Search Marketing on the Cheap

Hi, and welcome to today's Biznology digital marketing webinar. I'm Chris Abraham, one of the bloggers at Biznology. I'm the president of Social Ally, a social media outsourcing and support service. I focus on blogger outreach, blogger engagement, and internet reputation management. Today you'll be hearing from Mike Moran, the founder of the Biznology blog, who will present Search Marketing on the Cheap. But before we do, we need to recognize our sponsors. Brick Marketing, full-service SEO solutions company that increases website visitors. Marketing Pilgrim, the internet and social media marketing news blog. We cut through the bull so you don't have to. Rimm Kaufman Group, a digital marketing agency that combines superior marketing talent with sophisticated technology to increase clients' business through data-driven online marketing solutions, and my very own social ally, your market— your social media support. As we wait for more attendees to join, let me review the format of our webinar. Our Biznology webinars last just 30 minutes, so you can easily fit them into your busy schedule. We record each webinar and will email you that link later this week. During our speaker's presentation, you can use your GoToWebinar controls to ask question— to ask a question. That orange arrow opens and closes your webinar controls. If you have a question, simply type it into the box labeled Questions at any time during the event and press the Send button. I will select a few questions at the end of our webinar and pose them to Mike. While we're waiting for our last few attendees to join, I'd like to remind you that the Biznology newsletter and blog are available for free at biznology.com. So if you're not already a subscriber, we hope that you'll sign up now. My blog post came out today, so go check it out after the webinar, please. Thanks again to all of you for spending 30 minutes with us. We know how valuable your time is, so let's introduce today's speaker. Mike Moran is the founder of the Biznology blog, a well-known expert in all things digital marketing, and chief strategist at Conversian, a leading social consultancy. Mike is the co-author of Search Engine Marketing Inc. and the sole author of Do It Wrong Quickly. Mike is a veteran of IBM, managing groups in IBM.com for 8 years, retiring from IBM in 2008 as a distinguished engineer. So, if you've ever struggled with having a low budget for search marketing, this is the webinar for you. Mike, take it away.

