Search Engine Marketing

For niche online retailer Cruiser Customizing, a seller of motorcycle parts and accessories, an easily navigable site is critical to its success. Riders come to CruiserCustomizing.com to look for specific parts or accessories exclusive to their particular bike. Finding them quickly and easily enhances their likelihood to buy. For that reason, Cruiser Customizing has invested resources in upgrading its site search.

Branders.com realized its current infrastructure couldn't scale to support its growing SEO operation. The company needed an integrated platform that could handle large keyword volumes and provide comprehensive competitive SEO intelligence. After a review of the alternatives, Branders.com contracted with BrightEdge, a San Mateo, Calif.-based provider of on-demand, enterprise-class SEO platforms in 2008.

Do you know which keywords are driving phone calls to your business? Are the pay-per-click (PPC) keywords “red shoes” making the phone ring? Or perhaps calls are coming from searches initiated with “black pumps” or “wedge sandals”? Whether you’re spending $600 a month on PPC or six figures, it’s imperative to know how your online marketing efforts affect your offline sales conversions.

Vic Gundotra, VP of Engineering, demonstrated last December a preview version of Product Search for mobile with local inventory, which lets you see right in your search results whether items are in stock at nearby stores. We're happy to announce that as of today, if you're searching for a product that is sold by participating retailers, including Best Buy, Sears, Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, or West Elm, you can just look for the blue dots in the search results to see if it's available in a local store. If you see a blue dot, you can tap on the adjacent "In stock nearby" link, and you'll be taken to the seller's page where you'll see whether the item is "In Stock" or has "Limited Availability" near you. You'll also see how far away the stores are from you -- as long as you've enabled My Location or manually specified your location.

Part of the attraction of search advertising is that since it targets consumers toward the bottom of the purchase funnel, ads are served to users likely to convert. But display ads appear to a wider swath of consumers, pulling some into the purchase funnel and thus energizing search.

In late November, we surveyed the All About ROI editorial board members and other marketing insiders to gauge their views on the year ahead. At press time on the eve of the 2009 holiday homestretch, with their hopes for a better sales outcome than 2008 looking modest at best, few saw an especially bright light shining by December. Instead, many settled in to make the appropriate adjustments for reduced demand.

How do you separate fact from fiction when implementing an SEO program to raise your rankings on Google and other search engines? Here are 11 truths, strategies and rules of thumb that are proven to optimize sites and generate a flood of organic search traffic:

Too many marketers judge their sites by how they look. What really counts is how they perform. How does your site rank? What kind of quality shoppers (who convert) does it attract? Last month, Larry Kavanagh gave you six ways to get natural search moving. Here are 17 ways to make sure that traffic includes qualified shoppers who will buy.

Pure-play websites crush classic direct marketers when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). Most produce 50 percent or more of their total sales this way, garnering millions in revenue. Many direct marketers view their sites as cash registers where shoppers go to check out. They've either ignored or only paid lip service to SEO.

This year's economic retreat actually stands to help Gaiam, a product and information services company with a heavy emphasis on sustainability, position itself for greater growth in the near future.