Category Archives: SEO

Welcome to the Search Marketing Sweat Shop

First published May 25, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In the latest Business Week, buried on page 70, there’s a story about outsourcing in search marketing. The story is titled “Life on the Web’s Factory Floor,” and it’s about the thriving business in assembling search marketing ads.

From the description, it sounds like search marketing is nothing more than a big Scrabble game. You throw a bunch of combinations of words up in the air, see how they land. and cut and paste them into your ads. In fact, in the story a search marketing specialist is defined as someone who “types phrases to drive ad traffic.” One gets the mental image of the proverbial room full of monkeys sitting at typewriters. At least the writer, Burt Helm, called the process “slightly creative.”

R-E-S-P-E-C-T: Find out what it means to SEM…

I admit there are companies, some thriving, who take this sweat-shop approach to search marketing. But every time I see the mainstream press reduce my passion to this elemental level, I die a little bit inside. I’m already having enough trouble explaining what I do for a living. Just this past weekend, I was trying to explain to an importer/exporter the rapid growth in search marketing, and what I did most days between 7 a.m. and 6 p.m. He had no idea the search marketing industry existed, and when I told him it was a $7 billion dollar a year industry (just guessing at where we’ll be this year) I could see the question in his eyes. “How the hell can $7 billion change hands in an industry that doesn’t seem to be based on anything?” I’ve been struggling with this attitude for years now, and had finally thought that I was past it. But in one short weekend, with the help of a two-page story in Business Week, I’m right back where I started.

Perhaps the problem is that most users’ touch point with search seems so simple. I type in words, I see words come back–and not a lot of them, either. Most messages are 15 to 20 words at most. How hard can it be? It’s this prevailing attitude that has made search the bastard child of the online ad space. We get no respect. From the outside, it seems like anyone with an IQ topping 60 could market this way. So agencies launch search divisions. Large companies find people that seem to have no pressing items on their to-do lists and make them the new director of search marketing. Everyone throws their hat in the ever increasing search marketing ring.

HELP, I need somebody (preferably a search marketer)…

As an aside, I always find it enlightening to sit at a table during lunch at a Search Engine Strategies show where I don’t know anyone. As introductions are made around the table, you can bet you’ll flush one of these newly minted search marketers out of the crowd. The story is usually the same–the boss thought it would be good to come to the show and “get up to speed.” They look at you with hapless confusion, shell-shocked with the sheer amount of data to digest. Four days, four tracks crammed with information. That’s well over 100 sessions and 400 individual presentations, all dealing with some nuance of search marketing. Before the show, these people thought they had search pretty much pegged. At best, they thought they’d pick up a hint or two. They come back from the show realizing they’ve just jumped into labyrinth of arcane knowledge and tactical expertise.

I Fall to Pieces…

It’s the sheer volume of minutiae in search marketing that makes it such a daunting proposition. I’ve been immersed in it for over 10 years now and I can tell you, there’s no way one person can stay on top of it. That used to be possible, but it’s not today. Even Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman can’t keep up, and they work unbelievable hours to try.

Search is advancing on all fronts at once. You’ve got Google, Yahoo and MSN trying to gobble up new online territory at a frightening pace. You’ve got new players like MySpace emerging (for the first time, ComScore has included MySpace in its search share numbers). You’ve got new ways of using search, for broadband, on mobile devices and for finding local advertisers. And on top of that, we’re just starting to understand how, when and why consumers use search. I remember once in high school chemistry a classmate spilled a bunch of mercury on a workbench top. A hundred little globs of quicksilver scattered everywhere, proving impossible to round up and contain. That’s what search is like, multiplied by a factor of 100.

It’s Only Words, and Words Are All I Have…

I suppose when you pick search apart at the single message level, it can look pretty simple compared to other channels. Consider the time required to put together one message for one key phrase, compared to what it takes to put together a television ad.

We know that there’s this whole sexy industry behind television ads, with actors, special effects, huge buys and (sometimes) brilliant brand strategies. Now that’s something to admire. They’re like little tiny movies, and we all love movies. But a search ad is, well, just a few words thrown together. What we forget is that every key phrase is its own campaign, infinitely controllable and measurable. For the big search advertisers, that can mean millions of individual campaigns. We buy customers by the penny, building business click by click in a grueling marketing marathon.

