Posts filed under 'News and Views'
I was recently speaking to the Senior Developer of a reasonably big marcomss agency based in Bury, Lancashire who startled me somewhat with the following comment:
“most of our clients don’t really need OM to be honest…”
I have to say I was somewhat suprised by his approach to OM, however I would suggest many web development agencies are still guilty of the ‘Build and they will come’ approach to online, however with more and more organisations employing search marketing as part of their marcomms approach, it seems a somewhat naive approach to online, particularly where the rewards these days of getting it right online are often high.
Is he not aware that:
- 76% of UK’s online population have purchased online
- 80% of the UK are now broadband enabled.
- Internet shopping accounts for over 10% of all retail sales in the UK - given the proportion of spend this is a significant amount
- 80% of advertisers include the Internet in their marketing mix - can you really afford to ignore it?
- Above all - Online Marketing and Web Development sit side by side. You don’t just build a shop/service/office offline and then just leave it. So why would you do the same online. Surely to get the most out of online - you have to embrace it which means utilising all channels - your website and its marketing - together…
February 18th, 2008
There has been a lot written recently about marketing, in particularly the future, and the ongoing growth of digital as a fundamental part of the marketing mix. A flux of articles particularly have suggested that with the economic slowdown will come a further influx of marketing spend into digital, given the highly competitive ROI the channel offers.
In particular Search and Affiliate Marketing activity continue to thrive, with many suggesting Affiliate Marketing to continue its steady growth. Affiliate Marketing has come a long way since I was working on Tradedoubler accounts for a large PC manfacturer. Nowadays, it intersects many verticals, offering advertisers a very cost effective solution, whilst at the same time, not neccesarily associating them with the same level of risk as far as ROI is concerned as other channels such as Behavioural.
Search activity also continues to flourish, however it is SEO that seems to be stepping out of the shadow of Paid Search. In a recent Ad-tech survey, 57% of respondants reported prioritising SEO as a fundamental part of their marketing activity, up from 45% in 2006. With many verticals particularly finance reporting high CPC, SEO particularly through effective long-tail mining can provide a cost effective alternative.
Suprisingly however Behavioural (or perhaps not suprisingly), Behavioural is making a comeback. It is often said it is the channels that improvise that flourish, and I would suggest this is possibly true both here and within the Affilaite community. Whilst SEO and Paid Search (PPC) have remained relatively (dare I say) stagnant over the last few years, both the Affiliate and Behavioural roots are flourishing.
Perhaps this is a heads up to us UK SEO specialists (well all SEO’s in fact), Its time to improvise…
February 18th, 2008
The Aegis Group (part of the Isobar network), one of the largest digital media specialists is looking at purchasing independant agency I-Level - a London based interactive agency founded in 1999. US based AKQA has also been rumoured to be sniffing around I-Level according to the article in the Daily Telegraph.
The talk of acquisition comes at a time where there is a hive of activity in the digital arena, particularly acquisition, which is not suprising given the current boom in popularity of the sector, in particular search marketing and OMP. It also follows hot on the heels of other high profile acquisitions including
- Microsofts $6 Billion purchase of aQuantive
- Publicis (owners of Starcom/Mediavest et al) takeover of Digitas
- and swamping deals like the Global Media/Bigmouthmedia takeover a while back.
Further to-ing and fro-ing is sure to continue within the sector. However it is the potential sale of I-Level that is drawing much of the attention particularly here in the UK within the online marketing sector
January 29th, 2008
Interesting article in this weeks NMA (New Media Age) magazine. According to the article based on research by the AAR - the failure to listen is the main factor in the breakdown between an agency and a client.
Second in the list of criteria, was the quality of the agency personnel, with agencies mentioning the lack of ambition on the client side as the second biggest factor in relationship breakdown
October 25th, 2007
Laura Desmond, CEO of media agency Starcom Mediavest, has outlined their continued dedication towards digital by stating that she saw more digital ad spending in the short to medium term. She continued by saying that she predicted that Digital will be the third biggest ad expenditure at the Starcom Mediavest Group, behind national and local TV.
Other members of the panel at the New York Times CEO summit echoed this sentiment. Nick Brien, the CEO of Universal McCann highlighted that he saw digital as fundamental in the evolution of media agencies. Other panellists from agencies such as Mindshare and MPG also echoed the shift towards digital, however the long lamented lack of talent within this sector was highlighted as a significant barrier.
From a digital marketing agency perspective it is both good and bad to see the media agencies continuing to embrace digital. I personally have argued for a while, that the online marketing sector as a whole needs to evolve, and the further dedication to digital by more established offline agencies can only serve to enhance online as a viable advertising solution to clients, and hasten the perspective of online as a fundamental part of a marketing strategy.
Whilst it is going to present agencies such as ourselves with more high calibre competition, in the long term, I think it can only be good for digital marketing as a whole, whether it be behavioural or search marketing
September 27th, 2007
According to recent research published by Neilsen, Internet advertising spend increased by over 23% in the US in the first half of 2007, despite a fall of 0.5% in overall advertising spend.
