Pull Effect, how much pull to achieve an effect? Options

[siXcrookedhighways]

how many searches does it take to get to the center of serp number one tootsie pop?

mike grehan's pull article at clickz, the following discussion, and then the pontiac ad really grabbed my interest. i would guess most of us can't pull off a pontiac ad but do you think sites with a mom & pop budget can create any pull? we have seen many suggestions for the small budgets with link bait and such but i am wondering about the pull generated strictly by searches performed on the search engines.

how many searches for your name and keyword will it take to achieve the pull effect? the biggest variable here has to be the popularity of the keyword. one would think it is a lot easier to better your ranking for the less popular keywords. i think another variable would be your domain name and brandability of it. is your domain or business name made up of popular keywords, or a branded name without keyword confusion or much competition? i think a brandable name that is not a common word or keyword phrase may be easier to pull.

say you have a keyword that produces 250,000 results in google. do you think 500 or 1000 searches for searches on some variation of your domain, brand, business name, and keyword will bring you up? will it bust you out of the sand box? or produce a big zilch?

i think it will help you some but not sure to what extent.

what you think? what other variables do you see?

This post has been edited by siXcrookedhighways: Jan 30 2006, 01:38 AM

[Black_Knight]

do you think sites with a mom & pop budget can create any pull?

We're talking about marketing and creating 'buzz'. It isn't about how much mud you can afford to throw, it is about how much sticks. Guerilla marketing is still effective, and original ideas with tiny budgets will still outperform boring ideas with huge budgets.

Where the problem lies for the majority of 'mom and pop' businesses is that they have usually set up on a shoestring budget, and therefore anyone else with the same shoestring budget can usually set up in competition. In such a situation, originality doesn't last long, even if they had it to begin with. Trading on originality that has little or no barrier to competition has to be done very quickly.

The 'mom and pops' who are simply reselling other people's products will need to work much smarter and harder on originality than those with a more obvious original product or service that can't be bought in a thousand other, often longer-established, stores.

[Ruud]

500 or 1000 searches? My guess is zilch. This very second Google has processed twice as many quries already. By the end of this minute it will have done well over 150 thousand. And that is according to old numbers.

No, at this volume you need many more searches from many more locations over a much larger stretch of time.

The 'mom and pops' who are simply reselling other people's products will need to work much smarter and harder on originality [...]

I believe viral marketing is their friend; especially viral marketing of the linkable kind. Doesn't even need to be original as long as it is "forwardable"

[bwelford]

I think the 'Long Tail' nature of the Internet is even more the Mom and Pops friend here. If they have something very different and specialized, then someone who is looking for that very different and specialized product may well find them now. A community can coalesce around that specialized product and your viral marketing is off to the races.

[EGOL]

Here's a question.... Should Mom and Pop buy the best domain name / website that they can afford and be willing to pay as much for it (and it's out-of-the-box promotion) as they would for a brick and mortar store? The problem is that a bank will not finance this - and there is enormous risk of hiring the wrong person to do this work for them. Maybe more risk than the brick and mortar business which is more widely understood.

[siXcrookedhighways]

ok, let me define this a little better:

product: gizmo widgets, a typical product for a mom & pop shop. sales are peaking for christmas and other gift occassions like birthdays, anniversaries...

keyword: 2 word phrase, king term for the product, baiscally gizmo widget.

competition: other mom & pop sites. a half dozen with some quality backlinks.

monthly searches: overture shows 7024 for dec 2005. would guess this is at least double over a non-christmas month. maybe google hits 5000 per avg month.

tugging searches: 0 shown on overture keyword tool for dec 2005. by this i mean searches that include a "mom & pop store name + wizmo widgets" overture shows 14 entries on the 2 word keyword ranging from 7024 - 25, gizmo widgets is tops at 7024, #2 comes in with 351. 2-14 are just more specific types of gizmo widgets. i did not know what else to call this kind of search but tug seems to describe the subtle pull of a single name+keyword search. a search with tug, tugability, tug search.... you get the idea.

mom & pop shop in question : mom & pop in this example are buried around 500 after florida. 100 or backlinks from quality related websites.

so where does the scale start to tip?

500 tugging searches in a month - that's 10% of the avg total monthly keyword searches.

500 tugging searches in a week - that's 10% of the avg total monthly keyword searches concentrated in just a week.

2500 tugging searches in a month - that's 50% of the avg total monthly keyword searches.

2500 tugging searches in a week - that's 50% of the avg total monthly keyword searches concentrated in just a week.

5000 tugging searches in a month - that's 100% of the avg total monthly keyword searches.

