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.

Mobile Platform: Ready For Web 3.0

Compared to overall ad spend, mobile is but a drop in the bucket. For instance, according to eMarketer, in 2006 the mobile ad spend was $1.5 billion worldwide. Compare that number with the $24 billion spent on Internet advertising and $450 billion overall ad spend the same year.

Nevertheless, everyone expects mobile to get big.

ABI Research expects to see a 13-fold increase in global spending on mobile marketing and advertising between 2006 and 2011. Informa Telecoms & Media predicts mobile advertising will be worth $11.5 billion by 2011, surpassed by eMarketer’s projection of $14 billion. Some analysts say that figure can go up as high as $20 billion. So, why hasn’t something more dramatic happened yet?

Mobile Is Hot, Not

There are several reasons for the slow adoption of mobile marketing by brands and other advertisers, not the least of which is the paucity of mobile websites and the poor user experience on cell phones and PDAs. But that’s changing rapidly as proliferation of 3G smartphones makes surfing easier and more enjoyable. Suddenly the iPhone and BlackBerry have become the must-have du jour – you’ve all seen, “Sent via BlackBerry,” right?

Then, too, the carriers have been picky about controlling search functionality on their handsets. Many default to white-label search tools provided by lesser-known search providers. This allows carriers to put their own brand on the cell phone’s search function, giving them a degree of control over customer search behavior and future search advertising revenue.

However, mobile users are picky when it comes to search engines. iCrossing’s 2007 mobile study reveals that mobile users prefer Google, Yahoo!, and MSN rather than the default search provided by carriers.

Finally, advertisers themselves are wary of consumer privacy issues and await the FCC’s edict on the use of customer data, including location information, enabling local-mobile advertisers to conveniently shill consumers on the go.

Mobile Advertising

Up until now, mobile marketing has been mostly text-messaging campaigns as marketers are still wary of including video and other multimedia messaging ads.

Obviously, ads that work on the wired Web differ from what’s needed on mobile phones due to the small screen size and a number of user-experience factors. Below are some types of ad campaigns that work on the mobile platform.

Opt-in SMS Campaign: Text messages sent by short message service (SMS) ads are used to persuade consumers to give advertisers their cell phone number in exchange for special offers and coupons delivered via text message. Examples include contests to win prizes and SMS alerts to customers reminding them to reorder a product while handily offering a discount coupon with “buy now” call to action.

Opt-in MMS Campaign: An extension to the SMS protocol, MMS provides the means to send and receive wireless messages that include images, audio, and video clips in addition to text. For example, promotions can offer a mobile game by giving users a chance to download the free demo through a WAP link embedded in the message. Once the trial is over, users can choose to buy the full game from a dedicated WAP site.

Location-Specific Targeting: Cellular networks can locate callers to within 50 to 300 meters by triangulating signals. Thus, the caller’s location could be matched up with a business that has purchased an ad targeted by surfing behavior and demographics. Carriers like Sprint Nextel expect to deliver ads based on users’ near-exact location. While most carriers have yet to go with GPS-specific ads, the consensus is they soon will.

Local Search Display Ad: These ads are designed specifically for local search on the mobile Web. They can also be used to drive traffic to an offline business. For example, a consumer searching from Yahoo! Local on a cell phone might be trying to find information on mini blinds. That consumer would be served an ad within search results for a nearby hardware store or possibly Lowe’s or Home Depot would have sponsored ads showing as well. The consumer could click the ad for more info or even click-to-call.

Ad-Supported Content Sponsorship: Gartner predicts sponsorships will ultimately be the dominant format for mobile advertising. This model is useful because consumer surveys indicate mobile users are willing to receive and view ads in return for free or lower-cost mobile apps or services.

A 2006 Informa Telecoms & Media survey shows that music, games and mobile TV/ video are among the most popular mobile content services mobile users want for free.

For example, Greystripe provides mobile content free to consumers through its Ad-WRAP advertising network that delivers full-screen images, videos, and scrolling banners into its mobile games and applications. After download, users must view a full-screen ad before and after playing the game. In-game ad space sells for $45 CPM. Ad types are click-to-call, clickto- mobile Web, and click-to-jump page (survey/poll), and revenue is shared with the game publishers. This model claims an average worldwide click-through rate of 15 percent for the seven brands with ads in the game portal.

