Commentary by Jacqui Jones

“Netconcepts took away the headache of getting the site built so I didn’t have to manage it too closely.”

In March 2008 Blair Peach, Director of Marine Electronics launched their new ecommerce website, designed and built by Netconcepts, with the aim of shaking up the recreational marine industry online.

With many marine related websites in New Zealand being a “jack of all trades” by selling everything from ropes to wrenches, Marine Electronics differs by targeting the recreational fisherman and boat owner by being a price competitive specialist in marine electronics.

A partnership.

Marine Electronics started as a joint venture partnership between Blair Peach and a bricks and mortar retailer NavStation.  NavStation had tried ecommerce in the past but had found it difficult to sell anything on their website.

Having a background in eCommerce Blair approached them to do a joint venture on the Marine Electronics website.  NavStation had all of the supply lines because of their existing relationships with distributors in New Zealand and a reputation to back it up, while Blair offered his ecommerce know-how combined with Netconcepts’ web development and search marketing expertise.

Blair states, “It’s a bit of a learning curve as well.”  The management of NavStation admits that they are not familiar with what is meant by “pages being indexed” or “words being found” and how that relates to ecommerce, but are basing the success of the website on product sales.  The results speak for themselves.

“The results are pretty good and we have achieved good visibility so far in such a short amount of time.  We are in a highly competitive space.  The work we are currently doing is price pointing for the web and that is ongoing.  In the marine electronics arena, price is extremely important because it is all commodity stuff.”

The competitive landscape.

Distributors in New Zealand are struggling with a lot of import competition from the US because marine related products are reasonably priced there.  Blair says, “Having New Zealand based websites who can compete is a good thing for NZ distributors as it keeps the existing channels in tact.”

For many boating hobbyists, they are bargain sensitive and tend to do plenty of research before making purchase decisions.  It is important to have online stores they can purchase from in the New Zealand market rather than going abroad.

Netconcepts’ GravityMarket ecommerce platform has been a key ingredient in Marine Electronics success.

Netconcepts provided ecommerce store design and build services to Marine Electronics along with logo design and brand guidelines.  The site’s infrastructure is built using the search optimised ecommerce platform, GravityMarket which is also hosted and technology maintained by Netconcepts.

Blair Peach was happy with the result.  “We felt confident that we would get a website that was well built for organic search and has a good ecommerce engine and so far it is proving that.  I didn’t have any fixed ideas of what the site should look like, except that it needed to look clean and focus on the product.  Netconcepts designed the logo and overall colour scheme.”

Blair also noticed huge traffic gains from search engines naturally, without having to pay for the exposure. “In a quick period of time we had a PageRank of 6 due to the Netconcepts homepage link.  Great value.  That got us into the market and many of the dealers and distributors in the market noticed it pretty quickly without us doing any advertising.

“We got a quick response and we were high up on rankings straight away.   The site got spidered fairly quickly and in fact every product got spidered quickly so we had no visibility issues.  I have seen other sites that have taken a long time to get spidered and indexed by search engines.  We had a bit of coaching from Dave Cooper at Netconcepts on how to do linking, terminologies and much more.”

Marine Electronics have started capturing email addresses and implementing other online marketing activities.  “We’ve got a GravityMail account so we’re looking at setting up our first newsletter shortly.  We are also tracking conversions in Google Analytics including a “check out funnel” and use of the “tell a friend” email links.

Tracking and measuring success.

GravityMarket enables Blair to optimise pages throughout the site including category and product pages.  Blair states, “I spend some time tuning the words and ensuring they are placed in the right places on the site.  GravityMarket enables us to manage the url, the title, page content, category names and much more.”

“Google analytics is telling us that 75% to 80% of the traffic coming to our site are new visitors.  Our bounce rate is about 30% which is not too bad.  And our average time on the site is 3-4 minutes, however if we remove bounces from that number, people are spending much longer on the site and are viewing quite a lot of the site.

