I’ll be chairing a panel on Metrics and Measurement at Interactive Austin 2009, and tasked the panel (Ian Strain-Seymour of Apogee Search, Pam O’Neal of BreakingPoint, Michael Wilson of Small World Labs, and Andy Meadows of BudURL fame and Live Oak 360) with coming up with questions we think people will be interested in. We’ve got a couple of search marketing gurus, a couple of guys with companies wrapped around social media marketing, and Pam’s a B2B social media maven, with some great success stories and real-world experience to share.

Please take a few minutes and complete this questionnaire on the topics, focus and specific questions YOU would like to have answered. We will be a much more focused, relevant panel if we can get your input. Hope to see you at IA09!

Click Here to take survey

I’m always glad to see the gleam of positive news in the reams of economic doom, gloom and despair–and especially when it’s good news about our sector. This just in from the new Technical SEO Consultants blog:

While the world is experiencing an economic financial crisis, the SEO industry is experiencing a surprising increase in demand. From intensive training and SEO consultation to actual website changes and link building, the demand for expert SEO help is growing at an astonishing rate….But currently most established SEO professionals seem to have just the opposite need, they have too much business. Many established SEO professionals are declining to take on new clients because they just cannot accept any additional work load right now.

Google is releasing SEO guides, Microsoft and Yahoo! both have in-house SEO departments and the “SEO is BSâ€Â� crowd have lost a little of their swagger and a lot of their arguments. No surprise – solid evidence trumps wishful thinking, especially when times are tough….

“Prospects are demanding more specific information related to their sites issues and detailed, actionable solutions are expected. Generic audits that look automated in any way are no longer welcome. Ex: Don’t just tell me I got a problem with my titles, but tell me exactly how are we going to fix them! That is the attitude of an average educated site owner looking for help. This will ultimately separate the amateurs from the experts.�
-Jose Nunez

We’ve seen a year-end push from new clients, and of course the normal inquiries related to setting 2009 budgets. December looks to be very busy, for which we are thankful. The good news is that clients are getting a lot smarter about both the value of SEO and how it works. In tough times, the SEO charlatans who promise a lot for a little are going to be hard-pressed to show results, and the clients who continue to improve their sites are going to gain market share. Those SEO agencies which do good work are going to ride out the storm as valuable team members of those successful companies.

The economic storm is raging, and most of us have trimmed our sails and hunkered down. For seafaring men, time in port was not just spent drinking ale and carousing–the sailors needed to mend the sails, caulk the cracks in the hull, and take on provisions. In the economic downturn and the start of the holiday season, it might be easy to put off thinking about working on your website, but deferring maintenance may incur additional cost later…including the cost of missed opportunity. To be ready for driving business in the new year, now is the time to freshen your content, fix barriers to sales, and maybe overhaul your site optimization…or even the site design.

We have several design firms/developers/interactive shops we work with…there is no shortage of creative talent in Austin. Each company we work with has its particular niche and pricing structure, and each one really understands the importance of integrating a solid SEO strategy into the site architecture. If you’re thinking about putting the old site into dry dock and putting on a fresh coat of paint, give us a call and we’ll point you in the right direction.

Today we are announcing a new SEO coaching program, as well as a new, proprietary SEO management dashboard. This is a collaborative working environment for making improvements over time, as well as a way to monitor your rankings and clearly see the increase in penetrating the Total Available Search Market. If search engine optimization is one of those projects that you put off in the boom times, working with a flexible, creative, experienced SEO agency might be the most significant thing you can do in the lull to put wind in your sails when the new year dawns.

As part of the audit we do to kick off SEO strategy development, we ask folks to let us know who their competitors are.  Then we look at the competitors for search visibility on  the search terms we’ve been provided, and sometimes find, (through OK, way more meticulous research than might be needed, but you never want to leave any stone untermed), many times the competitors the client provides simply aren’t players.

We’ll find those URLs in the 20′s and 30′s ranks, or not present at all in the top 50. Checking out the top 20 URLs, competition that may be lurking just outside the client’s radar often emerges.  Sometimes an entirely new category of competitors emerges.  For instance, in an industry where dealers, affiliates or aggregators develop a lot of content about the industry (franchising, for example), those aggregators actually are your stiffest competition for getting your corporate URL seen in ranks 1-20.

