Solar Christmas Lights is an eCommerce retailer of solar powered sting, net, and icicle Christmas lights. These are easy to put up and unlike conventional lights don’t pile onto your electricity bill! Summit has been happy to do both the design of this website along with help getting the marketing up and going. We are looking forward to seeing excellent sales this fall and holiday season.

I tested a few popular client queries on both engines and was unable to get an exact match between them. Some of the screen shots out there show the identical results. So, the big question. What does it matter? Well if you are doing about the same from an organic standpoint, it will not effect you much. But now is a good time to insure you have a good standing with Bing.

Now would be a good time to install the new Bing Webmaster tools if you haven’t already. Be sure your site is being properly indexed by Bing and take a look at where you rank for your popular terms. It’s estimated that Bing will represent 30% of the total search market share when the ‘search alliance’ between Microsoft and Yahoo! is completed.

We’ve had very good look optimizing for Bing, so for us, this is a great development and can’t happen soon enough!

Adding this will not effect your ranking, but should help your CTR. For most businesses $25 a month is affordable and will be worth the investment.

Checkout this example from a local results search query on listing E: ‘Massage Boulder’

This is easy to setup and any business receiving more than 50 views of the local listing should consider doing this to help your listing stand out.

After running this on three of the sites that I manage, I have to say, its very promising technology, but it didn’t provide any new or useful information. Maybe because these are sites I’m very familiar with the keyword niches already…. I think the tool could be great for taking an initial look at a new website, but not a lot of use if you have good PPC data already. Another con of the tool is that it only looks at Organic traffic, so it will miss niches that a site has yet to rank for (and this is probably why your customer has hired you to begin with!). The tool is more for finding additional low hanging fruit keywords.

http://strategizer.wordtracker.com/

Anyway, that’s my take on the application. I would love to hear from anyone else that has experience or is trying out the tool.

For a while adwords has been allowing you to connect your Paid Search and Google Merchant accounts, augmenting your ads with relevant products.  Product listing ads takes this one step further by replacing your current ad with a specific product, showing an image, name and price.

Google plans to role this out on a CPA model. Instead of paying for each click, advertisers pay a fee for each sale. Currently product listing ads are in beta, and it looks like only available to large retailers like Target, Walmart and QVC.

This could be a great way for Google and advertisers to come out ahead if it gets more people buying. I think there is more value here in long-tail phrases that are very specific to one product. Ususally you want more general keyword phrases to land on a category page where you can show off your selection.

More information one product listing ads:
http://www.google.com/ads/innovations/productlistingads.html

This blog will be a great resource for online marketing professionals, web designers, or anyone responsible for their company’s website.