By Gareth Owen, Search Engine Watch, Feb 16 2011

Alex Cohen yesterday wrote about how paid results are increasingly getting clicks at the expense of organic results in “PPC vs. SEO: Paid Search as Your Organic Competitor.”

Today, we’ll look at some of the changes in how we attribute value in SEO, and how we’re increasingly turning to tactics that were previously considered to be the realm of paid search professionals in order to meet client expectations.

Three trends have led this charge:

1.A clear and continuing drop in the value of major generic keywords in natural search (historic data, Google products, use of search).
2.Renewed interest in exactly how the “halo” effect of optimization works and how ROI can be attributed.
3.Speed of results from good optimization.
Drop in Generic Keywords in Natural Search

This has been driven partly by people and partly by the search engines. Check Google Trends for any number of “high volume” generic keywords (car insurance, televisions, loans, dishwashers, handbags, etc.) and you’ll see a consistent trend over the last five years.

While I wouldn’t necessarily put 100 percent faith in the figures, they would reflect a degree of reality from what I see in client campaigns.

Look at searches for [televisions]:

Aside from drop in volumes, the space attributed to natural search results has been quite drastically cut in a number of areas.

Paid search results consistently give three listings at the top of the page now, with sitelinks and product feed results too. They can even push natural search listings below the fold on some screens.

To further complicate matters, there are now many more “products” (e.g., local business results, shopping feed listings) to compete against. In a world where rankings used to really matter, position three is no longer position three.

Renewed Focus on ‘Halo’ Search Traffic

Anyone who has ever optimized their own website will tell you that building links for a certain keyword (e.g., “hamster cage”) will improve your ranking. But these links, as well as URL and branded links, will also improve the overall authority of your site after you get your first number one ranking, making it easier for your site to rank more easily for other keywords.

Attributing this value, however, is actually quite hard unless you’re starting from scratch.

The upshot has been that keyword ranking reports are getting bigger and bigger in order to more clearly show traffic increases as direct results of specific keyword ranking improvements. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as long as other metrics like the total number of keywords driving traffic are also considered.

This is in turn moving us toward reports that include so much keyword data that merging PPC and SEO reports at keyword level could become much easier.

It has also meant that the keywords being targeted for SEO are bigger in number. Consider making bigger lists of categorized keywords for SEO a part of your strategy.

SEO Techniques Work Much Quicker Than Ever Before

This can be attributed to a number of factors and developments. But the sheer speed of indexing from Google in particular has undoubtedly been a factor.

On the plus side: small keywords can be targeted more easily, as the results of your activities are that much quicker and more transparent than ever before.

All in all, the keyword research and granular focus of PPC is becoming ever more a part of SEO — and this is no bad thing!

By Duncan Parry, Search Engine Watch,  Feb 2, 2011

Following its successful rollout in North America, Microsoft and Yahoo are focusing on rolling out the Search Alliance in Europe, starting with natural search results on Yahoo UK.

This move is largely welcome. With a UK market share of less than 10 percent for Yahoo and MSN, it makes more sense to manage campaigns on one interface. Right now, Yahoo staff are being trained on adCenter in preparation for moving their clients’ campaigns over.

Filling in my agency’s response to the European investigation into Google, I had to list a number of features of the AdWords platform. We all know the depth and breadth of development of AdWords outpaced Yahoo (and Overture) and comparative newcomer Microsoft a long time ago.

But where are the beta trials from Redmond? Where are the new initiatives, the new ideas from engineers that will differentiate the adCenter platform from AdWords, raise the revenue per search Microsoft receives, and grow loyalty with advertisers?

Try as I might, I can’t remember the last “big” change or enhancement on adCenter since Microsoft launched a desktop tool similar to AdWords Editor.

Parallel Races

It’s easy to sit outside a company and poke holes at their strategy. Microsoft has lots of intelligent, hard-working people who are pushing their search efforts forward — sometimes despite other people internally, I suspect.

They’ve built a search engine, created a PPC platform, and started to take the fight to Google (but let’s be honest, Yahoo’s been the main loser and Ask was already fading away).

