After traveling through Europe on vacation the past couple of weeks, nothing said I was home more than grabbing a slice of New York pizza!

Deciding to do a blog post on the topic, I wanted to find out who the “big cheeses” were in the pizza world and see if I could find some insight into their web strategies.

Using the Keyword Destination tool on Compete.com to get a list of sites referred to by a broad match for the generic keyword “pizza”, I quickly found that Pizzahut.com and Dominos.com were the hands-down winners.  Approximately 16% of all “pizza” related search referrals went to Pizzahut.com and 5.8% went to Dominos.com.

Both Pizzahut and Dominos showed strong consumer brand recognition, as seen by looking at branded vs. non-branded search referral data collected by Compete:

With similar patterns in historical UV traffic, these two brands were ripe for comparison:

You would think that two strongly similar brands would show similar ad spend profiles, but I was surprised to see that visitors referred to Pizzahut.com via a search engine were 1.8X more likely to have reached the site through a paid search link as visitors to Dominos.com.

What’s the difference?

Using Compete.com again to analyze keyword search referrals to the two brands provided a bit more insight:

For the sake of brevity I am just including a few keywords, but the general trend was the same.  Pizzahut seems to struggle to rank for organic traffic for long-tail phrases, even those containing their brand name. Paid search helps augment low SERP placement by artificially ranking Pizzahut ahead of the couponing sites vying for this sort of referral.

The Bottom Line:

While there are certainly more “slices to the pie” that this brief analysis can’t cover, the bottom line is that there is a constant struggle going on behind the scenes between large brands and third party sites looking to ride on their coattails through coupon offerings, referral links, and product reviews.  If you find your manager questioning the value of SEO, consider that the average CPC for a “pizza” broad-match term was $0.63 (source: google adwords keyword estimator), and in Q2-2011 approximately 5 million search referrals were sent to both Pizzahut.com and Dominos.com. Strong SEO efforts can translate into significant savings through reduced ad spend on paid search!

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Core search queries conducted by US web users on Yahoo dropped 13%, from almost 3.79 billion in May 2011 to about 3.28 billion in June 2011, according to comScore qSearch data. Yahoo retained its number two ranking among US search providers for core search queries.

Microsoft Core Search Queries Rise 5% Although Microsoft (including the Bing search [...]

• Search query volume across the 5 engines picked up slightly in May (up 2.5% from April), driving small shifts in search market share.
• Google’s share of the search market declined by 0.2ppts, although its query volume increased by 2.3%.
• While Microsoft’s share of the search market declined by 0.1ppt, the growth of Yahoo! by 0.5ppts resulted in an increase for Bing Powered engines M-O-M.
• Yahoo! experienced the largest growth in queries, driving a 0.5ppt M-O-M increase in share.
• All 5 engines saw slight increases in the number of unique visitors from April to May except for AOL which remained flat.

As Facebook grows, one concern for Google is that users could eventually turn away from traditional search and instead ask their friends for advice and answers.

So far, that’s not happening according to the chart below from Bank Of America Merrill Lynch.

When consumers want to research buying something, Google is still the primary option. Only 1% of 418 people surveyed say they ask friends on Facebook about the product.

It’s not in this chart, but BofA also says only 3% of Facebook users say they use Google less thanks to Facebook. (17% say they’re using it more thanks to Facebook.)

Of course, the real long term risk to Google is that Facebook has a trove of important data which it can not access. But, for these other concerns the data from BofA provides some relief for Google.

And for Facebook, this chart isn’t bad news, either. It’s still a place where users hang out and can be influenced by display advertising.

