FEATURE: What You Need to Know from SES San Jose

by Susan Esparza, August 17, 2009

Last week wrapped up Search Engine Strategies. For one week, search marketers of all stripes and experience mingled and shared information, seeking to better their business and hone their craft. If you couldn't make it, or you just want a refresher, we've pulled together all the things that you need to know from SES San Jose.

The overall theme of the conference was summarized neatly by Greg Jarboe in his panel. To be successful online, SEOs need to focus on something more fundamental than the technology du jour. They have to focus on the people using the technology. By focusing on people, you avoid tunnel vision and can consider options beyond just ranking and conversions. When people are making buying decisions, it's about how people feel, not logic. Establish a relationship and understand that you are establishing a relationship, even if the transaction seems very simple and of the moment.

Focus on Location

Local search is still gaining momentum. By targeting regional searches and using geo-local technology to find people, merchants of all sizes can better target and engage their audience. Local search optimisation isn't just for small businesses. Though local mom and pop shops can definitely capitalize on local search for big wins, it's important for every business to consider who their audience is and find those people where they live.

It's important to claim and consolidate local listings. To appear in the local results, you're going to need more than a P.O. box in the right ZIP code.

David Mihm's local search ranking factors are a great place to start narrowing down where your local search optimisation can use improvement. Like everything in SEO, conquering local search is a matter of doing many small things right.

Recognize the difference between searches for local information (those done by people seeking things in their own home town) and searches for location-based information (such as someone planning a trip to a place they've never been) and optimise for both. Consider how those audiences are different and develop content that will reach out to both types of local searchers.

Focus on Conversation

In order to effectively target your audience, you must know not only where they are but also what interests them. The Web allows people to reach out and push content in a way they've never been able to do before. Look at YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and other social sites not just as a way to feed out your content but also as a way to get to know the people who are your potential customers.

Authenticity is key to the social conversation. The white hat/black hat distinction isn't clear cut in social media, and in fact, those labels might be meaningless. Customers will respond to good content and ignore poor content. Lying to your customers in a social setting is especially dangerous because the entire conversation depends on trust. Not everyone in your organization is suited to social media. Find your superstars and let them engage your audience. Think out of the box; you never know who might be your best evangelist.

Talk in and around the conference was split on whether any agency can truly do a good job representing a company in the social media space, but it's worth noting that you must do more than simply inject buzzwords into conversation. No one wants to be friends with a company that only is interested in promoting itself. Your focus should remain on engaging the audience and delivering value.

Focus on Attribution

Customer-focused strategies lead to the death of last-click attribution. By acknowledging that the last click is only when the sale occurs and not what made the sale in the first place, you're able to spend your marketing budget in a more organic and effective manner. You already know that customers do not start out ready to buy. Following the entire conversion path of a customer requires knowing who that customer is and how your relationship started. Understand what drew him in. Understand what caught her eye.

The key is to track multiple conversion points - not just the sale, but the first contact and every subsequent step of engagement. Cookies are often unreliable, but there are ways to increase the accuracy of your tracking. Thomas Bindl recommends:

• Store click IDs on your site and return on conversion
• Pass on order/client ID with every conversion
• Use local shared objects (Flash cookies - often too slow for redirects)
• Ask your users for channel of origin
• Track unique coupon codes

Don't ignore phone calls. Even if you're not using call-tracking technology, train your CSRs to ask where and how the caller found you.

Applying correct attribution is still far from a perfected science, but it is crucial to the growth and success of the Internet marketing industry.

Focus on Working Smarter

The last component of outreach to customers is learning to use available tools to optimise your pages. The SEO Tools panel was one of the most popular at the conference and for good reason. Tools won't do your search engine optimisation for you, but properly applied, they make an SEO's job a lot easier. From our perspective, two of the most exciting developments were our SEOToolSet demo showing our next generation of tools and the pairing of SEO-friendly CMS Pixelsilk with SEOToolSet data. (If you haven't seen Pixelsilk yet, we've got a Pixelsilk demo right here.)

At the Bruce Clay booth, conference attendees saw a sneak peek of three tools from the brand-new, revamped SEOToolSet. Though not yet released, the Ranking Monitor, Check Server and Single Page Analyzer were instantly recognizable as useful tools for any SEO working on a search marketing campaign. The Ranking Monitor goes beyond simply reporting rankings and allows the subscriber to delve into an abundance of information to report on overall site health. The Check Server is used to check the performance of a domain's Web server in order to help diagnose any potential problems. Subscribers will find that the Single Page Analyzer is the real workhorse of the bunch, providing data about on-page factors that will help them edit pages and direct their SEO site-wide.

Ideally, when you build a Web site you integrate search engine optimisation into the very fabric of its construction. At the show, Pixelsilk announced Search Advice, a new feature of the Pixelsilk content management system that is aimed at doing precisely that. Real-time SEO feedback from the SEOToolSet provides additional search engine optimisation support by displaying best practice recommendations real-time, right within the content editor.

SEOToolSet subscribers using Pixelsilk will be alerted when on-page elements or tags might benefit by including specific keywords. On-screen and e-mail alerts can be scheduled to inform the production staff of changes to a page or notify them when content edits don't meet SEOToolSet suggestions. The inclusion of SEO best practices early in the content-creation cycle can help marketing and IT departments better coordinate SEO efforts from the beginning of a project as well as into the upkeep and management phases.

For permission to reprint or reuse any materials, please contact us. To learn more about our authors, please visit the Bruce Clay Authors page. Copyright 2009 Bruce Clay, Inc.

