Conference Buddies

So is this what people really do at “Conferences”

On the far left and far right is James and Richard, 2 nice agency guys from the UK.   2nd from the Left is Shannon, one of my original “Conference Buddies”, from CA (that’s Cananda, not California).   3rd from the Left, is me, Richard from www.iSynergyWebdesign.com & www.BeeSeen.com.    Last but not least, our newest friend Daphne who actually took this cool photo.   p.s. You don’t want to see the before and after photos ;-)

Internet Retailer 2008
Managing 3rd Party Vendors

Yahoo Store Customer Example:

American Bridal
American Bridal, started on Intershop Shopping Cart then switched to YahooStores.

American Bridal, did the $70K catalog expense and that didn’t work.   From design to mailing, and did not reap the return on investment.     Using online methods help you adjust quicker versus print catalog costs are fixed and non-adjustable once you send them out.

When working a shopping cart designer/developer to customize your online store, be respectful of their time.   Many top designers and developers will want your business to succeed and will give you the time of day and their advice, however, when you there are limitations to anyone’s skills as well as limitations to any technology.   If you force your will on the development process you may ruin that working relationship or make your project overly complicate and never launch.

1. Plan for Success!
2. Create an operational bible
3. Videotape or write down your processes which helps to create your operational bible

Express Design Group:
They Own 20 businesses, such as GreekGear.com
They use Yahoo Store and created an E-Commerce store for each apparel niche that are closely related to their business.

GunDogSupply:
They were one of the first Hunting Supply Store to be optimized online.   They were content experts on all the Hunting Dog Accessories, and ranked in the top rankings for keywords like “Astro Garmin 200 for tracking your dog”

They used ViaWeb which then was bought by Yahoo in 1998.

SEO Tip:  Rewrite product descriptions from vendors (because with duplicate content, google will rank those pages by pagerank, so you need to change the way it’s written/phrased or you will be on the bottom of the list for that article).    SEO tip, duplicate content is not penalized under certain circumstances, however, you will be ranked the lowest by pagerank (and others also say by freshness or age, i.e. the first one to write that content).

Take your own pictures of the products to be unique and to provide better stickiness for your website.

Create your own Editorial Content / Product reviews to add SEO keyword score, but also to add value to your customers.

Multiple Stores:

B2B Website:
Duplicate your Yahoo Store, password protect public page, no follow SE tags.  This works great for B2B or wholesale businesses that have both Retail and Wholesale customers.

Back End, Good Software to Start with:
StoneEdge, OrderMotion  (multiple stores with 1 order back end)

Focus on 1 store first, with PR 6, tons of links, then do multiple stores

eBay Store Statistics:

Ebay $60 Billon
1.3M sellers all or part of their living on eBay (not include hobbiest)
Every 1 Min a baby gear item is sold, a car is sold every min, mustang is sold every 26 minutes.
1 Billion pages views per day
100M concurrent listings (updated more than 500 times per second)
Double the transaction volume of NYSE

Millions of Buyers transact with millions of sellers
2008 Focus on our customers:
1. Trust
2. Selection
3. Loyalty

Detailed Seller Ratings (DSRs) (was eBay feedback)

The 4 DSR’s:  (up to 5 stars each):
Item as described
communication
shipping cost
shippng time

DSR within the last 30 days:
4.8 = 15% discount
4.7 promotion in search
4.6 5% discount
4.5 powerseller status
4.4 risk of demotion, seller, non-performance, payment holds

eBay Store Case Studies:

Stacie & Jon Sefton
ebay id: bhexpress, B&HFactory outlet
eBay feedback 316,612
2003 with husband
Sell Designer Clothing and Merchandise (100% of their sales in eBay, in process of building new store, Iowa)
*** eBay brings them customers
$12M Sales in eBay sales

Bill Frischling
eBay id dyscern, 72,946
Started in 1999 with wife
Sells Electronics
12,000 emails
40% of sales from eBay
Helps cashflow and keep inventory churning
Seller onramp
ebay.com/onramp

Other eBay Information:
Strategy is Counter Intuitive:
More people bidding on an item in at a lower cost will end up higher final bid price than an item that starts off high.   This is because in the fact that more people are bidding on it, then it must be good.

