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

Dental equipment manufacturer: You can target dentists, dental hygienists, and other practitioners to market your equipment. You can’t do that on Google, since you don’t know whether the person who is searching on “dentist” actually is one or is just looking for one.  People place their professions in their Facebook profile, so all job titles are fair game.

When you manage a large AdWords pay-per-click account with tens of thousands of keywords, you learn to appreciate anything that can save you time.  When you make a strategic decision, like to cut budget or work to improve CTR for better account quality scores, you want to do it quickly. Get in, get out, get on with your day.  Thankfully, AdWords has developed a lot of functionality to do just that – and many of its features revolve around slicing and dicing data, aka Filters.

I often use third party tools for campaign and bid management (and I won’t give away all the ingredients in my secret sauce), but here are a few of my favorite filters available to all advertisers through AdWords.

AdWords Editor (AWE) Advanced Search

AdWords Editor has been making our lives as pay-per-click marketers easier for years now, and one of my favorite tools is Advanced Search.  You can save searches that help you quickly drill down to campaign elements that you might want change, pause, increase/decrease bids, or use as a starting point for expansion. At the top of AdWords Editor next to the search box is a link to Advanced Search.

This is an example saved Advanced search looking for keywords with zero clicks.  Name it, save it for re-use, then you can select it as your View in AWE any time. You can use this view across tabs:  keywords, placements, ads, ad groups, etc. and across AdWords accounts.  Other Advanced Search views that I use are:

• Zero Conversions
• 1+ Clicks
• QS <=4
• GDN Campaigns
• CTR <1.0, Imp>500
• Avg Position>5
• Disapproved

You’re mostly only limited by your own creativity. Most common metrics are available as criteria and it’s fun to select multiple criteria to see what floats to the top (or in the case of poor performers, what sinks to the bottom.) Note: you can only save up to 8 custom advanced searches to re-use in AWE views, so choose the ones you use most often or can use as a base to fine tune with column sorts.

AdWords UI – Keyword Filters

You don’t need to be in AdWords Editor to use Filters to work your PPC magic.  In the Keywords tab in the AdWords web UI, you can create and save lots of different filters that can help optimize or improve an account.  Just go to the Keywords tab and open Filters.

Below are just a few of the many ways you can set up keyword filters. (Personally, I would never have all of these criteria in just one saved filter; this is just to show some possibilities for filters you might find helpful.)

_After your filters are set up and saved, you can adjust the date range and optimize from there.  Quick changes can be made right in the UI, or for more involved edits you can download selected items, make your changes in Excel, and then upload into AdWords Editor (or into your third party management tool).

Now that you’ve got your keyword filters set up and saved just the way you like them, you can go to the Ads tab and do the same thing.

AdWords UI – New Home Dashboard

Recently AdWords launched a new version of the Home dashboard that allows you to use Google-created Modules or customize your own Modules based on your Saved Filters. (Don’t worry – if you love the previous version of the dashboard you can still toggle between the old and new versions, at least for now.) For the example below, I created a saved filter for keywords with quality scores of 4 or lower. Then I can select that Saved Filter to display on my Home tab dashboard every time I log in.

Once you have custom modules set up, you can click “View Saved Filter” for each module from the Home tab, and go directly to the appropriate Campaign, Ad group, Keyword or Ad filter, and do what you need to do to get the job done in just a few clicks.  Pretty smart, pretty efficient.

While much of data analysis in pay-per-click marketing is science and statistics, there’s definitely an art to setting up and using filters for your AdWords account.  There’s also an art to how you name campaigns or ad groups so you can set up useful filters. Also, filters can be VERY account specific.  A reasonable filter for one advertiser might be ridiculous or just irrelevant for another. With experience, you’ll definitely get a feel for the filters that work on most campaigns and then can mold them for your account’s unique needs.

