A recent article by eMarketer stated “one-third of shoppers have either already used or would be interested in using Siri to compare prices at the shelf…” This means that shoppers will be doing their homework and the field will get more competitive for businesses. At the touch of a button, consumers will know the best price and if there is an available coupon that can be used with their purchase. Businesses need to determine their added value and capitalize on it.

What makes your business stand out among the competition? Does your company have good customer service or a no hassle return policy? Does your company stand behind your products and services? Does your company appreciate and reward loyal customers?  These are questions that every business needs to answer. Consumers aren’t just looking for the price point. Think about it, there are many shoe stores online, but people like to shop at Zappos because of their selection, atmosphere and return policy. If a consumer doesn’t like the shoes, they can pack them up and send them back with free return shipping. A consumer may be more willing to buy shoes from Zappos, even if they aren’t the cheapest price, because they know they won’t get hassled if they want to return the shoes later on. Loyalty is also import to consumers. If a consumer knows they will be rewarding themselves to get points or credits for future purchases, they may be more likely to buy now.  Nine West has a rewards program that gives customers a rewards pass coupon every time they spend a certain amount of money. But what if your business offers a service?

If your business offers a service, be competitive in price, but also make sure that the service is customer friendly from start to finish.  It may be a surprise to some companies, but people don’t mind paying a little more if they know they will get good results and be treated civilly. For example, dry cleaning company A may be cheaper than dry cleaning company B. However dry cleaning company B may get more business because they offer same day cleaning.

Businesses should know their added value and promote it via advertising. Too many times businesses look at the competition and want to mirror what they are doing, but it’s better to find the unique element that sets your company apart from others and market it

Late last month, Google initiated the latest string of updates to its algorithm. Code-named “Panda 3.3″, there were a slew of revisions to the way Google interprets data on a website because, according to Google, they want to be “more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes on the web.”

The major updates to Google’s algorithm include:

• The ranking of videos on Google’s YouTube platform. Google now says that searches on YouTube will return more locally relevant results.

• An update to image search. Google says they can now show “fresher” images in search results. This means that adding high resolution, optimally tagged images to a webpage will get it crawled and indexed in a quicker fashion. So if you have a news blog, for instance, a sharp image used on a recent and popular news post will enhance factors such as user experience and organic traffic to the page.

• Improved snippets for video pages. As detailed in a recent MoreVisibility YouTube Video Series, Google now supports rich snippet data for video content, as it may display an image of the video within the description snippet in search results if correctly coded with rich markup.

These changes, as usual, simply reinforce standard SEO best practices. Page elements, such as optimized and interesting content, clean web coding and geo-targeting will only help to improve user experience and your website’s overall search performance in the long run.

In 2010, Yahoo announced that its organic search results would be powered by Bing which led to many Yahoo properties being discontinued. So, as expected, on November 21st, Yahoo officially took down its free, search analysis tool, “Site Explorer”. What does this mean for Webmasters? Even though the data has been integrated into Bing Webmaster Tools, it seems evident that any type of robust (and free) online tool for checking things like backlinks is gone forever. There are, of course, a plethora of third party tools, but those tools are compiling an aggregate of a multitude of different platforms, and are not a true reflection of the “true” backlink data that a specific search engine has.

Bing Webmaster Tools has made some effective improvements over the last several months and the verified webmaster for a website will now be able to get even more comprehensive data. Bing Webmaster Tools will likely show an increased number of backlinks being reported for a website, as well as provide a central location for both Yahoo and Bing data.

However, many SEO’ers, including myself, will miss the practicality of the old Site Explorer. Site Explorer was the only free, public database from a major search engine that gave you an easy way to look at the amounts of backlinks to a specific page. While privacy was a concern, making certain information public inspired other webmasters to improve their own inbound link building techniques as well as making it easy for the more novice webmaster to take a quick glance at a competitor’s website for inbound link ideas, thus inspiring innovation in the world of SEO.