There are a lot of moving parts to each of those campaigns, including page placement, maximum bids, messaging, landing page performance and other conversion factors. We obsess over numbers, fine-tuning each campaign to provide maximum performance–or at least, that’s what search marketing should be. It’s this incredible granularity that makes search such a challenge to execute properly.

Search is not easy. Given the choice, I think it would be far easier to consolidate your marketing strategy into a few television ads that are measured on an ephemeral “brand lift” metric, rather then fragment it into millions of individual campaigns, each measured down to the click.

I realize there’s a paradox here. I know it’s this incredible amount of detail that gives rise to the web factories that Burt Helm talks about in Business Week. There’s a lot of heavy lifting to be done. But don’t discount the entire industry by simplifying it down to a room full of people throwing words together. That’s one rather unfortunate aspect of an incredibly dynamic marketing channel. “Typing phrases to drive ad traffic.” Give me a break!

Yahoo’s Keyword Selector Tool Broken?

Quick question. Is anybody else getting really strange results out of the Keyword Selector Tool at Yahoo? I just did a search for Los Angeles, and apparently all people are searching for are cars. These were the results I got:

Searches done in April 2006
Count Search Term
 350883  toyota los angeles
 333459  honda los angeles
 280591  bmw los angeles
 279022  chevrolet los angeles
 238133  ford los angeles
 226776  mercedes benz los angeles
 181748  nissan los angeles

Either everyone in Los Angeles is buying a new car, which could be, or the inventory tool needs a complete engine rebuild. Just wondering if anyone can shed a little light on this.

Did a quick check on Google based on keyword popularity and here’s what this tool gave me as the top variations:

los angeles, los angeles hotels, los angeles ca, los angeles california

That seems to make more sense

Ooops! It Really is a Small World After All

The Traffic Power guys are really too much. I had told you about the complaint that came my way from them. Seems these guys are also implying to prospective customers they have an “in” at Google because of a friendship with certain head engineers. Which engineers you ask? Well, the name Matt Cutts seems to be bandied about.

Hmmm..I know Matt. Wonder if he knows certain SEO’s are using his name in this manner? I just happened to have an email from a Traffic Power rep forwarded to me from a client that hinted at this special relationship. And I may have accidentally forwarded this to Matt. Ooops.

Matt’s words, “Extremely uncool”. Yeah..I’d echo that one. Come on, our industry has enough challenges without this. If an SEO tells you he’s friends with Matt Cutts, or any other person at any of the search engines, that’s one thing. It’s a small biz and we’re all pretty friendly. But if anyone hints that the keys to the church are for sale, based on a personal relationship with Matt or anyone esle, don’t believe them. Matt’s helped us out on occassion in understanding how Google indexes a site, just like he’s helped thousands of webmasters. That’s his job. But when it comes to influencing search results, there’s a church/state divide that just won’t be breached. Nuff said.

You Get the SEO You Deserve

Yesterday I decided to be a good Samaritan, and almost got taken. Let me tell you the story.

Yesterday morning when I got to my desk I had a voicemail message. There was an upset person who claimed they had been taken by an SEO company. A representative from the company in question had put a link to our eye tracking research at the bottom of his email signature, so this “victim” was seeing if we were connected in some way. I returned the call and found out that this guy had paid $2000 for a doorway domain but wasn’t receiving any traffic. Like most people, I automatically assumed the SEO company was the culprit. Wanting to restore this guy’s faith in our industry, I offered to take a look at the site and maybe offer a little free advice. He sent me the link.

White Hats, Black Hats and Dunce Caps

And now, I must digress for a minute. When I first met Matt Cutts at a Webmaster World he did an impromptu site clinic and when somebody called up a particularly egregious example of spam he said, “That’s worse than spam, that’s stupid spam”. The site that this SEO firm put up definitely falls into the category of stupid spam.

In the SEO ecosystem, there is a place for black hats and white hats. I happen to be a white hat and we provide a service to our clients, who for various reasons have chosen not to employ black hat tactics. That’s cool. There are also clients in ultra competitive categories that can’t rely on white hat tactics alone. These are clients who are willing to risk domain banning in return for higher rankings, and black hat tactics are the only way they’re going to get them. These clients go in knowing what they’re looking for, and there are black hats willing to provide the service. While possibly not the same degree of cool (in that spam degrades the search user’s experience) at least everybody is going in with eyes wide open. But it’s stupid spam that really bugs me.

