Category Archives: SEM Industry

Jun 07 10 comments
Marketing - General, SEM Industry, SEO, Search Marketing

Vanessa Fox + Laura Lippay = Search Marketing no one else can offer

I used to have one of those cheesy shirts in high school that said “Go Big or Go Home!”  That must have stuck with me because I couldn’t think of a bigger move than breaking away from Yahoo and partnering with Vanessa.

Our collaboration puts Yahoo-stemmed search & social marketing savvy + Google-stemmed strategic marketing and webmaster ringleaders together to form a partnership in Search Marketing unlike any other seen before; one that doesn’t exist anywhere else, and one that focuses on connecting the dots between marketing and webmasters to create a shiny happy search friendly world for all of us to live (online) in.

Our happy family also is also fueled by rising superstar Heather Champion who many of you know and cant help but to love, and search *genius* Todd Nemet who was previously in Engineering and Operations at Google, both of whom have blown my mind since I started working with them.

We’ll be updating the Nine By Blue website to reflect our whole family very soon, as well as adding a lot more contributions to Jane & Robot. I’ll also continue writing for Yahoo Search Marketing Blog as well as representing Wappow’s Woot! conferences (Search + Social and Emerging Media later this year in Hawaii!) + continuing the posts for the 8-Step SEO Strategy at SEOmoz.

If you know Vanessa, Todd, Heather and I, you know we love our community and want to hear what you’ve got to say – thoughts, ideas, protests, and especially send some love to Vanessa for putting together an incredible bunch.

You can find us at the Twitter handles below for now.

To say I’m excited is an understatement.  I’m amazed at the talents this group possesses, I’m energized by what we can bring to the table, and I’m inspired by energy and synergy of this team and so happy to be a part of it.

May 27 2 comments
Marketing - General, SEM Industry, SEO, Search Marketing

SEO Strategy – Taking SEO Beyond the Typical Audit

Until recently I headed up technical marketing for Yahoo Media, where our competition was in verticals like news, sports, movies, games, and finance to name a few. In terms of online competitiveness, this is nothing to sneeze at. This is how I learned to base everything I do on strategy.

A Lesson Learned

Let me tell you a story. Early in my tenure at Yahoo we tried to get into the site dev process in the early stages in order to work SEO into the Product Recommendations Documents (PRD) before wireframing began.  But as a fairly new horizontal group not reporting into any of the products, this was often difficult. Nay, damn near impossible.  So usually we made friends with the product teams and got in where we could.

On one specific project, one of the SEOs on my team was brought in during the wireframe stage.  T­he entire product team held SEO-specific meetings every week to go over specific recommendations, taking them very seriously, and leaning on every word our team said.  We were thrilled.  We were hailing their efforts, promising big wins for the relaunch, and even hyping up the launch and it’s projected SEO results in the company SEO newsletter.

Then the site relaunched. Initially we saw a drop. This is expected, especially when you relaunch an entire site of that magnitude.  Three weeks passed, and results were flat.  Five weeks passed, no upward trend.  Three months passed and the product team stopped talking to us. Results never went back up.

Search Traffic drop after relaunch

Search Traffic drop after relaunch

Like many SEOs, I was hired with one vague responsibility: to set up an SEO program and achieve results.  Like many SEOs, we jumped right in and started spewing out SEO audits, rewriting title tags, offering up link suggestions, rewriting URLs and so on.  And like many SEOs we promised results. But what we didn’t do, until that fateful launch, was develop a comprehensive strategy.  Sure, we did keyword research, we recommended partnerships and widgets and architecture advice, but we didn’t step back and take a good look at our target audiences, what sites were meeting their specific needs in search results, and what we specifically could build into the product that would be far more desirable than what everyone else had (not even thought of yet ideally) to make sure our entire site is superior, resulting in the inevitable stealing of search traffic from our competitors.

Instead, in this instance, we started at wireframe stage, plopping in keywords and meta tags.  Of course, the site really needed those things, and although it launched technically “optimized”, it wasn’t enough to provide a better product than our top competitor(s).  A product that people want to visit, revisit, email to friends, share on social networks, and link to more than our competitors.  It wasn’t even enough to move up in the rankings.

From that point on, if a property didn’t consult our team during the early concepting stages of a project, we shied away from working on that project at all. And let me tell you, things got a lot better.

An 8-Step Strategy for you to use

Doing SEO strategy right takes targeted competitive insight and very specific recommendations, beyond any SEO basics rulebook. And ideally a good relationship with the product (site) manager.

