I’m in charge of coming up with search marketing strategies for our clients, then helping get the content that makes them work through the process of development and implementation. That means I do a lot of research and exploration to find out what lies in that lovely matrix of customer interest and market opportunity. What I do is all about possibility. It’s about sorting out the puzzle pieces and making something cohesive from them (which I love doing).

My research takes me outside of the things that are my immediate domain because I need to have an understanding of what the client does already and how it’s working, what they’re not doing, and where the opportunities are. There tends to be a pile of “other stuff” that isn’t what we’re contracted to do. If there’s something that really needs attention, we’ll point it out and can help you get it taken care of or refer you to someone who can.

Sometimes, I wish that it was my job to help deal with this pile of “other stuff” that could be done as part of the web marketing strategy. It can be hard to curtail scope creep when you’re really excited about finding a huge, untapped opportunity for a client. You might be wondering how people missed these big opportunities in their own business. They’re often not the most obvious or trendy ways to solve the problem. Or maybe they solve the problem in an unexpected way. What they almost always are is the second right answer.

A Facebook page or Twitter stream might not yield big results for your company. You might not have the time or strategy to market it, maintain interest, and fill it with useful content. That doesn’t mean you’re exempt from needing to have some social media in place. Would answering common troubleshooting questions regarding your product or software on tech forums make users less frustrated and inspire brand loyalty? Is checking your reviews on Google, Yahoo!, and Yelp part of your routine? What about responding to customers that had a less than ideal experience?

If you’re intimidated or unable to build and maintain some of the bigger efforts that would boost your company’s web marketing strategy, I challenge you to sit down and think of a dozen things you could do that are second right ideas. Just because they weren’t the first right idea doesn’t make them any less right!

Great how-to from Marketing Sherpa in November. This is the reason I like Twitter, by the way…the industry’s leading lights sharing what’s interesting and/or valuable to them. Lots of year-end best-of lists right now.

This case study is a great resource, with excellent instructions on how to mobilize your company’s tribe of experts, what terms to use (not the same ones as you target on your site), and the results to expect. In this case, over half the search traffic is now to the blog…for the “other” terms that weren’t quite important enough for the main site.

This week, I’m thankful for my team, I’m thankful for our clients, thankful for our friends in the business like Mike Belasco, and thankful that our new service launch has gotten such a warm reception.

Doug Karr, of the MarketingTechBlog, got a preview of the new, low-cost service offerings supported by the Software as a Service tool that we’re using to help clients monitor the performance of their sites. In his review, he called it an “incredible SEO dashboard,” and went on to say:

There are three important elements of search engine tracking… the volume of searches per keyword, your current rank and volumes (and relative share), and your historical rank (whether you’re gaining or losing ground). As far as I know, there’s no other product on the market that looks at search as a ‘market’ and translates your rank to market share. RefreshWeb has done this with a simple but powerful reporting interface.

“Simple but powerful” was the whole idea, and our CTO, Tom Bartling, has spent every spare hour for the past year or so making it work. RefreshWeb wants to give a shout out to Tom, who’s not just a brilliant programmer, but a patient and helpful guy, smart, funny, creative, and always willing to explain and teach. These are an incredible combination, and we are SO glad he’s on our team. In fact, if you find yourself with an end-of-the-year budget you need to spend quickly, you should send it to Tom, care of RefreshWeb. It would make him happy, make you feel good, and make me a hero…one of those rare win/win/win opportunities!

Back to business: our goal is to provide exactly the services that clients need, at a price point that makes sense for any size business. And, if these new packages take off, there’s some job creation in store. This new dashboard makes it possible to provide SEO support starting at just $250/month. That’s a small fraction of the full service, SEO agency model we have always used in the past, but in this continuing recession, helping all kinds of business increase sales by moving up in the rankings is a worthwhile goal. So, we’ve developed a lot of flexible solutions for clients, from people doing SEO in-house to folks interesting in seeing if SEO works. Besides, we know there are a lot of companies that fallen for some fast talk and not seen results–but they have read enough to know that there IS a right way to do SEO.

If you’re come to the blog via the home page, you probably noticed all the design changes, namely boxes defining some prospects’ needs, pointing to new pages addressing how we can address this particular problem.

This was all possible because last Thursday, we launched our SEO dashboard at InnoTech in Austin, in combination with more flexible, less expensive service offerings. This is a big milestone, because it’s the first fruit of our strategy to evolve into a product company. As a bridge from here to there, we’re only selling the dashboard in combination with services we provide. From the business perspective, we now have a $250/mo. entry level price point instead of a typical monthly price of $2000, so our expectation is that this will stimulate a lot more demand. Plus, now we can help a lot more people weather the recession.

