But what underpins a reputation for quality, especially in the world of Search Marketing? When you “lift the hood” off your Search Agency, what is it that drives the consistency of service and reliability of results? Why is it so hard to find a quality assured Search Marketing service in the UK? What justifies a reputation for being a “leading search marketing agency”? The most employees? The highest revenue? The most profitable? The loudest marketing? Or the most satisfied customers?

It’s well documented that the world of SEO, PPC and Social Media could benefit from a better reputation for transparency and better quality service. Even before starting my own digital marketing agency in 2001 I’ve been amazed how easy it could be to fall for one’s own hype around being a quality business and that’s always concerned me. So in 2011 we asked the British Standards Institute (BSI) to audit our systems to the ISO 9001 standard and in November, I believe we became the only Search Agency in the NMA Top 30 which can offer Internet Marketing services which are accredited to the prestigious International ISO 9001 quality standard.

But achieving the quality standard didn’t come by chance, it was the result of a 2 year Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) with the University of Brighton which involved an investment of over £100k through the recent recession and resisting the constant temptation to re-allocate the investment elsewhere.
Before the KTP, the culture of the company was informal and lacked rigour or measurement and it was not clear who was responsible for each of the business processes. This led to problems such as re-work, lack of performance improvement and poor customer satisfaction. A cultural shift was achieved by involving employees in mapping the business processes and identifying who was responsible and accountable for each of them. Key achievements included:

Mapping of all company processes and KPIs identified:

• Responsibility and Accountability for all company processes mapped and documented in a “RACI” chart
• The development of new processes and systems to help improve the delivery of SEO, Social Media and Paid Search marketing campaigns for clients
• The development of a Quality Management Systems (QMS) using Wiki technology
• Demonstrable improvement in profitability of running client campaigns and the results achieved
• Cultural change and processes in place to make the rapid scaling of the business more achievable

Some of the tangible benefits we’ve experienced include:

• New starters are productive within weeks rather than months because they train themselves through the Wiki
• Greater ownership of quality and customer satisfaction within the production team has led to increased customer revenue per month.
• Greater transparency of individual capacity and productivity has allowed for a 39% increase in revenue per head from 2007 to 2010
• The “Productivity%” (the proportion of a consultants time which can be charged out to a client) has increased from below 60% to 85% during the period of the KTP.
• Improved profitability – gross profit % has increased from 37% in 2009 to 50% in 2011
  Customer complaints have halved in 2011 compared to 2010

It goes without saying that none of this would have been possible without the on-going and relentless commitment of our team who are the SiteVisibility ThinkTank under the leadership of our Operations Manager Shirin Maurer. Each team member is able to post Wiki updates, and it’s this involvement and collaboration which moulds the team into the strong unit that it is.

Training our staff to be capable of achieving their very best underpins their self-confidence. That, combined with well-documented, and often tailored processes, means everyone throughout the business can take advantage of the latest best practice techniques and this culture of learning brings new starters up to speed at a faster pace – as evidenced by our third IIP re-accreditation during Summer 2011.

The ISO accreditation, Investors in People and our ongoing commitment to ensuring our staff receive the best training in the industry, means we are able to sustain and grow our business and those of our customers by providing an unmatched customer experience.

Post from Apple Pie & Custard blog by SiteVisibility - An SEO Agency

A Quality (Search Marketing) Service Never Goes Out of Fashion.

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So I fired up my Rolodex and asked some of the great and good of UK SEO and asked…

You’ve been approached by a start up backed by some of the biggest VCs in the world. They’ve got one mission to beat Amazon at it’s own game. They’ve hired you in-house and given you a million pound budget to spend.

Where and what would you spend the money on?

Kelvin Newman, Creative Director – SiteVisibility

There’s a huge number of hygiene issues you’re going to want to ensure you’re absolutely spot on with. If you’re taking on a strong incumbent these aren’t voluntary – they’re a ticket to the lottery, they won’t guarantee a win, but ignoring them will make loss inevitable.

