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?

If you’ve been doing this a while like we have, you’ve probably got the basics down pat. You know how to support other marketing channels with search, how to engage with marketers from the respective businesses, and how to report out on results.

We’re very fortunate in that we’ve enjoyed a great deal of continuity in our DM group. I have the pleasure of working with some very talented counterparts in the other marketing channels and, as a group, we’ve been the beneficiary of some quite capable leadership. So the question arose some time ago, how can we raise the bar for our group?

One of the ideas that came up was to create a ‘Direct Marketing Board’, a type of Center of Excellence (CoE)– but not some figurehead kind of CoE where middle managers sit around and complain about upper- and lower-management, but one that actually makes a difference – one that makes real decisions that add value to the bottom line. One that can take decision making off of our leaders’ plates and move it closer to where the money is actually made and lost.

So, where to start?

The Direct Marketing Board or Center of Excellence (CoE)

First, your VP Marketing (or whoever sits on top of your marketing teams) needs to have buy in. This means that as a group, DM needs to have a track record. You wouldn’t want to throw a bunch of newcomers or people unfamiliar with each other into a CoE and expect them to formulate a cohesive strategy – these need to be seasoned marketing people who already trust one another. After all, at some point, you’ll be making decisions about who gets what budget, and for that you need folks who’ve been around the block together, preferably more than once.

Once you have executive support and a solid DM team, set up a meeting with the respective channel heads. Make it over lunch if you want, you’ll be there a while. During the first meeting everyone should cover their own channels and talk about how they work. Topics you’ll want to cover for each channel: Broad description (how it works, what you use it for – acquisition, retention, branding), what are the key metrics (KPIs) used to measure success, what are each channel’s particular strengths and weaknesses, and how you are currently budgeting/planning for it.

For the next (and subsequent) meetings, try pivoting from a world of marketing channels to a world of campaigns, events, and strategic initiatives. Pick an important upcoming event and talk about how each channel should support it. Dig into the details – talk about creative, budgets, flighting, which channels to (and not to) use.

What you’ll probably find out is that when you’re done, you’ve essentially built out a brief and a media plan for the event. Once it’s ironed out, use this as a blueprint for other events and campaigns. Pretty soon you will have built an entire process and practice around supporting company initiatives with DM.

Now that you have the blueprint, turn it into a Powerpoint presentation and deliver it to your VP as a group. There will be some minor tweaks as you gather feedback, but the intention here is to give something to your boss that he can take to his peers in the organization. The end-game is to give the DM group a more influential role in the planning stages of a campaign.

If you’re successful, when new events and initiatives come up, you’ll have a seat at the big kids’ table, and can thus drive some of the budget allocation and planning decisions of the supporting campaigns. By doing so you will create campaigns that are better informed than they would be without your expertise in media.

What Else Can The Direct Marketing CoE Do?

For one thing, since heads of marketing channels generally mange teams, the CoE can be used to decipher and handle teambuilding issues. This can range everywhere from troubleshooting staffing issues to creating formal cross-training programs. In either case, you’ll be better equipped to build and retain winning teams.

Also, if you haven’t done so already, you can build better reporting dashboards to show off your new cross-channel integrated goodness.

To summarize, we’ve covered three very good reasons to think about forming a Direct Marketing Board, or ‘DM CoE’:

1. Gain control over and drive planning and budgeting for campaigns and events
2. Tackle teambuilding and development issues with your peers
3. Build better and more integrated dashboards for cross-channel reporting

And, once you’ve solved all those problems and you’re still looking for something to do, then you can sit around and complain about upper- and lower-management.

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 tempted to push it even further and engage in risky strategies and competitive sabotage in order to get an advantage.

It is not a leap to say that Google has both created and enabled the popularity of this practice. I am not making judgements, simply stating fact.

For years, Google has pushed for its users to issue spam reports, and recently they’ve made submitting spam reports even easier while proactively requesting them at times.

Some outspoken opponents have denigrated this practice as Google policing the Web. While that certainly has an element of truth, the whole picture is not quite so tidy.

Rather than police the Web, Google would seek to police its index. The problem, it seems, is that Google’s index has become more or less synonymous with the Web.

Old Guards & SEO Outing

The old guard of SEO – some of the early professionals when the industry was still comparatively small a few years back – has always practiced according to a certain code. Outing competitors for shady practices was wrong, they said, it undermined the profession. It introduced a corrosive element to SEO as a marketing channel. Outing other SEOs deteriorated the perceived quality of the service and helped create a market for lemons.

Part of search marketing’s evolution has been the natural rise of SEO from webmasters, programmers, and affiliates, to a more corporate and business-like core. Sure, there are still lots of the old guard still practicing out there as well.

As SEO has grown and its constituents have become diversified, the closely held moral codes have begun dissolving. With this has been the play of upstarts such as Digital Due Diligence who bring high-profile SEO outing to the mainstream press. My prediction is that this practice will become more prevalent in the coming years.

