What is Search Marketing?

SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Paid Search, PPC...Search Marketing! Have you heard these terms thrown around but have no idea what it all means? Have you wondered what Organic vs Paid means?

Veteran marketeers will know all about Search Marketing. However, there are a lot of people out there just dipping their feet into online marketing or just trying to figure out what SEO stands for. I just had a friend ask what SEO was and I decided to do a post about Search Marketing in general.

Disclaimers:

• I will mostly reference Google in this article because they are the biggest engine at the moment. The concepts apply to all search engines.
• I provide specific examples in this article. However, numbers are purely to illustrate points. They are not from anything and should not be relied upon as accurate for any reason!

Here we go...

The n00b Guide to Search Marketing

First of all, Search Marketing is divided into two facets: Paid Search and Organic Search Results. Below is an image (click to enlarge) of a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). I have highlighted the two types of results. The red results are Paid Results. The blue results are Organic Search Results. When you click on one of the results in red, somebody is paying Google. This is how Google makes money.

Search Marketing, in all of it's variations, all comes down to keywords. Any Search Marketing Manager worth their salt knows how to do keyword research to find out what people are searching for and what is worth bidding on. If you pick a word that is too competitive, you won't be able to afford it on the PPC side and you won't have a chance at ranking on the SEO side. I will discuss keyword research later. For now, let's take a look at our first facet:

Paid Search
Paid Search is the easiest way to get traffic to a new site quickly. Any site owner can open an account with Google and begin competing with the big boys by bidding on keywords. However, many a site has met their end because enthusiastic, but inexperienced, bidding burned through their budget in no time at all.

The first thing you need to understand about Paid Search is Quality Score. Quality Score is how relevant the keyword, ad copy and URL are to the landing page that you are sending people to. Quality Score directly affects your ad cost. If you bid on "pet monkey" but you are sending people to a "pet alligator" page, you will pay more for the same position on the page than somebody sending the traffic to a "pet monkey" page. This is because your Quality Score is lower due to your ads relevance to the landing page.

The second thing to understand is how to calculate the potential cost. Google will tell you what the minimum first page bid is. You should know some things about your site through analytics. If you are not familiar with analytics, stop reading this, install Google Analytics on your site, and be very familiar with it before you even think about bidding on anything. You need to know your site's Average Conversion Rate (CR), Average Order/Conversion Value (AOV) and what kind of Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) ratio that you need to hit to be profitable. Then we use the following equation:

ROAS = (AOV * CR) / CPC

What the heck does that mean? Let's plug in some numbers. Let's say our AOV is $100. Our CR is 4% and the keyword we want to bid on costs $.25 / click (CPC).

$16 = ($100 * .04) / .25

Basically, each click that we get is worth an average of $4 (.04 * 100). Each click we buy costs $.25. For every dollar we spend, we will earn $16. Thus, $16 is our Return On Ad Spend. If you want to know your Return On Investment (ROI), you simply multiply the ROAS by your Margin. If your margin is 25%, your ROI will be $4.

In some cases, you may be willing to accept an unprofitable ROAS if you are trying to gain reach or branding quickly. However, if you continually operate at a loss, you will definitely go out of business eventually (I think they cover that on the first day of marketing class).


Organic Search and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
If you don't like calculating how much money you are going to lose, or don't like spending money in general, than SEO is for you! Organic results are free. Even better, it is estimated that roughly 80% of all clicks on the SERP are on Organic results!

Now for the bad news: SEO is not easy. The competition is fierce, ranking does not happen over night (though you can lose it over night), and the subject is notoriously geeky.

Here's how a search engine works: Google sends out a little computer program to scour the internet. This program is generally referred to as a "bot" or a "spider." You may also hear things like "When Google crawls or spiders your site." This is referring to when the bot visits your site. When the spider crawls a page, it looks at your page similar to the way a normal visitor would (with some very important exceptions which I will mention in a moment). Then, the content of your page is filtered through an algorithm. This is a complex, super-secret, proprietary calculation that attempts to extract keywords that it feels like are relevant to your page. These keywords are what you have the potential to rank on. So, in layman terms, if the spider looks at your page and sees the word "hiking boots" a lot of times on your page, you are more likely to show up on the SERP when somebody searches for "hiking boots."