The site I saw had tons of crappy text, inelegantly jammed with irrelevant keywords, was embedded in a clumsy link farm, and the link through to the client’s site was an ugly and totally useless Flash banner. The best black hats are at least elegant in their spam. This was ugly, pointless and stupid. And that pisses me off.

Good Samaritan Gone Wrong

So, I thought I’d bring these guys to light (and I will, bear with me) and offer to go to bat for the guy. I fired off an email seeing if he was okay with letting his name stand. He jumped at the chance. But something was niggling at me. The text on the page was at least partially relevant to his business, and it was written in first person. Where did the text come from?

I got him on the phone and asked him the question. The text came from him. Hmmm…my innocent victim doth protest too much. He had picked the keywords, which were ultra competitive and either marginally relevant or not relevant at all. And in the conversation, he exhibited more than a passing knowledge of SEO. The minute the site went live, he knew it was spam. He only got mad when after 3 months, the spam wasn’t working for him.

Then, he started working me. If I was either going to blog or write a column about it, he wanted to make sure he got a link to his main site. He went on to tell me that he could generate some “real business” from this exposure and how guys he knew in the same biz were pulling in $800,000 to a mil from their websites. I pointed out that the reason I was doing this wasn’t to make him rich.

At this point, I’m thinking that I was really hoping I’d find an innocent victim, but instead I found an accomplice. He was looking for an angle when he retained these guys, and it wasn’t the fact that it was spam that he objected to, it was the fact that it was spam that didn’t work. He is now pursuing legal action as well as filing a complaint with the BBB.  He’s spending a lot of time and energy tracking them down. Perhaps he should have shown this diligence before hiring them in the first place.

My point? We are all quick to point the finger at the SEO’s, but let’s remember that it’s clients like this that allows these companies to flourish. A quick investigation of the link farm showed hundreds, if not thousands, of clients that seem to think this is the way to use search. That too pisses me off.

Finally, a quick shout out to Matt and the Google spam squad. A few searches showed the bogus site had been already tossed from the Google index. It was the fact that the Google spider no longer came knocking that prompted our “victim” to start complaining. However, this site is actually ranking for some of the terms on MSN. Just one more example of how the gang at Redmond really has to get their act together if they want to compete head to head in the search space.

So, who is the SEO in question?

They go by various names, but some are 1p.com, and 1stinternetadvertising.com

Want to see an example of their work? Check out http://www.my1sthomebizsite.com/ (and no, this isn’t the person who complained. This is another site in their network.)

And to 1p, or 1stinternetadvertising, or whatever your name is, please stop using a link to our research in your email signature!

Addendum

Since the first post, I’ve discovered that 1p.com is actually Traffic Power. Of course they are! Thanks to Graywolf and MC for the info.

The Real Cost of SEO: It’s Not Budget, It’s Believers!

First published January 26, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Not too long ago, I was moderating a panel of search marketing experts who were comparing the merits of sponsored search and organic search optimization. We were unanimous in our support of organic optimization; none of us could think of an individual case where the cost- effectiveness of organic didn’t far exceed every other marketing channel our clients had tried. From the audience came the question, “If organic optimization is so effective, why isn’t it a more common strategy?”

Great question. Unfortunately, the answer isn’t an easy one.


Requirement One: Corporate Understanding

The problem with organic optimization is that it can’t be owned by any one department in a larger organization. While a sponsored campaign can be launched by a single department–or by an individual, for that matter–with no impact on any other department, organic optimization needs buy-in throughout an organization. This is why we generally see the best optimization on sites where C-level executives are close to the front lines, believers in optimization, and can give a single go-ahead that will open the required doors for organic optimization to happen. The bigger the organization, the more unlikely it is that this will happen.

Usually, the need for organic optimization is recognized by someone in the marketing department. Here’s the typical scenario: marketing has been convinced to try sponsored search. They’re generally happy with the results, but then they read an article or attend a conference where someone (and I happen to be a prime culprit) tells them that 70 percent of the clicks actually happen in the organic results. “Wait a minute,” they say. “I’m spending $4.28 a click and I could get more traffic with a free listing?” They immediately run to the nearest computer and see how they rank for the terms they’re currently buying. Nothing on the first page, or the second, or the third. Ah, there they are! Number 48 for their term–stuck in no-man’s land.