You need to pick your battles, I’d try and find a ‘type’ of query which isn’t currently being served effectively. In this example I’d try and own product comparisons searches like ‘macbook vs. macbook pro’ etc. These types of searches aren’t well served but do have volume. I’d ensure that for any search terms which has a commercial value for the business that they had the best possible content in existence for that term.

You are not going to compete in this sector by flying under the radar. You need to make a splash, ideally a big splash, and regularly.What’s the best way of doing this? by making high reward bets. Not all of these bets will be successful, but you need to ensure when they do they subsidise the less successful efforts. Think of it as a venture capital style approach to link building, PR and social media.

Tim Aldiss, Operations & Account Director, No Pork Pies

SEO is most commonly put in a silo in one corner. Every now and then a project comes along that places SEO at it’s heart. To my mind this is where SEO should be – it’s the most logical place to look at the how’s and why’s of building your website, and marketing is after all why you build a website, right?

The unlimited budget would allow the creation of a website that would be based on extensive research of the market opportunity at a keyword level. It would allow substantial linguistic work and meet user experience design head on. It would form the back bone of a site map of the website that would negate the need for user experience as the user would be delivered seamlessly to their destination. It would unleash data analysts to visualise the structure of the information relevant to the audience and the product in 3 dimensions. It would allow performance insight the ability to timeline profitability based on distinct measures of search success.

But it would also allow for an outline for the delivery of creative-inspired content. An area sadly underutilised in SEO. This is the realm of the advertising industry, and the term – creative – is often misunderstood and misused. Great ideas transcend medium, but SEO as a vehicle (and combined with social media as channels) is an underused path for creative content. We’re just seeing the start of this with campaigns like Greenpeace’s Detox SEO campaign but there’s so much more integration with creative genius at this level.

This is the tip of the content continuum, which stretches down through actually useful research documentation, visualisations such as infographics and motion charts, great guest blog posts, editorials and articles.

Only problem with this approach… getting the design right!

Still if it all goes wrong you always have someone to blame!

Samuel Crocker – SEO Associate Director, OMD
This is a great question and to be quite frank, I often wish I found myself in this very situation looking after a product with some budget to spend on the launch. It’s probably worth mentioning that if we are talking about the full online spend you can get a rough idea of what I’d do based on this post – but for the purposes of the response I’ll stick to this being just the SEO budget

There are a number of serious considerations to take into account here and if the game is to beat Amazon at their own game I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that there will be a lot of considerations and we’d be building a very big site. If I had that sort of money and that sort of scale to consider I would want to give a considerable amount of thought to how the site would grow and how the architecture would all piece together. I would almost certainly use some of this budget for some consulting time and to exchange some ideas with someone who specialises on I/A specifically – and I would probably go with Richard Baxter (I’m guessing he’s not cheap). For the sake of argument, between my time and a bit of Mr. Baxter’s consultancy fees let’s assume I would spend ~20k on the upfront SEO costs and full spec of the site.

In addition to the spend on the planning itself I would also want to invest quite heavily in the launch and some pre-launch activity (PR, linkbait, etc.). If there were any hope for this to take off I would want some top quality dev invested into this and we’d probably be looking at another £10k quickly chewed through on costs here prior to launch.

There’s no doubt for me that I would want to have unique product descriptions (short term) as well as UGC (long term) so for something the size of Amazon I think you could easily spend £100k to employ good native English speaking copywriters and perhaps a person or two to proof-read all of the content. I would plan to spend at least £50k in the creation and maintenance of a blog in year one (in terms of creative for the blog itself, linkbait, as well as staff) and look to expand this in future years.

