L&S Unscripted

Search engines (primarily Google and Yahoo) consistently refer 30-60% of our clients’ web traffic. People are searching for your product or service – the only question is: can they find you? Have you often wondered how to gain that highly sought-after position in the search engine results pages when people type a key phrase that’s applicable to your line of business? The path to success is search engine marketing and I’ll begin by defining the two sides of the equation:

• SEO: search engine optimization; work performed behind the scenes to best optimize your web site for top search engine positions (ranking). Example: the top organic (non-paid) positions on Google or Yahoo for a particular search term.
• PPC: pay-per-click marketing; paid text ads placed in the “sponsored listings” area on search engines. Normally the top 2-3 listings on the search results page and the right column of listings.

We hear the question all the time – if we’re working to optimize our web site for search engines (SEO), why do we need to invest in a pay-per-click marketing campaign? In most cases, we recommend both and our clients who aggressively pursue the online marketing landscape use both. I once heard an analogy that it’s similar to advertising in the yellow pages. There’s a huge advantage to acquiring both positions. Considerations:

Time:

• Short-term solution: PPC, the fastest way to drive traffic to your web site. You build the campaign, take it live and within an hour, you could be appearing at the top of the paid listings on Google, Yahoo or MSN for your selected keywords. PPC is also a great avenue to test keywords, ad copy response and landing page effectiveness.
• Long-term solution: SEO is a process, not a project. The time spent optimizing your web site copy, image tags and META data will have a positive long term result, but you have to be patient and often, even the best SEO work takes a couple months to show a true increase in rankings.

Cost:

• PPC is a great online advertising medium because you only pay for clicks that actually land on your web page. Therefore, if your web site is well built and guides the user to the desired conversion (sale, information request or particular web activity), it is a very effective way to gain new traffic to your web site. The best part is that PPC is entirely measurable – an exact ROI can be produced for every dollar spent.
• SEO is often referred to as “free” as once you gain a ranking, you don’t pay for clicks on the search engine listings. However, SEO as a process is not free. It requires constant effort, diligently keeping up with new tactics and modifying the web site code accordingly.

Bottom line:

Search engine marketing is a highly effective, efficient online marketing tactic and it consistently produces the lowest cost-per-lead for our clients when compared to other online marketing campaign components. Once you launch your search engine marketing campaign, you’ll want to assess both types of traffic, organic and paid, to identify the quality of both sources of web traffic and adjust your campaign accordingly.

Get in the game,

Robin

Search engine spiders, defined: Spiders are used to feed pages to search engines. It’s called a spider because it crawls over the Web. Another term for these programs is webcrawler. Source: www.webopedia.com

Can search engine spiders ‘see’ your web images? With the emergence of Google images and other image search engines, the importance of indexing the images on your web site has become all the more important. While you should be adding ALT tags (defined: The ALT tag is meant to serve as an ALTernate if the image source does not exist, or if browsers have images disabled) and descriptions to your images for organic search engine ranking purposes, the only way for the image search engines to find your images (and furthermore, link to your web site) is by adding information that allows the spiders to see you.

For example:

Non-Optimized Image:	Optimized Image:
What you see:	What you see: Mount Rushmore, Black Hills of South Dakota
What the spider sees:	What the spider sees: ALT=Mount Rushmore TITLE=Mount Rushmore, located in the Black Hills of South Dakota Caption= Mount Rushmore, Black Hills of South Dakota

The saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words” doesn’t hold true for search engines unless you tell the spider what it’s supposed to see. A fully optimized image includes the following elements: ALT tag, TITLE tag, thumbnail (version shown on the web) with a link to a larger version or additional content, and a descriptive caption beneath the image. Additionally, the file directories should be named similar to the topic.

Example of optimized image code (applies to the example above):

<a href=http://www.travelsd.com/_images/placestogo/rushmore/rushmore.jpg><img src=”/images/placestogo/mount-rushmore/mount-rushmore.jpg” alt=”Mount Rushmore” title=”Mount Rushmore, located in the Black Hills of South Dakota” /></a><br />

Resources: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_IMG.asp or http://www.htmlquick.com/reference/tags/img.html

Organically optimizing,

Robin

Each day I am amazed by the savvy technical skills of little kids. While I still much prefer my external mouse, when my 4-year old hops on the computer, it’s incredibly natural for him to maneuver the laptop mouse, keyboard and arrows. It stuns me. He has the lingo down, too. I’ll hear, “Mom, you got an e-mail” when my Outlook makes its distinct chime. And once he arrives on a web site, he navigates through without hesitation… the funny thing about kids is that they just keep clicking until they find what they want – they don’t get frustrated, unlike many adults.

You may be thinking, “Really – you let your 4-year old use the Internet?” I do, but with caution. We have an awesome toy plug-in that works with the Internet - Fischer-Price Easy-Link Launch Pad – it essentially locks all other computer activity and allows kids to play very specific games. It’s awesome. Alternatively, another favorite in my household is Playhouse Disney. 

Beyond games, kids are also exposed to various forms of online communication – when I’m on Instant Messenger or Facebook, my son’s curiosity is always piqued. He’ll ask, “Hey Mom, who are you talking to?” Fact: he says “talking,” even when I’m IMing or texting. Kids are growing up with an entirely different view of communication options… they know that it’s not just verbal. Social media has also arrived for kids: check out Disney’s Club Penguin and Webkinz.  

It scares and excites me to think about where technology will be when my 4-year old is in his 20’s. First came technology, then came social, and experiential is next. Get ready. Look at how experiential the Wii is – computer activity will follow suit.

