Are you turning your audience away after they visit your site?

Thursday, March 27th, 2008

Like millions of other fans, I’ve enjoyed watching episodes of Project Runway weekly on BravoTV, on BravoTV.com, on YouTube this past season. I, nor many of my friends my age have a cable TV or satellite subscription—Internet service is king. So in the case that there’s a cable television show that we absolutely have to watch, our first resource is the network’s website. Unfortunately for Bravo, all full episodes weren’t showcased on their site so many disappointed seekers averted to YouTube for their weekly doses of “Fierce,” “Make it work,” and “Auf wiedersehen.”

By not showcasing full episodes of the highly popular show, they missed out.

You should be the first source for consumers looking for your anything that relates to your brand and not allow your potential customers to look elsewhere for information. The more informative and interactive your site is, the more likely people are to visit, revisit often and become familiar with your all your services and/or products.

Create an oasis for like-minded internet users to converge and share ideas on your industry and your products. By creating forums and allowing comments on blogs and articles, you can gain a greater insight into your customer’s desires and get instant feedback (way quicker and less conspicuous than sending out a survey, don’t you think?)

And, of course this would not be a complete SEO post without the mentioning of quality backlinks. Having truly helpful substance on your site gives other webmasters a convincing reason to link there, naturally.

Posted in SEO | No Comments »

My 72 hours of SEM Heaven and Hell: How to Use PPC to Capitalize on Unexpected Offline PR

Tuesday, March 25th, 2008

As Search Engine Marketers, we have to remember that we do not live in a bubble. Sometimes we get so focused on what is happening with our individual keywords, our bids and CPA that we forget there is an entire offline world of marketing and PR taking place.

A recent client experience showed me how powerfully the offline world can impact what is happening online and how important communication between the client and a PPC firm is for integrating online and offline marketing successfully.

Our client’s industry was featured on Good Morning America recently. Upon being featured, our client called us first thing and asked how SEER could help capitalize on the interest.

Now our client was lucky as they had quality high ranks in the natural results when the news story broke. You or your client may not have this good fortune, which makes having a fast acting PPC firm even more essential to capitalize on unexpected PR buzz, which as the story below illustrates, can have incredible influence on people’s search behavior.

Immediately, we saw a surge in online conversions and spend due to the buzz Good Morning America created. This buzz was not even generated by promoting our client, but actually just the industry our client operates in. Seeing this, we added Good Morning America ad text into our rotation to speak to the people who had just seen the segment.

The new interest began to quickly push us up to our daily budget cap by mid-morning on a campaign that previously had been 100% visible all day. To fully capitalize on this new interest, we bumped up our budget. We thought 50% would keep us live all day, but as the day went on 50% became 100%, which quickly became 200% and ultimately ended up being 650% to ensure complete visibility. Only by knowing this new buzz had taken place were we able to realize our full potential by ensuring 100% visibility as consumer demand skyrocketed.

Watch out for Sneaky Competitors.

We were so proud of ourselves! Our ads were the only ones that were capitalizing on the GMA story. However, this was not the case for long. Since this was a story about our client’s industry, not just our client, by evening our competitor had copied our GMA ads.

Next time we may want to use a strategy promoted in this great post by NickyCakes.
Basically, the idea would be to “Fake Out” your competition by finding out their physical address and setting up a campaign with “not so good ads” and low bids only in their area. This way they will not be able to see your stellar ad that you would prefer they did not copy.

Brad Geddes, in his post about click fraud, explains another potential strategy. You may want to block out a competitor’s IP address. Geddes warns to make sure you are blocking the correct IPs, and explains that some hosts have thousands of users sharing the same IP.

Besides ad text changes, which can easily be copied, and budget increases, what else can online marketers do to capitalize on offline promotion?

We began to bid on words discussed in the promotion. This allowed us to find new words that were less costly, but relevant because the search demand for these words was new. These new words proved successful at a much lower CPA than what our current campaign was averaging. We also bumped our positions on our current keywords, with the idea that the new demand would increase our conversion rate and thus, keep our CPA in check, which proved correct.

Look at the content network for ripe places get an Ad syndicated.

My colleague at SEER, Laura, wrote about this concept of getting the most out of the content network, which became very applicable in light of the PR. We negotiated with the different content networks to get our ad listed on the online syndication of the PR.