Staff I would like to employ:
1 Full time Copywriter/Blog Support
2 Full time Linkbuilders/PR Specialists/Social Media/Seeding folks
1 Full time technical SEO
1 Full time developer – I want some of their time so I figure I’ll have to pay for at least one of their salaries out of my budget

For the sake of argument, let’s say that’s another £165k – bringing us to a total £345k

If I am going to leave a job to go work in house on such a big project that will undoubtedly have a lot of stress associated I’d want to be rewarded well and would expect a decent salary (hey, it’s all hypothetical, right?) – so let’s say I’d expect £85k for such a move which brings us rapidly up to £430.

In addition we’d have to look at the cost of tools, managing a team, conferences, research and development/SEO learning and additional spend for occasional freelancers, additional linkbuilding resource, and a whole host of other things I’ve left out, I’d say we need to set aside at least another 50k for a buffer.

Now, given that this would be the cost associated with getting us through year one, there will inevitably be other costs along the way (domain acquisition, freelance designers/content support and potentially the need for foreign language content, linkbuilding and customer service) I think this would realistically take up all of the budget until we hit a large enough return to cover the costs of our overheads and hopefully carry on doing it for a good number of years and grow the team over time

Tim Ireland, SEO Strategist – Jellyfish
Let’s say for the sake of argument that I wanted to use this million quid to get as many kites as high as possible in the sky for as long as possible; there are two ways you could go about it, and a world of variety between the two extremes

1. Conceive and release an idea virus that prompts people to build or buy their own kite, and fly it of their own volition, at their own expense, using the prevailing winds.

2. Buy kites, hire flyers to fly the kites, buy wind machines to create/enhance the wind.

The purchase of 100 wind machines, capable of getting maybe 200-300 kites in the sky (at a very modest height): a minimum of £500,000; half your budget (yes we actually researched this). I’m sure you can see where this is going.

Plus, the movement of air isn’t the only prevailing wind to take into account; there are predictable (and sometimes temporarily fashionable) ways that other human beings like to interact with each other, and if you can tap into this natural force in a way that is favourable to you, there are similar advantages to this as there are to using existing winds over creating your own.

In short, I would use the million to ride a wave, not make one. The bulk of the spend would be research and creative, with the intention being to capture a natural community force, and exploit it… as sensitively as possible.

Jason Ryan – Freelance Digital Strategist
Given my digital experience, I would naturally come at this from a strategic point of view. It would be very difficult to build an Amazon clone and beat Amazon at their own game, no matter how well the site is optimised for search engines.

I would also avoid a massive Above the Line brand building exercise as the budget would disappear very quickly.

In considering this scenario, I immediately thought of Instagram. I am a long term signed up member and huge Flickr fan, and until recently I thought that Flickr was the be-all and end-all of photo community/sharing sites; but I am hugely impressed and inspired by what Instagram have done. They have found a single point of difference from Flickr and exploited it – providing a engaging mobile experience through a real time stream of photos. I am finding Instagram so much more immediate and engaging than Flickr right now and can see how Instagram could quickly build additional services and products around this core offering.

Of course it would not be simple to do this with Amazon, a site that is so mature and comprehensive, but I would initially look for that point of difference, and base my engagement and marketing strategy on that.

It is important that all product descriptions, categories and related information should be shareable and well optimised for search engines – but the real value to customers will be evident in the user experience and the ease in which the offering can be integrated into their everday lives.

Perhaps the strategy should be to provide an improved social commerce layer that is available to everyone – retailers and bloggers alike; by providing site owners a smart way of filtering and selecting products that are related to the content on their sites or to the subject of their blogs; and integrating those products and product descriptions seamlessly through APIs and widgets, all of which can earn the site owner revenue and provide search equity through links and social interactions.

I would therefore spend the initial million by researching the customer need and the strategic opportunity; investing in the core digital service and the user experience; ensuring that all site content and product information is well optimised and shareable; enagaging with early adopters and advocates; and spending the remainder on tactical paid media.

