Biznology Blog: March 2005

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March 29, 2005

Will Click Fraud Kill the Paid Search Golden Goose?

I've just posted the March Biznology newsletter—if you use paid placement, this one's for you. Click fraud is running rampant—perhaps 20% of all paid placement clicks may be fraudulent—and the search engines may be powerless to stop the trend.

Find out what you can do.

Posted by mikemoran at 2:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 3, 2005

Business to Business Tactics for Search Marketing

My notes from the Business to Business Tactics session at Search Engine Strategies conference in New York.

The first speaker was Karen Breen Vogel of ClearGauge, a search consultancy. Karen says that many of their customers are B2B, including Dell. She noted that some companies are beginning to go away from the traditional industry and job function and going to more psychographics, such as “early adopters.”

She emphasized that your landing pages are the key to conversion and that B2B companies are much more likely to emphasize relationships because the buy cycle tends to be longer than the “e-Commerce search and buy” sessions that typify Business to Consumer marketing.

Next up was Paul Slack, CEO of WebDex, an internet marketing firm. He made the following points:

The world is beginning to wake up to the idea that Web marketing, and search marketing in particular, is more than just driving transactions—it is about lead identification.

In a typical sales cycle, clients start by uncovering a need. Clients will then try to research the contending suppliers and then shorten the list—they do those steps on the Web, often with search.

The B2B opportunity is usually about getting customers to make a decision, rather than a purchase, which usually happens off-line.

The two critical players are influencers and decision-makers.

Influencers understand the business problem better than decision-makers and they search early in the cycle and are problem-oriented. They use longer searchers and respond to calls to action—usually after looking at a comparison matrix, webinars, trials, and demos. They like specs, white papers, product pages, and newsletters. Influencers begin the sales cycle—if you make their jobs easier, they will make sure your company is on the list. Often you need to take content, such as a white paper, that is not written to be searchable and develop a landing page that is search-friendly that gets the ranking and lets them download the white paper.

Decision-makers are searching late in the cycle and they are trying to validate what the influencer says. Sometimes they don’t even click on your listing—they just want to see that you are listed. They may use different search terms that are high-level words that may require you to use paid search rather then rely on organic for such a competitive term. Decision-makers don’t read as much as influencers—the landing pages for them should be short, crisp bullets. If you have a call to action, make it graphical, but don’t expect it to be clicked very often.

One problem in B2B is that some of the most important queries get under 25 occurrences per month, and they are not shown in keyword tracking systems.

Use a process to improve where you define your marketing goals, measure your success, and then refine your approach to make it better.

Use a comparative analysis of all marketing activities and figure out your cost per lead. If you know how many leads you close, then you can see what your cost of acquisition is. Then you can pilot search marketing to see if you can have a lower CPA than the other channels.

The final speaker on this panel was Christopher Grady, president of Merak Communications, a company that makes e-mail server software. His product has very small sales to customers that have problems with his big competitors, but he does have 57,000 servers running his software for customers who care fervently about anti-spam and anti-virus capabilities—with all sales achieved through search marketing.

Chris made a number of points:

His company could not actively sell a mail server—they needed to wait for someone with a problem to search for the solution. But that’s why search marketing is so important—it allows Merak prospects to show themselves.

Merak prospects identify their problem, seek solutions, compile a short list, evaluate contenders, negotiate a deal, and then purchase. Search marketing kicks in on the first two steps: seek solution and compile the short list.

Problem: Every Merak sale was a takeaway from a competitor. But search marketing allows this, because you can market against the problem of your competition.

It’s important for companies to know which search engines and keywords to target. Chris sat down with target customers and asked them what they would do if they wanted to replace their mail server—after about 20 interviews, he knew which search engines they used and what search terms they were using. To this day they ask customers what search terms they used to first find them. Chris also studied competitors’ sites and terminology used it subject-related in forums and UseNet, and names in technical books and magazines. Pay special attention to the way the media refer to your terms because that will change searcher behavior.

Merak found that, over time, the keywords used by their searchers were becoming more varied. So, Merak started to develop a corporate keyword guide that helped copy writers consistently use the terms that searchers are known to use, no matter how varied they become.

Be careful not to target consumer words—use terms that qualify your business customers. Merak briefly had the #1 Google ranking for “e-mail” but that was a big problem because consumers started calling and e-mailing asking for technical support for e-mail clients they bought from other companies. Merak pulled back to keywords that targeted business searchers only—their real audience.