Here's where it gets complex. Google isn't a multibillion dollar company because their algorithm is simple. It takes tons of factors into account. It looks at the URL of the page, the page's title, the header tags on the page. It looks at what appears earliest and most often on the page. It takes bold and italic text into account. It looks at what pages the spidered page links to and what pages are linking to it. It also checks for keyword spamming and other blackhat techniques. Which brings me to my next point: SEO ethics.

The terms whitehat and blackhat are used a lot in the computer security industry and in the search marketing industry. Whitehats are the good guys. They follow best practices and try to be ethical. Blackhat's are the bad guys. They exploit anything they can find and profit off of it for as long as possible. Just like in comic books, the good guys usually win over time.

In the old days of SEO, blackhattery (I made that word up) was everywhere. Many sites would stuff the keyword metatags with hundreds of keywords. Pages would employ techniques such as putting hundreds of keywords in a microscopic font or a font that matched the background color of the page (and thus was invisible or near-invisible to normal users). As search engines got more sophisticated, they began to recognize and account for these behaviors. Blackhat techniques have gotten more and more sophisticated but so have the search engines. These techniques often get a site in the rankings for awhile, maybe even to the top placement. But eventually, they are discovered and dropped from the rankings alltogether. Once dropped, it can be very hard to recover your rankings.

So, how can you be good at SEO? I can't answer that in depth here because there are hundreds of websites dedicated to this very deep subject. The first thing is to know your way around HTML. None of these best practices will make much sense if you know nothing about HTML (it's geeky, remember?). That being said, here are some basics:

1. Minimize your page markup. Separate content from design by using elegant CSS so that it's easy for the spider to grab your content. This also helps users as CSS keeps pages light and quick-loading.
2. Content is key. Do keyword research to see what makes sense to rank on and then develop useful content around those keywords. Use the keywords early and often.
3. Get backlinks (links to your site) from relevant places. Backlinks add tons of SEO value because it's a "vote" from the internet. Another site out there thinks your site is worthy of a link and Google takes this into consideration. The more sites that "vote," the more SEO power you have.
4. Have unique and relevant page titles with well-researched keywords.
5. Have a clear h1 tag that reinforces the keywords in your page title.
6. SEO-friendly URLs are a bonus too: domain.com/hiking-boots/ is much more relevant than domain.com/category.php?catid=335
7. Link to relevant sites. If your site is all about kayaking, exchange links with other kayaking sites so that it's clear what niche your site is in.
8. Google's spider is blind! It can't "see" images so use alt tags on all of your images. And, just like everywhere else, use keywords that make sense in the alt tag.
9. Use the "title" tag within links and use anchor text that make sense. Title tags are a way to qualify your link text a little more without interrupting the user experience. A link that says "click here" does nothing for you. A link that says "Hiking Boots" is obviously more relevant.
10. Lastly, be aware of your keyword density. If your page is supposed to be about kayaking, "rock climbing" should not appear more frequently on the page!
11. Avoid putting any important content within Flash or Javascript. While search engine's may be able to read this content, it is still much safer to use standard HTML. If you need Javascript or Flash, make sure your content is available in HTML too.
12. Create an XML sitemap. This is a big subject so I'll leave it up to you to research how to do this!

If you follow those principals, you will already be ahead of a lot of sites out there. As a small website, you are in a position to refine the architecture on your site to be even more elegant and SEO-friendly than many of the big players. While architecture alone will not get you in the rankings, it is a solid foundation that you will not regret as your site grows in size and power. It's much harder to meet SEO best practices when your site grows to 1000 pages!


Keyword Research
The final piece of the puzzle. How do you know what to bid on or optimize for? Let's say you carry products from The North Face. You would like to show up in the SERPs for related searches. Should you bid on "north face?"

Let's take a look at the first screenshot I posted, higher up in this article. See the green box? That's the first step of SEO/PPC mastery. How many results did Google find for "north face?" That's right: 115 million. If you just built your site, your chances of ranking, organically, in the top ten out of 115 million other sites is exactly 0%. It will not happen.

In addition, if you try to bid on "north face" you will probably spend way more money than you can afford because there are clearly a ton of sites out there that are related to North Face. More competition drives the CPC up. The last reason you shouldn't bid on that term is the fact that it is Broad. Ask yourself what the search intent is behind a keyword like "north face." The searcher could be looking for information about the north face of a specific mountain. Maybe they are searching for products manufactured by The North Face but perhaps they are looking for pants and you only carry jackets. Or maybe they are looking for light jackets and you only carry heavy parkas. Even if your average CR is %50, it will be much lower than that because the user hasn't told you what they really want yet and you may not have it. The top three results on "north face" are the brand itself, REI and Zappos.com. Chances are, you do not have the resources to compete.

