Do you suffer from “Comment Phobia”?

by Christine Halvorson, Senior Blog Strategist

One of the first questions I get asked when speaking to companies about using blog technology to further their communications goals is, “What if we get negative comments?”

I can give you three answers for that question.

First, you are not required to allow readers to comment on your blog. You control your level of comment acceptance and it can range from allowing no comments to allowing anyone to comment “live” without prior approval. The wisest corporate blogging strategy falls somewhere in between. You can keep comments totally turned off for some entries, and open but monitored on others. You can pre-register your commenters to allow in the people you’ve heard from before. You let them in because you trust them.

Second, you will not get so many comments—good or bad—that they overwhelm you. Even the best and brightest corporate blogs have pretty small comment numbers. Companies should use blogs to tell their story differently. If you do that, you'll be attracting a friendly audience, developing trust with your readers and they, in turn, would likely not be inclined to leave negative comments. At Stonyfield Farm, for example, our most common type of blog comment is something along the lines of “Great work! Keep it up.” If you get 10 comments on one topic, that’s a landslide.

Third, you may want negative comments because they will further your own communications goals. It sounds improbable, but consider this example. Let’s say you want everyone to know that your company is 100 percent AGAINST the senseless slaughter of hamsters so that their furry little coats can be turned into cell phone holders. You want to say this loud and clear in your blog. Then, you want the other side, the Anti-Hamster Faction, to be able to have their say. Why? Because it will make them look like jerks. This is not rocket science, but it is an age-old trick journalists use. You let the source prove the point for you.

In short, your corporate blog is like your house. You make the rules here and you’re allowed to kick anybody out who doesn’t obey them. When to allow comments should be part of your discussion about starting a blog, but you shouldn’t let fear of comments rule your decision.

Beware Google AdWords Fakers Phishing

Somewhere out there are not-so-nice people sending out e-mails telling people their AdWords accounts are out of money and need attention or that their account information requires updating. There are several versions of this attempted Google-phishing going on, with the goal of getting your credit card or account information for nefarious purposes.

The e-mails purportedly from Google AdWords may look legit, but here are two main issues to consider. First, is the e-mail address the AdWords message was sent to the official e-mail address for your company’s AdWords account? If not, it is probably phishy.

If the e-mail address sent to also happens to be the official e-mail address on file at AdWords, the second issue to check is: when you click on the link, there will either be a redirect to a URL that doesn’t even contain the term “Google” or to a link that may look something like this: adwords.google.3459.com/accountupdate.html

Additional useful posts and articles:

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/016647.html

http://www.zimbio.com/Google+Advertising+Products/articles/163/Adwords+Phishing+Mails

http://www.thesemblog.com/2008/04/google-adwords.html

http://phishalert.blogspot.com/2008/03/google-adwords-please-update-your.html

Happy Testing Day, Mom

Holidays are always good news/bad news around here for our pay-per-click managers. Good news: There’s so much extra traffic out there, all really targeted on buying in specific categories and for a specific reason that it’s a great time to test. Bad news: Jeez, the keywords are expensive. Maybe not so coincidentally, Google recently introduced some potentially exciting new tools to its lineup for the Content Network which may create new avenues and potential for more targeted, lower cost per-click traffic than traditional keyword bidding. Features like site targeting and demographic targeting mean that narrower traffic (with the potential lower cost) may be more likely to convert to a sale. Since the nature of our business is to test, test, and then test some more, find what works and then test even more, there’s no time like Mother’s Day to kick the rims on these cool new features. And as the deadline for Mother’s Day draws near, people aren’t just looking for ideas. They’re looking to buy.

So, Happy Mother’s Day Mom! Thanks for giving us an excuse to really stretch our legs, engine-wise.

SEO: Getting back to basics

As we were closing a staff meeting last week, I asked for one SEO tip to finish off this month’s newsletter. Holly, who has been with our company since its inception ten years ago, said: “How about reminding people to pay attention to the basics?” She finds that often web marketers get so wrapped up in their many tasks and challenges that they sometimes forget to pay attention to the fundamentals.

The process of search engine optimization improves site spiderability, indexing, and organic rankings for the content of your website. In addition, the optimization process helps your products get listed with strong headlines and descriptions so that searchers are encouraged to click on the listings and enter your site. Basic components of the optimization process include:

Keywords: Use Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker and other tools to learn how your prospective customers are articulating their needs and desires when faced with the blank search box at Google or Yahoo!.

