An SEO and PPC competition is running from January next year with the entrants judged over a one year period. I’m not entering (for a start the entry fee is $5000 per category) but I’m interested in the criteria and the sample questions for a bit of self evaluation.

In the PPC category, entrants are judged on customer satisfaction, depth of knowledge, reporting methods, internal principles and competitive advantages.

There are sample questions here.

There is a great thread on cre8asite forums about creating user personas.

The discussion focuses on how to create a better website by thinking about the types of people who might visit the site. The technique is to invent a fictional person or persona for each type and then analyse how that person might interact with the site. The more real or fleshed out the persona, the better able you are to gain insights into what their experience might be on your site. You then use that information to improve the site and better cater for users’ needs.

That’s a quick summary and there are some good explanations and links to other resources in the thread.

Search marketers could benefit from applying this technique. Here are 10 thoughts.

1. People are at different stages in the buying cycle.
2. Each person will probably be doing multiple searches to find what they want. With each search they may learn something that has an influence on the next search.
3. People notice brand names familiar to them.
4. Some people are looking for aggregators first to make their task easier.
5. Often people get the comparison information they want from the aggregators and then seek more information from individual suppliers.
6. Some people ignore anything that they recognise as an ad.
7. Some people go straight to the ads particularly if they have previously found them more relevant to their needs than the organic results.
8. People trust authoritative sounding sites.
9. Some people will select video or images over text.
10. Some people are looking for free information and have no intention to buy.

There was an article today in Canada’s national newspaper about the impact of the online search market on ad agencies.

I came across it on Andrew Goodman’s blog and I’m linking to it because I think it’s relevant to the Australian market. The paid search market in Canada is cheaper and less competitive than in the US. There are parallels with the Australian search industry in this respect. We are a couple of years behind the US and this creates opportunities for businesses and agencies.

Google’s president of marketing and commerce makes the point that advertising agencies shouldn’t see the dominance of Google as a threat but as an opportunity. He concludes with the message that (in Canada) “we’re underinvested compared to what the opportunity is.”

Andrew points to Gord Hotchkiss’s post on the same topic. Substitute “Australia” for “Canada”. The post is very relevant to our market as well.

Is it reasonable to expect to know the rules when paying for advertising? The Google adwords blog stated yesterday that changes to the adwords quality score algorithm will not be pre-announced prior to implementation.

What’s odd about this is that there is quite an extensive help file for adwords. It’s not like the organic search algorithm which has never been outlined officially to the same degree. A search for quality score within the adwords help centre brings up 90 results and they answer questions like “what is a quality score and how is it calculated?”. Ok so at the end of every list breaking down the inputs to quality score there is the catch all “other relevance factors”. So there has always been the assumption that things are taken into consideration other than the main factors like click through rate, ad copy relevance and landing page relevance. However the announcement seems to hint at changes that might be worth announcing but nevertheless won’t be.

This was one part of the announcement. The post was mostly about the types of sites that may be singled out for a poor landing page quality score. These are:

• eBooks that show frequent ads or install malware
• ‘Get rich quick’ sites
• Comparison shopping sites
• Travel aggregators
• Affiliates that don’t comply with our affiliate guidelines

I was surprised to see comparison shopping sites and travel aggregators lumped in with the rest. On reflection it fits in with the philosophy of showing a broad variety of results to searchers as demonstrated by new initiatives such as universal search and the longer standing filtering of duplicate content.

I’m working on a new campaign which fits into the category “comparison shopping sites”. The website fulfils all the guidelines as laid out in the adwords help centre. It has relevant and original content on all landing pages. The campaign is organised into targeted ad groups with relevant ads. It’s only week three so still very early days but the campaign is suffering from a low number of impressions and I’m assuming that the quality scores are predictive and low and it’s a waiting game before realistic quality scores come into play.

It’s a different story if the site will continue to be penalised because it fits into a category that Google treats with special consideration. Comparison sites and travel aggregators are going to have similar content to other sites in their niche. Does it mean that only a subset of sites will be allowed to advertise and the rest will be forced out with high cost clicks due to quality score penalties?

Search Engine Land spoke with Seth Godin on the subject of search marketing. Seth has been critical of search marketers in the past and dishes out a fair bit of criticism in the interview. For example he makes this assertion:

“Spending money on ads or commodity-focused SEO is the last gasp of someone who is short on innovation, imagination and great stuff!”

