Welcome to the Digital Search Academy

The conversation threads in this online classroom have now switched to a private classroom only accessible for teams taking part in training programmes in this area. If your team are interested in this type of training, workshops or strategy development then simply email Admissions@DigitalTrainingAcademy.com to find out more.

I work on 3 UK consumer food brands, each with good basic websites and at least 20 pages of content. They get indexed by search engines but we don't seem to get much traffic. Our web agency has tested that the spidering’s working and Google is seeing the content okay, and we have google Analytics in place so we know EXACTLY how much traffic we do (or don’t!) get. We know that there’s a lot of people looking for the types of things we do, but something’s not right as we get only 30 people a day coming from Google and with these sort of numbers I should be canning the project.

When should I be buying paid search engine ads and when should I be getting some of that traffic for free through SEO?

Do I really need an SEO agency? We're looking at big bills for stuff I'm sure my juniors can do here at the magazine (we're a consumer magazine title).

New URLs or not?

This has cropped up in discussions several times this week and it’s clear there’s a risk in many marketing strategies when a new URL is created. Here’s why…

A web address is like a brand. It needs energy to get the name out there, get it noticed and get it sticking in people’s minds. Many marketers instantly go and create a new website to support their next campaign, and while unique URLs and a unique identity may look great on the surface, there’s a real challenge in getting sustainable audiences to these sites.

Part of the problem is how Google treats the site itself. Typically a new website takes a while to get indexed and that can scupper a marketers plans to get found quickly in Google. Without SEO support in place the team will be reliant on expensive key word and key phrase purchases – something that may be easy to calculate and factor in to the media plan if you’re a retailer or business service (with a clear customer conversion process and model), but something that’s much harder for a consumer brand where the site’s objective is engagement rather than sales.

Try running the microsite as a subdomain of the main site, like this www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/searchacademy …that way the site will be spidered faster by Google, the search engine will rate it as more important because it recognises the existing links into the topline domain name (for more on link equity see our training notes on Page Rank and what it means), and above all it’s easier for people to remember.

Instant traffic from search

For turning on traffic, you’re looking at Pay Per Click advertising, and probably at quite a high level. If the site is a retail site then you’ll have a strong sense of the value of a customer and the conversion rates that you get from a visit. This lets you learn about the price you can economically pay for your keywords. The assistants inside Google and Yahoo will help you generate your keywords and phrases, and we have some advice notes that could help you on:
- Getting the thinking right behind keywords
- How to calculate your customer value
Watch the price of the terms and how price relates to volume. You may find that there’s a long tail of very cheap words relevant to your brand that most people don’t bid on. But often you won’t get the volumes you need from this.

Look for a search agency that can quickly get the traffic flowing, while working behind the scenes with you on the search engine optimisation issues that will create long term traffic at a lower average cost per click.

Similar question: any advice on how we get traffic into new promotional sites. We're a bit late to the party and don't have sites for all our brands yet (they're inside ones for groups of brands). I need to turn on a tap of traffic.

A new URL or not?

We're looking to launch a website to support our next marketing campaign. As an FMCG we do this quite a bit. How do I get the new site quickly found in the engines? Is PPC the right approach.

The length of search queries

In the early days of the web there was not much content and you could find what there was pretty fast. As the content mushroomed and all of us became mroe experienced, the number of words we use in our search queries also grew. By now over 60 percent of searchs are driven by phrases of 3 or more words, with over 90 percent being 2 or more words. In practice this means that smart consumers are writing complex queries to find exactly what they are after; something that has a big implication for marketers looking to find ways to let their adverts and links appear straight after the customer has asked for help.

Search queries: long or short phrases? How does it work these days?

Retaining online audiences is something many media owners invest far too little time and attention in. Yet it is much cheaper to reacquire an existing customer than to acquire a completely new customer, so by building loyalty among existing readers the firm is well on the way to boosting the traffic and activity on the site.

A good model is to think of the sink with a tap of water pouring in new customers and a plug hole where existing traffic is draining out. Plug the hole just slightly and it has a dramatic affect on the audience volumes.