Money & Morality

With a distinct moral component this issue can be quite polarizing, and most of the folks I talk to fall in one of two camps. They either feel it is flat-out wrong and against their principles, or they feel it is a legitimate competitive technique.

For me, outing another company’s SEO practices falls outside of the ethical and efficiency standards that I feel comfortable working in. Accordingly, my policy is to never engage in the practice.

Over the years I’ve seen a lot of good, bad, and downright ugly SEO. And yet I have never submitted a spam report on a competitor. I feel my time is best directed on giving our clients the best possible service and recommendations. While submitting a spam report takes relatively little time, it takes focus off the core of what we’re trying to do. It puts too much focus on competitors. Much like Facebook’s ugly attempted PR smear on Google, petty spam reports take your eye off the ball and are not time well spent, in my experience.

As for straight outing a competitor publicly, that is an abysmal practice that could over time contribute to a market for lemons effect in SEO. Additionally, it is disrespectful and insensitive to the realities professional SEOs face.

Playing devil’s advocate for a moment, unless an SEO technique is illegal, immoral, hurts the web, and/or harms users, it’s more or less valid.

While Google has to a large extent made their business interests a moral issue, SEO is not about morality. It’s about money. And SEOs are working hard out there to make companies (or themselves) money practicing tactics that work. It’s still early in the game (relatively speaking), and it’s still in some sense the Wild West.

Evolving SEO Accountability

However, I do feel a higher level of accountability is in order. As a whole, SEO has grown lazy. Its grown fat on links as a free pass to ranks. Its grown fat on domain authority as a free pass to ranks. There are exceptional SEO consultants and agencies doing great things, but they are rare. The bell curve largely features middle-of-the-road practitioners doing fairly rote work and cashing their checks, with little creativity. And worse, there are SEOs doing harmful things and putting companies at undue risk.

Outing, in some sense, helps this. It pushes the field to improve and catch up, or fall behind. But it must be done right. While I absolutely do not agree with the recent outing of the flower industry to the New York Times, the company behind that story writes a compelling piece defending why due diligence is good for SEO. Any attempt to create information symmetry in the space is welcome, but not at the expense of SEO as a whole.

The Future Of SEO Is Shining White

Get ready for the next wave, because it’s coming. Can you imagine a time when your link profile is a competitive advantage, not only because of its obvious SEO value, but because it contains no paid links a competitor can out? Can you see the value in having a squeaky clean SEO footprint that no competitor could prey on? Be ready, because in the future competitors will not only report you to Google, they’ll report you publicly.

Every algorithmic change and evolution of the Web reinforces the value of white hat SEO. Every time. It is the only sustainable, long-term, and quality approach to SEO, if you care about those things.

How I Feel About Competitive Analysis & SEO Outing

My company, AudetteMedia, engages in due diligence on behalf of its clients. However, we follow an ethical standard as follows:

1. Respect the Work of Others. Above all else, we respect the work of other professional SEOs and know it was executed with the company’s best interest in mind. That point of view could change once research into a site has been undertaken. But it’s the point of departure.
2. Never Disclose Competitors Publicly.We are not interested in giving mainstream media fuel to create buzz and pageviews. We are not interested in creating buzz for ourselves by outing other companies.
3. Business is Business. Ultimately, SEO is about business. It’s not about morality. We don’t presume that our principles and ethics should apply to other search marketers.
4. Competitive Insight is Confidential. Beyond outing to the press or in public, competitive insight and analyses are not for outside eyes. It is confidential information to be used for SEO purposes.
5. Rare is the Perfect Site. Most sites have some sort of baggage to account for. Legacy paid links, media buys that appear to pass manipulative PageRank, thin or spammy content, there are many examples.

Conclusion

While I hope that this phase of SEO outing passes, I’m quite sure it won’t. We are embarking on yet another new chapter in SEO, and, combined with the Panda change, it will take many months to see how it ripples across the Web.

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 first couple months of 2011 revealed some interesting paid search marketing trends, including increased paid search volume and click-through rates for large advertisers. But, as mentioned, click prices remained stable over year-over-year.

A review of the first quarter of this year in comparison to the same period in 2010, shows that large scale advertisers ramped up their paid search ad spend by an average of 61%  year-over–year. At the same time, paid search ads served jumped, providing 41%* more impressions this year versus last.

As paid search impressions and spend increased, large-scale paid search marketers have also increased efficiency. By better optimizing their growing campaigns, marketers in the index have increased click-through-rates 14% since 2011, while holding overall costs-per-click stable.

While it’s possible that CPCs rose for some terms, overall improvements in quality appeared to have helped large advertisers keep a lid on average keyword prices.

Have you seen similar trends in your campaigns? More importantly, given the trend, have you taken the right steps to structure your campaigns for profitable growth?

Here are a couple tips for “industrial strength” paid search marketers to pay attention to as they continue their quest for increased volume and efficiency.

