SoloSEO

Google + SEO = The New “AOL Keyword”?

Posted by Michael D Jensen on June 18th, 2007

We all remember TV, radio, and even print ads back in the AOL era that left us with an AOL Keyword for finding their site. Over time, and as AOL became less important, TV/radio/print ads gave you a domain name instead. Today on the radio I heard a commercial from Honda Certified Used Cars that sounded eerily similar to “type in the AOL Keyword”. The radio ad said to visit Google or Yahoo! and type in the keyword “Honda Certified Used Cars”. Searching for this in Google brings up Honda’s Certified Used Cars site (http://automobiles.honda.com/certified/) as the first listing in the results. Obviously telling us to search for the keyword in Google/Yahoo! is much easier than telling us to go to “automobiles dot honda dot com forward slash certified”.

Plus, they can always control the PPC page. Their PPC page appears to go to the same place, but it actually goes to a page hosted on googlepages.com, so they must be doing some landing page testing.

As I was pondering this, my mind brought me back to last year’s PubCon when John Battelle talked about Google (et al.) as “the new interface to technology”. It literally is our yellow pages, our 411 service, our encyclopedia, our calculator, etc.

Some cautions are in order

1) Obviously if you’re buying radio and TV spots, you need to give out a keyword that you can realistically be in the top for a long time. It should probably include your company name. But if your company name is weird, hard to spell, hard to remember, or just plain dumb, you’re probably a good fit.

2) You’ll need to make sure your SEO is in tip top shape. Honda isn’t going anywhere ranking for that term, but you’re not Honda. Content alone is not going to do it, you’re going to need to build and/or buy some links.

3) You must also realize that you are setting yourself to lose some advertising dollars from your consumers finding alternatives on just their first look into that search space. Hopefully you control more than just 1 listing in the organic results, because otherwise the search results page has 9 other results just on that front page alone, and probably 9 more advertisers running ads on that page.

Is it a Good Idea?

I think we may see it be more common, especially for advertisements about specific products from a company. Honda sells new cars too, but this commercial is to boost their used cars product, and because it takes two clicks (on small text even) from their home page to get to the same place, it makes a lot of sense just to direct them to Google.

Another advantage is that in Honda’s case, they have local dealers selling Honda Certified Used Cars and the ads are geo-targeted. So I can not only find Honda’s site, but I can also find my local Honda dealer and search their inventory from their site (hopefully).

5 comments Visited 9642 times June 18th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Becoming SEO Famous: Neil Patel, YOUmoz, SEM Scholarship

Posted by Michael D Jensen on May 10th, 2007

I’m obviously not the authority on SEO fame (if I was I’d be famous), but I wanted to write about a few opportunities that can help you to become famous, at least in SEO. First, Neil Patel from ProNet Advertising has started his own blog with a cute domain, QuickSprout.com. It’s all about this topic, and he gives you experiences and tips on things that helped him and others to become well-known in the industry.

We all know SEOmoz, but do you know YOUmoz? YOUmoz is SEOmoz’ user generated content blog where you get to be featured on SEOmoz. If your post is good enough they’ll even move it onto the main page. That should attract some attention to you! I thought I’d try it out, so I posted a YOUmoz article on Google’s Next Move: Movie Screen Advertising. It’s an interesting post that I think any marketer or business person would find interesting. While you’re there… give it a thumbs up (if you like it, of course).

Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim created a scholarship for search engine marketers (SEM Scholarship) that gives anyone a chance to show off your SEM/SEO skills by writing an informative article and then getting it traffic. The winner from the first scholarship was Ben Wills and I know he received a lot more than just those prizes. The scholarship deadline is past now, but subscribe to Andy’s feed and you’ll be ready for the next contest when it comes along.

So, who wants to be SEO famous?

2 comments Visited 5192 times May 10th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Google Categories – Changes to Competitive SEO

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on April 19th, 2007

Lee Odden blogged about Google Categories yesterday. I wasn’t able to duplicate the categories look, but it did get me thinking about the ramifications to online competition if categories in search become commonplace. As well as how categories might influence our SEO strategies as business owners.