Carriers are testing a similar model to supplement their current payment plans. Verizon is testing a two-tier payment model that charges higher fees for no ads and lower fees for ad-supported content.

Planning and Targeting a Mobile Campaign

Because of the personal nature of mobile phones, mobile campaigns must be opt-in, relevant to the audience, and deliver a good user experience. Campaigns are good for branding and creating customer loyalty, as well as increasing sales. From an analytics point of view, there are many challenges; however, there is no better unique-identifier than the mobile phone number.

Best prospects are early adopters, business users, and the youth market (teens 13-17 and the 18-34 demographic). Know your audience well and target to their needs.

You can get good results from a well planned and targeted mobile campaign. Response rates are typically higher than those reported on wired campaigns. Enpocket reported an MMS-driven campaign for Samsung that achieved response rates of over 15 percent and a conversion rate of 2 percent.

The Airwide Solutions survey found marketers got good results with mobile ads: 75 percent reported mobile-marketing response rates over 5 percent. Another 27 percent said they saw purchase rates of over 5 percent in campaigns.

Who’s Going Mobile?

The Airwide survey found 32 percent of brands will spend more than 5 percent of their marketing budgets on mobile marketing in 2009, while 58 percent expect to reach that level by 2012. MarketingSherpa found 49.2 percent of marketers are thinking about conducting a mobile search campaign, and 13.8 percent will definitely start or test one this year.

We have focused so far on the execution of mobile campaigns; however, there are other factors that impact the success of mobile marketing, namely mobile site design and mobile search optimization. Below is a quick overview.

Mobile Site Design

While search engines will transcode any website into a mobile site, this may not result in a mobile-friendly site. Because site design is different for the mobile screen, your dot-com site may not provide the best user experience when transcoded for mobile devices. In most cases however, you can use a subdomain such as mobile. yourdomain.com or xhtml.yourdomain. com and, with a little updating and coding you’ll be right on track.

Here are some examples: if you have a smartphone visit mobile.citysearch.com – you can also check it out on your PC from a standard browser. Another example which I found to work very well on my mobile phone is xhtml.weather.com where I can input my destination zip code for local weather upon arrival or check on traffic conditions, news and other options that are all nicely formatted.

Coding: Use XHTML and write correct code. 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 filenames short and keyword-rich.

Navigation: Place navigation buttons below your most important content to keep that content above the fold and visible to users as they surf. Ensure navigation buttons are clearly labeled and well organized. Use text links for main navigation. Provide a site map – very important. Provide jump links on top, allowing users to quickly access content below the fold, and keep important inner pages within three clicks of the homepage. Remember, in some cases you’re designing for two square inches, so be mindful of the tiny screen.

Mobile Search Optimization

When optimizing your site for mobile search engines, follow traditional SEO best practices like targeted keyword copy, meta tags and links but adjust to accommodate the small screen. For example, when selecting keywords, remember that queries will be shorter – two to three words in the average mobile search query.

Avoid pop-ups, frames, and Flash. Run a linking campaign aimed at gaining links from relevant mobile sites. Press releases and blog posts work well for gaining backlinks. Don’t forget social bookmarking and tagging. Keep embedded objects (images, scripts, etc.) to a minimum because they might not download properly.

Here’s a neat trick: 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.

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

Check out the W3C Mobile Web Initiative and Open Mobile Alliance sites for mobile Web development standards.

Submit to Major Mobile Search Engines and Directories

Besides the majors, focus on the local and vertical search engines relevant to your niche. Many verticals are local in nature – people looking to rent a house might go to Craigslist. Retail searchers might go to BizRate or PriceGrabber to compare prices. Locally-oriented verticals include real estate sites like Zillow, and automotive portals like Vehix. Some verticals charge a submission fee. By rule, the nature of your business dictates the local/vertical search engines where you want to be listed.

Your Site to Go

It’s a good idea to take your site to go because with 2.8 billion mobile phones around the world (Wireless Intelligence, 2007), you can potentially reach a much bigger audience than the billion or so personal computers worldwide. Additionally, the number of mobile phones in use is growing much faster than the number of computers. And finally, consider this: most people carry their mobile with them, everywhere … something that can’t be said for computers or anything else.

