SEM Immaturity Threatens Industry Future

The search marketing industry is immature. I'm not just referring to the fact that nearly all the companies engaging in search marketing are less than 10 years old. The industry is also immature in the way "partnerships" are created and maintained.

Successful brands and successful marketers, be they manufacturers, retailers or catalog merchants, nearly always manage offline marketing by establishing long-term partnerships with their agencies, suppliers, and even media providers. These relationships don't always work out, of course, but there generally exists a mature understanding that in order for the company to thrive and grow, an investment in success requires both sides of the relationship to work hard to achieve agreed-upon goals and objectives, many of which will not be easy to deliver. Some initiatives take time to bear fruit; others rely on aggregation of experiential data, as well as learning by both organizations.

My hope is as search engine spending becomes more material and as senior management begins to fully understand the true value of attracting search visitors to their sites, an increased level of maturity will manifest itself on both the agency and marketer side of the equation. Unfortunately, strong relationships between SEMs and clients currently seem to be the exception, not the rule. Both marketers and agencies seem to display an alarming degree of immaturity in regard to what it takes to forge a successful partnership.

This malaise can be partially explained by the fact most PPC search spending continues to be managed in-house without the benefit of any kind of partnership at all, according to surveys conducted by both SEMPO and Marketing Sherpa. Of the 3,000 marketers served in Marketing Sherpa's PPC Survey (a larger sample than the SEMPO survey), "73 percent say they're using in-house staff for PPC paid search." The SEMPO study (conducted by Radar Research) broke results down by company size, using number of employees as the gauge. Sixty-three percent of companies with fewer than 500 employees manage paid placement search in-house; for companies with over 500 employees, this number drops to 39 percent.

There's hope in that there's a 24 percent difference in the in-house/agency ratio between small and large advertisers. It may be larger, more mature companies have developed a firmer understanding of what their competencies are, and can therefore better determine the correct share of search tasks that should be outsourced. But the story doesn't end there. While senior management may correctly understand the missed opportunities typically associated with in-house management of a non-core function, those at lower levels of the organization tasked with managing external relationships report they'd prefer to bring SEM (and SEO) in-house. This dichotomy in outlook between strategic thinkers and tactical implementers may explain why there's a high level of SEM provider churn, even among larger advertisers.

The SEMPO survey went on to delve into satisfaction with paid placement SEM services and found "just one-third of respondents said they were happy ("moderately" or "very") with their SEM agencies for paid placement campaigns. More than a quarter of respondents are unhappy ("moderately" or "very") Two out of five advertisers report "mixed results" when asked for their satisfaction level."

Why are so many advertisers unhappy? One could be tempted to blame SEM agencies for providing poor service. Perhaps these agencies are indeed providing service levels insufficient to help their clients compete in an increasingly-competitive marketplace. One cause of this may be that SEM agencies face the same labor shortage issues that plague the marketers attempting to staff qualified in-house search teams. The result is that many agencies simply cannot deliver the level of service required to hold onto an account.

But SEM agencies don't bear all the blame. Like serial daters or serial divorcees, marketers who report being disappointed after trying numerous SEM agencies must own up to their own mistakes, which include:

1. Poor Agency Choice Marketers rarely have a mature decision process capable of truly evaluating SEM agencies based on the underlying business needs of the organization.
2. Unreasonable Expectations Paid placement search is complex, and also hinged to the competitive set and how rational or aggressive the competitors are in the auction marketplace. Battles waged in this environment are both offensive and defensive. "Standing still" may require considerable effort and expertise to defend against competitors seeking to capture market share, ROI, profit, or other success metrics. Unless marketers approach this environment with a thorough understanding of its peculiar features, the result will be disappointment and SEM agency churn.
3. Unwillingness to Pay an Equitable Price Success in paid placement search may take more work that a standard discounted fee structure will support. Sure, marketers naturally seek to keep these fees low, and many agencies go out of their way to secure new businesses by meeting such demands. But low fee structures may preclude the partnership from evolving because they prevent the SEM agency from supporting the strategic needs of the client.
4. "Dating Mentality" and a Short-Term Horizon Depending on the state of an existing campaign, it may take time to lay the foundation of change to extract maximum value from it. Doing this requires a longer-term horizon than many in the industry currently use when evaluating campaign performance. In addition, changing SEMs or moving SEM responsibilities from in-house to an outsourced basis is a process that must be carefully managed.
5. Unwillingness to Communicate The time for marketers and agencies to communicate is when things aren't going well. When marketers give their agencies "the silent treatment" while waiting out the terms of their contracts, valuable opportunities are lost on both sides of the equation.

I hope and expect that as the SEM industry matures, agencies and advertisers will take a deep breath and approach their relationships as partnerships. It may take some healing time to bring this situation about. Many marketers I speak with tell me they consider themselves "burned" by their prior SEM agencies. Relationships between marketers and agencies are like personal relationships: bad experiences and bad memories can poison them and limit one's chances of finding a successful new relationship. But with maturity, one can see good relationships can provide fulfillment, adding up to a sum greater than the constituent parts.

It's taken decades for this level of maturity to evolve in other industries, and paid placement is only now finishing its first 10 years. Much healthier, more productive relationships lie ahead.

Google vs. Microsoft: Beyond PPC

Today, we'll look at the broader interactive marketing ecosystem, the competition between Google and Microsoft, and how this competition may affect the future of targeted PPC (define) (and CPM (define) or CPA (define)) advertising. Someday soon, the SERP (define) will be the smallest part of your digitally targeted media buy. That's why the broader battle between Microsoft and Google matters.

Microsoft still leads in productivity software for consumers and information workers, as well as in desktop operating systems. Recently, there's been lots of buzz in the press about Google and its foray into Google Apps, which provides free Web-based apps (they eventually may be ad supported) that compete with the Microsoft Office suite.

While Google's applications are usable, they won't be a significant threat to Microsoft unless Google also starts delivering the functionality in downloadable client-side software, due to the limitations of SAAS (define).

However, Google could decide to emulate the alternative desktop office suite providers, such as Corel, with its Office Suite, or private-label a free version of the open-source OpenOffice. Then it would indeed be going head-to-head with Microsoft's software-plus-services strategy, which envisions a world of software where you can be equally productive running applications and accessing data on desktop software or via Web services and the "cloud" (meaning the Internet).

The software-plus-services program is application and file interoperability and a set of applications that are agnostic as to whether you're working on your desktop or via a Web browser. The name, though, is an unfortunate selection because many sophisticated techies don't assume it describes Web services but professional services. This holds true even within the Microsoft partner community, which I had a chance to interact with at a recent Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC). Even some Microsoft employees don't seem to know what the Web services are and are therefore confused as well.

To minimize this confusion, Microsoft should consider coining -- and therefore owning -- a completely new phrase for applications delivered seamlessly, locally, and across networks while being device-agnostic (i.e., working seamlessly with PC, mobile, game console, and set-top box platforms). Trademark and rights issues aside (money solves these), I suggest the following terms (listed in order of personal preference) to communicate Microsoft's flexible vision of the future, along with their current trademark/domain owners:

* Anyware (owned by Secuware in Madrid)

* Flexware (unused domain; the company may be dead)

* Flexiware (owned by a domain speculator)

Microsoft won't likely choose a clearer descriptor to illustrate this evolution in software to a multidevice, multilocation paradigm but will instead spend billions in media to educate the masses and its partners about software plus services.

I found WPC to be quite instructive. It reminded me that while I might be considered geeky in the media world, there's a whole other world of technologists that keep the computers humming, the software stable, and the data flowing behind the scenes in every kind of business you can imagine. Those Microsoft partners help determine what business data is available within their client organizations and how it's stored.

My key takeaway from the conference was there's a massive shift in the way consumers interact with software, content, entertainment, and information, as well as how they communicate with each other. In this new ecosystem, data are the key that enables marketers to target consumers as they use their many devices. With data comes complexity, and success in the marketing arena will be earned by those who best manage complexity and are able to focus on proper execution over the next several years.

Thomas Edison once said, "Vision without execution is hallucination." Microsoft COO Kevin Turner modified this slightly: "Strategy without execution is hallucination" (and not for the first time). This reminder of what might seem obvious is very relevant to search engine marketers, as well as to the portals. There are lots of great ideas, tactics, and strategies out there, but prioritizing the ones that make a difference then executing them is critical for success.

Share of Voice in Search

Advertisers familiar with offline advertising metrics will now find a recognizable metric available in their Google AdWords interface: a share of voice (SOV) proxy called impression share (IS).

According to Google, SOV is "a relative portion of inventory available to a single advertiser within a defined market sector over a specified time period." The search giant defines "inventory" as the impression inventory available against your campaign based on your keyword and campaign settings. In addition to IS, Google has also released two related metrics: Lost IS (Rank) and Lost IS (Budget).

You won't find the new metrics in AdWords' campaign management section at either the ad-group or campaign level, but under the Reporting tab. To see IS data:

1. Select a "Campaign Performance" report.

2. Within the "Advanced Settings" area, select "Add or Remove Columns."

3. Select "Impression Share (IS)," "Lost IS (Rank)," or "Lost IS (Budget)."

SOV's History

SOV has long been used in offline advertising. It was typically calculated as a percentage reflecting your total ad spend against your competitors' total ad spend. A more accurate measure of SOV in offline advertising would be to base the share calculation on the share of ad impressions against the target audience. Alas, this number was far more difficult to calculate, so percentage of total spending within your competitive set became the standard.

No one in the mainstream agency world ever had a satisfactory answer as to why one wouldn't adjust for efficiency. After all, if you were twice as efficient in buying media, your true SOV would be twice that of your competitive set when calculated using media spending. This is an important point to remember when using IS and the other new metrics provided by Google.