Competing in the non-online marketplace has been a focus of research, and resulted in various competitive philosophies put forth by some of the most respected academic business minds in the world. Michael Porter of Harvard fame is one who has essentially dedicated his entire academic life to the concepts of competitiveness, and is seen my many (including myself) as the foremost expert in traditional competitive strategic analysis. But it is interesting to note, competing online is a different animal, and requires a different approach many traditional marketers aren’t quite comfortable with. Let’s take the shoe industry for example. Locally I can think of maybe a couple dozen places I could go and buy shoes, depending on what type of shoe I was looking for. So these local shoe resellers now compete against one another to attract my business. They buy newspaper and radio ads, do mailings, maybe rent a billboard, but they each attempt to get their message out to us, to keep us coming to them, and hopefully staying away from their competitors. But they now also need to keep our attention away from online shoe retailers, which is quite a different task, but important as more potential clients find online shopping appealing. Personally, I can’t remember the last time I bought shoes from a local brick and mortar store. I usually buy from Zappos.com… because I love the huge selection, the customer reviews, the free overnight shipping, and the free shipping on returns. It is a fabulous, no hassle system. Not to mention I don’t have to drive to the mall, deal with the crowds, or with my 2 year old daughter demanding to ride the “wee” (her term for slide) at the mall’s germ ridden treehouse (playground). It is a cesspool of all things icky (bless my wife for always having some Purell on hand to keep me sane).

So as more brick and mortar shops finally decide they also need to have an online presence, they will quickly determine the online competitive environment is very different, and can be intimidating. Not only are there far more competitors, as the geographical bounds are erased, but there are also non-retail sites competing for the same precious keywords. For example, if you type in “running shoes” in Google, you will see both online shoes stores, but also sites which review running shoes listed in the SERPs. So online retailers have to not only compete against more than just other retailers for keywords, but against information sites as well, as they attempt to squeeze onto the first SERP.

I have mentioned in previous posts that we use SEO techniques to improve our sites, so they perform better than our competitors sites. We pay little attention to other sites competing for the same keywords, who aren’t selling the same products, or are just informational sites. For example, we personally don’t care if Wikipedia ranks higher than our site for a particular keyword(s), since a potential customer can’t buy the products we sell from Wiki. We don’t consider Wikiesque sites an important aspect to our competitor focused SEO efforts. But how would Google’s Categories SERP influence competitive SEO efforts? In the Google screen shot in Lee’s post, we can see the categories listed as Comparison Shopping, Reviews, Stores, References and Others. I would be interested to know how these categories were decided upon, and if these will be the only categories for every search return, or will the search categories change based on the term searched? Is the order of the categories consistent, or will it change based on the keyword searched? We will need answers to these questions to properly prepare our SEO strategies. Obviously Google will need to be aware of those which will attempt to game the system and get their site listed in the top category, or in as many categories as possible, without regard to which category they should properly be placed within. I would imagine Google will only allow any given domain to be included in one category, period, or will have some protocol in place to best deal with these issues and how to police the system to hopefully be as efficient and relevant as possible.

Despite all the potential headaches Google might face, I like the idea of searches organized by category. And what I like most as a business person is through a search engine category system, the online competitive environment would more closely mirror the non-online competitive world. Now retailers could compete to be included in the Stores section of a SERP, and Wikipedia and others will be relegated to the References or Reviews sections where they belong. Also, as a searcher out to buy a product, hopefully it would be possible to set my preferences to drop the sites in the Reviews, References and Others sections, so I would just get a page full of retailers for me to peruse, perfect! Then, if we also throw the whole concept of Local search into the discussion, all of a sudden I could see the same couple dozen local shoes stores mentioned earlier listed on a locally-based, shoe oriented SERP. That would be pretty cool, I still won’t buy from them, but it would be pretty cool. As they now would compete against one another, as they have been doing in the “real world” for quite some time. Pretty interesting stuff.

3 comments Visited 4537 times April 19th, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz – Do NOT Market to Ignorance

Posted by Michael D Jensen on March 30th, 2007

“Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz, I don’t know what’s in it?”

Just 2 minutes ago I heard a radio commercial from Alka Seltzer. They put their whole radio ad message into a jingle (clever…) with the line “Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz, I don’t know what’s in it”. They are betting on my ignorance to sell their product, and that does not make a customer out of me. They want me to use it without even knowing or caring what is in it.