We got an ad shown on the story on GMA’s site. If this is not possible, posting an ad to syndicate “Run of Site” may still be worth it.

You may have to look beyond Google, Yahoo or MSN to find the content network that has ad space on the relevant story. An easy way to tell is to look for the advertise link in the ad block and see which network is syndicating the ads. If you can accomplish this, you will be getting a very relevant ad in front of the audience who may have just seen a promotion on TV. Now, instead of potentially going to your competitor, your ad is in front of this reader for them to click on and convert on your site.

“Ah, we were done,” we thought. All the changes were made and our campaign kept sailing and converting for the next few days, but we were not quite done yet…

Interestingly, once GMA launched the story, we saw other networks shortly after follow suit with their own take on the story. NBC picked up the story, followed by the Today Show, and so the process of changing ads, adjusting budgets, increasing bids, finding relevant new keywords and finding content networks started all over again.

In summary, below are key insights we learned from this experience for successfully integrating offline and online marketing:

• Open communication with clients is essential
• Know what is happening off line in your industry
• Be prepared to increase your budget 10 fold if a major network provides PR for your actual client or even just their industry
• Watch out for sneaky competitors
• Look for new keyword opportunities that may have low competition
• Look for new content network opportunities
• Look out for other networks, which may follow suit
• Act fast to capitalize on this buzz!

This buzz is still happening as I write this, so only time will tell when the effects of a promotion on a show like GMA will die down, but so far it has been an exciting ride – a little taste of PPC Heaven and Hell.

For a good 72 hours we had a combination of quadrupling conversions (Heaven), and sleepless nights as dropping everything to ensure no stone was left uncovered to capitalize on this once in lifetime Buzz was essential (Hell).

If our client did not communicate with us and give us the flexibility to increase budgets, change ads, look for new keywords and content opportunities, and if we in turn did not act quickly, we would not have been able to fully capitalize on this incredible PR.

Posted in business thoughts, PPC | 3 Comments »

Content is NOT always King & SEO is not always bad

Monday, March 24th, 2008

Ok if I put two sites side by side and I told you that one ranked much better than the other given these stats, which one do you think would rank highest?

If you said site B you’d be wrong. Even though the stats KILL site A it is just not the case that the best content always wins out.

How can Suite 101′s page on red wine (Page A), that is a general site with no theme, outrank Winelibrary’s Video on California Pinot Noir (Page B) on a search for California pinot noir??

Because content is NOT king, maybe someday it will be, but right now, that is NOT the case!

What kind of sparked this research was simple, I was following Jason Calacanis’ twitter feed (yes I am addicted to twitter now, see me here) when he praised this video of Gary Vaynerchuk.

Right off the bat, I like Gary. I met him briefly at Affiliate Summit in Vegas but really got a dose of his personality in this video (I have NEVER heard of Winelibrary TV but now I am hooked).

If you watch the video, I LOVE everything he is saying but then… I hear this at 2 minutes 15 seconds: “don’t worry about your SEO rank or how to title your blog posts”, What!!!!!!!!! (Disclaimer: this comment is about 2% of the whole video, I know I am focusing on a small part. The other 98% is awesome.)

Don’t obsess, yes, but don’t worry at all?! I think that is bad advice.

A search for “content is king” on Google showed me this:

In this video where Matt Cutts himself recommends that webmasters think about what users are going to type to find their content. He even recommends getting those keywords into the site. Optimization is NOT bad.

But the search engines are just not smart enough “yet” to make sure that the best content always wins out, and we’re not talking about #1. There can always be more than just 1 site with great content on a topic and there can only be one #1!. I get that.

What I’m talking about top 10, top 20 where so often lower quality sites can creep in. Often times replacing great content sites who have chosen not to optimize and stick to a “content is king” philosophy, where basic best practices are not followed.

Not following best practices as it relates to SEO leads to:

• Poorer results for users all over the web
• Allows lower quality sites to outrank you and pollute the web

Lets give an example of how far the search engines still have to go to determine relevancy:

Have you ever searched for a plural versus a singular and saw the difference in the SERPS? Here’s an example, check out a search for nursing college and nursing colleges.

There is a wide disparity, and I can’t image that Google really believes that Ohio-state.edu should be the second most relevant result for “nursing college” and not worth being in the top 100 for the word “nursing colleges” (as of my search) what if we complicate things by searching for “nursing university”?

