Online Ads Plug Away Like the Energizer Bunny

While many sectors of the US economy are going down, online advertising keeps going up and will be 10% of the advertising pie by 2009.

eMarketer predictions for US online advertising say it will account for 8.8% of total advertising in 2008, 10% in 2009, and over 15% of the US total ad spend in 2012. David Hallerman, author of US Online Advertising: Resilient in a Rough Economy says, “US online advertising is proving to be far more robust than other media channels.”

This report predicts overall Internet ad spending will continues to increase, with growth higher than all other major media. However, the report warns the Internet is not immune to downward economic trends despite being more resistant to advertising cutbacks than traditional media.

Source: eMarketer

YouTube Analytics Released

With a YouTube account you can now get more information about who’s watching your video? Where do viewers come from? How did they find my video?

Source: YouTube

Linking Prowess For In-House Teams

Linking is still de rigueur when optimizing for Google and all major engines. Linking strategies have run the gauntlet, from simple link exchange requests to buying links. For a good review of current best practices in linking tactics, I refer you to The Link Spiel by Debra Mastaler and “11 Experts on Link Development Speak Out” from Sugarrae.

While linking is a critical component of your in-house SEO tactical plan, it is also important to be careful in selecting the sites you link to. If you link to a site that’s totally unrelated to your own, search engines will become confused about your link neighborhood.

Defining link neighborhoods

A link neighborhood is a collection of like-minded or like-themed sites on the web. It could be a group of sites focused on niche areas like auto racing, women’s health issues, or sports, each linked to other like-minded, complementary sites. For instance, the graphic below shows some link neighborhoods that could represent a number of sports hubs on baseball, basketball, boxing, football, hockey, skiing, surfing, tennis, volleyball, etc. The best strategy is to focus on getting links in your own neighborhood.

What is a bad link neighborhood?

Broadly speaking, a bad neighborhood is a network of sites with a number of penalized or banned participants. These networks might also link to sites involved in hosting spyware, malware, offensive material, and/or illegal activities like phishing.

If you link to a bad neighborhood, this can categorize your site as part of the network, thereby damaging your theme and ranking strength.

Dangers of bad neighborhoods

Sometimes sites will get into a bad link neighborhood by linking to sites or pages whose only purpose is to exchange links for high search rankings, regardless of any relevance to the sites the links point to. Such sites will accept and accumulate links from anywhere, no matter what the topics of the linking sites might be.

If you are ever promised a link to a page contingent to your returning a reciprocal link, disregard the offer unless you verify the source is authentic and relevant to your site’s theme because it could be from one of these bad neighborhood sites.

Google’s take on bad neighborhoods

Google does not approve of the following types of web sites; thus, linking to these sites will have a negative effect on your Google rankings.

• Free for all (FFA) links pages
• Link farms (automatic linking with multiple unrelated links)
• Known spammers

General guidelines on bad link neighborhoods

Search engine personnel have posted on forums from time to time regarding linking and bad neighborhood penalties. Below is a recap of what has been documented in the past.

Bad neighborhood linking patterns: Search engines look for linking patterns and do not generally penalize a site for one or two accidental “bad links.” Search algorithms are focused on looking for patterns of egregious linking behavior on individual sites and collectively. One way they do this is to monitor the rate of acquisition of links to a site. The addition of too many links too fast can be an indicator of “unnatural” link buying activity, potentially jeopardizing a site’s rankings. Search engines also look at the rate of removal of incoming links to a site. Too many sites doing this simultaneously call for closer scrutiny.

Shared IP Addresses: The affiliations between a linking site and the linked-to site are inspected by some search engines. If two sites share an IP address or have a common postal address on the “contact us” page, the link is ignored at best, or can result in penalties.

Auditing outgoing links: Broken outgoing links that are not promptly taken care of are also noticed and can harm rankings. It’s a good idea to regularly audit your outgoing links to ensure you’re not sending visitors to inappropriate or 404 pages.

Outbound links and Google’s supplemental index: Despite much speculation to the contrary, Google personnel insist it is unlikely that a site’s outbound linking is the cause of its pages being listed in the supplemental index.

Best practices for buying links

Buying links remains a controversial tactic. However, many sites continue to buy links and feel it is safe. If you decide to use paid links, be aware of the following best practices:

• Your site and the sites linking to you must have some relevance to each another.
• Ranking benefits can increase in a matter of hours or days once relevant links are in place.
• Ranking benefits can also decrease in a matter of hours or days upon removal of those links.
• Direct URL links purchased from highly ranked, relevant sites may deliver click-through traffic in addition to search ranking benefits.
• While JavaScript or other script + database links are useful for providing click-through traffic, they do not increase search rankings. Only direct URL linking are proven to increase search engine rankings.

A linking mantra

Links, paid or otherwise, are necessary for decent search engine rankings. Use the following mantra when developing an in-house linking strategy: My link sources must be relevant, consistent, reputable, and from the right link neighborhood.

Recession-proof search strategies

When the economy weakens, companies will direct their attention to the marketing programs that provide the best return. Savvy marketers know this isn’t the time to cut marketing budgets; it’s simply time to ensure that marketing investments are getting the best return possible. The latest trends show that marketers are being held accountable for the return on their marketing investments, but companies are not cutting marketing budgets.

“B2B Marketing in 2008: Trends in Strategies and Spending” (MarketingProfs-Forrester Research) shows that marketers are increasingly being held accountable for marketing ROI in terms of business metrics. More than 70 percent of B2B marketers surveyed reported having systems in place that tie marketing success to business outcomes.

