I handle pay per click campaigns for most of my customers. The front-end, setting up and tuning the campaign is the most time consuming part of the effort. Finding the right words and then determining which words best convert. After the initial set-up maintenance requires far fewer hours, with much of the time spent adjusting spend for postion. However diligence and attention are important as results should be fed back into the website to improve landing pages and improve organic results for top performing phrases.

It is interesting to see how people charge for this service (most of my clients are hourly). There is an excellent article about PPC management options here

I had a meeting at Yahoo this week. The meeting was targeted at companies heavy into affiliate programs. We heard from a number of program managers, but because I am under NDA, can’t disclose all the great stuff they are working on. However, I will say these guys are not sitting around worrying about Microsoft. They are firmly focused on the future and presented an impressive list of products and upgrades. Most  interesting was some of the stuff going on with PPC management and while I can’t be specific, I think I can say that managing PPC on Yahoo is about to get a lot easier.

I know Yahoo isn’t the shinning star of the industry they once were, but these guys get a lot of stuff right. Google has the search traffic and therefore the money and therefore the clout, but judging by Microsoft’s track record, they don’t have the stuff to make Yahoo better.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not a Microsoft ‘hater.’ In fact I was a liaison to Microsoft when I was at Intergraph and spent a fair amount of time on the Redmond campus, they get a lot right. Tons of R&D and top people, but their leadership in office applications doesn’t currently translate to search or internet services.

So did Yahoo make the right decision? If I were a shareholder, I would probably wouldn’t think so. As a Internet marketing guy, I am glad to they didn’t merge this into Microsoft’s AdCenter mess. Yahoo had a business before the MS deal and it still does.

Yahoo has great people, product, and heart.

I recently went through a pre-launch design study with a client. The client is launching a new division of an existing company and after hearing me speak at a local business group, wanted to be sure he was starting with the right stuff.

First let me say this is a great approach. Its much easier to fix problems on the front end than to try and undo mistakes that have your site identified for the wrong things. However, when you work on an existing design you do have some history of what is working and what’s not. When starting from scratch, it can be difficult to evaluate the words and phrases you will need. If there are other business in the same space you can examine what they are doing, but in this case a head-to-head competitor didn’t really exist.

So I started reading through the companies marketing materials, technical papers, et cetera, making a list of industry specific phrases. Then I took that list and began googling each phrase to see which ones returned results for businesses in a similar vein. The problem was virtually none of the phrases I was working with were getting my anything but research papers of .edu sites (can you hear the crickets?).

So what’s the problem, you say??

People research before they buy, getting more and more specific with their searches as they become more educated to the jargon of the industry and the desirable features and functions of the items they are researching.  Anyone searching on these phrases will quickly find this company and be set - right? 

I don’t think so, if prospects are googling and not finding what they are looking for, they alter their search.  To use a “bricks and mortar” analogy, this is why restaurants successfully locate next to other restaurants, car dealers reside next to other car dealers and so on. 

Like the bricks and mortar world, when people are searching the internet for goods and services you want be where the traffic is. However, you need to be near the right kind of traffic. You don’t want to locate your paint store next to a research institute. If you cater to the home owner, your paint store would be better off near a Home Depot, or if you cater to contractors, in an industrial area where where contractors go for building materials.

And yes, you do need to educate buyers and incorporate technical content and jargon into the content of your site, but if your selling paint, I wouldn’t create the structure of site around the petrochemical phrases used to produce it.

When I started my consulting business, I imagined that I would be working with some larger firms with in-house web and marketing resources. I imagined that much like it had been for me as an in-house marketer, I would apply my SEO/SEM skills to a given situation and others would carry out the recommendations.

While it does work that way some of the time, I frequently work with small companies that have little or no marketing and/or technical expertise. It is unlikely they know or have anyone who knows what an <H1> tag is, or how to create an .htacess file.

I had one customer whose shared-hosting provider experienced frequent outages, sometimes several hours a week and another whose canned shopping cart was broken by a system-wide upgrade and was unable to process orders for months.

The long and short of this is that while my focus is SEO and SEM services, I frequently provide additional marketing services through relationships with local designers, programmers, and copywriters. Some of these folks I know from my days as an in-house marketer, others I have come to know and respect through clients projects.

I enjoy the challenges brought by different types of businesses and the opportunity to make a difference.

How about you, any stories you can share?