This is 2007, not 1907. Back then you didn’t have ready access to all the information you wanted even if you wanted it. Big difference, no Internet (and obviously no Google et al.). Today’s average person is information-oriented. They aren’t going to just go on the advice of some celebrity spokesperson (okay, some people still do). The customers that I want to serve love information and want to know as much as they can before making a decision.

I’m building a new house right now. I feel bad for my sales rep and the builder because I am so information and detail-oriented. Sure you can offer me a water softener, but I want brand, price, any other options, and contact information for the installer. I don’t want to just look at the fireplaces I can install, I want to know what company makes them, what kind of finishes are available, what else can I customize, and I want to know who the vendor is.

Give them information, they want it and will ask for it, now just give it to them. Case in point. We run Applied Content, a well known company that writes content for large and small web sites. For almost a year we went without displaying pricing on our site. So much of our time was spent informing our contacts of what our pricing was. We of course got clients from it, but obviously just a small percentage. Now we display our pricing on our homepage. The conversion of those who actually call or contact us? Nearly 90%. Now that’s efficient. Information is powerful.

Oh, you wanted to know what’s in Alka Seltzer. It’s made by Bayer, so it of course has Aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid) as a pain reliever, but it also has citric acid to neutralize stomach acid and baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) to react with the acid and dissolve it all (and make it fizz fizz). I for one will probably go with Tylenol (pain reliever), some oranges (citric acid), and some fresh cookies (baking soda).

5 comments Visited 5142 times March 30th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Accidental Page 1 Ranking for One Word Keywords

Posted by Michael D Jensen on March 27th, 2007

Have you ever found yourself ranked for a popular one word keyword that you never intended on ranking for? Maybe we’re an odd ball, but the top one word keyword (besides our company name) that drives traffic to our site is “tagged“. That’s right folks, as in tag you’re it. Last year I created the Blog Tag Tree and it drew in literally thousands of links, many of which used the anchor text of “tagged”. Obviously this wasn’t one of those keywords in my keyword glossary, so I found it interesting how much traffic we actually get from this pretty unrelated keyword.

Content alone isn’t going to make it happen, links with specific anchor text is needed.

What one word keywords do you “accidentally” rank for?

5 comments Visited 3749 times March 27th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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A Corporate Blog Makes You Linkable

Posted by Michael D Jensen on March 20th, 2007

I was reading a post by Rand Fishkin about the “secret” that’s not really a secret for ranking. Essentially the secret is linkable content.

As I was thinking about this, it’s hard to have truly linkable content for many subjects, like surgical gloves or ice cube trays. But a corporate blog can be very linkable, even for a company selling something unexciting like surgical gloves or ice cube trays. In that corporate blog if you showed all the characters you could create with surgical gloves, or do funny/amazing chemical and volume loading tests with them, you’d have something that would at least be fun to the humorous side of the web. For ice cube trays you could create ice cube tray recipes for frozen treats, or show different crystal designs from freezing certain types of water (like distilled water).

A corporate blog can make you linkable, even if your products aren’t linkable on their own.

Thanks to Hans for the great balloon character.

Add comment Visited 3044 times March 20th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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SEO around the globe

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on March 19th, 2007

SoloSEO has been quite a surprise. When we launched last November, we had no idea the draw a stand alone SEO system would have, nor the level of interest it would generate. It has been truly a whirlwind. We did some quick figuring the other day and discovered that domains from over 40 different countries are currently using our site to SEO their sites. It is also surprising Germany and Russia are the top two, since the site is only being offered in English, and not localized for any other foreign language. There was no way to predict this amount of international interest. Of course we are thrilled to see so many from all over the globe interested in what we are doing, but we now feel pressure to address the SEO needs of site owners who can’t read English, and provide them with the SoloSEO tools in their own languages.

Personally, international business is a big passion of mine. My graduate work was done at Thunderbird, a graduate business school located in Arizona which focuses only on international business, and is ranked by U.S. News as the top school in that speciality. After graduating I was hired by a firm located in Utah, which sold a mineral in over 50 different countries. I was given the title of Global Marketing Director, and put in charge of overseeing the foreign markets, both in managing the distributors and determining our global marketing strategies. It was a wonderful time, doing what I had gone to school to do, international business. I loved the travel and the many countries I got to visit. In a typical year I would visit half of our distributors in 25 + countries, traveling about half the year. It was horrible on my social life, but I personally learned a ton about the world of international business, and how to ask where to find a bathroom in many foreign languages.

