I am sitting here with a coffee and a powerpoint deck entitled Why Search Is Important.

At this point, I think the deck should be titled Why I Am Giving The Same Presentation To Your Organization For The 10th Time.

It feels a little like Groundhog Day.

I am more than aware that search and explaining search can be a learning curve requiring patience. I am also aware that I have a tendency to speak over people’s heads as I have been both doing and explaining search for more than 14 years now.

In today’s presentation, I will be speaking to three audience segments. Senior management stakeholders who know that search is now a requirement because of competitor market presence. They will not show up.

Then, there will be middle brand managers. Search is maybe 1% of their overall marketing budget so not really enough to warrant undivided attention as they check and recheck incoming emails because they could be missing something important, but they know they have to be there if only to say they attended.

And finally, that one familiar face from the IT department. Of course, search and analytics is not part of your job description and you’re tired of hearing about search.

In short, no one, for the 10th time will be invested in the process.

There’s a simple solve. Invest in one person. One single person within your organization who can become a search ambassador between all three audience segments. One single person who understands the challenges of your myriad flash web sites; or the fact that your secure server which won’t allow for brand presence can be easily solved; or one single person who gets the value and importance of analytics and how they apply not only to your individual sites, but to the aggregate learnings across all of your sites.

One single digital mind who need not be told why search is important because they already know.

If you break it down into ROI metrics, the cost of that person is less than $200 per silo per month.

Have a good one.

~ S

I watched with great fascination the HBO Documentary Schmatta – Rags To Riches To Rags the other night, a telling film about the rise and fall of the garment industry in the US and specifically New York.

There were a number of interesting facts, but chief among them, the fact that during the Kennedy years, 95% of all garments in the US were US made. Today, only 5%. And the industry has all but collapsed. Not only does one struggle to find the union label but the union employee as well.

A cautionary tale, to be sure.

But it’s not just the garment industry that has run the risk of commoditization taking industries with it. For a couple of years, it seemed every day a spam email would come in offering offshore SEO services because they were ultimately cheaper. And by ultimately, what I mean is exponentially.

In the recent AdAge article How EBay Is Winning With Bid to Enhance the Customer Experience author Natalie Zmuda essentially points out that in only a few short years the market has changed so much as to turn the machine that commoditized retail into a commodity itself, one that struggles to compete with the likes of Amazon, Zappos and others who have more capably succeeded chasing the lowest price every day.

A focus on price and price alone is fraught with risk that extends, far, far beyond retail. And in the descent from 95% to 5% share, management teams change and CEOs come and go.

New managers seek to make their mark within their first 100 days. Even US presidents are measured by their first 100 days. In creating impact, we most often seek to create efficiencies but the net result may, in the long-term, prove little more than a commodity.

Just ask ebay. Or the schmatta industry.

In the end, the cost may prove significantly more than the lowest price every day.

As marketers, we need to be aware of that. Not simply for our clients. But for ourselves as well.

Have a good one.

~ S

It’s the busiest time of year, with 2010 strategies and the holiday season coming on. In either instance, the hope is that budgets will increase to meet an ever-growing digital market.

But that isn’t always the case.

In a client dialogue over the past few days, we were asked by a client to assess possible budget savings for an already underfunded campaign prior to 2010 strategies. Over the years I’ve finally been trained that the client is always right.

Except when they’re wrong.

In assessing the client strategy, one suggestion tabled was that we should look at day-parting as some clicks were potentially more valuable than others. It is my fervent belief that the client strategy was off-point, however, because we have been unable to introduce analytics, it remains only opinion on either side of the table as the analytics can’t bear it out.

In the end, I was left scratching my head because two years in, the issues and ensuing challenges remain the same.

I am, of course, a stalwart fan of PPC and of search and digital in general. And I struggle with understanding how brand managers don’t understand that every click increases brand awareness, thus doing the same job as TV or print. And in fact, every click does more for brand awareness than traditional media in terms of providing insight and action.

This is not to say that traditional media is dead or dying. Traditional media has always been predicated on reach and frequency propositions. And certainly, in Canada, reach is still best accomplished by TV, Twitter and Facebook aside.

That said, search offers response and engagement and post-click, it does so in a vacuum as competitors have no real estate on your site. So the dialogue is necessarily one of brand awareness. Even a seemingly negative or ambivalent search is an opportunity to construct a dialogue to advantage by mitigating risk through acknowledgement and solution.

Morever, a “broad keyword” search that compells a click is a direct marketshare steal from those of your competitors on the same keyword, again moving the dailogue solely to your online poperty.

