Going to Washington, D.C. to represent our industry to Congress was a great honor and the highlight of my career as an online marketer. It happened so fast, I never really had time to think about it, and I’m glad I didn’t because I probably would have freaked out. We had fun, saw the sights, and we met some really smart people (all the Congressional and Committee staff). Makes me feel better about the folks getting things done in D.C. I met a couple of lobbyists, too.

I didn’t realize that lobbyists help Congress the way they do. I always had this vision of a cigar-chomping good ol’ boy buying round after round of drinks, but these folks weren’t like that at all. Funny thing is, lobbying looks an awful lot like search engine optimization.

As an SEO, you want to make sure a search engine knows what your site is about by marking up the page the right way and making sure your inbound links have the right anchor text, and all the while coloring inside the lines so you don’t get penalized (or even banned!). I think lobbyists work the same way, educating lawmakers and their staffs about their particular topic while playing by the rules (at least the white hat lobbyists).

In the end, I think the folks in Congress at this hearing “get search.” They understand how important Internet advertising is to small business folks like us. And while I think the jury is still out on the Google / Yahoo! deal from an anti-trust perspective, I think that search advertising specific regulation isn’t going to happen.

D.C. Travelog (Continued from Part 1)

Previously on Search Engine Land: Search Marketer Rob Snell got a phone call asking if he wanted to testify in front of Congress at a hearing of the US House of Representatives’ Committee on Small Business, and less than a week later, he’s packed up and about to fly out to Washington to speak before Congress about the benefits of search marketing for small businesses.

Where was I? Oh, yeah. It was almost 4:30 in the morning, and I had just emailed Danny my Search Engine Land article from the Copy Cow (my copy shop). I locked the door to run home across the street to pack with 30 minutes to spare. I packed the car and picked up my girlfriend at 5:00 a.m to have plenty of time to get to the airport for our 6:15 flight. The scenery was ethereal. We drove east as the sun came up, watching the mist rise from the dozens of catfish ponds with almost no traffic for the 20-mile drive.

We checked in, checked our bags, and made our way through security. I got the customary pat-down search that seems to happen almost every time I fly through GTR. We made it to the gate. Thirty minutes later, Delta announced that our plane had a mechanical difficulty and the flight was canceled. I love living out in the country, but one of the downsides of living in rural Mississippi is our tiny little airport. I may joke about Uncle Earl running the cows off the runway so the plane can take off, but I’m not exaggerating that much.

After waiting in line for 45 minutes, we found out that all the other flights that day were fulls and the busted mechanical part would be in later that afternoon. I went back home for 9 hours to catch some zzz’s.

Later that day, I awoke to my phone buzzing with text messages. The Search Engine Land article was published, and all my SEO peeps were texting or emailing.

We hurried back to the airport, caught our flight, and made it to Atlanta. Our flight arrived at Washington-Dulles by midnight, and we made it to the JW Marriott by 1 a.m. thanks to our cab driver, the Jeff Gordon of Uzbekistan.

The next day, I slept like the dead. We got up pretty late and delivered 75 printed copies of my written testimony (pdf) to the Small Business Committee. LINK: http://www.house.gov/smbiz/. I felt like I was finally ready to testify. Afterwards, we played tourist for a while and walked around D.C. looking at landmarks and enjoying the great weather.

A buddy had a good friend who testified to Congress several times before. She called to give me pointers on what to expect, what to say, and, more importantly, what not to say. Most of it boiled down to “be yourself.” As an invited witness who didn’t have an agenda, I was pretty safe as long as I was polite. Other folks suggested to just say what I thought when Congress asked questions, and to just jump in if I wanted to get a word in the conversation.

The night before testifying, I kept going over my speech with my timer. I had five minutes to hit the highlights of my written testimony. Even though we had over an hour and a half on the schedule for Q&A, I wanted to make sure I covered several important points. I made a “big print” version of the third version of my “final” testimony and called it a night at about 1:00 a.m. And I was pretty excited. And nervous, too! I could barely sleep. I kept waking up every hour checking the time.

The day of the hearing

Architect Pierre L’Enfant did a spectacular job designing Washington, DC. The United States Capitol looks particularly intimidating when you’re riding down Pennsylvania Avenue about to testify to Congress.

