search marketing: strategies for seo and sem
DESCRIPTION
Strategies for SEO, SEM. Social Media Optimisation and tips to improve your Paid Search Campaign.TRANSCRIPT
Search Marketing Strategies: Optimising Paid Search and
Search Engine Optimisation to Maximise Site Traffic
by Chris Smith
General Manager, Digital
Direct Banking, NAB
28 September 2010
Agenda
• Fundamentals of a search marketing strategy
• Trade-offs between search engine optimisation and paid
search
• Social media optimisation: Why it’s relevant for search
marketing campaignsmarketing campaigns
• Examples of NAB search marketing campaigns: Analysing
campaign strengths and areas for improvement
Fundamentals: Search Marketing Terminology
SEA
Search Engine
Advertising
• PPC Pay per click
• CPM Cost per 1000
• CPA Cost per action
• Display
• etc
SEO
Search Engine
Optimisation
• Content
• Links
SEM
Search Engine
Ongoing
Cost, AKA
Paid Search
Mainly upfront
cost, then top-up
AKA Organic Search
2
SMO
Social Media Optimisation
• Forums
• Blogs
• Etc
ORM Online
Reputation Management
• Monitoring Tool
• Manual monitoring
Search Engine
Marketing
or Search Marketing
Ongoing time
commitment
Examples of Organic and Paid Search
• Right side and sometimes the top of the page
are paid or sponsored search results
• Left side search results are the organic, or
natural results
• Publisher sites are eligible to display the same
text ads or display ads (CPM) aka AdSense.
Fundamentals: SEO in a nutshell
• Searchers type simple phrases (the
“search term”) in a search engine.
• Search engines index all pages they
have discovered (by following links)
• When the query is processed, the
search engine checks its index and
presents no more than 1000 results, presents no more than 1000 results,
typically 10 results per page.
• These results are ranked based on
their relevancy to the search phrase.
• The ultimate goal is optimise your site
to rank #1.
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SEO involves many people
Technical
Hosting
Domain Name
Registration
Page coding
Design
Server
Efficiency
Security
Related
companies
Content
Management
Page markupURL length
ContentLinks
5
TRUST
RANKING
SUCCESS
Design
Usability
Publicity
News
media
Writing for
the Web
Product
Facts
MultimediaSocial networks
companies
Style guides
Fundamentals: Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising in a nutshell
• Searchers type simple phrases (the “search
term”) in a search engine.
• The results page displays the most relevant and
most effective ads on the right and sometimes at
the top of the page.
• The higher-placed ads are clicked more than the • The higher-placed ads are clicked more than the
lower ads.
• A high placement can be achieved by:
> Compelling copy (attracts a click)
> A landing page that matches the search term
> Setting not necessarily the highest bid, but
enough to be high on the first page:
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SEO vs PPC: Some interesting statistics
• Marketing Budgets: SEO
- 61% of companies surveyed spent up to
$75k/year on optimising content
- 28% of the largest companies (rev > $1
• Source of Clicks
- 92% of all clicks are from Organic Listing
- 8% of all clicks are from Paid Search.
- 28% of the largest companies (rev > $1
Billion/ year) spent nothing on SEO.
• Marketing Budgets: SEM
- 63% of companies surveyed spent between
$3-$5m on PPC
• Disconnect? A fraction of spend is used to
attract majority of “free” clicks, whereas >
30x spend to attract minority of “paid” clicks. * Source: SEMPO State of Search Engine Marketing Report - 2010
SEO vs PPC: Where to put your spend in 2011?
• The case for SEO
— Great opportunity exists local,
news, blog, video, image, product
feeds.
— Much better ROI based on overall
spend
— PPC is “easier” — PPC is “easier”
• The case for PPC
— Flexibility in spending, quick
results
— Ability to adjust quickly
— Less reliance on your Web/IT
teams
— Pretty straightforward
— Placement of results more reliable
•Good reasons to do both
—Learn which keywords are
performing well from paid search
—Good optimisation leads to
quality scores
—Own as much real estate as
possible, less for competition
—Multiplier effect
Social Media in a nutshell
• Social networks have been
around for over 20 years. Key
message is that only some of
them are relevant to banks.