Requirement Two: A Friendly IT Department

In the next step, the marketing guy usually visits the IT department, which has technical ownership of the company Web site, and begins with the question, “How come we don’t rank on the search engines? What’s wrong with our site?”

You want to create a sworn IT enemy for life? This is the way to do it. And if this doesn’t work, follow up with the comment, “If you guys can’t do it, we’ll have to find someone who can.” This is generally where my company comes in, right in the middle of a vicious turf war between marketing and IT.


Requirement Three: No Sacred Cows

Now, the SEO experts (that would be us) start saying that the Flash on the front page has to go. Suddenly, marketing is not so sure. “We love that Flash, and it cost us a lot of money!”

It gets worse. The entire navigation structure of the site has to change, we need a lot more content, we’re going to want to create separate topic areas for our main offerings, we have to reconfigure our CMS, and we have to strip out all the Javascript we have on every page and reference it as an external .js file. Suddenly, marketing is second-guessing us, IT is up in arms, legal is having a fit because none of the additional content required has been vetted, and the C-level executives are wondering what the hell hit them.


Requirement Four: Champions with Perseverance and Thick Skins

At this point, our marketing champion, who got the whole ball rolling, is on everybody’s most- wanted list, and not in a good way. Everybody’s thinking, “You know, on second thought, maybe it would just be easier to stick to our sponsored search campaign.”

There is a cost to doing SEO. It’s not the budget required, which is minimal relative to other marketing initiatives. It’s the time and patience required on the part of one person to get the buy-in that’s needed to make SEO happen. That’s a price that many companies have been unwilling to pay up to now.


The Payoff

Let me give you some reasons why it’s worth it:

  • What’s good for a search engine is good for humans. The changes that make your site easier to index are almost always changes your visitors will appreciate as well. More content, less unnecessary Flash, standard navigation options and cleaner code will bring you in line with long-standing usability guidelines.
  • Organic traffic is not dependent on budget. This traffic base goes on, day after day, whether you’re topping up your AdWords account or not.
  • Organic optimization gets less painful as time goes on. Once you make the commitment, the painful part can be over relatively soon, but you’ll be reaping the benefits for years to come.
  • You’ll reach a whole new market segment. People tend to look at organic listings when they’re in the research phase, higher in the buying funnel. This gives you the chance to intercept consumers earlier and build a relationship that can last a long time.
    Ode to an Ex-Client

    I’d like to close off with a painful real-world example to prove my point. We had the CEO of a company bring us on to help with organic optimization. But rather than pave the way for success, he threw us to the lions and quickly exited the scene. We identified the issues keeping the company from higher visibility on the search engines, outlined our recommendations, and handed them over to the IT team for implementation.

    And there our suggestions sat, and sat, and sat. Meanwhile, the IT team pursued its own agenda, spinning its wheels on minutiae while ignoring the fundamental issues that had already been identified. Our frustration level rose, as did the CEO’s, who was wondering why there was no improvement. Guess who the internal IT team pointed the finger at? Eventually, we parted ways with the client. We couldn’t win, and the client was getting no value from recommendations that no one would follow.

    Wee usually monitor activity for a period of time following the termination of a contract. Eventually, this client did get around to doing one or two of the things we recommended. These were relatively easy fixes, but the results were dramatic: a 448 percent increase in visibility in the organic listings. Of course, at this point, no one remembers who made the original recommendation. All they’ll remember is that they only saw improvement after they got rid of their SEO company.

A Whiter Shade of Black

First published November 10, 2005 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week I was chatting with my friend Greg Jarboe. For those of you who don’t know Greg, he’s the guru of cranking up Web visibility through effective optimization of press releases and leveraging news search. But the pearl of wisdom that I picked up from Greg this time was an offhand comment that said volumes about our industry.

Stockholm Confidential.

Greg had just gotten back from a search conference in Sweden. At said conference, there tends to be a handful of black-hat SEOs that hold court after the show shuts down, showing off their spam de jour. For those of us who primarily live on the white side of the fence (and I say primarily because one is never sure exactly where that fence is) it’s always a guilty pleasure cornering one of these dark magicians. They’re brash, confident and masterful in their manipulation of algorithmic loopholes left by Google, Yahoo and MSN. Using every tactic in their arsenal, they manipulate sites up the rankings and make fistfuls of money in the process. I once asked a black hat if he had any ethical twinges. He replied, “The odd time, but my kids are going to a great college.”