To start the day, I had a 7:00 a.m. breakfast meeting with the Yahoo! who nominated me to testify to thank her and to grab a little oatmeal before heading to Congress. I made my way back to the Marriott to get my notes, and then we caught another cab who dropped us off at the Longworth House Office Building, right across the street from the Capitol. Security was tight.

Every official building we visited in DC had airport-like security with a bag x-ray and super-sensitive metal detectors. We cleared security, made our way to the hearing room, and waited for the hearing to start. My good friend, Andrea Harris of CarFax, showed up for moral support. I also fired up TWITTER on my iPhone and got some really cool attaboys from a few industry giants. I was pumped!

About 9:45 they opened up the hearing room. I introduced myself to the other panel members: Tim Carter of AsktheBuilder.com, Paul Sanar of SkyFacet, Randall Rothenberg of the IAB, and Richard Lent of AgencyNet.

Chairman Gonzales walked in at that point and introduced himself. He recognized me from either my caricature in the Snell Brothers logo and/or the photo on my biography. The testimony hadn’t yet started and here I was already familiar to the Chairman.

The members of the Subcommittee sat down at a long table across the back of the room. All five witnesses sat at another table facing the Congressmen and their aides. There were three microphones with speaker timers on the witness table. A huge flat-panel TV monitor hung on the wall to the right of the witnesses. Witnesses could see the monitor out of our peripheral vision, but the monitor was so the Congressmen could tell whether they were on TV or not.

Chairman Gonzales (D-TX) made an opening statement. Ranking member Westmoreland (R-GA) made his opening remarks. Next, the Chairman introduced the five witnesses and we gave five-minute oral summaries of our written testimony.

When practicing my testimony, I averaged about a minute per typed page of 18-point type. When I spoke at the hearing I was much slower. I was wrapping up page 2 and noticed the timer was at 3:15, so I had to summarize the rest off the cuff, editing while I was reading!

Here’s my last-last-last script for my oral presentation.

After the oral presentations, we got into the Q&A portion of the hearing. I’ll cover the entire hearing in detail in another article, probably after the official transcripts are posted later in July, but here are some of the points I covered in my portion of the Q&A session:

How do retailers deal with all these keywords?

• While a company like General Motors may buy millions of keywords, retailers who focus on a particular retail niche may still have thousands or even tens of thousands of keywords.

• I manage my keywords using my Indextools analytics software.
• Newer retailers without all this history can use online keyword tools. The paid search folks provide free keyword tools and there are some really good paid keyword research tools available (Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery).

Would I sell my keyword lists?

• No! My converting keywords are proprietary!

• I think competitors selling the exact same products usually have related but still very different keyword dictionaries, depending on what they sell and how they sell it..

How can small firms get into buying paid search ads?

• First, retailers can do paid search themselves.

• Later, they can hire consultants to help write ads, find more keywords and tune campaigns. These folks work on an hourly basis and perform audits for flat rates.
• Larger companies can outsource their paid search campaigns to agencies, many of which charge a minimum fee and a percentage of monthly ad spend like a traditional advertising agency would.

How easy is it to get online? And launch paid search ads?

• MYTH: Businesses think it’s hard to make SE-friendly web sites. 60% of small business folks think it’s difficult to get online, according to a survey. I thought that was a cop-out. Now more than ever there are more free or extremely affordable tools for the little guy. Yahoo! Store for e-commerce. Wordpress for blogs. Free keyword tools. Google Website Optimizer.

• Example paid search ad: “Orange Dog Collars.” I spent maybe 5 minutes the night before to show how fast I could make and run an online ad. Cranked my bid up to $2 a click to get that #1 position on Google. Set my daily limit to $100 so I wouldn’t get hammered on clicks. Asked folks in the audience to play along at home, search to see my result in the free search results, and click on my ad to see my landing page.

Are you afraid of Google’s domination in the search engines?

• Nope. Google is under too much scrutiny from the government, the media, their advertisers and their publishers to get away with anything for too long.

