Should You Hire an SEO?

SEO in this case means "Search Engine Optimizer", a person or firm engaged in the art/science of modifying your website so that it will appear higher in search engine results pages.

If you don't use an SEO now, you've probably been solicited by one. There are a few large firms who are notorious high-pressure cold callers, with big promises and questionable ethics. There are also a great many hard-working, honest and innovative SEOs who can help your business.

So yes, you should hire an SEO if you can reach an understanding of what they can and will do for you. Here are some questions you should ask before hiring an SEO:

Q: Do you have experience in my industry?
If yes, ask for client references and call them. Ask references about the quality of the SEO's writing, their responsiveness, and their willingness to teach.

Q: How soon will I see results?
This is a trick question. An SEO cannot wave a magic wand over your site code and immediately deliver a top 3 ranking for a competitive search term like "furniture" or "mattress" or "digital camera". If anyone insists they can do this, run away, because they are either lying or will do something (in your name), that ends up harming your brand and your company. SEO is a long-term strategy, never a quick fix.

These two questions will lead you to other questions and give you a good sense of whether this is someone you can work with or not. Try negotiating a limited engagement first, perhaps with one section of your website. A "test drive" will limit your risk and motivate the SEO to do their best work. If they dazzle you, then hire them and hold them to the same standard for the rest of their work.

A final, and vital point: hiring an agency to handle some part of your marketing will never be a "set it and forget it" proposition. The best agencies in the world need to work closely and often with their clients to produce superior results.

Google Analytics revisited

I've spent some time using the new Google Analytics service, but so far I've seen more potential than actual value. Of course, like any self-configured solution, the critical success factor is getting it set up correctly. So far, in spite of time spent asking questions in the GA forums, I've not managed to get GA to track conversions & PPC campaigns. If Google doesn't make this easier soon, some bright folks will fill the gap with platform-specific solution. For example, if someone figures how to make GA work in Yahoo Stores, they'll find an eager audience for their services.

The value of analytics is huge in making good marketing decisions. If you need to pay extra to have your web analytics solution set up the right way, I'd strongly recommend doing so.

RSS for Retailers

Really Simple Syndication. What is it and why should you care? If you're involved in online marketing, you've seen a lot of buzz about RSS recently. RSS has been around for several years, but is quickly gaining popularity, and is about to move from "early-adopter/geek tool" to the mainstream.

If you use a site like Yahoo as your start page, you've probably seen the "MyYahoo" links. These allow you to customize the content that is delivered to "your" page. You can choose from a list of content on these sites, or, if you're surfing and find something you like with a button that looks like this one: (You'll notice that I have a button like this in this blog's sidebar).

Click on that button, and the content will appear on your MyYahoo page the next time you visit. Congratulations, you've just subscribed to an RSS feed!

OK, so what?

Well, as a potential publisher of an RSS feed, there are lots of reasons to position yourself early in the adoption phase. Here are some good ones, courtesy of Stephan Spencer writing in Multichannel Merchant:

• Bypasses spam filters
• Encourages links and garners PageRank score
• Serves as a content delivery channel to your affiliates, giving them something they can republish on their own Websites
• Easy for your subscribers to manage communications from you without clogging up their inboxes
• Allows you to change content midstream (no need to push an "unsend button" as with e-mail)
• Is the only way your blog can be included in Google's new Blog Search
• Increases the likelihood of media coverage because RSS is a hot topic retailers are slow to embrace

Google Analytics

Big news today is the launch of Google Analytics. It is a service that provides analysis about what your customers are doing on your website. In March of 2005 Google bought Urchin, a web analytics company who counted about 20% of the Fortune 500 as customers. Google has now re-branded Urchin as Google Analytics. It's a direct competitor to offerings from WebTrends, WebSideStory, ClickTracks and many others.

Why is it news? It's free.

To those of you spending $15,000/year or more for your web analytics, that's pretty big news. To the $460 million web analytics industry, it's even bigger news.

Of course, web analytics packages can be complicated to configure properly, so you might well ask what level of customer support $0 buys you. That remains to be seen, but judging from other free Google services like Froogle, the support will be reasonably good.

I'm going to try it out with one of our accounts over the next couple of weeks, and I'll report back on my findings. If it's as good (and complete) as people are saying, then it's going to seriously shake up the analytics industry. Even if you don't want to consider the disruption of migrating away from your current provider, it's pretty clear that you'll be able to wring significant price concessions or service improvements from them by next year.

Pay per click advertising for the holidays

As we get into the holiday shopping season, the cost of paid search advertising will increase significantly. The reason for this is simple--more people bidding more aggressively for a limited number of search keywords. Many companies who do little or no paid search advertising throughout the year enter the market in November, and others will decide now is a good time to try it for the first time.

This creates what I call the "amateur effect", where people start pouring money into paid search campaigns without understanding much more than "I want lots of traffic" and "a #1 position is best". These advertisers drive prices up for everyone.

Established advertisers who know what works for them will gladly pay more to keep their top-converting keywords in the top 5 positions. The result is that prices start rising in November, will peak just before Christmas, and will drop down again in the first half of January. How much is a crapshoot, but it's likely to be 25% - 30%.

Shopping.com has gone a step further than most with this statement:

"Effective November 1, 2005 we will temporarily increase the cost per lead by 30% (thirty percent) in all categories."

So, you will spend more money to get prospects to your website during the holidays. If you want to maintain your momentum, you will likely need to increase your spending. This is a good time to look at how you set your ad budget. If you are managing your campaigns to a CPO or ROI target, you don't need to read any further; you already know that you need to adjust those targets for seasonal ad pricing, and make sure every step of your campaign is a well-oiled conversion machine.

If you've just been spending a fixed budgeted amount every month and you have no idea how you'd go about managing spending to a CPO or ROI target, then you are not getting the most for your online advertising investment. A good first step is to start tracking your conversion rates for your PPC campaigns. Most major search engines (Google, Yahoo Search Marketing) and shopping comparison sites (Shopzilla, Shopping.com, Pricegrabber) offer a tool for tracking your conversion rates. Until you understand, at a detailed level, what's working and what isn't, you'll be wasting money that could be working to drive new sales through your business.