As Bing introduced new features and received attention, Google seemed to wake out of a slumber and started rolling out new features in search results, continued its relentless development of AdWords and, with increasing speed, the development of its display business through DoubleClick.

So the foundations are firmly in place from Microsoft. They’re gaining traffic from their Yahoo deal and their own activities. Bing keeps adding new features.

But where’s the innovation in adCenter? I’m not talking blog posts, research reports, or tools around-the-edge (which they are often good at); I’m talking hardcore, at-the-center innovation that every advertiser, big or small, will be able to use. Things like Google’s sitelinks — self-service, enhancing search results and, crucially from a revenue per search basis, raising CTRs (and often ROI for advertisers — leading to increased budgets).

Several races are happening in parallel here. Market share is one, but there are others (e.g., innovation in PPC, further exploiting the connection between display and search).

Microsoft and Yahoo have strong experience in display and have done some work in this area — but Google is catching up, fast. They may not have the premium level display inventory Yahoo and Microsoft have access to, but with remarketing in AdWords Google has made the sort of retargeting once considered the preserve of the most well-funded advertisers available to all.

Search marketers are adopting this tactic in droves — but only on Google’s platform or through third parties — not adCenter.

What Could Microsoft Do?

So, if I think Microsoft should be innovating more in PPC, what would I suggest? The obvious example, sitelinks, bears some thinking about.

Sitelinks undoubtedly offer convenient ways for site owners to channel consumers into the right section of a site following a one-word brand search or ambiguous generic. The format and mechanics could be different — sitelinks can be improved in terms of reporting data and control over which links are shown.

Is this copying an idea and developing it further? Yes. After all, Google wasn’t the first PPC engine — they took the idea and added engineering rocket fuel.

Several other areas spring to mind — things Google is already doing, but not always that well: local information in PPC ads, incorporating feeds to enhance PPC ads (more control of which products display for which searches would be a start), and the ability to buy non-premium display inventory via adCenter for retargeting.

There are probably much better ideas out there, not to mention the ones bubbling away in the heads of engineers at Microsoft.

Do I feel Microsoft is distracted by the challenge of onboarding an increased volume of traffic, new advertisers, and training Yahoo!’s staff? Yes.

Do I hope we’ll see a burst of innovation on adCenter afterward? Yes.

But underlying concern is it’ll be too late — Google will have moved ahead in all these races, and there will be new ones opening up that adCenter won’t be equipped to enter. That will be bad for all of us in search — especially those of us in a market where Google already dominates 90 percent of searches.

We are delighted to have been appointed by online print business MOO.COM to handle its international digital marketing activity.  The account, which was won in a three-way agency pitch, will focus on paid search and digital display advertising, and we will be responsible for driving sales and acquiring new customers across UK, USA, Australia and other English speaking territories.  We will utilise teams in our London, New York and Melbourne offices to manage the MOO account.

Our task is to help raise awareness of the MOO brand and its range of innovative personalised print products and accessories through targeted display campaigns and to drive a high volume of quality traffic to MOO through paid search.

Paul Lewis, Head of Marketing at MOO comments, “We’re excited to be working with Steak; we feel that their energy and passion, as well as their understanding of driving efficient results, is a great fit with MOO as we look to accelerate global growth”.

Phil Burgess, Client Service Director at Steak adds, “MOO is one of those brands that you can’t help falling in love with a little bit, because it mixes traditional skills such as print and makes it personal and accessible to everyone via the web. We’re looking forward to working with them across multiple territories and utilising the Steak network to deliver sales”.

MOO, founded in 2004, combines the values of professional design with the accessibility and reach of the Internet.  With the patent-pending ‘Printfinity’ technology, MOO helps its customers to showcase their business or brand, their products or personality, by printing a different image on every card in a pack.  MOO has raised over US $5M in venture capital from the Accelerator Group, Index Ventures and Atlas Venture – the investors behind Skype, Betfair, Lovefilm, Last.fm and MySQL.  MOO’s customer base extends to 180 countries, and has a 75% NetPromoter rating.