“Along with that we have seen that some of the strategies we have put in place such as placing specific content on pages we are generating good click rates.  So it is good to see that some of our thinking is paying off.”

Marine Electronics track what words and phrases they rank for to understand where their traffic comes from.  Both worldwide and NZ only searches are reported upon and they have found that many of the terms they are targeting they are displayed above the scroll line where people are most likely to click.

Many of the terms are brand focused and there is certainly a long tail there too.  They also rank number one for many specific product terms even with plenty of competition for those terms.

Blair says, “For [marine electronics] we’re #1.  For [ray marine], which is one of our key terms, we’re #3 in a worldwide search, and #3 for a NZ only search which is just behind Ray Marine themselves.  Considering we have only been here for four months that is pretty good.  [fish finders] is a very competitive term web wise, so we’re ranking at #4 for [fish finders nz].”

Leading up to the holiday season.

Marine Electronics are not doing any Google AdWords advertising at the moment, but may give it a go when leading up to their peak season.

Recreational electronics is a seasonal business.  Marine Electronics aim to have all of their products on the site and merchandised before September of each year so that they have tested and proven all of the terms and the site before that time.  80% of sales will happen during the lead up to Christmas and they are aware that their Marine Electronics ecommerce website needs to be ready well ahead of that time.

Strategies are also being put in place to generate sales during New Zealand’s off peak seasons by targeting offshore markets within their summer periods.

Blair’s final comments.

“Netconcepts understands how to create an ecommerce website that technically offers visibility in Google and other search engines.  With that knowledge Netconcepts has built an ecommerce engine that enables us to tweak our products ourselves.  A website is never finished so we are able to tweak and tune our product which is really helpful.  If we need help, I know Netconcepts is only a phone call or email message away.”

Even though it is early days for Tim Norton’s PlanHQ, his team are making quite a bit of traction with their web based business plan software. Below is an iJump interview (thanks Simon!) with Tim in regards to his approach to marketing of PlanHQ using the blogging world as their main driver of referral traffic to their site. I highly recommend to OnlineMarketer.co.nz subscribers that this interview is well worth the watch. The main points of the interview are:

• PlanHQ participate in the blogger community to drive traffic to their site.
• They focus on bloggers who will influence main media
• The data that is generated within their website and software application by its users helps with decision making on future product developments
• Tim uses PlanHQ himself for their business
• Finding existing communities to participate online is easier than starting your own community
• The first phase of marketing PlanHQ was to get people talking about the product which is a “pull” marketing strategy. Tim will now go into “push” mode.
• Tim typically blogs every 2 days.
• The main benefits of blogging for PlanHQ are: increasing traffic to the site, high quality engagement with their target market, the ability to test ideas and get immediate feedback and to gain trust.

Tim Norton is speaking at the Interactive Marketing Summit next Monday, 26th May. Netconcepts will also be at the conference. It will be a great day mixing with some of the leaders in the online space in New Zealand.

Debbie Mayo-Smith wrote an article today in the NZ Herald’s Business Herald paper titled “When Google seeks, make sure your website is what it discovers”.  Unfortunately I can’t link to it right now because NZ Herald has not made this particular story available online.

Debbie makes good points that the typical brief when designing a website is “make my site look good” and that making a website search engine friendly is often not even considered throughout that process.  It’s a shame because many businesses are investing a lot of money into their websites to find out that it is filled with good looking pictures and design, but it can not be accessed by search engines like Google.

Dave Cooper from Netconcepts was  referred to by Debbie as being “brilliant” when he offered the following advice when building and marketing a website on the Internet…

• Incoming links are the most important element
• Use Words, not graphics
• Make each page unique in keywords
• The page title is the most important part of the page
• Use heading attributes - search engines place importance on these
• Give your homepage the most attention as it is the most important
• Use keyword rich site maps
• Do not use complex URL structures that include parameters like &, % and ?

These tips are only the basics of natural search marketing.  As your website technology requirements become more complex and competitive within your online market, more advanced strategies are required to gain the visibility in search engines that generate bottom line results.

