aimClear Search Marketing Blog

Overseeing local and mobile search marketing efforts can be daunting. Numerous providers offer ever-increasing abilities to target eyeballs by demographic criteria. How much should be budgeted to the greatest benefit?

What should we do first? Who are the players? This session explored the “tactical demands of running a successful local/mobile search marketing campaign.”

Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, Search Engine Land , moderated and led off the discussion. Chris gave us the good news first, that “local and mobile campaigns have a lot in common with traditional search marketing. However, local mobile is much more fragmented with dozens or hundreds of factors to keep track of.”Read the rest of this entry »

There has been a revolution of keyword research tools over time. The first introduction to keyword research for most of us was years ago with the free overture keyword tool, which was the basis for many an early PPC campaign. Overture became Yahoo and provided insight into Yahoo’s keyword “inventory.” it was revolutionary.

Now with more advanced tools like Trellian Keyword Discovery, and WordTracker we have access to databases of differing sizes, quality, focus, skew and insight. aimClear suscribes to several regionl, global, and specialized keyword databases (through their APIs) which we aggregate in a proprietary tool. However WordTracker offers a free keyword research tool with useful functionality to the public. If you’re willing to do a little screen scraping, data can be harvested to provide insight into the keyword universe.Read the rest of this entry »

If you pay attention to seminar speakers (and anecdotal chatter) it’s quite obvious that many advertising agencies are grappling with (and feeling threatened by) the ubiquitous evolution of search marketing.  The new Internet marketing is about a constant stream of recurrent content published on SEO savvy platforms. The days of set it and forget it static pages are over…gone the way of meta keywords, and other antiquated SEO attributes.

Making the situation more confusing for agencies is the reality that advertising agency clients have heard about search marketing, they know they need it, and they ask agencies directly about it. This puts (formally full service) agencies in an awkward position including but not limited to the possibility of missed revenue opportunities. Agencies in our area seem to give their clients the stock answer: “we don’t offer those services and recommend working with a firm that specializes in SEM.”

This post begins a series of articles aimed squarely at advertising and PR agencies with the intent of demystifying the SEM process.

Old Information is Cheaper
This is especially true in second and third tier markets where engaging an “SEM firm” often means paying too much for second or third tier misinformation or web 1.0 advice (in a web 2.0 world). Unfortunately the current environment of great demand and fast profit for SEM wanna-be-companies breeds “SEM firms” that are actually last-generation website building shops. Hiring a design/build firm to market a website costs less in the short tem and you get what you pay for-less traffic and sales over time.

Read the rest of this entry »

From a marketing perspective “search” can be confusing, challenging, and exciting. However many industries exist in and must remain compliant to regulatory environments. For instance the pharmaceutical, health, alcohol, legal, and insurance industries all must deal with various rules, regulations, and laws when it come to advertising and privacy.

Adding this regulatory layer to organic and paid search thickens the soup. Interestingly enough, many companies do not pay full attention to the regulatory liabilities associated with certain aspects of paid and organic search marketing efforts. It can come back to bite them in the search engines.

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Sometimes it is possible to predict keyword niches from current events or things you believe will happen. Recently Yahoo Small Business Hosting had a 3 day HTTP server 500 error issue which affected WordPress blogs and other .php applications running on their servers. When we called Yahoo to deal with the issue (this blog is hosted with Yahoo Small Business Hosting for the moment) they told us “Yahoo runs .php scripts just fine” but that the outage “only affected .php pages.” They told us the server 500 error would last for up to 3 business days which surprised us. We responded with a link baiting article on our main website, aimClear.com to attract other upset Yahoo Small Business Hosting Customers.

Predicting Future Keywords
Both wordTracker (12/06 – 3/07) and Trellian (2/06-2/07) were reporting that no searches were queried for “yahoo small business hosting bug” and other keywords which might be associated with the outage. Still, since lots of people host .php applications on Yahoo Small Business Hosting servers. We wanted to experiment with attaining ranking on the search engine results page (SERP) for what we believed would be a future pocket of searches that were easy to attain rankings for now while the phrases were uncontested. Here’s the thinking in 6 steps. Read the rest of this entry »

What is Geo-Targeting?
Geo-targeting refers to a search engine’s ability to discern the IP address of incoming search traffic and resolve the user’s IP address to a geographic location. The technology of IP targeting is not perfect and search engines offering geo-targeting options are careful to put forth disclaimers regarding the accuracy of their geographically targeted media placement capabilities.

For instance Panama, Yahoo’s ad platform (the evolution of Overture) allows advertisers to target PPC ads by state province or DMA but offers the following caveat: “Note: Please note that geo-targeting accuracy is not guaranteed and may vary depending on the level of targeting selected, as well as other factors.”

Google AdWords help explains the inherent inaccuracies of geo-targeting technology as follows: “You (or others) might not be able to see your ad if we’re unable to determine the search location. This might happen if you or another searcher: Uses an ISP that employs a proxy server, preventing us from identifying the computer’s IP address , Has an IP address that doesn’t match the actual region of the person searching , Hasn’t entered a recognizable location-specific term in the search query.”

First Google unveiled geo-targeting and we’ve been successfully using it for years. Panama Geo-Targeting is a major feature of Yahoo’s advertising platform and, after a bumpy start, works fairly well. It’s a brave new world. However it is important to strategize the mix of geo-targeting and geo-tags with full understanding of the tools.Read the rest of this entry »

“Search” Is Not Just About The Internet anymore. Search means people actively looking for things, no matter where they go to do so. Whether our audience is reading the newspaper in the barber’s office or social bookmarking a website on technorati, to know precisely what people search for, the words they use to ask, and how often they seek gives us powerful insight in every communications channel.Read the rest of this entry »