Recently in The Business of Search Marketing Category

I do not often enough get an opportunity to collect my thoughts and blog on our company website – but try to make an effort every other full moon or so when I think something is absolutely critical to our industry.  The recent buzz (or lack thereof depending on if you are one that loathes anything Microsoft) has been regarding whether or not Microsoft’s most recent effort at launching a viable search engine is something that the Mountain View Monolith need worry about.  And the short answer to that should be, at least if you are in the Interactive marketing industry, God (or other worshipped deity) I hope so!

Here is a scenario that I am sure is not unique to Fuel Interactive regarding paid search engine marketing: Yahoo provides a pretty good return on ad spend, but not enough volume to make a real difference to your client’s business.  Microsoft/Live.com could not deliver enough traffic to even determine if it might be a viable marketing resource for your client’s business.  The other secondary/tertiary search engines are not even worth you or your client’s time to invest in the allocation of resources to investigate whether or not it might be a viable marketing resource for your client’s business. 

What is left?  The 800 lb Googrilla – which can provide the volume of business necessary to make a difference, but is becoming so hypercompetitive that you cannot afford any inefficiency.  And if you are really trying to deliver market-changing results for your client, elevating the CPC to effectively move the needle absolutely comes into play.  After all, there is only so much optimization you can do before bidding up to garner more impressions across high volume, ultra competitive keywords becomes a reality.

So, will Bing.com be a homerun?  Is it “disruptive” search technology?  Maybe not – but the few searches I have conducted on Bing would indicate the quality of results returned is competitive with what one has come to expect from Google.  I use Google now because I have to – it’s what the majority of the population of Earth uses and it is the only concern our clients have related to their positioning, both paid and organic.  I long for the day where I need to worry about something else.  So count me in to the minority of people who hope Microsoft succeeds with Bing.  Maybe the $100 million ad campaign buys enough market share to make them a viable competitor.  Maybe they will buy Yahoo’s search business before it’s entirely irrelevant.  Having only one player in search is not good for anybody – especially not SEM rockstars like Fuel’s Brian Carter or the agency for which he works.

MYRTLE BEACH, SC – April 1, 2009: Fuel Interactive, South Carolina's #1 interactive agency, has announced a groundbreaking new service to clients to retroactively optimize online marketing campaigns.  The new service offering leverages technology from Archive.org's Wayback Machine, which delivers archived versions of older websites.

The technology, the specifics of which are a closely guarded secret, is based upon updating the cached versions of older sites via a proprietary retro-posting technique on the popular Archive.org toolset.  By effectively posting a new content to a previously released site, Fuel Interactive has been able to break the real-time marketing ceiling, which has typically been seen as a insurmountable barrier in bringing product/content to market and on which Albert Einstein was working at the time of his death.  Now we finally have an offering that gives Fuel the opportunity to promote new products and services back as far as 1997, the date when Archive.org was launched" commented Director of Business Strategy Pete DiMaio.

James "Jim" Woodring, long time client of Fuel Interactive, was interviewed regarding the new service.  "I was initially surprised that development team at Fuel [Interactive] was able to offer such a compelling system.  After approving the process on my site I was amazed that the system had actually been up and running for three weeks by the time I returned to my office [three blocks away] and I had thousands of dollars in bookings, including a couple that had just completed their vacation and had already posted a positive review on Travelocity."

"We created retro-optimization because, at Fuel Interactive, we ask a lot of 'what if' questions and we're technologically innovative," said Fuel Interactive president Will McIntosh..  "We thought, hey, we've learned a lot about web design and development and SEO and analytics- what if we had that business intelligence for our clients 5 years ago?  Well now we do. Retro-optimization is a powerful technology, limited only by your imagination, and we can help you imagine more and newer ways to use it- in fact, we combine retro-optimization and multivariate testing and then we retro-optimize the best retro-optimizations to exponentially power your business forward."