In the last of our SMX Sydney series we caught up with Danny Sullivan who shares some tips to get rankings in blended search along with keeping a balanced life in this crazy “always on” digital world.

Jacqui Jones: Hi, I’m Jacqui Jones from Netconcepts and we’re at SMX Sydney and today were speaking with Danny Sullivan and so, welcome to Australia and welcome to this side of the world.

Danny Sullivan: It’s good to be here. I’m squinting and crying because it’s so bright today.

Jacqui Jones: It is extremely bright. Well, thank you for your session today on blended search, it was very interesting. We have some questions that we’d like to ask you from the team back in the US. One of which is about images and so when you actually do a site query command in image search, will that actually bring up all the images that are typically indexed by Google?

Danny Sullivan: I honestly don’t remember, I’d have to go back and sit at the computer and take a look at it. Are you saying that if I do a site colon and that domain command and I’m in image search, does that narrow it down?

Jacqui Jones: Yes.

Danny Sullivan: I wanna say that it does, but sometimes the site command can be funky when you try to use it on some of the vertical searches, so I’d have to take a look and see.

Jacqui Jones: Can we then assume that if that is the case, does that mean that only those images would be displayed in blended search results?

Danny Sullivan: Yeah, I mean if those images aren’t in Google image search, there not going to be showing up in blended search results, so that certainly is a good way of to find out what’s likely to make it.

Jacqui Jones: Absolutely and so, images from Flickr and other image type sites would actually display in blended search results as well, won’t they?

Danny Sullivan: That’s right. I believe that Google can crawl Flickr and pick up the material that’s over there. I don’t think that they’ve blocked it, although you don’t tend to see a lot of Flickr showing up on Google, and then of course at Yahoo it is the opposite. They favour the Flickr photos. They’ve been pulling in the Flickr thing, so certainly if you’re trying to deal with blended search at Yahoo, you wanna have a Flickr account.

Jacqui Jones: One of the observations I’ve made is that the content or the text on the page actually puts the image into context and that actually affects the ranking of that image, do you think that’s the case at all?

Danny Sullivan: I believe that’s what certainly Google has said, that the content of the page can be associated with it. Usually it’s the words that are very near the image, definitely the Alt text. They’re very explicit about the Alt text being important as well.

Jacqui Jones: Ok, great. So were seeing a lot more other types of web assets and media appearing in blended search results such as video, so how would you go about getting your video to rank in Google, is it a matter of just pointing links at that video on YouTube or on Google video?

Danny Sullivan: Well, in the terms of blended search, they’re hitting both YouTube and the stuff that’s on Google video. As I was talking about, some people feel like they’re favouring that content. Since a lot of these places allow you to take the video content anyway, I would just go and put it out on as many places as possible. If you can have it on YouTube and you can have it on MySpace video, why not put it in both places, you can always choose to promote just one of those, if you want to go with it from there.

Jacqui Jones: If everyone is doing that, if a whole range of businesses in a particular industry are all putting video onto YouTube, Google video and other video sites, how do you actually make your video more important in search results, more relevant to that search query? Is it dependant on the ratings or the number of views of that video in YouTube or is it simply having some links with good anchor text in it, linking back to that video?

Danny Sullivan: I honestly don’t know what Google has said in terms of when they hit blended search, how they’re making that determination. I don’t think that they’re using things like the YouTube ratings. And the reason I’m fairly certain they’re not doing that is because they couldn’t use those YouTube ratings and then fairly weight all the other video content that’s out there as well. I would tend to think it’s going to be much more a combination of looking at the meta data from the video they have that’s been reported as well as looking at the anchor text they’re pointing over.

Jacqui Jones: We know that local search and maps is huge on the internet, and it’s made a huge impact on what people are seeing in search results and where they’re going to. Once maps and local search starts to become more popular and more business are being listed in local search how do you actually make it to the top 10 listings that are displayed there? Again, is it based on reviews or links going back?

