Change is a popular word lately, and living in DC area the theme is practically unavoidable. You can even buy (a shiny version of) change at the mall. I walked through a Macy’s department store last week and passed a large rack of sparkly “Change” pins for sale. Change is everywhere.

When I started doing in-house search in 2000, not many companies realized the importance of search marketing. Today, it seems that almost all companies do. But getting a search marketing campaign off the ground is daunting for many companies, especially smaller businesses.

Using search agencies

Many companies that I talk to still do not have in-house search experts, but are interested in hiring. In-house talent can be hard to find, and may be harder to find in some cities than others. In lieu of in-house search marketers, companies often work with search marketing agencies. (Even when working with the best search marketing agency, I believe that having an in-house expert to manage the agency relationship can increase return on investment.)

It seems to me that there are more search agencies today than there were in 2000.  Sometimes companies ask my feedback on search plans that were developed by agencies that they’ve chosen. I’ve seen a couple of great plans, and unfortunately an equal number of bad (as in cancel-the-contract-now) plans. As long as search agencies have existed, it seems there have been both good and bad ones.

It’s a good idea for any company to do their homework before signing on the dotted line.  In 2001, MarketingSherpa published a buyer’s guide that included search agency reviews and ratings. It was highly controversial, triggering legal action in at least one case. (Am I the only one that misses that kind of scandal?)

Using web analytics

One change that has greatly impacted in-house search is the increased adoption and accessibility of web analytics software by companies.  As more people research and shop for products and services online, understanding their behaviors and patterns is critical for growing a company’s online. Most companies today seem to understand this. With the availability of free analytics tools like Google Analytics, there is almost no reason for a company to not understand their web site traffic.

In 2000, the dot com where I did search had no web reporting software. Instead, the company pulled the (really large) referral log files and parsed them manually. Each month I received a Microsoft Access file that contained the previous month’s search referral data. Needless to say, search traffic analysis then was a lot more time-consuming. On the plus side, I learned Access and the log files provided great traffic data. But the company missed out on a lot of the data that is available through web analytics packages. (The company has since started using web analytics software.)

Change is more

There are more search resources available today, and as is often the case with more choices there is a better and wider variety of search content available. More sites, more forums, more conferences, more tools – more of all of it. That also means more to sift through, and increased filtering of what content is most useful (and credible).

There are clearly a lot more search marketers today than there were in 2000. A lot of the search marketers who I met in the beginning are still active in the industry. I will be active in the industry for many years to come, and always look forward to seeing familiar faces – and a lot of new ones – at the next SMX conference.

What is your company’s brand awareness?  Measuring brand awareness is important for understanding the impact of offline and online marketing strategies.  Because brand awareness is affected by so many different marketing strategies, quantifying brand awareness is not always straightforward.

One way to gauge interest in your company’s brand is to analyze keyword search patterns.  Your analytics team may gain valuable insight by monitoring changes in search patterns for your company’s brand.

Relative keyword interest growth over time

A tool like Google Insights for Search provides keyword search volume trends (but not quantitative data) relative to total Google searches.  One great thing about Insights for Search is that, unlike in Google Trends, you can filter by timeframe, country and region, and business category.

With so many ways to slice and dice the data, you probably will find many uses for Google Insights for Search.  Besides helping to gauge brand interest, the tool can be used for doing competitive research, identifying negative keywords for PPC search campaigns, understanding regional search activity, and more.

For analyzing brand recognition, it may be most useful to compare a single keyword over multiple timeframes.  You can set a specific date range by month and year, or use the date range options provided.

In this example, see interest for the keyword “google” in the U.S. in 2008 compared to 2007.

To prevent skewing of the data, remember to filter out countries and regions if the keyword holds different meaning in those locations.  For example, Carfax is a well-known brand in the U.S. and Canada, but is also the name of a nightclub in South Africa and a location in Oxford, England.