• Use Technology to Drive Scale – As the paid search landscape becomes more competitive, the ability to grow paid search campaigns while maintaining a consistent ROI will become increasingly challenging. Whether you choose to develop your own tools, or use a third party platform, make sure that you are leveraging technology to drive efficiency. Remember that saving a couple of hours a week through automated reporting or bidding provides time savings that you can reallocate towards launching new campaigns, refining keyword sets, or optimizing creative.
• Benchmark Growth Against the Competition – Are you growing your campaigns fast enough?  To find out, start by comparing your spend growth against the industry, or better yet your competition. Your search engine account teams likely have some basic information that you can use as a starting point. To get a more precise picture of how you stack up, you can leverage industry benchmarking reports available free from a variety of SEM vendors, agencies, and research organizations. Finally, the best benchmarking tools allow you to make comparisons to competitors directly. Tools like Hitwise or Comscore are a great source for this data, but typically require a subscription.
• Make Sure Your Ad Copy Stands Out – With increasing volume, you can also expect increased competition, making your creative more important than ever. Make sure you are periodically performing an analysis of your ads in comparison to competitors. Being thoughtful about how your calls to action compare in the competitive landscape will not only help you to grow your programs, but will help to maintain or increase efficiency.
• Add Negatives – Whenever you scale programs by adding new campaigns, it’s important to remember to optimize your negative keywords. Adding negatives will help you shape your traffic and maintain return-on-investment ratios. I suggest reviewing the raw queries from the past couple months and adding appropriate negatives to ensure you’re aren’t paying for non-converting clicks.

Increased search volume and click-through rates are good news. If online activity is a leading indicator of the economy then hopefully everyone’s revenue will be up in 2011. I look forward to seeing if these early 2011 trends continue.

*Editors Postscript: An updated chart has been posted and a change made to the copy here, to resolve the error with juxtaposed numbers (as noted in comments below).

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 driving clicks and conversions.

Do The Easy Stuff First

When thinking about all the stories I could tell that pointed to integrated search campaigns, I decided to first take a tiny step back and think about my audience.

• What if some of these marketers hadn’t integrated search into their marketing efforts at all?
• What if search was sitting over in the corner all by itself, the wallflower of the media channels?
• What one thing could I tell everyone to do that they could take back to the office and actually implement?

Ah, yes…Search Retargeting! Search retargeting is something that marketers can buy from their search engine representatives fairly easily. You basically take your top keywords, hand them to your rep along with any display creative you’re either running or want to run, and off you go!

Users who have searched for your top keywords are then targeted out on the broader network with your display ads. Here’s the example I used. Suppose a user searched for “ncaa hockey championship” as in below:

If we were running a retargeting campaign using this keyword, then a user elsewhere on our site might see an ad such as this:

I’ve exploded the ad so you can see it better — it’s an ad for NCAA Hockey Championship gear at the Yahoo! Sports Shop. You can then track these users back to your site, using your analytics platform, where they normally perform much better than untargeted consumers of display media. This is the easiest way to ‘connect the dots’ with Search, especially if you’re already buying display media. Try it — you’ll like it!

Wagging The Dog

Once you’ve gotten a taste of integrated search marketing, you’ll be instantly hooked. So where will you get your next dose? Some time ago, we conducted offer testing using paid search, and it’s a story that I enjoy telling even now because most marketers still aren’t harnessing the power of search marketing in this way.

The story goes like this: I was working at an agency and we were trying to help a client determine the best offer to use for the holiday season that year. Should they use ‘free shipping’ or ‘we pay the sales tax’? We had tried to test the offers through our email channel but something had gone horribly wrong, either with the email list or the drop itself.

There was a sense of panic in the room as we looked at our inconclusive results and our seemingly limited options. I quietly smiled to myself and raised my hand. “Give me a week and I can tell you which offer will work better”, I said with confidence.

As the collective eyebrows raised, someone finally asked the question I was eagerly awaiting: “How are you going to do that?”. I explained that with paid search we could quickly build out these offers (and a control offer) and we could do some crude but fast testing to see which offer converted best to sale. We all agreed that conversion rate was the metric that mattered, and I ran off to put my plan into action.

A week later, we were sitting in the same conference room reviewing our test results. Sure enough, ‘Free Shipping’ was the hands-down winner as far as conversion rate went. But here’s the really cool part: We not only went with “Free Shipping” for our PPC campaigns that holiday season, we went with it for all media channels AND the site as a whole for the ENTIRE holiday season.

Paid & Organic, So Happy Together

I wrote a previous column about this a while ago, but I love this story so much I’m going to tell it again (and again), only this time much more concisely. This anecdote begins with the common question: “We already rank #1 organically for our brand keyword. Why would we ever buy it on PPC?”. While the answer can be different for everyone, we should be able to agree on how to find the solution.

Here’s how we did it.