Google’s Universal Search

Google wants to help you find the best answers, even if you don’t know where to look. So it folded all its verticals into Web results as an assist. Listen up, search marketers — it’s no longer an option to include optimized images, videos, news, local maps or blogs in your SEM strategy; it’s a requirement. Google’s launch of Universal Search has opened up the possibility for even more tactics to be applied and requires a new outlook on your SEO strategy.

Search engine rankings boil down to three things: links, content, and relevancy. Sounds simple, right? Not so much. It gets complicated at the tactical level because of the infinite ways to create relevant content and earn relevant links. The secret to website optimization is finding the most effective tactics and developing a process to implement them in a scalable way.

With Universal Search, the information (content) readily available to Google users has been vastly diversified to include alternative media such as news, video, images, blogs and other verticals Google has in its back pocket. For search marketers, the strategy stays the same: develop content and get links. The only difference is that now, the list of tactics to choose from has significantly increased (as if it wasn’t long enough already).

What is Universal Search? Universal Search combines all of Google’s various vertical databases into one index to serve a single set of Web search results. Here’s a rundown on some of the most popular verticals that Universal Search will include.

1. Google Blog Search: Let’s hope you all have a corporate blog. This important Web 2.0 tool has revolutionized the way companies interact with customers and the media. Not only that, you need a blog for reputation management. Your team will love expressing their opinions on a regular basis. Don’t forget to tag (digg, del.icio.us, reddit, stumbleupon, etc.), and then submit to broaden your reach for all target queries on Google.

2. Google Maps: Local search is hot, and your businesses can benefit from a local presence. Mobile search is also gaining momentum, and I don’t need to emphasize the growing importance of the small screen. Go to the Google Maps Local Business Center for a free basic and/or paid listing.

3. Google Video: This is another hot area that should be considered. The cost of creating video content can vary, depending on your pocketbook. Just remember to use keyword- rich file names that accurately describe your video. And don’t forget to use a video site map. You’ll need a Web page from where to launch your video — optimize the content using traditional SEO tactics. Create page titles, description tags and text (transcription, captions, commentary, etc.) that are keyword friendly. Submit to Google Video, YouTube and other video search engines and portals like blinkx and Metacafe. You will also want to promote your best videos within the blogosphere and on relevant social media sites.

Interesting things are taking place on Google’s search network on the video front. For example, a search for “Steve Jobs video” on AOL (powered by Google) returns video results but not from YouTube. The YouTube video in position three is not converted into a dynamic video (as it is on a standard Google search) and AOL video results are force-fed to the top. It’s probably a good time to start thinking about syndicating your content on AOL video.

4. Google Image Search: Google finally acknowledged the old adage that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Now, customers can find you via these images with ease. Unlike most other Universal Search results, images (and blog search results) are not being integrated into the top ten results, but are being served to the top (or bottom) of search result pages. This positioning garners the attention of plenty of eyeballs, so you’ll want to optimize your images with descriptive ALT tags that make use of popular keywords. Make sure you employ descriptive keywords when creating file names as well. As with video, search engines can’t interpret the meaning of an image — yet. Consequently, make sure you employ standard on-page text optimization techniques in addition to image optimization.

5. Google News: Using press releases to enhance SEO listings is now a standard practice. Keep your releases newsworthy and the information will be displayed and indexed as news. News is informative when you announce training seminars and local conferences; it borders on boring when you announce a new client account.

Universal Search Examples

With the launch of Google Universal Search, a search for “Steve Jobs” provides news results in the fourth organic position (a), with blog posts and image results included on page one of search engine results (b).

A search for big-wave surfer Laird Hamilton provides a YouTube video in the third organic position that you can play without leaving the search result page (c).

It’s important to note that the page hosting the video on YouTube does not have a significant amount of inbound links, and a scan of the page shows only a few mentions of Laird Hamilton. However, this video has been viewed over 180,000 times, has a fivestar rating and has been tagged on social media sites like StumbleUpon. This indicates that each vertical, including video has its own set of ranking variables that may be quite different from those used for ranking the standard website. It also means that developing, syndicating and promoting creative content just got much more important.

News and press releases have also been given a promotion in the rankings. For example, a search for the term “SEO” returns news results in the fourth organic position regarding Tampa Bay pitcher Jae Seo accepting assignment to Triple-A Durham, four hours ago at the time of writing this article (d).