Examine ways to open up a relationship with existing users to help them reconnect with the content. Here are some of the most effective ways of quickly changing the engagement levels with existing users:

1. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a way of helping existing readers get reminded about the brand
2. Email newsletters are the most powerful way of maintaining contact with occasional readers: create newsletters that take elements of the website and package them into a format easy to send and click through from
3. RSS feeds are increasingly powerful in helping sophisticated readers find the right material and content
4. Encourage bookmarking, and social bookmark use such as Delicious – getting into bookmarks means customers will be reminded about the brand regularly, raising awareness as well as click rates
5. Syndicating content: look for good partners to syndicate headlines and simple feeds to ensure content is easily discoverable by audiences who know the brand
6. For mainstream consumer brands, desktop ticker devices like Skinkers can be a great way of staking a claim for the most previous real-estate on the web: get into the customer’s desktop or bookmarks is getting into the front of their mind on a regular basis

How do I keep audiences coming back to my website? (We’re an online magazine)

Boosting the traffic to websites is a ceaseless challenge and as many businesses become increasingly reliant on their web presence to acquire customers or deliver messaging, the marketing of that web presence needs an increasing amount of attention.

For media owner websites there are the additional challenges that stem from the tight relationship between internet traffic and revenues (on every page there are ads the media owner only gets paid for when the page is viewed so the more views, the more ads, the more income).

Building sustainable audiences to an online media property takes focus and effort, but smart publishers plan out a strategy for customer acquisition and retention. After all it’s easy to buy ten thousand clicks from Google, but getting the right people and getting them to stay takes skill and insight.

Start with a strategy for strong audience acquisition mechanisms. Examine ways to make the content of a site discoverable by non-users and invest in content development to ensure that there is a tight match between the content created and the ways people might look for that content in search engines.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) remains the most effective long term tool for customer acquisition
Create body copy in the stories which is written with Google in mind: ditch some of the more flamboyant headlines and look for language that creates immediate clicks
Email newsletters are a great way of maintaining contact with occasional readers, but also to reach new readers by encouraging them to forward their news to a colleague
PR channels both offline and online can provide some of the most creative thinking about audience acquisition and there’s a tight relationship between PR and some of the most outstanding thinking in viral marketing
The new generation of social media are proving powerful ways to raise awareness, although not necessarily delivering large volumes straight away
RSS feeds are a way of helping the more web savvy users stay in touch and monitor a site’s content, but they are only one form of feeds, and with similar techniques available to supply content and headlines into FaceBook profiles and other channels, having the content in this form can prove extremely flexible
For mainstream consumer brands, desktop ticker devices like Skinkers can be a great way of staking a claim for the most previous real-estate on the web: get into the customer’s desktop or bookmarks is getting into the front of their mind on a regular basis

And then there are the range of tools and techniques of cross promotion in moving audiences between media channels. Here are a few quick tips:

Weave the web address into the masthead and logo
Give the website a clear positioning in the mind of the reader: “See updates, live, online at …”
Use house advertising to drive specific propositions; rather than generic messages about the website, link the location of the advert to a specific message such as something like this in the cricket section of a printed newspaper ‘More cricket news and team archives online at…’ or this in a directory of a business magazine “For more listings of leading suppliers, with web addresses and online reviews, visit…”
Take the URL into all merchandising so the publication echoes the website at every point
Check that web addresses are always present in online and offline advertising campaigns

How do I boost traffic to my website? We’re a media owner and although our traffic is okay, I don’t get the sense that we’re really getting what we should from the market.

Selling online marketing solutions

Although I first started coaching teams in how to explain and sell online marketing well overa decade ago, we've been teaching the Digital Media Sales Academy courses for online ad sales teams since 2004.

This month I wrote up a few of the questions and answers from the Digital Classroom we run for ad sales teams. You can read the notes and download the report here:
http://www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/articles/2008/02/training_tips_from_the_digital_classroom.php

Our agency has started selling search - it's pretty straight forward for some clients but others struggle to do anything more thana token effort. Any quick tips?

