RefreshWeblog--B2B Web Marketing and SEO News

Please visit our new RefreshWeb blog

Hi--

Well, I finally decided that a business blog ought to be hosted on our site instead of on TypePad. Getting links and trackbacks pointing to the main site is more valuable than having them point here, and besides, if we make it a part of everyone's job description to blog, there will be a lot more content and points of view.

When I started this blog, part of the rationale for hosting it elsewhere was to have links pointing to the RefreshWeb site. If you have a small site, by all means consider TypePad or Blogger as a useful tool. Your posts will probably rank higher coming from a big site like these than they will on your regular site, and the conversational tone of a blog means it may be more appropriate for "off line" web presence.

On our new blog, we've got several months of content up now, so it's time to point you over there:
http://www.refreshweb.com/blog/

If you would like to get the feed, here it is: RSS Feed

Here are the latest topics:

Goin' Back to Houston

Houston Internet Marketing Association
Interactive Strategies '07 Conference, 10/25/07

I've been in Austin since the '60s, but spent my childhood in the woods and fields of Houston's Memorial Drive area, in the golden, pre-urban days. Had to jump at the chance to speak at the Houston IMA conference, since our Houston office is staffed by my two incredible sisters...and Out Of Town speakers are preferred at these local shindigs. They definitely do it right, with speakers invited to a happy hour and dinner afterward.

However, having a speaking engagement has lit a fire under us to finish version 2.0 of our website. We have been creating fresh, SEO-ified content for weeks, not to mention some pretty nice design and graphics. This is on top of rolling out the prototype of our SEO management dashboard, writing a long article on how to manage and measure search, and of course writing a new PPT for Houston. I love showing marketers how effective search marketing can be. Search engine optimization is simply applied marketing intelligence, but it takes a marketer to do it right.

The process of doing software development is new to me, but we have been blessed with a very process-oriented coworker, Susan McElhenney, and she has been delighted (and delightfully tolerant of our misgivings) to take on the task of defining the processes we go through in SEO. We have a cork wall for conceptualizing the functionality of the dashboard, and a giant whiteboard for detail. Here is a look at what our programming team now calls "The Wall of Doom," because every action item seems to have the color code for a programming deliverable, and we are getting really good at creative scope creep:

Check the website on the 25th! Seeya.

Rebirth: Austin Interactive Community

Talking Sense and Talking Shop

Many thanks to Yahoo for the freebies, and thanks to Apogee Search for deciding the time is right to resurrect the Austin Interactive Marketing Association. Great turnout last Thursday night at the organizational meeting, from agencies, vendors, startups and clients. Tom Ball from Austin Ventures was the "keynote" speaker, and his remarks were very brief: we have the entrepreneurs, we have the capital, we have the technology...we need to find the marketers who can launch new companies.

This is first time I've heard someone from AV ($3 billion under management) acknowledge that fact, and it's something I've been pushing for the last 10 years.

Each of the sponsors was responsible for coming up with a haiku, and several were clever, in that Keep Austin Weird way. Otherwise, it was a typical rah-rah mixer, with the exception of the fact that the three folks from RefreshWeb talked shop with the three folks from Dell who oversee search. That's a company with a lot of ground to recover, both with retailers and the public, before they resume their growth into the consumer, SOHO and SMB segments. The direct model is good for low pricing, but their buying experience is more like driving around to the loading dock than going into a retail store. The magic of technology is in the seeing, not the specs.

SEO vs. PPC, Round 12

Pay-Per-Click Gets A Taste Of SEO Mojo
Why content matters more than ever.

First the rant, then the "didn't I tell you so."

In the search marketing trades, the buzz is all about personalized search, the latest new thing from Google. Yes, it changes everything, and yet it changes nothing. Some idiot who works for a PPC company wrote a column to say that search optimization no longer matters, since Google can now serve every individual up a different page. Guess he didn't read the article about Google assigning quality scores to landing pages...his world is going to change a lot faster than ours.

