Last week Chris Sherman (Executive Editor from Search Engine Land) spoke at a very valuable Search Marketing Now webcast entitled ‘Leveraging All Search Marketing Channels’. This event was sponsored by 24/7 and provided pertinent information regarding various search marketing channels, both traditional and emerging.

The speaker challenged the audience to think of how many channels we are using and where we might be missing opportunities. Mr. Sherman believes the evolution of search has many parallels with television in that at the beginning there were a few big dominant players and ads were only available to big spenders. Later, as the medium developed smaller niche players and opportunities for smaller advertisers emerged.

In the world of search, at the beginning, we had three or four large search engines and now we are seeing opportunities in smaller, niche oriented markets.

There are two groups of search marketing channels: traditional and expanded.

1. Organic Listings

Natural search results derived from the full text of all pages found on the web

2. Paid Listings

Carefully worded advertisements consisting of 2-5 word title and 2 very short lines of text

1. Content Options

News and Press Releases – Many people aren’t taking advantage of PRs. By optimizing the press releases, companies can drive people and journalists to their site.

Always optimize PRs with hyperlinks to the URL to your site.

Remember to submit PRs to wire services (different crawlers).

Bonus – journalists writing about your news may drive more traffic than the releases itself. Opportunity to have your news picked up on 2 different channels – journalists and web.

Social Media

Simple definition: Internet way finding tools informed by human judgment. There is currently no good industry standard definition of social media. They do have some component of search involved but they are involved by human beings (voting on stories, answers questions, contributing content).

Why bother with social media? Social media sites are attracting huge audiences that have a memory (book marking). If you do well on these social media sites, people might find your content when they aren’t actively searching.

Types of Social Media

Collaborative harvesters – People on the web are trying to find content and recommend it to other uses (Digg, Netscape, Reddit, and Sphinn).

Collaborative Directories – ODP, Wikipedia, Prefound – These sites are created by human beings and not search engine crawlers. Wikipedia can be used for search marketing because you can add content you want (with caution – as the editors are suspicious of anyone changing content for marketing purpose) or at the end of all Wikipedia entries there are links to external sites. Wikipedia is heavily trafficked and the links can send traffic to your site. IF you have images about your product or service, you can upload those images and those images can have a link to your particular product or service page.

Social Q&A sites – Yahoo Answers, Answerbag – They have less value than the other types because of the Q&A format so you don’t have much opportunity to influence people.

Local Search

Likely to be the next big thing.

Relevant for both small location based businesses and large companies relying on locally purchased goods or services. (Even large companies can take advantage of local search because most people are still buying their products locally instead of online).

Many players, so try to submit to as many as possible. Most are free or minimal cost.

Feed-Based Search Marketing

Allows you to have a direct dialog with search engines (if you have a product based inventory or a large site that you need control on what gets to the search engines).

Gives you control over what the search engine sees and indexes.

Types of Feeds

Web based inclusion

Shopping and product comparison

Local search and directory

2. Ad Options (beyond traditional)

2nd tier or alternative search engines

Operate just like Google, Yahoo – but with less reach.

Be careful: traffic quality can be poorer than with the majors (may not get the same level of qualified buyers and poorer conversion rates – monitor to make sure you are hitting your performance goals.

Advantage – usually less expensive and can target searchers not using the majors. Examples: (Looksmart, Enhance, Epilot, Marchex, Miva, Mirago (Europe), Search123, 7Search, PageSeeker).

Contextual ad networks

Backend works just like the search advertising platforms, but ads are distributed to content sites on the web rather than search results pages.

Be careful: potentially less engaged users.

Consider all the majors, plus the smaller players like Kanoodle.

Ad exchanges

Auction style exchanges designed to facilitate exchanges betweens advertisers and media buyers (no middleman & potentially better audience targeting).

Players include RightMedia (Yahoo), DoubleClick (Google), AQuantitive (Microsoft), & Context. AdsDaq is a new player that will be launching soon that has recently launched.

3. Platform options – the web is now an object based platform, instead of just a text based platform.

Video

Two ways to use video in a search marketing campaign.

Optimize meta data to be found by the search engines (because the search engines can not see video – only text). 98% of videos aren’t doing this so it is a wide open area right now.