Web 1.5, the previously undiscovered land between 1.0 and 2.0, ushered in with the launch of Retro-Optimization and puts control back into the hands of large corporations.  "The end consumers have had too much power for too long with web 2.0 and it's about time that [control] it's been given back to the faceless corporations that are running the show," said an anonymous CEO who looked a lot like Dick Cheney.  The genius of web 1.5 is that it gives consumers the ability to get their hands on new products and services after they undergone years of trial an error prior to their initial development.

Brian Carter, Director of Search Marketing for Fuel responded, "You may ask why then haven't we seen anything from say 2010 injected back into 2008?  Because retro-optimization will become illegal next year- so hurry up and order your retro-optimization services now, before your competition does, or did."  Brian continued: "While our Retro-Optimization is still in beta, we look forward to our clients having enjoyed the system in the upcoming previous years."

Headquartered in Myrtle Beach, S.C., Fuel Interactive provides all interactive services in-house through expert developers, designers and marketers with more than 583 years of combined marketing and Web development experience who understand the potential of well-done, effective online marketing.

Fuel Interactive provides clients a variety of services to create dynamic, individualized interactive marketing solutions that range from Web site design and Web hosting to such online applications and programs as search engine optimization, online media creative, Pay-Per-Performance and email marketing. The Agency provides clients with an easy, cost-effective way to tap into the online market without having to dedicate important time and internal resources to achieve meaningful results.

8 Ways Clients Can Help Their PPC Agency Succeed is a new article I wrote on Search Engine Journal- here's an excerpt:

After working with about 100 different interactive clients in various industries over the last five years, I can confidently say… When you work at an agency, there are things clients can do to help you succeed for them... read more

UPDATE: This opening has been filled as of 8/26/2008.

Join our cool team!  Just saying that because that's what cheezy companies say that want you to think they're a cool, team-oriented, fun environment.  But we actually are cool, team-oriented, and fun.  Really!

Fuel Interactive has an entry-level opportunity in the exploding field of search engine marketing and optimization.

You will work directly with the Director of the department, another Search Marketing Specialist, our Web Analytics Specialist, Account Managers and other team members.

Fuel Interactive is a rapidly growing internet marketing agency partnered with one of the top traditional marketing agencies in the Southeast and another long-standing successful technology company.

We need a sharp individual interested in on-the-job training and working hard in a quick moving environment. You'll learn cutting edge internet marketing techniques and tools.

What's the Job Like?

One Search Specialist says, "it's cool working in an innovative industry not everyone knows about." It's not easy work. He says, "I've read and studied more in the last two months than I did in college." Search is always evolving and requires constant learning.

But Search is a growing field. In these times of economic downturn, getting a job in this field is "true job security in troubled times." While employers in other industries are laying people off, Fuel has been hiring like crazy.

Responsibilities and duties include:

* Following up on SEO research, build relationships with other sites, help build links to client sites
* Mining of multiple data sources to develop keyword lists
* Creating and editing text and URL's for SEO
* Gather and organize data/research from various websites to aid in SEO and PPC efforts
* Pay Per Click and SEO reporting
* Campaign management- on the job training provided
* Similar activities for Online Reputation Management and Social Media Management programs

Skills needed:
* Ability to handle multiple tasks and work independently
* Must be attentive to detail, good spelling a must
* Proficient with Excel- importing, sorting, cleaning data
* Good written and oral communication skills, team player
* Ability to prioritize, multi-task and dependably deliver results
* Ability to quickly learn new software tools
* Analytic and quantitative abilities

Pluses:
* Experience with AdWords, Yahoo PPC management, SEO, blogging, social bookmarking, Twitter, Google Analytics, Omniture, Urchin, HTML, CSS, CFM, PHP, ASP
* Sense of humor, or just the ability to pretend you have one
   
Location: Myrtle Beach, SC

I spoke to our main Google contact today about the imminent AdWords Quality Score changes.  These changes have only been rolled out to a small percentage of accounts so far, but will go system-wide soon (she didn't give me a specific date).

Here's a summary of what I discovered.  No, it's not in interview format, what she told me is written up in summary form.  Less reading for you!

Quality Score Rating Quantified!
We're going to see a 1-10 scale for quality score, along with the same old poor->great continuum... but quantified now!  You'll be able to see room for improvement with keywords that are Great but not the Greatest.  You could get them even Greatester if you work on it.

