The Findability Formula E-Book

Heather F. Lutze

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 291

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

To be successful in business you must be able to attract the right clients and persuade them to buy. However, on the internet, people only see what the search engines direct them to and the competition for those top spots is fierce. So how do you ensure that your business is front-and-center when prospects are searching for solutions? The answer is The Findability Formula. The Findability Formula is for anyone who wants to improve results from Internet marketing. The book is specifically written for business owners who are frustrated with a website that is not showing up in search results and not generating business. The Findability Formula will help readers understand how prospects and customers search for products and services on the Internet, and will show them, step-by-step, how to optimize their findability. The book will be a non-technical guide to effectively building and implementing, from the ground up, an Internet search marketing program that gets results. The reader will learn how paid search works, and how paid and organic search can work together to create optimum web visibility and reduce paid search costs over time. The basic message of the book is that there is a formula for findability and for converting prospects to purchasers.

Readers' Benefits from The Findability Formula:
* A complete step-by-step approach to search engine marketing applicable to any product or service, The Findability Formula will include easy-to-follow instruction from chapter to chapter as well as launch checklists in the appendix.
* The most up-to-date search research and statistics available, including uncommon ways to connect with your online buyer.
* Shows the reader how to avoid common search marketing mistakes that cost big money. How to not be bullied and take control of in-house e-commerce department strategies and SEM agencies.
* A small company can compete successfully in search with larger, well-established competitors. How to work smarter to get even better search engine "findability".
* Maximizes the reader's investment. The reader won't waste money by needlessly paying for "clicks" from customers who have no intention of buying. The investment in this book will be repaid thousands of times over.
* Saves time, money and energy in creating in-house search marketing programs and properly tracking results by keyword. Negates the need to hire outside SEM agencies

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Praise

Title Page

Copyright Page

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Who Should Read This Book?

How This Book Is Different

The “Secret Agent” Pen Story

About the Author

CHAPTER 1 - The Basics

The Long and Short of It

Definitions

CHAPTER 2 - First Things First

Conducting Your Paid Search Campaign

Knowledge before Action

The P Words

Laser Focus

A Good Click

Avoiding Bad Clicks

CHAPTER 3 - How People Search, Shop, and Buy Online

Path to Purchase

Correcting a Common Misconception

The Buying Cycle

The Keyword Trail

CHAPTER 4 - The Art of the Keyword

Why Keywords Are Key

Leaving the Laundry

Narrowing the Field

Secret Sauce

CHAPTER 5 - Keyword Alignment on the Path to Purchase

Keyword Tails and Search Strings

Advantages of Targeting Your Keywords

Phased Searches

Purchasing Keywords

Establishing Trust

The End Game

The Pause That Refreshes

CHAPTER 6 - The Keyword Discovery Process

Impatience

Finding Your Keywords

Company-Centric Keywords

Mapping Out Your Keyword Strategy

CHAPTER 7 - Grouping and Themeing to Complete the Keyword List

Organizing and Refining Your Keywords

Keyword Themeing and Grouping

Grouping Keywords by Customer Experience

Why Are We Having You Go to All This Trouble?

Organization

Grouping According to the Buying Cycle

Keyword Combinations and Variables

CHAPTER 8 - Location, Location, Location

Geotargeting

Geographic Modifiers

Geotargeting versus Geographic Modifiers

Another Example

Recommendation

Example: A U.S. Delivery Campaign with Geographic Modifiers

CHAPTER 9 - Seasonality

Yes Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus

Hidden and Subtle Seasonality

Reverse Seasonality

Campaign Timing

CHAPTER 10 - Writing Your Ad Text

What Is an “Ad”?

How Hard Could It Be?

It Ain’t Easy

Your Ad Writing Goals

More Help with Ad Text

Real-Life Example

Trust

The Italian Job versus Wayne’s World

Incorporating the Buying Cycle into Your Ad Campaign

Ads along the Path to Purchase

CHAPTER 11 - After the Click

Quality Score

Where Are You Sending Them?

