Archive for ‘SEM

What Is Inbound Marketing?

Posted by Jeb
Jan
31
2009

1
Comment

Filed Under: Internet Marketing Search Engine Optimization Search Engines SEM SEO


Have you recently heard the phrase “inbound marketing” bouncing around? As with most new fangled terms it actually means something quite simple- being found by your customers instead of you seeking them out. Basically you are playing a grown up version of hide and seek where you actually want to be found.

If you own a company you know that it’s much cheaper and more effective to make a sale with a customer that is actually seeking your services. Essentially you are cashing in on someone else’s work. Someone else has already convinced the customer that they need your product or services. Maybe a friend, a co-worker, peer or a blog. Doesn’t matter really, the bottom line is that this customer has their wallet open and is ready to go. All you have to do is not screw it up!

Since we all know and agree that Inbound marketing is much more effective than traditional (Outbound) marketing the question becomes now do we most effectively practice Inbound marketing?

The answer is in how your company uses the web. People are looking for your products and services. More than ever their first stop is a search engine. Are they finding you there for your industry related searches? If you are selling “green widgets” and when they type in “where to buy green widgets in Indianapolis” are you the first listing? If not then you aren’t being found and it doesn’t matter if you have a better green widget. The customer has already completed the transaction with another company.

So don’t hide from your customers, get found. More specifically, use the web to get found or get you will get left behind.


Note: Thanks to Hubspot for their informative post on Inbound Marketing that I referenced in writing this blog.

Want Your Business To Survive The Recession? Use The Web

Posted by Jeb
Oct
9
2008

0
Comments

Filed Under: Internet Marketing Search Engine Optimization SEM SEO

It’s hard to stay optimistic these days with the stock market tanking, credit drying up and the financial crisis spreading around the globe. Companies are going to be looking closely at every expense just as families will be reigning their budgets. So how do we make it through these tough times? In short- metrics. Make sure everything your company is doing can be measured and tweaked to improve ROI. The web is perfect for this. You can track what keywords people are using to find you, what pages they go to, what you are paying for every conversion, etc. The web is all about metrics.

When you start with a robust web presence it multiplies all your other marketing efforts. If you dominate searches for your location and industry then all your traditional marketing will be that much effective. It’s like creating this huge net to catch all the leads that your marketing creates. If someone hears about you on the radio then runs into you again on a search and then see you linked from a site they respect and then sees you commenting on a popular business site, like SmallerIndiana.com, you will become their only real choice for the service or product you are offering. This puts in the position to charge the prices you need to be profitable.

Having a website alone is not enough. Beyond having a dynamic, updated site you have to engage across many different web platforms- blogs, community sites and email. You have to be ubiquitous. It’s like having a store front and not putting out a sign. The website is the storefront but your activity on the web is your sign. Put up as many signs as you can, you will be able to clearly measure the increase in traffic and the increase in revenue.

So if you are spending thousands on a Yellow Pages ad or other media that have no real metrics built in, drop or reduce them, push the money to the web and start fine tuning your way to success.

The Secret Ingredient to SEO or White vs. Grey vs. Black Hat

Posted by Jeb
Jul
21
2008

1
Comment

Filed Under: Search Engine Optimization Search Engines SEM SEO

I went to see Kung Fu Panda last night with my 4 year old daughter Georgia. The core message of the movie was that there is no “secret ingredient” to life (and the noodle soup), it’s all in you to begin with. Somehow this nice little morale got me thinking about SEO, specifically how there is no “secret” to SEO, just good practices. But there are some tricks which some companies use to game Google so this post is about some of those tricks and why they often backfire.

I know, I’m pathetic, can’t even watch a movie with my kid without thinking about SEO!

There are still many companies running around telling you that they can guarantee you a #1 ranking on Google via some SEO magic. There are also very legitimate companies offering SEO tricks via blogs that duplicate the same content across multiple pages on your company’s website. So I thought I would spend some time exploring these issues and hopefully clear up the world of SEO for those interested in using search engines to grow their businesses. It can be intimidating but really there are only three things you need to know-

In the world of SEO there are three “hats”- White Hat, Grey Hat and Black Hat.

