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From SEMPO annual survey - what are companies trying to achieve with PPC and SEO

I have always been curious to find out what agencies and companies were trying to achieve through Search Engine Marketing. The answers vary whether we are talking about Paid Search , Search Engine Optimization or Social media. The SEMPO annual survey gives us an insight into online marketers in the US:


For paid search (otherwise known as Pay Per Click): 

 For Search Engine Optimization: 

For Social media:

As expected, Paid Search and SEO are mostly  driven by lead generation and products sales where Social media has a much stronger brand awareness component.

State of Search Engine Marketing report 2010 - SEMPO

The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization just released it State of the Market survey for 2010. The long awaited report gives us an insight into Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Paid Search trends, based on the input of 1,472 agencies and client side marketers from 68 countries. This year and for the first time, the report included a section on social media marketing. 


Some highlights from the report:


1. Econsultancy and SEMPO estimated the North American Search Engine Marketing (SEM) industry to be $14.6B in '09, up from $13.5B in '08. They estimated the market to grow by 14% in '10 to $16.6B


2. Companies continue to shift money from traditional advertising to SEM: 

3. Google continues to dominate the SEM market:

4. Companies expect to spend 43% more on SEO and 37% more on paid search in 2010


5. More than half of advertisers say that Google keywords have become more expensive

Most companies expect to spend more on social media in 2010:

Paid Search and Google guidelines for copy goods and trademarks

No later than yesterday, we received a business inquiry from a company based out of Asia. They have a number of web site which sell high quality copies of famous products to European products. This raised a number of issues we have not considered previously.


Before I start outlining the issues, let's imagine you are a start-up hungry for new business. A business opportunity like this pretty much meant we could make our first year of revenue, let alone expected earnings.


Beyond the ethical issues associated with helping companies selling fake goods, we took a closer look at what Google said about copy goods and trademark issues. We are not saying Google is the ultimate Net Supreme Court but they provided a decent set of principles.

''Advertisers are responsible for the keywords they choose to generate advertisements and the text that they choose to use in those advertisements.'' In other words, Paid Search advertisers are judged responsible for the ads they service. ' Google prohibits the sale or promotion of counterfeit goods''. The actions Google might take include disapproving or disabling ads and/or terminating advertisers. In the case of SEM agency, this pretty means the company might go bankrupt. This does not apply to Natural Search, which makes me wonder what happens to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies promoting fake goods web site. 


The most interesting part is related to trademark policy. Since last year, Google reviewed its trademark policy and now allows US advertisers to bid on branded keywords even though you might actually be a competitor to the brand being advertised. There was some controversy at the time since it was felt this was not a fair practice. More companies are going to bid for branded keywords. In Addition, if you bid on your competitor's name, your competitors might return the favor. This is bad business for advertisers. Ultimately it creates bidding war, and let's face it more media spent on Google. The only caveat was you can not use negative or pejorative terms to bid on branded keywords. This applies to the US only. Outside the US, it is still against Google principles to bid for branded keywords (unless this is your brand of course). 


To make a long story short, we declined the business opportunity on the basis of Google's fake goods principle but also trademark principle (the target market was the US). 


We lost a potentially very profitable business but feel good about our relationship with Google and more importantly about the company's integrity in general. 

PR 2.0 or the art of boosting your Search Engine Optimization through smart PR

I was talking to a BusinessWire representative this week about PR 2.0 - For those of you who are not familiar with BusinessWire, they are one the global leaders in transmitting Press Releases to journalists, analysts, regulators but also search engines. Companies of all sizes have a subscription and pay for each release distributed through Business Wire network. The fees vary from $400 to $600 for each distribution.

Why do we care?

The art of PR has changed over the last few years. PR was traditionally seen as something that only Corporates can afford. It may require robust corporate messaging and PR professionals (i.e people who are comfortable picking up the phone from journalists). More and more smaller companies have been using online PR (digg, Facebook, Twitter etc.) to generate some buzz and customer engagement vis-a-vis their brand. Social media by definition is PR.

Social media can only be earned

What we tend to forget is getting customers to talk about your brand is not easy to achieve. It's one thing creating a Facebook page or a Twitter account. It's another one to get customers excited about your product and ultimately generate this buzz on your behalf. It is even more difficult to tie this back to your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts. These backlinks from your more loyal brand supporters are hard to earn. Particularly if what you offer is not really sexy and /or tend to be oriented towards companies.

Alternative tools to boost SEO

Back to my discussion with BusinessWire, I have found they offer a decent set of tools to create a comprehensive list of backlinks to your web site at a reasonable cost. They recently launched a new product called Enhanced Online News (EON). EON is an online platform where companies form all sizes can submit press releases to maximize SEO coverage.

This means small and medium companies can quickly post press releases that will be distributed to the BusinessWire network for a nominal fee. To ensure strong SEO results:

1) The press release title should be short with all keywords included at the beginning of the title

2) Targeted keywords in the release should be repeated a few times in the release description (just after the title). The tool then adds targeted keyword into the meta tags of the page. This is only available for the title meta tag for now, not keyword tags yet.

