Archive for August, 2006
Danny Sullivan is a legend in the search marketing industry. He launched searchenginewatch.com back in 1997 and went on to develop and host the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conferences that have become must-attend media events in their own right.
Yesterday Danny announced that he will be leaving search engine watch. This news has shaken up SEOs and search marketers all over the globe. If you read the comments to Danny’s post or one of the many articles about Danny’s departure, you’ll quickly grow to understand that Danny was about as well-respected in the field as any one person can be. In fact, Google even appears shaken by the news.
I think it’s fitting to write a few words about how Danny has affected my career and helped to educate and inspire me. I started learning about search engine optimization in 1998, when I worked for a small Web shop that developed six-figure websites for pharmaceutical clients. When the clients started asking why they couldn’t find their big ticket sites on search engines like Yahoo and AltaVista, I was asked by my manager to “look into that.”
In 1998, I was a lowly writer/editor in charge of proof-reading web copy, but I loved it. One of my responsibilities was writing short Web site descriptions for submitting to directories such as Yahoo. It wasn’t a stretch to give me the task of figuring out why our overpriced Web sites weren’t showing up in search engines like AltaVista and Webcrawler.
I don’t remember what I typed into AltaVista (my search engine of choice back then) to find Danny’s website, but it didn’t take long for me to stumble upon Searchenginewatch.com. Back then it was sort of a teal blue and beige, and the most prominent link was “The Webmasters Guide to Search Engines.” I read the entire site. Ubeknownst to me, my career was about to change.
Communicating what Danny taught me from the information he posted on Searchenginewatch.com became my mission. I worked with our site developers, designers and writers to impart the benefits of a search-engine friendly Web site to clients. I learned the value of well-written content versus flashy graphics and design, and to understand just how important my writing skills were in the Web world.
Thanks to Danny’s integrity, I learned the right way to optimize a Web site so that it would not get black listed by search engines and fall off the face of the Web. Still, my first ALT tag was about a paragraph long and spanned the width of the page.
That small Web shop where I’d worked full-time since 1997 was bought by a much larger direct marketing company which did not understand the Internet. The Web development division grew to about 100 people (in a year) and my little SEO service became a slightly larger SEO department.
I was promoted five times during the company’s heydey and given two empoyee achievement awards for innovation. At the height of it all, I attended one of the first SES conferences in New York (I think it was in 2000) and got to Shake Danny’s hand.
Danny’s enthusiasm, integrity and intelligence have raised the bar for all of us out here in the search marketing trenches. He’s given SEOs a voice, helping to pave the way for the industry and, for me personally, create a viable way to make a living that I can be proud of. I have no doubt that he will continue to do great things and impact the search world. His legacy will surely live on at Searchenginewatch.com and SES.
My one regret is that I never got back to SES after the first conference I attended in 2000. I’d actually planned to go to the New York conference this coming April and looked forward to possibly shaking Danny’s hand once again.
Danny, consider this post a cyber-shaking of the hand. You’ve truly made a difference in my career and my life. Thank you.
August 30th, 2006
Last August, Google implemented a Quality Score review to Adwords in an attempt to motivate advertisers to make their ads more relevant to the landing ages where the ad was pointed.
Per Google, the Quality Score “aims to improve users’ experience so that these users (your potential customers) will continue to trust and value AdWords ads.“ The Quality Score was Google’s response to the many low-quality affiliate ads that brought visitors to crappy web pages with lists of products and little else. The penalty for continuing to promote these types of landing pages for advertisers is not the removal of the ad in question, but an increased CPC for ads with a low Quality Score.
While it’s not a bad thing to raise the bar for paid search landing pages, it is not always clear to advertiser’s what they can do to reduce their Quality Score, particularly since there’s no way to determine the Qualty Score on a given ad (as far as I’ve seen, although I have sent Google an e-mail about this).
It’s one thing to scratch your head with organic search engine optimization, and tweak your web site based on Google’s proprietary ranking algorithm. It’s quite another to be charged more money for an ad based on a Quality Score that contains mysterious ranking criteria outside of your control. I mean, Google, please, throw us a bone here!
Google states it looks at the following variables when determining an ad’s quality:
- Previous CTR
- Relevance of your ad text (I’m guessing that this is relevance to the keyword you’re bidding on and your landing page)
- Historical keyword performance (how this is different from CTR is beyond me)
- Landing page quality (as defined by Google’s Web site guidelines)
- And (I kid you not) “other” relevancy factors
Some of the things I’m not clear on are 1) how do content-targeted ads effect the quality score? (these ads tend to have much lower CTRs than keyword-targeted ads) , 2) how often are campaigns reviewed for quality? (this is important because once I make a change to a campaign, I’d like to know when the campaign will be reviewed.), 3) beyond the max. bid imposed upon my keyword, is there a way to determine the Quality Score for a given ad? Ah questions, questions, questions.
Until I get more info from Google (which I will happily post), here are a few recommendations for dealing with the Quality Score within your own campaigns:
- Blitz your campaign for about a month (run it at the highest budget and position you can afford for your most desired/lucrative keywords). This should give your keywords positive historical clickthrough performance, which in turn will helps improve your Quality Score.
- Do not link to your home page unless it is relevant to your ad and the keyword you’re bidding on - link internally. If an internal page of significant relevance does not exist, then create one.
