• Local Search: Tips For Driving Buyers To Businesses
    According to Google, 70% of mobile local searches result in a consumer connecting with a business over the phone. And 66% actually visit the business in person. Mobile searchers are buyers, and a marketer simply can't expect that type of return on investment from a desktop campaign. If you're responsible for marketing one or more locations for a small business or a national brand, it's unlikely that you can organically rank at the top of the results for every related query or have the budget to pay for top placement for every search. So where should you focus?
  • The Power Of Meta
    To the best of our knowledge, humans are the only species capable of thinking about thinking, even though most of us don't do it very often. We use the Greek word "meta" to talk about this ability. Basically, "meta" refers to a concept which is an abstraction of another concept -- an instruction sheet for whatever the original thing is.
  • Today, Spend Some Time In Quadrant Two
    Last week, I ranted, and it was therapeutic -- for me, at least. Some of you agreed that the social media landscape was littered with meaningless crap. Others urged me to "loosen up and take a chill pill," intimating that I had slipped across the threshold of "grumpy old man-itis." Guilty, I guess, but there was a point to my rant. We need to spend more time with important stuff, and less time with content that may be popular but trivial.
  • Working With Google? You've Got to Embrace Co-opetition
    Last week my 3Q Digital colleague Susan Waldes wrote a blog post exploring all the ways that Google is steadily encroaching on the turf of third-party campaign management companies like Marin Software and Kenshoo. I have a slightly different take on this theory. First off, I don't think Google is particularly focused on killing off third-party platforms - I think Google is generally focused on competing with anyone and anything online.
  • Search's Role In New Era Of Publishing
    Without a doubt, every business is a publisher. We've grown beyond websites as brochures, where we simply list our products, services and hours of operations. In order to drive organic traffic, we need to consistently create content that is timely and relevant. This can be a stretch for many organizations, as this wasn't even an expectation just five years ago when the website was pronounced dead, soon-to-be replaced by Facebook and other digital properties. So what's an organization to do? And how does this relate to search? Let's focus on three areas where search can be a boon to organizations …
  • #Meaningless #Crap
    Let's stop hashtagging everything! First of all, it only belongs on Twitter. It's not a universal punctuation mark. And it doesn't belong in front of every word of your post! If you're writing about something that falls under a topic category that people actually care about, slip a hashtag in.
  • 10 Ways To Apply Jugaad Innovation To Your SEM Practice
    In February, Navi Radjou, author of Jugaad Innovation, delivered a keynote presentation at the Kenshoo K2 Summit, focusing on the idea that businesses must unleash their "MacGyver Instinct" -- also known as "frugal tinkering" -- to innovate and drive business results.
  • Cutting Through The Complexity Of Search Marketing
    The first search advertisement I placed was on GoTo.com in the late '90s. Back then, it was pretty simple. The highest bidder for a keyword landed at the top of the search results. For that keyword, you paid your bid price for each click. Done.
To read more articles use the ARCHIVE function on this page.