One tip:  Products for $65 with free shipping sold more than the same products priced at $50 and no free shipping.

ChannelAdvisor = Using eBay

Mainly:
Overstock, close out, liquidation merchandise, used

One other area I wasn’t aware of is broken merchandise (but they are labeled as non working and only for parts i.e. people looking for spare parts to fix their digital camera, computer or other product)

CNet Channel, PriceGrabber, etc.

Sometimes call customers instead of email
have a great customer service rep, that people love to talk to

Autoloader = Channel Advisor
ShipWorks = Shipping Tool

Suppliers = after 3 years to establish a relationship

Clothing:
6 full time photographers, 24 data entry people
B&H Express

Benefits:
Greater protection (confirm every address)
Lower fees for better feedback
Power Sellers in More than 1 year (can’t leave them a negative rating within 7 days)
Increase seller services in the future
Increased International Sellers (with the weaker dollar)
Some sellers have over 50% of their sales are overseas

SEO:
Chose store name and store descriptions are pushed to SE
Within Stores, put in custom categories, with at least 5 items (then eBay pushed to SEs)
Items that are up for a long time, i.e. Fixed priced items, and less of the auctions that are temporary

Misc:
.40 to $4 for auction insertion fee
.05 &.10, Insertion free for (30 day listing format, with relisting), for items that don’t sell for a while

eBay owns a presence in over 60 countries (eBay.de, eBay.it, etc.), and also has part ownership in different brand Int’l websites.

Canadians ship postal service vs. UPS
i.e. $5 versus $50 to $70
Lower dollar amount (under $100) no trariffs i.e. $50 in addition to shipping fee

Amazon Store Statistics and Information:
30% sold by 3rd party sellers
Millions worldwide active seller accts
Over 20 categories
Fullfillment services
Expand into Int’l

MISC SHOPPING NETWORKS:

Use Larger Images

MSN Shopping
Optimization 1 Sheet (15 recommendations for data feed)
Frequent Shopper Program
Shophelp@microsoft.com

AOL Shopping
Female 45 Avg Age

Success:
- Deliver the right product, to the right customer, at the right time
- Establish relationships and maintain relationships to get customers to come back
- Boost sales with promotional events (annual, seasonal, etc.)
- Increase sell through (conversion, upsell, etc.)
- Meeting objectives and within budget

AOL Seller Advantages:
Deals, inSeller emails
Gift Centers
Gift cards
A-Z Store Directory
Wish Lists
Vertical Search
Ratings
My Shopping
Mobile Shopping
On and off network distribution

Yahoo Shopping:
Greg Hintz, General Manager
Yahoo Product Submit (merchant program to submit listings)
10 years, new website redesign 3 months ago
Coupons, Discounts,
30M monthly vists
100M products
250M monthly page views

Your Products May Be Featured in these areas:
Yahoo! TECH
Yahoo! MOVIES
Yahoo! TV
Yahoo! SEARCH

How to Get Started:
Open a Yahoo Store which can easily integrate with Yahoo! Product Submit
Product Feed into Yahoo! Product Submit

How to optimize your Feed and gain more:

Relevance: Accurate product description to Improve relevance
Merchant Rating:  Improve your merchant rating
- no bait and switch
- don’t up-sell after the sale
- review your merchant review and attend to conerns
- encourage your own customer to do merchant reviews

Soon to increase from 64 to 1200 categories
Category and Sub category level bidding

Pricegrabber listings also get into AOL shopping

Internet Retailer 2008
Social Sites for Retailing

Find a message to promote such as being carbon neutral as a company or being involved in the Green movement.