Using Google's New Metrics

In Google's case, the IS and lost IS metrics are useful in ways similar to the offline SOV. However, there are limitations in how you might use this data, not the least of which is the dramatic difference in the value of PPC (define) ad impressions within a SERP (define) based on position.

Common sense, CTR (define) data, and the eye-tracking study we did with Enquiro a couple years back all prove top center positions are far more likely to be noticed by searchers, making this impression dramatically more valuable. This goes back to that question to my supervisors years ago: why don't we adjust for efficiency in SOV?

Yet the data can be very useful in identifying poor campaign settings that may be causing low-value impressions while missing more valuable impressions (and clicks). If you have plenty of budget to spare, don't really care about efficiency, and have a high IS, congratulations. You're in the minority. Most advertisers are stretching their limited budgets as far as possible.

If your impression share is low, consider weeding out less valuable or (even better) less relevant impressions from your campaign. These search impressions could be tuned out by dayparting, ad scheduling (days of the week), geotargeting, adjusting match types, or keyword tuning. By eliminating impressions from the bottom (based on click profitability or relevance), you raise your IS without actually spending any more.

A side benefit may be impressions lost due to a low AdRank (based on Quality Score times bid) improve due to enhanced relevance. Google specifically identifies which impressions were lost due to low rank and which were lost due to campaign budget caps. If the lost impressions were due to a poor AdRank, raising the bid would help, but it's always cheaper to look for Quality Score improvements. Of course, you must take into account the value of the time spent tuning the campaign for improved Quality Score, but the benefits of an improved Quality Score are cumulative for as long as any campaign is active. This can be quite significant on high-volume campaigns.

More data is always better, so long as the data are actionable. When looking at Google's new SOV metrics, start on the most material sections of your campaign first and experiment with tuning there, where it matters most. The ad groups in your campaign's tail may be less significant in the overall picture and can probably wait. Those tail ad groups may also be less competitive, meaning your SOV is already higher.

My team and I have been using and will continue to use SOV and share of clicks data we have in a proprietary system that uses both client and comScore data. It's nice to see the engines are finding ways to make this data available as well.

Presidential Primary Underdogs Send E-mail, Too

The best-known presidential candidates -- Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, Barack Obama and John McCain among them -- get most of the attention. But the fact is those who haven't made it to the top of the polls, as well as the popular yet unofficial candidates, are still campaigning. And, of course, they're sending out e-mail to supporters and campaign watchers.

With help from e-mail tracking firm Email Data Source, ClickZ News took a look at some of the Republican and Democratic primary candidate underdogs and the e-mails they've sent since the beginning of the primary campaign cycle this spring. Themes common with the more popular campaigns were evident among the lesser-knowns. They, too, had links to donate, featured or linked to video of recent appearances or events, and petitioned supporters to get their friends involved with their campaigns.

One interesting thing to note: Campaigns for Republican candidates or would-be right-leaning candidates sent out far fewer messages than their Democratic counterparts. For instance, former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson and Texas Congressman Ron Paul's campaigns sent just two e-mails this year, while ex-U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich put out six e-mails to registrants of his Newt.org site. Neither Thompson nor Gingrich have declared themselves officially as primary candidates; however, much speculation abounds about each, particularly Thompson, a star of NBC's "Law & Order."

The underdog Dems on the other hand have been prolific in the e-mail arena. Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd sent 19 messages since April, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson's campaign distributed 22 e-mails in that time, and Delaware Senator Joe Biden's campaign sent 32 e-mails to campaign observers since May of this year.

Each campaign, like the more prominent candidate efforts, had its own individual approach. Some jammed e-mails with a variety of issue-based ideas and commentary, and others took a more bare bones tack. Perhaps the two polar opposites in the style category were Congressman Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich, both fringe Republicans. Paul's spare messages mimicked press releases; they were nearly all text, and stuck mainly with messages of momentum building. Gingrich's, on the other hand, featured lots of images, and read like dense diatribes on multiple political issues while keeping with the overriding theme of government bureaucracy.

Thompson, yet to officially throw his hat in the ring, wrote of testing the campaign waters. The would-be candidate kept with his typical casual approach, even making mention of baseball and football. Senator Dodd promoted the Democratic CNN/YouTube debate and his participation in the annual liberal blogger grassroots YearlyKos convention. Governor Richardson stuck to issues like troop redeployment in Iraq and global warming. Meanwhile, though issues were a regular focus for Senator Biden, the most recent messages from the perennial Sunday morning political talk show guest featured media alerts touting upcoming TV appearances.

Fashion Industry Gets a Whiff of Web 2.0 Marketing

The apparel industry has long been a holdout to online advertising as other categories commit ever more dollars to the medium. Now that may be about to change, as several agencies and digital properties have begun courting fashion marketers with digital ad offerings.

A new division of Ketchum, a unit of Omnicom Group, is ramping up a service called Fashion Interactive 2.0. The new initiative will deploy brand evangelism, social networking, word-of-mouth, blogging, podcasts, and mobile communications to reach consumers, and -- the company promises -- deliver measured ROI to marketers. Other current efforts by "paper doll" avatar site Stardoll and, yes, a Second Life agency, aim to snare the attention of fashion brands.

Jeff Danzer, VP and group manager at Ketchum, explained that Fashion Interactive 2.0 will focus on "how to keep a brand fresh in the eyes of consumers, going out where they live and where they play." Without sharing many details, he said the agency's formula includes outreach to brand evangelists, content creators and consumers who frequent social shopping sites like This Next and Kaboodle, which was just acquired by Hearst. The agency is currently in talks with apparel companies, but has not identified any clients yet.

Ketchum is better known for its PR work on behalf of a roster of tech clients than it is for building programs around clothing brands. Fashion Interactive 2.0 practice head Danzer's professional background includes the development of the brand and marketing strategy behind the men's underwear brand 2(x)ist, and the designof iBoxer, a line of men's underwear with a pocket for an iPod. When those projects earned him the nickname "underwear guru," Danzer sought to apply his expertise more broadly to the apparel category, and to interactive campaign development.

Though it's early, that may prove a wise choice. Earlier this week the founder and CEO of Kaboodle, Manish Chandra, told ClickZ News that the fashion category is now the growth leader on e-commerce and comparison shopping sites.

Virtual communities in particular appear ripe for fashion marketing. Clothing manufacturers like American Apparel have created storefronts in Second Life, and H&M is providing its clothing collections to EA's "The Sims 2" though the expansion pack "The Sims 2 H&M Fashion Stuff."

And this week, Stardoll, a virtual community for teen and tween girls, opened StarPlaza, an interactive galleria where girls can spend "Stardollars" to outfit their avatars, called MeDolls, with real-world fashion brands. Stardoll already has celebrity boutiques with promotional merchandise from Hilary Duff, Avril Lavigne, and Swedish pop singer Darin.

Additionally, Second Life-centric marketing firm Dynamedia is seeking brands to help develop what he calls VirtuReal, a shopping mall in Second Life where Founder and President Antonio Collier says visitors will be able to shop for real-world products.

Top 10 Search Terms in 10 Categories, July 2007

A look at what terms get the top searches on the Web in 10 categories. The data are provided by Hitwise.

Top 10 Search Terms by Category, Four Weeks Ending June 30, 2007 (%)
IT and Internet Automotive Manufacturers
Search Term Search Volume Search Term Search Volume
paypal 5.17 toyota 2.24
paypal.com 1.20 nissan 2.02
people search 0.69 honda 1.99
www.paypal.com 0.59 ford 1.57
experian 0.56 harley davidson 1.00
mapquest.com 0.51 dodge 0.95
pay pal 0.47 suzuki 0.93
ebay 0.44 chevrolet 0.90
mapquest 0.38 mazda 0.77
intelius 0.34 hyundai 0.77
Movies Internet Advertising
Search Term Search Volume Search Term Search Volume
imdb 1.29 money maker group 0.52
netflix 1.09 unclaimed money 0.40
harry potter 1.09 work at home 0.38
transformers 0.80 smcorp.com 0.37
movies 0.74 free banner advertising 0.37
blockbuster 0.73 adwords 0.36
fandango 0.65 famous quotes 0.32
cinemark 0.33 www.smcorp.com 0.27
regal cinemas 0.32 nudist 0.25
movie times 0.31 reining horses 0.23
Food and Beverage Brands and Manufacturers Pharmaceutical and Medical Products
Search Term Search Volume Search Term Search Volume
pizza hut 2.62 alli 1.55
starbucks 1.09 chantix 0.54
mcdonalds 1.00 lexapro 0.46
transformyoursummer.com 0.96 myalli.com 0.46
candystand 0.78 viagra 0.42
subway 0.74 phentermine 0.36
dominos pizza 0.64 cymbalta 0.33
burger king 0.52 lyrica 0.30
candystand.com 0.51 herpes 0.28
dairy queen 0.50 pfizer 0.27
Blogs and Personal Web Sites Broadcast Media
Search Term Search Volume Search Term Search Volume
myspace 0.85 cnn 2.11
perez hilton 0.71 fox news 1.15
xanga 0.42 msnbc 1.09
yahoo 360 0.41 cnn.com 0.88
360 0.31 ksl.com 0.48
livejournal 0.25 foxnews 0.47
rosie 0.25 bbc news 0.45
myspace.com 0.23 www.cnn.com 0.44
area codes 0.19 news 0.40
yahoo360 0.18 abc news 0.40
Shopping Rewards and
Directories Travel Destinations and Accommodations
Search Term Search Volume Search Term Search Volume
mycokerewards.com 0.32 hotels.com 0.58
consumer reports 0.30 holiday inn 0.27
coupons 0.16 hotels 0.26
free stuff 0.12 six flags 0.22
free samples 0.12 disneyland 0.21
pch.com 0.12 motel 6 0.20
my coke rewards 0.11 cedar point 0.18
mycokerewards 0.11 disney world 0.16
www.pch.com 0.11 days inn 0.15
www.mycokerewards.com 0.09 holiday inn express 0.15
Hitwise logo
View: Top 10 Search Terms by Category, Four Weeks Ending May 26, 2007

Hitwise monitors how more than 25 million Internet users interact with over 500,000 Web sites across 160 industry categories. It collects Internet usage information through a combination of ISP data partnerships and opt-in panels. Data are collected in accordance with local and international privacy legislation and are audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers

Delta Faucet Directs E-Mail Flow

Getting close to the customer is most marketers' goal.