Samantha Stratton, Digital Marketing Director – Koozai
To start with, I would go back to basics and review the site to ensure that it is fully optimised for the search engines and has decent, unique content. Making sure the fundamentals are in place for any search project is a key element to the future success.

Although a million pounds sounds like a great sum of money, to take on Amazon, you would need a lot more than that for your marketing budget! With this in mind, I think the most sensible thing I would do to aid a higher conversion rate and revenue sum for a new business is to run targeted PPC campaigns and use the budget for spend on AdWords. This would allow the new site to be seen high in the search results and the ads can appear instantly without having to wait for the search engines to index the pages.

To attempt to take on Amazon, a lot more would need to be done to create a brand that people are aware of and want to buy from. Most people know and trust Amazon so this is a massive task in itself.

However, if we are looking at getting more creative I would focus my attention on social media and create awareness of the new brand in this way. With social, I think a million pounds would go much further than standard search. Setting up a bespoke Facebook and Twitter Account would not eat up much of the funds. I would then use these to create an element of fun around the brand so that people want to link to the site automatically and talk about it across the web.

Oreo have done some great things with customer competitions and Lick Race is a good example of this. This exact match domain (http://www.oreolickrace.co.uk/) has a significant element of fun and bloggers have been talking about it and linking to it without being asked. The competition was also promoted heavily on their Facebook and Twitter profiles and drove a lot more brand awareness.

On top of this, Amazon do offer a product feed so if the start-up was selling similar products that fit into Amazons categories, I would look at getting the products listed on their site. This would give me some brand exposure but also give me additional revenue to ensure that the start-up business could continue to run into the future.

Kevin Gibbons, Director of Strategy – SEOptimise
Great question! I’ve probably thought about this a bit too much, but other than giving SEOptimise a £1 million SEO contract, I’d split the budget something like this:

£500,000 – An extreme PR campaign – looking to generate a huge amount of online buzz, attention and links. Think big, think crazy, think anything to get media and press attention. So hire a team who can help you to brainstorm and carry out these ideas – as long as it’s legal that’s fine!

£200,000 – Social media campaign – continue your crazy PR ideas with a social media campaign. This is all about creativity and creating something remarkable that will naturally be shared and generate huge amounts of attention. Sounds easy doesn’t it?! Use the music angle, hire someone like the Rage Against Machine guy who got the Christmas number one – and figure out a way to get people talking about your new brand on Facebook and Twitter.

£100,000 – Top quality content – hire celebrities & run big events – e.g. interview actors/actresses, music artists, record labels, radio DJs etc and guest write on their sites too. Run events, festivals, online music concerts – basically get as much attention as possible. A £100,000 budget sounds a bit low, but get sponsorship, sell tickets, do joint promos with the celebs and I’m sure you can save a bit of cash. This gives you some great content which naturally generates attention and links.

£100,000 – Buy a competitor domain – Ok you’re not going to get a top competitor, Play.com sold for £25m last month, so that’s a long-way off budget. But maybe you could find a dormant domain which is ranking in the top 50 positions in Google, which would give you a much better starting point to compete.

£100,000 – SEO & link building – Obviously you need to get your on-site SEO straight and also think of ways to generate quality user-generated content which can rank for a long-tail of terms. But make sure you focus a large percentage of the budget towards link building. This is where there is a huge difference between your site and Amazon, so think about how you can create a strategy which can realistically create high-quality links which have a chance of influencing search rankings and competing with Amazon. Sound difficult, but maybe you could start replicating their best links – or at least bribing the owners to switch them to you!

It’s a big ask – but I think you’d be well on your way with that approach. And if all else fails, just hire a hacker to take down Amazon and 301 everything to your site! Ok, maybe don’t do that one!

