In January this year I was doing an analysis on the traffic sources to the hobby-based site I run (SuperMotors). Since we run the site as a hobby, it must pay for itself via direct subscriber fees and advertising revenue (on a CPM basis). From ad revenue standpoint, more traffic to the site equates to more revenue. Simply increasing the pageviews that existing traffic is already making is not enough in a CPM environment because ad networks will optimize ads to show less frequently to visits/sessions that have already seen their ads. Instead, we needed to look at creative ways in drawing in more visits to the site.

Referring search traffic is a significant driver in website traffic

What I found over an 8-month period — I knew it was the leading referrer in traffic, but it was surprising to see that it was the leader by a clear mile — was Google Organic search was driving over 37% of traffic to our site. The next closest traffic referrer was only at 11.7%.

Google’s search index of our site (in January ‘09): 56,800 pages

Perform a Google search on your site index with this query: site:www.yoursite.com . In the case of SuperMotors, the 37% of traffic being driven by organic results in Google was a result of 56,800 pages in the Google index for www.supermotors.net. Not bad, but when compared to competing enthusiast sites who had indexes in the several hundred thousands, it was substantially low.

Bottom line: we were missing out on revenue opportunities by having a small natural search index.

Google Webmaster Tools: Adding Sitemaps

Sitemaps are the single most cost-effective way at increasing search visibility for your site with Google and getting additional, free organic traffic driven to your site. The premise is simple: the more content that Google indexes from your site, the more keyword hits there will be for your site. Rankings of these pages are another story altogether, but long tail search can account for a substantial portion of traffic being driven to your site. Here’s the link to Google’s webmaster tools: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Here is a screenshot of one of our sitemap indexes (for photos posted by our members), there are 11 separate pages each with 50,000 records each:

Even 8 months after submitted this Sitemap, of the 529,979 unique URLs submitted, Google has still only indexed 339,578 or 64% of them. Over time, this figure will continue to grow as the Googlebot absorbs more and more pages out of the Sitemaps.

Google’s search index (8 months later) of our site after adding Sitemaps: 1,200,000 pages

For the past 8 months, the Googlebot has been methodically inhaling more and more pages from our various sitemaps to increase our searchable index for SuperMotors.net in the Google Search index. Our search index increased from 56,800 to 1,200,000 — a 2100% increase in indexed content free of charge.

Your results will vary — we have a lot of user-generated content and the 1,200,000 million pages represents forum messages, pictures, sounds, and videos posted by 10’s of thousands of members over several years. For sites without user generated content, indexed content will probably be much lower — and this is OK. Apple.com for example, has approximately 115,000 indexed pages in Google at the time of this writing.

Referring organic Google visits have increased 5.76%

As the result of simply adding Sitemaps and telling Google about them via the Webmaster Tools page, we have seen a 5.76% increase in organic visits from Google. All other things equal, when you increase site visits by any percentage free of charge, this will result in increased revenues from CPM advertising programs. Or in the case of e-commerce/retail sites, this should increase online sales provided that you’re converting these visits at the same rate as other visits.

Look at some of your favorite websites in Google’s search index — impressive results or not really? When you have a big brand name, you may not spend as much effort in the Sitemaps arena. However, organic search is highly qualified traffic because someone has searched for a keyword that you have on your site. Increasing your search index size is the first step in taking share away from your competitors online. Optimizing the content on those pages is another tactic altogether — but content optimization won’t matter if Google doesn’t know the page exists on your site.

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MediaBuyerPlanner reports ”Only about 55 percent of search marketers integrate their search efforts with offline marketing efforts; the other 45 percent make no effort at integrating SEM (Search Engine Marketing) with offline initiatives, according to a new study by iProspect and JupiterResearch.”

You may have an SEM management gap

The above article claims budgetary and resource concerns. I think the bigger picture is one of the following scenarios that many marketing organizations face:

1. Marketing, being resourced constrained, probably pawns this off as an “IT project” because it involves technology.
2. Marketing has assigned SEM efforts to a vendor specializing in SEM and no other marketing initiatives.

Scenario #1: SEM lives in IT

I can understand why SEM has traditionally been an “IT responsibility” because SEM in large part, is still a rather large mystery to marketers. They don’t understand the rules of the game and the execution of your organization’s SEM campaigns requires a fundamental knowledge of your website and the visitors of your website. It’s commonplace that a marketing communications department, who handles traditional print and television advertising, may not be the resident experts on web strategy and design. It’s easy to pass SEM off to IT — because they handle “the technical stuff.”

Scenario #2: SEM execution lives with an outside firm

There are many companies providing SEM services and not surprisingly, these companies are technical in nature and not traditional direct-marketers. Those that are direct marketers are generally small and have a localized client base, making it hard for them to penetrate the mold of Fortune 500 companies. Those that are technical may have a great technology to sell, but lack the marketing savviness of a direct marketing firm to truly bring SEM the return on investment it demands — resulting in poorly performing SEM campaigns. This leads to the disconnect in online and offline marketing mentioned in the above MediaBuyerPlanner report.

How do you close the SEM knowledge gap? Who should manage SEM?

