Assessing Your Web Marketing Strategy

There is no better time than now to take a deep look at your search marketing options. A sound search marketing strategy will enable you to attract more people to your website, which in turn should translate to increased profitability for your business, which also means greater opportunities to brand your company and products. Optimizing a search marketing strategy requires a multifaceted approach and an understanding of several different aspects of search engine traffic and search-related services. The following is a brief description of the important areas in search and why they're worth your attention.

Where Does Site Traffic Typically Come From?
Organic. The most desirable traffic comes from "organic" search. In other words, these site visits are the result of users clicking on listings that appear in the unpaid, non-advertisement section of the search engine results pages. Users enter a search term, and the top listings that appear are as a result of their high relevancy to the search term. Professional search engine optimization can help increase your site's ability to rank highly for organic search terms that closely relate to your site's products and services.

PPC. Pay-per-click visits are the result of users clicking on advertisements. In this model, ads are created that appear above and next to organic results, when users search for certain words and phrases related to applicable products and services. A charge is applied only when the ad is clicked. PPC advertising can be an effective way to increase both the number of visitors to your site and when combined with a solid SEO strategy, can lead to a significant increase in a site's return on investment.

Direct. In a direct search, a user isn't using the search engine because they want a variety of results to choose from; they already know what they want and are going right to it. For instance, rather than using Google to search for XYZ widgets, they enter in the URL http://www.xyzwidgets.com into the search bar and go right to that site. This type of traffic usually happens with repeat customers, or people you have already reached who know about you and know what you have.

Product Feed. A product feed is a data file that you (or someone you hire) create that contains information about the products you have for sale on your site. The feed is structured, with specific fields of information that are filled in, such as size, color, brand, price and other specifications. These feeds are submitted to search engines (such as Google, for their "Shopping" option) and comparison shopping websites (such as Shopping.com, Pricegrabber.com, and Shopzilla.com) Product feeds are most effective when submitted regularly, perhaps weekly or bimonthly, to make sure that these sites have the latest inventory specifications to display. Customers searching within these indexes and subsequently clicking on your listings will be taken directly to your site, where they can then complete the purchase.

In June 2012, Google announced big changes to Google Product Search. Google Shopping is replacing Google Product Search by the Fall of 2012. The new form of Google Shopping is a paid model. Google believes that requiring merchants to pay to have their products listed will create a better, more relevant shopping experience for the consumer because merchants will care more about the accuracy and completeness of their product feeds. This is a big change, and it is something that requires some action on your part if you want to continue listing your products.

To list your products on Google Shopping, you'll create Product Listing Ads based on your existing product feed from Google Merchant Center and manage your ads with an AdWords account. This is now going to be something that is more expensive and needs to be managed, and it might not be the right thing for you unless you have a budget. 

Social Media. Site visitors have many options for finding you with the advent of social media. Users may find your site through your blog, Twitter account, Facebook page, Pinterest account, forum, or YouTube channel. These are excellent avenues to cultivate for search traffic, as social media represents a hugely growing trend online.

Other search engines. Site visitors have a variety of search engines to choose from when they search online. Google has the biggest share, by far, of the search market, but some other options are Yahoo.com and Bing.com. There are even specialized search engines such as GoodSearch.com, which generates money for charity whenever a search is performed using it. Or DogPile.com, which combines Google, Bing, and Yahoo listings for each search.

Which Search Engines Matter
It probably goes without saying, but Google is the most important search engine, and continues to grow in popularity and market share. Bing.com (formerly LiveSearch) was unveiled in March of 2009 and is establishing a foothold. As of January 2012, Google was in the lead with 66.2% of searches. Bing.com had about 15.2% of searches, while Yahoo had slipped to third with 14.1%. Ask.com was a distant fourth with about 3% and AOL with about 1.6% of all searches.

How SEO Has Changed
The basics of search engine optimization are still in place-high quality on-page content consisting of useful information organized in an effective way, and relevant words and phrases related to your prime search terms, and incoming links from other high quality sites. However, search is a dynamic industry. Exactly how a search engine ranks their results is a closely-guarded secret, but it is known that search engines must constantly change their data-gathering algorithms, primarily in response to spammers and others who try to "game" the system.

As a result of this, Google is placing increased importance on off-page factors that are more difficult for webmasters to control. This means more emphasis on incoming links and link authority, and less emphasis on on-site optimization, although that will always be important. Incoming links from other high-quality web sites is considered to be the top "true" indicator of a site's popularity and factors highly in placement on the results pages.

One important factor within linking is your link popularity, which is the number of sites that are linking to you. Another is relevancy, which is how closely related the content of the sites linking to you is to your content. For instance, if you sell flowers, it wouldn't make much sense for you to have an incoming link from a shoe shop, so Google is not going to value that link very highly. However, if you had links from florists or nurseries, that would be very highly valued. Another factor is link text, which is the words used within the link that is coming to your site from the other page. For instance, if your link from a nursery is a link with the clickable text "wholesale flower grower," that is going to be much more impressive to Google than a link with the clickable text "click here." Link building is a long-term project, so have a plan, be patient, and do a little at a time.

