Search Marketing Insomniac…The Blog of Adam Henige

There are plenty of web awards out there, and even some locally here in Lansing.  But we at Netvantage wanted to have a bit more fun with it and let the general public vote for their favorite websites.  With that in mind, we cooked up the Lansing Web Awards, our idea for a web 2.0 take on local web awards.  So while this isn’t the most scientific approach to choosing the best website in the greater Lansing area, we think it’s a great way to get local businesses and the general public thinking about the web and the many great websites established by local businesses.

So if you’re a local business or just a fan of a local business’ website, check out the Lansing Web Awards page and tell your friends, and have your friends tell their friends!  The winners will get some fancy hardware, and as much publicity as we can generate for them.

Further, we finally had a chance to use our green screen for something (there is no truth in the rumor that this entire contest was created so I could finally do something with the green screen), so check out this extremely fancy video we put together.

So, if you like this idea, feel free to share it via facebook, retweet it, or write it on a piece of paper and send it via carrier pigeon.  The more people that get involved the greater success this will be.  Thanks!

I don’t like when things don’t work.  A month ago Comcast decided to create a firewall to block our office from using a service we use every day.  It took three days of emails and phone calls before I finally got it fixed.  We didn’t do anything wrong, Comcast’s firewall just went haywire and decided to ruin our day.  The fact that it took several days to clear up was just ridiculous…

So while I’m no fan of Comcast, I just got flat out annoyed by their most recent addition for customers - the Comcast search redirect!  If you navigate to a down page with no 404 or a dead site you get:

Comcast's latest attempt to annoy me.

Now, I understand the practical nature of this for the average user, but as an SEO I actually like getting the dead page.  I can quickly grab the URL without getting redirected and research it for any number of useful search marketing tasks.  Fortunately, there’s a link in the upper right hand corner to disable this error message - which can be easy or difficult depending on the availability of your myComcast username (good luck with that), and then you’ll get to deal with Comcast customer service!  Have fun with that…

Perhaps my favorite part of search engine marketing is the chance to educate people about it. I never thought much about becoming an academic, but I really have taken a liking to teaching people about search marketing. This evening I had the opportunity to speak to a packed (okay, partially filled) auditorium of college students from the Michigan State Marketing Association, and it was a great experience.

I’m very interested in learning how the generation behind me thinks about search marketing, and how they consider it in comparison to other media.  I threw out the concept of a revolutionary product during their lifetime, and we ended up talking about the Ipod.  Showing my age, I told them that I still owned a Walkman when the Ipod was launched…allowing me a miserable 30 or so minutes of music before I had to flip the tape over - a serious inconvenience mid-workout.

Once they got done laughing at my caveman-like ways (and I didn’t even mention that I was still sporting my sweet Sony Walkman at the gym in 2005) I asked them, “How would you let the world know about this revolutionary device?”  After a minute of coaxing we started talking about traditional ads, and then using demographics to hit our target audiences, etc. etc.  And they were right, this is a great way to build awareness.  But as our discussion went on, I made the point that this was a major departure (not to mention a much more expensive one) from the old fashioned Walkman and the CD player.

Don't act like you're not jealous.

So while the billboards, magazine ads and radio/tv spots can start the buzz, people want to inform themselves before they buy.  Especially in an age when information is so readily available.  And that’s the main point I wanted to get across to these young marketers - information is cheap now, and you need to stay on top of how people are getting their information to be successful.  Search is a key element in that right now.

In my Walkman example I talked about marketing “noise”.  You may have seen the commercial by watching the game, but if you don’t remember the name, how are you going to search for the Ipod the next day?  Would you type in “digital Walkman”?  “Digital music player”? In these situations, if your product’s not there, then you don’t exist.  Herein lies the importance of search marketing, at new product launch and onwards and upwards throughout the product life cycle - you simply HAVE to be there.

I did a lot of talking tonight, and maybe the point wasn’t as refined as it is in the above paragraphs, but I kept the students awake and interested it seemed, and I hope they took away some of the points I tried to make here, because I sure had a blast talking to them about Netvantage and what I do for a living.

Another 1am blog, and in the words of the Ice Cube, whose tape was in my Walkman, “Today was a good day.”

You can’t pinch your pennies enough these days, or pinch them at all if you’re working with a broken hand as I am…ANYHOW, I figured it was about time for another quick hitting edition of SEO On A Nickel - so all of my penny pinching fans feel free to rejoice! No lengthy diatribe, typing with one finger doesn’t lend itself to verbose blogging.

What I want to cover today is extremely important. If you’ve never really laid out a strategy for your SEO work, or you’re just getting started, it’s extremely important that you assess your current state, and the state of those pages occupying the SERPs you desire.

There are some sweet paid tools that will do this for you - like SEOMoz Labs’ Linkscape Visualizer. This very succinctly details how you stack up to a competitor.

