Economic waves rise and fall and Internet retailers are as vulnerable to capsizing as any business. Why do some local businesses seem to ride it out more easily than others? What can you do to help your business stick around until the next break in the storm? Here are some common sense answers to how […]
I am waiting for the You & A With Matt Cutts at SMX Advanced 2008 in Seattle. I figured I should post the conference coverage thus far and then add in the links to the coverage of this session. Here is today’s SMX Advanced coverage:
Last week, Page Zero Media held a seminar in Toronto called Winning the Paid Search Game. In the intensive half day seminar, we focused on tactical PPC issues like ad copy generation, landing page optimization, and the differences between the search engines. But strategy is possibly even more important than tactics – envisioning the “endgame” […]
Efficient Frontier is out with new research looking at how the major search engines get search traffic outside their own search engines, including the remarkable stat that less than half of Yahoo’s paid search clicks happen on its own search sites.
In part 1 of What SEO/SEM Professionals Should Know About Website Usability, usability experts Peter Morville and Susan Weinschenk answered the question, “What should SEO professionals know about usability?” For this installment, website usability guru Jakob Nielsen and Kim Krause Berg share their observations and perspectives. Enjoy! Jakob Nielsen’s formula for website success “The main […]
Google has announced that AdWords is no longer a requirement for Website Optimizer. In fact, you can now go to google.com/websiteoptimizer and register for free to use Website Optimizer, even if you do not have an AdWords account. Now, you can use Website Optimizer to not just A/B test your AdWords landing pages, but also […]
B2B search advertisers must confront an annoying paradox. For most advertisers the billable event is the click. Yet for most B2B advertisers success depends not on clicks, but rather on conversions: the percentage of visitors who take the desired online action, such as downloading a white paper or registering for a webinar. B2B marketers must […]
Pretend you don’t know anything about what your company offers and you stumbled onto it somehow. Can you tell immediately what it’s all about? Can the search engines? Do this exercise with each inner page of the site as well. Is what each page has to offer truly crystal clear? Or does your website presume […]
Social media is hot. Everyone wants to be on Digg’s home page. Link baiting, especially using things like numbered lists, imperative rules, or controversial hooks is the SEM strategy du jour. There’s just one — major — problem with spending so much time and effort on capturing the eyeballs of social media users. Social media […]
Some time ago, I did a blog post called the “Other Long Tail of Search“. When Chris Anderson’s book came out, several smart search marketers realized that the long tail phenomenon applied to our industry as well. If you look at the keywords that drive traffic to your site and plot them according to traffic […]
Just a few weeks after Offermatica was picked up by Omniture, TechCrunch reports that Interwoven has agreed to buy Optimost for $52 million in cash. While we were pretty sure that AKQA would get the deal, it looks like the CMS won out. The Interwoven website is now serving up a page specifically on the […]
Pay-per-click (PPC) remains a leading online marketing strategy despite ever-increasing competition and rising click costs. Why? Paid search works extremely well when you’ve established an accurate estimate of your cost per acquisition (CPA) and return on investment (ROI). However, not everyone is properly measuring their CPA and maximizing their ROI. To get optimal results from […]
Part one of this article is here. “Big money goes around the world” – Rush When we left off, I had shared the results of a first test for the home page of a small business ecommerce site. My colleagues and I went through a systematic process to work with the business owners (like us, […]
Isn’t it funny how things have a way of coming full circle? It’s been years since I last talked with my mentor, but his sage advice rings true today more than ever. He told me that anyone can ramble on about anything without regard for their audience, but that it takes great skill to find […]
Smarter’s video product reviews are a very entertaining and useful product research tool. As Smarter’s product evangelist Paul Willmes said, “the reviews are by people who actually own [the product] which makes it more real. It makes the opinion more valuable, like a friend giving you advice.”
Earlier this month, Travelocity’s chief marketing officer Jeffrey Glueck generated a bit of a stir in the search marketing world after giving a speech saying his company found only 4 percent of non-branded search terms brought in bookings. Problem is, Glueck now says those figures weren’t reported correctly. As it turns out, nearly 25 percent […]
Matt Greitzer and Chris Boggs of Avenue A/Razorfish have compiled a report based on the experiences of 33 Avenue A | Razorfish since the release of Panama, Yahoo’s new search ad system. As you know, when Yahoo released the new algorithm, it changed the core foundation of how search ads were positioned within the Yahoo […]
One of the reasons I tend to focus on “organic” search engine optimization (SEO), as an online marketing strategy is that the majority of search results come from the natural spidering process. Admittedly, searchers tend to look at and click on the top results from both the paid and unpaid listings. However, after carefully evaluating […]