Danny Sullivan: There’s a tonne of factors that come in. The proximity to say the city centre if you’ve done a generic city search, it’s coming up within that, certainly the words that are in the listings, the title of the business name can have an impact and it can bring you up there as well. In some cases, like I think with Yahoo that they did say that ratings could have an influence as well. I can’t recall if Google said the ratings have been. I mean local search tends to be a very, very complicated creature in terms of all the factor s that flow into it.

Jacqui Jones: The next question is on a personal note. I don’t know if you’ve heard that on blogs recently or on the news, that some bloggers they have had heart attacks or a couple of A list bloggers have had heart attacks and it’s because they haven’t had a balanced life. And I know for you, you’re busy traveling the world and blogging and you’re online all the time. How do you actually keep balance in your life?

Danny Sullivan: I saw that story in the New York Times and thought it was a lot of bull really. I mean we had one tech writer that actually died of a heart attack. Om Malik who runs GigaOM did have a heart attack. I don’t know that’s a wave of bloggers suddenly having… Om fortunately didn’t die and he’s well, but you know I think lots of people have unhealthy lifestyles. I don’t know that just because you’re a blogger that tends to do it. For me personally, I did notice about two years ago that you know, I spent a lot of time sitting in front of the computer, doing a lot snacking, not getting a lot of exercise, I suppose blogging, it’s just anyone using a computer a lot.

I just really started thinking more about what I was eating, trying to eat less and do a lot more exercise. It was around the time there was a lot of people talking about doing this blogger diet, so I got inspired by it. I remember Chris Pirillo had lost a lot of weight, and (Jeremy Wodney?) had done that, so it was kind of nice peer pressure to think, well I wanna go out and see if I can do something better. I guess my life does probably, you know health wise has improved a bit. I’m sure I’m not the healthiest person out there though.

Jacqui Jones: So, what does a blogger diet consist of?

Danny Sullivan: Well, I mean in my case, it wasn’t that I was eating the wrong things. I was just eating a lot. I mean I was doing a lot of snacking. I would get up and I would take a break and I’d have you know, just some candy or something like that and eat too much and I wasn’t getting a lot of exercise. I think on the traveling it’s harder, cause you’re traveling and you’re going through an airport and it’s very easy to say I’m gonna get a candy bar here and I’m gonna grab a thing there. You go into a reception here and there’s a lot of food that’s out and you go oh I’ll have this muffin and pick up something like that, so for me that’s just more a lot of saying no.

Jacqui Jones: Very good. One last question. What do you think are the main challenges for search in Australia and New Zealand?

Danny Sullivan: You know it’s difficult to say, cause I’m not down here. I’ve really been talking with a lot of people already. The top of my head, I would say one of the biggest challenges is, you’re not getting as much support as of some of the new things that are coming out. There’s Local (search) that’s out there, that felt like from talking to some people that they didn’t have as much support. They did have a local business though, they were pleased about that. There’s no product search for Australia and they’ve had product search at Google for like 5 years now. So where, you know the heck is it?

It’s not like the people in the room that we were talking with didn’t have products to sell. There’s just no ability to put it out there. This is my 3rd trip to Australia and talking with people, unfortunately you seem to get use to being forgotten sometimes. You know, “we’ll get to you when we get to you”.

At least on the last trip I came out, it was still a case you couldn’t even buy the paid links, you know, so I guess there’s advancement there. They want to take your money now. You couldn’t even give your money away to them at the time.

Jacqui Jones: I think your observations are right, that sometimes we do feel a bit forgotten, but things are catching up and there’s a lot more happening down this side of the world, which is fantastic. Thank you for your time today and I hope you enjoy the rest of your time in Sydney.

Danny Sullivan: Definitely looking forward to it, you’re welcome.

In our second video from our series of SMX Sydney interviews, we speak with Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz on seo tools, link building and social networking.

Jacqui: Hi, I’m Jacqui Jones from Netconcepts and we’re at SMX Sydney and we have Rand Fishkin right here from SEOmoz.

Rand: Hi, How are you Jacqui?

Jacqui: Welcome to Australia.