Another report by TNS Media Intelligence, offers similar figures, with online advertising spend of £2.7Bn reported for the first half of 2007, up 18% on the same time last year. This accounted for 7.6% of total advertising expenditure in the US, compared to over 11% in the UK. It should however be noted the TNS Media Intelligence report does not include paid search or broadband video advertising, something I would have suggested would have significantly impacted on those figures.
One thing is for sure, it will be interesting to see how the UK online advertising figures compare.
September 25th, 2007
It was only a matter of time before part three came along….
I would have thought by now, my thoughts on paid linkage would probably be fairly clear, if not heres a recap
Paid Links - Good or Bad - a UK SEO perspective
Paid Links - Good or Bad - a UK SEO perspective Part II
I was however reading Matt Cutts presentation to SES San Jose, regarding paid links - which I have to say was highly informative, however one slide in particular got me thinking, in particular Slide 2
Are paid links evil?
That’s the wrong question.
The right question: Do paid links that pass PageRank violate search engines quality guidelines?
The answer to that question is yes.
This has lead me to evaluate Googles quality guidelines in order to evaluate just which aspects Matt Cutts refers to. The quality guidelines are taken from here, and we will refer in particular to the quality guidelines only
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769
The analysis
Guideline 1: Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”
I would suggest this would not apply to the issue of paid links. The development of pages for increased visibility in the search engines would not apply in this instance
Guideline 2: Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
Now this may be the guideline in question. My feelings on this have been previously outlined in the posts above - I as the competitor do not have a problem with competitors buying links (if they wish to buy links on the basis that Google may change the algorithm -as they have - let them - i will have to find more creative ways - and anyway - if buying links for SEO purposes only is bad - why isn’t getting links by any other means for SEO purposes only bad ie directories). Surely this needs further explanation.
Secondly where do you draw the line here. Using a real life example, I noticed a number of ads down the right hand side of a well known marketing/consultancy portal in the UK. The site itself fairly enough offers advertising, paid advertising to clients, and some of these clients have contextual linkage to their site included in the ads to a number of well known SEO companies based in Scotland and England. These links are neither no follow, nor is the page nofollow, nor is the link 302′d, nor is the page protected by robots.txt.
Does this therefore constitute paid linkage - and if so have these links been waited down? Looking at the performance of both sites, I don’t think so. So therefore it brings into question - just what is ok and what is not.
Finally, and this leads on from point 2. Intent. How is Google going to determine intent. Yes, there will be tell tail signs on some link patterns but using the self same portal above. I will give these seo companies the benefit of the doubt, and say that these adverts were brought purely on a brand awareness basis, and any link juice gained is purely co-incidental. However how can I be 100% sure this is the case - the point is I can’t and the same applies to many of these paid links. How can Google be 100% sure that the link has been purchased for SEO purposes only or is this to be selective - and if so this needs to be very definitively explained.
However according to Matt Cutts presentation ‘Buying paid links that pass PageRank violates our quality guidelines’. Surely that doesn’t even bring intent into it. Again the presentation goes on to say - Google is willing to take strong action against PPP links, and is an area Google is focussing on.
If this is the case - I would suggest further advise is required by Google to webmasters and SEO specialists in order to educate as to what is good and what is bad.
Guideline 3: Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
Now again this could be one of the points in question. However this is still quite a grey area, as Google are yet to say submitting to directories is bad - and lets face it - I would suggest many SEO specialists merely submit to directories for SEO purposes only. Whilst I agree with people such as Andrew Girdwood and John Andrews when they say that content development is the best way forward, there is no way of getting round the fact that people do ‘acquire’ linkage for SEO purposes only, and thus if paid is bad, surely any other form of link acquisition in order to facilitate increased visibility in the search engines is bad - and the line can not be merely drawn at just paid links.
Guideline 4: Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.
Again - would suggest this wouldn’t apply here.
Finally the specific guidelines - going to do these in one as I don’t think any apply
To conclude - maybe I along with many other search marketing professionals would be more open to the nofollow campaign if it didn’t appear to have as many gaping holes in the guidelines as it does. I personally, do not want to go against any guidelines, and thus see any clients online visibility therefore impacted, hence why any queries/objections are therefore highlighted via a medium such as this.
However I would suggest the policy of nofollow does need to be significantly further though through in order to be fully implemented (correctly) by the search marketing community as a whole.
September 3rd, 2007
Lisa Barrone from Bruce Clay followed up my previous post on whether Google hated SEO’s (from the 8th of August) which provoked the following response from none other than Matt Cutts from Google
“I also feel like if Google hated SEO, we’d know it. Google isn’t just tolerating SEOs; they’re going out of their way to help them and give them access to more information. We’ll always want more information and more data and more transparency, but if you look at what they’ve given us over the years, it’s pretty impressive.”
What you said. 
