Archive for the 'SEM – Search Engine Marketing' Category
In a previous post you might have seen that we won a Google Knol; Top Pick Knol Award – just today I noticed that my Knol profile lists me as receiving a Top Viewed Author Award!
It seems that some companies are starting to ‘get it’! It is amazing the number of SEO/SEM job ads I see that go on for weeks and weeks as the salary creeps up from the absurd towards reality ($30k-$35k, then $35k-$45k, next week $45k-$52k). Recently I saw a couple of nice postings where the companies are willing to pay what a good SEO’s value really is:
If your website was getting a lot of visitors searching for the weather or sports scores then, YES!
As Google attempts to become stickier how many websites will it hurt? Or does the fact that they are actually helping the searchers make it a wash because that is their core business? But they make money off the advertisers to the tune of 95% – so are they really biting the hand that feeds them. Will they sell the branding for these type of results?
Let’s play the game, “How Much is this Position Worth”?
Read the description below and then guess how much they are offering to pay. Here are some clues, the offer is less than a window washer makes and about 30% less than a bus driver earns.
Role:
The Internet / SEO Marketing Coordinator will be responsible for ensuring that the website and online marketing programs perform to their best ability in meeting company expectations. This person will provide leadership to identify, evaluate, and implement methods to maximize the effectiveness of the web site and online marketing opportunities. This candidate must have experience with and knowledge in online marketing campaigns including email marketing, search engine optimization and website management. This position is both creative and analytical in nature. The candidate will work closely with the President and Sales Department to execute online marketing initiatives that are effective and in line with the company’s overall marketing goals.
Web Site Management
• Write and publish content to effectively communicate company services
• Ensure that all webs site components are in line with overall website goals, brand and strategy
• Identify opportunities for fresh content to ensure a dynamic and up-to-date web site
• Review and evaluate integrity of the website by conducting website audits and ongoing content clean-up
• Review, evaluate and report visitor and site metrics to propose updates to site, including content, creative, messaging, features and functionality
Email Marketing
• Manage email marketing programs
• Develop and maintain calendar and project deadlines
Online Marketing
• Design, implement and manage online marketing programs focusing on building awareness and customer acquisition
• Drive strategy for search engine marketing and search engine optimization initiatives
• Manage search engine marketing, and online lead generation programs
• Track and analyze campaign date to proactively identify opportunities for performance optimization
• Enhance the user experience by improving the quality and relevance of search engine results
SEO Experience
• Experience in developing and implement SEO campaigns/strategies
• Monitor, track and report on paid search metrics, including trend analysis
• Create website content with SEO enhancements, title tags, Meta descriptions to optimize for SEO purposes
• Provide support for search engine optimization recommendations
• Assist in Keyword discovery and expansion
• Research and analyze competitor advertising links
• Monitoring overall search engine performance for SEM Campaigns
Social Media Experience
• Create a comprehensive social media strategy to define programs that use social media marketing techniques to increase visibility, membership and traffic across all Aareas brands and Implement and manage social media programs
• Experiment with new and alternative ways to leverage social media activities
• Monitor trends in social media tools, trends and application and appropriately apply that knowledge to increasing the use of social media at Aareas
• Strategize with and educate the management team and others across the company on incorporating relevant social media techniques into the corporate culture and into all of the company’s products and services.
• Measure the impact of social media on the overall marketing efforts
We are looking for an ambitious and enthusiastic individual who wants to capitalize on the rapid advancement of information technology. We expect that the niche market we operate in will see significant growth in the future and need a highly motivated Internet/SEO Marketing Coordinator.
EXPERIENCE AND SKILLS
The successful candidate will have a majority of the following experience and skills:
Sales/Marketing Experience in the new home / condo industry is a must,
University/college marketing degree or 2 years industry experience,
2-3 years online marketing experience, specifically email campaigns, web site management and search engine optimization
Experience in managing search engine campaigns by analyzing keyword performance, expanding and adjusting keyword lists
Experience in content development for electronic media
Strong organizational skills and ability to handle numerous projects simultaneously with superior attention to detail
Excellent communications skills (written and verbal)
Attitude and Personality: Enthusiastic, organized, self-motivated, take-charge team player with a willingness to learn in a constantly evolving environment,
Deadline driven,
Computer savvy on applications such as Microsoft Word/Excel/PowerPoint, Photoshop, and Illustrator,
Ability to work well both independently and as part of a team.
