Bing!…Google is on to you

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 | Internet Marketing, Internet News, Search Engine Marketing | No Comments

The new “decision engine” with its 80 million dollar advertising budget sure has got its money’s worth with all the news, online articles and blogs circling around its arrival.

“Its beating Yahoo in search engine share!”

“Its not technically beating Yahoo’s search share.”

“This surge in search share percentage is temporary!”

” The home page graphics are a waste of time. ”

“No its Appealing and everyone loves a good useless fact!”

Whatever your opinion is about it, why not check out how others are using it to get to your site.  Google blog has announced that they will be able to track Bing! as a search engine through Google Analytics fairly soon.  If you cant wait, simply add the code below to your google analytic code: (currently Bing! is a refereeing site under traffic sources)

pageTracker._addOrganic(”bing”, “q”);

Now we play the waiting game….

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Tags: alternative search engine, Bing, Search Engines

Bing!: Oh, so we’re setting the bar low now?

Friday, June 5th, 2009 | Internet Marketing, Internet News, Search Engine Marketing | No Comments

You know those small rock chips you get on your car as you’re hurtling down the highway? Those tiny imperfections in your car’s auto body called “dings”. They’re the ones that are annoying but too small to invest money or time in repairing, so you simply ignore them. That’s how this blogger feels about Microsoft’s newly launched “Bing!” search engine. Bing! is nothing more than a rock chip along my travels on the information superhighway – thanks for scratching my paint.

Excited by all the internet buzz of this week, I visited Bing.com only to discover that I had been Punk’d. Featuring a boring graphic of nature at Her finest, Bing! offered me a search bar, and implored me to “Explore” five choices along the left navigation: Images, Videos, Shopping, News, Maps and Travel. At the bottom of the screen they offered me a “Popular Now” section with a few topics that are certainly not popular in my search behavior.

I admit that at this point I was thoroughly unimpressed. I’m a search marketer and we always hammer home the message that our client’s landing pages have to be compelling. We implore them: “You’ve got to grab your audience’s attention and inspire them to click through your site!” “Add graphics”, we suggest, “use video technology to demonstrate your products, give your reader dynamic web copy, and above all demonstrate the value of your brand and your product above the competition.”

I cannot be excited about a page that fails to embrace these simple marketing truths. No, Google’s homepage is not the stuff search engine marketers dream of - but they were first in line and get points for originality.

I feel let down. All the hype and I get a white-letter logo with an orange dot for the “i” and an old Windows Live page with a facelift. Oh, and the social media connectivity or integration? I suppose they ran out of time or money to add these as features since they were concentrating on adding their clairvoyant flight fare finder which will tell me to hold off buying that ticket because the price is likely to drop. If the rest of the world is interested in social media, why are you showing me pictures of the mountains and calling it brand new? Besides, I had to hunt down the video tutorial to teach me how to find and use their flight and hotel planner. You know, it’s funny, I know of five other sites that offer that same “New!” feature.

I recognize that my opinion is in direct contrast with many of you Bing! luv-ahs, but I’m afraid that embracing Bing! sets a standard that we just can’t accept. I expected more from you Microsoft - and I hope the purported $80 million you’re spending on advertising this remodel can be put towards adding on some real, usable features. On behalf of search engine marketers, informed consumers, savvy Internet explorers, persons with heartbeat, and individuals across the nation who can’t stand to be hyped up and then disappointed - Bing!, since you failed to lead, or even follow, please get out of the way. Besides, I hate chipped paint.

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Tags: Bing, landing page, microsoft, microsoft bing, new search engine, search engine, Search Engine Marketing

Resession Time Means Marketers Move More Dollars Online…

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 | Internet Marketing, Local Search, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments

Not surprisingly, the budgets of more than 54% of marketers worldwide have been negatively affected by the recession, according to data gathered from an eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit.  Most would guess that advertisers are spending less - way less in the case of newspapers, local radio and television.  Got that, but then where are they spending their precious ad dollars?  If you guessed “online”  you guessed correctly.