But for many business-to-business (B2B) marketers, there's often a go-between involved: a distributor, reseller, or advisor who has the closer relationship with the client. This can create an e-marketing challenge since the e-mail's sender line is so important to getting e-mail open.

Should the e-mail come from the larger company with a well-recognized global brand or the intermediary who's actually in touch with the client?

Delta Faucet solved this conundrum by creating what e-mail marketing manager, Kim Biggerstaff, calls "on your behalf" e-mail.

Delta doesn't have a direct sales force. Instead, it has a group of sales managers who work with independent sales agencies who act as manufacturer's reps. These sales agents call on wholesale plumbers, builders, architects, designers, and other wholesalers in their geographic region.

Since the sales agent actually call on clients, Biggerstaff decided the e-mail messages should be sent by them, not Delta.

To preserve the Delta branding and ensure the messages are on strategy, Biggerstaff creates the e-mail messages herself with the help of her agency, Ohio-based Hanson Inc. and her e-mail service provider, ExactTarget.

She works on creating a "really beautiful e-mail that is very much on brand, on strategy" and locks in all the main components, except for an area of personalization for the sales agent. Here's a typical "on your behalf" e-mail.

The sales agencies choose the e-mail messages they want to send out, import their own list of contacts from their local market, then add a custom paragraph or signature. The e-mail messages are sent out under their own names, such as marketing@salesagency.com. The product branding is accomplished in the subject line.

Any responses go directly back to the sales agency itself for follow up. However, Biggerstaff is able to track open and click-through rates, which are both above industry averages, and beyond the results Delta usually achieves. The open rates are one and a half times the industry average, and the CTRs (define) are three times the industry average.

To find out whether the e-mail messages generated revenue, Biggerstaff had to rely on anecdotal feedback from the sales agencies, which was more difficult to pin down.

But the feedback she did receive suggests a very successful campaign. One sales agency reported an e-mail opened the door to a new client and generated a six-figure sale. Two other sales agencies wrote orders from new clients who had never bought Delta products before. In addition, Biggerstaff received many calls from sales agencies that told her they loved the e-mail campaign.

The "on your behalf" e-mail messages were originally sent as a test and proved beyond a doubt to Biggerstaff that her hunch was correct. Customers would rather hear from a sales agent they know on a local level rather than a global manufacturer.

In essence, the message seems to be: "Think globally, sell locally."

Compare and Contrast: SEM and SEO

Marketers and the media prefer simplicity. Search engine marketing (SEM) is not, of course, simple. If SEM and SEO (define) were simple, traditional marketing agencies could slot SEM into media plans with little thought or effort. SEO consulting wouldn't differ from site design.

Yet SEO and SEM have spawned a multimillion dollar industry, even a trade organization, SEMPO. In their quest to simplify SEM, many members of the media and company executives prefer to look at its challenges as a single problem. In fact, a host of variables influence an SEM campaign's success or failure.

One simplification marketers, the press, analysts, and even some agencies succumb to in an attempt is to drop organic SEO and pay-per-click (PPC) SEM into the same bucket. So let me clarify.

Poor SEO is primarily a problem of several digital hurdles that inadvertently block search engine spiders from doing their job. Spiders are on a mission to:

* Find quality content.

* Identify that content and separate it from extraneous information.

* Grade the content for clarity.

* Extract the essence of a site's content on a page-by-page basis.

* Grade the content for source reputation.

* Understand the content's context in respect to the Internet as a whole (assign communities or explore relationships between content and sites).

* Catalog the content's URL.

* Keep the content cache fresh.

Generally, 90 percent of SEO relates to removing obstacles to the search engines finding and understanding the content's essence. Having an under-optimized Web site is like having a broken window; it can be fixed in a reasonable and finite length of time.

Realistically, if content isn't relevant you can't achieve long-term visibility in organic SERPs (define). Sure, black-hat SEO techniques may work for a while. But, a search engine's mission is to deliver the most relevant results to searchers. You need a plan to remove all obstacles to an engine finding and grading content while understanding its essence.

Once a site is search engine friendly, 90 percent of the site-side SEO work is done. True reputation management, online PR, and content freshness based on seasonal search behavior, as well as trend adjustments, are ongoing processes that will enhance a search engine friendly site.

Paid SEM: High Maintenance

Paid SEM is very high maintenance, not a set-it-and-forget-it business. Skill sets required for planning and executing paid search campaign management are different from those required for SEO, particularly early-stage SEO, where problem areas are identified and roadblocks to search engine friendliness removed. The technology needed to maintain excellence in paid search are also very different from those required in organic SEO.

Commonalities

What, then, are the commonalities between managing and optimizing for both organic and PPC search? They're primarily linguistic, analytic, and behavioral in nature. They include understanding:

* Keyword research and cross-utilization of keyword data for SEM and ongoing SEO

* Buying-cycle factors and how they relate to keywords and sites

* Visitor behavior within sites for organic and paid traffic, particularly conversion behavior

* Seasonal keyword search factors

* Linguistic analysis of query strings

* Conversion factor analysis

The above relate to improved user experience through understanding visitor needs as expressed by search queries.

Paid search's true differentiator is requiring a combination of immediate and reactive action. Immediate action is often based on data that are available for analysis on a real-time basis, such as bidding activity. With our industry's evolution beyond pure search, the number of variables under a marketer's control is growing. These include landing pages, creative presentation and offers, and additional factors that are different for every business, depending on what specifically drives optimal user experience.

Over the next year, I predict continued competition within paid placement search will result in a whole new generation of strategies and tactics. They'll take best practices in paid search further away from organic search.

Organic search is simultaneously centered around both the spider and the visitor, with a preference given to the spider (a non-search-friendly site means no visitors). Paid search is all about maximizing efficiency by applying direct marketing principles. Each variable is considered and tested.

What are the chances the same page built for Google, Yahoo, and MSN spiders is the absolute best page for a paid-search landing page? Pretty slim. Spiders and humans have different needs, wants, and desires. Likely areas of divergence include copy length, format, flow, and tone; navigational diversity and priority; and graphic richness.

Organic and PPC search teams will undoubtedly work together. In smaller companies, they'll be the same person, in the same way marketing directors in smaller companies handle PR, marketing, advertising, and promotion. In larger companies, where both types of search are mission-critical, specialized professionals will be hired, as either an outside agency or in-house staff.

Jupiter Research (a Jupitermedia Corp. division) data seem to validate part of the trend toward outsourcing mission-critical paid search. ClickZ News reported on the recent Search Engine Marketing Agency Constellation report. Analyst Nate Elliot confirms this trend toward professional agencies managing larger spends: "Agencies account for 51 percent of the total spending on paid search -- a significant increase over the past 18 months."

Will the same agencies that manage PPC budgets also assist in organic SEO efforts, or will the specialties diverge due to SEO's front-heavy workload requirements? Time will tell.

25 Tips for Marketing Your Blog

With so many blogs being created every day, it’s a mystery to many bloggers how to make their blog stand out. There are many types of blogs or purposes for blogs and a certain number of tactics are applicable to just about all of them.

Some companies choose to hire a blog consultant, but others like to try things internally. For those “DIY” companies and individuals interested in practical tips for marketing and optimizing a business blog, try out the following list of blog marketing and optimization tips:

1. Decide on a stand alone domain name www.myblog.com or directory of existing site www.mysite.com/blog. Sub domain is also an option blog.mysite.com. Avoid hosted services that do not allow you to use your own domain name!
2. Obtain and install customizable blog software - WordPress and Moveable Type are my favorites.
3. Customize blog look and feel templates - aka design.
4. Research keywords and develop a glossary - Keyword Discovery, WordTracker, SitePoint, SEOBook Keyword Research.
5. Optimize the blog:
* Template optimization - RSS subscription options, social bookmark links, HTML code, Unique title tags, URLs, Sitemap
* Add helper plugins specific to WordPress or MT
* Create keyword rich categories (reference your keyword glossary)
6. Enable automatic trackback and ping functionality.
7. Create Feedburner Pro account and enable feed tracking.
8. Setup a Google account for Sitemap, validate and prep for future submission.
9. Identify authoritative blogs, web sites and hubs for outbound resource links and blogroll.
10. Format archived posts, related posts.
11. Enable statistics for tracking - Google Analytics, ClickTracks.
12. Submit RSS feed and Blog URL to prominent RSS and Blog directories / search engines.
13. Engage in an ongoing link building campaign.
14. If podcast or video content are available, submit to Podcast and Vlog directories.
15. Submit blog url to paid directories with categories for blogs - Yahoo, BOTW, bCentral, WOW, JoeAnt.
16. Optimize and distribute a press release announcing blog.
17. Request feedback or reviews of your blog in relevant forums, discussion threads. If you have a resourceful post that will help others, point to it.
18. Research and comment on relevant industry related blogs and blogs with significant centers of influence.
19. Post regularly. If it’s a news oriented blog, 3-5 times per day. If it’s an authoritative blog, 3-5 times per week, but each post must be unique and high value.
20. Monitor inbound links, traffic, comments and mentions of your blog - Google Alerts, Technorati, Blogpulse, Yahoo News, Ask Blogs and Feeds.
21. Always respond to comments on your blog and when you detect a mention of your blog on another blog, thank that blogger in the comments of the post.
22. Make contact with related bloggers on AND offline if possible.
23. When making blog posts always cite the source with a link and don’t be afraid to mention popular bloggers by name. Use keywords in the blog post title, in the body of the post and use anchor text when you link to previous posts you’ve made.
24. Use social networking services, forums and discussion threads to connect with other bloggers. If they like your stuff, they will link to you.
25. Remember when web sites were a new concept and the sage advice to print your web address everywhere you print your phone number? The same advice applies for your blog.
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26. If your blog’s goal is to promote you as an authority, interview other prominent bloggers in your industry. Your own credibility will improve by association.
27. Build out your online networks through services such as MyBlogLog, Twitter and Facebook and leverage them to promote particularly useful content on your blog.
28. Once your blog has 1000 or more subscribers, show your Feedburner badge
29. Host images with Flickr making sure to include an anchor text link in the image description back to the post where the image is used.
30. Use your blog to gain press/media credentials at relevant industry conferences and use the event to create content, connections and increase your knowledge.