Gareth Hoyle, Director – Manual Link Building
1 – I would invest a decent amount in a cleanish aged domain

2 – I would invest in at least 10 product code microsites per week hosted across different C Class IPs

I would use the microsites to sell individual products but feed back into the main site through “view other PRODUCTNAME”

3 – I would employ a team offshore to review products on our page and feed them out to review aggregators
I would also run some form of social media “booze for reviews” scheme

4 – I would link building to all pages and include a large element of social interaction (manipulated plus ones, fb likes, digg votes)

5 – FB competition – outreach to key influencers on industry forums and get them blogging about us and our product range in exchange for free products

6 – I would use some budget on PPC to piggy back my rivals brand searches

7 – I would also PPC on diverse phrases loosely related to my products – eg – If someone on hollyoaks gets a new TV – I would purchase ‘hollyoaks’ and link the ad to the TV that is featured on screen

Chelsea Blacker, Head of Search – Tamar
1) Amazon has 11 categories of products, so will I. For each category hire an SEO exec outside London at starting salary of £19,000. Total cost: £209,000

2) Most CMSs have horrible URL structures, pay my chosen CMS whatever ridiculous upsell price they demand to get custom, relevant URLs which accurately reflect the navigation. Cost: £20,0000.

3) Create social media communities around each of the 11 categories. Each should have their own twitter account, fb fan page, stumble upon account, reddit profile, squidoo, etc. Every day, my 11 execs must share have at least 3 interactions on each platform.
Cost: Free.

4) Build social media communities. After 2 months of 3 interactions a day, start buying followers, fans, friends, etc so the profiles build up a bit of authority.. Give each category a budget of £200 to do so. Cost: £2200

5) Build an App. Just joking. That would be a waste of time for any retailer. http://www.chelseablacker.com/2011/10/are-catalogue-apps-worth-it/

6) Ideally, I want 5 reviews for each product I’m selling.

Amazon has 351,000,000 page indexed of which I’d assume most pages are products. That means each exec needs to pull reviews for about 30,000 product pages. Whoo! Let the automation begin!

Each exec would identify 10 sites with product reviews relevant to their assigned category. Then I’d expect them to work with my developer to scrape reviews for products from those sites. Cost: £20,000 freelance developer building/tweaking a scraper tool

I’m not a big fan of spinning tools, but in this case there is little choice. Get a spinning tool and some O Desk employees in india to start spinning the scrapped reviews. Set up an O-Desk budget of £4000 for each category. Cost: £30 tool & £44000 O-Desk budget

7) Attempt to build some viral content. Give each exec a £60,000 budget to come up with some cool sh*t. They’ve been immersed in their given subject, I’d trust they are now experts in their fields and know what their communities would want to see. Let them manage it as they see fit.

So how would you spend the money?

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which featured several top digital marketing gurus;

Paul Madden, Automica Limited and Kerboo

Kevin Gibbons, SEOptimise

Jeremy Spiller,WhiteHatMedia

Mark Cook, Further

Bas van den Belden, State of Search

The talk evaluated if it is ethical to buy links And if it’s not, but your competitors are and they’re out ranking your should you point that out to Google?

The final point to take away from the day was that of if the whole process of trying to ‘engineer’ search rankings is ethical in the first place?

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Every so often a marketing campaign will hit what I like to call a ‘golden age’. These campaigns fall in nicely with a set of current trends, they are carried along by a wave of social noise and community; people will be hungry to digest as much content as you can throw at them. The internet is happy, the campaign client is happy and you can bask in the fact that you really understood your audience, the brief and everything.

The problem with the ‘golden age’ label is that these lovely pockets of opportunity tend to flitter by in no time at all. Popular interests and trends evolve and change every day… the thing is that most marketing campaigns don’t.

With a constantly shifting landscape, in the case of larger campaigns, some opportunities can pass before even the planning stage is over. The trends that have been painstakingly identified and the resulting strategies somehow lose their relevance. By the time the campaign is released there are other opportunities but it’s a bit late by then. Maybe next year…

So what is the alternative to what we are doing at the moment you may ask?

