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In These Economic Times, Small Business Can Mean Big Business

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Due to the difficult economic times, marketers everywhere are getting their budgets slashed. A lot of businesses think that they will make it through these hard economic times by not advertising.

Something to think about, however, is the new trend in consumer spending. Consumers are looking for ways to save money, while maintaining the same level of product quality. Therefore, brand loyalty is not important anymore. What’s most important is finding a brand that caters to consumer wants, while satisfying needs.

If anything, marketing is more important now than it ever was. People are willing to try different products. If they are satisfied with these new products, there won’t be a reason to switch back once the economy gets better. Aggressive advertising and marketing will put your products in front of the consumer when they are looking to find that great new product.

How can you find these consumers? Get them online! With every dollar being more important than before, consumers are researching almost every purchase they make. Serious thought is put into everything from what toilet paper brand to buy to what car make to drive.

Online advertising can be done most economically through search engine optimization. It does not involve a lot of money toward advertising, and the people it drives to your website are better qualified leads if keyword research is done properly. There are great tools, such as SEOBook.com, that provide free tutorials on the basics of Search Engine Optimization. This way, you can work on SEO on your own and monitor your own progress. If you don’t have time to learn, or you want help from experts, another great way to start an SEO campaign is to work with a marketing firm, like Accession Media, to help implement and handle your SEO for you. Good internet marketing firms will get to know your company and products, and work with you to determine the best strategy to implement and monitor your SEO campaign. Taking this route will free your time up to work on other things, and you’ll get regular reports and advice on the progress and direction of your site.

A Seat at the Table for Search Marketing in Big Business

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Whether you are an in-house search marketing strategist at a large organization or you’re an agency who has a search marketing champion, there is a common barrier that you will consistently come across: Establishing priority for search marketing in conjunction with getting buy-in from required stake holders. Below I have outlined 5 ways you can push search marketing strategies along more effectively within big corporations.

  1. Relationships: While working at businesses (>150 employees) you will find there are numerous stakeholders involved with every task. Establishing strong working relationships with team members in marketing, IT, and design is extremely beneficial in understanding the corporate structure as well as the flow for strategic processes.
  2. Quick Wins and Tips: Once you have established some decent relationships it’s a good idea to understand each individual’s priorities/responsibilities. From there you should begin to pass along occasional quick wins and tips allowing these individuals to be more effective with their day to days tasks. This idea will really help build your trust level and make your team members looks good infront of their bosses.
  3. Training: This is a technique I have had great success with. In order to get buy-in on the implementation of SEO and PPC strategies from my marketing team, I designed one hour SEO/PPC training sessions for groups of intimate groups of 5-7. With a better understanding in both SEO and PPC the marketing team was more open to asking for my help in future strategies. I kept the groups small to help promote questions and conversation during the training sessions.
  4. Get Involved: If you see an opportunity to help out or add insight, take it. A suggestion for an A/B test for an email marketing campaign, a missing competitive term in a PPC campaign, an important tweak to a landing page or missing meta tags for a prominent product page – Word these hidden opportunities with benefits and you will find success.
  5. Long Term: Don’t just stop at the basics, once you have established relationships and received some buy-in, continue to evangelize search marketing with on going strategies. Find yourself a seat at meetings related to new website designs, CMS selection, and online campaigns so that you can continue to give search marketing a voice a the table.

In House SEO: Make 100k Per Year

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The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), http://www.sempo.org/, today announced top line findings from its first-ever survey of in-house SEM job salary compensation. I had a chance to chat with Duane Forrester, co-chair of SEMPO’s in house committee, about the findings from the survey, listen to the audio:


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In-house search engine marketers (SEMs) are receiving healthy salaries in line with their experience levels but if you want a salary in the mid-to-high $100s to the $200K range you are usually going to have to invest five to seven years to get there – a traditional dynamic in which experience brings greater compensation.