>Audio, e.g. Podcasts
>Video, e.g. YouTube, Vimeo
>
>Social Networks, e.g. Forums
(discussion groups), Facebook,
MySpace, LinkedIn
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>Video, e.g. YouTube, Vimeo
>Aggregators, e.g. my.yahoo.com,
Google Reader
>Bookmarking/recommendation
tools, e.g. Delicious, StumbleUpon
>Ratings & Reviews, e.g. Digg
>Photo Sharing, e.g. Flickr
>Wikis, e.g. Wikispaces, MediaWiki
MySpace, LinkedIn
>Blogs
—Comments
—Promotion tools, e.g.
Feedburner
—Blog search tools e.g.
Technorati
—Blog communities, e.g.
BlogCatalog, MyBlogLog
—Microblogging, e.g.
Social Media in the Search Marketing Mix
• Everyone seems to have embraced social media (SM).
• Is your SM campaign integrated with the rest of your search marketing
strategy?
Social Media Optimisation (SMO)
• Simply using various popular social networks is
half the journey.
• You can optimise each in different ways, e.g.
— Facebook Pages are the only part of Facebook
that is crawled and indexed by Google
— Videos can be optimised to benefit SEO
— Customers have conversations at social — Customers have conversations at social
networking sites and references to a company
serve as “Citations” to their website even
when there are no clickable links.
• You can be proactive in maintaining a good
reputation by educating your marketing and
corporate affairs department.
Press Release Optimisation (PRO)
• Press releases are now known as Media
Releases and some companies have Social
Media Releases
• Submit to various online distribution services
such as PRWeb and PRNewsWire
• Apply standard SEO principles:• Apply standard SEO principles:
— Use plain English
— Insert deep links to a specific part of your
website
— Provide links to relevant supporting media
such as images and videos.
— Provide links to your profiles at various
social media outlets e.g. Twitter, blogs
• See http://schools.nsw.edu.au for local example
Search Marketing Strategy: Pulling it all together
Relevant Content
Website Success
Credit card
Keyword
researchWrite
content
Social Network
page(links)
Rank #1
Relevant Deep Links
Success
13
Credit card
comparison site
Credit card
info site
(link)
(link)
Article about
personal finance
(link)
(Word of mouth,
viral effect)
Case Study: Optimising Your PPC Spend
• If you are not happy with your Google or Yahoo PPC results, your
campaigns might simply need a tweak.
• Clues:
— You are paying too much per click.
— You are not getting enough conversions.
— You don’t know if your ads are working for you.
Case Study: Improving your Google Quality Score
The Quality Score is fairly simple to grasp:
• Scale from 1 to 10 (10 is best)
• Are the keywords in your ad group present on the landing page?
• Are the keywords in the ad copy?
• Does the landing page load fast?
• Is the landing page a quality page?
— Is it relevant to the keyword?
— Is your business transparent?— Is your business transparent?
— Is the content original?
— Is it navigable?
Yes, a high Quality Score is achievable
Case Study: Lowering the cost per conversion
• Comparing two dissimilar ad groups, one being non-competitive and the
other being very competitive, we can see not only the difference in the cost
per click, but also the lower cost per conversion.
Non-competitive, High Quality Score
Competitive, Low Quality Score
Wrapping it up
To summarise:
— Effective search engine marketing is a blend of SEO, SMO, PRO and PPC
— SEO is the cheapest to implement but it involves your own organisation
on an ongoing basis, not a short engagement with an agency.
— PPC is essential to fill gaps in search engine visibility and gives instant
results and gratification.
— Social media needs careful planning and splendid implementation. It is — Social media needs careful planning and splendid implementation. It is
not for everyone, but for consumer brands it is essential and should be a
long term commitment.
Questions?
Thank you.
— Chris Smith
— General Manager, Digital; Direct Banking, NAB
— http://www.nab.com.au