Conference Buddies

• Complete most SEM project by 20th of each month
• Good book to read: Getting Things Done – by David Allen
• Check email 2 to 3 times a day and turn off the email notification. Don’t do email first thing in the morning – you will be fighting urgent fires rather than focusing on strategic projects

Speakers/Panelists:
Lance Loveday, Founder, President and CEO, Closed Loop Marketing
Eric Papczun, Director of Natural Search Optimization, Performics

Conference Notes/Description:

• 1/3 of searches are ready for purchase
• 77% are for research
• 50-70% bounce rate for landing pages

awareness > consideration (clicks) > (post-click) preference > purchase

Holiday pages:

• Valentine’s day offer – after valentine change to story about valentine’s day surrounding the gift purchased = fresh content and keeping content
• sitemap = search engine customer service
• 800 # gives sense of: not beging afraid to talk to me, reputable, established

ROI = Visibility x Effectiveness

ROI = Traffic x Conversion

ROI = SEO x Usability

SEO, Design, Usability

It is possible to have all 3, it’s just more work & planning
Goes hand in hand.

Flash

Progressive Enhancement – still allow SE to see flash elements
ie. Flash on left side, and static scenes and descriptions on right hand side

Usability

Good usability does not make the user think. Everything is spelled out and easy to find.

1. 25%-400% increase in conversion from usability enhancement
2. functional tagline: tell people what you do
3. Men and Women navigate through the site differently:
   • Men scan the nav bar first
   • Women more interested in looking at images and read content
4. Length of URL does matter
   • long URL = complex and a turn off (2.5 times less likely to click on than short URLs)

User judges your website within 1/20th of a second

• 75% of web users admit making judgments about the credibility of an organization based on the design of its web site.
  -Fogg BJ Standford Guidelines
  • lack of clutter; openness
  • navigation
  • professional design

Resources

• Book: Web Design for ROI

Speakers/Panelists:

Scott Brinker, President and CTO, ion interactive
Jonathan Mendez, Founder and CEO, RAMP Digital
James Zolman, CEO, semvironment

Conference Notes/Descriptions:

Going beyond the basic concept of landing page with advanced techniques such as keyword-specific pages, audience segmentation and targeting, dynamically-generated landing pages and more.

API: understand the technology that people are using

All APIs that are available – www.programmableweb.com

Some APIs include:

• Social AMP landing page: Facebook API to pull content to FB; backdoor to social media advertising
• APIs within Ads: serving the landing page to people
  • content in Ad is dynamically updated where the user can complete the transaction within the ad

Build experience to bring revelance to people

• The more control you give people, the better it is
• Providing advanced search can generate persuasive information generated based on the search performed. ie. reviews, maps (give sense of location), helpful / useful information, etc.

Strategy = Bigger Picture

Marriage of Creative + Technology = Success

5 Kinds of Landing Page Capabilities

1) Cycle Speed: Concept to Completion

- No ad hoc landing page creation; Plan & Follow a Process:

1. CMS
2. Design Templates
3. Digital Asset
4. Proof/Approval Workflow
5. Forms (data collection)
6. Parameterized Flash Objects

2) Targeting = Audience Segmentation

1. How segmented
2. How revelant

Coordination Between Pre-Click & Post-Click (Search Marketing Continuity Space)

Testing

1. Test Process:
   • Hypothesis-driven testing
   • Segmentation Testing: testing audiences vs. content
2. Test Experience:
   • 1 pager vs. multiple pager experiences
   • 2 Step landing pages:
     Page 1: User choices to allow further revelance experience on page 2
     Page 2: More revelant information based on user’s choice from page 1

5) Creative

1. “Beauty is a signaling strategy” -Seth Godin
2. Tap visual design talent
3. Play with flash elements
4. Bold testing / out of the box

Additional Tips & Information: www.postclickmarketing.com

Dynamic Landing Pages:

- Works especially well for E-Commerce

1. 2nd Page dynamics based on 1st page simple entry. Multiple page landing page is often better in conversion.
2. Geo-Targeting: IP Address
3. Keyword: dynamic word insertion

Not for Dynamic Landing Pages:

1. Broad Match Technology: too broad which might include negative image
2. Content Network: default keyword is used resulting in generic landing page
3. Semantics: same word but different meaning

Increase Chances for Success:

1. Negative Keywords
   - Tools: Word Tracker, Analytics, Search Engines, Keyword Research Tools
2. Target & Plan: Campaign Structure & Processes
3. Test Small % of Traffic: Day part campaign; use long tail keywords/phrases to lower volume
4. Location: where to place dynamic keywords (H1, H2, etc. tags as well as footer)
5. Copy writing: make it engaging with questions

Multivariate Tools:

• Omniture Testing Targeting
• Google Website Optimizer
• LiveBall

Speakers/Panelists:

Jeremy Crane, Managing Director, Online Media and Search, TNS Compete
Dan Darnell, Director of Marketing, Optimost, Interwoven, Inc
Sandra Niehaus, Vice President User Experience and Creative Director, Closed Loop Marketing

Conference Notes/Description:

Landing pages with multivariate testing tools – tools that let you change various elements of the page dynamically to see which tests better with people.

Stimulus > Exposure > Response

Advertising > Landing Page > Conversion Funnel

Insight + Testing = $

Rules:

1) Dedicated Landing Page
2) Don’t get between your customer: focus on the target destination
3) Optimizing post-click experience
4) Learn from your competitors
5) Every other rule is only true for 5-6 months

Copy:

- Less is More: Remove distractions
- Clear organization of copy
- Clear messaging of offer
- Credibility support (logos)
- Each landing page should have a unique phone number for tracking

Call To Action (CTA):

- Test CTA text, learning what does not work is the goal
- Make text align with expectations to get the offer to the right audience and help people focus on what you want to drive conversions to
- Clear CTA

Overall:

- Pick your battles, focus on what is most important
- Interactions between elements make a difference (test combinations)
- Be careful of raising issues unnecessarily. ie. Privacy Policy for well known brands. In contrast, for less known brands Privacy Policy will help in assurance.

