SEO
• Display Advertising = Static Ads + Context Ads + Video + Rich Media (excluding video)

1. Using the % Revenue split as a proxy for # of websites paying for Organic SEO, Online Ad-placements and Affiliate Marketing and applying in an early adoption factor based on Technology Adoption curve we have ~ 200,000 web sites

Estimating the size of user base

GOAL: Determine # of interactive marketers involved in (thereby being the purchase customers) for Organic SEO, Online-Ad placements and/or Affiliate marketing

1. Estimate revenue/interactive marketer based on revenue of Top 11 US Digital Agencies (extrapolating data from Forrester and AdAge)
2. Estimate # of interactive marketers in US based on revenue ratio of Top 11 US Digital Agencies and Total US Interactive Marketing revenue
3. Estimate # of interactive marketers in Europe applying logic in step 2
4. Calculate # of interactive marketers by skill/function i.e. Organic SEO, Online Ad-placement and Affiliate marketing using the revenue split in Step 4 (see above section)
5. Estimated # of interactive marketers ~ 120,000

We asked the guys to help us out with several market scoping projects (lots of TAM and SAM shaping) in order to prioritize markets and give our VC’s a better understanding of where we’ll be in the next three years.

Excellent relationship so far from Sanjeev and Yervand, very smart very responsive and knew exactly how to do the market scoping exercise.

Linkdex Labs – Musing on blog detection, SEO

We hired our first two analysts last week – a couple of very very smart guys – Toby and Neil.

There job will be two fold – improve on the accuracy of signals that we pick up when crawling and to analyze search results versus the influence and relevance in a successful sites backlink structure. This is serious stuff for us and we’ll be expanding the team a lot further this year.

It’s rather like having our own Bletchley Park.

As I was walking past one of there desks to day I noticed some scribblings…all about super accurate blog detection…(forgive pic quality – it was a snapshot with an iPhone)

So lets have a look at the respective unique selling points of each sector.

PR – exceptional at relationship forming and management combined with message refinement

SEO – exceptional technical skills and technical “link baiting” to get linkers attention

To me the technical arguments of how to make a website more search engine friendly are well over. It’s all in the public domain and I even see corporate websites “get it”. So that part of the SEO mission is becoming past tense.

The link baiting facility is a good thing. Generating inbound links is allways good, period. But, not so much control of the linking party (which could also be spun to say it’s a good thing – link diversity is important)

But I think the target seeking missile of PR has an increasingly useful part to play – identifying the target landscape and going after long term relationships has to be a big win.

But for the life of me I don’t understand why PR firms haven’t bitten the valuation bullet (for PR surely must be valued less than SEO in this climate) and started to acquire SEO companies…

By looking at the content of a page (not just links) allows us to identify a whole basket of factors that determines whether a page/domain is an opportunity for a conversation or is going to be a waste of time. Here are some examples.

Blogs – by examining certain aspects of a page makeup we can detect a blog as opposed to a normal web page. For instance, if we see the word “wordpress” in the HTML we know it’s a blog. We have in fact built a sophisticated algorithm that allows us to detect blogs with a high degree of accuracy.

Freshness – I’ve seen so many pages than generate excitement with search engineers because they look great link targets. Only to discover that they are ancient and not good link targets because the conversation opportunity has passed. InfluenceFinder can discover how fresh a page is as soon as we crawl it in order to ensure the conversation opportunity it not missed.

Contact Info – this is so critical – you can find the best partnering pages in the world but it’s a wasted opportunity if there are no contact details. InfluenceFinder helps you find contacts by scanning for them and interfacing with the Jigsaw contact database.

More later!

Lets deal with objectives. For many many marketing reasons finding sites that have influence is hugely important. But influence is only one element of a 4 axis set of dynamics. The next one is performance – how well does at site peform from a traffic perspective? Then there is relevance – we believe it to be a strong ranking factor for Google. And then the big one is opportunity. Countless times in SEO I’ve found a fantastic partnering opportunity to discover it’s not an opportunity at all. It may look good but then you discover the last time it was updated was a year ago – oh and there’s not contact details.

So, how do we compare? Well Moz looks at influence well (although with a much smaller link map that we have). But’s that it.

We look at influence, performance, relevance and opportunity. In a link map of 1 trillion links.

More on this post later as I break down how we deal with each axis.

Here’s a frightening set of numbers that every link building and PR agency should be aware of, focus on, and benchmark against.

Picture this…

An experienced SEO’s on $50,000 salaries will spend 20% of their time discovering link partners and engaging them. Let’s call this ‘productive time’.

The rest of their time will be spent talking to clients, reporting, defining strategies, making coffee etc.

If the 80% of their productive time is spend on partner discovery and screening and 20% actually having conversations with prospective or active partners, our research shows a typical person may discover 40 new prospects per week and have 10 serious conversations.

Out of those conversations 2 will result in a high quality link partnership being formed.

The cost of each of those partnerships is just over $100.

Now imagine…

You reverse the amount of time you spend on discovery and having conversations. So 80% of you time is now spent having conversations with potential partners. You can do this because it now takes a ¼ of the time it did to build a great list of prospects.

Then imagine…

You don’t have a 20% success rate in turning a conversation to an active link partnership. Instead you have an 80% success rate. This is possible because of InfluenceFinders unique domain insights.

The cost of each partnership falls to under $7.

InfluenceFinder creates efficiency improvements like these.