Today Yahoo announced to their search advertisers the time frame for that will be “August/September”:

“Assuming our testing continues to yield high quality results, we anticipate that our organic search results will be powered by Bing beginning in the August/September timeframe.“

What does this mean for your SEO traffic from Yahoo?  Well, it depends on how well you are doing in Bing today.

To assess the potential impact, you can look at two things:

1. Compare current positions for important keywords in both Yahoo and Bing, and
2. Look at your website analytics for traffic from each of Yahoo and Bing organic search engines.

For current positions, do a sampling of keywords that are important to your website.  Look at where you are in Bing and Yahoo for each of those.  There are a number of automated tools to do this, such as CheckRankings.com and Web Position Gold.

For analytics, this will depend on what tool you use, such as Google Analytics, WebTrends or Omniture.  Look for keywords that send good traffic from Yahoo organic, and compare to Bing organic traffic for those same keywords. Be sure to separate out other sources, such as paid search traffic.

Bing search volume is about 67% of Yahoo, so if there are keywords where Yahoo volume is much higher than Bing (e.g., 2x or more), then you may want to put some effort in to improving Bing SEO for your site.  This will be hard since Bing is still evolving from being more content-driven to including broader factors such as site quality and inbound linking, so it is a moving target.  For now, however, look to be sure you have your keywords present on each relevant page, in the title tag, <h1> tag and body text.  Also work to get inbound links that use those keywords in anchor text, and where the linking page uses your keywords in the page title and body text.   These are standard SEO practices, and will help with both Bing and Google.

Also be sure to register and check your settings for Bing webmaster tools for each of your sites.  See  http://www.bing.com/webmaster
One downside of this transition is that Microsoft still does not have very good tools for managing organic search results, and Yahoo had much better.   Hopefully Microsoft will improve their tools, such as adding the ability to ignore URL parameters that do not impact content.

Long term, this means we now have only two major search engines to monitor for SEO:  Google and Bing.  As of now, Google is about 63% market share, Yahoo 19% and Bing 12%.  Ask.com has 4%, which for most sites is not enough to put effort into optimization.  Given Bing will more than double in volume, and potentially have a 30% share, a more effort should be put into optimizing for Bing search.

If you don’t call your leads, they’re not going to close. Pretty simple, huh? You might be surprised to learn that the research I have at my fingertips says over 30 percent of Internet leads never get a response and there is has been little improvement over the past year (at least in the for profit education vertical).

This spring, LeadQual (www.LeadQual.com), went undercover to conduct a survey to see how 158 for-profit colleges respond to over 780 Internet leads. This survey repeats one that we did last year in which we carefully submitted more than 450 Internet inquiries during regular business hours to a cross-section of more than 100 American colleges.

We learned that only 69% of leads were responded to, up slightly from 63% last year, and only 35% of the schools responded to 100% of their inquiries, no change from 2009. Along with that finding, we learned that the median time to respond to a lead per school was one hour and 35 minutes, virtually unchanged from our study one year ago.

That tells us that very few schools have rigorous systems and processes in place to be sure to consistently follow-up with their on-line inquiries. From experience, I can tell you that companies have trouble (a lot of trouble!) following up on leads. Closing leads takes a more disciplined approach than most people want to believe.

Why speed to lead matters
LeadQual research http://leadqual.com/whitepapers/SpeedWins.pdf echoes research done by MIT and Leads360 which states that the number one driver of conversion (beyond simply calling a lead back), is how quickly you make that call. MIT says calling a lead within minutes is 100x more effective. Leads360’ study http://www.leads360.com/download/whitepapers/leads360_wp_speed_to_call.pdf sites a nearly 4x improvement in conversion if called within 1 minute. You can pick which multiplier you want to use, but the evidence is clear, speed to lead matters.

The reasons companies struggle to connect with leads
I’m not saying the process of closing leads has to be a complicated one. It doesn’t. But there are two factors that scuttle sales people’s efforts to connect with leads.

First, many organizations don’t respond fast enough to Internet leads. I define fast enough as two minutes, or less. That might seem daunting. But the information we gleaned from our research states that the best companies respond to Internet leads in fewer than 120 seconds. These companies know that the average Internet consumer visits five web sites and completes at least 3 different web-based forms when shopping for products and services. They also know nearly 60 percent of Internet consumers choose to buy from the first company that responds to them.

