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Each issue of CMO Close-up features an interview with a CMO, as well as other marketing executives answering that issue's "Big Question."
This week's feature:
Close-up with Keith Pigues, VP-CMO, Ply Gem Industries
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| Issue Alert - Top Stories |
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Natural search adherents learn the value of tweaks and tweets
Christopher Hosford
Story posted: July 20, 2009 - 6:01 am EDT
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It's not news that marketing budgets have been cut to the bone, nor that even paid search expenditures are in a slump.
What is new, and slowly building over at least the past six months, is the realization by marketers that search engine optimization—the “free” kind of Web site tweaking based on content, metatags and link-building that helps a company get recognized in search queries—can return big, enduring benefits.
“Because of the recession, there has been an acceleration [in attempts] to figure out proper Web site optimization due to its lower cost overall and higher ROI,” said Aaron Kahlow, founder and CEO of the Online Marketing Summit conferences.
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SEO GETS LEADS
“It's forced us to ask what is the most effective way- to get traffic leads and sales,” he said. “And there's almost no one out there who won't say SEO is now No. 1 by far, with e-mail a close second.”
Besides attributing this burgeoning focus to the recession, Kahlow believes marketers are simply outgrowing old assumptions.
“It doesn't take a lot of skill for the mainstream marketer to get started with paid search,” he said. “They're used to paying for ads, and also perhaps some got burned by the SEO work done for them by snake oil salesmen. But today, there's a gradual awakening to the virtues of natural search.”
Another reality driving the growing implementation of search engine optimization is the explosion of social media, according to Loren McDonald, VP-industry relations at online marketing company Silverpop.
“Everything from Twitter to LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs and video—all are things ultimately about creating content and dialogue, which is basically integrated into natural search,” McDonald said. “People are realizing that the Web site content they create needs to dovetail with social dialogues, and they have to do it correctly.”
If SEO is on the rise, it's due, in part, to a reduction in PPC efforts.
Paid search ad spending across all search engines in the U.S. was down 21% in the second quarter this year compared with the same period last year, according to a study released last week by search engine marketing technology company Efficient Frontier. That, in turn, followed a first-quarter, year-over-year decline of 23%.
PPC expenditures on Google were off by 8.2% worldwide in the second quarter compared with the first three months of the year, according to marketing analytics company Covario, the second straight quarter the search giant has seen global decreases. Spending on Yahoo was even worse, down 30% quarter to quarter.
Microsoft's Bing edged up slightly from a small base due to its aggressive June launch.
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NATURALLY ROBUST
By contrast, natural search appears robust.
According to eMarketer's “Search Marketing Trends” report released in February, 55% of marketers will increase spending on SEO this year, more so than any other advertising channel. The study, which analyzed search engine company earnings reports, paid listings, contextual text links and other data, projected total U.S. search marketing outlays to reach $23 billion by 2014. SEO expenditures are forecast to total $3.9 billion, according to the study, overtaking contextual advertising.
“And the imbalance as to which gets the most clicks is trending toward SEO,” said Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz, a search information Web site. “Three or four years ago, 87% of all clicks were on organic query results, and now it's up to 91%. Marketers are looking at this and saying, "We haven't paid a dollar on that. Maybe we should get some of those clicks.' ”
Perhaps users click on organic query results so often precisely because they're not ads, said Robin Smith, global search marketing manager with life sciences company Life Technologies, the product of a merger last fall between Invitrogen Corp. and Applied Biosystems.
“SEO is considered to have more credibility,” Smith said. “People tend to trust the results a little more than a banner ad or paid sponsored link, and are comfortable that the results were achieved organically.”
Life Technologies maintains more than 5,000 Web site pages, and is helped here with automated SEO management solutions from Covario. Covario recently released its D3 product, which automates keyword value determination, Web site optimization and performance monitoring, freeing up staff for manual changes to the site.
“This year we've taken a more aggressive look at our search program overall,” Smith said. “Organic is a little harder to have a strategy around, but in the future we'll be more aggressive there. If you have an authoritative site, you can see the results fairly fast.”
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PAYING THE PIPER
Search engine optimization isn't free, of course. Skilled consultants charge hefty fees to refine on-page content criteria and build inbound link relationships with reliable Web sites elsewhere.
Perhaps because of that, the threshold of marketer acceptance still has a ways to go, SEOmoz's Fishkin said.
“It's a unique imbalance between marketing and IT,” he said. “SEO can be massively time-consuming and require a huge amount of insider knowledge. A marketer might not want to spend $50,000 during a recession on an SEO audit and a list of action items, but then the next day he'll spend $100,000 on paid search clicks.”
But an increased focus on natural search optimization is hard to ignore, in particular during hard economic times.
“With PPC you can have great efficiencies in buying keywords, but when the market goes down and your revenue per click goes down, the lifetime value of the campaign also goes down,” Fishkin said.
“Intelligent people stay on top of it and are seeing that SEO is the other side of the coin.” M
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