This trip, Greg managed to take a black hat to dinner. And in between the courses, a confession came out that stopped Greg in his tracks. “Black hat stuff is getting too hard. I’m actually thinking about turning legit.” What? Is this capitulation? Is Courtney Love taking up a nun’s habit? What would cause a confirmed black hatter to turn his back on the incredibly lucrative dark side of SEO and step into the light? As much as the army of engineers at Google and Yahoo would like to say it’s their constant refinement of their algorithms, I think there’s another force at work here. Online is just growing up.

Frontier Mentality.

Up to now, online has been the Wild West. The sheriff hadn’t come to town yet. Black hats could get mediocre sites to the top of the rankings because the vast majority of legit sites had no clue about search engine optimization. Reams of content were hidden in content management systems, locked off from the search engines by impenetrable dynamic urls. Ill-conceived site architectures meant redirects off the home page to destinations buried four and five levels deep. The essential title tag wasn’t even optimized. This is more common than you think. I’ve participated in a number of search workshops where some of the best-known brands in the world had their sites examined. It’s rare to see a keyword show up in the title tag.

But, slowly, things are changing. Brands are clueing into the importance of algorithmic search. Spider friendliness is usually a requirement in evaluations of new CMS solutions or site redesigns. And when you take a site that has thousand of pages of content, with rich internal linking structures and scads of legitimate, authoritative incoming links, it will jump to the top of the search results. It’s inevitable. Those are the sites MSN, Yahoo and Google want at the top of their results. Those are the sites we want to see at the top of the results. It’s the online universe working as it should.

The Settling of Main Street.

Today, these huge brands are turning to white-hat search practitioners to help unlock the full potential of their sites. At this point, it’s still a trickle, but it’s improving every day. And every time a big brand grabs a spot in that “Golden Triangle” at the top of the search results, a black-hat-manipulated site is moved a little further down the ladder. It doesn’t matter what tricks a black hatter has up its sleeve, you can’t beat the sheer bulk of these killer sites, as long as they’re properly optimized.

So, as the online geography becomes more civilized through the influx of legitimate business, black hats are forced to move off Main Street into the back alleys. There’s less territory for them to operate in. And now, they’re competing for position against other black hats who are as ruthless as they are, rather than against naïve site owners who have never heard of a meta tag or Pagerank. It gets harder to make a buck.

I’m not discounting the effort that the search engines have made to clean up spam. Google’s Florida Update was probably the single biggest blow to black hat optimization and affiliate spam. But, at the end of the day, spam’s being eliminated because better sites are being optimized effectively, allowing them to naturally claim their rightful territory in the search listings. And it’s the legitimate SEO industry that’s making that happen.

Isn’t it ironic? As the Web grows up, it appears that many of us in the SEO industry might actually turn out to be the sheriff.

Murthy vs. the Goliaths: The Power of Search at Work

First published August 9th in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In the good old days, online was the place where David could beat Goliath. It was the forum where success was decided not just by market cap or the size of your advertising budget, but by nimble strategies and just plain chutzpah. It was the place where the little guy could triumph and slam one in the face of the corporate behemoths. But those days are over, right?

Not quite, at least not in the legal field.

As part of a client project, I was using Hitwise to determine who the category leader was in law firms. Who was grabbing the biggest slice of the potential 100 million visitor-per-month pie? After sorting through record search sites like Intelius, people finders like US Search and directory sites like Lawyers.com, I started looking for those huge firms that you would expect to find on top. Here are the usual suspects:

Baker & McKenzie: 3,246 attorneys, 69 offices around the world
Jones Day: 1,822 Attorneys, 29 offices around the world
Skadden: 1,822 Attorneys, 22 offices around the world
Latham & Watkins: 1,627 Attorneys, 22 offices around the world

(The information on the firms comes from the Internet Legal Research Group and the firm’s own sites.)

And the winner was….

The Law Office of Sheela Murthy.

Who?

Murthy.com is the official online home for a small immigration law firm based in Owings Mill, Md. There are just nine attorneys in an office that’s probably smaller than the executive washroom at Baker and McKenzie. Yet, Ms. Murthy is kicking the big guys around the online block. And we’re not talking a slight edge in traffic. According to Hitwise’s market share report, Murthy.com captures 10 times the market share of these four huge firms combined.

