Exploiting Site-Internal Search Systems for SEM

April 24, 2007 – 10:05 am

Many of our clients’ sites have internal search features, which allow visitors to the site to search for information within the site, such as a “Find a {Doctor/Center/Office/Event/Course/Dealership/etc.} Near You” feature. This type of internal search is powered by a searchable database, and the URLs of search results pages in this system are dynamically generated. With all the possible permutations of different parameters, this can add up to thousands of possible URLs. However, we have recently been developing tools for using the internal search results pages as landing pages for sponsored search ads. This is a unique way to take users directly to the page that is most relevant to them.

Suppose you have internal search on your site. Your brand, Acme Dialysis, is trying to help people find kidney dialysis centers near them. Assuming the user’s first stop is a typical search engine like Google, where they type in, for example, “Dialysis centers in Chicago”. You have a search results page on your site that contains a list of all your dialysis centers near Cleveland. But how do you serve an ad on Google’s search results page that links people to your internal search results page for Chicago?

The answer is that those long, complex, and often intimidating URLs of internal search results pages are actually quite systematic. By tapping into this systematic URL structure, we can generate super-targeted keyphrases and ads, so that when someone types in:

“Dialysis centers in Chicago”

They see an ad that says:

Chicago Dialysis Center
Visit Acme Dialysis Center Located
Near You in Chicago.
www.Acme-Dialysis-Centers.com

And they are then taken to page on the site as though they had just searched your internal database for centers in Chicago. It is possible to do this for hundreds of locations at a time, as well as for multiple products. The end results is a campaign with thousands of keywords, each of which has a highly targeted specific ad, and each of which takes users to exactly what they wanted on your site.

Major e-commerce retailers have long used this tactic. For example, if you search for an ordinary product and click on an eBay ad, you will be taken to the same page as if you had searched within eBay for that product. As brand marketers’ sites become more integral to their business, they should consider integrating this type sophistication into their paid search campaigns as well.

By Ehren | Posted in CPC, Local Search, PPC, Paid Search, SEM, Search Marketing | Comments (0)

Search Matters Weekly Search Links 4/18/2007

April 18, 2007 – 9:21 am

Google Bombing, Wikipedia vandalism and the future of Google search are making the top headlines this week.

  • Is Stephen Colbert the Greatest Living American? You decide. (SEOmoz)
  • Now that Google is an advertising giant, will search get abandoned and/or outsourced? (Gord)
  • Search for regulated industries? Who knew? (Catalyst Blog)
  • Want to know how far you walked after dinner last night and if you burned enough calories to account for the creme brulee? Try Google Maps Pedometer. (Gmaps Pedometer)
  • Channel Partner B2B search marketing tactics (Search Engine Land)
  • Wikipedia seeks to bar submissions for “The Office” because of wiki-vandalism. (Yahoo News)
  • Ask.com CEO explains “the alogorithm” and why it keeps finding Jesus. (SEW)
By Francis | Posted in Ask, Google, Linking, SEM, SEO, Search Engines, Search News | Comments (0)

Report from SES: Linkbaiting

April 16, 2007 – 9:56 am

One of the hottest topics at the SES Conference in New York was the concept of “linkbaiting”. Content producers have always known that hot news items attract visitors in droves. Providing viral tools such as “E-mail to a friend” can help encourage that. But in the last couple years, viral marketing has acquired a new infrastructure of its own, one that advertisers can leverage to promote their products.

Social media sites such as Digg, del.icio.us, and YouTube have very different business models and functions, but they share the same “killer app.” They provide an environment where people with similar interests can easily share links to sites they like. If you are a Red Sox fan, like me, we no longer have to e-mail game highlights to each other. I can simply bookmark the highlight for myself on del.icio.us, and the sharing happens automatically.

Read More »

By Sherwood Stranieri | Posted in Linking, SEM, SEO Best Practices, SES, Search Marketing Conferences, Search News, Social Media, Video Search | Comments (0)

Search Matters Weekly Search Links

April 11, 2007 – 2:39 pm

For those of you who, like me, don’t happen to be at SES, there is actually some search news happening that isn’t in New York city. Which is where all your colleagues are. Laughing. Networking. Maxing out their expense accounts. Completely not sitting back at the office blogging. Good times.