It’s a fact during tough times, more marketers are adopting search engine marketing techniques.   Over 90% of marketers polled by eMetrics said they would increase or maintain their spend on e-mail advertising, and more than 83% said the same about paid search. Advertisers also want to know what they are getting for their search engine marketing investment.  In fact, over 87% of those surveyed plan either increasing or at least maintaining their spending on web analytics. This all adds up to one thing…accountability.  In the advertising world it is all about return-on-investment, measurability and the ability to target - hallmarks of search engine marketing.

Lastly, it looks like this trend will continue.  A recent report by eMarketer.com states that search engine marketing (specifically paid search, contextual advertising, paid inclusion and search engine optimization) “will experience increased spending through 2013. By then total US search marketing outlays will reach nearly $23.4 billion, and marketers will be spending more on SEO than on contextual advertising.”

Isn’t it time that your moved more of your marketing dollars online?

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Do You Know What Your Mom Is Doing Online?

Monday, May 18th, 2009 | Internet Marketing, Internet News, Search Engine Marketing | No Comments

So what are American Moms doing online - checking their email, checking their checking account balance, the weather or what’s on sale?  How about all of the above?  Not surprisingly all of these are among the top ten online activities  for moms according to a study  by Marketing Moms Coalition. What is surprising is that the same study reports that American Moms with children under the age of eighteen spend an average of three hours a day on line, one hour more than the two hours their school age children are spending online.

This is great news for merchants who are selling their products online or utilizing the internet to influence the purchase of their product or service off line.  Families/Mothers with children under the age of eighteen consistently ranks among the most sought after demographics by advertisers.  In many cases these ladies carry the keys to their household’s treasure chest of disposable  income.  In short, American Moms are making or influencing most of their family’s purchases.  Knowing where one can find these moms (online) and understanding what they are doing there, allows marketers to more effectively target them.

Makes sense, but specifically where online can you find them and what tactics can a marketer utilize to reach them?  The most obvious is an email marketing campaign.  85% of American Moms are checking/sending email.  Gathering emails from and then re-marketing to moms with a professional, well designed and topical email marketing campaign should  be at the top of a marketer’s list.  One of our customers now ties in most of the discounts that they offer to “email club members”.   Within a several months they have built their email to well over a 1,000.

The next best place to find these American Moms are the search engines.  I submit that most of the remaining top ten activities involve a search on Google, Yahoo or MSN.  So a page one presence (91% of consumers never search past the first page)  on these search engines, in either the organic or sponsored links section, is paramount.  Display ads on sites which are targeting this demographic is another opportunity that should be considered.

So now that you know where you can find the typical American Mom,  isn’t it  time to reach out and tell her all the reasons why she should be spending money with you?

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Ad Spending on Internet Outpaces that Spent on Newspapers, Radio or Outdoor!

Thursday, April 16th, 2009 | Internet Marketing, Search Engine Marketing | No Comments

Where are businesses investing their marketing dollars?  According to Neilson Online & AdAcross in December 2008 ad spending on the Internet was only topped by that spent on Television and National Magazines.   For years when planning their marketing expenditures, most marketing managers started with the “Big Four” – Television, Radio, Outdoor (Billboards) and Print (Newspapers & Magazines).  These traditional media were where consumers were going for information and/or entertainment.  Not anymore!  Now Americans spend as much time online each day as they do watching television – which had been the area where most people spent their leisure time.  When online, consumers’ two favorite activities are email & search.  So it is no surprise that more and more ad dollars are being shifted to search engine marketing and email marketing. There is one thing, however, that most marketers haven’t changed.   They still invest their precious ad dollars where it will reach the most prospects.  The Internet, lead by Search Engine Marketing, is such a place.  Plus, SEO & PPC offer advertisers another bonus…the ultimate in advertising accountability.  But that’s a topic for another day.

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Tags: Ad Spend, billboard, neilson, ppc, radio, Search Engine Optimization, television

5 Steps to a Landing Page Sales Strategy

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 | Search Engine Marketing | No Comments

While you’re landing page might not have a firm handshake and a winning smile, the following are some steps you can take to improve your landing page’s sales ability. (doesn’t make sense? it will…) I’ve broken down the 5 main steps in a general sales strategy and related them to the landing page creation process.