One discipline that has tackled similar problems is the software development sector. Some clever  Manifesto for Agile Software Development below:

Manifesto for Agile Software Development http://agilemanifesto.org/

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

Despite the obvious point that this is a manifesto for agile software development and not agile marketing campaigns there are some really nice ideas here which us marketers can adopt. Let’s have a quick look at each.

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

This one is nice for us digital marketers with a social flavour. Instead of spending time planning the conversations we are going to have with our online audience and which platforms we will be using we could be giving the individuals involved the responsibility and education to participate and work flexibly in existing communities.

Employing this philosophy allows us to stay relevant and, furthermore, helps us to identify emerging trends.

Working software over comprehensive documentation

For me this point translates to ‘innovation and results over paper trails and disclaimers’.  Obviously some documentation on the work you are doing is important but in a perfect world we would be able to spend all of our time working on beautiful ideas instead of playing it safe and covering our backs in case something goes wrong.

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Client education is key in any digital marketing project and the most successful campaigns are those in which the client is fully engaged and ‘present’. If you are battling to negotiate contracts and details all the time you are burning up budget which would otherwise be used for making the campaign great. The more collaboration you have with a client the more understanding you will both have about the market place and your objectives.

Responding to change over following a plan

Planning is an important part of any project but modern campaigns require flexibility to make the most of ever changing market places. Working in shorter iterations, an agile concept, by planning, implementing, measuring then rinsing and repeating the process using what you have learned can be a great way to make sure you remain relevant and keep up with those opportunities as they arise.

Speedy Summary

So, to sum up so far, the market evolves quickly, most marketing projects don’t. Sometimes that’s OK but sometimes it can result in missed opportunities. Using some ideas from the Agile methodology can help us remain flexible and relevant. It also give us something to chat about with our developer friends.

As well as these handy points Agile project development has lots of clever actionable ideas that us marketers might adopt but I think I’ll leave that story for another day… I might even with some jolly anecdotes of my time spent with real life agile web development techie people!

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Having started my career with George Wimpey in 1991 in the pre-internet days, my first experience of internet marketing for the construction industry was commissioning the www.tarmac.com website in 1997 using a London agency to design the site having retrieved the domain name from a Hong Kong based cyber squatter.

The site was an (expensive) online brochure site. Moving through Tarmac and Carillion I don’t recall SEO or online lead generation being mentioned and even whilst at www.buildonline.com , the website marketing objectives were more focused on email marketing and newsletter list building than the online reputation of the websites for search engines. I’m pretty sure that when I left BuildOnline in 2001 the building industry had not yet woken up to SEO so I was both surprised and excited when doing a little research prior to the 2009 CIMCIG conference that Search Marketing in construction remains a relatively underexploited online marketing channel.

I was surprised because I’m pretty sure that the industry is now online with most architects, engineers and procurement specialists being connected to Google at the office. (Neilson Online claims that in Jan 2009, 72% of the population had access to the internet either at home or at work and I don’t think the industry is any less represented than this average). And with most site based contractors being equipped with a mobile phone, the internet could be accessible by the vast majority of the workforce. Hence my excitement for the opportunity to explain to CIMCIG how SEO could be deployed as a lead generation and sales channel by construction marketers.

I needed to get an uptodate insight into the market size and found that there are 550,000 searches for glazing and 15,000 searches for roofing tiles per month on Google UK at the moment. The Natural search results for roofing tiles displayed mainly manufacturers whilst all of the Paid search results were populated by contractors and merchants paying Google for leads. It makes sense for the manufacturers to invest in SEO as they want to visible to the Specifiers and Architects who will include their products in the building specifications for the contractors to purchase.

But I was surprised that the builders merchants were not better represented in the natural search results (apart from  Jewson ) since they will actually sell the vast majority of the volume to the smaller contractors. The opportunities for local search results, accessible via mobile phones wielded by local builders looking for availability and the best price from their most local merchant shone out as an opportunity for someone to own.   I know a specialist SEO Agency that would be pleased to help….