• I advise retailers not to be solely dependent on search engines for their marketing — paid OR free. Email marketing is very powerful. Send postcards to your customer list. Sponsor web sites. There’s more to the Internet than Google, Yahoo! and MSN.
• I talked about how the anti-trust issues of the Google / Yahoo! deal were above my pay grade, but I liked the idea of having Google ads run on Yahoo! when Yahoo! didn’t have any ad inventory and/or Google ads converted better than Panama ads.
• I’m not worried about Google being on top forever. Google had Google Video, but still had to buy Youtube. The social sites have sprung up from nowhere in spite of Google and Yahoo having similar products. The game is always changing. These companies will either innovate or have to acquire those that do if they want to remain on top, and some folks don’t want to be bought out.

What are the differences in free search and paid search?

• Explained differences between SEO and PPC. Showed how a page one position is important because 90% free clicks come from the first page of results.

• Examined the anatomy of a search engine results page. Pointed out what parts are free and what parts are paid
• Looked at local search for local businesses. I suggested also looking at paid search ads targeted for broad keywords, but using geo-targeting and only running those ads in markets their brick and mortar stores served. Example was buying the keyword “books,” but only in San Antonio, TX, for a Texas book store in the district of Chairman Gonzales.

What did we think Congress should do? What should Congress not do?

We spent most of the day trying to convince them not to legislate something that was working just fine. My suggestion was for them to create a Small Business E-Commerce Czar with the job of getting the word out to let all small business folks know about all the different ways to sell and market online.

Long-time Yahoo! Store owner and developer Rob Snell of Snell Brothers blogs about Yahoo! Store, speaks at search conferences about Yahoo! Store, and is the author of the Yahoo! Store book: Starting a Yahoo! Business For Dummies.

Last Tuesday afternoon, I got a phone call from a director at Yahoo Small Business who asked if I wanted to testify in front of Congress at a hearing of the US House of Representatives’ Committee on Small Business about search marketing. Now less than a week later, I’m speaking before Congress about the benefits for search marketing for small businesses!

The committee needed a witness that had a good search marketing experience to balance out the panel of witnesses, some of whom had been banned from Google. The committee wanted a full range of witnesses, all with different experiences from using search marketing. I think they wanted me because I was a retailer, and an author, and a consultant, so I had a pretty wide range of search marketing experiences to draw from.

Our family business is Gun Dog Supply. We sell dog training collars. I’m a retailer, as well a consultant for other Yahoo Stores and have seen a lot of folks do well using what I call a two-fisted approach to search marketing: maxing out paid search while still cranking up the SEO to get as much free traffic as possible.

The previous week I spoke at Internet Retailer in Chicago on a Yahoo Stores panel, and I think the folks at Yahoo were happy that I said what I thought, even when I was praising Yahoo’s competitors or giving Yahoo a hard time about something I thought they needed to fix. They wanted a witness who was somewhat objective about search marketing, but someone who had generally had a positive experience.

My problem was the hearing was a week from tomorrow, and I had gotten home from two full weeks on the road going to SMX Advanced in Seattle, speaking at Internet Retailer 2008 in Chicago, and playing in Kansas City between shows. I was pretty beat and two weeks behind at the office, but I said I would do it if I could get a .gov link from Congress!

Yahoo’s lobbyist called me and gave me the skinny. She forwarded my info to Bill Maguire, the Counsel for Technology Policy for the US House of Representatives’ Committee on Small Business. He called me late on Wednesday to interview me as a potential witness for the hearing. Bill picked my brain about search marketing, and how it worked for us and our clients, and I just fell into the conversation like I tend to do. After about 30 minutes on the phone, Bill said I was in and to expect an official invitation to testify at the hearing.

I got this cool official letter from the Chairwoman of the Committee:

Dear Mr. Snell:

I am writing to invite you to testify at a hearing of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Small Business, Subcommittee on Regulations, Health Care and Trade, entitled "The Impact of Online Advertising on Small Firms." The hearing is scheduled for 10:00 a.m., Wednesday, June 25, 2008, and will take place in Room 1539 of the Longworth House Office Building.

The entire written statement will be entered into the record. You should be prepared to summarize the written testimony in a five-minute oral presentation. The Rules of the Committee require that testimony is submitted at least two days prior to the date of the hearing, as well as a copy of witness’s curriculum vitae (or other statement describing education, employment, professional affiliations and other background information pertinent to the testimony), and a completed witness disclosure form (enclosed).