Press Coverage:

Campaign

Brand Republic

Media Week

Marketing Magazine

By Duncan Parry, Search Engine Watch,  Nov 19, 2010

The search industry never stops. From AltaVista to Google, and GoToast to Search Ignite, the fortunes of companies and technologies evolve over time.

I was reminded of this recently when training new hires. They’d never head of names like AltaVista, Excite, Lycos, etc. — companies that defined the search space less than 10 years ago.

So, how do you keep up to date?

Ignore the Noise

It’s important to recognize that there are many, many blogs and articles published about search every day — and many more “experts” on forums and Twitter and in Facebook and LinkedIn groups.

You can ignore most of them. The ability of the search industry to report on, discuss, analyze, argue about, and regurgitate a fact until it has been distorted out of all proportion and attained myth-like status is legendary. There’s a lot of noise — so you need to spend your limited time on sites that are credible and, most importantly, correct.

It’s also important to note that the search engines are no longer search companies — they offer much broader product lines; so you will need to keep up to date on developments in all their products, too, as search is often integrated into them (and paid search revenues pay for them).

Select an RSS Reader

I can’t think of an industry news site that doesn’t have an RSS feed — so choosing a good reader is crucial. There are many available. I use Google Reader to collate and organize feeds by topic in folders as it’s tied to my Google login and easy to use on any computer, iPad, or mobile.

I often use Feedly linked to Google Reader as it offers a slicker interface that feels closer to a magazine. Another bonus of Google Reader is that you can add any URL to it — not just RSS feeds — and Reader will monitor the page for changes and present them as if a feed has updated.

Many sites offer several feeds — follow those most relevant to your area of work and interests; it’s easy to overload yourself with feeds and find you have more than 100 articles to wade through every morning. Pretty soon you’ll find you’re too busy to bother, and end up reading nothing.

Keep an Eye on the Mainstream Press

Sometimes announcements by the search engines receive mainstream coverage — or a story breaks about a negative issue, like the recent Google Street View privacy coverage. Add the technology sections of mainstream sites like the New York Times, USA Today, BBC News, etc., to your reader to ensure you know the stories your clients (and their bosses) are reading over their breakfast.

Digital Overall

To keep any eye on the wider industry I follow a few key sites — Mashable, The Next Web, Robert Scoble, John Battelle’s Search Blog, and Econsultancy, to name a few.

The Search Stalwarts

There are a few search-focused sites that are must-reads. Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Land are the two heavyweights; I receive their newsletters every morning as well as follow their feeds; they provide a summary of the most important search news and topics. Search Engine Roundtable is also important and often have details of new Google tests or rumors with some basis to them as reported on other sites or forums.

There are of course many other digital industry and search sites — the above sites link to good sources as they cover stories, helping you find other sources.

Don’t Forget To Cull

One last piece of advice: don’t forget to delete feeds. Over time, sites change editor, or their focus shifts or their writing declines in quality. So when a site seems to publish nothing of interest, delete it — your time is precious.

Advertisers are continuously being tasked with the challenge of successfully maintaining a working and efficient partnership between an established paid search team and the affiliates that use PPC as their main income source.

For the majority of paid search teams, PPC affiliates represent a major challenge as the lack of direct communication and an often precarious overall strategy makes the affiliate unpredictable and sometimes results in conflict for all sides.

In order to make the two parts work together, the client must sit down with their appointed PPC agency team and not only construct a “crystal clear” strategy that points out the “allowed” and not “allowed”, but also to establish what is the role of the PPC affiliates in the overall picture.

It is important to consider that some of the “converting” terms could be distributed to the affiliate, as the earnings they make on these terms can then be invested in generic keywords. The PPC partner will not survive and can not sustain the activity on misspellings and low volume terms alone;  this has been reinforced with the launch of Google Instant.

If the affiliate manager and the advertiser decide that the PPC affiliate should be involved in the programme, they must understand that this partner is a compliment to the main paid search channel and that with good planning the results can be more than satisfactory.

One strategy is to implement dayparting to bring balance between the two sides and also ensure that the highly converting times are covered and that potential converting terms are explored thoroughly.