I must admit, I was a little skeptical at first. So, I tried some quick checks on Alexa. Sure enough, the small firm from Owings Mill was decimating the big guys when it came to generating Internet traffic.

Frankly, I’m at a bit of a loss to explain this. The only explanation must be that the big guys don’t really care. This is surprising, considering that well over a million people searched for some kind of lawyer on the Yahoo! network in May. And that’s just on Yahoo! Google’s numbers would easily double this. That’s a minimum of 5 million potential clients up for grab every month, and the four largest firms in the United States haven’t even optimized their title tags. You guessed it. Just the name of the firm shows in every case!

As search marketers, we often assume that the whole world knows about the power of search. Sometimes, it takes a blatant example like this to make us realize that a large part of the world is still waking up to the new reality of online marketing. And, as long as the giants are sleeping, there’s still the opportunity for the Sheela Murthy’s of the world to eat their lunch.

Come on, admit it: Aren’t you going to be just a little bit sorry when those days are gone?

Redefining Search Optimization

First published May 26, 2005 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

We search marketers use the word optimize a lot. We use it to talk about increasing our positions in the organic listings, or maximizing our bidding strategies, or fine-tuning our landing pages. Rarely, though, do we use it to talk about boosting a site’s overall user experience. And by turning a blind eye to the site side experience, we could be denying our clients a strategy that could provide the biggest lift of all.

An Eye Opening Experience We’re just wrapping up a usability study for a client who targets 18- to 35-year-olds. These are the most Web savvy people on the planet. In talking to a number of them and watching how they interacted with the site, some things became painfully obvious. First of all, a good portion of screen real estate was devoted to a flash banner that was repeated on every page. Above this banner were some vital navigation links. There were also some interactive features and conversion calls to action, primarily graphical in nature, incorporated into this banner.

Here’s what happened: Within a few seconds of entering the site, most users decided the flash banner was advertising and ignored it. In doing so, they ignored any navigation options that appeared in the top third of every page on the site. In fact, this aversion extended to pretty much anything that appeared to be graphical and interactive throughout their entire site session. The client spent the majority of their Web design budget in creating a series of interactive tools, some very useful, that usually appeared in these ignored areas of the page. But almost all the participants in the study went straight past these to the plain text and pictures portion of the site. Unfortunately, the client didn’t put the most attractive conversion triggers in this section. They were up above in the no-eyeball zone.

The Economic Argument Let’s say you have a sponsored search budget of about $100,000 per month. This generally produces about $250,000 in new business as measured by your success metrics. So, for every dollar you spend, you get a $2.50 return, or a 150 percent net gain.

Now, you could extensively manage your keyword baskets, use advanced bidding strategies, and aggressively reduce your PPC costs by 20 percent, dropping your budget from $100,000 to $80,000. For most companies, this type of ongoing management requires many hours of extra work each month. Let’s say it takes 10 extra hours a week for a person to which you pay $48,000 per year. To realize the $20,000 gain each month, your cost in additional resources is $1,000 (roughly 25 percent of your manager’s time), giving you a net gain of $19,000 monthly. Not a bad return on investment, right? At the end of 12 months, you’re up $228,000.

But let’s say you instead concentrate on improving conversion rates by tweaking the user experience. You undertake a one-time conversion improvement project at a cost of $30,000. By implementing the changes, you boost your conversion rates by the same 20 percent. This bumps the business realized monthly to $300,000. Your budget remains the same, so now every dollar you spend gets you a $3.00 return, or a 200 percent net gain.

The extra business adds up to $600,000 at the end of 12 months. Your one-time cost was $30,000, leaving you up $570,000 for the year, more than twice the return realized from aggressively managing the PPC expenses. Further, optimization will improve conversion rates from all traffic sources, not just your search traffic. And the cost is one time, not on going, although I would certainly recommend optimizing your conversion mechanisms on a periodical basis.

It’s a Matter of Perspective All too often, search marketers mechanically do what it is we do, without tying it to the client’s objectives. Case in point: We were recently talking to a prospect with a very large site that they sell advertising on. The client’s objective is to increase page views so they have more advertising inventory to sell. This site happens to have great brand loyalty, but there are some navigation issues to deal with.