A really quick way to get some alternative keyword ideas is to use Google Suggest. Google Suggest is the results that Google Suggests when you start typing something. Let's start typing "north face" and see what happens:

If Google is suggesting that you search for these terms, it's probably based on other user-behaviour. It could be that Google simply puts the highest-searched terms at the top of the list but it is more likely that Google also accuonts for whether or not the person seemed to find what they are looking for. Keep in mind that Google wants to be the best and being the best means helping people find stuff faster. These might be good terms to remember!

The next place to go is Google Keyword Suggest. This tool will help you find similar searches to what you are looking for and show you the competition on these terms as well as the estimated search volume. Here is an example, sorted by volume:
Notice that the top searches by volume do not match the results from Google Suggest, which seems to indicate that Google Suggest may be a better place to research because Google thinks that people who searched for those terms found what they wanted (which will hopefully be your site)!

Also notice the competition. As volume goes down, the competition bar is less full as well. The important lesson here is that volume is expensive! As a small site (or even a medium or large site), you should not attempt to compete on these large terms. Big companies bid on them either for branding or because they are stupid. Chances are, a person will search for "north face" and get a broad list of results. But, if they are shopping, they will probably narrow their search to something more specific before they actually convert. While being the first thing people see when they search for a name brand is important for companies like REI to reinforce their brand, branding is hard to track and costs a lot. If you try it, I hope you have a nice plan B.

Let's refine the list based on what we know from Google Suggest. Apparently, a lot of people happily find what they are looking for after searching for "north face fleece", which your hypothetical website carries! "North face fleece" is still to expensive to bid on but it gives you ideas:
"Women's north face fleece jacket" has much less competition but this keyword, combined with variations, could still drive substantial traffic. The more qualified the keyword, the cheaper it will be to bid on, and the more likely the visitor will be to convert (assuming you can competently send them to the right page and you have the product)! You should also consider bidding on misspellings (people can't spell. I'm sure there are spelling errors in this post!).

Keep in mind that some of the terms that you encounter, while still to expensive to bid on, may be candidates for SEO. "North face fleece jacket" is still pretty competitive on the PPC side but the number of results Google returns has moved from 115 million to 808 thousand. While still a lot, you can see that a few qualifying keywords can really increase your chances. And optimizing for "north face fleece jacket" will still include the keywords "north face" and "fleece jacket" which may have opportunity as your site gains power.

One final tool that is helpful for keyword optimization is Google Trends. It simply tells you what keywords are more highly searched and may give you an idea of search intent:
In this example I have compared "pants", "trousers" and "slacks". Google Trends shows me which one is most highly searched and recent news events that may be skewing the data. You can use this to figure out which variation of a term is better to bid on, either because it has higher traffic or because it has lower traffic!


Final Advice
If you are serious about Search Marketing, be prepared for a deep learning experience. Everything I have touched on above will prove to be deeper and more difficult than the simple way I have presented it. This is not meant to discourage you but to educate you on how to get the most out of your marketing dollars! Final advice...

TODO

• Check out Google's webmaster tools and learn to use it and the webmaster tools that other engines provide
• Learn the many powerful ways that you can use Google for information.
• Learn all about HTML and CSS and ensure that your site is meeting best practices for both. This will help your user experience as well as SEO and PPC.
• Invest in quality content. Google's algorithm is not designed to be exploited. It is designed to choose sites that seem to have helpful, relevant and popular content. Get good content on your site, and then tweak it subtly to be complaint with best practices without being spammy.
  

TODON'T

• Be wary of anyone offering "amazing deals" on SEO or PPC services that are "guaranteed to get you in the top ranking." Such services, if legitamate, will be very expensive and a poor choice for a new business. You can learn this. And every dollar you save by not investing in a scammy, spammy, blackhatter that will only hurt you, is a dollar that you can invest in your own advertising and learning!
• Get too excited. Take it slow, watch your analytics and make informed decisions. You will make mistakes so keep them affordable! Google Adwords has lots of ways to limit your spend so you can catch it before it gets out of hand.
• Believe everything you read. Especially about the latest hot SEO technique, etc. The best practices have been best practices for quite awhile now and it's safest to stick to the basics for a dependable cashflow. Let others tear their hair out as they spike and drop repeatedly.