As a company, our intent is to become known for personalized education about search, tools for clients to better oversee and manage SEO (either internally or for an overview of the results from their consultants or SEO agencies), and as a trusted partner for developing site optimization strategy. The SEO dashboard is the first tool we’ve created, in response to where we believe the market is headed, which is wanting to develop search marketing as an internal capability. With the right kind of help, we think clients can develop this as a truly sustainable competitive advantage.

A friend of mine who is an economics professor sent me this from the Global TED in Oxford.

“The wonderful Rory Sutherland wows the audience at the TED conference in Oxford with a superb sixteen minute talk on advertising and aspects of behavioural economics.” As a repentant ad guy, it’s refreshing to see a “practising” ad guy leading the way for less is more. Enjoy!

October is usually the month that companies are working on budget for the next year, so I wanted to be prompt in reminding you that the continual improvement offered by site optimization is a great investment.

We talk to a lot of companies who a) didn’t know they were missing 90+ percent of their potential new prospects by having an unoptimized site, b) had no idea they would need to rework their website to reach these people, and c) didn’t budget for it. Well, what other marketing investment is going to increase your leads and web sales by 50-100%? That makes the ROI on the investment easy to figure out.

If you don’t know what it’s going to cost to fix your site, talk to a good SEO agency now, discuss your options, and make sure you include enough money to do the substantial work with content that will improve your rankings. Even if you only have $1000 a month to put toward working on the site, that’s still enough to effect positive change. We have clients who spend $250 a month, and clients who spend $5-10,000 a month on SEO. What you need for a search marketing budget really depends on what needs to be done…which is why we start with an audit or, for bigger companies, an audit with a thorough competitive analysis. That gives you a strategy and road map of how to get there…well worth the effort and the limited investment ($2500-4500). Our rule of thumb for B2B sites is to plan on spending $25-30K in the first year, and adjust based on your results.

Now that all of the excitement has died down from the launch of Bing and the announcement of the Yahoo-Bing partnership, I would like to reiterate the words spoken by Gord Hotchkiss to all of Google’s competitors before all of this took place. Last December at the Search Insider Summit in Park City, Utah, he took Yahoo and Microsoft to task for not mounting a more significant challenge to Google’s dominance. In short, he said, “Do something amazing!”

We now know that Microsoft is spending $80 to $100 million on a branding and marketing campaign to promote Bing. This is great news as it seems that Microsoft has finally put some financial muscle behind their intention to be a major player for search. Bing should also be taken seriously because Microsoft has even deeper pockets to invest more money as part of their overall online strategy. Sorry Yahoo, but now that Microsoft seems to have the financial and strategic will to mount an attack against Google, this message is specifically for Bing: do something amazing!

Bing needs to do the small stuff well and create an excellent user experience, but it also needs to make some high profile investments like Google Earth, Google Street View and the Google Books Library Project to show that it means business. This means that Bing should invest early and invest a lot now that the sound of the buzz of Bing is still ringing in our ears. There was MSN, then there was Live, and if Microsoft cannot succeed with Bing, then this is strike three and you’re out.

Here is a great post for B2B marketers on “What you don’t know about optimizing PDFs can hurt you.” While my pet peeve is the PDF that gets posted using the designer’s PDF, which was intended for the printer (say, using 17×11 paper), the real shame is the wasted potential of PDFs. One of the most effective contributions we make to optimizing a B2B site is to go in and specify the document properties, thereby creating a title tag and description. This is a comprehensive guide to best practices. Read it and reap!

Matt Cutts, in an interview at SES San Jose, explains what’s to be expected from Google’s first major update in a few years:

Google announced yesterday that it has been working on a project called “Caffeine” that will re-write the architecture for Google’s Web search. As Matt Cutts shares exclusively with WebProNews, Caffeine is comparable to the “Big Daddy Update“back in 2005, which consisted of changes to the way Google crawls and indexes websites.

How much of an impact will Caffeine have on results? Matt says there will, hopefully, not be a big difference. Google will integrate Caffeine slowly and take user feedback into consideration. If you would like to try it out, go to http://www2.sandbox.google.com/

Got this via my Twitter stream, a retweet on a post from Guy Kawasaki:

20 Must Read Beginner Twitter Tips for Small Business Owners

Getting links to great articles from smart people is my main reason for wading through the clutter on Twitter, but by following other people in the industry and maintaining searches on key topics, it’s also a way to keep up with what’s happening. I highly recommend TweetDeck as a management console…as long as you go into settings and turn off the little beep that happens with every tweet!