The throngs of marketers attending the five program tracks at Search Engine Strategies 2006 last month clearly demonstrated that every industry – including book publishing – is going after this burgeoning branch of online marketing.
Geoff Ramsey of eMarketer mapped the terrain: $15.6 billion will be spent on online advertising in 2006 – more than double the spending of three years ago – which will double again by 2009. Search advertising now represents 41% of online ad spending, with branding close behind at 38% – yet all online ad spending still represents less than 5% of the total advertising dollars.
What’s fueling the growth? Bryan Eisenberg, chairman of Web Analytics, cited one meaningful stat: people are now spending 25% of their time on the Web. While Ramsey noted that only 5% of this time is spent on search, more than 67% of Internet users conduct online research before making a purchase.
Search engine strategies begin with how you present your content, how your pages link, and whether the keywords you use lead to your site. Conference organizer Danny Sullivan, editor of searchenginewatch.com, emphasized that whether you call them “free listings, or organic, or editorial or natural,” your site can rank high on a results page – without any advertising expenditure – if it has great content, quality links, and good traffic. To find out how they stacked up, participants eagerly had their own sites critiqued by such well-regarded experts as Shari Thurow, author of the popular Search Engine Visibility (searchenginesbook.com).
Tips and tricks abounded, here are a few important tidbits to keep in mind:
– Link building is an art in itself. Search engine crawlers will score your pages higher if your site links to other high-traffic sites. From Debra Mastaler, SES New York: Link to non-competitive sites that appear on your search results pages; Rankings are based on both outbound and inbound links. From Eric Ward (ericward.com): keep these links as close to the home page as possible, so that the search engine crawlers can find them. He claims to have added 90,000 links by simply changing the url for his news page from the complicated www.urlwire.com/2005/july/week1/story to the simple www.urlwire.com/news.
– Keyword optimization. Submit your site and a well-thought out list of keywords to the search directories. But, warned Sullivan, “Be sure to test your own keywords on your site. If you can’t find them, neither will your customers.”
– Vertical search is huge. For several years, vertical search has been dominated by the smaller specialized search engines that focus on a particular industry (Indeed.com, Jobster.com, Answers.com, Become.com). Big companies however, have caught on – LookSmart changed its business model in 2004 and now has more than 180 vertical search engines (e.g., autos, cities, education, food, health, etc.); Amazon entered the field in 2003 with a9.com (a separate company that offers search, yellow pages and maps products); Google now places its top three “relevant” vertical search results in a “One Box” listing at the top of the results page.
– Paid search. The average cost of a search clickthrough rose 11% to $.40 this year. Blue Nile, FTD, and eBay have reported finding the cost of the top spot for their keywords now too high. Keep your search cost down by using negative match on Google and Yahoo to weed out misleading keywords. And focus on conversions, not clickthroughs.
As web users tire of banner ads and spam, every web site owner interested in increasing web traffic and sales needs to invest the time required to customize pages for visitors from search engines, to build links to quality sites, to experiment with new advertising opportunities on the latest search sites, and to analyze and optimize paid search results. It’s what you need to keep getting searched.
PT thanks Rich Kelley, New York-based writer, editor, and publishing marketer, for contributing this report. He can be reached at richkelley@nyc.rr.com.
