“The [seo] challenge comes from a combination of:

• The need to create new content that travels and that others are motivated to link to
• Convincing web site owners that they need to create and promote content on an ongoing basis outside of their brochureware corporate site or online product catalog

…. “Long term, promotion of content that attracts relevant links from those empowered to publish will win. The act of linking is performed, unsolicited, by individual publishers.”

One undercurrent effect here is that there is a shift in responsibility for the success of a site from the SEO (with his bag of tricks, magic levers and dials) to the site owner (producing relevant, domain specific content worthy of links.) It also may spell a major shift in the role of SEO to content producer for some companies, and not a lot of SEOs will be able to deliver on this.

I’ve seen, time and time again, that getting a company to assign (talented) resources to the production of content is very difficult. Either because of laziness or lack of long-term mindset, there is a rift that develops between the consulting SEO’s recommendations and the company’s willingness or ability.

So, the clients nod at the ‘you’ll need to produce quality content‘ task discussion, when time comes, nothing gets done. Either they will avoid the task altogether or they’ll assign “an intern” or someone that’s already doing 3 jobs to the work… and the output hardly counts as link worthy.

That rift causes huge levels of stress and can be interpreted as a lack of ability on the SEO’s part. Saying “but you’re producing crap content” hardly mends the issue. It will be the responsibility of the skilled SEO to not only identify and recommend the content production, but also in educating clients on the value of this activity.

Image: Mikel Ortega

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As you can see the content that wins is ‘tabular’ in nature. That is, it tabulates in the form of a list or in a list of comparisons, etc.

With the new Keywords + Placements feature you do not have to create seperate campaigns for keyword and placement-targeted campaigns. In each Ad-group, you now have tabs for each content network method… cool!

This will let you isolate areas of weak or strong performance. So if you’re targeting a home improvement portal with your placements, but you only sell plumbing supplies, you can more accurately limit ad display to pages with plumbing items.

When you choose to run your ads anywhere on the content network, AdWords compares your keywords to available ad placements to find good matches for your ad. (If you have the keyword digital cameras, your ad is likely to appear next to content about digital cameras.) When you choose ‘Relevant pages only on the placements I target,’ your ad can show only on the places within the content network that you select yourself.

We should be able to see better stats now on reports, and also be able to tweak bidding based on the quality of a placement-keyword ad’s performance.

So… what’s improved:

1. precision in targeting by adding a “dial” for keywords used in placement ads. You don’t have to appear on irrelevant pages in a given placement when it is not matched to your keyphrases.

2. bidding control - adjust bids to suit the quality of the placement

3. bidding CPM with keywords, not just placements. So you can do either or both.

4. Ability to do better testing with placements. Even though I’m going to approach this carefully, it gives us the chance to split test and multivariate test performance of keyword-specific ads in the content network. This could help with reducing the time necessary to get statistical significance on the sample size

How it works

Keywords are scanned and then Google will scan the content network and find all matches for a given keywords. Your settings determine what happens next. Either it will kick in the whole contextual network or it will use your placements list, and filter it based on your keyword choices.

AdWords also takes keyword matching down to the page level. If a placement has many different pages, only those pages that match your keywords can show your ads. For instance, suppose placement A is a website about flowers, with 100 different pages: five about red roses, and 95 about other flower varieties. AdWords may identify only those five pages about red roses as a good match for your keyword. Your ad won’t appear on the other 95 pages of A, even though you’ve targeted the entire website, if those pages aren’t a good match for your keywords.

What I expect

In addition to saving time on campaign creation, this should help clickthrough rates (CTRs) and performance of campaigns on adsense properties which have general content on most of the site, but have an area of interest to you that has specific content.

I have some campaigns right now that will benefit…Looking forward to using it!

Venn Diagram photo by Lisa Williams used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License

Some of the concepts covered

• Make sure the filenames are SEO friendly
• Update your Meta Data
• Check the password protection
• Add a specialty introduction page to help search engines
• Use reading order tags

Enjoy!

It also rekindled my thinking that I need to finally change the name of my firm. You all know what a joy doing that is, especially when you have strong search rank for your old domain name.

I hear this all the time

“I’m a designer and I don’t really do I.T.”
“I’m more of an I.T. person, I don’t really do design.”
“I looked at competitor sites and built something similar.”
“We don’t really look at our site’s statistics much.”
…and on….