Marketing 1.0 Skill Sets Are Not Sufficient in a Web 2.0 World

Marketing 1.0 Skill Sets Are Not Sufficient in a Web 2.0 World
The phrase Web 2.0 has become popular lately. If you’re not familiar with the term (and like a lot of internet-related terms, its definition is not completely agreed upon), it describes the web’s second generation, which has more community applications, such as social networking sites, wikis, message boards, blogs, etc.

Web 2.0 means that users have a voice and increased expectations for commercial websites and communications with brands online have increased. It also means that online marketing has become incredibly more complex than the days when you could get by with throwing up your brochures and a contact us page and wait to see what happened. There are significantly greater opportunities for business as well as significantly greater complexity for those who manage online marketing. Of course, this means that the skill sets necessary to effectively manage web 2.0 must similarly evolve.

However, historically, companies have staffed their internet marketing department with personnel that lacks marketing experience, when, in fact, internet marketing is easily the most complex marketing channel to manage today. Very candidly, again and again, I’ve seen and learned from peers with similar experience that the reason for inadequate skill sets in the online marketing department is often rooted in senior marketing executives not being comfortable or familiar with online marketing. Consequently, they often view online marketing as an area to hire managers with strong technology skills, not necessarily strong marketing skills. My twenty two years of marketing and advertising and twelve years of managing online marketing tell me that companies should be looking for managers with very strong marketing and communications skills who are technology savvy. So, what is the result of online marketing departments staffed with inexperienced marketers? Check recent studies on marketing effectiveness, integration in the marketing mix and ability for online marketing to measure effectiveness from the CMO Council, Jupiter and others from the past several years. Although online marketing departments can provide a lot of web operational metrics, they rarely provide measures that are meaningful to the business. (Hint to CMOs: If you’re staff is providing you with low level web operational measures such as visitors, click-throughs and page views, you have a problem – you should be seeing measures meaning to the business objectives and ROI. Additional deficiencies include areas such as marketing mix integration, planning, setting quantitative objectives, properly testing, effectively leveraging media vehicles, etc. -- the list goes on.)

Web 2.0 not only means that marketing and metrics experience is even more critical than in the past, it also means that in-depth experience with communications is vital. Web 2.0 means that your targets have a voice – whether it’s on your turf (AKA website) or somewhere else. Which means that online marketing staff should be managing communications that are two way in nature. Think message board, blogs – it doesn’t matter if your company has launched one of these vehicles or if your targets use them somewhere else; if you’re not at least monitoring these vehicles and leveraging the information in your marketing -- plain and simple -- you’re not properly managing your brand.

All of this makes internet marketing incredibly more complex than it was a decade ago. It is no longer about throwing up brochures and watching what happens. I’m not even persuaded it is fair to call that interactive marketing, when that is about as interactive as someone reading a newspaper or watching a television show on their couch -- that's observing. Today’s web enables significantly greater interactivity. Internet users can rate things, provide their opinion to the community or brand, ask for help or give help to others, share their experiences with a brand – there are almost endless possibilities. However, companies still often manage this area with skills sets that fit more with Web 1.0.

I’ve put together a list of some of the skill sets necessary to manage online marketing in today’s environment:

- Advanced communications skills.
Merely understanding and communicating the value proposition isn’t sufficient. The web isn’t like one-way communications sent out to the public such as advertising or press releases, online marketers must be fluent in two-way communications with the public and know how to deal effectively with harsh critics. This is probably the most difficult skill set to expect from candidates, as this area is so new. Consequently, strong corporate communications experience is imperative.

- Strong knowledge of branding and a solid understanding of design, usability and user experience.
Visitors to your website, recipients of your emails, readers of your corporate blogs are all experiencing your brand. Your website being hard to use and forms not working might represent that your company is not customer-focused and concerned with ease of use in your products to her.
- Strong knowledge of other elements of the marketing mix.
Great online marketing rarely exists in a silo. It is integrated into everything else your company is doing, from PR to word of mouth marketing to traditional advertising to packaging to support. In order to be integrated, great online marketing requires integrated planning and, ideally (but rarely, in practice), integrated metrics. This means that online marketing managers must have a solid understanding of how these other elements work in order to best integrate.

- Strong marketing, segmentation and targeting skills.
Effective online marketing requires a strong foundation in marketing and direct marketing fundamentals (yes, I believe a foundation in direct marketing is very beneficial for online marketing, even if you're not doing direct selling), segmenting audiences and effectively targeting messages.

- Strong understanding of technology/information technology.
Managing online marketing requires a strong knowledge and comfort with technology to understand how things work and what is possible. It means working closely with the IT department, programmers, coders, designers, illustrators, analysts, etc. Even more, because internet technologies and usage is regularly evolving, it requires a manager to regularly stay up on technology. However, the technical aspect of managing online marketing shouldn’t define the online marketing position, marketing skills should.

- Strong analytical/data skills.
Online marketing, even for brands that do not sell direct (that is, through channel partners), requires constant analysis of data that indicates what users do. Database marketing experience is critical.

- Strong knowledge and experience with research and marketing testing techniques.
I’ve often thought that a good place to find great online marketers is from the direct mail marketing world, as these marketers are often experts with testing, complex metrics and database marketing. Doing online marketing campaigns at a best practice level requires testing and an effective online marketing manager must have a strong knowledge of testing techniques, and research in general to know when to conduct research and how to leverage the information learned from research.

Managing online marketing well requires a strong grasp of internet technologies, but it requires an even stronger grasp of marketing management. Perhaps CMOs are only beginning to realize this.

Americans Continue to Be Loyal to National Brands

Americans Continue to Be Loyal to National Brands

According to a recent report for the Grocery Manufacturers of America (GMA) by Roper Starch Worldwide shows that brands continue to dominate the shelves of most Americans' pantries, accounting for 80% of total food, drug, and mass merchandisers' sales. And examining the shopping habits and demographic makeup of consumers who buy national brands may provide new insights for brand marketers looking to retain their share of consumer dollars.

According to the report, which explores what types of consumers buy national brands, nearly half of Americans (46%) are "National Brand Loyalists." Defined as consumers who usually buy national brands when making a food or beverage and health and beauty care purchase, National Brand Loyalists are the "ultimate consumer," according to the report, and 44% say "today is a good time to buy." As a group, these shoppers are:

Better off economically. Their median household income of $41,700 is 35% higher than that of their store brand-buying counterparts.
College educated. One in four (27%) have at least a bachelor's degree (11 points higher than store brand buyers), and 40% hold executive/professional or "white collar" positions (15 points higher than store brand buyers).
Married and in two-career households. 59% (versus 54% of store brand buyers) are married; a third of this group are in marriages where both partners work.
Homeowners. 68% (vs. 49% for store brand buyers) own homes.
Personal computer users. Half of all National Brand Loyalists own a PC or laptop (11 points higher than PC ownership for store brand buyers) and more than a third (37%) have accessed the Internet from home during the past month (10 points higher than store brand buyers).
"Clearly national brands are still king in consumers' eyes," said GMA president and CEO C. Manly Molpus. "Our partnership with Roper Starch on this report provides a wealth of revealing facts about today's brand loyal consumer, who is looking for a level of quality, innovation, and value that only brands consistently deliver."

Beyond demographics, "National Brand Buyers" also tend to recommend brands they use. The report finds that an impressive 64% of National Brand Loyalists have recommended a restaurant to others in the past year, 16 points higher than Store Brand Buyers. This group is also more likely to publicize movies, television shows, cars, magazines, and other products and services they like.

How do consumers choose the products they'll bring home? The report shows that consumers are most likely to feel brand loyalty to brands that differentiate themselves from the other brands within a specific category. The Roper Starch research shows 47% of ice cream consumers say some brands are better, up five points from 1997; likewise, 37% of toothpaste consumers, up two points, and 31% of household cleaner purchasers, up three points, feel the same way. "The common thread in these categories is the fact that marketers have offered innovative or distinctive products," the report says, which adds that improving products with anti-bacterial ingredients, fragrance varieties, cavity fighters, new flavors, and other "benefit bundles" may be the key to winning consumer brand loyalty.

Chronicling the evolution of brands through the decades, the report reveals the resurgence of "power brands" in the mid-to-late 1990s, where brand loyalty and brand differentiation rebounded. From toothpaste (62%, up five points) and deodorant (60%, up seven points), to orange juice (44%, up eight points) and cold cereal (31%, up seven points), more Americans in 1997 than in 1995 had "one favorite brand" of a host of products.

With the economy soaring in the past several years, consumers in 2000 are now more apt to experiment, shopping around a "considered set" of brands and choosing among two or three. In some categories, such as toilet paper, facial tissues, and furniture wax/polish, consumers are heavily gravitating toward brands, with both "one favorite" or "two or three" favorite brands growing. While the economic downturn of the early nineties trained consumers to be savvy, price-conscious shoppers, they're also more likely to try a new product and buy something else if they don't like it, without breaking the bank.