Ad Correlation

Brick-and-Mortar Metaphor

Uh-Oh

Landing Pages

Landing Page Guides and References

CHAPTER 12 - Bidding and Budgeting

How Much Do PPC Ads Cost?

Research Your Keywords in SpyFu

Google AdWords Traffic Estimator

Adjusting Variables

The Challenge of Bidding

Setting a Bid

Across-the-Board Bidding

Data

Ongoing Bid Strategy

Budgeting

CHAPTER 13 - Account Deployment

Taking Control

Beware of Defaults

Starting with Google

Anatomy of an Account

Road Map

CHAPTER 14 - The Care and Feeding of Your Search Engine Marketing Campaign

Finding a Balance

Let It Stew

The Exception to the Rule

Two Weeks Later: 80/20

Rebucketing

Focus on the Cream

Checkpoints

Checking Your Quality Score

Tweaks and Refinements—30 to 60 Days

What about the Other Search Engines?

Ongoing Support

Search Engine Relationships

More Help and Support

CHAPTER 15 - Hiring Help

Decisions, Decisions: Outsource or In-House?

CHAPTER 16 - SEO—Search Engine Optimization

What Search Engines Care About

Your Primary Concern

What Is SEO?

PPC + SEO—The Marriage of Two Enemies

SEO Road Map

Linking

SEO Wrap-Up

The Findability Formula Wrap-Up

Invitation

Index

Praise for The Findability Formula

“In the brave new world of SEO and SEM, Heather Lutze and Lutze Consulting bring valuable Internet insights and experience to the marketing arena. Forward-thinking advertising and marketing professionals should take advantage of this tried-and-true marketing knowledge of the digital universe.”

—Pasquale Marranzino, Chairman and CEO, Karsh & Hagan Advertising

“The Findability Formula simplifies the complex world of Internet marketing. Every business will benefit from understanding simple to advanced techniques for finding new customers online.”

—Brad Geddes, Google AdWords trainer and BG theory consultant

“After many failed attempts at search engine marketing, we are now back on track and on the top of search results—thanks to The Findability Formula, a must-read!”

—Michael A. DeMayo, Law Offices of Michael A. DeMayo, LLP, Charlotte, North Carolina

“The Findability Formula is a must-read for all people or organizations that are trying to establish themselves on the Internet. Heather Lutze provides an easy-to-use process that works. Her information is useful, practical, and it produces results. If you want to be found on the Web, this is the book you need to read.”

—Ron Karr, CSP, President, Karr & Associates, Inc.

“In this book Heather has taken complicated paid marketing concepts and translated them into real business strategies that every business owner should pay attention to if they want to grow their online presence.”

—Sean A. Golliher, Founder/Publisher Search Engine Marketing Journal

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Copyright © 2009 by Heather Lutze. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.Published simultaneously in Canada.

Chapter opening illustrations by Josh Alves (www.joshalves.com)

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, [phone], fax [phone], or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, [phone], fax [phone], or online at www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

For general information on our other products and services or for technical support, please contact our Customer Care Department within the United States at [phone], outside the United States at [phone] or fax [phone].

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. For more information about Wiley products, visit our web site at www.wiley.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Lutze, Heather, 1969-

The findability formula : the easy, non-technical approach to search engine marketing / Heather Lutze.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN : 978-0-470-44564-8

1. Internet marketing. 2. Internet advertising. 3. Internet searching.

4. Web search engines. I. Title.

HF5415.1265.L88 2009

658.8’72-dc22

2008038668

.

Foreword

There are few things more frustrating than doing an Internet search for your own name and not even turning up in the results, especially if your livelihood depends on it. After writing a half-dozen books and touring the lecture circuit for 30 years, I’m at least almost famous, yet there was my web site, buried on the twelfth page.

These days, if your site doesn’t turn up “above the fold,” that is, within the first five or six results of a search, you might as well not even exist. They think you died, if they think of you at all. In my business, I AM the product, so I hired a geek, spent thousands of dollars and several months of late nights rebuilding my web site. We managed to move it from 124th to 56th. Depressing.