Dell.com/regeneration (re-generation)
ReGeneration.org

Enlist and encourage participation within the social networks

Dell used Facebook to start a contest: “What does green means to you”
They first used the Graffiti add-on to promote writing and pictures, then later used more of an essay style contest.   Numerous of Facebook users spent their time online to express themselves about what “Green” meant to them through Dell’s contest.

Social Network Statistics:

MySpace & Facebook Stats:
8 to 9% overall online US market share, 80 to 90% of social network traffic
Bebo & Facebook = UK’s largest social network market share (not myspace)

Facebook & MyYear book, high growth in the US

Gaya Online (an anime website) uses  coins to give users to spend to motivate online social activity.  They also offer limited edition coins as a special status within the community.

Social Networks has on average 2.6x pages than search engine traffic and 8 to 9x page views of news and media.

Monthly Retention Rates:
95% for Myspace
94% for Facebook

MySpace Demographic Growth:
18-24 (-13%)
25-34 (+9% growth)

Facebook Demographic Growth:
18-24 (-28%)
25-34 (+7% growth)

Adoption:
14% find videos useful
Of the 14%, there is 57% Use video to become your Brand Advocate
Of the 14%, there is 47% that tell others of a new site i.e. send a link to tell friends

Social Network Demographics:
Younger & Weathier
38% = Age 25-34
19% = Income over $100K

Entertainment related products recieve greatest share of referrals
Top areas: Music, Ticketing, Apparel, Computers, Sport and Fitness

Some Companies Utilizing Social Networks (Digital content to advocate your brand):

Delivery.com (earn points)
Amazon created apps for wish list, birthday reminders, buy gifts for friends
Sears uses facebook for social shopping for prom dresses
Pink from Victoria’s Secret (photos)
DiGiono (apps when pizza is ready, and provide coupons)
Guiness (petition to make st. patricks day an official holiday)
Zappos (badges to spread your brand message on websites)

More stats:  ilovedata.com = hitwise data blog

Trends:
Convergence of Entertainment and shopping experience

Uses:

Enhance Customer Experience:
Honeyshed (product video, and click to buy)
Martin + OSA (Shop by outfit / video)
VS Pink  (user generated content)
misses: madewell (no buy button, must call them to buy)

Increase Transaction Conversion:
QVC how to videos
Walmart canopy drill in details on product photos

Other:
How to fold a casual cuff, bowtie, etc.
Top 3 Social Areas:
Social networks
Ratings and reviews
Blogs

Others:
Wikis
Widgets/Applets (website, mobile, desktop)

Social Shopping:
Shopping 1.0
Surgical shopping, Know exactly what you want (lost pleasure of shopping)

Shopping 2.0
Kaboodle (60+% market share of this space)
(wish list, comments, similar interests)
anyknockoff

Product Design 2.0:
Let customers design, share, vote on and the co produces it (Levis)
1. product comparison
2. build a place for customers to play/share (behr paint)
3. Engage in the conversation (talk to your customers i.e. Racked)
4. give users and influencers the ability to leverage content from you (to become advocates, i.e. content for facebook page i.e. home depot, karma loop i.e. earn points)

Ajax SEO Problems:
crawling
bookmarking
no unique url

Turn off javascript in browser to see page in the eyes of SE (also can use firefox plug-in)
Other tools:   googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com
Other Misc Notes (SEO):

B2B:
GalaSource.com
2nd largest distributorship ecommerce site ($18M), food service equipment & supplies dealer serving hospitality industry  (design services, equipment, from concept to completion).
DiscountedRestaurantEquipment.com ($30K/mo on eBay)

Galasource.com, avg 6800 to 9000 visits/day
PPC: $80 to$150K/mo
SEO: 63% Organic
Product Data Feeds, froogle, pricegrabber, business.com
GalaDesigns.net 300 vendors, 300,000 products
25,000 keywords in PPC
5,355 keyword focus (747 on 1st page)

