Notes and Thoughts on Grocery 2.0

As more advertising budget dollars are shifted to online efforts, search marketing is becoming an essential part of an online strategy. Search marketing is a method of internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs)  through search engine optimization, paid placement, paid inclusion and paid search. Though paid search is only one aspect of search marketing, its popularity has increased as it allows for a quick setup and can be managed by either an agency or in-house. Free tools from Google make it easy to set up campaigns and get on the search results pages quickly. Once established, your paid search campaign will produce quantifiable results in as little as seven days. Paid search campaigns can be used to achieve many goals, from increasing brand / online awareness to selling products and services. Regardless what your goal is – if you’re not advertising with the search engines, you should be.

So you want to try paid search? The first step is to choose a search engine and set up a campaign. Below are some quick tips to get your campaign up and running:

• Keyword Research – Knowing what terms customers associate with your brand, product/service is essential. Once you have identified core and assist keywords on your own site, check out your competition. Checking a site’s keyword density with the SeoQuake toolbar or SpyFu is a good place to start.
• Creative – Be creative and clever with your Ad Copy. Writing text ads can be hard – look at other text ads in the space and see what your competition is using, and then write something that stands apart from the rest (while still conveying the message of course).
• Landing Pages – Never be more than 3 clicks from completing the desired action. If the goal is to have users sign up for a newsletter, put the form on the landing page. Landing pages should be simple and designed to produce the desired action within three clicks.
• Geo-Targeting – A million eyeballs is better than a thousand, right? Not with PPC. There is no use in spending money on eyeballs that will not convert. If your flower shop only delivers within a 20 mile radius, set your campaign to only target that area. Do NOT waste your impressions on unqualified individuals that decrease ROI and lower your CTR.
• Pre-qualify with Ad Copy – If you’re only selling $40 red widgets, say that in your text ad. This will help weed out searchers who are searching for the $20 blue widgets.
• Iterate & Test – Think the first headline converts better than the other? Test it. And then test it with the copy. Combine different copy with different headlines and test that too.

Search marketing requires continual tweaking and refinement. Monitor what goes on in your space and apply it to your campaigns. Google Alerts can notify you of current articles, postings and blogs about your product. Read the comments and join discussions to see which benefits matter most to your customers, then incorporate them into keywords and copy.

Remember, search is constantly changing and affected by external influences. It reflects what’s going on in society, the market and, your customers head; how people think and what’s important to them – your campaigns should too.

Good luck & happy bidding!
Elise

I was lucky enough to spend the past week at the SMX West search marketing conference hosted by Search Marketing Land and it was really interested to see how the economy has affected the search marketing industry. So what’s the low down?  Search is widely viewed to be more important than it was before.

This is largely due to the fact that the SEM results are so easily measurable compared to traditional forms of media. Where one may have to wait for the next issue to hit the stands to see your big, pricey print ad, wait for that radio spot to get on air or the TV commercial to run – your paid search results are almost instantaneous. Within days of setting up a campaign on Google, marketers can begin to measure ROI. Campaigns are also easily targeted, spend can be adjusted depending on the hour of the day and your impression share can be either massive or restricted to your niche depending on your strategy. Beats the pants off that pretty little print ad!

So what have the search marketers  seen in terms of budget cuts and reallocation? For the most par

t, paid search/sem/seo has stayed the same or recieved a larger chunk of that reallocated budget.  Search has become an integral part of the way users shop, for retailers it’s inconceivable not to have an online strategy. With Google snatching up 60% of all internet searches it would be silly not to at least try to rank well in the engine, organically and sponsored.

The same old issues  – organic search optimization (SEO) is a longer term project and incredibly important, many companies do not consider SEO a top priority.  Jessica Bowman held a fantastic series of sessions on how to set up, implement & manage  SEO in-house – focusing on how to work it into the project life cycle. SEO is great because it doesn’t cost nearly the amount paid search does. Ranking well organically for a search term is just as important as holding down that 1st position in sponsored – people do still click on other search results. The beauty of SEO is that you can achieve the same results as with paid search, it just takes longer. The buy- in for paid search seemed to be more easily attained as it can be directly linked to sales and measurable ROI.

One major trend is the switch from agency to in-house sems. Where the majority of the conference attendees at SMX LoMo in July ‘08 came from agencies, the vast majority of everyone at SMX West were in-house. I’m not sure if this has more to do with cost effectiveness of losing the agency or acknowledgment that your sem/seo is best done by someone who knows your product. Internal resources that can work within the company to ensure and execute a comprehensive online strategy are invaluable.

For a full recap of all the festivities visit SMX West 09 and don’t forget to sign up for SMX Advanced!

Some of My Highlights From SMX:

• Keynotes with Vint Cerf, John Battelle & Danny Sullivan
• Legal Session on Trademarks, gTLDs & Privacy
• Advanced Keyword Research panel
• Advanced Landing Pages
• In-House Day with Jessica Bowman

Budgets change, companies come and go but one thing is certain – Search is definitely here to stay and it’s going to be an exciting year.

Elise

Have you ever noticed that certain search results display category links under the description of the website? These links are reflect the navigation of the website and let you jump to the page you’re looking for just a bit faster than you would if you landed on the homepage first.  These links are Google’s way of displaying more relevant results and trying to make your life easier. Well how do you get those links to display under your listing? It isn’t so simple.

If you’re using Google’s Webmaster Tools than you’ve probably noticed the area called “Sitelinks”. This is where you can see which navigation links the Googlebot has indexed and is showing with your site deescription. After a little poking around I discovered that while you can tell Google which links you do not want displayed, you can’t tell it which ones you do. The Googlebot has to find your sitelinks on it’s own. Bummer.

Sitelinks display under the search result

So how do you tell Google which sitelinks are important for your website – and ultimately, your user (because Google is ALL about the end user). In your html code. Here are a few tips from Kerry Dean of Range Online Media on how to let Google know which links to display:

The main site’s overall popularity, domain authority and brand popularity. If your site ranks No. 1 for a search term, you have better chances of having Sitelinks listed in the first place.

Optimized internal link structure. Tell Google which pages are important through optimized internal linking.
Optimal anchor text in all links on the site. Reinforce keywords in all links, and place very important links toward the top of the page.

Solid SEO implementation for all pages and on-page factors. Implement solid SEO strategies for every page on the site. This helps tie everything together for relevancy and authority.

Competition of the vertical. The tougher the competition in the vertical, the tougher it will be to rank No. 1 for certain terms. It’s easier to gain Sitelinks for searches with less competition.

Read the entire article at MediaPost.com

Happy Optimizing!

Elise