Spending a little time testing some filters out and playing around in Editor and the AdWords UI can save you tons of hours in the long run. Trust me. The less time I have to spend downloading CSVs and then manipulating columns in Excel, the better.

***********************************

Lisa is a data driven online marketing enthusiast and Senior Client Manager at Point It, one of the Pacific Northwest’s largest search marketing agencies. Lisa leads a team of account managers on a large global brand account.  Lisa has a deep background of online retail marketing, traditional advertising and market research experience, for large and small b2c and b2g growth companies.

Often times the biggest barrier for launching campaigns targeting mobile devices is that advertisers do not know where to start or they are worried they do not have the right tools to get started. Sometimes the best solution is just to jump in and get your feet wet. If you are using Google Analytics, you can already get information on how mobile visitors are interacting with your site, so learn from that data move forward and optimize your campaigns for mobile. The below 5 frequently asked questions will help you get started and hit the ground running for launching mobile AdWords campaigns.

1. What if I do not have a designated mobile site or landing page?

You are not alone! Majority of websites lack mobile specific sites or dedicated mobile landing pages, but that should not keep you from testing mobile campaigns. Test your campaigns targeting mobile devices to see how user friendly your site is. If your site is generally functional, mobile is another opportunity to target your audience.

2. How do the mobile visitors I currently receive interact with my site?

Google Analytics has mobile specific reports that will allow you to see how mobile visitors currently interact with your site – because remember, even if you’re not specifically advertising to mobile devices, users are still likely to find you via organic search or directly navigate to you on their mobile device. The Google Analytics mobile reports are broken down by device and carrier, so advertisers can see the difference in engagement metrics for specific devices. Before you launch any mobile campaign, first take a deep dive into the analytics and see how your current mobile visitors are interacting with your site. If your bounce rates from mobile are very high, then this likely tells you that your website is not providing an optimal user experience because they are quickly leaving.

3. What keywords are people searching for on their mobile devices?

Google AdWords’ Keyword Tool allows you to understand mobile search volume for your target keywords. In the advanced settings of the Keyword Tool you have the option to select different devices under the “Show Ideas and Statistics for” section. For mobile keyword research, select the “Mobile devices with full internet browsers” to best understand keyword traffic from mobile devices.

Google Analytics is also a valuable tool to determine what current keywords are bringing traffic to your site from mobile devices. Create a custom report in Google Analytics, like the one below, for keyword data from mobile devices.

4. What types of AdWords campaigns should I test with mobile targeting?

If you are hesitant to launch mobile AdWords campaigns because of site usability concerns, try testing your branded campaign first. Since branded visitors tend to convert better than non-branded, testing a branded campaign can be a safe way to begin. If after launching your mobile campaign you determine that branded visitors are not interacting with your site in a positive way, this is an indicator that you might need to consider developing a dedicated mobile site. If branded customers can not navigate around your site, just think how customers unfamiliar with your brand will feel…

5. Ok, I’m ready to try it – now how do I create mobile AdWords campaigns?

If you are unsure where to start with AdWords mobile campaigns, Google recommends creating a mobile campaign that mirrors your existing desktop/laptop AdWords campaign. In AdWords Editor simply copy and paste your existing campaign, update the device targeting settings to mobile devices, then optimize for mobile performance (make updates to ad text, update bidding strategy, etc).  Once you have created the mobile campaign in Editor you can then go into the AdWords interface to define your targeting settings even further. For example, if you only want to target Android devices because you are promoting a product specific to users of the Android operating system, make sure to only check the Android box, as shown below.

When it comes to your PPC campaigns, testing is key and mobile campaigns are no exception to this rule. I hope the answers to these 5 frequently asked mobile questions will help in launching your new mobile campaigns. Still not sure about launching mobile AdWords campaign? Feel free to ask your questions in the comments below!

***********************************

Heather Schwartz, has been working as an Account Executive with Anvil Media, a Portland based SEM agency, since 2008 specializing in B2C ecommerce clients such as lucy activewear and non-profit clients like The Nature Conservancy, developing SEO, Social Media and PPC campaigns to increase clients’ online visibility and ROI.

