A Search Engine Marketing Program

The purpose of this page is to provide a snapshot of a typical search engine marketing (SEM) program that involves search engine optimization (SEO). It assumes an evaluation of your opportunity with SEM has returned positive and the decision made to embark on a program.

Although the following breaks the program into component parts, the process is more fluid and less linear than this outline suggests. It begins with understanding your general business and marketing and sales goals, as well other factors, such as experience to date with traffic and sales on your site. As marketing professionals, we understand SEM is just one part of your marketing mix. Our perspective isn't limited to driving traffic to your site. We want you to convert sales and will tell you if we think your pages or site need strengthening to sell more effectively. This is something that often surfaces once a program is under way and we have hard data that let's us know what is working and what is not.

A search engine marketing program in not a one-off effort but an ongoing campaign. Nevertheless, there is an upfront ... of activity we call the set-up phase that takes typically one to two months, depending on the size and scope of the work to be done. During this time we figure out points one and two below, optimize for an agreed-upon number of priority keyword phrases, submit them to search engines, create and make directory submissions, begin seeking inbound links, and create and begin implementing a cost-per-click keyword advertising campaign. Even when there's a specific, limited list of keyword phrases for SEO, we usually don't complete them all in the set-up phase. We want to get optimized pages out the door as soon as possible so they can start working for you. SEO efforts, in terms of adding new keywords, can extend six to 12 months, or even longer depending on the opportunity. Basic maintenance of your rankings, and especially the CPC keyword advertising, need to be ongoing.

After the set-up phase, in what we call the ongoing monthly maintenance, we tweak existing optimized pages to improve their rankings, add additional keywords, and continue to seek links and run the CPC ad campaign, as described below. We also provide you with monthly keyword ranking and log analsis reports so you can see very specifically the results and progress of your program. The greater the number of good keyword phrases available, the more impact we can deliver over a longer period of time, both in SEO and CPC keyword advertising.

Following are the basic components of a search engine marketing program in more detail:

1. Keyword Selection: Our first task is a comprehensive keyword phrase analysis. Finding and prioritizing the best keyword phrases is the most important part of SE marketing. See Importance of Keywords for a detailed explanation. We work with you to prioritize these keyword phrases. We may eliminate some keyword phrases for SEO, or change their priority, based on a subsequent analysis of the competition for those keyword.



2. Analyze the Competition: We look at the top 10 sites on Google and other search engines for our keyword phrases to understand what it will take to get on the first page of search results. With the use of specialized software tools, we analyze, with a good deal of detail, the competition's page content as well as the strength of their inbound links. This analysis is discussed in some detail in the section The Essence of SEO in our essay, Search Engine Optimization.
   
   
3. Run Current-status Reports for Benchmarking: Once the keywords to be optimized have been selected, we run and provide you with two reports: Keywords Ranking and Log File Analysis. The former tells you where your selected keywords currently rank on the most important search engines. The latter, which we run for the most current complete month, gives us a lot of detail on the kind of traffic your site's getting, though we're primarily concerned with what it's getting from search engines. A log file report tells you the visits you're getting from specific search engines as well as the specific searched phrases that brought visitors to your site. To see what this looks like, here are links to sample reports from WebTrends Log Analyzer, the leading log analysis program, and to 123LogAnalyzer, which we like because it's fast and only 25 percent the cost of the WebTrends program. Depending on the sample report, view the Referrer & Keywords or the Search Engine Statistics.



4. Develop an Optimization Strategy: We need to figure out how to take your existing Web site and optimize pages for the selected keywords. We map the keywords to specific pages, and in some cases recommend creating new pages. This strategy may also address site design, architecture and navigation issues. We may suggest adding a site map so that search engine spiders can better find and access pages at lower levels of the site hierarchy. We may suggest adding a links page, to be able to offer link exchanges as part of building your inbound link position. In our essay About Search Engines we discussed The Search Engine-friendly Site and said that many sites are either unfriendly to search engines or completely impenetrable to them due to the use, or inefficient use, of such things as frames, Flash, JavaScript, and image maps. Especially, if you want to be well positioned in search engines, you need to use words on your site, and not words on images.
   
   Every Web site is a unique challenge. How flexible you, our client, can be about making changes to the site will determine what strategy we recommend. For example, if your site is impenetrable to search engines and you're unwilling to change this, we may need to go off-site in our tactics. This could involve building another site that can be highly optimized to feed visitors to your site. Another strategy could be to employ what's called cloaking. This involves having your server show one page to the Web user, and a different page to the search engine spiders. It is achieved by knowing the IP addresses of the spiders and putting a special script on the server to manage it. You're not spamming the search engines as long as you're giving them the same content that the browsers see; in this case you're just enabling the search engines to see what humans see.