When it comes to being found, the Internet has evolved into the world’s ultimate haystack. It’s made up of more than 180 million web sites and billions of pages of text, images, and video. And it’s growing at the rate of 1.3 million new web sites a month (http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html).

Luckily for us, smart people have developed clever software that sifts through this whole mess, so we can find the information we want with just a few keystrokes (well, usually), and “Google” has become a verb.

Good content and good design used to be enough to get you found. But all the search engines have different methods of deciding what constitutes a match, and the rules keep changing. Like a lot of people today, I was lost in the labyrinth of HTML meta tags, keywords, and reciprocal links; and if it’s not all done just right, you’re actually penalized. So my gorgeous, expensive, Flash-powered, content-rich, e-commerce-enabled web site wasn’t even getting on the radar.

Making it all even more complicated, the search entrepreneurs realized they could charge good money to make your site leapfrog to the top of the page, and companies lined up to pay millions to ensure their findability. Speaker bureaus were waging a bidding war, running pay per click ads to divert searchers who had looked for me BY NAME over to their own web sites, where they could sell the services of some other schmuck who wasn’t nearly as good.

That’s when I was introduced to Heather Lutze. Heather is a fellow member of the National Speakers Association, and she lectures on this topic all over the country, so we hit it off right away. She has been managing the Internet ad campaigns of hundreds of companies, large and small, for years. She is SO intense and knowledgeable. Heather became my guide.

Luckily for me, Heather has cracked the code on search engine optimization. She gave my site a thorough shakedown, making dozens of quick-fix recommendations that we could implement right away. We set up an AdWords campaign, so we could see exactly how people search when they’re looking for a speaker on “Guerrilla Selling.” We set up alerts to automatically notify us when new, competing content was published, and we tested various headlines and taglines to track where the clicks were coming from. The results were an eye-opener; they were nothing like what we had assumed.

When she asked me to read the first few chapters of this book before submission, it was like the clouds parted and the sun came out. I GOT it! Heather has a gift for cutting through all the jargon, so it wasn’t complicated and it wasn’t difficult. Once you understand how your customers LOOK for you online, building a web site that gets FOUND is straightforward and easy. You begin to attract the RIGHT customers, RIGHT when they’re ready to buy.

Together, we used all the data to inform a complete redesign of my site, with smarter architecture and a more straightforward selling cycle. We loaded it with content rich in keywords using our customers’ vocabulary instead of our own. And we upped the ante on our pay per click, bringing in qualified inquiries from hot prospects. And the results were unbelievable. I’m getting found. I’m getting booked. I’m getting PAID.

Finding your own “findability formula” is like having a license to print money. And you’ll see it explained here in simple, non-technical terms that non-geeks like me can understand.

ORVEL RAY WILSON, CSP Author of best-selling book Guerrilla Sellingwww.GuerrillaGroup.com

Acknowledgments

A heartfelt thank-you goes out to my entire Findability Formula book team because without you, this book would never have been possible. Thanks to my amazing husband Mark and my sons, Evan and Kyle, for putting up with my long nights and endless edits; to my amazing copywriter Maury for her unending energy and enthusiasm; to Cindy for her “get-to-the-finish-line” technical help; and last but not least, to my mom because without her “you should write a book” dream for me, it would never have come true. I am blessed to have you all in my life.

Introduction

Who Should Read This Book?

The Findability Formula is written for businesses that market themselves on the Internet but aren’t quite satisfied with their results. It’s also the perfect book for those of you who are about to embark on a search engine marketing program but want to avoid making mistakes and wasting money. This book will not only save you time and money; it will also exponentially improve your results.

Additionally, The Findability Formula will also help those of you who already know that being found by common search engines—the very definition of “findability”—is critical to Internet marketing success; but who need to learn how to improve your search engine rankings.

If you’re a total novice, this book is perfect for you. We recommend that you read the entire book before starting the paid-search process. It will help you avoid the disastrous mistakes so many advertisers make.

