No kidding, right?
Gone are the days when all it took was a website with a few keywords sprinkled in. Gone are the days when keywords could be purchased for five cents a click and the campaign basically ran itself.
Today, dynamically generated content with long URLs, competitors with endless content development budgets, and eBay keyword buys are just three of the hundreds of thorns in search marketer sides each day. Today, search marketing can no longer be given to the intern in the corner cube—a unified strategy needs to be created, so all marketing programs work together. Today, even your PR team needs to get involved to manage search engine reputation.
Yesterday, the people from Jupiter and Search Engine Watch came to Atlanta for a half day presentation and round table event—Search Engine Watch Forums LIVE!
Key take aways were...
- Dave Williams from 360i. "Watch the trends. There is tremendous growth in the vertical search market – Orbitz, Shopping.com, Froogle, and Shopzilla. Out of search new ad models have emerged – click to call, local search, day parting, demographic search, contextual search etc. Your competitors are becoming savvier with A/B testing & multi-variable optimization. More and more studies show search is a valuable component of a branding campaign."
- Stacy Williams from Prominent Placement. "To overcome search marketing challenges, use all the tools available to you... Optimized blogs & press releases and well placed, high quality links to your site. Make sure your PR team is regularly monitoring the web and is working with the marketing team to address any negative PR that crops up. Take a look at local search – 25% of today's searches."
So, to sum it up, search marketing is hard and yet there is so much opportunity for growth. This post merely scratches the surface. How have you seen success? What creative methods are you using to get found and keep your reputation pristine?
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