"Today's National Brand Loyalists are the ultimate consumers," said Edward Keller, president and COO, Roper Starch Worldwide. "By understanding what motivates these consumers to buy national brands, brand marketers are in a much stronger position to attract new customers and retain the trust of their most loyal buyers."

Accurate Website Visitor Measurement Crippled by Cookie Blocking and Deletion, JupiterResearch Finds

Accurate Website Visitor Measurement Crippled by Cookie Blocking and Deletion, JupiterResearch Finds

According to JupiterResearch's recently released report, "Measuring Unique Visitors: Addressing the Dramatic Decline in the Accuracy of Cookie-Based Measurement," in 2004 58% of online users have deleted "cookies", which are small files often deposited on their computers by Web sites they visit. Tracking cookies is a principal means Web site operators use to track visitors, personalize their sites, and account for the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and Web site enhancements. If users delete cookies, accurate long-term measurement of consumer behavior on the site is severely compromised. If users block cookies, accurate short-term measurement is compromised, relegating increasing numbers of Web visitors to "anonymous" status.

The report found that as many as 39% of online users may be deleting cookies from their primary computer monthly, undermining the usefulness of cookie-based measurement and leaving many site operators flying blind. "Given the number of sites and applications that depend heavily on cookies for accuracy and functionality, the lack of this data represents significant risk for many companies," says Eric T. Peterson, Analyst at JupiterResearch. "Because personalization, tracking and targeting solutions require cookies to identify Web visitors over multiple sessions, the accuracy of these solutions has become highly suspect, especially over longer periods of time," added Peterson.

Privacy and security concerns on the part of online users are responsible for the cookie-deletion behavior that JupiterResearch has found. According to a recent consumer survey cited in the report, 52% of online users indicate a strong interest in stories and articles about Internet security and privacy, while 38% of online users believe that cookies are an invasion of their security and privacy online and 44% of online users believe that deleting or blocking cookies will protect them.

The JupiterResearch report provides advice to site operators for how to cope with the decline in accuracy of visitor measurement and predicts that Web analytics vendors will adapt their tools in the face of a consumer landscape that makes established measurement practices unreliable.

Disintegrated Marketing...

Disintegrated Marketing...
After more than a decade experience with the commercial web, you’d think major marketers would consider the web more than an afterthought.

However, evidence reveals many consumer marketers still can’t distinguish between a website, an ad or a brochure. While retailers like Wal-Mart, Lowes, Nordstrom and Circuit City get it, there are others that still seem confused.

When clothing retailer Gap ran its latest very cool television commercials and turned its website into a single page that read “Under Construction” for the past couple weeks (same thing with OldNavy.com, which shares the same corporate parent), I was pretty amazed.

Where’s the planning? What about integrated marketing?

You have to wonder if Gap would do the same with its retail stores. As of this writing, OldNavy.com still features the words “Under Construction.” All that's missing is the little animation of the construction worker shoveling

Marketing: The Art vs. Science Debate

Marketing: The Art vs. Science Debate
I am amazed at how often we marketers debate over whether marketing is art or science.

I was recently at a marketing association fund raising event where a speaker proclaimed that marketers are true artists, as if being artists validates our work. I thought, hmmm...Maybe that's part of the reason why CEOs and other departments think of marketers as lacking process and accountability, because we can excuse those shortcomings as "art" -- just as branding has been far too often used as a black box to explain away campaigns and programs that lack accountability or perform poorly.

Consider an example that can appear more art then science. The marketing of Apple's iPod. It features beautiful design, beautiful packaging, a slick user experience. Hold an iPod in your hand. The product certainly delivers on some very slick, artsy, advertising that promises cool.

But should Apple manage it's very artsy advertising as if it were art with little or no regard to brand and sales metrics? Of course not.

Should Apple forsake slick branding in favor of a series of hard sell, direct response commercials? Of course not.

Apple, like any marketer, needs to manage its marketing to deliver value to the brand and while the creative needs to be creative, the process determining what goes out the door and what does not needs to be more science than art, more left brain manages right brain than a battle.

We marketers aren't true artists, we need to be highly creative thinkers who apply scientific principles to managing the art. Designers and copywriters (creatives) are the artists and marketers need to manage their artistic output to ensure it delivers on business objectives. We need to ensure effectiveness and accountability -- that we are meeting these objectives; that is our master, not art.

Too many marketers look at ads and websites as if they were bright shiny objects and throw logic and science out the window. Considering marketing's credibility battle and a short life span of CMOs (less than two years), I think a new model is in order. Brand marketers can learn a lot from direct marketers. Brand marketers often look at accountability as forsaking the brand, but done well, it's just the opposite.

Marketing should be scientifically managed art. At a handful of companies it is this, but it's certainly not the norm. Check every study on marketing accountability published in the last five years. We need to be raising the bar on marketing to earn organizational credibility and move the bar on marketing ethics. In an age where customers are no longer so dependent on marketers for information (they can now communicate with peers with ease), marketing must evolve, and part of that is becoming more scientific

Most Search Engine Marketing is Measured Using the Wrong Metrics, Here’s How to Change That

Most Search Engine Marketing is Measured Using the Wrong Metrics, Here’s How to Change That
Tying Search Marketing Results to Campaign Objectives


Online marketers handling search engine marketing campaigns often chase after what their gut tells them are the most important keywords (I’ll use the term keywords for single keywords and keyword phrases for the sake of simplicity) for their products and services or the keywords that attain the highest click through rate (CTR) at the search engine or a combination of high CTR at the lowest cost to achieve a desirable listing position. But this model tells a marketer nothing about a keyword’s ability to perform on campaign objectives. After all, a keyword with a CTR of 35% at $.30 per click might look great on the surface, but this says nothing of that keyword’s performance on campaign objectives.

At best, e-commerce marketers track which keywords lead to a sale and which don’t, dropping a cookie to track behavior over say 30 days. But this approach neglects the value of other brand events. After all, there is a value to moving prospects further down the purchase funnel – and shouldn’t those visitors who don’t purchase but complete certain events that indicate movement down the purchase funnel be valued, monitored, and managed?

To use a direct mail marketing analogy, the sponsored search listing copy is a lot like the teaser copy on the outside of the envelope. The click is similar to the recipient opening the envelope and the landing page and user flow through the website pages to the end desired action (s) (or conversion event) is a lot like direct mail recipient’s actions opening the inserts inside the envelope.

While direct mail marketers commonly limit measurement to actions tied to response and conversion, not actions that have brand value or that push recipients further down the purchase funnel. Simply put, measuring these kinds of actions offline isn’t simple, it takes research and may push a campaign over budget. However, online, it’s an entirely different story.

Online metrics enable measuring user paths through click actions and time spent, two very valuable indicators of visitor behavior. While most search engine marketing campaigns focus, at best, on conversion events, few also measure the value of activity that pushes visitors further down the purchase funnel and events that have brand value.

The Search Engine Marketing Scorecard: An Objectives Based Approach

Online ad server applications like Dart (tm) and Atlas (tm) enable detailed keyword tracking and custom scoring of click events for campaigns possible. A handful of very savvy internet marketers and agencies are beginning to score actions on landing pages for paid search campaigns and online banner ads. This enables the keyword purchasing choices to be made based on campaign objectives, not merely click through percentages or the lowest cost per click – two methods commonly used by search engine marketers that have little connection to a keyword’s ability to perform on campaign objectives. (Note: The scorecard method can be applied to other types of online marketing, not just search engine marketing.)

For example, if you’re a B2B widget marketer, you may see the keyword phrase “size a red widgets" as perfect because you’re getting a click through rate of 15% at a cost of around $.35 per click. However, this approach neglects to take into account whether or not that keyword phrase is effective at bringing visitors to take the actions you desire – and that’s critical to an effective campaign. Whereas, if you have scored website actions according to your objectives and say, there are ten potential actions a visitor could take once at the landing page and a total possible score of 100, you will be able to determine that keyword’s ability to deliver on your objectives at the lowest possible cost. Let’s say that your two most important actions are subscribing to your email newsletter and registering for a webinar, you will want to give these two items a higher score than other events to signify their importance to your objectives.
Scoring actions according to campaign objectives enables your search engine marketing agency or in-house team to optimize all search marketing tactics around your objective of attaining the highest possible score at the lowest possible cost. Even more, it provides the campaign manager with more meaningful metrics than click through rates from search engines and web operational metrics, metrics that can be used to determine and manage campaign effectiveness and ROI.

Search Engine Use Increases Sharply, Edging Towards Email as the Primary Internet Application

Search Engine Use Increases Sharply, Edging Towards Email as the Primary Internet Application
Search engines have become an increasingly important part of the online experience of American internet users. The most recent findings from Pew Internet & American Life tracking surveys and consumer behavior trends from the comScore Media Metrix consumer panel show that about 60 million American adults are using search engines on a typical day.
These results from September 2005 represent a sharp increase from mid-2004. Pew Internet Project data from June 2004 show that use of search engines on a typical day has risen from 30% of the internet population to 41%. This means that the number of those using search engines on an average day jumped from roughly 38 million in June 2004 to about 59 million in September 2005 – an increase of about 55%.

comScore data show that from September 2004 to September 2005 the average daily use of search engines jumped from 49.3 million users to 60.7 million users – an increase of 23%.

This means that the use of search engines is edging up on email as a primary internet activity on any given day. The Pew Internet Project data show that on a typical day, email use is still the top internet activity. On any given day, about 52% of American internet users are sending and receiving email.

These findings have considerable consequences for the way people gather and use information online and the way e-commerce is conducted.

“Most people think of the internet as a vast library and they increasingly depend on search engines to help them find everything from information about the people who interest them, to transactions they want to conduct, organizations they need to deal with, and interesting factoids that help them settle bar bets and backyard arguments,” said Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet Project.