I’ve been writing an SEO Strategy Guide at SEOmoz where I share a detailed 8-step process for creating your own SEO strategy, starting with defining target audiences, and taking it all the way through categorizing keywords into topics, finding Gaps & Opportunities, doing competitive research, press release strategy, and ending up with a set of detailed, very specific recommendations that go far beyond the regular out-of-the-box SEO recommendations.  This is the kind of stuff that can be far more useful to the client than an automated SEO check, and it’s the kind of stuff that starts to draw the line between the novices and the pros.

Here are the posts so far:

  1. The 8-Step SEO Strategy, Step 1: Define Your Target Audience and Their Needs
  2. Categorized Keyword Research: Step 2 of the 8-Step SEO Research Strategy
  3. Finding Gaps and Opportunities: Step 3 of the 8-Step SEO Strategy
  4. Define Competitors: Step 4 of the 8-Step SEO Strategy
  5. Spying on (and Learning from) Your Competitors: Step 5 of the 8-Step SEO Research Strategy

I hope they’re insightful and help you to provide quality insights for your own sites and your clients’ sites.

Follow me on Twitter to be the first to know when the next posts go up at SEOmoz.  :)

Feb 17 0 comments
SEM Industry, SEO, Search Marketing, Technology, The Future

The Future of Marketing Part 3: Marketing Straight to the Brain

In Part 1 of the Future of Marketing we looked at what people are searching for around the future and the future of marketing. In Part 2 we looked at keeping target markets and goals in mind amidst the current explosion of channels and devices and the inability of platforms to keep up with it all.

In this third and final post, we’ll dive into the uber-geek promise land of the future – looking at what may be in store for us sooner than we know – things like reverse engineering the brain, computerized human telepathy, and two way communication between consumers’ brains and marketers.

Personal and Relevant is not the Future, it’s Now

Personal and contextual advertising is here, and becoming more granular and more ingrained in our surroundings every day. FourSquare is an iPhone app growing in popularity that allows people to “check-in” wherever they are, see who else is checked in there, any notes anyone has left about the place, and where their friends are checking in. Locations appeal to their FourSquare patrons by giving deals to frequent visitors, and by showing specials nearby. Personal and contextual promotion in action. Another app, UpNext lets you fly through a city and “see” what’s inside buildings. Ample personal and contextual advertising opportunity.

That stuff is already here. Now here’s the really fun part. What do the marketing and technology futurists, the Nostradamus’s of the information age, have to say about what’s in store for us? Here’s a few examples of where thought leaders think we’re headed in 2010 and beyond.

Ubiquitous Computing (and Ubiquitous Marketing)

Ubiquitous computing was coined by Mark Weiser in 1988, and is becoming more and more prevalent in today’s world. Wikipedia defines ubiquitous computing as “a post-desktop model of human-computer interaction in which information processing has been thoroughly integrated into everyday objects and activities. In the course of ordinary activities, someone “using” ubiquitous computing engages many computational devices and systems simultaneously, and may not necessarily even be aware that they are doing so.”

Ubiquitous computing envelops concepts like ambient intelligence, ubiquitous learning, and context-aware pervasive systems. In short, this stuff makes the new iPad look like Fisher Price. Ubiquitous computing means your target markets are going to be accessible anywhere. Smart floors could identify and track people (including summoning assistance in the event of a fall), toilets could measure weight, fat, blood pressure, and heart beat, ubiquitous cities (U-cities) are even being built, like Korea’s New Songdo City where information systems like traffic, parking, hospitals, retail, and crime are linked, and your own personal RFID smart card controls your house keys, movie tickets, parking meters and more.

Can your radical creative marketing mind start to picture the opportunities? Don’t think of this as information overload, think of it as taking personal and relevant marketing opportunities to the extreme – truly to the individual.

Ubiquitous marketing is a term that is so new it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page as of this post (nor does ubiquitous advertising), but it speaks to marketing in an extremely relevant context – taking the concept of reaching the right people at the right time in the right place to a whole new level. It is two-way communication, at visible and invisible levels, all around us, all the time.

Consider providing a targeted online ad, knowing not only the consumer’s demographics, but also that they went to see an action movie last week, bought a high-performance bike, live in an A-frame in Tahoe, and booked a two-week camping trip to Yosemite. Would you put designer heels in front of this person, because her demographic profile that you currently have shows she’s a mid-income 23 year old girl?

Adam Greenfield (who visited us at Yahoo in 2006 and spawned the futurist fascination in me), wrote a book called Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing that explores the adaption and future of Weiser’s ubiquitous computing concept. Check it out for yourself.

Marketing Straight to the Brain

Did you know there are systems that can project a sound that only a specific person can hear? Imagine walking down the street in your home sweet U-city and when you’re within a block of a department store you hear a sound coming out of thin air that a pair of Adidas you’ve been trying to find are in stock at this store and on sale. Mix ubiquitous computing with Audio Spotlight’s hypersonic sound applications and you have just that.

