KoMarketing Associates - Search Engine Marketing Blog

Coke developed Coke Zero, Pepsi developed Pepsi One.  Dominoes offered $5 pizzas, Pizza Hut offered $5 pizzas.  NetFlix started delivering DVDs to your door, Blockbuster thought they had better get in on that.  Do you see where I am going with this?  What your competitors do is extremely important to what your business does .  If they have an advantage, you had better work to erase that advantage.

When beginning a campaign, be it SEO or SEM, we always make sure we are aware of the competition.  It is a great way to find out where a client stands and what they need to improve upon.  (It’s also a fantastic way to get new ideas!)

A recent success we had with using Google Base (Google’s product search) to drive traffic to one of our manufacturing client’s website made me consider how companies that make, market, and sell industrial goods can take advantage of search engines and social communities to enhance their online presence.

Here are some online marketing strategies that manufacturers and distributors can leverage:

1) Google Base

Any company with a product catalog can create a data file containing their products and upload it to Google Base, free of charge.

A couple weeks ago I came across an interesting discussion on the trustworthiness of SEO in LinkedIn Answers. The question posed was fairly simple:

What don’t you trust about SEO (search engine optimization)? … and why?

SEO is a fundamental aspect of making your website relevant to your visitors and prospects. The major search engines have SEO consultants on staff because it is so critical to effective paid placement. Yet, there are many examples of genuine disdain being expressed for SEO on LinkedIn as though it is a false promise rather than a business tool. Why?

Earlier in the month Google announced a search technology partnership with Yahoo!

Essentially this does two things:

• Gives Yahoo! Access to AdSense for Search:

AdSense for Search is a highly customizable search box that can be placed on a website and will feed Google’s search inventory through relevant results. The publisher has additional control as he or she can specify certain keywords to add or omit, or limit the search results to some or all of the search categories.

For instance:

I attended the B to B Online NetMarketing breakfast in Waltham, MA this morning featuring speakers from Novell, Motorola and Cognos.  I have attended previous events and each time I am pleasantly surprised by how candid each panelist is about their company’s marketing endeavors.

Each person spent about ten minutes or so talking about a specific marketing campaign and while there was no direct ‘do this and you will be successful’ tip or idea it was interesting to see and hear what each company is doing.

I had key take-aways from each speaker (which I will get to) but I also had some overall thoughts:

When evaluating web analytics packages for your business, there are a lot of great tools and options out there, regardless of the size of the website or company budget. Even though search engine marketing has become an integral part of most analytics packages, it’s important to make sure specific search engine related needs will be addressed in your selection.

Here is a checklist of valuable questions and details to look for in a web analytics package related to your search engine marketing efforts.

I think I just had my first truly valuable corporate twitter experience.

I’m a light user of twitter, so it’s probably not surprising that I’m saying this after about 7 months of use (just checked and saw that my first tweet was Nov. 7, 2007).

And by a light user, I truly mean light - as of this blog post I’ve only “updated” 149 times. Compare this to “guykawasaki” (Guy Kawasaki) who has 7,404 updates, “Scobelizer” (Robert Scoble) with 12, 417, and “Pistachio” (Laura Fitton) who has 12,761 updates.

Recently, someone I met at a local event called to refer a client to us. What I found refreshing was that a reason we were contacted was because of how we manage client relationships and build SEM programs. The individual was impressed with the honesty conveyed in our initial discussions.

Are There Ethics in Search Engine Marketing?
Interestingly enough, this communication coincided with the news that a particular search engine marketing tactic was sparking intense debate within our industry.

Why 27?

Because, after hours and hours of searching, and using Google Alerts for months, that is how many worthwhile articles I have found regarding Blogging ROI so far. I’m sure there are more out there, and I hope that if you know of an additional resource that you will provide that as a comment to this post.

Why have I looked so hard for resources about this topic? Because getting marketers and C-level executives to put corporate blogging on the front burner is so darn difficult.

For those of you interested in calculating Pay Per Click (PPC) projections, I have created a basic PPC calculator that is available for download (click on the “PPC Calculator” link to download the Excel file).

There are two worksheets in the file - one for B2B Lead Generation and one for E-Commerce.

Each calculator requires a series of inputs from you in order to calculate the primary metric - Target Cost Per Acquisition (in each case, B2B & B2C).

You can use the calculators to focus on an entire program, a specific campaign, a specific ad group, or specific keyword.