The first steps in launching Universal Search took place on May 16, 2007, but the full extent of its power will not be seen until November and beyond. As Google’s new algorithm integrates additional types of content into its Web search results, users will witness a more comprehensive search experience providing a wide array of information on the topic of their query.

Impact on Search Marketers

Just like many 15th century Europeans believed that the earth was flat, many of today’s search marketers are stuck in a twodimensional mindset. Of course, the earth is round and with Universal Search, search marketers can no longer rely on text-based SEO and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising alone. It’s time to buy your creative team a round of beers and start thinking feeds, widgets, and social media.

Feeds include:
• Google Local Business (Google Maps) when applicable
• RSS and press release syndication (Google News)
• YouTube video syndication (YouTube)
• Google Base (XML product feed) when applicable
• Google Books (XML book feed) when applicable

Widgets include:
• Viral desktop applications
• Web-based widgets for social media sites and blogs

Social Media includes:
• Blogging
• Blog monitoring
• Blogosphere public relations
• Online brand/crisis management
• Content syndication
• Link baiting
• Wikis, forums, and chat
• Viral ad campaigns

Measurement and ROI
Universal Search results in two mandates: 1) the array of search marketing options is no longer optional, but obligatory and, 2) measurement is more important then ever before.

Search services (when appropriate) now include:

• Paid Search (on more than Google)
• Pay-Per-Call (national services companies)
• Google and Yahoo! Local Business (chains)
• Google Base (product SKUs)
• Google Books (product SKUs)
• Shopping optimization feeds
• Shopping comparison engines
• Paid directories (major and verticals)
• Extensive and redundant keyword research
• Natural search diagnostic site audit
• Page editing and optimization
• Serious recurring inbound link-building strategy and tactics
• Social media optimization
• Brand reputation management

Measurement factors include:

• Integration of natural search on paid listing shelf-space
• Keyword inventory and traffic analysis
• Offline and online (paid and natural) competitor analysis
• Natural search cost-benefit analysis

As Google’s new algorithm builds momentum we will begin to see more Universal Search influence on search result pages. This process will take more than six months, it won’t happen overnight.

We believe Universal Search is designed primarily for two reasons: Deeper content for users and better ad targeting.

Google wants you to use its verticals such as Image, Video and News, among others. What better way than to force-feed that data into primary organic search results? It’s no coincidence Google is beginning to serve video and image PPC (and CPM) ads on its content network. Integrating images and videos into the natural results will make it easier for Google to start serving these ad types on its search engine result pages and search network (AOL, et. al.). And, as usual, Google wants to create more ad space. What better way than to promote its vertical space and unfold new shelf-space within these verticals?

So, it goes without saying that when Google changes things up, we all must adapt or get left behind. Dig deeper in your SEO toolbox — the standards have changed. Including press releases, video, blogs, news, images and maps are just some of the verticals Google is giving precedence. Search results are changing and those that expand the reach of their website’s content will be those that prosper in this new era of search.

Five Steps For Outsourcing Search Marketing

Hiring a search engine marketing (SEM) firm to perform search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is no easy task.

There are many considerations and just as many choices. But it’s also an important decision — SEM, SEO and PPC are all crucial aspects to any online enterprise. So, the selection process should be handled carefully to make the right decision for your business.

When you choose to outsource, the success of your selection process will directly affect your ability to compete and thrive as a business now and well into the future. We are three years behind the technology curve, so the plan you implement today will either have you flourishing in 2010 or dead on the vine by 2008.

What happens if you outsource to a firm that doesn’t meet your business goals? A failed partnership can ultimately cost your company in more ways than one. A bad experience can result in resentment from both your colleagues and stakeholders when you see the lift your competitors get with the right combination of SEO and PPC.

On the other hand, hiring the right SEM firm will positively affect you and your company in two ways. First, a successful selection process will make you look good to your colleagues and gain the respect of your stakeholders. Second, a profitable SEM relationship will result in plenty of smiles and high-fives in the board room — and that’s good for everyone.

Finding the right SEO/SEM firm to meet your business goals is a five-step process. You must educate yourself and, in that process, you will verify third-party ratings and research the capabilities of various firms. The last two steps include listing your needs and conducting the interview and selection phase.

