Posted by: Janessa Seewald, Account Manager

Setting goals for a new search engine marketing (SEM) program and developing the strategy that will achieve them are your first steps toward high ROI. There are several important factors that arise when you go through this process, ranging from qualitative considerations such as the audience’s awareness of your brand to quantitative considerations including your initial budget.

Let’s take a look at a few of these factors more closely:

• Brand Awareness – Knowing how familiar your target audience is with your brand plays a large role in goal setting and strategy development. This will help you define what tactics to consider as part of your program and what metrics you define as important in achieving your goals. For example, contextual advertising is a great way to generate brand awareness by targeting prospects that are searching for content related to your product/service offerings. However, since this is often primarily a branding tactic, you should expect a much lower click-through rate (CTR) than you might from tactics such as email or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. read more »

Posted by: Leslie Russell, Senior Marketing Coordinator

Analytics tools provide tremendous insight into the activity that is taking place on your website. These tools, such as Google Analytics or Omniture, reveal how users reach your website by disclosing the keyword phrases that are driving traffic, generating the best performance and helping drive the highest conversions. Plus, Analytics tools will break down your top-performing keywords based on paid traffic and organic traffic. All of this can be a big help in your search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns.

By narrowing in on the data that these tools make available you are able to expand your keyword list based on your most successful keywords with the help of other keyword tools. Once you’ve identified the best performing keywords generating the highest ROI, you can use Google’s Search-Based Keyword Tool to find additional keyword phrases related to your top terms.

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Posted by: Janessa Seewald, Account Manager

Ever since search engines have become such a commonly utilized gateway to the Web, new engines have continually emerged in an attempt to steal searches and market share from bigger companies like Google and Yahoo!; however, besides a small threat made by Ask, no other engine has been able to break through. Cuil, a search engine developed by some former top Google engineers, did pose some threat with its launch in July 2008. It was touted in the blogosphere as a potential “Google Killer,” but according to Search Engine Watch, it had a disappointing start, and traffic numbers are dismal.

So, what will it take for a new search engine to emerge onto the scene and show staying power? read more »

Posted by: Sean Voorhies, Senior Marketing Coordinator

Aside from its attempt to buy Yahoo!, Microsoft’s Live Search spent most of 2008 playing catch up to arch rival Google. Recent attempts to keep pace have included Live Search News, a quality based ranking tool, updates to Live Search local listings center, an adCenter community site, an expedited ad approval process, the adExcellence training program and improved adCenter functionality.

According to Nielson Ratings data, Live’s search volume remained relatively static throughout the year - averaging roughly 1 billion searches per month, while Google’s search volume increased from 4.25 billion in January to 5.5 billion in December.

With its mainstay software business being hit by the recession, Microsoft is under pressure to deliver in online search. So, will 2009 be the year that Live Search steps out of Google’s shadow?

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Posted by: Gloria Dutton, Marketing Coordinator

Personalized search is not completely new. It has been introduced slowly over the last couple of years, but it is now in full force. It is important to pay attention to this change and optimize search engine marketing (SEM) programs accordingly, since a shift towards personalization alters the broader search landscape.

Many factors play a part in determining how search results are shown to any given user, such as past searches, Gmail activity, IP address and more. In addition, once search results are displayed, Google SearchWiki users are further able personalize their listings by removing what they find irrelevant, adding URLs, posting comments, and designating which listings are their favorites. So what does this mean for the future of search? It’s going through big changes, but if we keep just a few key points in mind while optimizing our websites, we should be able to keep up with the transition.

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Posted by: Leslie Russell, Senior Marketing Coordinator

Closing out 2008, Yahoo! continued to lose usage share points, as Google widened the lead as the predominate search engine of choice.  Rumors persist about the sale and acquisition of the struggling engine.  And yet Yahoo! remains steadfast in its attempts to restore the engine’s image by undergoing both performance changes and staffing changes.

Late in 2008 Yahoo! announced it would be making changes to its crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms.  Some industry analysts have reported seeing some of these changes beginning to take shape with the increased emphasis on URL naming conventions as well as Yahoo!’s attempt to clean up the relevancy of search results.  Yahoo! has not publically released any specific algorithm updates so far in 2009.

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Posted by: Kayla Wagner, Account Manager

The search engine landscape is always changing and will continue to do so in 2009. But rather than going with the latest and greatest, take the new year to focus on the basics first and then build on top of them. Is the base of your SEM program serving as a strong foundation?

1. Recalibrate your keywords in your SEO and paid search (or PPC advertising) programs to match your goals. Often we start with terms that we’re used to using internally at our companies. But is this what your prospects are using to search for you? And aren’t those prospects at various points in the purchase cycle, ranging from completely unaware to aware and ready to buy? Make sure your terms and phrases account for the various segments of your audience.

Here are a few resources to help you create your strategic keyword list:
-    Google’s Search-based Keyword Tool
-    SEO Book.com
-    Microsoft adCenter Labs Keyword Forecast

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90octane is included in the newly released Marketers Resource Guide ‘09 by BtoB Magazine. The firm is listed under the Top B-to-B Agencies, Interactive Agencies and SEM Vendors sections.

The Guide directs its audience of business-to-business marketers in creating partnerships with vendors. BtoB’s VP-publisher Bob Felsenthal notes, “If you are in the b-to-b marketing world, you need partners who are familiar with b-to-b markets, who know your needs and how your customers react. These partners will also know what messages engage these audiences, what media they use and what language they speak.”

90octane strategizes and implements search engine marketing and online demand generation programs for nonprofits, consumer companies and business-to-business organizations. The agency’s business-to-business clients include Gates Corporation, ProLogis, Charter Business^®, Atlas Copco, Symetix and ITT Visual Information Solutions.

Download the complete Marketers Resource Guide ‘09 from BtoB Magazine.

Posted by: Janessa Seewald, Account Manager

Despite the tough economy and the fact that many companies are cutting portions of their budgets, most are maintaining their presence online and adopting an even more competitive, aggressive approach. The following tips can be utilized to help differentiate your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising/contextual advertising strategy from your competitors’.

1. Evaluate the messaging your competition is using within their PPC and contextual ads, and determine how to make your creative stronger. It’s got to really stand out. For example, use questions, customer testimonials and of course your strongest offer within your ad text.

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Posted by: Shannon Denny, Project Manager

It seems more than ever marketers are striving to make the most of their marketing bucks. If you’ve previously run search engine marketing (SEM) programs, one of the best ways to stretch your dollar is to evaluate your campaigns’ past performance. Here are a few questions to ask when optimizing your current SEM campaign:

·     What type of traffic did your previous campaign drive? If you were satisfied with the number and quality of the leads you were receiving, then it’s safe to assume you can continue down the same path; however, if the leads didn’t necessarily give you the results you were looking for, consider the strategy of your past campaign. For a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaign, you may need to revisit the keyword strategy to determine what terms converted well. For an organic optimization (or SEO) program, see what position your website was showing up in, and try being more aggressive with any terms that aren’t performing to your expectations. read more »