Below is a mini PowerPoint on integrating PPC & SEO, drawing from several of my posts. I’ll update this PowerPoint this weekend. I’m pushing this out today as part of a Citizen Agency event, otherwise I would of hold it over until tomorrow.

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Yahoo: User Data and Smart Ads
Emergence-Media has been hot on the idea of Yahoo’s potential to do Behavioral Targeting and Social Search in a big way for awhile now. Yahoo has a mountain of user information (Y! Jobs, Upcoming, Flickr, Del.iciou.us, Y! Games) that the ability to do customized ad servicing (behavioral targeting) and social search is quite obvious.

The introduction of Yahoo’s SmartAds is a major step for Behavioral Targeting (BT). Behavioral Targeting has been a buzz since 2004 (if not earlier), which makes it interesting that it took this long for Yahoo, who has oodles of user information, has taken its first step in doing BT in a big way.

As per Yahoo’s demo on SmartAds, the system works by matching a user’s behavior to a customized on the fly advertisement. In the demo, it has user Joe (who Yahoo knows lives in Los Angeles and plays Yahoo! Poker Superstars II game), being served “LA to Las Vegas” flight ads (which is a banner ad created on the fly):

Beyond Tim Mayer’s “Cool Lamps” Social Search
Yahoo’s demo with SmartAds gives a glimpse of what Behavioral (with Social Search) can look like. Tim Mayer, Yahoo’s VP of Product Management, is fond of giving the “Cool Lamps” example of Social Search: A user would be receive not only what is traditionally algorithmically ranking for “cool lamps” but also what the user’s friends have tagged as being “cool lamps”.

While that’s the “Social” side of search, what about the behavioral (intent) side of search? The SmartAds example of the gambling enthusiast named Joe can be applied to both SEO and PPC:

PPC: Link Joe’s search for “cheap flights to Vegas” with more accurate geographic information “Joe is from Los Angeles” (than by using IP information), giving greater weight to ads for Casino.

SEO: Like PPC, organic SERPs could give higher relevancy to websites with “Los Angeles” in them due to Joe’s geographic location. Also, more generic searches like “Las Vegas” will lean towards Las Vegas casinos, since Joe is a gambler. On the Social side, maybe webpage URL recommendations based on the behavior of his fellow gambler players online.

Potential Impact
Note that the above is pure speculation, but it is not difficult to imagine Yahoo eventually adopting their SmartAds system to the Search world. In any case, the impact will be more evolutionary than revolutionary: SEO is already increasingly more about PR and relevancy and PPC has been moving to a similar model with the use of Google and Yahoo’s Quality Score. Attempting to assess user behavior and their social network is just one more layer of complexity.

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SEO is Dead! Well, maybe your Google SEO

Why is SEO important? Because the majority of people search on the Internet to find things…reviews, contact numbers, shopping etc. But what is Search? Google? Yahoo?

If you’re search engine optimization campaign is targeting Google, then what are you doing about the “searches” on Del.icio.us, Technorati, StumbleUpon, Yelp, Wikipedia, Oodle and even Digg? Maybe those searches are not for the mainstream (yet), but it maybe where the Linkerati, the savvy “Influencers”, go?

Is your SEO really just “Google Search Optimization”? Have you brainstormed with your marketing team to see if your company, product and/or service needs to do more?

The Linkerati: Where Are They?

Rand Fishkin has made much about how SEO folks need to make sure their linkbait (and ditto for Viral/WoM campaigns) needs to cater to the Linkerati audience, the savvy online influencers who create and forward content.

But moving beyond finding what appeals to the Linkerati, is the need to find out where are they online, We need to diversify our thinking on 1) how where/how they create content; and 2) how they find content.

Recently, ValleyWag noted that while the number of active blogs tracked by Technorati has stagnated “personal publishing is still growing, but the fastest growth is occurring on social media properties”, such as MySpace, Digg, Yelp, and Twitter. Indeed, a recent study suggests that “40% of all social networkers said they use social networking sites to learn more about brands or products that they like”.

