Archive for January, 2008
Beware SEO Consulting Snakeoil… You Can Probably Get All the Info You Need On Your Own
Thursday, January 31st, 2008We try to be as transparent as possible at Spring Creek Group about what we’re good at, what we’re great at, and what we believe is better off handled either internally by our clients’ own marketing and development teams OR handled externally by other, more qualified and deeply experienced expert agencies or consultancies. One of the areas about which we are asked most often – and it appears the marketplace is most perilous for decision-making – is SEO. And to be clear, the end game isn’t SEO for its own purposes, but good and improving natural search engine results for a client’s website against the potential available list of search terms and phrases most relevant and aligned with their business / value proposition. When we can, we offer a set of “core principles” regarding website architecture, page code and construction, and linking and content propagation strategies (including SEO / SMO PR and Communications publishing and editorial principles). And I believe we charge fairly — which is to say “not excessively” – for providing this information to our clients, when they request it and it’s pertinent to their marketing goals. However, we are VERY CAREFUL not to over-sell, over-promise, or over-promote our agency’s capabilities in the realm of SEO simply because we believe two things:
1) Most SEO “best practices” can be researched, learned, understood, internalized, and taken action upon BEST by the program managers and development managers + teams who are chiefly responsible for the UI / UX and actual website code development for a given domain;
and,
2) Genuinely best practice SEO guidance and principles are available from a pretty short list of deeply knowledgeable, right-on-top-of-the-topic-as-it-develops-given-the-ever-changing-nature-of-the-search-engines-algorithms SEO firms and websites out there. To site a few of the best ones we’re aware of, there’s SEOMoz, SEOBook, ethical-yet-clever reputation management and search engine result improvement services such as Visible Technologies’ TruView service, and some of the resources available via links from the Wikipedia page on SEO (including SEMPO).
And let’s not even get into the whole realm of “paid links” practices and firms… which we regularly and firmly denounce, because linking should be a result of company advocates and compelling content doing their thing whenever there is content or information on your site that deserves a mention and link elsewhere on the Web. We DO help clients provide tools to increase the likelihood and velocity of “voluntary linking and sharing” of our clients’ sites, via integration of content syndication tools like RSS feeds and integration of Bookmarking, Sharing, and Permalink/Email “one-click” tools such as the very simple and comprehensive ones that AddThis supplies… for free!
Well, the following post came across our RSS Reader today and we thought it merited linking to — and extending commentary upon — because the whole topic of SEO is genuinely a growing problem for marketers and their good-hearted efforts to improve their customer acquisition funnel and brand awareness.
We did some research a few months back, and the marketplace research and analysis reports seem to suggest that SEO consulting services represents between $1billion and $1.5billion annually in Web marketing services revenues. And it’s growing as rapidly or more rapidly than Web media/advertising fees (usually structured as 15% – 20% of total media buying budget spend, when serviced externally by an agency partner).
The short story – from our perspective, as well as the author of this post‘s – is that sound SEO practices DO NOT come down to spending exorbitant fees on SEO consultants and “black hat” SEO firms. Instead, they come from doing two things well:
1) Learning and staying knowledgeable internally with a website development and/or product management / product marketing stakeholder about the highest-priority core principles of search engine natural results performance effectiveness,
and,
2) Allocating the focus and resources regularly over a long period of time towards this marketing opportunity, alongside the focus and resources allocated to the other key customer acquisition and brand awareness channels on the Web such as SEM, display and rich media opportunities, Web-optimized PR practices, and social media marketing opportunities.
The author of this post – and countless others like it – is absolutely correct: $350-and-hour SEO consultants not only often aren’t worth it on an ROI-basis for your marketing spend, but often they don’t know any more about the leading edge thinking and theories regarding SEO best practices than what your talented internal team members could learn at little or no cost (beyond the “cost” of their resource time and attention dedicated to the topic, of course).
We believe we have some knowledge, information, and experience to offer our clients in this realm, just as we do from both a strategic and a tactical standpoint when it comes to performance-marketing advertising campaign management, social media marketing and management strategies and programs, and web analytics methodologies and technology solutions. We’re in the business of helping our clients grow their online brand awareness and penetration, and helping turn that into increased flow of potential and returning customers into their website conversion funnel. But we strive to do so using completely ethical and “value-fair” services which neither under NOR over-charge our clients for the actual value of this knowledge, experience, and services to those clients created by our partnership with them in pursuit of their marketing and business growth goals. We deserve to be held totally accountable to this standard. And so does the rest of the SEO industry.