Every click provides value, even those with constistently high bounces rate inform and suggest that the promise is not living up to the provision, allowing opportunity for a dialogue more in line with consumer or prospect need state.

Search Versus Traditional Budgets

Though consumers spend more than 30% of their time online, digital and search budgets remain less than 10% so for 2011, perhaps the dialogue shouldn’t be one of cutting budget on a campaign that performs to objective daily, thwarted only by budget, but of culling one single magazine or broadcast insertion and adding it to the search budget.

Ask not what your search marketing can do for you. Ask what you can do for your search marketing.

Have a good one.

~ S

Very interesting article in Adage this morning: Google Lures Local Advertisers by Subverting Its Own Search Policies.

I’m sure everyone will be focused on the “local search” and click-to-call part of the equation but to me there’s something more intriguing in the equation. Flat fee click. Very intriguing indeed.

For the longest time, I’ve been left scratching my head as it seems to me that there’s a whole lot of money being left on the table for a number of relevant searches.

Money In The Bank

Moreover, for larger brands, there is often the issue of ad score quality and relevance primarily because the brand focus of “traditional” advertising is typically solutions (Get a better quality of life) or brand message (You deserve something today) focused. These are not key drivers for search or for relevance.

Flat fee clicks would seem to me to be a way to solve that. Hello Mr. X, you have a product, we have a sizeable amount of search volume that we’d like to talk to you about and we’d like to offer it to you at the low, low rate of X for Y clicks.

Such a proposal would of course involve human interaction. Let’s call it sales, A salesforce.

They’ve already changed the model at the low end, why not apply it to the very high end. Trust me, Google knows where the gaps are in their model. They have to know there’s money left on the table.

This would solve that.

Yahoo… Bing… Are you listening?

Hmmmm.

Have a good one.

~ S

So the other day I was ambling to a client meeting (When the weather’s nice, I sometimes amble.) and I chanced upon a transit shelter that said Search: 2012.

I was intrigued and mentally lauded a marketing effort clearly meant to track offline stimuli to online use.

On arriving home, I did. I searched 2012.

On Bing.

And found myself staring at a Wikipedia entry in the first result.

How odd, thought I. Who wants me to find out that 2012 is a leap year and has been designated Alan Turing Year.

2012 - Alan Turing Year

(That in and of itself is not a bad thing as he is a personal hero but it seemed to me a simple email would have sufficed, a full transit campaign wasn’t really necessary to capture my attention. In fact, I shall email my brilliant programming friend Brian and let him know, or perhaps I should just email him to suggest he walk by innumerable transit shelters until he finds one that captures his specific attention, and he’ll know which one it is.)

I was, of course, corrected and informed that it was for a forthcoming movie: 2012.

Ah, now that makes complete sense to me. There’s a movie about the London Olympics coming out in the next few days. Boy, do I feel like an oaf.

Um, no, idiot, I was chided by a friend, you’re using the wrong search engine.

How so? said I. I always use Bing.

There are a lot of things I like about it, not the least of which include that by tripping over a transit shelter and doing a simple search at their request, I was able to find information I wasn’t previously aware of.

HAPPY FORTHCOMING ALAN TURING YEAR, EVERYONE!!!

Have a good one.

~ S

In a client meeting last week, I had a brand manager look me in the eye and ask: So when did you become a marketer?

While it was meant as a compliment, I must confess, I about fell off my chair and took it as a bit of an affront. The comment stayed with me and while my first instinct was to be annoyed with the client’s apparent lack of knowledge, it dawned on me that the comment could only have been borne of my own failure to market our capabilities beyond search marketing to full potential.

If that truly is the case, we’re leaving money on the table and need to think about moving forward as a search marketing agency.

Going over past dialogues and virtual introductions in email history, I’ve noticed that we are, from companies that don’t use us to full potential as the “search agency” or “search guys”. For the longest time, I took great pride in the reference, feeling not unlike Rain Man — a little special and somewhat beyond being understood.

What Is Search Marketing?

So what is search marketing?

Search marketing is a place to start. Web sites are only ever built based on need, or on opportunity and it’s an important distinction. Those built on need typically do not perform as well as those built on opportunity. And it’s hardly any surprise. We need to keep up with the competitor, or we need to keep our job. Myopic at best. Frustrating at worst.

The opportunity to move beyond a competitor or introduce a new product is advantaged from the outset. To see and to recognize opportunity necessarily implies that enough research has been done to recognize a market deficit and respond to it.