Our goal was to track the clickthrough rates (CTRs) of both the organic listing and the paid link to see how the two links interact (looking at CTRs will tell you if you’re cannibalizing your organic traffic). We did this by estimating daily search volume for the keyword and tracking the click volume on both the organic and paid listings.

Once we were set up to measure this, we alternated periods of buying paid ads and then pausing them. Then we plotted these effective CTRs on a scatter graph by day and did a linear regression to see what the trend was.

Here’s what it looked like:

(Note: One of the key best practices that came out of this analysis was to make sure and differentiate your ad copy from your organic listing).

In our case, the paid ad actually drove more traffic to the organic listing! Who knew?! Depending on your business this may or may not be the case, but if you at least know how to find the answer, you can wrestle control of the conversation and guide it in a rational way.

There are many more examples of innovative ways to ‘connect the dots’ with search marketing by integrating it into your larger marketing initiatives, and we’ll continue to discover more exciting ways to leverage search data to make our marketing worlds better in the coming months and years. Until then, Happy Searching!

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 area of links. There are still way too many sites that are prospering through the use of poor quality link building practices, and the Panda algorithms do not address them directly. These poor practices frustrate publishers that try to play by Google’s rules, because they see “cheaters” taking business away from them.

I believe that Google will make an algorithmic move against some of these practices in the near future. Here are some of the things they may key in on:

1.  Hit Counters

Believe it or not, there are still sites that use hit counters to get links that are prospering. Here is an example:

This site has published a hit counter from a third party, and in return, they have provided a link with the completely irrelevant anchor text “Expedia” to the company that provided the counter. I believe that creating useful tools and allowing others to publish them is a legitimate practice, but the problem with this example is the lack of relevance.

If the link back had said something like “Hit Counters” it would be a different story. Widgets relevant to the site providing them and that provide attribution links back to that site is a valid strategy as I discussed with Matt Cutts back in 2008.

2.  Useless Blog Posts

Guest posting is another link building practice which I think has a lot of value if done in the right manner. In my view, the right way is to write a quality article, give that article to only one quality site, and get an attribution link back in the credits. Contrast that with this post:

There are several easily detected signs that gives this post away. The three keyword rich links embedded in the post are just begging to be flagged. This stuff simply has to go the way of the dinosaur.

3.  Footer Links

There is really very little reason for someone to give a link that is meant to an endorsement in the footer of their website. I know that it happens legitimately some of the time, but if a high percentage of a site’s inbound links appear in the footer of other people’s sites, I would think that would be a clue of misguided link tactics. Of course, there also extreme examples like this one:

This one is extreme because the blog post on which this appeared is nowhere in sight. The link is many inches below the last bit of text on the page.

Why I Think This Shift Is Coming …

These type of link building practices are (most often) used by poor or lower quality sites. When a publisher’s promotional strategy uses manipulative techniques like this, the chances that they go home at night worrying about how to add more value to their users is relatively small.

Google took one big step forward with Panda, using one set of signals that they were able to show through internal testing, to help improve search results. The type of link building illustrated here is another set of signals ripe for picking. No doubt that it will require serious effort and tuning to get it right.

Processing these types of problems algorithmically isn’t as simple as it may seem on the surface, but with testing the search engines can find a way to clean out a lot of crappy sites.

My advice to readers of this column is to stay clear of these types of shady practices. I have no way to predict precisely when, but I believe that their time is coming, and you don’t want get caught in the crossfire.

“What’s up with Google now, post-Panda/Farmer/whaddayacallit? What am I supposed to be doing for SEO?”

(Usually accompanied with a deep sigh, aggressive hand gestures, and/or grimacing.)

It All Started With Caffeine

“Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale.” – Carrie Grimes, Google

If we look back a year ago, when Google rolled out Caffeine, which was (and still is) unprecedented in search, it was this infrastructure change that allowed for the dramatic algorithm improvements we’ve seen recently.

Caffeine was not an algorithm change but instead a massive improvement to the freshness of Google’s index and its ability to crawl and then index content nearly in real time.

But closely timed with these changes was the Mayday update, which specifically focused on returning quality results for long-tail queries. Ecommerce sites were impacted, as were any sites with an architecture built around item-level URLs standing on thin content and separated by several clicks from higher-authority pages (like home pages, major categories, or any URL with authority and unique content).

Then came Panda/Farmer. While Mayday appeared to hit a relatively small portion of the total query space, the latest version of Panda has a much stronger impact, hitting about 12% of all searches. As distinct from Mayday, which focused on long-tail quality and authority (penalizing shortcuts such as simply matching keywords to queries), Panda focuses on concepts such as quality, authority, trust and credibility, and also incorporates user signals.

So why does Caffeine matter so much? It seems that Caffeine, at least in part, has enabled these evolutions in the algorithm, through its ability to index such a massive portion of the web. Carrie Grimes from Google again:

“Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles.”

