I recently read a good article by Sara Holoubek at DM News entitled “The buy vs. build argument for SEM” where she talks about whether an advertiser should develop the inhouse SEM capabilities or outsource to a search marketing agency.  She debunks some of the current, as she says, “misconceptions” about building an inhouse SEM competency, in which she states that inhouse competency can be achieved, that “once-proprietary only” agency technology is no longer the case (e.g. bid management tools, analytics freebee tools) and that even an inhouse agency can keep up on the ever changing technology.

I guess my only comments on this are the following:

•  Some of the decision will rest on the company’s culture - there are some firms that just don’t have the intent to get involved with the technology nor will they bill willing to invest financial resources to build that competency
• Some firms may start out with an agency relationship and then leverage that experience and knowledge in migrating to their own inhouse agency
• I, like Sara, still think there will always be a need for SEM agencies, like Out of Bounds, in the same way that there are advertising agencies, direct marketing firms or even lube and oil change outlets.  The services industry is here to stay in my opinion.  I could learn to change my own oil and filter and invest in that equipment but does it make sense for my business?

What do you think?

I cant tell you how many times I have worked with clients whose ecommerce platform is either totally incapable of being optimized for SEO or is severly limited.  Heck, in some cases, we can’t even get basic Google analytics tags installed!

I  hate to name names but one of the worst systems I have seen to date is Miva Merchant.  Several developers I have worked with absolutely hate the software, saying it is ‘a bunch of crap…’ and basically they are not even able to add a basic Google analytics sitewide tag, and asking them to add the commerce tracking tag or even the basic Google conversion tag (which is so so basic) was simply impossible to do!

How do these vendors expect their customers to run ecommerce business using a software platform that doesnt even allow for web analytics and tracking?  I have basically had to tell several clients that I couldnt help them, as much as I wanted the business, I cant really conduct online marketing programs if I cant even have analytics in place.

Other clients have come to me with inhouse/homebuilt commerce systems, again with some real fundamental problems like not being able to have customized page titles or meta information for each page!  Or using session ID’s in the URLs….

I guess I am just upset that these customers basically are SOL and will likely have to migrate to a new platform..

Google recently expanded their beta program for their Google Gadget ads to a limited number of their adwords advertisers.  Unfortunately, none of my clients have been invited to join yet.  These gadget ads are rich media ads that can contain a large number of interactive, interesting features such as data feeds, flash and other multimedia tools.  The ads run on Google’s content network and can be cpc or cpm based.

Some examples of these rich media ads can be found at: Gadget ad examples .

I am so excited about all the opportunities becoming available for online advertising.  These gadget ads are just another example of how Google continues to innovate and push the marketplace further along.

There are millions of lists out there for building links but I actually wanted to capture some recent articles and postings about web directories and their usefulness for search engine optimization and link building.

• Hey, this article is almost three years old but many of the directory ideas are still good - some are free and some you have to pay a yearly fee. In all cases you have to watch out for the quality of the directory: “56 directories to submit to“
• Another dated but I found still useful article on “how to find directories to link to“
• Great article by Rand Fishkin on “What Makes a Good Web Directory“
• Rand again has some great ideas on what makes a good directory in his article “The Wisdom and Folly of Directory Link Building“
• 131 link building strategies (another way old article but still relevant)
• Andy Hagan & Aaron Wall’s article on “101 Link Building Tips to Market Your Website“

Its easy to be lured into thinking all you have to do is set up some automated bid management toolset for your paid search campaign (PPC) and sit back and watch the money come in. Unfortunately, that is rarely the case. Nonetheless, with a little planning, you can use these various ppc tools to your advantage, freeing up your time to do more important, less routine things than managing bidding.

Case in point, I have been using www.keywordmax.com lately and I do love the new version they came out with a few weeks ago. You can now simultaneously manage multiple instances of the same keyword/match type across multiple campaigns! Before this release, what happened is that the first instance of the keyword that keyword max found was managed, the others being ignored. Not a very good situation if you are running 25 identical versions of the same keyword but differing in geotargeting (e.g. “keyword A” in kansas, “keyword A” in nebraska, etc…).

I have also found that having a good methodology and system for selecting what keywords to manage really helps as well. I have been using database technology and simple formulas based upon conversion rates, minimum impressions and overall competitiveness of the keyword to come up with my selection of keywords to manage using keyword max. I then run the query and save the results as a table, labeling as this month’s keyword max selections.

Give keywordmax a try and let me know what you find out! Its alot of work but will pay off with lower conversion costs and more effective spending of your advertising dollars!

Google came out around a month ago with another new PPC tool for their adwords advertisers - called “Optimize Campaign” (see snapshot below).

I guess we can’t expect Google to programatically replace us search engine marketers just yet. I tried out the campaign optimizer on a few client campaigns and found out the following:

• It seemed to suggest raising the bids quite a bit of the time (imagine that!)
• The suggestions for optimizing the text ads were really weak - all I ever saw was a revising of the display url to show the ‘www’ subdomain (which i dont want to do anyway)
• The google optimizer did however have some good ideas for new keywords

Frankly, on first glance, a search engine marketer may have been worried, thinking that Google was going to eliminate our business by building an automated tool to do our PPC work. However, on first glance, it looks like it will be a while before you can replace your human search engine marketing analyst!