We've got a ways to go to catch SEOMoz...those rascals!

If you’re not familiar with SEOMoz, they have their own metrics (thus the names), but the basic concepts from this can be done with other tools to give direction to your SEO efforts.  Some things to look at, and the tools to compare them:

• Inbound links - Yahoo site Explorer is the easiest tool for this task.  Look at the link profile of the ranking page, as well as the domain.  The page may have few links, but might be ranking out on the strength of internal links from a very powerful domain.  Also, be sure you compare apples to apples, having 50 links from the same domain is far different than 50 links from unique domains.  If your links all come from only a few sites, you’ll want to add that to your list of priorities.
• Trust - This is a bit more difficult, but if you have MORE links than a competitor, trust could be an issue.  Link Diagnosis will show you the Google PageRanks of sites linking in.  If you have a bunch of PR1 and PR2 pages and your competitor has a few 5 and 6s…it’s time to get some more authoritative links.
• Internal links - Site Explorer works well for this task, too.  Are you getting the most out of your own site?  Sometimes just by optimizing internal links you can make a major move.  If you see a target page is lacking in internal links, start there.

Essentially, if you perform the above tasks and make yourself a checklist, you can figure out your greatest deficiencies before moving forward.  If you’re trying to save a few bucks in your marketing efforts, this will definitely be a step towards efficiency.

It was everywhere this week - Yahoo and MSN/Live/Bing have joined forces to try to take a bite out of Google. The net was aflutter with buzz. Me? I yawned and kept on with my activities. You see, I’m a bit of an MMA fan, and the events of the last week in the world of mixed martial arts is strangely similar to what I see happening in search so it all feels a bit dated to me.

A quick rundown for those of you who don’t follow the sport - you’ve probably heard of UFC, the unquestioned market leader.  If I say MMA, my mother won’t know what it is, but she’ll know UFC.  To the casual observer, two guys fighting each other in a cage is now known as UFC.  In essence, it’s the Kleenex of the mixed martial arts world.  Much the same, people don’t “search” anymore, they “Google” something.  I’ve heard people say they “Googled” something on Yahoo…I’m sure the brass at Yahoo love that.

Anyhow, due to the success of the 800 lb. gorillas that are UFC and Google, everyone’s trying to get a piece of the pie, but almost no one is succeeding (I’m looking at you Cuil).  UFC has been challenged recently by rival promotions Strikeforce and Affliction.  Affliction paid major dollars to bring in some serious star power (similar to renaming, rebranding and running a gazillion dollar ad campaign with a search engine), including the undisputed best heavyweight fighter in the world Fedor Emelianenko and the number three heavyweight in the world Josh Barnett.  Obviously, these guys were spending serious money on talent and promotion, with pay per views lined up and expected to reach six figures for this coming weekend’s event.  As it happened, the wheels fell off.  Barnett tested positive for steroids, the company didn’t have money or depth in the roster to replace him on short notice, the event was canceled and the entire promotion folded in the span of three days.  The slightly better run Strikeforce promotion (with a TV deal on Showtime) will likely absorb some of the fighters and press on, struggling to make a buck living in UFC’s ever larger shadow.

Being the best fighter in the world outside the UFC must be like being the best search expert in the world working for Ask.com. Photo courtesy of Sherdog.com.

The lesson here is that the war is over.  UFC has already won.  Sure, there will be pockets of turmoil, but things are firmly under control when it comes right down to it.  You’ll notice the NFL’s rival leagues over the years (the USFL for example) never went anywhere, and the leagues that had any success as upstarts (the AFL and ABA) only managed a few successful franchises that eventually got engulfed by the undisputed leader.

What Yahoo and Microsoft fail to realize is that they’re fighting for scraps and it will never amount to more.  They’re not reinventing the wheel here.  People like Google, it works well and that’s that.  I doubt they’ll pull an Affliction and fold in three days (hooray for diversification!) but the search game is one they can’t win without TRULY trying something different.  Putting two guys in a cage, or giving me a search bar that returns results is just allowing me to watch UFC and Google something with a different label on it (and historically of lesser quality).

Either change the way the game is played, or go niche.  Some examples:

• The WEC is a sister fight promotion to UFC that’s gotten popular with fight purists by having lighter weight classes which makes for more fast paced fights, but fewer explosive knockouts.
• Spock is a search engine focusing on finding people, and does a fine job of it.  It helped me contact an old friend that I hadn’t been able to track down in five years - take that Google!

It’s not that there isn’t money to be made, it’s just that companies trying to beat products and services in a game where the established leader sets the standards and makes the rules is just foolhardy.  You’re not going to take their market share away without changing expectations or some serious creative destruction in the market.  Since the creative destruction does not appear to be coming, let’s wisen up a little bit, shall we?