B2B Marketing Blog - TopRank®

B2B Marketing views, news and interviews.

Google Click to Call

Google Click to Call Hey, this is interesting. Google is testing some pay per call ads with a program called Click to Call .

“Here’s how it works: When you click the phone icon, you can enter your phone number. Once you click ‘Connect For Free,’ Google calls the number you provided. When you pick up, you hear ringing on the other end as Google connects you to the other party.”

You can try it yourself with a search on Google for “New York Hotels“. See screen shot below:

Google Click to Call

Pretty interesting keyword phrase match on the part of Google, since the Search Engine Strategies conference is coming up in New York at the end of the month. Or am I giving Google marketing too much credit?


Google Click to Call

Google Covers

Google lands not one but two major magazine covers this week:

Google on cover of Time magazine
Time: Meet The Google Guys

The answer to this question is classic Googlespeak:

IS THERE A GRAND STRATEGY FOR GOOGLE? IT SEEMS AS IF YOU’RE DIVING INTO ALMOST EVERYTHING.

SCHMIDT: We try very hard to look like we’re out of control. But in fact the company is very measured. And that’s part of our secret.

Google on the cover of Barron's magazine
The article in Barron’s is less optimistic about Google’s financial future.

“Google reminds me very much of what went on in 1999 and 2000,” says Fred Hickey, editor of the well-regarded High-Tech Strategist newsletter and a member of the Barron’s Roundtable. “The valuation is insane, relative to what they do.”

And in comments about senior Google execs selling stock:


Google Covers

Google Advertising Tools

I just received a review copy of the new book, Google Advertising Tools: Cashing in with Adsense, AdWords and the Google APIs by Harold Davis, author of 20 books, (Googleplex Blog) and published by O’Reilly. Companion site here.

Chapters range from SEO and affiliate programs to “Profiting from Adult Sites” (hmmm) and of course whole sections on Adsense and AdWords.

It’s a bit techie, but I’ve not had a chance to go through it fully. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to post a review here when I get around to finally reading it. If you’ve already read it, feel free to post comments.


Google Advertising Tools

Gmail for Business

Google is taking beta subscription requests for hosted Gmail accounts using your company or organization’s domain name. Just login with your existing Google account or create a new one.

What you get:

Gmail – 2 gigabytes of storage and search tools that help users find information fast.
Control Panel – Easily manage user accounts, aliases and mailing lists.

Very interesting. This should increase the number of Gmail users by a significant sum. More maybe?

More about the initial beta test with San Jose City College at the


Gmail for Business

Can a Napkin Business Plan be the Next Google?

Marketing Experiments has announced a “Back of a Napkin” business planning contest. They say they are are looking for the next ‘Google’.

The winner will get a jumpstart package worth over $100,000 and will get to pitch their plan to some of the leading VC’s. In that $100 large there’s $25k of PR for three months. Ahem. I appreciate the PR firm’s valuation of their services, but $25k for THREE MONTHS?

During 2006, MEC Labs (the group of researchers behind the Marketing Experiments Journal) will work with the winning idea to help launch their business.

Entries are due no later than February 25 with finalists announced February 28 and winners announced March 31, 2006.

Hurry up, business plans can be registered online.


Can a Napkin Business Plan be the Next Google?

BMW Site Gets Spanked by Google

Notice to search marketers: Your brand will not save you from the consequences of screwing with search engines. Lots of fun commentary on this one:

Google blacklists BMW.de – CNET News.com

Ramping up on international webspam – Matt Cutts of Google

BMW cheats search-engines, Google removes it from search results – Boing Boing

For Matt Cutts to point out a crackdown on international search spam, I suspect there has been a lot of it going on un-checked. Or at least not under as much scruitiny as English language sites.

Time for BMW.de to clean up their act and brush up on steps to a re-inclusion request.

I wonder how BMW Public Relations is going to handle this? Do you think they’ll “out” the SEO?