The same survey shows marketers are not significantly decreasing marketing budgets due to economic concerns.

• 45 percent of B2B marketers surveyed reported marketing budgets will remain unchanged.
• 50 percent reported an increase in marketing budgets with average increase of 26 percent.
• 6 percent reported a decrease in marketing budgets with an average decrease of 18 percent.

Search provides accountability and top ROI
Search marketing accounts for more than 40 percent of internet marketing, and research shows it yields top ROI. However, marketers must know how to closely track organic and paid search campaigns to see exactly how the campaigns break out in terms of performance. This not only helps justify marketing expenses to management, it also allows you to achieve even better performance.

The returns on measurement through web analytics can be significant when you use your customer data as actionable intelligence, whether management is calling for increased revenue from the corporate website or seeking a better return from your marketing campaigns. Let’s say you are under the gun to improve performance for organic and paid search campaigns. Here’s where knowing what to measure and how to analyze results with web analytics is key.

Organic and paid search synergy
Too often, marketers are overly focused on paid search results. However, it is clear that implementing both natural and paid search campaigns will empower you to more successfully accomplish your interactive business goals.

Paid search advertising is effective for increasing traffic volume to a website. Natural search is essential for building credibility and providing validation in the SERPs. When the economy is challenging, many companies increase their branding efforts. That’s because in a competitive situation, the stronger brand will get the sale. Using both natural and paid search gives your brand the opportunity to place its products and services in front of millions of prospects 24/7 for both direct response and branding.

Today’s marketers get the best results with integrated marketing programs that take advantage of the right marketing channels for their products, region and industry. It’s always important to know how well your marketing campaigns are performing, especially when the economy pauses. Today, more than ever, it’s important to use web analytics and campaign optimization to gauge and increase ROI.

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Measuring search performance
Web analytics tools can perform a quick analysis of the core keywords in your industry, also enabling you to research competitor paid-search advertising trends and statistics for that industry. These tools can track and trend natural search results as well, modeling and predicting the benefits. Analytics tools are indispensable for tracking competitor search performance so you can understand how to leverage their strengths and weaknesses to your own advantage.

However, it’s important to use accurate, clean data for best results. All your online advertising campaigns should be tagged with URL-tracking parameters to accurately measure site performance and/or online marketing campaign performance when executing dual natural and paid search campaigns.

Search, both natural and paid, is a significant driver of traffic for most websites. As the economy softens, there is increased demand to prove investments are working and to know how well. That’s when measurement becomes essential.

When you measure search performance, your web analytics reporting tools typically provide you with quite a bit of information right out of the box. You’ll be able to see how much traffic your site received from each search engine. You’ll even be able to see what search terms visitors used to view the paid or natural listing that led to your site. Before you can accurately measure search campaign performance, however, you must have established your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

Key Performance Indicators
KPIs are important metrics that can help you measure progress toward achieving website and marketing campaign goals. They must be quantifiable metrics that will indicate success or failure in meeting your established business goals.

When measuring search metrics, start by identifying site goals to be achieved with paid and natural search campaigns. You might want to measure year-over-year page views and the percentage of new visitors, identify conversion leads and engagement metrics, or look at homepage performance or international markets, depending on the nature of your site.

You must know who your visitors are and what they’re looking for to set specific, quantifiable goals. Depending on your site category and business goals, the table below offers a few examples of KPI reporting.

As an addendum to your executive KPI report, you should include a search engine marketing scorecard.

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SEM scorecard
The SEM scorecard is an ROI report for organic and paid search results, showing the SEM triad of organic brand, organic non-brand and PPC keyword results. Note: you must break out your brand vs. non-brand keyword data to separate online and offline impact on organic traffic acquisitions and conversions.

While the primordial term SEO (search engine optimization) should receive the credit for all organic non-brand keyword traffic and conversion data, brand managers typically involved with offline advertising should receive the credit for all organic brand keyword traffic and conversion data. The third group in the SEM triad, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, should receive the credit for PPC keyword traffic and conversion data.

Drilling in deeper than traffic and conversion, ROI is positive when [value-per-acquisition] is greater than [cost-per-acquisition]. Therefore, a key metric within your SEM scorecard should be the “Conversion Value to Spend Summary.”

As seen above, your dashboard should display a comparison of the conversion value to the investment and segregate organic non-brand (SEO) and pay-per-click. The example above exceeded everyone’s ROI expectations. Organic non-brand (SEO) return on investment is 1,653 percent and PPC is 2,372 percent.

Executive KPI report and SEM scorecard
It requires a lot of preparation to set up the right KPIs in your dashboard and score card because there are many measurable website metrics to identify and evaluate. You must select the metrics that accurately reflect your business goals. KPIs are never permanent because your site goals can change, and your KPIs should change accordingly.

Allocating resources can be challenging, and this is where analytics modeling can help.

Analytics modeling for paid and organic search
Analytics modeling can be used to better understand how to allocate your resources and improve the performance of your search programs. To dig deeper into how the analytics modeling process works, I interviewed President and Chief Technical Officer Gary Angel of SEMphonic for in-depth information about tracking the results of individual paid and organic search campaigns.

When tracking dual SEO and PPC campaigns, Angel suggests adding a distinct campaign code to your PPC URLs during set up. This helps to learn the all-important split between natural and paid traffic.

“If you don’t do that work, you’ll see all your traffic as natural — and you’ll be unable to effectively compare the two,” Angel said.

