Relevancy

The recent article in the NY Times about J.C. Penny’s shenanigans shines a light on the practice of manufacturing links to improve rankings. J.C. Penny created a very webby and sturdy network of paid inbound links to convince Google the company was a premier destination for consumers.

There is a lot of chatter about how the company was unaware of what its search engine marketing vendor was truly doing. J.C. Penny didn’t pay enough attention to what the “experts” were doing.

I see two key lessons in this story:

1. If you are outsourcing SEO services, understand what the vendor is doing. Even before you enter the discussion of “white hat” vs. “black hat” tactics, simply be clear as a bell about the fundamentals of the recurring services needed to nudge Google to crawl, index, and rank your website.

2. If you are serious about SEO and want to be a valuable resource in the eyes of Google, embrace your role as a publisher. To stay above board and be right in the eyes of Google, adopt a publisher role that shows a commitment to creating content that users want. Some online marketers refer to this as “purposeful” content.

A business website is about your business. That is understood. Professional SEO demands that you go well beyond brand and encourage links to your site because you have great content that people crave.

I am calling 2010 the year of perpetual planning (and interruptions). Budgets are set, changed, set, and changed again. Interactive marketing efforts shift and alter. It’s hard to get your footing this year (if only for sanity’s sake).

I receive a lot of questions about those must-have, low-cost tactics. Up at the top is always search engine marketing (SEM) because it is typically the most cost effective with the best return. I am still blown away at the lack of competitiveness for some lines of business on search engines. You key in a basic phrase for a product or service, and there literally could be no one marketing through search.

If you are new to search engine marketing, 2010 is the year to have a search engine marketing firm like CSG Interactive do a quick assessment of both your site and competitors. You may be pleasantly surprised.

I am also big on single-themed search engine marketing campaigns. What is a single-themed SEM campaign? It is a tightly focused campaign about a specific business area or subject matter. You deliberately favor one part of your business and amplify it through search.  When I say amplify, I mean blow it out with specific keywords and ad groups. And you expand your reach by looking at and joining with the chorus of related news, events, and other contexts.

For example, say you sell paints. You may be thinking about “who you are” (paint store) and “what you sell” (paints) when you start a typical SEM campaign. With a single-themed SEM campaign, you take something specific like environmentally friendly paint (e.g., low VOC) and build a campaign just around that product line and the context for search engine users’ interests (“painting a child’s bedroom”, “green paint products”, etc.).

Don’t think this kind of tactic starts out as a shot in the dark. Firms like CSG Interactive have the keyword research tools to measure keyword search volumes, usage trends, user demographics, high peak volume periods, and geographic hot zones. For example, we saw a huge trend building when running a general SEM campaign for Mr. Waterheater. Interest in “tankless water heaters” went through the roof a few years ago. In fact, search numbers for “tankless water heaters” surpassed queries for traditional water storage units! This posed an opportunity we could not ignore, so we created a special single-themed SEM campaign.

For the year of perpetual planning, I suggest buckling down with a website poised for search engine marketing and running some lean, mean, focused campaigns. Get those leads you need now to build confidence along with the bottom line.