Archive for May, 2010

Thinking outside the search box.

May 28th, 2010

I’m not going to bang on about how great search is, or about how you should make sure that your site maximises the use of SEO with PPC as part of an integrated strategy involving all types of media. Chances are you hear that all the time anyway if you work with us. However, I will look at some of the things that, for me, make natural search a unique experience – not just in marketing terms but in the way that people approach it, the way their minds work.

Clients are becoming increasingly involved with and interested in SEO, which I think is great. I have no idea why some companies still try and make SEO such a top secret operation. By now everyone on the ‘practitioner’ side ought to know that the best projects are the ones where we can help the client understand how natural search truly works, pushing aside the mystique. Once the client understands and believes in it, they are more likely to make changes. Just as the search algorithms constantly evolve, so does the need to clarify with more depth. We want clients to ask about our recommendations, or suggest recommendations of their own, as we’ll be glad to discuss and explain what we feel works best.

Of course, there is never just one right answer. There are so many factors that influence natural search that it is imperative that we continue to think outside of the box. For example, for one of our clients the biggest influence on their SEO traffic is daily news stories. It is not a news site, but if a subject is not on the news then no one searches for their related terms. Another example is a site which sees increased traffic whenever specific episodes of certain shows are shown on TV. The trick is spotting these trends and attempting to capitalise upon them. We’re not necessarily saying look out for every wave of traffic, but when you see one wave coming in, think about how you might catch the next. A referral from a search engine may not result in a sale right away, but other influences can help you convert it into a sale further down the road.

The worst thing you can do in SEO is think “if I do ‘A’, then ‘B’ will happen immediately”, and it is crucial that agencies and clients communicate to avoid this kind of assumption. When clients understand more about the process, hopefully conversations around SEO will go far beyond the ‘As’ and ‘Bs’, to questions such as the right way to link several sites together, or how to sculpt ‘link juice’, ‘page rank’ or ‘link strength’ within a site. Or on the PPC side, whether to use keywords with ‘free’ in them if you are targeting something that users have to pay for.

If you’re keeping score by the way, the short answers are: you can build some strength by connecting your different sites, but it needs to be done in a way that seems natural; for link strength if you don’t want a link to be followed, it’s not going to improve the other links on your page, in fact it can hurt the site overall as retaining link strength is unnatural; and last but not least, for the PPC question, yes, some of the best ‘paid’ conversions came from ‘free’ keywords.

As for the long answers, well that’s another conversation or blog post. Still, here at Reform we like being asked questions, because in the world of search there is always at least one answer…

Blog post by Niall Madden, SEO Director of Reform

The State of Search Marketing Survey – guest comment from Ed Stevenson, MD of Marin Software

May 21st, 2010

Congratulations on your recent State of Search report.  I thought it provided some extremely valuable insight into the big issues facing our industry.

In particular, I was interested in the things that advertisers want to see more of from their agencies. Here’s the full list from the report:

• More insights from performance data, not just impression levels and basic daily reporting
• Better recommendations that can be implemented quickly
• More transparency of data
• More pro-activity overall
• More advice and assistance planning with ATL activity
• Direct access to tools for data without waiting for agency to provide it
• Ability to do more structured testing
• More meaningful (not necessarily more detailed) reporting and analysis
• Better understanding of the client’s company and its products to make PPC campaign changes easier
• More integration between SEO and PPC

What I think shines through here is a growing desire for control: advertisers want more of it; agencies have not always been able to demonstrate they can provide it.

Of course, advertisers have always wanted to know how their search campaigns are performing, but – as the report clearly shows – search spend has increased dramatically both in absolute terms and as a share of the overall marketing mix in recent years. With this growth inevitably comes greater scrutiny and a desire for more intelligence around how search is directly impacting the business.

The report also shows where this appetite for greater control can logically end up – with search being taken in house. Almost a third (32%) of clients are now taking this option and over half considering doing so. Clearly, in some cases this can make very good sense and certainly knowledge of ‘how to do search’ is no longer confined to a small niche of agency specialists – the basics are becoming commoditised.