As most delegates had a general appreciation for what SEO is, we overviewed our THEME approach to integrated search marketing which was pioneered by Helen Trendell and which aims to drive results from your key insights into the audience you’re targeting. The THEME approach involves identifying your target audience (TRIBE), then using your insights into the target audience to clarify what their motivations are / what benefits they are looking for online (HOOK), creating engaging content which directly addresses the HOOK (ENGAGE), choose promotional (MARKETING) tactics to present the optimised content to your TRIBE and then EVALUATE the relative success of the campaign. This was illustrated with a SEO Case study and 5 SEO tips for construction marketers:

1. Identify the traffic generating keywords which represent your niche / point of difference. Think about who your target audience (TRIBE) is and what they’re likely to be looking for (ie the HOOK) – for example; architects looking for glazing specifications
2. Target your keywords – create new content rich pages around your keywords
3. Create useful free resources – think specification sheets, conversion tables, online tutorials, produce reviews and other useful content which will attract links back to your site
4. Manage your reputation – look who ranks for your brand terms and be pro-active with any negative publicity relating to your brand online. Turn a negative into a potential positive (and traffic generator)
5. Re-use offline collateral online – make sure your PR agency is talking to your SEO agency and build an online resource library of well optimised content

It’s well documented that it’s difficult to earn a reasonable profit margin in construction and as a result, the typical marketing manager does not enjoy a huge budget – every aspect of that budget needing to prove its value. The previous presentation by David Thorp, Research Director for the CIM highlighted the problems marketers have with gaining credibility amongst FDs and MDs and although that’s not a problem confined to the construction industry, it seemed to me that Integrated Search marketing (both SEO and PPC) could be a great tool for construction marketers to start to bridge that credibility gap with  improved transparency, accountability and results. There’s no doubt that an increase in revenue and profit that can be directly attributed to a search marketing campaign would encourage most self respecting FDs to release more budget in anticipation of a repeat performance.

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SEO for Construction Industry Marketers

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Keyword research is the bedrock of any successful search engine optimisation strategy. And by “success” I refer to the tangible business gains that can be achieved through SEO, and not just simply search rankings.

Good research and analysis is required to help define a targeted set of key phrases that will drive high quality visitors onto your site. But if you’ve never implemented a search engine marketing campaign before, how do you know which relevant keywords are going to drive the right type of visitors on to your site?

Keyword research is not an exact science

Although search marketing professionals have access to keyword research tools that will help them to identify the possible keyword variations of a particular theme, those tools aren’t capable of helping you to gauge the quality of visitor that that phrase is likely to deliver.

Many SEOs will start optimising pages for specific keywords without really knowing if the search volumes predicted by the keyword tool are accurate or if the keywords are going to consistently drive high quality visitors that convert. They use up their time, energy and resources without knowing what lies at the end of their optimised rainbow. SEO is a long-term game, so changing the keyword strategy halfway through a campaign can be costly, and will ultimately delay the final results.

Integrating PPC and SEO

Setting up and running a trial PPC campaign can help reduce the risk of chasing high rankings for the wrong set of key phrases. Start out by setting your keywords to ‘broad match’ to help initially generate the required levels of search engine visibility and impressions. As you start to get some good traffic visiting your site, use your web analytics package to track which actual keywords visitors have come in on. You can then further optimise your PPC campaign by setting up phrase and exact match keywords so you can isolate and more easily measure the effectiveness of specific key terms. Furthermore, once you’ve been able to develop a list of high performing exact match keywords you can then start to test what impact different marketing messages will have on conversion rates, by setting up dedicated landing pages and using split-testing techniques to determine which copy works best.

Focus on quality, not quantity

The benefit of this approach is that not only will you have a much clearer idea of which key phrases work best for you in terms of driving high quality visitors, but you’ll also know which marketing messages will appeal to those visitors and thus help you to maximise conversions.