Social media tools and techniques
Did you guess yet?
How much would you take this job for?
Can a single person even do this job?
Last chance!
Compensation: 35k-45K per year
I know the SEO/SEM job market is quite young up here in Canada but come on there is no way any sensible person can expect to get the above qualifications and experience for $15.00 an hour when folks at the local McDonalds are making $11.00 an hour.
It seems SEO’s are fairing well these-days, even in a bad economic environment – salaries for SEM/SEO related positions were up in 2008 and that just shows that decision makers are continuing to see the relative value we bring to the table.
2009 yearly salaries for an individual contributor with 1-3 years relevant experience range from $40,000 to $80,000; senior manager salaries range $70,000 to $120,000; and vice presidents with responsibilities for large SEM campaigns or a team of specialists earn from $160,000 to $250,000.
While the salary range for those with 1- years experience is quite wide I think that the majority of those getting the low range, $40k – $50k are in the 1-2 year experience range. Once you have 3 years plus under your belt I don’t think you would even consider a position for under $60k.
It seems the spending on SEM will continue into the distant future and that is sweet music to anyone that is involved in this industry!
Search engine optimization (SEO) has really taken corporate Canada by surprise or a better way of putting it would be bewilderment. Most decision makers in this country know that SEO is important but are not sure exactly what it is and how it can ultimately effect the bottom line of their companies. Because of this uncertainty Canada still lags behind the USA and the UK in terms of utilizing SEO to drive quality visitors to their websites and grow their business .
The secret that many large companies in the UK and the USA already know and that the more progressive Canadian companies are now just starting to find out is that having a ‘real’ professional SEO in-house is like having a “secret weapon” – and just to clarify, I am not exaggerating, blowing my own horn or using a poor analogy. This is the cold-hard truth and up until now a very well kept secret.
Here is an example in support of my above statement:
-In my last in-house position the basic numbers supported the true power of SEO as the ultimate ROI (return on investment) and secret weapon. When the company made conversions through more traditional marketing methods both online and off with banner ads, radio commercials, TV spots and print advertising the cost per acquisition was $49.00 When they made acquisitions through SEO the cost was $9.50 – considering SEO brought in almost 20 million dollars in revenue in 2008 I would say that not only was this an amazing ROI but it is really what kept this company afloat.
Having an in-house SEO allows a company to be very ‘light’ on their feet and take advantage of opportunities that would otherwise not be found or leveraged to their full potential. When you have an edge on your competition by using SEO to increase your website traffic, brand awareness and ultimately your companies profits it can open many doors for partnerships because everyone in your industry or complimentary industries wants to be part of a successful company.
When the boss/board of directors/owners/CEO or president wants to test market a new product or service they can jump in with both feet knowing the in-house SEO will support and find ways to promote and analyze the potential of the new endeavor. When someone comes knocking to sell them advertising or the newest greatest profitability scheme they can have the SEO sit in on these meetings and offer ‘real’ advice based on hard data. For example, we had the Yellow Pages folks in for a meeting last month and they were telling us of their newest and greatest ‘improvement’ coming down-the-pipes in which we would be able to bid on top placement in their online directory. The section they were recommending for us was one our SEO (me) knew only garnered us a few dozen hits a month even in spot 4 on Google – so it gave us the heads-up on what type of bid would be worthwhile (a low one) where-as another company in our market might get sucked into bidding very high for the same keyword because they did not know the actual value of it.
When a partner in the industry was refocusing their mission thereby leaving a website up for grabs the in-house SEO was able to see the value in this site and the company was able to acquire it before it went to public auction where it would have fetched 4 or 5 times the value we paid.
Really, I could go on and on….leveraging current market share, taking advantage of hot news trends, driving long-tail traffic to inner pages, raising the value of current affiliate and membership programs, developing good will with suppliers and friends, spotting red flags on the horizon and avoiding penalties. I can’t count the times I have sat in on a call with my boss and x supplier, x salesperson, x investor, x affiliate, x business proposal and had valuable input into what the offer might mean to us. Simply because as the in-house SEO you live and breathe the business and industry you work in – knowing the data and pitfalls from the inside out give you tremendous knowledge and insight.
Having an in-house SEO really is a secret weapons, sort of like having in-house council but it costs a lot less, for now!
