BusinessWeek
Advertising Week is underway, but the financial crisis is perhaps the most pressing topic facing those marketers and advertisers who’ve converged on Madison Avenue this week. BusinessWeek reminds us that a weak financial sector means financial services firms have less money to spend on advertising, even online advertising.
When budgets are tight, advertisers stick with proven methods like search, placing less emphasis on experimental campaigns in sectors like social media and mobile. As Russell Fradin, president of Adify, which creates ad networks for companies, says, “Mobile and social networks will be hit.” He adds that for the greater online ad market, “the first six months of the next year will be slow.” Matt Sanchez, CEO of video ad network VideoEgg, thinks the slowdown could last up to a year. He anticipates that less well-funded firms will have a difficult time surviving.
Meanwhile, researchers were cutting back online spending estimates even before the AIG bailout and the demise of Wall Street’s independent investment bank structure. In August, eMarketer cut sector growth projections to 17.4%, compared to 25.6% in 2007. Next year, growth will be even slower, the firm said, at 14.5%. “Online advertising will not grow as fast because of the economic problems,” eMarketer senior analyst David Hallerman says.
PPC Hero
If a particular landing page is undeperforming, it may not be the ad copy, according to John Lee. It might be a fluke in the design/navigation of the page itself. And so Lee devotes an entire blog post (the first of a landing page-focused series) to design tweaks you can make to boost conversions and build authority.
First, keep your call to action above the fold. Some insiders may urge you to try to get all the content — including headlines, forms, buttons and images — above the fold, but Lee argues that that’s not a realistic mandate. “From one level-headed marketer to another, let me lay it out… you can’t fit everything above the fold!” he says. You have to choose which page elements are most vital (like the call to action or a product image) and get them up there.
Also, avoid packing too much content into your landing page. Leave some white space. “Clutter on a landing page is confusing for the user and can keep them from finding relevant details and your calls-to-action,” he says. “Users scan the text and take away only certain elements that they use to make a decision if the page is relevant to their goal or not. Clean use of space allows users to scan and absorb key messages.”
Small Business SEM
Matt McGee piggybacks on a recent Google Webmaster Central blog post highlighting some of the top questions posed in the forums, and highlights the answers most relevant to SEO.
For example, did you know that sitelinks are displayed dynamically? According to Maile Ohye: “In some search results, the sitelinks displayed are determined algorithmically based on the user’s query. So, while Webmaster Tools may show 8 sitelinks for your verified site, it’s possible that search results show only a subset.” The content of each link (i.e. the title and page it directs users to) can also vary depending on the query.
Meanwhile, Google is increasingly pulling images into the core search results, but every image doesn’t get crawled or indexed alike. The ranking of the page where the image is hosted can actually determine whether a picture gets indexed and how well it ranks for a given query–even if it’s more relevant than a picture from a more authoritative site. “In other words, images placed on your strong/authoritative pages should have a better shot at being found in image search,” McGee says. “Something to keep in mind if you rely on traffic from image search.”
SearchViews
Twitter has quickly emerged as one of the go-to tools for brand monitoring and reputation management, and as Miguel Cancino notes, it’s becoming an SEO tool as well. While doing some “vanity Googling,” Cancino found that his tweets (or the 140 character Twitter messages) comprised about 20% of the results on the first page. So imagine the potential branding benefits of a company’s own tweets (or the tweets of its devoted customers) taking up that much SERP space.
“It appears to me that the single biggest factor contributing to Twitter’s impressive SEO is the fact that Twitter profiles/status pages are sub-directories of Twitter.com (i.e. http://twitter.com/searchviews), as opposed to sub-domains (http://searchviews.twitter.com),” Cancino says. “Whatever SEO benefits Twitter receives is passed to its sub-directories (this is not the case with sub-domains.) In other words, it’s Trickle Down Twitternomics.”
And that link value is golden from an SEO standpoint, so Cancino suggests doing some keyword research for your Twitter posts (much as you would for a blog).
Small Business SEM
“It’s been a while since I’ve gone out on the hunt for links from quality directories, and the experience these past few days hasn’t been good: There’s a lot more junk out there than not,” Matt McGee says. “This can be a problem for the small business owner who may struggle to know how to tell a quality directory from the rest.” So he offers some tips for deciding whether a directory is even worth your time.
The first red flag should go up if a directory requires a reciprocal link–as it means the company is likely more concerned about growing its own footprint than delivering high quality traffic. Similar alarm bells should go off if the directory promises a full refund (if your site isn’t “accepted’), or offers extra links for an additional fee. Both conditions reek of a paid link scheme. “We can debate paid links until we’re blue in the face, but it’s reasonable to assume that search engines don’t consider this kind of arrangement to be a sign of a quality directory,” McGee says.
Other warning signs include pages overrun with ads, as well as poor indexation within the engines. Do some research and see how many of the deeper pages are being indexed, as poor indexation means that visitors may not even find your link during a routine search. Lastly, check to see who your company will be, if you do get a link from said directory. “Search the directory for spammy phrases like ‘buy Viagra’ and see what results show up,” McGee says.