Google: revenues in the UK top $2.5bn

The success of the pay per click search model has pushed Google's revenues in the UK over $2.5bn for the first time. We've had a lot of questions so we wrote up a quick summary note with links here:
http://www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/articles/2008/02/google_revenues_in_the_uk_top.php

How big is Google in the UK? We're media planners and it woudl be useful to get some sort of picture of the relative size after everything that's in the headlines... (Do you guys do this?)

Understanding Page Rank

Google’s co-founder Larry Page gave his name to the ranking tool that describes the importance of a website in terms of its link equity. The complex algorithms behind PageRank are part of the secret of Google’s success, and by understanding the model, search engine optimisation teams can build stronger link equity and social media optimisation strategies.

We've written some notes just here to cover some of the basics... http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/searchacademy/2007/08/getting_to_grips_with_google_p/

I use to think that page rank was simply about the ranking in a search engine but it seems to be about more than this. What do I need to know?

Search advertising products: going way beyond the click based listing

2008 is set to be another massive year for online advertising product development. A few key players will drive these initiatives because their global economies of scale allow for exceptional research and development resources. My two favorite new tools from Google are Google Video Units and Google Gadget Ads.

There are some notes here about them… http://www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/articles/2008/01/online_ad_products_more_innova.php

What are the next search advertising products we shoudl expect to see?

Counting your inbound links?

It’s as easy as a click on Google.

Simply go into the advanced search pages of Google, type in your URL and let Google do the rest. Here’s a link to get you started… http://www.google.co.uk/advanced_search?hl=en

How do I find out how many people link to my site?

After a day on The Search Academy, we're changing how all this works in our firm. there's a need to upweight the role of SEO in particular, but what's the best process for structuring it all?

SEO for magazines, newspapers and media sites: processes and tips

Search engine optimisation is critical for driving traffic and raising audience numbers. Every website wants to increase users and page impressions, but for media sites this is at the heart of their business model. The problem is most publishers fail to give it the attention it needs.

For the internal team’s SEO needs, there’s quite a bit to balance out between look and feel the readers see and what Google needs to deliver the indexing publishers crave. In general media groups face an additional challenge of stakeholder alignment between IT, editorial, marketing and advertising sales. The second challenge is resourcing: skimping on SEO is strategically dangerous for the whole business because the risks and effects are disproportionate: get the SEO right and millions of casual viewers can stumble into your content. Get it wrong and you’ll have to generate all those ad views from just a tiny (albeit loyal) audience. It’s as core a part of the engine of web publishing as the content itself, and yet consistently most media firms fail to prioritise it.

Back in 97 I was one of those guys, having to figure out why the audience growth on the newspapers I was working on didn’t behave the way it should have, or at least the way I felt it should have. Great content, great brand, great freshness, great innovation; but only ‘good’ audience growth. SEO was the answer, but tough to diagnose; then even tougher to explain to stakeholders. Since then it’s been a first port of call in the diagnostics for any online media business we’ve been called in to sort out.

That’s why there are some special tips we developed for media firms. They’ve become a process roadmap for getting it right…

1. Understand the scale of the challenge by running diagnostics using the engines themselves
2. Map out the workflow, process and the stakeholders so there’s a clear picture of the landscape
3. Analyse the weakspots and scope out framework for fixing it
4. Involve the stakeholders in the discussion; all of them
5. Get the senior management buy-in (time as well as money or agencies)
6. Be particularly careful with what the CMS can / not deliver, the role of the publishing platform, and how editorial workflow process can be adjusted to incorporate what’s needed
7. Go soft on the timelines unless you’ve done this before with these technologies and teams
8. Get the analytics and metrics right at the start to give the baseline performance
9. Use specialists when you need expert knowledge, but under very tight accountability
10. Look for those test areas of ‘exposed’ and ‘control’ activity that you can use to benchmark activity and success in
11. Implement in a test phases and then test the implementation; looking for how you can refine this and learn from issues that are stumbled upon
12. Once the models right, throw the heavyweight resources behind it – extra bodies, agencies, analysts – and push through the changes quickly so the team can see results and then move onto the next task
13. As always use Digital’s 4Rs: Review, Revise, Reflect and Rebuild; the plan may be needed again for the next media product

Every media group will want to do things in their own way, but this forms a useful starting point the discussion, and by thinking about the process it builds a much stronger and resilient strategy. The model works for the small sites as well as the large, and although it’s tempting to leap into ‘solutions mode’ by starting to write new page tags or changing the writing style, a more strategic approach is what really pays off.