BACK TO BASICS: Back to Basics: Holiday PPC Campaign Planning

by Virginia Nussey, August 17, 2009

It's August and we'll soon be trading sun-kissed summer days for the sparkling holiday season. Gift giving and round-the-clock Frank Sinatra tunes are still off on the horizon, but there's no time left to put off holiday PPC campaign planning. In fact, as far as a holiday Internet marketing campaign is concerned, SEMs can take a tip from Santa. Start making that list, and checking it twice!

While the winter holidays themselves only last a few days, preparing and managing a seasonal SEM campaign takes much longer - as long as six months or more! A seasonal PPC campaign calendar might look something like this:

Read on for an in-depth exploration of the goals and tactics that can help guide an effective search engine marketing holiday-planning strategy.

Understand the State of the Market

Few have escaped the harsh realities of the troubled global economy. The recession has caused some understandings of shopping behavior to be thrown out the door. But by keeping up on the latest trends and reports, marketers can analyze and make decisions based on information both innovative and traditional.

Past trends tell us when shoppers traditionally begin the holiday shopping season. A quick search for "gifts" in Google Trends shows us that searches for the term typically start to rise during the first half of October. Armed with this timeframe, marketers know to launch targeted holiday campaigns at that time.

The Google Trends data also highlights the role of search in consumer shopping behavior. According to comScore's State of the U.S. Online Retail Economy in Q1 2009 (pdf), 74 percent of consumers reported that they would likely shop online before making an offline purchase. From an understanding of the overall market, one can begin to understand the target market.

Study the Target Market

An easy trap e-commerce businesses can fall into is failing to identify their true target market or audience. In order to address the needs and expectations of consumers that are most interested in the product or service, marketers can research current customers. From that information, they can create several personas to represent the various customer types interested in their product or service.

It's a good idea to survey customers about their demographic information, online behaviors and consumer motivations. From that information, marketers can create personas by identifying common groups that best represent the customer base.

Each persona should paint a clear picture of that person's personal and professional role in life, where they live, how much time they spend online, where they go online, what deals or special offers they appreciate most, and what problem they want the product/service to fix. Special attention should be paid to how they phrase their own needs.

A marketer can then map out consumer paths and conversion funnels. What search queries are they using for their initial research? With these broad terms in mind, the marketer can guide their product or service into the early considerations of consumers. What long-tail terms are consumers using later down the conversion path? Knowing these terms helps to engage potential customers with a message that speaks to their fine-tuned, long-tail queries.

Study the Competition

Before one can enter the holiday search marketplace informed, a marketer must research competitors. Understanding the marketing strategies of those businesses competing for the same customers is helpful for several reasons. Initially, it can validate or void assumptions about the target market. If competitors' messaging is aimed at a substantially different persona type, it's useful to consider why that might be.

Furthermore, understanding competitor strategy is the first step to differentiating ad copy and the overall marketing message. By considering why a consumer might click on one ad instead of a competitor's, search engine marketers can develop unique selling propositions.

Define KPIs and Internal Goals

As bid costs rise sharply during the holidays, it's critical to have established goals and clear metrics of success before launching a PPC campaign for the holiday season (pdf). SEMs can find out from merchandising and finance departments what the high-margin products are and what products have high and low stock in the warehouse. They can talk to the marketing manager to learn what the top revenue-driving keywords have been in the past.

And of course, it's critical to determine and monitor the key performance indicators of the PPC campaign, including: the revenue per customer, the average order value per customer, the average profit per click, the cost per conversion, and the percent of converting keywords.

Create a Seasonal Campaign Strategy

From data comes wisdom. With an informed background in place and clearly defined goals and metrics in mind, an SEM can develop holiday-specific strategies and offers for the campaign.

According to the comScore report released in April, consumers consider the most important features of online shopping to be: incentives, site navigation and product reviews. Buying incentives like free shipping can help drive conversions. Coupons can be another incentive. The use of coupons is up across the board, year over year; plus, coupons offer the added benefit of conversion attribution by tracking the coupon code's point of origin.

Site navigation is an element that should be optimised on landing pages and throughout the site. In ad copy, special offers and user reviews stand out to an audience sifting through a number of offers.

Also consider what other channels will be directly integrated with the PPC campaign. Tying social media channels together with search advertising tactics and on-site optimisation can have an enhanced effect on a holiday marketing campaign. For instance, Twitter can be used to publicize time-sensitive offers and drive potential customers to search and find out more.

Finally, one of the biggest differences between a seasonal PPC campaign and a general PPC campaign are the keywords being targeted. Developing a keyword list is a continuous process that involves ongoing research, selection, testing, analysis and refinement.

Test Early and Adapt

The holiday sales season makes up a critical portion of the annual sales cycle. Because so much is riding on sales generated at the end of the year, all marketing campaigns must be fine-tuned and up-to-speed by the time October comes around.

It's advisable to use the months leading up to the holiday sales period to conduct planning, research, goal setting, and testing. Experienced search marketers typically recommend that a testing cycle last for 60 days and take up a single-digit percentage of the holiday PPC budget. By measuring performance early, a marketer may refine ad groups and replace poorly performing ad copy.

Conclusion

While no one's in a rush to put away the barbecue and cover up the swimming pool, the holidays are fast approaching. An uncertain sales environment will couple with relatively new online shopping behaviors, which means that marketers will have their work cut out for them this year. Be prepared for the coming season by developing a holiday PPC strategy, setting clear goals, researching and testing early, and creating stand-out incentives.

For permission to reprint or reuse any materials, please contact us. To learn more about our authors, please visit the Bruce Clay Authors page. Copyright © 2009 Bruce Clay, Inc.