- Customize ads to match the keywords you’re bidding on - this is to address the “relevance of your ad text” quality indicator - plus it’s just a good SEM rule of thumb.
- Remove poorly performing ads from your campaign quickly. Again, the higher CTR should help reduce your CPC and increase the quality of your ad.
August 21st, 2006
For those of us who have been search marketers for five or more years, it may come as a shock that there is a huge dearth of talent in the industry and agencies are suffering for it.
We’ve been optimizing, managing, bidding, and reporting on search results for years now. We know it works. Most of us old timers have become advocates for search - helping to push the adoption of search into the mainstream. Well folks, it’s working.
If you take time to tear your gaze away from Atlas, or KeywordMax or your Google Adwords MCC for just a few seconds, you may be shocked at the range of employment opportunities that have become available to you.
But this article isn’t for you, it’s for the agencies and companies that need people like you to work on search which has grown tremendously in the past couple of years. In fact Jupiter research reports that nearly 24% of search marketers spent more than $500,000 on SEM campaigns in 2005 (compared with 12% in 2004).
If that number doesn’t give you pause, then perhaps this one will. Emarketer reports that paid search spending will reach ten BILLION dollars by 2010. I wonder what Dr. Evil would think of that?
As a person with executive level search marketing experience (and yes, I still change bids myself), I have been in the position of having to hire search marketers on several occasions. Here are a few tips for hiring your very own search marketer (hint: they may be right under your nose).
Media experience a plus: Media buyers and planners (both online and off) possess the necessary eye-hand coordination to manage search campaigns. Sure they may require some training on how to set up campaigns, manage bids and provide reports - but chances are they can pivot a table in Excel, set up a meeting with Google for a crash course in Adwords and get a search campaign launched lickity split. Media planners also have a well-grounded respect for client budgets. They have handled IOs with grace (a must when dealing with a $500K plus search spend) and don’t get frightened by the term “reconciliation”
You may not need a full-time search marketer: Unless your agency routinely spends a million dollars or more on search per year, it may not be necessary to hire a dedicated search marketer. Even at that spend, you should assess the benefit of hiring a full-time search marketer if you are grossing up the media as your sole source of payment for search. Instead, evaluate the hourly requirements of paid search management and allocate some of it to a savvy internal planner (see above recommendation) or sub-contract it to an Internet Marketing consultant such as myself (blatant self-promotion is entirely intentional)
Starving writers and/or home-based moms welcome: I know you know where I’m going with this. Stop cringing, it’s ok. There are a lot of smart people out there that want to work for you, but they cannot dedicate forty hours or more per week to one position. maybe they live three hours away. Maybe they live in Brazil. I work with a few women who consult from home 10-20 hours per week and help me out with everything from media research to bid management to writing Meta tags. I met all of them while I was working at various agencies and I maintained contact with them long after I left. It was their decision to leave full-time agency life, but they did not disappear from the online world forever - they simply changed the way they work. Fear not the freelancer!
Have realistic expectations: Sometimes I read the requirements for dedicated search marketing positions just for fun. If you are looking for one person who can create the keyword list, write the ads, research the competitors, launch the campaign, manage the bids, provide ongoing reports and recommendations, know HTML, understand organic search, tie search into your offline media campaigns, be available for new business pitches and reconcile all your online media invoices while balancing a stack of 100 plates on their head - then you may be in for a long wait. Either subcontract your search campaigns to a dedicated search agency, or evaluate how you can disemminate the responsibilities among two or three employees including people that are already working for you but may not have search marketing experience. For example, if you’re already working with a writer, then they can probably develop a preliminary keyword list and ad copy which can be given to your search guru for refinement
Learn the business, please: If you want to expand your agency’s capabilities into the realm of search marketing, then take some time to learn how to do it. Meet with representatives from Google and Yahoo. Attend at least one SES or Ad Tech conference. Download free trials of the tools. Join a search marketing discussion board. Start a search campaign for your agency and manage it yourself! Knowledge is power. If you have more than half a clue about what we deal with as search marketers on a daily basis, then it will be that much easier for you to hire us
Do-it-yourselfers rule! The best search marketers are those people who have managed campaigns themselves for their own web sites. This is primarily true for organic search, but people who have had to spend their own money on paid search quickly learn the value of ROI. Suddenly .50 per click doesn’t seem so cheap when it translates to zero sales and $5000 in media over the course of a campaign. If there’s a candidate you like because they fit in well with your agency, have lots of project management experience, know Excel like the back of their hand and LOVE the Internet, but they have zero search experience (except for promotion of their own web site or sites) consider hiring them on a trial basis. Chances are they will be happy with a smaller salary, eager to learn and will rise to the challenge
Happy head hunting. Here are a few resources to help you on your quest.
The Hired Guns: This agency (of whom I am a member) specializes in finding interim talent for high-level projects that can be done via temporary or long-term freelance positions. They have over 7,500 registered “Guns” that can come in and help you out in a pinch, with little or no training.
SEMPO.org: The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization has a job board (you must be a member to post a job) and they possess a wealth of information about the search marketing industry
SEOConsultants.com: This site is primarily focused on organic SEO, but there are always jobs availale for paid search and even general web marketing. Just another opportunity to reach potential candidates (also, people with SEO experience may also be interested in switching over to paid search and it’s not THAT much of a leap)
Jobs in Search: A job board devoted entirely to SEM (SEO and paid search) jobs
August 3rd, 2006
