Online Advertising Ventures Further Into Search Engine Marketing Realm

By Broderick, Pat

San Diego has been a breeding ground for search-engine marketing, based on its history as an incubator for pioneering companies.

That’s the take of Cindy Turrietta, founding member of Affordable Search Engine Ranking, an independent consulting company based in Kearny Mesa. Among the pioneers she cites are Engine Ready Inc., founded in 1998; WebSideStory Inc., which earlier this year joined with Visual Sciences LLC under the Visual Sciences brand; and Urchin Software Corp., which was acquired by Google in 2005. They all specialize in Web analytics, which gauges the effectiveness of an online marketer’s presence.

“So many people in San Diego are at the heart of what is happening in the search marketing industry,” said Turrietta.

Initially, there were only a select few who “got it,” she said.

“Now I see more of an awareness among businesses, that they need to get involved in this industry,” said Turrietta. “But a lot of big businesses today are still pooh-poohing it, saying ‘We don’t need to go there.’ But, when Google became a verb more and more companies realized, ‘We better pay attention to this.’ You need to have this as part of your marketing budget.”

Turrietta does her part to educate businesses. Her “eMarketing Talk Show,” a popular podcast, can be found at www.emarketingtalkshow.com. She has been invited by SCORE, the small business advisor, to teach workshops on search engine marketing.

“A lot of startup companies are realizing that they need to get involved,” she said of Internet marketing.

Market Forces

Search-engine marketing – known as SEM – is continuing to grow as businesses become increasingly aware of its possibilities, say industry experts.

According to eMarketer, which compiles market research and analyzes trends, paid search ads make up the largest segment of the U.S. online advertising market.

eMarketer estimates that the share of paid search spending has remained on the 40 percent-plus plateau since its “spectacular” rise early in the decade.

“That paid search’s share is barely growing obscures the enormous sums going to this advertising format,” said eMarketer. “U.S. spending on search advertising will rise by more than $3.2 billion from 2006 to 2008 alone.”

The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, a trade association based in Wakefield, Mass., found in a survey that most advertisers are relying on both paid and organic search engines, although most of the SEM budget is allocated to paid search media; and that strategic search engine optimization – SEO – is a “high priority,” noting that search engines have opportunities to capture both more revenue and provide better service to business customers.

“It is so new to a lot of people,” said Dana Todd, executive vice president of the La Jolla-based SiteLab International Inc. “It’s growing by leaps and bounds.”

And, she added, it’s easier now for advertisers to access which mediums are making the best of their marketing dollars.

“We are sticking our thumb up the collective nose of the old school advertising industry and saying there is a better way of doing this, a more efficient way of doing this,” said Todd, a SEMP board member.

But Todd is quick to point out that search-engine marketing is not a magic bullet.

“SEMPO is not a policing body,” she said. “We warn people to ask for transparency. We also try to tell them that there is no such thing as a guarantee.”

Keyword Cachet

Keywords are the key to success on the Web, but it can get mighty complicated.

“Search engines don’t understand a fork on a table from a fork in the road,” said Paul Bruemmer, director of search engine marketing for Red Door Interactive, a San Diego-based SEO firm that handles such accounts as Leap Wireless International Inc. (cricket.com) and K. Hovnanian Homes (khov.com). “They are robots, and they look at things in terms of words translated into numbers.”

The engines manage to do a “pretty good job coming back with reasonable results,” he added. But it can get dicey, considering the billions of keywords for what they have to decipher on a regular basis.

“Even if they could figure out between a mustang horse or a car, it’s a challenge to deliver the best data for you,” said Bruemmer. “They don’t know your intentions when you type in a search. We are probably 10 years away from any sort of artificial intelligence that will determine what your intentions are based on your past searching habits.”

Bruemmer said finding the best keywords is “the cornerstone of where any campaign begins,” but it can be tricky, because all words are not created equally.

Consider the word clothing versus apparel. While some of the fancier stores might favor “apparel” as a keyword, “clothing” draws 10 times the traffic, said Bruemmer.