Embed URL in titles and inserts on video for people to type into their browser – simply by having your video out there you can drive a lot of traffic.

Podcasts

Are increasingly being picked up in general search results.

Optimize metadata (ID3 tags), but also optimize web site (content information (overview), unique landing pages, transcripts). Gives crawlers more text to chew on.

Create and submit RSS feeds with embedded podcasts (content).

Mobile

Similar to, but also very different from web based search marketing (difficult because of small screens and keyboards).

Crucial difference: mobile searchers have different needs and wants (big opportunity because of the number of users – definitely something that everyone should have on their radar and start experimenting with it). Need to optimize content differently- for example the navigation structure should be at the bottom instead of top. These users want an immediate action; they don’t want to scroll through dozens of links etc.

Two other key players – device manufacturers and network operators.

Big Five Areas for Mobile (verticals) – these are the players that should be involved in mobile now because of customer needs.

• consumer packaged goods

• fast food restaurants

• entertainment

• travel/hospitability

• financial services

Opportunity to get a big leap forward than competitors

Mr. Sherman concluded with posting the global question…

You need to ask yourself that question.

If you answer yes – you’ll need to spend more time researching the channels (e.g., The Digg of France is Scoopeo and Brazil is Linkk).

Take into account local customs, local laws. Remember what plays well in the U.S. may not in other countries. Don’t make the presumption that if something is big here it will be elsewhere (ex. Google is not the dominant search engine in China).

Chris Sherman asked the audience to consider how you put it all together. Answer these questions to help guide you along…

Is your SEO strategy aligned with your paid search initiatives? If you have that solid foundation, you are ready to go out and experiment with newer channels. However, SEO needs to be aligned with paid search first.

Are you leveraging all relevant search marketing channels? Not all channels will be relevant to all businesses. Ex. top five categories for mobile are very relevant for those industries and not for others. If it’s not relevant to your business and won’t impact your business goals – don’t move forward.

Are you integrating online and offline marketing efforts? Because we are moving into these peripheral areas with search marketing, we need to make sure our campaigns are integrated in online and offline efforts. To really gain the maximum leverage you possibly can, make sure all your campaigns are integrated and play off each other really well, reinforce each other.

Mr. Sherman counseled that we have much richer opportunities for search and we will continue to see it evolve. Keep aware of the new things coming down the line and keep an open mind and take advantage of all the new things that are coming on the web as that will make it easier to reach our customers.

There was a few minutes for questions at the end of the session.

What are some of the newswires?

Business Wire, PR Newswire are two of the biggest. Search or look for online news release services. Most are fee based, some are free and they’ll give you instructions on how to do it. Relatively inexpensive and painless.

Can you be penalized for duplicate content when on a newswire and on your website?

No, the search engines know that you’ll be on a newswire and you won’t be penalized for duplicate content. Newscrawlers and webcrawlers work independently. Not to be concerned.

Are Podcasts are more useful for staying in touch with existing customers or acquiring new ones?

Both, it is easy and cheap to do a podcast. Great way to keep channels of communication open with new and existing customers.

What do feeds cost?

It depends on the pricing structure. They could be content based (yahoo) i.e. Based on number of pages on your site. Could be based on the number of clicks on the site. Shopping feeds are the same thing and depends on the comparison engine you are submitting to. Consumer products cost one thing, another product category costs another.

What is the best social media option for someone just getting started?

Get out there and lurk, don’t jump in right away. You’ll find the sites are dominated by people who have been on the site for some time – you need to make sure you are familiar with the community and be careful not to promote in an overt way. The social media loves lists (top ten reasons to do x), if you have content that will help the page achieve their goals that is helpful. Tread cautiously. You might want to start with smaller, niche based sites first as the communities aren’t as hard core and a little more inclusive and may accept newcomers. You will get focused and relevant traffic.

What effects to you see on human powered search marketing?

People in search is very promising because human beings can watch videos, provide tagging etc. Yahoo Answers has introduced a rating system where good answerers get good ratings and are higher rated.

Thanks to everyone for putting on an informative web seminar… Chris Sherman, 24/7 Real Media, and Claire at Search Marketing Now!

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