BMW Site Gets Spanked by Google

Sebastian Interviews Google Sitemaps Team

Sebastian has an excellent interview with the Google Sitemaps team over at his Smart IT Consulting site.

Some excerpts:

“Sitemaps convey some very important metadata about the sites and pages which we could not infer otherwise, like the page’s priority and refresh cycle.”

And how Google Sitemaps work:

“Sitemaps are downloaded periodically and then scanned to extract links and metadata. The valid URLs are passed along to the rest of our crawling pipeline — the pipeline takes input from ‘discovery crawl’ and from Sitemaps. The pipeline then sends out the Googlebots to fetch the URLs, downloads the pages and submits them to be considered for our different indices.”

Matt Cutts adds:


Sebastian Interviews Google Sitemaps Team

Take a Few Cutts from Google’s Matt

Matt Cutts was recently interviewed on WebmasterRadio.fm’s SEO Rockstars show with Oilman and Webguerrilla.

Rand has posted some insightful take aways including Matt’s thoughts on Sandbox, BigDaddy, linkbait and that v7ndotcom malarkey.

If you need more Matt Cutts, then listen to this previous interview, also at WebmasterRadio.fm and of course, you would do well to visit his blog, where he provided an update on Bigdaddy recently.

Bigdaddy is the rollout of some signigicant infrastructure changes at Google and to see Bigdaddy search results compared to current results, try this. Although Matt says, “I‚Äôd expect a new data center to be converted to Bigdaddy roughly every 10 days”, so a normal search on Google.com will likely return Bigdaddy style results.

Tags: Matt Cutts, Google, Bigdaddy, WebmasterRadio, SEO Rockstars, SEO, Sandbox


Take a Few Cutts from Google’s Matt

Google is Dead

In this month’s Business 2.0, “2006 Smart List” issue, Google was bestowed “The Smartest Company of the Year” honors. In the ensuing article four scenarios on the possible future of Google were outlined. Three were optimistic and the fourth was doomsday for Google by 2020.

The cause? Hold on to your seat, because this is damn hilarious ….. SEO.

Yes, Rand, you’re given credit – it’s all your fault. And Microsoft.

From the absurd article:

“The once-mighty search engine falls prey to privacy intrusion, optimizers, and Microsoft.”

This article was good humor. The demise contributed by search engine optimization is credited to the focus on Google optimization by so many SEOs, that MSN’s search engine is ignored and that Google search results fill with pron and irrelevant sites. MSN search in the meantime, takes this time to develop without notice by SEOs.


Google is Dead

Google Roundup

A few things on Google today that I decided to roundup all in one post:

Possible new Google interface. Anyone else seeing this? Via PC World

David Utter from WPN posts about an offline Google AdWords Editor application that is in beta, “invite only” mode.

“AdWords Editor is Google’s free, downloadable account management application for your computer. Now you can download your AdWords account to your computer, make your changes, then upload your revised campaigns”

Localizing blog points out an interesting TV commercial (notice the reflection in the TV) for Pontiac where at the end, the viewer is invited to search for Pontiac on Google. Business Week has a great article on Google advertising which includes a quote from GM’s head of sales/marketing, Mark LaNeve:


Google Roundup

Five things to consider when changing websites.

TopRank Marketing Editor
TopRank Marketing Editor
Google, Microsoft Bing, Online Marketing, SEO, Yahoo

Every year or so, companies decide to go and update their website. Not just a few pages, but usually the entire design and structure. This can be a big factor in search engine optimization and whether it’s positive or negative depends on how you do it.

There are lots of things everyone has to keep in mind when changing websites. Most things need to be thought of before hand, not after, and any issues should be addressed before a new site goes live.

Here are five things to keep in mind.

• URLs
URLs are very important. Not only are search engines referring you traffic, but what about links from other peoples‚Äô sites, bookmarks, press releases or social bookmarking sites? You could have hundreds of links out there and you don’t want to forget about them or else your visitors may be coming to a ‘Page Not Found’ error instead of an information page.


Five things to consider when changing websites.