For the first time ever, analysts report annual online spending topped $100 billion in 2006, with holiday shopping rising by 26 percent over 2005. Powering this growth are the big five search engines — Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask.com and Time Warner, which between them account for 95 percent of U.S. searches, according to Enid Burns' February 2007 Convera study "US Search Engine Rankings."
However, success comes at a price. The Internet grows by an estimated 6 million documents a day with only half being "indexed" or retrievable by searchers. Increasingly, with billions of documents on call, using the proper keywords and long tail phrases makes the difference between success and failure. According to a Convera survey of 1,000 professionals, 95 percent find search engines useful in their work but only 40 percent say they are very satisfied with the results. The average search takes 11 minutes and half are abandoned.
The problems with search are even greater for Internet businesses that rely on being found by customers entering search queries. Several years ago, many online businesses discovered that "organic" or non-paid search advertisements were becoming less effective in delivering traffic and sales in an increasingly competitive environment. Thus was born the PPC, or pay per click, industry wherein companies and Web sites bid for high placement in search engine keyword and key phrase searches, with prices per click ranging from one cent to hundreds of dollars.
Nevertheless, paying for high placement in search results is the easy part of the challenge online companies face in today's market. Finding and effectively using the right keywords for driving consumers to a Web site is far more daunting, as is the minutia of Web site design — text and image, holding the visitors interest from gateway page to cart in a user-friendly manner, separating buyers from browsers among visitors, lowering "bounce" or abandonment rates, strategies for converting visits into a purchase, as well as guarding against PPC click fraud, search engine spamming penalties and other pitfalls. Collectively, these challenges lead to the burgeoning SEM or Search Engine Marketing industry whose players regularly meet at SES Conferences and Expos.
Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo Beginning with a single show in San Francisco in 1999, the SES Conference & Expo has expanded to 10 locations in the U.S., Europe and China. It is the search engine marketing standard, attended by industry insiders as well as hundreds of companies large and small seeking to optimize every aspect of their search engine marketing. We sat in at the flagship Conference in New York City.
The Conference is certainly aimed at the serious rather than the serendipitous, the attendance fees are hefty, $795 for any single day's sessions and $1,895 for the entire four-day event. In New York between April 10 and 13, 7,000 gathered to attend dozens of presentations, almost as many private, semi-private and open company sponsored parties, and mainly, at least for industry insiders, to network, set-up deals or just schmooze with colleagues and competitors that they would not otherwise get to see over the course of the year.
Though there were several nuts and bolts courses on the basics, the mainstay of the presentations were aimed at online marketers and industry people seeking sophisticated methods to get a leg up in the SEM world. Our interest was in the instructive sessions on various aspects of search engine marketing, four of which we attended.
Search Term Research and Targeting This presentation dealt with the bedrock problem of finding which search terms to target, and was delivered by SEO executives in front of a standing room-only audience of more than 500. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft adCenter execs hosted a question-and-answer session afterward. The session covered ways of undertaking search term research that will net keywords and phrases successful in both "organic" free and paid listings.
The first goal is to develop a list of relevant terms to target in PPC and SEO. There are a number of ways to determine the right stuff, with most of the suggestions aimed at medium to large size companies, though small businesses can certainly employ the same tactics:
Brain storm within the company; the collective head is better, but it is important to speak the customer's lingo — avoiding insider jargon that is not likely to make it into customer's search queries.
Monitor the site's search box for what customers type in.
Imitation is not only the sincerest form of flattery, it can also lead to financial success: scour online and print magazines as well as company and product reviews and lift and test terms that are used.
Check online thesauruses and dictionaries.
Monitor customer surveys and focus groups.
Talk to company support and tech people, should they exist.
Check log files that capture "exact phrases" that searchers entered.
Review all relevant chat rooms and blogs for terms.
Do not be proud: Beg borrow and steal terms from the competition if they are successful.
Tools While WordTracker has been an industry standard, it is emphasized that no single tracking tool will do everything, use two or three at the least. Here are the suggested products and sources:
WordTracker: Data is pulled from Meta search engines.
Google Webmaster Tools: Found on the Google site map, a multiple keyword tool that will go to different countries, expected to improve its mobile search and tells what search entries return your site.
Yahoo Overture: A free keyword tool but does not differentiate between singular and plural.
Vivisimo: A cluster tool.
MSN adCentral: Its Audience Intelligence Tool can determine age, gender and geographic region of a searcher, as well as what time of day he or she searched. The Online Commercial Intent Detection tool offers clues about buyer intent by analyzing search terms and phrases.