This is a great example of why it pays to hire SEO out.  If you are coming up to speed on SEO, you might start your research by looking at which URLs are present on the terms you think are the best.  Then, if you don’t see your competitor’s URLs…you might think SEO isn’t all that important – since none of your competitors seem to be doing it.  What you don’t know by guessing is that there are probably dozens of search terms that people are using. Between not quantifying the Total Available Search Market(TM) and not understanding the competitive landscape, you may be overlooking the potential gains from SEO entirely.

The truth is, your prospects are searching.  That’s all you need to know, to know investing in SEO campaign management and analysis makes sense.  Besides, you really don’t want to look through data on who’s out there in the top 50 ranks for hundreds of terms on a zillion search engine pages, do you? And I do…

One thing I love about Twitter is getting quick links to interesting posts from people in the industry I respect. Posts by poseurs on Twitter being slow today? Not so much…hey guy, you’re not helping!

So, even though Seth Godin is in our search marketing blogroll and one of the best and brightest writing on marketing, I had not seen this post on The Secret of the Web (hint: it’s a virtue) until today. (Gosh, I was out of the loop for almost a day!) It’s a good reminder that the hard things, like refining your content to be more relevant for a golden nugget of a search term that nobody else has discovered yet, are ultimately worth doing. The cool things that keep you from doing the hard things, like SEO? He talks about that, too.

There are a couple of search marketing luminaries I really admire. One is the seen-everywhere, cited-everywhere Gord Hotchkiss of Enquiro, whose company originated the heat map research which has been so illuminating to the industry. They do a great job on research, they also specialize in B2B search marketing (we’re just thankful they’re in Canada and we’re in Texas), and I bet they do a bang-up job for their clients.

The other guy I am thinking about is Mark Jackson, who is super sharp and unfortunately right here in Texas. He’s actually the inspiration for this post, with his concise, accurate and insightful column in last week’s Search Engine Watch. He’s someone we all can learn from, and his columns are the ones I pass along to our account managers and biz dev people as excellent models for communicating about the complex world of organic SEO.

Here is a taste of his food for thought–remember, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, so don’t just read it, DO IT! For more specific information on the issues found at the intersection of web design and search marketing, please see his excellent two-part series on “Don’t Hire a Butcher to do a Baker’s Job,” with 13 questions to ask the design firm.

Last weekend, we learned of the death of beloved U.S. newsman Tim Russert. Within minutes, Google’s results reflected the news in its index. Most of the Top 10 ranked URLs on a search for his name were related to the (very) recent news of his passing.

That’s the “new” reality of SEO, and goes to the heart of why every company should create fresh content.

Fresh content will help you achieve top rankings right away, and help your Web site become an “authority” site. Search engines love fresh content and deep Web sites….Keep in mind, the old tried and true SEO method still holds. You should have static pages (pages that have always been there, and will always be there) within your Web site and a regular schedule of developing links to these pages, both externally (links from other Web sites, using a varied description/anchor text) and internally (links from other pages of your Web site).

Marketing people are very good at communicating. That’s what we call it, and that’s how we make our money, but really, what we like to do is talk, have other people listen, and then see them take action. That’s exciting. On the web, we search marketers pay a lot of attention to what people are looking for, and try to help them find it, but I’m not sure if we marketers are really communicating with the market. That’s where social media comes in…where we get to listen.

Dave Evans pointed out the difference last Thursday at the InteractiveAustin2008 conference, and I wanted to bring it up in the panel I was on, because it needs discussion. That didn’t happen–we did have a lot to cover, between niche marketing on the web and bridging the generations–but it is something to keep in mind as you think about using social media in your marketing mix. Social media is about listening.

Where are people talking about you? What are they saying? Can you help solve their problem with your company or your product? These seem like great opportunities for marketers to get closer to your customers…and learn what they really want, not what we think they want.

One of the things we all struggle with is building relevant links to our sites. “Relevant” being a link from a page that’s actually related to the site content, and “building” as opposed to “paid,” which has become a no-no in the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Assuming you are a professional marketer with search as one of your many responsibilities, we certainly understand the need to outsource. But since you can’t throw money at this problem any more, and it goes without saying that you have better things to do than spam site owners asking for reciprocal links, what now?

PR is a great way to get links. For us, links outweigh ink in terms of the benefit. A story gets interest for a day, but press releases with links to your content stay out there forever. Because we’re active in social marketing, we’ve watched very carefully as online press releases have become, for some, the preferred way of getting news. A Google Alert takes a minute to set up, and you immediately get updates on any new web content relevant to your interest. Take that and add optimized press releases, and you have a much more energized public for your public relations. (You may also may be keeping your competitors more informed than you would like.) However, public companies have fiduciary responsibilities that sometimes get in the way of aggressive marketing with PR…so PR is not a one-size-fits-all solution.