In talking to the client, they mentioned that one of our competitors said that they were going to optimize the title tags and meta data on every one of the many thousands of pages on the site and asked if we were prepared to do the same. I replied that we could, but why? Wouldn’t it be better to optimize the pages with the best potential for traffic gains, and then take the remaining time to find ways to boost their average visitor session from 10 page views to 12 or 13? We calculated that even with a tremendously successful meta tag optimization campaign, they may realize a total traffic gain of a few percent points, while extending the visitor sessions would give a 20 to 30 percent boost in that vital page view inventory.

Sometimes, you have to step back a little to get the full picture. Step back, search marketers, step back.

Black vs White: SEM Soul Searching

First published on Jan 6, 2005 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

At the recent Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago, there was a new addition to the session list: Black Versus White, And Lots of Gray! Danny Sullivan wanted to stage a showdown between known black hat SEO’s and those that have chosen to tread the purer path. Holding down the dark side was Todd Friesen and Greg Boser. The champions of the straight and narrow were Alan Perkins and Jill Whelan. Falling into the great gray in between was Mikkel deMib Svendson.

The Lighter Side of the Dark Side

The session had a somewhat tongue in cheek tone, but nevertheless, some serious issues that lie at the heart of organic search optimization were explored. Alan Perkins began to tackle the thorny issue of whether black hat SEO was even legal.

His reasoning was that manipulation of factors to increase rank for obviously commercial pages of questionable relevancy was in fact misleading presentation of advertising messages. There’s also the issue of whether hiding or presenting content specifically for search engines falls offside of the recently enacted accessibility legislation.

Todd and Greg countered with a plea for all search engine optimizers to come clean and admit we all manipulate search results (Greg believes SEM should stand for search engine manipulation); it’s just that some of us are more effective at it than others. They use tactics of varying degrees of aggressiveness, and only use the extreme black hat tactics in industries where it’s an absolute necessity to compete, such as online pharmaceuticals and gambling.

Greg made the excellent point that the most serious breach of ethics he’s run across in SEO are those companies that use black hat tactics but don’t disclose the fact to their clients. He insists on full and total approval of tactics by the client.

Was Sun Tzu a Black Hat?

Mikkel likened search marketing to warfare, citing Jay Conrad Levinson’s guerrilla approach, and said that you have to do whatever you have to do to win. Greg agreed, calling it a “full frontal assault” on the search engines. Alan Perkins found the warfare analogy unfortunate and distasteful, saying he didn’t believe that search marketing should be compared to war, because there are no winners in war.

As could be predicted going into such a heated topic, no one changed their minds, but I think we discovered a few more shades of gray between the two extremes. I suspect that was Danny’s intention in putting the session on the agenda. Somewhere between the blinding white of Alan’s world and the dark practicality of Todd and Greg’s, the real world of SEO exists. And as long as people continue to look for organic results, that world will continue to be colored in various shades of gray.

In fact, there is a somewhat symbiotic relationship between the two extremes in our industry. Many reputable companies that steer well clear of questionable practices look with fascination on the tactics employed by the true black hats. One cannot help but admire the sheer brilliance of the methodical attack on the algorithms of the search engines. And in those tactics, they hope to pick up the kernel of a strategy that can be pulled back and employed in a less aggressive manner for their clients. Even the search engines routinely plant informants at the shows at which the black hats tend to congregate to pick up intelligence on the latest tactics.

In the “Wish I Said” Category…

So, at the end of the day, there were no easy answers. But there were a couple of points made in my follow up conversations that I wish had come up in the session. One of the best points was made by my friend Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR.

The fact is that black hats will aggressively look for any hole, and they will attack that hole with everything at their disposal. This means that legitimate ways to gain search visibility are soon exploited by the black hats, forcing search engines in many cases to close down legitimate and useful opportunities for both users and advertisers.

We know that search marketing is a real estate game, and there’s nothing wrong with aggressively looking for new opportunities to gain territory on the page by exploring new strategies including shopping feeds and news engines. That’s just smart search marketing. But the line is crossed when the black hats aggressively subvert the rules and use those new channels to artificially build links or boost their visibility at the expense of the user experience.

And that brings me to my final point. I believe there is a place for guerrilla marketing, but I think Mikkel, Greg, and Todd missed an important point in using the all-out war analogy. Levinson’s intention was that the casualty would be the competition. When you attack the search engines, the casualties are numbered amongst the users of that engine. And those users are your target consumer. I somehow doubt that Mr. Levinson ever wanted you to launch a war on your customer.