In order to rank URLs appropriately, they must be in an index (after being crawled and fetched). These are distinct processes with their own sets of algorithms. Caffeine represents a new model in search, whereby the largest modern day index of the web has been created, in order to model the data accurately and rank pages based on content and social signals, as well as the PageRank equation signals Google has built its search engine upon.

What Does This Mean For SEO?

It has been common practice for many years to monitor overall site indexing in each of the major engines (mostly focusing on Google, naturally). Sites that weren’t being indexed deeply would need specific tactics to push that number up, and sites well indexed would be monitored closely to ensure that was sustained.

What’s different post-Panda is that indexing, as a metric or signal, is no longer viable, simply because Google seems to want everything it can get in its index. The index is not a signal of anything, anymore, except that Google has the URL in its databases.

We’ve seen several large sites which were impacted by Panda, and in each case, indexation remained fairly flat while traffic from Google organic search plunged 50% or more.

In her piece on Google confirming Mayday impacts the long-tail, Vanessa Fox reported:

“I asked Google for more specifics and they told me that it was a rankings change, not a crawling or indexing change, which seems to imply that sites getting less traffic still have their pages indexed, but some of those pages are no longer ranking as highly as before.”

This is precisely what we’re seeing with Panda, as well.

Recommended SEO Approach For Panda

While most of what works now, has always worked, there is at least one important change.

The SEO model has changed with Panda in that, rather than getting as many URLs as you can indexed, you now want only your highest-quality, most important URLs indexed. Consistent signals should be sent as to which pages are most important:

1. Decide which URLs are canonical and create strong signals (rel canonical, robot exclusion, internal link profile, XML sitemaps)
2. Decide which URLs are your most valuable and ensure they are indexed and well optimized
3. Remove any extraneous, overhead, duplicate, low value and unnecessary URLs from the index
4. Build internal links to canonical, high-value URLs from authority pages (strong mozRank, unique referring domains, total links, are example metrics)
5. Build high-quality external links via social media efforts

Pay special attention to number 3 above. If your properties have low-quality or significantly duplicative content, it is best to remove those URLs from the indexes. Even a site with some high-quality content and lots of thin or low-quality content could see traffic deterioration because of Panda.

The new SEO, at least as far as Panda is concerned, is about pushing your best quality stuff and the complete removal of low-quality or overhead pages from the indexes. Which means it’s not as easy anymore to compete by simply producing pages at scale, unless they’re created with quality in mind. Which means for some sites, SEO just got a whole lot harder.

Additional Reading

• Just What User Behavior Data Does Google Use to Influence Search Rankings? SEOByTheSea.com
• Google Told You So SEOmoz
• What Google’s Latest Changes Mean For SEO AudetteMedia
• Why Quality Is The Only Sustainable SEO Strategy SearchEngineLand

The majority of these mobile users are performing Google searches, providing a growing marketing opportunity for paid search advertisers.

In addition, rising smartphone use means consumers are expecting more from their mobile experience. Instead of looking up restaurants or hotels before heading out, more people are now searching for places and services with their phones on-the-go.

At a high-level, managing mobile paid search ads is very similar to managing desktop paid search campaigns. In fact, your Google campaigns may already be opted-in to mobile and you could already be advertising on mobile devices.

However, user patterns and intent are different enough on cell-phones that you should be managing mobile campaigns separately. With our experience with large scale advertisers, mobile campaigns typically have higher Click-through-rates (CTR) and lower Cost-per-Click (CPC) and CPA.

Here are some of the best practices that we have identified working with large scale advertisers:

Separate Mobile Campaigns

As I mentioned above, ads perform differently on mobile devices. In order to optimize for mobile-specific performance, you need to separate mobile campaigns from your traditional desktop paid search ads.

The easiest place to start is to duplicate your existing high-volume campaigns and target them to mobile devices (excluding mobile devices from the existing desktop campaign targeting). Separate, mobile-specific, campaigns will provide more granular control over bids, creative, and landing pages that should be optimized for mobile devices.

Optimize Mobile Landing Pages

With the majority of mobile browsing occurring on smart phones, the browsers mimic desktop browsing experience with two key differences:  everything is smaller and there is limited support for Adobe Flash.

With the proliferation of smartphones, it’s not necessarily as important to have a mobile specific (or WAP) website (see Mobile Mondays for more on that topic); however, you want to ensure that landing pages provide a positive user experience.

Evaluate what pages look like on standard phones (iPhone and Android) and fix pages that would show broken images or Flash files. Another common usability issue with mobile browsers is pages where the user is forced to scroll back and forth to read the content on a page.

Tailoring mobile landing pages, or if you have the resources, developing smartphone specific websites are proven to encourage the conversion process on mobile phones.

Position Is More Important

Google shows only 1-2 paid search ads on the top of mobile search results and a couple of ads at the bottom of the page. This means that mobile searches have limited inventory in comparison to the 10+ ads that are displayed on the top and side of desktop browsers.