1. Identify Your Customer – What are the demographics of your clients? Are they younger or older? Have caviar and champagne dreams or McDonald’s value menu incomes? Play sports or spend their time trading Pokemon cards? Whatever it is, you can use the information to create a look and feel of the landing page. If you know your focus client is more technical savvy, use more technical jargon in the content versus an image heavy site. The page should be simple but directed towards your target audience.
2. Qualifying Customers - aka: SEO your site. Hire someone like, (cough) NetSearch Direct to optimize your sites ranking and target your keywords. Add a Pay-Per-Click campaign to increase your traffic and increase your keyword focus. Do your research and make sure that all your product or service keywords are somewhere on your landing page.
3. Reassure Credibility – Content, Content, and Content. Explain on your page why the visitor should choose you over everyone else advertising online. Add testimonials, comparison charts, or reviews and most importantly add an offer. With a weak economy, offers are more popular than ever in gaining the sale. An offer can be in a form of a coupon or free service or a guarantee. Be creative and try not to have the same offer as your competition.
4. Ask for the Sale – A step most sales people overlook, but your landing page shouldn’t. After a customer has visited your landing page by qualifying themselves through natural or paid search marketing and read your credible content, what do they do next? This is where a “Call-to-Action” comes in. Add terms that will lead to what action you want the visitor to take: “Buy Now!” “Start Searching!” “Get More Info!” And for Pete’s sake, don’t forget the exclamation mark!
5. Follow Up – Invite the customer to register to receive additional information from your site after the action. Keep your customers engaged in the site; write a blog, start a twitter account, email a newsletter about new products. The 80/20 sales rule holds true in Internet sales, meaning 80% of your sales comes from 20% of your customers so keep your clients coming back for more.

Want to know more? Call Us Today! (note the exclamation mark)

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Tags: Landing Page Conversion

How Quickly Things Change

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009 | Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization | 1 Comment

I was recently reading an article on search engine land that was discussing a way to check to see if Google has penalized a domain. Basically, by adding the word “hyves” as a sub-domain to your site, and checking the PR, it would come back with a code that told you if it had been penalized. While that’s a great thing to be able to do, what’s really interesting is that, this sparked a pretty involved discussion in the forums and comments.

People were trying different domains, analyzing the results, comparing notes, and the discourse went on and on. Well skip ahead a few days, and guess what? All of a sudden that technique didn’t work anymore. You would think that Google would be pretty busy with cutting out huge chunks of services, their new personalized search results experiment, and launching a news service in Singapore, but obviously Google pays attention to these forums, and sites that talk about search engine marketing, and quietly turned that feature off.

So my point is this, things can change very quickly in the search engine marketing world. Techniques that work today, might not work next week. Only by actively staying abreast of news, SEO discussions, and the general feel in the SEO world, can you hope to improve and maintain your search engine marketing campaigns.

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Tags: google, hyves, PR

SEO and Cell Phones: Can they work together?

Monday, January 12th, 2009 | Internet Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments

On a desktop computer, most people are happy to see their website ranked in the first one or two pages (first 10-20 links) of the search results.  For those of you who use search engines from your cell phone, you know that the mobile versions have fewer results per page than when you search on your PC.  You must also consider that when typing a search query on your cell phone, you probably use fewer search terms than if you were to perform the same search from your computer (FYI — the average search term is 2.4 words according to good ol’ Wikipedia).  With fewer search terms and fewer results per page, SEOing your site for the mobile web can be a daunting task.

Suggestions for SEO on the mobile web:

• Does your site pass the W3C compliance test for mobile websites?
• Take off large images, flash, and other media
• Submit the mobile version of your site to search engines (for example: Yahoo’s mobile site submission page).
• If you’re only going to make one mobile version of your site for all cell phones to use, make sure you design the pages so they work on even the lowest-end phones.
• Title tags are still important!  Just don’t make them as long as you normally would.
• DOCTYPE and character encoding are important even on mobile sites.

Something else to consider is that when you’re on the go, you’re most likely searching for completely different things than when you’re sitting at your desk.  For example, when you’re walking down the street, you may want to know where the closest Starbucks is.  Or, you might want to find and download a new ring tone.