“The evolution of search engines as everyday consumer Web tools has made them a vital resource for marketers,” said James Lamberti, vice president of comScore Networks. “Search engines are obviously a critical vehicle in reaching consumers during the buy cycle, but they also offer a rich source for consumer profiling, segmentation, and measurement of product demand. To-date, we have only witnessed the preliminary impact of search engines on e-commerce.”

Business Blogs

“Blogs are the most important thing to online marketing since sliced bread.” “Blogs may have their place… but it’s not in direct marketing.” With such disparate views, whom do you believe? The blog consultants? Or established “old school” marketing mavens?

Barraged with hype, marketers can have a tough time deciding whether blogs should be part of their arsenal. Listen to the blog consultants? But who profits from the blog phenomenon? Are we talking “opportunistic agenda” or “objective perspective”?

How about the marketing experts? Is it fair to say that blogging doesn’t belong in a direct or business-to-business marketing program? Why do so many veterans bristle at the idea of blogs? Is it simply because of imagined shortcomings? Or do blogs stump an “old school” sensibility that seeks a precedent for comparison?

A decade ago, with the dawning of the commercial web, marketers faced a similar dilemma. One faction wrote the web off as negligible, while another took to the barricades, waving the web banner and proclaiming the demise of other channels. As we learned, new vehicles do not necessarily replace old ones -- in fact, they may even supplement them.

“Okay,” you say, “history is well and good. But what happens in the next senior-management meeting when the CEO asks, ‘Does blogging belong in our marketing communications program?’ What do I tell him?”

First, you can tell him blogs are not an effective direct marketing tool. I doubt they ever will be. Blogging doesn’t allow you to precisely target audiences or permit any discernable control over who sees your message. However…

Blogs have already proven useful in publicity campaigns, generating word-of-mouth and, in some cases, media attention. CPG marketers have made the most effective use of commercial blogs, with highly imaginative efforts attracting throngs of consumers. There’s no question these blogs have affected consumer bonding with brands.

Blogs can also play an important role in business-to-business marketing. Management gurus, public speakers and prominent business leaders can wield some mean business-to-business blogs. Tom Peters, for one, has a very successful blog. For Peters’ fans, this is a godsend -- access to Peter’s daily thought process. Of course, the more people who clamor to glean Peters’ next idea, the more likely his next seminar will sell out and his next tome will fly off the bookshelves.

Are blogs right for every company or brand? No.

Are bloggers, and especially blog consultants, over-hyping blogs? Absolutely.

The first group is merely excited about technology. The second benefits from getting businesspeople to turn off their logic and open their pocket books. The unfortunate backlash -- wholesale discrediting of blogs by critics who have either never used them effectively or never used them altogether.

The Importance of Search Engine Optimization/Search Engine Marketing for B2B

Is Search Engine Marketing cost effective enough to increase profits for B2B marketers? You bet, and here’s why. It’s always been conventional wisdom that the fastest and most efficient way to research products and pricing is on the Web. Now Enquiro has documented survey research on the role of search engines in B2B transactions.

As you know, B2B transactions differ from most consumer transactions because these decisions require coordination between a number of different personnel before the final transaction is made. Therefore, the process requires a period of time between researching the product and placing the order. It’s an ongoing rather than snap decision.

“The Role of Search in Business to Business Buying Decisions” is a well-designed study of approximately 1500 participants responding to a 40-question survey that was validated with pre-testing before implementation. You can download the entire report for free, and here are a few highlights:

When participants were asked to indicate how they would go about making a B2B purchase, 93.2 percent said they would research the purchase online.

When asked if they would use a search engine at some point in this task, 95.5 percent of participants indicated that they would.

When asked where they would start their search for information, 63.9 percent of participants chose a search engine over consumer review sites, e-commerce sites, manufacturer’s sites, and industry portals.

When taking budget into consideration, manufacturer’s sites and industry portals were the chosen starting place as budgets increased. However, 86.9 percent of participants said they would visit a search engine after visiting those sites.
The study is rich with too many details to cover in this article, but following are some important conclusions:

Search engines play a dominant role in B2B purchases.


Search engines are used in the early or mid research phase in the buying cycle.


Google is favored over other search engines.


Search engine research takes place at least one to two months before the buying decision.


Good balance between organic and paid search is necessary. Organic SEO gets over 70 percent of the clicks.


Position is a factor, with over 60 percent clicking on the top 3 listings.


Most users decide which listing to click on in seconds upon scanning the page.

With all this qualified traffic originating from search engines, it is more important than ever for B2B marketers, wholesalers, and B2B exchanges to ensure their Web sites are correctly optimized for good positioning in search results. There is also great value in SEO/SEM as a user-friendly marketing tool.

The Uniqueness of Search Engine Marketing

Search engine traffic is highly targeted. That's because potential buyers who find your B2B offerings through search engines are looking for your products and services on their own, so they are predisposed to hear your marketing message. You can’t find a more qualified prospect than that. Here’s what distinguishes search engine marketing from other types of advertising:

Non-Intrusive: Search marketing is a non-intrusive marketing tool. Most advertising, both online and offline, interrupts consumer behavior. If a user goes to a web site for info, up pops an intrusive ad. Reading a newspaper? Ads dominate and force articles to be continued on another page. With search engine marketing, the user is actively seeking your products, services, and information. They are delighted to be driven to your site.
2. Voluntary: Search marketing is the result of user-originated behavior. Your visitors from search engines and directories have voluntarily clicked on your listing rather than any competitors, thus they are motivated to explore your offerings.

Deciding Your SEO Strategy

Deciding Your SEO Strategy

When it comes to search engine optimization strategy, there are basically two camps: those who view search engines as adversaries to be conquered at any cost, and those who regard search engines as partners in their online marketing efforts. Long-time readers of my articles probably already have a good idea of which camp I fall into; however, I believe both approaches can be effective optimization methods.

Adversarial Optimization Methods
Service providers who have this “adversarial” philosophy will tell their prospects that the formulation of a search engine optimization strategy is much like a high-stakes game of chess. It’s an “us vs. them,” “winner-take-all,” and “every man for himself” mentality. It’s also rooted largely in technology; under this philosophy, success is defined as unraveling the latest search engine algorithm to find new optimization methods and exploiting its technical aspects for immediate benefit.

The underlying premise of this search engine optimization strategy is that you must use optimization methods that trick the search engines into showing a website predominantly in the results since the site isn’t currently offering attributes that the search engines consider valuable. The primary benefits of this approach are that it doesn’t require much work on the part of the client and that results can be realized more rapidly. These qualities both stem from the fact that there isn’t a large amount of additional content needed, nor are there many wholesale changes to make to the website when using such optimization methods.

While this is not the methodology that I recommend, it is a valid - albeit potentially volatile - search engine optimization strategy.

Partnership Optimization Methods
Those who view search engines as partners have a very different search engine optimization strategy. These service providers embrace the idea that the attributes and optimization methods that give a website high rankings in search engines are, by and large, the same ones that make the site more valuable to website visitors and potential customers.

This theory makes sense. Every search engine needs to return results that their users find to be the most relevant and useful. If search engine R&D people operated in a vacuum, they would probably find their market share rapidly diminished while they lamented about how “people are stupid.” This means that each of the major search engines spend endless research dollars to determine exactly what it is that search engine users find valuable, and each has a high stake in the results of the research. No search engine marketing or web design firm has the resources or motivation to conduct studies of this magnitude. It is, therefore, highly advantageous to use the findings of these studies, deduced from common algorithm traits of multiple search engines, to improve your search engine optimization strategy and website.

I consistently hear from companies who are puzzled as to why their expensive, cutting-edge website is perpetually outranked by a site of perceived inferior quality - “our website is better than theirs” or “we are a much bigger company” are common remarks. Beauty is, as always, in the eye of the beholder. The sites that consistently rank highly are almost always using optimization methods that offer something of value to people who entered the search query. Search engines care as much about the size of a company or how much it spent on its website about as much as they care about what you had for breakfast this morning. (I had blueberry muffins, but Google hasn’t called to ask.)

The advantages to the “partnership” search engine optimization strategy are numerous. Rather than chase the ever-changing technical attributes that can get you short-term results, you instead use optimization methods that leverage your company’s knowledge of your industry to create something useful for the searcher. You can improve your website and offer the information and products that prospects are seeking, even if those prospects are in the earliest stages of the buying cycle. In general, you will not have to watch your rankings swing wildly based upon new spam filters and algorithm shifts, and thus will enjoy a higher level of predictability when it comes to your website (although with search engines, there are never any guarantees). Since you aren’t constantly forced to re-address your site’s search engine optimization methods, you’ll have more time to focus on other online marketing areas that need attention, such as the website’s conversion rate, an e-newsletter, or online PR.

Anatomy of a Search Engine

Anatomy of a Search Engine

For some unfortunate souls SEO is simply the learning of tricks and techniques that, according to their understanding, should propel their site into the top rankings on the major search engines. This understanding of the way SEO works can be effective for a time however it contains one basic flaw: the rules change. Search engines are in a constant state of evolution in order to keep up with the SEO's in much the same way that Norton, McAfee, AVG or any of the other anti-virus software companies are constantly trying to keep up with the virus writers.

Basing your entire websites future on one simple set of rules (read: tricks) about how the search engines will rank your site contains an additional flaw, there are more factors being considered than any SEO is aware of and can confirm. That’s right, I will freely admit that there are factors at work that I may not be aware of and even those that I am aware of I cannot with 100 percent accuracy give you the exact weight they are given in the overall algorithm. Even if I could, the algorithm would change a few weeks later and what’s more, hold your hats for this one: there is more than one search engine.