Questions to Ask:

1. Where are my customers? Who are the influencers within those circles?
2. Where do they search?
   (Do they search on Yelp, Technorati, Digg or Del.icio.us?)
3. Have I distributed my content there?
   (E.g. Placement of Yelp, Blog on Technorati, Content on Digg, Bookmarked on Del.icio.us)
4. Is it searchable? Or, simply, Findable? Is it “optimized”?

Counter Point: Who needs the Linkerati? Web-2-What and Big Seed Marketing.

There is the question of how important the Linkerati crowd is in shear physical numbers and how important the Linkerati and influencers are in general.

In May’s Harvard Business review, Duncan Watts and Jonah Pertti proposed the idea of “big-seed marketing” as opposed to “Influencer”-based viral marketing, which:

combines viral-marketing tools with old-fashioned mass media in a way that yields far more predictable results than “purely” viral approaches like word-of-mouth marketing.
…
big-seed marketing harnesses the power of large numbers of ordinary people, its success does not depend on influentials or on any other special individuals; thus, managers can dispense with the probably fruitless exercise of predicting how, or through whom, contagious ideas will spread.

The Tiny Linkerati

According to a Pew Internet May 6 study, 49% of the US audience are those that have “few “tech assets” and limited use of technology”. The survey goes on to show how little of the US audience are among the Web 2.0 Internet savvy. They are so little of them. Is it worth the effort on being on Yelp, Twitter, Digg, MySpace etc to appeal to them?

Of Course, It Depends

It is important to understand that you can create online marketing success without getting caught in the buzz about about “influencers” or the Linkerati. It depends what market your client and your customers are in. Of course, innovation carries risk – but this is not to forsake the long-hanging fruit for risk taking and vice-versa. You need both.

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So let’s get to the Q&A Session!

“Question 1) Because blogs score high in Google Search results, how does this impact corporations who spend resources on SEO campaigns for their websites?”

Good Blogs are effective because they 1) generate good, timely and updated content; 2) encourage bloggers to link to them and vice versa; 3) have a clean technical format that is easy for search engines to crawl.

Corporations can either choose to create their on blog (which takes resouces and cultural shifts) or choose to emulate why blogs do well: timely and good quality content with good linking from other sites.

“Question 2) If Social Media is an effective way to gain in SEO (as well as engage an audience), should we increase Social Media Program budgets and reduce SEO budgets?”

Cutting edge SEO is already incorporating website usability, widget creation, RSS feeds and linkbait (PR tactic to try to get people to link to your website) as part of the “SEO Tactics Toolbox”. Indeed, I’d say SEO people are one of the leaders pushing Social Media Marketing.

SEO will not compete with Social Media, but will eventually merge with it. SEO will be about Website Positioning Strategy. As I’ve mentioned in my post “SEO as Website Positioning Strategy“:

The idea of Strategic Website Positioning is to think of search marketing (organic SEO and PPC), social media marketing and website development as an integrated approach, by asking questions centered around:

• How is your website’s content, structure and usability fit with the intent of your audience?
• How does your website “fit” in how people search (one-box searches on Google/Yahoo, Technorati, Oodle, vertical search engines) for what you offer?
• How is your website positioned in Social Media Community? How do you want to participate?

“Question 3) The word of mouth network is becoming more and more efficient. Communities are forming and networks are formalizing, these networks allow users to share info about products and services without using search. (Twitter, blogs, myspace are good examples). update: If these word of mouth networks become so efficient and content is shared amongst a common group, will this reduce the need for searches?”

Short Answer: No.

Long Answer: Twitter, Blogs, Digg are places of communication and sharing and creating content. So people will still use search to find articles on Digg and use Technorati to find blogs.

Social Media sites like Digg, Twitter and YouTube are great on keeping abreast with the latest information, but its a real pain to actually use it to find something. You need search.