Micro-microsites are BAD!
Lead generation sites with only one page are BAD and have been for a long time, but this is going to get worse.  If you do lead generation in the future, do not created isolated new microsites or you'll pay much higher cost per click.  Instead, create new pages on existing sites that have other information on them.  Give it some semantic weight and something searchers can benefit from immediately.

The "Ad Display Frequency Algorithm" is Complicated
AdWords has a sub-algorithm that I've never read about that determines how often ads are shown when keywords are searched for (how many impressions they get)- I'm calling it the Ad Display Frequency Algorithm.  It's complicated.  (That's me being confused on the left.)

Automated CTR Optimization, Time of Day, and Geotargeting
Even our Google rep, who's quite smart and in the know, is not clear on all the details- but this display frequency algorithm will now be affected by historical data on click time of day and CTR in various geographic regions.  The geo-part is key for our local clients, but she said the differences we'll see will be small. 

STILL, the implication is we might want to relax some of our geotargeting to allow for better auto-optimized performance in locations we're not sure of either way- and we're going to have to watch state by state metrics before and after to see if anything important changes.

Google Cares About Their Clicks, Not As Much About Your Conversions
All of this is CTR and relevance based, and we also care about conversion rate and booking amts, etc., so we still have to watch for high CTR low CR situations.  I questioned her about why Google doesn't incorporate conversion rate for customers that track it, and she mentioned customer concerns about privacy- I said those who use AdWords conversion tracking probably aren't as worried about that- even an opt-in would be cool.  I also said I understand Google gets paid based on CTR and that's their business model- so we still have to watch the conversion rate, ROAS, average revenue per conversion, etc. 

We already have to keep CTR vs CR in mind when optimizing- an automated optimization of CTR makes that a bit more complicated.

Advertising on Not So Relevant Keywords Will Be Virtually Impossible
AdWords will be more harsh on irrelevant keywords.  For example, one of our clients recently requested a test of the "myrtle beach" keyword which isn't highly relevant to their exact offerings- only 10-20% of people searching MB are interested in that product/service.  We weren't surprised to see them get 10% their typical CTR and much higher cost per click.

These sort of attempts to place ads on irrelevant keywords will be more expensive and get fewer impressions.  Basically, learn that AdWords is all about relevance, or suffer zero results.  And that's good.

Summary
Our rep said they would roll these changes out cautiously- and that advertiser reaction could destabilize things temporarily, but over time it should result in improvements.  Still, I'm uneasy about automated CTR optimization- it could be great, but then again, sometimes a really high CTR results in lower CR... so I'm going to wait until the results are in.

I’m a big fan of the “Now Discover Your Strengths” series of books, including “StrengthsFinder 2.0”, and “First Break All the Rules”.

If you’re not familiar with these books, the big idea is:

It makes more sense to do what you’re really good at, what you’ve always been a natural at, than it does to try to perfect your weaknesses. 

This goes contrary to common business organizational practices.  And that may be one reason why so many businesses are mediocre.

Why Focus on Strengths?

Strengths are

• Things you do naturally do...
• Things you love to do…
• The ways you tend to think, and
• They lead to you perform excellently. 

On the flip side, no matter how good you get at your weaknesses, you’ll never excel by doing them.  You’ll never beat a person who’s natural at those things.

Don’t misunderstand: you can’t be incompetent at certain things, and you should manage around your weaknesses, but you should spend most of your time doing what you do best. 

Enough italics?

Organizationally speaking, there are enough humans with varying talents for you to focus on yours.  Find your spot.

This isn’t just some neat-o-keen idea to sell business books… it’s based upon the Gallup organization’s research on 1.7 million employees at 101 companies in 63 countries.

What Are Your Talents, or “Strengths”?

Gallup discovered 34 strengths or talents… things like: Competition, Relater, Learner, Input, Deliberative, and Ideation.

It takes a while to learn what these strengths all are and identify which ones really are your top strengths.  The first two books I mentioned above each comes with an online test to find them, but as they explain, these tests aren’t perfect, and you really need to understand the definitions and then watch yourself for a while to accurately diagnose.