So if we cannot base our optimization on a set of hard-and-fast rules what can we do? The key my friends, is not to understand the tricks but rather what they accomplish. Reflecting back on my high school math teach Mr. Barry Nicholl I recall a silly story that had a great impact. One weekend he had the entire class watch Dumbo The Flying Elephant (there was actually going to be a question about it on our test). Why? The lesson we were to get from it is that formulas (like tricks) are the feather in the story. They are unnecessary and yet we hold on to them in the false belief that it is the feather that works and not the logic. Indeed, the tricks and techniques are not what works but rather the logic they follow and that is their shortcoming.
And So What Is Necessary?

To rank a website highly and keep it ranking over time one must optimize it with one primary understanding, that a search engine is a living thing. Obviously this is not to say that search engines have brains, I will leave those tales to Orson Scott Card and other science fiction writers, however their very nature results in a lifelike being with far more storage capacity.

If we consider for a moment how a search engine functions; it goes out into the world, follows the road signs and paths to get where it’s going, and collects all of the information in its path. From this point, the information is sent back to a group of servers where algorithms are applied in order to determine the importance of specific documents. How are these algorithms generated? They are created by human beings who have a great deal of experience in understanding the fundamentals of the Internet and the documents it contains and who also have the capacity to learn from their mistakes, and update the algorithms accordingly. Essentially we have an entity that collects data, stores it, and then sorts through it to determine what’s important which it’s happy to share with others and what’s unimportant which it keeps tucked away.
So Let’s Break It Down

To gain a true understanding of what a search engine is, it’s simple enough to compare it to the human anatomy as, though not breathing, it contains many of the same core functions required for life. And these are:

The Lungs & Other Vital Organs – The lungs of a search engine and indeed the vast majority of vital organs are contained within the datacenters in which they are housed. Be it in the form of power, Internet connectivity, etc. As with the human body, we do not generally consider these important in defining who we are, however we’re certainly grateful to have them and need them all to function properly.

The Arms & Legs – Think of the links from the engine itself as the arms and legs. These are the vehicles by which we get where we need to go and retrieve what needs to be accessed. While we don’t commonly think of these as functions when we’re considering SEO these are the purpose of the entire thing. Much as the human body is designed primarily to keep you mobile and able to access other things, so too is the entire search engine designed primarily to access the outside world.

The Eyes – The eyes of the search engine are the spiders (AKA robots or crawlers). These are the 1s and 0s that the search engines send out over the Internet to retrieve documents. In the case of all the major search engines the spiders crawl from one page to another following the links, as you would look down various paths along your way. Fortunately for the spiders they are traveling mainly over fiber optic connections and so their ability to travel at light speed enables them to visit all the paths they come across whereas we as mere humans have to be a bit more selective.

The Brain – The brain of a search engine, like the human brain, is the most complex of its functions and components. The brain must have instinct, must know, and must learn in order to function properly. A search engine (and by search engine we mean the natural listings of the major engines) must also include these critical three components in order to survive.

The Instinct – The instinct of a search engines is defined in it’s core functions, that is the crawling of sites and either the inability to read specific types of data, or the programmed response to ignore files meeting a specific criteria. Even the programmed responses become automated by the engines and thus fall under the category of instinct much the same as the westernized human instinct to jump from a large spider is learned. An infant would probably watch the spider or even eat it meaning this is not an automatic human reaction.

The instinct of a search engines is important to understand however once one understands what can and cannot be read and how the spiders will crawl a site this will become instinct for you too and can then safely be stored in the “autopilot” part of your brain.

The Knowing – Search engines know by crawling. What they know goes far beyond what is commonly perceived by most users, webmasters and SEOs. While the vast storehouse we call the Internet provides billions upon billions of pages of data for the search engines to know they also pick up more than that. Search engines know a number of different methods for storing data, presenting data, prioritizing data and of course, way of tricking the engines themselves.

While the search engine spiders are crawling the web they are grabbing the stores of data that exist and sending it back to the datacenters, where that information is processed through existing algorithms and spam filters where it will attain a ranking based on the engine’s current understanding of the way the Internet and the documents contained within it work.

Similar to the way we process an article from a newspaper based on our current understanding of the world, the search engines process and rank documents based on what they understand to be true in the way documents are organized on the Internet.

The Learning – Once it is understood that search engines rank documents based on a specific understanding of the way the Internet functions, it then follows that in order to insure that new document types and technologies are able to be read and that the algorithm be changed as new understandings of the functionality of the Internet are uncovered a search engine must have the ability to “learn”.

Aside from a search engine needing the ability to properly spider documents stored in newer technologies, search engines must also have the ability to detect and accurately penalize spam and as well as accurately rank websites based on new understandings of the way documents are organized and links arranged. Examples of areas where search engines must learn in an ongoing basis include but are most certainly not limited to:

* Understanding the relevancy of the content between sites where a link is found
* Attaining the ability to view the content on documents contained within new technologies such as database types, Flash, etc.
* Understanding the various methods used to hide text, links, etc. in order to penalize sites engaging in these tactics
* Learning from current results and any shortcoming in them, what tweaks to current algorithms or what additional considerations must be taken into account to improve the relevancy of the results in the future.

The learning of a search engine generally comes from the uber-geeks hired by and the users of the search engines. Once a factor is taken into account and programmed into the algorithm it them moves into the “knowing” category until the next round of updates.
How This Helps in SEO

This is the point at which you may be asking yourself, “This is all well-and-good but exactly how does this help ME?” An understanding of how search engines function, how they learn, and how they live is one of the most important understandings you can have in optimizing a website. This understanding will insure that you don’t simply apply random tricks in hopes that you’ve listened to the right person in the forums that day but rather that you consider what is the search engine trying to do and does this tactic fit with the long term goals of the engine.

For a while keyword density spamming was all the rage among the less ethical SEOs as was building networks of websites to link together in order to boost link popularity. Neither of these tactics work today and why? They do not fit with the long-term goals of the search engine. Search engines, like humans, want to survive. If the results they provide are poor then the engine will die a slow but steady death and so they evolve.

When considering any tactic you must consider, does this fit with the long-term goals of the engine? Does this tactic in general serve to provide better results for the largest number of searches? If the answer is yes then the tactic is sound.

For example, the overall relevancy of your website (i.e. does the majority of your content focus on a single subject) has become more important over the past year or so. Does this help the searcher? The searcher will find more content on the subject they have searched on larger sites with larger amounts of related content and thus this shift does help the searcher overall. A tactic that includes the addition of more content to your site is thus a solid one as it helps build the overall relevancy of your website and gives the visitor more and updated information at their disposal once they get there.

Another example would be in link building. Reciprocal links are becoming less relevant and reciprocal-links between unrelated sites are virtually irrelevant. If you are engaging in reciprocal link building insure that the sites you link to are related to your site’s content. As a search engine I would want to know that a site in my results also provided links to other related sites thus increasing the chance that the searcher was going to find the information that they are looking for one way or another without having to switch to a different search engine.

How Key Performance Indicators Can Improve E-Comm Strategy

How Key Performance Indicators Can Improve E-Comm Strategy

Part One of the series by Steve Jackson

The problem with most e-commerce marketing strategy today is that companies don’t understand how they use things like web analytics. Most e-commerce directors or web marketers are given a budget and told to stick to it, and good analytics don’t usually come cheap. Without web analytics you can’t even begin to measure key performance indicators (KPIs), which should be a part of any good e-commerce strategy. We often see that marketers face a problem in that they know they need Web Analytics, they just don’t know why they should pay for it and don’t know what to measure. This three-part series of articles will hopefully help clear up some of the things that marketers should measure as key performance indicators concentrating on one KPI per article.

What is a key performance indicator?
In website measurement terms a key performance indicator is a metric which will help your organization define and measure progress toward your website's business objective. Key Performance Indicators are quantifiable website measurements that reflect whether you are successfully meeting or falling short of your websites business goals.

That’s quite a boring definition of a KPI even if it is important, so in a last ditch attempt to keep you from falling asleep let's talk about Formula One racing (or the Indy 500) and the KPI’s they use.

What has Formula One got to do with KPIs?
There are many minute factors in Formula One that constitute being a winner. Everything down to the performance of the fuel, the tires, the speed of the pit stops, the quality of engine parts, the weight of the car, its aerodynamic ability, everything is measured and tested, long before the driver even gets into the car. The difference between the winner of a race and second place can be as little as a hundredth of a second.

That extra hundredth of a second could be because the fuel used on that particular race day allowed the driver to get more out of his car than the guy in second place.

How did the race team know which fuel to use?
Because before hand they had tested maybe 50 different types, each one tuned for the demands of different circuits - or even different weather conditions.

They got that extra performance by knowing the key performance metrics of the fuel, so they could say with confidence that "Fuel A" was better for their car if "Condition A" was satisfied.

Condition A might have been the car's weight that day the type of road surface and the weather. When all matched together it meant that the race team had a particular choice to make when selecting the fuel for the car.

The website KPI I’m about to discuss is the fuel that powers your ecommerce sales and lead generation strategies. Both are measured by practically all web analytics systems, but both not commonly measured to their full potential.
Page views per session: the fuel behind your web business objectives

For those of you that know why page views and sessions are important bear with me for a paragraph or two. For those of you that don’t here we go.

Why are page views and sessions important?
Page views are a metric that represents the amount of times your pages are viewed by the people who visit your website. On its own it might be an important measurement if you’re a very well trafficked content website looking to sell B2B advertising in the form of some kind of ad (banners for instance).

If you can accurately say to an advertiser that you have 10 million page views per week, it’s very likely that this alone will be one of your KPIs, simply because if it goes down, your advertisers will most likely not want to pay you as much to advertise with you. It would be important in this case that you keep the page view count at least to the same level every week in order to keep the same level of banner revenue for example.

Sessions represent the amount of users (people) visiting the website over a given period. Again it’s a very important metric to know, the general idea being that more of the right kind of people visiting your pages will eventually mean your bottom line improves.

By combining these two metrics however we get a much more powerful way to use the figures.

