SES San Jose Day 4
August 11, 2005
Day 4: “All good things must come to an end.”
Day four marked the last day of SES San Jose 2005. It had been a great week, but some true “gem” sessions remained for those who had not burned out already. The first sessions started at 9:00am, and I had decided to cover “Business 2 Business Tactics.” Three excellent speakers from different companies spoke, starting with Karen Breen Vogel from Clear Gauge, who spoke the “considered purchase” that must be considered in B2B search marketing. Her emphasis on the difference between B2B and B2C (business to consumer) is the fact that the buying cycle must be considered. Since they focus a lot on email marketing for their client generation, they strongly believe that the Internet should be used as a relationship medium. They use SEM tactics as well, enforcing the idea that Internet marketing should combine SEM and emails and other tactics in order to be more “holistic” and therefore successful. The use of different landing pages for paid search in order to target the different keywords used in various stages of the buying cycle has been highly valuable to them. Karen also described the difference between using popular keywords and what she calls “operative keywords.” These are similar to the “latent keywords” described by Gord Hotchkiss during the day one session “Searcher Behavior.” If you can incorporate these action and result-intensive keyword phrases (often verbs) into your ad copy and the content of your email communications, higher success ratios will follow. She finished off by giving very sound advice: do not optimize for clicks or traffic, but rather optimize for actual results such as leads or sales. Next to speak was Paul Slack from WebDex, who spoke about the difference between “influencers” and “decision makers” and the importance to target each of them differently when focusing on B2B. As Karen had said, it is important to concentrate on the B2B sales cycle, and catch the right people at the right time with the right pages. He showed some research that shows that a large percentage of people use the Internet during the “consideration and research,” and the “decision” stages of the buying cycle. If you offer plenty of information to the influencers in the form of comparison matrixes or white papers, for example, they will have information ready to print out and show to the decision makers. This makes the influencers look good because they have seemingly done a lot of research. The decision makers on the other hand are more likely to respond favorably to validation, according to Paul. They look for sources of content and things such as case studies that help to assure them that they are making the right decision. He sums up his presentation with wise advice to “begin with the end in mind.” Christopher Grady of Merak Communications has performed most of their SEM in house, which has allowed them to learn from mistakes. They have targeted keyword phrases in the past that were too vague, or not specifically used by decision makers. One problem they had was that since they offer a product that people search for when something goes wrong (an email server), they found that most people did not search for such an item until they needed it right away. It became very important for them to close a larger percentage of visitors to their website, since they knew that people did not actively search for their product until this time of true need. Their biggest customer found them using an eleven word keyword phrase! The next biggest used a nine keyword phrase. In these searches, people tended to use a core keyword modified by a number of requirements. Echoing what Karen said earlier about “operative keywords,” it is important to have any possible requirements the customer may need built into the verbiage on the site. The second session I attended was a “Meet the Crawlers” session, specifically the “RSS and Feeds Edition.” Once again, representatives from the major search engines were on hand to help give insight on how to use RSS and other methods to feed your content to the search engines, hopefully culminating in its indexing. Danny Sullivan was moderating. Kaushal Kurapati from AskJeeves spoke first, discussing some do’s and don’ts of submitting to Ask.com. First of all, they do not actually accept submissions any longer. Their new crawler will find the site, as long as it is linked-to from a reputable source. Things that make indexing difficult include duplication of content, high bandwidth sites (suggests use of gzip which can cut size by 75%) and infinite pages such as calendars that go all the way to the year 3001. Ask.com follows all robots.txt standards including <no follow>, <no archive>, and <no index>, so he advises using these and crawler delay codes to ease the bandwidth drain on your servers.
Next up was Debbie Jaffe from Google, who spoke mostly about the new Google sitemap inclusion system. Webmasters can create an account to submit sitemaps in an xml version. They can then track the results of their submission, and resubmit through the same portal. Instant Position and its parent company G3 Group have used this service and it is very helpful. Debbie stresses that the sitemaps and the regular crawl are two completely separate things, and that one will not hurt the other. The system also allows you to generate a sitemap based on your current content, in order to save time if you have not already done so.