JumpTap has released the most popular mobile search topics.  Combined, the following seven categories represent about half of all mobile searches:

1. Navigation
2. Music (ring tones)
3. Entertainment
4. Sports
5. Reference
6. Local (the Starbucks example above)
7. Shopping

With 100 million people paying for Internet access on their phones, can you afford not to have a mobile website (source: Nielsen)?

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Tags: cell phones, mobile internet, Search Engine Optimization

Yahoo Makes Important Change to Advertising TOS

Monday, January 12th, 2009 | Internet Marketing, PPC Advertising, Search Engine Marketing | 1 Comment

In mid-2008, Yahoo changed their TOS to include the following clause:

“In the U.S. only, for those advertisers not bound by an Insertion Order, we may help you optimize your account(s). Accordingly, you expressly agree that we may also: (i) create ads, (ii) add and/or remove keywords, and/or (iii) optimize your account(s). We will notify you via email of such changes made to your account(s), and can also include a spreadsheet of such changes upon your written request. If you would like any of such changes reversed, please reply to such email within 14 days of the change(s), and we will make commercially reasonable efforts to reverse the change(s) you specifically identify. Notwithstanding the foregoing, you remain responsible for all changes made to your account(s), including all click charges incurred prior to any reversions being made. It is your responsibility to monitor your account(s) and to ensure that your account settings are consistent with your business objectives.”

What does this mean for end users?  It means after you spend hours creating your campaigns, adding your keywords, and deciding how much money you want to bid on each term, Yahoo has the right to “optimize” however they feel necessary.  Not only can they delete some of your keywords and replace them with different ones, they can also increase and/or decrease your bids.  Best of all, you are not told about the modification(s) until afterwards.

While this did happen in June of last year, businesses are just now starting to discover changes to their advertising accounts.  The email you’ll receive from Yahoo will read something like this:

“Yahoo! is committed to the success of account “account name” and we believe there is an opportunity to provide you with improved performance.

To help you save time and get the most out of your campaigns, we are launching a new automatic account optimization program. It’s intended to help raise the performance of accounts that are experiencing issues like low quality scores, low lead volume or low click-through rates.

And the best part is, we will do the work for you: Our content developers will use their search advertising experience to help your marketing dollars go further.

What we will keep an eye out for:

• Search ads with low click-through rates relative to competitors
• Ad testing not in use? missing an opportunity to optimize ad copy
• Ad groups that have a quality index score of 2 or lower

How we can help:

• Create new ads for existing ad groups, enabling ad testing
• Write multiple versions of ads for any new ad groups we create, enabling the use of ad testing to help ensure that the best-performing ads are displayed more often
• Search our database for keywords that can drive more targeted traffic to your site

In short, our goal is to make sure that your account is firing on all cylinders–and do this while keeping your existing keywords and without exceeding your spending limits!

As always, you are in control of your account. If we make any optimization changes to your account through this program, we will notify you by email, and you can let us know whether the account changes are positively affecting your account. Also, you are welcome to contact your account manager to review, edit or ask us to reverse any of the changes. Finally, if you do not wish to participate in this program, you may opt out by contacting your account manager.

We’ve identified keywords and ads in your account that are significantly underperforming, and we’ve initiated the changes to the creatives that you will find attached.

We are very excited about this new program, and hope it will provide you with improved performance and a higher level of service. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.”

SEO and SEM bloggers seem to be outraged by the new TOS.  One went as far as comparing it to your investment adviser buying stocks on your behalf or switching your portfolio from bonds to hedge funds.  I can’t say I disagree.

I recommend contacting your account manager or marketing company and making sure that Yahoo doesn’t change your campaigns.  You should determine how much money you spend, and what to spend money on.  Not Yahoo.

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Tags: ppc, PPC Advertising, PPC campaign optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Yahoo

SEM and PPC Webinar

Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 | Internet Marketing, PPC Advertising, Search Engine Marketing | No Comments

“SEM 101: Everything You Wanted to Know About Search Engine Marketing but Were Afraid to Ask!”

This webinar will educate you on Search Engine Marketing basics, illustrate industry trends, and demonstrate successful marketing strategies that work in almost every advertising vertical. The holiday season is approaching and this year consumers will be comparison shopping more than usual. In today’s economy, can you afford to miss this webinar?

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Tags: ppc, Search Engine Marketing, webinar