Combining the two metrics as one KPI is done by taking a ratio of page views per session as an average. So if 1,000 visitors viewed 2,000 pages the mean page views per visit KPI is 2, (2,000 / 1000 = 2).

Why is this combination important?
If your website e-store system required that you need to view five pages in order buy a product and your KPI is telling you that your site gets an average of two page views per session, then the site is under performing badly.

If it takes five pages for your visitors to buy something then your goal should be to get an average KPI of at least five page views per session. Otherwise it means that the vast majority of your visitors aren’t going deep enough into the process.

Much more importantly deciding on a KPI like this is giving you a measurable objective to work towards. If you know that the vast majority of people are abandoning your website after only viewing one or two pages there is a problem which you need to work hard to solve.

It means you know that somewhere within your web analytics you will be able to detect the areas of abandonment that are the problem. The simple fact of the matter is, if you have a low page views per session KPI then your analytics system (if it’s any good), WILL be able to show you where the problem lies. Once you have found the problem areas, congratulations, you’re becoming a web analytics expert. Now you know which pages have the problem and you just need to figure out the why.

Figuring out why is the real secret
It may be that you’re driving the wrong kind of visitors, such as people who aren’t interested in your offer. It may be that you don’t have enough compelling content to keep visitors interested. It may be that your shopping cart has a problem with abandonment or your lead generation process is too long or has a scary form to fill in. In all cases your page views per session KPI is the first warning signal and you can monitor it quite easily.

Other warning signals
The other side of the coin is if this KPI is too high. What if you have a 1,000 people viewing 20,000 pages? Unless you have incredibly compelling content there is a problem. It probably means that people are very interested in something but can’t find it on your site. So having this KPI be too high is also a warning flag that means you need to analyze your web analytics and see where the problems are. Are people skipping around pages? How long do they stay on your site? (Another KPI we’ll come to in the next article of this series.) Have you got site architectural problems with navigation?

Too high or too low, it’s all useful measurement
The point is to find out how to use the fuel remember? If you start measuring page views per session as a KPI, you will begin to see if you have a problem or not. You can get as deep and as sophisticated as you like, I’m just trying to show you the idea with this article.

For instance you could measure page views per session of visitors only hitting your shopping cart, or lead generation system. Content websites could use page views per session in particular content groups to work out how compelling particular kinds of content are. It all depends on the website business objective.

To summarize

Developing KPIs allow you to measure things on your website which directly effect your business objectives. In the example I’ve demonstrated by finding ways to improve the number of pages people view per session there is more chance that those users will complete your calls to action (buy, register, subscribe, whatever web business objective you may have). This first KPI that I’m suggesting you consider is an early warning signal that something is wrong and it’s very easy to determine how to set a measurement. The next KPI I’ll discuss is time spent on site and why it is also important as well as how you can use this in combination with page views per session.

Starting a Professional SEO Campaign

Starting a Professional SEO Campaign

Hand Off to Bob or Outsource the Job? by Scott Buresh

We are often asked if professional SEO (search engine optimization) can be done effectively utilizing in-house talent. Despite our obvious self-interests on the subject, our answer is always a qualified "yes"– you can achieve professional SEO results using existing talent. However, for every company we have known that has met with great in-house SEO success, we know of many more that have seen their in-house efforts fail. We have also discovered the companies that have succeeded share some common traits.

If your company is considering doing SEO in-house, there are some critical questions that you should address before you proceed.

Do I have the proper resources at my disposal to achieve professional SEO results?

Search engine optimization takes time, and your internal SEO expert will need to have a great deal of it at his or her disposal – especially at the project’s outset when target audiences, keyphrases, and optimization schemes are first being established. Even after the initial optimization effort, the nature of SEO will require this person to spend ample time keeping up with industry trends, monitoring campaign progress, performing A/B testing, and expanding the campaign as new products and service areas are added.

Perhaps even more important than time, achieving professional SEO results requires a unique set of aptitudes. The person responsible for your internal SEO initiative must possess the ability to learn quickly and to look at your website from a macro-perspective, marrying together the needs of sales, marketing, and IT. He or she can not be an aggressive risk taker, as this is often a surefire way to get your website penalized and potentially removed from the major search engines. These gifted people exist in many companies, but given the unique attributes that these individuals possess, their time is often already spent in other crucial areas of the business.

Without enough time to invest in the project or the right type of person to execute it, an internal SEO initiative is likely doomed to fail.

Do I know which departments of my company should be involved, and will they work with an insider?

As mentioned above, professional SEO, by necessity, involves marketing, sales, and IT. The SEO expert must work with marketing to find out what types of offers and initiatives are working offline to help translate them effectively online. He or she must work with sales to identify the types of leads that are most valuable so that you can target the right people in the keyphrase selection process. And, finally, your SEO expert will need to work with IT to determine any technical limitations to the SEO recommendations, learn of any past initiatives based on a technical approach, and get the final optimization schemes implemented on the website.

Sadly, in many businesses, these departments have a somewhat adversarial relationship. However, it is the duty of the SEO expert to act as a project manager and coordinate the efforts of all three departments if you are going to get the most out of your campaign. No professional SEO project can be completed in a vacuum. For whatever reason, it is often easier for an outsider to get adversarial departments on the same page, in the same way that a marriage counselor might convince a woman of her undying love for her husband while the husband is still grimacing from a well-placed knee in the parking lot.

Will someone be held accountable for the results?

This may seem like a small consideration, but it can have a tremendous impact on the success of the campaign. If you have added this responsibility to some poor soul’s job description with the direction that he or she should "do the best you can," you’ll be lucky to make any headway at all (especially if the person is not enthusiastic about SEO). Whether SEO is done in-house or outsourced, someone will have to take responsibility for showing progress, explaining setbacks, and continually improving results. Without this accountability, it is very common to see an initiative fade as the buck is passed.

Can I afford delayed results based on a learning curve?

It’s a reality - professional SEO expertise has a steep learning curve. While the information on how to perform the basics of optimization are freely available on the web, much of the information out there is also contradictory, and some of it is actually dangerous. It takes time for someone unfamiliar with the discipline to sort the SEO wheat from the SEO chaff (on a side note, a "quoted" search of Google reveals that this may actually mark the first occasion in human history that the phrase "SEO chaff" has been used – we’re betting it’s also the last). Simply put, if the person you are putting on the job has no experience, it will take longer to get results. This may not be a consideration if you aren’t counting on new business from SEO any time soon. However, if you are losing business to your competition due to their professional SEO initiatives, time might be a larger factor.

Will it cost me less to do it in house than it would to choose a professional SEO firm?

Often, companies will attempt this specialized discipline in-house in order to save money, and sometimes this works out as intended. However, accurate calculations of the cost of in-house labor that would be involved versus the price of the firm you would otherwise hire should be performed to make an accurate comparison. When making this calculation, also factor in the opportunity cost of the resource - the tasks that your in-house people are not able to perform because they are involved in SEO.

In addition, if worse comes to worst and your in-house SEO expert is led astray by some of the more dangerous "how-to" guides available, it can cost even more to repair the damage than it would have to hire a professional SEO firm to perform the optimization from the outset. And an internal SEO campaign gone wrong can cost even more than the stated fee - websites that violate the terms of service of the major search engines (whether intentional or not) can be severely penalized or even removed, costing you a lot of lost revenue when potential customers can not find your website for a period of time.

Do I believe that the end result I’ll get in-house will be equal to or greater than the results I would have gotten from a professional SEO firm?

Search engine optimization can create huge sales opportunities, and slight increases in overall exposure can have not-so-slight increases in your bottom-line revenue. If you believe that your talented in-house resource will, given enough time, achieve results equal to or greater than those that could have been achieved by the professional SEO firm you might have chosen, it may make sense to do it internally.

However, in addition to a better knowledge of industry trends, one clear advantage that search engine optimization firms have is the benefit of the experience and macro-perspective that comes from managing many different websites over time. Professional SEO firms can watch a wide range of sites on a continual basis to see what trends are working, what trends aren’t, and what formerly recommended tactics are now actually hurting results.

This macro-perspective allows professional SEO firms to test new tactics as they appear on a case-by-case basis and apply those results across a wide range of clients to determine what the benefit is. It is harder for an individual with access to only one site to perform enough testing and research to achieve optimum results all the time, something that should also factor into the equation.

Do I have at least a slight tolerance for risk?

Neophytes to SEO can make mistakes that can lead to search engine penalization or removal. This happens most commonly when they have an IT background and treat SEO as a strictly technical exercise. We are often called in to assist companies who have had an internal initiative backfire, leaving them in a worse position than the one they were in before they started. The simple truth is that you cannot perform effective SEO without marrying your efforts to the visitor experience, but this is not something that is intuitively understood when people approach SEO for the first time.

However, professional SEO firms are not perfect either. Some firms use those same optimization methods that violate the search engines’ terms of service and can get your site penalized. So, if you do decide to outsource, educate yourself on SEO and do some research on the firm. Know the basics of the business, find out who the firm’s clients are and how long they’ve been in business, and ask for professional references - just like you would do with any major business purchase.

If you have considered all of the above questions, and your answers to all seven are "yes," your company may be uniquely equipped to achieve professional SEO results in-house. If you answered "no" to any of the first three questions but "yes" to the rest, it does not necessarily mean that you can’t perform SEO in-house - just that you may not be in a position to do so at this time. Taking the actions required to get you in the right position to answer in the affirmative might be worth your while. However, if you answered "no" to any of the last four questions, you may want to consider outsourcing the project to a professional SEO firm.

A professional SEO firm has the resources, the time, the expertise, and, most importantly, the experience, to launch an SEO initiative for your website that will have a positive effect on your bottom line. Whichever option you choose, it is important that you fully embrace the channel. A half-hearted initiative, whether done internally or outsourced, can be as ineffective as taking no action at all.