• The Virtuous Cycle And The End Of Arm's-Length Marketing
    Last week I wrote what should have been an open and shut column, looking at why SEO never really lived up to the potential of its business opportunity. Then my friend Scott Brinker had to respond with this comment:
  • 10 Tips To Get Ready For Holiday SEM Craziness
    While many people look forward to the holidays as a time to unwind, open presents, and take family vacations, life is far from bucolic for many SEM pros between Thanksgiving and Christmas. 'Tis the season for wild fluctuations in bids (upwards) and make-or-break ad buys. As an early Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/Festivus gift, here are 10 tips to maximize your holiday SEM.
  • Why SEO Never Lived Up To Its Potential
    IAB Canada President Chris Williams asked me a great question last week. We had just finished presenting the results of the new eye tracking study I told you about in my last three columns. I had also polled the audience of some 400-plus Internet marketers about how many were doing some type of organic optimization. A smattering of hands (which, in case you're wondering, is somewhere south of a dozen, or about 3% of the audience) went up. Williams picked up on the disconnect right away. "We have a multibillion-dollar interactive advertising industry here in Canada, and you're telling me …
  • The 10 Effective Habits Of Proactive Marketers
    To execute effective multichannel, multi-screen, multipurpose marketing, you must transform your organization into a proactive machine. Proactive marketing is all about looking ahead and seizing future opportunity in real time. It's the antithesis of reactive marketing, which is the practice of looking back to see what worked and then creating plans based on historical data. Proactive marketing is something search marketers are well-positioned to embrace. After all, there's no more proactive consumer than the one typing a keyword into a search engine.
  • After The Search: The New Shopping Cart Travels Online To Offline
    Are you interested in modernizing your brand experience and customer journey to attract younger generations, such as Millennials? If you're following the money in any fashion, chances are very good that you are. And if you're not, you should be. Estimates say this group, born between "Airplane" and "Gladiator," will spend $200 billion per year by 2017 and $10 trillion in their collective lifetimes. While Millennials' peak buying power may still be years away, marketers need to think about how to build strong business-to-consumer relationships with this demographic juggernaut. For all their acclaimed technological savvy, here's an equally important and …
  • 10 Ways to Optimize Pharmaceutical Sites And Get Regulatory Approval
    The pharmaceutical industry is one of the most highly regulated industries in the world. Trying to get products approved by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration and making sure products and information are found by healthcare professionals and consumers through SEO is a very daunting task. By comparison, a root canal can seem like a pleasant experience. Any SEO who has worked in the pharma space knows that it can seem nearly impossible to get SEO best practices implemented across a brand's site, but things don't need to be so hard if you implement the 10 techniques and methodologies listed …
  • Evolved Search Behaviors: Takeaways For Marketers
    In my last two columns, I first looked at the origins of the original Golden Triangle, and then looked at how search behaviors have evolved in the last nine years, according to a new eye tracking study. In today's column, I'll try to pick out a few "so whats" for search marketers.
  • Using A Link Audit To Protect Your Site From Nefarious Links
    It's no secret that inbound links are extremely important in search; adding high-quality links should improve your site's rankings. As an SEO expert, you've likely spent a significant amount of time and energy developing these links. At the same time, Google has put a ton of emphasis on eliminating questionable and manipulative links, specifically through its Penguin algorithm updates. "Nothing for me to worry about," you say. "I've avoided black-hat tactics, so I'm in the clear." Not so fast.
  • How Search Users' Habits Have Evolved
    Last week, I reviewed why the Golden Triangle existed in the first place. This week, we'll look at how the scanning patterns of Google users have evolved in the past nine years. The reason I wanted to talk about information foraging last week is that it really sets the stage for understanding how patterns have changed with the present Google layout. In particular, one thing was true for Google in 2005 that is no longer true in 2014: Back then, all results sets looked pretty much the same.
  • Preparing For A Keywordless SEM World
    Keywords - the historical currency of SEM - are dying. Google is slowly eliminating keywords in favor of product feeds, spidered results, and audience-driven advertising. This news likely does not sit well with many of you, who have labored tirelessly to build massive keyword libraries. Keywords, however, will soon outlive their usefulness to Google, and SEMs will have to adopt to this future reality.
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