Search Engine Marketing Has Become
Very Competitive
How to manage search
marketing in an increasingly competitive environment.
Ah, for the good old days when the big ad agencies thought
banner advertising was online marketing and their big
bricks and mortar clients thought the big ad agencies
knew what they were talking about. In 2007 the last of
the elephants seem to have caught on and we are being
really challenged for position in natural search results
and bid way up in paid results.
That's not all, Google
has finally addressed the gaming of inbound links from
bookmarking sites and blogs (called Web 2.0) to boost
sites in search results. What are we to make of all of
this and how do we maintain our strong positions?
Through the years websites that we optimized and
promoted held position in search results with little or
no maintenance from us. Except for a few areas of very
strong search engine optimization (SEO) competition,
such as search marketing and porn, an optimized site
with a number of relevant pages of information and
strong inbound referring links could successfully
compete for top positions against very large
competitors. In 2006 there was a lot of talk about SEO.
2007 we began to see major corporate websites that were
being optimized for search results. As the big players
with plenty of resources to put to work creating content
start emphasizing optimization of the content for
searchers, it will become increasingly difficult for
smaller companies to compete, even in natural search
results, never mind in pay per click where a large
budget is an obvious advantage.
Inbound Links
In the meantime Google, which made referring links an
important part of ranking sites in search results, has
decided to get tough with the gaming of referral links
by slick SEO firms. The take on this by the industry
press is that Google is penalizing the practice of
directories including those that pay for links. If that
is the case, paying Yahoo $299 per year to list your
site suddenly becomes much less valuable than it was
before. Yahoo is Google's closest search competitor in
the US, hmm.
While Google is going along with the idea that they
are getting tough on sites selling links in order to
bolster the linkee's position in search results, earlier
in the year, they introduced algorithms to defend
against "Google bombing" the practice of boosting a Web
page in search results by many people with popular blogs
linking to the page with a particular phrase. The most
famous example was the top result for a Google search
for "miserable failure" pointing to George W. Bush's
biography. This was all taken care of with a change in
algorithm, Google contends. The same Google bombing
technique was being used by SEOs to boost client sites
in results for specific keywords, so Google's algorithm
change has to affect the search result rankings for a
lot of websites. These moves by Google call into
question the impact of inbound links as part of the
search optimization strategy.
Pay-per-click Sponsored Listings
Meanwhile on the paid listing front, ad agencies and
corporate web marketing teams are increasingly hiring
search engine marketers and competing in the pay per
click (PPC) arena. The larger agencies are more willing
and able to invest in pay per click management and
analytics tools. Google has always favored big spenders
with support and interfaces. All of this challenges
small businesses and small search marketing agencies.
Fortunately for us, we have not yet found an automated
PPC management tool that improves on what we do. We are
watching one tool called Adgooroo that seems to give a
bit of competitive insight for AdWords campaigns, but in
trials we did not find ways to improve on our largest
PPC program. And in trying various analytics tools, we
have found the (free) Google Analytics to perform better
than some very costly analytics packages. We will
continue to keep an eye on all of these developments,
however, to make sure that we bring our clients the best
service available.
Although the sites we manage have been holding firm to
their positions in search results we have seen a lot of
movement in key indicators we use to determine the
visibility of websites. Google Page Rank has been moving
around, without necessarily changing a site's position
in search results, and the Alexa position of many of the
sites we watch has fallen like a rock. So there is much
for us to pay attention to as we enter 2008.
Try our Cost per Customer Acquired Calculator to aid in setting your average keyword click budget.
For more information about these and other
online marketing concerns e-mail or call 928-284-2704.