If your company markets in specific regions, you may want to compare keyword search interest in various geographic areas.  Note that Google Insights for Search may not report data for a subregion if the search volume in that region is too low.

I tend to advise caution in using Google trending data alone to predict traffic.  If you know specific search volume for a keyword then you may make some assumptions based on Insights for Search information, but allow yourself some wiggle room.

Keyword impression growth over time

Another way to gauge search interest in a keyword is to use impression values.  The importance of this strategy is that it provides quantifiable data, which the trending tools do not offer.  You can control the timeframe (i.e., week, month, quarter) analyzed in order to make your analysis more precise.

Assuming that a PPC ad is displayed every time that a keyword is searched, you can use reported search impressions for that keyword to estimate search volume growth for that keyword over time.

You will want to limit your impression reporting to the search network only.  Exclude content network impressions – they fluctuate often (sometimes wildly) and as result are not suitable for trending.

Also consider keyword match type.  Tracking impressions on an exact match keyword will give you a much more accurate picture than tracking impressions on a broad match keyword.  For tracking and other purposes you may want to advertise on two versions of a keyword – broad match and exact match – in the same campaign.

If you run local PPC ads for the same keyword in multiple markets, you may be able to identify factors in some markets over others.  It may also be interesting to chart local impression growth against total impression growth over time.

It may make sense to track impressions only in one search engine, especially if a significant percentage of your traffic for that keyword comes from one search engine.

As companies in many industries start to more closely evaluate their marketing budgets, communicating the success and impact of search marketing within your company is as critical as ever. When presenting this information to your executive team or colleagues who may not be as familiar with search marketing, you want to be thorough but concise.

For me, a dashboard is the best tool for this. My dashboard shows, at a high level, the performance of three search streams. I distribute (via e-mail and/or print) and present the dashboard monthly to executives, developers, and colleagues at levels in between. It is my most important and frequently used analysis, and I rarely attend a meeting without it.

Here are some pointers on creating a great dashboard from the standpoint of an in-house marketer responsible for multiple traffic streams.

Your dashboard is essentially a report card. It communicates your goals, how you plan to meet those goals, and how you are performing against those goals. Including multiple streams on the dashboard enables its readers to see the impact of each stream on the total.

Some data that you may want to include for each stream on your dashboard include:

• Revenue
• Conversions
• An indicator of traffic: visits, visitors, etc.
• Cost (if applicable)
• An indicator of return: return on investment (ROI), cost per acquisition (CPA), effective commission, etc.

For each metric, include current (i.e., last month) and year-to-date (YTD) performance. To help indicate growth of each segment and account for seasonality, include percent change YTD and year-over-year (YoY).

Below is a sample of a dashboard. The data used here is for example purposes only:

The dashboard I use today looks different than the one that I first created for the company more than four years ago. Your dashboard will probably also evolve over time as you find additional metrics or insights to include.

Ideally your dashboard should print on one page – without having to print the document at 40% its original size and on legal paper. The idea is to make it easy to read and understand.

Your dashboard should be self-explanatory. If you were to distribute it without any discussion or explanation, your audience should be able to understand it. Members of your audience may not have time to read and absorb your entire dashboard, so the most important information should be located in a logical place and should stand out.

Quality is important. Before you distribute the dashboard, you probably want to double check that the data in the dashboard is correct. I typically print out the final dashboard and literally put a check beside every number as I confirm it is correct.

Once your dashboard is ready, you may want to e-mail it to your executive team and set up a meeting to discuss it in person with them. Be ready – the dashboard can generate great discussion about search and its impact on your company’s growth.

Andrea Harris leads the search engine marketing team at Carfax Vehicle History Reports where she oversees all aspects of the company’s organic search, pay-per-click (PPC) search, and affiliate marketing programs in the U.S. and Canada.

