Silicon Alley Insider has provided a nice summary of Google’s moves to boost revenues and cut costs over the last few months. And no, if you noticed more ads on Google’s search pages, it’s no accident.

Here are eight ways in which Google is driving revenues, followed by two ways it is cutting costs…

(more…)

Could it be that we don’t really need to get the first spot on the search engine results pages (SERPs) in order to attract our most qualified prospects i.e. the supposed 20 percent of prospects who generate 80 percent of sales?

Well, some research from MarketingSherpa indicates there might be some truth in this…

In a recent study, MarketingSherpa found that certain kinds of search engine users are prepared to wade through more SERPs than one might normally expect. It found that among industrial engineers:

• 14 percent just looked at the first few results on the first page of results;
• 39 percent looked at the first page of results;
• 10 percent stopped looking after the second page of results; and
• 37 percent looked through more than two pages of results.

MarketingSherpa reckons these findings would be typical of niche searchers. Presumably, anyone highly motivated to find uncommon (i.e. niche) information is more inclined to look through more pages of results than other kinds of searchers.

Given that search engine optimization (SEO) - like anything - comes at a cost, it *may* follow that at a certain point it may no longer be cost-effective to keep striving to become number in the SERPs, simply because niche prospects are prepared to look through more results anyway.

Maybe…

Source: MarketingSherpa, “New Chart: Optimize All Your Web Pages For Niche Searchers Seeking Relevant Results”, MarketingSherpa, October 14, 2008