Step 1: Educate yourself

Today’s business leaders depend on education and training to keep their staffs nimble, up-to-date and competitive. Education is your first step toward finding the best outsource solution. Learn the fundamentals of search marketing, as you will need this information to make intelligent decisions regarding outsourcing and your search marketing campaigns as a whole.

We’ll review a number of educational resources below. But first, a quick quiz to see what you know right now. Answers appear at the end of this article.

1) What activity on the Web is performed 550 million times per day in the US?
2) Describe the term canonical.
3) What is the most important Web page element for SEO?
4) What is the longtail?
5) What external influence will affect your search engine rankings the most?
6) What single company’s revenue represents 20 percent of the global online advertising spend?
7) Describe the most important benefit from SEO.
What factors influence ad position in Google AdWords?
9) Describe how to measure website and search marketing campaign success.
10) What distinguishes search marketing from every other form of advertising?

If you had trouble answering these questions, don’t worry — below is a brief review of the top SEM educational resources.

• Search Engine Academy provides SEO and SEM certification in two-, three- or five-day workshops, depending on your needs.

• SEMPO.Org Learning Center is a non-profit organization offering many resources including SEM courses through its Search Marketing
Institute, articles, Webinars, research data and case studies.

• SEOToolSet™ is based on years of search engine research and successful website optimization and training. SEOToolSet™ training adheres to a strict Code of Conduct and Code of Ethics.

• Interactive media and search marketing publishers such as iMedia Connection and Search Engine Watch are good sources for expert advice on SEM.

• You can also get the latest information from the top search marketing blogs. Pandia lists their top-five pick of SEM blogs and several
others considered to be the best online.

• You can learn a lot about search marketing if you are willing to attend one or more of the major industry trade shows including Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo, Webmaster World Pubcon and ad:tech.

Step 2: Verify third-party ratings

Every SEO/SEM firm will tell you they are the best in the business. So, it’s important to find independent, outside sources to help make your decision. There are numerous third-party resources for finding qualified SEO/SEM firms, including publishing sites with resources about qualified Internet marketing firms, industry trade organizations, and/or research firms. You can also seek business referrals from colleagues.

One leader in the publishing space is Crain Communications’ Advertising Age, which has been circulating for the past 90 years. Ad Age, as it is commonly called, recently compiled its first comprehensive Search Marketing Fact Pack, an excellent resource for your business.

As part of its 2006 SEM Agency Constellation Report, Jupiter-Research conducted a formal survey of 420 qualified search marketers to identify the top firms. However, of the original respondents only 15 SEMs were included in the paid search constellation and 13 SEOs in the natural search constellation. While these SEM and SEO firms represent the top 28 of 420, based on quantitative and qualitative criteria, it is debatable whether everyone would agree with the validity of the report’s choices and rankings.

Piper Jaffray’s comprehensive report “The User Revolution,” attempts to explain the shift in advertising technology and services. Of particular interest is the chapter on advertising services and technologies, describing key themes in SEM, analytics, and ad serving. You can find a list of the Top 20 SEM and SEO companies on page 267 of the report.

While research from Jupiter, Forrester and Jaffray can attempt to identify the top SEM firms based on various criteria, these lists vary widely depending on the report. There are thousands of SEM providers, making it impossible to evaluate them all. So when a report comes up with a list of 15 or 20 top providers, these lists, understandably, must be taken with a grain of salt.

Other resources include websites dedicated to listing search providers for the purpose of matching them with marketers. TopSEOs.com registers search vendors, providing resources for firms seeking SEO and SEM services. The site evaluates the registrants, lists vendor information and provides a form for soliciting bids. While such resources can save time needed when contacting multiple companies individually, you may still have to research on your own to find the best vendor.

Finally, the tried and true way to find a good search provider is to ask for referrals. Word-of-mouth is a trusted source for consumers. Ask around at trade associations or industry meetings and seminars.

A good deal of top-level business is conducted on a referral basis. Perhaps a non-competitor colleague, partner or vendor working with your company has optimized a site or used PPC advertising. Ask whom they use and if they are satisfied with the services and results.