When I eventually decided to go out on my own and do the entrepreneur thing, I had hoped to continue with my international life. I started a consulting company with a partner, and we attempted to assist other companies on how they could expand their business operations into international markets, but this proved to be a tough sell. Many of the companies we met with thought we were too young, with too little international experience (5 years) to be consultants of anything, and especially in international business. Eventually, with my international dreams dashed, I had some technology built by a company I was attempting to represent in Japan, and started an online technology company that transfered digital files overseas for processing. This company became the extent of my global business aspirations and I was severely disappointed. But at least I got to be an entrepreneur, and I began to focus my attention on making a living in other ways. I decided it was time to put food on the table and take care of my families financial needs, but I hoped for an opportunity to “go global” in the future.

Michael and I originally met during the development on the first online company, and we struck a bond/partnership. 7 years later we have now launched other technology companies, all of which are focused on delivering online services to domestic clients. And this was also the original design behind SoloSEO. We just felt is was important for domestic site owners to have all the SEO tools they need, all in one place, so they could make SEO a less painful process. We knew others were probably struggling like we were, and they just wanted to optimize their site, to hopefully attract potential clients who were searching for their products. It was our hope the launch of SoloSEO would address the SEO needs of many domestic site owners, little did we know the international excitement which would grow quickly. Soon we had requests from the UK, Spain, Germany, among others for potential strategic partnerships, and international site owners, from many non-English speakers were signing up for the service. It was quite hard to believe, but here we are, and we are now trying to best capitalize on this interest.

So, as of last Friday, I have been here in Tokyo, Japan meeting with potential partners to hopefully offer our SoloSEO tool set in Japan (which is why my Japanese business card is included as the image above). I truly love Japan, I love being here. I lived here for a few years, over 20 years ago, and I studied Japanese in college, so I have grown to love the Japanese people, the culture, the language, the business methods and the food. Japan is as unique as any country on earth, but much more civilized, and perpetually polite and proper (and safe) than all others, which is also what I like about Japan. If you get a chance to visit Japan, you must take it, you will not regret it.

So in this post, I guess I wanted to say “thank you” to everyone who has made this trip to Japan possible, and I hope there will be many more international trips possible in the future. The growth and success of SoloSEO is remarkable, and we hope future international partnerships will contribute to our growth, which will continue to ensure that SoloSEO is always on the cutting edge in providing the best in SEO online tools. We assuredly continue to provide our clients with the most efficient and effective SEO tools available, no matter which country they are living in, or which language they speak.

Yoroshiku Onegaishimasu.

I’ll be back home Thursday, I hope the weather will be sunny and warm. I need to golf soon.

1 comment Visited 4484 times March 19th, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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Starting your SEO Business: 10 Ways to Make Your Small SEO Firm Look Big

Posted by Michael D Jensen on March 15th, 2007

Nowadays you don’t have to be big to get big clients. After 3 months of starting up (early 2006) our own web content firm (Applied Content), we landed a big deal with a Fortune 500 company (actually in top 30 though!). It’s not that we looked like a giant corporation, but we looked big enough to show that we cared about our business and about our image. Whether you are a business-to-business or business-to-consumer company, looking “bigger” or more professional will help you land bigger clients, and more of them.

Now for my top 10 list of ways to make your small SEO firm look big:

1) Show that you exist

You should exist more than having a website and a contact form. Preferably put up a phone number and an email address. Get a toll free number if you need to and have it forward to your cell phone. Show your office address, a physical location that someone could look up on a map and find. If you work from home, consider getting a PO Box, but get one that has an address instead of a box number (I think UPS is starting to do this).

2) Show that you actually work with clients

In the field of web content our clients don’t want us to tell the world we write their content, so we actually just “hint” at who our clients are (Fortune 500 company, a site listed in Time magazine’s 50 Coolest sites, other SEO firms, local companies, etc). If your clients don’t mind, I’d like to see the list, even a short (best of) list. If you’re doing SEO, what keywords is the client ranking for?

