TKG SEO Blog

Guest Blogger: Corey Hammond

5 Things No One Will Tell You About SEM

Moderator:

• Chris Zaharias, VP Search Sales, Omniture

Speaker:

• David Rodnitzky, VP, Strategy, PPCAdBuying.com
• Terry Whalen, SEM & Internet Marketing Expert, Founder, TDW Consulting
• Chris Knoch, Principal Consultant, Best Practices Group, Omniture
• Vinny Lingham, CEO, Synthasite

Goal is to talk about different things that isn’t talk about that much. People are allowed to ask question whenever.

Chris is speaking first and his topic is about the long tail. Most people originally said the long tail is where marketers should target because of the growth vs. shorter keyword phrases. The stats are really showing that 1 keyword and 2 keyword search terms are going up as well. Search is becoming a “final destination” meaning that people are searching with the expectation to end up at a particular goal.

Vinny is speaking now about the return on effort. His main theme is that people should focus their efforts on where they are getting a return and where things work. A lot of people try to cast the net too wide and target too many keywords across too many search engine (referring to PPC) and what happens is their efforts get diluted.

Dave starts speaking on SEM Works for Everything and how it is a myth. He think other mediums can be better suited by other marketing means like offline media and banner ads.

Chris is going to now talk about Search vs. Search Engine Upsell. This was all about PPC and leveraging content networks with your PPC campaign. Search engines are trying to “upsell” people by trying to get them to spend more money by offering different type of advertising. These different types of advertising can be found within one’s Adwords account. Some people will just click the content network option without creating a new campaign that will target the different audience of the content network vs. the usual search network.

Search is opaque is now covered by Terry. There are factors like quality score and the algorythm that people don’t know. People can always see what their competitors are doing through competitive intelligence. If companies are new to the game or behind, they can always use that as a resource and learn from the strategies, keywords, etc. that their competitors are doing or using. He referrences Spyfu.com for PPC competitive research as a tool to use.

This session was labeled as a more general search engine marketing but it heavily leaned to PPC vs. organic search. It was interesting to see their points about keywords and keyword selection even though it had that PPC keyword buying spin.