Advertisers see huge drop-offs in click-through and conversion rates when their ads are shown in the lower positions. In order to get your ad to appear when a user searches, you need to place a bid that ensures it is in one of the top positions.

Because CPCs are often lower on mobile-specific ads, this doesn’t necessarily mean that you should pay more, however, it is important to monitor position to ensure that ads are displaying in the limited spots available.

Tailor Mobile Ad Creative

The combination of limited real estate on mobile search results and different user intent, calls for mobile specific ad copy. We’ve seen more success with shorter, “to the point” messaging than with ads that use all of the available characters.

You also want to make your call-to-action as clear as possible so that consumers know they will be able to make a purchase, registration, etc. when they click on your ad.

Customizing creative to the browsing device, for example putting the words “iPhone” or “Android” in the creative text has also demonstrated better click-through rates— just be sure that you set the device-targeting parameters to match the messaging.

Focus On Local Activities

With separate mobile paid search campaigns, you can now begin to focus on the mobile experience. Consider how consumer intent for mobile users might vary from your traditional desktop browser.

According to Google, “one in three mobile search queries are made by people who are looking for something in their local area.”

Are mobile searchers looking for your store locations or a phone number to call? If so, you can use location and click-to-call extensions to provide that information directly in the search results.

In addition to providing supplementary information, local offers or coupons placed directly within ads provide further encouragement for in-person conversions.

In this Adidas case study, Google showed that mobile ads with offers had higher click-through-rates than other mobile ads, and double the in-store coupon redemption rate.

Also, when focusing on local conversions, don’t forget about the landing pages. Placing location, contact information, and coupons clearly on mobile-specific landing pages will help consumers that click on your ads get to this information more quickly.

Closing Thoughts

While you may already be receiving traffic from mobile search, your program will benefit taking a proactive approach managing your mobile campaigns. Just as with any online campaign, it is important to continue monitoring performance and adjusting your keywords, creative and landing pages according to what works and what doesn’t.

This type of tactic can turn the ‘head’ of your portfolio into more of a ‘tail’ and makes it work more efficiently for you. But if you’re like us, and you have super-sized SEM programs, how do you tackle this in a manageable way that will drive incremental profit to your group or company, and make you look like the PPC Superhero you’ve always dreamt of being?

Channel Your Inner Superhero

Today I’m going to focus on search network targeting as an example. This is one of the simpler targeting options to leverage, and if you can master this one, the others won’t pose too difficult a task.

First, let’s define the target. On both AdWords (for Google) and adCenter (for Bing & Yahoo!), you can, with some degree of accuracy, split out your search traffic from so-called “Owned and Operated’ (O&O) sources and syndicated sites (third-party sites whose search functionality is powered by the big engines).

For example on AdWords, for a given campaign, you can choose to have your keyword ads displayed on Google search only, or on Google search + search partners such as AOL, Ask, etc.

On Microsoft’s adCenter, the target is set at the ad group level, and there are three options: a)Yahoo & Bing b)syndicated sites only, or c)Yahoo & Bing and syndicated sites.

Either way, in order to take advantage of this, you’re going to want to duplicate parts of your portfolio. So where should you start, and where do you want to put the duplicates?

Digging In

As far as where to start, you’ll want to first hit the campaigns and ad groups that have your highest volume keywords in them. Reason being, once you start breaking up keywords, your data thins out pretty quickly. Also, duplication and the ensuing management takes a fair amount of work, so you’ll want to apply these efforts where they’ll bear the most fruit.

There’s the work involved in building out these duplicates, managing them, and added stress on APIs in bidding on duplicates. In our case, these desirable head keywords are spread throughout our portfolio, so in some instances we may duplicate entire accounts, rather than sifting through them to find the right combination of ad groups and campaigns.

Also, because these programs are very large, the duplicates will often live in new, separate accounts.

Going Once, Going Twice

Next, you’ll need some notion of how to bid these duplicates. On Google this is particularly important, because these two targeting options actually overlap (see above). But even on adCenter, you may want to make some assumptions about the relative value of each of the targets.

Hint: Sometimes core search performs better than syndicated search. Pick a percentage lift and apply it appropriately.

For our risk-averse friends who are feeling a bit queasy about changing bids too radically, start slowly (a few ad groups or campaigns) and get a feel for the relative difference in performance – then change your tactics accordingly.

Creating Synergy

Remember that the goal here is to separate out the traffic sources and optimize them individually. Once you’ve done so, and you’ve reached a stable state with each of the keyword instances, roll them back up and see what your metrics look like.

If you’re lucky, you’ve achieved some combination of efficiency and lift, and you’re better off than you were before. For example, if the profit/roi/revenue driven by the sum of both of the keyword instances is greater than the single instance was, congratulations!

Keep moving through your keyword portfolio from the head toward the tail, until the returns you see no longer justify the effort.

Once you’ve reached this point of diminished returns, you’ll want to turn your attention to one of the many other targeting options offered by the search engines. Match type, geo-target, day part, etc. Just take it from the top, rinse, and repeat!

