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

By Mary O’Brien, Founder/Director, PPC Summit  

A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend SES San Jose. I hadn’t been in a couple of years, and I was really curious to see what an SES conference looks like now, given the recessionary state of the marketing Industry.

The good news is – Search Engine Marketing is obviously alive and kicking with no chance of decline in the foreseeable future, so if you are thinking of learning a marketing skill to complement your resume and make your career recession proof, Pay-Per-Click, SEO and Social Media will definitely make you more marketable.

Although attendance was down a little bit the conference was still vibrant and focused as usual on the future and big picture of Search Engine Marketing. What was interesting this year was that attendees were actually paying attention, and using the conference to its best advantage. In years past when I attended SES it seemed like all anyone was focused on were the cool tchotchkys that were being given away at various booths. This year folks were actually attending sessions and networking with each other, with the intent of making themselves more interesting to future employers, or even better, going out on their own and getting clients.

Maybe it was the lack of a Google Dance that caused this shift.  In previous years it seemed like the Search Engines went out of their way to compete with each other on who could hold the biggest, craziest party, but this year, it was a much more focused event, totally in keeping with every Search Marketers need to do more with less budget.

So why does learning Search Engine Marketing make you more marketable as a marketer?

From SEMPO’s State of Search Engine Marketing Report and Survey, released in February 2009:
• The North American Search Engine Marketing industry grew from $9.4 billion in 2006 to $13.5 billion in 2008
• North American Search Engine Marketing spending is now projected to grow to $26.1 billion in 2013, up significantly from the $18.6 billion forecast in 2007.
• Pay-Per-Click captured 88.4 percent of 2008 spending, up 1% from 2007; organic SEO captured 10.6 percent
• Budgets are shifting to Pay-Per-Click. About a third of respondents said their funding for Pay-Per-Click came from a mix of new and existing marketing funds. Another third reported using entirely newly allocated budgets

Reuters also reported that while online advertising isn’t growing at the rate that print advertising is declining it IS still growing even as the economy all around us is shrinking. Basically, Search Engine Marketing is pretty recession proof. Advertising dollars are still available but they appear to be moving online, and over 85% percent of that is for Pay-Per-Click.

This is important for two reasons:
1. This will give more companies the incentive to advertise online in case their competitors beat them to the punch.
2. Those companies will need knowledgeable, talented and properly-trained people to execute a great Search Engine Marketing campaign.

When times are not so good, more businesses are willing to push budgets online. When times get better, do you think that is going to change?

The numbers from SEMPO show that nowadays a larger number of businesses get the importance of not only having a Web presence, but are working hard to maintain their visibility. Now that the economy is slow, budgets are being pulled from other sources and moved online.

What does that mean for the future of Search Engine Marketing?  Basically, as a marketer, a large percentage of your time should be focused on SEM. You should be doing it, researching it, learning it and staying current with all the nuances and changes.  You don’t necessarily have to be an expert at every part of it, but you should know who the experts are, the best tools to use and also how to get access to info when you have a question.

So even in a recession continue your Search Engine Marketing education. Go to conferences, training and seminars that can help you to learn, network and improve your marketability. You’ll meet amateur and professional Search Engine Marketers and business owners, create great peer relationships, and learn more skills. If your current company has cut their training budget, considering paying for training yourself.  That way you’ll truly make yourself recession proof along with Search Engine Marketing. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a huge expensive conference, as long as it meets your specific education needs. Go where you can learn the most about the skill that will make you the most marketable right now. This is a great time to invest some marketing dollars in yourself.

By Mary Huffman, Executive Vice President, Ionic Media

Article 1 of 3 Series: Drive Best-in-Class Results by Integrating Your Pay Per Click (PPC) with Other Online Marketing Channels

It is a mistake to rely solely on PPC as your go-to  marketing channel to drive the success of your business.  While effective, PPC cannot always deliver great results when your brand is unknown, your product is commoditized or you are in a crowded field, for instance.  Smart marketers understand the online marketing landscape and know which levers to pull given their market position.  This article is the first in a series of three articles which will describe the online marketing landscape and provide some tips on driving revenue with PPC and other effective marketing vehicles.

In the first two articles in the series, we will explore the following marketing channels:
*  Affiliate
*  Blogging
*  Display (e.g., banners)
*  Email (house and rented lists)
*  Mobile
*  Online PR
*  Pay per click (PPC)
*  Search engine optimization (SEO)
*  Viral/social media

Then in the final article, we will describe how to integrate your PPC marketing with other vehicles to drive better results than one vehicle alone would deliver.