As you might expect White Hat SEO does everything above board, following best practices by creating a search engine friendly website with lots of fresh content (this is what a CMS does) augmented by quality external links. Naturally there is a lot more detail we could go into but that is basically the core of White Hat SEO- do everything right and don’t try to game the system. Small Box is a White Hat company.

Grey Hat is also, as you might expect, a little grey. Mostly Grey Hat SEO companies are doing best practices but they are also open to exploiting some openings in Google’s (and other search engine’s) search algorithm- this is the crazy, complicated program search engines use to determine page ranking for search terms. A current opening is Google’s fondness for fresh blog content. As it stands Google gives overwhelming preference to new blog posts often pushing a new post by a popular blog to the top of the listings for relevant searches within an hour or so of the blog post going live. Businesses have noticed this and want their companies to benefit from the blog bump. Essentially we are living in the era of the “blog bubble”. So, naturally, other companies are coming forward with blogging solutions for businesses to exploit this opening. This isn’t a bad thing except when some of these blogs are essentially duplicating content over and over under different keyword configurations in an attempt to game Google’s search results for their industry keywords. This is a loophole in Google’s current algorithm and it is only a matter of time before it gets closed and these blogs are seen as spam by Google and possibly relegated to Google Hell, a place you don’t want to be!

As you can probably guess Black Hat SEO is practiced by those that are often at the highest level of wizardry in the world of SEO and know how to navigate all the cracks and openings in Google’s algorithm. These practitioners of the black arts often execute shady SEO campaigns that involve paying for links, creating fake websites that link back to the target site and many many other nefarious tricks that can land your website in Google Hell once Google figures out what is going on and tweaks its algorithm to shake the loophole. Unless you are willing to risk your company’s online reputation I would recommend staying away from anyone who promises you these amazing results, it will invariably come back to bite you long after the Black Hat companies have cashed your checks.

Hopefully this has helped outline the world of SEO a little. I know this stuff is confusing but just like building a house the best way to go is to do everything right and cut no corners. This isn’t always the fastest way to get things done but it is the only way to have real search engine dominance for your industry. And as we’ve seen, the web isn’t going anywhere so it’s worth the investment to build your house with the best materials.

Wikipedia entry on SEO
Blog on Grey Hat SEO

SEO Trends: Search Engines To Read Flash Websites!

Posted by ben
Jul
1
2008

6
Comments

Filed Under: Design Development Search Engine Optimization SEM SEO

For quite some time, it’s been a well accepted tennet of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that Flash websites perform poorly in the search engines and should be avoided. The reasoning went like this: the search engine spiders that crawl our web pages to “figure out what they’re about” can not read Flash code (typically contained in .swf files). So, when a search engine crawls a Flash website it looks empty. That means you have to rely almost exclusively on “off-site SEO” (i.e. backlinks from external sites with keyword appropriate anchor text) to inform the search engines what your site is about. Enough backlinks can compensate for the invisible Flash code, but this is often not a cost effective proposition for businesses that need to drive traffic to their websites through organic search.

This all may have started to change.

Jeb just forwarded me this story from PCmag.com where Adobe announces it has developed technology to allow search engines to read and index Flash code. They’ve given this technology to Google and Yahoo! and, according to Adobe, Google’s already been using it with Yahoo! to follow soon.

Details on how this technology works are still murky. It’s not clear what parts of the flash code the search engines will be able to read, let alone which elements will be given more weight over others. Flash developers currently don’t have any tools to optimize their code for search engines but Adobe has announced that they are working on them.

Until things become clearer we still recommend against developing a site entirely in Flash (unless you don’t care about organic search traffic). Flash has a place on a website, but in our opinoin only when used as an element on an HTML coded page. You could roll the dice and hope that Google correctly understands your website’s Flash code, but that’s probably a chance your business doesn’t want to take.

In the meantime we’ll be keeping an eye on how this develops. The day is probably not too distant when a Flash website can perform as well as an HTML coded website.

I was surprised to see that Google’s already been using this technology because I haven’t noticed any Flash pages performing surprisingly well in their search engine. I would love to hear from anyone that’s found a Flash webpage performing well in Google.