There is real, non-zero value to this knowledge… and most importantly translating it into actionable, impactful strategies and tactics/development for B2C and B2B Web-enabled businesses of all kinds. And it’s true that this value increases as the desire, ability, and inclination to gather and act on this knowledge by any given company internally declines. But much like any other marketing investments — comprised of both actual dollars spent + value of resource time internally and externally spent on the channel — these SEO investments should be evaluated by the same metrics and standards applied to all other Web marketing activities: “What is my return on spend?” The math is pretty simple here, much like it is for total SEM, display, rich media, promotional, PR, social media, or other marketing spend:
Total Expected Profits from Channel / Total Expected Cost for Channel
If your SEO investments are too low today, look at your overall marketing budget + resources mix and determine if you can improve your profitable return by investing more here. But if you are over-spending, be sure it’s not because your cost of acquiring SEO knowledge isn’t wildly out of whack in relation to your current and expected future return in real revenue and profit growth from increasing your natural search results “ranking” and domain presence.
And one last point on this topic: The reality is that most businesses have, at best, any luck of hitting the first page of search results for maybe 10 or 20 search terms. Beyond that, if you want to be there, unless you are in the upper 1% of site content optimizers and link-generators, your most cost effective expenditure between SEO and SEM investments to get on to the first page of search results for a given search term or phrase is likely to be cagey, analytics-driven search engine advertising.
Happy SEO researching — and auditing of your SEO investments/expenditures on behalf of your business. Don’t under-spend, but certainly don’t over-spend here either. Snakeoil wasn’t medicine… it was just something that made you think you would get better. [And often the principle ingredient was alcohol, to divert your attention later from the fact that you had been duped into buying something you didn't need and that wouldn't work the way the salesmen said it would.]
Brand Names in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Ads Increase CTR, Recall
Tuesday, January 29th, 2008… so says Microsoft, after a joint research study with Sony conducted using Live Search and the related AdCenter SEM advertising network. Not terribly surprising, after all a search ad is an impression just like any other customer impression, so it stands to reason that including the relevant brand term (presumably not only in the Display URL, but somewhere in the three available lines of ad copy) would increase likelihood of action and subsequent brand recall.
A useful reminder, though, given how many SEM ads don’t utilize a brand or product name anywhere in the 3 lines of copy. There is often a view in SEM ad creative development that says, “we don’t have much copy room – maybe 100 characters total – so we need to speak to the need-state rather than wasting copy on a product or brand name.” However, when you remember that average search ad CTR’s are in the very low single-digit-percentage to fraction-of-a-percentage-point range, it’s not hard to see how you’re wasting 99 impressions out of 100 if you’re not at least delivering a “leave-behind” branded impression in the SERP viewer’s grey matter.
Conversion is king, but branded impressions improve recall… so don’t miss out on the latter being overly focused on the former when you write your three lines of copy. [Full disclosure: we probably need to go do an audit of our Live Search, AdWords, and Yahoo Spring Creek Group agency search ads now, as well...]
Good luck harvesting clicks…. and securing brand recall among all the “99 percenters” whose eyes you’ve momentarily got if not their index fingers.
Facebook Opens Up (a little) – Levels Playing Field with OpenSocial?
Monday, January 28th, 2008Quietly big news in social graph and social applications land today: Facebook is enabling on-platform apps (of which there are grillions, from the cultural phenomena like iLike and Scrabulous to the highly arcane and everything frivolous in between) to be made available on other sites via javascript tools.
Google and OpenSocial either forced their hand here, or it was already in the works strategically for a long time and finally was ready for primetime technically. Either way, social networking application development just got a little more interesting.
Jarvis is liveblogging “very big conversations” at Davos
Friday, January 25th, 2008….and the most interesting recent posts have been about the sessions focused on making positive social and environmental change… particularly by Google Foundation gang. (No word yet on the “I can’t believe that guy lost 7 billion dollars” hallway chatter, perhaps a different live blog is covering those threads…).
How killer a life does Jeff Jarvis have that he gets invited to Davos with the world’s heavy hitters and then gets to sit in the room and listen to the biggest names in business, law, politics, and economics discuss the largest problems facing our world? And then liveblog it. None more killer, as Nigel would say.
Anyway, try to ignore the “I wish I was Jeff Jarvis” impulse and focus on the issues by reading on here.