With that said, search engines definitely still have a ways to go, and while they are not perfect they NEED a boost now, they need a little help, and honestly I think that that is what good SEO does.

Here’s a step by step example of WHY people with great content who are NOT doing SEO basics, like how to title your blog posts are hurting and not helping! I’ll use Winelibrary.com as an example:

When I type in “red wine” I get this:

• A relevant about.com page (they do SEO basics)
• 2 sites about health
• A Wikipedia page (of course)
• And redwine audio’s site

No wine library in the Top 100! I think they deserve to be somewhere in the top 100, don’t you?!!!

I can’t tell you the countless times I have used search engines to help me find a good bottle of cheap wine while out at the wine store or before I head out for dinner and I NEVER saw Gary’s site. Why are you holding out on me bro?

OK, MAYBE this is not a term that winelibrary should rank well for. So, I did a search for “wine reviews” — This seems to be LOCK STEP with the idea of the show. I love Gary for not being a freaking wine snob, I hate those guys too!

Do a search for “wine reviews” or “wine reviews online” on Google or Yahoo, and they will not show Winelibrary.com and I think that is a BAD thing for wine enthusiasts and people who want to learn about wines. I honestly feel that if Winelibrary.com were to rank well for these terms that it would help wine enthusiasts all over the world.

At this point, forget the business equation of:
higher rank = more traffic & more traffic = more business for winelibrary.com (which is not part of the 80/20 principle Gary mentions)
And forget the ego boost:
higher rank = more visibility & more visibility = more notoriety (also not 80/20)

I kind of imagined a Gary & Matt (Cutts) Conversation going something like this:

I could see the conversation between Gary & Matt Cutts right now:
Matt: I love wine man, your site is great!
Gary: Thanks man, its all about just being real about the wine and the Jets bro, glad I could help, You a wine guy?
Matt: A bit
Gary: What kind of wines you like?
Matt: Well I love pinot noir, but the other day I wanted a great California pinot noir and did a search and found this site:
Some pretty BLAH content, I noticed that you had this video & this video, good stuff.
Do me a favor man, please put the title of the video in your title tag and post a transcript so me and millions of others find your stuff instead of suite 101 and a stale about.com page.
Gary: We don’t need no stinking titles, just good content man! Content is KING, didn’t you see my gigaOM video?
Matt: Well man, you know I do have to take some time out of my schedule to chill with my wife and play with the cat! We’re working on it but for now, just a few best practices will make sure I get better wines after a long day fighting spammers, not to mention you’d actually push the crap further down by helping your stuff move up.
Gary: Content is King man, I don’t need to optimize, that’s SEO stuff!
Matt: Darn, oh well, let me go talk to these 400 spammers who are going to tell me they did nothing wrong, but in the meantime, make my job a bit easier and optimize just a little bit, k?
Gary: Yeah, Go J-E-T-S Jets, Jets, Jets!

Comedic Interlude Over:

Seriously, by not optimizing your site with just basic best practices you are allowing:
Thin affiliate’s, scrapers, and low authority sites to get information (possibly poor information) out to wine lovers & possibly giving them a bad experience with wine.

To his defense Gary didn’t crap on SEO but in passing he briefly mentioned not to worry about putting the right keywords in and let content win out.

So I quickly wanted to respond by saying, I think this new approach to saying hey I am not going to optimize my site and you shouldn’t either can lead to a bad user experience when searching for things on the web.

I also look at the best buys section of wine library (cause I am always looking for a good cheap wine) and notice some good stuff there too, yet because the site isn’t following basic best practices it is not ranking well.

Gary, while I don’t like the Jets, (Go EAGLES) here are some tips to help you sell more wine to help you buy the Jets maybe a day or two earlier:
I would take the best buys section and first do some keyword research to see how people search for lower cost wines, starting with Google Suggest:

Then a little Yahoo Search Assist:

This exercise took me about 3 minutes
Winelibrary.com already has a page that has great wines called “best buys”
When looking at the admittedly quick research it seems that people search for wines under $10, $15 and $20 dollars. Winelibrary already has a page that has wines under $20, could you also develop one for $10 and $15? Because the research shows that there are people out there searching for wines at these prices and you have credibility in helping people select wines, you would be HELPING them.
Heck, maybe you could do a video on wines under these price points. Given the way the economy is, we don’t want to stop drinking great wines, but we may have less money, and I’d listen to your opinions.

