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

Online marketing today is not quite what it used to be. Just a couple of years ago, the combination of SEO with PPC seemed to be the final word in serious online marketing. With Social Media gaining ground in recent years, more and more channels and communities are accessible to users where they prefer to ‘hang out.’

Users are researching blogsphere & community websites for checking out reviews of products they want to buy, find solutions to their problems, or just share their views on subjects that would interest most marketers in reaching out to them. Most users feel that peer groups tend to offer a more unbiased and genuine reviews about products.

Facebook’s traffic alone is inching close to Google’s traffic and is growing at a much faster rate than Google’s traffic. Twitter’s traffic is in the vicinity of Yahoo’s & Bing’s traffic put together. Smart marketers need to put their content in front of these potential buyers, right where they hang out.

The increase of Social Media usage, as against traditional marketing channels like SEO & PPC, is also throwing up several uneasy questions –

• Is SEO losing its effectiveness, becoming obsolete or already dead?
• Will PPC become more expensive? Will it continue to serve its original purpose?
• Will companies divert part of their PPC budgets into SEO & Social Media Marketing?
• Is Social Media just a fad? Can Social Media really serve as a serious marketing vehicle? Should one have a defined and serious Social Media Marketing strategy?
• Will Social Media continue to grow at the same pace or is it reaching its saturation?
• What will happen if search engines like Google make more radical changes to their algorithms?
• Should one have a common or a complimentary marketing message across SEO, PPC & Social Media?
• How should SEO, PPC and SMM dovetail into your online marketing strategy? What role should each play? What kind of performance can one expect from each of these marketing vehicles?
• How does one decide how much budget one should allocate to each media?

Today’s marketers need to take a fresh look at their marketing strategies when they plan their media mix of SEO, PPC, Social Media and other vehicles to deliver their marketing message. Conventional promotion techniques and approaches need to be innovated to get powerful results and fight competition.

One can no longer think of SEO, PPC, and Social Media Marketing in isolation. You need to have a holistic approach in planning the media mix, keeping in mind the power as well as limitations of each media. The role of each media should be deployed in such a way that they fill gaps of the other. One needs to use each medium for what it is best suited to individually accomplish, given its distinct advantages. Ideally, SEO, PPC, and Social Media should together serve your common business goals.

Online Marketing Objectives

Before you can go about planning how each marketing medium should be used, it is important to first outline your specific short-term & long-term marketing objectives. Getting clarity on your marketing objectives is key to setting a roadmap for your resource deployment and budget allocation to SEO, PPC and Social Media. SEO usually works well to serve your long-term objectives, while PPC and Social Media Marketing can be used to achieve both short-term and long term marketing objectives.

For example, SEO can be deployed to steadily build website traffic for your main key phrases but may require considerable time and resources to get good results. However, SEO can achieve quicker results for your long-tail keywords with minimal efforts. It is also cost effective to promote ‘non-commercial’ product-relevant keywords, which may not boost instant sales on your website, but is good to get potential buyers interested in your product and may eventually convert into sales.

PPC is ideal for promoting special offers, seasonal sales, geo-targeting, new product launches, direct website sales, lead generation, website page content A|B split testing and getting traffic for your ‘head’ or competitive keyword phrases that result in conversions. Essentially, it is best to invest in PPC where time is of essence and the results can be commercially measurable.

Social media promotion can play an effective role in building customer relationships, interactivity, providing customer support services at reduced cost, get direct customer feedback on your products, your services and your website. It allows you to build communities, positively influence existing communities and steer a positive peer review of your products.  Social media also works well in affiliate development, engaging new marketing partners, hiring key people, channel development, brand image building, creating brand visibility, online reputation management, and lead the users to useful online resources, information and reference material on your website.

Of the three stages of the buying process –

a) research stage where the customer is researching on the possible products or solutions

b) when the buyer firms up his buying decision and

c) when he is ready to make the purchase

- SEO and Social media can work cheaper to serve the first two stages, while PPC can serve as a ‘go-getter’ to grab the buyer in the third stage.

In this multi-part article, I shall evaluate several of the aspects listed above. We will try to understand the unique advantages of SEO, PPC and Social Media Marketing and how each of these marketing vehicles can work in coordination to deliver maximum mileage for your marketing dollar. A well planned marketing strategy based on clearly laid out objectives not only enables you to measure the success of your campaign but also secures your investment for a long term and helps you remain ahead of the competition.