I’m old. I’m blessed (cursed?) with a background EXTENSIVE in both I.T., Design, and Search Marketing. What I realized even with the different viewpoints is that SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is far more important than any pixel tweaking or snazzy coding ever was or would be to the growth of a web business. I imagine I see the world like those flies that have 100s of lenses each giving a slightly different angle on things.

In 1998 when I started, I was all about web design and meta tags, but over the next 3-4 years, through 2002, I did more and more real search marketing. By 2004, it was almost full-time, a split between organic SEO, PPC, and landing page optimization. Design was done as a necessary vehicle to achieve search rank - sort of a super-landing-page project (in my mind at least.) Site Creations, Inc. doesn’t fit anymore. I’m going to have to rebrand soon to be faithful to this change.

I feel that no design should be started without a true SEM expert present at the meeting, and throughout design. This introduces confusion into my sales activity, of course. Most people come to me wanting web design, often for abysmal product offerings. I want to help, but unless they have a great offer, and truly understand how conversion-driven design works, I have a hard time staying enthused unless we can address some of the underlying issues first. I thought David Rodnitzky did a nice job of summing up one way this can work:

….frequently pitch clients on a combination of ongoing SEM consulting and a one-time usability tune-up. Again, this is a win-win situation – I get more of the client’s business by charging for the usability assessment, the client gets a much better converting Web site out of the deal, and we both end up satisfied with the increased success of the search engine marketing campaign….

….it’s important as a consultant to try to bring these folks at least a little closer to earth and establish realistic and clearly understood goals at the beginning of the relationship….

I realize that I.T. and design skills are both vital to the success of many sites - features, functions, branding, and identity are naturally very important. But when “expertise-egos” get in the way, you lose. When that feature is taken too far for no good reason, or when that customer-driven design compromise makes you feel defensive, it’s time to hand over the keys.

From Google:

“Automatic matching shows your ads on relevant search queries not already captured by your keywords. It works by analyzing the content of the landing pages, ads, and keywords in your ad group. It then shows your ads on search queries relevant to this information. The system will continually monitor your performance on these queries and adjust its matches accordingly. Automatic matching aims to show your ads only on queries that yield a high clickthrough rate (CTR) and a cost-per-click (CPC) comparable to or lower than your ad group’s current average CPC. This way, your ads receive additional targeted traffic at a similar cost to your current traffic. Automatic matching won’t allow your spend to exceed your budget, and it also won’t affect the traffic you’re currently receiving. In addition, automatic matching will have no impact if your campaigns already capture the majority of relevant traffic.”

I’ve not used this system ( I wasn’t in the beta ) but even just reading this email I can already list at least 9 things I dislike about it.

1. It does the equivalent of keyword research on the fly, trying out keywords to see if “they stick” based on Google’s data. This removes the human from keyword research. My experience is that 80% of keyword research is ELIMINATION of poor quality choices before you spend money on using them in your campaign. In other words, there is a lot of intuition applied based on advertiser domain knowledge and automatic match eliminates that phase. While some may think this approach is a good way to learn keywords to use, I think there are better ways, especially when they involve harvesting keyword data and then doing some smart detective work on the results.

2. The almost impossible task of creating negative keywords that will negate the constant algorithmic display of Google-chosen keywords. Think “automated embedded match without the associated automation on the negative embedded match side…. How often will you check it? How often will amateur or new advertisers? I’m guessing never. So you will very likely end up advertising for phrases where you do not offer the product being searched for - a classic waste scenario.

3. The enabling of the system by default. Many advertisers won’t know what hit them. While Google has assured everyone that this is an optional system, it would be likely that it will be turned on.

4. It further dismantles the smart idea of keyword-specific URLs and landing page parameters, not to mention dynamic keyword insertion. Caveat - I have no idea how Google will handle existing exact match and phrase match keywords - I’m assuming it will use the old rule of most-restriction-first-shown.

5. It spends your budget. All of it, on your behalf. With my clients, I prefer to ease “up” to their daily budget. That means starting with precision matches and loosening them gradually to find a sweet spot between relevance and volume. This way you don’t waste money or possibly reduce quality score while you tweak your campaigns or testing (by throttling our ads.)