So Google finally stepped up to the plate with a post over at GoogleWebmasterCenteral on blog comment spam but the real question is did they give us good, useful information or just open up a Pandoras box of ways to ‘kill’ your competitors in the search rankings?
FACT: Abusing comment fields of innocent sites is a bad and risky way of getting links to your site. If you choose to do so, you are tarnishing other people’s hard work and lowering the quality of the web, transforming a potentially good resource of additional information into a list of nonsense keywords.
FACT: Comment spammers are often trying to improve their site’s organic search ranking by creating dubious inbound links to their site. Google has an understanding of the link graph of the web, and has algorithmic ways of discovering those alterations and tackling them. At best, a link spammer might spend hours doing spammy linkdrops which would count for little or nothing because Google is pretty good at devaluing these types of links. Think of all the more productive things one could do with that time and energy that would provide much more value for one’s site in the long run.
Now many folks are drawing the obvious conclusion, should I just go buy a blog spam commenting package from overseas for $10 and hope the dozens of spam comments will sink my competitors rankings? Google answers back that if your competitors link profile is otherwise healthy then this type of offensive won’t make a difference but what happens if your competition is relatively new and has a really small link profile with just a few dozen links? Will I then be able to sink them for all the semi-competitive keywords they are beating me out on because of their high quality content?
I just wish Google would do away with their shroud of secrecy and start being more transparent because this sounds like they just opened the door with a sneaky, under-handed method of playing dirty.
It seems MFA sites have been hit with low quality scores and are being warned/banned by the truckload!! This is great news for ‘real’ adwords users because now the bids won’t be artificially pumped up with the estimated 10-15 million MFA sites rotting the web.
Here are some excerpts from a thread over at Webmaster World:
“they are still at it.. got a few campaigns hit by 1/10 QS.. Ads that have been running for last 2 years with no change in ‘domain’ or anything.. They just decided overnight that they are low quality..”
“Our affiliate/partner sites which were running for over 3 years without any change are now 1/10 …The problem is bigger because some of our other websites which are not connected to affiliate/partner business in any way, and have order form on our own domains and we sell it from our stock, they are also 1/10 … This websites have PR5″
“My site went to QS 1/10 after 2 years of not having any issues, I have been using adwords since 05″
“This thread is such a nightmare for adWords users. Anyone who hasn’t got the dreaded mail must be thinking.. I am next. I keep logging in and checking my adwords a/c every few minutes. Getting paranoid. Horrible feeling..”
“Another account banned here. I have gotten warnings in the past, but feel they were unjustified. I talked to my reps about these warnings and they gave me recommendations, but never told me that if they were not resolved you will be banned. This account has been online for 5+ years and we spend about 100k per year in advertising.”
The whole thing sounds brutal and you can follow the thread here http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adwords/3995572.htm
In 2008 it is interesting to see that paid search efforts outspent organic optimization 10-1, my thoughts are that this will drastically change over the course of the next 5 years because many competitive industries are hitting extremely high costs on a pay-per-click basis and even though SEO can be harder to measure and can take a longer time to show results. Those results are so impressive that they can mean the difference between ‘making-or-breaking’ a business.
I was recently involved in doing SEO for a company that had a cost per acquisition of $47 through traditional style advertising and that cost went down to $3.85 for those aquired though search engine optimization.
I find the biggest problem with SEO continuing to grow at the pace it deserves is twofold, first there is a lot of resistance from traditional marketing folks because SEO is a much different animal. With SEO you are spending considerable resources on something your company ultimately has no control over, the search engines. And to make matters even more complicated the search engines keep their algorithms and methods of ranking a secret. Secondly, most business owners and traditional type marketing managers don’t really understand SEO and that makes it very difficult for them to justify the expense and risks involved in switching over their traffic acquisition methods to organic vs. paid.
But there is hope and I do see a pattern starting with the largest and most progressive companies as they give SEO a try. It has even reached a point where many of these companies are bringing SEO in-house where they can learn, track and enjoy these advantages up close and personal.
Came across an interesting little site today that brings up a Google and Bing search side-by-side for easy analysis. I used my obvious number one raking term, “toronto SEO firm” and the results from the two engines are quite similar. But I have to say that I really like the fact that Bing brought up my ‘About Us’ page in the first page of results.
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