The CCI at Swinburne University of Technology released a report in May outlining the online habits of Australian internet users. The report presents findings from the second survey of the Australian component of the World Internet Project.

Where we live, whether we download illegally, what we think of restricted content, how we stay in contact with friends - even how internet usage has affected our book-reading, there is a lot of information in there (and it is downloadable for free!).

What is of most interest to me (and my clients) though, is the online SHOPPING habits of Australians. I was surprised to discover that Australians appear to be some of the most avid online shoppers in the world, with over two thirds of users making an online purchase every month, and nearly 90% of users using the internet to research products. 

Between the last survey (2007) and this one (2009), the number of users spending more than $500 online per month more than doubled to 22.6%.

Other interesting findings of the survey:

 - Over 75% of users use the internet to make travel reservations
 -  Over 70% use it to pay bills online
 - Over 60% purchase event tickets online
 - And 73% of users had researched goods online before purchasing from a local store, while 41% reported they look at goods in stores before buying online
 
Australians are increasingly comfortable, and interested in, online shopping, which means a website and the accompanying online marketing should be a priority for retailers targetting Australians. Shops offering easy to find, and use, online shops will benefit from Australians eager adoption of internet technology.

Let me just say first out - don't panic. Yes, Google launched a new index yesterday, but this doesn't mean any major changes to your SEO strategy yet.

This is not a change to the algorithm (which is the way Google determines rankings), but just a change to the way they index pages. 
The new index will index pages much faster than the previous index, so the main change is that new pages of content  should be indexed a lot quicker. This doesn't mean it will crawl your pages any faster, it just means it will find new pages faster.

We don't believe this will mean that existing pages will be dropped and replaced by newer content. We think this means that more content will be able to be indexed, and it will be indexed faster. For this reason we don't necessarily believe that blog posts and Tweets (for example), are going to make a massive change to the rankings, except for very relevant terms.

However, as this is all such a secret science, there are no guarantees, so we would recommend that you;
1. Make no major changes to your SEO strategy until the new index has had a chance to show its effects
2. Monitor your rankings very carefully, noting and analysing changes
3. Create and upload fresh and competitive content (as this never hurt any website), and see how it gets indexed
4. Put more thought into how you can incorporate real time results in a meaningful fashion (i.e. don't just do it for SEO, do it for your users)

MooMu Media is looking for a new best friend, to come and work with us as a part-time business development manager!

This is a role we want to develop with the successful candidate, but the overall goal of the position is to come up with brilliant ideas and strategies to help us grow our local business.

Although we have been in operation just under 2 years, we have a 100% client retention rate, and much of our business has been built on happy customers and their referrals. These strong relationships have helped us grow our business to service an array of industries, including B2B, online retail, professional services, media and recruitment.  We have decided that this is the right time to take control of our own destiny and create a dedicated business development team.

From little things, big things grow - so this position will be part time in the beginning, with the potential to grow in all kinds of directions for the right candidate. If you are;

• Passionate about online,
• Experienced in business development or sales
• Looking for a flexible position in an exciting industry

Send your CV to jobs@moomumedia.com and let us know how you think we could work together!

Hope to be having After Work Drinks with you soon...

You may or may not notice, (depending on how long, unique or fast your queries are), that Google uses predictive text when you type in your search. But did you know that if you start with "I love" you get a lot of predictions, but if you start the phrase "I hate" you will not get any?

Insignificant trivia? Yes indeed.

Well, anyway, the actual point of this post is that predictive text could potentially help you with your search engine marketing. If people are slow typers, or maybe a bit indecisive, they may indeed start relying on Google predictive text.

Say you are looking for car insurance online. If you type in car insurance, all of a sudden you get a host of suggestions (although, if you type quickly and press enter, you may not notice this)...

If you saw this, you might change your query from 'car insurance' to 'car insurance quotes'. Or maybe the third suggestion, 'car insurance comparison'. This obviously has ramifications for car insurance companies who want your business - they will want to be ranking high for those terms you are most likely to choose. Or, maybe you will look more carefully and see 'car insurance nsw' and realise that is what you are really after - so maybe car insurers should optimise for that kind of local term?

In any case, if you are optimising for shorter terms, which are stems for longer queries, you might want to see what those longer queries are and whether you should optimise for them as well.

Strange results-  I previously blogged about this strange result - and I still don't know what it means - but if you Google 'hairdresser', the first predictive result is 'Hairdresser games'. Is this really so popular?! When Google did a search shake up earlier this year, the Hairdresser games certainly got a mention on page 1 for hairdresser.

Make sure to see what predictive text is saying about your brand, product or industry - and see if you are optimising for the options they are offering!

I stumbled across this fun page on Google today - World Bank statistics on Internet usage around the world. It lets you compare any number of countries, or the whole world. I discovered that 70% of Australians have internet usage, but only 24% of the worldwide population.

They put China at 22%, but I know that has increased rapidly in the last year or two, and last time I checked they had more internet users (absolute number, not percentage) than America (76%).

This is a great example of Google answering my needs - I typed in 'World internet usage statistics', and the number one result was an image of this graph, and even better, the graph comes with a nifty link to help me embed it easily into this blog post.



Yes, it is 2 years out of date, but I feel like we could easily imagine the extrapolation of these graphs.

You can go to the site yourself and click whatever countries you want to compare. Note that it is internet users as a PERCENTAGE of population, not an absolute number. Which is why the line for China is so much lower than the one for Australia.