Nothing to do with search engine optimisation, but great for business optimisation in these recessionary times!

MYOB training seminars

SureFire Search is delighted to announce the appointment of Jeremy Templer to the newly created position of client services director.

A returning Kiwi expat, Jeremy brings a vast amount of in depth search marketing knowledge gained from over 13 years  working in highly competitive offshore search markets.

His most recent role was in San Francisco as Director of Search Marketing for global interactive services company Acxiom.  Prior to this Jeremy was a senior manager at US web analytics and business optimisation company Coremetrics where he established an in-house search agency managing search campaigns for Coremetric clients.  Jeremy has also worked in a range of roles both in Australia & the USA for search advertising network LookSmart.

We’re really pleased to welcome Jeremy to the SureFire Team & know that our clients will benefit from the extensive knowledge & skills he’s gained working in highly competitive markets that are significantly further along the curve than the relatively immature NZ search market.

If you’d like to meet up with Jeremy to discuss your search marketing requirements please contact us.

With the flood of businesses choosing to advertise via Paid Search, it has become increasingly more difficult to gain the desired campaign ROI which was once so easy to achieve. The fact is, many organisations are making a number of mistakes and are not maximising there profits from Paid Search. Listed below are five ways to get the most out of your Paid Search campaigns.

1. Position one in Google isn’t always the best position to be in.

As marketers, this goes totally against our competitive nature. We all want our ads on the coveted position inside the cover of a magazine, or our TVC shown during primetime television. But the truth of the matter is that search engine advertising is different. Occupying the first ad position in Google is only important for a selection of keywords.

Generally, there are five steps to the consumer purchasing process;

1. Identify a need/want which needs to be satisfied

2. Search for a solution

3. Evaluation of alternatives

4. Purchase

5. Buyers dissonance

For search engine advertising, we focus on in the middle three steps, starting with ‘searching for a solution’. Typically consumers weigh up a number of alternatives before making a purchase. Consumers will click on two-three (sometimes more) ads before evaluating alternatives.  Therefore, advertisers can avoid paying the premium of occupying position one as lower ranked ads are going to be clicked. For example, if you owned a company selling dieting books, you wouldn’t want to rank number one for the search phrases ‘how to lose weight’ or ‘diets that work’ as these are ‘searching for a solution’ based phrases.

The same applies when consumers are evaluating their alternative solutions and would apply for broad product related searches such as ‘compare diet books’ or ‘top five gyms’.  Also, when consumers are doing comparison shopping they’ll click on a number of ads to check the offerings of different advertisers – in the same way people typically don’t buy from the first shop they walk in to. For such search queries the perfect ad position is the last one people click on – not the first!

Where you do want to rank high in the search results is for purchasing keywords. For example, you would want to occupy the top positions for keywords such as ‘buy diet books’ or ‘apply gym online’.

2. Failing to apply the correct match types to keywords will hurt your ROI.

Identify the right match type for your keywords is critical to the success of your campaign. With Google there are three match types, ‘Broad’, ‘Phrase’ and ‘Exact’. Yahoo! has two types; ‘Standard’ and ‘Advanced’. Google’s ‘Broad’ and Yahoo’s ‘Standard’ match types are the default when setting up your campaigns and as the names state, they provides the ability to drive a wide range of visitors through to you website, including those you want to target and those who are less valuable. By only using broad/standard match in your campaigns, you are channeling a high number of unqualified visitors to your website which reduces your ROAS and is essentially a waste of money.

Furthermore, if you were to target using only Google’s ‘Exact’ or yahoo’s ‘Advanced’ match there is the potential that you are neglecting qualified traffic which will be snatched up by your competitors.

By analysing your keywords and using the suitable match type, you are ensuring that you are driving quality traffic to your website which will convert.

3. Failing to include negative keywords will also hurt your ROI.

Negative keywords play a vital part in controlling the quality of the traffic being driven via your campaigns. Negative keywords can be either associated with the keywords that you are targeting within your campaign, but are not resulting in conversions, or keywords which when combined with your keywords have a different meaning e.g. you are a educational institution and targeting keywords such as ‘degree’, ‘courses’, ‘study’ etc… you would have the negative keywords ‘free’, ‘fake’, ‘buy’ as negatives . By using negative keywords, you are weeding out irrelevant searches and saving your budget for qualified traffic.

4. Having too broader ad groups makes it hard to target customers.

Simply put, your ads must match the keywords your customers are searching for. If your ads do not contain your keywords or there relevant synonyms then your ads will not appear relevant to your customers and will not stand out against the competition. This is magnified by the fact that when an ad contains the keywords a customer use within a search the matching keyword is highlighted in bold.

5. Test, test, then test again.

Testing variations of your ads is critical to your campaigns success. Starting with totally different ad copy and working through to the finer details can drastically improve your ROI. By testing your ads ‘call to action’, titles, the two lines of copy, and display URL you can fast discover what catches your customers eye and what doesn’t.

The bottom line is that by keeping a close eye on your Paid Search campaign and constantly tweaking all of its aspects both large and small you will provide the best possible chance of driving the right kind of traffic to your website.  However, in order to maximise your ROI from Paid Search requires investing a lot of time & effort into proactive & continuous campaign management. If you don’t have the time available or specialist skills necessary then it should be outsourced to specialists. So if you are taking a set and forget approach to Paid Search, perhaps it’s time to reassess your strategy. Otherwise you are wasting your time and money.

