MarketingSherpa Blog

This week marks the opening of MarketingSherpa’s Seventh Annual Search Marketing Benchmark Survey. If you’re involved in search marketing, please take the next 5 to 15 minutes to share data and insights via the following link:

http://www.surveygizmo.com/s/269878/k0tnd

As a thank you for your time, we are offering a complimentary Executive Summary Report that includes key charts and insightful commentary. You will also be invited to attend a free webinar to review highlights from the study.

In the last year, the search landscape has seen a number of dramatic changes. Between social media’s continual growth, search innovations like mobile search, real time search, and search personalization emerging and gaining importance, accompanied by increased competition, search marketers face greater challenges than ever before.

How are marketers perceiving and reacting to these new changes in search? This year’s Search Engine Marketing Benchmark Report will be stacked with information on balancing search and social media to achieve optimal success, as well as sections dedicated to search innovations.

In the meantime, let’s take a deeper look into the social media content that will be covered in this year’s report:

Applications and benefits of social media integration with search campaigns

-> Search Performance

The search landscape is growing more competitive, and this is partly due to social media. Social media has added another venue in which marketers must up their SEO ante, so to speak.

What tools and tactics are most effective these days in SEO? How many marketers are integrating social media into their search efforts? What are my industry’s current performance benchmarks? These are just some of the questions this year’s report will answer for you.

-> Search and Social Objectives

There are a number of target business objectives that can be achieved with social media, and improving search rankings is a popular one indeed.

Other popular objectives include:
o Increasing website traffic
o Increasing lead volume
o Driving sales revenue
o Improving brand reputation and awareness.

These objectives, of course, can also be achieved with SEO. The key is to balance your SEO efforts with social media in order to achieve success towards these common objectives.

Sections in this year’s report will include the effectiveness of search and social against key target objectives, and insights on search marketer’s greatest success stories and challenges.

-> The Impact of Social Integration

When used properly, social media can have a great impact on SEO. One of the most effective and most difficult SEO tactics is generating inbound links.

With social media, you can generate highly relevant inbound links to your site by attracting links from blogs, forums, social networking sites, and other social media channels.

Another great benefit search engine marketers are reaping from social media is increasing the number of listings that get displayed for their brand in the SERPs, pushing their competition to lower rankings and increasing the click through rates on their own listings.

We want to find out what specific goals are being most widely targeted for integrating social media into search campaigns, and what impact social media has had on results. As responses to this year’s survey start to come in, we’re becoming more anxious to see final results.

Stay tuned! The 2010 Search Marketing Benchmark Report is scheduled for release soon!

Please feel free to tweet or post the following invitation:

Search marketers share your insights. Take the 2010 Search Marketing Benchmark Survey http://www.surveygizmo.com/s/269878/k0tnd @MarketingSherpa

Natural search marketers have been in a precarious position for the last few years. Much of the data they’re using is supplied by search engines, and some of that data is fuzzy at best.

Adam Audette, in a Search Engine Land post today, goes as far as calling some of the data unreliable and “downright misleading.” However, Audette astutely notes that marketers need the data even if they don’t completely trust it.

What’s a marketer to do? Here are Audette’s suggestions for the SEO metrics you should track:
o Percentage of overall site traffic from search
o Percentage share of each engine
o Free search traffic at the keyword level, clustering related terms
o Difference between branded and non-branded search traffic

Metrics that he implies are far less reliable:
o Ranking reports
o Indexed page counts
o Backlink counts
o Toolbar PageRank

For marketers, I would add conversion data to Audette’s list of primary metrics to measure — especially conversion data for non-branded keywords. If you’re a natural search marketer, any conversions you can prove came through non-branded keyword searches point directly to money you are bringing the company.

Branded search conversions are great, but they show that the searcher already knew your brand. The searcher has likely been reached by another marketing channel. A non-branded conversion implies that someone chose you over the competitors also listed in the results.

Which metrics do you consider vital? And how reliable are they?

We’ve had a couple of great search marketing articles come through the pipeline recently, and we have one more this week on the way. Since our articles are available for one week before being added to our membership library, I thought I’d highlight a few key points while our readers can still peruse the pieces for free.

Last Tuesday, we featured Dan Tate, COO, The Concrete Network, and his team’s video SEO strategy. The team has uploaded over 220 short videos about concrete design to YouTube. The videos are:
o Branded
o High quality
o Generally less than 5 minutes

Tate’s team optimizes the videos’ metadata, adds them to relevant pages on ConcreteNetwork.com, and hosts them on their YouTube channel. Many of the videos show up in Google’s universal search results for broad phrases such as “concrete pool decks,” giving the team multiple links on the results page.

