Search Engine Marketing

Often times, marketers overlook the importance of a campaign?s keywords in favor of catchy creative, fancy testing techniques or their reliance on bid management software to sort it all out. Now, I?m not saying that these individual components are not important. Everything plays a role in the success of a campaign. However, keywords make up the fundamental basis of a strong campaign.

So, CircuitCity.com, a massive web site went down recently. All access (even to the robots.txt file) to the site is redirected to a single page that talks about the chain's closing of stores in the US. Of course, I couldn't help but think of better ways to make use of this domain instead of shutting it down.

Marketers put a lot of time into naming the services and products that their companies sell. Before the advent of search engines, such naming efforts more often than not aimed to appeal to emotions. The keyword-driven nature of search though has forced marketers to at least consider the gap that may exist between what they call something and what their potential customers call something.

In response to a recent submission of mine to Sphinn, Lee Odden wrote that he thought Enterprise SEO was recession-proof. I don't think anything is recession-proof, but that's not what I want to write about here. Instead, I'd like to look at how SEM agencies and consultants might go about differentiating themselves from the riff-raff in the SEO industry. In times of plenty, the riff-raff and the true experts can co-exist, be profitable, and for the most part ignore each other. In bad times, the riff-raff are the ones likely to slash their prices because they know, deep down inside, that their services aren't worth the prices they've been charging. This action has a side-effect on the experts that then must put more effort into differentiating their service offerings to counter the, "Why do you cost 5 times XYZ SEM Agency?"

You don't get many people relating their disappointment with major webmaster conferences. And so I found the following commentary amusing. Maybe it's because I was bitter at not attending...

Not too long ago, Jeremy Shoemaker wrote about his successful attempt at trademarking the ShoeMoney brand. This in turn allowed him to submit documentation to the Google AdWords team so that using ShoeMoney within ad titles and copy wouldn't be allowed. This inspired me to see if I could find a way around Google's trademark protection system which I ended up accomplishing within 10 minutes or so. My experiments with this technique are over so I figured I'd share the trick. I imagine other people have already discovered how to do what I did so maybe it isn't much of a secret anyway.

In a previous post I implied that Yahoo's Paid Inclusion program was for lazy SEOs. That's a little harsh, I suppose, but I'm sticking to my belief that you can achieve high rankings in Yahoo with less effort than true search engine optimization. I've worked at two search engine marketing companies now where there was debate of whether a paid inclusion effort should be handled by the SEO team or the PPC team. I doubt this post alone will settle the matter, but that isn't going to stop me from trying!

Jeremy Shoemaker of ShoeMoney fame recently wrote about his recent success with obtaining a trademark for ShoeMoney which in turn allowed him to eliminate AdWords ads that contained his trademark. Of course, I couldn't resist testing out just how thorough the AdWords system is with such things. And in 10 minutes I determined that using someone else's trademark is still doable.

When affiliate marketers are too aggressive with their search engine marketing efforts, the end result is something that just feels wrong. But does having something feel wrong mean it shouldn't be done? If the idea is expected to be profitable and someone else will do it if you don't, should you still not do it? Tough questions with, no easy answers.

One of Google news alerts sent me a link to this list of SEOs and SEMs that are on LinkedIn. It's an interesting idea that I thought I'd quickly mention. I'm not actually sure there's value in being on the list, but it certainly can't hurt, right? I'm #65 in the Greater New York City Area and #692 in the full list. More reason to spam my friends to become contacts!

The investing world has been abuzz with the news that Google didn't do as well as expected. But the most amusing comment came from Jim Cramer:

"I would have liked to have seen a much higher click-through rate in advertising, and it makes me wonder whether, at last, people have figured out that most of those click-throughs to the right are simply unhelpful at best and dreadful at worst."

A co-worker sent this link out today. It's the first commercial (as far as I know) to play on a major network (CNBC) for search engine marketing services. All the movement makes the message feel compelling, but at the same time I question the use of the term SWOT. Do people know that it stands for strengths, weakness, opportunities, and threats? Of course, maybe this term was included to make SendTec sound even more like experts. I also wonder if the SendTec folks expected or even hoped for the extra coverage they're likely to get on YouTube.

By its very nature, search engine optimization (SEO) takes time not only to implement, but also to see the changes in traffic and rankings. For those who are in a hurry or just plain lazy, Yahoo offers an alternative with their paid inclusion program. However, in exchange for all the time you save in not having to optimize your site, you'll have to fork over some cash to Yahoo.