Thanks a lot, Chris. So, hi everybody. The reason you're here is because you're cheap. I am too. And the thing that's hard is that we all know how important search marketing is. And the problem is that it can be incredibly expensive. It's not even just paid search, although I think we think about paid search a lot when we think about how expensive search marketing can be. And paid search bid costs do seem to rise every year, and it makes sense that they would. It's an auction, and the more people discover the value of search marketing, the more bidders there are going to be, and the higher the prices will go until eventually the prices are high enough that there are some bidders that really can't afford to be in anymore. And that's going to be the way it continues. Search marketing is expensive. Paid search for sure is expensive, but it isn't just paid search. SEO, search engine optimization, organic search, whatever words you want to use for it, That's also expensive. There are some experts that will tell us we should be buying links, even though the search engines tell you you're not allowed to. And there are lots of sites that have to have very expensive makeovers where their architecture isn't working, or they drank the Kool-Aid and did their site in Flash or something that makes it very hard for you to succeed. At SEO. And both paid search and organic search, you can spend awful lots of money on consultants like me. I will happily charge you lots of money to solve all of your problems. But the truth is that there's a lot that you can do on your own. And the reason that we're having this call, the reason we're talking about this today, is because— You want to make sure that search marketing is filling your cash register and not depleting your cash register. And so the question you would have is, what are the things that you can do on your own? What are the things that you can do to make sure that search marketing is something that you can keep under control from a budget point of view? Because Search marketing can have huge value, and there are lots of reasons to spend lots of money on search marketing. But if you're a very small business and you don't have that kind of budget, or even if you're a large business and you're trying to do things as inexpensively as possible, you'll want to work with someone who is going to figure out how you can save as much money as possible and allow you to do as much on your own as you can. So let's look at the kinds of things that can really reduce your costs. I want to start with paid search. Now, the easiest way to reduce your costs is not to do any paid search, but for a lot of companies, it doesn't make any sense because paid search actually brings revenue in. And so how can you save money on paid search without reducing how much revenue it brings in? Well, one way to do it, and this is something that I saw working when I was at IBM is to do cooperative marketing. Now at IBM, when they were in the PC business, they did a lot of cooperative marketing with Intel. And if you see the whole Intel Inside program, that's really what's going on is that Intel is providing money to the companies that put their chips in their products so that they are helping those companies do marketing. And so even— and so you might not be in the PC business, but cooperative marketing can still be something that works for you. Can you ally with a company that is looking for the same customers that you are? So you're not competitors, because that wouldn't make any sense, but you could be— you could sell a product and another company sells the service, or you could do the Intel approach where you work with the manufacturer of the products that you sell and you share expenses with them. They might be very interested in doing this because they're going to get more business out of it as well. But if you can share the same keywords and still drive forward and figure out how you're going to get the same revenue in, but you can split the cost with someone, that can be a really useful way of lowering your costs in paid search. Another way to lower paid search costs is by really analyzing what's working and what isn't. And this is something that most companies do, but not all. And so if you're not doing it, this is a really easy thing to do. But what you have to think about is because your search keywords are really your market segments, you want to apply all the same kind of work that you do with market segmentation to paid search that you do for anything else. So you want to analyze which keywords are converting higher. You want to analyze which time of day or which day of the week do things seem to convert higher. And so you can use dayparting to try and change your bids at different moments. You can— I mean, if you have a seasonal business, you can do the same kind of thing. You might even find that there are different keywords that you want to turn off at different times, right? Anything that you can do to analyze your conversion rates will help you to target your bidding so that you're bidding more at the times when you're more likely to convert and less when you're not. And so those are 2 tips that you could focus on for paid search, but you're probably expecting that most of the time, we're going to be looking at organic search. We're going to be looking at SEO, and that's true. So, but before we leave paid search, if you don't know how to count your conversions, so if I gave you all that great advice about analyzing your conversions, but you don't know how to do that, a free way to count your conversions is with a free analytics tool like Google Analytics. And so it's free, it's easy, it works. That's what you need to be using. And so if you have a different analytics tool, that's fine. There's no problem with paying for an analytics tool. It might be lots of good reasons to do that. But if you're trying to save money, and you've said that you don't want to analyze your conversions because it's too expensive, well, this is a free tool that lets you do it. And that can help you analyze your conversions for both paid search and organic search. And organic search is what we're going to spend most of the time on, SEO. Because that, you don't have to pay the search engines for every click. And so this is a place that you really have a chance to save money on search marketing. So let's look at the 4 steps for SEO. So the first one is to get your pages indexed. And we'll go through each of these steps and try and not only tell you what they mean, but try and help you figure out how you can save money in each place. So getting— you might not realize that all of the search engines have something called a search index, which is a file that they look at. It's a database that has all the pages in it. So it looks like they're running around the internet finding the pages when you search for them, but they're not. They ran around the internet earlier, and they put them all in this one place. And so the problem is, if your pages aren't in the search index, they'll never be found. And so what you have to focus on is how do you make sure that those are in the search index? And so what you want to do first is to figure out whether your site is actually in the search index. So you can use the site operator to do that. And that'll give you a