Let’s first look at how each of these marketing vehicles compares to the another on driving branding goals (building awareness and interest but not necessarily trial or purchase) and driving direct response (DR) goals such as visits, downloads, sales, etc.

Email (to a house list), PPC, SEO and mobile marketing are generally the most effective DR channels.  They are best at driving traffic and sales in the most controllable way.

Online PR, blogging and viral/social media can do a lot for driving awareness and interest but are less likely to drive measurable increases in sales and revenues.  Make no mistake, though, these more brand-building marketing vehicles have an important job of raising awareness and driving interest.  Awareness and interest are the foundation of success for sales.  Without these elements, you can be left sitting in your office wondering why no one wants to buy your wonderful, ground-breaking product.  Pssst…they don’t know about it.

Display is balanced between DR and branding.  So too are affiliate marketing and email (to a rented list) marketing, although they are generally harder to make as effective as other channels.

Let’s dig in and review the strengths and weaknesses of four of the most-used channels: PPC, SEO, display and email to a house list.  Here is a handy summary chart that you can use as we review each marketing channel in more detail.

Pay-Per-Click Search Marketing (PPC)
*  Can be a laser-focused traffic and sales driver
*  Develop a keyword list that numbers in the tens of thousands (not in the tens or hundreds)
*  Write ad copy in the context of the other ad copy that may appear on the search results page
*  Ensure your landing page is relevant and meets the needs of the user (based on the user’s keyword)
*  Test everything…constantly
*  Best used for: Products/services with some inherent demand.  Your PPC results will be disappointing if no one is   searching for what you offer

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
*  As much art as science
*  The goal with SEO is to raise both the relevance of a webpage to a given keyword as well as increasing its authority. 

This translates to extensive on-site work as well as off-site link building.
*  The ROI for SEO can be in the thousands of percents – it is well worth the effort
*  Best used for: anyone with a website who wants to build traffic levels in a cost-effective way.  Note: it takes several months to begin driving traffic so you need to be in it for the long term (e.g., 12 months at least).

Display (e.g., banners, rich media, video)
*  Banners have a bad reputation for delivering few sales and being priced based on impressions
*  Look again, as banners come in many more shapes and sizes and some of them can now do tricks (e.g., expand on roll-over, peel off a page, allow for in-banner video or in-banner form completion, synchronize so two banners on a page can work in tandem to communicate a message)
*  New tracking techniques allow you to measure the “assists” from banners so you can see how many users viewed a banner several times and then later searched for the product and bought something from your site.  The assist value of banners can be very high and is easily overlooked if you do not set up the tracking correctly
*  While clickthrough rates for traditional banners remain at less than 1%, the new formats and new tracking mean that banners can be a huge activity driver if the creative and call-to-action are compelling
*  The ROI from display advertising can vary.  We have seen instances where banners were MORE effective than a PPC campaign when a product was not yet in high demand and we needed to increase awareness
*  Best used for: products/services with lower awareness or interest, and those offerings that benefit from visual explanations and/or more explanation

Email (House List)
*  Generally delivers the best ROI as recipients are familiar with your product/service and may be previous purchasers
*  Typically inexpensive since the only costs are usually creative development and actually sending the email
*  Best used for: anyone with a house list.  Do not let your house list age and wither without using it to drive additional revenue with re-sell and cross-sell efforts.  If you do not have a house list, begin building one (perhaps by using the other channels described here).  Test continuously to improve performance on metrics like bounce rate, view rate, open rate, clickthrough rate (by link) and conversion rate.

These four marketing channels (PPC, SEO, display and email to house lists) are the workhorses of online advertising.  Consider them (and more importantly, test them) carefully before you eliminate one from your marketing mix.

In the next article in this series, we will review the other online channels (mobile, online PR, blogging, email to rented lists, viral/social media and affiliate marketing).  The final article in the series will provide tips for how to integrate these various marketing vehicles effectively with PPC.  Our goal is to make the integrated marketing plan deliver more than the sum of the parts.

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Mary Kingsley Huffman is a co-founder and Executive Vice President at Ionic Media, a firm with deep experience driving bottom-line results for clients using search and online marketing. Previously, she was Director of Marketing at Overture Services where she was responsible for the acquisition marketing and communication departments, leading all advertiser acquisition efforts and customer communications. Prior to Overture, Mary was an Engagement Manager in the London office of McKinsey & Company, specializing in marketing solutions. Mary has an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a BA from UCLA.

…but you may still want to try it.

At this point is there anyone in America who isn’t on Facebook? The site boasts over 200 million active users, and more than 100 million log on to Facebook at least once a day. This is obviously a very engaged audience, just what you’re looking for as a marketer.