How about getting TV commercial feedback from viewers by knowing what they’re feeling when they watch the ad, without consumer survey or online listening platform feedback? Already being done. Innometrics claims that of last year’s Superbowl ads, Careerbuilder.com had the highest engagement (this year’s results to come). They know this by measuring conscious and unconscious measures in the brain.

We put microchips in our pets’ necks to find them in case Fluffy should wander off and get lost someday. We’ve been experimenting with humans too, using the same technology (RFID) that U-cities are using. There have been tests on controlling human emotions through microchips, which is just downright scary when you put it in a marketing context, or worse yet, the possibility of being hacked. But awesome when you consider that microchip implants in the brain could help control the tremors in Parkinson’s Disease.

In 1998, Kevin Warwick, Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading, England, had a microchip implanted into the median nerves of his left arm, linking his nervous system directly to a computer in order to assess the latest technology for use with the disabled. They created the first extra-sensory input for a human and the first purely electronic communication experiment between the nervous systems of two humans – a computerized telepathy of sorts. While he was at it, he also had the chip in his arm open doors at his lab and turn on the lights for him when he entered.

According to Ray Kurzweil, an eccentric futurist and author of The Singularity is Near, we will be able to reverse engineer the brain by the year 2019. In reverse engineering the brain, nanobots inside the brain could replace actual senses with virtual senses, replacing actual experiences with virtual ones. Brain microchip experimentation for controlling disease was happening in the 1960s. This implies that software could be (and according to Kurzweil, already is) downloaded straight to the brain. Progress is being made in controlling a computer interface by reading the brain, and the future of gaming could likely go this way (no more expensive TVs broken by Wii controllers!).

All of this suggests that the future of marketing and advertising hasn’t even begun the profound changes we will encounter in the coming decades. Imagine providing singly personal and contextually relevant ads to specific individuals in shopping malls, on street corners, in virtual realities, or better yet, zapped directly to the brain. Imagine getting your marketing data from signals sent directly to your desk from inside your consumers heads…

This is the kind of stuff Neal Stephenson fans drool over, the kind of stuff sci-fi movies are made of, and the kind of stuff our real life, near term future holds for us. You can prepare for marketing through the newly released, highly hyped iPad, but I suggest you start keeping an eye on RFID systems that will hold our valuable marketing information in the near future.

See you there.

Feb 16 0 comments
SEM Industry, SEO, Search Marketing, Technology, The Future

The Future of Marketing Part 2: Exploding Marketing Channels, Devices and Platforms

We all know the marketing landscape is changing, and fast. The term “traditional marketing” is an everyday, commonly used term, meaning marketing beyond what is considered traditional is well-ingrained. It’s here to stay, but that doesn’t mean traditional marketing channels are dead and gone, (although some channels and agencies are on a slippery downward slope), moreover the landscape is just changing.

In the first part of The Future of Marketing Series we took a quick look at what people are searching for online around the future and the future of marketing to find that internet/online/web marketing is popular, followed by search marketing, email marketing and direct marketing respectively, and that they are interested in the future of their devices (computers and phones).

In Part 2, we’ll look at statistics behind the shift from traditional to interactive marketing, the explosion of channels and devices, and the inability of marketing management platforms to support the fast-growing industry, hindering marketers’ ability to manage true, complete, multi-channel marketing effectively through one platform.

Marketing Dollars are Shifting Towards Interactive

There are several sources citing a trend towards abandoning some traditional marketing channels for more interactive marketing:

Forrester’s US Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2009 To 2014 suggests that “Interactive marketing will near $55 billion and represent 21% of all marketing spend in 2014 as marketers shift dollars away from traditional media and toward search marketing, display advertising, email marketing, social media, and mobile marketing.”

 

Interactive Grows At The Expense Of Traditional Media

Figure 1: Forrester: Interactive Grows At The Expense Of Traditional Media

Figure 1: Forrester: Interactive Grows At The Expense Of Traditional Media

 

Marketers See Greater Potential in Interactive Channels

Figure 2: Forrester: Marketers See Greater Potential in Interactive Channels

Figure 2: Forrester: Marketers See Greater Potential in Interactive Channels

 

Forecast: US Interactive Marketing Spend, 2009 To 2014

Figure 3: Forrester Forecast: US Interactive Marketing Spend, 2009 To 2014

Figure 3: Forrester Forecast: US Interactive Marketing Spend, 2009 To 2014

 

Destinations Where You Reach Target Markets are Exploding and Fragmenting

Our grandparents told us stories about how the old days were so hard, how they had to walk to school in the snow uphill both ways with only bread and butter for their lunch. We’ve got it so easy today. Right? With marketing I dare to say it’s the other way around. People who’ve outlived their marketing days and retired before MySpace or the Blackberry are sitting back fat and happy and laughing at all the newcomers who have to make sense of social marketing, search marketing, digital book readers, mobile apps, local targeting, personal targeting, mobile marketing, interactive TV, slingboxes, popboxes, zaggboxes, boxees, iPhones, iPods, iPads… Who’s walking uphill both ways now?