Ask.com: While only garnering 5 percent of the search engine market, this engine does have a loyal following and it is expected to grow due to the focus on its specialty — answering questions.
The Rest: Other "honorable mention" sites and resources include Clusty.com, NicheSpot, Country-Specific Tools and Hitwise.
Assuming one has followed some or all of the suggested means of finding relevant terms, the resulting list, regardless of the product or service, should be enormous. (Presenters in other sessions suggest that the more keywords researched the better, as in up to 10,000,) We are advised to whittle the list down to 10 to 50 then apply modifiers for skewing issues:
Relevance: Simply, does the term fit the product or service and the companies advertising and Web site text? Keyword research and rating reports should be run at least twice monthly. Set a time to review reports and do not bog down by spending a month on any one area; concentrate on relevant data.
Popularity: Less popular terms can be more focused on what you are selling. How many top 10 results match yours?
Consider Shopper Intent: The keyword phrases and terms can indicate at what stage of the purchase process the searcher has reached. For instance, if a potential auto customer types in "car reviews," he or she is at the beginning of the process. On the other hand, "auto financing" indicates the consumer is ready to buy.
PPC (pay-per-click bids) can define the value of a top ranking: We are advised that if a competitor uses pay-per click, you must as well. Competitors can do your research for you. If competitor PPC bids are below market, say, 50 cents compared to $3, there is a reason — the terms do not lead to sales. (While this may be true, note, however, that this advice comes from search engine reps with a stake in PPC.)
ROI: What is an acceptable rate of return on investment for search term research and placement?
Search Engine Friendly Design This basics session deals with the delicate art of simultaneously pleasing crawler-based search engine algorithms and visitors to your site. The speaker, Shari Thorow, Webmaster at Grantastic Designs, began and ended by emphasizing that Web site design should be strictly for end-users, not for search placement. If properly constructed, a Web site can cash in on free traffic from search engines while moving visitors along a frustration-free path from the landing page to the check out cart. Building from the ground up, there are three essentials of Web site construction and search engine optimization, which we highlight below.
Proper Site and Page Architecture
As in any initial meeting, first impressions are important. Web sites need to be consistent in layout and design: no surprises, confusion or Easter egg hunts for information.
Avoid "splash" pages wherein an image takes up all or most of a page. Search engines do not track images or text in images, and visitors want to be brought to what they are searching for. Flash is not search engine friendly.
The site should be quick to download, taking no longer than 30 seconds with a dial-up modem, preferably within 15 seconds.
Bring the visitor directly to the relevant page. Research indicates visitors will go up to 25 clicks before abandonment, but visitors should find what they need within seven to eight clicks maximum.
Above all, the site should be easy to read and navigate and products must be easy to find. The start page should have anchor text or hyperlinks to bring the visitors where they want to be.
Heavy color saturation draws people's eyes, faces draw people's attention.
Keyword-Rich Text
Site text must contain search query words. Use keywords as much as possible but do not overdo it to the detriment of the copy.
Quality copy writing is a must. A site that is listed tenth can make more money than a site ranked at the top if the number-one site has poorly written sales copy. After facing all the expenses of Web site design optimization, research, software and so on, site owners think they can write their own copy. The problem is many cannot. If you do not have a text copywriting Shakespeare on the staff, a professional copywriting company can be a wise investment. All major search engines offer free listings that come from "crawling" the Web. But search engines can and will list what they want. It is advised not to depend on free listings nor to ignore them. Do a mix.
Leverage your content. Have relevant content on different topics using HTML text. Ideally, have a page or section of "real" content for each key term.
High Quality Link Development
In regard to building links, which search engines use to rate and rank sites, there are three golden rules, according to Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land: Get links that are read by the audience you want, buy links if the visitors that come solely from the links justify the cost and link to sites because you want your visitors to know about them.
Here are other highlights of the session:
Page content is crucial, as is title; design issues and "link analysis" play important roles. Crawlers will consider "off-the-page" criteria such as age of the site, click through and the "neighborhood."
Crawlers are especially likely to find pages with many or important links pointing to them.
Submit home page and key section pages. Turnaround is said to be anywhere from several days to several months.
Paid inclusion offers the benefits of listing crucial pages that will not be listed free, and it is expedient for time-sensitive inclusions when you can not wait for free listings. Further, while it will not get you at the top of the page, you may make the first page, which can be a plus for searchers who automatically ignore labeled paid listings.
Tomorrow we will cover the issues of Web analytics, a detailed look at measuring search engine ranking and sales success, and the ultimate Web site challenge of converting visitors into buyers.
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Search Engine Strategy Expo Exposes Valuable Tips