Step 3: Research the capabilities of various firms

Often, a company will have multiple needs when it comes to managing their Internet presence. There are short-term tactics and long-term business goals, measurable results, cost-cutting and additional skill sets such as creative, art direction, site analytics, technical website development and programming. Your website may need email marketing, rich interactive media (video), ecommerce, a content management system (CMS) and/or advertising (print, direct mail etc.).

Because of the multiple and varying needs of most businesses, the search for a qualified SEO/SEM firm may require casting a wider net. For instance, measurement is a key factor to search marketing success. You may need a firm that is proficient with A/B and multivariate testing as well as tweaking landing pages. If this describes your company profile, you may want to consider these capabilities in conjunction with your SEO/SEM outsourcing.

Travel, meetings and communication are of paramount concern during the process of managing a search marketing campaign. While email and telephone communication are quick and easy, meeting personally with your selected agency will send a message that you are serious about your business and expect the same level of professionalism from whomever you choose. Ensure both your company and the selected agency has the resources to properly address travel, meetings and day-to-day communications.

At Red Door Interactive we flip the table. Our process begins with a Needs Assessment Report (NAR) conducted on-site to determine client capabilities. This involves documenting a critical path plan for any knowledge-transfer, tools and/or resources required as determined by the NAR. The NAR can then be flipped and used by the client to fill gaps and list the needs to be fulfilled by the SEO/SEM firm.

Step 4: List Your Needs

Once you have identified all potential resources to fulfill your business goals, list and prioritize them clearly and concisely. Weed out those that don’t align with your goals and objectives. There are many SEO/SEM firms and agencies to choose from, so it’s important to select one that matches your needs rather than a firm that wants you to match theirs.

After you have pre-qualified a list of at least three SEO/SEM partner/vendors, create a Request For Proposal (RFP) document outlining your list of needs and expectations. Then send your RFPs out to the finalists.

Foundstone, a division of McAfee, offers five RFP criteria for consideration depending on your company’s requirements.

• Introduction and Background: A description of project objectives plus any additional background about the organization or business objectives.

• Administrative Information: Contact information that the vendor will need to prepare and submit its proposal, as well as major dates and deadlines associated with the RFP submission, evaluation and award process.

• Guidelines for Proposal Preparation: Guidelines for vendor communication with your organization and the preferred proposal format.

• Evaluation Factors For Award: An outline of the criteria used to evaluate the proposal, including operational, technical, cost, and management requirements.

• Statement of Work and Deliverables: Provides sufficient technical details about the environment, allowing a vendor to understand the scope of the effort and be able to price it appropriately. Describe the deliverables required in detail.

Step 5: Interview and select a vendor

Once you have received replies to your RFPs, I recommend a face-to-face opportunity for interviewing and selecting the SEO/SEM firm that best fits your company’s structure and goals. Body language says it all. Meet with the team that will be responsible for helping you accomplish your online business goals. Be sincere and up-front as you pre-qualify your prospects and request that prospective vendors present proposals in person.

The Internet has expanded our personal and business capabilities. However, some things still require eye contact and a hand shake — SEO/SEM is one of them. Always meet your search marketing team face to face before signing on the dotted line.

To summarize, outsourcing your search marketing project is a selection process that requires education, research, and careful evaluation to find the right partner to help you meet your business goals. Don’t be sparing of your time and resources. It is an important decision that will directly affect your bottom line both now and for several years to come.
Answers to quiz:
1) Search.
2) Refers to the non-www version of a domain (website) indexed as a duplicate of the www version.
3) The Title element.
4) Chris Anderson coined the term long tail, which refers to the economics of abundance. In search marketing, it means that you can make more by selling less with certain infrequently used keyword phrases.
5) Relevant inbound authority links.
6) Google.
7) Organic search engine traffic from relevant non-brand keywords.
Bid amount, CTR (click-through-rate), and landing page quality.
9) Define “what success means for you” in the way of business goals, then track changes in performance.
10) Search marketing is a pull-marketing strategy where prospects pull products toward themselves, as distinguished from the push or broadcast marketing used in advertising to push products toward prospects.

Site Design, Search Engines & Organic Keyword Rankings

“Website? What’s a website?” That is what I was hearing 11 years ago when prospecting for search engine optimization (SEO) clients. Now, thousands of new websites are created every day. Whereas the evolution of the website has been an incredible journey with many changes over the years, there is one common denominator that has not changed much at all — what search engines see when crawling a site. Search engines have certainly improved the delivery of relevant data to our search queries and vastly increased the size of their databases. But what they see today is pretty much the same as in 1995 — HTML. However, not all websites are alike.