If not for growing your business, how about for actually helping people on the Internet find good wines under these price points from a GREAT source, which you are. Remember your 80/20 rule, help me, and many others find great wines, you guys are a credible source, with yes, GREAT CONTENT, even if it needs a little boost to make it findable.

If you don’t want to do it for yourself, do it for us, the wine loving public!

Posted in business thoughts, google, SEO | 8 Comments »

Content is NOT always King & SEO is not always bad

Monday, March 24th, 2008

Ok if I put two sites side by side and I told you that one ranked much better than the other given these stats, which one do you think would rank highest?

If you said site B you’d be wrong. Even though the stats KILL site A it is just not the case that the best content always wins out.

How can Suite 101′s page on red wine (Page A), that is a general site with no theme, outrank Winelibrary’s Video on California Pinot Noir (Page B) on a search for California pinot noir??

Because content is NOT king, maybe someday it will be, but right now, that is NOT the case!

What kind of sparked this research was simple, I was following Jason Calacanis’ twitter feed (yes I am addicted to twitter now, see me here) when he praised this video of Gary Vaynerchuk.

Right off the bat, I like Gary. I met him briefly at Affiliate Summit in Vegas but really got a dose of his personality in this video (I have NEVER heard of Winelibrary TV but now I am hooked).

If you watch the video, I LOVE everything he is saying but then… I hear this at 2 minutes 15 seconds: “don’t worry about your SEO rank or how to title your blog posts”, What!!!!!!!!! (Disclaimer: this comment is about 2% of the whole video, I know I am focusing on a small part. The other 98% is awesome.)

Don’t obsess, yes, but don’t worry at all?! I think that is bad advice.

A search for “content is king” on Google showed me this:

In this video where Matt Cutts himself recommends that webmasters think about what users are going to type to find their content. He even recommends getting those keywords into the site. Optimization is NOT bad.

But the search engines are just not smart enough “yet” to make sure that the best content always wins out, and we’re not talking about #1. There can always be more than just 1 site with great content on a topic and there can only be one #1!. I get that.

What I’m talking about top 10, top 20 where so often lower quality sites can creep in. Often times replacing great content sites who have chosen not to optimize and stick to a “content is king” philosophy, where basic best practices are not followed.

Not following best practices as it relates to SEO leads to:

• Poorer results for users all over the web
• Allows lower quality sites to outrank you and pollute the web

Lets give an example of how far the search engines still have to go to determine relevancy:

Have you ever searched for a plural versus a singular and saw the difference in the SERPS? Here’s an example, check out a search for nursing college and nursing colleges.

There is a wide disparity, and I can’t image that Google really believes that Ohio-state.edu should be the second most relevant result for “nursing college” and not worth being in the top 100 for the word “nursing colleges” (as of my search) what if we complicate things by searching for “nursing university”?

With that said, search engines definitely still have a ways to go, and while they are not perfect they NEED a boost now, they need a little help, and honestly I think that that is what good SEO does.

Here’s a step by step example of WHY people with great content who are NOT doing SEO basics, like how to title your blog posts are hurting and not helping! I’ll use Winelibrary.com as an example:

When I type in “red wine” I get this:

• A relevant about.com page (they do SEO basics)
• 2 sites about health
• A Wikipedia page (of course)
• And redwine audio’s site

No wine library in the Top 100! I think they deserve to be somewhere in the top 100, don’t you?!!!

I can’t tell you the countless times I have used search engines to help me find a good bottle of cheap wine while out at the wine store or before I head out for dinner and I NEVER saw Gary’s site. Why are you holding out on me bro?

OK, MAYBE this is not a term that winelibrary should rank well for. So, I did a search for “wine reviews” – This seems to be LOCK STEP with the idea of the show. I love Gary for not being a freaking wine snob, I hate those guys too!

Do a search for “wine reviews” or “wine reviews online” on Google or Yahoo, and they will not show Winelibrary.com and I think that is a BAD thing for wine enthusiasts and people who want to learn about wines. I honestly feel that if Winelibrary.com were to rank well for these terms that it would help wine enthusiasts all over the world.