When used correctly, your web analytics tools can help you understand how many repeat visitors came to your site. It’s important to identify repeat visitors for loyalty programs, but you can get a lot of false positives. Repeat clickthroughs can appear in your referral logs in two very different ways. Most clickthroughs will trigger a new visit (also called a session). But sometimes visitors will click through to your site, go back to the search engine and then click through again on the same or even a different search query, leaving the false impression that the second time is a new visitor.

“Your analytics program can compensates for this, and you’d be surprised how often it actually happens,” Angel said.
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Variability in search performance
In today’s competitive environment, it’s important to look beyond your total visitors via search by measuring the actual effectiveness of search traffic. Not all traffic is created equal, and search traffic is likely to vary in quality by channel (natural or paid), search engine and keywords clicked.

There can be a wide diversity in performance between natural and paid search. Natural and paid visitors on identical search terms often perform differently because paid programs invest resources to create a custom landing page for top performance; whereas with natural search, the page is “selected” by the search engine.

The difference is a controlled landing environment.

“The entry page makes a big difference in performance and can be a reason for using PPC even when your natural positioning is excellent,” Angel said. “Sometimes, your natural landing page works better and that can be embarrassing on the paid side, but it’s easily fixed by using analytics to optimize your paid search campaign.”

Personally, I believe most search marketers are overly infatuated with paid search and continue to underestimate the power behind natural search. Based on user response, I’ve consistently seen SEO outperform PPC for the simple reason that unpaid natural results satisfy user intent on a personal, non-advertorial level. This search user characteristic, within various website categories, has resulted in loyalty, trust and repeat customers without controlling the landing environment.

The fact that visitors click on natural vs. paid listings may account for the variability in performance between paid and organic search campaigns. In fact, some search users simply don’t use paid listings, and this audience segment may perform differently from others.

“Visitors might also use natural or paid listings depending on where they are in the buying cycle (information gathering, shopping comparison, buying, etc.),” Angel said. “At times, it may appear that natural search visitors perform less effectively than paid visitors or vice-versa, whereas it’s really a case of visitors simply being in different phases of the buying cycle. When this happens, many of your campaign tracking tools will attribute sales only to the most recent campaign (and often lose visibility after 30 days).”

A major benefit of using a web analytics tool to segment your search traffic is the ability to get a better understanding of how your natural traffic performs over longer periods of time.

Learning to use an analytics tool takes time and practice before you can understand all of the metrics. As your search marketing programs evolve, you’ll find that more and more colleagues want to understand how search is impacting overall site performance. Since search programs (both paid and natural) tend to shift rapidly, that question becomes difficult to answer.

As more questions arise about search campaign performance, you may find yourself spending too much time explaining the impact of your search campaigns. If so, you may want to rely on automated solutions or web analytics consulting.

Benefits of automated analytics reporting
Automated reporting can help you solve the time dilemma. To get quality automated reporting, it isn’t enough to simply dump a batch of data into a spreadsheet and distribute it to everyone in the organization. Not only will most people be unable to find the data they need to understand how search impacted traffic, they will probably misinterpret a good chunk of the data they find.

When this happens, it might be beneficial to hire a web analytics consultant to provide easy answers to questions posed by various colleagues in different departments. Such firms have developed specific approaches to help you answer the difficult questions without taxing your time schedule.

As search programs grow ever larger and more sophisticated, there’s a big advantage to being able to accurately understand and report the impact of search campaigns on overall business performance.

Analytics: vital to marketing success
Measuring the progress and success of natural and paid search campaigns has become key for many marketers, especially in today’s economic environment. Accurate KPI measurement is not an easy task. That’s why marketers must select a robust web analytics package. I can also suggest hiring a web analytics consultant to help set up your analytics package and get you started on tracking the right KPIs.

KPI expertise is a valuable asset for marketing managers, and the ability to accurately communicate the status of online marketing programs to management becomes a requisite skill.

The returns on precise measurement and analysis can be significant with analytics modeling. You can better understand how to allocate your resources, how to improve performance of individual programs and how to explain the impact of your marketing programs to everyone in your organization — all important insights in challenging economic times.

Automated reporting helps you and your colleagues understand the impact of individual search marketing programs, allowing you to ensure that every dollar spent gets the best possible return.

Lessons Learned As An In-House SEO Consultant

Jessica Bowman’s article in the Winter issue of Search Marketing Standard, “Bringing SEO In-House,” defines the In-House SEO Life Cycle as: Courtship, Honeymoon, Reality, and Synergy phases. In the courtship phase you recruit the best in-house SEO possible. When the honeymoon is over, reality sets in. That’s when you have a chance to develop synergy. She also suggests two different options for your in-house search marketing team: All In-House or Hybrid Outsourcing.

Based on our experience at Red Door Interactive, there usually seems to be a certain amount of outsourcing by in-house teams, even though the company does SEO in-house. We’ve consulted with companies about the in-house SEO conundrum for years now and find that Bowman’s Hybrid Outsourcing model works well for conducting SEO in-house and typically yields remarkable results. That’s because there are many experts in the field who can make problem solving much quicker and easier, allowing in-house teams to accomplish their SEO campaign goals faster and better.

Hiring SEO staff

When it comes to staffing for conducting SEO in-house, the obvious choices are either train existing employees to do the job or build a new staff, preferably with at least one person who has a few years’ SEO experience and maybe a couple of others with the aptitude and desire.

The scarcity of well trained SEO technicians is documented as early as 2000, when research started to show that experienced SEO personnel were hard to come by. More recently, MarketingSherpa’s 2008 Search Marketing Benchmark Guide reported one-third of the marketers in its survey said it is “very difficult” to attract qualified SEO technicians.