Numbers don’t lie. For in-house search marketers analysis is critical for reporting performance, identifying trouble spots, and finding your next great opportunity. If you hire an agency or consultant to help with your search marketing, the numbers reflect success of that agency’s work, and can tell you ultimately if the agency is worth what they charge.

In this and future articles, I’ll share analytics insights that I’ve picked up as an in-house marketer. Here you’ll learn some approaches on how much time to spend, which team should do your analysis work, and how often you should analyze search data. How much is enough? As an in-house marketer you can probably expect to spend 20% or more of your time reporting and analyzing data. On some days I spend 50% of my time on reporting and analysis. If you’re spending less than 20% of your time reporting and analyzing search data, you may be missing something.

DIY I’m a do-it-yourselfer. Electrical wiring, plumbing, laptop repair – you name it, I’ll try it myself. I take a similar approach with reporting and analysis.

Get up close and personal with the numbers. Even if you rely other teams to provide certain data, put together reports and do the analyzes yourself when you can. The process can help you better understand the data. It’s hard not to know the numbers when you’re the one putting them together. Based on your knowledge of search, you also may be better positioned to see certain trends in the data.

As a bonus, in doing your own analyses you’ll learn more about your Web reporting software. Having a better understanding of your data sources helps you answer questions about the data. Where does your data come from? How is the data collected? Why visits vs. visitors?  Being able to answer questions like these can help distinguish you as an expert. Know where your data is coming from and how it is reported.

If you lead an in-house search team, you might want to have every member of your team do some regular reporting and analysis. It’s an important skill for every search marketer, and in doing the work your team may just feel a bit more invested in the business.

Trend spotting The most important reports are often the regularly scheduled reports, because they show growth trends and help me recognize problems. You probably have a number of regular reports, at different frequencies for different traffic streams. Setting the frequencies appropriately can help you be more efficient and effective.

For pay-per-click (PPC) search campaigns, you may want to report metrics at least weekly for each search engine in which you advertise. PPC metrics can change quickly as a result of changes in the search engine networks, your competitors’ ad strategies, and other factors. When there’s a sudden change in PPC cost and/or ROI, it needs to be addressed quickly. This makes the regular PPC reports perhaps some of the most critical.

If you measure search traffic or conversions daily, sometimes the data simply doesn’t change enough to be significant. However if the numbers that you’re reporting are very large, then a daily report may make sense. Daily analysis can help you understand search traffic patterns by day of the week. I would expect the search patterns to reflect overall site traffic patterns by day. Do you know what changes to expect in search traffic over holidays? Daily analysis over the holidays can give you this insight.

For organic search, unless trends change dramatically from week-to-week then monthly reporting may be sufficient.

For the purpose of pinpointing unexpected problems with affiliate reporting or shifts in marketing strategy by your top affiliates, it’s good to track total affiliate traffic and/or conversions daily. It could take less than ten minutes per day to pull the data and confirm that things are on track. On top of that, a more in-depth weekly or monthly report enables you to analyze trends by affiliate category.

Many larger companies are able to virtually dominate the organic search results through the sheer number of unique domains that they have to work with. For example, in addition to its corporate websites, Honda ranks in organic search with domains that are unique to its vehicle, watersports, engine, and motorcycle business units, among others. Provided the business propositions and/or products/services offered are unique, these rankings are helpful to searchers.

But we don’t all work for companies that have many diverse business units and unique websites. (Relatively) smaller companies can achieve similar organic search success by working with and through third-party sites to help build their profile in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

This approach is designed to help you increase the number of productive, positive rankings for a specific keyword, usually your company’s brand. If there are multiple sensational, spammy, or otherwise negative URLs that rank in organic search for your brand, this strategy can help you increase traffic and revenue, and may even help increase customer confidence in your brand.

Partners

Your company’s business development team establishes and builds relationships with corporate partners. Many partners have credible websites that generally rank well in search. Through your business development team, work to post content about your company on those partner sites. It’s a win-win: your partners get more content to include on their sites and your company benefits from the increased visibility.