I hope you have enjoyed this article. Please comment with questions or errors and I will try to edit or respond in a somewhat timely mannger. I do this for a living so I may not respond as timely as you hope! Thanks for reading.

Google as a CSE

Google Product Search is the users interface of the Google CSE. If you are new to CSE';s Google Product Search is probably the best place to get your feet wet. There is no risk in testing this platform because currently there is no cost associated with listing or clicks on your products via Google Product Search. To the right is a screenshot of Google Product Search and below that is a search results page for the query "Asolo FSN 95". As you can see there are many vendors listed with images, prices and reviews all reverent to the above query. There are also highly relevent paid search results on top and to the right.

To get started you need to visit the Google Base Site (Screen Shot Below) when there you see three different options for getting your products listed. I have never tried the "One at a time" method because of the sheer number of products that get uploaded on behalf of the company I work for. This is why we use the "Data feed" method and an updated feed gets sent out every morning. The third option is "API" and I can only assume that it is also a great way to get products listed. For some strange reason there is two different names, Google Base is the backend interface for listing your products on Google Product Search. Confusing I know especially for a Google product, but remember it is still in Beta so that could all change.

Revised CSE Relationship Chart

Since the rebrand of MSN's Search, Shopping and Affiliate properties to Bing, and some new information from a couple of the Shopping Engines. It seemed like a perfect time to revise the CSE Relationship Chart and add all this new information. Below is the revised CSE Relationship Chart. The additions include the MSN restructure and change to Bing as well as adding a new child under Become.com and Shopping.com.

Amazon as a CSE

Alright let's get back at it with the Comparison Shopping Engines. The first Tier 1 Shopping Engine listed in the CSE Relationship Chart from my last post was Amazon.com with the child site of BrowseGoods.com. BroweGoods is a visual shopping aid and eventually links directly to Amazon.com for the final sale. Amazon also has associates (affiliates) that help move their product and your product if you have it listed with them. However, as far as them being a Comparison Shopping Engine I don't think I would classify them as that since for a lot of products, especially shoes and apparel, no actual comparisons are made. For the products that do have comparisons they are less obvious than most CSE's and one click deeper. I think Amazon.com would be better classified as an affiliate. As a merchant you can put your products on Amazon.com but there is little to no competition like on other CSE's. Amazon will just display the product and price with a note that the order will be filled by Merchant X, and to compare you have to dig deeper with the link to the right "More Buying Choices." I don't have any personal experience with Amazon because when I came to work for my current employer they had already ceased the relationship with Amazon due to too many technical issues with data feeds and implementation. However I would assume that most of the time the rewards for having your product on Amazon would be worth the implementation and data feed hassles due to the sheer ammount of traffic that they drive. If your business aligns with Amazon's core market of books, movies, music and games it would most likely be a strong partnership. The partnership would also benifit from Amazon's other web properties such as IMDB.com and CDnow.com which should get your products even more exposure. To list your products on Amazon you use the Amazon Marketplace. Next time I will cover Google Product Search and Shopzilla.

CSE Relationship Chart

Comparison Shopping Engines (CSE's) have a similarity to Search Engines in the fact that there are relationships between engines. With Search Engines there is a well know source for visualizing the relationships which is Bruce Clay's Search Engine Relationship Chart, and it shows how paid and organic results populate other search engines. I have looked for a similar chart that shows how data feeds trickle down from one CSE to their affiliates or other web properties, and have had no luck. So I did a little research and created an initial draft of something similar. This may change over the next month or two because I need to verify the these conclusion with each CSE, but it's a start. Over the next couple of weeks I will take a closer look at each of the Parent Shopping Engines starting with Tier 1 and working my way through Tier 2 posting any interesting details that I come across.

There is a Revised CSE Relationship Chart available.

Keyword Level Destination URL's

Before I get to some information on CSE's I thought I would go into a bit more detail of how keyword level destination URL's are set on the top tier Search Engines, and why they are important. The importance of using destination URL's is three fold. First you get more granular data when you use any analytics package to track at the keyword level and this results in better insight. With increased insight you have more actionable data which if used correctly should result in better ROAS. Secondly you should gain a higher conversion rate from correctly using keyword level URL's. If you direct traffic from search results to the most appropriate page or most appropriate sorting for the products on that page it improves conversion and quality score. Thirdly with improved quality score you will save money by having a higher quality score you can pay less for the same placement or pay the same for a higher placement on the SERP. Below are examples of how to set up and use keyword level URL's in Google AdWords, Yahoo Sponsored Search, and Microsoft adCenter.