Let me know if you find it useful; and please share your perspectives on what’s worked well if you’ve had to wear those shoes.

SEO is a big issue, but what are the ways to tackle it - how do we navigate all this?

Next steps after training?

Here’s a typical learning plan you could make from a course like this week’s Executive Coaching in The Search Academy

1. Keyphrase research
Run the Keyword Consequences game the next time you’re starting on a campaign plan. Use this to uncover the groups of keyphrases. Pay special attention to the phrases you want to block against.
2. Toolkits
Taking a look at the different toolkits will really help. Look for a provider who can help you manage search campaigns.
3. Hands-on
Work through the Google Adwords system for the placement of a token campaign for the agency; this will help you practice and see how the bidding interface works.
4. Time
Allow yourself significant time for researching and planning the next couple of campaigns.
5. Data
Focus on the data that’s available to track the effectiveness of a campaign. This will take some energy right at the start to ensure that you’re gathering it effectively and that the baseline numbers are something you can rely on.
6. Link love
Use the tools within Google to learn more about how much link love there is out there for a site, and if there are no other analytics in place then Alexa will still give you some baseline data to work from.

In The Search Academy we look at the three groups of marketing objectives and then explore the issue of brand objectives. Within branding there are four clusters of issues, and any could be isolated for a search marketing objective, although awareness will be the easiest.

For a given search term (such as ‘range cooker’ in household appliances) find out how many searches there are. Look at the rankings of the sites that appear and learn more about the way those products market themselves. Then take the brand site you’re working with and track its own performance.

When you run your search engine advertising or your SEO, you can then set a truly smart objective for the awareness of the brand’s site by looking at the number of times the listing is called. Add to that an analysis of click throughs (from both natural and PPC search) and you have an awareness metric at two levels: exposure to brand name, URL and brand position statement at listings level, and then a deeper brand experience on clickthrough.

So in terms of a smart objective, there are many ways this could be expressed, but at a very simple level, this could be something along the lines of:
U thousand exposures (an OTS metric)
Of advertising message V
Containing brand image statement W
Over time period X
Resulting in Y click-throughs
And Z deeper brand experiences within the site

For sure, most firms, most of the time, are just chasing the click – but for sophisticated marketers (and those experienced in the importance of a brand’s share of voice) there’s a powerful additional benefit in search that most firms are yet to realise.

can you provide an example of what an SMART brand marketing objective would look like? Using Range cookers as a product.

CHECKING YOUR META DATA

The most simple way of doing this is to view the web page you are interested in and then go up into the browser and click on ‘view source’. This will bring up the actual HTML of the page itself. Don’t worry if it looks a little intimidating at first; if you’re not familiar with a mark-up language then lots of it might appear to be nonsense but it all performs a critical role in making your page appear the way it does.

By going up to ‘Find’ in the navigation bar and looking for ‘meta’, you’ll be able to zoom in on the tags that describe the meta data. That includes the page title, the description and the keywords. Although they don’t have the same role in search engines as they did in the early days, getting the meta data right still helps with the way your page is read and characterised, and as it’s only one click away from your screen it’s real easy to check and see what’s there.

When you are considering what should be in your meta-data, use the exercises in The Search Academy to help refine it and get it right.

How do I check what's happening in my meta data (I run several sites).

One of the challenge with language is that most people are not perfect spellers. One word, typed two or more ways, is not uncommon. Add in the differences between, for example, British and American English, and there’s a recipe for even greater challenges.

Smart search engine marketers harness this by recognising the challenges of misspellings and buying those words as part of their keyphrases. In fact, this can be some of the cheapest ways to buy traffic, although don’t expect a massive rush of customers, as, fortunately, the volumes of those phrases in search engines should be quite small.