Google definitely doesn’t hate SEO. Sure, there are some bad SEOs out there that do bad things - sometimes even illegal things. See e.g. http://justinsomnia.org/2007/08/search-engine-marketeers-are-the-new-script-kiddies/
Stuff like that ends up giving SEO a black-eye with lots of people. And you only need to watch the Scoble video to see that SEO has an image problem with some non-SEO folks.
But Googlers know that there are a ton of great SEOs out there that help clients improve their sites and make the web more crawlable. And the more that we can do to help and encourage those SEOs, the better that is for the web and the search industry.
So the short answer is that Google doesn’t hate SEO or SEOs”
Which as it turns out followed on quite nicely from yesterdays post regarding changing peoples perception of SEO - and growing up into a respected profession - not an easy job - but one I would say is necessary in the long term
August 31st, 2007
Right, a bit of time away from the paid links debate. I have just finished Dave Pasternack’s ‘Dave to ad agencies: Do your homework or get out of my office’ article on DMNews. Whilst I did start reading it awaiting another anti-seo rant - I did have to say I found myself agreeing with quite a lot of what he said (however I will hasten to add I didnt agree with the over-generalisation of SEO’s as a whole as a bunch of sheisters)
The article has come around as a result of a recent study by the Intelligent Business Group, a UK-based marketing think tank and provided an interesting critique of most advertising and marketing agencies primarily in the US. However the main discussion point from the report was just (in Dave P’s words) “out of whack todays advertising industry is.”.
Other interesting findings were as follows:
- 100% of respondants stated that the ability to provide insight into their customers was one of the most important factors - in order words the decision making process went beyond the ability to create mind blowing artistic work and creative, with agencies being seen as partners with significant expertise of the marketplace as a whole
- 85% believed that agencies didn’t do enough research before making their pitch. Even more suprising, 61% went as far as saying that they believed agencies did absolutely no research at all prior to pitch
Dave says the next bit far better than I can
“Can you imagine this situation occurring in any other professional field? What would you do with a doctor or lawyer who walked into your office to solicit your business, uttered a bunch of smooth verbiage, but couldn’t answer even the most basic questions about your legal or medical situation? Chances are you’d toss this charlatan out of your office within 60 seconds. And yet clients and I’m talking about Fortune 100 clients tolerate this behavior from ad people. If anyone’s looking for the reason why so many accounts churn or why so many CMOs last only a few months in their jobs, you’ve found it.”
However it is a shame that the article then descended into an over-generalised critisism of the search industry, however I will add that some of his critisism, unfortunately does have some validity. Internet marketing despite having come along way in the last couple of years is still very new, and personally I would suggest the advertising industry as a whole is still learning how people react/use the internet and thus how to most effectively target customers. lets not forget, the television industry probably has over 50 or so years on the Internet, and print even more, so there are definite learnings to be made.
However I will end on the following note - surely its how we as advertising organisations (whether online or offline) learn from such reports, and apply to this to our working lives will determine how effective we become. This is not a one-way process though, and I would suggest that both client and advertising partner have to work more closely together, in order to understand each other for any campaign to fully realise its potential.
To read Dave’s full article, please click here
August 29th, 2007
I have just read John Andrews recap of the SES session on Paid Links (hat tip to Andrew Girdwood for the initial post on this), and have to say from my earlier post, possibly one aspect I missed was the subject of content development.
Both John and Andrew (and Google from the afore mentioned session) make reference to the value of unique content, which I would suggest all SEO specialists would agree with, is one of the most important aspects of SEO. However I do have to still stop short of the ‘Paid links are bad’ argument.
Whilst I would agree, a campaign based purely on paid linkage is surely not advisable or indeed should be rewarded, I still personally don’t see the problem with paid linkage (again I would highlight the fact this is coming from someone who hasnt employed such tactics to any real effect on the past).
However, move back to my original references to the offline model.
If I were to market my product offline, I may use a PR campaign (lets compare this to Content generation) and some direct offline marketing or magazine advertorials (lets compare this to link generation whether it be paid or unpaid). Offline works with a combination of the two factors (albeit the example above being wildly oversimplified), however the point is - surely Google’s algorithm could factor in such factors as uniqueness of content, depth of content, link density, link relevancy and weight accordingly.
Paid links aren’t bad - over-reliance on paid links is bad, however my concern with the approach of such radical action is it merely serves to focus hardcore OVER-SEO activity elsewhere, like reciprical linkage before it. I personally understand what both John and Andrew say about content, however the mere fact Google have said Content is good will no doubt result in millions of pages of so-called unique content being produced thus diluting both the value and quality of content, and I would suggest we may find ourselves in a similar situation regarding content generation in the future.
I will however end this post echoing some of John’s thoughts. Whilst I personally may not agree with some of the factors of Googles recent approach to paid links, we have to live with them, and I will end with a quote from Johns post
“Is Google right in its approach to the web? Is Google just in its delivery of the carrot and the stick? Is Google fair in the way it operates? None of that matters to the search marketer/SEO. …You need to get to know Google, and listen to what Google says. You don’t need to agree” - John Andrews - johnon.com
August 28th, 2007
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