Google AdWords:

Google says it pretty subtly and logically they will use the most granular destination URL available. When you edit keyword settings below is exactly what is displayed.

Edit Keyword Settings
“This optional feature helps you track individual keywords and their costs. You may enter individual CPC bids or destination URLs for any keyword. (These bids will apply only to search clicks and not to the content network.) Fields left blank will take the default ad group CPC or URL. To enter an entire list of keywords, URLs, and bids all at once, try the Edit Keywords and CPC page.”

Yahoo Sponsored Search:

Yahoo makes it pretty easy as well in the screen shot to the right you can see that there is a check box that has to be set that allows the use the keyword level destination URLs. That box gets checked as soon as you start typing in the field, and is unchecked if there is nothing in the text field. This makes it fairly idiot proof but gives you the option to do A/B tests on ad copy without losing the keyword level destination URL settings and tracking parameters.

Microsoft adCenter:

MSN has a good setup once you understand it and know how everything is linked together. However, it is not well documented and hard to understand if you only look at one piece of the puzzle. When you set a keyword level destination URL it is under the heading "Destination URL {param1}" that is only 1/2 of the puzzle.If you just set that and think that it will work like either of the above search engines you will not be collecting the data you desire.

The other half of the puzzle is in the ad level destination URL. You have to set the ad level URL to keyword destination URL and below that will appear {param1}. This is shown in the screen shot below. Now that you know both sides of {param1} this should make tracking a bit easier.

MSN AdCenter Nuances

Last week I learned a very valuable lesson for anyone who thinks they can learn the in's and out's of Google AdWords and apply that knowledge to other Paid Search campaigns.  At Sierra Trading Post we use a third party tracking and bid management system from Channel Advisor.  With that redirect tracking system and setting internal  tracking tags as well as Google Analytics tracking parameters you really need to know what you are doing.  Needless to say that day I assumed I did, but I didn't.

Google AdWords and as far as I know Yahoo Sponsored Search there is a hierarchy of destination URL's. Shown to the Right. This shows that it will use the most specific destination URL possible (usually keyword level destination URL) and if that is not available then use the next most specific and so on.  This way you can put all the tracking and redirect parameters at the keyword level and have very granular data to observe later, and ad level destination URL's are just a backup. With time constraints always lurking I usually leave those without proper tracking.  This is a bad practice and you should always place tracking on all destination URL's that way it is easier to find and solve problems if they do arise.

Well getting to the point Microsoft AdCenter does not function this way.  It uses the ad level destination URL unless other wise specified in the ad by using {param1}.  {param1} in layman's terms means use the destination URL at the keyword level.  Well therein lies the problem for me.  I made ad copy changes to Microsoft AdCenter ads to reflect our new branding just like I would have done in Google or Yahoo interfaces and didn't append tracking to the ad level destination URl. Without any tracking all the revenue that was generated by those ads went directly to SEO revenue and Paid Search ROAS went down the tubes.  Trust me on this one it is a hard thing to explain when the higher-ups ask "So why is the Paid Search revenue down this month?"  Your only response is "Well, because I'm an idiot."

More on the differences of the major search engines and a comparison shopping engine relationship chart to come in the next couple of weeks.

Introduction

First things first, I am by no means a marketing expert nor will I claim to be.  This blog is only to share the lessons that I have had learn the hard way.  Hopefully along the way it will reduce the hardship for at least a few.  

My Background:

I have a bachelors degree in Computer Engineering from Montana State University (Bozeman) and graduated just after the dot-com bubble burst and there were still layoffs happening in the technology sector, so I took a job building and maintaining websites.  After building websites for two companies over the course of 4 years the natural progression led me into marketing.  I got my first marketing job with Sierra Trading Post as an Affiliate Marketing Specialist or otherwise known in the marketing community as an in house AM (Affiliate Manager).  I worked with our affiliate network team from LinkShare for about 6 months in which time found a couple of ways to save the company significant operating costs.  Turnover in the company opened both Paid Search Marketing and Comparison Shopping Engine Management, so with proven detail oriented success in the AM position the company bestowed upon me the responsibilities of both open positions.  That is still where I am now 6 months later.  So take this blog with a grain of salt I have only been in the marketing industry for about 1 year.