If you’re a paid search advertiser who is frustrated with your results, this book will make a significant difference in your success. I meet hundreds of paid search advertisers over the course of a year, and I’m often surprised at the basic mistakes made by experienced advertisers—even at large and sophisticated companies. This book will help you correct or avoid some of those errors, and get your campaigns performing as you hoped they would.

If you’re mystified by search engine optimization (SEO) and can’t figure out how to get your site “organically” ranked, The Findability Formula will unlock the secrets to identifying the keywords and search terms under which you want to be found. It will also help you understand the intricate relationship between paid search and SEO.

If you’re a seasoned search marketer who is well experienced with search marketing, you may find the language and approach of the book a little elementary for your level of experience. However, I guarantee that you’ll find new ideas, tips, and fresh approaches for taking your paid search campaigns to the next level.

When I’m training, I almost always encounter a few crossed arm, closed-face, resistant people who are certain that they already know everything that there is to know about search marketing, and that there’s nothing new anyone can teach them. You can tell that they’re not happy about having to sit through my training. Yet 9 times out of 10, these are the very people who come up to me at the end of the day to say thank-you, and to tell me that they had learned some useful new things.

I’ve been involved in search marketing since 1998, and I still learn something new every day. I’m constantly refining my skills and the campaigns that I manage—including my own. So I suggest that experienced advertisers read this book with what Zen Buddhists refer to as the “beginner ’s mind”—a mindset that is open to new ideas.

The Findability Formula includes creative strategies for keeping campaigns fresh and performing. It offers approaches to help you find new ideas and get out of your comfort zone, so that you can reenergize stale campaigns. It’s easy for successful search marketing managers to get too comfortable with the same old keywords or their favorite ads; after all, sometimes you just run out of ideas. This book will provide input for tweaking campaigns so they’re even more successful.

If you’re a “techie” you could learn a lot from reading this book. Even though The Findability Formula isn’t a technical guide, you might enjoy the novel approach of looking at search marketing from the customer’s perspective.

Finally, if you’re hiring an agency to manage your search engine marketing, this book will be a useful resource. You’re going to want to monitor what they’re doing and closely track the results they’re getting because no one knows your business and your customers as well as you do. What you learn here will also help protect you from common mistakes that agencies often make and that end up costing you money. Without recounting a lot of horror stories, suffice it to say that it’s not a good idea to be too hands-off with your search marketing agency.

For all readers, the purpose of this book is to help you crack the code of being visible to your customers when they are searching on the Internet and when they ready to buy. It will teach you how to appropriately connect with customers throughout their search process, especially when they are ready to take action. This is the formula anyone marketing a business on the Internet wants to know and understand.

If you read the entire book—and we’ve kept it short to make that easy to do—you’ll discover that it gives you the fundamentals and the practical steps for the deployment of a paid search campaign. It shows you how to translate what you learn into a productive, organic, SEO-friendly strategy that gets results.

You’ll see exactly how paid search works, and also how to make it work with organic search to create optimum web visibility and reduce paid search costs over time.

We’ll walk you step-by-step through search engine marketing from the ground up, including:

• Creating a paid search (pay per click or PPC) campaign from scratch, or redoing your existing campaigns

• Demystifying SEO by teaching you how to connect with searchers under the correct keyword phrases when they are ready to buy—no guesswork involved

• Explaining how the two approaches to search marketing (paid search and SEO) relate to each other, and how they work together to optimize your presence on the web

We will illuminate the art and science of making a business visible on the Internet—the formula for findability—and for converting prospects to purchasers. If that’s what you want, then this book is for you.

How This Book Is Different

The Findability Formula is different from other search marketing books in three important ways:

1. It’s written in plain English. We’re not diving into coding or other technical stuff, and we’re not talking theory. We’re offering practical steps to get your site found on the Internet; and we’re using understandable and down-to-earth language that any businessperson can easily follow to walk you through the process.

2. We teach you the art of finding the keywords that will spell online success for your business because keywords are the key to the findability formula. (By the way, your highest performing keywords are often not the ones you might guess.)

