A guide to search marketing and how online businesses can maximise the benefits of search to increase conversions and ROI

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How companies should
really use search?
by
Ann Stanley
April 2013

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Agenda
Part 1 – Introduction to search
Part 2 – Quick Wins!
Part 3 - Search engine optimisation (SEO)
Part 4 - Importance of Social

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Part 1 – Introduction to search

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Digital landscape

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Growth in Digital
IAB/PwC - Total Market Size First Half 2012 (Oct 2012)
• Digital Ad spend in H1 2012 reached £2,591 million (£2.6 billion); this is a record
• Spending on digital advertising grew by 12.6% year on year.
AA/Warc Expenditure Report (Jan 2013)
• The size of the annual UK online advertising market is expected to reach £5.3bn (year ending
2012), more than 31% of all UK advertising
• Q3 growth still at 10% (year on year)

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The importance of search!
£1,527 million was spent on search in the first half of 2012. Source: IAB/PcW
Advertising spend by category
Search
Display
Classified
Others

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Understanding the search results

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Google results for [luggage]
Product Listing
Pay per click ads
ads
Local business
listings
Organic or
natural search Pay per click
results ads

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Shopping results

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Localised results

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Local listings

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Local listing (in Google+)

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Universal Results & Schema

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How to get into the Google results
Free
• Map – create a free Google Places listings (also in Bing) – this is now part of
Google Plus
• Images & videos – make sure these have keyphrases in the file names and
tags
• News, blogs and author results – create ongoing blog content on your site or
via news feed sites (PR)
• Organic or natural listings – search engine optimise your website i.e. SEO
Paid
• Ads – set up an AdWords pay per click account – where you bid on relevant
phrases and you pay if they click on your ad
• Shopping results – feed your ecommerce database into Google Merchant
Centre and use Product Listing ads in AdWords

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Part 2 – Quick Wins!

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Local listings

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Local listings

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Getting listed in Google Places (Local Search)

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Add your company details

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Google Plus Page

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Create a Google+ page

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listing through My118 Information

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Using Google AdWords
or pay per click (PPC)

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Pay Per Click in Action
1
User submits
search
2
Listings
dynamically
ordered by
bid price &
relevancy
3
User clicks on
paid link,
triggering
payment to
Google

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Ad Extensions, Local Listings (map)
and new Product Listing ads

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Examples of Product Listing Ads

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Summary of different shopping results in Google
Keywords =
Samsonite luggage
Organic shopping
results AdWords Products Map and
Product Listing ads
ad extension Local listings
(Merchant Centre)

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Call and location extensions

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Click to call

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PPC Account Hierarchy
Campaigns (<20) Estate
(set a budget and targeting) agent
Ad Groups
20-100 per campaign “City”
Local estate Professional
(each has its own ad copy estate agent
estate
agent agent
and landing page)
Keywords Local estate Professional [Bromsgrove
agent estate agent estate agent]
3-9 per ad group
[Local estate “Professional “Bromsgrove
3 x match types agent] estate agent” estate agent”
Ads
1 or 2 per Ad 1 Ad 2
ad group

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Typical PPC results
Glossary
Impressions = number of times your ad is seen
Clicks = number of times searcher clicked on your ad
CTR = click through rate is clicks divided by impressions (>2% indicates a more relevant
keyphrase and ad combination)
Avg. CPC = average cost per click (amount paid when users click on your ad)
Cost = total spent in period (clicks times average cost per click)
Avg. Position = Average position achieved in results
Conversions = completed sales or completed registrations
Conversion rate = conversions divided by clicks
Cost per conversion = total cost divided by number of conversions

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Managing PPC – what’s important
• Quality Score – Google’s measure of relevancy – it affects
your position and how much you pay (e.g. QS of 8/10 you
pays half as compared with 4/10)
• Click through rate – pause phrases and ads with a CTR
below<1%, otherwise this drags down your QS
• Position and bidding – you may have to bid lower (cost per
click) and settle for position 3-6 to avoid the bidding war of
position 1-3, where the CPC will be too high!
• Cost per acquisition (CPA) – most sites have a typical
conversion rate of 1%. Your cost per sale or lead will be 100 x
your cost per click – can you afford this?

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Remarketing

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Remarketing (Google)
• Set-up Remarketing in AdWords
• Visitors to certain pages on the website (from all
sources) have a Cookie added to their PC
• They are then shown an ad when they visit another
site on the Google Display network
• Ideal for targeting customers that came to your site
but did not convert
• Ad Serving Networks outside of Google offer a
similar technology (called Retargeting) – including
Facebook Exchange

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Remarketing in AdWords (aka stalking)

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Part 3 -
Search engine optimisation (SEO)

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On-page optimisation

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How Search Engines Work
A search engine is made of three basic components:
A Spider or Robot A Storage System A Matching Process or
An automated browser, it or Database Relevancy Algorithm
searches the web for new A record of all the pages The rules that tell the search
websites and changes to viewed by the Spider engine how to determine what
websites then views the would be relevant to your
web pages and strips out search
the text content

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Check that your site is indexed?
Do you have
keyphrases in
your url, title and
description?