One of the key findings is that roughly one third of in-house search engine marketers are managing monthly budgets in excess of $200,000. “We anticipated a lower ceiling of monthly spend closer to the $100,000 range so we were pleasantly surprised,” says Duane Forrester, co-chair of SEMPO’s In-House SEM Committee and Lead SEO Program Manager with Microsoft. “The $200K monthly spend is a healthy barometer of the search marketing industry and it syncs up with SEMPO’s current trend projections that SEM spending will double by 2011, to more than $18 billion.”

A cross section of global entry level, mid and upper level, in-house managers and in-house analysts completed the online survey during the fall of 2007. There were 656 completed surveys, a strong market response to this inaugural project. The survey was open to all in-house SEM professionals – working in organic or paid search. SEMPO membership was not a requirement to take the survey.

SEMPO’s largest pool of survey respondents – more than 26% – came from managers, whose compensation clustered in the $60,000 to $90,000. Despite the manager’s title, SEMPO found that almost half did not directly manage people.

Senior managers and directors comprised close to 20% of the respondents. Salary ranges for senior managers clustered in the $70,000 to $100,000 range, with more than 36% reporting an annual salary of $80,000+ to $100,000.

Director level compensation tracked with experience: more than 18% of the directors taking the survey said they had from five to seven years experience. About a quarter of this group reported annual salaries between $100,000 and $120,000. With this comes greater responsibility: more than 44% said they managed monthly budgets in excess of $200,000.

What is SEO?

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With a lot of discussion lately if SEO is dead or not, I thought I would step back to see how others define Search Engine Optimization. Before we can tell if it’s dead, let’s see what it is. Below are definitions from several popular website.

MarketingProfs.com – The altering of a Web site, Web pages and links to Web sites and Web pages to improve visibility, rank and relevance in the organic, crawler-based listings of search engines.

WebsiteNova.com – This is the process of making a website ‘search-engine-friendly.’ Search engine optimization is primarily used to increase rankings in SERPs, and effective SEO can increase the potential of your website and bring in more traffic.

Wikipedia.com – A set of methodologies aimed at improving the visibility of a website in search engine listings.

SEOmoz.org – … the active practice of optimizing a web site by improving internal and external aspects in order to increase the traffic the site receives from search engines.

Webopedia.com – … the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a Web site by ranking high in the search results of a search engine

All of those are very good definitions from very reputable sites. I use several of them often.These definitions seem to have one thing in common: traffic. SEO brings in traffic.

That is good at a basic level. SEO is definitely not dead, it’s just elementary. Traffic is good, but quality traffic is better. SEO is needed and appreciated, but it’s important not to stop there.

As mentioned before, if you are looking for help: You need a Search Engine Marketer, not an SEO.

** Find more articles from John W Ellis at http://www.johnwellis.com/

Free Download: In House SEO PDF

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If you’re considering bringing Search Marketing In House then I recommend downloading this In House SEO PDF. Get expert advice from established SEO professionals at: NetConcepts, ResortQuest, Time Inc., Business.com and Classmates.com. Earlier this summer I asked some of the top SEO minds the same 2 questions, it was quite a popular series so I decided to turn it into a PDF.
  • What is the biggest advantage for an organization to bring Search Marketing In-house?
  • What is the biggest challenge in accomplishing a transformation to In-house SEO?

Download Now!

The PDF also includes a bonus section: Links to 10 great In house search marketing resources. Below is a snippet from the In House SEO PDF.

“Often search engine optimization is an after-thought, if it is thought of at all. The biggest benefit for bringing search marketing in-house is that you have someone internal who can champion and represent SEO in the hallways, at meetings, and through relationship building. Also, it gives everyone in the company someone to reach out to for an immediate answer and/or involvement when the need arises.” – Jessica Bowman, Business.com.

Special thanks to: John Ellis, Jessica Bowman, Jennifer Mathews Somogyi, Aidan Beanland, Rudy DeDominicis and Chris Smith.