At this point, forget the business equation of:
higher rank = more traffic & more traffic = more business for winelibrary.com (which is not part of the 80/20 principle Gary mentions)
And forget the ego boost:
higher rank = more visibility & more visibility = more notoriety (also not 80/20)

I kind of imagined a Gary & Matt (Cutts) Conversation going something like this:

I could see the conversation between Gary & Matt Cutts right now:
Matt: I love wine man, your site is great!
Gary: Thanks man, its all about just being real about the wine and the Jets bro, glad I could help, You a wine guy?
Matt: A bit
Gary: What kind of wines you like?
Matt: Well I love pinot noir, but the other day I wanted a great California pinot noir and did a search and found this site:
Some pretty BLAH content, I noticed that you had this video & this video, good stuff.
Do me a favor man, please put the title of the video in your title tag and post a transcript so me and millions of others find your stuff instead of suite 101 and a stale about.com page.
Gary: We don’t need no stinking titles, just good content man! Content is KING, didn’t you see my gigaOM video?
Matt: Well man, you know I do have to take some time out of my schedule to chill with my wife and play with the cat! We’re working on it but for now, just a few best practices will make sure I get better wines after a long day fighting spammers, not to mention you’d actually push the crap further down by helping your stuff move up.
Gary: Content is King man, I don’t need to optimize, that’s SEO stuff!
Matt: Darn, oh well, let me go talk to these 400 spammers who are going to tell me they did nothing wrong, but in the meantime, make my job a bit easier and optimize just a little bit, k?
Gary: Yeah, Go J-E-T-S Jets, Jets, Jets!

Comedic Interlude Over:

Seriously, by not optimizing your site with just basic best practices you are allowing:
Thin affiliate’s, scrapers, and low authority sites to get information (possibly poor information) out to wine lovers & possibly giving them a bad experience with wine.

To his defense Gary didn’t crap on SEO but in passing he briefly mentioned not to worry about putting the right keywords in and let content win out.

So I quickly wanted to respond by saying, I think this new approach to saying hey I am not going to optimize my site and you shouldn’t either can lead to a bad user experience when searching for things on the web.

I also look at the best buys section of wine library (cause I am always looking for a good cheap wine) and notice some good stuff there too, yet because the site isn’t following basic best practices it is not ranking well.

Gary, while I don’t like the Jets, (Go EAGLES) here are some tips to help you sell more wine to help you buy the Jets maybe a day or two earlier:
I would take the best buys section and first do some keyword research to see how people search for lower cost wines, starting with Google Suggest:

Then a little Yahoo Search Assist:

This exercise took me about 3 minutes
Winelibrary.com already has a page that has great wines called “best buys”
When looking at the admittedly quick research it seems that people search for wines under $10, $15 and $20 dollars. Winelibrary already has a page that has wines under $20, could you also develop one for $10 and $15? Because the research shows that there are people out there searching for wines at these prices and you have credibility in helping people select wines, you would be HELPING them.
Heck, maybe you could do a video on wines under these price points. Given the way the economy is, we don’t want to stop drinking great wines, but we may have less money, and I’d listen to your opinions.

If not for growing your business, how about for actually helping people on the Internet find good wines under these price points from a GREAT source, which you are. Remember your 80/20 rule, help me, and many others find great wines, you guys are a credible source, with yes, GREAT CONTENT, even if it needs a little boost to make it findable.

If you don’t want to do it for yourself, do it for us, the wine loving public!

Posted in business thoughts, google, SEO | 8 Comments »

Advertisers beware – Big changes are coming in the PPC world…

Friday, March 21st, 2008

In the online advertising world, updates, small tweaks, etc. are made to the search engines on a pretty regular basis without tremendous controversy. However, the past few weeks have tested advertisers’ patience, as both Google and Yahoo! have announced some hefty upcoming changes that have caused a bit of a stir in the PPC world, as they may cause a significant negative impact across advertisers accounts.

First, take a step back and ask yourself a few questions:

1. Do you use redirects on your landing pages that slow down the user’s experience? 2. Are you operating off of a slow server?