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Now with Google’s latest “Orion” update, it looks like meta-descriptions may be following the same fate as meta keywords. Which begs the question of what would happen if Google decided meta titles were no longer a worthy ranking factor?

Well thankfully, your title tag is still one of the most important factors to optimise for. But if you’ve optimised your page content and you’re still not achieving the SEO results you were hoping for, what next?

Integrating your paid and organic search campaigns with your other marketing channels can dramatically increase website traffic and leads, whilst maximising ROI across the entire marketing mix. Especially when you embed integrated search deep within the marketing strategy.

What has THEME, KOALA & CAPER got to do with integrated search?

Since discovering the famous marketing acronyms AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) and SOSTAC (Situational Analysis, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics, Actions, Control), I’ve been a big fan of handy ways to remember strategic marketing techniques.

So, since working at SiteVisibility I’ve been testing a number of models to help our clients increase website traffic and conversions, whilst reducing their PPC spend. I’ve developed these into 3 integrated search models made up 5 letter acronyms…

Introducing, 3 new integrated search models

THEME (the strategy for increased targets):

Tribes - Identify and segment your visitors by behaviour

Hook – Find the main benefit of your website for each tribe

Engaging content – Create something they’ll want to link to and share

Marketing – Decide how to promote it (across all channels)

Evaluation – Agree how to measure it

KOALA (the strategy for reduced budgets):

Keyword – Choose a lucrative keyword to target

Optimise – SEO your onsite content for that keyword

Actions – Add a call to action or two

Link internally – Create a link from another page using the keyword in the anchor text

Approach others – Give 3rd party sites a reason to link to the page

CAPER (the strategy for reduced resources):

Content – Use a great piece of existing content

Audience – Understand who the content is aimed at

Platforms – Discover where those audiences can be found online

Engage – Get out there and start a conversation with them

Repurpose – Find a way to repackage the content 

Why use an integrated search marketing model?
The main reason why you’d want to use an integrated search marketing model is to go through a tried and tested marketing campaign process which has been proven to deliver repeatable results – again and again.

By following the steps of each model, you can improve your website traffic, conversions, links and search engine rankings.

The real benefit of creating search-led marketing strategies is that this can drive value throughout your existing PR, advertising, affiliate marketing, email marketing and social media investments, ultimately ensuring maximum brand awareness and lead / revenue generation.

What case studies are available for integrated search campaigns?

Leading retail, publishing and ethical organisations are already pulling together their SEO, PPC, online PR and social media campaigns together into one integrated search campaign…

THEME Case Study: Environment in Business Magazine

• Traffic from natural search increased by 852% (Jan v May 2009)
• Rankings increased for “environment business” to the lucrative no. 1 spot
• The number of links and subsequent referring traffic also increased

KOALA Case Study: Times Online

• No. 1 in search results for “redundancy calculator”
• No. 3 for “redundancy”
• 7,543 links from websites with work related content
• Increased search and referrer traffic
• No longer needed to bid on the term for pay per click

CAPER Case Study Results: Cafe Direct

• No. 3 for “fair-trade coffee”, “fair-trade tea” & “fair-trade hot chocolate” (Fairtrade.org being the only site listed higher with 2 entries)
• Links increased by 50% in 3 months
• Social media engagement and awareness increased

How can I increase my website traffic & leads using integrated search?

You can find out how to implement integrated search campaigns that deliver a mixture of powerful results in one simple step… Download the Integrated Search White Paper

Post from Apple Pie & Custard blog by SiteVisibility - An SEO Agency

Integrated Search – 3 New Strategies You Can’t Live Without

Related Posts

• Integrated Search Marketing – A Quick How to Guide
• Google Personalised Search knows where you live…
• Integrated Search Marketing Video Presentation Pecha Kucha by Helen Trendell

Post from Apple Pie & Custard blog by SiteVisibility - An SEO Agency

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