Using the wrong keyword also can be pricey, said Brian Lewis, vice president of marketing for Engine Ready, a San Diego-based pioneer of the SEM industry. One cliens, a purveyer of logo pens, discovered that fact after Engine Ready went to work.

“People were typing in personalized baby pens or animal pens,” said Lewis. “He doesn’t sell those, but his ad was so general, that it didn’t have the word ink in there.”

Going Organic

Search engines include both paid and non-paid also known as natural or organic – listings.

“The paid search is great stuff, but the natural search is so much more abundant and meaningful,” Bruemmer said. “Coming from an organic search, you go deeper, stick around longer, and make transactions more frequently.”

Many businesses have gravitated to paid search-engine marketing, which also has advantages, said Bruemmer.

“You can identify the keywords you want, put in bids, and manage those bids with software to push your ads to the top,” he said. But, he added, consider that 85 percent of traffic on search engines is organic, or non-paid.

“You’ve got to figure the amount of inventory for a natural search is ‘ginormous’ – the difference between a lake and an ocean, with enormous opportunities,” said Bruemmer.

Lewis sees benefits in both paid and non-paid listings, but observed that neither is cheap.

“Paying an SEO company to make changes to your site is not inexpensive,” he said. “You can be paying $5,000 a month and have an SEO company working on your site, and have no idea how it’s impacting your traffic.”

On the other hand, said Lewis, PPC – or pay per click options allow a company to “fail fast” reflecting the philosophy that, “If you are going to fail, let’s do it and move on. With SEO, it will take months to find out if you are getting a positive return or not.”

But Lewis suggests businesses do both.

“Marketing budgets need to be set up in a way that companies can allocate funds among PPC, SEO and social media Facebook, blogs and podcasts,” he said.

Services Rendered

The fees for optimizing a Web site vary greatly, depending on the client and services required, but Turrietta said that savvy businesses are making room in their budgets for SEM. How much of a financial commitment is that?

“It all depends,” she said. “Did they do it right the first time? Before they even selected a domain name, did they consult with a search-engine optimization specialist? Did they build a Web site and then decide, ‘We need to market and then talk to someone?’

Turrietta’s rates vary, but typically she charges $1,500 for an analysis of what needs to be done for a particular client, and a strategy. Her one-on-one training fee is $150 an hour, which also varies, while her hourly rates range from $75 to $100, depending on the project.

When it comes to the bottom line, said Turrietta, “If you optimize it properly from the beginning, you stand a better chance of ranking organically. If your return on investment is there, your budget can be ‘sky’s the limit.’ “

While results are measurable, said Turrietta, “It’s not an exact science. But it is more exact than traditional marketing, where you mail out 1,000 brochures and hope for a 1 percent return; it’s more exact than that.”

There is another challenge advertisers must consider when using SEM, said Andreas Roell, chief executive officer and president of Geary Interactive, a San Diego-based online marketing agency.

“At one point, diminishing returns start to occur and, at the same time, there is only a maximum amount of qualified users searching for your product, said Roell, who also serves as president of the San Diego Ad Club.

The solution?

“Marketers need to extend their online campaign into tactics that generate demand, versus just fulfilling demand,” he said.

Among their options, he said, are banner advertising, e-mail, mobile and word-of-mouth marketing.

“This is a longer term and dedicated effort, and requires advertisers to have a dedicated online advertising budget,” said Roell.

No matter what option a business selects, the main goal is to avoid the dreaded “bounce” – visitors who enter a site and depart the page without taking any action. For those businesses that are involved in pay per click, said Lewis, they are spending bucks every time someone lands on the page – whether they stay or bounce right off, leaving their shopping carts empty.

“You’ve spent the money, and gotten zero return for it,” he said.

Lewis recalls the old direct marketing days, where advertisers had a certain amount of control.

“A letter had a clear start and ending point,” he said. “You may not read every word, but they could still guide the experience. Web pages are more of a challenge, because they are more interactive.”