If you answered yes to either of the above, the new addition to the Google Quality Score may have a negative impact on your account. Google has announced that within the next 2 weeks landing page load time will become a factor in determining the Quality Score. Google suggests that one of their motives behind this change comes from (1) data showing that users have the best experience when there is not a long time in between clicking an ad and getting to the landing page. Google plans to add this to the Keyword Analysis page shortly, giving advertisers with a bad review a month to improve page load time before slapping them with a lower quality score.

I, for one, am actually in favor of this change, especially from a consumer point of view. If I have to wait for a page to load, there’s a large chance I will abandon my search and try someone else (and probably one of your competitors). If you can’t serve me your landing page with the information I am seeking in a timely fashion, I cannot imagine what other obstacles I may face using your product/service. This is exactly Google’s second (2) motive for adding the page load time to the QS. While I am sure Google will make an extra dollar off of this change by lowering QS and raising minimum bids for advertisers, advertisers on the other hand will get a bit of a wake up call and a slight insight as to why their conversion rates may be lower than expected. Should advertisers take Google’s expertise to heart and work to improve page load times, it may be a god-send in decreasing bounce rates, in turn improving conversion rates.

Now ask yourself the following:
1. Are you bidding on terms that are not relevant to your business?
2. Do you have well-structured ad groups around tightly themed keyword groups?
3. Are you bidding on a keyword level to take advantage of lower bids for certain keywords (to offset higher bids on other keywords)?
4. Are you utilizing keyword match type (broad, phase, exact and negative)?

Depending on your answers above, the next big announcement from Yahoo! (who is not only hanging on through the talks of being bought by Microsoft, but is taking even more steps to tailor their engine to mirror Google) may cause your minimum bids to increase OR decrease. Yahoo! has announced the change of their minimum bid function, which previously had been set at $0.10. Now, they are moving more towards the “Google auction method”, taking into account factors such as quality of the keyword and value and are creating a bit of chaos in the PPC world as well.

As an advertiser, it’s important to closely monitor your minimum bids over the next few weeks as this update rolls out. While some keywords may drop below the $0.10 bid, others may jump well above the $0.10, causing you to bid more for terms that previously you were able to get away with low bids on.

To best prepare yourself for the update, I suggest putting yourself into the user’s mindset — Are you offering the best user experience you can? Chances are, if you see flaws in the experience, they will too.

Posted in PPC | No Comments »

Advertisers beware – Big changes are coming in the PPC world…

Friday, March 21st, 2008

In the online advertising world, updates, small tweaks, etc. are made to the search engines on a pretty regular basis without tremendous controversy. However, the past few weeks have tested advertisers’ patience, as both Google and Yahoo! have announced some hefty upcoming changes that have caused a bit of a stir in the PPC world, as they may cause a significant negative impact across advertisers accounts.

First, take a step back and ask yourself a few questions:

1. Do you use redirects on your landing pages that slow down the user’s experience? 2. Are you operating off of a slow server?

If you answered yes to either of the above, the new addition to the Google Quality Score may have a negative impact on your account. Google has announced that within the next 2 weeks landing page load time will become a factor in determining the Quality Score. Google suggests that one of their motives behind this change comes from (1) data showing that users have the best experience when there is not a long time in between clicking an ad and getting to the landing page. Google plans to add this to the Keyword Analysis page shortly, giving advertisers with a bad review a month to improve page load time before slapping them with a lower quality score.

I, for one, am actually in favor of this change, especially from a consumer point of view. If I have to wait for a page to load, there’s a large chance I will abandon my search and try someone else (and probably one of your competitors). If you can’t serve me your landing page with the information I am seeking in a timely fashion, I cannot imagine what other obstacles I may face using your product/service. This is exactly Google’s second (2) motive for adding the page load time to the QS. While I am sure Google will make an extra dollar off of this change by lowering QS and raising minimum bids for advertisers, advertisers on the other hand will get a bit of a wake up call and a slight insight as to why their conversion rates may be lower than expected. Should advertisers take Google’s expertise to heart and work to improve page load times, it may be a god-send in decreasing bounce rates, in turn improving conversion rates.

Now ask yourself the following:
1. Are you bidding on terms that are not relevant to your business?
2. Do you have well-structured ad groups around tightly themed keyword groups?
3. Are you bidding on a keyword level to take advantage of lower bids for certain keywords (to offset higher bids on other keywords)?
4. Are you utilizing keyword match type (broad, phase, exact and negative)?