There is a lot of buzz around Google's recent beta testing of a cost-per-action (CPA) advertising program. The excitement is justified of course since Google has a strangle-hold on the cost-per-click advertising market making it a power to be reckoned with and one worth watching.

There's an interesting article from AdAge about the effectiveness of non-branded paid search campaigns. In this article, Jeffrey Glueck, chief marketing officer of Travelocity, is quoted of saying, "It is a profound mistake by all of us to think we've figured out how to measure ROI on search. We're in stage one."

There's an article in the NY Times (I'm not going to bother to link to it since it'll be gated soon) today that is causing a bit of a stir in the pay per click (PPC) world. In the article, a representative from Google states that in a few months advertisers will be able to see what URLs their advertising is appearing on. They will also have the ability to bid on specific sites rather that just on keywords.

Google's AdWords program has included a quality rating for each keyword and ad combination for quite some time now. What's relatively new is that they've made this score publicly visible to advertisers. Of course, the specifics for how the score is calculated is still a secret, but at least you can see now whether your score is poor, OK, or great. Anything other than great, of course, should be addressed.

Google's AdWords program offers an unprecedented training ground for aspiring pay-per-click (PPC) advertisers. It doesn't just offer a theoretical education, but rather a practical one from which you can learn lessons to become a successful search engine marketer. The problem is, many people fail to learn from their mistakes and keep on wasting their money.

You should always be testing PPC ads unless you've completely run out of ideas. The simplest form of testing is A/B split tests where you run ads head-to-head with, ideally, only one thing different between them. During the tests, you need to let the ads run long enough to make the results statistically relevant before you discard one of the ads for being a poorer performer.

There are many techniques for improving advertising campaigns particularly with robust systems such as Google's AdWords program. Some of these techniques are considered to be advanced, but I find that often they're advanced more because they're not commonly used rather than because they are necessarily effective.

New users of pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaigns likely get caught up in the click-through rate game. This little statistic often becomes the only measure of success for a given keyword. Google re-enforces this thinking by automatically deactivating keywords if they fall below a certain CTR threshold.

For those of you that have been using the Internet as an advertising medium, you know that there are various pricing models available to you. However, there are a lot of people just entering the fray and so I thought I'd take a quick look at the 3 categories that cover 99% of the advertising currently in use. The oldest is the cost-per-thousand (CPM) category. More recently, cost-per-click (CPC) stepped in to the ring and currently, in my opinion, holds the crown for being the most effective. And the newest is cost-per-action (CPA) which is still in its infancy.

I came across an interesting quote from a BusinessWeek article about the expected monthly costs of a basic paid search campaign: "Even a search-engine marketing campaign--the most basic means of getting attention--is becoming prohibitive. Ellen Siminoff, CEO of marketing firm Efficient Frontier Inc., estimates that it would cost a startup $20,000 a month now to run a worthwhile campaign, up from $5,000 two years ago. As vets of the dot-com bust might say, welcome to the real world."

In a post earlier this year, I briefly mentioned AdWords arbitrage (a.k.a. AdSense arbitrage) as part of a discussion about driving traffic to a site via the AdWords program. A lot has been written about taking advantage of Google's system, but there was a particularly interesting piece on Forbes.com.

A teaser at MarketingProfs (no link since it's a two sentence teaser) mentions a new book titled Marketing Metrics: 50+ Metrics Every Executive Should Master. The teaser goes on to suggest that 50 metrics is quite a lot to keep track of and that web marketers are likely going to want to zero in on a much smaller set of data. This got me thinking.

There are many ways to promote a new or existing web site, but one of the easiest and fastest techniques is to use Google's AdWords program. Many people consider AdWords to be of value only to those who have a product or service to sell, but that's simply not true.

Today it became apparent to me that a lot of money is being made through ringtone ads via services such as Google's AdSense and Azoogle. Yes, I'm clearly the slow one on this. I've seen blog postings here and there about ringtone ads for quite some time, but didn't pay them much attention. That is, until now.

You've got to see this check from Google for over $100,000. Is it mine? Nope. Do you think I'd be sitting here writing a blog entry if it was!? I'd be too busy doing nothing somewhere sunny.

If you've been running a web site for a substantial amount of time, you've probably already put some thought in to monetizing your traffic. You've probably even joined an ad serving program such as Google's AdSense. And if you're like me, you've probably seen your earnings plateau. During a recent business trip, I came up with 3 related ideas to break through to the next level.

WebmasterBrain.com has been running an experiment to determine which of the top search engines are the most relevant. There are likely a few unscientific aspects to the experiment that affect the fairness of the test, but as an informal examination, the results are worth looking at.