The Rules of the Committee also require that an electronic copy of the testimony is submitted for the Committee majority and minority staff by sending it to: [DELETED]. In addition, please provide 75 copies of your testimony for distribution at least one day prior to the date of the hearing. Testimony should be delivered to the Committee’s office at 2361 Rayburn House Office Building and a copy should also be delivered to the office of the minority staff in Room B-363 Rayburn. The Committee looks forward to your participation. Should you have any questions, please contact Bill Maguire, Counsel, at [DELETED].

Sincerely,
Nydia M. Velázquez
Chairwoman

The Committee is Chaired by Rep. Charlie Gonzalez (D- TX), and the Ranking Member is Lynn Westmoreland (R- GA). Here are the other members of the Subcommittee

• William Lipinksi (D- IL)
• Rick Larsen (D- WA)
• Jason Altmire (D- PA)
• Melissa Bean (D- IL)
• Gwen Moore (D- WI)
• Joe Sestak (D- PA)
• Bill Shuster (R- PA)
• Steve King (R- IA)
• Mary Fallin (R- OK)
• Marilyn Musgrave (R- CO)
• Vern Buchanan (R- FL)
• Jim Jordan (R- OH)

So now that I had an official invitation, my girlfriend and I decided to make a week of it and do the tourist thing in DC, so I booked my flights and hotels with less than a week to go.

I was told that "the hearing on the 25th is intended to highlight both the benefits of on-line advertising to smaller firms and the concerns that some small companies have raised about the challenge of making on-line advertising work for their businesses." After talking with an aide, it sounded to me like we would be doing a lot of explaining of basic concepts behind search marketing and giving our opinions After writing my Dummies book, Starting a Yahoo! Business For Dummies, I had gotten pretty good at breaking things down to a third-grade level.

I also was told to expect questions about pricing issues and models, the Yahoo/Google deal, fallout from the Yahoo/Microsoft non-deal, click fraud, and any other potential concerns of advertisers.

I think the Committee also wanted to hear how a small business can get national exposure with SEM in ways they could never afford with traditional marketing models like broadcast or newspapers. They also told me to bring "evidence of the cost-effectiveness of web advertising for small businesses versus other forms of advertising, particularly yellow pages, and estimate of costs to small business for SEO and PPC campaigns."

I prepared my written testimony, and was ready to summarize it in an oral presentation. I had to fill out some paperwork regarding my government affiliations and contracts (I have none), and bring 75 copies of my written testimony, and get all this info distributed to various Congressional office two days before the hearing (which means later today). Here’s my preliminary testimony:

Good morning. Thank you for asking me to appear on this panel. I’m here today to talk about how search engine marketing has transformed my family’s business, my clients’ businesses, and to show how other small businesses can take advantage of this effective and affordable way to drive visitors to their Web sites.

My name is Rob Snell. I’m from Starkville, Mississippi. These days I wear quite a few hats. I am a co-owner of Gun Dog Supply, our family retail business that sells supplies for hunting dogs. I’m also the managing partner of Snell Brothers, the consulting company my brother, Steve Snell, and I started that helps Yahoo! Store owners with their online marketing. A couple of years ago I wrote a book on Yahoo! Store: “Starting a Yahoo! Business For Dummies.” I’ve included information from a few of the marketing chapters at the end of my written testimony for your review.

Today, I’m going to share real numbers with you, so you can see the impact of search marketing on a real small business in dollars and cents. Every year our Yahoo! Stores get millions of visitors from the search engines. Tens of thousands of those visitors convert into paying customers. This year we will sell over $10 million dollars though several different Yahoo! Stores.

The Internet levels the playing field for small business folks like us. As a consultant and speaker, my job is to teach the little guys how to compete with the big guys. We use the Internet to leverage the strengths of small business: unparalleled product knowledge, enthusiasm for what we sell and do, and outstanding customer service and support. Bigger retailers cannot compete when we go head to head, product to product. They sell too many things!

Background

My parents, Warner & Anne Snell, started GUN DOG SUPPLY, back in 1972 on their kitchen table in Jackson, MS. They ran tiny display ads in hunting dog magazines and went full time with the business in late 1970s. Slowly, the business changed to a retail store with less emphasis on mail order sales.

