Websites, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), blogs, paid search placement, lead generation websites, online advertising, email marketing the choices available for online marketing can be overwhelming. In addition, simply staying current on best practices, understanding what works, and knowing when to use each element can seem like a full-time undertaking. Consumers frequently go to search engines to research and purchase products and services. How easily your website is found is critical to your success. This primer focuses on your website and Search Engine Marketing (SEM). It offers some best practices and simple steps for maximizing the effectiveness of your online strategy. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) search marketing now comprises 40% of all US online advertising spending and is estimated to peak at $155 billion in 2008 (Krol, 2008). These figures do not include the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) marketing agencies involved and the countless hours of internal staff manually optimizing each webpage for top organic Search Engine Results Page (SERP) listings. This large and growing dependence on SEM is due to two key facts: 1. Having a website is meaningless if no one knows it exists 2. Websites are equally as meaningless if those who come to the site don t value the content that is being provided or don t feel that it is relevant to their search. This requires search engines to be aware of your website and this awareness provides them the ability to connect your site with qualified visitors. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is generally split into two different categories: 1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has a long-term focus based on understanding what search engines value when they index a website and ensuring that your website follows those standards and best practices. 2. Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC) typically has a short-term focus and looks to increase website traffic by bidding on the placement of pertinent keywords on SERPs. Most businesses that involve themselves in SEM typically allocate 30% of their budget on PPC campaigns and the remaining 70% on SEO activities. One of the most common misconceptions about SEM is that it is all about engaging in various activities that result in attaining one of the top SERP placements for a particular keyword. This misconception typically leads marketing managers to spend advertising dollars without getting tangible benefits in return, or even worse, engage in gray-hat or black-hat SEM activities (activities that aim to trick the search engines) that may lead to their eventual delisting from many of the major search engines. At its core, SEM is about getting the most qualified audiences to your website. With this philosophy, tricking untargeted visitors to a website provides no benefit to anyone. Secondly, by bringing qualified visitors to your website, the expectation becomes that your website is properly prepared for these visitors and various conversion metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) have been established to measure the effectiveness of the SEM efforts. Search Engine Marketing (SEM), one of the youngest marketing disciplines, is soon becoming one of the most powerful, engaging and measurable marketing employed by today s leading marketing organizations. Pay per click results Pay per click results Organic results
Planning: Objectives and goals There are three basic activities to online marketing: 1. Acquisition 2. Conversion 3. Retention Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the primary tool to facilitate acquisition, but the quality of these acquisitions will be based on your ability to increase conversions. Acquisition, or site visitors, in-and-of themselves provides no real value you; Conversion Metric it s their conversion, or potential to conversion, is where the business derives its value. Setting up proper conversion Whitepaper or case study download metrics is critical to establishing an effective PPC and SEO campaign. Purchase made online The first step in selecting the right combination of conversion metrics is to define your overall website objectives. Ask yourself: What kind of website is it? Is it a lead generating B-to-B site or is it a revenue generating B-to-C site? How is the website being used to meet organizational objectives? Is it primarily used to reduce costs or increase revenues? Information request form completed 30-day trail initiated Free demo downloaded Webinar registered Outlining a site s key objectives will lead to easily identifying conversion metrics that can be used to successfully measure and qualify the effectiveness of the SEM campaign. Once conversion metrics have been identified, creating a baseline analytical report is the next step. With this baseline report the present situation can be quantified, goals and targets can be accurately decided upon and budgets can be allocated to achieving those targets. Budgets should include how much will be allocated to PPC keyword placement, their management and the resources required for developing, measuring and adjusting internal SEO activities. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the primary tool to facilitate acquisition, but the quality of these acquisitions will be based on their ability to increase conversions. Benefit to Organization Provided contact details for future follow-up Increased revenues Provided contact details and indicated specific interest in product or service Induced trial and provided contact details for future follow-up Induced trial and provided contact details for future follow-up Provided contact details and indicated specific interest in product or service 2
