Are you interested in learning what the top local searches are on google.com for 2009? Every year google.com publishes the Google Zeitgeist that identifies the most popular yearly search terms. Go ahead and take a guess of popular searches consumers conduct for your city. There is a good chance your guess/guesses is/are wrong, and what you would imagine as popular is not necessarily so.

Google has identified the top 10 most popular searches for every major city in the United States throughout the year. It is amazing to see how detailed consumer local searches are becoming. Valuable information for geodomain owners with developed websites. Click on the image to view all major U.S. city popular searches.

Geo-Targeted display ads are set for growth through 2013 according to BIA/Kelsey. This is a strategy that has been in use for some years now. I found this article interesting because it shows “potential” in advertising revenue for geo domains in the near future. If advertisers are paying for geotargeted ads based off of IPs and spending $1.9 billion, then one could conclude they would be willing to pay for display banners on quality targeted geodomains that produce potent traffic. Afterall, it is much more targeted than IPs, as IPs can be off by 30 miles or more. (Read Comments)

Would be neat if an advertising agency was formed to harvest geodomain portfolios and offer geotargeted ads directly to advertisers spending all this money geotargeting by IPs. There would be some pretty good payouts for the owners of these portfolios. It would be another form of PPC without a long line of middlemen taking their cuts. 

Via Clickz.com

The market for geo-targeted display ads is poised for aggressive growth over the next few years, from $897 million in 2008 to more than $1.9 billion in 2013, according to digital media consulting firm BIA/Kelsey.

Geo-targeted ads — banners that are presented only to people logging on from a particular region, or that appear different depending on the location of the user — currently represent only about 10.2 percent of display ad units, according to BAI/Kelsey, which is based in Los Angeles.

But that share will increase to 15 percent by 2013, the firm says, as advertisers look for cheap alternatives to search ads and publishers and ad networks look for creative ways to unload a glut of display inventory.

You can read more and comments Here. 

Sedo.com recently completed an overhaul of their website. It looks great, however, it was a bit weird navigating as I was accustomed to the old platform. Anyway, I came across some interesting statistics regarding average sales prices for domains. As you may know, Sedo.com is one of the largest domain auction platforms in the World.

The quarterly average sales price they produce has valuable information if you understand how to use it. Looking at the chart below, you can see geodomains have done outstanding each quarter, running competitively with dot com sales prices and crushing all other popular gTLDs.

Interesting enough, .fr, the France ccTLD, has out performed dot com for the past 3 quarters. As American domainers continue to state .com is king, the demand and sales numbers show geodomain ccTLDs are taking a run at the title.

I am one that believes .com is king, so I don’t want to get into that weathered topic. However, I am not foolish enough to ignore the data in the chart that clearly identifies the demand for geodomains globally. You have read it many times on this blog, and statistics continue to support the fact, that geodomains and everything local are the future of the internet. I hope to see a geodomain platform released by Sedo.com in the near future. It is clear based off the statistics above, it is time.

This is part 2 to the case study that was conducted on SG 3-4 December on the importance of article titles to deliver traffic to your website.  It is no secret that a good headline will catch the curiosity of readers. Additionally, well written content will rank well in search engines. I would like to apologize for my delay publishing the results. Some interesting things occurred with the blog on 4 December that I had to investigate. I was going to publish this article yesterday, however, decided to do one more day of research.

As I stated in part 1, SimplyGeo.com received an average of 700 unique visitors a day. As this study came to a close on 4 December, something interesting happened. The blog started getting an abundance of direct type-in traffic. This completely effected the case study numbers. I could not confirm where or why this traffic surge continues to take place. So my findings are unfortunately inconclusive to the effectiveness of the article title delivering increased traffic.

However, as the study went on through December 3rd, the amount of people who clicked on the article and those who followed the blog feed showed the title was effective in bringing eyeballs to the blog. By 4pm over 900 unique visitors entered the blog, but after this time I could not confirm the numbers because of the spike in traffic.

The title did not bring increased traffic from domaining.com, I think 54 visitors came from domaining.com during this little experiment. It was nothing surprising as Domaining.com historically delivers anywhere from 30-80 visitors a day, with the rest coming from feeds, search engines, and direct navigation.