number of pages that is found in the search index. But the problem is that most of the time, that number isn't exactly accurate. And so it might tell you that your site is in the search index, but it doesn't necessarily tell you individual pages that are in the search index, or how many are in there. And you might want to calculate that. You might want to figure out, how many pages are actually in the search index for each search engine, and divide that by the number of pages that you know you have on your site. And make sure that you're at least at like 70% or 80%. You're not going to do it perfectly, but you want to have a high enough number. And in order to do that, you really want a more accurate number. And it's better if you have something— if you use Google Webmaster Tools or Bing Webmaster Tools, they will tell you how many pages are in that search index. But they'll only really do a good job of that if you have something called a sitemap. So if your site isn't indexed, you might have problems that are preventing it from indexing. And if you put a sitemap in place and you really set up your Webmaster Tools, they will give you reports that tell you that you have errors on the site that tells them— tells you exactly what might be wrong. And the sitemap is actually the key to finding out how many pages you have indexed. It's free. So there are a lot of different formats. It costs a little money for you to actually put together the software that will create the sitemap and keep it up to date. But all the major search engines support it. And it doesn't cost you any money to use. And it gives you all sorts of diagnostics that tells you if your site isn't indexed or if some pages in the site aren't indexed. And it can tell you what's wrong too. And that doesn't cost anything. Now if your site is really messed up, So we mentioned earlier, maybe your whole site is in Flash, or there's some other problem that you've done that you really can't get the search engines to see what's going on. Then what you probably need to do is to do your site over again. And that can be expensive, but there are even free ways of doing that. There are content management systems like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal that don't cost any money for the software. Now, it will still cost you money to actually do all the work. But it won't cost you any money to use the software. So that's a free way to even redo your entire site if you're stuck in that terrible position. The second step is to choose your keywords. So unlike most other forms of marketing, you have to actually know what people are looking for in order to show up. And so you have to figure out how you're going to know which words people are typing in and which ones make sense for them to find you with. And so there are tools to do that as well. Every search engine provides a free keyword tool. So Google provides one. Bing provides one. Anyone that you want to use uses a free tool. But they're only going to tell you about the searches that they see within their search engine. So it's a little harder to know, for example, how many people are searching for things across all the search engines. So there are other tools that help you do that, and one of them Trellion Keyword Discovery. They can be really helpful if you need to have an understanding of how country by country you're being found. So rather than just looking at tools for the US, you can look country by country. Now, the free tool doesn't do that. So their free tool would kind of give you a starter into that, but it doesn't really give you all the things that their paid tool does. They're trying to use the free tool is kind of a come-on for you to go ahead and buy the paid tool. And if you, if you're not interested in using that, you have to use the free tools from the search engines. Now, some of these tools don't cost that much, but this is about search marketing on the cheap, so we're trying to show you things that are inexpensive or free. And free keyword tools abound, and if you're willing to do a little extra work, they can work just as well as the paid ones. Third step is to audit and optimize your landing pages. So what does that mean? Well, first of all, you have to know what a landing page is. The landing page is the page that the search engine brings up when someone types in the keyword. And so when someone clicks on that search result, they are landing on your site. So that first page they land on is your landing page. And so what you're trying to do is to make sure that pages from your site become the search landing pages when people search for the keywords that you're looking for. So when you understand what keywords you want people to find, then you have the opportunity to then go ahead and optimize your landing pages. And so there's a process that you can follow, and this process doesn't cost you any money at all. It's work. And so you start by picking a landing page. Now, you have to understand, when you pick the landing page, you don't want to pick any page on your site and say, well, this is where I want them to go. What you want to do instead is pick the page that is most likely to have the answer to their question, because that's the page that Google and Bing are going to want to show. So really you want to pick the page that they want to be on, not the page that you want them to see. So that's different from most kinds of advertising. So once you choose that page, then what you want to do is you want to analyze metrics. And what are the metrics you want to look at? So you want to look at things like where does it rank when people search for it? So if it's on page 1 or it's even the top search result, that's fantastic. But most of the time when you start this process, it's not. You know, it's buried somewhere on page 17. So unless you're marketing to people with obsessive-compulsive disorder, it's probably not a good idea to be on page 17. So what you have to do then is figure out how you're going to put the right words on the page, in the title, in the body, in order to get the search engines to think that's the right page for them, and how you're going to raise the quality of the content for that page so that it really, really is the best answer to that question. So that other people are going to link to it, and they're going to identify that page as a good page for you. Now the other metric you want to look at is conversions. So we talked earlier about Google Analytics or using another analytics program to know what the conversions are going to be. So you want to look at that as well, because who cares if you get people to come to your site if they don't actually buy anything? So after you analyze the metrics and you audit, if it's okay, then when you're happy that you're getting the conversions you're looking for, then you go on to the next page. But if it's not okay, Then what you want to do is examine that landing page, see what's wrong, and try and keep improving that content so that you'll start to attract links, so that you'll start to put the right keywords on the page. And then you analyze it again. And you keep doing that until you're starting to get the results you're looking for. So how do you think through optimization? So the title is actually the thing on the search page that shows up every