In 1996, Petsmart opened across the street. 50% of our competitors went out of business overnight. Our sales dropped, too. We dusted off our mailing list and put together a new catalog. Unfortunately, our list was stale, and we lost money on every single catalog sent.

In 1997, I built a 5-page Web site. I wrote a killer Yahoo! directory listing, and we started getting tons of visitors from Yahoo! We had to figure out how to sell online and fast. Fortunately, we found the online store builder which is now Yahoo! Store.

For my family, selling on the Internet has literally changed our world. We went from a retail company doing $400,000 a year and struggling to pay the bills to a multi-million dollar retailer in a few short years.

Search Marketing = Free Search + Paid Search

Search marketing is the one-two punch of free search and paid search together. By performing search engine optimization on your Web site, you rank better and get more free traffic. Buying paid search ads insures [sic] you control your advertising message, and you’re not at the mercy of shifting search engine ranking algorithms.

Almost 40 percent of the traffic from the Big Four search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN/Live, and Ask) comes from paid search ads. I believe you should buy paid search ads when you already rank well for your keyword terms in the free search results. Why? When do you normally get two chances to make an advertising impression with a prospect who is ready to buy? It’s like buying an ad in the newspaper that runs right next to your feature story. You can’t control what they write about you in the paper, but the ad is all yours!

Using all the content from our print catalog for our online catalog was the secret to our initial success with the search engines. Those 50 pages of text covering hundreds of products would help us sell our dog training collars, Garmin Astro GPS, Tri-tronics collars and retriever dummies.

Originally, half of our traffic came from banner advertising and half was free traffic from search engines. My Yahoo! Store stats would tell me not only where the traffic came from, but what keywords folks were searching for. This information was gold!

For example, someone would buy a leather dog collar and the source of the order would show the sale coming from a search on Yahoo for “leather dog collars.” Another order would come in with a search for “retriever training supplies” and they would buy some training dummies, and/or a book or video on training retrievers.

I caught on pretty quick that keywords were important. People were buying the things they were searching for, so I started to obsess over our keywords and their search engine rankings.

By 2003, the search engines started selling text ads based on keyword searches. The free ride was over. I opened an account with Google Adwords and started buying ads on different keywords. I also had a Goto.com account which later became Overture and is now Yahoo! Search Marketing.

Paid search is good, too! With an online store, a small retailer can instantly have access to millions of potential customers. With as little as a $5 deposit in a Google Adwords account, a small business owner can buy targeted advertising and get instant traffic to his Web site.

Retailers can run national ad campaigns targeted only to folks searching for what they sell. You can buy ads but only for keyword searches relevant to your product mix.

Local retailers can also target their ads to run only in the specific markets they serve.

Selling on the Internet via an online catalog is much cheaper than sending catalogs through the mail. Advertising on the Internet is more cost effective than any other medium we’ve tried.

Search marketing is extremely efficient because you are ONLY marketing to those interested in your products. It is the least obtrusive form of advertising as the customer is literally asking for your ads when they perform a search. No other marketing method can touch search engine marketing for targeting the right prospects in the right places at the right time – when folks are ready to buy.

Thank you for the opportunity to appear before this committee. I look forward to answering any questions you may have.

Free Search & Paid Search Resources

• Yahoo! Search Marketing’s Resource
   
• Google AdWords Learning Center
   
• Google AdWords: (2008 Edition), by Andrew Goodman (Page-Zero)
   
• Matt Cutts is a senior engineer at Google in charge of search quality. Read his unofficial, but extremely relevant search blog
   
• Brett Tabke’s WebmasterWorld.com
   
• Aaron Wall’s SEOBook.com
   
• Danny Sullivan’s SearchEngineLand.com

From “Starting a Yahoo! Business For Dummies.” (Wiley, 2006)

Chapter 17: Driving Traffic That Converts

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art and science of making changes to your Web site to rank better for relevant keywords in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Most effective SEO is done in two ways: by implementing the current best practices and by testing new methods, tracking your results, and then keeping what improves your rankings.

The two basic building blocks of search engine optimization are text and links. Text refers to the words on the page — visible text you can see and a search engine spider can read. If you can see it on your screen and highlight text with your mouse and cut and paste it in a text editor like Notepad, then it’s visible text.

