When the going gets tough…

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Just last might I was reflecting to a friend that we had been unexpectedly busy recently with lots of enquiries, proposals and statements of work going out the door, many of them related to search marketing and SEO in particular. Then this morning I read Rand Fishkin’s post over at SEOmoz:

In the last 6 weeks, SEOmoz has received a higher than normal volume of requests for consulting. Alongside that, we’ve been getting calls from venture capital firms out of the blue - seven to date – asking either about investments they’re considering in the SEO sphere (and requesting insight) or literally asking whether SEOmoz would like to take more capital to grow (post about that coming soon). And it’s not just us. The jobs and contracts section of the Marketplace has been humming in November, and anecdotal conversations with other SEO firms tell me there’s quite a bit of business to be had for both in-house and external SEOs.

Read the full post: Why Companies are Investing in SEO During the Economic Downturn

One thing that really rings true for me is his point about interest in SEO being driven by paid search marketing. With the ROI on PPC being so immediate and accountable it is only natural for Marketing Managers to start asking about the other 70% of search queries which don’t result in a click on a paid listing. How good would it be for your business if you could rank top 10 for those?

Marine Electronics Case Study

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“Netconcepts took away the headache of getting the site built so I didn’t have to manage it too closely.”

In March 2008 Blair Peach, Director of Marine Electronics launched their new ecommerce website, designed and built by Netconcepts, with the aim of shaking up the recreational marine industry online.

With many marine related websites in New Zealand being a “jack of all trades” by selling everything from ropes to wrenches, Marine Electronics differs by targeting the recreational fisherman and boat owner by being a price competitive specialist in marine electronics.

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Marketing is an Art and a Science

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This post over at Idealog caught my attention this morning…

Google chief executive Eric Schmidt told a recent Advertising Age conference that the future of advertising lies in measurement. But, to quote the genius campaign for Toyota’s Signature range of imported used cars: they would say that.

It would be easy to assume that Google is utterly unbiased—the numbers don’t lie, after all. But data (gathered after the event) doesn’t necessarily amount to intelligence.

If Google is right we will have gone from one extreme to the other. Rampant idealism meets bloodless statistics.

read the full article

The point I think David MacGregor is making is that marketing and advertising are not just about statistics, and that we should not let Google’s algorithmic approach to what they do vanillify marketing practice. And I have to say that I agree in large part…marketing is about people and when it comes to people there’s always more art than science imho.

But marketing and advertising is an art in the conception and the execution (just like business generally). Google are pioneering ways to execute better but I don’t think that necessarily means there isn’t still plenty of scope for well conceived advertising creative.

Even in Google’s Adwords product there’s a need for creativity and persuasion. For sure it is very a limited medium, but good ‘creative’ copy in search marketing can move ROI + or – an enormous amount. And Google’s Adwords product isn’t just about what you do to get the click, that’s only half the job (or less), what happens after the click is probably more important…enter stage left talented marketers.

So, I would argue that Google’s algorithmic approach doesn’t reduce the need or importance of good creative marketing and advertising (the big idea!), but does bring some long overdue science to the execution. Measurement is really important. Particularly as the economy tightens good marketers want to know where the ROI is.

But then again, I’m a dyed in the wool search marketer so I would say that :)

Blended Search

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This article also appears in the September edition of NZ Marketing magazine

What is search engine optimisation? The usual reply is “oh, that’s placing keywords on the homepage of your website”. Truth is there is much more involved in optimising a website, and it is goes well beyond just the words on your pages.  Indeed, where the end goal is to generate qualified traffic to a website to reach marketing objectives it does not necessarily mean that only your website needs to be optimised.

The term “Blended Search” represents the various online media and search products that can be found in search results today. Traditional web search is only one product offered by search engines. Other search media include images, video, news, people, maps, documents, directories, books and blogs.

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Online Retail Seminar Series

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I just got back from a really great seminar series organized by e-retail consultant Cate Bryant under the auspices of the New Zealand Retailers Association. It was a great event with fantastic presentations from Grant Jennings of Ezibuy and Vikki Branagan, former CEO of Stevens. Sailesh Manga (of Optimal Usability), Cate, and myself also did some site reviews of well known Kiwi eCommerce sites as well as some on the fly assessments of sites volunteered by attendees. The event was held over three days in Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch and I think was genuinely useful for all the attendees. If you are in the business of online retail I would recommend looking for the next in this series which will feature a talk by Will Hunsinger, ex VP of Gap online in the US.