3) Clean Website

I can’t even count how many interested clients for our web content firm have called and said “I like how clean your website is”. It’s not perfect by any means, but yes it is clean and simple. Don’t have your 14-year old nephew design your site and don’t use clipart. You can find all sorts of free web templates, just make sure you customize them a bit so they don’t look “templatey”.

4) Nice Logo

You should have a logo if you don’t already, even if it’s just the name of your site in a nice typeset. We’ve used LogoWorks before, but I’d try a local design shop first if you can.

5) Link out

There’s a reason that Google et al. like it when you link out to authoritative sites, and for me that reason is because I want to know that you know your industry and resources.

6) Multiple author blog

Now not everyone can do this, but if you have someone else on your staff or even someone that remotely helps you out, even if its a Link Ninja, have them blog too. They don’t have to blog all the time (you should, at least once a week) but enough so we know you actually talk with other people.

7) Rank for your Business Name

If I am going to use you for SEO you’d better be ranked #1 when I search for your company name. Remember that Google et al. is not just a search engine, it is also a dictionary, phone book, map, and calculator.

Run a PPC ad for your Business Name

It won’t cost you hardly anything, especially if they use your organic listing (see #7). It tells me you are using pay-per-click like a smart business does, even if I don’t know what other terms you are advertising with.

9) About Us Page

Be personal about your company or yourself. How did you start, what makes your business strong, what are your strongest points, what makes you you? You can do this on a Contact Us page if you want. You don’t need to tell me about your family and your dog, but I do need to know you are real. I need to trust you.

10) Call me on the phone

Don’t email me, call me. When some contacts you, call them back before you try to send an email. Then send a follow-up email and do all your contact through email if you want. A phone call makes you real, that you are interested in providing your services to me, and you care about my needs. I think human nature now is email because it is easy, convenient, and you can actually think and re-think before the message is delivered. This also means, if you’re having potential customers fill out a form you want to ask for their phone number (maybe even require it).

I hope these tips will help you to be better, look more professional, and land more clients. Your potential clients do care what you look and act like, so you had better give it to them.

This is part 3 in our series about “Starting your SEO Business”. In case you missed them, here are the others:

Starting your SEO business: 5 Steps to Getting New SEO Clients
Starting Your SEO business: Tapping into Local Business with Local Search Tools

10 comments Visited 29046 times March 15th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Treat your Visitors from Search Ads and Contextual Ads Differently

Posted by Michael D Jensen on February 21st, 2007

If you are running a PPC (pay-per-click) campaign with search engines, you can create campaigns that are either Search or Contextual based. Both have their merit and usefulness, but both have unique traits about the customer and their current frame-of-mind. If you’re looking to improve your conversion rate (who isn’t?), knowing these differences can certainly help. At the end, I’ll give some tips for programmers to tell the difference between your Search and Contextual Ad visitors.

Before we get into those differences, let me first just make sure we all know about these two types of PPC campaigns.

Search and Contextual Ad Refresher

A Search ad campaign will run on the top and side of a search engine when users come to perform a search. They type in a keyword and the search results page shows up, with both natural results and paid results. The paid results are based on the actual keyword used in the search by the user.

A Contextual ad campaign is displayed on websites that want advertising revenue from their site. You can even bid separately on the price of your keywords for content ads. The ads that display on these websites are based on the content of the page. If a page is about dog food and dog toys, the ads displayed on that page will be based on those topics. Your ad shows up when your keywords from your contextual ad campaign match the topic of the page, as well as other factors (bid price, quality, etc).

The Scenarios

Let’s start with a scenario to make it more real for you to see the differences, and see if you can spot them yourself before I give it away.

Search Ad Scenario: Joe’s wife just reminded him it is almost Mother’s day, so Joe is looking to send flowers to his mother in Colorado. His first method of finding a flower company that delivers flowers to another state is to use a search engine. He types in the first keyword that comes to mind, “mother’s day flowers”. Joe gets the results page and glances through the ads at the top of the page. There are even some prices in there, some mention Mother’s day too. He clicks on one of the ads.