Ideally, a partner will develop unique, valuable content to describe the partnership, your company’s products, and/or how your company works with that partner. Before approaching the partners you may want to review the executed partner agreement to make sure that adding content is within the spirit of the partnership. Not all partners may be willing to post the content, depending on the nature of the partnerships that you have with them.

To help ensure consistent communication of your brand message, it may be wise to review or approve each partner’s content before it goes live. The content may already be optimized by the partner’s search marketing team. If not, you may want to recommend changes that will improve the content’s search ranking.

Affiliates

Affiliates can also help raise your company’s profile in the SERPs. Affiliates are often savvy search marketers. Your affiliates may even outrank the company’s official site on some relevant keywords. Or maybe that’s the point, depending on your strategy. If you find it difficult to rank well in organic search for certain keywords, then working with affiliates is one alternative. However, this strategy comes with risks.

Some affiliates are successful in search because they use gray-hat tactics that you may not be willing to employ. In the long term you may not want your brand to be associated with these affiliate sites. You also need to closely monitor how your brand is promoted by affiliates. Some affiliates use bait-and-switch or other unsavory tactics to sell your product. Your company might have leverage in cases like this, depending on the guidelines set forth in your company’s affiliate agreement.

Social media sites

Social media marketing is not yet widely adopted by many companies, with industry-wide debate about how to monetize the resulting traffic. But in-house search marketers can’t afford to overlook social media marketing opportunities. Especially if your company has strong brand awareness, social media is another way to raise the company’s profile in organic search. For example, if your company doesn’t have a presence in Wikipedia, you may want to start a page for your brand. Be sure to follow the guidelines in order to avoid a conflict of interest, which is easy to do on some social media marketing sites.

Review your inventory of video or image content and post the content on sites like YouTube. More popular content typically works best. This works not only for bigger, national companies but also for smaller local companies. For example Eastern Motors, a car dealer group in the DC area currently ranks in Google with its commercials.

Shopping engines

Upload your products to shopping engines, such as Google Product Search, can also help raise your company’s profile in the SERPs. Google posts shopping results at the top of the SERPs for many keywords. If you sell Toyota RAV4 floor mats, for example, Google Product Search may just earn your company a top ranking.

These are just a few ideas. What are some other ways that your company can work with third-party sites to raise your profile in search?

Perhaps for the first time ever I’m guilty of being slack. Either that or I’ve been seriously buried (a condition I’m sure most in-house SEMs are quite familiar with). Although there was some great live blogging of SMX Advanced, nobody to my knowledge summarized key takeaways for in-house search marketers. So here are what I consider the most compelling topics discussed at SMX Advanced last month:

• Google is starting to manipulate forms on some web sites, in order to access content. Google may also index pages that are displayed when incomplete forms are executed. It may be worth reviewing the forms on your site(s) through the eyes of a search bot.

• Google accepts cookies if necessary to access content. If you have an accessible non-cookie page and an alternative cookie version of the same page, then Google probably is not indexing the cookie version. In those cases, it probably makes sense to focus search engine optimization efforts on the non-cookie version.
• Page layout is important as a ranking signal. Ideally, a page’s layout should not break when scripts are turned off. The Firefox noscript add-on is a great tool for testing this. Yahoo! suggested no hiding cascading style sheets (CSS) from bots, as this could be seen as an attempt to hide information about a page’s layout.
• Yahoo! has improved its crawling of XML sitemaps files. If your Yahoo! sitemaps failed in the past, you may want to resubmit them.
• After acquiring a new domain for SEO purposes, to prevent resetting the domain’s PageRank don’t update the domain’s host, DNS setting, and content all at once. Instead, do it gradually.
• User agent detection is acceptable if you’re using it to present different content based on different technologies. For example, using user agent detection to serve mobile versus web content is acceptable. User agent detection for other purposes is not recommended.
• Google recommended using one set of data to power multiple views. Presenting new data in alternate content could seem spammy to a search engine. For example, when using swfobject the text should match the flash content.
• The AdWords landing page quality score may be at least partially based on organic search ranking signals. If that’s the case, then advertisers could skirt high minimum bid requirements by switching to new destination URL domains—that is, until the minimum bids are increased for those domains.
• For nth testing of web pages, it is best to set the test with a cookie for each path instead of including test parameters within URLs. Otherwise, your test pages may be indexed.