This same study shows approximately two-thirds of American firms perform search marketing in-house. Many of these firms outsource a part of their efforts because of the difficulty of finding qualified SEO technicians. Jupiter Research shows 63 percent of large search marketers outsource at least one SEM function to agencies (reported by SEMPO).

Proliferation of SEO/SEM training

In the meantime, the SEO/SEM training field has mushroomed over the past year or so. There are now training sessions at Search Marketing conferences, SEMPO Institute, DMA SEM training, as well as Google and Yahoo! PPC training. Savvy companies started hiring SEO/PPC consultants a couple years ago, and their search departments are now ahead of the curve.

Brands must be proactive

It’s important for brands to have access to expert SEO/SEM consultants as there are far too many SEO issues that can arise unexpectedly. In addition, the frequency and multitude of changes within the search engines themselves requires fast adaptation by specialized search optimization technicians.

Just look at a few of the major changes that transpired over the past year: search personalization, universal or blended search, social media networking and optimization, the rising importance of site reviews and product demos, etc. How can one person or even several within the search department have expertise in all these areas at once when they’re happening one on top of the other?

The continuing changes in user trends or algorithm shifts will keep the staff so busy figuring it out that they can’t concentrate on meeting their campaign goals. The practical answer is to call on various outside consultants and experts within the search community. It’s just too much to handle alone, especially when in-house staffs have additional job responsibilities besides SEO/SEM. Heaven help you if you’ve got a new-hire; it’s going to take three to six months to acclimate to the new job, and doing this in addition to SEO integration is just too ambitious for an in-house SEO team to tackle alone.

Many companies reconcile these facts after several months and end up hiring a consultant to assist the team. Some don’t admit it until a year goes by and have to settle for mediocre results. Competition is increasingly keen, and companies that want to hit it out of the ballpark (highly competitive markets) should seriously adopt Bowman’s Hybrid Outsource model from day one.

Conclusion

The only way to survive in an environment where trends and tactics are changing rapidly is to constantly be informed and quickly learn how to adapt. The best way for in-house search teams to remain nimble is by availing themselves of SEO/SEM expertise through expert consultants within the search community. Lastly, in-house SEO teams will likely find that ideas they have proposed in the past will gain acceptance when an outside consultant researches, supports, and validates the same recommendation.

Is The Time Ripe For Search Marketing Standards?

Over the past ten to twelve years, various SEM practitioners have brought up the need for industry standards. I started asking the question in 1998, and others have brought it up since, but the industry seems to have a laissez faire attitude.

Albeit, we’ve seen some standardization steps taken by the search engines themselves. Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft got together on the Sitemaps protocol, and Google, Ask.com, and Microsoft are now anonymizing log file data. Subsequently, Google called for international privacy standards. The November 2007 FTC public forum on behavioral advertising also focused on privacy concerns. These are all steps toward industry standardization with regard to consumer privacy, an issue search engines must address to maintain public trust. But search engines are not as motivated to establish standards for search engine marketing tactics.

Obstacles to standardization

The legion of search engine marketing practitioners is too fragmented to have a leader calling the shots that others will follow. After years of competing against each other, the white-hat/black-hat divide seems to be gravitating toward white-hat dominance, although there are still some black-hat practitioners in the marketplace. Matt Cutts recently said in his blog, “I was looking over a list of 20+ black-hat SEO companies that I compiled back in 2002. The majority either went out of business or have transformed into white-hat SEO companies.”

The wide variance in range of services provided by SEM firms is another reason why industry standardization is difficult to achieve. We have standalone SEO or PPC providers and firms that provide both SEO and PPC. Then we have the ad agencies with specialized search departments. Many traditional and interactive agencies provide search engine marketing in addition to a bevy of traditional and online marketing services. You can get email marketing, search marketing, banner creative, direct mail, and media buying services from these one-stop shops. By the same token, many of the SEO/PPC firms have expanded their services to include search and other marketing services as well. Part of the reason for the lack of industry standardization is the fact that your typical SEM firm is in no way typical.

Looking beyond the obstacles

Looking beyond these drawbacks, I also see signs that we may be getting ready to establish standards. For one thing, the industry is maturing. In some respects, search is still in its infancy because ongoing changes occur rapidly. But the saturation point is fast approaching in search marketing as growth begins to slow. Search marketing was a $9.4B budget item in 2006 when the SEMPO State of Search Marketing survey reported a 62% growth rate over 2005. SEMPO’s report for 2007 is not out yet, but industry experts believe growth is slowing due to market saturation and maturity.

Another sign of industry maturity is the growth in search marketing training programs. In addition to all of the individual courses and seminars, there are also search training courses in conjunction with search industry conferences like SMX and SES. We have a number of organizations offering certificates of completion for online and offline search marketing courses like the SEMPO Institute Search Engine Marketing courses and the DMA Search Engine Marketing Certification Program. There are even a few universities that offer search engine marketing courses in their curriculum. These advancements also indicate the time is near for establishing common search marketing standards of behavior and techniques.

To understand why little progress has been made over the past decade, below is a brief review of past attempts.

The history

Act 1: In August 1998, Danny Sullivan wrote an article in SearchEngineWatch, “Promoters Call for Certification.” The article stated that principals from four major promotion and design firms had sent an open letter to the major search engines calling for establishment of a certification program for optimization professionals. At the time, Danny said,

“The letter is the first such coordinated move from the Web promotion community ever regarding search engine positioning issues.”