time someone searches. That's the thing that they get to click on. And so what you want to do is to pick a title that not only has the keywords in it— having the keywords in it is really important— but also has a call to action. Because the title does more than just tell the search engine what the page is about. It tells the searcher what the page is about. And so you want it to be something that's going to cause the searcher to click. Because who cares if you get the number one result if no one clicks on the page? And so we put some examples in here. From our book, we had a fictitious company called Snap Electronics. And what they did is they went through numerous changes to their title to try and figure out what was the right one. And so at a certain point, if you see the ones down lower on the screen where there are some ellipses in there, that's where the title was getting cut off. So you can see the titles that we have in the example here, they're getting cut off where there's more in the title, but the search engine just, just doesn't show it. And they eventually settled on a title that not only had the keywords in it, but it had a call to action, and it fit within the 70 characters that the search engine uses for the title. You also want to optimize the body text. And again, none of this costs you any money. It costs you time, but you don't have to pay for anything. And so how you are going to do that is you are going to put keywords in headings. You are going to put them near the top of the page. You are going to put them throughout the page, but not just the keywords. What you want to do is you want to write naturally. You want to use related words. The search engines are smart now. And what they do is they don't just look for the particular words people search for. They also look for all of the related words. So if we're taking this example that we had for Snap Electronics where they're looking for— to try and get searchers who type in digital cameras to find them, well, the search engines aren't going to show a page just because it says digital cameras on it. There are millions of pages that have the word digital cameras on it. But they will be looking for a lot more than just the word digital cameras. They're going to be looking for things like megapixels, or photography, or flash, or all sorts of words that have to do with digital cameras. They're all words that people might be using when they're writing a page that talks about digital cameras. And so all of these things are important, not only for the search engines, but they're important for the persuasiveness of your page. If you write a really high-quality page, you can expect that people are going to use many, many different kinds of words, not just repeat the search keywords over and over again. And we've talked a lot about the text on the page, but it's more than just text. So Google has universal search. This is called in the industry blended search, where they're not just showing blue links for web pages, but they're showing pictures, they're showing videos, there's all sorts of things that might be showing up. And so what do you do for things that aren't text? Well, the real thing you have to do is to add more text around them. And so where can you do that? So if you think about videos or audios, you can have transcripts with them. You can do something called closed captioning. So you see this on television where they run the words at the bottom of the screen. For people who might be hearing impaired. Well, you can use closed captioning on your videos as well. And when you do that, you are actually giving text to the search engine so that it knows what it is about. If doing the transcripts and the closed captioning is too much work for you, you can add summaries. You can put in background. You want to put in some kinds of words in your YouTube video, or in your audio, or in any of these non-text objects so that the search engines really know what they're about. The last step is to demonstrate the quality of your content. And so the quality of your content was originally something that only links did for you. So the search engines looked at how many links were coming to your site, how many links were coming to your pages, and they decided that the ones that got the most links from the best places were high quality. But what's happening now is that Because so many search spammers are tricking the search engines by setting up things called link farms and other kinds of fake linking. And because so many people are paying for links, the search engines are dubious about whether links really show that something is high quality or not all by themselves. So they're starting to look at social activity as well. So the secret here is very simple, which is if you do really, really good content, you will attract the links and you will attract the social activities that the search engines are looking for. So how can you figure out how many links you have? Well, we show on the screen here that you can use something to find how many links you have. There's a particular set of search operators that you can put in. But the problem is that most of the time the search engines don't give you highly accurate results for that because the spammers were actually using this to figure out which links were the best ones. And so what you need to do instead is to use a link counting tool. SEOmoz has something called Open Site Explorer which is an extremely useful tool. And Bing just came out with a tool just a couple of weeks ago called Link Explorer which replaces a previous tool that Yahoo used to have called Site Explorer that was very, very popular. And these are ways that— these are free tools you can use so that you can figure out how many links you are getting to your site, to which pages, and what their anchor text is. But as we said before, social media activity counts a lot. So what can you do to figure out how to get social activity? So you should be tweeting your content and sharing it, but how do you get other people to do it? One really simple and free way to do that is to put bookmarks on your site so that people can tweet things. They can dig them. They can save them to Delicious. They can put any of these buttons, these sharing buttons on their screen. Will help you to be able to get other people to share content for you. And that will really get a lot of social media activity going around your content if it's high-quality content. And that's really the key. It has to be high-quality content in order for these strategies to work. But creating high-quality content is free also. So that's it for today. What we're going to do is we're going to take some questions. I hope you have some questions. I'm going to turn it back over to Chris, but I just want to talk to you about our next webinar, which is coming up really soon, just in a couple of weeks, our July webinar. And it's about the Google Panda update. And that's something that is really important because it's a way of human beings rating your site to prove to the search engine that it's high quality. So if you want to know what are the kinds of things that raters are looking for and you want to understand how Panda works, that's something we will do next time on July 10th. So Chris, Take it away. How many questions have we got?