Target audiences Conversions are what you want and value, but what does the target audience want? Now that your objectives of your site have been established, you must cater to the perceptions and desires of the target audiences when determining keywords and site design. These targeted keywords will be used to acquire your site s visitors and your site s overall design will be used to persuade them in completing a conversion activity. You must understand the following questions and use the responses to develop relevant keywords and meaningful content: Who are the main target audiences of your website? What are these individuals searching for? What are their top three questions when they come to your site? What are their overall objectives in coming to your site? What does success mean for them? Keyword search There are a few steps in determining the relevant keywords used in webpage SEO and PPC campaigns. The best way to begin is to create a Google Adwords account and use their free keywords tracking tool. This tool allows users to enter in any keyword or key-phrase and it will return with data on hundreds of possible synonyms and combination keywords. This report also provides the average estimated cost per click, the approximate monthly search volume and the degree of advertiser competition for each suggested keyword or key-phrase. This gives you a complete list of all the likely relevant keywords/key-phrases and the costs associated with them. To help shorten this list, online tools like SEMrush, GoogSpy and KeyCompete can provide insights into what competitive sites are using for keywords in their SEM activities. When determining the final list of keywords, it is important to stay away from generic terms as they typically have the highest PPC price and don t provide the best qualified visitors. The more specific the term or phrase, the more qualified the visitor will be and typically, the lower the cost of the campaign. Secondly, remember that SEO has a long-term focus and PPC has a short-term focus. This means that you should optimize a website with more conservative keywords and experiment with risky or questionable keywords in the PPC campaign. If the keyword is not delivering as well as expected in the PPC campaign, the keyword can be easily changed in real time whereas altering the website s SEO will take more time and effort. 3
Implementing Site architecture When designing the website s overall navigational structure, there are three basic concepts to consider as it relates to SEM: 1. Use externally-known terms for navigational items 2. Organize content in a manner that visitors appreciate and understand 3. Build with the end goal in mind conversion Don t use product names, internal divisions, company technologies or jargon to name or categorize any page within the website. Page categories and titles are the highest valued pieces of content to search engines and individual searchers are rarely querying your product names or internal company nomenclature. Individuals are searching for product categories and the solutions they provide, giving significant benefits to building your site around common terminology. Additionally, if they are attracted to your site and see all internal phrases and keywords within the main navigation and content of your site, they many not feel that your site is relevant and quickly bounce back to the SERP. Content Do s Content Don ts Do have unique titles and page descriptions for each web page Don t duplicate content, make sure every page has unique, compelling and relevant content Do tag all your images with descriptive text Do use text format modifiers like header, strong and emphasis tags Don t bury keyword information in images, Flash, JavaScript or AJAX; keep titles, headings and key content in the main text content of the page Don t have too much on the page, this destroys the visitor s ability to know what to do next or meet your conversion objective Do update your content regularly Don t have more code within the page than copy content when you examine the page s source code Do make as many hyperlinks within your content as possible; link keywords to other pages about those specific topics Do link to external sites that are related to page topics Do use lots of bulleted lists that can be scanned quickly and easily by visitors Do trim your content as much as possible get to the point and reduce the amount of marketing-speak Do develop content with plenty of call-to-actions related to conversion pages 4
Conversions are what provide meaning and value to your website from your perspective, so design the architecture with this in mind. Map out what is perceived to be the natural funnel from entry page to the desired conversion destination. For each conversion metric, map out these funnels and then combine all the funnels to build a blueprint of your site s overall navigational structure. Content When it comes to Search Engine Marketing (SEM), content is king. The web page s content is the single biggest influencing factor in determining SERP results. Ensure that each page s content has been carefully peppered with keywords or key-phrases in the titles, page descriptions, headers and in the body copy. However, remember to optimize the page for the user, not search engines, as webpage s that are too difficult to read or needlessly complex will likely cause the visitor to bounce back to the SERP. Secondly, most search engines get suspicious if the keyword-to-content crosses the 7% keyword density threshold and may retaliate by reducing the page s ranking on the SERP 1. Programming Do s Programming Don ts Do have each page have its own URL stay away from JavaScript, AJAX or Flash pages that provide multiple pages within a single URL Do use search engine friendly URLs which