Posts Tagged ‘search’

October 2nd, 2009

Building an effective search engine marketing strategy

Just had to set out all the elements of an effective paid search strategy for a client. Thought it might be worth setting out some of the important areas to consider if you are to develop an effective paid search strategy. It’s not exhaustive, but it is helpful if you need a quick check list of things to cover.

  1. Platform Selection – determining which of the search platforms to use. The main options are Google, MSN/Bing and Yahoo! Bear in mind that in the UK Google’s share of the search market is around 90% (Hitwise Sept 09). This raises issues about work loads versus potential returns. In my view, sadly, alternatives to Google are below critical mass now.
  2. Network Deployment – do you run across the site’s extended network/content partners? This means your ads appear on other sites apart from the search engine you are using to create the campaign. This can be good or bad  - it depends on the ROI both options deliver to the campaign you are planning.
  3. Campaign and Ad Group Structure - Organise your keywords into Campaigns and Ad Groups for optimal targeting efficiency. Remember that budgets can only be set at campaign level so if you want to allocate specific budgets across groups of target keywords you will have to set up individual campaigns for each set.
  4. Keyword Selection – Select the keywords your target audience are searching. Remember that generic terms are likely to produce more traffic and fewer purchase conversions than highly targeted lower volume keywords. Given that you are likely to be paying for clicks, you need low levels of clicks and a high conversion rate.
  5. Negative keywords – if you’re selling ‘flat pack furniture’ you don’t want to be selling ‘flats’ or ‘puncture repairs’! Negative keyword settings allow you to eliminate these problems.
  6. Keyword matching – Search engines will return your ad against phrases that contain your target keyword terms. But because the words in a phrase can be rearranged to mean something else, poorly targeted keyword phrases may deliver searchers who are looking something different to what you are selling. You can solve this problem by using Phrase match or Exact match keyword targeting.
  7. Bid Tactics - Your keyword bid will determine how high you appear in the search engine’s listings. But remember that the #1 position does not always provide the best ROI. Lower positions can have a much higher cost efficiency. You will need to set up tests to monitor this and refine it as your campaign gathers sales data. Remeber you pay for clicks but only conversions will build your business.
  8. Day / Day parts - Your target audience may be more or less active on certain days or at certain times of day. Setting up the days and times of day that you want your ads to run allows you to target prospects when they are most active or most likely to convert to a sale.
  9. Budget Setting – You can manage budget deployment by setting your daily / monthly budgets at the campaign Campaign level.
  10. Budget delivery – Search engines will “spend” your money in two ways, either 1) as the searches are pulled through by consumers or 2) spread evenly throughout the day. The problem with route 1 is that you can be out of budget by lunchtime. You can set the way your budget delivered across day.
  11. Ad Text Copy Writing – Preparing copy to fit the confines of the ad text box and reflect your keyword selection is a vital component of search marketing. You have a fixed number of characters across each of the three lines including the headline. It pays in terms of ranking and response to match the ad text as closely as possible to the keywords you are targeting. Relevance is key.
  12. Linking / Deep Linking - Linking ads to the relevant web site page(s) and/or landing page(s) can take your prospect directly from their search, through your ad and to the page containing the product information they’re seeking. That makes for better conversion rates.
  13. Analytics tracking – setting up Google Analytics to track your campaign in detail will allow you to generate in-depth insight about where your visitors come from, how they enter your site, what they do on it, and the pages they leave from. But perhaps best of all, once you’ve gathered enough data Analytics will allow you to start optimising your campaign parameters around sales rather than clicks.

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October 20th, 2008

A Secure Office Cabinet

Searched Google today for a “Secure Office Cabinet”. In position 4 in my Google search returns was the UK Cabinet Office Intelligence and Security Committee. I think this raises important questions. Does Google in its infinite information-driven wisdom, know that the Home Office Cabinet Security Committee with its brief to “examine the policy, administration and expenditure of the Security Service” is in fact nothing more than a secure cupboard tucked away in Whitehall? Or is it the case that Google really can’t tell the difference between a high ranking government department and vendors of lockable office storage cupboards? There is of course a third and rather Pythoneqsue possibility: that the Security Committee meets in a cupboard. This is not as ludicrous as it sounds; the Beatles reputedly recorded their White album track “Yer Blues” in a studio cupboard.

Interestingly for SEO purists, the SERP #1 return, LA Office, had a PR of 1/10 whilst the government department at SERP #4 has a PR of 5/10.

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October 3rd, 2007

Can keywords help define Brand DNA?

Brands are defined by many factors; their personalities, the personalities of their owners, the opinions of their consumers, their attributes, their positioning relative to competitors, their packaging, their price, distribution, advertising and so on. But as substantially more marketing budget moves towards online, we may be about to see another set of definitions being used to define brands. These new definitions will be built around the keywords that consumers use to meet their needs, solve their problems and locate brand solutions.

We’ve all heard about the long tail. And so far that’s been a power law / Pareto curve. But I reckon that when it comes to specific brands, and we move from generic to custom search terms and keywords, strange things may happen to the relationship between keywords and customers along that curve. For example, we know that conversion rates are more likely to increase as more refined ‘long tail’ searches are made. But other things may happen too; the value, loyalty and other characteristics of customers may also vary along that curve.

It seems to me that future ‘brand prints’ or ‘Brand DNA’ profiles may have to consider the keywords consumers use to locate them (remember, consumers rarely search for brands – they search for solutions to their problems, and then use brands to refine and /or justify their choices). A given brand may score extremely well in terms of click rates against terms 3, 8, 16, 18, 25, 60, and 85. Moreover, the same brand may score well in conversion terms against another set of keywords. These keywords will form part of that brand’s online DNA. And of course, the DNA keywords may be altogether different to the keywords against which a competitor scores well – their keywords will be their DNA.