Publicis / Digitas Demonstrating Its Biz Dev Chops
Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008Today’s announcement (however vague it was) that Publicis and Google have been “cooperating” for a year is mainly interesting because it shows that Publicis can convince Google to let them issue a press release about non-specific initiatives. Every major advertising agency in the world is “cooperating” with Google… in the sense that they are, with permission, utilizing all manner of search marketing tools, web analytics tools, and probably beta testing unified search and display advertising media buying. I don’t doubt that Publicis has got some kind of specific, deeper strategic information sharing and technology development initiatives underway with the Mountain View Juggernaut. I’m just surprised that Schmidt allowed them to “create news” about their friendliness without any specifics. If nothing else, it shows how proud Publicis is of their sleek reputation as the innovative, digital-forward ad agency among the big guys.
Pretty meta though: A PR and Advertising firm issuing a press release about an unspecified friendly initiative with an advertising network… and reminding readers that another PR and Advertising firm is also friendly with the advertising network, but just not as friendly.
But then, any press release with the word “Google” in the headline is a good press release, we suppose Messrs. Levy et Schmidt?
Wikia Launched
Monday, January 7th, 2008Jimmy Wales (mr wikipedia) new search service, Wikia, launched. We have been playing with it a bit today to get a feel for results. An interesting experiment.
Best Search Blogs 2007 List (and a question)
Thursday, January 3rd, 2008So Search Engine Journal posted a long and comprehensive list of nominees for best search engine blogs recently. You can find it after the jump here.
If you kept up with the flow of posts and articles to all of these sites, you would certainly be well informed about the state of all things search-engine-industry related. But looking at a list of this size, it begs the question: would you really want to, and would you even be able to do so if you did?
In today’s super-flat, broad-AND-deep, online media world, is it even possible to keep up with your RSS reader anymore? Back in the olden days of consolidated editorial publishing, there were maybe 10-20 industry and mainstream news media pubs a given marketing exec had to keep up with. A challenging task, but not an unmanageable one if he or she had access to a quality clipping service and a capable in-house or agency PR and Communications team who could remain vigilant about addressing crisis management and proactive about driving key messages with their “pitch list” the rest of the time. By my (quick) count, there are at least 50 unique blogs and sites represented in this list specific to Search. Now, I know that there aren’t nearly that many covering every industry, SEC code, or vertical…. search is aggressively covered because, well, it’s search – the most popular web application in the history of the Internet, and it’s an inherently online service so online media are going to provide ample coverage. But Search gets covered aggressively as an “industry” in mainstream pubs, newspapers, and elsewhere too. Total it all up, and you’ve got to stay on top of hundreds of online and offline/barely online media outlets and properties to stay current on the industry? Good luck.
Perhaps it’s not quite as bad if you are in a less “new media” industry… something like, say, shoelaces… or piston rings. But even for consumer brands like, say, Etnies shoes, or for middle and major market business services companies like, say, Bain Consulting, keeping abreast of “the state of your brand and industry” is an exceedingly much more difficult task now than it was ten or twenty years ago.
And what about the Communications and word of mouth implications of the new media landscape?
In today’s multi-channel media world, it can sometimes (not always – let’s not get carried away – but sometimes) matter more whether you get 10 good blog posts than if you get one good national publication “hit”, if your goal is getting brand engagement and word of mouth.
With the volume of content being published these days, brand managers need more than just a big OPML file to keep up with everything that’s being discussed about their products, services, and brands. They need technology tools built to collect, analyze, and make sense of all the white noise… and often times they need extra resources (or a partner) to help them understand where the brand equity trend-line is headed and how to formulate a strategy for how to better manage their brand presence online.
Having a social media market research and engagement program is rapidly turning – for many industries – into a “gotta have” aspect of the Marketing function rather than a luxury bolt-on for bleeding-edge marketers only.
The good news is that the technology tools are advancing rapidly, and addressing each level of the marketplace. And Spring Creek Group is certainly not alone in offering a Social Media Management strategy and program for partners who want to learn where to start, what to do, and how to do it when it comes to this new and evolving channel.
Maybe you don’t need to keep up with 50+ blogs to stay on top of your market — in all likelihood it’s more like 5 or 10. But the real question is, should you and are you? If not, perhaps it’s time to start at least understanding what’s going on out there that’s pertinent to your industry, your business, your brand, and your customers. From attention and understanding flows insights and strategy… from which can emerge a gameplan for what, if anything, to do about it.
Happy posting (and reading) in 2008.