are populated with legible keywords, not database query strings Do use custom 404 page not found error pages that redirect traffic to the homepage or site map Don t use frames or pop-ups Don t try to trick the search engines with any unethical or fraudulent activities such as duplicating content, keyword stuffing and/or invisible text Don t use a meta refresh where visitors are automatically redirected to another page after a specified period of time on the original page Do link to your site map on every page Building pages The single greatest Search Engine Marketing (SEM) tactic you can employ when building web pages is to follow the W3C endorsed Web standards (http://webstandards.org) as thet relate to organizing and specifying the page s code. By following Web standards, you ensure that the search engine spiders/crawlers can easily understand the content of your pages and follow all the links throughout your site. Web standards were developed with specific accessibility issues in mind and following these standards not only aids those visiting your site with visual impairment, it also helps search engine spiders understand the graphical content of your site as well. Another key component to building pages with Web standards is separating content from page structure, formatting and functionality. In doing this it helps load times, assists the search engine spiders in focusing on content and decreases the ratio of code to content. Measuring effectiveness Before a fully Search Engine Optimized (SEO) web site can be properly launched on the Internet and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns can begin, your site needs to be primed for detailed analytical reporting. Google Analytics is free, easy to use and is quickly becoming the default standard in website analytics. An account can be easily set up and within minutes you can be adding the Google Analytics Tracking Code (GATC) to the header or footer of every webpage. Out-of-the-box, Google Analytics provides detailed reports on the visitor counts and statistics, top entry pages, top referring websites, keywords used in search engines to get to your site, and page and site bounce rates. The real power of Google Analytics as it relates to SEM is that it seamlessly connects with your Google AdWords account and data from the two systems came be freely exchanged. Within Google Analytics you can specify successful conversions; typically the display of a thank you page after a completed transaction. Linking this information into Google AdWords, 1. Walter, Arron. Building Findable Websites, P106. 5
you can combine successful conversion data with the keyword originally used to get to your site from Google, the cost of that keyword and the estimated benefit to the company of the conversion-transaction. This provides you with realtime ROI on all the keyword pay-per-click advertisements currently being employed on the Google search engine. Pay-Per-Click Much like a Google Analytics account, a Google AdWords account is very quick and easy to create. During the specific PPC campaign creation process, you will need to specify five key pieces of information: 1. The keywords or key-phrases to be bid on 2. The URL the ad will be linked to 3. The maximum Cost-Per-Click (CPC) you re willing to pay per keyword 4. The total daily budget 5. The ad copy that will appear on the SERP The keywords to be bid on, the landing URL, the maximum CPC and the maximum daily budget should have been decided long before the initial SEM planning process. At this point the ad copy needs to be carefully crafted as the allowable size and length is very limiting. A Google AdWords text ad consists of four lines of text: Headline 2 lines of description Your URL The headline can be up to 25 characters long and the description copy combined cannot be longer than 35 characters. Given the Cost-Per-Click and the brevity of the message, the ad copy must be to the point, noticeably relevant to the keyword, honest, and as clear as possible. You may be paying up to $10 per click, so attracting untargeted visitors can quickly become a costly proposition. Control Room Solutions Rear projection display products for mission critical operations controlrooms.christiedigital.com/ Ongoing development and maintenance Link building strategies In the early 2000s, Google quickly surpassed all its competitors as the premier Internet search engine due to the significantly increased quality of the results provided on its SERPs. This enhanced quality can be largely attributed to their introduction of referral links into their search algorithm. Up to that point, the other search engines focused their indexing almost exclusively based on the content provided within the site itself as the key determinant of topic and relevance. The developers at Google believed that they should look at external sites and understand the context in which an external site is linking to a site and use these other sites as third-party endorsements. For example, if a website has a relatively high degree of authority (determined by Google s PageRank algorithm) and it has a webpage about Topic A and it links to your site about Topic A, then your site must be about Topic A. If the words within the hyperlink to your site have the keywords Topic A in them, then this is an even stronger endorsement that your site is about Topic A. Given the priority these third-party endorsements have in the Google search engine algorithm (all other major search engines now use this method as well), it becomes an ongoing imperative for you to indentify authoritative websites and have them link back to your site. This is typically done through searching out industry directories, working with channel partners, adding URLs throughout the copy of press releases and