I was among those signing the letter to search engines, asking them to develop an SEO certification program in order to eliminate spammers and other search engine gaming techniques. At issue was the fact that Infoseek, then a popular search engine, had banned pages redirecting to other pages. In those days, optimization techniques depended on the redirects, which were the only way to record visitors and charge for optimization. I thought Infoseek’s ban came about due to the heavy abuse of redirect pages loaded with spam by the adult Web site industry. Reputable SEO firms weren’t interested in spamming with redirects, and the idea of certification seemed like a good remedy for the “Wild West” mentality of the day. However, the letter was politely acknowledged and ignored, except for Danny’s comments.

Act 2: In November 2001, Sullivan wrote “Desperately Seeking Search Marketing Standards,” a review on further attempts to establish search marketing standards. He started by saying every so often there’s a new push for search marketing standards and then cautioned they’ll need lots of luck because “the barriers to establishing standards remain substantial.” He opined that search engines are reluctant to be transparent because overzealous SEOs would likely come up with heretofore unknown spam techniques for favorable rankings.

Sullivan mentioned early efforts by WebSeed to provide a “Search Engine Promotion Code of Ethics” in 2000 (no longer available online) and, of course, Bruce Clay’s “Search Engine Optimization Code of Ethics,” which has been used extensively by search marketers since then. Both documents supported Clay’s position against doorway pages, a controversy then and now.

Sullivan discussed the whitepapers issued against spam, like “The Classification of Search Engine Spam” by Alan Perkins, as well as the disagreements over what constitutes spam. The article reviewed several attempts to begin the dialog on standards, including the efforts of Terry Van Horne’s SEOPros.org, the World Association of Internet Marketers (no longer online), and the heated threads on this topic at WebmasterWorld. All was to no avail.

Act 3: In April 2004, Sullivan wrote, “Spam Rules Require Effective Spam Police.” This article countered Kevin Ryan’s assertion in “Spam, Unprofitable Spam” that the industry has no rules. Sullivan pointed out that the rules are implicit in the Webmaster guidelines posted at Google and Yahoo!.

He discussed the futility of lobbying for standards by saying, “SEM pioneer Paul Bruemmer pushed for search engine optimization certification back in 1998. But as I wrote then, just having a “rule book” doesn’t mean an end to spam. We also had a push in 2001 for search engine marketing standards, which also has gone nowhere in terms of reducing spam in search engines.”

Sullivan suggested that a real solution to the spam problem would be for search engines to publish a list of companies they have banned. While this seems like a good way to help consumers avoid non-reputable SEM firms, the search engines were afraid of possible lawsuits.

He mentioned SEMPO’s reluctance to enforce spam rules for its members, agreeing that it’s not the responsibility of a third-party group to enforce rules they don’t create. Since then, SEMPO has created a Metrics and Standards Task Force with a mission “to develop a set of standards and guidelines specific to search marketing.”

Back then, the only advice Sullivan could give to those seeking standards was to follow search engine guidelines and ensure your vendor does as well if you outsource. He cautioned the engines are good at detecting spam and other non-sanctioned techniques, and while they can’t catch every single instance, it’s not worth the risk of being banned.

Where we stand today

In August 2007, the IAB and DMA in the UK launched a certification program (one that left Danny less than impressed). In January 2008, the IAB announced a successor program, an online best practice resource to “reinforce its commitment to trust, transparency and accountability within the search industry.” The new initiative has the backing of Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft. To be hosted on the IAB UK Web site, the Search Best Practice Resource will provide access to materials promoting an understanding of key search marketing issues and how advertisers can conduct search marketing responsibly.

Complementary to existing material on the site, the new resource will include how-tos on search marketing best practices for basic and advanced techniques. There will be checklists to help advertisers through key steps in the search process, and a section describing basic search engine policies on trademarks, user privacy, and fraudulent or invalid clicks. The resource will be managed and updated through the Search Council, which is leading the project in conjunction with the DMA and other search industry projects aimed at advertising agencies.

While the IAB and DMA have taken some steps to establish search marketing standards, SEMPO states in its FAQs that it is not a standards body or a policing organization:

“Is SEMPO a standards body for the SEM industry? SEMPO is not a standards body or a policing organization. Membership in or involvement with SEMPO is not a guarantee of a particular firm’s capabilities, nor does it signify industry approval or disapproval of their practices.”

SEMPO has a Metrics and Standards Task Force, and we have contacted the committee to see where they stand with respect to search marketing standards. As stated on the committee’s description, “The mission of this task force is to develop a set of standards and guidelines specific to search marketing.”

Call for standards circa 2008

As you can see, the call for search engine marketing standards dates back to 1998, and the industry hasn’t stepped up to the plate yet. Search has grown and become mainstream, but the industry needs to increase its value, authenticity, and integrity by identifying a set of standards to help replace devious SEO techniques that still tarnish our industry.

The lack of SEO standards is one reason why some businesses give this valuable marketing strategy short shrift. While 75% of marketers say they use SEO (MarketingSherpa 2008 Search Marketing Benchmark Guide), they obviously spend more money on PPC (SEMPO State of Search Marketing 2006). Right now, the only thing that marketers can do is obtain a methodology statement from their search agency, read it carefully, and ensure the agency follows search engine guidelines, which are somewhat similar but also vary.

Many search agencies say they’re committed to SEM best practices. But establishing standards will take more than lip service. Real people will have to stick their neck out to get this done. It will take leadership by individuals, by search agencies, and by our industry trade organization. We need search standards to bring more credibility to our trade.

Why You Should Reveal SEO Secrets To Clients

Pinpointing Search Performance with Analytics

A major benefit of search marketing is its accountability through campaign performance tracking. The returns on precise measurement can be significant when it comes to campaign performance. For instance, you can track competitor search performance to understand how to leverage their strengths and weaknesses to your own advantage.