These new types of websites are opening new search frontiers: what do I need to do well on Technorati? How do you make sure your YouTube video gets found when someone searches YouTube? Blinx for example, just released guidelines on video search optimization.

“Question 4) I state that Web Marketing is not on Two (corporate and google) domains only. Some savvy companies are realizing the Web Marketing battle isn’t on the corporate domain only, as the word of mouth effect becomes more important, do companies really want visitors to come to their site? Or will the savvy company realize that the most effective web marketing is using advocate customers to turn cold and warm prospects. How does this impact the SEO industry?”

Web Marketing will (already is?) about where ever your company or its services are mentioned or should be mentioned: Google, Corporate, Social News Sites (Digg), Blogs etc. (Furthermore, there will be a blur between mobile, web and gaming/entertainment consoles but I’m saving that talk for this posting.)

This is why SEM (PPC/SEO), Reputation Management, Blog Marketing, Viral-Videos and Word-of-Mouth will begin to blur together and require a shared strategy in the coming years. People move easily from one website to another with a click – from Digg, to your corporate website, to a Google Search to MySpace Video – and that requires coordination to ensure that the same message and goals are implemented for each of those channels.

SEO needs to lose the SE (Search Engine) part and become agnostic – optimizing any kind of “organic” traffic”. As I’ve mentioned:

“I believe that eventually search engine optimization (SEO) will be succeeded by simply “Organic Traffic Optimization” – optimization that is agnostic to where the traffic comes from, but is limited to the organic (natural and unpaid) side of things.”

It is gonna be crazy fun to do this! At least for me ;)

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Update: Fixed MS Word HTML issue. Thanks to Jake for letting me know.
Search Engine Optimization or Strategic Website Positioning?

Search marketing veterans have seen the shift of SEO tactics moving from keyword density and page title optimization to the leveraging of PR-like tactics to conduct link-building (building rankings by having others link to your website) and to now even more complex strategies. At this point is SEO still SEO or has it outgrown that name? Maybe it is time to look at the idea of “Strategic Website Positioning”?

The maturing of the SEO industry has resulted in many changes. The top four has been 1) the further integration of PR-ish tactics like “linkbaiting”; 2) the embrace of social media in social media marketing; 3) changing the metrics from rankings and to relevant traffic and conversion; and 4) thinking about usability and conversion optimization, not just search traffic generation.

All of these new changes will be unfamiliar to someone from the early days of SEO, which mostly concerned itself with placing important keyword on the webpages.

What Does Strategic Website Positioning Mean?

The Working Definition

The idea behind “Strategic Website Positioning” is not original. Businesses create websites with considerations of what the website should be to their targeted audience.

The idea of Strategic Website Positioning is to think of search marketing (organic SEO and PPC), social media marketing and website development as an integrated approach, by asking questions centered around:

• How is your website’s content, structure and usability fit with the intent of your audience?
• How does your website “fit” in how people search (one-box searches on Google/Yahoo, Technorati, Oodle, vertical search engines)?
• How is your website positioned in Social Media Community? How do you want to participate?

From this we can build further questions…

Community Positioning

• “What are similar people tagging (or perhaps tagging with similar words) – Del.icio.us and Google Search History” (SEOBook)
• “What are similar people reading? (Via My Yahoo! or Google Reader or MyBlogLog) – Graywolf recently highlighted how MyBlogLog can use your readers to show what community your site is in” (SEOBook)
• “What words are associated with your brand or site? What sites are associated with those words? What searcher intent is associated with those words? What else are they searching for?” (SEOBook)
• What Terms Are Your Competitors Using? On their website, on their copy, on their AdWords campaigns?

Content Building based on Community Positioning

Building on the above, but including:

• Content Funneling (See Emergence-Media on “Building Content for Branded and Non-Branded Search“)
  How is your website catering to your target audience in general product research, comparative shopping and purchasing mode? How can you be considered an authoritative source for each?
• What is the approach on new sources on online content like blogs and widgets?