There's a couple right now. Thanks, Mike. I'm sure our attendees have a much stronger idea of the free tools and techniques available for search marketing. But you didn't answer every question. So there's a couple now, but if everybody within the sound of my voice could go in there and pile on. And I know that Mike has a hypnotizing voice and the content is awesome. But if you could please throw me a bone and ask a couple questions, I'd be much obliged. I've got a couple good questions for now. One of them is, how do you access the free Google Keyword Tool, if you hadn't already addressed it? And the other question, which I think is very interesting, what is the average conversion for the industry? In other words, how do people get a feeling for whether it's working or not?

So the Google Keyword Tool, there are actually a couple of them. There is one called Google Trends that can be really interesting. But the Google Keyword Tool, you can just search for Google Keyword Tool and you should find it. It's part of the Google AdWords area of the site because the reason that the search engines give away keyword tools is because they are hoping you will use them to decide that you're going to buy some paid search ads. And so Bing has a free keyword tool. Google has a free keyword tool. And both of those are— they work just fine. And you can find them really easily by just searching for them. In terms of conversion rates, it's very hard to decide what an industry average is. First of all, because there's loads of different industries, and second of all, because there are different averages that are different across things like B2B and B2C. And they are different with businesses that sell online and sell offline. So the question is, what are you questioning the conversion of? Is it a conversion just to go from online to offline, or are you actually buying something like in an e-commerce situation? So what I found with a lot of experience is that there are some sites that can convert maybe at 5%, but most sites, their conversion rate is under 1%. And even if you look in an industry, you often find that there isn't a lot of agreement on what a good conversion rate is. If you were to get those conversion rate numbers across different companies in the same industry, you might see some wide variations. And so instead of focusing on what the average conversion rate would be as something to shoot at, what I really think is the smart way to go is to focus on benchmarking where your conversion rate is and then constantly striving to improve it. If you continually try to beat what you did last month, then over time, your conversion rate is to improve, and your conversion rate is going to put you in a position where you will be the industry leader, because there's a lot of other companies that aren't focused on it. And if you are, you're going to continuously do the things that you need to make it better.

