Electronic Retailer - December 2011 - 32

WHAT’S NEW IN SEM?

“construction clothing.” And the ad’s link should take the searcher to a web page that features work boots, not to the advertiser’s home page. Google’s algorithms reward all of this. If you are “extremely accurate” with regard to what the user is searching for, Riff says, you might pay, say, $1 for position two on the paid-ad list for a given keyword. Your competitor, who is less accurate, might have to pay $2 for the same position. Accuracy is growing more important to search engine optimization, as well as SEM, because it keeps getting harder to fudge or finesse your way to the top of the list of organic hits for the keywords you target. Google, the giant among search engines, which accounts for about two-thirds of all U.S. search traffic, has made at least 500 tweaks to its search algorithm in the past year alone, says John Fairley, director of web services and social media for Walker Sands Communications, a Chicago marketing firm. All of those adjustments refine Google’s ability to provide users with the most accurate responses to their questions. Most of the tweaks are minor. But a major one earlier this year, called Panda, impacted more than 15 percent of all Google searches, Fairley says. “Some websites lost 90 percent of their organic search traffic because of it.” Why? Mainly because Panda rendered some “manipulative” SEO strategies less effective, Fairley says. “Some of the tricky things that SEO companies used to do to boost your organic rankings now don’t work as well. So you need to invest more in paid search while you fix the problems.”

Accuracy is growing more important to search engine optimization, as well as SEM, because it keeps getting harder to fudge or finesse your way to the top of the list of organic hits for the keywords you target.
come in to the client’s website, not to a toll-free phone number. And of those web responders, only half reach the marketer’s site directly by typing in the URL they saw on the TV screen. The rest don’t bother memorizing the URL; they look for the marketer’s site via a search engine. This means that SEM now directly affects the success of DRTV campaigns – and, by extension, DR advertising on radio and in print. That’s only one example of SEM’s new centrality, Medico says. Consider the growing importance of social media. Marketers are awakening to the fact that when their products are talked about on social networks, or compared with other products in online user reviews, the effects can be powerful – for good or ill. “But that’s all search-engine-driven,” Medico points out. How do potential buyers find the online reviews or the areas of social networking sites in which your product is being discussed? They use search engines. In a very real sense, Medico says, the new imperative to monitor and respond to online comments about your products on Facebook or Twitter or in the blogosphere is just one more extension of search engine marketing. local or national results for certain kinds of searches and will show you more of one type than the other accordingly. Fairley also points out that the social media service Google Plus was made available to the general public just months ago. Through partnerships with Twitter and LinkedIn, Google knows your associates in those networks and will tell you (if you sign up for Google Plus) when a friend clicks the “+1” button for a particular link that turns up in your search. Thus, search has gone not only personal but social. One effect of personalization is that both the paid and organic results that one person sees when searching a given keyword are not necessarily the same as those presented to another person. This makes it trickier – or at least more time-consuming – to keep track of the positions in which your ad appears for various search terms. “If I just check the rankings by typing keywords on my own computer, I may think I’m doing well,” Fairley says. “Because I visit my own site a lot, Google will show my ad high on the list. But what I’m seeing is no longer what my customers are seeing.” The upshot: Marketers now need to check Google Analytics more often to learn where their ads appear in the rankings. What else is happening on the complexity front? Chris Crompton, technical marketing manager for ROI Revolution, points to “remarketing” as a phenomenon that has exploded within the past two years. This is the practice in which visitors to your website are tracked via cookies and later shown banner ads for your products when they visit other sites.

New Layers of Complexity Higher Stakes Involved
The stakes involved in getting SEM right keep rising as search engines play an increasingly central role in consumer spending. Anthony Medico, president of New York direct response marketing agency E+M Interactive, says that fully half of all responses to his clients’ DRTV campaigns now 32 Agencies are tracking several recent developments that add new layers of complexity to SEM. Fairley of Walker Sands notes that “personalization” is changing the results that individuals get when they use search engines. Google now adjusts the results you see based on your past search behavior. It knows, for instance, whether you tend to prefer

electronicRETAILER | December 2011

Electronic Retailer - December 2011

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