February 10th, 2009 by Richard Lee
The Dozen Most Common Search Marketing Mistakes That CMOs Make – SMX West 2009
Speakers/Panelists:
Keith Dieruf, Manager, Online Marketing, Ameriprise Financial
Jody Farmer, Vice President, Strategic Marketing, CreditCards.com
Jane Flint, Manager, Kaiser Permanente Internet Marketing Services
Brian Kaminski, EVP and Managing Director, iProspect San Francisco
Karen Weber, Vice President, eMarketing, Irwin Union Bank
Conference Notes/Description:
The 12 most common strategic mistakes that companies make in their SEO and paid search initiatives and gain insight into these critically important concepts surrounding search marketing and its role within the entire marketing mix. Advice and perspective on these dozen critical mistakes, how to avoid them, and how understanding them can dramatically increase your search marketing results.
Mistake #1: Failing to Set Measurable Goals for Your Campaigns
Most CMO’s don’t set goals when it relates to Search Marketing. When you do that, how can you:
- Improve performance
- Gauge success
- Set baseline measurement
- Able to flag things working vs. not working
Mistake #2: Failing to Assign $ Values to Every “Conversion Action” Available on Your Site
Many actions help with the sales process. Measuring key actions help measure the success as well as help you optimize. Measuring actions such as a signup to RSS feed, newsletter, contact info form. Assign a conversion value to areas that have a strong correlation to a sale.
Mistake #3: Assessing the Success of Search Marketing Using Solely a Direct Marketing Model
Many CMO’s and execs see the bottom line solely tied to the direct sale. However, much of marketing helps or assists with maturing a user to the final sale of your product.
Yahoo & Comscore = 92% of of online traffic converted offline (on phone and in store)
Mistake #4: Treating SEO as a Project and Not an Ongoing Process
SEO is not “Set it and forget it”. SEO is not a one time project.
One agency that tracked customers that went on their own with a “Set it and forget it” strategy, ended up losing 1/3 of page 1 ranking in 6 months. Due to changes in algorithms, competitors, internal website changes, etc. It takes 1 year to make up for the 1 year you skip and then you are still 1 year behind the competitors.
SEO needs to be an ongoing process
Mistake #5: Making a #1 Ranking as Your Most Important Objective, When It May Be Costing You Business
- You don’t always have to rank #1
- Ranking 3-5, or first page, in many instances will help attain your ROI
- Your desire for position 1 may cost you your ROI
- You have a finite amount of resources, so you need to allocate that time wisely
Mistake #6: Focusing on “Big” Keywords and Forgetting the Long Tail
“Big” one keyword phrases like Car is more expensive than 2 or 3 word phrase keywords
Long Tail keywords are less expensive, convert better, capture customers further in the buying process, makes it easier for customers to find your product.
Buy Car or Car Loan vs. just the keyword Car
Last year 28% of keywords never been searched before
Learn now while the new words are less exp ($0.50 vs. $11 a click)
Mistake #7: Engaging in Paid or Natural SEM but Not BOTH
Having combined natural/organic search and paid search has a multiplier effect and synergistic effect 1+1 = 3. Customers seeing you in both areas increase credibility in your brand.
Paid search also helps in help with test new keywords for meta tags and content with SEO
Mistake #8: Using Your Langauge, and Not that of Your Customers
You need to understand how your customers are searching versus how your company would want them to search
Fitness String vs. Jump Rope
Financial Advisor Managing Your Assets vs. Asset Manager
Rubbing compound vs. Scratch remover (3M)
Show how people are actually searching
Mistake #9: Optimizing Only Your Web Pages and Not Your Other Digital Assets
Some companies focus only on optimizing the website
You need to optimize Press Releases, Blogs, Social Marketing Areas, Video/YouTube, Reviews, etc.
Mistake #10: Treating Your Search Marketing and Other Channels Separately, Instead of Integrating Them
Integration is key to have higher results as a total
TV = Create Demand
Search = Capture Demand
67% as a result of offline channel, 39% made a purchase
Ask dept to insert terms that you are targeting into their writing
Ask offline dept what words they are using that you might not be using
Search Insurance = For TV Ads think about what words people might use to search on
Mistake #11: Failing to Bid on Terms for Which Your Site Ranks Highly Within the Organic Results
Reinforcing several of the earlier points, is that Bidding on terms will help build credibility and synergy within your marketing campaigns.
Test having Paid and Organic dual placements.
Organic Listings is great for Branding
PPC is great for Lead Generation, Direct Reponse Messaging, in addition to Branding (Not always about direct marketing)
52% = using the SE as their first step in the buying decision
Mistake #12: Bidding Solely on Branded Terms and Ignoring Non Branded Terms
Definitely don’t skip PPC for non branded terms, otherwise you are talking to people who already know you if you only bid on branded terms.
Other problems of only bidding on branded terms: i.e Bidding on Laptop will bring in more customers than bidding on Dell Latitude Laptop harder for a company like HP.
Bonus Mistake:
Attributing Conversions to the Last Click, When There May Have Been Many Clicks
Attribute model, what’s helping you convert through out the customer funnel
Q&A:
How to Find What Keywords Customers are Searching On:
- Website Log File
- Internal Site Search
- Paid Search Data
- Content on Website
- Keywords in Blog Comments
Feeds on people talking about your product on Twitter (mine public information to be a partner)
Not good example:
Customer Focus Group (not a good sample size for good keywords)