For example, I would have denied that I was a competitive achiever until I read these books- then the more I watched myself the more those strengths explained stupid things I did like having to pass other cars on the freeway.  It’s stupid, but I think I’m winning and achieving when I do that.  Just so you know: if I pass you on the road, I win!  Deal with it.

Is There Just One Set of Key Strengths for SEO or PPC?

Even more complicated for this particular article: there probably isn’t one set of best strengths for PPC and SEO.  For example, a recent article about SEO’s pointed out the difference between technically-oriented SEO’s and copywriting-oriented SEO’s.  Each requires different talents.  You might have both.

The point of this article is to figure out how to get people who are naturals at the talents required for SEO and PPC.  Some companies hire neophytes and train them from the ground up.  Skills and tasks can be trained but, alas, talents cannot.  Although you could probably train many people to be mediocre SEO’s or PPC’s, my hope is that you’re looking for potentially excellent ones, or wondering if you could be an excellent one.

I’m going to take a stab at which strengths are required.  I assumed that SEO and PPC would require a different set of strengths, but upon review, I found the talents to be quite similar.  Naturally, many talents are required in business, but I’ve tried to include the ones that are most unique to SEO and PPC job functions.

How to Criticize My List of SEO/PPC Strengths

Feel free to discuss and disagree, especially if you’re familiar with the 34 strengths system!  I may have shaped these potentials to fit just our company’s vision- let me know if yours is different and requires something else. 

The other thing to keep in mind is that all strengths look good- it's like looking at some dessert menus- you want everything.  As you read them you may say "of course we should have this, too!"  But everyone can't have every strength- and any job candidate may have a few of these along with others that aren't as critical for SEO and PPC.  So the question to ask of each strength in the list below is "is this talent really essential to excelling at SEO or PPC?"

I tried to put these in order of importance, yet I feel all are indispensable.

The 7 Essential Strengths of An Excellent SEO/PPC Employee

1.    Maximizer – Obsession with making good things excellent.  Optimization.  This one’s a no-brainer for all analytics-based marketing.

2.    Achiever – Relentless need for achievement.  Key for making consistent improvements and getting more and more results.

3.    Focus – Need goals and clear destination.  Filter actions based on effectiveness and efficiency.  Key for getting things done.

4.    Individualization – Tendency to look at how things, people, websites are unique.  Key for dealing with unique niches, varying semantic spaces, and current client’s website situation.  Key for writing ads that are highly relevant to the keywords and landing pages in an AdGroup.

5.    Arranger – Loves complicated challenges.  Productively configures countless variables and factors.  Key for dealing with the number of things that affect search rankings and indexing, and working on all those things at one time.  This is also key for creating tightly focused AdGroups in PPC.

6.    Strategic – Sort through the clutter and find the best route.  Ability to see what would happen if you did this or that.  Key to anticipating possible results of any optimization.  Also important for thinking through the ramifications of interconnected PPC factors like CTR, bid, and quality score.

7.    Analytical – Prove it.  Show me the data.  Key for results-oriented SEO.  Without this you can have lots of fascinating conversations but you need this to get the best results.  However, there’s a lot of mystery in SEO, and if you’re too analytical you might not be able to tolerate that- for this reason, this is probably a better PPC strength than SEO.

Strengths for the SEO Team

Just after publishing this, @DerrickWheeler an SEO at Microsoft told me to check out his comment on this Bruce Clay blog post... it's his summary of the strengths you should have somewhere in your overall SEO team (scroll down to the comments).  I'm reserving my comment for now on the specific strengths he chose until I've had a chance to think about it, but that's another good angle to look at when checking your resources... if you're adding to your team, you can inventory existing members for strengths, find out where your strength gap is, and emphasize your talent search in that direction.

 

The number of new articles on these topics per day is at least 50... 50 good ones.  How do you keep up?  How do you know which ones to read?  How can you filter the god from the bad?

You don't have to.  We do that for you.

