aimClear Search Marketing Blog

[This post is our continuining coverage of SES Chicago 2008] Proper execution of the basic, proven and successful models is necessary for success in any business endeavor. Search Marketing is no different. After spending the past 3 days listening to excellent people extol us to further develop and exceed current practices and performances, it was time to stop for a moment and “Get back to the basics.”

Search Advertising 101 was just the elixir and this baby was a cool tall drink. Covering basic tenets and language surrounding keywords, online ad creative, placement and campaign management processes provided an accelerated  learning curve.

Moderator Anne Kennedy, Managing Partner and Founder of Beyond Ink did a great job setting the pace and handing over the podium to Matt Van Wagner, President of Find Me Faster and Mona Elesseily, Director of Marketing Strategy at Page Zero Media.

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PPC, search engine optimization and SMO do not exist in a vacuum. In fact for countless small business SEMs, the delineation between working amongst these classic disciplines is simply a matter of how the marketer’s day is spent.

Larger in-house and agency settings often present internal walls built between each department, along with classic pros and cons of specialization vs. becoming fragmented. Read the rest of this entry »

Tune in to Webmasterradio.fm and hear yesterday’s interview. David Szetela and I described a reputation management crises we handled for a client together, that tallied 32 million targeted “emergency PR” Google pay per click impressions for less than 4K.

We had a client with a bad “problem-word.” The nasty verbiage also existed in annoying permutations like “problem-word” + DirectBrandName. Mission one was to serve the public with timely information. There were thousands of news articles in the SERPs, ranging from major sources to po-dung radio station sites. Read the rest of this entry »

We encounter companies spending obscene amounts of Internet marketing cash on unfocused local television and newspaper website banner ads, relying on semi-useless statistics and without building in the campaign’s ability to calculate return on investment.

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It’s Day 4 at SES San Jose and it looks like they saved the best for last. Moderated by Gregg Stewart SVP, Interactive, TMP Directional Marketing, this session looked at Contextual Advertising from two directions: from a publisher’s perspective on how to generate more revenue dollars and also effective tactics for managing contextual campaigns. David Szetela CEO, Clix Marketing shared world class content targeting  tips from Advertisers perspective. Read the rest of this entry »

Moderated by Dana Todd, CMO for Newsforce, Day 3 of SES San Jose found SEM experts discussing how Quality Score has impacted results and how you can impact quality score results. Read the rest of this entry »

As paid search grows to be ever more expensive, employing techniques to wring every drop of ROI from PPC becomes more crucial. Moderated by Richard Zwicky, Founder and CEO of Enquisite, the “Advanced Paid Techniques” session here at SES San Jose examined common landing page mistakes and the benefits of negative keywords to help squeeze more out of media buys. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s an age old issue. You know that your online is driving off-line sales - But how do you measure?

Search Online, Purchase Off-line at Day 2 SES San Jose offered two case studies to help marketers better understand ways to tackle this important issue. Read the rest of this entry »

The initials “PPC” traditionally have referred to “pay per click.” However in these days of double digit inflation, agency (and in-house) clients are coming to expect a different rendering of these classic initials, “pay per per conversation” — to improve PPC ROI.

Every click is an opportunity to engage a potential customer. How do you demonstrate the defining values surrounding your services overall in your marketing pitch? An often overlooked answer is to market by savvy content planning, improved relevancy and tons of testing.

This SES San Jose session discussed the pathology of missed conversations and techniques for further engagement of PPC traffic. Moderator Anne Kennedy is founder and managing partner of BeyondInk SEO consulting firm. Read the rest of this entry »

Bit Torrent search engines, image search engines, artificial intelligence systems, clustering engines, recommendation search engines, & metasearch are all example of viable alternatives to Google. Each has its own unique place in the marketing mix.

This SES San Jose session’s Moderator, Andrew Goodman, founded Page-Zero Media, a ROI-driven online marketing agency. I’ve interacted with him online before but never seen him in person and it was well worth the wait. The first speaker up was Sage Lewis who runs SageRock.com, an online marketing company. Read the rest of this entry »