  • Jupiter study finds that local search and vertical search are on the rise. Whew! (Search Engine Land)
  • Jupiter also says that Search Marketers are happy with ROI and plan to spend more. (ClickZ)
  • Jupiter is a failed star, or gas giant that saves us from most intra-solar system comets and meteors (Wiki-P)
  • Why you should blog. And this one says a little more than my list which is: for the money, duh. (SEOmoz)
  • Sometimes you can actually over SEO-ize your site. (Copyblogger)
  • From the dark side…viral videos. Beware. Only what you take with you… (SEO Blackhat)
  • 6 Reasons Aaron Wall shouldn’t blog: Again: for the money duh… (SEO Book)
  • Dave Sifry expands his “State of..” from the blogosphere, to the “State of the Live web.” Next, is Sifry’s “State of the known universe including your box full of wires that your fiancee keeps trying to throw away, but when she needed an extension cord for her bridal shower, that box was looking pretty good wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?” (Sifry’s Alerts)

And to kill the rest of your afternoon: The entire movie Office Space, reshot using Peeps as actors. Freekin. PEEPS. Head over to YouTube to see it because apparently it’s too hot for our servers to handle. (Go)

By Francis | Posted in Search Engines, Search Marketing, Search Marketing Conferences, Search Matters, Search News | Comments (0)

Catalyst is at SES. Behold!

April 11, 2007 – 9:19 am

SES 2007 is underway in New York City! The best of the best in Search are there! Two of our top Catalyst people (Catalytes?) are there! Why am I talking in exclamations? No clue.

Heather Frahm, Catalyst’s President and co-founder is speaking on Friday in the vertical track. Her topic is Search for Regulated Industries. She’ll discuss the difficulty of developing SEO/SEM campaigns for the pharma and healthcare in an environment where the exception is always the rule and best practices won’t cut it. Heather will be posting a recap of her talk and her experiences at SES over at her blog, Catalyst Search Marketing Blog.

Sherwood Stranieri, Search Marketing Director at Catalyst, spoke yesterday on the hot buzz topic of Video Search. Sherwood is an industry expert on video search, so needless to say his presentation was a hit. He tells me that he recieved great questions from the conference floor and was really excited to see the interest in this new search channel. Stay tuned for a more detailed summary from Sherwood later today.

Here’s just a few of the top search sites that covered Sherwood’s Video Search Presentation.

We’ll be posting all week from SES, so check back for updates. We’re very excited to be a part of SES NYC this year and to meet our peers, colleagues and even competitors - whom we’ll be glad to take out for beers. Really.

By Francis | Posted in SEM, SEO, SEO Best Practices, SES, Search Engines, Search Marketing, Search Marketing Conferences, Search News, Video Search | Comments (2)

Search Matters Weekly Search Links

April 4, 2007 – 2:31 pm

There are a lot of hot search topics going on this week from litigation, to PPA, to Google’s right hand not know what their left hand is doing. Try to keep up.

  1. Google’s Website Optimizer is now out of beta in into …whatever Greek letter comes after beta. Is it cloaking? Is Google so big that they can’t see that this may violate their own TOS? (SEW)
  2. Think just because you have a PPC ad running that you should open a Swiss account for all that sweet ROI. Think again. Here are some steps to make sure you’re getting quality clicks not just quantity. (Search Engine Land)
  3. SEO can save your business and your marriage. Well maybe just your business. But your wife seems nice. (SEOmoz)
  4. Get Gmail Paper! It has everything that regular Gmail has but now you can fill your Costanza wallet with your archives. Never delete a thing! (Google, via Matt Cutts)
  5. Don’t ask Seth Godin to be on your Blogroll (kidding). Reciprocal linking is sooo high school. (SEL)

Enjoy the links. The snarky comments are mine, not the erudite and totally serious authors to whom I have linked.