Taking the next flight into cyberspace, why not look into promoting your site, your product, your expertise with articles? The intent of the article submission sites is to provide non-copyrighted articles for use by publishers doing newsletters, blogs and periodicals, so they prefer that the article be for a general audience, and not self-promotional. But you can easily explain the benefits of using your product or write a brief educational piece (400-600 words) that gets people thinking. In the “resource block,” you can place a short bio and a link to your site. When someone picks up the article and includes this resource block, you get another link.

As an experiment, I wrote a couple of articles in November and submitted them. Within 30 days, I found that we had 42 new links to the site, picked up by Yahoo’s Site Explorer. Now, we have 51 links from those articles. Considering that investing an afternoon in writing and publishing increased our link total by about 11%, article submission is definitely my new best friend when it comes to getting links. I control the content of the page, and I control the keyword phrase used to link to the site. The only thing I don’t control is where and when the article runs, but one did get picked up by a national search marketing newsletter. I found that one by searching on my name…because they didn’t include the link. Running a Google Alert on your name is a great way to see where the article gets picked up.

As you would expect from a marketing company working on our direction for the future, we have been homing in on our differentiation. Surprisingly, there are a lot of search marketing companies which don’t have much real marketing experience. Because it’s web marketing, companies tend to skew young, to have a hip, wired, energetic company. However, a company full of marketing newbies may not be a good fit if you need a business partner entrusted with bottom line performance. It isn’t hard to do PPC, and any web person can add tags to a site, but real agency- and client-side marketing management experience is hard to come by. Since we happen to have a lot of that (and some of us have some gray hair to go along with it), it’s an important part of our identity. And, we’ve realized that a lot of our joy in doing our jobs comes from helping our clients understand how web marketing works, so we are focusing our future on education, strategy and reporting.

From this most recent study from eMarketer, it looks like marketing executives are really coming up to speed on two important issues: marketing basics (any economic downturn spurs both a drive toward “back to basics” in budgeting and an emphasis on measurement and then reporting on ROI) and, surprisingly, search engine optimization. From our viewpoint, SEO is the foundation of modern marketing, especially if you are marketing to businesses…it’s nice to see our client-side marketing peers mention it as both a trend and as an almost fundamental emphasis.

Lots of good thinking out there on how referrals are becoming the new filters that sort out the good stuff from the “90% of everything that’s crud.” (Chris Anderson, The Long Tail) It’s not so much the wisdom of crowds (remember Howard Dean?) but the “nichebusters” that break to daylight and someone casually gives you a rendezvous with greatness. That’s the power of social media, and why it is so important to the future of search marketing. Even for B2B. Thinking future perfect, we are already becoming a social media agency, courtesy of our teaming with leaders like Tom Parish, Cynthia Baker and Deltina Hay. (These would be the people you would HOPE to have in your network!)

As marketers who are in the business of helping people find what they are looking for, it’s nice to know that we are both helpful and contributors to the bottom line for our clients. It’s so much better than being in advertising and trying to figure out how to persuade someone that one brand is better than any other option, just because of the cool person who is using it in our TV ad! (for a cool $250K)

I love this quote because it can explain to your CEO why nobody ever searches on your tagline:

“Marketers now have to compete with the conversations customers are having with one another about the products they buy. None of those conversations consists of customers repeating the same three word phrases over and over. This is one of the main drivers for (the market’s) interest in “customer-generated mediaâ€Â�: Not only are customers more credibleâ€â€�a 2006 study by Edelman PR showed that customers think the most trustworthy source of information about a company is “a person like meâ€Â�â€â€�they’re also more interesting. Customers are now “mashing upâ€Â� marketing materialsâ€â€�re-editing them into parodies, mixing them up with totally inappropriate soundtracksâ€â€�turning commercials back against their creators and in the process making them far more interesting than they were originally. Think of it as customers’ revenge for all those years of being treated like simpletons.â€Â�

The truth is that advertising stopped being smart and tried to win by being clever, and fell away from relevance. As David Ogilvy said, the consumer isn’t stupid, she’s your wife. For this next gen of search marketers, the lesson should be clear: don’t try to use tricks to outsmart Google, because in the long term, you will never win. Talk to the people! Open up and let them in…they are smart enough to see through corporate speak, and they ARE talking about you behind your back. If you are honest, responsive and reliable, that will be your reputation. My view? You don’t really manage your reputation–you earn it every day.