I’d expect brands, particularly brands that are searched, sourced and purchased online to be increasingly measured by their keyword profile. Moreover, brand positioning for these types of online brand may become a contest to fight for, win, retain and recover specific keywords that reflect consumers’ behavioural and search-based view of brands and brand solutions.

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June 9th, 2007

The secrets of search copy success


Paid for search marketing offers all advertisers exactly the same creative format; a small text box. What is said in that small box can have a critical effect on campaign success. Text box copywriters have to make it happen with three lines of around 35 characters (give or take the requirements of each individual search engine) or around
15 words in total. Success depends on arranging these basic resources into an effective headline and two compelling lines of copy. All search text boxes have effectively the same call to action.

What are the secret of success?

1) Think before you write - work on your proposition and how well it reflects the attributes of your brand or the benefits your are offering before you start writing.
2) Appeal to a need; consumers are searching because they want to solve a problem. Create copy that anticipates that problem and delivers a relevant solution. Don’t over-promise; consumers don’t like disappointment.
3) Check out the competition, but don’t let them corrupt you; you may want to learn from them, or you may want to steer clear and be startlingly different.
4) Question the value of each individual character and word in your copy; each character and word must be effective selling copy if you are to succeed.
5) Form relevance linkages in your copy - your copy should link through from your keyword to your text box headline and then straight into your landing page copy; Google for one rewards this relevance by prioritising it in search results.

The hard work is worth the effort. Each text box will be accurately tracked and reported. The response you generate for each keyword will be measured as click through rates, conversion rates, cost per click and cost per conversion. Badly written boxes slip straight down the performance reports for all to see.

Recent results based empirical research (’1st Position Isn’t Worth It‘ by Brandt Dainow on www.imediaconnection.com) has shown that the effect of copy may well be far more important that bidding strategies in search marketing. Dainow reached the conclusion that “the text in the ad is more important than the PPC price you’re paying.”

The search text box is in effect a 21st century digital version of the old ad agency copy test. In these tests, aspiring creatives had to “Sell this product in 15 words”. Today’s search specialists face the same challenge. It can be hard work. The best creatives spend hours or even days developing what are in publication often the shortest bits of copy. When thinking about this, I was reminded of an apposite Winston Churchill quote, “If I’d had more time, I’d have written a shorter letter“. Exactly.

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May 2nd, 2007

Google’s secret recipie


These are MI5 products. They’re are both produced using “secret recipes”. Employees involved in their manufacture probably sign a commercial equivalent of the Official Secrets Act with their contract and are sworn never to divulge the ingredients and techniques used in the making of these products.

And now of course, we have a 21st century online equivalent of these culinary mysteries; the search algorithms used by Google to sift and rank the world’s websites.

Seas of SEO consultants claim to be able to “beat Google” and increase your site’s page rank. They too have their own SEO recipes; buy more back links, get listed in big web directories, optimise your HTML, don’t use java or pictures and remember that meta tags are passe. For some, ‘beating’ Google is an interesting intellectual puzzle. For others, it’s a chance to fleece the unwary. So what is Google’s secret recipe and is it really possible for an SEO consultant to beat it?

My guess is that Google runs what is, in effect, a very complex credit scoring model and applies it to the web sites of the world just as a retailer applies credit scoring to prospective card account customers. Think back to when you last applied for a credit or store card. You were asked where you lived, your DOB, your income, where you worked, if you owned your home, if so, for how many years, whether or not you had other credit cards or other debts and so on. This process is about collecting statistical data about you to predict how you are likely to behave as a customer. The store or the credit scoring company don’t know you as a person so they have to collect information that is representative of you, your financial behaviour and, ultimately, your financial trustworthiness.

But collecting this data is just the start of a complex process (you can do a PhD in Credit Scoring in the School of Computer Sciences at Edinburgh University). To start with, not all your answers are treated as equal. For example, where you live may be three times as important as your age in determining your credit worthiness. And your income may be twice as important as where you live. All your answers are individually weighted and then aggregated to give an overall score for your credit application. So if you fail against an unimportant factor, your score may not be significantly reduced. But if you fail against a highly weighted factor, that could fail you regardless of all your other answers.

There are other factors too. Companies must continually adjust the way they score applicants because the nature of the applicant market ‘pool’ may change, or because the firm may have changing volume targets to deliver from within a fixed pool - necessitating a change in the way they look at those applicants within the pool. Statistical rules may need to change.

New techniques are being developed to reflect the dynamic nature of the task. Models are now capable of “meta learning” which means that they can run multiple learning applications and then take the most important learnings from the learnings developed by individual sub-models. This is where we get into the territory of machine learning, soft margins, non-linear regression and hyperplanes. These models are far more complicated than the recipes for certain spicy foods or fizzy drinks.

If you’re a webmaster, then it’s highly likely that your site is being scrutinised by Google using these sorts of data mining techniques. If you come across a search consultant who claims to have discovered how to “beat Google” and “improve your page rank dramatically” then bear in mind that they must have cracked the sophisticated statistical model that Google uses to prioritise pages.

So is Google really the equivalent of the HP or Worcestershire sauce of the 21st century? Well the answer is both yes and no. Yes, it’s certainly secret, but no, it’s far more complicated than the process of manufacturing a spicy sauce.

Update 22 August 2007:

Under the term “Digital Media+Web 2.0″ Teqtonic.com is ranking 11 out of 49,000,000 returns on Google. Unfortunately, that keeps us at the top of page 2, which is not ideal. But we’re working on those last 11 places….

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