But first, let’s describe Search and Analytics to bring new readers up to speed. Then we’ll dive into the advanced aspects of intuitive analytics reporting by interviewing a leading Web analytics consultant to answer the complex questions about why traffic changed, rather than simply looking at what changes occurred.

Paid and Natural Search Synergy

Internet search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask provide advertisers with similar opportunities on the Web. Natural search, as it implies, occurs naturally as determined by search engine rules and mathematical formulas. Paid search, on the other hand, is advertising. It is generally displayed as groups of sponsored listings at the top and side bars, labeled as such and paid for by advertisers.

Too often, marketers are overly focused on paid search results. After all, when you’re spending money you want to see a measurable return. But even from a quick glance at the above graphic, it is clear that implementing both natural and paid search campaigns will empower you to more successfully gain traffic, brand your website to users and accomplish your interactive business goals. Paid search advertising is effective for increasing immediate traffic volume to a website, while natural search is essential for your long-term presence in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Analytics Tools

Search, both natural and paid, has become a significant driver of traffic for most websites. But as organizations and people invest more money and resources in search marketing, there is a corresponding demand to prove the investment is working. That’s where measurement becomes essential.

As groups of advertisers engage with search engines, analytics tools can perform a quick analysis of core keywords in your industry – revealing those terms important to your search strategy, while also enabling you to actively research competitor paid-search advertising trends and statistics in that industry. These tools can track and trend natural search results as well, modeling and predicting the benefits.

When you measure search performance, your Web reporting tools typically provide you with quite a bit of information right out of the box. You’ll be able to see how much traffic your site received from each search engine. You’ll even be able to see what search terms visitors used to view the paid or natural listing that led to your site.

Tracking Natural and Paid Search

To dig deeper into how this process works, I went to Semphonic President and Chief Technical Officer Gary Angel to ask a few questions.

Where is a good place to get started measuring search performance?

With just a little bit of extra setup work (adding some distinct campaign code to your PPC URLs) you can learn the all-important split between natural and paid traffic. If you don’t do that work, you’ll see all your traffic as natural – and you’ll be unable to effectively compare the two. So that’s an important first step.

What are repeat click-throughs and what does it say about your visitors?

Repeat click-throughs to your site can appear in two very different ways. Most click-throughs will trigger a new visit, also called a session. But sometimes visitors will click through to your site, go back to the search engine, and then click again on the same or even a different search query. You might be surprised how often that happens. Used correctly, your Web analytics tools can help you understand how many repeat visitors came to your site.

Not all traffic is created equal, and search traffic is likely to vary in quality by channel (natural or paid), search engine and keyword.

How diverse is the performance between natural and paid search?

Natural and paid visitors on identical search terms often perform differently because paid programs invest resources to create a custom landing page for top performance. Whereas with natural search, the page is “selected” by the search engine. So the difference is in controlling the landing environment. The entry page makes a big difference in performance and can be a reason for using PPC even when your natural positioning is excellent. Sometimes, your natural landing page works better, and that can be embarrassing on the paid side, but it’s easily fixed.

I’m one who believes most search marketers are overly infatuated with paid Search and continue to underestimate the power behind natural search. Based on user response, I’ve consistently seen SEO outperform PPC for the simple reason that unpaid natural results satisfy user intent on a personal, non-advertorial level. This user characteristic, within various website categories has built loyalty, trust and repeat customers without controlling the landing environment. Would you agree another reason for the variability in performance is the fact that visitors who click on natural vs. paid listings can be from distinct populations?

That’s right, some search users simply don’t use paid listings – and this audience segment may perform differently than others. Visitors might also use natural or PPC listings depending on where they are in the buying cycle – information gathering, active shopping, buying, etc. At times, it may appear that natural search visitors perform less effectively than paid visitors or vice-versa, whereas it’s really a case of visitors simply being in different phases of the buying cycle.

When this happens, many of your campaign tracking tools will attribute sales only to the most recent campaign (and often lose visibility after 30 days). One of the benefits of using a Web analytics tool to segment your search traffic is the ability to get a better understanding of how your natural traffic performs over longer periods of time.

Do automated solutions help in understanding the varied metrics?

Yes, automated reporting can help you solve this dilemma. To get quality automated reporting, it isn’t enough to simply dump lots of data into a spreadsheet and distribute it to everyone in the organization. Not only will most people be unable to find the data they need to understand how search impacted traffic, they probably will misinterpret a good chunk of the data they find.

When this happens, it might be beneficial to hire a Web analytics consultant to provide easy answers to the questions posed by colleagues in different departments. Such firms have developed specific approaches to help you answer the difficult questions without taxing your time schedule.

Gary, what’s your approach?

Semphonic starts with the construction of an analytic model of your traffic, incorporating that model into your reporting. Figure 1.2 is a sample of a report based on this method. This report is created by dumping all of the relevant sourcing and site performance data from three monthly periods into Excel. An Excel VBA script then processes the data and, using the analytic model, automatically identifies the key factors driving traffic impacts.

Open in New Window

As search programs grow ever larger and more sophisticated, what is the advantage of accurately understanding and reporting the impact of search campaigns on overall business performance?

As you can see from the example above, key factors are clearly identified for all decision-makers with analytics modeling. The model even tells the decision-makers how much change each factor is responsible for. This type of reporting answers many questions before they are even asked. And unlike traditional reporting, it helps protect the decision-maker from misusing the data or misreading the impact of irrelevant or non-causal factors.