Depending on your answers above, the next big announcement from Yahoo! (who is not only hanging on through the talks of being bought by Microsoft, but is taking even more steps to tailor their engine to mirror Google) may cause your minimum bids to increase OR decrease. Yahoo! has announced the change of their minimum bid function, which previously had been set at $0.10. Now, they are moving more towards the “Google auction method”, taking into account factors such as quality of the keyword and value and are creating a bit of chaos in the PPC world as well.

As an advertiser, it’s important to closely monitor your minimum bids over the next few weeks as this update rolls out. While some keywords may drop below the $0.10 bid, others may jump well above the $0.10, causing you to bid more for terms that previously you were able to get away with low bids on.

To best prepare yourself for the update, I suggest putting yourself into the user’s mindset – Are you offering the best user experience you can? Chances are, if you see flaws in the experience, they will too.

Posted in PPC | No Comments »

The 5 Lies SEO companies tell and how to not fall for them

Friday, March 21st, 2008

SEO is an industry with unethical, unscrupulous, shady folks at every turn, and I hate what many of those people do to our industry, so I figured I’d post the following list of how SEO companies lie and how to not fall for those lies. So here goes:
SEO Company lie #1 – Their Clients

STOP being lemmings!!! For you who select SEO companies to work with, please don’t fall for the client list! It matters less than you think! Putting a client on your client list doesn’t mean you did a real project for the company listed.

Being invited to speak at a company does NOT make them an SEO client, nor does doing a 5 hour engagement (in my opinion). If a company has impressive client roster, pick the references! Having worked for someone and having a GOOD relationship with them are two different things.

SEO Lie Repellant Tip – Choose your references

While any SEO company will have some references all ready for you, you should ask for at least a couple that YOU PICK from their client list.

The SEO company should say “NO PROBLEM” when it comes to connecting you to at least half of the client you requested, asking for more than 3 references is just weird though so don’t ask for the whole client roster to be a reference. Keep in mind some clients just aren’t into doing the reference thing sometimes and as a result SEO’s may not be able to easily get them, that is why I say half is a good figure to shoot for.

One thing to expect is that a lot of SEO companies don’t work direct with their clients, and often are private labeled, so they may not have direct connections with each client.

The agency that brought them in should easily be able to vouch for their work though. Some SEO companies private label, so you may see some big names that are brought to them by an agency, you should speak with the agency in these instances.

There will always be minor reasons why someone can’t connect you with every requested reference, the bigger issue is how they react to being asked this question. Their gut reaction should be like “no problem”, if they gut reaction is “why” or “ummm, well, err, my contact left there” or some other excuse, be wary and do deeper digging before selecting them.

Again people, stop falling for the client list and big client names, get the details.

Even SEER has to clean up our list a bit, as a smaller search company that knows we can compete with the big boys, we fell into the trap of listing our most recognizable brands only, that will change with our impending re-launch.

SEO Company lie #2 – Their Staff

If you feel more comfortable with a certain size SEO company, that’s fine. I am not here to change your mind, but to help you do a little due diligence and make sure they really have that many people. After seeing an SEO company totally rip off a prospect and just flat out lie about their staff of 25 people I was pissed and thought…

“how can I help people figure out how to catch these liars…I got one way…”

SEO Lie Repellant Tip – USE search engines!!

Of course there are always special relationships, virtual CFO / COO types work with multiple companies, billing people, exec assistants, etc. But when it comes to the core SEO/SEM team, you should be finding members of your SEO/SEM team on LinkedIn, Digg, Del.ico.us, Zoominfo, Sphinn, etc. Hint: search for the company name in addition to the individual’s name, also search for the persons name as one word too, see what I find when I search for dannysullivan vs. Danny Sullivan again, if someone uses their real name, run the search on that too.

Now of course many will have aliases (sugarrae, greywolf, oilman) so they won’t be easy to find, and to be honest you don’t really need to. I have another way if the search engines come up a bit lame.

Use Linkedin (most business people are here)
Here’s my quick check, a few of ANYONE’s search team should be on LinkedIn, if a company says they have a search team of 10 people it is not crazy to think that by typing in the name of the company in LinkedIn and see 4 or 5 of them, right?

Go search for the company name, what comes back?

I think small good companies have no problem saying, “We’re small, and we’re GOOD”. If what makes a company good is their size then they’ve got problems, and now you do too!