While I was at SMX in Seattle a few weeks ago, I sat down with some of the Facebook folks who were there (a bunch of very nice, very evangelical Facebook fans) and they took me on a great tour of the Facebook interface.

It’s really easy to quickly create ads in Facebook, and very user friendly, especially for small businesses as you don’t need a lot of money to get started. You can target different audiences, different locations, set a budget, and monitor progress using the reports. You can purchase ads using a CPM or CPC model, which makes it very easy to test the same messaging as you would use in your pay-per-click campaigns.

So does it work? During last year’s Pay Per Click Summit in Los Angeles (Sept 2008), I surveyed a bunch of attendees and asked whether they had tried Facebook as an advertising vehicle. Only about 10% had, and out of that 10% maybe 3 or 4 had experienced good results. But now it’s 2009 and Facebook has re-vamped their advertising platform, and also put the ads in the upper right hand “call-to-action” portion of their pages so after SMX I asked my Twitter and Facebook followers, and discovered advertisers give it very mixed reviews.

This time maybe 20% of folks surveyed had tried Facebook Advertising and approximatley 50% were getting good results, but that’s hardly competitive with the kind of response you would get from advertisers using AdWords, where conversion rates of 20% and more are possible.

So who are the folks getting the results? Basically the same folks who get good results using Contextual Advertising. So it’s really not fair to compare Facebook to Google. In fact, they are just another large publisher (like the Wall Street Journal or ESPN.com) and you need to create, target and determine the CPA for your ads accordingly.

Contextual Ads can work extremely well for products that are impulse buys, or for branding, and the more targeted they are to the content on the page the better. Advertisers selling mortgages, insurance, entertainment, weight loss products, etc. are all doing very well with Facebook advertising, as are affiliate marketers generating leads for these types of businesses and for other products.

So can it work for your business? Just like any form of advertising you need to test it. If you are currently doing contextual advertising with something like Google Adsense or ContextWeb then it’s easy. Just set up similar campaigns targeting the same placement and demographics on Facebook and test against each other to see what works.

If you are not currently using content ads then it is very easy to set up a campaign in Facebook.  Here are some tips to get you started:

1) Most rules of pay-per-click also apply to Facebook marketing. Make sure your offer matches the landing page, and the keywords/images in your ad are consistent with the landing page also.
2) Include a call to action in your ad. Just like writing an AdWords ad, but punchier.
3) Less is more when it comes to text/copy and graphics. In fact writing like the “National Enquirer” might be totally appropriate as you only have a few minutes to catch people’s attention. Big headlines can work. This is not AdWords where folks are already looking for what you are selling. With Facebook you’re trying to get people’s interest when they are focused on something else entirely, so make your headlines snappy.
4) Consider testing a contest. I’ve heard of advertisers getting good results with them, and they may appeal more to social media users who aren’t really in buying mode.
5) Geo-target your campaigns well. If you don’t ship to Canada or the UK – don’t advertise there.
6) Try segmenting your campaigns by gender to make them more targeted
7) Use people in your graphic ads if possible. Just like on landing pages people respond to pictures of other people.

Just remember, as with Contextual Advertising, you shouldn’t try this form of advertising (or actually, any advertising at all) if you don’t have good tracking on your site. Content ads can take more tweaking to get them to perform, and you may need to test and track many variations before you find that sweet spot.

Have you tried Facebook Advertising? If you have, we’d love to hear your results. Tweet me at @ppcsummit or post a comment at www.ppcsummit.com/newsletter in response to this article. We’re also considering adding a session on Social Media Advertising at our upcoming PPC Summit in Los Angeles in September. Please let me know if you are interested in that also, and we’ll add it to the agenda.

To Your Continued Success Online,

Mary O’Brien
Chairman and Founder PPC Summit

by Jon Rognerud, Entrepreneur.com

Why do you have a hard time getting (converting) web traffic when it’s *this* easy?

The lifeblood of all businesses online is traffic. I mean – targeted traffic that you can begin to test for conversions.

#1: Keyword Research
Keyword research should be #1 on your list – always. Try tools like Google Keyword Tool, SEO Book Keyword Tool, Market Samurai (free trial). Get more ideas using the search based tool. If running PPC (you should), look at PPC data and keyword portfolio overall that is most closely aligned to your market need: write and optimize for those terms. The most competitive should be in focus, but the higher converting term is most often not the most highly trafficked term. Discover how they search the web and target your terms accordingly. (Informational, Transactional or Navigational)? “Armani black leather jackets for women” is better than “leather jackets,” for example. Use search engine optimization (SEO) to create a set of themed pages to match your findings.