What is the use of misspellings to buy website traffic cheaply?

Remember that there are dozens of tools on our Digital Training Academies that can help you put into practice the ideas we disucss here. If you missed the last Digital Training Academies in your country, then check the termtime pages to see when the next public access courses are in your areas: http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/termtime/
... and remember that most of the time firms invite us inside their company to train the whole team in one go! Email me for details of how we could do this for you and your team. We're waiting to help boost your group's output straight away!

SETTING SMART SEARCH MARKETING OBJECTIVES

I’ve been helping people learn search engine marketing since before Google hired their first international employee. Search is key to unlocking the real value of the web, and yet most campaigns still lack strong objectives and fail to benchmark. It’s changing, but maybe not fast enough.

What are the objectives in Search? Since 1998 I’ve argues that they’re just like other marketing objectives: building brand, generating response or boosting retention. In each case you can set SMART objectives:

How do you put the SMART into search marketing objectives?
Here’s a few pointers to get you heading in the right direction…
- Specific: focus on a business goal, keeping the numbers tight and the deliverables clear
- Measurable: use the pay-per-click model, or put in place a way to track your natural listing clicks (if you can’t measure, how will you know what’s working?)
- Achievable: talk with stakeholders to gauge what is realistic
- Relevant: just about getting ‘traffic’, or about conversions in your business?
- Timebound: fix a monthly target, being real specific about the numbers

If you’re a seasoned search marketer then this will be such second nature, you probably never need articulate it. But often there are so many stakeholders in a web marketing campaign that it’s easy for no-one to own the objective setting process. Failing to set objectives is setting out to fail.

Training tips?
- Talk with your colleges, agencies and other stakeholders
- Build up objectives together
- Put in place the measurement mechanics to monitor
- Test the process works
- Start the campaign and watch the monitoring
- Call a post-launch review for the stakeholders
- Then structure the reporting into your management process
- Put a milestone down for X weeks time to review the whole process
- And institutionalise the learning so your team just get smarter and smarter ;-)

…and let us know how it goes

Search marketing objectives – how do you set them?

TRANSLATIONS AND META DATA

The meta-data are the information blocks about the page tucked into the top of the html. The chances are that if you’re reading this page, you probably know quite a bit about the importance of getting it right and the role it plays in getting your sites found. But thinking about the roles of people in a marketing team, there are extra challenges for multi national firms. The question "do you translate the title tags and meta-data when you roll out your sites?" is fascinating...

It blows open all the doors to the project management and structural issues of how search agencies are briefed and monitored, how search marketing needs deep project management, and why search just isn’t big enough on the radar to get the attention it deserves inside many leading global brands.

The next question it begs is: "And if so, then how do the page builders know?" Which means that clients have to think about how briefs are presented to their agency and what the scope for the brief really is.

And that’s all before you get into the rich subtleties of language that mean the notion of ‘translation’ is radically different from simple page translation. Your meta data deserves a great linguist, and a lot more time than you’d normally spend translating 40 words. The takeout? Invest now and reap the rewards longterm.

So here are some simple tips for international marketing teams...
- Decide on the ownership for website project management and internationalisation
- Put meta-data and SEO into the brief for any internationalisation
- Invest appropriately and hire linguists with SEO skills
- Explore the language in title tags and meta-data, maybe sharing it with a wider community of stakeholders
- Apply the same rigour and testing you would for your first language
- Share with your colleagues the learnings you uncover to make the next site faster, cheaper, and easier to implement

Search marketing – translating title tags and meta data: “who does this?”

Measuring search accurately can be tough

Remember that the rate of growth in digital media is incomparable to anything the marketing industry saw in classic channels. But that can create problems with its measurement: the constantly evolving types of online advertising mean that it’s always necessary to double check exactly what’s being measured and how. If you’re involved in online advertising research, then look at the models for measurement in classic media, and then the tools available in online. Pay particular attention to the challenges of measuring search engine advertising and online advertising sales networks as there’s a material risk of double counting in both cases. Check out the impact of ecommerce sales on the size of the online advertising sector, but be clear about whether the transaction is included (it’s a subtle but important difference between tracking the growth of spend on media space vs spend on online commerce).