Content Ad Scenario: Joe is reading about a new gardening technique for his tomatoes that he just can’t get to grow right. He notices an ad on the side of the article that reminds him that Mother’s day is coming soon. He thinks of his mother and that it would be nice to do something for Mom. He clicks on the ad.

Differences between Search and Contextual Ad Visitors

1) Focus
Joe, in the Search Ad Scenario, was specifically looking for flowers to send to Mom for Mother’s day. He set aside the time and is focused on doing this task right now. Your challenge as a Flower Delivery company would be to have the ad that captures Joe the most, be it by price, on-time delivery, freshness of the flowers (quality of product), or some sort of guarantee.

In the Contextual Ad Scenario, Joe’s mind has been on his struggling tomatoes, but the Content Ad diverted his attention to his Mother and Mother’s day. Your first challenge was capture him with the ad, which worked. Your next challenge is to follow through and maintain his focus so he gets the flowers (through your site) before he continues thinking about his failing tomatoes.

2) Readiness

In the Search Ad Scenario, Joe is ready to buy something. He may compare a few companies, but he wants to buy something. Your challenge is to allure him to your ad, then keep his interest in your site and product, and fulfill his needs and questions. His readiness can easily be quieted if there are stumbling blocks to the purchase (not trustworthy, too pricey, not enough options, no guarantee, not secure, etc). Joe from the Search Ad probably won’t care that your sale ends next week because he is ready to buy right now.

In the Contextual Ad Scenario, Joe has diverted his attention to your product, at least for now. He wasn’t specifically looking to buy flowers for Mom, so he may either buy now or come back another day. Both of these need to be addressed in your content and atmosphere of your site. If he is ready to buy now, it should be so easy to find the perfect flower bouquet for Mom and to make the purchase, that he doesn’t lose interest and go back to his tomatoes. If he is going to come back tomorrow, you need to find a way to make your brand/product sticky in his mind. Will he remember your site (branding)? Can he easily find the special you advertised again? Because Joe from the Contextual Ad is not necessarily buying right now, anything you can do to make buying now more advantageous would be good for you and for Joe.

The two scenarios above are helpful for showing the focus and readiness. Other products/services may have additional differences in Visitors’ frame-of-mind, but generally these two are applicable across the board. Certainly not all Search ad customers are ready to buy now, but compared to Contextual ad customers, they are “more ready”. Some advertisers will find they generate more revenue from Search and some from Contextual, it depends on many factors. But understanding more about your visitor when they come may be able to influence your conversion rate.

Treat your Visitors Differently based on Ad Type

If there was a way to tell the difference between a Search Ad visitor and a Contextual Ad visitor, would you do something about it? If it helped your conversions you probably would! There are two different ways to do this that I will illustrate. The first method isn’t as reliable and not as easy to implement as the second method.

(Method 1) In programming you can capture certain variables from each visitor, including what URL they came from. This is the HTTP_REFERER server variable. In PHP for example, you can capture this with $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']. In Perl, you can capture this with $ENV{‘HTTP_REFERER’}. And for spelling freaks (like me), yes, REFERER is supposed to be spelled that way. Sometimes based on HTTP_REFERER alone you can distinguish whether the ad is Search or Contextual, but this is not always the case.

(Method 2) The best way is to include it in the URL of your ad. Set up separate campaigns for search and contextual ads. When setting these up, include a variable in the URL (address to your page) that distinguishes the two from each other. For example:

http://www.yourdomain.com/landingpage.html?adtype=search

http://www.yourdomain.com/landingpage.html?adtype=contextual

Then on your landing page, capture the variable ‘adtype’ and then adjust the content to fit the focus and readiness of the visitor. There are other strategies you can combine this with, such as basing the content on inferred intentions from the actual keyword that was used in the search.

What other differences do you see between visitors from these two sources, Search Ads and Contextual Ads?