Social Media Assessment

• How Visible are You in Social Media Websites?
  How “popular” are you online? Do reputation management? See how communities, blogs, reviews and del.icio.us describe your website?
• How do you want to Participate in Social Media Websites?
  Do video promotions? Community building? Virals? Podcasting?

Search Engine Positioning

• Getting on One-Box Search (See Google on Travel searches, Website Searches)
  Are you using Google Base to get listed on Google’s Real-Estate Seach?
• Getting on Vertical Search like Technorati, Oodle, Kayak, *Shopping Search Engines*
  Beyond the big search engines Google/Yahoo/MSN/Ask, what about the specialized vertical search engines?

Greater Marketing/MarComm/PR Integration

• Sharing “Keywords” Knowledge:
  Does some department have consumer studies on what words people use to describe your product?
• Integrating Offline Ads with Search:
  What’s your slogan, hook, that song playing in the background of your commercial. Is that integrated into your search strategy?

Conclusion: SEO Needs a Conceptual Reset and Reboot

I could go on and on, on the list above. They are not hard and fast categories, but they are the type of questions that need to be asked. They maybe best laid out in a mindmap (see Emergence Media’s SEO Mindmap from last year).

There are many folks trying to tackle what the new SEO exactly is. Todd Mailcoat has placed it forward as “New School SEO”, pointing to various other tactics that beyond traditional SEO: Social Media Marketing, Video Promotion, Community Participation et cetera. Aaron Wall has looked at the community (a more precise type of link authority and PageRank) as the next possible area where more search engines will determine relevancy.

Whatever it is, conceptual we need to rethink how we think of SEO. It’s not just about using WordTracker to do keyword research anymore, so our frame of thought has to change too. “Strategic Website Positioning” is an attempt to reset that thought. Once we figure what exactly SEO will be, there comes the next step: How do we explain it to our clients?

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Introduction: Oodle Rolls out Personal Search

Last week, Oodle launched its personals search service, extending its role as a classifieds listings vertical search tool which currently covers everything from job to real estate listing.

Personals is a booming industry, a recent Pew Study notes that “31 percent of all American adults (63 million people) know someone who has used a dating Web site, while 26 percent (53 million people) know someone who has gone out with a person he or she met through a dating Web site.”(1)

With such a large market available, Oodle Personals has found a useful niche:

• With over 800 dating sites on the web, it will be difficult for a person to necessarily find a niche dating website catering the to the person’s criteria.(2) Oodle helps a person discover these websites.
• Relating to above, Oodle can help smaller niche online personal websites with greater exposure, with a person finding a website they would not other wise meet if they stick to the majors like Match.com. As in its classifieds sections (or search engines for that matter), listings returned based on a user’s query links directly back to the original websites.
• Oodle seems to allow for more flexible keyword-based queries on personal listings than would be currently possible on some of the sites it indexes.
• Oodle crawls beyond strictly dating sites to include social networks like Friendster to increase the pool of profiles to view.

Vertical Search: Expending the Definition of Search Engine Optimization

Oodle, and others like Vast.com, are the type of sites that are helping shape a broader image of what is search engine is, going beyond the general search tools of the Big Three.

Indeed, as mentioned in “Organic Traffic Optimization? Doing Agnostic SEO“, the growing lists of vertical search engines places emphasis on the need at ensuring a website’s content is indexed beyond Google, Yahoo and MSN. Content should also be looked at how competitively positioned it is on vertical search tools. For example, people doing online dating search can be very picky – on ethnicity, religion, age, interests – does the profile easily lists all of such data? Is the data listed in a way people would search for? Available on feeds to engines like Oodle? Publicly (like LinkedIn does now)? Note that there are also privacy issues like “What control does the user has to be indexed by a third-party?”

Disclaimer: I know several Oodlers quite well and have even attended a Oodle sponsored event (To SMCers: and not, I didnt get a free drink out of it).