article submissions, and sending products for third-party online reviews. More contemporary approaches typically involve using social media whereby content is created that has a high degree of viral-ability to incent blog writers and other social media contributors to write about the topic and link back to the source. In a similar but lesser degree, current search engines also consider the links on your site to other external sites. The underlying philosophy behind including this into the search algorithm is that if your site claims to be about Topic A and it links to many authoritative sites about Topic A, then your site most likely is about Topic A. This can be easily achieved by listing and linking to partners, suppliers, channel members, industry associations, online industry publications, respected industry blogs... etc. Google and other search engines warn against getting involved in various link exchange schemes as they see them as grey-hat activities. Google recommends that you create valuable, engaging and original content which others will be compelled to link to without the need for artificial incentives. Google AdWords text ads 6
Keep content fresh Search engines have always placed a high value on websites and web pages that are updated frequently. Stagnate and dated sites rarely make it to the top of the SERPs. Search engines believe that the more a website is updated and refreshed with new content, the more lively, engaging and authoritative the site is on almost any topic. Given this, developing new and updating content can become a full time job for any website owner. Most organizations have a steady flow of press releases, career postings and new products and services, but you need to remember to update your company profile, markets served, industry overview, and training web pages. To help free up the bottle neck when it comes to posting topical, new and updated content, your can engage the larger online community with a user review section, forums and a blog that encourages visitors to provide their own content to the topic. These online discussions will not only keep your website content fresh, they also may increase the number of topically relevant inbound and outbound links. Out of-the-box, Google Analytics provides detailed reports on visitor counts and statistics, top entry pages, top referring websites, keywords used in search engines to get to the site, and page and site bounce rates. Measure and make changes Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is not a fire-and-forget medium like many other marketing activities; proper SEM needs to be constantly monitored and altered. You need to allocate a specified period of time per day or per week to measure and evaluate which keywords are generating the highest conversions, where the bottlenecks on your site are and what the overall ROI of each keyword campaign. Keywords must be changed if they are not meeting ROI expectations and the website s content and navigation needs to be altered if prospects are not following the anticipated conversion funnel. 7
The final task in any effective SEM campaign is to close the loop. If your site is a lead generation site, the leads generated need to be qualified and tied to specific sales to determine the true value of the PPC keyword and the overall ROI of the campaign. If your site is a consumer e-commerce site, the visitors coming to your site from the PPC keywords need to be tied to the sales made. It s beneficial to understanding which keywords and PPC ads are driving traffic to your site, but it s better to truly understand which keywords and ads are driving the most qualified visitors to your site, visitors that are converting into tangible business opportunities. Conclusion Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is quickly becoming one of the most powerful marketing mediums in any industry today. This is because it can bring in targeted audiences, campaign effectiveness can be easily tracked, campaigns can be changed mid-course, and it can produce one of the highest ROIs of any marketing communications activity. Marketing managers need to start developing competencies in SEM as it is not only an extremely effective tool to connect with targeted audiences, but also because its success builds on itself. The more entrenched your site becomes with a particular keyword or key-phrase, the harder it will be for others to dislodge it. The higher your site is ranked, the more times searchers have clicked on your site s link and the more inbound links your site will get as more people interested in that topic will know about your site. The longer your site has been known to be about a particular topic, the more authoritative your site is perceived to be about that topic. All of this feeds on itself and those who don t start working at SEM activities now will soon find it even harder and more expensive to get the top results and drive qualified visitors to their websites. If you are interested in more detail, Search Engine Watch (http://searchenginewatch.com) is a great place to start. Corporate offices USA Cypress ph: 714-236-8610 Canada Kitchener ph: 519-744-8005 Worldwide offices United Kingdom ph: +44 118 977 8000 Germany ph: +49 2161 664540 France ph: +33 (0) 1 41 21 44 04 Eastern Europe and Russian Federation ph: +36 (0)1 47 48 100 Singapore ph: +65 6877 8737 India ph: +91 80 4146 8940 Shanghai ph: +86 21 6278 7708 Beijing ph: +86 10 6561 0240 Korea ph: +82 2 702 1601 Japan ph: +81 3 3599 7481 Dubai (United Arab Emerates) ph: +971 (0) 4 299 7575 christiedigital.com Copyright 2008 Christie Digital Systems USA, Inc. All rights reserved. All brand names and product names are trademarks, registered trademarks or tradenames of their respective holders. Marketing Primer SEM 0309