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Internet Marketing Articles
Interface Tech News
May, 2005
by: Seth Barnes
Search Engine Marketing Tactics: Staying Current and Competitive
Much of the chatter at the Search Engine Strategies 2005 Conference in New York dealt with the increasingly competitive search engine marketplace. As placement in both the free (or organic) and paid search listings becomes intimately related to a company's bottom-line, it's easy to discern a single sentiment from the legions of marketing professionals looking to harness search engine traffic: how will people find me?
In the past few years, it has become obvious that a multi-faceted strategy is the best approach. To improve ranking on the organic side a complete Search Engine Optimization (SEO) program (researching and implementing popular industry keywords into website content, headers, title /meta tags, and internal links) along with a link building program (soliciting relevant inbound links to your site) is in order. Combining this with a pay per click (PPC) advertising campaign on Google or Yahoo ensures balanced placement on both sides of the search page.
But the playing field is getting crowded. While only 3% of traditional advertising budgets are devoted to search engine marketing (SEM), conventional players in every conceivable industry has realized that SEM is a viable and necessary undertaking. And all indications suggest that the dollars will continue to flow towards SEM. According to JupiterResearch, paid search is expected to expand faster than any other segment of online advertising, increasing from $2.6 billion in 2004 to $5.5 billion in 2009. Also, offline purchases are significantly influenced by online activity. Recent research suggests that consumers utilize the Internet in some fashion before 90% of offline, in-store purchases.
In addition, the major search engines like Google and Yahoo continue to refine, augment, and alter the algorithms within the "spiders" that crawl the web for information and subsequently set the protocol for rankings by keyword. This, combined with the saturation of the SEM market means that nothing is guaranteed—your position in the paid and organic listings can fluctuate as competitors optimize their own websites or initiate new paid campaigns.
SEM is not a one-time win or lose proposition; it's a constant game of oversight and proactive response. If you simply make SEO changes and/or set up a PPC campaign only to remain on the sidelines, your hard work will likely be trumped by competition who is actively monitoring their SEM campaign. Measuring conversions is the easiest way to measure the performance of a PPC campaign. By setting up an "actionable" landing page (a page that allows the user to take an action of some sort by submitting an order, signing up for a newsletter, or leaving contact information) you can measure the percentage of visitors who take action on the page after clicking over from the PPC ad. Establishing a value for these conversions then allows the marketer to measure the back-end ROI of the campaign.
Increasingly, search engine marketers are turning to web analytic software like ClickTracks, Urchin, or NetTracker in a quest to gain another layer of data behind the performance of their PPC ads. Web analytic programs like ClickTracks provide a user-friendly interface allowing the marketer to track user behavior once they arrive at the website from a PPC ad.
For instance, let's say a certain keyword is generating a healthy click thru rate (CTR) from a PPC ad, but the number of conversions remains low. After looking at the web analytic data, you might realize that instead of filling out a contact form on the landing page, users are clicking on another internal link. Or you might find that they're exiting the landing page soon after arrival. In the first case, you'd need to tweak the content and structure of the landing page so the qualified users who click over from the ad aren't distracted from the end-goal of the contact form. In the second case, you'd want to make your PPC ad copy a bit more focused: the content of the ad as it stands is too broad, and as a result, you're enticing a number of searchers to click on the ad who aren't interested in the product.
In this competitive search engine marketing climate, you can succeed by appealing only to the qualified leads that ultimately directly affect your bottom-line ROI. An efficient PPC campaign leads to less spending and higher conversions.
Search engines are huge repositories of information that we access with a few choice keywords per query. Conventional wisdom suggests that the average search query is between 2-3 words. This is backed up by the fact that the most generic keywords are the most competitive/expensive on the paid side.
Both Google and Yahoo offer "broad" keyword matching capabilities where your PPC ads appear for keywords that are semantically related to your existing keyword. So while you can bid on a common keyword phrase like 'real estate', your ad will appear for related phrases that contain 'real' and 'estate' in any order along with other terms such as 'real estate listing' or 'ocean real estate'. This broad matching is sure to drive more traffic and to raise your average cost per click (CPC), but it isn't time effective to tailor the creative of each PPC ad to match all the "broad" variations that are reeled in.
While the majority of users utilize concise language in the search engines, they aren't always looking for generic items. You're forced to compete for words that only describe your business in general terms. To some extent, the consumer has come to see the search engine as a magic box; they assume that by providing a brief snippet of information, the search engine will dynamically generate the specific results they are looking for. PPC advertisers need to maintain a viable presence for the most competitive keywords in their industry, while also testing the performance of longer keyword phrases.
On more than one occasion at the Search Engine Strategies 2005 Conference a panelist insisted that search engine marketing was not a "set it and forget it" proposition. Effective campaigns require constant attention, tweaking, and testing. Measure the success of your campaign against your goals. Use tracking tools to gauge the relative worth of your PPC ad buy in terms of ROI. Purchase a broad range of generic and targeted keywords and pay attention to the terms that garner the best conversion rates. Search engines provide tremendous value as a means of disseminating and organizing information for searchers. To harness those consumers in this increasingly competitive environment, it's wise to implement and test a variety of tactics to obtain maximum return on your online campaigns.