Rand: Thank you.

Jacqui: It’s a bit bright isn’t it? It’s very sunny.

Rand: I think this is just about the best weather I’ve had at a conference. Maybe one of the best cities too, it’s incredible here.

Jacqui: That’s a lovely thing to say. As I just mentioned, one of our analysts in our US office, she wanted to ask a question about the sluggish-nish of your web site, so what is the case?

Rand: There are a few issues with SEOmoz. One is it was not built to handle the traffic that it gets right now. It was architected for maybe a max of 10,000 visits a day and it gets close to 15-20,000 on a lot of days. The other thing is the tools slow it down heavily. So as the tools have gotten more popular, that’s a tonne of database requests and it’s a tonne of pulling data from other places. One of the biggest problems was, I think a couple of weeks ago was running super slow, and were going what the heck’s going on, and we found this spammer in Singapore had like signed up for a tonne of accounts and was running like 50 tools at a time, so we’re constantly monitoring for that kind of thing. So, November we’re going to co-locate hosting in New York and Seattle. Were gonna have a new version of the site which runs a lot faster. Hopefully it will get better.

Jacqui: Ok, so in the meantime, you know, do we just have to persevere?

Rand: Yeah, I would say visit it during, no you shouldn’t have to do anything. It’s ridiculous to ask people to not like, come and visit. I mean were doing the best we can and I do apologise for the sluggish-nish. I promise it’s totally worth it dude, just you know, come on over.

Jacqui: Another question I have is how did you come up with the name SEOmoz? What does moz actually mean?

Rand: So, we stole it from the Mozilla foundation, and Chef Moz and DMOZ and all of those sites. So, they had this philosophy that we just loved, which was of openness and of sharing a lot of robust, free content. And we’ve always subscribed to that moto. So even though we have paid stuff, kind of behind the pro membership, there is thousands and thousands of pieces of great free content on SEOmoz. There’s a lot of stuff that users contribute themselves through YOUmoz, through the market place. All that kinda thing so, yeah, we took it from the kind of ethos of openness.

Jacqui: You’ve got a range of professional analytic tools available on SEOmoz. Can you tell us a little bit about what they are?

Rand: Sure, so I mean there’s a tonne of them, but one of the ones, how about I’ll tell you about one of the new ones, one of the ones that’s coming out, that no one has seen yet! So, in, what’s it gonna be, it’s June 3rd I think it launches, and it’s, I don’t know, we haven’t come up with a name yet, maybe like the video watchers can help us, you can help us come up with a name for it. Internally we call it the Trifector tool. So, it is page strength, which has been probably our most popular tool right, which gets a bunch of factors about your web site from the search engines, from Yahoo, from Google, from Alexa, all these places and then comes up with kinda score of how important we think you are. And, we took that one step further and said you know, page analysis is fine, but for a lot of time we need to analyse a whole domain, and other times we wanna… there’s blogs right and we specifically want to break out blogs, so we have page strength, blog strength and domain strength, thus we call it Trifector right, and so that is launching June 3rd. We have a tonne of tools in there, but I think this one is going to be huge, it’s gonna be very, very popular.

Jacqui: We’re looking forward to seeing that being launched. A question from one of our analysts Tim in our US office… he wants to know, can you actually add more than one site to the pro analytics tool.

Rand: You can’t right now, but you’ll be able to add five sites in total, so your site like plus four top competitors starting May, I think its like, May 20th, May 25th, something like that. We launched it in a preview Beta mode, knowing that’s what folks would want. We all ready have internally, some stuff where you can see like four sites at a different time. You can see oh well, Search Engine Land is going up and SEOmoz is going down, and oh we have to catch up to that Danny bastard, you know, yeah.

Jacqui: So what do you think what are some of the greatest challenges in search for Australia and New Zealand and I appreciate you have only been here for 5 minutes, but what are your observations so far?

