I recently had the opportunity to interview Ken Headrick, the Director of Products and Marketing for MSN Canada about how website owners can succeed with search. Ken is one of speakers at the upcoming Search Engine Strategies Toronto conference. (sidenote: I will be going to the conference from June 16-18 and will be reporting back on what I learn).

Here are the questions I asked Ken and his responses (my favourites are the last 3):

What has happened in Search in the last year and what can we expect over the next year?

A little more than 1 year ago Yahoo and Microsoft brought our PPC offerings to Canada and provided advertisers with new and different options. Generally, more Canada businesses are investing in Search but we are still quite a bit slower to adopt this technology as compared to businesses in the US or the UK. Market shares have grown for Google while the Microsoft market share has held steady and Yahoo’s has declined to the point that Microsoft is solidly in the #2 position in Canada in terms of search market share. The search experience is evolving in that there is more and more search pages displaying more than just the 10 links. Results show videos, images, maps and other relevant information on most of the major engines. More and more information is being put into the search engines to the point that I am not sure that people know that they can query stock prices or weather forecasts or sports scores or do local searches for businesses in their neighbourhood on Microsoft Live Search and some of the other engines. There is lots of innovation but a final one is that there are new mobile search offerings coming to market to allow you to search from your cell phone or Windows Mobile phone.

Local Search. How does it work and which businesses does it make sense for?

Local search is very popular as 46% of searches have some sort of location involved in the search. Local search is particularly popular on mobile phones for finding businesses in a local area like a restaurant, or a store etc. and this importance will only increase over time. Most of the major engines populate their local searches with databases from common popular local providers. It is important if your business involves a physical location you want to drive people to, that as consumer behaviour changes toward using the internet to search for things, that your business can be found in the local search of all of the major engines.

When I search for my business, I rank pretty low. What can I do to get ranked higher?

Most of the major search engines have a link on their pages for webmasters. Follow those links to the search engines tools, forums for discussion on tips and tracks and to participate in the SEO community (Search Engine Optimization) and pose your questions there and get help from others on how to improve your site. There are also a variety of free tools that webmasters can you to assess how they are ranking and for assessing the pages of their sites. Minimizing flash and other elements that are difficult to for a crawler to index, submitting your site maps to the engines directly, keeping your site content fresh and using your keywords in the titles and body of your pages, are a few of the basic guidelines.

Organic or PPC? How should a website owner determine where to spend her time and money?

It always make sense to make sure that your site is well search engine optimized so that that each of the engine’s crawlers can find you and the webmaster tools available from each search engine and a variety of partners can help with is activity. Depending on what you do and how broad your offerings are, it may be very difficult to come up on the first page on 100 different terms or on the specific terms you are interested in if they are common words or they are very competitive. In which case, PPC guarantees that you will be shown to your prospective customers in all of the cases that you want to. Thus, it is generally a good practice to be balanced in your approach recognizing that this will be different for each advertiser’s unique situation.

Microsoft or Google? Why should webmasters look at what Microsoft and not just focus on Google?

Generally it is best to advertise with all of the major engines to do Search as searchers for several reasons. Firstly, search advertising is likely the most measurable, trackable, controllable and provides the best ROI as compared to any other form of advertising you can do. Based on that, advertisers should be investing as much as they can, in as many engines as they can, to drive the most effective use of their marketing budgets. Second, Microsoft adCenter (the system you use to book PPC ads on Microsoft Live Search) provides the highest conversions in many categories as compared to Google and Yahoo and the cost per click will be cheaper with Microsoft adCenter and thus your returns will be better. Thirdly, Microsoft Live Search also reaches 46% of all online Canadians searching – over 10 Million people and we have the #2 market share in Canada – 2% share points ahead of Yahoo. This comes partly from the fact that MSN is the #1 portal in Canada and has the #1 position with over 90% share with Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger and so we have a very large audience to help you target. Finally, using Microsoft adCenter allows you to do demographic targeting of your ads to help boost your conversions and the ROI of your campaigns.

How valuable is a the #1 spot or page 1 spot worth?

This can get technical but there is a fairly well known piece of research by a Canadian company called Enquiro that uses eye-tracking technology to track searchers behaviour on search results pages where you have a typical 10 links being shown. The study shows where people look and refers to “the golden triangle” that lies on its side across the top of the page and points out to the right. While it is generally true that click through rates decline from the #1 position through the other positions at the top of the page and continues to decline down the right hand side, most advertisers will test and experiment with their campaigns and can move their positions up and down the listing of ads in the mainline (top of the page) and along the right side of the page to assess the changes in price per click vs. click through rate declines and reach the optimal return. The key point here is to test and that results will be different on different engines and for different advertisers.

What do you think of Ken’s comments?