If you were at SMX Advanced, I hope I got a chance to meet you and I hope that my perspective here is helpful—even if it is a bit delayed thanks to my responsibilities at my “day job!” See you at the next conference!

Andrea Harris is search engine marketing manager at Carfax Vehicle History. The In House column appears on Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.

It’s easy to get hooked on search conferences. For me, there’s no better way to learn so much about search in the course of a couple of days: what’s working, what’s not working, and what others in the industry are experiencing. The networking opportunities at conferences are priceless—where else do you have access to so many experts in one place, especially if you don’t live in the Bay area?

As an in-house marketer, I’m fortunate to have a company that recognizes the value in sending me to conferences. To help ensure that my company sends me to the next conference, my goal at each one is positive ROI—to get more out of the conference than my company spent to send me there. For me this comes in the form of new ideas and strategies. From a recent conference I brought back 36 to-do items, ranging from launching a new marketing initiative to implementing a small change on a subdomain.

With SMX Advanced kicking off tomorrow, I thought I’d offer some tips to help get the most out of your next conference, plan ahead, make the most of your time, and follow up after the event.

Before the conference

Before the conference, start a running list of goals, both general and specific. My conference goals generally fall into these categories:

• Specific search questions or problems to resolve

• Better ways to do certain search tasks
• New search marketing initiatives that could benefit my company
• Search topics that I want to learn more about

Based on your goals, plan which sessions to attend. Print out the online agenda and mark your first and second choice sessions in each time slot. Consider your goals for the conference, the session topics, and speakers for each session. This advanced planning keeps you from having to make as many schedule decisions when you get to the conference, which frees up more time for networking.

Before you leave for the conference, review your goals and agenda with your manager. This demonstrates a professional and strategic approach to the trip, and helps give your manager confidence that you’ll be focused on work while you’re there.

Bring your agenda and list of goals to the conference—you may need them for reference to help stay on track.

At the conference

Every minute you’re at the conference, be aware of the opportunities around you and make the most of them. Go to the conference sessions. Attend the networking events. Talk with other marketers. Learn about their search marketing experiences and share some of yours. Learn new approaches or get confirmation that you’re on the right track.

Great ideas can present themselves at any time when you’re at a conference. At a recent conference I attended a panel about a marketing initiative that I wasn’t sure made sense for my company. After the session, I ended up sitting with one of the panelists for lunch. We discussed it, and I came away with an implementation plan (one of my best-ever conference lunches).

You’ll probably come across several new ideas at a conference. As you hear new ideas, jot them down. For me, it works best to bring one notebook dedicated to action items, and a separate notebook for all other notes. Writing down the ideas makes it easier to organize them when I get back to the office, and helps ensure I don’t overlook any ideas.

After the conference

Soon after you return to the office, organize and prioritize your ideas into a to-do list. If the list is long, I might assign each item a category from 1 to 3, where 1 is most important and 3 is least important. Then I prioritize all the 1’s, all the 2’s, and all the 3’s.

If your to-do list contains a new marketing initiative, develop a brief project plan that includes goals, observations, and options for the project.

Present your to-do list and project plans to your manager. This communicates to your manager the value that you got out of the conference, enables a chance to get buy-in on the ideas, and helps get your manager involved the process.

I haven’t implemented all 36 items on my recent conference to-do list, but I’ve implemented many of them and look forward to adding to the list at the next conference.

See you at SMX Advanced!