Rand: I have a really good friend who’s based here in Australia and he spent a week with us at SEOmoz. Lucas Ng from Fairfax digital and I think he’s just brilliant, absolutely brilliant about SEO stuff and he commented that Australia and New Zealand are always about a year behind the US in terms of technology. Everything from Ajax, to social media marketing, to Twitter, you know, to Digg, or whatever it is, their always kind of a little bit behind, and so I think it can be tough to come to some of these presentations and to hear these tactics described and then say to yourself, ok we’re not quite there yet, but this does gives us an opportunity to be on the cutting edge.

Obviously some of the other things are it’s really tough to network from Australia, in person networking is extremely hard because it’s so far to fly to you know, London, or to Los Angeles, or San Francisco or New York, I mean these are just far, far away destinations, and so I think that there’s a lot of opportunity therefore in the power of social networking. I mean I had, you know, I had never met, Colina Jordan until I came here, but she was a huge name for me and the same is true with Barry Smyth and you know a lot of the other folks who are here. I knew them through the social profiles and media that they contributed to and participated online, so I think that recognising that challenge and also that opportunity.

Jacqui: Great, so for those particular people, they would want to have an international profile to network with people like yourselves and others in the industry in the States. So for businesses in Australia and New Zealand where they primarily want Australian and New Zealand business and traffic, if they were to participate in social media sites in the US, does that really provide a lot of benefit to them?

Rand: So, probably not quite as great as the other side, however that being said, if you participate in those sites, you can probably earn links that none of your competition will have and you can earn this branding outside of what your competitors can get. And that will help you right, so all of those links will help you to rank well for queries even here in Australia. You’ll earn that trust and the authoritative domain status and all these kind of things and then when your competitors are you know, struggling, they might say, oh man how did they get those links, how can I get those links and that’s a pretty powerful thing.

Jacqui: If you are generating global links, does that really benefit your site? I mean surely regional links will be better than a global link?

Rand: Not necessarily, not entirely. There’s something to this idea that authoritative domains gather links from all different countries, all different languages and recognising that is going to be really important. SEOmoz is a good example. Once we started getting links from Germany, from the UK, from Canada, from Australia, from Singapore, from China, and we look at all these different markets and said oh my gosh like this is really establishing us as an authority on the web on this subject and it means that our rankings are going to increase in the US as well as overseas. Let’s say you want to say target Singapore, getting links in Singapore is absolutely very important, but if you’re working here in Australia and you’ve got an Australian domain and you have lots of Australian links already and now you’re trying to expand your link profile, going international can be a great, great help.

Jacqui: We’ve been speaking with a range of PR consultants recently, and they’re just starting to learn about social media and PR online which is great and one of the question they ask is well, how do you actually value a link because they’re so use to when they get a mention in a newspaper article, they can put a dollar value on that, so how do you actually value a link? Is that possible?

Rand: Not, not right now, not, at least not from the prospective of this helped me this much to get the rankings that I want. I think you can do it arbitrarily and you can do it a little bit, you can kinda say, hey we through out this piece of content, it got this many links, it’s earned us this much traffic and referrers to that page sent us this many conversions. You might be able to puzzle out something, but chances are it’s gonna be a low ball. I think that low ball number is probably an ok thing to use, but yeah it’s a very, very tough thing to do because you don’t know whether that link is going to be, oh hey that increased my trust rank, that increased my page rank this much. I think that eventually there will be tools that will help us to analyse those.

Jacqui: Great, well that’s all the questions I have for today, so thank you very much, and enjoy the rest of your time in Australia and also New Zealand when you go there next week, so thank you.

Rand: Thanks Jacqui, it’s been terrific.

At SMX in Sydney I had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing a range of professionals in the search marketing space. Over the next few days we will be delivering some of the video interviews that we conducted. The first in the series is with Monte Huebsch from AussieWeb where we discuss the state of local search in Australia and New Zealand.

Jacqui: Hi, I’m Jacqui Jones from Netconcepts and we’re at SMX in fabulous Sydney. Right now we’re speaking with Monte Heubsch from AussieWeb. How are you?

