Search with Webtrends Ad Director and Mullen

Building Content

I like that this campaign is in a blog format, it provides us with interesting opportunities to strategizing strengthening our keywords without touching the bloggers copy. We will do this through the supporting structure of the site. As the weeks progress I will share all the strategies we utilize to strengthen our rank in the search engines.

The list of keywords I decided that we will initially optimize for the Open Campaign (based on the initial content I was given) will be:

More than likely the term webtrends will show up in our organic search results so I haven’t listed it here. Likely if we do receive traffic (remember: very short timeline here) for any of these terms, they will come in with the term webtrends attached to them and for now that is okay with me. If this were a long-term campaign I would definitely want to move away from my terms supported by my brand name.

Authority and Themes
It is good practice to build sites around the site as an authority on its theme. We’re challenged here because the Open Campaign is of such short duration and it is more difficult to expect it to be accepted as an authority but the time and effort we spend on strengthening our authority is not wasted. One of our goals is to learn as we go and learning about authority and themes are important SEO strategies.
A themed site that is built with the intention to grow into an authority site is a site destined for success.

Authority sites capture far more visitors than those sites laid out statically to entice a handful of strategized keywords. Since the intent of the Open Campaign is aggressive content building if I apply a strategy around strong internal and external linking the Open Campaign could eventually (given more time) become an authority site; think in the extreme and you get “Wikipedia”. As an authority, we ideally would benefit from this Open Campaign site as an authority in campaign building, including campaign measurement and campaign openness.

Themes
I intend to use the following terms to support the core terms above. Optimizing for supporting terms not because I think we will rank in organic search for them but as a way to draw visitors in with combinations I may not have considered initially but I know are important supporting terms for the “theme” of this site. These extra terms should add to the authority and theme of the site.

I won’t be tracking the support terms during the Open Campaign because in reality there is no possibility of attaining rank with them with this short of a timeline. I am eager to see if these terms do come in some combination of a phrase I had not originally considered.



Tracking Our Organic Search Engine Visitors
I will be tracking visitors coming in from the search engines. I have set up reporting for this and will talk about that more in a future blog. Everything is open here so you will know along with me not only how well the keywords are doing in the search engines for rank but which terms are pulling in traffic. As with any campaign we want to know how the visitor gets there, what they do while they are visiting and how they leave.

We can learn many things from our visitors through the keywords they use to get to us so optimizing for an array of supported terms gives us more opportunity to provide them entrance. If we then use this knowledge to provide them with a site that addresses their interest, ideally helping them once they get there to convert then we as a team meet with success.

I’m very interested in your thoughts and will gladly respond to your comments and questions.

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One of the more obvious things to note, when trying to understand the value of a click, is that if no one clicks on your ad, there is no value to be measured.

When evaluating the performance of the Paid Search portion of the Open Campaign, click volume immediately stood out. We selected generic online marketing terms, generating roughly 10k impressions/day. However, click through rate has hovered close to 0.27%. This could mean one of two things.

• We are targeting the wrong audience or
• We are not engaging the audience properly.

Though Click Through Rate is not typically a metric I consider when assessing the performance of a campaign, it is a strong indicator of whether or not you are speaking to the right audience and whether they care about you have to offer.

In general, paid search ads should not be used for branding purposes. The beauty of paid search it offers more than just eyeballs but instead gives a marketer the ultimate reward – quantifiable ROI. Search marketers ignore CPM when evaluating their campaigns as text ads cannot capture users attention as well as an attractive banner ad. The goal is to attract users to your offer and get them in your sales funnel (and ideally all the way through to conversion) Search marketers have to walk a fine line to capitalize on the impressions they do get. If your message strays too far from what your landing page offers, the clicks you do get will be worthless. If you narrow the scope too much, you may get no traffic at all.

Our current ads are as follows:

The goal was to leverage the power of the Webtrends brand while narrowing our audience down to people that were interested in the inner workings of a marketing campaign. Given the broad terms we were going after (think ecommerce, site analysis, web analytics), we found it essential to have total synergy between our ad and the content of the Open Campaign. In the coming days, I will be working with Rory Trahan from Mullen on better understanding our audience (see her upcoming blog on Keyword selection) and, in turn, tweaking our ad copy to capture their attention and talk about the Open Campaign at the same time…in less than 95 characters of course.

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SEO or organic search is first and foremost, keywords. I am assuming readers here know enough about organic search and basic SEO techniques and concepts that I won’t go into all of that in this blog; instead I’ll focus on how these concepts were put to work for the Open Campaign. Today I’m focused on our current The Open Campaign keyword strategy.

We are taking the strategic position that our keywords must be built into the core of the site to be successful.
For us to optimize the core of our site for keywords we first have to understand our purpose, who our visitors are and what we intend for them to do on the site through to conversion. It’s what we all want for every site isn’t it? For public facing websites, drawing in relevant organic traffic should be considered a universal success goal. We certainly want our visitors to convert. We spend lots of time with analytics improving the conversion process.