#2: Social Media & Link building
Most know and agree that the Google algorithm relies heavily on links for ranking, especially in competitive markets. Most of these tactics are low cost entry points. Offering quality, and something of value will create link opportunities by default, and should always be your goal. Spend more time thinking about this and submit to quality properties than the useless “300 directories for $49.99” approach.
a. Article Marketing - 400-600 words with real value. Think about the users and webmasters (who    may use the information) first. Make sure to include at least 2 links in the resources box. One could be the actual company name, another, an anchor text keyword. Think users, and then search engines. Make sure to submit to top article directories within your category and sub-category. You can use Yahoo directory and DMOZ to get a sense for activity and relevancy in your marketplace. Use EzineArticles to start.
b. Answering questions - Providing value to your community is always a good thing. See the top answer search engines and get started. I have used Yahoo Answers and Yedda, they are all pretty easy to use. Remember to not “pitch” your own business. Provide real, useful answers. Of course, you’ll get a link back to your site, but the “value” is more important long term. If one of the answers (example Yahoo) appears high and gets you more traffic, you can target additional ads on that page too. (Sponsored Results). If you cannot spend the time yourself, an expert author or an outsourced model works well for an hour a week to work on this.
c. Activate the social communities and start sharing your (quality) content
        a. Start with one of two at first. Look at what your competition might be doing. Then, check – Digg, Reddit, Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Youtube, Technorati, Stumbleupon. But – don’t forget to look at: Squidoo.com, Hubpages.com, Zimbio.com, Scribd.com, Docstoc.com, Slideshare.net, eHow & Wetpaint.com. For competitive terms you can get to first page ranking using these trusted web properties. It certainly can build your brand and company reputation much quicker. All this for free (outside of your time, of course)! Use socialmarker.com to bookmark your best content across multiple accounts easy and fast. However, do not spam – and try to keep the various content channels unique, not just duplicate content.
        b. Distribute your videos via tubemogul.com, and for a paid fee, try trafficgeyser.com.
        c. Use budurl.com to track your clicks and visitors from Twitter, and use ping.fm to distribute your “tweets” across multiple social platforms – in seconds! Remember! Creating your trust and authority using relevant link building is a “never-ending” task for you.

d. Blog Strategies
      a. A little more advanced topic, but creating PR or Traffic pumper sites with (WordPress) blogs that are relevant to your business, can work very well. Create newsworthy sites and promote them. Use an inter-linking strategy to feed traffic and PR juice to the destination sites of more “core” (money) sites that you own.
e. Directories
      a. Get Yahoo (paid), DMOZ (free) listings established. Look at goguides, gimpsy, skaffe and botw.org as well (not free). This strategy will yield more link/authority juice than 100’s of low quality directories.

#3: SEO
SEO – Search Engine Optimization is the art and science of crafting keyword rich copy and building search friendly websites to appear high in the rankings in the natural search results pages. Consider the power of blended search in all your doings where video, news, podcasts, images, maps all display into one “Universal Search,” as Google calls it.
     a. TAGS: TITLE, DESCRIPTION, H1, ALTs – Make sure to describe your page using keywords in these tags.
     b. LOCAL SEO: If you are a local business, make sure you get your listings into the big three search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing/Microsoft). You can use getlisted.org to check your listings, and ease the process of submission. Do NOT spam by faking multiple listings and phone numbers. See Google Local for more details, and the steps you can take. Make sure to read David Mihms Local ranking success factors.
    c. Google Webmaster Tools: Make sure to set up a free account here. Look at the diagnostics, links, what Googlebot sees, and terms that Google qualifies. Do they match your major topics and keywords? Tune accordingly and continue to build links, as mentioned.
    d. Analytics: Google Analytics, Getclicky (free/paid) – to make sure each page is getting the right keywords and traffic that you had planned for each topic and subtopic.

#4: Plan to Fail? Or…
…fail to plan. Be clear on your strategic plan for all online endeavors. Make sure you have short and long term goals in mind. A SWOT plan can really help you. Look at the competition using (free/paid) SpyFu.com, Compete.com and SEMrush.com tools. If you want a quick overview of your competition that includes social popularity and traffic measures, try quarkbase.com. However, it’s important not to over-obsess on the competition. And, think about conversions as your end goal, not rankings.

Summary
Using the above tactics – along with tracking your competition’s URL and keywords in your space via Google alerts (www.google.com/alerts) will get you ahead of your competition and the search engines. 
 