Check out the Digital Insight Reports (http://www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/insight/ ) for perspectives on how to get to grips with search engine advertising research

Danny Meadows-Klue, Academy Director, Digital Training Academy

On the advanced Search Academy we didn't dwell too much on the editorial policies of the engines, but if you're planning to put in double listings for the same keyword then this needs to be checked out clearly. When we ran the masterclass level Search Academy in Warsaw, it was clear that the team were all real familiar with these sort of issues, but for those less experienced in your group, or for those who are reading this and have not been on one of our Advanced Search Academy programmes, the advice is to check out the best practice with the engine and your county as it varies greatly.

Remember that the great thing about search engine advertising is the accountability, so don't be shy in checking out those issues and getting a test lined up. Classic split-run testing can be a great way to understand the implications of different types of online advertising effectiveness. Look for a model where you have a clear set of control data and then introduce one other variable. Do it in a way that you can record and track the effectiveness all the way through your activity. Include the final effect on sales and (ideally) customer lifetime value in your model. Remember that in classic direct marketing you’re running A/B split-run tests in almost every occasion. But in online it’s cost effective to take the same approach and run way more: A/B/C/D/E split run tests.

If you’d like more on testing then try out some of the ideas in the Digital Web Analytics Academy.

Danny Meadows-Klue, Academy Director, Digital Training Academy

Hello everyone,

My attention was drawn to the statistics showing that generic position gives 20 clicks, paid (AdWords) gives 10 and combination of both (I understand if the ad and search result are on the same page) gives 60... This is rather surprising...

Google does not recommend (me neither so far) to post two ads for the same keyword (from different accounts of course), as this increases the cost.

Assuming the 20+10 = 60, if say from the 60 clicks above, 40 are search result clicks and 20 are sponsored link clicks, means that the additional 10 clicks cost 1/3 of the price because they "bring" 20 more clicks of the generic results, so it decreases the cost (by 50%).

Does anyone have experience in testing it? My intuition say that rather it should be "10+20=25" and not "10+20=60" and I rather use the keywords where the site appears in search results as negative, especially if the budget is limited.

http://www.jobland.pl

BRANDING AND SEARCH: A NEW ERA

The metrics you use to measure a campaign might need to be a little broader than you think. Here's an example…. In search engine advertising it's normally all about the direct response, the immediate sales and the customers that are acquired. However, from 2005 onwards it's clear that lots of marketers began to explore the value of search engines as a brand building tool, using the listings to boost key metrics such awareness. On the Search Academy we explore how Carling's sponsorships of music venues around the UK have helped deliver this – their example is one of the most extensive strategies we came across in 2006 - but any brand can benefit from a top ranking that everyone sees.

The classic four groups of brand metrics are:

- Brand awareness – either prompted or unprompted

- Brand attributes – or 'image statements' (all unique for each brand)

- Advertising recall – measuring the awareness of the specific advertising creative you have

- Purchase intent – or 'brand favourability'

Think about the ones that are right for you, and if you need advice on how to use these in practice then get in touch.

What about the brand impact of Search? How does that work, and how can it be traced?

GEOGRAPHY AND MAPPING

The battle for 'local' is on. Maps on Google were just the start of a major push from the search firms to develop products that give you the local targeting your brand might need. There are constant waves of product development that started by simply encouraging searchers to use of local terms, are now fusing in maps, and have the scope to use the IP addresses that define the location of a computer to relate back the geography of the searcher to the geography of the data. Over the next few years there will be graphical search ads inside many engines and these too will give you a greater scope for localised impact. The fusion between IP addresses and search will let marketers optimise search in new ways so stay close to the engines and if you retain a search agency then ask them to keep you abreast of the latest.

Where is search heading? What's the future for maps and geography?

BUILDING KEYWORD LISTS

Here's an example from one of our Search Academies. We asked participants to think of a product and consider the phrase they might type in that describes, to them, how they'd be likely to describe this word.

