Search Marketing InsiderPay Per Click, Social Media and SEO Strategies – An Internet Marketing Institute Publication

These days, any conversation about online marketing is required by law (OK, not really) to include extensive discussion of Facebook and Twitter. Social media is heralded as the way to generate buzz and virality, interact with existing customers, create demand among potential customers, and build your brand. Anecdotal evidence is plentiful – consider Orabrush’s 14 million video views on YouTube, Converse’s 15 million fans on Facebook, or Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh’s 1.8 million followers on Twitter.

These examples show the massive potential reach of social media, but large numbers alone do not a successful marketing campaign make. Indeed, in the world of SEM, success is not measured by clicks or impressions, but by conversions and revenue. A campaign with 15 million clicks in AdWords might be a rousing success – if it drives ROI for your business – but could equally be an utter disaster if these clicks don’t produce revenue.
Because social media marketing frequently does not result in direct revenue for an advertiser, it’s very difficult to determine just how much a fan, follower, or video subscriber is actually worth. Various studies have tried to place numbers around these different social actions, but trying to come up with an “average” value is really an impossible task. Again, think about paid search – if someone asked you how much a click was worth on Google, your answer would have to be “it depends.” We know that some clicks are probably only worth a few pennies and others – a famous example would be “mesothelioma attorney” – can exceed $50 a click.

So while it is impossible to state in absolute terms that one form of media is more valuable than another, I would strongly argue that the pecking order of value for most businesses is as follows:
1. Email newsletter subscriber
2. Facebook fan
3. Twitter follower

Think of your own online behavior. How many email newsletters do you subscribe to? According to a study by ExactTarget, the average American gets 12 commercial emails a day. MailChimp reported the average open rate for ecommerce emails is almost 15%. Translation: consumers don’t subscribe to many email newsletters and those that they do subscribe to they tend to read.

Now consider a Facebook fan page. Facebook makes it really easy to sign up for a fan page – I suspect that sometimes people sign up without really knowing they are doing so. If you are active on Facebook, you might have hundreds of friends and pages posting onto your wall. Of course, no one has time to really read every post to their wall, and if you only log-in once or twice a day, you are likely to miss many posts. Add to this Facebook’s “EdgeRank”, which will actually hide posts that you would likely not click on anyways, and there’s a good chance that many so-called fans will rarely if ever really see a message from a company. A recent study suggested that Justin Beiber’s fan page had the highest percentage of “active fans” – i.e. fans that do anything beyond simply becoming a fan – at a whopping 2.8%.

Has Converse sold 15 million additional pairs of shoes to their 15 million fans? Have they even sold 10,000 shoes to these fans? I tend to doubt it. Assuming that Converse is “best of breed” and has a 2.8% active fan number, their 15 million fanbase is really only around 450,000 (and likely much lower). Turns out it’s easy to sign up for a fan page and even easier to ignore subsequent messages from that fan page.

And then we come to Twitter. I allegedly have 671 people following me (@rodnitzky) on Twitter. And yet, whenever I tweet an update, only 4-5 people respond to my tweet or re-tweet it. It’s likely that of my 671 followers, a good 600 of them are followers in name-only – they have a 3rd party Twitter app that only displays a small percentage of their followed tweets, and they have really followed me to get me to follow them back. Indeed, the sheer volume of tweets makes such a 3rd party tool mandatory. As a result, the number of followers you have is actually somewhat irrelevant – what’s more relevant is the number of people who actually read your tweet and the “clout” of your retweeters. Again, like Facebook, it’s very easy to follow someone on Twitter but to never actually engage with them, which makes this a meaningless metric.

If you’re not already convinced that email is far more powerful than Facebook or Twitter, just look at how financial markets are valuing emails, fans, and followers. Groupon – which really is just a giant email newsletter – has a value is somewhere around $25B and has around 40 million subscribers – that puts the value of a subscriber at about $625. Facebook has 600 million users and a value of around $70 billion – that translates to $116.7 per user. Finally, Twitter has 175 million accounts (the number of actual users may be less) and has a value of around $4 billion – that’s about $22.8 per user.

All of this is not to say that you shouldn’t pursue a Facebook or Twitter strategy as part of your online marketing investment. Social media will continue to grow in importance, it will evolve, and marketing best practices will gradually be established. In the meantime, however, invest wisely and try to understand what marketing channels really drive ROI for your business. My guess: ‘old school’ online marketing channels like SEM and email marketing may not be as sexy as a cool Facebook fan page, but for most businesses, they are still the best way to grow revenue and profit. Fans and followers are hip, but hipness won’t pay your electricity bill.

David Rodnitzky is CEO of PPC Associates, an SEM agency in San Mateo, California. If you are currently spending $25,000 or more a month on SEM, contact David at david@ppcassociates.com to learn how his agency can optimize your SEM campaigns.

Before targeting a new keyword vertical, it’s a good idea to evaluate the competitiveness of the market. This will give you a sense of how difficult it will be to rank for that term in organic search, and/or how costly it will be to bid on that term in your PPC campaigns.

This is done by analyzing keyword competition. By estimating how much time and effort it may take to achieve top rankings for particular keywords or search terms, search marketers can better gauge where to spend their time. So how do you judge keyword competition? What are the factors involved in competitive keyword analysis?

Here are five tips on evaluating keyword competition to get you started.

1. Check the age of competitive domains

One indication of how difficult it might be to rank highly for a keyword phrase is the age of the domains of sites that are already ranking at the top of the SERPs. WHOIS is a tool that allows you to look up domain registration info, so you can see how long the top 5 or 10 sites that rank for your chosen keyword have been around. Older domains tend to have a much longer tail of inbound links, and it can be difficult to compete with trusted domains that have been around for many years.