I implore you to take a deep breath, close your eyes, take a step outside yourself and your marketing day-to-day, and think about this in a holistic manner. Because the information age is exploding with marketing channels and devices, each with its own features, uses, adoption demographics and shelf lives, one must consider all of this as a whole, rather than each channel and device separately – at least to understand the big picture.

We, as consumers, have been testing the technological grounds to find ways to stay entertained, informed, and connected throughout our day, in real time, when we want it, where we want it. As marketers, our target markets are still at the core. Just because social media marketing is all the rage right now, doesn’t mean you should blindly move your entire marketing budget there. In the same respect, creating an iPhone app just because everyone else is doing it doesn’t always translate into revenue. One thing that has stayed the same whether you’re a traditional marketer, a new media marketer, or something in-between is that you need to identify your target markets and determine how and where they ingest information, then determine your goals (traffic, brand awareness, double your revenue, etc), and then devise strategies for marketing and advertising in those channels.

Maybe your target market hasn’t fully adopted mobile yet – they don’t generally have smart phones, iPads, digital book readers, etc. Do this research before you spend all the time and money on a mobile app.

Maybe your goal is to increase brand advocacy among your targets so they are more of a fan of your brand than your competitor’s. Make sure your efforts are geared toward exactly that.

“Ready, Aim, Fire” vs “Fire…What Happened?” Simple isn’t it?

New technologies allow us to microtarget consumers, at local and personal levels, whenever they access information, wherever they are, which makes interactive marketing all the more relevant and useful for the consumer, and hopefully more targeted and profitable for you.

Define your target market. Define your goals. THEN define channels. Don’t forget to breathe, and everything will be ok.

Marketing and Advertising Management Platforms Aren’t Keeping Up

If you want to make some money, create a flexible, personalizable, multi-channel marketing platform that can keep up with the marketing industry. Better yet, plug that platform into cross-functional business platforms within an organization like Sales or Customer Service CRM platforms, and ad sales management platforms.

At the highest level (stepping back outside of our day-to-day), all of these business units work separately but as a whole, with the ultimate goal of making money for the company. Platform as a Service (PaaS) allows you to choose and connect your own platforms for managing whatever parts of the business you need to, and usually without having to hire someone to build and connect it all for you. For example, if my business needs software for managing sales, financials, and the company website, I can literally grab the apps I need and put all of those pieces together to form my cross-functional management platform.

Managing all of our complex marketing channels through one software (or even several pieces of software than can connect together) still has a lot of growing to do though – especially if we want to do listening, targeting, monitoring and even vendor management all in one place. Most marketing software focuses on traffic, conversions and/or ROI from traditional channels, with some Search, Mobile, and Social capabilities if you’re lucky. Free-standing Search, Mobile and Social software is usually much more robust since the primary business goals for those software creators has been much more targeted to one channel than the full-solution providers. Add on the different devices where we want to track impressions, adoption, clickthroughs, engagement, traffic, conversions, ROI… and.. well we’re still getting there.

Unfortunately as of yet, marketing analytics platforms, listening platforms, and PaaS solutions aren’t keeping up fast enough to allow advertisers to fully manage true multi-channel marketing, as fast as multi-channel marketing is evolving.

Forrester’s 2008 Enterprise Marketing Platform paper on this subject states “Eighty-three percent of marketers, a significant majority, tell us that they need a comprehensive marketing suite to improve their effectiveness.”

It suggests that today’s 6 core enterprise marketing platforms still do not support complete marketing information and efforts.

 

Forrester: Six Applications Dominate Today’s Enterprise Marketing Platform

Figure 4: Forrester: Six Applications Dominate Today’s Enterprise Marketing Platform

Figure 4: Forrester: Six Applications Dominate Today’s Enterprise Marketing Platform

With better tools to do the job, the future of interactive and comprehensive multi-channel marketing would surely become a more streamlined and uncomplicated process. And as we’ll see in the third and final post of this mini series on the Future of Marketing, this explosion is just the beginning. Soon everything will be computerized, potentially even our brains.  Imagine the splinterization of channels, devices and management platforms that will need to keep up with that…