Everyone loves guarantees. Most companies are able to provide guarantees for their customers in the sense that, if it doesn’t work, they’ll replace it at no additional charge to the consumer.

This is true for new cars, flat-screen TVs, even major kitchen appliances. Guarantees give the consumer faith in the product. They know that the chances of their new computer not working are slim, but they have the reassurance that it can be fixed or replaced if something goes awry. But notice how all these guarantees are associated with a tangible product?

SEO is a Service

Yes, SEO can be seen as a product, but not in the same way a new pair of jeans is a product. SEO falls more into the services category. And the bottom line is that some services can never be fully guaranteed.

An SEO expert, just like an airline or hair dresser, is going to do the best they can for their clients. But there is no guarantee that your website is going to see the exact results you were hoping for, just like there is no guarantee your haircut won’t be a little bit shorter than you were expecting or bad weather won’t cancel your flight.

No One Can Force Google to Change Your Ranking

A good SEO provider is going to do everything in their power to improve your website, but they can’t force Google or Bing to change your site rank. They also can’t control what your competitors are doing or have done with their own SEO efforts.

There is a lot of competition for the top spots on a search results page and if your company is late to the SEO game there are a lot of factors working against your success. An SEO expert is going to do everything they can to best position your site to take on these external factors, but in the end they have no control over the search engines’ algorithms.

SEO Takes Time

When SEO is done correctly, a site should see an increase in traffic and related bump up in the search engines. But this is only going to happen over time. Any SEO company that guarantees your site will rank on the first page for your selected keywords in a month is feeding you a line.

Don’t fall for it. No company can guarantee exactly where your page will rank after X amount of time. Sites that work in a niche industry with little competition may rank extremely well very quickly, because they are the only ones trying to do so. Sites that operate in a larger market and are going after competitive keywords may have a much longer road ahead of them before they get the results they want.

Google itself stated that, when it comes to guarantees “No one can make that promise.”

Beware of Black Hats

Companies that tote SEO guarantees are often using black hat SEO techniques to artificially boost their clients’ sites. That site might rank extremely well for a few months, simply because it is being propped up by 10,000 irrelevant links. But search engine algorithms are designed to catch and penalize these sites. Not only does the site lose its position, it can be removed from the search engine entirely. The short-term success of black hat SEO can easily be spun to look like a fulfilled guarantee, but when that site is no longer a client of that SEO company, it’s not unexpected to see those links (and ranking) disappear, even if they did escape the search engines.

Some black hat SEO companies will guarantee their work by getting a site to rank first for a very obscure, long-tail keyword that no one is really searching for. But your site is ranked number one! Guarantee fulfilled.

It is the actions of these black hat SEO firms that have given the rest of the industry a bad reputation. Website owners get repeatedly burned by companies that are supposed to be helping them. This “once bit, twice shy” mentality affects their opinion of the industry as a whole. Good, white hat SEO professionals have to work that much harder to convince their clients that they really are doing their best for the site.

Beware False Promises by SEO Companies

The bottom line is that SEO guarantees don’t really exist, regardless of what the SEO company promises. While it may be frustrating to not have that assurance, website owners should now that a white hat SEO expert is going to help their site in the long run. You can expect good things to come when your SEO is handled by someone who knows that they are doing and does it in the search engine approved way. But no company can guarantee you’ll see specific results.

*************************

Nick Stamoulis is the President and Founder of Brick Marketing a Boston SEO services firm and Internet marketing firm. With over 12 years of industry experience, Nick Stamoulis shares his knowledge by posting daily updates to his blog, the Search Engine Optimization Journal (or SEO Journal) and publishing the Brick Marketing SEO Newsletter that goes out to over 126,000 opt-in subscribers.