The Benefits of Automated Reporting

The returns on precise measurement and analysis can be significant with analytics modeling. You can better understand how to allocate your resources, how to improve performance of individual programs and how to explain the impact of your marketing programs to everyone in your organization. Automated reporting is one way to help you and your colleagues understand the impact of search marketing programs on your overall site performance. For more information about Semphonic and their automated reporting solutions, visit www.SEMphonic.com.

Three Keys To Success With Local Mobile

In early November, Google announced plans to dominate the mobile market with its Android operating system, offering $10 million in rewards to the developers who build the best Android applications. Meanwhile, Yahoo! is busy locking up worldwide distribution deals for its Go 2.0 system and has signed up major phone manufacturers such as Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, LG Electronics and HTC.

Since mobile phones are in the process of becoming mini pocket PCs, there’s no doubt mobile is about to get hot. Marketers, start your engines; it’s time to concentrate on a local-mobile marketing strategy now.

The stakes
Money is there to be made despite the years of slow motion. In 2006, the mobile ad spend was $1.5 billion worldwide (eMarketer). That may seem rather puny compared to the $24 billion spent on internet advertising, never mind the $450 billion spent on total advertising for the year. The lack of interest in mobile has been mostly due to limitations of technology, which are being overcome with the iPhone and other smartphones to hit the market, not to mention Google’s push to provide an operating system with apps that make phones into mini PCs.

The problems concerning privacy are also melting away as research continues to show that mobile users will accept ads for free services. IBM Institute for Business Value conducted an online survey of more than 2,400 mobile users in the U.S., U.K., Germany, Japan and Australia, reporting a majority of these users would accept ads for free services. To provide a current example, Virgin Mobile USA signed up about 330,000 of its 4.8 million subscribers for its Sugar Mama program that “pays” subscribers one minute of free call time for every 45 seconds they spend interacting with an ad on their phones or the company’s website. Since the program launched about a year ago, Virgin has given away 9 million minutes of mobile talk time, as reported in Business Week.

Despite the fact that mobile spending is miniscule now, this platform will grow rapidly with its ubiquitous nature that almost imparts omniscience. Imagine the beauty of having instant access to information in your pocket 24/7 with Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 apps at your fingertips.

The monetary projections vary widely, perhaps in anticipation of advanced technology yet in development. ABI Research projected a 13-fold increase in global spending on mobile marketing and advertising between 2006 and 2011. Informa Telecoms & Media predicted mobile advertising will be worth $11.5 billion by 2011. eMarketer is more bullish, predicting $14 billion by 2011. Yet other analysts say mobile marketing can get as high as $20 billion worldwide by then.

In the U.S. alone, Kelsey Group expects mobile search ad revenue to grow from $33.2 million in 2007 to $1.4 billion in 2012, representing a compound annual growth rate of 112 percent.

The obstacles
For mobile to succeed, it will be necessary to achieve cooperation between the mobile carriers, the handset manufacturers, the software developers, and the search engines. These are the major players that have the most to gain or lose, and they’re all fighting for control. The carriers are the most anal, trying to control their customers and databases.

But the customers refuse to be controlled. iCrossing’s 2007 mobile study shows that mobile users prefer Google, Yahoo and MSN rather than the default search provided by carrier deck. These walled gardens won’t last much longer as the smartphones give users unfettered access to the mobile web.

The development of the mobile web gives your business the opportunity to extend its reach through an additional marketing channel. Competing in the mobile channel requires the following three-prong strategy.

It goes without saying that developing a site for the mobile screen differs from designing a wired site. Don’t plan on transcoding your wired site into mobile because this simply won’t give users the best user experience. You can, however, use a subdomain such as mobile.yourdomain.com or xhtml.yourdomain.com, and get a decent site with some updating and coding.

To illustrate the difference in screen size between mobile vs. PC screens, try this: if you have a smartphone, go to http://mobile.aol.com/. Then go to http://www.aol.com/ on your PC from a standard browser to see what I mean.

Here’s the mobile screen:

Here’s the web screenshot:

Keeping in mind the constraints of a tiny screen, below are some tips for designing your mobile site.

Navigation: Put navigation buttons below your most important content to display critical content above the fold, making it visible to users as they surf. Ensure navigation buttons are clearly labeled and well organized. Use text links for main navigation. Important: provide a site map. Place jump links on top, allowing users to immediately access content below the fold. Important inner pages should be within three clicks of the homepage. Be ever mindful of the small screen.

Coding: Use XHTML. Write correct code and avoid unnecessary code to ensure fast download. Use external CSS to decrease load time and ensure correct display across multiple devices with different screen resolutions. Keep file names short and keyword-rich.

Mobile SEO
Follow traditional SEO best practices by using targeted keyword copy, meta tags and links that can accommodate the small screen. Be mindful that queries are shorter (two to three words in an average mobile search query) when selecting keywords.

Avoid pop-ups, frames and Flash. Get links from relevant mobile sites. You can use press releases and blog posts for gaining backlinks. Use social bookmarking and tagging. Go easy on embedded objects (images, scripts, etc.) because they may not download correctly.

Test across devices and device simulators (Google Mobile Proxy and Skweezer). Validate your dot-mobi site with mobile code checkers (W3C Mobile Web Validator and .Mobi Validator).

Tip for local-mobile: Make your telephone number clickable by using the sample syntax below. This immediately connects users to your business when they click on your phone number.

<href=”tel:6193982670″>619-398-2670< /a>

References for mobile web development standards:
W3C Mobile Web Initiative
Open Mobile Alliance.

Training: The In-House SEO/SEM Marketer’s Trump Card

A recent Forrester research report, US Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2007 to 2012, concludes that all marketing will become interactive over the next five years, with no single channel dominating the scene.