Plugged-in and parenting,

Robin

My husband and I are upgrading to smart phones. Up until this point, our cell phones have been, er, not smart (to say the least). We are also combining our single plans into a shared family plan, something that’s long overdue.

So we’ve been on the Verizon web site a lot, without a lot of luck. We found the phones we wanted, but we couldn’t figure out how to get the online discount on both at the same time. And we couldn’t access the family share plan with those phones selected, but we couldn’t figure out why. After a reconnaissance mission to the local Verizon store, we confirmed with their salesperson that our desired combination of phones and plan was a possibility. But as we would save 300 bucks buying online, we left the store and decided to have another go ourselves.

And we almost didn’t make it. Until a friendly chat box popped up – “Can I help you?” And “KaylaK” did, very well. She explained that we first had to upgrade on our single accounts and buy our phones, and then we could combine our plans. She walked us through this, step by step. She stayed online 26 minutes after their customer service lines closed to help us finish. Sure, some of the responses were obviously canned, but they were also thorough and that was good enough for us. Our new phones will arrive in one to two business days.

The more I am exposed to site design and optimization, the more I realize there is no “perfect” web site. While you can provide good paths and clear navigation for your visitors, they are still human and unpredictable. Site visitors are like water in your basement, they will always find the cracks in your foundation. Sites change and evolve constantly as products are added and processes are tweaked, and something in the user experience inevitably gets bumped or shifted. So the answer is to fight humans with humans – provide a real live person who can answer as many questions as your site users can come up with. Live chat is an effective, easy and cheap way to add an element of human interaction to your web site. Because, like Bruce Springsteen says, “I just want someone to talk to, and a little of that human touch.”

In an increasingly plugged-in world, don’t we all?

Krista G.

Search engine behavior research (a.k.a. keyword research) has been used to feed pay-per-click and search engine optimization efforts for some time; however the reach of this intelligence is virtually untapped. Recently, one of our clients wanted to enter a new geographic market in a very short time frame. We always approach new markets with sufficient research to ensure successful messaging and placements; therefore found ourselves trying to schedule roundtable focus groups in this market which wasn’t feasible due to the short time frame and limited budget. So, we decided to study online behavior and apply the findings to the entire campaign effort. First, we performed extensive keyword research to learn about search engine behavior relating to their offering. Second, we launched a 2-week PPC campaign in the market to derive user behavior and interest judged by response to varying ad copy.

Searchers are telling us how, when, where and why to communicate with them. If a web surfer is looking for a product/service, the first thing they’ll do is approach Google with a specific search term. These search terms actually form descriptions (that come directly from the consumer in an unsolicited environment) that are invaluable as we begin to develop a marketing campaign. We also learn about day parts - when are users typing these terms? During the day at work or at night? The answer to this question will lead to very different media buys. The way that users in different geographic locations search for a product/service differentiates perceptions among different audiences.

Great messaging power lies in the studying search behavior. Prepare yourself for a new data addiction because once you start analyzing search behavior, it’s hard to stop. Learn from the very best – your future clients.

Ambitiously analyzing,

Robin

In a meeting yesterday, I had an ah-ha moment. As we’ve tried to help our clients make the leap to social media, too many times social media brainstorming is limited to banner ads on Myspace or Facebook. As marketers, we know that this is only the tip of the iceberg, so I say: take social media out of the list of marketing tactics… it doesn’t belong there. Really, it’s a paradigm shift in that the social nature of messaging is infused in everything we do online.

Virtually every type of digital marketing has or could have a social component changing each medium from a one-way form of communication to two-way communication stream. For example, we must understand online user behavior to be able to join the conversation. Going in blind simply doesn’t work. This act of online listening can be defined as participating in social media. Cross-linking is social media. Reading and writing blogs, ratings and reviews is social media. Digital PR is social media. I’ve even known certain e-mail campaigns to generate dialogue. And of course, we can build web applications that have social nature and application.

Don’t place Social Media as a line item within your marketing plan - that’s too limiting. Think big. It’s not a new phenomenon, it’s simply the online world in which we live and play. Dive in.

Steadily socializing,

Robin

It’s an exciting day at Lawrence & Schiller; today we launch our agency blog. We’re ready to start talking and we hope you’ll join our digital exchange.

As a blog reader, you know the buzz firsthand. From rant and rave blogs and political activist blogs to travel blogs and corporate blogs, the blogosphere is changing web content as we know it. Consumers trust online content, and if you’re not generating dialogue, rest assured that your competitors are.

Over the last year, we’ve heard the resistance and questions time and time again from our clients: Why would we want to start a blog? What’s in it for us? For us, we see it as a great opportunity to start conversations about hot topics in our day-to-day client experiences, to collect unsolicited feedback and to strengthen relationships with our key audiences.

When clients or potential clients ask these questions, our answer goes something like this…

Blog benefits are simple. They:

• Position your employees as thought leaders in your respective industry. The key to a successful blog is to assign the best writer to the job - subject matter experts. It doesn’t have to be the same writer each week; mix it up and find the person that is the most passionate about the topic.
• Feature innovation or unveil new products or services. Build hype.
• Direct conversations about your business by providing topics and discussion starters. Pose strategic questions that will collect consumer insights about your products or services. It’s where online PR and online research unite.

Your insight and passion about your business topics will resonate with your very best target audience. They’re searching for you - have you initiated the conversation?

We call it digital word-of-mouth. Start talking. People will listen.

Diligently digitizing,

Robin