Notes from Search Engine Strategies New York 2010 Day 1

Opening Keynote: New Rules of Marketing & PR

David Meerman Scott started his lecture by telling a story about how Harry Potter Theme Park got 350.000 mentions the first day of it's existence. How? Cindy Gordon, the vice president of the theme park told 7 people. These people were influential Harry Potter bloggers, and the word spread pretty fast. Any other vice president in any other company might have been fired for this, but she made this a social media word-of-mouth success story.

Why is this a success story? She managed to give her product attention, the main keyword for the rest of the lecture.

Scott continued going through how you can reach your buyer persona with interesting content. How can you earn attention?

1) Encourage sharing. This is done by ”word of mouse”. Give people reason to tell others about you.

2) Talk to people in their own language. Nobody cares about your product, people care about themselves. By dropping the ”gobbeldygook” (both written and visual) and talking to people about what interests them, you will get attention.

3) Lose control of your content. Let your audience use your content, being video, music or copy. This is often hindered by fear in many organisations, but it will work. Also, he included a tip: If you remove the ”insert email address” in any form online, you will increase the attention of the page 50 times, as people then can share the content openly.

4) Put down roots. Provide advice for free. People will then give you earned attention.

5) Create triggers to share your content.

6) Point the world to your (virtual) doorstep by being there with interesting content when things happen.

He continued with examples on how the US Air Force is using Twitter. They want all employees to tweet about their job. This way they get 300.000 PR employees at once.

He closed his keynote by showing the audience an example of how even a seemingly boring product can get a lot of attention, by showing us a YouTube video of a commercial for a German toilet producer:

How to become a link Magnet

The session was introduced by Jennifer Slegg CEO JenSense who talked about how you efficiently can develop a strategy for building your personal brand online.

What name should you use? Search for it first, are similar names being used? Does it have potential double meanings? Should you use your company name? Or spin on your company name i.e. GoogleGuy? The conclusion is: Whichever name you go with, register it everywhere.

You also need to choose what kind of persona you are going to be:

1. Helpful
2. Informative
3. Controversial
4. Jerk

The point of building a strong personal brand is to get others to build it for you, this way you can become a link magnet.

Rand Fishkin SEOmoz was speaking the second half of the session about Link magnets – the new paradigm of link acquisition.

Link magnets are one step beyond link baits, they reward the linker.

Ingredients in the link magnet soup

• Content that Rewards.
• Targeted link anchor text
• Strategy for Promotion / Spread

Make it easy to retweet (share), make the retweet (share) button visible.

Understanding Search Ads Quality - Sponsored session by Dan Friedman, Google

Friedman had a very informative session about AdWords Quality Score with concrete advice on how you can improve your ads quality score.

It’s important to keep in mind that even if it’s important to have a good quality score it is not the most important metric for your campaign; profit is the most important metric.

The Quality Score influence:

• Eligibility: Weather your ad is eligible to enter the auction for that specific query
• Position: Relative position in relation to other ads on the result page
• Price: Good quality score reduce the price to maintain the same position
• Top slot (high quality AdWords ads above the organic results)

The Quality Score number 1-10 is just an approximation on how Google expect the keyword to perform.

Quality score consists of

CTR is by far the most important factor contributing to your quality score.

Relevancy factors, Google use signals unique to the specific query to help improve quality prediction.

Landing page quality is used to police serious offenders of the landing page guidelines. It has nothing to do with the aesthetics of your website, just usability and user friendliness.

How to improve QS?

• Organize your account for maximum effectiveness; you should organize it like your website.
• Chose relevant keywords: specifically relevant keywords, not tangible relevant keywords. This meaning “chocolate” is not a relevant keyword if you are a flower shop (even if you think a person searching for chocolate may want to buy flowers instead, Google doesn’t consider that relevant).
• Write straightforward targeted ads with a clear call-to-action.
• Point users to relevant landing pages.

Even if you did everything right it doesn't mean your quality score will be 10, focus on your key metric, which is PROFIT.

Managing a Global SEO Campaign

The lecture went through the basics of managing a global SEO campaign. The main keyword for all in the panel was localization, not translation, and to use locals to optimise campaigns, someone who knows the market and preferably lives there right now. The lecture was pretty basic, so I won't go into the details, but I noticed a few things I didn’t know about the South Pacific Asian market (by Motoko Hunt from AJPR LLC):

Baidu have a 7% share of the market worldwide. In China it is the only engine that matters.

In South Corea Naver is the main engine. “People will laugh at you if you mention Google” she stated.

When you are doing an Asian SEO campaign you need to go back and learn from scratch, or hire someone who knows that market, since all countries in Asia acts differently, and since the search engines are so different from what we are used to.

USA is still the biggest market online, followed by China.

When it comes to buying things online on the other hand, China is not the largest. Japan and South Korea takes the lead here (in Asia), and China is all the way down at #7. Why? In China people research online, but they buy offline, since that is the most affordable for them. These kinds of details are important to know before starting any Asian SEO or SEM campaign.

Another good tip I picked up from this lecture was this: buy domains from a local registrar. The rules for buying TLDs in different countries are very different, and you need to know the country to know the rules.

State of search, where to next?

The session went into where search are going next. All in the panel agreed that the one thing they think will be most important in the future is more visible, user friendly search results, generated by open source markups like Yahoo! Search Monkey.

When using markups you allow the users to see things like pictures, prices, video, and product information directly in the search result. Using this can increase the CTR drastically.

Larry Cornett of Yahoo! Search also gave a good tip: You need to show value in the SERPS. It's not about getting the first click anymore. Why not show your potential users your phone number directly in the SERPS for added value?

