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How Much of Your Budget Are You Re-Allocating to SEM? »
Posted on April 7th, 2010 by Justin Seibert in Google Adwords, Local Search, Microsoft adCenter, Paid Search, SEM, SEO, Yahoo Search Marketing | 2 Comments
First thing’s first. Despite what some people in the industry say search engine marketing, or SEM, refers to all forms of marketing, optimizing, and advertising through / to / with search engines. Primarily that means paid search and search engine optimization plus all related disciplines and offshoots like local search, press optimization, etc.
Often people use SEM just to refer to paid search marketing, often also referred to as pay per click, or ppc (Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, Microsoft adCenter, et al). If I’m having a conversation with a prospective client who uses SEM that way, I’ll go along for the sake of conversation, but you, loyal reader, should know better. Not picking on anyone here; there’s a lot of confusion around the term – even Google itself uses it this way in their AdWords testing materials.
 Alright. Now that we’re straight, let’s dive into SEMPO’s just released 2010 State of Search Engine Marketing Report, which you can buy here if you want to curl up with 112 pages and some cocoa late at night. Here are some key findings taken from the report synopsis and MediaPost’s write-up (hence the dueling bullet point styles): Continue reading →
TAGS: allocating marketing budgets, local seo, mediapost, SEM, sempo
How Customers Tend to be More Right if They’re Ex-Cops »
Posted on May 6th, 2009 by Paul Woodhouse in SEO | 2 Comments
Clients come in many a shade. While we’d all love to be given free reign and an open checkbook to play around with a site to see what works, that very rarely, if ever, happens.
It’s also fairly rare to find a client who has a budget, but gives you free reign to do as you see fit to generate the end result. Granted, this increases the more you prove yourself over an extended period, but it’s still quite infrequent.
The other evening I shared a pint with an unhappy CEO currently with an SEM company contracted to perform SEO duties for his ecommerce site. This CEO had more than your average sprinkling of SEO nous, but didn’t consider himself an expert by any means. There’s always the potential for the rutting of the alpha male SEO stag when you have clients with SEO knowledge (a little of it being a dangerous thing and all that).
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TAGS: ecommerce, keywords, SEM, SEO
SEM Smart: Rainy Day SEO »
Posted on June 25th, 2008 by Paul Woodhouse in SEM, SEO | Leave A Comment
I knew there was a reason I’d stopped feasting on the evening offering of the various television networks. That reason has never been clearer than Celebrity Family Feud.
Heavens to Betsy.
Al Roker, the former(?) NBC blimp of a weatherman who hasn’t so much lost weight as deflated like a celebratory balloon that’s been left stuck to the wall for a couple of years, was the host. The two opening families were the Rivers’ (as in Joan) and the Ice-T’s.
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TAGS: SEM, SEO
Search Engine Marketing Certification: Paid Search & SEO »
Posted on March 3rd, 2008 by Justin Seibert in Paid Search, SEM, SEO, Web Credibility | 6 Comments
As the half-dozens of regular readers of the Direct Online Marketing™ Blog know, Derrick “McKinley’s Bodyguard” McKee recently came on board to our search team. Before deciding on him I was able to speak with several talented folk.
One was a young woman in school down in Georgia who had studied internet marketing in school and played around with it on the side. She asked where she could get training on learning more while she awaited graduation.
I threw out a few places, giving costs and my 2 cents. After all, I’ve had my search marketing training and certifications over the years and design the training our employees get. But what a perfect opportunity to ask an expert in the arena.
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TAGS: David Temple, Eric Ward, neo@ogilvy, paid search certification, search engine optimization training, SEM, SEMScholar
The Difference between Search Marketing and Other Forms of Advertising »
Posted on January 30th, 2007 by Justin Seibert in Online Marketing, SEM, Search Engines | Leave A Comment
When all you deal with every day is online marketing, it can sometimes be easy to completely strip yourself of your experience to fully explain the medium to people outside the industry.
I think I normally do a good job of explaining to people how search engines work at the most basic level. That’s not always the case apparently.
We just launched a search engine marketing campaign for a client and the results have been slow in the extremely early goings. This isn’t new to me; I make it a point to tell clients and potential clients that the results in week two will be better than week one, better in month two than month one, and so on. That’s one of the benefits of search engine marketing as an extremely direct marketing platform – testing can be done inexpensively, quickly, and effectively. Continue reading →
TAGS: SEM
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