Is your March Madness Bracket destroyed? Mine is. I had Ohio State walking away with a championship and VCU out in the first round! If there was any method to the “Madness”(get it?) then I would still have some hope in the office tournament.

Although you can’t predict or influence the NCAA basketball tournament you CAN influence how well you manage multiple PPC clients. Here are 8 things that I have found that help make managing multiple PPC clients easier:

• Create To Do Lists- Do you ever find yourself without a specific task and end up wandering from account to account checking on that days statistics? Do you do that multiple times a day?? If so go make a list now! I’ve found that making “to do” lists daily help focus me on important tasks, prioritize those tasks, then execute them. “Our priorities are most visible in how we use our time”, said Dallin H. Oaks. Make sure your time is being spent on your priorities!
• Focus On One Task at a Time- It takes time to shift your mind from one project to another. When you are doing that dozens of times a day it can add up to a lot of wasted time. Instead choose one task to focus on and complete it before you start or get distracted by anything else.
• Perform Audits- You may be checking on key performance indicators like cost, clicks, or conversions daily but you don’t take a deep look to make sure everything is running smoothly. To make sure there are no issues with our clients we perform scheduled audits for every client. This helps avoid any problems when things appear to be running smoothly.
• Calender Notifications- If your clients are like mine they often have explicit instructions on when and what they need for PPC. For starting and stopping projects for specific accounts I’ve found that setting calendar notifications that are sent to my email is the best way to remember these things. I use Google Calender which is connected to my Gmail account. As soon as I hear a specific date for any project I immediately add that to the calendar.
• Use a Customer Relationship Management(CRM) – We use a CRM in order to keep track of all the specific notes for the accounts. Some of the things we keep track of in there are: contact email, billing email, are they active, usernames, passwords, etc. You get the point J. We use Salesforce for our CRM but there are others out there. Wikipedia does a good comparison of them all.
• Use Client Management Interfaces- If you’ve got more than one client likely you are already doing this, but each search engine offers a client management center where you can have access to all your accounts in one place. Google has the My Client Center(MCC). YaBing has Agency Management. Facebook also has a type of client center. If you simply add your Facebook email address to any account you can then access that account from your advertising page.
• Have a Team Behind You- Often I’ll find myself in analysis paralysis from staring at the screen too long, and looking at one too many accounts in a day. It is incredibly helpful to just have someone to bounce ideas off of and get their input on a situation. Sometimes I’ll even find a solution to a clients issue when I’m explaining out loud what is going on. Having a team lets you strategize and get ideas you may not have thought of before.
• Where Does the Rubber Hit the Road?- What I mean by this is think about what really is going to help a client’s account out. Is looking at the conversion stats one more time during the day really going to help? Or is getting down and dirty with keyword bids a better use of your time? I don’t want to downplay analysis of an account, because that is absolutely necessary. But if you are analyzing accounts all day and not actually making any changes, nothing is going to improve. Where does the rubber hit the road?

By using these tips you can make sense out of the “madness” that is managing PPC. What other tips have you found useful in managing your PPC accounts? I would love to hear!

************************

Luke Alley is a PPC account manager and owner at www.GetFoundFirst.com, based out of Rexburg, Idaho. He is an up and coming search engine marketer and loves working in the search marketing industry. He is a happy husband and a proud dad. You can find him on Twitter at @lukealley.

The level of buzz about all things “social” in marketing today is becoming deafening and frankly I’m worried that in some organizations it will drown out the voice of reason when it comes to setting marketing priorities. I recently took some decibel readings on social media buzz during the eTail West conference in Palm Desert. This is a great annual event that brings together executives from every kind of retail business to discuss online retailing. The hottest topic this year was definitely social media’s potential to increase retail performance. How do I know? Through social media itself.

I did not attend eTail West in person this year, but from my desk a thousand miles north of Palm Desert I tracked the Twitter stream for hashtag “#etail” during the week of the conference. Social media was definitely the hottest topic. A close second was “mobile,” as in: “What can mobile devices do for my retail business?”