Josh Williams, Shannon Sell, and I (Brian Carter) post the best of the best SEO, PPC, social media, and online marketing articles in a special FriendFeed "SEM, SEO, PPC, social media, media placement links, articles" room.  (If you don't use FriendFeed, check that out too- it's a way to aggregate all your most important social networking feeds in one place.)

Get most useful, most relevant-to-the-real-business-world info there.  Check it out!

    

These are a couple of SEO women who had a major fictional fight over a guy and ended up having to resolve it on the baseball field in Sumo suits.  Because that's the best way to resolve an imaginary guy fight - fake-sumo-fighting in front 3600 baseball fans and 20 of your fellow employees who are drinking beer in a suite at a Minor league baseball game in a Southern U.S. beach town!

 I did the pre-fight interview and the post-fight smack talk about Tennessee (hey, Katie's a fellow former buckeye... what can I say?)

Kudos to Brandon Tucker (funny golf blogger and video man from worldgolf.com) for filming it (in HD no less) and the killer editing, music, and slo-mo replays.

Of course we put it on YouTube... so it can go viral! 

• Tell your friends,
• Email your sumo buddies, or
• Send a carrier pigeon to your grandma with this video on an ipod tied to the pigeon's itty bitty bird feet...
• DO IT NOW!

Here are some preview images:

Why I Wear Graph Paper Shirts: Fashion & The Business of SEM

Previously a fashion choice made only by engineers and MIT students, graph paper shirts are now all the rage in the hot, young, explosive search marketing industry.  Coincidence?  I think not. 

 

Graph paper shirts symbolize everything that's right and good about the business of Search Marketing. 

I'm going to tell you why:

1. Aren't Graph Paper Shirts Nerdy?  Yes.  And that's a good thing!

Good SEM is analytics-based.  Analytical people like order.  Does anything say "I'm organized and logical" better than a shirt with lots of parallel and perpendicular lines?  Graph paper requires thinking inside, alongside, and through the box. 

Is there an "outside the box" in SEM?  Yes, but it's inside some other box. 

Sorry, you visionary freaks!  Think of something new.  We'll categorize it and assign metrics to it and define the process for doing it optimally.  Then you'll be in another box to think outside of.  We'll keep you visionaries on the run, and you'll love it, because you define yourself in opposition to us.

Alternative Lifestyle Indulgences: Wear mock turtlenecks or your old Metallica Ride The Lightning t-shirt and talk about "conversations" and "engagement".  Watch the facial lines of worry stay stubbornly etched into the faces of executive decision makers handcuffed by a recession economy.

Best Solution: Wear graph paper shirts, talk analytics, talk metrics, talk bottom line.  Use charts and graphs.  Project profit.  Get more clients.  Make lots of money.

Taking it Too Far: Drawing 45 degree upward ROI lines on your graph paper shirt with those big sharpie markers is kind of unnecessary ...Rob.  ...Duh!

2. Professional?  Yes.  Clients like it.

SEM, like most new computer things, is an unknown quantity (scary) for the traditional businesses we're trying to help. 

Your prospects and clients don't understand PageRank Sculpting, Quality Score, or Information Architecture, but they do understand charts, graphs, and metrics. 

Even if they haven't used KPI's adequately in their own businesses, your evangelizing of ROAS while wearing your graph paper shirt speaks reassuringly to their bottom line. 

And they do understand the bottom line.

Fun Alternative Business 2.0 Lifestyle Choices: "Hey, we're new and wacky, we're business 2.0, we wear hawaiian shirts and birkenstocks and tattoos- we are new and powerful and weird, respect us!"  Cool, may work for getting small SEO contracts for surfboard shops, but take that to a posh real estate development company in the South, and... um... nuh uh, see ya!

Best Solution:  Wear graph paper shirts, talk analytics, talk metrics, talk bottom line.  Use charts and graphs.  Project profit.  Get more clients.  Make lots of money.

Taking it Too Far: Creating your own graph paper pants. That's common sense, guys.  Just say no to graph paper pants.  Yes to graph paper shirts.

