The Marketleap Report
Volume IV, Issue #1, February 20, 2004

A Marketers Guide to Search Engine Marketing and Staying Alive in 2004 - Part One
By Keith Boswell

We've written a lengthy two-part report, giving you a solid guide to the things you absolutely need on your radar for 2004 and beyond. In 2003, search engine marketing accounted for 2% of the US advertising and marketing spend, the same amount as all billboard and outdoor advertising. 2004 promises to take search engine marketing beyond the signs dotting the roads and highways.

Understanding Your Keyword Market and Best Practices for Organic Search
Before delving into any trends, individual search engines, or speculation, it's important to focus on the core goal of search engine marketing. Your keywords are your life. You absolutely need to understand your online keyword market intimately and begin speaking to it. If you don't, you're missing the tremendous opportunity to communicate directly with current and new customers.

Your keyword market(s) is the natural language your customers are using to try and find you online. It's the quirky combination of terms that someone comes up with while trying to accurately describe something very specific to them, like "Hong Kong vinyl robot action figures."

When approaching search engine marketing, start by focusing on the low hanging fruit. You've got to incorporate the key phrase you know about into your pages first. That may be from a list you have created at Wordtracker.com or from research you have done on competitors in your space. Then you need to see how the various search engines react to your website. Do they index your whole site, or just a few pages?

Within a few months, you should be able to see which keywords are driving traffic to your site. Then you can see if there are variations of new or frequently searched words to put into the site that might improve conversions over the metrics you've already established. Baby steps, baby steps. Skipping this step will cost your business dearly because your competitors will be there speaking your customers language, not you.

Someone searching at a search engine only sees the Title of your HTML page as a link, and either your Meta-Description tag or an abstract made up of words pulled from the page to describe it. A link and a description, that's all you've got. If your pages don't speak to the person searching, all the work you put into your site is worthless to them.

Also realize that if you have a brochure-ware site or you are an affiliate marketer, you have to be a unique presence on the Internet to be listed in search engines. Duplicate content and sites that look the same aren't going to improve the quality of search results. You have to spend the time creating content for your audience that is above and beyond your competitors.

If you need a refresher on keyword markets, writing good Titles and Meta-Tags or other tips for basic survival, read some of Marketleap's free SEO 101 articles.

Understanding Search Engine Submissions
When search engines started, free submissions were the only way to get listed. You would suggest your website to them and hope it was included. A whole industry was created of companies that offered to submit your website to thousands of search engines for a low fee. Because there are over 10 billion pages published and available online, relying on suggested submissions just doesn't work for search engines any more.

You can still go to the free pages listed at various search engines and input your URL as a suggestion to be included. But once you hit submit, you begin operating in what we call a "negative marketing zone." This zone contains no guarantees you'll get in, and nothing but an endless amount of time to wait and see what happens.

The companies advertising to submit your website to all those search engines and provide you with ranking reports aren't delivering real search engine marketing. You're not going to know anything more about your online audience if you know that you consistently rank #5 on Google for "Scratch and Sniff Posters."

If you are a serious online business, you need more than that. Paid search services are a reality that all marketers should embrace because of the options you get: quick time to market, detailed reporting, and technical support from the search engines. None of this was available with the old model of basic website submission services. Paid Inclusion and Pay-for-Placement (P4P) will dominate the paid search arena and grow as more marketers shift budgets to search engine marketing. Both can be priced similarly, but their tactics, goals and results are quite different.

Understanding Paid Inclusion
Paid Inclusion is a publishing model that allows you to get as many of your web pages indexed as you want in search engines like Inktomi, FAST, AltaVista and Ask Jeeves. These major paid inclusion search engines are the backbone for delivering search results to major portals such as Yahoo, MSN, HotBot, Excite and MetaCrawler. You may pay a flat-fee or per-click, depending on the amount of URL's you want indexed.

Paid Inclusion doesn't guarantee any positioning benefits, but it means your pages are indexed and updated frequently within these search engines. Why would you pay to have more than 500 pages indexed? Because Paid Inclusion completes the publishing cycle, it draws visitors to the web pages that are appropriate to them. Are you really live on the Internet if you can't be found in a search engine? And knowing that probably 70% of the live websites aren't indexed at search engines, can you afford not to be there?

When you accurately describe and position your pages to include the language your customers are searching for, you can expand your business because of the many opportunities each page has to come up within a unique search. Paid Inclusion helps companies increase their presence in organic search results and capture a much larger search market than they could through pay-for-placement campaigns alone. Web pages don't exist in a linear fashion, once the site is live, your customers have many points of entry into your business. Paid Inclusion helps make sure those many points of entry are available in search engines.

Understanding Pay-for-Placement (P4P)
P4P is search engine advertising. With P4P you don't have to worry about which pages you have indexed at the search engines. Instead, you buy a keyword ad and pay auction prices for the position your ad will appear within search results. If your business absolutely has to show up at the top of results for "Hotel Rooms Washington DC", P4P is the only way to guarantee that you can be #1 for that specific phrase.

Auction prices for keywords range anywhere from $.10 cents per click to as high as $50 per click in extremely competitive areas like Travel and Finance. You have to know the keyword phrases that are going to get you the highest quality of traffic if you hope to survive in this space. Each P4P search engine has its own unique set of editorial rules, targeting and distribution options which require you to have completely independent strategies for each.

Google and Overture are the two leading providers of P4P. Overture was the founder of P4P search and they have the largest distribution and advertiser base in the market. Their ad network reaches approximately 80% of all Internet users through partners such as Yahoo!, MSN, InfoSpace and CNN.

Google AdWords is the most advanced P4P service in the market because of its many features. Google has a large distribution and advertiser base that reaches the entire Google audience and their partners like AOL, CompuServe, Netscape, Ask Jeeves and more. Other P4P networks like Kanoodle, Ah-Ha, FindWhat, etc. represent a small percentage of the total P4P market but they do add value through their smaller networks.

If don't have a good understanding of your keyword market at this point, throwing money into P4P could be a costly exercise. Paid inclusion will probably help more by leveraging your own website content and tapping into the real keyword phrases people use to find your website.

Before approaching P4P and Paid Inclusion, you need to have a great understanding of what you are purchasing and set your expectations accordingly. We'll use future Marketleap Reports to get into more of the strategies behind Pay-for-Placement and paid inclusion campaigns and ways you can be successful in them.

Summing it Up
If you're thinking about spending money on search engine marketing for your website, look in the mirror first. See if you have any keyword data you can learn from today. Once you feel confident your website matches up with what you know of your keyword market, then you can start stepping out into the more advanced world of search engine marketing. Remember, it all boils down to words and phrases. The more your site reflects your customer's unique language, the better your search engine marketing efforts will turn out.

Add the Marketleap Report to your site using our XML/RSS feed.