Why does Google think web design means car insurance?

Posted by ben
Jun
25
2008

14
Comments

Filed Under: Internet Marketing Pay Per Click Search Engine Optimization SEM SEO

Why does Google think “web design” means “car insurance”? You might not believe they do which is why I took this screen shot to prove it:

Why would Google place Pay Per Click (PPC) text ads for Geico next to organic listings of my two favorite web design companies in Indianapolis (Small Box Web Design and Slingshot SEO)?

Google does pride itself on their “separation of church and state” i.e. their religious segregation of the non-paid, organic search departments from the paid advertising departments. Both paid and organic search use separate algorithms and Google has a strict policy of keeping the two branches incommunicado. Their professed goal is to keep the organic results “pure” and untainted by commercial interests. Are they trying to prove a point that organic listings really are separate from paid listings?

Or maybe the paid search algorithm blew a fuse? Or maybe it was part of a calculated strategy to increase ad revenue?

In my opinion it’s most likely the latter. But before I get into that, let me describe how it happened:

Screen 1:
Earlier today I Googled “car insurance” because it’s a very expensive click with fierce competition and I was curious to see who was organically number one and who was paying for the ad space to be alongside them. There was nothing too surprising: a bunch of organic listings for car insurance along side paid text ads for the same thing.

Screen 2:
Then out of vanity I googled “indianapolis web design company” to see Small Box at the top and also to see who was paying for the neighboring text ad real estate. Image my surprise when I found that Geico and Allstate were paying for that space!

Screen 3:
I thought, “Maybe Google’s PPC algorithm is broken and is just showing the text ads late.” So, I searched for “group health insurance” to see if local web design companies were listed next to insurance brokers. But there were no text ads for web design companies in Indianapolis.

You can see the sequence of search engine results pages (SERPs) in the three screen shots below:

What was going on?

After some searching I found a few blog posts addressing this strange Ad Words phenomenon. Turns out that for roughly a year Google’s been using cookies to track the search history of users even when they’re not logged into their Google account.

They then use this search history to create custom text ad listings that blend the previous queries. See this blog post to see how previous searches for “weather forcast” and “holiday to spain” listed text ads for Spanish weather forecasts. You can see this same sort of blending of searches in the last screen shot above. The searches “indianapolis web design companies” and “group health insurance” generated text ad #5 for a web design company targeting insurance agents and agencies that need a website.

In this article from last summer Google confirmed that they were tailoring text ad listings based on previous queries and the author is more than a little critical of Google’s lack of transparency in how they do it. It even looks like this prior search “feature” is coming to organic listings too.

But none of this fully explained or described what I experienced. The text ads alongside the listings of Small Box and Slingshot SEO were not a blend of “car insurance” and “web design”. You might think it’s a blend of “indianapolis” and “car insurance”, but Ad Words has been serving up geographically targeted ads based on our IP addresses for ages (to see an example of this look at the #4 text ad in the first screen when I queried “car insurance”). Instead the “car insurance” text ads completely trumped the “web design” text ads. Why?

I can’t prove it and haven’t done any testing that could even be remotely described as “scientific”, but I have a hunch that Google is doing this to squeeze as much money out of advertising as they possibly can.

On average, a text ad’s click following a query for “car insurance” can cost as much as $26, but a click for “web design companies” brings Google less than $5 – and a click for “indianapolis web design companies” will cost less than half that. So, if you were Google and had the choice of selling a click for $25 or for $2.50, which would you pick?

The cost per click for text ads displayed following a search for “group health insurance” is roughly $10. This probably explains why I didn’t see any text ads for web design companies alongside the organic results for insurance carriers and brokers.

This is clearly a nice feature if you’re an owner of Google stock and depending on the circumstances it could be a nice feature if you’re a search engine user (especially when the previous queries blend appropriately to deliver targeted results). But is it a feature you want as an advertiser?

If you’re Geico, do you want to be paying $25 for clicks that come from ads displayed alongside web design companies?

If you’re one of our unfortunate competitors that has to pay to get on page one, are you happy that your ads for a highly targeted search got trumped by ads for more expensive search terms?

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