Testing:

- Fine tuning landing pages increases ROI significantly

Step 1: Fix all usability issues on website

Step 2: Getting the offer to the right audience

Step 3: A/B testing is great for clients that are inexperience with testing. Or has a really bad design and needs convincing that a redesign is needed and worth the investment.

Step 4: Multivariate testing for winner of A/B Testing

Investment in Landing Page Design:

- Investing in design skill is worthwhile to achieve the high level of professionalism, harmonized design elements, and good flow of usability experience.

Speakers/Panelists:
Drew Hubbard, Senior Linking Analyst, SEO, The Search Agency
Matt Liu, Product Manager, YouTube, Google Inc.
Jonathan Mendez, Founder and CEO, RAMP Digital
Eric Papczun, Director of Natural Search Optimization, Performics

Conference Notes/Description:

Tips and tactics for doing well with YouTube, the leading online video destination for the web and leading video search engine. YouTube content is widely distributed in search results elsewhere, including those of its owner, Google.

YouTube:

• 2nd largest Search Engine behind Google
• 4th largest web property

Video Ranking:

1. Title
2. Description
   • use complete sentences
   • avoid keyword stuffing (will be penalized)
   • descriptive, accurate & unique
3. Tags
   • avoid keyword stuffing (will be penalized)
4. Community
   • Share & distribute
   • Experiment with annotations, video responses & thumbnails
   • Avoid spamming & rating your own videos
5. Embedding Video
   • distribution = popularity = better

YouTube Insight

• Free Video Analytics Tool for anyone with a YouTube account
  1. Discover: Paid, Organic, etc. traffic
  2. Demographic statistics
  3. Paid Search
• CPC
• Only US & English Only
• Goes to video

Integrated Marketing Campaign with YouTube

• Keyword density within description
• Inbound links
• Ad Bitz video link
• Channel page to include:
  • Optimize channel & profile
  • Include keyword in channel title, tags, description
  • Include the word “Video” within the title
• Subscription
• Distribution: email, embed, embed entire page
• Landing Page for more content
• Deep branding engagement using YouTube

2 Linking Opportunities:

• Under profile picture (deep link)
• Indicate website link (domain only)
• These links are no follow links which will not help SEO but Google does see them

Annotations:

Allow cross-linking within YouTube; these links are clickable. Outside link will not be clickable.

YouTube Title = Meta Title
YouTube Description = Meta Description
YouTube Tags = Meta Keywords

Additional Optimizations:

• Upload captions, annotations, transcripts
• Brand your video with logo watermarks for additional layer of branding
• Annotations can be placed on top of video
• Include Google Map for integration into local search which is 3.3 times more likely to click through
• Include and optimize thumbnails
• Include video sitemaps

What videos can do:

• Promote demand and awareness (ie. BlendTech increase blender sales by 700%)
• Generate traffic through social media: facebook, blogs, media press around video
• Video lifetime is long: months

Jonathan Mendez’s Blog – SEM, Branding in Digital, Social Media Optimization, etc.:

http://www.optimizeandprophesize.com/

TubeMogul:

Distribute video to multiple sites.

Speakers/Panelists:

Mona Elesseily, Director of Marketing Strategy, Page Zero
Matt Van Wagner, President, Find Me Faster

Conference Notes/Description:

The basics of how to purchase ad placement, usually on a Cost-Per-Click (CPC) or Pay-Per-Click (PPC) basis, from major search engines including best practices.

Paid Search Flow Chart:

Campaign -> Ad Group(s) -> Keywords -> Ads -> Landing Pages
Note: Don’t forget the landing page

Ask.com:

Displays own ads as well as fill its extra space with Google Ads resulting in possible double display of your ads.

Additional Features:

• Geographic Targeting
• Time of Day, Day of Week
• Demographic Targeting
  • MSN: Available but when used does not mean the ad is exclusive within the area. Those targeted sites will have the Bid Boost.
  • Google: Available but only within the Content Network.

Use Ad Targeting Preview Tool for testing preview of your ads so to not count as an impression and skew the metrics.

Keyword Tools:

• www.compete.com
• Wordtracker
• www.spyfu.com

Tips for Ad Text:

• Stick to 2 to 3 words keywords
• Use 1 word keyword conservatively
• Test phone numbers on Ads (phone numbers give a sense of authority)
• Include keywords and Call to Actions (CTA)
• Lead generation sites does well for Content Ads
• People do not like acronyms
• Filter clicks by targeting specific audience
• Use appropriate tone

Test:

1. Price
2. Reassurance (official site or 24/7 phone support)
3. Deals (offer ending soon)
   • Free Multivariate Testing Tool: www.adcomparator.com
   • At least 100 clicks for sufficient data

Multivariate Testing:

Buy Cycle:

Different Ad Copy during beginning or end of buy cycle.

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)

Search Marketing Expo – SMX West 2009
February 10-12, 2009
Santa Clara Convention Center
http://www.searcmarketingexpo.com/west/

3 days of search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO), paid search advertising (PPC), link building, keyword research, analytics, networking events and much more! 

I highly recommend this event for those wanting to learn more about search marketing or connect with other professionals.   A must see event!

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 ;-)

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!!!