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Jon Rognerud is Entrepreneur.com’s SEO columnist, an SEO consultant and the author of The Ultimate Guide to Search Engine Optimization, in bookstores now. He has more than 20 years experience building software and marketing projects, including creating content and application solutions at Yahoo!/Overture. His SEO company provides search marketing solutions for small to midsize businesses.

by Kim Toomey, Anvil Media, Inc.

Social Media is More than a High School Reunion.

We all know we should be engaged with social media as companies try to communicate with customers and monitor what’s being said. Think of social media as bringing word of mouth marketing into a visible medium.  Never before have businesses had real time access to what is being said about their products and services, and all of this content is perfect for parsing out keywords to use in other search engine marketing (SEM) activities based on what your customers think of your brand.

People are going to search for the terms that they know and use when it comes to your company, so make sure you’re optimizing your site with those phrases.

Keyword research has never been a science, but most would agree that the wider variety of tools you can initially brainstorm with will result in a more targeted and successful keyword list. Google’s Keyword Tool, WordTracker and Keyword discovery have been some of the heavy hitters in the past. But with more social media sites popping up with elaborate search features, the flood gates have opened.

Use the Right Tools: There are plenty of tools out there to help you find conversations that are going to be beneficial to your research.

• TwitterSearch is Twitter’s own search engine, and with great advanced search options, is a great starting place. You can look for an exact phrase (your brand) in a certain location with a positive tone, and voila! You can see what your customer’s are saying about your brand.
• Collecta is a new real-time search engine that scours social media sites as well as blogs, news and Flickr for your search term.  You can filter your results if you don’t want to see pictures or news articles for example. Don’t expect these new breeds of search engines to take over the search marketplace anytime soon, but they can provide more helpful results than Google, Yahoo or Bing.

Sort through the Clutter: Once you begin searching for conversations about your company, what exactly is it that you’re looking for? Frequent misspellings are a good place to start. Do you have a store front located in a city that’s not easy to spell? How about variations of your brand name? Do your customers say Dr. Martens or Doc Martens? 

While you may not want to use these variations on your website for search engine optimization (SEO), you will want to use them for Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns. 

• Social media conversations are also great ways to determine what your customer base thinks your most popular product is. If you have a site with many different offerings this is great information to have so you can make an informed decision about what content belongs on your homepage.
• Don’t forget to consider seasonality and that the needs/wants of your customer will change, so make it a point to revise this at least every quarter.
• Lastly, look for the adjectives that are being used when describing your company or product. Do you have a “cozy restaurant,” “rugged backpack” or “time-saving software?” Chances are you’re already aware of some of these descriptors, but it is always important to check your perception of what you are offering with your customer’s perception.  Use these descriptions in all the usual places where you would put SEO effort on your site, because chances are that other people are looking for a “cozy restaurant” for dinner tonight.
• Beyond keyword research, this information can also be used in offline marketing materials when describing your company or products.

Keep up with the times
Now that you have some keyword ideas down, you should also verify your information against social media tools that pull top trending keywords. These are great resources for finding “now” keywords; topics that are mainstream right now. Twitter’s rising trends are also found in Twitter’s search tool, and show what topics are being most discussed in Twitter at that moment. TweetVolume is another Twitter tool that allows you to see how often a word appears in Twitter. You can enter up to five words at a time to compare traffic. This tool is particularly helpful if you’re trying to decide between variations or synonyms of a popular keyword phrase.

Facebook Lexicon is a similar tool that pulls top phrases being used on user’s walls. One of the more interesting aspects of Facebook’s tool is that it also provides demographic data for their keywords which may help you make a final decision on keywords based on your target audience. Select a keyword and Facebook will show you how many people are posting that word in their profile daily as well as the age and gender of these users (still in beta, so only a limited number of keywords are available for the demographic data). 

One last overlooked social media research tool is Delicious Tags. Delicious is a bookmarking service that has been around for quite a while and gets overlooked in the social media world because it’s not very flashy and exciting. Delicious has a “popular tags” list on the homepage. The great thing about Delicious keywords is that if you click on one, it gives you a list of related tags that are also popular. While Food is a popular tag, it also suggests recipes, cooking, health, restaurants and travel as related keywords.

There is no right or wrong way to build a keyword list for your website. As the Internet continues to evolve, be on the lookout for new ways to discover what is being said and searched for online. I recommend using social media keyword research to supplement traditional methods and tools for now. What your customers are saying about your company is important on many levels; thanks to the internet and social media all of their comments are now traceable and easily accessible.

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Kim Toomey works for the Portland-based SEM agency Anvil Media, Inc. She has expertise in all aspects of search engine marketing and specializes in social media strategies. Toomey has been responsible for the development and execution of dozens of search and social marketing campaigns during her time at Anvil.