SEM “belongs” in marketing and should be on the radar of anyone executing any outbound marketing and awareness campaigns (email, direct mail, or otherwise). “Belonging in marketing” and “being executed by marketing” are two different things. From marketing communications, to product marketing managers, to channel marketing, each group has their own functional needs/goals for SEM. Establishing a governing body to ensure the proper SEM techniques and optimization are in place is recommended — but simultaneously avoiding the bureaucracy that’s often accompanied by “governing committees.”

A good place? The web experience/usability group within your organization. SEM may be funded by marketing while the governing body and “gatekeeper” for SEM can be facilitated through the people who know your site inside and out and intimately understand the experience an end-user desires when arriving at the landing pages on your site via an ad. After all, not much ends up on the site that doesn’t pass the approval of this group. Any campaigns directing traffic to the site are right up the alley of a usability professional.

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Sigh. This post claims that branding is irrelevant/dead thanks to search engines and how search is transforming the way in which people research and buy products.

Huh?

I couldn’t disagree more. You can’t honestly tell me that Lamborghini, BMW, Lincoln, and Hyundai (just to name a few random automotive brands) are all on equal playing fields when a consumer searches for “car” on Google. 

The post goes on to talk about the power of SEO and why SEO is not dead. SEO is most certainly not dead and should make for a critical component in your online strategy. His point in trying to prove why SEO is not dead is muddied by the claims of “branding being dead.” Brands don’t matter in certain categories (probably because there’s no clear category leader), but certainly not across the board.

Proper SEO can elevate your brand to the top of the listing for non-branded searches.

They key is creating brand awareness (through advertising, promotion, PR, etc. outside of search engines) and dominating on branded AND non-branded searches for your category. This is done by juggling your SEO work with your SEM campaigns to find the “sweet spot” so SEM can pick up the slack where you lag behind in SEO. Branding then goes onto heavily influence clicks on search engine results.

This type of tunnel-vision thinking is why “online” is still broadly viewed as an IT function.

Flat-out comments like this show the still “techy” and misguided view of some Internet strategists and how marketing and “tech” still quite aren’t aligned — even on established sites such as searchenginewatch.com. Any marketer worth their salt should understand that brands can drive search results. When industry publications and commentary throw out claims like this, it’s difficult to create alignment with a marketing department — especially when marketing should “own” (or at least have visibility to) SEO and SEM strategy.

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I came across this article yesterday which presents very interesting findings relating to branding and search engine results. The proper combination of paid results and organic results has a positive impact on brand affinity, brand recall, and purchase intent.

This presents an interesting dilemma for those keywords that don’t convert well (i.e. “blinds”) but are high-volume in nature. Some terms are so generic that for folks in the market for the product, it can actually make sense to play in these areas for branding-related purposes.

A proper SEM strategy with channel partners and an SEO strategy for your own site now theoretically will not only help conversion rate, but the influence of your brand. Sometimes you can’t show up for every possible keyword that relates to your products, but through a combination of leveraging the breadth of sites that sell your products online (i.e. your channel partners) and your own SEM/SEO strategy, search has a significant potential to influence buyer preferences.

In essence, the more they see your brand for all keywords related to your product, the higher the probability they will associate your brand with those terms — and hopefully convert/purchase your products.

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Initiatives like these make me a happy advertiser. Google has performed another wave of crack-downs on MFA (Made For Adsense) sites. These are sites which offer little-to-no content value and are specifically designed to lure uneducated web surfers into their sites to only get them to click on a sponsored link. The typical trick is to bid on low-volume keywords in an effort to turn around and get surfers to click on higher-priced keywords in the Adsense ads placed on these sites.

A quick search for “levolor blinds” produces a search result for a site called http://www.all-window-blinds.net and http://www.wholesaleblind.org.

These sites present a problem for advertisers and brands for the following 3 reasons:

1.) MFA sites derail the consumer
For the consumer looking for real information on a product, this creates an unnecessary step. For a product category already as confusing as blinds and shades, the last thing our industry needs is another speed bump in the research process.

2.) They drive up pricing of keywords for legitimate customers (as well as brand advertisers)
As we know, search advertising is based on “highest bidder wins.” The bidding will go as high as the competition is willing to pay — MFA sites force legitimate advertisers to increase their bids to gain higher positions in sponsored search results. Furthermore, if an advertiser is not careful, they may be placing sponsored links on MFA sites and be getting charged for ad impressions/clicks on these sites.

3.) They dilute a brand name
For manufacturers of brand names that mean something to the public, any tasks associated with the research of your brand name can reflect positively or negatively. A brand who does not have sponsored links under control both with their partners and by eliminating MFA sites altogether will suffer from having a product that becomes difficult to find credible/relevant information about online.

How would you like to be competing for advertising space amidst other companies who had nothing to offer in regards to your products? Who wants to dial a phone number from a classified ad found online only to be met with a recording that provides other phone numbers to call to find the product you’re looking for? I hope Google makes it easier for the community to report MFA sites in the future. This will help them create a sweeping algorithm to eliminate more MFA sites from their list of Adsense publishers.

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