Yahoo! Also talked about a brand new iPhone app they are launching in the US, where you can draw with your finger on a map the area where you e.g. want to find a restaurant, instead of browsing through a whole area.

Yahoo! Also showed some new search features, where you can get “related people” suggestions to the left in the SERPS when searching for celebrities, or “related movies” when you search for actors or movies.

Keynote panel – Analyze This

The keynote panel discussed topics like social media, real time search and the use of social media in TV ads. Nothing new, but a lot of personal opinions from the panel, though nothing to blog home about, so we won't.

From Real-Time Search to Dynamic Discovery

The panel talked about how they rank real time search. The following triggers are important to rank well in real time search:

• Volume à e.g. Real time search for “Idol” can rank well during the broadcast hour of “Idol” on TV
• Common queries à e.g. Political issues
• Link structure à Who follows you (e.g. on Twitter), are you “important”?
• Semantic analysis à trigger keywords in different languages
• Popularity of content
• Age of the content
• Posting frequency (e.g. in blogs)

PUSH (PubSubHubBub) is also important, and let bloggers submit real time content to the search engine directly, e.g. through Wordpress.

It is also important for both Yahoo! and Google to show both the latest news and the most relevant news. They are adjusting their algorithms for real time search to make sure the search results will not be spammy and overlooked.

Social Search

Google want to show you results from both direct and secondary connections. Maile Ohye then mentioned some markups you can use to sort your connections:

Rel=”me” and Rel=”friend”.

YouTube TV

Google is working on TV ads, YouTube content that can be distributed on TV, where you pay per impression and only for viewings that are longer than 5 seconds. It will be integrated with Google Analytics. Read more on www.google.com/tvads

Mark Drummond from Wows Inc. (real time search engine) then talked about how you should follow real time events to buy keywords (in e.g. PPC campaigns) that are trending at an exact moment. If you don't catch the keywords in the moment they are trending, the potential will be lost forever.

Larry Cornett talked about Yahoo!'s real time search opportunities. More information on www.labs.yahoo.com/search_sciences.

How to supercharge your SEM campaigns in 2010 – Michael Motner and Michael Stone Wpromote Inc.

1Always test everything

Buttons, colours, text, supporting graphics, charts, images and other media.

2 PPC and Retargeting

PPC drives targeted users to your site, retargeting brings the 97% who don't convert back. Cookies are dropped to remember users. Cookies are recognized on sites around the web and then the ads are shown. Retargeting can customize messaging based on pages visited on your site, and customize messaging to “come back”.

3 Optimizing PPC in the Google Content Network

Content has changed, content can add value and it's a great companion to search efforts.

Google Wonder wheel can help you figure out categories for the content network.

Track monitor and optimize content, run placement reports frequently.

4 PPC Keywords and Ad grouping

Why is it so important? It is one of the single biggest things that can help or hurt your quality scores, optimization and ROI.

5 Out of the Box Link Building

SEO link building, example TOMS shoes, TOMS is viral, but users need direction.

Badging initiative on the site, make it easy to link to you! It drives SEO rankings, traffic and sales.

6 Content is King

Content is key for SEO, adopt a page a day mentality. What is your content roadmap?

Content ideas: blog, resources section, articles, forum.

Blogging:

• Best URL is yourdomain.com/blog.
• Submit your blog to blog directories,
• Employee blog rotation.
• Incentivize employee blog post.
• Invite guest bloggers

Creative content ideas, FAQs, text or interactive, images, video universal / blended results.

7 Be Timely Seasonal and Hip.

Wpromote added winter elements on their own web site even though our products are not seasonal. As a result bounce rates and time on site improved, conversions (consultation request) increased.

Encourage interaction, social tools show that you are current. E.g. Facebook and twitter buttons. Use Facebook and twitter to continue your messaging and sales.

8 How to Craft the Perfect Message

Ideally you would tailor the sales pitch custom for each visitor to the website, but by segmenting or bucketing users we can dramatically increase results. How? Use what we know.

Keep the messaging consistent. User query > PPC text ad > landing page headline.

Echo back their preferences. Identify the needs of the users

9 Insights from Google insights for Search

Use it and take action, unless you make the tool to make actual changes it's just another Google toy.

10 Social Media is too Big for one Topic

The most important is to monitor the conversation and your reputation online.

Free tools:

Google alerts, twitter search

Paid tools,

Scoutlabs.com, Viralheat.com

Getting the Most Out of AdWords Features & Tools

Sponsored session by Google

Introduction of the opportunities tab, it was launched a while ago, but it has been upgraded with several improvements lately.

The most important news was the introduction of the AdWords Search Funnel, which launched today (March 23rd). Search funnels are a new set of reports that allows you to see clicks and impressions that occur prior to the last clicks that drove the conversions, as well as the average length and duration of the conversion paths, so that you can better understand the true value of your keyword(s).

Search & the Integrated Marketing Mix

The last lecture of the day was about using search as a part of a greater marketing mix. The people that work with search need to burst out of their bubble and acknowledge that search is much more effective combined with other types of marketing.

Some tips from the lecture:

67% of all media spending results in a search. 40% of these will result in a purchase. Remember that when putting up your search campaign.

Consumers are less likely to buy from a brand that is not visible in the SERP.

Plan your PPC campaigns around TV ads, or around competitor's TV ads, this can give you great results.

Pay attention to Retargeting. This can give you great value for your money, and can be bought from most big ad networks.

// More to come tomorrow. Follow Agnete, Sigrid and Qualité on Twitter:

@Agnete

@SigridSaxevik

@Qualite_Search