3. Changes Your Attitude?  Yep!  Use it!

Don't get me wrong, it took me 34 years to darken the doorstep of a Brooks Brothers store.  I'm the ultimate cool casual clothing sorta guy.  I used to work at an outdoor gear retail company where business casual was a The North Face fleece, convertible khakis, and Merrell hiking shoes. 

But dang it I'm in the South, and I'm in management.  Have you read the research that shows that one of the biggest determinants of who gets to be the leader is the one who most looks like the leader?  Studies also show that the taller you are the more money you make.  I'm not a tall guy so I have to impress people with my stunning good looks, my mind-blowing intellect, my cantankerous obsession with results, and my ridiculously hilarious sense of humor. 

But all of that would fall apart without my graph paper shirts and Italian dress shoes.  Why?  Because I think and act differently in different clothes.  Are you so different?  Try it and see what happens.  I act more professionally, more conservatively in dress clothes. 

Conversely, I'm more lax and self-centered in casual clothes.  I call it being "creative", being "me", etc. but the measure of my value at work is the potentiation of my internal resources (knowledge, decision making ability, analytical ability, creativity, everything) in a team framework- and I'm simply a better team member in dress clothes.  Weird, but true. 

Self perception affects behavior, behavior affects self-perception.  Classy clothes stimulate classy behavior, classy behavior creates a classy person.

This from a guy who used to say "it shouldn't matter how I dress- you should accept me for who I am".  But if it doesn't matter how you dress, then dress respectfully- and if you won't do that, that says something about who you are, doesn't it?  Noncomformity is disrespectful, because other people have limits in their perception of value- we use external cues to guess at truth- and if how I dress changes my own behavior, then I'm optimizing my work value by wearing different clothes... as an SEO I understand that clearly.

Alternative: Wear whatever you want, and witness yourself starting emails to clients with phrases like "hey dude..." and "hey man!"  Sure there's a place for that, but it shouldn't be the default.  Try an experiment- measure your productivity from client perspective, what you got done for them, and alternate your dress on different days for 6 days- analyze the results of your productivity in your different get-ups, and let me know what you find.

4. Morality?  Yes, Clothing Affects and Creates Business Morality

Everybody in SEM knows morality is an issue.  At the recent SMX Advanced conference, Danny Sullivan asked Matt Cutts how it felt to be the moral compass of SEM.  SEO professionals must decide whether to and when to use gray and black-hat techniques. 

Fundamental to this decision are questions like:

• Is this truly not a white hat technique?  (Discernment)
• Will this technique put my client at risk? (Altruism)
• Will this technique put my reputation at risk? (Vision)
• Is there truly no better white-hat alternative to this (Creativity)

It may be argued that gray and black hat techniques don't jeopardize an SEO's career, especially if they only do it on their own sites- some may even posit that usage of these techniques increases SEO savvy.  However, if your use of these activities could injure your client and could directly or indirectly injure your career, I'd argue that your attitude is immoral, instant-gratification-oriented, unwise, and more importantly: un-American, and you probably support the euthanizing of homeless people.

Is there less chance you'd engage in gray or black hat activities if you were wearing a graph paper shirt?  Of course!  Read on...

Alternative Amoral Clothing Choices: Everyone knows that the Enron executives got tattoos and road Harley motorcycles to work and wore leather boots just before defrauding their investors of millions of dollars, right?  Just kidding.   But Enron executives did not wear graph paper shirts, and they should have.  They wore black suits and ties, and that may have been a problem, but more research is needed.

Best Solution: Wear graph paper shirts, go to church, feed the homeless, write down your SEM ethics, and follow them.

Taking it too Far: Using a red marker to check a box on your graph paper shirts every time you beat the temptation to take gray or black hat action.  We don't need to know, buddy.  Keep it to yourself.

Bottom line?  The clothes make the man or woman.  And if you disagree, you're wrong.  I know, because I wear graph paper shirts, so I'm right.

More reading on Clothing, Self-Perception, and Business:

• BusinessWeek: Leaders Must Look the Part
• The Influence of Appropriateness of Dress and Gender on The Self-Perception of Occupational Attributes
• Clothing interest, clothing satisfaction and self perceptions of sociability, emotional stability, and dominance
• Search Google Scholar for more!