Second, many companies rely on a call center to connect a sales person with a qualified lead. These companies rarely pay attention to how many leads are lost when a consumer is put on hold, while the call center attempts to connect an Internet lead and a sales person via phone.

How can companies overcome these challenges?

Track Speed of Response
As a first step, figure out how fast (or not) your team is responding to leads. Track how quickly your call center or sales representatives are responding to a lead. I call it speed of response. Everyone my company speaks with says they measure speed of response. But few folks really do. Measuring speed of response is like putting a gauge on your “sales & marketing dashboard” that warns you if your team is letting leads slip away. How? By watching your speed of response rate, you can see if your organization is reacting in less than two minutes. If they’re consistently not hitting that goal, you’re losing leads. To track leads, you can hire any number of good Internet marketing firms to put together a program, or, if you wish, you can track this data yourself.

Either way, keep in mind that CRM systems don’t accurately track how fast a sales rep responds to a lead. These systems track that someone has taken the lead, but not how quickly they follow up. CRM systems won’t be effective in measuring speed of response. Instead, try an ad hoc method where you assign someone to cross-check a random sample of Internet leads each week with recordings from your call center to determine how long it took a lead to receive a call back. It might be painstaking work, but it’s worth learning the answer.

And don’t expect sales reps to document when they called a lead. These folks are just too busy trying to make contact and close business to remember to track speed of response.

Put in place a rapid response team
Once you have a metric for speed of response, you can contract with a third party to serve as your rapid response team, or build a team in-house. If you choose the latter, though, expect to hire a minimum of a dozen people, including managers, to cover all the hours in a five to six day workweek. Remember, those dozen or so staffers would be needed just to make the first call to qualify an inquiry. That figure excludes additional staff to handle closing the sale.

Live transfer saves leads
You’re now measuring speed of response. And you’ve put in place a rapid response team. It’s time to address how effective your call center, or rapid response team, is in handing an Internet lead over to your sales executive.

Let’s say a lead comes in via the Internet to your call center. Your call center rep quickly dials the lead and gets them on the phone. They begin talking to one another. The call center rep qualifies the lead. At this point, you don’t want to keep a lead on the phone any longer than you have to. Now it’s about transferring the lead to your sales rep to close the sale. This is the point at which many companies put a lead on hold. Even if you do that for a few seconds, it’s a critical mistake. Those few seconds can cause a lead to become distracted, and hang up. And the likelihood of getting that lead back is slim to none.

Instead, make a live transfer from your call center rep to your sales rep. There are at least two ways to do this. You can implement some face-to-face training or e-learning courses to instruct your call center and sales executives to make this hand-off part of their process. Or you can invest in lead qualification management technology to help you make the transfer. The former approach grows increasingly complex with the size of your call center and sales team. If your team is small enough, say, a few dozen folks, then it’s feasible to bring everyone together and brief them on the change and continually remind them.

If you’re organization is large, and you have complex business rules for handing leads to sales reps, then technology may be the smarter play. Here’s how technology would work: Lead qualification management software alerts a call center rep to an Internet lead, determines whether the consumer is a qualified buyer and connects the call center and lead in seconds. Software of this kind enables the call center worker to record notes about the consumer and tap instant messaging technology to reach a cadre of sales people available to take a new lead, while the call center rep keeps the caller on the line. Lead qualification management systems can even factor in a complex set of business rules to determine the order in which sales people should receive a qualified lead from the call center.

In industries like education, mortgage and insurance, it’s a given that no lead is exclusive on the web. My company’s research shows speed counts when a company is trying to, for example, enroll a potential student or sell a loan.

You can hold on to those leads if you’re constantly monitoring your response rate, training your people to make live hand-offs and deploying technology whenever the scale or complexity of your lead management process grows too large.

In our study, lead forms were completed and submitted for 136 lenders.  Incredibly, only 40% of our inquiries received a telephone response over a 24 hour period.  That’s right - 60% of our inquiries did not receive a response!  The average response time for leads that did receive a response was just under SEVEN hours!

To be sure, there are lenders responding to all their leads, and doing so quickly.  Our study concludes that the current state of lead response presents both a challenge and an opportunity for virtually every lender that generates or purchases Internet leads.