92,000 product pages (seec)
7% of 2007 rev
20+% some months
only 1.7% of budget (sales, 5 to 6% of rev for mktg)
Automated Page Generation
Performance basis, by click basis
Higher page rank, the more pages will be index (i.e. url rewriting)

B2C:
Trulythefinest.com
teakalook.com
gonauticalgifts.com
oneofakindbuys.com

Internet Retailer 2008
Comparison Shopping Engines (CSE)

Shopping Networks (SN), Shopping Search Engines (SSE), or also commonly know as Comparison Shopping Engines (CSE), is another form of how consumers search online for products, with websites like eBay, Amazon, NexTag, Buy.com, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, PriceGrabber, Overstock, Yahoo Shopping, and many others.

Buying and Selling Big Brands still work well in Comparison Shopping Engines (i.e. gucci purses).

Price is a big factor, but the main factor.    Support, quality, user ratings, etc. are key to increase your conversion rates from CSE’s.   However, you can sort by price easier by price on CSE’s than you can on other Internet Shopping Channels.

Fundamental Principles:
CSE and other SEM = Assist Sales (multiple touch points before a buyer finally buys)

CSE = Lower Life Time Value (you must always be low cost leader to succeed in the )

Customer driven, do not over rely on automation (automate where it makes sense for tedious tasks, such as product feeds, but not your overall management, strategy and tactics.   Many companies automate too much with software and miss out on opportunities.)

Customer Factors:

Customer Decision Process => Find product => Price Sort => Review Brand/Support/Credibility, etc.

Customer Acquisition (most expensive)
Customer Monetization (most profitable)
Life Time Value of the Customer
Multi-Channel / Assist  (some users may use 20+ sources or exposures before buying your product, i.e. find you on search engines, reading product reviews, etc.).

Direct Response Marketer (catalog, etc.)

Research:

Hitwise -> find your online exposure online, by brand terms online

Affiliate Marketing Factors:

Affiliate Marketing is advertising your product by giving the advertisers a % of the revenue and no money for the Ad placement.   A commission based way to promote your products.

Your own Affiliates are competing with you, even on the CSE’s and SEM/PPC
You need to set Terms & Conditions
Affiliates are in each channel (i.e. discount sites, urls, .com retailers, etc.)
Drive sales and clearance section to affiliate mktg
Use behaviorial targeting to find the right affiliate sites (transacting, talking to each other)
Top tier affiliates = High affinity with your brand, with your community

Main Point:
Understand where your incremental business is coming from

SMX Advanced – Seattle, WA – June 2008
Topic:  Blow Your Mind Link Building Tips

Here are some typical but top Directories where you should get links from:

DMOZ.org = http://www.dmoz.org/
Best of the Web = http://botw.org/
Yahoo Directory & Search = http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
Joe Ant = http://www.joeant.com/
Blog Catalog = http://www.blogcatalog.com/

EDU Link Building
All conference speakers talking about link building tell you .GOV and .EDU are the best links to get.   For .GOV you have to be “special”.   But for .EDU you can get listed on various pages that lists resources, links, or favorites.   But to find these sites that accept links is tricky.   However this SMX session provided some link love secrets:

This is to find all the pages that has a links page within a certain school.edu site:
linkdomain:nameofwebsiteorschoolhere.com site:.edu “links”

For all websites within a school domain, that have a links page:

site:.edu “links”

Note that “links” can also be replaced with any common text that a link page might have, such as “bookmarks”, “resources”, “favorites”, “favorite sites”, “websites” or your products, services or industry.

Viral Marketing:
Creation of widgets, blog templates, sponsorship of templates, contests, and content syndication are ways that create massive buzz and links to your website.  If you create a useful free tool or content, many people will end up linking to you naturally.

