Establish Search Marketing Best Practices


After you staff and train your central search team, you need to put them to work assisting your extended search team. The central team must constantly evangelize, educate, and consult with the extended team, helping them implement each search technique. But that's not enough. The central team must work with the extended team to embed search best practices into the existing standards and processes of your organization.

Why is this important? Because search engine marketing is not a one-time thing. This is not the Year 2000 project, in which everyone gears up to do something once and then goes back to normal when it is over. Search marketing must be worked at every day. You must convince dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of people to undertake new tasks, sometimes changing the way they have done their job for years. Those kinds of behavior changes do not come about because you gave them a presentation once. They come about because every process in the organization is gently (and sometimes not so gently) nudging them to do what is needed.

The most important guideline is to go with the flow. Look at how work already flows in your organization and try to add tasks where they belong. Here are some examples:

  • Every Web page being changed goes through a quality-assurance (QA) checkpoint before being promoted to production. Maybe you can get the QA team to enforce your new search standard at this checkpoint for each page?

  • All technology projects have their designs reviewed by an architecture board before beginning development. Could you assign one of your team members to the board to ensure that designs are search-friendly?

  • A content standard already exists that requires a title tag be present on every Web page. Can you get the standard updated so that all titles must be a certain length? And that they are unique, rather than the same title appearing on multiple pages? And that description tags must be present too?

  • All new Web projects are starting to use a content management system. Can you update the publishing workflow so that all pages undergo both HTML validation and keyword analysis (for prominence and density) before they are promoted to production?

  • Your site regularly executes a program that checks every page for broken links and reports the pages with errors to their owners to be corrected. Could you get the program expanded to check for proper title tags as well?

You get the idea. Take whatever processes already exist in your organization and tweak them to include what you need. It is much easier to change an existing process than to get agreement to start a new onea new one can often arouse the corporate immune system (the one that rejects foreign ideas). Although your organization will undoubtedly have unique processes that you must think through, you should consider two key best practices: changing your standards and centralizing keyword management. Let's look at standards first.

Change the Standards and Enforce Them

Embedding search marketing best practices into existing standards and processes helps the extended team in several ways. First, it ensures that search marketing techniques get their attention, if only because their project is stopped to correct a problem. Second, it also helps extended team members justify the extra work to their managers. If there are no teeth in the standards, managers under the gun to cut budgets or meet impossible deadlines will cut the search work, even if the extended team members want to do it. By making search work part of what is required, it cannot be eliminated even when the pressure is on (which it always seems to be).

Now understand, merely enhancing existing standards and processes might not be enoughyou might need to create new standards and develop new procedures to enforce compliancebut existing standards are the place to start. It is always easier to change an existing standard than to create a new one, and existing standards already have a compliance process in place. When you create a new law, you might be stuck hiring a new police force, too. It is difficult and expensive and should be a last resort.

We have covered all of these issues in other parts of the book, but here is a consolidated list of items that make sense for almost every organization to cover in their standards:

  • Content standards. Ban frames, pop-up windows, "meta refresh" tags, JavaScript navigation, and the various other evils we preached against in Chapter 10, "Get Your Site Indexed." Demand correct robots metatags as well as validation of all HTML. Consign style sheets and JavaScript coding to external files, and do not allow pages to exceed 100K. Relegate Flash and other non-HTML formats to content that you do not need included in search indexes. Don't require typed entry of information in order to display any page that you want indexed. Also remember the lessons of Chapter 12, "Optimize Your Content," by insisting on unique and well-written title and description tags and keyword-rich content.

  • Technical standards. Require robots.txt files to be coded correctly and checked frequently. Insist on 301 redirects when pages are moved to new URLs. Minimize the number of parameters in dynamic URLs. Don't require cookies, JavaScript, or any other technical requirement that spiders cannot fulfill to display a page. Order all servers to be available 99.5 percent of the time or more, and demand that all Web pages load within 10 seconds.

Use existing standards where possible to capitalize on existing compliance processes, but invent your own if needed. One place where you will undoubtedly need to invent your own process is our next topic: keyword management.

Centralize Keyword Management

After you have some experience with search marketing, you will find that some keywords that are very important to you are also very important to others. You will probably find there are a few keywords that are highly competitivemaybe you have someone constantly bidding you up in paid placement, for example. That's not an easy situation, but it's intolerable when that other person is inside your own company.

Yes, large companies often find the right hand bidding against the left hand. Maybe Buick is bidding against Cadillac within General Motors for the keyword luxury sedan. Or Tide is fighting with Cheer and Gain at Proctor & Gamble over laundry detergent. At other times, your company is struggling over customer setswould a large consulting company have multiple groups battling over small business marketing? Sometimes the contested keywords are more subtle. How many departments fight over Linux or Windows? Different groups have servers that run Linux or software the runs on Linux or services to help you migrate to Linuxyou get the picture. But it is not a pretty picture. It is upsetting enough when your competitors drain your paid search budgets with "crazy" bidding, but how galling is it when it is your own company?

That is why you need to consider centralizing all keyword planning. You recall from our discussion in Chapter 8 that centralize is a relative term, depending on your organization. When you decided the scope for your central search team, you wrestled with this questionthe decision you made then will work now, too. Within that scope, centralizing all keyword planning is usually a good idea.