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Atul Gupta is the Co-Founder & CEO of RedAlkemi.com, a company specializing in Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing. Atul is a thought-leader in Online Marketing industry and has been working in this field since 1996. His company has helped over a thousand clients succeed in their online businesses. Atul is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and has published several articles about SEM industry.

Have you ever had the sinking feeling of checking your favorite search term one day to see if your site has climbed a spot or two, only to find a complete disaster has occurred? I think the reasons sites suddenly plummet within organic search results fit into three classifications—the “Oops,” the “Duh,” and the “Dang, Got Caught.”

Most mistakes can be completely avoided by paying more attention to two things: SEO technical best practices and the search engine “rules.” The search engines do a great job of providing most of the tools needed to resubmit an adversely affected site, sub-domain or directory level.

1. Typically the quickest fixes are as a result of “Oops” mistakes.
2. “Duh” mistakes can be a little more severe, and take additional time to fix both internally and in terms of regaining trust within the algorithms.
3.      “Dang, Got Caught” mistakes can take a long time to recover from — to the point where the domain should perhaps be written off as a business loss.

Oops And Duh

Accidents can happen with redesigning a site, and may have a negative effect on search engine results. For example, redirects may be improperly mapped, resulting in negative user and search engine experience, including a large increase in 404 error responses. Many developers like to employ a temporary redirect to an error page and serve a 302 to a 200. In English (LOL), this tells a search engine that the page is only temporarily moved, and then serves an error page which claims it is OK. I have seen Sitelinks (the extra links below a branded search result) lead to 404 pages for weeks and longer in some engines.

Other “Oops” and “Duh” mistakes include (among dozens) improper use of the robots.txt file and setting up long server downtimes without properly informing the search engines. A friend once told me that the robots.txt file is like a ninja sword, and thus must be handled very carefully. Long server downtime can cause the site to be removed from the index. If you have accidentally blocked your entire site or even some major directories from being indexed, this can be a relatively painless fix (measured in days to weeks) by resubmission within search-engine-provided toolsets such as Google Webmaster Tools. Without being set up and verified in these toolsets at Google and Bing, you take great risk in your ability to mitigate.

Dang, Got Caught

Unscrupulous SEO practitioners and high-risk-taking marketers are the most likely to be victim to the sometime severe backhand of the algorithms. There is not much to say in this area other than a number of clichés having to do with playing with fire. If you participate in tactics such as same color text as background or buying thousands of links at a time from unrelated domains, you will be caught. Large brands may be able to win their way back relatively quickly, but for others, it can take months or years of reinclusion requests. Search engine toolsets can help with this too. Rules, like laws, are open to interpretation. One last thing to always keep in mind is that search engine crawlers can’t see, but rather rely on what they can understand from the code as being presented on the page. If automated text readers can clearly understand your content, and it doesn’t differ from what is on the page, you are probably safe.

There are many free toolsets available on the Internet to see how search engines see your site, and the redirects and response codes they are given. Being prepared and knowing your site’s performance is the only way to keep yourself truly safe from disaster.

What are your experiences in seo mistakes and how have you overcome them? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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Chris Boggs of Rosetta is a specialist in search engine optimization and paid search advertising. Chris joined Brulant in 2007 as the Manager of the SEO team, and Rosetta acquired Brulant in 2008.  He is a frequent contributor to Search Marketing Standard magazine.

Internet marketers already familiar with search engine optimization and pay per click marketing know the importance of analytics, metrics, key performance indicators, and so on.  Analytics can (and should) play an important role in your social media marketing strategy.  If you’re not setting goals, tracking metrics, and analyzing performance, how can you tell if you’re succeeding?

 Setting Social Media Goals

I find it useful to break down social media goals into discrete components.  First, identify your bottom line goal, whether that is sales, cost savings, brand awareness, or some other goal.

Then, work backwards from your end goal to identify intermediate steps to achieving that goal, such as increasing web site traffic, newsletter sign ups, quote requests, or qualified leads.  Repeat as many steps as you find logical or necessary.  The step preceding increased traffic, sign ups, and leads could be achieving a certain level of social media engagement: views, posts, feedback, RTs, mentions, replies, and so on.

From Goals to Metrics

Once you’ve established your goals, you can identify corresponding metrics to track.  In the scenario explored above, your goal / metric pairings could look something like this:

Social Media Presence:  Number of Facebook “Likes”, Twitter Followers, LinkedIn group members, etc.

