Search Advisory

Come hear me speak this Thursday,

March 28, at a TAG Marketing event.  Here are the details:

The Heart of the Matter: How Content Drives Your Mobile, SEO, and Lead Gen Strategy

Many marketers think about content as another “to do” on their list of marketing tasks. But content strategists point out more and more how content is actually at the center of a multiplicity of marketing strategies. Without a content strategy, you don’t have a mobile strategy, an SEO strategy, or a lead generation strategy.

How do you create a content strategy to anchor your other marketing strategies? Our panel of experienced B2B and B2C content strategists from a variety of companies and industries will tell you how.

Event takeaways will include: (Read More…)

Earlier this month,

Google AdWords announced that it’ll be rolling out “enhanced campaigns” over the next six months.  Enhanced campaigns are designed to do two things:

•    Provide more targeted ads to searchers – the example Google’s giving is if you’re searching for “pizza” at noon on your work PC, an ad driving you to an online ordering form or menu is probably most relevant to you.  But if you’re searching for “pizza” at 7 pm on your smartphone and are a half mile from the restaurant, a click-to call phone number or restaurant locator may be more appropriate.

•    Make it easier for advertisers to serve up appropriate ads to searchers based on the device they’re using, their location, and the time of day, by automating and simplifying the above.

Sounds good, right?  And a lot about it is good.  We’re all increasingly using different devices throughout our day, and often for different purposes.  Advertisers can bid higher for more valuable searchers (based on device, location and time), or lower for those they value less.  Enhanced campaigns also come with better reporting that measure new conversion types, including phone calls, app downloads, and individual sitelinks.

But…where Google giveth, Google taketh away.  (Read More…)

Join SEMPO Atlanta for our first event of the year! You asked for a pure social event, and you’ve got it! Best of all, it’s being held at Atlanta’s latest microbrewery, Monday Night Brewing.

Their new event space just opened this week, so throw your tie up on their wall of ties (really!) and sample four types of brews. You’ll get to keep your Monday Night Brewing pint glass, and help yourself to Moe’s taco bar and desserts. So come join fellow digital marketers at a “business” event that’ll be pure fun.

Price: Special rates – FREE for SEMPO global members, $10 in advance for non-members, $15 at the door.

REGISTER HERE

THE FINE PRINT:
· The four beer tasting samples will be

8 ounces apiece, or 32 ounces of beer per person.”Unfortunately, state law does not allow a cash bar, so once your samples are gone, you’ll have to steal someone else’s glass to get more.
· Non-alcoholic beverages will be available.
· There’s plenty of free parking.
· Don’t worry about the weather – the space is indoor/outdoor and there are fire pits on the patio.
· Read more about Monday Night Brewing’s founders and how brewing beer started as a way for three friends to loosen their ties together on Monday nights.

Earlier this month, Facebook announced a new feature called “Graph Search,” currently in beta, which will allow users to run searches on information specific to Facebook and thus off-limits to Google, Yahoo, or Bing.  Graph Search will let you, for example, search for which restaurants your friends who live in San Francisco have visited.  You’ll be able to search for friends of friends who work for a particular company.  You’ll even have the ability to find which bands your friends Mary and John both like, prior to setting them up on a blind date.

Currently, Facebook handles about 1 billion search queries per day (roughly a fifth of Google’s volume), although most of those are probably for specific people or business pages.  If Facebook can change our collective searching habits, it may well steal some search market share from Google.  But it’ll have to do one thing first. (Read More…)

Here’s the email I sent to folks on the SEMPO Atlanta mailing list.  Please subscribe so you’ll be notified of upcoming events!

Thank you to those that took our survey last month. We asked what you’d like from us, and you told us! You said:

• You asked for Advanced content (78%), followed by Intermediate (50%). We will no longer hold Beginner-oriented events.
• Two thirds of you want to continue to meet in the evenings, but since half of you wish to have lunchtime events, we’re going to try some
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  of those this year too.

• Wednesday was the most desirable day to meet – you got it!
• Midtown was the favorite location, followed closely by Buckhead (the Westside was a distant third). Sorry, OTP folks – you’re going to have to continue to drive in.
• In addition to listening to educational speakers, you want to network. Several folks suggested a purely social event, so that’s coming up in February.
•  Most popular topics were, in order: (1) SEO; (2) search marketing tools; (3-5)a three-way tie between paid search, social/local/mobile, and analytics; and (6) landing page testing/conversion optimization/usability.  So that’s what we’ll focus on this year.