Personalized search is an option for people who log in to their Google account. Otherwise, it's still search as we know it. I don't know about you, but I'm not too likely to log in before I search for the answer to a question that pops up...and when I'm checking my gmail account, I'm checking email, not working on the Web. So, very interesting technology, and exactly what I have been waiting for personally, but this is just an inflection point, a course alteration that is a small beginning toward better, more relevant indexing. Until the billions of web pages change to accommodate a more 1:1 search environment, Google can't do much more than filter against your preferences...if you don't mind Google breaching your privacy as part of their service.

As a consumer who understands marketing, I want to be known...we boomers made our beer brand decisions years ago, so STOP ALREADY with the commercials! Here's my demo, here are my preferences, now stop wasting my time and your money. However, I'm a professional marketer. The bulk of consumers are a) much more paranoid about what is recorded about them and why, and b) not so techno-savvy that they even have a Google account. In fact, my bet would be that Google account holders are much more paranoid than the average consumer! We'll have to see if this becomes yet another failed Google experiment, or if there is widespread use and adoption. Remember, people use search to find answers to their questions, so they tend to use more vague language to search...search is vague by nature. Personalization won't solve that problem.

Meanwhile, Google has made optimization a requirement for landing pages. Landing pages are where all those little PPC ads point. Click on an ad for a new Infiniti, and you expect to see page content on Infiniti, not to dig down through content on transportation/vehicles/cars/Japanese cars/Infiniti/U.S. Dealers. Relevant content TO YOUR SEARCH needs to reside on the landing page, or suddenly the advertising needs to pony up a much higher bid to stay there.

Funny how Google's extortion of the search marketers points back to what we've been saying all along: relevant content really matters. The guy who was trying to be provocative probably is now going through craigslist looking for content developers who know how to write optimized copy--I suspect he has dozens of clients who are unhappy about suddenly paying 200% more per click, and is screaming for that PPC firm to immediately produce hundreds of search-term-relevant landing pages. Meanwhile, the results from our PPC campaigns are making our clients very, very happy...not because our landing pages naturally clear the hurdle Google just set up, but because they intentionally meet the needs of those individual prospects (by the hundreds).

Timeshares on Google

Pay Per Cycle Is More Like It

If you think that creating a PPC campaign is an easy do-it-yourself project, you're in good company. Product marketing managers all over the planet are dipping their toes in the water, unaware that pay per click engines have some very sophisticated ways to pull money out of their pockets.

The first assumption is that high bids will get you to the top of the page...the most valuable real estate on the Web. Without going into the complexities of how Google factors in your click through rate (Google needs to make money somehow), what many people don't notice is that you don't own that top space, even if you're bidding $20 a click. For popular search areas, there are many bidders willing to pay top dollar--but a limited amount of top space.

So Google has created timeshares for these penthouse positions. It cycles through dozens of ads, with clusters of "top bidders." To see if this affects your ads, just hit "refresh" and see if your ad is still there. We have seen up to 5 clusters in contention, meaning that our ads are only reaching 20% of the Total Available Search Market (TM) for this particular engine.

That's another reason to invest the time and effort in getting high rankings in the search engine results pages by way of natural, organic site optimization. For one recent client, we completely redesigned their site (they had one of these syndicated template-driven sites) and created a site optimization strategy using 25 important keyword phrases. The site was immediately in the Top 20 for all these terms, with 15 Top 10 rankings and 3 #1 rankings. Net result was a 300% increase in visibility.

Selling via Search: Up 221%

Does This Search Stuff Really Result in Sales?       

          We still see it in the eyes of marketing managers when we talk about the benefits of a comprehensive search strategy – that “Yeah, but will it result in actual sales?” look. If they are any good, they are doing the ‘back of the brain-velope’ calculation about whether the dollar spent on search is better spent elsewhere, some tried-and-true deal like a beefed-up tradeshow presence.