3. Although this book is about how to be found on the Internet through the search engines, it is also about how to respond to your customers and understand their issues, their wants, and their needs. It explains how you can connect with them along every step of their “path to purchase.”

One of the basic flaws in search marketing—a mistake made by amateurs and professionals alike—is that they put too much emphasis on the search engines and not enough on the customer experience. This is a serious error.

I’d been observing this problem for quite some time, when I had an “a-ha!” moment during a meeting with a well-known search engine and a fundamental search marketing error suddenly became clear.

The “Secret Agent” Pen Story

For our quarterly meeting with one of our major search engine partners (who shall remain nameless), some big corporate guns flew in from out of town. They ordered a fancy breakfast and made a PowerPoint presentation that detailed my company’s spending with them over the past nine years, how much traffic we had generated, and our overall success with their search marketing tools. At the end of the meeting, they announced that they had a gift for me to express their appreciation for all the business I had sent their way. They mentioned that it came from their “VIP gift collection.”

With a bit of flourish, they handed me a small, nicely wrapped box that I imagined might contain a diamond watch or perhaps airline tickets to an exotic location. I got kind of excited wondering how a company of their size might reward a client who had spent more then a few million dollars with them.

Inside the package there was a very fancy James Bond-style brushed aluminum case, which I opened with great anticipation; and there, nestled in its custom-fit foam bed, I found . . . a pen.

Now, don’t get me wrong; it was a very cool pen. A sort of space-age, Get Smart kind of pen with a laser pointer, a flashlight, and USB port. But folks, it was a pen! Nine years and millions dollars, and I got a pen.

At that moment, it struck me: we’ve got this thing all wrong.

Search marketers spend all their time courting the search engines, but they’re focusing on the wrong people. Luckily, the “pen incident” woke me from the search engine stupor. It was the clearest illustration possible that if you spend all your time focused on the search engines, you’ve misspent your time, energy, and search marketing efforts.

What we need to do is to focus on our customers.

I’d been killing myself to build relationships with the search engines, and what was my reward in the end? A pen. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not ungrateful. It was very nice of the search engine to acknowledge me, given that they have millions of customers. And I absolutely appreciate my relationship with them and how wonderfully they support me and my clients. But fundamentally, since I am paying them to perform a service they are really working for me, not the other way around. In that moment, it woke me up to this realization:

We need to court our customers—not the search engines . . . our customers!

And what’s our reward for that? Business! And sales! And profits.

It’s time for us all to shift our concentration from the search engines to our customers—the people who actually give us business. Search engines are amazing conduits that connect us with customers all over the world, but online success lies in our ability to meet the needs and requirements of our customers, not the search engines. This shift in focus will drastically change your online business.

And in a neat twist of fate, if you create a great user experience, then the search engines reward you with good positioning and ranking anyway.

So we’re going to teach you how to uncover the keywords that will connect you with your prospects throughout every stage of their Internet search process. We’re also going to share the secret to servicing them in such a way that they convert to paying customers.

Our SEM consulting practice clients pay big bucks for this information—and you’re getting it for just the price of this book.

If you execute what you learn here, you will avoid making the mistakes that multitudes of business owners make every day, and my reward will be knowing that I have made an important contribution to your search marketing success. (And that beats even the fanciest pen, any day!)

Take-Away

• At the conclusion of each chapter, we will include the most important “Take-Aways” from that chapter. We hope you will find this helpful.

About the Author

Heather Lutze was working with the Internet beforemany of us even knew what the Internet was.She’s as savvy as they come.

—Tom Harper, “The Food Guy”

Before reading this book, you probably want to know who I am, and exactly what makes me an authority on Internet marketing.

I began my career as a web designer. After I sold my web development company, I became the Internet Marketing Manager at a large dot-com in Denver, Colorado, and was responsible for implementing a multimillion-dollar Internet marketing budget. This was prior to the infamous dot-com bust of the late 1990s.

My job was to “brand” the company on the Internet prior to our IPO (Initial Public Offering). It was a race to the finish line to spend $2.5 million as quickly as possible to impress potential investors and support the IPO.