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Google keyword research tool

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Determine the level of competition

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Page plan with levels of monthly searches
vs. competition (results in Google)

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On-page factors
• Title Tag
• Content
• Heading content
• Frequency of phrases (how many times they are
mentioned)
• Density of phrases (proportion of the text)
• Internal Link structure with anchor text)
• Image optimisation (file names, Alt tags)
• Avoid Spam techniques and over-optimising
• Create new ongoing content on your site e.g. a blog

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Example of On-Page Factors

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Keyphrase density (using SEO Quake)

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Checklist for optimising your website
• Carryout keyphrase research
• Prioritise your keyphrase by high search volume and low
competition (use pay per click data if you have it?)
• Produce a topic and a page plan (i.e. which pages are to be
optimised with which phrases)
• Write new optimised content on existing and new
pages, (URL, title, description, headers, body copy, anchor
text, image optimisation)
• Upload your content through your CMS and add new links
from the homepage for new pages
• Add new optimised content every week via a blog
• Review results using Webmaster Tools and Analytics

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Off-page optimisation

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Off-page factors
• Domain age
• Domain name
• Filename/full URL
• Directory listings
• External Link Structure
• Anchor text of inbound links
• Page quality of inbound links
• Social bookmarks
• Reviews and testimonials
• Social indicators especially Google +1 and Facebook
“Shares”

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Why are Links important?
Key to Google’s algorithm:
• Indicator of value: PageRank
• Indicator of relevance
Best links from:
• Highly trusted sites (high PageRank / Domain
Authority)
• Pages with relevant content

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Off-page factors - Linking

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Off-page factors - Linking

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Getting Links
• Content that people will want to link to
• Free stuff
• Blog posts
• Useful documents/articles
• Online tools
• Video and audio
• Funny or entertaining content
• Your content on other sites
• Guest blogging
• Online PR
• Directories
• Social networks

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Part 4 - Importance of Social

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Importance of social
• Direct sales e.g. Facebook commerce
• Direct traffic e.g. Brand pages (Facebook, Google
Plus, Twitter, LinkedIn)
• Community, loyalty and word of mouth (Facebook
Likes, Twitter, Reddit, Digg, Delicious) and social
shopping sites e.g. Kaboodle
• Referrals, links and SEO benefit (Google
Plus, Facebook Shares, social bookmarking)
• Paid social – PPC advertising in Facebook and LinkedIn

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Blogging

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Social networking for businesses
(personal vs. company profiles)

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Google Plus

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Facebook

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Pinterest

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Part 5 – Case studies

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PPC Case study – Experian
• Started: Dec 2012
• Restructured with exact and phrase matches with negatives
• Feb 2013 conversion rate >10%

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PPC Hair Supermarket
• Project Started May 2012
• Account restructure + keyphrase expansion
• Optimisation on CTR/Quality Score and
conversion rate

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SEO case study –
The Theatre People
• TheatrePeople.com was a brand new site selling tickets for
West End shows online.
• Brief: to drive targeted organic search traffic to the site in a
highly competitive sector.
• Approach:
– On-page optimisation - technical SEO, tabbed theatre pages for more
content, >650 keywords, optimised content and blog, Off-page
optimisation – link building and online PR.
• Results from natural search (6 months):
– Traffic has increased by 900%
– Conversions up by 250%.

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Example of a page plan

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Monthly KPI tracking
Keyword Google UK start Google UK Google UK position Google UK position Google UK position
position position - May - August - November - December
theatre tickets
London 100+ 49 44 40 31
west end theatre
tickets 100+ 22 11 6 6
theatre tickets 100+ 100+ 31 15 11
London show tickets 100+ 22 100+ 69 25
west end show
tickets 100+ 25 20 16 13
cheap London
theatre tickets 100+ 100+ 82 45 37
cheap theatre tickets
London west end 100+ 32 22 23 23
cheap theatre tickets 100+ 84 71 34 23
discount theatre
tickets 100+ 100+ 89 80 61
theatre and dinner
deals London 100+ 15 14 6 7
dinner and theatre
deals 98 14 1 2 2
London theatre
breaks 100+ 44 67 14 16
theatre packages
London 100+ 41 66 27 26

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Increase in conversions
from organic traffic

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Summary
• The digital landscape is more competitive with many ways of
promoting your business
• You can get quick wins with local listings, Google plus, and paid
search (PPC)
• Paid search continues to offer new ad formats, particularly, ad
extension, clicks to call, Product Listing Ads (integrating with
Google Merchant Centre) and Remarketing
• SEO is a long term technique that involves both on-page and off-
page optimisation
• Social is important to generate direct traffic and sales; but also
indirectly due to the importance of social indicators in SEO

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Thank You
Ann Stanley
@annstanley
ann@anicca.co.uk
www.anicca.co.uk