My particular focus was on social engagement metrics. To get access to this data on other sites I made use of the Pro level service from Compete.com. This allows me to look at metrics such as time on site, pages per visit, and visits per person.

Unfortunately, bounce rate was not available, but these still felt like three pretty good metrics to examine. I also decided to look at some of the larger content farms to see what the story was with them.

Here is the raw data:

What Does The Data Tell Us?

I’ve sorted the data based on the level of drop in the traffic reported by Compete from January to February. First, be aware that Compete.com uses a relatively small sample size of about 1% of US Internet users.

This means there is a fair amount of room for error in the data. For example, other sources such as the winners and losers article cited above indicated that eHow and WikiHow both gained traffic.

However, I still think the data is directionaly meaningful. While there may be some bias in the data due to the nature of the way it is collected, the key is to look at groups of sites that the bias would affect in a similar way, in this case, all high volume article sites.

Here are some interesting observations about what I see in the data above about the 3 sites showing less than a 10% drop in traffic. They had:

1. The best time on site metrics
2. The highest visits per person
3. The highest number of fans for their fan pages

In contrast, the pages per visitor metric does not track the other three. The second and third highest pages per visitor sites were sites that lost 40% or more of their traffic. Nonetheless, in aggregate, my takeaway is still that the social engagement on the losing sites was lower than on the winning sites.

It is likely that the metrics Google is using may include some or all of these, but certainly includes many others, and it is also likely that the signals are being evaluated in aggregate — i.e., no single metric is being used as a signal, but a combination of metrics are being used.

This is important because no single metric provides a good enough signal to act upon, but as a larger group the data quality improves significantly.

How To Move Forward

I have done similar examinations in other market areas, and have seen similar data. When people come to us for help with Panda, one of the first areas we look at is the social engagement metrics for the site.

With analytics, we can examine which portions of the site have the worst metrics. We also look at crawl rate data to see what sections of the site had the biggest decline in crawl rate volume since the Panda update.

In addition, don’t overlook the simple concept of performing an objective review of the content of your site and making determinations as to where the weakest parts are. Each of these exercises can help you identify the areas that users value the least on your site. more advanced tools include ClickTale and AttenionWizard.

Whatever you end up doing, don’t get wrapped up in trying to find the edge of the algorithm.

As Vanessa Fox indicated in this article don’t try to identify a footprint that sites that focus on users have, instead “Focus on users!” Once you get used to thinking this way, it can be more productive.

Here are some of the thing you end up thinking about:

1. What can we offer our users, that is related to our product or service, that is valuable that no one else does? Or at least very few people do?
2. How do we present that in an engaging web experience that helps people find the value add quickly?
3. What steps can we take to test and measure user engagement with my offerings and by website?
4. If we can’t do the above steps in my current business how can we change it so we can?

Some publishers don’t want to have to work this hard, hopefully most of your competition.

But here is the reality:  you never are going to make tons of money doing only the easy stuff – everyone does that, so where is the differentiation? Focus instead on some of the hard things, and figure out how to make them easy.

That is where the big money is to be found. Doing this is not by itself guaranteed to make you piles of money, but it is something that at least gives you a shot at it.

Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal conceded that there are signals in the latest algorithm update that can be gamed. (Any algorithm can be gamed.) What are they? It will take time, but eventually some of them will be discovered.

If quality, credibility, and authority can all be algorithmically identified, then certainly they are based on distinct sets of factors that in sum create signals.

Things such as density of advertising, author names and titles, address and phone information, badges and memberships in known organizations, content density, the quality of a site’s link profile, maybe even W3C compliance (although that’s a stretch) are all potential areas to investigate. This advice is not just for the gamers, these are areas where high-quality, white-hat SEOs should be looking, too.

We are coming upon a graduation of sorts for SEO that will continue to bring various disciplines together: information architecture, user experience, even web design are all important in regards to SEO and how a site is scored.

How a site “feels” to a visitor, the credibility it portrays, these are areas that design plays an important part in, an area that John Andrews was already talking about at SearchFest in 2010.

Above and beyond the granular tactical stuff we SEOs are obsessed with, we need to figure out what users want, because that’s where Google is going. Chasing users, not algorithms, will have the best long-term influence on a site’s rankings.

After all, Google (and any search engine) is basically a means to an end, a way to capture audience share (the users) who depend on search to find good information. I’ve been saying exactly the same thing for about 10 years, and it’s more true now than ever.

What Link Metrics Translate To Higher Rankings?

The conference season is in full swing and I’ve spoken at a couple recent ones: SearchFest, where I presented on link building with Rand Fishkin, and at SMX West where I presented with Vanessa Fox, Dennis Goedegebuure and Tony Adam on enterprise SEO.

Building presentations is always a great exercise, because it forces you to distill your thoughts into actionable, quality information for conference attendees. I love the process and I really enjoy speaking at these shows.