This was before pay per click advertising existed; Internet advertising was uncharted territory and a bit of a free-for-all. Metrics were all about “traffic,” “hits,” “eyeballs,” and “CPM” (cost per thousand). Banner ads, display ads, contextual ads, and pop-ups were all popular vehicles. We didn’t match venues to target audience; we simply bought display ads on any and all web sites. I remember we once spent $50,000 to be on the front page of Yahoo.com, on which our ad appeared for exactly one day. Those were the kinds of buys we were making: $50,000 for one day! At the time, that was perfectly acceptable. We were just after traffic and hits, and we had no method to any of the madness. We were just trying everything. Our instructions were simple: “Get eyeballs on the site. Build brand awareness at any cost. Now go!”

It turns out, however, that no one should have cared about traffic and hits. It was a lot of “sound and fury signifying nothing.” Hits aren’t what matter; conversions are, that is, converting visitors to customers. And to do that, you have to be reaching qualified prospects.

But amid all that sound and fury, I got a fabulous Internet marketing education. With millions to spend, I had all the search engines flying people out to meet me, making me feel I was someone important. But of course, it wasn’t about me at all; it was just about my budget. As a result, though, I got an amazing opportunity to learn all about the medium, including:

• The major search engine players

• Internet marketing products and offerings

• How to make advertising buys

• How to test results

• What was a good investment and what wasn’t

Most important, I learned how to manage an Internet marketing strategy—what worked and what didn’t.

I was laid off along with everyone else during the dot-com bust; but I gained a passion for figuring out a method of Internet marketing that would produce consistent results.

Paid search and keyword marketing were just coming online by then. I knew they would be extremely valuable and eventually would be the key to successful Internet marketing. I was introduced to Google™ AdWords and Yahoo!® Search Marketing®, and delved into how their programs worked. I learned that if you chose the right keywords and put some money behind those keywords, you could get consistent results.

Granted, it was a different world from what it is now. I had the personal phone number of someone at Yahoo! named Cindy. I could pick up the phone and call her if I had a question or need. Ah, the good old days!

Fast forward to July 2000, when I started Lutze Consulting in response to all the web site owners who had paid big money for web sites that weren’t performing. I thought that if I heard, “If you build it, they will come” one more time, I was going to scream—mostly because it wasn’t true. People didn’t automatically come; you had to figure out how to get them to the site.

I became an expert at paid search techniques that worked. Over the past nine years and hundreds of clients, Lutze Consulting has excelled at Yahoo! Google, and MSN® visibility through optimiza tion and paid search campaigns that work. I also became an expert at listening to frustrated business owners whose Internet marketing campaigns weren’t working despite the money they were pouring into them. During this time, I also had the privilege of being one of three trainers hired to lead the Yahoo! Search Marketing Workshops for Success in 2006 and 2007. After training thousands of advertisers across the country, I gained a unique insight into the needs and frustrations of individual advertisers and business owners trying to manage their own search marketing campaigns.

In fact, I did a lot of listening. What I heard was that my clients and attendees were tired of wasting money on expensive traditional marketing and on failed Internet advertising. They wanted something new and fresh that would convert to qualified leads, actions, and purchases on their web sites.

Internet marketing can be that medium; but it requires a skilled and carefully crafted approach. Here is what I know from years of experience:

What works in the field of successful Internet marketing is keyword-driven searches.

I believe in keyword-driven searches because with this approach, users qualify themselves. They tell you (through their use of keywords) what they want. Then all you have to do is give it to them in the right way at the right time.

I believe in keyword-driven searches because they are trackable, from the first click to the final buy.

I believe in keyword-driven searches because, quite simply, they work.

And if you follow the approach recommended by this book, I’m confident that you’ll become a believer, too.

CHAPTER 1

The Basics

The Long and Short of It

The Findability Formula is a search marketing guide for driving prospective customers to your site and delivering a user experience that converts those prospects into customers.

The formula has been crafted around two proven fundamental principles:

1. The secret to Internet marketing success is using the right keywords at the right time so that searchers can easily find you, That is what we call findability.

