Mr. Search Marketer Goes To Congress

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.