What was not top of mind among the event’s tweeters was search or conversion; which is a pity, because both of these remain, in my opinion, far more fundamental to commercial success in the digital world than social and mobile. I think this is true whether you are a multichannel retailer, a web-only etailer, or an insurance company with a website from which you hope to gather leads and land new customers.

Of course, you might expect people who tweet to be jazzed about social, so I checked in with folks on the ground at the event and they confirmed my Twitter-based impression that social media was getting a lot of attention. To some extent that is understandable. Social is exciting, new, and clearly rich in possibilities. The bad news is that too many companies, both in retailing and beyond, are going to devote time and resources to social media initiatives before they have their search and conversion strategies in order. The big risk here is that a lot of money spent to generate social buzz and bring traffic to the website will be wasted because the website is not optimized for conversion.

Unless a website is properly tested and tuned to make the most of the traffic you drive to it, bounce rates will be higher than they should be and conversion rates will be lower than they could be. And the sad thing is, many companies may not even notice. If a company pursues social media initiatives while measuring success purely in terms of traffic numbers—usually the easiest metric to get–there may be much rejoicing as waves of new visitors hit the site. There may even be some spikes in revenue, or leads, or other metric that the company uses to measure marketing ROI. But unless you’re also watching bounce rates and conversion rates and retention rates and revenue per session, the point of “going social” may be missed, along with a lot of dollars.

I admit that I spend a lot of personal time on social networks for fun, but I would never encourage a company to spend even a dime on a social network initiative unless there was a plausible ROI model to justify that decision, plus a system in place to measure the actual ROI in practice. As I see it, the buzz about social, and to a certain extent the frenzy over mobile, reflects three fundamental problems in eCommerce:

1. Most companies find it easier to measure traffic than conversion rates.

That can lead to a false sense of success from social media campaigns. Be wary of statements like: “We know we got a lot of fresh traffic and we think it resulted in more revenue.” When it comes to results, digital marketing is about knowing, not thinking; it’s about making data-driven decisions. You can’t rely on “we think it paid off.” You need real numbers, like actual lift in conversion rate, revenue per session, and average order value. And if you’re running an online store, what was the actual effect on customer acquisition and cart abandonment rates?

2. Most companies find testing and optimizing website content harder than buying traffic.

For most companies the website is the place where conversion occurs and if you are going to use social media to drive traffic to your website you need to make it feel welcome. In other words you need to serve up content that is targeted to that traffic. Unfortunately, good tools for doing this have, until recently, been hard to find. That meant content changes had to go through IT and we all know how many other pressing things IT has on its plate besides catering to Marketing.

3. Most of us find edgy new things more exciting than the fundamentals.

This is just human nature but there are times when we have to resist our impulses and use reality to drive our decision-making. I’m not saying social media marketing is not worthy of investment, I’m just saying you need to keep it in perspective. That perspective needs to include the fundamentals, like a systematic approach to testing and targeting of content. Get the fundamentals right and you will be ready to produce some truly awesome social media magic.

**************************************

A prolific blogger and content marketing pioneer, Stephen Cobb has helped a series of hi-tech startups to achieve successful outcomes by educating the market for their products. Currently Marketing Evangelist for Monetate, the Philadelphia-based marketing optimization company, Stephen resides in Upstate New York.

Whether I’m helping the first time PPC user or consulting an established advertiser, I often field questions about when it is appropriate to start a new campaign vs. starting a new ad group. I follow two main rules.

Rule #1: Begin with the end in mind. Ask yourself what is the objective of this particular effort? Are you trying to test different ad copy, a new batch of keywords, performance on different days of the week? Once you know the objective of your effort, move to the second rule.

Rule #2: K.I.S.S. The more complexity in your account, the harder it will be to manage. Every campaign, every ad group and every keyword has a cost. Not only the actual cost-per-click (CPC) but a cost in time and effort to create, manage, test & optimize. If in doubt or indifferent, choose the simplest answer.