Sources:

1. Gottlieb, Lori, “How Do I Love Thee”, The Atlantic, March 2006
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_dating_service

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1. Yahoo and Social Media:
   User Profile Building, Social Media CTR rates, Cultural Differences, Yahoo! Answers Opportunities for Marketers
2. On-site Analytics Vendors:
   Future of On-Site Analytics – Integrating Competitive Analytics?

Please Note: If anyone feels they or their company are misrepresented by this post, please feel free to email me or comment on the posting and let me know. I’m always open to constructive feedback and fair evaluations.

Yahoo and Social Media

Speakers:

• Kakul Srivastava, Senior Product Manager, Flickr, Yahoo! Inc.
• Yumio Saneyoshi, Senior Product Manager, Answers, Yahoo! Inc.
• Ashish Baldua, Senior Engineering Manager, TripPlanner, Yahoo! Inc.
• Tim Mayer, Director of Product Management, Yahoo! Inc.
• Kakul Srivastava, Senior Product Manager, Flickr, Yahoo! Inc.
• Joshua Schachter, Director of Engineering, creator of del.icio.us

On Social Search, User Profiles and Advertisement
Responding to a question by yours truly, Tim Mayer answered that they have no current plans for user profiles and stressed the privacy issues associated with that. At least in the mid-term to long-term, Mayer said their goals were to grow the userbase for different social media properties. I was not sure if that included database integretion across the multiple properties as well.
Social Search/Media and Lower CTR Rates?
An attendee asked Tim Mayer if Yahoo finds that social media websites have lower CTR rates, which Tim said he could not answer. The argument that social media websites have lower CTR rates seem to make sense: Social Media websites have great stickiness and promote browsing behavior, behavior that may decrease “bailout” rate to other sites via ads.

Cultural Differences between Flickr, Del.icio.us and the rest
Hearing each speaker, the different Yahoo properties all seemed to come from very different cultures and perspective – most likely result of these properties like del.icio.us and flickr being bought by Yahoo rather developed in-house. Flickr and del.icio.us sounded very much like Internet purist of the dot-com era, focusing on the power of the Internet to change culture with flickr focusing on the “Culture of Sharing”. The Yahoo! Answers and TripPlanner folks seemed more focused on monetization in addition to growing their user base.

Yahoo! Answers on Monetization
The speaker for Yahoo Answers mentioned two experiments on monetization: branded Answer channels and sponsored experts. The idea of sponsored experts answering questions, say on behalf of Black & Decker, should sound very interesting to marketers and PR folks.

Vendor Chat on Measuring Success

Speakers: John Marshall (ClickTracks), Akin Arikan (Unica/NetTracker), Brett Crosby (Google Analytics), Chris Knoch (Omniture), Warren Raisch (WebSideStory) and Barry Parshall (WebTrends)

On the Future of Analytics: Adding Competitive Analytics?
All of the speakers stressed integration with bid management, A/B Testing, and email marketing tools. John Marshall of ClickTracks pointed out that analytics is helping to drive marketing, but there’s no links yet between analytics and CRM/Sales teams.

When I asked the speakres about the integration of on-site analytics (like comScore, HitWise) and competitive analytics, Chris Knoch (?) immediately jumped in and said it was coming soon and that there are partnerships and discussions occurring between on-site analytics tools and competitive analytics reports. Such a move would follow Hitwise quisition of HitDynamics, a search bid-management analytics company.

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Recently, Bambi Francisco of MarketWatch comments on the future of social media as they “search” (bad pun) out for an advertising model. Francisco sees a future in search query data and behavioral marketing:

“We just haven’t seen it work all that well because the companies that know about our search history — aren’t really sharing information with the companies, such as MySpace, Facebook and YouTube, that increasingly know us personally and increasingly occupy our time.”

Francisco’s commentary is not a revelation, but does give for a pause, especially when she casually brushes of the privacy concerns such data mining would bring:

“[M]arketers will increasingly take someone’s search history or search behavior, and use that information to target ads on social network pages they browse.