That’s the first role of the search marketing. To see and recognize market opportunities and more often than not, it’s barely a consideration for brand managers. Search marketing agencies are brought in typically after sites are built and have to work with what they’re given. If, on the other hand, with search as a precept, market analysis, competitive analysis and a digital asset analysis can provide insight to support or strengthen opportunity.

Analysis extends beyond numbers to take into account behavioural analysis. Copy testing can be done through paid search and product on such seemingly trivial matters as product or color order, creating increased opportunity for conversion. In combination with keyword testing, this can be of huge benefit before the cost of a site build is undertaken.

Organic requires patience and as such, both organic and PPC play a role from the outside, with PPC providing satisfying need (I need it now) and organic providing sustained opportunity.

And then there is the issue of copy or content. Both are intertwined as keyword copy is a consideration for ads that should extend to the site content and beyond to press releases and primary content dialogue. If blue widgets are your mainstay and you know the market hungers for blue widgets that should be part of your dialogue from the elevator pitch to the site content to the ads, the press release and the launch party. And again, there is a distinction between blue widgets and widgets. (I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen invented words with no support behind them as blue widget brand managers try to widgetize the world.)

In the end, search marketing is the beginning. All search marketers are first and foremost marketers. (My 12 years search experience is eclipsed by over 20 years of marketing experience.)

So ask your “search guy” for a resume. Chances there’s more than search on it. Chances are it’s a culmination of insight and research that’s afforded opportunity. Search is still young enough that it’s opportunity based, not need based.

Take advantage of that.

Have a good one.

~ S

In light of the Yahoo/Bing Search partnership, it intrigues me that no fewer than $200 million is being allocated to branding campaigns this past year.

Bing is spending up to $100 million to announce what is functionally the rebranding of a name change and Yahoo, another $100 million for what is a simple repositioning of an existing brand. $200 that Google feels no need to spend. When you’re number 1 and 2 competitors throw $100 million each into the market and you barely blink, that’s not only confidence, that’s strength. And understandably as Google is now the most recognized global brand, accomplishing that particularly feat with no advertising.

I’m no Carol Bartz (although I too have dropped a few f-bombs along the way) and I’m no Steve Ballmer but if you were to hand me $100 million for a brand campaign, I’d start with search and online.

Really. Think about it….

What to do?... What to do?

No TV. I’ve got too much to say, too much to accomplish to be able to do it with :30 or :60 and a yodel. So no TV.

Besides, the audience I want is an online audience. Why would I look anywhere else?

And perhaps I’m naive. But I don’t think so.

Both companies have insight into search. Insight into CPC and conversion and time spent. Why not capitalize on it.

$100 million at $1/click is 100 million visitors. And let’s remove operating costs. 5 execs, 10 soldiers. Let’s call that $2 million. Build costs, let’s even call that $2 million although in truth it costs much less. So, $4 million.

I’m feeling generous. Let’s toss in $1 million in prize money for a contest. (I understand it’s a brand campaign, but let’s chase conversions as well, $1 million should be a sign up incentive.)

And of course fees and the like. Let’s call that 10% all in. $9.5 million.

That leaves me with $86.5 million at a CPC of $1 or 86.5 million visitors.

Could it be done? I’m naive enough to think it could. In fact, if you want to toss me $100 million, I’d be willing to go head to head with the $100 million in market.

We’re a young, hungry company, we wouldn’t charge $9.5 million. We would provide clicks, conversions and time spent increases.

But alas no one has asked us.

Have a good one.

~ S

SearchEngineLand.com features the Google: Stop Suing Over The Meta Keywords Tag, We Don’t Use It article today, that

The keywords meta tag has no impact whatsoever on how Google’s search engine ranks pages. None. Zilch. Nada.

That may well be true.

And I may well be the lone voice of dissension, but what holds true for Google isn’t always a universal truth. It’s only Google gospel.

For myself, meta keywords tags are as important as title and meta description. Primarily for three reasons:

The first is while they may not necessarily be relevant for Google, they may well be relevant elsewhere. Particularly entities of which we may not be aware. Google isn’t the only game in town. It never has been. Other projects and initiatives may well be nascent, and nascent typically means rudimentary in V1 applications. Much as tags and alt tags matter, to my mind, meta keyword tags may also hold relevance for that which we are not aware. Ergo, use them.

The second reason is thet meta keyword tags help as a reference guide for creating content. I am a firm believer that content is king, and enduring. I am also a firm believer that organic works best when it communicates, effectively a single idea per page.