To illustrate the two rules in action, consider these specific examples:

Situation 1: You have a successful campaign running across the United States, but feel that response is low on the West Coast. You would like to run different ad copy in California, Oregon and Washington.

Answer: New Campaign. Geo-targeting is a campaign-level setting. Create a new campaign targeted to just CA, OR & WA and copy paste the ad group(s) from the successful national campaign (use AdWords Editor and this is quick and easy). Then change the ad copy in the appropriate ad groups to begin testing your hypothesis that different ad copy will resonate better to West Coast customers. Also, don’t forget to change the settings on your national campaign to exclude CA, OR & WA.

Situation 2: You sell widgets and a newly released book by a prominent author advocates using widgets to stay healthy. You believe that people interested in this new book would be good prospects.

Answer: New Ad Group. This follows Rule #2. While we could accomplish the same goal with a new campaign, I recommend keeping things simple. A new ad group will allow you to advertise on keywords related to the new book, write highly relevant ad copy and direct prospects to a landing page that ties the book to your widgets.

Situation 3: You already have separate campaigns for Search and Display (congratulations) but you would like to test the performance of Google search against the performance of search partners to see which performs better.

Answer: Sorry, Google won’t let you do that. While you can turn off search partners in your current search-only campaign to see performance on just Google search, you can’t run ads just on search partners. I suspect this is to mask the poor performance of some search partners, but this is just one option you don’t have in AdWords.

As you can see, each situation needs to be judged individually, but most situations where you need a new campaign will involve campaign-level settings such as:

• Geo-targeting
• Different languages
• Networks (search, search partners & display)
• Devices (mobile, desktops, iPad)
• Day of week
• Time of day

Good luck with your new campaigns and/or ad groups and remember the two rules: Begin with the end in mind & K.I.S.S.

2010 was the year of growing your fan base. Brands poured in millions to invest in getting more fans. Why? They read an article, the CEO saw that the competitor has more fans, or perhaps they believe that a Facebook fan is like a email subscriber- a long-term, permission based relationship.

But in 2011, we see brands that now have millions of fans not knowing what to do next and also being unable to either measure that value.

The quickest gauge of power is engagement rate. Take the total number of likes and comments and divide that by how many fans you have. Let’s say you are averaging 100 interactions per post and you have 200,000 fans. That’s only 1 out of 2,000 fans engaging with you, which is 1/20th of a percent. This is about average for brands, but is awful overall. We see some brands consistently hitting 1 percent. Why?

They haven’t let their fan base atrophy. They protect their investment by regularly feeding fans with that they want- content, special
offers, interesting items- all the while being careful not to be overly promotional.

A fan page with one percent engagement on 50,000 fans has as much power as a page with a million fans but only 1/20th of a percent engagement. Which situation would you prefer to be in?

We have one sporting goods company as a client that has only a couple hundred thousand fans, while their competitor has a few million. Yet, our client has more likes and comments, plus more revenue, than the competitor.

Key mistakes:
- Investing blindly in building fans for the heck of it, without a corresponding nurture program.
- Running a general contest to drive traffic and fans without realizing this drives the wrong types of users and permanently polluting the fan base with folks who only wanted a free ipod, not your product.
- Not measuring traffic to the website from Facebook or enhanced placements in organic search (yes, on Google, too, because of your Facebook activity).
- looking at last click attribution as the ROI of Facebook marketing.

Where are you in your Facebook fan lifecycle? Are you still building your base or maybe looking to now nurture fans and extract value? Maybe you are cautious and want to establish a social strategy before embarking on Facebook. Regardless, consider Facebook a multiplier of fan (real world fans, not Facebook fans) emotion. Better to attract and nurture the right people rather than the masses for pure bragging rights.