Other Areas of Link Building:
Commenting on Blogs is great way to get a link back to your website.   Be sure that the website does not have the “nofollow” rule on, which does not let Search Engine spiders follow links out of their website.

On the flip side, if you write a useful article or information, many bloggers will tend to link to you naturally. Make sure you track this with a pingback or trackback. 

According to Wikipedia:
A Trackback is one of three types of Linkbacks, methods for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking, and so referring, to their articles. Some weblog software programs, such as WordPress, Movable Type, Typo and Community Server, support automatic pingbacks where all the links in a published article can be pingedwhen the article is published. The term is used colloquially for any kind of Linkback.

A Pingback is one of three types of Linkbacks, methods for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to their articles. Some weblog software, such as Movable Type, WordPress and Community Server, support automatic pingbacks where all the links in a published article can be pinged when the article is published.

A Linkback is a method for Web authors to obtain notifications when other authors link to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to their articles. The three methods (Refback, Trackback, and Pingback) differ in how they accomplish this task.

Here are a couple other tools mentioned that help with tracking links:

http://www.seomoz.org/backlink-analysis/

http://tools.seobook.com/backlink-analyzer/

Here’s one tool not mentioned in the seminar, but has great uses in Google:
http://www.google.com/help/operators.html
http://www.google.com/webmasters/

Other Conference Comments:
There was also specific discussion whether or not reciprocal and paid links are dead in terms of SEO score.   It’s a fact that reciprocal links still provide a good score for anchor text / keyword link score.  However, 1 way links are weighted much higher than reciprocal links.   As long as you make your quest for links look natural as it was suppose to be then you should be fine i.e. many businesses find links for the sake of having relevant direct users come visit your website.

With paid links, they are also still valid, however, Matt Cutts one of the key search developers at Google is on a mission to reduce “link spam”.   So use paid links sparingly, asking yourself the question, “will this link bring me valid traffic to my website”.   If you answer yes, then it’s worth getting.   And as long as you have a business purpose, then it will look natural and you will gain link score.

… the bottom line is to use your common sense!!!
 

SMX Advanced – Seattle, WA – June 2008
Topic:  Website Architecture Issues – SEO Tips

Here are a couple useful commands and tools for SEO:

This is  a useful command to find all your website pages that are indexed in Yahoo and Google:  site:insert-website-name-here.com

You type this command in the search field in either Yahoo or Google. This is great to see before a website redesign, in order to do your 301 redirects properly.  90% of website redesigns end up in a significant loss in traffic due to the lack of due diligence and planning.   Having a snap shot of what pages you have indexed, their meta tags, and keyword ranking is definitely useful and should be on the all web designer’s check list, as well as on every SEO manager’s check list. 

Use the Firefox Developer plugin tool to disable JavaScript to see what the search engine crawlers see.   You can download it here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60

Finally a good Google page rank tool for Firefox:
http://googlebar.mozdev.org/

I never heard of this tool.   This tool helps you check if the redirects are the ones you actually want (i.e. 301, 302, etc.).   In which case for SEO you want 301 redirects to tell the search engines that you have permanently move this page with the page rank and score intact.  Google will not transfer score for anything other than 301 redirects.  Check out this tool the next time you do your SEO QA:
http://web-sniffer.net/

Here are a couple other tools from Google not mentioned in this session, but is very useful for Webmasters:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/

Persona’s help you identify who your audience is.  It’s also considered a way of profiling. Power to create deep empathy with your customers.

David Ogilvy once said, ”All good marketing requires empathy”
 

Key Points:
- Personality, wants, fears motivations, aspirations, etc.
- Speak directly to your audience   (Exactly what they need)
- Narrative  = description (demogr, psycho graphics, business) to get closer
- Empathy / Insight

Process:

1.     Research
2.     Brainstorm 
3.     Write it down 
4.     Create your campaign
5.     Segment your audience
6.     Measure, adjust, repeat

Research:
1. Demographics
    Geo, Gender, Income, etc.