3) Companies should take advantage of the free banner area at the bottom of the page to include screenshot of the company web site or even banners

What I like most about this tool is it identifies two or three quotes from the release and alternates them on top of the release, so that crawlers always find something new to look at.

More editorial tips are included on the EON portal.

To me, this seems to be a good option to create backlinks in a short period of time at a reasonable cost.

If you have had experience using that tool, I would be curious to find out whether it worked or has not worked for you.

Does Google Local Business Center influence Organic Search Results?

In a previous post about geo-targeting, we mentioned Google's latest attempt to break into local businesses. For small businesses, Google Business Center is another way to reach local customers.

Google Business Center is adding features everyday and it gradually becoming integrated into other Google products such as AdWords, Merchant Center and of course Google Map.

This is how Google Local Business Center looks like today. The example below is for a College Hunks Hauling Junks franchise in Atlanta. From a reputational standpoint, potential customers who enter this business name and location will be able to see it in Google map (under the organic search option). The little paragraph provides basic information including address and phone number.

By clicking on the map, a new window pops-up and shows the following information;

In addition to these gimmicks, businesses can offer coupon that will show up in the Google map window. By the way, you will notice that AdWords ads for this businesses come-up on both left hand side and underneath Google map.

The question that immediately came to my mind is whether this would have any impact on the Organic Search Results. Does a business registered in the Google Local Business Center is more likely to come-up in search queries? As I mentioned above, yes from a reputation standpoint (i.e. someone look for the business name). Probably not from a product standpoint. I have not seen evidence yet that this particular business came up higher in Search Engine Results Pages when a customer looks for 'junk removal Atlanta' let's say. But it certainly can't do any harm.

Writing good AdWords Copy - from Ogilvy to Google Lady

If you have been writing Ad copies online and offline for some time, you know variations in Ad copy matters. In Paid Search in particular, visitors spend no more than a few seconds looking at organic search and sponsored results. Some studies have shown most visitors look at sponsored results in clutters, which means most of them will hardly read the Ad. 


I was curious to find out what made a good Ad copy stands out for the competitors. In particular whether the good old principles of advertising still apply in the digital area. In Ogilvy's 1963 book 'confession of an advertising man', he laid out a number of tips to write effective ad copies. Let's see how many of these are still relevant today:


Tip 1 ''On the average, 5 times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy'. 
The headline remains the center price of any Google (or other Search Engine) Ad. It makes about 25% of total ad space allocation. Typically, it includes dynamic keyword insertion where search queries are added automatically to things such as the headline, display UR etc. 


Tip 2''Inject news in the headline''
What might have been true during Ogilvy's time is a hard thing to do in Paid Search, given space limitations of 25 characters. But if you can find creative ways to make your headline sounds like newsworthy, go for it. Keywords such as ''announcing'', ''new'', ''available now'' have higher click-through-rates. 


Tip 3 ''The two most powerful words are 'NEW' and 'FREE"
These words definitely attract more eyeballs. The value of adding the word 'FREE' is a bit ambiguous. Some industry observers like Google Lady recommend to stay away from any Ad copies which includes freebies. Since advertisers pay per click, you might want to stay away from freebies hunter. They will hard convert anyway. The third keyword that has great success online is 'OFFICIAL'. Its popularity is probably due to the fact there is a lot of junk on the web and potential visitors pay more attention to any credible Ads. 


Tip 4 ''Other most powerful words include:'' This is Ogilvy's list,as published in 1963. 

And here are Google Lady's favorites (February 2010): 

Once we take out all e-commerce jargon such as 'download', 'free shipping'', the two lists look awfully similar!


Tip 5 ''Include your selling promise to your selling promise'
The selling promise became our value proposition but it's pretty much the same idea than 40+ years ago.  Make your value proposition relevant, unique and differentiated. Don't forget that in an online environment, any competitor can track changes in headlines in less than 24 hours and copy it in even less. 


Tip 6 ''Headlines should not contain more than 6 to 12 words''
It's actually probably closer to 3 to 5 in Paid Search given the 25 characters space limitations. But the idea remains the same. Your Ad copy headline must telegraph your value proposition and entice potential customers to read description lines. Don't forget the objective of your headline is not to sell, but to connect with your readers. 


Tip 7 ''Do not use obscure headlines''
Obscure headlines, particularly ones with negative can be confusing to potential customers. I have always been interesting to find out how effective these Ads can be online: 

As a summary, it's interesting to see that most Ogilvy's principles are still relevant today. I would think the primary differences lie in technology progress. Some semantics might have changed slightly ''download now'' but the biggest changes are:

1. Ability to dynamically create ads with customized keyword
2. New functionalities such as geo-targeting, day-parting (change ads depending on time of the day) and demographics targeting (for Google's content network for example)
3. Stronger immediate call-to-action. Potential customers are now one click away to buy products and/or sign-up services.