5000 tugging searches in a week - that's 100% of the avg total monthly keyword searches concentrated in just a week.

certainly one of these would have to turn a tug into a real pull up the serps. is 10% too optimistic for any results, maybe. but i think 50% would get some serious notice. could a mom and pop pull this off? maybe, with a great campaign using newsletter, flyers in the orders they ship, some sort of viral campaign..

what do you think?

[Black_Knight]

It doesn't break down into percentages like that.

There is absolutely no relationship between how many pages exist for a term and how much 'pull' searching can be garnered.

In addition, there are several things that seem to be getting all mixed up here.

- The Sandbox Effect
- Branding and Memes in search
- Niche keywords vs Generic keywords

These are all different issues, which can all interelate on one particular project, but are still individual issues that can be dealt with independantly.

The Sandbox Effect is simply how some label the way that temporality (timeliness) affects some searches, and especially the way Google looks more at linking patterns and the age of links to determine 'trends', 'news' and simple spam.

The Sandbox Effect has the least effect on the honest mom-n-pop businesses, because it is usually a lot longer than 9 months after setup that they can finally afford an SEO. Their site should be out of the sandbox long long before they even knew there was a sandbox thing. Sandboxing hits SEOs and those who register domains with expectation of instant ranking gratification. Almost no mom-n-pop stores are ever that arrogant.

There's been a lot of discussuion and articles looking at Search Memes, and I think searching for some of those is going to be more effective than me attempting to summarise the whole thing into one post. Memes are about 'creating' your own buzz words and phrases. What did the word Google mean in 1997? Nothing at all.

Branding is something again often covered.
We've discussed before how a search for the phrase 'click here' brings up over a billion results - which is about one out of ever 8 pages Google even knows exist. The number one result has so many links with that text pointed at it that it ranks #1 even though it doesn't use the words at all on the page.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=click+here+cre8asite
But adding our one brand word, which is a meme thanks to the numeral in it, brings us to the top and makes us findable

[siXcrookedhighways]

thanks for the reply knight.

i am not really concerned with the number of serps there are, that just gives you an idea of how big the world is for that term. i am more interested in the number of tugging searches brand/domain name/business name + keyword as a percentage of the total searches for just the keyword. will your domain or business name searched along with the keyword bring attention to your site for that keyword?

mike grehan described a similar process in this follow up article follow up article

Mike Grehan Post Friday, January 13, 2006
Let me go back to Goliath Vs Goliath and think about a tactical promotion. What about, we give away a discount coupon to everyone on our mailing list (which as a large company may be sizable).

But, instead of putting a link to a promotional web page on the site, we cut and paste a link for a search on Google for brand+product. And instead of using "click here to get your token" as the call to action, we use "Just Google us and click through for your coupon."

That certainly works to increase number of searches and usage data for a larger organisation which is going to be found in the top 20 anyway. There's an extra bit of oomph!

But even a smaller company can do that. If you sponsor niche newsletters and ezines in your space and use the same tactic, you'll end up with a noticeable query stream. This is very much a guerrilla tactic. In the first instance, your end users may not be likely to find you in the results. But it'll sure as hell ring a little bell to let Google know there's somebody new at the door.

Why brand+product? Here's a little clue. Go to Jeeves and search on my name (Mike Grehan - it's a long post so you may have forgotten who I am). Then take a look at "Expand your search.". You'll see that my brand (my name) is related to two of my products. Think about it.

To sum up my views, I'm really trying to get people to just think "out of the box" (sandbox, that is). Just as there may be technical ways to achieve things in this industry, so will there always be alternatives.

i believe mike is saying with enough brand + keyword searches, search engines will make a connection between the two and you will see better rankings for your site when only the keyword is searched for after the search engine makes the connection.

a meme and a keyword will easily show you at the top for that specific search, just like putting in your domain name with a keyword. i understand that. the point is trying to better your ranking for only the keyword once you peppered the search engines with the combo search phrase.

[randfish]

The Sandbox Effect has the least effect on the honest mom-n-pop businesses, because it is usually a lot longer than 9 months after setup that they can finally afford an SEO

A lot of savvy small businesses are putting SEO intot their business and marketing plan before they even launch a site. Trust me, many, many of them notice the Sandbox effect (they all email me with their sandbox detection reports ).

And many Mom & Pop stores are far more arrogant than their mid-large size firm counterparts - they have little business experience in many cases and think that the search world is such that they should rank on top of their competitors since they... (pick any one) have the keyword on the page more times, sell for less than everyone else, have a better product, have submitted 3X to Google already, etc.

This post has been edited by randfish: Jan 30 2006, 02:35 PM