Under the Hood
To give us a better understanding, let’s look at two prominent and competing websites that show measurable differences in what a search engine finds and subsequently indexes. This is what you and I will see when we go to The Wall Street Journal.

The first thing you will notice is that when you type www.wsj.com/ in your browser, the address 302 redirects to http://online.wsj.com/. You will also notice the sheer volume of content on the page. While this screen shot is only a fraction of the entire page, on this day it was 2,422 words. That’s a lot of content, right?

Below is the same URL as seen by a search engine. This time the total count is 140 words, and none of the words match those from the browser screen shot.

One would think The Wall Street Journal would have thousands of pages of content indexed in Google by now. The screen shot below shows us there are, in fact, only 394 pages of www.wsj.com indexed in Google.

Yet, it gets worse. The 301 redirect landing page has only 29 pages indexed in Google. Now, take a look at the Meta Title Tags — they are all exactly the same and, if that weren’t enough, there are no Description Meta Tags.

Best practice is to provide unique Title and Description Meta Tags for each individual page within a website, using keywords that describe the page content. This helps the search engine determine exactly what the site is all about (e.g., Mustang horse versus Mustang car).

Now, let’s take a look at The New York Times website.

This time, when you type www.nytimes.com into your browser, you land on www.nytimes.com (no re-direct). Again, this screen shot is not the entire page, but the total word count for the nytimes.com home page on this day was 1,963 words.

When looking at these two websites from a browser they appear to be very similar — a header, sidebar, content, links and ads. However, when you look at them from a search engine point of view, the numbers speak for themselves. There is a big difference between what Google sees at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

The New York Times website in Google
• 2,960,000 pages indexed
• 196,000 link backs (inbound links) to home page
• No redirect of any type

The Wall Street Journalwebsite in Google
• 394 pages indexed
• 23,000 link backs (inbound links) to home page
• 302 redirect to online.wsj.com

The New York Times has nearly 3 million more Web pages indexed and 170,000 more inbound links to their home page compared to The Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal also has that nasty 302 redirect code.

Given these differences, I can assure you WSJ.com is at a serious disadvantage with respect to its organic keyword rankings and its daily, weekly, monthly and annual traffic volumes.

Is there something you can do to make your website more like The New York Times and less like The Wall Street Journal? You bet. All it takes is some advanced planning and adequate consideration to the way search robots interact with your site.

Planning Ahead for Organic Rankings
First, let’s preface the planning exercise with a quick review of user experience.

User experience involves looking at all aspects of a user’s encounter with a product or service, ensuring everything is in harmony.

Disciplines under the umbrella of user experience include information architecture, interaction design, user interface design, communication or graphic design, and usability engineering.

Planning a website for a good user experience and maximum search engine utility requires a comprehensive knowledge of how search engines work. The following information provides a basic outline of search engine issues to consider during your website planning process. While this list is not exhaustive, it will get you started with your basic search engine considerations.

Server
Your first consideration is the server, as it is the first point of contact a search engine will have with your website. There are essentially two server choices, dedicated or virtual hosted.

A dedicated server is the better choice, because it allows for much more flexibility and provides the ability to keep your IP address clean — this means a clear history devoid of spamming.

It’s also important to have a dedicated IP address, rather than a shared IP address. When using a dedicated address, a search engine will have a unique thumbprint for your website. A shared IP acts as an intermediary agent on behalf of its customers — in which case the originating IP addresses might be hidden from the server.

Also, be sure that your reverse DNS entry is configured properly. This will help search engines move through their checklist quickly — as will placing a robot.txt file in your root directory and ensuring that alias and/or multiple URLs are managed properly.

Finally, non-www domain names should be 301 redirected to your www domain name to avoid search engine canonical issues.

All of these steps will make sure that when a search engine robot arrives at your site, it will have a red carpet experience.

Site Architecture
The layout and structure provided for the information architecture of your website should represent the flow of wellorganized
data throughout the site. Remember, search engines are robots, not human beings. Their speed of gathering data requires that you provide them with a clear path for crawling, digesting and comprehending your entire website in a very thorough and reliable manner.