My SearchFest presentation sought to communicate the following four points to our audience:

1. Traffic yield of the URL

While “people” need keywords to find what they’re looking for, keywords are just a proxy for the people who use them. As SEOs, we tend to obsess on keywords… after all, they’re where the money is. Right? Sort of. Keywords are a means to an end, they are bait on a hook. The hook is your quality resource which will attract and retain them. And that resource is best signified for SEOs by one thing and one thing only: the URL. In SEO, the URL is where all the value is, not the keywords.

Ranking reports are becoming even more meaningless than ever. Google appears to be throwing random results back for IPs and/or user agents that appear to be scraping for rankings. This creates a lot of noise and problems as reports are built for clients.

What matters is not the ranking (funny though how Google reports on “average rank” in Webmaster Tools), but the total traffic yield of the URL.

What is the traffic quantity in total keyword searches? How much volume do those searches have, how much traffic does the URL see? And what is the quality of traffic, such as bounce rate (hopefully low), average time on site or pages per visit, and conversion rate (hopefully those are high).

That is much better information than a ranking report. All this said, ranking reports are not going away because there is far too much education yet to be done on the client side. Ranking reports are comfortable, they are what’s always been used to track SEO success. That needs to change.

Getting back to the above point, the URL is where all the value is stored. Page scoring factors and many other criteria are rolled up into the URL, which is stored as a distinct field in the search engine databases.

2. Preserving the power of URLs

This is why it’s absolutely critical that URLs are preserved. Well-aged URLs will score best, unless they’re in News and QDF searches. Redirects greatly hamper SEO success. Any redirect.

Recent experiences have shown a great deal of equity loss when using 301s, and in some cases, a rel canonical tag appears to work better to transfer equity. The idea that one can “store” internal PageRank to be used later with a 301 is what basically introduced the equity rot that is occuring with permanent redirects now.

I still recommend using a 301 when you can. It’s the best possible way to permanently move content. Just be open to rel canonical, because it’s quite powerful and can be a very strong signal for Google at this time. It’s also well adopted across the web. Bing also supports it, but reports are mixed how well they’re using it.

3. Looking beyond links

It’s not only about links. However, especially prior to Panda Farmer, links tend to brute force top rankings on competitive SERPs (when overall domain authority, or the “wikipedia effect,”, doesn’t hold sway).

I took the time to analyze several competitive SERPs to see what factors really mattered when it comes to links: is it sheer quantity, unique domains, page-specific links, diversity, or anchor text? In my analysis, the biggest four factors were domain authority, total domain links and unique domains, page-specific links and uniques, and matching anchor text.

However, it was interesting to note that in several cases, prominence of exact-match anchors seemed to be very common in positions 7-10, possibly indicating up-and-coming competitors pushing hard for rankings using heavy anchor matching. Stronger competitors were benefiting from a more cohesive link strategy that also focused on sheer quantity, especially quantity of unique referring domains.

The below image shows the link profile for the SERP ‘marketing automation’ in unique referring links and matching anchor text. Can you find the Wikipedia entry? Bet you can.

4. Link factors in search algorithms

There are many link factors that could (and should) be taken into account by any algorithm. These include (at least):

• Recency (are links “come and go,” have there been a lot or very few links recently, etc
• Transience (do links disappear after a time)
• Anchor text (how much exact match is there)
• Context (is the link contextual)
• Relevance (how related to the site’s content is the link)
• Prominence of placement (is the link in a spot that maximizes its CTR, or is it lower left or in a footer)
• Other links on the page (what quality are the other links on the page, and how well do they match)
• Trends (what is the trend of links over time)
• Co-citation (what kinds of links point to the page)
• Frequency of linking (how frequently do the domains exchange links)

While the above is a fairly exhaustive list of link factors, in our analyses we’ve found time and again that there are basically 4 link factors that tend to influence performance:

1. The domain authority of the ranking URL
2. The quantity and diversity of links into the domain
3. The quantity and diversity of links into the URL
4. The amount of matching anchors

(“Diversity” here meaning the amount of unique referring domains.)

There are always exceptions, and in fact, every SERP is unique. Additionally, it’s impossible to isolate link scoring outside of on-page factors; rankings are more complex than links. But the result of link analyses tend to show the above factors.

How To Achieve SEO Sustainability

In industrial strength SEO, quality and scale must hold sway. On-page strategies, internal linking, and off-page strategies in social and link development, should always emphasize quality and scalable techniques.

As we’ve found with the latest Google algorithm shift, when quality and the user is kept in focus, performance can withstand even dramatic algorithm adjustments. The name of the game in SEO is change, but by keeping focused on users and not algorithms, negative consequences can be minimized.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t keep an eye on what the engines are doing. On the contrary, I recommend studying the algos like a hawk! It’s essential to know what’s happening and why. Just don’t build your SEO strategy around the algorithms. Build your SEO strategy around your users.