So what does that mean to you, trying to make information about your products and services available to the general public ? It’s going to be harder, at least in the short term. What does it mean to you, the searcher trying to find specific information that’s a little bit off the beaten path. It may be more difficult.

Here’s a possible side-effect of the brand bump in the Google SERPS, that I haven’t see much discussion about. In a couple of different verticals I work with, I’ve noticed page one being filled with directory results from large paid directories, rather than websites of individual businesses, when doing a local search for a specific product or service. Are these big directories considered a brand?  How does adding an extra step of displaying a directory results page in the search engine results page help anyone?

So Big Brand=Higher Quality, More Accurate Content=Better Search Results? No. Google has the ability, resonsibilty, or authority to determine what information is “TRUE” and what is not? NO. My personal opinion is that such an idea, forced into the algorithm by the almighty dollar rather than a concern for helping the searcher find what they are looking for, will result in people switching to another search engine to find what they are looking for. Then, when the traffic decrease results in a loss in revenue, Google will move the other way. I hope.

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.

Branding is:
1. Accumulative
2. A conditioning process
3. Associate symbols, colors and phrases with certain emotions

Affinity Branding
1. Placing logo near objects.
2. Establishing close relationship between the branding element and product.

Example: You see some jeans in the store with the Calvin Klein label on them. You may have been conditioned to associate Calvin Klein with quality or fashion, so you may see the jeans in front of you has having those characteristics because of their association with the logo.

Dispositional Branding
1. Not placing logo near objects
2. Do what you are predisposed for
3. No clues available – there is nothing in front of you to help make the choice
4. Depends on situation

Example: If someone were to ask you what service you would use to ship a package across the country and have it get there the next morning, you would probably say FedEx. You have the disposition or tendency to associate the service with their brand, without being given presented with a choice between FedEx or DHL, for instance. However, you may have chosen DHL.

Indirect Messaging
1. Using slogans and images to condition the customer to the brand
2. Must be repetitive
3. Takes time
4. Easy to Design

Direct Experience
1. Using actual experience to condition
2. More effective
3. Harder to design

The Ford Website given as an example of Indirect messaging. Commercials on the Website interrupt and are unpleasant. Their Website had many logos everywhere, but didn’t help navigation. They were just distracting.

Best thing you can do in branding a site is to give a good experience, i.e. allow user to complete task (good direct experience). Logos and advertisements can work against you.

Associate the brand with good experience on your Website.

Usability

The experience dominates the user’s visit. There is NO evidence to support that fast loading sites are easier to use. The opposite may be true.

How slow is too slow?

Perceptions of users on speed of download is uniform and consistent (given different tasks they chose themselves).
1. No correlation between download time and perception of download time.
2. There is correlation between perceived download time and completio of task.
3. Zeigarnik effect – The Zeigarnik effect states that people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed ones. If you don’t let the user complete the task they visited your Website for, they will remember that as a negative and associate it with your brand.

Other correlations:
· Fun
· Professional
· Whether or not they would return

Task completion is paramount!

Seducible moments

After the user completes a task they are more susceptible to being marketed. Also, you can offer alternative product selections.

A search engine on a Website is not good for sales. More purchases come after clicking on categories than after using a search engine. If they need to use the search engine, your navigation is too hard. Fix it.

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