Our product today was from a travel company: "In-flight Entertainment". Here's what Academy participants discovered:

- flight personal TV screen

- films on board a flight

- movies on flights

- best onboard entertainment

- best airline entertainment

- Emirates onboard films

- inflight entertainment flights

- flight movies games

- new movies inflight

- personal DVD players on flights

- TV films onboard

- [airline brand name] inflight

As search marketers talking with your customers is key to understanding the different types of groups of terms that might be out there; you may be in for a big surprise!

KEYWORD AND KEY PHRASE BUILDING

Talk your customers' language. Learn what they're looking for. You know your business inside out, but do you really know what consumers think about it? Do you know how they describe your products?

To most firms this may come as a shock, but there is usually a real gap between how you see your products and how your average customer descries them. On the highstreet none of that mattered, shop assistants bridged the gap; translating the way a customer described what they were looking for into a set of potential product that matched those needs. Forget it; that highstreet experience is long gone. The clever names you gave your ranges, the descriptions of the colours you agonised over, the technical specs you wrestled with for hours – they may all count for nothing. Instead, start in a different place.

Start by listening to your customers: talk with them. Hear what they say when they speak about your products, about their needs, about what they're looking for. Whether that means getting your field reps to visit clients, reading through blogs and online forums, dropping by a branch to track down those shop assistants, or simply taking a few of your regulars out for pint at the local – chances are it will be one of the most insightful things you've done for a while.

Develop a range of keywords and key phrases

The problem is the complexity of language and 'intent'. Someone looking for a holiday cottage might also use words like 'farm' or contractions like 'B&B' to describe it. There may be geographical names they'll include, or groups of products and different themes. Tiny variations in the term 'House Manchester' vs 'Houses Manchester' could yield different results.

The point is that as patterns emerge, savvy search marketers will be looking for many clusters of words and phrases, within which it might reveal hundreds of alternative terms…

Why should I build out long lists of key phrases for campaigns? Why can't I get away with just a few...

SELLING SEARCH

How to position search?

Most agencies make the mistake of diving into the details and the process of search and skipping over the financial essentials. Search engines could be providing the majority of leads to your website which means that using them effectively is going to be key to unlocking more returns from the whole investment you've already made. It's the simplest for of web marketing to start and track because you can see immediately that your customers arrive and that the value is delivering. By starting small PPC should prove itself quickly, and this builds confidence inside the firm for delivering more. Remember that as the size of the PPC campaign grows, it will need more resources and probably more specialist agency support.

How should agencies be selling search? I work in an agency with a third party search specialist that sorts this out for our clients. What's the best tactic? How should we position search?

SEO: ADVANTAGES OVER OTHER FORMS OF ONLINE MARKETING

Here are some of the key reasons why SEO is so popular

- You only pay once (or in batches)

- You can enjoy free advertising (no media space)

- You can get more value from your web investments because the principles in SEO also help with great web design

- You can optimise thousands of words across the whole of your site and unlock greater richness and depth from your existing content

- You can set budget limits, but there's an element to which this needs to be built in at

PPC: ADVANTAGES OVER OTHER FORMS OF ONLINE

Here are some of the key reasons why pay-per-click (PPC) is so popular

- You only pay for the traffic that you get

- You can set it up quickly

- You can get to the top of listings immediately

- You can turn it on and off when you want

- You can set budget limits

- You can measure the ROI easily

- You can transfer what you learn to your overall marketing strategy

Why is pay per click so popular?

UNDERSTANDING THE ROLE OF THE AGENCY

Search engine marketing agencies can add a huge amount of value. Tap into their expertise and it can transform your search engine marketing. Getting the right resources is key to unlocking the value of your online marketing.

Here are some questions to ask…

- Do you have the same title and description for every key phrase?

- Does the agency look at the wider challenges of customer conversion, looking at the barriers to purchase inside of your website?

- How will they be testing your copy, bid strategy and campaign developments?

- How many people, and how much training, have the agency team had?

- What would the agency recommend to increase the value you get from the space you're buying?

How can I get more of an understanding of the role of the agency?