What are your thoughts on the new tool?

I have been thinking of better ways of figuring out what the ‘intent’ of the search visitor is. What has always been hard for me in search engine marketing is making that leap of faith when matching a keyword to a client’s product or offering. Is the customer really searching for what we are selling? For example, if the query is for “chemical warning labels”, is the searcher’s intent to buy warning labels for their hazardous chemicals or are they simply searching for information about warning labels on their child’s medicine?

I am going to try using some of the Google analytics parameters to help me evaluate that in some sort of quantitative sense as follows:

• Segment keywords by page view per visit
• Segment keywords by % exit ratio

My theory is that keywords that consistenly show a small page view/visit ratio (say <1.5:1 or so) probably are not relevant to my offerings. If the keyword intent was correct, why didnt they view more of the site? The same argument could be made with the exit ratio. If a keyword consistently shows a high exit ratio (assuming I have selected the most relevant landing page I can), then again, probably the searcher intent is not matching with my offer.

Tracking search engine optimization ‘campaigns’ or results is not even close to being as easy as tracking and monitoring paid search advertising results. Why? Well, just think for a minute. With PPC, you define exactly which keywords you want to advertise, what matching options, etc. then you define what search engines and even what campaign and ad group names. And you can insert tracking codes into the query strings on the ad URL’s to provide your analytics engine with exactly where that visitor came from and what their actual keyword query was. The beauty of PPC is that you have already defined up front what campaign or category that keyword belongs to. Thus, instead of looking at each keyword and how it is doing, a daunting task, you can monitor at a more macro level, the campaign or ad group level, then troubleshoot and go down to more detail from there.

But, what about SEO? You get thousands of inbound organic keyword searches a month, with visitors using phrases you never, ever optimized for. How do you even ‘allocate’ or define what campaign an organic keyword belongs to? With SEO, you optimize specific pages on your site for a handful of keywords but what keywords organic visitors use if never known until you view your web logs or analytics tool. The difficulty is then sifting through these thousands of organic keywords and figuring out what ‘campaign’ or keyword category they belong to so you can have a more macro view to analyze. Otherwise, how do you determine how you are doing with your SEO?

The Changing PPC Landscape and Challenges for the Search Marketer

One could argue that there are three main PPC players right now: Google, Yahoo and MSN. Ask.com has a smaller market share, around 7% (Comscore 2006) while Google commands around 50% of all the searches. 2nd tier search engines, like Kanoodle, Dogpile and Mamma, niche business search engines like Business.com, or even PPC networks such as Quigo, give us as search marketers many options for our paid search advertising.

However, along with all these options come challenges:

• Data Management and Integration - how do you capture and act on all this data?
• Targeting Options - Google offers geotargeting, time and day parting, with Yahoo hot on their heels with a similar set of options in their upcoming fall 2006 release. MSN even offers lifestyle targeting and demographic data on their searcher data. How do you properly configure these parameters?
• Competition - How do you see what your competitors are doing? How much they are bidding?

PPC Optimization Levers

Short vs. Long Term Optimization Levers
Short Term - Done every couple days - examples: adjust CPC bids, monitor/adjust coverage monitor 3rd party PPC tool settings, adjusting budget to adjust coverage
Long Term - This takes more planning and analysis - biweekly or monthly - examples: new text ad creative/offers, study/adapt to competitor ads/creative ideas, adding new keywords, changing overall bidding strategy

Campaign Structure

Having a well organized PPC campaign can help you in several ways:

• Easier to manage your budgets, targeting and ad positioning settings (Google, MSN)
• Allows you to quickly see what is going on with your PPC campaigns at the campaign level, before you jump in and get lost right away at a more granular level
• Organized campaigns lead to better organized ad groups/categories and thus more relevant keywords and higher response rates

Be Careful Who You Associate With

Page links are critical when you’re attempting to elevate your natural search engine rankings. You may already know this, but did you know that changes in search engine algorithms have made who you link with more important than how many links you have?
Put simply, Google and the other big search engines are making it harder to manipulate your ranking just by adding inbound links.

When you do link building for your web site, you should focus on your “linking neighborhood” and who you are associating with. What many shortsighted search engine marketers view as a hassle can become a great asset to your company if you follow a few simple optimization techniques.

Search Engines Are More Sophisticated

In theory, the search engines are becoming more sophisticated in their analysis of your site’s inbound linking map. As you probably know, Google’s PageRank algorithm, as originally set out, uses a democratic approach to analyzing the value/authority of a page. Each link to a page is a “vote” for that page - the more votes a page has the higher its importance. Combining PageRank with content analysis of the page, Google ranks pages and displays them in the results. However, this connectivity approach to calculating a page’s importance was, at first anyway, easy to manipulate, resulting in less relevant search results.

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