Online Marketing Blog

If you are in the market to harvest leads from your web site, then this is the session for you! Industry experts Barbara Coll, CEO of WebMama.com, Patricia Hursh, President and Founder of SmartSearch Marketing and Adam Goldberg, Chief Innovation Officer for Clearsaleing gave some tips and insight to help B2B marketers develop search strategies to increase the number of qualified leads from their search campaigns.

Patricia kicked off the session with 10 tips for B2B Marketers!

1. Reach prospects early in the buying cycle
The sales cycle can often be long and complicated. B2B marketers rarely face the fact that people are conducting product searches at the beginning of the buying cycle. Reality is, your customers are looking for your product information way before they are ready to convert. You have to be there early!

Whether you’re part of the search industry or just affected by it, you’ve probably not only grown used to change but are excited by it.

Attending a session this morning about personalized and universal search, we had a panel full of excited folks and audience members all bursting at the seams to discuss what these two types of search bring.

Panelists included:

Moderator:
Greg Jarboe, President and Co-Founder, SEO-PR

Speakers:
Dave Davies, CEO, Beanstalk
Jonathan Mendez, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, OTTO Digital
Richard Zwicky, Founder and CEO, Enquisite
Aaron D’Souza, Software Engineer, Google
Bill Barnes, Co-Founder & Executive Vice President, Enquiro Search Solutions Inc.
James Colborn, Director, US Trade Marketing, Microsoft Corporation

Experienced client side and agency search marketers know that today’s SMB and enterprise SEO projects involve much more than single event “SEO triage” and link building. A quick look at the topics on the top search marketing forums, newsletters, conferences, blogs and even print magazines shows an increasing variety of strategies ranging from marketing with social media to SEO and usability to leveraging user generated content.

As companies look for the right online marketing resources to help navigate the ever changing and increasingly complex world of search marketing, what variables, channels and outcomes should be considered?

In order for companies to realize the maximum benefit from a search marketing initiative, there must be a certain level of understanding about how various online marketing channels work. One of the most effective ways our SEO firm has found to assess current understanding and to introduce important concepts is through a discovery process including questions.

A trap I fell into early in my career as an SEM specialist was to ensure clients we would do our best to drive all the traffic we could to their site. Looking back, I’m glad I learned the obvious error of this statement before becoming involved in a client’s burgeoning PPC campaign.

The session “Creating Compelling Ads”, moderated by Allan Dick of Vintage Tub & Bath had at its core the powerfully obvious notion (in hindsight) that driving all traffic to your site is not only a fool’s mission, but in the realm of PPC, a costly mistake.

Generating qualified traffic for a campaign shaped the presentations provided by the esteemed panel of:

• Mona Elesseily from Page Zero Media
• Brad Geddes of LocalLaunch.com

Stacy Williams is a long time search marketer in Atlanta and I’ve known her and partner/husband Matt for about 3 years. Stacy is a long time Search Engine Strategies speaker and is equally adept in the SEO and SEM fields. At Search Engine Strategies Chicago, Stacy had a few very interesting things to say about search engines making modifications to campaign creative, match type and ad status without notifying the advertiser.

In this video interview, I asked Stacy to elaborate and she provided three specific examples. I hope someone from the search engines reads this and offers insight into why these things happen.

I would like to link to Stacy’s blog but, sigh, she doesn’t have one.

The DMA06 conference is getting rev’d up with pre conference sessions Satuday and Sunday. The new search engine marketing certification program started on Saturday with Jeannette Kocsis, VP of Digital Marketing at Harte-Hanks, presenting on “Introduction to Search Engine Marketing” and I followed up with “Search Engine Basics”.

Unfortunatley, I was not able to sit in on Jeannette’s session, but Amanda Watlington said there was great feedback. Here’s the description of the module:

Introduction to Search Engine Marketing: Explore search engine marketing and what it takes for a marketer to achieve search engine marketing results. Learn how to identify ethical search engine marketing practices and how search engines define spam. Learn how to shape the business case for search marketing for your business, and how to staff this valuable marketing function.

