MarketingSherpa.com : Practical News & Case Studies on Internet Advertising, Marketing & PR
MarketingSherpa.com : Practical News & Case Studies on Internet Advertising, Marketing & PR:i recommend readng this article as well as an overview of the paid search market it covers:
Click fraud, search engine spam, trademark fears
Site design mistakes: search-centric and search-ignorant site design
Measuring results beyond clicks
Contextual Ads versus going vertical
Getting your optimized message onto other sites as well...
Click fraud: "Joe Doyle, VP at Realtytrac.com agreed, 'Click fraud is a very serous problem for our site. Overall I build into my overhead an additional 10% just to account for the cost of click fraud.'
To ameliorate the problem, Doyle's tech team runs regular click log reports. 'On some days clicks from Google will suddenly double from 3,000 to 6,000. It's obvious fraud.'
(Side note: Unexpected clicks aren't always related to fraud. Check Yahoo's Buzz Index http://buzz.yahoo.com for other reasons for unusual traffic surges.)"
Site design and landing pages: What should you put on a landing page? Highly relevant copy, trust-building elements (a privacy policy note, testimonials, whatever), and a big fat button to where you want them to go next should be included.
In other words, your landing page declares: "Yes, you are at exactly the right place. It's a safe trustworthy place, here's what to do next."
Obviously this isn't your generic home page. "I frankly think home pages are a terrible invention," said Michael Sack, Chief Product Officer Inceptor. Plus, as Eisenberg said, "60% of search-driven visitors drop off after the first page." If that first page is your generic home page, you're probably losing more than that.
IBM's in-house Search Effectiveness Team Leader Bill Hunt said that they focus on "improving page quality for popular queries each and every month." It's an ongoing process worth investing in.
Tracking results: The search funnel. If you're measuring immediate clicks to conversions, you're missing the brand marketing power of search results, as well as delayed or offline purchases.
Eisenberg suggested, try dividing your search term results into categories roughly by possible intent. Would someone using a term be likely to be doing initial category research, or is it a term only used by consumers with immediate purchase intent?
Dan Thies President SEO Research Labs advised, "Beware of free keyword research offers from PPC engines. Their goal is to increase your spending and overall competition, not your profit."
That said, several speakers mentioned case studies in which a client had increased the number of targeted keywords dramatically and seen leaps in results (probably because when you get ultra-granular, conversions nearly always rise).
Thies also warned against lumping all of your organic traffic into one pot when buying SEO services. "Use a weighted popularity formula, i.e. number of searches multiplied by relevance equals weighted popularity. 100 searches a day, that are 50% relevant, may be only worth 50 searches to you."
Getting your optimized message onto other sites as well...
" PR people don't fully recognize yet that they're not pitching to a human editor anymore; they're pitching to an algorithm." You have to optimize releases just as you would any web page: pick a keyword phrase and use it several times in the release.
We foresee a boom in the press release distribution world when (ok, if) the PR world catches onto this. Why? Just like a Web page, a release should only be optimized for a term or two. If you want to catch more results, you need more pages, or releases.
posted by Jen @ 11:32 AM
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