We’ve seen some evidence of erosion in the ad spend for traditional media this year, as the latest TNS Media Intelligence report shows a decline in U.S. ad spend for newspapers, radio, and broadcast TV. However, Internet spending increased 17.7 percent to $5.52 billion over the first six months of this year. This supports Forrester’s contention of the shift toward interactive advertising.

Forrester predicts the interactive marketing spend will increase to $61 billion by 2012, and that interactive marketing, coupled with its technological advances, will drive the customer-centric model, demanding integration of all marketing efforts to achieve optimum results with less emphasis on media buying.

Interactive marketing drives growth

What does this have to do with in-house SEM training? Forrester believes four interactive marketing areas will drive major growth: search marketing, online video ads, social media, and mobile marketing—all of which require serious attention and aptitude for search marketing and optimization skills.

Yet, our interactive industry is still young, and we don’t have a lot of trained personnel to provide the skills needed to fuel this growth. With the barrier between traditional and interactive marketing dissolving, Forrester predicts a 27 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for the interactive marketing spend over the next five years. Currently, interactive marketing accounts for 8 percent of all ad spending, and this will increase to 18 percent of total ad budgets in five years. Search marketing is slated to triple in five years. The search category is increasing at 26 percent CAGR and will reach $25 billion by 2012 (Forrester Research).

In-house versus outsource

The question of whether it’s best to outsource search search marketing or bring it in-house has created ambivalence for years, and is currently a topic covered in many industry conference sessions. Research shows at least two-thirds of U.S. businesses prefer to keep SEM in-house.

Reasons can vary, but basically, there are special challenges in executing SEO strategies, especially when it comes to integrating recommendations with other marketing and IT activities among multiple divisions. When it comes to paid search, different departments or divisions can be targeting the same or similar terms, resulting in these units competing against each other for keywords when there is no centralization. The trend is definitely toward in-house SEM, and the headhunters have their jobs cut out for them.

The challenge of in-house search marketing

One of the most difficult challenges marketers face with in-house search marketing is the management, organization, and training of personnel. Very likely, in-house training for SEO, PPC, developers, graphic designers, copywriters, and brand managers will be the norm in the next couple of years, if not sooner. Businesses continue to develop in-house search departments, but if they proceed without SEM/SEO training, they might as well begin their dissolution process in 2008 because their competitors have been and will continue to ramp-up in search knowledge transfer.

Search Marketing: To illustrate the effectiveness of in-house training, I can report that by implementing SEO best practices in-house training in January 2007, a national retailer increased year-over-year, non-brand keyword organic revenue 258 percent in Q1 and Q2 (the company chooses to remain anonymous). Their success is only one of many in-house training success stories. Smart firms will put SEO best practices in-house training on their to-do list today.

Online Video: Increasing consumer adoption of online video will result in a dramatic 72 percent increase in online video ad spending to $7.1 billion by 2012. Forrester Research states, “More customer-centric online video applications will increase the medium’s appeal for consumers and marketers.”

To quote The Weather Channel’s search marketing manager Derek Fulford, “…applying SEO basics to your video content will put you ahead of the curve.” Derek has done an excellent job of improving his company’s web site organic search results and raised its Quality Score for Paid Search in the process by complementing video with text-based content.

SEO video best practices being developed today should be on your list for training sessions as soon as possible. Derek was able to revise The Weather Channel’s Forecast Earth strategy to increase the average daily number of video views to 275 percent.

Social Media: As one of interactive’s emerging channels, social media will reach $10 billion in ad spending by 2012. Mainstream adoption will drive spending in social media, mobile marketing, game marketing, widgets, podcasts, and RSS. The social media ad spend alone will reach $6.9 billion (Forrester Research).

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is known to have significant impacts alongside best practice SEO/SEM. As CondéNet Director of Marketing Sandor Marik said recently, “SEO best practice just gets you in the game… involvement is needed on all levels. Traditional Web publishers are challenged as target audiences are drawn to blogs and social networking sites. While professional quality content does present unique value, publishers have to employ the tools and practices of the ‘long tail’ to stay visible in the ever-increasing volume of Web content.”

Social media sites also tend to generate a large number of links that vary in quality (in terms of anchor text), while niche blogs tend to provide paid text ads and contextual links with high quality anchor text pointing to specific category and sub-category pages.

The Social Media Marketing best practices being developed today should be on your list for training sessions immediately. The natural link building power we’ve witnessed so far continues to be remarkable.

Mobile: Mobile marketing will reach $2.8 billion by 2012. As consumers become increasingly dependent on personal computing handsets, they’ll start handling more transactions on their mobile devices (Forrester Research).

Currently there are 2.8 billion mobile phone subscribers worldwide, and 233 million were documented in the U.S. in 2006. High penetration of devices that receive input anywhere-anytime provide 5 percent CTR, target specific audiences, have the ability to build customer databases, and generate buzz, a few of the many reasons to be prepared for this next wave.

In-house training on executing mobile marketing content sponsorships, location-specific targeting, and opt-in SMS campaigns should be on your list for training sessions now. Mobile is about interaction, trust, pull, targeting, relevancy, opportunity, and integration with media; it has unquestionably rolled out.

In the face of these challenges, your best response is to be proactive with your basic and advanced in-house SEM/SEO training objectives. Get help now or prepare yourself for mediocre results. I don’t mean to alarm; however, one of my core values is to empower clients. I like to provide my expert opinion based on the best information that can help marketers make informed decisions—the power of “the agency recommends.” And there you have it .