Related: The TRUTH About Facebook: 18 Charts Reveal Everything

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• THE GOOGLE INVESTOR: Could Google’s New Features Bury Groupon?
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It’s no secret that negotiations between Google and the recording industry haven’t been going very well. Perhaps even less surprising are the reasons behind the stalemate. According to the Hollywood Reporter, discussions between the two parties have sputtered thanks to three usual suspects: money, file-sharing and concerns over competition. During licensing talks, Google agreed to pay upfront advances to all participating labels, but the major players wanted bigger guarantees. That prompted the indie contingent to ask for similar money, unleashing a snowball of stakes-raising. The two sides also failed to agree on how to handle pirated music, with the industry demanding that Google not only ban illegally downloaded files from users’ lockers, but that it erase P2P sites from its search results, as well.

Hovering above all this bargaining was a thick cloud of destabilizing uncertainty. Some execs welcomed the idea of a new iTunes competitor, while others were less enthusiastic, amid concerns that Google Music wouldn’t deliver new revenue streams. The ultimate question, of course, is how negotiations will proceed now that Google’s already launched the service. The labels were warned that Tuesday’s I/O announcement was coming, but the search giant didn’t do much to mend fences when it effectively blamed the record execs for holding up negotiations. It’s hard to say whether Google’s bravado will help or hurt matters, but according to a source from a major label, “People are pissed.”

What stalled negotiations between Google and the music industry? (Hint: money) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 12 May 2011 16:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Investors have been fleeing Demand Media since April 6th, as shown in this chart from Yahoo Finance.

April 6 is right around when Google implemented its latest search algorithm tweak, which has hammered Demand Media’s sites according to Hitwise data given to Forbes, as well as earlier data from SEO firm Sistrix.

Demand admitted its traffic had fallen off, but said it would still hit its stated financial goals. Obviously that wasn’t enough assure spooked investors.

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• CHART OF THE DAY: What People Care About When Buying A Smartphone
• CHART OF THE DAY: The iPhone Is Now Half Of Apple’s Business
• Dear Steve Jobs: Al Franken Has 9 Questions For You About Location Tracking

New data from comScore shows Google’s share of the U.S. search market has remained flat, stuck in the 66% percent range.

This is a problem for Google because it still gets the vast majority of its profits from search. Yes, the overall search market continues to grow, as does revenue per search. But, it’s clear Google is not going to completely dominate the search market.

If Google’s stock is ever going to start soaring again, Google will have to prove it has a second real profitable business beyond search.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Bing search engine has managed to pick up a few percentage points of search share in the last year. But it’s paying an unbelievable amount for those few points of share, and it’s taking away share from its partner, Yahoo.

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• CHART OF THE DAY: Google’s Cash Cost Per Employee Hits An All Time High
• The Guy Who Ran Microsoft And Google In China Clones US Startups
• Android Dominates In South Korea, And Now Google Faces Antitrust Accusations

Overcoming the challenges can bring efficiency and performance

Seven in 10 (71%) marketers who use social media plan to increase their use of search engine optimization (SEO) in the near future, according to the “2011 Social Media Marketing Report” from SocialMedia Examiner. Furthermore, only 1% plan to decrease their use of SEO and 8% have no plans to utilize it, with 20% intending [...]<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/marketingcharts/~4/HkKTw3ENvIs" height="1" width="1"/>

The United States government may be dissolved tomorrow, but it’s certainly taking care of one final piece of business before going into shutdown: this. If you’ll recall, Google announced its intentions to acquire ITA for $700 million in July of last year, and as we cruise into the start of America’s summer travel season, all signals are go. Today, the US Department of Justice approved Google’s request to move forward with the buy, but rather than having the entire travel search market under its wing, El Goog’s going to have to make a smattering of concessions in order to get the right signatures. For starters, the search monolith will allow ITA’s existing client contracts to extend into 2016, and it’ll let both current and new customers license ITA’s QPX software on “fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.” No one’s saying when the integration will be complete (or start, for that matter), but we’re desperately anxious to see just how Kayak and Bing Travel react after this launches in earnest. Power to the searchers, as it were.

US DoJ approves Google’s acquisition of ITA, but not without stipulations originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 08 Apr 2011 17:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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