Social Media Engagement: Number of views, feedback, comments, posts, RTs, @ mentions, @ replies

Qualified Leads: Number of new leads from social media and web channels

Sales / Revenue: Dollar increase in sales, revenue, and profit

Analytics Tools for Social Media

While there are all sorts of tools for tracking your social media accounts, it can be difficult to get an overall picture of the effectiveness of your social media strategy without combining information from multiple tools and sources.  Remember, although your bottom line goal may be sales, revenue, or profit, there are many milestones along the path to that goal.

Following are some tools to help you track progress and trends as part of your social media strategy.

Klout

Klout is one of the top tools for measuring social media influence.  With the recent addition of analyzing Facebook as well as Twitter data, Klout lets you look at a variety of data about your social network presence in one spot, including trend data.  The free version allows you to refresh your information every six days.

Twitalyzer

A Twitter-specific tool, Twitalyzer analyzes your Twitter presence and network to present you with a wealth of information, including your impact, engagement, influence, retweet and mention ratios, and much more.  Twitalyzer also provides trend data, and comparisons and contexts, so you can see how you fit in in the Twitterverse.

Facebook Insights

Insights is Facebook’s basic analytics tool that accompanies pages.  Data includes information on monthly active users, activity, media consumption, and interaction.

Google URL Builder and Analytics

Hopefully, your website already has Google Analytics on it.  Analytics lets you track where your web visitors are coming from, how long they are staying on your site, and what they’re looking at.  Combining Analytics with the URL Builder tool (link: http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55578&hl=en) and referrer data, you can determine how many visitors to your site are coming from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networks.  See how long these visitors stay on your site vs. other sources and how well they convert.

Constantly Monitor and Adapt Your Social Media Strategy

Social media is not a “set it and forget it” platform.  Your user base, their habits, and their preferences are constantly changing.  What works for you today may not work tomorrow.  That’s why you need to continuously monitor your social media profiles and the traffic they refer to your website.  If your current strategy isn’t effective or stops being effective, then it’s time to try new techniques.

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Jason Mikula works as a freelance search engine marketing and social media marketing consultant.  Jason has experience working with pay per click, search engine optimization, and email and web marketing.

Did you know there were nearly 16 billion core searches during August 2010 in the US? According to comScore recent data reports, Google led the US core search market in August with 65.4% search market share, followed by Yahoo at 17.4% and Microsoft Bing with 11.1%.

Looking at the search market share data from 2009 compared to 2010 (chart below), the numbers show that Google has remained relatively flat over the last year. However, recent September 2010 data reveals that Google search shares are showing modest gains. Meanwhile, Yahoo continues to drop in search share, and Bing shows only slight gains in search growth year over year.

The chart below shows data for search market share (August 2010 versus 2009) in the US for: Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask and AOL, provided by the Silicon Valley Insider.

(Source: Silicon Alley insider)

Search Market Share: Google and Bing Upward Movement in September 2010

• Google remained flat from August 2009 to August 2010, but in September 2010 showed modest gains 66.1% up from 65.4% in August.
• Yahoo! continues to lose ground with 16.7% in September 2010, down from 17.4% in August 2010.
• Bing has grown year over year, and continues to increase slightly to 11.2% in September from 11.1% in August 2010.

Taking a look at the latest numbers from September 2010 search share comScore data, Google gained while Yahoo took a hit and Microsoft Bing shows slight growth. The Google share gains reflect the impact of Google Instant Search (the new feature that provides results in real-time while users type their search words). And Bing has managed to slightly increase market share in spend and in clicks partially due to the Yahoo-Bing integration. The new Facebook Like social data stands to improve Bing search results and help increase Bing market reach as well. However, Bing Marketers are waiting to see any real boost in search marketing results.  Make no mistake, Google is the dominate player with nearly 66% of the market share.

The upcoming online shopping season should spur stronger search marketing ROI.  We’ll be watching the search market trends to see how they pan out during the–fast approaching–holiday shopping season!

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Kelly Larsen, Director of Marketing at PPC Summit and Landing Page Success Summit, the Web’s largest conversion conference coming up on November 3-23, 2010.

