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 missed Andy Beal’s post about online advertising in Australia. It’s worth a read as he links to an emarketer study saying that Australian advertisers plan to allocate 22% of their marketing budgets to online advertising.

I particularly like Andy’s last paragraph:

“Anyway, having recently returned from Sydney, I can tell you that the Australian SEM industry is getting ready to explode. There are a few smart SEMs down there, that can watch their American SEM cousins for the latest practices and bury their competition.”

It’s a definite advantage being able to watch what is happening in America. We have to wait a bit for the latest tools and research in Australia but it’s less competitive and there’s a lot to be gained from seeing what is about to happen before it hits with full force.

Sophie Wegat, the owner of Think Prospect in Melbourne, answers a question on search marketing in Australia as part of an interview series profiling women in Internet marketing.

“What differences do you see between optimizing for Australia and optimizing for the US?”

I hadn’t seen Sophie’s blog before but just subscribed.

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)

A good search marketing provider will:-

1. Have the required mix of skills including literacy, numeracy, creativity and web development know-how
2. Partner with you, communicate regularly and share knowledge freely
3. Demystify the jargon
4. Focus on results not individual stats
5. Keep working at improving the results
6. Keep up to date with latest trends
7. Set realistic expectations
8. Provide good reporting
9. Demonstrate credibility eg adwords qualified, sempo organisation member
10. Have experience and a good reputation

Search Summit was well worth the trip down to Sydney. The conference was at Luna Park and I also got the opportunity to stay with friends and go out to dinner. I lived in Sydney for 10 years and while I don’t regret moving away from the corporate world it’s good to experience the buzz of the big city once in a while.

Here are my highlights from the conference:

• The networking opportunities , I had many interesting and valuable conversations with smart, friendly people. I met people on the client side, a couple of industry people whose names and faces I recognised, and a few one-man-band type operators similar to myself.
• The industry stream: Three sessions ran concurrently, training, industry and tactics. I attended some part of each stream but found the industry stream particularly motivating and valuable. Andy Beal gave a good run down on how successful he has been building search engine marketing firms, and the steps he took in order to achieve this.
• Google representatives: The question and answer sessions with the people from Google were very valuable.
• Chris Sherman:Gave an excellent keynote speech and had good input at a couple of other sessions I attended.

I’m going to the search summit conference in Sydney this week. It should be good. If anyone reads this who is attending leave a comment!

Want to read more about search marketing? Here’s a list of must read blogs compiled by Lee Odden