Offline Money

Have you ever been out and about, chatting to someone, maybe a shop owner while they serve you and the question comes up “What do you do?”.

Well I am a search engine specialist

Then the questions come asking how they can get more traffic to their website, or maybe they don’t even have a website (yes, still today so many local business owners have not created a website)!

The only thing you need is a blueprint showing you how to take a lead…. in fact, how to generate that lead to begin with, then create clients from your leads. These clients that are willing to pay each month to have a stream of traffic coming to their site!

Image via Wikipedia

Some things never change, it’s true. Just like the leader in search engines always remains strong, Google! Yes, sitting pretty at #1 yet again is Google search according to comscore.

Google Sites led the U.S. core search market in December with 65.7 percent of the searches conducted, followed by Yahoo! Sites (17.3 percent), and Microsoft Sites (10.7 percent). Ask Network captured 3.7 percent of the search market, followed by AOL LLC with 2.6 percent.

In the December analysis of the top properties where search activity is observed, Google Sites led the search market with more than 14.0 billion search queries, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.6 billion queries and Microsoft Sites with 1.6 billion searches. Bing experienced large growth during the month with a 6-percent increase in query volume to nearly 1.4 billion searches. eBay and Amazon Sites experienced gains in December as retail search activity picked up during the holiday season.

Image via Wikipedia

More encouraging news as reported come in from comscore regarding Christmas spendings in the US for 2009. With all the downfalls of our economic times, it seems we still know how to spend money to maintain growth.

According to comscore, holiday season retail e-commerce spending for the entirety of the November – December 2009 holiday season. For the full holiday online shopping season, $29.1 billion was spent online, marking a 4-percent increase versus the same period last year. The season featured distinct periods of strong spending growth surrounding the Thanksgiving-Black Friday timeframe and the final shopping week leading up to Christmas.

In recent changes to Google’s way of life, we have seen a difference in local results for US/Canada and UK google local search.

The ’7pack’ as it is known (the local map with ~7 businesses listed at the beginning of search results – Local Search) was easy, and still is.
What you need to keep in mind now, and inevitably forever, is that should you choose to be adding a SEO or webdesign business to local search, you will know longer see it when searching for example: San Francisco SEO Service will only show “natural results”. By simply changing the search to SEO Service in San Francisco it will now show the ’7pack’.