A link is a hyperlink pointing to the page from other pages on your site or from other sites. I go into a lot more detail about SEO in Chapter 19, but here’s what you need to know:

• Text: You want to have keyword-rich text on each of your pages using your most relevant keywords in well-written product descriptions and other useful content such as product reviews, articles, FAQs, and more. These keywords also appear in various HTML elements in places like your title tag, meta keywords and description tags, inside header tags, body text, and links on your site.
   
• Links: You also need links pointing to each page. The links can come from your site (internal links from your other pages or navigational text links), or the links can come from other people’s Web sites linking to you. Good examples of other folks linking to you are directory listings, resource pages, reciprocal link exchanges with similar sites, suppliers and manufacturers linking to their retailers, product review sites, and even people linking to you from their blogs.

Chapter 18: Buying Your Way to the Top

The instantaneous gratification of pay-per-click ads can be tempting. Here’s how paying to get listed in the top results beats hoping to be listed in the free results:

• With paid search, you’re totally in control. You choose the keywords, write the ads, and pick which pages get promoted. With SEO, the search engines (and sometimes the spammers) are in control of the rankings.
   
• With paid search, your ads appear almost immediately. You don’t have to wait weeks or months for your site to appear in paid-search ads like you do in the free search results.
   
• With paid search, you’re not at the mercy of search-engine spiders and ranking algorithms to determine the most relevant page. Just get out your wallet and buy your way to the top, because (like in the real world) the highest bidder gets the best real estate.
   
• With paid search, you choose what keyword phrases you rank well for by how much you’re willing to pay. Free search-engine rankings for keywords sometimes seem almost random, even though you optimize for your best words. For example, my #1 referring keyword phrase from Google on my dog-supply site is Dog Boots, but we sell only two kinds of dog boots and have around 1,500 other kinds of products. Go figure.
   
• With paid search, you can test keyword phrases that you don’t rank well for in the free results. That way, you can see whether you want to optimize for those words, too. Sometimes very competitive or expensive keywords don’t convert like you think they should.
   
• With paid search, you also write the ads so that you determine what users see. You choose the link text (title) and the little snippet of text (description) that appear on the search results pages. With the free listings, you have little or no control over what the search engines display.
   
• With paid search, you also choose what pages folks land on for each keyword. Instead of hoping that your best landing pages rank for your best keywords, you get to pick where folks go on your Web store. You can also change your landing pages as often as you want to maximize their effectiveness. When your pages rank really well for your best keywords in the free search results, you’re almost afraid to touch the pages.

Unfortunately, paid search has a dark side as well:

• Paid-search advertising is expensive and consumes a lot of time. Babysitting your ad campaigns takes a lot of time and mental energy. If you don’t closely monitor your campaigns, a good campaign can go down the tubes fast.
   
• Customers trust the free, natural, organic results. Free results are seen as independent and more authoritative than ads. More sophisticated surfers seem to avoid clicking ads.
   
• Competitors can be foolish and bid insane amounts, thus temporarily making your search-ad campaign ineffective or unprofitable. Competitors can also click your ads. Click fraud can be costly and frustrating.
   
• More retailers lose money than make money on pay-per-click ad campaigns (in my experience). This loss is probably due more to egobidding, mismanagement, or neglect than from evil-doers.
   
• Keywords just keep getting more and more expensive! The average cost per click just keeps going up. Two or three years ago, most traffic was free. You can still get thousands of people per day to your Web site at no cost-per-click with good old-fashioned SEO. There’s nothing like free traffic from search engines. Develop some good unique content, get a ton of links, and that’s pretty much it.

Right now it’s 4:07 a.m. on Monday. Thank goodness I own a copy shop, the Copy Cow, so I get a discount on my printing and have 24 hour access. My flight leaves in less than two hours and I haven’t slept much since I got the phone call. Time to go pack. Wish me luck!

Rob Snell is Managing Partner of Snell Brothers, a consulting firm specializing in search marketing for Yahoo! Stores and a co-owner of Gun Dog Supply. He posts somewhat regularly in his Yahoo Store blog and guest posts from time to time in the official Yahoo Store Blog.