2. You must also appropriately connect with your prospects at all times by providing a relevant result in response to their search,

That is what we call delivering a good user experience.

The second principle, though often overlooked, is as important as the first. You can’t just focus on being “found” and “ranked” by the search engines because customers—not the search engines—are your target audience. Properly focusing on your customers’ wants and needs gets you results in terms of sales and search engine rankings. That’s why these two principles working together are the secret to Internet success.

This approach lets customers win because they are getting what they want and need; it lets search engines win because they are in the business of delivering good results to searchers; and it lets you win, because you’ve cracked the findability code and are showing up with good rankings in Internet searches on relevant pages relating to your product or service. This is the “sweet spot” where searchers are converted to buyers. It not only improves your bottom line by generating sales, it also improves your search engine rankings.

Improved ranking means better placement on a results page, which in turn usually means more site visitors; further improve your visibility, and therefore, your sales. It is a perfect circle of success breeding success. Additionally, as your paid ads begin to attract more clicks, you can actually end up paying less for them.

Let’s move on to defining some of the terms we’ll be using throughout the book.

Definitions

Findability

What is findability?

Wikipedia’s definition of findability is spot-on in relation to search marketing. Wikipedia defines findability as the quality of being locatable or navigable; and this is exactly what you’re after in the realm of search marketing.

Sometimes people confuse findability with branding, and they’re two different things. The goal of branding is to get something (company, name, product, service) known. It’s about name recognition and is an effort to penetrate or saturate a given market space by getting a name, tagline, or logo out there. Branding doesn’t require any action, response, or feedback from the customer. In that way, it might be considered a passive marketing approach.

Findability is an active process. It requires action on the part of the company to make itself findable and it requires an act on the part of the customer—first by initiating a search, and then by clicking on an ad or a search result.

Findability

Findability refers to the quality of being locatable or navigable.

At the item level, we can evaluate to what degree a particular object is easy to discover or locate. At the system level, we can analyze how well a physical or digital environment supports navigation and retrieval.

Findability is not limited to the World Wide Web. The concept of findability is universal and timeless. However, with a distributed, heterogeneous collection of several billion items, the Web does present unique and important findability challenges.

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Findability on the web means:

You know how and when to appear on the first page of search engine results under the right keywords at the right time.

This book can guide you in that process.

Keywords

A keyword is any word or series of words (also known as keyphrases) entered into a search box on a search engine. This term can be confusing to members of the search marketing industry, because it’s used in that field to mean either a single keyword (i.e. TV) and/or a keyword phrase (big screen TV) and/or a keyword string/search string (big screen plasma TV Denver). We call all these terms keywords because in the world of search engine marketing, a keyword is simply any term a searcher types into a search box. Whatever people type into a search box is called a keyword—even if it’s more than one word. When searchers use a long string of words in their search, we sometimes refer to the keyword as a keyword string or a long tail keyword or a long tail search term, or a search string, and we generically refer to any search term as a keyword.

Keywords are the starting point for every prospect or customer when performing a search or making a purchase online. They are how your customers navigate the search process and how the search engines deliver results pages to searchers.

Search Engines

Search engines are the aggregators and classifiers of all the information available on the web. While at one time you might have visited a library and asked the librarian for information, today’s “librarians” on the World Wide Web are the search engines. Instead of asking the librarian where you might find information on, say, Yugoslavia and having her direct you to those resources, now you type in Yugoslavia, and the search engines respond with links to the resources on that topic available on the web. We call the search engines’ response to your query search results, search engine results, or just plain results.

Search Engine Results

There are two different groups of results: sponsoredresults, which is a term for results that an advertiser paid to show up on that page (through a paid search campaign); and there are organicresults, which means the entry is there by virtue of the relevance of its web content and the repetition of certain keywords on its web pages. Getting your web site to show up in those results—and preferably on the first page of those results—is the science of search engine marketing.

Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing (also called SEM and search marketing) refers to marketing activities designed to increase the visibility or findability