Importance of Google Product Feed
When searching for a product on Google.com, users have the option to click on the "Shopping" tab for options to buy products specific to that search. Your products can appear there through the Product Search index. Good positioning of your products in Google's shopping results is critical. A well-optimized feed can rank well in Google's Product Search, which can help you gain more traffic and customers. Just as with its SERPs, Google ranks products by their relevancy, so a descriptive and complete feed is essential. The more relevant your product descriptions are to common search phrases, the more likely your products are to be seen.

As previously mentioned, listing your products through Google's product feeds is now a paid service. HEROweb is limiting our offer to manage PPC and Google Shopping ads to a case-by-case basis.

Google is offering some incentives for merchants to get started with the new paid model now rather than waiting. As a promotion, all merchants who create Product Listing Ads by August 15, 2012 will automatically receive a monthly credit for 10% of their total Product Listing Ad spend through the end of 2012. Existing Google Product Search merchants can receive $100 AdWords credit toward Product Listing Ads if you fill out a form before August 15, 2012.

Utilizing Paid Options -- Calculating Return on Ad Spend
Return On Ad Spend, or ROAS, represents the dollars spent on ads versus dollars earned, and it is determined by dividing advertisement-driven revenue by the dollar amount spent on advertising.

Knowing whether your paid advertising efforts are paying off are critical to understanding where to place your limited dollars and what changes need to be made to your strategy. ROAS also goes hand-in-hand with the Return On Investment metric. While ROAS measures only what you spend on advertising, ROI is a more complete measure of how much you might spend to get going with an ad campaign. For example, if you spend $10 on AdWords and attain $50 in revenue, the ROAS is $5 or 5x.When other profit margins are taken into account such as COGS (cost of goods sold), etc., you find that the $50 in revenue is really $38, and ROI is $3.80, or 3.8x.So in effect, ROAS is simply how much money returned from sales compared to how much money is spent on advertising, but does not factor in true net profit.

PPC
Using PPC to drive traffic to your online store can work very well, but if the clicks slow down, so does business. It's a challenge to keep these accounts profitable; they often require a lot of attention to make small changes to adjust for keywords and price per click to save a few cents or dollars per click. There's really no way around it-online marketers do need to pay attention to their PPC accounts and be willing to experiment, try new ads, new landing pages, and new keywords.

Google Insights For Search (http://www.google.com/insights/search/#) is a relatively new free product from Google that provides information to help e-tailers make decisions about their paid search. Google doesn't release the actual number of searches for any key word, but they do provide results that help track trends.

Comparison Shopping Engines
Comparison shopping engines, as mentioned above, like Pricegrabber.com and others, are a growing source of traffic and can be an important source of revenue provided they are used optimally. These are growing in popularity as consumers become more aware of the need to spend less or find "a deal." These sites typically don't sell their own merchandise, but they source prices from other sites, from which the shopper can compare and buy.

Some comparison shopping engines retrieve their pricing data directly from sites. Other CSEs do require a product feed file, like the feeds that must be submitted to Google's Product Search. The resulting price retrieval service is accessible to anyone with a browser.

Different CSEs have different payment models. Sometimes, retailers pay a flat fee to be included on the site. Other times, retailers pay a fee each time a user clicks through to the retailer web site, or a retailer may pay every time a user completes a specified action-buying something for example, or signing up for a newsletter.

Twitter, Facebook and realtime search

In late October 2009, Bing entered into agreements with Twitter and Facebook for better display of real-time search results from those services. Shortly after, Google announced that it will similarly display status updates from Twitter. This is a big development and further changes that have been rolled out since then (such as Google +1) have put a continually increased focus on social sharing in search results. When these deals are implemented, this means that Bing and Google will integrate status updates by users of these free services into their regular search service. Twitter and Facebook are by far the largest sources of real-time and content-sharing information on the web today. In order to be listed in the public search results, users of these services have to have certain privacy settings to allow it. If, as a business owner, you have debated about getting a Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest account and haven't yet done so, there is no better time than now.

What You Can Do
The above article presents a lot of information about seemingly unrelated topics. But that is indicative of how the scope of the Internet and how it is used has changed. The first thing to do is assess where you currently are in all these search avenues: what are you using, what are you not using, what would you like to be using, what do you need to learn more about.

Look at your analytics to see where your traffic comes from. This is the most basic of the information that you need to help you decide, with your budget of time and money in hand, where to put your efforts.

With regards to link building, there simply is no real, effective way to reduce the amount of time and effort this takes, but building links from other high quality sites is probably the top one or two most effective things you can do to increase your search engine rankings. If building links is your goal, work on developing relationships with other site owners, enhance the content of your own site, and offer them good reason to link to you. If you are selling products, make sure you are developing good exposure in Google Product Feed through well-optimized, complete data feeds. If you have the budget, experiment with paid search options.

The great thing about these efforts is that while they are important, none are set in stone. It is OK to find the two or things that really work for you and stick with them. The first thing to do, though, is to find those things!