I did a presentation today at Internet World’s “webbdagarna” as the chairperson of SEMPO Scandinavia. It was an interesting morning with some high-quality presentations and a good audience, however the “Jante law” always kicks in; so again not a lot of questions were asked by the audience. If anyone has any good and tested ideas on how to improve this please let me know. For those readers that don’t know about Jante’s old school law that many people tend to live after in this region - read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jante_Law

As I was doing my presentation summarising status of Sweden in the search field, it struck me (again) how far behind we are in realising the value of search and the potential it has. I am grateful to see my clients moving this direction and honoured to work with managers that DO understand, but sad to see that the market in general still has a long way to go. So, who’s fault is that then..? Well, it is the professional search industry that needs to pull efforts together. As mentioned previously we need to join forces and educate the market. We need more educated marketing managers and we need a market that grows strategically to meet the fast moving search consultancy competitors of emerging markets.

At the conference there was a discussion about result driven search and I deeply agree that search needs to be result driven but we need to focus on the bottom line sales or whatever the decided action, target or goal is. I don’t see why some search consultants still just talk about driving traffic to the site and price themselves based on this.

At the same time, I smile because this means that this opening creates great opportunities for long term search marketers with an overall integration perspective

Thank you to all of you attending the search and PR seminar today. I am glad to see that so many of you find it interesting and applicable to your own daily business.

I was intrigued by you all to write a short post about the link popularity of search engines algorithms and how this in the end connects better ranking in the search results and better publicity. As we discussed in seminar, links pointing to your site (=link quality score and link popularity) to your site is of interest to Google when ranking a site in the search engine results page as it regards it as “a vote”. Link farms and other variations of the like has decreased in value due to the fact that search engines don’t like when we try to trick them and appear more popular than we are. This is a point worth stressing and make sure the message of longterm SEO gets out to the crowd of all the marketers listening. There will always be tricks and new methodologies to work around the engines rules and algorithms to score higher points and rank well in Google (or other future search engines). The reason for this is of course in the end money… (as always). SEO is business for many companies and if they don’t make their clients rank high in the search results they loose the client and rightfully so…

If we were to accept the fact that quick fixes is never the answer to a search engine ranking that changes the algorithms on a daily basis, we would also understand that quick fixes with links and “work arounds” aren’t forever.

To follow the guidelines of Google and the other engines you don’t even have to read their guidelines… just understand that search engines try to rank the most suitable sites in the organic listings and meet the needs of their visitors. So.. if we apply this in a our longterm search strategy we need to work with our surrounding; partners, bloggers, friends, organizations etc. to receive high quality and long term link popularity score. And as we all know.. taking care of the partners, bloggers, friends and organizations is never bad. If we also feed them with news and relevant information it will create better visibility for you on their sites and make your link popularity score higher as well as create visibility for you and your partners in the engines.

Good luck to you all with your linking and your PR efforts!

To maximize success and make sure you are making money on your search marketing efforts you have to have a reliable tracking tool. To this very point many people agree with me, however the amount of people actually studying their data aren’t the same. This fact is still fascinating… many clients I meet and have met over the years have a great tracking tool and in many cases a very expensive one (even more so when you don’t use it). I am pretty sure after many years of asking the same question; that this isn’t a case of only laziness… it is a question of knowledge. Often it is the marketing department that get pinged by the sales people and agree to buy and install.. but then the actual knowledge transfer isn’t made. Also I have found that most people in the marketing department are interested in the data but just don’t know how to use it.

Input to the client side: Integrating search and analytics means your internal teams have to meet. It is critical that the in house teams of marketing and analytics act together to buy, install and set up the conversion funnels to measure success. If you buy or invest time in a tool - make sure it is set up correctly and you are clear on what you want to measure. A tip: Try setting up an ongoing analysis for trends so that you can evaluate more sources of data in one spreadsheet.

Input to the sales side: It is about time that all basic installation processes is part of the overall package. Some have this some don’t. Specific training of course needs to be added as every client is different.

To maximize the ability of your search efforts make sure you integrate with the analytics team of your company and define and measure the result together from start. Spend time to make sure it has a correct set up and make sure you get training to use all the capacity of the tracking tool. Invest more money on training and understanding than the actual tool is a rule I normally apply.

Lately I have received many questions around how to work with your PR online and how the search engines read press releases. This area is not new and since I spoke about SEO and PR at Webbdagarna conference in Stockholm 2006 some companies have started to pick up and sell this to clients. It is very important to understand that it is not in anyway a new feature or new product… however very powerful if you work with this in an integrated marketing approach.

Making sure your press material is optimized and your blogs are visible in the search result list can be very powerful and even critical if you have a lot of negative publicity. Negative publicity around your brand, CEO or products can easily get spread over the net and will be visible in the search engines. Therefore make sure you are optimizing your press releases and include keywords in headings, content and name of file so that it has a chance of ranking in Google News, Yahoo news as both journalist and clients use these.

To get an idea if you have negative content in the search results pages I recommend you to go do some research in the engines on the related keywords and see what shows up. Sometimes it is information that is not even true and might be interesting for you to act on.

To provide my local audience with more details around this I partner with David Lerdell at Lerdell Investigations as he is an excellent PR and Blog expert. Together we will run a short seminar in Stockholm the 11th of March 2008 to inform and share case studies on the subject of search and PR integration. If you want to attend this seminar, go to the following page:
http://www.lerdell.com/anmalan/

Measuring brand effectiveness online can be somewhat tricky… but there are definitely some different techniques that can be valuable to look at if you spend the time and effort to do so. As the marketing father Philip Kotler preaches; one of the best ways to measure your ongoing performance is to use benchmark studies. You need to measure brand performance and satisfaction in order to see how you are performing online and in order to place further investments.

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Maybe search gives such good feed back that your product enhances and search suddenly was a resource to you that made everything in the launch better!..

What can you do to get search input for a product launch…?

• Search in search engines for the keywords related to your new feature or new idea and see if there are any posted blogs, articles or forums with current wishes or if they see any new potential of old versions. At the same time note what sites rank on what keywords and be aware of the competition you might be facing if you want to show up in the results yourself.
• Search your competitors’ products and see what information they provide around new features and where they rank. Especially look at what other people have said about their products and if any rankings reveal some interesting facts.
• Some launches can be discussed in blogs on or off the corporate site but in order to get people there you should get your own blog to rank high in search engines or choose blogs that already are popular and is addressed to your target group.
• Produce additional content with questions and conversation of the new features you plan. If these features are not yet
• Produce articles and content on your site about new product enhancements you are about to do, even before they have left the idea stage, so that you can receive feed back.

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Search should never be considered as only a traffic generating marketing channel. It is your window to meet your target audience. It is more about how you wish to communicate with them in that space and how you make sure you are the perfect match for than rather than your key competitors.. It is hence a window of opportunity for every marketer but also a moving forever changing list where you fight for space in a crowd that gets more and more creative. At the same time you also need to be aware that your customers are a moving crowd that will constantly evaluate you and compare you to meet their needs.

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It all really depends on what you are looking for. I think it is crucial to consider that we have cultural variations and that we search differently. However we are all human beings with the same problems or same concerns and we are all looking for information and news. What really differ though are local searches and the way we conduct them. In many non English speaking European countries for instance we adopt English phrases and English terms and put these into our local search engines to avoid all the non local information that we would get otherwise.

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This is my first own blog and I am really excited to get started with this project. I think the search marketing industry is in lack of blogs that is not focused around algorithms and rankings and hopefully I can fill a gap. I am also looking forward to great input from other valuable bloggers in this area so that it will be a resource to learn from and inspire to better and more integrated marketing efforts.