Tim Mayer from Yahoo, a very popular speaker at these conferences because he is always one of the most informative presenters, was last to speak (no MSN rep was available, unfortunately). He remarked that it was great to see another company (Google) adopting feeds, since Yahoo has used them successfully since 2001 (touche). He describes Yahoo’s goal of getting searchers to “find,” not just search (ironically that is the motto of find.com’s new search engine). His main suggestions included not placing content too “deep” on a website. In order for content to be crawled, it generally has to be within the top 3 or 4 levels. He suggests using unique page META titles and descriptions, and not splitting similar content onto separate pages. Also highly suggest avoiding “tricks” such as keyword stuffing or cloaking, saying that Yahoo crawlers are getting better and better at identifying these tactics. Tim explains that Yahoo has four different crawlers it uses to index content: Slurp, Seeker, a multimedia crawler and audio-video crawler. He provides the link add.my.yahoo.com/rss to add your RSS feeds to yahoo. Within about 48 hours, you should be able to see a special link below the description in the search engine results pages (very cool).
There were some decent questions asked at the end of this session, available in the blog recap here: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002369.html (please note that this blog was written and published in practically “real time,” so some typos understandably exist).
The last session of the day, and the conference, was one of the best: “Spanish Language SEM.” This session was moderated by Barbara “Webmama” Coll, an early leader in SEM for Spanish websites. Also presenting were Ignacio “Nacho” Hernandez of iHispanic.com and Lucas Morea from Latin Edge. Barbara announced that nacho has succeeded in convincing Jupiter Media to have a conference especially for the Latino search industry, which will occur in July 2006 in Naples, Florida.
Barbara spoke first, discussing the major growth in buying power of the Hispanic market in the US. According to recent research, Latinos will account for 10% of disposable income spending by 2007. She also described the mistakes being made by some that are attempting to target Latinos, such as using English in their META Title tags, even when the page is in Spanish. She sees improvement on this front, but lots of refinement still needs to occur. She also lauds MSN Search for actually having a tab for Spanish searches right on their homepage. Lucas spoke next and highlighted some more opportunities that exist in this relatively new search engine marketing focus. He showed how many results came up for searches in Spanish, and compared the total number of results between Google US and Google Mexico, showing that the number of sites was about the same. If you do the same search in English, there are about 6 times as many results. He also discussed how the Latino search market is not yet as “advanced” as English searchers: more searches are now occurring for 2-3 word phrases in English while the majority of Spanish searches are still one-word searches. His primary advice was that website owners dealing with the Hispanic community need to be prepared to offer assurances that there are actually people on the “other end.” The use of contact forms and if possible even live chat is very effective in building trust with the Latino community. Lastly, you should be prepared to take alternate forms of payment for those that do not use Credit cards.
Nacho led off by debunking the myth that Latinos do not have credit cards. Recent studies show that Credit Card use among Hispanics had grown from 48% in 2002 to 57% in 2004. More importantly, $5.6 Billion was spent online by US Hispanics in 2003. In order to effectively target this market, Nacho feels that a website should focus on paid inclusion and paid search, using landing pages that are in Spanish. He found that the cost of some keywords for the automotive market in San Diego was 94% lower than buying the same keywords in English. However, the average cost of popular Spanish terms was rising between 10 and 25% per year. He gave some great examples of strategy when dealing with the Spanish market, and also advised that you should be prepared for more offline conversions, as well as more pople using alternate forms of payment than credit cards.
Nacho ended off by giving in no particular order the ten most important tips to keep in mind when dealing with the Spanish market: If you are ready to commit to this market, don’t just target to Hispanics, target AS Hispanics. Do a readiness assessment. Use effective creative. Have realistic objective strategy. Set aside enough resources. Be committed to the market. Do research as to what language to use. Start with paid programs. Remember that organic results more competitive. Test. Adjust. Test again. Hispanic market is not one size fits all. That’s all folks! Please feel free to contact me by email at cboggs(at sign here)instantposition(dot here)com.
Chris Boggs.