Moving back to the traffic surge.

I suppose this increase of traffic could be due to internet users conducting a typo of SimpleGeo.com, a new Location based start-up company formed in August 09. However, when TechCrunch.com ran the articles about the company on 19 Nov 09 and 30 Nov 09, the blog remained unaffected. It was not until 4 December that traffic started to triple to 2,100 unique visitors daily. In a seven day window, the blog has received over 10,000 unique visitors.

Although I am a little flustered that I could not provide complete details of this case study to readers, I am convinced that the title did the job in delivering increased traffic. Anyway, I am content with the increased daily traffic to the blog. This allows the blog to reach new readers if it is from a typo. We will have to wait and see if this traffic sustains or if it is just a fluke. I will keep you posted.

It will not be too long before I post data on the case study I conducted for readers, so make sure to check back later.

On a sidenote, there have been some interesting traffic surges to SimplyGeo.com starting on 5 December that caught my attention today. The backend statistics show direct type-in traffic to the blog with no referral links. I am a little confused on the surge of traffic, but believe it is visitors conducting a typo for SimpleGeo.com. 

Are you looking for SimpleGeo.com?

New visitors to the blog, please let me know what brings you to the blog. Maybe someone can help me figure this out.

Anyway, thank you for visiting the blog. Please make sure to subscribe to the feed and newsletter. I hope you enjoy the content provided and look forward to catering useful topics of interest to you.

How do you search the internet for products or information? Do you type the domain directly into your browser bar, or do you use detailed queries on search engines? Study identifies that internet users are getting more detailed when searching for products and information online as the internet goes from a global to local platform.

The internet continues to deliver opportunities for entrepreneurs/domainers. Navigation on the internet has become a complex task for many internet users as websites continue to flood the internet. Internet users are having difficulty finding what they are searching for on the internet. A study I came across this weekend by Experian HitWise , clearly identifies human behavior is evolving online. The study outlines search statisitics based off 10 million U.S. internet users. This study is a few months old, however, I believe it has valuable information if you know how to utilize the information provided in it, from SEO to domain names.

Longer search queries are increasing monthly, averaging five to eight or more words in length, increasing by 3% between October and September 2009. This trend will probally continue to increase as internet users are tired of being led to websites that do not deliver results they are in search of when using generic words/descriptions in search engines.       

Here are some additional statisics that identify how consumers are using the internet to go local. Are Geodomains sleeping giants? You decide. The truth is in the numbers. 

Okay, this is a case study I am performing to show how titles to articles can deliver traffic to a website.  While there is a ton of information on the internet that already exists on this subject, I wanted to gather my own research on how playing words can deliver traffic to your website.

Why is this important to readers? Well, it may not be to some, however, to those who have developed geodomains, it can lead to future visitor growth. Most developed websites that cater to the local community have blogs, reporters, and/or use social media platforms.

Using strategic titles to articles published by your business is one secret to generating increased traffic. Part two is delivering effective content that supports the title of your article. You see the secret is not really secret, yet publishers get it wrong everyday. All you have to do is scan news headlines to see my point.

Articles with strategic titles stand out of the crowd and raise curiosity. This causes visitors to click on the title. Once you capture that visitors attention, you have to deliver effective content. If you do this well, and consistently, you secure a loyal visitor for days, months, or years to come.

A website with links to a variety of bland article titles, will almost certainly send a visitor somewhere else to find articles that raise their curiosity.

This strategy is essential in social media platforms, to include YouTube.com videos. Effective titles are secrets to increased website traffic.

So let’s complete this experiment with the title I have selected, “Valuable Secrets Realved! Check it Out. Don’t know if it will do the job, but we will give it a try.

Since getting back on track with the blog 2 weeks or so ago, SG now receives an average of 1,400 700 unique visitors daily(Filtered Spider and Robot visits) based off backend stats with the WP WassUp plugin. These numbers are nothing amazing, but it will be used as ground zero to see how many additional visitors the blog title delivers.

I will post the results on 4 December. Hopefully, the title and content will deliver results. Off we go.

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