2 comments Visited 5180 times February 21st, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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PPC Advice – Good or Bad… or VERY BAD

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on February 15th, 2007

Today, I took a few moments to take in a bit of the current online marketing blogscape. I eventually came across a post entitled “17 most common PPC mistakes web marketers make” by Igor Mor. It was posted on SEOMoz as part of their YOUMoz program where they “claim” posts from others they deem appropriate. Since my last post was about the ongoing feud between some PPC gurus and SEO pros, I was interested in the topic. As I read I was quite pleased with the content and the expertise Mr. Mor obviously has obtained through his experience with previous PPC campaigns. Unfortunately my positive mood did not hold out until the end, in fact I now wished this post had been named “16 most common PPC mistakes web marketers make,” because the 17th point is not very good advice at all.

In points 8, 9 and 16 Mr. Mor makes it a point to discuss the importance of protecting your firm’s name from your affiliates, and from your competition. This advice, although obvious to most business people, is very sound. Your firm’s name and the proper branding of that name are of paramount importance in the marketing world, online or otherwise. If your competition is using unethical marketing tactics to steal clients and benefit from your firm’s brand, or if they attempt to purposefully damage your firm’s reputation or brand image without cause, then by all means firms need to do all they can do, including taking legal action, to stop these competitive threats. I have no problem with this advice.

However, point 17 is so misguided and potentially dangerous, it severely reduced the quality of the post. Here is the problem, in his last point Mr. Mor suggests firms bid on the brand name of their competitors, because “anyone searching for your competitor could easily be your customer instead” (ghastly logic) and “Most of the time the ROI on those keywords is excellent” (Ah, we make more money, so the practice is acceptable, the good ole “Ends justify the Means argument”). What makes the whole suggestion even more preposterous is Mr. Mor explains earlier in point 8 that his firm frequently sends out “legal letters” to their competitors to stop them from continuing this type of unethical behavior. So I guess we have an acceptable double standard here, we are instructed to engage in bidding on our competitor’s brand name as a good PPC strategy, and we should make it a point to legally threaten our competitors if they attempt to do the same thing to our brands. Doesn’t sound so good to me, even with my lower than average cognitive skills. In Mr. Mor’s closing sentence, he advises “If you get a “legal letter” from the competitors and it holds water, I’d suggest comply with it.” If we get a letter, and if it holds water? I’m sorry folks, that isn’t a letter I want waiting for me in the mail box, the innumerable bills and credit card applications already in wait make the trip to the mail box miserable enough.

I get frustrated with the disconnect between the online world and the non-online business world at times. There is this maverick/old-west mentality online that continues to percolate, where obviously unethical and potentially illegal marketing strategies are employed by some with impunity. Interestingly enough, the resulting vitriol from those who are caught in their back alley practices is impossible for me to comprehend. These unscrupulous marketers know what they are doing is sinister, but they risk it anyway for a few extra bucks. How can they be so upset when they are shut down? Here is another thought… I know I personally do not want the FTC, or any other government entity, to form some sort of Internet Marketing Oversight group to start governing our every online marketing move. But if this sort of poor online marketing advice is continually doled out, and routinely implemented, then I think we should expect the involvement of the government in the future. And they will do it in the name of consumer protection, and fair trade enforcement, whether that truly be the case or not.

Just for fun, I took a second and went out and Googled “Dell Computers” and interestingly found no PPC ads for Apple or HP. I then searched for “Apple iPod” and found no PPC ads from Microsoft taking us to their Zune site. This isn’t by accident, corporate reputations are priceless. Clients aren’t fools and they will know when firms have attempted to hijack a competitor’s brand name. Yeah, you still might get a sell, and yeah, that will improve your ROI, but what has this ploy done to your company’s image? It is hard to quantify in dollar terms, but it should be considered, it is considered by image conscience Fortune 500 companies.

My advice, don’t bid on your competitors brand name in your PPC campaigns, earn your money the old fashioned way, work harder, work smarter, have a better product, offer superior customer service, run PPC ads on the long tail keywords, have fresh content on a site benefiting from solid SEO techniques. Simply put, do it the right way, stay above the murky waters of black-hat marketing tactics. You will sleep better knowing you will not be receiving a cease and desist letter from your competitor’s legal representatives for unethical behavior. Instead, if you do it the right way, you may very well get an offer from a competitor to just buy you out, because they are sick of being hammered by your squeaky-clean, brilliantly employed marketing efforts, and interestingly enough, your pristine brand will actually be worth your ridiculously high asking price.

5 comments Visited 8408 times February 15th, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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