Best practice recommends a technician with a complete understanding of search engines to be assigned to the sitemap and wire frames development process.

However, before sitemap and wire frame development, start by conducting keyword research, using AdWords or similar tools. Keyword research is the cornerstone for all search engine work and accomplishing your online business goals.

After keyword research and content creation, do a thorough analysis of your content and subject matter before proceeding with your sitemap and wire frames development.

If this is a redesign project, you must complete a diagnostic audit prior to developing your sitemap and wire frames. The audit will point out existing technical and editorial factors hindering top organic keyword rankings. The audit will also identify any top organic keyword rankings you won’t want to lose during the redesign or site move due to changes in architecture, such as directory and page naming conventions.

Here is an outline for your initial steps:

Keyword research
• Include research on your top five competitors

Diagnostic audit
• Identify technical and editorial roadblocks.
• Identify existing top rankings, when applicable.
• Plan ahead by analyzing content and subject matter.

Sitemap and wire frames
• Determine directory and page naming conventions.
— Use your keywords
— Minimize duplicate pages
• Consider internal link structure protocol for search engines.
— Link up to top of directory structure
— Use keywords in your anchor text
• If possible, provide a sitemap Web page linking to all pages in your website.
• Provide a Privacy Statement or Policy page.

Page Construction
Another important consideration during the planning stage is the characteristics of your page construction. Although search engines love simple HTML code, not everyone can deliver simple HTML for a variety of reasons — including shopping carts and content management systems.

However, there is a minimum standard you must consider if you expect a search engine to rank your site as a subject matter expert in the top organic shelf space. Understanding basic robot protocol will help with your planning.

Meta Tags
The Title and Description Meta Tags are very important to a search engine. It is necessary to include these tags within each of your Web pages to achieve high rankings. The tags must be unique to each page and include a primary keyword that is also included within the content of the page.

Alt Tags
ALT Tags are brief descriptions, including keywords that describe a photo or image on your page. These are very helpful to robots when determining the overall relevance of your site.

Heading Tags
Heading Tags further inform the search engine robot of the context or meaning of the words on the page. It’s important to always use a keyword in your Heading Tags while avoiding using more than three or four words.

Text on the Page
It is mandatory that text on the page includes a primary keyword — the same keyword located in the title and description Meta Tags. It is helpful to also include four or five supporting keywords.

Text navigation
It is always useful to provide alternatives for a robot to crawl your website. If your navigation bar is not made up of text links, it will be helpful to include a group of navigation text links at the bottom of all pages.

Providing a sitemap Web page with text links to all of the pages in your website allows for easy location and indexing by search spiders. However, avoid more than 50 text links on a page and break up your sitemap Web page, if necessary, into multiple sitemap pages.

JavaScript and Style sheets
Externalize JavaScript and style sheets. The reason for this is to position the body content of any given Web page as far up within the page code as possible. Studies show that the higher up the body content is on the page, the more relevant it is to the search engine.

External Influences
There are other, external influences that should be taken into consideration when planning for organic rankings.

During a Web crawl performed by a robot like Google, many duplicate and near-duplicate Web pages and documents are encountered. One study suggests more than 30 percent are duplicates. Multiple URLs for the same page, the same website hosted on multiple host names and Web spammers cause robots like Google to discard some and use what is considered unique content.

Robots want to avoid storing near-duplicate copies, and returning near-duplicate Web pages in their results. To improve rankings, ensure that your Web pages are not considered duplicates by the robots. There are several online tools available to check for duplicate content on your site.

Finally, perform a close examination of your inbound links. Although link popularity is a very important part of the ranking algorithm, it can be thought of as “relevancy validation.” Given that each link has its own value, it is important to understand their attributes, (i.e. quality vs. quantity). Good links come from sites that are credible and trusted subject-matter experts.

For a complete description of these types of links and how to get them, consider reading this information authored by Todd Malicoat at http://www.stuntdubl.com/2006/08/21/linktypes/.

Search engines are a major part of the Internet experience for millions of users every day. It makes good business sense to take the necessary steps to be part of a positive experience.

Therefore, it is wise to plan ahead by giving adequate consideration to the way search engine robots will interact with your website. Site design, optimization and implementation require teamwork and many sets of considerations, but the results will be well worth the effort.