But I still strongly believe that in many cases agencies can play a vital role in giving an outside perspective and adding creativity to search campaigns that advertisers can benefit from. And in a world where demand for exceptional search talent still outstrips supply, agencies can help clients access the skills of the best people available.  As I’ve written about before on my own blog, I think to succeed agencies need to directly address the issue of control. They need to be more transparent in their reporting. And they need to offer not just information, but insight and intelligence about campaigns and relate that back to the businesses they are serving in a language they understand.

A third of clients already see search as too important to outsource – and they may well be right.  The key to the future of agencies is to develop such a deep understanding of their clients, combined with outstanding creativity, so that an agency relationship no longer feels like outsourcing at all.

Guest blog: Ed Stevenson has worked in the search industry since the early days of AdWords and is now the Managing Director of Marin Software in Europe. Read more about his take on the rapidly expanding world of big search marketing at http://www.bigsearchblog.com.

You can read more about this State of Search Marketing Survey and download the full report here: http://www.reformdigital.com/reform-search-marketing-survey.

The winds of change…

May 14th, 2010

Have you found it strange that so many commentators have been aghast as the new UK government formation has emerged over the last few days? Only a week ago we were off casting our votes at school halls up and down the country – did we realize what momentous change we were about to make at the time? Our vote appears to have delivered a completely new and surprising shape and flavour of government; only time will tell if it will pass the collective taste test.

‘Sense-making’ and ‘sense-guiding’ are how we join up the dots of change, giving meaning to ourselves and others when situations need order. It’s a rather retrospective endeavour, and I’ll give you odds now that future explanations of how our coalition government came to exist will have Gordon’s ‘bigot’ comment woven in somewhere central to the story. We all use it, and as participants in a knowledge-based economy, probably more frequently than most. Our digital world thrives on innovative thinking, surprises, and what can appear like chaos eventually emerging as opportunity. However, the temporal nature of this world throws up anomalies and uncertainties; what is robust and proven today can lost by the wayside tomorrow.

Change is everywhere, and it is no surprise that we seek out some certainties. We need to be able to make informed decisions that can guarantee us at least medium-term stability… don’t we? Whether we are aware of it or not, transformational changes such as our new government are not simply the result of our vote on the day, but a combination of small emergent changes effecting and affecting our environment, social and cultural world views, the economy and even technologies. These changes impact our perception, our ‘sense-making’, of how the shape shifts, with occasionally surprising outcomes.

Reform is in the business of making sense in real time of those incremental changes, whether emergent or planned. We can help realize our clients’ value, potential business development, and increased profitability. Through our process of exploring the business, utilising data, looking at search behaviours and so forth, we develop and deliver planning tools and action plans that enable truly transformational change outcomes, without causing a revolutionary shake down.

Blog post by Mary Keane-Dawson, non-Executive Director of Reform

You can take a horse to water…

May 10th, 2010

The web is a marvel that has transformed the way consumers interact with the suppliers of goods and services, but it has not changed some of the basic rules of merchandising. Over the last few years the BBC has run a few series featuring Mary Porter the ‘Queen of Shops’, where our inimitable heroine has been challenged to improve the retail performance of an assortment of different shops, ranging from the super fashionable to the charitable end of the perspective.

Some of her focus has been on signage and window displays in an effort to attract more visitors to the individual shops, but far more emphasis has been placed on what merchandise is bought, and crucially how this merchandise is displayed. Online retailers of both goods and services would do well to understand the importance of this distinction. It is all very well developing a highly optimised website that ensures that relevant keyword searches drive traffic to your site, or indeed targeting specific paid-for-search copy to attract visitors to specific features within your site.

However the key to successful deployment of search budgets is the adoption of a holistic approach that goes beyond making your site findable, but also facilitates transactions for prospective purchasers. This means considering the usability of sites both from the point of view of being able to quickly identify the specific goods or services within a site, and also being able to complete an informed purchase with the minimum of hassle.

As the Queen of Shops would tell you, there is no point having your best selling items in a dark room at the back of the shop and only having one till operator for a queue of thirty customers; especially if you have just spent thousands painting the outside and dressing the window. The same applies to search, where the most effective budgets will utilise search spending as part of a comprehensive marketing strategy and the best search practitioners will understand the wider ramifications for servicing the customers that they drive to your site.

Blog post by James Kilpatrick, non-Executive Director of Reform