Most PPC managers should be well aware that over the next six to eight weeks, Yahoo & Microsoft will be merging their PPC platforms into an integrated platform called, ominously, “The Search Alliance”. Understanding how the Yahoo & Microsoft Search Alliance will impact your business will help to ensure that any impact is a positive one. This article will provide a brief background of the Search Alliance and more detailed insights into three things you should do to prepare your PPC campaigns.

The Basics of the Yahoo & Microsoft Search Alliance

It’s no secret that Yahoo & Microsoft’s PPC offerings have long been a distant #2 and #3 to Google’s AdWords platform. By the beginning of Q4 2010, Yahoo & Microsoft’s PPC platforms will be merged and all PPC campaigns will be managed under what is now Microsoft adCenter. This will create a larger consolidated network that is likely to pose a greater threat to Google AdWords than either Yahoo or Microsoft ever did on their own. Yahoo Search Marketing will effectively phase itself out and adCenter powered ads will supply both Yahoo & Microsoft properties with paid advertising. This is all slated to be completed before the beginning of the 2010 holiday season.

For more detailed information and regular updates about the Search Alliance, check out the official site: http://www.searchalliance.com/home

How to Make the Search Alliance a Positive for Your Business

Although there are many more nuances to the Search Alliance that could be written about at great length, the three main things to understand about the Search Alliance are:

        I.            Decide Which Transition Option to Use

In preparation for the upcoming Yahoo & adCenter Search Alliance, Yahoo advertisers should now all be seeing a new “adCenter” tab in their Yahoo accounts with three options for transition:

1. Help Me Transition: Will allow you to move existing campaigns from Yahoo into an adCenter account. Since Yahoo campaigns are inherently structured differently than adCenter, I would rarely recommend this option.
2. Set Up Account Only: Create a new adCenter account where you will be able to import campaigns from AdWords, for example, or create new campaigns from scratch. If you don’t currently have an AdCenter account at all, this is the choice for you.
3. No Help Needed: If you have an AdCenter account that is already fairly optimized, then select this option. Your Yahoo account will essentially phase itself out as the transition gets underway.

Note that once you select one of these three options, there isn’t an “undo” button – so be sure about your choice!

      II.            Start Optimizing for AdCenter Now

The sooner you can begin to make sure you adCenter campaigns are optimized, the better. This will help to ensure you hit the ground running when adCenter ads start receiving more and more traffic from Yahoo properties. A great place to start with optimization is to look at what you are doing in Google AdWords. AdWords and adCenter are more similar than Yahoo and adCenter on many levels – some examples of similarities include:

• Keyword matching options: broad, phrase, exact match keywords
• Ad text: 25 character limit headlines, 70 characters total in description

Due to these and other similarities, AdWords campaigns often translate quite well to adCenter. In fact, the adCenter Desktop Tool allows for easy transition of AdWords campaigns by using a simple AdWords Editor export. However, keep in mind that there are still differences between AdWords and adCenter, for example:

• adCenter limits the quantity of negative keywords in each campaign.
• adCenter’s dynamic text functionality is very different than AdWords’ – however it is more robust and many would say better than AdWords, so this is something to learn and become comfortable with to make the most of your campaigns here.

Ensure that you are comfortable with these differences – start optimizing now.

    III.            Be Prepared for Changes Once the Transition Begins

Slated to begin late September through early October, the transition will mean less traffic flowing through your Yahoo PPC ads and more flowing through your adCenter ads until Yahoo is entirely phased out. As that happens, I predict there will be some noticeable changes to your adCenter campaigns. Some things to keep watch for:

1. Increasing CPCs. More market share means that more advertisers are likely to sign on to adCenter, increasing competition and driving up CPC’s in the auction.
2. More traffic. This is obvious, but remember to account for this when looking at your web analytics data, as paid traffic from Yahoo will trail off. For the time being, there is going to be no way to differentiate targeting to either Yahoo or Microsoft properties via adCenter – so report on performance accordingly.
3. Improving functionality in adCenter. If you are already an adCenter user, this will be a welcome change. adCenter has several updates planned between now and the transition, and will need to continue to develop to bring themselves in line with the superior functionality offered by AdWords.

By considering all of the options, making the choice that best suits your business and preparing for the changes still to come, you can help ensure that the Search Alliances is something that doesn’t bruise your business but instead bolsters it.

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Leisa Hall is an Account Director at Anvil Media, Inc. – a search engine marketing agency in Portland, Oregon. Leisa directs Search Engine Marketing strategy for primarily B2C clients ranging from start-ups to Fortune 500.