Merak found that some of their biggest customers used 7-11 keyword phrases that could not be optimized on a page-by-page basis. The reason they found Merak was because of the central guide that made sure the product was consistently referred to on all pages, so every page has the core keywords and then are found based on whether they are a match for the more detailed keywords in long queries.

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Link Your Way to Organic Search Success

I attended two sessions on Day Four of the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York. The first session, named “Advanced Link Building” focused on strategies to attract the right links to your site to impact organic search engine marketing.

Up first was Keith Hogan of Ask Jeeves. Ask Jeeves uses the Teoma search engine, which is highly attuned to the "communities" formed through links, so their results are sometimes different from other search engines. Keith says that other search engines rate minor directory pages more highly than Ask Jeeves does, but that the important directories are useful in every search engine.

Keith advised search marketers to:

Be in Yahoo! and DMOZ and any important industry directories.

Focus on your anchor text to mention the keywords you are targeting.

Pay as much attention to avoiding bad links as to attracting good ones—you are known by the company you keep. Random links from message boards and blogs just don't work in Ask Jeeves.

Matt Cutts of Google was up next, saying it's important to know whether you are willing to do anything to get links fast or whether you are really in this for the long haul. He advises that you use life-changing weight-control techniques rather than a "lose ten pounds fast" approach.

Matt unfurled a laundry list of "lose ten pounds fast" approaches that just don't work:

Free-for-all links: You sign up and can put your links there, but so can everyone else. Because you get only a fraction of the value of that page's PageRank (based on how many links are on the page), it isn't worth much.

Spamming people with reciprocal link requests.

Buying links—you get some of the same problems as free-for-alls, but sometimes they do work.

Triangular links: Get three companies to do it so the search engines can't tell the links are reciprocal. It's hard to scale this trick.

Involuntary links using blog and guest book spamming.

Linking to sites that themselves practice these techniques.

Stealth links that only the search engines see.

The next panelist, Eric Ward, is the best-known advocate of using links to build your Web site, going back to 1993. He describes himself as a publicist for Web content. Eric believes that some links that do nothing for search marketing can nonetheless be important to your site. For example, every day editors choose cool sites and those links get enormous amounts of traffic as a result:

Yahoo! Picks of the Week

USA Today Web Guide

Kim Komando site of the week

New York Times Student Navigator

RSS Feeds are critically important because they build links to your site by getting your message out there. RSS-specific search engines such as Feedster help people find RSS feeds. You can also put a button to add your site to My Yahoo! which gets individual visitors to come to your site every day.

Eric warns against changing domains and URLs without taking steps to retain your links.

The next speaker was Greg Boser of WebGuerrilla, a well-known expert in search marketing, known for staying on top of the latest techniques. Greg is down on reciprocal links, because they are:

Time-consuming

Not as valuable to search engines (one-way links are worth more

Not possible for many big brands—their PR people rightly do not want to link to smaller companies that might cheapen their hard-won brand image

Greg emphasized that blogs and RSS are the most important ways to attract links for any company. His advice is to add a blog and then give it an RSS feed, and to embed a link back to your site in your feed.

One often-overlooked technique for attracting links, according to Greg, is to create a Web tool, because if you give people something useful, they will link to you. Or they will use your tool with a "Powered by" link back to you, such as the way Atomz does its search engine. Greg showed a great example that uses this technique: Carp is the #1 site for "newsfeed display" in Google based on one "Powered by" back link—distributed thousands of times.

Greg advises against using the big affiliate programs because they circumvent the link value from your affiliates—there are a few programs that offer straight (not redirected) links to your site and you do get the value for those links.

If you buy links, Greg urges you to approach them the same way you would any link. If there are many links on the page or the site has a PageRank much higher than yours, or the site looks like a link farm, you won't get any value for your money. Greg also cautions against using identical anchor text in every purchased link.

Debra O'Neil-Mastaler of Alliance Link was the final speaker. Debra emphasized that, used skillfully, anchor text is critical, but it can be a big problem when used badly. She mentioned that links have the most value when the PageRanks of the pages are similar—not much higher or lower than yours: If you are PageRank 5, looks for links from sites between PageRank 4 and 7 and get links from sites that are on the same subject as yours.

Debra believes that Teoma is a great place to find links—look for the high-ranking sites for your keywords and you will see highly-linked sites within the community.