A couple of takeways for me related to the use of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) in the online retail space, which was something the Ezibuy team talked to, and also the idea of Gift Giving as an online retail strategy which is what Vikki Branagan talked about. I’ll be following up with some posts reflecting on both these soon.

If you are interested in search…

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Just a quick one to point out this post on the official Google blog by one of their ‘Google Fellows’, Amit Singhal. Of course it doesn’t dive too deep, but it is a good read if you are interested in the way Google works. I also find it interesting because it seems to signal an intent to be a bit more communicative with the marketplace…

As part of our effort to discuss search quality, I want to tell you more about the technologies behind our ranking. The core technology in our ranking system comes from the academic field of Information Retrieval (IR)…read more.

The post goes on to talk about one of my favorite topics, searcher intent, but one of the take aways for me was the reminder that Google not only has to solve the problem of indexing and understanding the content of pages on the web, but they also have to solve the problem of understanding search queries, which might be mispelled, have double meanings or be otherwise non-specific. Amit gives some great examples to illustrate these.

Searchme brings graphical search interface

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I’m not really looking for a new search interface, the fast and easy Google interface is good enough for me. But people (developers and marketers) always want to bring us new things. Now, Searchme delivers the new graphical search interface – the iTunes Cover Flow style. While it’s still in Beta, the quality of the search results is still not up-to-speed. And the question is “do we really need to search this way?”. But anyway, it’s a very interesting thing to watch.

Apart from the graphical search interface, Searchme also provides a service called Searchme Stacks which is much cooler and useful in my opinion. You can create any stacks with your favorite websites and share with others, through email, social bookmarks or drop onto your blog, like the one below:

New Top Level Domains – A Big Deal?

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The internet governing body ICANN recently announced plans to open up the top level domain system, allowing individuals and companies alike to apply for their own top level domains (TLDs). This paves the way for potentially millions of new domain names from .hotels to .surfing to .whateveryouwant.

There are currently just 21 top level domains available, but with this new announcement, an infinite number of domains could be on the horizon. Brands such as Apple will be able to register .apple, and cities such as Auckland could register .auckland.

But will this have as big of an impact on the online sector as many are speculating? Is it really a big deal?

My initial thought was that this would increase the threat of cyber-squatting exponentially. Would this flood of new domain names force organisations to register all their brands and trademarks to prevent others from obtaining and exploiting them?

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Firefox 3 – Download Day

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Firefox 3 Download DayJune 17th was the day Mozilla released it’s latest version of the Firefox browser, Firefox 3.0. This was not only Firefox 3 launch day though. With the release of Firefox 3 this also kicked into action Download Day. Download Day was a campaign Mozilla was pushing to set a new Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in a 24 hour period, coinciding with the launch of Firefox 3.

According to the Download Day headquarters, they got more than 8 million Firefox 3 downloads in 24 hours. That’s more Firefox downloads than they’ve ever had in a single day and it created a new Guinness World Record.

The Download Day microsite exists within Mozilla’s official community marketing site, Spread Firefox. At Download Day headquarters you were able to make a pledge that you were going to download Firefox 3 prior to launch day, with the pledge results being displayed via an interactive world map. This map was a good touch as not only could you see the total amount of pledges worldwide, but going off some of the comments in the various Mozilla groups and forums, it probably helped engage a bit of competitiveness between some countries, thus encouraging more pledges.

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So Flash is now indexable…

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flash.jpgBig news broke in the search engine world last week…Flash files (.swf) can now be indexed by the major search engines. Flash developers will be rejoicing, but at the risk of being a killjoy I’m not sure this is really worthy of celebrating…

The news broke last week, but honestly it feels like more of a PR exercise for Adobe than any real break though in the search friendliness of Flash. Our recommendation is still to use Flash only for rich media, and leave content and navigation to HTML, which will always do a better job.

The announcement actually opens more questions than provides answers, and here’s a few reasons to remain cautious… Continue reading →