Hey Mike, we had a huge snowballing of questions. So the next question by Adam is, is it true that more frequently updated content bumps you into a higher SEO tier? I.e., if I have some bullet points on my homepage that describe what we do, and I reorder those same bullets in different orders on the same page, when the page is crawled, does it appear to Google as being more current, etc.?

That's possible, but you have to understand that not every search is one that people are looking for fresh content for. I mean, if someone searches for searches, what is Lincoln's birthday? It doesn't really matter if the answer is 5 years old. He's pretty much sticking with the same birthday. But if, for example, the search is digital camera reviews or best digital cameras, then yeah, it does matter that your content is fresh. But the thing I would argue is that just like moving the deck chairs around on your Titanic of a homepage is not really going to do anything good. I mean, even if it does somehow fool Google into thinking the page is fresh. It's not going to fool anybody coming to the site. And so you're not really— and eventually Google is going to have enough smarts that they're going to know that that isn't fixing anything either. And so I wouldn't be spending time reordering bullets on the page. I'd spend time changing what's in the bullets to make the page more persuasive and higher value and more informative. I mean, yes, it takes more work. Yes, it takes more time. But the truth is that I'd rather do that work for fewer pages than be reordering bullets around for lots of pages, because you're not really creating any value when you're just changing the order of bullets. And what you need to do is to create value, not by trying to trick the search engine, but by actually delivering what the search engine and the searchers are looking for.

And I'm going to combine 2 questions into one, which is, how Do you have any insights or recommendations when it comes to either going global in terms of having multiple languages and multiple geographies internationally? You know, who are your clients? Do you have any advice for people who have polyglot websites? And then do you have any advice for people who are hyperlocal? You know, local search, local business.

Yes. So for local, up until recently there was Google Places page, but Google has now reordered the way they do their website. But they still have a way for local businesses to, for free, register where they are, their location, phone number, to kind of claim their listing, so to speak. And so if you're hyperlocal and location of people finding you is really important, you can show up in those local results just by going to Google and making sure that you've registered as a local business. And that can be really useful. For the global business, we actually had a full webinar a few months ago on global search marketing. So I'd encourage you to search for that on the Biznology site and bring that up. And that's another half-hour webinar that we did. And we go through all sorts of advice for global. In terms of doing global cheaply, most of the things that we talked about here would work just fine. I mean, you can even use those free search keyword tools. You just have to go to each country for the Google Keyword Tool. And because Google allows you in that keyword tool to pick country by country and say which ones you want to go after. And so these tools will work just fine for global businesses. When I worked at IBM, we used a lot of these tools. to try and keep our costs down in search marketing.

Excellent. Do we have another minute?

Let's take one more minute. But, you know, if anybody asked a question that we don't have time to answer, we'll try and get answers to you. If you would send those questions to— we'll announce where to send those questions. So we'll take one more question in the interest of time, and then we'll announce how the rest of the questions can get answered.

Okay. The final question is about server location. If you are a subdomain of a global site, but you want people in the US to find you, how much does it matter that your server is overseas or not?

It used to make a big difference. It used to really matter a lot. But again, we cover this in the Global Search Marketing webinar. So if you want to go back and listen to that one, we explain exactly how it works now. It used to be that you either needed to have a domain name that looked like you were in the country, or that you hosted your server in that country. But now both Bing and Google offer ways through Webmaster Tools for you to identify which parts of your website belong in which search country indexes. And so you can go in and update those and make sure that things show up exactly where you need them.

Excellent. I quickly need to pop in and thank the sponsors again. I really thank you, Mike, and everybody for attending. Brick Marketing, full-service SEO solutions company that increases website visitors. Marketing Pilgrim, the internet and social media marketing news blog. We cut through the bull so you don't have to. Rimm Kaufman Group, a digital marketing agency that combines superior marketing talent with sophisticated technology to increase clients' business through data-driven online marketing solutions. And this time I will try to speak through my own company correctly, Social Ally, your social media support. That is all the time we have for today. Again, thanks to Mike for these great ideas. And thanks especially to our audience for your participation and your questions. If any of you had any questions that we did not have any time to answer, like Mike said, You can email your questions to Eileen, eileen@mikemorangroup.com, and she'll be sure to get them to Mike for the answer. Later this week, we'll send you all a link to the recording of this webinar to listen to again and to share with others. We also invite you to mark your calendars for our next Biznology webinar, Inside the Google Panda Update, scheduled for 11 AM Eastern, On July 10th. Thanks again, everyone, and I look forward to seeing you on July 10th.