SEO Company lie #3 – I know (insert celebrity here) Matt Cutts, Rand Fishkin, Danny Sullivan, Aaron Wall, Neil Patel, Todd Malicoat, Greywolf, etc… knowing them and THEM KNOWING YOU are TWO different things.

Accepting someone on LinkedIn doesn’t mean you are friends!

Sure this adds credibility, but come on people, when someone says they know someone, I would expect that to be a reciprocal relationship. These SEO celebrities probably get 1000+ cards a year from a ton of people and may even have e-mailed some, chatted a bit, but that doesn’t a relationship make.

SEO Lie Repellant Tip – This doesn’t matter!!

To be honest, knowing these guys shouldn’t really mean much for you as a purchaser of SEO services. Why would your SEO team need to know Matt Cutts? I’d like to think that Matt has heard of me or seen my SEO videos – A guy can dream right?

If for some reason who an SEO knows means something to your in your selection process, you are focusing on the wrong things!

LEE Odden did a great piece on the Fallacy of the SEO celebrity.

SEO Company lie #4 – We do social media

Because social media is hot right now, I think everyone says they do linkbaiting / social media, which is fine, we all gotta start somewhere. But here’s how you can decipher one from the next: (Tamar, thanks for the help on this one & please never go back to full time server admin work, LOL!)

Ask your social media strategist for their URLs on:

• Facebook
• Youtube
• Digg
• Del.ic.ous
• Stumbleupon
• LinkedIn
• Twitter (which I hate but recently fell victim to)

If they have accounts for most of these consider them a beginner that has at least done the basics (which is OK, this is a new area and you shouldn’t expect them to have 3-4 years experience in this area).

The question is do they actually have activity and friends and are adding to these profiles with plugins, groups, etc? You really have to be active on these communities to understand the nuances of how they work. Each one is slightly different.

Mid level social media folks should be very active on many of these above, not all but many. Additionally, some of these would be a waste for marketing, but at least a mid level person is involved enough in the community to stay on top of marketing opportunities if they exist.

The top folks at least know of these & what kind of content plays best on these:
• Sk-rt
• Hugg
• Mixx
• Reddit
• Yahoo Answers
• Ballhype

Be careful here, the key is ACTIVITY not just an account. If they were not active recently, maybe it is because they have not found a lot of value there, but at some point there should have been some serious activity.

And yes, the key is activity, but if you’d want to emphasize anything, don’t spread yourself too thin (by using all these services). Do a little and get good at one or two social media sites.

SEO Company lie #5 – We can guarantee XXXXX or we’ll get you XXXX links per month sales pitches

If the guarantee is for keywords, or #1 rankings, or page 1 rankings, NONE can be guaranteed! This is the easiest issue of the 5, but after having been asked in a room of hundreds of people about the effectiveness of a 20 THOUSAND keywords meta tag at a recent affiliate summit, I think basics are still important and worth discussing.

Ok, here’s a simple rule…if you got cold called, DO NOT work with that company. Sure some of you may have exceptions, but this is simple, no cold calls, no marketing e-mails!

No company can guarantee an actual ranking, or an actual number of terms on page one. If you do have a company that gives you a guarantee, ask them if you can select the terms that count, make sure all are two the word phrases and watch them squirm! The issue with guaranteeing page ones is that the SEO company is likely to include some softballs in there to make sure they hit their “guarantee”.

Any company that tells you how many links they expect to get you monthly is the wrong company to work with. Do you really care that they get you 3, 30, or 300 links per month? NO you shouldn’t, it should be about maximizing rankings to maximize leads / sales for keywords that are applicable to your business.

Links are a byproduct, not to mention, getting 3 good strong hard to get links could be worth 10x more than 30 or 300 in terms of how they help you rank.

Disclaimer:
We do have a guarantee though ;)

It is simple. We feel that if by 6 months we don’t have a certain percentage of terms on the first 2 pages of Google / Yahoo / MSN and the client account is in good standing, then we pause payment until we do. We do this because we just don’t feel right taking people’s money if for some reason 6 months in we are not performing.

Don’t fall for other SEO Lies, if you have more please let me know, I plan on developing am ongoing checklist of things to look for when selecting an SEO firm and obviously I am missing a bunch!

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