The value of your fan base is not $3.60 or some arbitrary value from an article somewhere. It’s the product of your nurturing efforts and ability to engage fans.
**************************************
Dennis Yu is Managing Principal of Facebook Strategy for Webtrends. You can reach him at dennis.yu@webtrends.com. He welcomes your comments.

Last fall I made the big career move from in-house to agency, and last week I attended my first search conference, SEMpdx’s SearchFest, since crossing over to the other side.  Even if the subject matter is the same, the perspective is very different.  So, during the day’s sessions, I found myself thinking about how I might have done things differently at my last company.

I won’t lie – when I joined Anvil Media last fall, after a long tenure as an in-house online marketing manager, I was burnt out on working on the same website for four years, and frustrated that, after so much hard work, we hadn’t conquered the online world.

In particular, Marshall Simmonds and Dustin Woodward’s session, Implementing Your Search Marketing Strategy, gave me a lot of food for thought and helped me flesh out my top 5 things, if given the chance, I would have done differently:

1. Quit trying to reconcile data. We always had three sets of numbers: in-house tracking, Analytics and engine (AdWords, adCenter, affiliate program) data.  When I arrived, they were way off, and over time, they got a lot closer.  But I also spent an inordinate amount of time figuring out why they were off, and almost as much explaining to management how each number could be part right and part wrong.  Talking about implementing solid Analytics, Marshall referred to Omniture over-reporting, Webtrends under-reporting, and Analytics splitting the difference, and I realized: most of my clients now have conflicting numbers, depending on multiple reporting mechanisms and fine-tuning their Analytics over time.  Instead of trying to massage all those numbers to match up, pick the ones you trust, stick to them, and make them the ones that go in the reports.
2. Institute unified reporting. Along similar lines, different people in my organization requested different numbers.   Some were curious about traffic, some product performance, and some campaign metrics.  So, in an effort to give each exactly what he/she needed, and not overwhelm anyone with too much search engine geekery, I found myself providing one set of regular reports to the Director of Marketing, other one-off reports to the General Manager, and so on.  What would have saved me time, and more importantly, provided a much clearer picture of our online presence, would be to “present digestible, simplified, unified metrics across the organization.”
3. Don’t be afraid to engage an agency. Dustin Woodward’s presentation focused on the differing tactics, ammunition and roadblocks specific to each size of small business – different sized teams and budgets dictate different approaches to online marketing.  It struck me that almost every tier, from the one-man show to the well-funded, established business, included some kind of outside involvement.  My former company was never big enough to build a team under me to distribute the load of SEO, SEM, email, site content, and so on, but I’ll admit I bristled initially at the suggestion of bringing on an agency.  Engaging an agency, whether it’s shoestring help getting AdWords up & running, a one-time audit of existing efforts, or fully outsourced PPC management, allows you to leverage an entire team of search experts and frees you up to focus on the big picture needs of your business.
4. Avoid design by committee. As Woodward moved to bigger businesses with healthier budgets, he spoke of “paralysis by analysis” and the danger of “design by committee.”  Once you have the luxury of taking time to evaluate your website, suddenly everybody wants to be part of the redesign!   We went through usability testing, assembled an interdepartmental committee, had all sorts of executive discussions, and ended up with a new website that, well, looked and acted like it was designed in a conference room, far from the developers or marketers most qualified to drive the process!  Soliciting and incorporating input from around the company is extremely important, but you also need to make sure you don’t end up with too many cooks in the kitchen.
5. Pay closer attention to specific competitor tactics. My former company was in an extremely competitive space, so I spent a lot of time keeping an eye on the other guys – I knew who had a great website, who was spending tons on AdWords, and who had what reputation among our customers.  But, it was another SearchFest session, John Andrews and Todd Malicoat’s on Competitive Intelligence that got me thinking on a whole other level.  Andrews dug deep into ways to build competitive intelligence – analyzing habits on Twitter, chasing down AdSense placements, poring over source code.   SEM is very much a game of “keeping up with the Joneses,” where fortunately, the Joneses leave all sorts of clues.  Putting on my BizDev hat, I focused most of my competitive intelligence at a strategic level.  But, I would have been better off leaving on that schwaggy Google hat I got at the last search conference and analyzing our competitors on a more tactical level in order to “emulate their successes and exploit their weaknesses.”

