Well, hello there and happy Friday!

Welcome to our new feature. Each week we’ll be bringing you a round up of some of the best blog posts/articles we’ve read relating to Search Marketing – so here goes!

SEO

Stephan Spencer (via Search Engine Land) rants about a site which despite being ‘unfriendly’ to search engines, still ranks well.

Small Business SEO

Sugarrae (Rae Hoffman) wrote an excellent post on how small businesses might increase their online presence. She’s used lawn care to illustrate her example, but the ideas can easily be applied to any business.

Search Engines

Google Searchology 2009, saw the launch of some new developments – Google Search Options, Wonder Wheel, Google Squared and Rich Snippets - see Matt Cutts’ thoughts and Danny Sullivan’s Live Blogging coverage.

Blogging

Preparing to launch your blog? Or maybe just considering your options? Don’t miss Lucy Langdon’s fantastic blog launch checklist on SEOmoz.

Social Media

There’s been a whole lot of noise about Twitter, but I couldn’t agree more with Dr Pete’s post about the real power of Twitter on SEOmoz.

Jennifer Horowitz talks us through the seven deadly sins of social media - check yourselves boys and girls :)

Web Design & Usability

OK, so this post wasn’t written this week, but I think it’s fantastic. Dr Pete’s created a really rather marvellous cheat sheet to designing a usable website. The man’s a genius.

PPC

Joe of PPC Hero wrote a great post about broadening exposure on the Google Content Network - now many advertisers elect not to run on the content network, but for some clients we’ve seen some really good results – if you’re thinking about trying it yourself, it’s a must read.

 

Aaaannnnd Finally, Friday’s Funny

Well there;’s not much point in doing this if we can’t make you smile. 1000 Awesome Things is a blog – where in, as the name suggests they count down 1000 awesome things. Kinda like a daily reason to be cheerful – enjoy and have a lovely weekend.

 

Is there something I’ve missed? Hit up the comments

 

A friend recently asked for some advice on how to go about creating an online store. There are a lot of e-commerce solutions out there, which can make choosing the right one difficult. 

However, before you rush off and research a load of options, make sure you can answer the following questions - 

 

1. How many products is the site going to sell? How will these products be organised?

It’s important to have a clear idea of how you want to organise the products on your site, and indeed how many products you want to sell; as many e-commerce solutions are priced based on the number of products you want the solution to handle.

Ordinarily, we’d recommend creating a wireframe for the site, prior to selecting an e-commerce solution. A wireframe is a simple visual representation of the site and how the pages relate to one another.

For example, lets imagine that we are planning to launch a website selling socks. It’s conceivable that you’d have four top level categories:

Men’s

Women’s

Children’s

Baby’s

Then within each of these top categories you will have further sub-categories – e.g.

Children’s – Boys

Children’s – Girls

Again, from here you may have further categories e.g.

Children’s – Girls – Knee Socks

or

Children’s – Girls – Ankle Socks

Clearly it will take time to get all of this down on paper, but once you’ve planned your site out, it will be much easier to implement, and of course, you will have a much clearer idea about the sort of e-commerce system you are going to need.

2. Are the number of products for sale likely to change frequently? How regularly are you going to have to edit and update the site?

If you are going to regularly add and/or delete products, then you’ll be well advised to look for a solution will allow you to update yourself, rather than a fixed solution which can only be amended by the e-commerce provider.

3. What expertise is available to you? Do you have or know anyone  with the technical abillity to help out? Do you need a system that can be used with little or no trainning?

Any e-commerce solution will require some training to use . However, work to your strengths – if the person who will be responsible for managing the system is not particularly technical, make sure you select a user friendly, intuitive solution.

4. How much control do you want over the look and feel of the site?

Some e-commerce solutions allow only very limited customisation – as such you may find that you do have as much say in how your site and the products you sell are presented. If you have a particular look and feel in mind – make sure the solution which you select is fully-customisable.

 5. What payment methods do you want to use?

There are many different payment options available – these are often referred to as Payment Gateways. Your choice of payment method is very important, because you are asking your users to submit sensitive financial information – they need to be able to trust the payment gateway. Therefore using well known, trusted and established companies can be of benefit. As such we would also recommend offering more than one payment method, so your customers have a choice. 

 6. SEO considerations

Fortunately most e-commerce solutions generate search (and indeed user) friendly urls -  e.g. www.sockz.co.uk/childrens-socks/girls/knee-socks.html rather than www.sockz.co.uk/product3/category1/sub5.html – but make sure your chosen solution generates search friendly urls; you’ll be saving yourself a lot of heartache in the future.

The BBC reported today that Search Engine Ask is reverting back to its original name Ask Jeeves, and is bringing back the Butler character as part of their corporate branding.

Jeeves the Butler was dropped from the brand back in 2006 as the brand attempted to increase market share.

Jeeves explains his own absence as follows:

The search engine has been through a series of rebrands, including a TV advertising campaign portraying it as an underground alternative to Google.

Broadly speaking marketing can be split into two distinct subsets:

1. Direct Response

This type of activity is primarily focused on driving the customer directly to purchase – examples include paid search advertising, email, direct mail etc

2. Brand

This type of activity is primarily focussed on increasing the visibility of the brand and ultimately increasing brand awareness amongst your target audience (i.e. the people who might be interested in purchasing from you / using your services.

Now clearly, it’s not as cut and dried as this, as inevitably direct response advertising may positively impact brand awareness, and brand advertising may indeed generate direct sales.

To understand the importance of brand v direct response it’s useful to consider how consumers might find you. 

1. Brand – they are looking specifically for you. In this instance the consumer spontaneously recalls your brand and are searching specifically for it. An example of this would be a consumer searching for ‘Compare the Market’ when they need car insurance, rather than searching for the more generic ‘car insurance’.
2. Specific Product or Service – here the reverse is true – the consumer searches for ‘car insurance’ rather than a specific brand.
3. Ambient – here the consumer isn’t looking at all. They may not be aware of the product or service which you offer, but you make them aware of it.
4. Existing Customer - an existing customer may decide to return to you
5. Recommendation - someone who comes to you because someone else has recommended your product or service

There are of course many other ways that consumers ‘find’ brands, but just using the five examples above we can begin to see the importance of both brand and direct response techniques.

 

Many companies elect simply to utilise direct response techniques – this is because broadly speaking, these techniques are easy to measure, and when executed well, offer an excellent return on investment. For example, many companies elect only to run SEO and Paid Search campaigns.

No bad thing, some might say, and indeed these campaigns are cost effective; however – ultimately these companies are only advertising to those who are already looking. Chances are, unless you actively search online for the particular product or service which these companies offer, you might never know they exist.

Which is a bit of a shame, because if you look at the list above they are only hitting 3 of the 5 possibilities – i.e. people searching for a specific product or service; existing customers (although, they’re really only hitting these customers by default – they aren’t actively marketing to them), and they may pick up some recommendations.

 

I’m not trying to infer that direct response marketing is inferior to brand marketing – it’s not. I think in fact, that a balance of direct response and brand marketing often yield the best overall results.

We recently saw just that with one of our clients who in addition to their existing SEO and PPC campaign decided to do some TV & radio advertising. As a result, month on month they saw a 10% uplift in online leads alone – not to mention an further increases in offline leads (via their call centre and in store). Very impressive – particularly given the current economic climate!

We also observed that customers who arrive on websites from branded search terms convert at a much higher rate than those from generic search terms.

Interesting stuff, huh? As with any marketing activity, we would of course recommend a test and learn approach – but we think it illustrates the strength of integrating brand and direct response marketing strategies within a single campaign.

 

Image credit Heideho