aimClear Search Marketing Blog

[This is a guest post written by Dennis Yu, CEO of BlitzLocal.] We  get asked the “GA or Omniture” question often enough that we decided to offer up this analysis as a buyer’s guide to the marketing executive or CEO. So how well does a free product stack up against one costing six figures?

The main selling points of Omniture are engine-independence and paid support. Conceptually, there is something to be said about using a third-party tool to manage your spend across multiple engines. At the same time, the primary engines have formats (API and bulk loading) that make it easy to export and import campaigns. Read the rest of this entry »

I had a near out of body-real-time SMS/search/tweet experience last night interacting with our attorney, Laura.  (No, the picture’s not Laura.)  She’s in Manhattan to attend the Social Media Risks and Rewards legal conference, and pinged me to quick-search for information about a ruckus she was observing outside the famed Waldorf Astoria.

Our innocent little text exchange and my ensuing searches (illustrated later in this article) make it entirely clear there’s a radical new type of query intent (what users’ are looking for): situational. It turns out Google’s not adept at some situational searches which, to some minds,  leaves them vulnerable to services like Twitter in a substantial segment of emerging search inventory. Read the rest of this entry »

On June 3rd, Matt Cutts freaked the technical SEO community by casually stating that PageRank sculpting, the subtle art of flow-managing page value distribution, had changed significantly from what Google had been prescribing.

Who cares, we don’t need noFollow. What bothers many is that know we’ve learned Google flipped the switch a year ago, all the while offering misleading public information. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s get this out of the way: Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s web spam team. He is perceived as a rock star in the industry and everywhere he goes he is a followed by a giddy horde of search marketers. SEO trends and techniques live and die by the words of the affable Mr. Cutts.

Yet there remains a healthy degree of skepticism and about Google’s advice. At the end of the day, the various teams at Google are doing what’s best for Google’s search users, which is not always best for an SEO’s clients.

Continuing the SMX Advanced tradition, Matt was kind enough to sit down with Danny Sullivan once more to take on audience questions in a You & A with Matt Cutts. Read the rest of this entry »

Periodic, if not constant, change in search marketing is a certainty. Proof positive is that “Google” didn’t even exist 10 years ago and is accepted in the vernacular as a verb (“She “Googled” this or that”). The growing use of online media provide new avenues for searchers. Watch for the changes, and always ask yourself, what is out there and how will your customers find you?

Today at SES New York, speakers focused on what Google has done and what they could do better in “Beyond Googling: Where Will Your Customers Be Searching in Five Years?” The session was moderated by (one of our favorites) John Marshall, SES Advisory Board, CTO, Market Motive. Read the rest of this entry »