To wit: A house is not a home. Two separate keywords that should not be used interchangeably and require two separate pages. By identifying the primary keyword (before content is undertaken) everything else, from URL structure to title, description, headers, onpage content, alt tags and internal links falls out naturally.

So why isn’t house the same as home? Do a simple search for each. And on all/each of the primary search engines, you’ll see separate and distinct results for each term. Ergo, a house is not a home.

The third and final reason is because inserting a meta keyword tag is also a gentle reminder that a meta description tag is also an ongoing requirement for every new page. It’s surprising how many times neither are included on a page and both should be.

So, from an indexing perspective, they might in fact not be relevant. From a process POV, they are both necessary and useful.

Just my $.02.

Have a good one.

~ S

Having just returned from vacation, I find myself refreshed and reinvigorated… exactly that which a vacation is supposed to provide.

A whirlwind cruise of the Mediterranean provided insight into Rome, Egypt, Mykonos, Pompei, Naples and more, supplemented by a few days in Paris on the tail-end.

My partner and I are not resort vacation types, foregoing and foresaking all-inclusive in favour of something a little more engaging. This was definitely that. And more.

Insight into ancient worlds provides infinite insight into the human condition. It has long been said that those who fail to learn from history or doomed to repeat it but the truth is, those who fail to learn from history are probably, well, already dead.

Things we know and know we know come to life in a perspective so visceral and real it’s staggering. But it’s also the nuance of life which can be staggering. Little things like marveling that a renaissance painting features a wine glass that anyone can happen upon in a restaurant today, some 600 years later. Glass has changed that little. Or the knowledge that the colosseum of Rome held room for 55,000. Much like stadiums today.

The more things change...

Da Vinci envisioned flight. And it was realized. And having conquered flight, we moved a step beyond to conquer flight to the moon and then manned flights to the moon.

Search is not rocket science but in a sense, all things are rocket science. Knowledge, borne of curiousity, applied. And actualized.

In 2004, speaking at Search Engine Strategies Toronto, I stated that the Internet and search hadn’t really changed anything, human behaviour is human behaviour and search was about that with which we are ultimately already familiar. We have a vague sense of value when we go price-hunting. We have a vague sense of how to cook a turkey when we search for holiday recipes, or at the very least, that a turkey will enter into the culinary equation.

Flight brought more of the world seemingly closer to us, but the concept of flight didn’t change in the process. Search does much the same and not to overly-simplify it, but it’s a reapplication of the yellow pages. Applied. And actualized. To borrow from the CPG world, it is all about the need state. And even an informational search is prepositioned on a “need to know”.

So take a flight of fancy. Step outside your world and into the world at large on occasion. Along the way, you might discover some of the things you didn’t know you didn’t know. And a small glass on the table in a Renaissance painting just might help you see the bigger picture.

Have a good one.

Cheers

S

While often the bane of a search marketer’s existence, a $35/day search budget may well be the lion’s share of a local business marketing budget for the year.

$35 is $1,000 per month or $12,000 per year. Even for a half million dollar a year company, that means 2% of overall revenues on search alone. 2% that must be spent wisely.

Some companies have made a living from $35/day/per customer. But there are two necessary codicils to creating success around that. It has to be $35 per day, and there have to be a lot of customers. Volume. And scale.

Some companies have become billion dollar enterprises based on $35/day. Volume. And scale. So why can’t their competitors?

I was asked by an industry peer what I would do.

Most often, competitors aren’t looking at $35, they’re trying to chase down $10,000. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But what if your biggest competitor has also focused on chasing down $10,000 and they’ve been doing it longer?

That’s opportunity knocking. A veritable goldrush.

Local Search Marketing Strategies

Chances are, they’ve outpriced themselves for the $35/day customer and stealing a $35 customer is easier than stealing a $10,000 customer particularly in these recessionary times.

The how is easy. Identify a cheaper pricepoint. Identify better quality. Identify sustained market presence. All for the same $35.

Suppose your pricepoint is $.60 versus $1. Instead of 35 customers per day, you’re offering 58. Instead of 1000 prospects per month you’re delivering 1500.

Even with less traffic, the number two market player may not only be able to offer more prospects (clicks) but also more impressions. If the local business person is outpriced in the market, they could well be going through their budget too soon.

A perceived “lesser” player in the market may actually be the stronger of the two by delivering better overall SUSTAINED metrics. Down to conversions.

There are 300,000 small business in Canada. At $35 per day….

Have a good one.

S