          Indeed, many of our clients made the determination that they have to get involved in search because they don’t want to get passed by the competition...or dissed by their sales guys. Whether or not there are sales dollars that can be directly attributed to good search position is beside the point, in their minds, because being visible in the search results is reason enough to spend money on SEO and SEM. This makes good business sense, all the more so when you remember that there is a “seniority effect” in Google’s determination of search position – the longer a site has been indexed for a given keyword, the better it does in search rankings for that keyword.

          But we have recently gotten some information from one of our key customers that may put that marketing manager’s mind at ease: increasing visibility, and optimizing for more transactional, more product-specific search terms, increases sales substantially...about 2X what you might expect.

          We have worked with this client for almost two years. We optimized, reoptimized, secondary optimized, foreign-language optimized and advised them on the PPC program. One of the reasons we like working with this particular client is because they value our advice – it never ceases to amaze us when we send off optimized copy, etc., to a client’s web team and, weeks or months later, they implement only a limited subset of our recommendations. This client, however, implements in a timely fashion virtually every time.

          The news from our favorite client was this – since they started working with RefreshWeb they have seen their web-based sales increase 221 percent. That’s a pretty healthy increase.

          Would we claim complete responsibility for all of it? Heck, no – credit first and foremost goes to the quality of their product and the efficiency of their sales system: and this company really respects the channel. But if your customer uses the web to look for a solution but they can’t find you, it really doesn’t matter how good your product is – you aren’t going to make a sale. Our client recognized this and thanked us for our efforts – and signed up for another year.

Our TASM (Part III)

The Relentless Art and Sweet Science of Keyword Selection

     In the first two blog installments, we discussed a website metric developed by RefreshWeb called the Total Available Search Market, or TASM. In the previous installment we explained that evaluating the search performance of each selected keyword phrase provides our clients with actionable data. In this installment, we will explain how that works.
     Optimizing a web site means deciding what keyword phrases (KPs) you want to compete on and then weaving those keyword phrases into the copy and metatags of your website’s critical pages. A search engine, like Google, will compare the keyword phrase of the searcher with the content of gazillions of web pages, find the pages that have the most matches, further evaluate each matched page by looking at inbound links, determine which page is the best match and then rank accordingly in the search results. But it all starts with you selecting the keywords you want to compete on!
     Two points need to be emphasized here: 1) you decide what is important, and these decisions are strategic and critical, and 2) they are not set in stone – there is much trial and error involved, and as your business evolves, as the buying behavior of your customers evolves, and as the phenomenon of search evolves, your KPs must evolve too.
     Case in point is the wonderful world of search – it has become incredibly competitive, and that has vast implications for your KP selection strategy. Virtually any competitive keyword phrase will return literally millions of listings. As we have seen, if you are not in the first twenty, you are somewhat out of the running. It’s pretty scary.
     Heck, we’ve seen the difference in how we work. Not long ago, we began a client engagement by compiling a list of a given client’s KPs, adding a few of our own and researching the number of clicks per phrase and “skimmed the cream” – pulling out the top twenty and that was our recommendation for the client’s web site. We don’t do that anymore. We spend a lot of time researching KPs to find the best opportunities, which basically means we develop a much longer list and then reality check that list by seeing how competitive each phrase is, then we recommend the KPs that look like they offer the client the best chance to successfully compete. In practical terms, this means we recommend transactional phrases (better purchase intent) that may be much further down the initial list, because the phrases at the top of the list (the ones that have the biggest monthly search numbers) usually are too vague and have too many competing pages to offer much traction. In short, we dig a lot deeper now, and that trend will be accelerating.
     At the same time, we encourage our clients to never be satisfied with their KP list. Work it, revise it, reconsider it at every available opportunity. Our own experience is illustrative – we recently revised our own KP strategy, and our web site, because we realized our KP list was outdated.  We started out emphasizing Austin-specific terms (Austin internet marketing company, Austin SEO company) because we thought that offered the best competitive opportunity. But a few years down the road we realize that a minority of our clients are Austin-based, and that we are really a national company – indeed, we are getting international clients now, too. And since we can only effectively optimize on a finite list of KPs, we needed to refocus globally. By moving the target, we're now visible to thousands more searchers per month.
     Understand that none of this is possible if you are not focused on the performance of each KP.  But once the search performance of each KP is available to you, you have actionable data – thus, the Total Available Search Market report. Simple, right?
     Maybe not so much. Give us a call.

