Advanced Search Marketing
Silicon Valley Web Guild
12/13/06

Speakers

1. Barbara Coll, Founder & Search Specialist, WebMama
2. Jessie Stricchiola, Founder, Alchemist Media
3. Moderator: Massimo Burgio, Search Specialist, Global Search Interactive

I’ve just outlined comments or information that stood out as being useful for someone involved in or trying to understand search engine marketing.

Pay Per Click (PPC) and Web Analytics

Massimo: Analytic tools are important in obtaining necessary metrics to determine ROI for a marketing campaign.

Barbara: Business to business marketers selling products priced between $5000 and $25,000 aren’t worried about PPC costs. What is the most important question to answer? What are you willing to pay to get a customer? What is a customer’s lifetime value to you?

Jessie: Send PPC traffic to the proper landing page. Properly track clicks with a query string in the link, i.e. url?page=2.

Redesign your page layout for the best conversion. You can better track the effect of changes by testing with a PPC campaign. Use split AB testing for this purpose. Feed the data obtained by this testing back into your SEO program.

Keyword Analysis

Massimo: Talk to your sales force. They are most likely using different terminology than you PR department and customers.

Tools:

Trellian.com – Keyword discovery.
Wordtracker.com – Wordtracker keywords. Has a steeper learning curve. You can buy a daily license.
Bruceclay.com/web_rank.htm

Firefox tools for SEO
Extensions:
seobook.com – search “SEO for Firefox”
http://chrispederick.com/work/webdeveloper/

Jessie: The average number of words in search queries is increasing all the time. The following are measurements and predictions by John Smart -
2002 – 1.3 words
2006- 2.6 words
Projected:
2010 – 5.2 words
2013 – 10.4 words

The average number of words in a human to human questions is 11.

Question and Answers

Q: What is the most critical piece of information in designing your internet marketing campaign?
A: Barbara: Which action converts.

Points to Take Away from the Q&A:

1. There is better conversion on the long tail.
2. Local.google.com gets most of it’s traffic from Google.com because Google includes links to local results in it’s SERPs when appropriate.
3. Buy a feed on local.google.com. You can also include local results in your adword campaign.

Advanced Search Marketing
Silicon Valley Web Guild
12/13/06

Speakers:

• Barbara Coll, Founder & Search Specialist, WebMama
• Jessie Stricchiola, Founder, Alchemist Media
• Moderator: Massimo Burgio, Search Specialist, Global Search Interactive

Barbara Coll works for large companies that have large advertising budgets. She started off by sharing the insight that there are not enough searches on the internet to capture all of the possible investment. The ROI for search marketing is so much better than that of conventional marketing channels, that companies would like to invest more, but there just aren’t enough clicks.

Big companies don’t just try to get the number on spot on the SERPS for their chosen keyword or phrase. They want to OWN the page. They want to be show up on the sponsored links (pay per click) as well as having as many of the natural results as possible.

Big companies also would like to own their own brand and control their image on the internet. It’s called “reputation management.” To the extent it’s possible to keep “your company sucks” and the like off of the SERPS, they are willing, or should be willing to pay to do it.

I believe she offered this tip (but I might be mistaken): The most valueable link you can buy for ranking in Google is a listing in Yahoo Directory. I’ve purchased these for clients in the past, and I think they were $299/yr. My little secret – if you buy it for the first year and cancel, they won’t remove your listing! Or at least they haven’t for the sites I’ve worked on. Anyway, I agree, that is one valuable backlink. Working on natural search engine position is crucial, even if you are running spend on PPC campaigns. Contextual ads convert at 1/5 the rate as search, so natural search engine position should always be on the radar.

Barbara also advised against pulling your yellow pages ad. That is, until everyone has their computer by the phone in the kitchen, like they do the phone book.

A company’s IT team is the biggest potential barrier to search engine marketing. A lot of the changes necessary for search engine optimization fall into their realm.

Jessie, who does search engine optimization (SEO) for smaller organizations says “Always optimize for organic.” Like I stated earlier. I guess that’s where I got the idea. She also warns to expect a “grandfathering period,” or a period of around 6 months, for changes to take hold.

Here are some additional tips, compliments of Jessie:

• Make sure all data is accessible.
• Don’t have site structure that blocks spiders.
• Use consistent themes – ensure your site is thematically structured.
• Develop more content – everything in print should be on site to increase site size and therefore pagerank.

That’s all I have time for now. Coming soon – Silicon Valley Web Guild, Advanced Search Marketing – Part 2