It’s not intrusive; in fact, people will come to expect it. And, quite frankly, some may even feel a little bit alive because they’re acknowledged, even if only by a lowly marketer.”

Interestingly Bambi Francisco talks about search engines and social networking sites as seperate companies, ignoring Yahoo’s powerful array of social networking and web 2.0 web sites (Flickr, Y!360, del.icio.us) – which is something we’ve been talking about at the company I work at.

Mining MySpace

While search queries presents great and freely volunteered information on the intent of the searcher, Francisco seems to pay insufficent attention in the inherent value of social network themselves.

Social networks – with all kinds of personal information disclosed freely and even sometimes displayed publicly – is the ideal data rich resource that can help take Behavioral Marketing to the next level. Shawn Gold, VP of MySpace, briefly alludes to this in a recent iBreakfast (via The Virtual Handshake):

87m stories in the database, and a lot of that content is professional. Every nightclub, every major Christian band, every celebrity brand, is in the database. They’re now slicing the database by professional type, e.g., if you want to reach all the comedians.

Sure, targeting comedians on MySpace is nothing compared to the possible social network analysis (SNA) and demographic data analysis possible. But its coming. SNA has been used in counter-terrorism experts and will soon be used to profile users based on their interests and those of their friends, with tools that automatically segment the wealth of user data on places like MySpace. This would invovle building behavioral profiles and purchasing habits of users for targeted marketing and product recommendations engine.
The Power of the Yahoo Network?

While the attention is on Google for privacy concerns and MySpace as the current king of social networking, let’s not forget Yahoo’s network of websites.

A month or so back, folks in my company discussed the power of Yahoo Network (based upon Yahoo’s Gay Pride minisite):

• Upcoming (Events)
• Flickr (Photos)
• Answer (Questions asked by Users)
• TripPlanner/Yahoo! Travel (Travel)
• Yahoo 360 (Social Network)
• MyWeb/Del.icio.us (bookmarking)
• Personals, Jobs, News, Local, etc

Between these network of websites, Yahoo could build a customer profiles allowing marketers to say, “let’s market to single, straight, Asian, Male, (Y! Personal/360) who vactioned in Europe (TripPlanner/Flickr/Y! Travel), went to a PR event in Palo Alto (Upcoming) and has been recently looking at jobs at the likes of Edelman and other PR companies (Y! Jobs)”. And Yahoo, would have all the information available to do this.

Indeed, today we hear the annoucement of Raghu Ramakrishnan joining Yahoo!, who will head Yahoo’s “social search”:

“At Yahoo you have this unique opportunity to integrate conventional search with Flickr, Del.icio.us, Yahoo Answers, Yahoo Groups and Yahoo Mail,” Ramakrishnan said, listing Yahoo’s services that center on human contributions. “How do you take all this search activity and learn from it?”

The question is: How long before Yahoo can successfully integrate its many web properties? How can they lure MySpace users away? What are the privacy implication of Yahoo having so much information on its figure tips and do they dare build a target ad network based on it?

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Jonathan Mendez, formerly of Digital Grit and now OTTO Digital of Offermatica, is an Internet marketing strategist that I have come to deeply respect for his analytical approach and well-researched insight. I’ve seen him speak at SES 2005 on several panels and found his talks, direct, honest and insightful without the cliched gloss of a PR spokesperson.

Mendez, in “Searcher Goal Classes” on Optimize and Prophesize, reminds Internet marketers that the audience is human and people searche online with certain goals in mind (see excerpt of chart above):

Understanding searcher goals is the single most important element to raise your online marketing ROI. It gives you the knowledge base to craft finely tuned titles and descriptions, the clarity to create display ads that draw user attention and provides clear direction to focus your landing pages messaging and offers. It is not an easy task to obtain goal definition in search but it is a very valuable and essential practice since it makes everything you do more relevant to the user.

Read more here. And be sure to check out his “Seach Goal Classes” chart (PDF).

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