With organic search we have the opportunity to draw in visitors that we believe are more likely to convert, we prequalify them. How? We build our site around terms that our ideal visitor would use to find us. We continue to refine this strategy as we learn more about our visitors.

Understanding the Goals
With the Open Campaign our SEO goals are:

• To measure our current rank for our keywords in Google, Yahoo, MSN and/or Ask and Bing to set the benchmark. I’ve done this and will share those results soon. Given this is a fresh new site there was no ranking for any of the keywords so it’s all up hill from here. Given the campaign itself provides a relatively short period of time to rank high in the search engines, I’m not expecting #1 ranks throughout though #1 is ultimately ALWAYS my highly competitive SEO goal.
• To improve our rank over the course of the campaign through site wide optimization and report on the actions we take and then the results, opening up the conversation to our readers.
• Track the keyword phrases and tie them into conversions.
• Use internal search to feed the expansion of the initial keyword list.
• Integrate SEO successes in with PPC activities. I’ve had much success and saved companies up to a quarter of a million dollars a year in PPC costs by strategizing an affect integrated SEO/PPC campaign. We don’t have as much time as I would like to do it all here visually with The Open Campaign. If not here then perhaps at a future date in the Webtrends corporate blog I can share with you all some of my successful strategies in this area.
• Visualize the data. I am working with Robin Balmer on a SEO dashboard we started developing during the last Developer’s Day here at Webtrends. I hope we will have time to finish enough of it to share here during the Open Campaign.

When to Introduce SEO into the Campaign
Ideally SEO is included in the very inception stages of a websites creative development along with the analytics and other tracking and measurement strategies. We express our thoughts on our strategies in the requirement gathering stage of in this case both website and campaign development. Ideally with organic search the website is SEO friendly to its core. This focus on SEO in the development stage also improves the success of internal search, especially when you put your analytics to work to measure and use the data you collect to continually improve on the successes while eliminating the pain points.

With the Open Campaign I was invited to participate early on. Unfortunately as busy as we all are here at Webtrends and this project an extra on top of my clients needs, there hasn’t been a lot of time to sit down with the Marketing Team (Client here) and discuss what terms they hope to draw traffic from. This is normally a vital conversation to have with the client. Besides their insights it often helps them to think in terms of search and not just marketing lingo (optimizer’s nightmare). We (SEO Strategists) yearn for access to the content but this is more often than not a struggle to achieve.

I haven’t yet suggested content adjustments. I decided to start with the backend, underbelly of the site to strengthen our organic position and will with gentle requests suggest content changes. This strategy has worked well for me in corporate settings when working with marketing teams. As a corporate optimizer I understand the importance of the marketing message.

For the Open Campaign I opted to draw my keyword list from the current copy I’d been provided with for the site. These keywords will change and refine as time goes on. We’re early in the content development stage especially since this is a blog campaign. My SEO challenge is there will be multiple writers participating and I have no control of the words they use. That is not an uncommon situation today in SEO, applying the optimization to support the blog not writing the blog to support the optimization.

It is not unusual to have conflict between SEO copy and Marketing copy. I’ve learned to work on the core issues of optimizing for search before I talk with the Marketing Team about modifying their copy for search. If I am successful with strengthening my site for search then it’s usually just a tweak here and there with copy and I can get to where I need to be. Over the next week I will take you through how I am building the keywords into the structure and core of the site and then we will measure those affects as we go and track which effects produce the best results.

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These are difficult times. We have all been beaten over the head with this notion and seen it hurt our bottom lines. But what can we do?

In short, plenty.

Paid Search, and online marketing in general, offers marketers the chance to get measurable results – the trick is to focus on the right ones. Metrics rule online marketing but if you are not optimizing your efforts to the right one, you are doing yourself – and your company – a huge disservice. This, ultimately, is the goal of phase one of our Open Campaign.

I work with Ad Director clients on a daily basis to help them get the most of their Paid Search efforts and I can tell you, with great certainty, that the most successful are those who a) understand the value of a click and b) use this information to maximize revenue.

So how does a paid search optimization and analytics company make the best use of its own technology you might ask?

As part of this campaign, we will be engaging users in a few different ways – email registration, white paper downloads and a request to contact sales. As these users progress down the sale funnel, our aim is to determine which keywords are bringing in users that engage with the site and just how much value we, as a company, derive from a conversion. Once we have this information, we will be able to start optimizing and making the most out of our paid search budget.

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I am very fond of an open process where the team and community openly collaborate on projects. The Open Campaign is a very exciting project for me and this is what I love about working at Webtrends, these amazing opportunities to stretch and grow.

I hope we are able to communicate and discuss back and forth the strategies I am following for this particular project. I will be writing over the weeks about what I did during the development stage and be open about what I am doing and the results of those actions as it affects driving qualified leads and drawing them into conversions.

Organic search is a passion of mine; I simply love the competition and game of it from driving the lead through to the conversion. I use the SEO to drive qualified traffic to the site and the analytics helps me to optimize the site through to the conversions. A great SEO campaign working in harmony with the paid search marketing can maximize return on investments by reducing costs and increasing coverage. Read the rest of this entry »

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