Debra passed along a few other tips:

Avoid internal links between pages on your site that do not make sense-site-wide chunks of links that reduce your topicality. You are especially vulnerable if you get site-wide links from other sites.

It makes sense to cross-link multiple sites that you own, but be aware that overdoing it will look suspicious to search engines. If all of your sites are in DMOZ, however, that reduces the danger considerably.

Use Yahoo! to check your back links, not Google (whose back link operator does not work).

Look for directories already listed in search engines that don't use redirection-you want to make sure you get credit for the link.

Following Debra's talk, there were many questions from the audience:

Q. If you have budget for only a blog or an RSS feed, which is more important?
A. Greg said that this is a false choice because all blogging packages have RSS feeds built in. Check the box in the blogging package and you get RSS as well. Matt pointed out that sometimes you can get your employees who are curious about blogs to do it for free, greatly reducing your costs.

Q. Should my blog be at a different domain?
A. Greg says not if you want it to show up at Google.

Q. If you have a new product line, should you have a new domain or a subdomain?
A. Greg: The Google Sandbox does not affect subdomains, so it is usually better to have a new subdomain. But don't be too granular: "electronics.domain.com" is OK but "digital-cameras.domain.com" is starting to create too many domains for the search engines. You also want to use your main domain to make sure that people know exactly where they are going so that they trust it.

Q. How can I get links if I don't have much budget and I am not sure I have the creativity to keep a blog going?
A. Matt cautioned against putting the cart before the horse-write for visitors first. One way to get links without writing a blog is to offer a forum for your visitors to create that linkable content themselves. Some shopping sites are using RSS feeds to alert shoppers to new products or sales, using content that you already create. Debra says you should add links to confirmation e-mail with links back to your site for more deals or more information.

Q. How can SEM vendors be protected against algorithm changes?
A. Matt advised that you read Google's terms of service so that you know what will always work as opposed to what is the fad of the week. Use robots "nofollow" tags to surround places on your site (like guest books) where you are unsure about whom those links go to). Matt asked whether, instead of making your links appear natural, how about making them really natural? Matt advised that if you make your content good, the links will follow.

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March 1, 2005

Blogs, RSS Feeds, and Search Marketing

What could be a more appropriate topic for my first-ever blog entry? Blogs and RSS Feeds are taking off. You can’t turn around without running into advice on how to write one and why you are missing the boat if you don’t have one—almost regardless of whether you have anything to say.

I hope I have something to say, but just in case I don’t, I’ll start my blog by quoting what others say, starting with this well-attended session from the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York.

Amanda Wattlington, formerly of iProspect and author of Business Blogs: A Practical Guide, says that blogs and RSS feeds are vital for any marketing site. She argued that blogs allow your readers to subscribe to your regularly-supplied information, while avoiding the problems of spam filters for e-mail newsletters (and do not require your readers to provide their e-mail addresses).

She quoted Robert Scovel of Microsoft as saying that “Anyone that has a marketing site today without an RSS feed should be fired.” Amanda says that measuring RSS results is not mature yet, but you can count the number of subscribers, the number who view the summaries, and the number who actually click on your content.

How do you keep your blog/RSS feed easy to find by search engines? Amanda described several critical characteristics. First, write fresh, topical, and keyword-rich content. Also use categories, not just dates, and write good anchor text. Link a lot from your blog and you will get links to your blog. Keep your template simple so that it does not confuse the spiders and, most of all, syndicate your content widely.

Amanda reminded us that success can come quickly, but there is huge growth to come—only 5% of Internet users have RSS readers installed. Some are using Web aggregators, she said, but many Internet users are not using RSS at all.

Next up on this panel was Stephan Spencer from NetConcepts (and author of a blog). Stephan explained that blogs are unspammable ways to reach readers that replace e-mail newsletters, but they can do much more. Visitors can use Web-based aggregators such as Bloglines or install an application such as NewsGator to start receiving blogs, but what do search marketers do to write one?

Stephan has a five-step approach 1) Give it away: News alerts, latest specials, clearance, events, new articles, top 10 sellers, and many more. 2) Make it easy to subscribe: You can use buttons that make it easy to add to specific aggregators or use link tags. 3) Track subscriber behavior: Count the subscribers in user-agent fields in your log files and count viewers of summaries and clickthroughs deeper into your site. 4) Personalize: Use interests tick boxes. Allow users to remain anonymous if they choose. Personalized feeds are good for readers but don’t always reinforce the same themes to give you strong links for search marketing. 5)Think about search engines: Encourage links to RSS directories and search engines (use this list). Let your syndicators use your summaries through a technique called “trackback.” Pay attention to your title—it will be the link text in search results. Use 301 redirects from your syndicators so that the link value accrues to your site rather than the affiliates. FeedBurner is a good RSS metrics package, but it uses 302 redirects, so it does not help you gain link value through search engines, the way 301s do.