2. Use Google search operators

The search operators “allintitle” and “inanchor” can provide a good indication of how many pages are already being optimized for a particular search query. Google allintitle:”keyword” to find pages with the keyword in the title tag and inanchor:”keyword” to find incoming links that use the keyword in the anchor text. The more pages these searches return, the more competitive the keyword.

3. Check the top results for home pages

Are the results in the top 10 mostly home pages or deeper pages? For example, for a keyword like “running shoes” you might see mostly home pages on the first SERP (such as Nike’s and Reebok’s home pages), whereas for a keyword like “how to write a wedding toast” you might see deeper pages, forum threads, and blog posts. If the top results are mostly home pages, you’re probably looking at a very competitive keyword.

4. Run it through a keyword suggestion tool

Do a search on your keyword in a tool like WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool.

In general, the more keyword suggestions, variations, and related results the tool returns, the more competitive the keyword. The relative frequency, monthly search volume and competition columns in our tool provide further signals of the keyword’s competition (the latter two are only available in the paid version of the tool).

5. Gauge advertising interest

By looking at the sponsored ads for a given keyword, you can get a sense of the competition. If the advertising space is full on the first page of the SERPs and extends past the first page, and if the ads aren’t based on broad match (in other words, the ads are linked to targeted domains, not general ones like Target and Amazon), this is a strong indication of a competitive keyword.

These are some tips to give you an idea of where you stand when it comes to tackling a new keyword space. There are also plenty of tools devoted specifically to keyword research and analysis, some free and some paid. Competitive tools can make a nice complement to straight-up keyword suggestion tools. Give them a shot!

About the Author
Elisa Gabbert is the Content Development Manager at WordStream Inc., a provider of PPC management software and services as well as a new Keyword Research Suite. Elisa is a frequent contributor to the WordStream Internet Marketing Blog and you can follow he

In the world of marketing, everyone’s favorite question is “What’s my ROI?” ROI (return on investment) is all about knowing what you’ll get out based on what you put in. If you spend X amount of dollars on a television commercial, how many people will see it? How does that affect your sales? In an economy where every dollar is being stretched to its maximum potential, companies are unwilling to part with their budget unless they know it is going to be worth it in the long run. Understanding the ROI of a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign is just as important as understanding the ROI of running a radio advertisement. So what exactly should you be looking at when determining the success or failure of your SEO efforts? Here are a few factors to take into consideration:

1. Traffic to your site

A great way to see how well your SEO is doing is to look at your site’s traffic. You should see a steady increase in traffic over time, especially once your SEO begins to build momentum. You don’t want to see peaks and valleys; this means that your SEO efforts aren’t consistent. Peaks and valleys could also be an indication of black hat SEO tactics being used to promote your site. Black hat SEO provides short bursts of success, but no long-term, sustainable gain. I used to include search engine rankings as the main goal, but since rankings fluctuate so much these days, it is becoming less of a key SEO measurement metric.

2. Online presence

Part of conducting a successful SEO campaign is link building. One component of link building is the creation of business profiles on sites like Yelp, Merchant Circle, Google Places and so forth. As these profiles age, they will start to rank in the search engines. Depending on how competitive your industry is, these profiles can rank well when a user searches for keywords that you have incorporated into your profiles. The better your profiles rank, the more you can dominate the search results and increase your online presence. If your SEO is doing a good job of increasing your online presence, you should see your site showing up in the search results more and more frequently, and from a variety of sources. Aside from business profiles this can include directory listings, blog posts, press releases, social networking sites and more.

3. Bounce rate

Your bounce rate is a good indication of how well you site has been optimized, a critical component of any SEO campaign. A lower bounce rate means that more targeted traffic is being delivered to your site. It also is a good indication that your site’s user-experience is matching up with your visitors’ expectations. If a visitor can find the information they are looking for and is drawn further into your site, your bounce rate will go down. Bounce rate shouldn’t be the end-all-be-all measurement of success, however. If the goal of your site is to get someone to pick up the phone and call, they might not hang around once they find your phone number. If that is the case, your bounce rate might be high, but that isn’t necessarily an indication of bad SEO.

4. Conversion rate

Your site’s conversion rate is arguably the best way to measure the success of your SEO. Every site’s conversion metric is different. Do you want someone to pick up the phone? Sign up for a newsletter? Download a white paper? Whatever your site’s goals are, your conversion metric is a reflection of that. An increase in your conversion metric is good sign that all of your SEO efforts are working together. More targeted traffic is being directed to your site, which means that you’ve gone after the right keywords and are ranking well for them. A higher conversion rate also means that your site is keeping visitors engaged once they get there.

These four ways to measure the success of your SEO campaign are by no means the only way to determine how well or poorly your SEO is doing. They are, however, a good place to start and prove ROI. Being able to show a growth in traffic and conversion rates, among other things, is tangible proof that what you are doing is working.

About the Author – Nick Stamoulis

Nick Stamoulis is the President and Founder of Brick Marketing (http://www.brickmarketing.com), a Boston SEO services company. With over 12 years of industry experience, Nick Stamoulis shares his knowledge by posting daily SEO tips to his blog, the Search Engine Optimization Journal and publishing the Brick Marketing SEO Newsletter, read by over 130,000 opt-in email subscribers.

Contact Nick Stamoulis at 781-350-4365 or nick@brickmarketing.com