2. Pschographics
    Personality, likes/dislikes, ambitions

What’s that one thing that will stop the purchase?

Resources:

1.     Quantcast.com
2.     Compete.com
3.     Adlab.msn.com
4.     Prizm / Claritas.com (expensive, data based on zip code)
5.     Trellian Keyword Discover
6.     Word tracker
7.     Google Suggest
8.     Adwords
9.     People (Trainers, Sales Team, Customers (Surveys))

Avoid like the plague:

1.  The CEO Data Source
2.  Stereotypes
3.  Quest for Perfection
4.  The perfect Ad is the one that never launches
5.  The perfect Persona is the one that you never use
6. Thesauritis (Easy words / easy to read / not too long)
7. CEO-it-is  (I know my customers syndrome, therefore I don’t need to ask)

                                             
Other sites to visit:
ConversationMarketing.com/Personas
PraticalPersonas.com
GrokDotcom.com

Decision Making Landscape (Low to High):

 i.      Emotion
ii.      Knowledge
iii.     Risk (loss)
iv.     Reward (gain)

Define and Understand Objectives

We’re more alike than different (Standard behaviors)

Channel Capacity:

Short Term Memory = temporary memory i.e. white board
1.     Limitation  = channel capacity (i.e. too many listings, users can’t click on everything)
2.     Limited to 4 to 5 things / 4 to 5 listings on average in which a user will click on
3.     On average all users will at least click on 1 organic listing
4.     First 5 seconds (on average the attention spam before a user clicks on a listing)

Long Term Memory  (Journal putting away for long time)

1.     Heuristic vs. Otimal Decision Criteria
2.     Heuristic (meet or surpass cutoff)
3.     Bounded rationality
4.     Sati-slicing 
5.     Misc

Find what meets general criteria
Narrow down then detailed rationality
     i.e. find key dealerships then drill down for best price of those 3 to 5 (and not price 100 dealers)

Model:

1.     Awareness
2.     Satisficing
              a.     Cut down to fit mental white board
3.     ComparisonMatrix
              a.     Now more rational
4.     Head to Heads
             a.     Sub Concious / Concious

5.     Focusing on Information Scent
         i.     Understand intent
        ii.     What is your objective
       iii.     Information Scent / Focus / Clustered in logical area
g.     Navigating with Scent & Images
h.     Men vs. Women        
         i.     Women use both side of brain (use 2x as much as men when in search)
        ii.     Search Engine made for Men
i.      Misc
        i.     Usage Case

Overall, Personas are fictitious personalities that we give to different type of imaginary customers, in which we do our best to understand each type of customer segment (by demographic, lifestyle, shopping behaviors, etc.), in order to tailor our marketing messages to each specific niche or segment.   This in turn helps identify, find, and communicate to customers that are within the target market of our products or services to lessen wasted advertising spending and focus on a more effective ways to acquire customers and grow sales.

The world of online advertising and paid search (also known as pay per click – PPC) has change over the last several years.   However within the last year, the rules have changed dramatically, and we now are officially in Adwords 2.0.

From the beginnings of GoTo.com with a pure bid for placement, the highest bidder wins the higher Ad link placement.   I still remember the days of 1 cent Ad placements with 10 cents buying you some top listings.   This is a far cry from today’s rising PPC costs with top rankings ranging from $5 to $50+ a click.  Can we say “mesothelioma lawyer”?

Now Google has raised the bar in making it difficult to not only rank higher in the natural or free listings, but now (actually in 2007, but more noticeable and advanced in 2008) Google has created advanced algorithms or formulas on how you will be ranked in the paid search / sponsored listings (or Pay Per Click, PPC).   This new way of ranking you (Also known as Ad Rank), not based on the highest bid, but rather a set of factors is known as Quality Score.

