Amidst all of the hype about SEM, a panel at OMMA East tackled the issue of the "black magic" art of SEO. (Mediapost) Unlike SEM, SEO is more difficult to sell – because the results/benefits are more… amorphous. But marketers/clients need to learn how to articulate/understand the importance/benefits of SEO, lest their site (or their client’s site) suffers.
iCrossing – an SEO and SEM firm – announced that they’ve raised $13 million Series C round of financing – which includes new investors RRE Ventures of New York City and Generation Partners of San Francisco.
US Web (US Web? Do
they still exist? Would anyone want that name? Evidently what’s left of that once mighty mess is squirreled
away somewhere near the storage barns at Phoenix airport) is taken to task for
offering bloggers five bucks a pop to post wonderful things about their
clients. We’re not sure about the ethics
of this either way but it is reminiscent of the early attempts at “Audience
Development” where agencies like Cybernautics could make a good buck with teams
of young, low paid employees furiously posting to newsgroups (remember newsgroups?) on behalf of
clients. Just like anything, the
aggressive Web-based businesses who believe a brand is something you burn onto a
cow will do anything to acquire new customers. Companies with brand images to protect won’t touch this stuff – it won’t
be worth their time to answer the snarky phone calls from reporters. This business seems ripe for outsourcing – if
it costs five bucks a post from the US, could you find bloggers to post for a buck in
c|net published an article today reporting on a group of Flash Web Site developers who are tackling the issue of "whether Google indexes pages written in Macromedia’s Flash animation
format as well as it does "static" Web pages, such as those written in
HTML, SHTML, ASP or PHP."
In Web 2.0, acquisition is the new metric. But a new study conducted by Yahoo! and comScore, sheds some light on search:
Search driving offline purchase – 92% of consumers (eventual purchasers) who performed a search online for consumer electronics did not buy online. (Granted, consumer electronics lends itself to this trend.)
Latency – Only 15% of all purchases as a result of a search actually occur in that same search session. And 40% of purchases occured 5 to 12 weeks later.
Generic terms – Generic terms ("TV," "Plasma," etc.) accounted for 70% of search terms, and brand names accounted for 20%, leaving the remaining 10% for specific product terms.
