If you’re at all like me, you’re marketing a variety of different web assets – products, properties, businesses – and you’re working alongside a number of other marketing channels in a larger group. In our case, it’s the Direct Marketing (DM) group – in your organization, it may be called ‘acquisition marketing’ or ‘performance marketing’. In any case, how can you be sure you’re supporting the proper marketing initiatives with the appropriate marketing mix? How do you make budgeting decisions for each of the channels - search, display, email, affiliate marketing? [...]

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Be ready, because there's a new wave coming: competitive sabotage through SEO due diligence and outing. Competitive analysis will always be fundamental to search engine optimization. SEO, by nature, is a competitive pursuit: a site climbs the ranks on the backs of other sites, and there's only room for one URL at the top. Because of the large amount of money at stake, and the dramatic increase in CTR a top position grants, every SEO professional worth their salt will undergo deep competitive analysis if they hope to compete. It is a cornerstone of the work. And yet, some companies are te [...]

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Back in December 2010, I was relatively convinced that click prices were going to continue increasing in 2011, but Marin Software recently released a study of large scale paid search programs that suggests otherwise. The Paid Search Quarterly Benchmarking Report showed that although average cost per click (CPC) has increased since December 2010, it hasn’t changed year-over-year. However, the underlying trend is the same trend we’ve seen for the past couple of years: advertisers continue to migrate dollars from offline to online advertising, driving spend on paid search higher. The fi [...]

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At a conference last month, I had the privilege of speaking on a really fun panel with some of the brightest minds in Search, where we told some stories about integrating search into larger marketing efforts. We called it ‘Connecting The Dots’. I love these kinds of tales because they nod to the promise of search marketing – leveraging the comparatively precise nature of search data to inform other marketing channels in ways that only search can. And because I’m a search geek at heart, I get really excited when I think about ways to use search marketing for something other than just [...]

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On February 23, 2011, the day that Google's Panda update was released, a significant shift in search algorithms and SEO in general happened. For the first time, user experience and content quality became ranking factors in SEO for Google. Google clearly liked the impact of that change, since they followed more recently with an update, rolling out Panda to more audiences, and also applied it to sites with less traffic. So Panda is here to stay, and you can expect more and more updates along the same lines. So what's next? What is the next shoe to drop? I believe that it will be in the [...]

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