Monte: I’m great Jacqui, thanks for talking with me.

Jacqui: So you’re originally from Brisbane aren’t you and you’ve flown down to Sydney for the SMX conference?

Monte: Yes, we came down. This is the largest international conference of its type in the southern hemisphere with 200 plus people, people from New Zealand like yourself. I’ve got a yank accent, but, yes, I’m from Brisbane.

Jacqui: Is it possible that you can tell us a little bit about AussieWeb and what you do?

Monte: AussieWeb is a local search and business directory with 1.2 million Australian businesses in it. It’s the 5th largest directory in Australia. People who are larger than us are who you’d expect like Google, Yellow Pages and TrueLocal which provide the data for both Google and Yahoo!.

Jacqui: What is the status of local search in Australia and New Zealand if you know that?

Monte: Local search is in its infancy and is just beginning to grow. All the searches that were done historically in the past, and even Google recognises this because we partner with Google, you’ve used Google and found what you wanted and you have bookmarked all those sites and so you do less searches unless you have a new problem. Now people are using the Internet to find local businesses.

They are doing research on the Internet and finding a local company and not completing the transaction online, but they are buying local. In fact 62% of online purchases are influenced by online research.

Case in point, if you search for an Apple computer, an iPod or an iTouch you might find the Apple website, however you might not want to buy online and wait 3 days for it to be delivered. You want to find the local outlet, find out whether they have the stock of the phone or iTouch you want and then go buy it. Actually, local search is a percentage of general searches growing at a faster rate now.

Jacqui: Sorry, did you just mention before that you supply some of the data to Google and Yahoo!? Is that correct?

Monte: No, TrueLocal is the provider of the data. It is owned by Rupert Murdoch and they provide in Australia the data to Yahoo! and Google business directories. Google actually takes their data from multiple sources so they will have restaurant reviews from a restaurant review site. We provide Google with an xml feed if they think that data is useful so they use our data as well.

Jacqui: Do you think that over time that by Google’s local search and maps technology becoming more popular will possibly make local directories such as AussieWeb and local search redundant at all?

Monte: Good question Jacqui, it’s a valid one. Of all the major directories in Australia of which there are about 8, there are only two that are considered Web 2.0 and what I really mean is that they are free which are Google and ourselves. All the rest of the directories have premium listings and charge anything from $800 to $8,000 to participate. TrueLocal is a good case in point. They are an $800 a year product and if you list in TrueLocal, you automatically show up in Google and Yahoo!, as well as TrueLocal.com.au. That’s a paid environment and there is a big difference between paid and free. I don’t think we’ll go out of business just yet.

Jacqui: What do you think are some of the greatest challenges for businesses in Australia and New Zealand in regards to search?

Monte: The challenge in either country is the same and that is that there are so many new businesses starting every year and there are also so many businesses that exist and then go out of business. The number is around 40%. So keeping your directory base current and accurate is the biggest challenge and the way we get around that we have a button on AussieWeb’s site that says “report this listing as wrong”.

If someone goes and says “hey that business is longer down the street or they have closed or changed their name”, we’re actually using our users like a wiki to provide information to keep our directories fresh and current. That is our greatest challenge.

Jacqui: What are your top tips or what do you see happening in the future or what would like to see happen in local search?

Monte: We just did a seminar session with all the search players, competitors and friends alike, all got together and spoke about that. Google is a good case in point, where they have just added video, where you can link video to your local search listing and I think you’re going to find rich content coming along.

The ability for a small company who may not even have a website, having a directory listing that includes pictures, a map to get there, directions, a video, it literally becomes their web presence. And having that in multiple locations is valuable and the cost of being on virtually every directory in Australia of consequence, except maybe Yellow, is a few thousand dollars and that is probably better money spent than building a website which small businesses are time poor and do not have the ability to maintain and operate.

Jacqui: Absolutely. They are all the questions that I have for you today. Thank you for speaking with us at Netconcepts and I look forward to catching up with you again soon.

Monte: We hope to catch up with you in New Zealand.