TASM, Part II

Measuring Web Site Performance

            The issue is how to measure search, to provide our clients with an objective measure of their performance on the major search engines. (Google, Yahoo and MSN count for over 92 percent of all U.S. search traffic.) This is becoming more important as studies show that, in the business-to-business market, over 75 percent of purchasers searching for a new solution begin their search on the web.

            To describe our solution, the Total Available Search Market metric, or TASM, we need to take a step back and review what occurs when somebody uses a search engine to find a solution. Typically they open up a search engine, often Google (often 60-70 percent of b-to-b searches), input a search phrase of two to four words and get a whole bunch of search results back – often millions of listings assembled ten at a time on separate pages. The searcher then clicks on listings until they find what they are looking for – to the searcher, the efficiency of a search engine is probably measured by how few listings they need to explore to find what they are looking for.

            So how do we measure this process? It is important to know that the number of incidences of search phrases is carefully measured. We use Overture and WordTracker to evaluate our clients’ potential search phrases to find the best candidates.

            Also, there has been considerable research on the “readership” of each page of search results – in the B2B arena, we believe 100 percent of searchers read the first three listings, 90 percent review listings four through ten, and 50 percent see the second page of listings 11 through 20. After that, readership declines rapidly – only 10% of searchers reach the third page.

            So it is fairly easy to see how our metric works: we make a list of our client’s search phrases, measure the number of times that phrases was used in the course of a month, measure the client’s position on a search listing for that phrase, and do the math to measure out how many people will see the client’s listing when they input a particular search phrase. Here's a link to a sample search engine ranking report. In search marketing, visibility is the key index.

            For example, one of RefreshWeb’s keyword phrases is “b2b marketing agency,” which gets 300 searches a month across all the major search engines. At this writing, we are number seven on Google, MSN and Yahoo for this phrase. Ninety percent times 300 is 270 persons – that is how many people are exposed to RefreshWeb when they use a search engine to find a “b2b marketing agency.”

            The math is easy – what is not immediately intuitive is the reality that creating a useful metric means not trying to do too much. What makes for good marketing intelligence is “actionability” – a metric that is too reductive reduces the ability of our clients to act on the data we are giving them.

            For practical purposes, this means fighting the very human desire to appreciate the “horse race” and aggregate the data (with a weighted average) into a single “score” that rates the performance of the client’s website. We need to keep our eyes trained on the performance on the important keyword phrases in order to have a sense that we are attracting the “most, right” traffic to the website (that comma between “most” and “right” is no accident).

            There is an apt metaphor in one time-honored way to create a sculpture. The sculptor will sometimes create a clay model of the finished work and submerge it in water, progressively removing the water to expose the next horizontal plane that needs to be sculpted. The restricted view allows the artist to focus on the next few strokes of the chisel – very important when a single errant stroke could destroy the entire project.

            While the risks aren’t the same when optimizing a website, that kind of focus – keyword by keyword – is critical to developing an effective natural search strategy. It is even more important when adjusting and tweaking the website.

            In the next article we will look at developing, and adjusting, your keyword strategy to capture just the right market that makes sense for your business.

Total Available Search Market

TASM: The Search for a Tool to Evaluate Search Competitiveness

As a species, we love the horse race - the thrill of seeing a winner unambiguously declared.  As Americans, particularly Americans involved in the full-body-contact sport of business, we require it.  RefreshWeb is a business that helps its clients win. Win in search rankings. Win by attracting good leads. Win by filling the pipeline. Wouldn't it be great if we could find adequate expression for winning, in a way that makes sense for search?