Stephan recommended an e-book called Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS.

Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR was the next speaker in this informative session. Greg explained that RSS success requires a combination of marketing and technical skills, just like search marketing, because RSS is a bit tricky technically but strong content is what makes your blog popular.

Greg says that we’re just at the beginning of the blogosphere. In 2004, 27% of Internet users began to read blogs (a 58% increase) and the growth is continuing.

Greg expounded on an interesting case study. BTI, a small phone company, faced extremely competitive search marketing situation. They could not compete with large phone companies for terms like “VOIP small business” and others—they had too much competition. They started out trying search marketing but could make no headway.
They decided to start a blog. Most blogging software is designed to let one voice discuss something regularly. But companies need ways for multiple authors to speak with one voice. BTI developed their own tool to let their employees talk about VOIP, but they did more. They invited well-known VOIP bloggers to post to their blog. They also used RSS feeds to bring in content based on search terms to keep their content fresh without having to write it all themselves.

Success happened quickly. It attracted 164 links in June, 1,312 in December, and 1,441 in February, yielding 50 #1 rankings in August and 120 in November, some for very competitive keywords like “small business VOIP.” They have a link from their blog to their corporate site which caused site traffic to increase 60%.

Greg showed that using blogs to get search rankings has very high value. It’s hard to get good organic search rankings, but blogs can work very well. It’s much easier to drive links to blogs than to a normal corporate Web site, because the content is designed to be fresh and topical—it causes people to want to link to it. Blogs are starting to look like newspapers—would you rather read a newspaper or a corporate brochure? If corporations can create their own newspapers, they can fill them with ads for their products.

After the panel presentations, the floor was opened to questions from the audience.

Q. What companies are doing this?
A. Cisco has a Newsroom blog that looks just like their regular Web site, but it is actually a blog and attracts lots of links.

Q. Will blogs end up like e-mail?
A. They might. If bloggers are not responsible, then the same kind of spammy content may start appearing in blogs and feeds. The difference, though, is that readers can turn it off, so spammers need to constantly move to new feeds, but it could happen.

Q. Are there dangers in blogging from a corporate site?
A. Yes. A corporate blog from a corporate site might not be accepted by the blogosphere, but that depends on your company’s reputation and what you say. Greg said that BTI used a BTI subdomain because they were concerned that people know that it was a legitimate BTI voice. Amanda thinks that transparency is important—don’t hide your identity. Stephan says that you need to decide if you want a news blog or an author blog (where you have a point of view).

Q. Is there a culture change required inside the company to do blogs?
A. Greg says that most companies do need that culture change. Can your Web site management and legal reviews be circumvented in your culture? Think: don’t your sales people and PR people answer questions from customers and reporters? Another way: The conversations are happening already without us, so we need to participate. Pick a pilot project to show success. The BTI blog had a problem because they had no good writers, so they hired a writer that works a few hours a week to write three stories a week. Amanda says that the company has to be willing to let the voice be heard without censorship for this to work, perhaps by establishing a blogging policy. Microsoft has 90 bloggers at the moment. Stephan says being absent from the conversation is deadly—Kryptonite lock company did not know that Bic pens could pick their locks, but bloggers did. They suffered enormous bad publicity and then recalled $10 million worth of locks. By being plugged in, they might have recalled far earlier (costing less), changed their design, and looked responsible. Ignoring the bloggers made them look unresponsive on top of having bad locks.

Q. Does this take a lot of work? How can the cost be justified?
A. The panel thought it was much cheaper than other forms of marketing, including paid search. Stephan points out that there is no substitute for the image of thought leadership that you get from having a blog and being quoted in well-respected blogs. You can’t buy the kind of PR that some well-done blogging posts can bring. Greg says that blogs are the advance guard of buzz and that none of his clients want their ROI disclosed because it is a competitive edge. And their return happened in months, rather then the time that so many marketing campaigns require. To reduce your costs, you can hire a blogger for very little money—many bloggers are happy to get hired to write blogs for your company.

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