Well I do spend money on ads, for my search marketing business and for my clients. Same with SEO although I’m not quite sure what is meant by commodity-focused SEO. If there’s a better way then I’d rather be doing it so I made a summary of Seth’s points to consider how to be more innovative.

1. SEO isn’t a replacement for doing the right things (the right things being building remarkable products, getting your best customers to talk about those products, building relationships and playing the long game without being too impatient to get a quick sale).
2. Personal recommendations are better than any alternative so the future is in blogging, private channels such as RSS, and human controlled sites such as squidoo. Search in its current form is broken.
3. Many advertisers are lazy. They don’t customise offers to match ads and instead send people to generic or home pages.

At the core of all this is trust, credibility and relevance. If someone we trust and whose opinion we respect recommends something of interest to us then we are quite likely to take action. If the outcome is good to the point that it’s worth remarking on then we are likely to be motivated to tell someone else.

We know this to be true when we’re talking about actual human interaction. I’ll try a restaurant if a friend tells me she had a fantastic meal there.

However, just because something on the Internet has attributes that might indicate a degree of trustworthiness and credibility doesn’t mean that it can actually be trusted or that someone will accept it as being so. I’m talking about attributes like putting a name and perhaps a photo to blogs and comments, or a third party recommendation for a product rather than the company’s own endorsement. These factors can help but we know social media can be manipulated, abused, and used for short term gain. Social media participants can “cheat” just as search engine optimisers can use aggressive tactics to rank highly.

Seth Godin claims that “search is broken” and elaborates by saying:

“Well, if search worked, then you wouldn’t need a strategy! People would find you when you needed to be found, and find someone else the rest of the time. Of course, search is always going to be a bit broken (though it keeps getting better) and the more human person to person recommending that gets included (including squidoo.com), the better it’s going to work.”

Introducing a human element for recommendations isn’t going to mean the true deservers rise to the top. Search and social media are just different mediums. They can both be manipulated and in both cases the “best” content (whatever that means) can remain hidden because the right things weren’t done to get the most visibility.

The search landscape is certainly changing and there are many more opportunities to get a message out other than ranking highly in Google. As Seth says the message may best come from enthusiastic advocates rather than self promotion. I don’t disagree with that.

Seth does actually say what he’d do in place of unimaginative ad placing:

“If I ran a travel site, I’d engage my best customers to build blogs and Squidoo lenses and to use Digg to point to reviews and insights and things that would make people WANT to seek me out.”

A good proportion of my clients’ prospective customers have never even heard of blogs, squidoo lenses and Digg never mind actually created content or looked at any examples.

I manage a paid search campaign for a travel site. We’re always looking at different ways to promote the products and are starting to see a lot more referrals from sites with consumer generated content such as tripadvisor.com. The reality though is that if someone wants to book accommodation online they are most likely to search using Google. A proportion of these people will find the paid ads to be more relevant than the organic listings. And yes when they click they get to an appropriate page and often a custom landing page if it’s a specific offer. Spending money on ads might not be the most innovative, imaginative thing to do, in comparison with say, creating a squidoo lens, but the good thing is, it works.

I read about 20 blogs each day and there are others that I look at on occasion. This is one of my favourites at the moment so here’s a link. It’s relatively new and there have been some good posts. Also check out their keyword manager. I’ve been a big fan of Aaron Wall’s keyword tool for a while and this is similar with a couple more features.

Here’s the link:

PPC Super Affiliate Blog

E-consultancy have an excellent 12 page report on paid search including the latest statistics (from the UK) and the market trends in paid search. It’s well worth downloading and is free after registering. Thanks to Danny Sullivan for including it in his “day in search” round up post.

Here’s a summary of the market trends that were identified. This was the output from a roundtable which had 5 UK organisations in attendance.

Market Trends

1. Ongoing concern about click fraud
2. Increased sophistication of bid management tools
3. Paid search becoming more like SEO due to the importance of landing pages
4. Increased use of paid search for brand building
5. Marketers more savvy about ROI and starting to exploit longer keyword phrases that are cheaper than generic terms
6. Search is being built into overall marketing plans and there is more recognition of the need for paid search to complement SEO and other marketing channels (online and offline)