It turns out that is easier said than done.

We set out a number of months ago to develop a metric - really, a report - that would give our clients a sense of how they were doing on the web. Simple, right? Well, maybe not so much. What is the definition of winning, when it comes to organic search? 

The more we thought about it, the more we realized that this ain't no horse race. First off, this is a horse race that never stops. The whole idea of saying we won implies a terminal point, a point when all the competitors pull up, catch their breath, shake the hands of the winner. To even suggest there is such a point to our clients is to do them a grave disservice. And not only is search 24/7, global, relentless -- it is a race where the judges can and do regularly change the rules in mid-stride.

But our most critical insight was the realization that the horses in the race are not the websites of our clients and their primary competitors. The horses were the keyword phrases they'd made a strategic decision to compete on. In short, search is like dozens of horse races being run concurrently, all of which never stop. What is a winner in that context?

This is the heart of the issue in evaluating the search competitiveness of a company's website. It is very much keyword-by-keyword kombat and must be evaluated as such - because the real game is in the adjustments you make upon evaluating real time data. The popularity of search phrases ebb and flow, with the sum total of searches on relevant terms composing the current total available search market...a metric with meaning. The data stream is constant and the adjustments are constant, as are those of all competitors.

And we know from experience that when a senior corporate marketing manager asks the question "How are we doing?,"  the LAST thing he wants to hear is "Ummm ... depends."  In the corporate world, such ambiguity is often considered to be an unappetizing blend of sloth, incompetence and fear. We needed a report that would be sufficiently granular so as to be useful, but that would provide managers with some degree of unambiguous assessment as to the performance of their website on the major search engines.

This was our assessment of the challenge as we set out to develop a Search Competitiveness Report for our clients. In the forthcoming posts, we discuss the basics of web analytics and RefreshWeb's solution, a report we called Total Available Search Market, or TASM.

Bottoms Up!

Reframing B2B Marketing

“Top-down” marketing was dying a slow, unattractive death before the web took over the world. Perhaps it was a victim of its own success – certainly it was a victim of its own ubiquity. No longer could companies declare that the consumer absolutely buy a certain brand of laundry detergent or suffer the unbearable social ignominy of “ring around the collar,” along with the inevitable ostracizing. Success of this kind of pitch led to too many brands with too many dubious claims. Eventually, consumers just didn’t buy it, in every sense of the term. So even before the web came along, the dollars, creativity, “impressions” and everything else needed to launch, maintain and build a brand were increasing every year, along with the odds against success.

In this climate entered the web, where everybody could find everything and talk about it to everybody else for no marginal cost. Refinements like blogs, RSS feeds and other things made it so that if you had ten minutes and an opinion, you could literally tell the world about it instantaneously. The idea of “bottom-up” marketing, generally not much more than a gleam in some marketing professors’ eyes, became a reality. In B2B, it has become more than that – it has become the environment.

For most B2B purchases, particularly first-time purchases and particularly technology products, the web is the only source for information. It’s been that way for several years now – the B2B marketing environment has been undergoing a nonstop reframing thanks to the Internet. What is evolving is the information sources being consulted and how they are being developed and used by marketers. Sure, consumers will consult a company web site for product information. But they will also consult a couple of blogs for product comparisons, maybe subscribe to an RSS feed or two if it’s a hot topic, like Internet security and privacy. The era of instant information is here – lots of information, but fewer trusted sources for information. This begets both use and abuse.

What we absolutely know for sure is that, barring the massive detonation of an EMP device that wipes out the Internet, “bottom-up” marketing is here to stay. And we are pretty dang sure that every marketing professional worth his or her salt is staying up nights wondering how to use “bottom-up” techniques to good advantage – alternately having light bulbs go off and bending over double with stomach cramps. We sure are. But we love it.