6. It encourages lazy adwords management. When your ad campaigns are running, having them unattended can create an unhealthy black box between you and your pay per click. The variety of auctions, bid types and match types already has advertisers perplexed - and adding another dimension will make it worse. I really worry about “rush” and “fire and forget” Adwords solutions. They are insanely wasteful. This is why I hate turnkey PPC setup programs.

7. The only way you can see what queries are generating ads is to turn on a Search Query Performance report and watch for irrelevant queries - then create negative keywords for them as they come up, whack-a-mole-style. A never ending cycle that few advertisers will remember to do.

8. Advertisers will need to look at the special Automatic Keyword Performance data in reports to see how well these automatic matches are working and add special tags to your destination URLs for logfile analysis. This means yet another tag on the URLs.

9. Google does a pretty bad job of limiting broad match. With this already causing grief, are we really going to make things better by loosening it further? Yes, I know - some of you will say that broad match has its place in pay per click marketing. As Brent Hodgson expertly points out, perhaps that it’s a way to cast a net and capture heretofore unknown keyphrases. If you have endless funds, yes. But it’s a bit like testing newly designed bulletproof vests on real humans - it’s nice when you get it right - but when you don’t, it’s bloody expensive. I think other keyword development tools + log analysis + intuition + internal search logs make a hell of a lot more sense.

The right way to do Adwords

Take the time to grow a keyphrase list, divisions into thematic adgroups, and built up a collection of negative campaign and adgroup keyphrases that use phrase and exact match. Easing into your budget using split testing of ads and optimization of landing pages, you can eliminate broad match (conceding: except on your experimental campaigns.) This process alone can improve the conversion performance of your campaigns by a factor of three or four.

I should underscore that I’ve not used the system, but I’m very familiar with adwords and extended broad match issues. Is there a chance that the algorithmic remnant-sale system will work? I guess, but only if your Adwords campaigns were AWFUL to begin with and you’re willing to throw money to the wind and see where it lands.

Ok, it’s the middle of the night and I’m sitting in a rock hard airport chair, but my mind is on the takeaways that I have from the SMX Social Media conference. Much of this I knew, but it was heavily re-enforced.

The bigest benefit, as with most of these small shows, is the contacts and friendships I have started or continued. I think the best in the world were at the show, and for clients who seek out these people, huge success awaits.

While I think the overall presentation quality was high, my favorites were Randy Woods‘ well-grounded discussion and Rob Key’s insightful discussion about tribal culture and Second Life. I was also impressed by Brent Csutoras’ discussion about link building.

But the client-marketer relationship was the one thing that bugged me most. Nobody seemed keen on sharing information about this essential element of the SMM profession, yet I could definitely sense lots of folks were seeking it. I often wonder if conference organizers should think more about the harsh, real-world realities of getting programs like these in place. Or perhaps there’s just no way to wrap that up into a single presentation.

20 Take-Aways:

1. Social Media Marketing (SMM) is terrific for link building, not for conversions. This is a major change for many marketers to internalize and incorporate into their offering.
2. It takes a special kind of client/consultant relationship to make SMM work. It’s closer to organic SEO work than any other web marketing in the “grind-it-out” nature.
3. SMM cannot be sold as a one-off service or “by the campaign.” Too many external variables mean you have to execute many campaigns over time to hedge your bets. To sell as a one-off service is to invite failure and client ill-will.
4. SMM requires incredible organization on the part of the marketer. Both to keep track of a campaign and to make sure not to break out of acceptable tribal ‘participation.’
5. SMM link building requires a keen eye for linkbait that relates to your marketing goals and finesse to make sure it’s not overtly sales-like in presentation.
6. Vertical social networks should be an important part of any campaign. Smaller numbers of highly enthusiastic players are using these sites.
7. Explaining SMM to clients is going to be very, very difficult. But those who have an inherent curiosity and willingness to participate will earn a strong competitive advantage.
8. Having a strong network of friends is essential to SMM, and that network requires daily nurturing.
9. Wikipedia makes Digg look like a baby traffic wise, and there are opportunities…but…
10. Wikipedia sessions feel a lot like COBOL classes. Even if the people are smart, that whole thing requires a really strong level of patience and persistence. But 5m+ page views daily makes marketers salivate.
11. People need to create policies to outline who owns SMM profiles, what happens when there is a change of hands.
12. To succeed in social network marketing, plugged-in individuals who know the “tribe’s habits” will win. 20-year PR veterans need not apply if they are still in the mindset of the press release or are unwilling to spend time participating before promoting. Plenty of people have got in trouble.
13. There are a lot of really smart people in SMM. Compared to other forms of marketing, the growth and opportunity aligns with trends towards authenticity, word-of-mouth, and making up for short consumer attention spans.
14. One of my greatest worries is that clients will write off SMM while their competition runs with it. I worry because catch-up is a tough game to play in SMM and you can’t rush it.
15. Even one SPAM slip-up in a social network can ruin an entire branding or SMM effort. Social networks have zero tolerance for screw-ups. Re-building a profile can take 6 months or more of hard work.
16. SMM is risky if your brand is fragile or an easy target - putting your brand out in the public eye requires awareness of the cost-benefits. Almost always it’s worth it - that is if you sell a decent product, but you will need to weather the storm of negatives that will come your way with skill.
17. Advertising agencies don’t get it, for the most part.
18. SEO/SMM are joined at the hip for many things and a link building effort can stack up dozens if not hundreds of authority links…but direct-click traffic itself, independent of the SEO/link advantages, can be significant.
19. Participation in social networks - real participation - is a requirement, and is very time consuming. I left wondering who will pay for this time.
20. Red-eyes suck.