Content: Create content that talks about your brand, products and services using the natural language used by searchers – the keywords you’ve identified. But don’t overdo it! Google frowns on repetitive use of keywords at the expense of natural flow. The more quality content your site offers, the more your visitors can benefit from the site and become engaged by it. The more engaged they are with the site, the more frequently they will place links to your site from their own, enhancing your search engine organic rankings over time.

Title and Meta Tags: Where possible, use keywords in page titles and Meta descriptions. Remember, these descriptions are likely to turn up on the search engine results page, so you want to put your best foot forward when you write meta tags. Each page of your site should have unique Meta and titles.

Site Map & Internal Linking: For search engines to spider and index your site most effectively, they have to have easy, thorough access to all important pages of your site. Create or update your site map on a regular basis and offer internal text links of value to your visitors that the spiders can use, too.

Keep it moving: SEO is never completed, just as your business can never stand still. Review your keywords monthly or quarterly; add content to focus on new products or timely/seasonal topics; make sure your new pages have unique titles and Meta. Run rankings reports to identify downward trends and troubleshoot at least once a month.

SEM Metrics & Economic Woes

At the recent spring conference of the New England Mail Order Association (NEMOA), one topic on everyone’s mind was this difficult economy. During one session, participants talked about how Internet sales are increasing for most member companies but retail and catalog sales are falling short of goals. This matches up with national trends.

After the session, I chatted with a few colleagues who, like me, provide services to e-commerce sites. One man said: “I guess we’re in the right business.”

“Yes,” I answered cautiously.

Spending in search engine marketing has increased year after year for the ten years I’ve been in this business and shows every sign of continuing to do so. But, while I celebrate my company’s best first quarter ever, I also realize that, in 2007, online sales were only 6% of overall retail sales and this year are expected to be 7%.

That leaves a lot of room for a struggling economy to whack our clients in their other 93%. And that ultimately will affect us all.

As with each economic downturn, the smartest advertisers are the ones who keep advertising because, historically, those are the companies that will come out on top when the world rights itself again.

And the smartest of those smartest will be unwavering in their demands for returns on their advertising dollars that are measurable.

So, yes, search marketers who deliver highly measurable, profitable results to their clients are in the right business. But that doesn’t mean we can be complacent – the challenges facing retail and catalog companies shouldn’t be taken lightly by anyone.

Posted by Susan O'Neil

Google Offers Demographic Targeting

Google recently introduced a new demographic bidding feature to control the display of ads within the Google content network. This feature is available to either keyword contextually targeted or site targeted campaigns running within Google AdWords and opting into the content network of publisher sites.

For those sites that offer information on the demographics of their visitors, advertisers can raise or lower bids, or even prevent ads serving to certain groups based on age or gender. Google is offering this option as a way to allocate more resources to those groups advertisers know are more likely to meet goals. If you know specific groups that are more likely to convert, bids can be increased to them. Conversely bids can be lowered to reduce ad impressions to lower converting groups. If you don’t already know what demographics are best, then using Google’s free conversion tracking tools will enable analysis of click-through rates, costs and conversion associated with different groups in order to identify your best audiences.

While this simple bid and limit ad strategy will likely be productive, there is another use for this tool that could squeeze even more from contextual campaigns -- using demographics bidding to control which ad versions display.

Various offers and landing page layouts will work better for some groups than others. Rather than just finding that men ages 19-39 are your best audience and going after only them, you can use the demographic tools to set up multiple campaigns. Each of these campaigns can test out which ad text, image creative, landing pages and offers will increase conversions for each audience. For example, the ad text and offer that may attract a click from a male 19-39 may not be best suited for females age 49-59.

This new feature offers great ways to control spend and target your best audience. But the real power will likely lie in the ability to control your message to different groups of potential customers, and through rigorous testing, increase sales to lower converting segments. It is this power of testing that makes us hope this option will soon become available for search targeted campaigns as well.

Posted by Michael Briggs, VP Search Strategies

More Change Coming to Google AdWords Quality Score

Google has in beta another criterion for the landing page quality score it assigns to web pages you may be using as destinations for your Google AdWords campaigns. Soon, Google will be factoring into the Quality Score the load time of each one of your landing pages.

Of course, we all know that fast loading time is important for your human visitors, but now it is also important enough to Google for that factor to become part of the recipe, or algorithm, incorporated in an ad’s positioning.

Posted by Mike Briggs.