Search Engine Marketing Certification: Paid Search & SEO »
Posted on March 3rd, 2008 by Justin Seibert in PPC, 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

Go Back, Baby. Momma Needs Drugs »
Posted on January 3rd, 2007 by Justin Seibert in Online Marketing, SEM | Leave A Comment

I was reviewing my blog posts recently and saw how often I mention something about my kids. I laughed thinking about how different this blog would look were Justin at age 25 - he who dressed in a poor man’s gerbil outfit and rolled around OU’s block party scene in a giant ball one Halloween night - writing it.

So in honor of Young Justin, I won’t discuss my youngin’s at all in this post. Instead, I’ll discuss Torri Roger’s latest edition to the family.

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TAGS: conversion rates, free consultation, landing pages, SEM

Search Engine Marketing for Schools »
Posted on November 12th, 2006 by Justin Seibert in DOM News, Online Marketing, SEM, SEO | Leave A Comment

When someone asks me what my company does, I usually say that we help businesses increase sales and quality leads through targeted online marketing. If a company is a sales organization and truly wants to increase its sales, we can help.

The one problem I currently have with my description is that not everyone thinks of the words “business” and “sales” the same way I do.

For example, some of the heaviest online marketing investment is for educational facilities. It began with online colleges like Phoenix and has blossomed to brick-and-mortar colleges and universities. Now private schools, boarding schools, parochial schools, and schools for at-risk youth are discovering they can increase enrollment - or just increase the quality of their enrollment - through online marketing.

Online schools can obviously market almost anywhere - they don’t care whether students come from Bar Harbor, ME or Chula Vista, CA. Last month there were over 4.5 million searches for “online college”* - even more than just “college” - so even though there’s a lot of competition, there are a lot of potential “clients” to reach.

The power of geo-targeting allows day schools with physical locations to target only students (or students’ parents) within a drivable distance, say 15-50 miles. Search engine optimization is probably more effective than search engine marketing for these schools unless they’re in major metropolitan areas just because of search volume by geographic region.

Most “colleges” (1.78 million), “boarding schools” (151,000), and “military academies” (22,000) - the numbers in parentheses represent searches per month for those particular terms - may be able to enroll students from any area, but they may also find that they have an easier time selling students from a particular state or region. A school in West Virginia or Arkansas, for example, may not think it’s worth it to try the New England prep scene region and opt instead for the South or Mid-Atlantic.

By advertising on specialities of your school, such as being a “culinary school” (107,000), helping students get “biotechnology jobs” (111,000), or helping “troubled teens” (53,000) you can both differentiate yourself and reach more people with less competition.

By the same token, maybe a boarding school has had students come to it from Japan, Switzerland, or South Korea in the past and wants to try to reach more people from that region. Why not advertise on “American boarding school” (2500) in those regions? You can even have your students help you write the ads and landing pages in the appropriate language.

If you work in admissions for a school that would like to increase its enrollment, please give us a call at 1-800-979-3177 to discuss how we can help you meet your goals.

* A note about my statistics: I base my search volume numbers on the number of overall searches last month on Yahoo for the United States and English speaking Canada, which has about a fifth of the market share of searches in these locations and then multiply these numbers by five (5) to come up with an approximate total # of searches across all search engines per month. Singular and plural versions of the keywords have been combined unless otherwise noted. And remember, these are only numbers for high level keywords. By expanding your list, you can come up with many many times greater numbers of searches.

Of course these numbers will vary by month. If you want to see how search volumes vary over the course of several months, might I suggest Google Trends. A pretty good tool, although search volumes have to be pretty high to show you a trend over the past couple years.

TAGS: google, keywords, SEM, SEO, yahoo

The Problem with ESPN… »
Posted on October 19th, 2006 by Justin Seibert in SEM, Slightly Off-Topic | Leave A Comment

Note: Although the specific articles are pretty clean, the links below point to sites that may contain some questionable language (people are pretty passionate about sports). Please do not click on them if you will be offended. You’ll still understand the point of this entry regardless.

With the World Series finally ready to go, I began fondly reminiscing yesteryear and all the great sports that used to be available for public consumption via basic cable. When I was in college last decade, I enjoyed one of the greatest runs of television history - ESPN Sportscenter.

But Sportscenter is still on sayeth you. Technically you’re correct, but any avid sports fan in their mid-20s or older will tell you that it’s a mere shadow of its former self. Think Mike Tyson during his first title run and Mike Tyson now. Before he was the baddest man in all the land and now he’s a side show, saying that he might both fight women on tour and service them at Heidi Fleiss’ planned male brothel.

In the 90’s, Sportscenter actually gave you complete box scores and - gasp! - coverage of games no matter how bad the two teams were and what the major American sport was.

Now? As long as you’re a fan of the Yankees, Red Sox, Patriots, USC, or Notre Dame, Sportscenter still works for you. For the rest of the population, forget it. And they repeat the same shows over and over again each night. It’s not like they don’t have the time.

I’m not writing this to point out how bad ESPN was and how much I wish they had competition so they’d be forced to go back to their old ways. Well, not completely.
Think of Old Sportscenter (BSS - Before Sean Salisbury) as a buffet. You might be stuck in line having to wait through clips of burnt tater tots before you get to highlights of fresh fruit salad. But you will eventually get to the fresh fruit salad.

New Sportscenter (EHE - ESPN Hollywood Era) gives you plenty of chicken cordon blue, liver, and mushroom popovers, and a very limited amount of fresh fruit salad. If you like that style of chicken, liver, and mushroom treats, you’re in hog heaven. If you don’t, you may still stick around because there are no other buffets in town, it’s cheap, and you’re hoping to get to the fruit salad before it runs out (i.e. you fall asleep or your spouse asks you to take out the trash).

If you’re a Pittsburgh Pirates fan like some people who own Direct Online Marketing, you have plenty of problems, so maybe you shouldn’t even be worried about EHE. But if you’re an Oakland A’s fan, you should be really upset as your team tears through the American League West better than almost any team in the league through the second half of the season and you get nary a mention.

If Sportscenter were like Search Engine Marketing, it would be even better than BSS - it would be On Demand FPV (free per view) Sportscenter, allowing you to search for any team whose games you would like to see clips of. You could even catch a hockey clip.

It would almost be like a free Mobile ESPN unit. I think. I’ve seen 5,000 commercials for it just like you, but also just like you, I don’t know anyone who bought one before it finally admitted defeat.

TAGS: espn, SEM