According to the SMX Advanced session on Dectrypting Quality Score, these following factors are key:

How:
I.   Minimum Bid
II.  Keyword Relevance (Within your Ad and Landing Page)
III. Click Through Rate (CTR)
IV. History

Note: What gets me is CTR or Click Through Rate is essentially making Google more money by ranking the company with the most paid clicks higher.   However in Google’s defense I can also see this lowering Click Fraud due to the fact you wouldn’t want your competitor to rank higher therefore stop clicking on them.   I guess Google wins either way.
Why is Google doing this?

Google is doing this to discourage spam Ads as well as keyword arbitrage.  Where by tens of thousands of individuals buy up keywords just to drive traffic to their spam related related website to make money while not having an actual product or service to sell. 

Note:  Okay, this makes sense, but it makes it extremely difficult to key up in the best rankings within PPC.   It takes constant effort to stay profitable even for companies with great products to sell.

Other Factors:

Within Keyword relevance you can get even more granular by breaking up your keyword campaigns within these areas:

- Narrow Your Keywords (2-3 word phrase matches) 
- Hand Build your Ads (Do not automate)
- Tailor Your Landing Pages to Match Your Keywords 
- Targeting by Geography Helps
- Segment & Microtarget (organized by focused and targeted Ad Groups and Campaigns)

Testing & Metrics:
- Track CTR & CR for all Ad copy variants
- Isolate variables
- Track to $ sales
- Experiment with different grouping structures
- Homgenize Ad groups
- Exact matches count
- Use day parting 

One of the main take aways within this area is that there is a new “Sandbox” theory not just for SEO but now for PPC.   Within that initial period of time you are being graded for QS or Quality Score which dictates your Ad Rank.    However what’s not clear still, is how long will you be in that PPC “Sandbox” i.e. how many clicks will it take for you to grow your QS and Ad Rank score.

One last thing as a main take away is to be focused in your organization of your keywords and Ads, as well as the quality of your website (i.e. relevancy) is key to your success as well.   

SEM = SEO + Paid Search

Most prices are firm to avoid haggling and to offer consistent and fair prices   

5 Different SEM Pricing Models:

1) Retainer Based (6 to 24 month contracts)

2) Performance Based

     – Delta change (% of change in sales, leads, traffic)

     – Commission Structure

3) Fee for Service Model

     – Project based

4) Hourly Consulting

5) % of Ad Spend  (10 to 20%, some at 12.5%)

Setup Fees i.e.  $25K+ upfront  or phased approach $8K for each phase

SEO Core Services:

1) Extensive Keyword Research & Analysis

2) Keyword Placement & Site Optimization

3) Inbound Link Campaigns/Reporting/Social Media

4) Other Custom Services 

    – Web site audits

    – Negative keyword reports

    – Web analytics

    – Monthly Mainenance 

    – Copywriters, agencies, web dev, etc.

Different Levels:

   – New domain vs. established site vs. past problems, etc.

Additional Agency Misc Info:

Process:

Consult

Research

Evaluate

Analyze

3 Agency levels:

Enterprise

SMB

Boutique

Types:

Train you

Do for you

Hybrid

SEM Agencies add value by using SEM (PPC + SEO) to research new  areas to grow your business 

i.e.  Using the right analytics, a SEM agency helped Martha Stewart find a large amount of people searching on “pale green buckets”, which then helped shape offline / magazine advertising.    New consumer trends are a natural byproduct of the strategic help from SEM agencies.

SEM = drives all channels of marketing mix (research & test messaging) 

SMX Advanced, June 3-4, 2008 in Seattle, WA

SMX (Search Marketing Expo) Advanced includes advanced topics on SEO, PPC, SEM Businesses, and SEO Web Developers. Topics include advanced tips on Link Building, Bots/Spiders, SEM Business Tips, International SEO, PPC Bidding, SEO Development covering AJAX, and other advanced topics not normally covered at most Search Marketing conferences. For more information, visit:
http://searchmarketingexpo.com/advanced/