There is no doubt that a good partnership can bring good results, but it is essential to lay down the rules of the game and ensure both sides are happy before campaigns go live.

By Duncan Parry, Search Engine Watch,  Oct 22, 2010

Recently I posted some tips for paid search newbies. This time, I’m focusing on five ways the stakeholders employing PPC experts can help (or hinder) their efforts.

Communicate!

I still hear of situations where agencies or in-house teams are told days (or even hours) beforehand of a site change — whether it’s a page moving, new product launch or worse, lots of changes. Sometimes they find out only when performance drops.

This never ceases to surprise — search has been around long enough for many marketers to know that on-site changes have an impact on campaigns and sales figures often suffer as a result.

Let everybody know about a likely change, even if it’s not signed off, so they can plan resources, assess any impact on performance, and provide feedback that might improve performance even further (especially in terms of SEO and AdWords quality score optimization). A “mundane” change might be the opportunity to use technical resource already secured to make additional changes that will have a positive impact.

Go Beyond The Click

Many brands give their experts the scope to significantly boost their traffic and achieve their KPIs — but don’t involve them formally in what happens post-click.

Optimizing landing pages can significantly improve quality score and aid SEO — that’s a given. Perhaps more significantly for the bottom line and senior management, combining this with optimizing all the steps to sale can create a further step-change across all traffic sources, not just search.

Recently, I helped a client’s internal team go from a 2 percent to 9 percent conversion rate in one redesign, which helped them exceed targets and invest more budget.

Optimizing pages and the path to conversion, as well as campaigns, creates a positive feedback loop; as every dollar spent on traffic works harder because the site works harder, so keywords or placements that were previously ruled out on a performance basis can come back into reach — exposing the brand to more consumers and potentially increasing market share.

Google knows this — hence Google Optimizer being provided for free.

Automate

PPC can become extremely time consuming — especially if inventory changes on the website a lot, whether in terms of stock levels or prices.

Feeds are a perfect way to automate much of the change required, and some paid search tools can work with them to automate this work. Yet many brands don’t have adequate feeds in terms of content, quality, or frequency of update.

Educate Upwards

A scenario I’ve encountered many times:

1.Campaign starts.
2.Initial data is used to optimize, changing average positions.
3.Client’s boss phones up and angrily asks “Why aren’t we number one for keyword X?”
4.Agency receives a worried or irate phone call or e-mail.
5.Agency diverts time to answering this with a presentation for the boss, meaning they have less time to make the client money by further optimizing campaigns.
This doesn’t need to happen. Much of this time can be saved by educating upwards.

Explain to senior stakeholder that positions are based on achieving targets, not ego building. This is a fundamental step in managing expectations — and yet so often, doesn’t happen and PPC experts find themselves under largely unnecessary pressure born of misunderstanding.

Challenge

After the initial launch period, it’s easy for campaign reporting and meetings to become repetitive and even stale. Challenge the teams — asking what they would do in perfect world of unlimited budget and resource (within reason!) can kick start interesting conversations and ideas — especially if you throw the doors open to other digital channels, the website itself, and business processes.

A client recently started a meeting with several agencies by saying “There are no sacred cows — everything is up for discussion and change today.” I wholeheartedly agree.

I doubt there’s a single PPC team that doesn’t have a mental wish list of three or four things they would fix if they were in control — tap into that. Your sales figures may well thank you.

A colleague in the Steak London office recently shared an interesting Marketing Sherpa survey of 2,000 marketers about their attitudes to paid search. I expected the results to be obvious – most use PPC, most are happy with their results and ROI, a small minority are cutting budgets…

I was wrong. The survey of US marketers revealed that for 33% “PPC is a promising tactic and will eventually produce ROI. Let’s increase budget but do it conservatively”.

Perceptions of PPC at Budget Time - From Marketing Sherpa

So a third of marketers hope their PPC campaigns “eventually produce ROI”. Coming from a search background where direct response is the bread and butter of campaigns, this is shocking. Are their campaigns poorly managed? Or are they so sophisticated they are thinking about life time value KPIs they don’t yet have visibility on?

