Search Engine Marketing

As many of you know, I was fortunate to participate in the first Search Engine Watch Forum's first live Forum on June 28th, at the Ritz Carlton in downtown Atlanta, Georgia. It was a great mini conference. One of the main presenters was Stacy Williams of Prominent Placement. Stacey discussed search engine optimization, linking, future trends etc. After her talk, I asked if she would spend a few minutes for an interview so Linking101 visitors, customers, readers, could get some great inside information.

Q. Could you provide a brief background and how you got into online marketing

A. My background is advertising and marketing. When this thing called the World Wide Web became known to marketers in 1995, I was fascinated with it, and soon ended up running the Internet marketing division of the small ad agency I was working at during that time. Pretty soon we figured out that building web sites wasn’t enough – that we had to drive traffic to them too. So we did banner ads back when that was big, and then in 1998 I signed up for an online correspondence course to learn about this thing called search engine optimization. Back then, you could learn all you needed to know in six one-hour classes! SEO fascinated me, so I learned it and brought it to all the agency’s clients. Got good results, too – SEO was so easy back then!

Then, in late 2000, I had an epiphany. I thought to myself, “I have a skill hardly anyone else in the world has, and it’s in demand.” (That was the first time I’d ever been able to say that, and I knew most people never got the opportunity to say it.) I realized that I could follow my passion and do search engine marketing full time, for myself. I quit my job early in 2001 and founded Prominent Placement.

Q. What is "organic SEO"?  [Maybe I should ask, what types of SEO are there?]

A. Search engine marketing, or just “search marketing,” is an umbrella term that covers a variety of tactics related to helping web sites get prominent placement in the search engines. As I mentioned, search marketing started as simply “search engine optimization.” This is where you insert targeted search terms into the pages on a web site in order to get the pages ranked high in the “organic” search engine results.

“Organic” results refers to the search engine’s database of web pages, and the web pages show up in the main, editorial area in the search engine’s results page. Just to confuse people, besides being called “organic,” SEO is also commonly called “natural” or “algorithmic.” What these words are trying to convey is that you can’t buy your way into high rankings. Sure, you may pay an expert to help you optimize your site, but there’s no way to pay a search engine and get ranked high in these editorial results. It’s similar to using P.R. (public relations) to get news coverage in a newspaper or magazine.

The other main tactic under the search marketing umbrella is pay-per-click (PPC), or paid listings. These are the rankings that show up under the “sponsored listings” section of the search engine’s results page. There may be a couple at the very top of the page, and then more down the right side. This is advertising – you bid for your ranking and pay the search engine when someone clicks on your listing.

There are other, lesser-known and lesser-used tactics under the search marketing umbrella, such as link-building efforts, optimized press releases, search engine reputation management, blogs, locally-targeted search marketing campaigns, and Internet Yellow Pages.

Q. What SEO or SEM recommendations, would you give a webmaster if he was doing it himself?

A. First of all, recognize that search marketing – whether it’s SEO or PPC – is more complex than it may appear at first. Do your homework and learn the right way and wrong way to do things. Four good sites to learn from are www.searchenginewatch.com, www.searchengineguide.com, www.planetocean.com (paid but worth it), and www.highrankings.com. [Editor's note: I concur, these are great site!]

I’d also say to make sure you’re targeting the most appropriate search terms. Make sure they’re words and phrases that your target audience would use – not industry jargon that you use internally. Make sure you’re targeting search terms that are used frequently (so you have a chance of driving some web site traffic), and that are not too competitive (so you have a chance of achieving some rankings). One tool that can help with all this is at www.wordtracker.com.

And when it comes to SEO, be sure not to use any tricks that violate the search engines’ terms of service. Most search engines publish webmaster guidelines you should read. The above resource sites I recommended are all “white hat” (meaning they recommend reputable methods) – avoid anything that tries to trick the search engines or that seems too good to be true.

Pay-per-click can be a great tool for a webmaster to play with in order to test response to various search terms. You have a lot of control over the campaign and can turn it on or off whenever you want. Just be sure to set a daily budget you’re comfortable with so you don’t get any surprises, and read all the online information provided by the Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing (the two main players) so you can understand all the options and nuances of placing a campaign.

Q. If someone was looking for a company to do SEM for them, how do you grade or tell if you have a good SEM company?

A. I feel for people in the position of hiring a search marketing firm – it can be really hard to know who you can trust and what kinds of results they’ll get for you. The best thing to do is to check their references and find out what kind of results they’ve gotten for other clients. Also, invest in the MarketingSherpa guides (www.sherpastore.com) – they have one guide to hiring an SEO firm and one guide to hiring a PPC firm. The guides include a lot of information about what to look for and what questions to ask. They also list various firms as well as their answers to a number of questions about their services. It makes it easy to compare providers side-by-side.

Q. How long does it take to see how effective your SEM efforts have been?

A. Search engine optimization, unfortunately, is taking longer and longer. The amount of time it takes will be directly affected by how competitive your industry is online, how long your site has been at its current domain name, and how many quality links you have pointing to your site already. After a site is optimized (which can take a month or two, or longer), it can take six months to see results for an average site in an average industry. New sites, sites with few existing links, and sites in competitive industries can take much longer.

Pay-per-click, on the other hand, is nearly instant. Hopefully you’ll spend some quality time planning your campaign – the search terms you’ll bid on, your bid amounts, writing your titles and descriptions, figuring out match types – upfront. But once you set up an account, it’ll be live on Google instantly, and on Yahoo within 5 business days or less.

Q. What importance do you give to local searchs?

A. A study by The Kelsey Group showed that 25% of all searches are local in nature, meaning that a person is looking for a company in their geographic area. So if your target audience or service area is limited geographically, obviously, local search marketing is going to be the only type of search marketing you need. This can include getting into both the editorial and sponsored listings for the local databases of the big search engines, as well as getting into local-only search engines such as www.truelocal.com and Internet Yellow Pages (IYPs).

We look at local search more broadly than most and are now trying to get all of our clients into the local databases of the big search engines as well as the IYPs. That’s because often you’ll see local results listed at the top of editorial results, before the site that’s ranked #1 organically. You’ll often see results from IYPs showing up in search engine results as well. We go for all the visibility we can.

Q. What do you see coming down the road?

A. More personalization and customization, for sure. The search engines are already trying to figure out if a searcher is looking for information (that is, they want to read and research) or to shop or buy online. They’re serving up different results for each type of query. The methods they’re using now are far from perfect, but they’re working on improving relevance and on giving searchers more control. This means that we’ll be focusing a lot less on rankings, since your site will be ranked differently for different people, even when they’re using the same search term. We’ll focus more on site traffic and on what those visitors are doing on the site – are they converting to visitors, etc. And that’s really where the focus should have been all along.