We will be presenting results of our study at the Mortgage Bankers Association 96th Annual Convetion and Expo in San Diego, booth #425.  Visit us at our booth, or call us to get your individual company results.   The study can be downloaded here:  http://www.leadqual.com/whitepapersindex.html.

Jeff Miller

The results are startling. Only 63% of leads were responded to, and the average response time was over SEVEN hours.

Wow. Schools are spending so much money to generate the leads, but don’t have the systems in place to effectively manage them. Feel free to download the study here:

http://www.leadqual.com/whitepapersindex.html

If you’d like to see if we secret shopped your school, please drop us a line, or come visit us at the CCA show in Orlando.

Regards,

Andrew Coleman

Imagine opening your Sunday paper and seeing ads from a large supermarket chain that didn’t list actual products for sale; instead, they simply listed the categories of products available - offers like “Buy discount cola” and “Snacks on sale.” The ads wouldn’t be useful since you wouldn’t know what products are actually being offered. For many categories of advertisers, this is the problem they have faced on Google for some time.

That is why, in an effort to improve ad quality and user experience, we are adjusting our trademark policy in the U.S. to allow some ads to use trademarks in the ad text. This change will bring Google’s policy on trademark use in ad text more in line with the industry standard.

Google announced today that they are making updates to the their trademark policy. In the past advertisers were allowed to bid on trademark terms but were not allowed to use trademark terms in their Google Adwords adcopy. However Google has opened up their trademark policy for a few exceptions.

• Resale of the trademarked goods or services: The advertiser’s site must sell (or clearly facilitate the sale of) the goods or services corresponding to a trademark term. The landing page of the ad must clearly demonstrate that a user is able to purchase the goods or services corresponding to a trademark from the advertiser.
• Sale of components, replacement parts or compatible products corresponding to a trademark: The advertiser’s site must sell (or clearly facilitate the sale of) the components, replacement parts or compatible products relating to the goods or services of the trademark. The advertiser’s landing page must clearly demonstrate that a user is able to purchase the components, parts or compatible products corresponding to the trademark term from the advertiser.
• Informational sites: The primary purpose of the advertiser’s site must be to provide non-competitive and informative details about the goods or services corresponding to the trademark term. Additionally, the advertiser may not sell or facilitate the sale of the goods or services of a competitor of the trademark owner.

This actually brings up a whole bunch of questions. Does the site have to be an official reseller? What if a site who wants to buy the term apple ipod decides to add one apple ipod component into it’s product list and then sends users to a list of products (With the ipod component highlighted of course)?  Is that ok? Can the informational site be run by a competitor as long as it doesn’t sell or facilitate the sale of their own goods? What if it equally links to all competitors? What if its a “A” vs “B” comparison site and “A” clearly has the better features? Can the company still buy “B” as a trademark term since its a fair informational site?

Lots of Questions. But Google is smart so let’s see how they position themselves for each of these type of scenarios.

Google: Don’t Blame Me, It’s the Advertiser

Google makes it explicit clear that Google is not in the position to arbitrate trademark disputes between advertisers and trademark owners. The advertisers themselves are responsible for their own adcopies and keywords and should be dealt with directly. However they are willing to perform limited investigations into complaints.

How do I Register my Trademark with Google?

Google actually does not register trademarks. You’ll have to register at the national office in which the trademark applies. You can ask Google to do a limited investigation into a trademark issue here.

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
SEM - LeadQual

LeadQual’s lead response and live lead transfer service was created on this principle, and we proud to have the data to show how our customers benefit.

Key findings of white paper include:

• Prospective buyers fill out 3-5 lead forms
• The first to contact a lead increases conversion 238%
• More than 65% of all conversions occur on first call
• Calling a lead more than 5 minutes after a lead is submitted has a 46% lower qualification rate than calling in less than 5 minutes.
• Speed of response is the best predictor of a closed transaction
• Enormous opportunity exists for after-hour and weekend calling when most companies are not staffed for a rapid response

It is important to note how calling within 5 minutes after a lead is submitted dramatically increases conversion.  This is where a call center that specializes in lead response can drive success.

For more information on this study and our live lead transfer service, please contact us here.