I can’t imagine a whole third work for businesses with that sort of model, so can only conclude there are fundamental issues with their campaigns or verticals.

Another 15% only carry out PPC when time permits and don’t have visability on ROI. No doubt technical issues are part of this story, preventing accurate tracking – I know many businesses struggle with capturing the source of phone leads, for example (something we have a solution for at Steak).

The survey provides a reality check for anybody working in digital who thinks “everybody knows about paid search” or “everybody know how to measure their ROI”. As Nathan Williams argues, talk of a “post digital” age is, frankly, utter nonsense.

Many businesses are still getting their digital houses in order, sorting their technical and marketing infrastructure and reaching out to agencies to educate them on how to achieve ROI or branding metrics in a measured way, even in more “established” digital disciplines like PPC.

Targeting is one of the corner stones of the success of paid search. The ability to place a message in front of consumers actively seeking out the advertiser’s product is gold dust – if you had told an Ad Man in 1950s Madison Avenue you could do that and provide them statistics related to copy and location, they’d have offered you their daughter’s hand in marriage. And a large bourbon.

One area of targeting in paid search that seems to be missed repeatedly is the use of negatives. Each week I see ads in search results that clearly shouldn’t be there and are diluting CTRs and Quality Score; the examples are numerous but a recent example:

Google results for "Stolen Cars for Sale"

I am confident that Ask and VivaStreet do not want to be aiding car crime, but without “stolen” as a negative in their account (ideally at campaign level) they’ll continue to be the car thieves best friend. Negatives are not hard to come by. Good sources include:

• Google Keyword Tool
• Search Query Reports
• Analytics / Server Log Search Strings
• Related Keyword Tools
• Typo and Misspelling Generators
• Brainstorming around a topic (with a good old pen and paper!)
• Common Sense!

There’s really no excuse – Google introduced Search Query Reports to help with this based on advertiser and agency feedback, my own small voice included. When I started out in search in 1999 we had no keyword research tools that were UK specific (even at search engine Lycos where I worked) so we’re spoilt these days – and there’s no excuse!

Google recently announced that AdWords Product Extensions would be available to all UK advertisers, after what feels like a very long period of beta testing with select merchants.

They look like this, for anybody unfamiliar with them:

Adwords Product Extensions Results for Mountain Bikes

Product extensions provide consumers with additional (mainly visual) information about products, and provide advertisers with more of a showcase for their wares. I have to admit I’ve yet to click through because of them – a situation that will no doubt change as coverage rises.

I can see them working especially well for advertisers offering products in the same category that appeal to different tastes but that attract the same keywords – e.g. different types of chair (antique carved wood to minimalist metal) listed in a Product Box triggered by “dining chairs”.

However, my betting is many retailers are unable to quickly adopt Product Extensions – because of their own website technology. I never cease to be amazed by the number of brands who have a good website and little or no capability to regularly create, manipulate, update and publish feeds from it; meaning they can’t utilise Google Merchant Centre to boost their product coverage in Google. There are lots of brands out there whom think they have feeds and are fine; in fact their feeds are often lacking photos, basic information (i.e. data attributes) and generally are a dog’s dinner.

Of course here at Steak we have tried and tested ways around these problems using our own capabilities or those of selected 3rd party providers, but the fact remains: brands would save themselves time, money and missed sales if they paid feeds a little more attention; something underscored by some of the points made in Gareth and I’s Splinternet essay and talks. Feeds are going to be more important in future – not less; Product Extensions are just one immediate example of that.

Yesterday I posted a FAQ on Google Instant and discussed if consumers will hate it.

Today I’m going to look at what this might mean for campaigns; the reality is nobody will know for sure until they have gathered data over a decent period of time, roll-out has finished to eligible computers – and consumers have got used to the feature.

US and UK Rollout – A Big Difference

Below are my thoughts from a UK point of view – Steak NYC will be posting their thoughts shortly, too. There is already an important US to UK difference – in the UK, you have to be logged in to a Google Account for Instant to work; in the US, all consumers will see it if their browser etc supports it.

Here are my (UK centric) thoughts:

Impressions on Generic Terms to Rise?