The videos capture thousands of views daily, have about a 17.9% clickthrough rate, and have about a 12% conversion rate among those who clickthrough to the site. That’s pretty amazing for not spending one dollar on advertising! (Details are in the article here)

Today, we published an article featuring Sean Reardon, Director, Sales and Marketing, The Liberty Hotel, and his team’s efforts to enhance their Google Maps result. The Boston luxury hotel opened about two years ago. Around that time, the team checked their result in the local search engine and noticed that it had the wrong address. Yikes!

The team jumped into action to take ownership of the result through Google’s Local Business Center and fix the address. They also started adding loads of descriptive content and pictures.

After building up their result, the team noticed that they were ranking high in local searches for terms such as “Boston hotels,” and increased their traffic from Google Maps by several thousand percent.  (Details are in the article here)

The two campaigns mentioned above are great examples of the low-cost, high-effort nature of SEO. Natural search often involves a little research, a little cash investment, and a heaping load of elbow grease–but it can pay off with time.

Lastly, keep an eye on our business-to-consumer newsletter this week, as we will feature Jennifer Brady, Director of Marketing, UMassOnline, and her team’s PPC strategy. Brady’s team started with a single generic landing page, expanded into dozens of search-specific pages, and used multivariate testing to further strengthen results. Their cost-per-lead plummeted and their per-month lead volume shot up over 80%.

I had an interesting conversation with Scott Dunlap, CEO, NearbyNow, last week. NearbyNow helps consumers find products in local stores through its website, mobile apps, and the major search engines.

A consumer looking for a particular product in his or her area will typically be alerted via an email or a text message on the product’s availability. This service has several interesting applications for marketers–such its OnTheWay ads. These ads allow marketers to advertise in the alert messages to consumers who’ve indicated that they’re planning to visit a store near their own.

Some marketers, Dunlap says, have leveraged these ads to emphasize the core motivations that consumers have for searching for local products. The top three motivations that Dunlap’s team has uncovered,:
1. Consumers want the products immediately
2. They want to see, hold, and test the products (particularly relevant for apparel, shoes and gadgets, Dunlap says)
3. They do not like the hassles or costs of shipping

How have these motivations been applied to the ads? Some marketers are pushing immediacy to the extreme. They will give 20% off products in their stores for the next two hours. That can force some consumers to consider visiting the advertiser’s store before visiting their intended destination.

Local search and sales for products–with real time inventory updates–looks like it holds a lot of potential for retailers and brands alike. I expect the major search engines to start rolling out more ways for marketers to connect with consumers looking for products locally.

When speaking with Erick Barney, VP of Marketing, at Motorcycle Superstore, about how his team saves precious marketing dollars for the company I couldn’t help overhearing a really innovative way they track organic search rankings.

The team creates thousands of web pages for key search terms to improve the site’s SEO. To make sure SEO efforts are effective they produce a monthly “Keyword Visibility Report.” It’s basically a report of how well the company’s top 100 keywords are performing.

“We have a scoring system to assign any movement,” Barney says. “Anything that’s 30 or above we just put an N/A. We track anything that’s got a position from 1 to 30 and we’ll plot it each month and as it moves around we’ll assign a new rank.”

The report makes it easy for them to see if their SEO efforts are paying off. In addition, Barney has an incentive program tied to the report, giving the team a reason to push the bar even further. How cool is that?

Is there a way to measure the ROI of social media?

I ask this question all the time and rarely get a concrete answer because it’s just one of those tactics that’s difficult to measure.

Research from MarketingSherpa’s new Social Media Marketing & PR Benchmark Guide suggests that 43% of marketers rank the inability to measure ROI the most significant barrier to social media adoption.

I still don’t have the answer, but here’s one example of a way social media can impact an Internet marketing campaign:

Read more…

Third-party shopping comparison sites such as Shopping.com and Shopzilla can get products to consumers who aren’t visiting brands’ sites directly. However, these sites pose challenges: they have different audiences, data requirements, bidding requirements, and capabilities.

Mercent, a Seattle-based company founded by former Amazon execs, has built a platform to help marketers sell across a range of third-party sites. I chatted last week with Mercent CEO Eric Best and several marketers from specialty retailer Brookstone.

Read more…

If you love Flash or SEO, keep an eye on our search newsletter. A two-part report that describes how to reconcile the two opposing forces should be published in the coming weeks.

I found a ton of great information while researching the article. Some of it just didn’t fit. One interesting tidbit involves the value of images in search engines. Read more…

Yikes. Sometimes one letter can make a huge difference.

I was glancing over our blog today and something didn’t sit right with my post for last week.

“Only 85 million searches at Google Sites last year? That seems really low. I feel like I searched Google 85 million times last month.”

And sure enough, that stat should be “85 billion.” My bad!

Google is a growing giant. Some stats from comScore’s 2008 Digital Year in Review (a free report if you surrender some info):

– Nearly 85 million searches were conducted on Google sites in 2008

– Google sites captured 63.5% of the searches among the top five engines in December 2008

– Google captured about 90% of the overall growth in search volume last year. Read more…