When you centralize keyword planning, you immediately get rid of runaway paid placement bidding against yourself. You also give yourself a chance to optimize organic searchif you have separate domains within your company (www.buick.com and www.cadillac.com), you might be able to get two listings for each of them in the top ten organic listings. (That's 40 percent of the organic results on the first page.) Although you might find some benefits in centralization for organic search keywords, you will accrue the bulk of your benefits by eliminating intramural bidding wars in paid search.

So how do you go about centralizing keyword planning? If you do not yet have any battles over keywords in your company, establish the practice before any damage is done. If the battles have already started, however, how do you wrest control? You start with evangelismtell everyone about the problem. Long and loud. Calculate what it is costing the company in wasted paid placement fees. Use your metrics to show how much those wasted fees could have returned had they been invested well. Then offer to save that money by handling the coordination across the business units within your central search team. If the coordination work is extensive, you might need to take a cut of the savings to pay for additional resources for your team.

When you wrest control of the mission, you need to organize your approach to coordinate the job. Depending on how much coordination is required, one of these ways will make the most sense in your situation:

  • Manual. This is the simplest method and the easiest way to start. Simply appoint someone on the central search team as the focal point for all business units to work with on all keyword planning. Some organizations require that this person get the passwords for all exiting paid search accounts so that all paid search activity goes through one place.

  • Automated. If you have a large paid search budget, the manual labor of coordinating all that activity might cost too much. In that case, create a central database for all paid search requests. Anyone who has the budget to run a paid search campaign can submit a list of keywords to your central keyword tool. It does not matter whether your tool is a Web program, a database application, or any other shared resourcewhatever is easiest for you to implement. What does matter is how the tool works. It should check the list of keywords submitted against all existing keywords to find any conflicts. If no on else in your company is using your keywords, you proceed with your campaign. If there is a conflict, the tool can resolve the conflict, as we describe later in this chapter.

  • Hybrid. Perhaps you do not have enough money to fully automate the process. Then just automate the most painful part of the process. Maybe you can post the keyword list that is currently in use so that anyone proposing a new campaign can check the list before the campaign starts. Frequently, you can develop an automated process one piece at a time.

Now that you know how to identify a conflict, what exactly do you do when you find one? Your organization probably already has a style it uses for conflict resolution, so take advantage of the existing culture. If disputes between organizations are typically resolved by a high-level executive, you can bring the list of disputed keywords there each week for a decision. If your culture calls for the two parties to work out the dispute themselves, provide the contact information so they can talk to each other. If your company likes to have impartial boards of experts, go that route. Sometimes you can make the criteria for resolution objective:

  • The group that had it first gets it.

  • Each group rotates week to week.

  • Both groups should use the "friendly URL" technique (discussed in Chapter 14, "Optimize Your Paid Search Program") to avoid bidding each other up. (This solution will not work for Google, unfortunately.)

  • The group with the most profitable product gets it.

You can probably think of other ideas, too. But most organizations find that the best way to solve this problem is to develop a new landing page that features the offerings of both warring groups. If you think about it, the reason that each group wants the same keyword is that their customers would likely use it to find either group's product. If that is true, why not let the customer decide?

Think back to the Linux example. If five different groups within your company all have something to say to customers searching for "linux," why not put the messages of all five on a single landing page? Each group can have to a link to their old search landing page from the new landing page. So if your company sells five kinds of software that all run on Linux, show them all on a single landing page.

This approach helps in several ways. Obviously, it ends the bidding war and provides a seemingly fair solution to the five parties involved. (Yes, they will each argue about which group gets more prominent placement on the new landing page, but you can develop several versions of the page that rotate, if necessary.) But it also makes your company's message far stronger than before. Many more searchers will find your ad copy and your page to be compelling and some might actually be interested in more than one of your offerings, whereas in the past they would only have seen one.

No matter how you resolve the conflicts, make sure that your advertising agency or search marketing consultant (if you have one) is aware that your central search team arbitrates all conflicts. You can also work directly with the paid placement engines themselves, so that they know what your policy is. If you are a large enough customer account, the engines will be happy to let you know when they see internal bidding wars and will counsel the combatants to contact you for resolution. If necessary, you can go so far as to require that any new campaign must have your approval before the engines can place any ads.

Intel provides an excellent case study for how well central keyword planning can work. In 2002, 19 percent of all keywords were being bid by more than one Intel search marketer, sometimes by as many as nine at once! You can imagine that this was costing Intel a lot of money as well as making it harder for searchers to find the breadth of Intel's offerings. Intel's Martin Laetsch spent the next year centralizing all keyword planning, resulting in a doubling of clickthrough rates with a 50 percent reduction in per-click fees. Your company might be able to produce a similar success story with centralized keyword planning.



    Search Engine Marketing, Inc. Driving Search Traffic to Your Company's Web Site
    Search Engine Marketing, Inc.: Driving Search Traffic to Your Companys Web Site (2nd Edition)
    ISBN: 0136068685
    EAN: 2147483647
    Year: 2005
    Pages: 138

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