By Francis | Posted in Adsense, CPC, Google, Organic Search, SEM, Search Engines, Search News | Comments (2)

Online Video for Healthcare Companies

April 3, 2007 – 7:46 am

Since the DTC advertising took-off ten years ago, pharmaceutical companies have been aware of the persuasive power of video. TV commercials have brought an unprecedented degree of awareness to mass audiences, and have brought depth and dimension to products that would otherwise be difficult to explain. Now that opportunity is expanding to include online video. Online video resembles television in many ways:

  • It is currently dominated by entertainment content.
  • Thanks to the widespread adoption of broadband, viewership can often be measured in millions (although there’s no “broadcast” - so that viewership builds-up over time.)
  • Word of mouth (and its e-mail/IM equivalents) can launch a video into the spotlight.

Healthcare companies can use these similarities to reach out to online audiences by purchasing pre-roll commercials at popular portal sites. These are displayed at the start of a video clip, and often accommodate a standard 15-second format.

However, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Greater gains can be had by leveraging the non-TV attributes of online video: Read More »

By Sherwood Stranieri | Posted in Healthcare, Newsletter, Pharma, SEM, SEO, Search Engines, Social Media, Video Search | Comments (1)

The Google is Coming. The Google is Coming.

March 27, 2007 – 3:29 pm

Like the last invaders from back in ‘75 (Seventeen Seventy Five that is), it seems that Google, a new dreadnought, has its sights on Boston and they’re planning on more than a fortnight’s stay. Amidst not so subtle clues, like job listings for Google and YouTube for the Boston area and search insider gossip, the one if by land two if by sea warning may be a moot point for this invasion; a move that may bring some much needed tech juice to the flagging overpriced economy of the city known for its chowder, funny accents and dirty, dirty water.

Google, one of the tech world’s hottest companies, is scouting for a major location in Boston or Cambridge.

Cambridge is likely at the top of Google’s list as it looks to establish a major presence near Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in one of the nation�s top pools for technology talent, executives said.

“It’s just further evidence of the world-class labor resources we have in our area,” said Robert Richards, president of downtown Boston commercial real estate firm of Richards Barry Joyce & Partners. “We are not the cheapest place to do business, but many people feel we are the best place to do business.”
(source)

Expensive? As anyone from Cape Cod will tell you in their Black Dog T-shirt, and best Kennedy accent, “Why be cheap, when you can be rich?” All kidding aside, Boston is an extremely expensive market in which to live and even more so to do business. Google has long proved the old idiom that bigger is better and that money can buy anything, (they’ll definitely get a bungalow on Nantucket) so what better place to invade set up shop, than Beantown USA. Read More »

By Francis | Posted in Blogs, Google, Local Search, Organic Search, SEM, SEO, Search Engines, Search News | Comments (0)

Paid Search: Are you getting your money’s worth?

February 28, 2007 – 2:18 pm

The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) recently released its annual industry survey and it includes some truly remarkable findings. One such finding is that spending on paid search marketing was approximately $8 Billion (U.S.) in 2006 and that number is expected to double over the next five years. This is obviously a testament to the value that paid search marketing can provide, but it also begs some key questions. Am I getting my moneys worth from my paid search campaign? Is my campaign producing a positive ROI? Should I spend more, or less?

Read More »

By Tim Breen | Posted in Adsense, CPC, Local Search, Newsletter, Overture, PPC, Paid Search, Search Engines, Text Ads | Comments (3)

SEO for Events and Seasonal Promotions

February 21, 2007 – 4:48 pm

Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has a lot of strengths when compared to other marketing channels. SEO can build long-term equity for a website, providing a cost-effective supplement to paid search ads, media buys, and many other forms of online advertising.
But one area where SEO traditionally fell short is with seasonal or event-driven promotions. SEO practitioners know that preparing a website to rank in search results can take a lot of time and effort. And even after the changes are made, the search engines still need to digest the new pages and adjust rankings accordingly. Because of this lag time, SEO isn’t usually considered a front-line technique for promotions that come and go.

Read More »

By Sherwood Stranieri | Posted in Google, Organic Search, SEM, SEO, SEO Best Practices, Search Marketing | Comments (0)