5. Implement Optimization Strategy: Having established your priority keywords and agreed on an optimization strategy, we now implement that strategy. As noted above, site wide changes may be made to open up the site and make all pages more accessible to search engines. Or we may only make changes to the specific pages needed to optimize for your priority keywords. This may entail major copywriting to ensure the page sells the prospect more effectively, and especially if the page is not already rich enough in word content for us to effectively optimize it. We may create new pages, as well. Depending on your specific program, it's unlikely that we'll optimize for all the keywords selected for the program before submitting to search engines, so we can start seeing results as soon as possible.
   
   Simultaneously, we also set up the CPC keyword advertising program and begin efforts to obtain more inbound links for the site, as discussed below.



6. Directory Submissions: If your site is not already listed in Yahoo! and Open Directory, we will submit to these prior to the spider search engines because the their links to your site will have a definite impact on how they rank your pages. To learn more about directories, please see our discussion, Search Engines vs. Directories.



7. Express Submissions: Once we're ready to submit your newly optimized pages to the spider search engines and have procured any needed directory listings, we recommend using the express submission programs offered by some of the search engines. By paying money we can have these search engines index your pages quickly—for example, within 48 hours versus in two to three months. Depending on your budget, the cost is not insignificant. For example, the Inktomi program, which feeds MSN and Hotbot, charges $39 for the first URL and $25 per URL thereafter. And you must pay them every year. Other engines that offer express submission include AltaVista (which charge more than twice as much because they must be paid every six months), Lycos and FAST/AlltheWeb. Google does not offer express submission, but fortunately Google indexes fairly frequently, at least monthly. The engines that do offer it, however, can take months to index new pages. It's advantageous to use express submissions not just to get the initial indexing, but to ensure the search engines index your pages often. This is important because we're constantly making changes, or tweaking the optimized pages to improve rankings. Progress would indeed be slow if we had to wait two to three months to see the impact every time we made some changes.



8. In-Bound Links: A critical part of just about any SEO program is attaining more inbound links to your site. And as you might have inferred from the earlier section on competitive analysis, we want to obtain quality links from sites with relevant content to your own. We cannot overemphasize the importance of building a good inbound link infrastructure. It's one of the most important factors to search engine rankings. It's something you invest in over time, and like any other investment, it pays dividends. A competitor cannot come along and overtake you overnight. For more information, see Importance of Links.
   
   During the initial set-up phase we expend an agreed-upon number of hours to link acquisition. We need to dive into this a bit to understand the universe of opportunity for your site. After putting in the initial effort, we can determine how much additional time in link acquisition will yield value.



9. Cost-per-click Keyword Advertising: A detailed discussion of CPC keyword advertising is provided in our essays, CPC Keyword Advertising and SEO vs. CPC Advertising. As soon as we've completed the keyword analysis, we can start setting up programs with various ad networks and creating ads, unless we need to create or do a major rewrite of the pages we'll be sending prospects to. While it's time consuming to set all this up, results (traffic to your site) can be had within three days of submitting the first ads.
   
   If your site is not too large and server space isn't an issue, we recommend creating separate directories on the site for each ad program, and then copying all your files into them. This provides a more accurate picture of site activity as a result of these programs, as portrayed in log file analysis reports. For example, if we have a directory called "ov" for Overture, when we look at a log file report we can see all the page views generated from Overture because every one will be recorded in that directory as in: http://www.yoursite.com/ov/index.html .
   
   Tracking CPC keyword advertising closely is very useful because it tells us not only which keywords are performing, but also tells us which Web pages are not doing a good job of selling. If we have a very specific ad (i.e., to qualify your prospects), and we get a lot of clickthroughs, but then see in the log files that nearly everyone is jumping off the site without going beyond the entry page, we know that there's a problem that needs to be fixed, e.g., perhaps the page is not communicating or selling effectively.



10. Monthly Maintenance: After phase one where we get everything set up and send some optimized pages out the door, we move into the monthly maintenance program. On an ongoing basis, we continue to try to improve rankings for keyword phrases we’ve already optimized for, and to optimize for new keyword phrases (e.g., 1 to 4 per month). We continue to seek inbound links, where additional effort is likely to yield value. And we run the CPC keyword ad program.
    
    Every month we run both the keyword rankings and log file analysis reports. A couple paragraphs earlier we mentioned the value of log file analysis in implementing the CPC keyword advertising program. Log file analysis is also valuable in SEO, because it can tell us such things as which keywords should be emphasized (e.g., work to improve their rankings) and perhaps new keywords to add. The keyword rankings report is helpful in telling us where your keywords are ranked. But ultimately, Search engine marketing is really about getting targeted prospects visiting your site, and then converting them.
    
    Finally, a SEM program, like any marketing program, is a fluid and evolutionary effort that involves trial and error, learning and improvement, and back and forth communications between client and agency. As marketing professionals, we understand and meet the needs of our clients for professional communications.