By Craig Whitaker

Welcome to part 2 of this article which examines the relative benefits of both SEO and paid search. In Part 1 we looked at the pros & cons of paid search and saw there are some very compelling reasons for using it.

Time now to switch gears and look at Search Engine Optimisation (commonly abbreviated to SEO).

SEO is relatively ‘geeky’ and so many marketers struggle getting their heads around it compared to paid search (commonly abbreviated to PPC). However to ignore SEO is a mistake because it’s a great way of driving additional customers to your website. Having said that we’ll start with looking at the cons.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Cons:

The first thing to understand is that, contrary to popular misconceptions SEO is NOT ‘Free’. Whereas PPC is a ‘pay as you go’ model, SEO has front loaded costs and is, arguably, more expensive then PPC in the shorter term. The analogy to renting versus owning a house has been made.

SEO, especially in competitive areas, involves a lot more time & hard work than most people anticipate. Invariably changes to the website are required. This involves not only changes to site architecture & structure, but also changes to the content. Then the hard work really starts with link building…

Other negatives of SEO compared to paid search are:

• Limited keywords – as previously noted a page can usually only be optimised properly for 1 or 2 related search terms (keywords) which limits the number of keywords you can target compared to paid search.
• Lack of control over position – SEO is all about trying to influence search engines so they recognise your page as being highly relevant for a certain keyword phrase and thus rank it in the first page or two of organic search results. In SEO there are no guarantees in terms of ranking positions, despite what some con artists may state. The reality is you can’t guarantee what you don’t control & SEO is about influence, not control. So unlike paid search you can’t readily change where your listing is positioned in the search results. In contrast with PPC you can actively modify bids & preferred ad rank positions to test if, say, position 3 works better than position 1.
• Lack of control over landing pages - for the same reasons you do not have the same level of control with SEO determining which pages Google selects to include in its organic results compared to the high level of control paid search offers.
• Results take time – for people used to the relatively instantaneous results seen from paid search this is one of SEO’s biggest drawbacks. The plain simple fact is that SEO takes time before it shows results – and the more competitive the keywords you want to rank for the longer the wait. Generally it takes 3 – 6 + months before a site starts to rank for the primary keywords being targeted. If you need results yesterday, SEO is not the answer!

The time before results get seen combined with the limited level of control means that for most marketers SEO requires a ‘leap of faith’. For this reason we find most are far more comfortable starting off their search marketing efforts on a limited scale with paid search, then based on its success scaling that up and then later adding in SEO.

SEO Pros:

Having read about the cons you may well be wondering why you’d bother with SEO. Hang in there, the reasons are very, very compelling. Essentially it comes down to performance & cost.

1. More traffic – 70 – 75% of all search traffic is organic, rather than from paid search advertisements. The reason for this relates to the buying cycle. When people are in the early stages of information gathering & research they are far more inclined to focus on organic search results rather than paid ads. So if your SEO efforts get you ranking well in the organic results your chances of prospective buyers going to your website are enhanced.
2. Higher conversion rates – conversion rates from organic results are often higher than paid search traffic.
3. Lower cost over time – whilst SEO is definitely not free and takes more time, money & effort upfront than paid search the cost over the longer term is much lower because you’re not paying per click. For this reason getting good SEO work done on your website is a smart long lasting investment.

So which is better, SEO or PPC?

Really it depends on your objectives & situation. However we usually recommend running an integrated search marketing campaign with both to exploit complementary strengths of SEO & PPC. A typical SEO/PPC mix for a new website is often:

1. Start with PPC campaign
2. Implement SEO campaign
3. Progressively reduce PPC when SEO kicks in
4. Continue SEO with tactical PPC if needed

Do you need both SEO & PPC?

This debate frequently comes up when a client who has been using paid search for a particular keyword starts to rank well organically for it. “Great, we’re ranking organically so now we can ditch paying for this traffic using PPC”. That’s a reasonable conclusion to draw, especially for your brand name, however there are several reasons to stick with PPC even when you’re ranking well organically.

• Increased chances of being clicked on. With organic listings Google & other search engines normally will only show a maximum of 2 listings for any one website. So even if you are in the enviable position of having 2 results on page 1 of Google, by also having a PPC paid ad you increase your presence on the page by 50% & thus chance of being clicked on. Whilst you’d prefer they click your organic listing, as long as you’re bidding a sensible amount for paid search you still win.
• Paid & Natural Search Performance Synergy. There is evidence that having high organic & paid search results for a keyword leads to an uplift in performance for both – effectively a 1+1=3 effect.
• A study in March 2007 by iCrossing (Search Synergy: Natural and Paid Search Symbiosis) concluded that “Running natural and paid search campaigns in an integrated manner leads to superior online performance versus running either of them alone.”

  

• As the chart shows online performance for a range of key metrics improved significantly when natural & paid search were integrated. Why this happens is not clear – some speculate that having top results in both organic and PPC listings can help build the credibility of the site (Customer: “Hey, these guys are all over this page! They must be the industry leader” or something along those lines.)
• Other reasons for running both SEO & paid search include:
  • You have control over your brand message
  • Prevent competitor brand squatting in PPC search space (Prevent “Broad Matching” algorithms, and unscrupulous practices from putting your competitor’s ads above your natural search link for brand searches)
  • It’s insurance. If you slip from the organic rankings for a day or two, your paid ranking will maintain your presence.

Conclusion

1. SEO & Paid Search are each very effective ways of driving additional traffic to your website.
2. For maximum search marketing performance use both together & leverage their complementary strengths.

Mark Sceats