The idea is simple; as consumers start typing, they may be driven by Google’s suggestions to use generics more (either by clicking through, or by reading search results for more than the 3 seconds Google requires to count an impression). I’m not so sure this will happen – see my comments on the long tail below – and I think this would provide consumers less relevant results; a real threat to Google’s loyal user base who love it’s relevancy.

Impressions on Brand Terms to Rise?

I’ve seen a lot of brands appear in results when I start typing – for example “e” brings up eBay results, potentially increasing impressions for this brand term. The same is true of many other letters in the UK and US, and no doubt this spreads to other brands 2 or 3 letters into typing.

If a consumer is starting to type in a non-brand search, and happens to be shown a relevant brand by Instant, then there is the possibility they will go to that site straight away – robbing competitors of the opportunity to compete for them in “normal” non-brand search results.

Brand CPCs to Rise?

This may well happen because of the knock-on affect of more impressions without a click as a result of the above, affecting brands whom are shown for searches where they receive no click – but do have an impression counted against them. However, if the market as a whole experiences this, the competitive affects may be limited – everybody will have the same experience.

Long Tail to Suffer?

I’ve seen a lot of commentary stating that the long tail will suffer, and even that businesses that receive most of their traffic and sales via it will die.

If Google can show search results within a few letters that are relevant compared to the long(er) tail query the consumer was going to type in, then some long tail queries will be diverted onto generic terms of one or two words. However – so far – I’ve rarely had this experience when searching with Instant. No doubt Google will improve the algorithm – it is only day 2, after all.

The more I consider this and talk to colleagues, the less likely this seems, so…

Long Tail To Grow around Suggested Search Strings?

Consumers who are typing in a long tail search know they need to use several words to find what they are looking for – they are taking deliberate action based on past experience. Will they suddenly abandon that behaviour because Google is showing them search results as they type the first few letters? I don’t think many will – if anything, they will “type past” Google’s suggestions to the results they want (i.e. that are relevant) – and maybe add to/edit the long tail search as they see the results it generates. Something they probably would have done anyway, over several distinct searches on the “old” Google.

So long tail might grow – as more consumers notice that the search results change as they type and they think more explicitly about what they are typing, they may be driven to enter more words to refine their search or use the suggested search terms that seem relevant. This would raise long term volumes and, for suggested searches, effectively push consumers onto “predefined” search strings with all the impact increased competition on a term brings for advertisers.

More Keywords To Add?

Google Instant may mean that some consumers start to click through on “half-formed” search terms – e.g. somebody who was going to type in “home insurance” clicking through on a site shown for “home ins”. This may in affect create new keywords to add to campaigns, researched by brainstorming or reviewing analytics/tracking alongside the normal keyword tools. Match type settings will play a part in this coverage, too, for paid search campaigns, and I imagine that Google will ensure broad match covers some of these searches off.

Ranking Even More Important?

As consumers quickly scan results as they type, sites below the fold won’t get any opportunity to catch their eye and draw their click – somebody typing isn’t scrolling. So ranking above the fold will be important in this situation.

Dust-Off Abandoned Generics

A very interesting point Mark in our New York office has made is that brands may need to look at increasing exposure on generic (aka head) terms to ensure they are ranked well for the first term consumers will see results for as they type; so there could well be increased competition for generic, one-word terms. It may be worth re-considering generics previously removed from keyword lists because of high CPCs/competition across paid/ natural search…

Conclusion

I don’t think a fundamental shift to generic terms will occur; I’m increasingly thinking that consumers will start to click through from longer search strings, either by clicking on a search suggestion or typing more words in; if anything Instant will prompt them to improve the way they search.

However, the jury is still out and I know colleagues here at Steak and elsewhere in the industry have different opinions…

So I could be wrong – for all the technology, commentary and gut instinct we all collectively have, consumers can be notoriously unpredictable and the ultimate test will only be time – and data. I can see a long Excel session coming on…

UPDATE:

Our sister agency Minute Steak have also been blogging about Google Instant during it’s beta testing and also their thoughts on the launch and its implications.