Please mark your calendars now – we

have selected the dates for all our meetings in 2013 (location to come).  We’ll be meeting the third Wednesdays of these five months:

• February 20, evening – this will be a purely social event! Details coming soon.
• April 17, lunch
• June 19, evening
• September 18, lunch
• November 20, evening

We’re looking forward to an exciting 2013, packed with cutting edge search marketing people and content!

Special thanks to

Dana Udwin, Lindsay Walker & Jeff Rowe, who contributed heavily to this article.

Your December wouldn’t be complete without Search Marketing Predictions for 2013, would it?  I thought not.  I decided to skip the obvious predictions that you’re no doubt already familiar with: the explosion of mobile, the continued importance of social media (in general, as well as in SEO), Google’s constant algorithm updates, etc.

Here, instead, are some less obvious search engine marketing trends that we believe will become even more noteworthy in 2013.

Search Engine Optimization:  On the SEO front, brevity is more appropriate than ever.  As search engines get smarter, they’re able to glean context much more quickly, so cramming paragraphs of optimized text onto a web page isn’t going to have the same effect as it did in the past.

At the risk of stating an obvious trend, having quality links – ideally, those you earn rather than those that you beg for – is going to continue to become more important.  Social media links and votes will grow in importance, particularly from Google+.  Whether or not you actually use Google+ as a social network, having the +1 button on your web content and sharing it on Google+ will help your SEO efforts. (Read More…)

Special thanks to Star Bradshaw, Senior Conversion Rate Optimizer, who contributed heavily to this article.

Although we’re primarily in the “drive more visitors to your website” business, we have long realized that the “getting more results from the visitors you’ve already got” approach is just as important, if not more so. After all, why drive traffic to a website so awful that people are going to bounce right off? Even if your website isn’t awful (and we’re sure it isn’t), there are probably things you could do to boost its performance.

All marketers should be engaged in continual Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Here are the six basic steps, as we see it. (Read More…)

Google is projecting that a majority of its users will access its services through mobile devices in 2013…a year that, might I remind you, begins in less than two months.  The company also reports that mobile searches have increased 200% so far this year, and Google-owned YouTube has seen a 300% increase in mobile traffic and views to date in 2012. More details are in this article.

In the meantime, with mobile growth at an explosive level, marketers should ensure they have a mobile website that’s user-friendly, and are leveraging mobile SEO and mobile paid search. It’s just not the same on a small screen!

If you’re like me, you’ve probably largely ignored the In-Page Analytics feature of Google Analytics. I played around with it, but never found it to be very helpful or accurate and relied on tools such as Clicktale or Crazy Egg instead to reveal u

ser interaction insights.

I’m pleased to learn that Google has announced significant improvements to this feature that might actually make it useful. The new and improved feature, referred to as Enhanced Link Attribution, should now provide accurate information such as:

• Distinguish between multiple links to the same destination page, attributing the right number of clicks to each link.
• Provide click-through information even when redirects are
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  being used.

• Provide click-through information for other elements such as buttons or navigation triggered by JavaScript code.

This is vastly better than the feature’s prior capability which showed the same statistics for two or more links pointing to the same destination page, making it impossible to tell which link was actually clicked.

Here are the details on how to set up Enhanced Link Attribution which requires adding two lines to your tracking snippet and enable the feature in the web property settings.

SEMPO Atlanta has another informative event planned for next Thursday, November 1. Join

us to hear a panel of experts speak about the latest and greatest with paid search, focusi

ng on the Display network and Retargeting (aka Remarketing). Here are the details:

We all know paid search and display ads are pillars of effective online advertising programs. Now, search retargeting has emerged to leverage the best features of search and display to deliver better clickthrough rates and brand value. Search retargeting can be predictive based on recently conducted searches or it can be contextual, targeting users who have recently clicked on a search ad.

Join us November 1st as experts from Yahoo, Simpli.fi, Magne+ic and Performics share insights and recommendations for using search retargeting to stretch online budgets, improve reach, ROI, CTR and deliver better online advertising results.

Speakers:

• Craig Osika, Director of Solutions Engineering, Yahoo
• Gus Spathis, CTO, Magnetic
• Dana Todd, SVP of Marketing & Business Development, Performics
• Donny Dye, VP of Strategic Partnerships, Simpli.fi

When: Thursday, November 1, 2012. 6:30 – 9:00 pm

Where: Ravinia Club, 2 Ravinia Drive, Suite 100, Atlanta, GA, 30346

Cost: Free for SEMPO global members, $25 in advance or $35 at the door for non-members

Parking: Free

Register here today!