The 2007 report from Marketing Sherpa is out on search marketing benchmarks. Last year’s edition showed that SEO agencies beat in-house SEO by 300%. The new edition provides information from 3,944 marketers, agencies, and affiliates on PPC and SEO campaigns as well as eyetracking “heatmaps” to better understand how users view search results pages and ads.

The guide also includes five special reports:

• Search & Shopping
• Search Marketing & Public Relations
  
• Vertical, Second Tier, Local, and Pay Per Call Search
• Click Fraud — Perception versus Reality
• Search Eyetracking Study Year Two
  

Overall this is a hefty report with plenty of data to help you make search marketing decisions as well as a tool help sell search marketing upstream to your management team for expanded budgets or the reallocation of budget to things like  natural search optimizaiton, press release optimization and/or blog marketing.

Ask.com has announced this morning the launch of an upgraded version of Ask Sponsored Listings with improvements based on advertiser feedback and a new API to allow search marketers to create customized tools.
Here are some of the new features:

• Daily Budgeting
• Variable Refill Amount
• Hourly Billable Data
• Bulk Upload Enhancements
• Dashboard Reports

Looks like Ask is stepping up in the world and with 66% year over year growth in searches (2005 to 2006) according to Nielsen/Netratings, there’s a lot more overall search market share left to take from MSN and AOL.

Barry provides these links to more info: Program details and a “ASL 2.0 Webinar“.

Debra Mastaler, Christine Churchill, Jill Whalen at SES San Jose

I got a ping from another old school SEO, Jill Whalen recently about her next search engine marketing seminar. Jill’s group of instructors include: Scottie Claiborne, Karon Thackston, Christine Churchill, Debra Mastaler and Matt Bailey (who is also going to be doing one of the modules for the DMA SEM Certification.

Here’s a fun, short video of Matt from SES San Jose this past summer. (sorry Matt, you crack me up)

Jill and company are very focused on practical, takeaway tips for company marketers:

“Each speaker will build upon the info provided by the previous speaker, giving you a cohesive plan of action you can begin to implement as soon as you’re back at your office.”

Marketing Sherpa has released their 5th annual Buyer’s Guide to SEO and PPC agencies. The new report includes:

• In-depth profiles of 62 PPC agencies and 104 SEO firms include honest notes on which types of clients each works best with — and who should *not* hire them.
• Practical 80-page Shopping Overviews guide you through the budgeting, decision-making and RFP process.
• Easy Scan Charts let you compare-and-contrast dozens of search marketing firms at a glance. Includes factoids on pricing, staffing, and specialization. Great for creating your short-list.

There were 104 SEO companies and 62 PPC agencies profiled. You can buy the guides individually at $199 each or as a bundle for $249. Also, you get both a PDF version immediatley for download and a print copy is mailed to you within 24 hours.

If you’re looking for sources of information on search marketing, conferences can be a great resource. Or. if you’re a conference junkie like me, then you’ll find the SEOBook “Must See SEO Events” calendar exceptionally useful.¬† Some disclosure here, I am editing the calendar along with Aaron.

Some of the conferences listed include:

• Search Engine Strategies
• WebmasterWorld Pubcon
• ad:tech
• DMA conferences
• MIMA
• eMetrics Summit
• eTail
• Shop.org Summit
• Search Insider Summit
• OMMA
• Affiliate Summit
• SEO Roadshow
• SEO Bash
• And more

If you know of a conference that deals in some way with search marketing (SEO or SEM) then drop a comment. Regional events are welcome as well.

DM News has announced the next edition of their Essentials Guide to Search Engine Marketing (pdf). Editor in Chief Mickey Alam Khan says:

“Packed within these pages are articles from executives at the nation‚Äôs leading search engine marketing firms, agencies and consultancies. Also inside is commentary from two of the top three search engines, Yahoo and Microsoft. These experts offer tips, best practices, case studies and research on almost every topic under the search sun.”