A few other places to get SMX social-media related information. Add more to comments and I’ll add to this list with ‘follow’

Coverage of the Jason Calacanis and Jimmy Wales panel
More coverage of the Social Search: The Human Challengers
Social Media Marketing Essentials
Linkbait - Chumming for Traffic on Social Media Sites
Extra! Extra! The Social News Sites
A Marketer’s Guide to Social Bookmarking

Sloppy PPC

Broad match PPC ads with DKI are sloppy. Such automated ads rarely improve the search experience.  A few more advanced PPC managers create morphing landing pages that account for this…but most advertisers are winging it.

Luckily for searchers - the syntax is hard for newbies and scares away many amateur advertisers. But there are plenty of fire-and-forget adwords buyers who are using it.

The only way I can see DKI being useful for those who care about the performance of their campaigns is through their use with exact match and highly researched keyphrases on the search network only. Here, you can insert text into the ad and guide the user into a relevant, thematic adgroup that funnels people into a landing page for the purpose. If the phrase doesn’t appear in the list you’ve defined, your ad does not display.

Will Quality Score Take Care of the Problem?

Will Quality Score slaps get rid of this problem on their own?  I’m not sure.  My tests have not shown any impact on costs of ‘poor’ ads using DKI that I’ve seen from clients.  The silly ads just keep running.  Google has said before that they use only exact matches to do the calculation, and they will disable poor quality keywords… but it still gets confusing about exactly what happens in the broad match + DKI situation.  I guess it depends on the landing pages.

Trademark Troubles

The trouble starts when people begin to enter trademarked terms. Now, the ad-buying company is posting ads generated by the search activity that might include trademarked phrases. This negligence appears to be gaining some legal footing as a justifiable lawsuit, where earlier it was a bit fuzzy and things were happening on both sides. Only if you post negative keyphrases of all trademarked terms in your industry can you prevent it.

Exact match DKI - What would this do?

Exact match DKI prevents the problem, improves the ads, and puts the responsibility for legal keyword use in ads squarely on the advertiser. If the ad showed the keyword in ad copy, there is no question the phrase is in the advertisers’ keyword list somewhere.  Google can disable poor quality keywords straightaway from the keyword list rather than through some mysterious invisible system.

What are your thoughts? Should Google block DKI on broad match? What are some good uses of this you’ve found? Does quality score, which is determined through exact match vesion of keyphrase only

It’s unacceptable. Business customers deserve honesty, integrity and more help in understanding which are selling bullshit and which have the needed expertise. If a product or service isn’t going to fly online, they deserve to be told so, and why- not bled dry.

I envision a process including the following steps in order to make this happen: 1. Define commonly used search marketing tactics; 2. Rate the tactics by risk level; and 3. Educate webmasters on the ratings… he search engines provide Webmasters with guidelines on what tactics they consider right or wrong. Enumerating the various tactics, and the risk rating associated with each tactic would allow people who are not familiar with search marketing to make informed decisions. It would also go a long way toward fostering a better understanding of the work that goes into organic search engine optimization.