**************************************

Andy Lohr joined Anvil Media as an Account Executive in November 2010, bringing with him almost a decade of in-house SEM, SEO and Web content experience.  Andy began his career in search at LookSmart.com, where he helped build one of the 1st generation Web directories and one of the first paid search inclusion programs.  He is thrilled to be a part of the Anvil Media team, and the opportunity to stay on the cutting edge of online marketing and to help great companies like gDiapers, Icebreaker, and Moonstruck.

This is a prime example of what can happen when you take a sub-par approach to search engine optimization and create a less than stellar strategy for a large global brand. The slightest mistake could easily thrust you into a negative spotlight causing you to spend years repairing the issue and not to mention the costs involved for online brand repair. If you are a large organization like JC Penny you should keep a much closer eye on how you generate links online because you could find yourself in the dog house if you cut corners and take a spammy approach.

Here is a list of things we can all learn from the JC Penny SEO nightmare:

Always Understand What Your SEO Firm Is Doing
Sure it is difficult to keep an eye on every single little thing that happens online but JC Penny should have had a slightly better grasp on what their search marketing firm SearchDex was doing behind their back. If you have an employee in charge of being the contact point or liaison between your brand and the search marketing company it is your duty to be inquisitive about the efforts and strategy in place. In this case SearchDex has been their firm of choice for a number of years and maybe someone got complacent at JC Penny and figured this sort of thing could never happen but it did.

Keep an Eye on Your SEO Link Building Efforts at All Times
You should always be reviewing what sorts of links are being built for your website. Sites like Google are really stepping up their spam department to oust unruly websites looking for loopholes and using them. This is just another example of the Google police stepping in and reprimanding a large global brand for their spammy link building efforts.

Too Big To Fail Doesn’t Apply with SEO
It doesn’t matter how big of a company you are or how much you spend with pay per click advertising if you are cutting corners on your SEO, Google’s algorithm could whack you for it. What many people don’t often realize is that Google does not necessarily have a physical human giving out penalties. Their search algorithm is designed to automatically give out a penalty to websites that could be trying to manipulate the search system and it is up to the website to clean up any bad links or website issues to allow the penalty to release itself. It does not matter if you have 1 employee or 1 million employees the algorithm doesn’t really care and if a red flag pops up you are going to have a rough morning if you rely on all your organic search rankings.

Communication Is Always Important
Communication between you and your firm on a constant basis is always important especially when you start to head into an area where things are extremely advanced. When you start to get into enterprise search engine optimization the efforts and steps can get highly complex. A marketing manager in charge of the account might not want to understand all the steps being taken but they really need to so these things don’t happen in the future.

Understand The Clear Difference Between White Hat and Black Hat SEO
I understand that you can’t recognize all efforts of search engine optimization if you are really not in the thick of it but do some research on your part so you understand what it is that could get you into trouble. Things that were done years ago are not necessarily allowed any longer and if you still apply them to your online marketing approach you could find yourself or your website in the hot seat. There are many resources online where you can educate yourself on the topics of reputation management and brand management.

The moral of this story is get a grasp on what types of search engine optimization efforts are being conducted on your company’s website. Just because everything is safe right now does not mean that it will always stay safe. Things change in the search engines and algorithms update very frequently. It is up to you and your service provider to monitor these changes and roll with the punches otherwise you land in the hot seat like our friends over at JC Penny.

Image via Gentleman Standard
**************************************
Nick Stamoulis is the President and Founder of the SEO services firm, Brick Marketing.  Nick Stamoulis writes daily in his SEO blog, the Search Engine Optimization Journal.