Archive for April, 2007

Disruption Marketing is inventing new methods to disrupt the normal way your industry conducts business. It’s about creating compelling customer engagement, and stronger customer relationships.

Think of the last time you visited a doctor. How long did you have to wait in the waiting room after your appointment time? What subconcious message does the doctor send you? Do you feel he is being considerate of your time? Aren’t you his client. Shouldn’t he be more respectful of your time? So, now…imagine if a doctor advertised that he actually keeps ALL his appointments on time. That would be a form of Disruption Marketing!

How’s this relate to Paid Search? In my opinion, most Search firms need to learn how to integrate Paid Search campaigns with offline marketing. That would be a change in the traditional way Search firms just hand over keyword data, and the corresponding analysis & optimization recommendations to their clients.

How’s this relate to SEO Consultants? Many SEO Consultants charge by the hour. But, what if an SEO Consultant put some “skin into the game” by drastically lowering the hourly rate in return for a specific percentage of the incremental profit he generates. Let’s say reducing the hourly rate by 50%, in return for a percentage of the incremental revenue generated directly from his efforts. This would be a Disruptive change in the SEO industry business model.

The way to monitor and track such an arraingement would be to first establish a baseline of the success metric (eg: conversions). Then, use Web Analytics to track every conversion by keyword by engine. This quantitative data can be used to measure incremental profit.

Disruptive marketing can be used in areas such as: Market Positioning, Service Segmentation, Target Markets, Pricing Structure, etc.

Here are some cool Disruption Tools, including this Disruption Scorecard.

What to do with a limited SEO budget? Should you optimize 1 keyword phrase, or spread the budget around to a long list of keywords?

For example, we had a term that was not ranked in the top 50 results in Google before we began optimizing. We ran a small strategic Link Campaign & optimized the site.

I checked the results after the changes were implemented, and the client website is now ranked #7 for that term. Obviously, this is excellent for the initial results. However, they are still on the bottom of the search results page, and people need to scroll to see their website listing. Most people click on websites “above the fold” (that’s a newspaper term, for when people fold the newspaper to read it). Advertisements below the fold, usually do not get seen. Based on our preliminary success, it is my strong belief that we can attain a higher result “above the fold” if we run another Link Campaign, and do some more on-site optimizations.

There are about 19 other terms that haven’t improved much because we still need to optimize for them. So, my question is, should the client continue to spend the budget to champion the initial keyword, or just let it sit where it is (#7) and shift the budget to another keyword phrase?

The magic formula for SEO today is, Content & Links. You’re not going to get where you want to be by just improving content…or just manipulating source code. You need both on-site & off-site optimizations.

Industry research shows how Search Engine rank impacts traffic, and that the higher position you get, the more clicks from searchers you’ll receive.

So, my recommendation would be to champion the initial term before spending money (of the limited budget) on optimizing for other terms.

Myspace optimization is more than just ranking high for a specific set of keywords. It’s also about targeting your demographic so your advertising efforts will be more effective. Think of it as accumulating a large amount of friends in the right demographic, so you can communicate advertise to them more effectively.

According to Hitwise data, MySpace moves into #1 position for all internet sites. Saavy marketers are optimizing Myspace.

Here are a few ways to optimize a Myspace page:
1) Get more targeted friends (sort by demographic criteria).
2) Leave “friends” comments
3) Profile Customization
4) Send Bulletins
5) Sending mass private messages (with banner ad).
6) Writing keyword-rich content with appropriate outbound linking with deliberate anchor text.
7) Get inbound links from other websites besides MySpace.

Sending bulletins, and messages (Myspace email) can be a great method to drive targeted traffic to your page, which can lead to sign-up’s, adsense clicks, impressions, etc.

Encourage users to interact with your profile by offering downloads, wallpapers, screensavers, AIM icons, audio, video, etc. Be creative. Host weekly contests and product giveaways.

More and more big brand advertisers are creating their on Myspace page. Some examples are: The US Army , and the Honda Element Myspace profile, and the Aquafina Myspace page.

I have in mind large advertisers. The kind of advertisers doing large scale offline & online campaigns. There is a difference from just outsourcing to a Search firm, or allowing your ad agency to handle the Search component of the media plan.

Large Ad agencies can analyze and convey the relationship between online search behavior and offline behavior. Sophisticated Search marketers will integrate the data and interpet the matrix of integrated analysis for the client to make logical business decisions based on the integrated data analysis from online & offline.

The large ad agencies are best positioned to take the fullest advantage of Search Marketing and truely understand the data integration. It’s not just about handing the keyword performance data to the client. Online behavior is driving offline purchases, and offline behavior is driving online purchases. You have to look at search and how it interacts with your other channels…online & offline. How to best optimize a media plan. How Search interacts with direct mail, for example, beyond just online direct response.

This integration and data analysis has moved the large agency relationship deeper into strategic planning and business development.

After doing a recent SEO Audit, I started musing about all the different mathematical ratios we use to calculate the SEO strength of a website.

Text to Code Ratio:
We know that one of the factors that search engines use in ranking a webpage is the percentage of text on a web page. Simply put, “Text to Code ratio” is the amount of text on the page / the amount of html code on the page; expressed as a percentage. Search Engines use this ratio to determine the relevancy of a webpage. The higher the % of text to code ratio, the greater chance you have of ranking higher.

Text to Links ratio:
Is there an ideal amount of links to have on a page?
Is there a specific amount of links on a page when Google will stop attributing SEO value?
Is there a magic number of links with the keyword in the anchor text that boosts position in the SE’s?
Is there a secret text to link ratio?

Deep Link Ratio:
This ratio calculates the ratio of deep links — links to internal pages — versus the number of links to the homepage.

Keyword Density Ratio:
This is a measure of your keyword to the total text on the page; expressed as a percentage.

Return on Advertising Spend ratio:
A simple formula to calculate ROAS is: (Revenue-Advertising Cost)/ Advertising Cost. Then, multiply the ROAS by 100 to express as a percentage. Figure out how much new sales revenue resulted from Organic traffic from a keyword. For example, if you spent $10,000 in a month for SEO, but your Sales Revenue from that Keyword was $1,000,000, then more than likely the SEO campaign was a success.

Internal Link Percent:
The Internal Link Percent is the percentage of pages on the domain that link to the Target URL. To perform this manually on Yahoo, you’ll need to perform two (2) queries:
site:domain.com , then link:http://www.domain.com/target-url.html site:domain.com . The first will tell you how many pages are on the site, and the second will tell you what number of pages on that site link to the URL. You can then calculate the percentage manually.

Share of Traffic ratio:
Is defined as the ownership of clicks related to total keyword search volume. Basically, Share of Traffic is the traffic of a keyword expressed as a percentage of the universe of total traffic for the keyword.