So here I cast my link juice to this article about SEO/SEM Standards and why they’re needed. Chris, you did well, my man.

Go check it out.

What I’m hearing about the new Google Automatic Matching beta is that they will look at unspent funds in your account, and “spend it for you” on terms its algorithms deem appropriate. I blew this off at first thinking it sounded like a rumor, but am now hearing more buzz about it.

Some advertisers received this note (I have not verified this note with Google!)

I’m excited to tell you that you have been selected to participate in a beta for our new automatic matching feature which will be starting on February 28th.

Automatic matching automatically extends your campaign’s reach by using surplus budget to serve your ads on relevant search queries that are not already triggered by your keyword lists. By analyzing the structure and content of your website and AdWords campaigns, we deliver more impressions and clicks while maintaining your current CTRs and CPCs.

For example, If you sold Adidas shoes on your website, automatic matching would automatically crawl your landing page and target your campaigns to queries such as: “shoes” “adidas” “athletic”, etc., and less obvious ones such as “slippers” that our system has determined will benefit you and likely lead to a conversion on your site.

Be assured that automatic matching will try to never exceed your budget. If you’re already meeting your daily budgets, automatic matching will have a minimal effect on your account.

Hat tip Dan Thies

It sounds like Google is saying “If you aren’t going to use our keyword research tools, we’re going to use them for you.” If I don’t sell Adidas slippers on my athletic shoes website, I’m going to be rather ticked off to spend money on it, especially when I’ve optimized my landing page for athletic shoes.

This is the difference between having someone help you who’s on your side, versus someone who’s on Google’s side. Last Summer, I let Google “optimize” one of my very small campaigns (yes, I saved the existing one!) and it was a fiasco. The campaign was set up to broadly snag tire-kickers who were not even remotely interested in the offering. But it would spend every penny of their budget, every day. It was optimized for Google - not for me.

One of the most important things about pay-per-click, pay-per-call and pay-per-action marketing is how it “curve-fits” demand and gives you the ability to control how tight or loosely you surround a niche. Optimally, you’re only getting calls or actions relative to the actionable interest the public has in your offering.

Well-written ads and landing pages can increase efficiency and reduce waste. If you do good work on that, you are able to market right at your potential and control things very precisely. You can then take your remaining marketing budget and spend it on other high-value activities, such as SEO or Social Media marketing. Google rewards relevant advertising with a quality score, which in turn improves your position and reduces your costs per click. These motivations have kept PPC marketing “honest” - meaning you either succeed by doing great marketing work or you fail (big) by being lazy.

It sounds like this may be turned on without users knowing it….like the way Google handled the Content Network setup (default=0n). A while ago, Google set up content-bids, and then they improved reporting, it still makes little sense unless you truly know what you’re doing.

Every client coming to me desperate for help with Adwords spend has content network on (without knowing it) and using broad match - showing ads in places that seemed “plausable” but which returned horrific return on investment. Fixing those problems provides immediate benefit, and setting up a long-tail keyphrase arrangement can turn a money-burning adwords campaign into a profit center for the customer. No, Google doesn’t make as much money this way but my clients see dramatic improvements. When you know what you’re doing, opting into the content network may make sense.

caveat: These comments are all qualified by “I’ve not tried it.”

Postscript: AdwordsAdvisor posted in WebmasterWorld these comments.

A few quick comments, as I see this subject is generating quite a lot of interest and speculation:

* First off, I have already passed your feedback along to the right teams - so your comments and concerns have been heard - and will continue to be heard.

* Please be aware that this is a limited beta test, available as an option to a small number of advertisers.

* Future plans for the feature will certainly be influenced by feedback from folks who participate in the beta. So if you are one of those invited, who then choose to participate in the beta, please be sure to comment early and often.

* Advertisers offered a spot in the beta may certainly turn off the feature if they wish.

* This feature is not intended to ‘exhaust the budget’ - rather it is only meant to deliver additional traffic where performance metrics such as CTRs and CPCs stack up well against the adgroups current CTR and CPC. If there is no additional relevant traffic to direct to the advertisers campaigns, automatic matching will not spend additional money.

* The queries will appear in Search Query reports.