Lewis compares this to an untrained dog that dashes all over the place, and may even run away altogether. In the case of the Web, he said, “You need to put the visitor on a leash and guide them through the page.”

This means paying attention to font sizes, text formatting and using dark text on light backgrounds, creating a sense of urgency with such terms as “start now” and “apply now,” and including a “What’s in it for me?” headline, said Lewis.

The Wild West

The cyber world is still very much like the Wild West, where the villains wearing black hats often are a few gallops ahead of the law. With a new frontier, and the hordes of homesteaders it’s attracting,the Internet can provide both limitless opportunities and plenty of perils for the untutored.

Consider this cautionary tale told by Todd.

“We had a client who had leased a domain name – very much like a cars.com or resorts.com, a broadly searched noun. com,” she recalled.

The company that leased the domain name couldn’t afford to buy one, and was paying $8,000 a month to lease the name, said Todd.

“It was prime real estate,” she added. “They got into a long- term contract, then spent more money building this beautiful Web site on it. Then they went live and Google blacklisted the domain.”

What happened?

“The previous tenant had done some very aggressive tactics and got into trouble with Google,” said Todd, explaining that Google has some very strict guidelines on what is and is not permitted on its search engine.

Todd’s clueless client hired her to act as a go-between to “clean up” the mess and get back into Google’s good graces.

“It was a four-month process to get them out of hock, after they made all of the engineering changes to comply with Google Web master guidelines,” said Todd.

While getting booted off a search engine is a worst case scenario, she added, “It happens more often then you’d think.”

These “black hat” tactics that can involve spamming, incorporating hidden links or text usually are at odds with the search engine’s established guidelines.

An example:

“You can artificially inflate your links,” said Todd. “Black hatters have a machine that can generate keywords and spit them out in blog format, and launch thousands of mini-Web sites with little human endeavor. They can flip a switch and they got a thousand links.”

It’s the quantity of links, rather than the quality, said Todd.

“A site by itself, with no friends, is not popular,” she said. “It’s like being at a party, and a guy keeps dropping names all over the place. You don’t respect him until someone drops his name. It’s about who is talking about you.”

But, while this mischief might work in the short term, it is bound to backfire, said Josh Jenkins, co-founder of Del Mar-based Treehouse Search Engine Marketing.

“Manipulation only works for a short period of time,” he said. “The scary thing about that is, a site itself can be banned forever from the Google index.”

Weighing The Risks

Sometimes it comes down to how much a particular business has at stake, said Todd.

“The black-hatters try to push as far as they can without getting caught,” she said. “But, most of the big brands aren’t going to risk that, because it’s not worth getting blacklisted. If you are in a highly competitive industry – cars, mortgages, legal, which has a high volume – using aggressive techniques can pay off huge. If you don’t care about brand damage, maybe the SEO black hat technique is appropriate for you. Otherwise, it’s better to be aligned with best practices.”

Todd said that she never engages in black hat behavior on behalf of her clients. But she also agrees that there can be a fine line between what might be considered a legitimate business practice and one that crosses the line.

“People are so a passionate about it,” she observed. “They treat it like a religious debate within the SEO community. By their nature, tech people are an academic bunch, and they have a tendency to really look awfully close at the methods for engineering your way to the top.”

But, said Todd, “It’s all about business goals and business strategies.”

“If your strategy is to throw caution to the wind, drive hard and get out, your risk profile will allow you to take those risks,” she said. “If you are not like that, and are looking for the long haul, and building a nice solid equity on the search engine, you don’t want to do anything crazy.”

More openness on the Web is the key, said Bruemmer. He predicts that the next big thing on the Web will be more transparency that will usher in a “different type of commerce.”

“The old days of trying to hide things or limit what people can see or do, that stunts business growth and creativity,” he said. “Through transparency and sharing information, we as a society grow more productively.”

Copyright San Diego Business Journal Oct 1, 2007

(c) 2007 San Diego Business Journal. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.