Most of the top UK PR agencies do not offer online press releases
Recent survey carried out by Bigmouthmedia revealed that 79 out of the 100 top UK PR companies don’t offer online PR services.
Sadly, only 14% of the operations that claimed to have new media covered, published their own blogs. All in all, surprisingly as low as 11% of UK PR consultancies communicate with clients, colleagues and the wider marketplace via their blogs.
Companies nowadays still do not seem to see the real semantic difference between online press releases and digital press releases.
The following figures for October 2008 in the UK show the differences in terms of their relative search popularity:
Online PR 2,900
Online public relations 1,600
Web PR 880
Digital PR 590
Internet PR 260
Internet Public Relations 170
Digital public relations 73
Just came home from the International Search Summit
the Summit, presented by WebCertain was held in central London last Thursday. The ISS is search marketing event with a niche, focusing on multilingual and international search marketing.
All of the sessions had a global approach looking at the issues affecting online marketers when they are managing campaigns in multiple languages and countries. The do's and dont's.
Among great speakers the ISS had Alex Burmaster from Nielsen Online, Eugene Lomize from Yandex, Christer Pettersson from the Scandinavian search engine Eniro, Andy Atkins-Krüger of WebCertain, Jessica Bowman of Jessica Bowman SEO and Ed Pushman from the Microsoft adCenter.
Great event and even greater after me and Eugene sang some Russian folk songs at the Ivy in Soho and had an instand offer from Simon Cowell on the SEO Factor.
And talking about Russian folk songs we are Nordic eMarketing are starting to prepare for the Reykjavik Internet Marketing Summit in March next year. We already have speakers from Google, Nike, Augure, IBM, Microsoft and Yandex lined up and more to me announced - www.rimc.is.
Click here for more information about the International Search Summit
SMX Sverge is coming up – Stockholm I am on my way!
I will speaking at two pannels and moderating one at the SMX Stockholm 2008.
The first session is Nordic Search – What’s going on?
"Who are the dominant players and which players are the ones to watch closely? What are people looking for and how is that different to other markets? In this session our experts will bring you up to speed with the Nordic Search market."
Moderator is Christer Jones from Sesam and speaking with me are John Brenne, General Manager WebCertain Norway and Christer Pettersson, Online Manager Search at Eniro.
Then on the 24th I am speak really early in the morning (thanks Sara) on a topic really close to my heart "Reputation Monitoring & Management Through Search"
"What do people find when they search for you by name? Is it negative? If so, what do you do? What can you do? Depending on the situation, there are a range of tactics that may help. This session explores the issue."
Sante J. Achille will be moderating this and with me I will be Mikkel deMib Svendsen, Creative Director, at deMib.com and David Lerdell, CEO & Founder of Lerdell Investigation AB.
Finally I am moderating a session called "Search Advertising: Test & Tactics". Speakers are Anna Eriksson, Sales Director from Keybroker, Jørgen Brunborg-Næss, Co-founder and Oslo Manager for Synlighet.no and Daniel Rytterström, Agency Relationship Manager from Google Sweden.
"Not all ads convert equally and it’s not always obvious why. To maximize the impact of your search advertising, it’s important to test different combinations of ads and landing page copy, and evaluate the results. This session explores the various methods and tools available for most efficiently testing and improving your search results."
http://searchmarketingexpo.com/stockholm/2008/full_agenda
See you there!
Speaking at the a4uexpo in London, 14 – 15 Oct
... and the a4uexpo stands for THE Affiliate Marketing Conference and Expo where guests will learn strategies to increase their online revenue using affiliate marketing, This will also include related topics such as Search Engine Optimizing (SEO), Paid Search (PPC), Video, Mobile, PR, Cashback and the king of all topics Social Media.
Must say that I’m really excited about this event and it has a great line-up of speakers including Andy Atkins Kruger og WebCertain, Dixon Jones of Receptional, Mel Carson AdCenter Community Manager at MSN, The SEO Chick Judith 'deCabbit' Lewis, Joost De Valk from Onetomarket in Holland plus some 10 other great speakers.
It's held at the ExCeL in London, see you there!
The great Google conspiracy theory
I love conspiracy theories and as some of you know I have been doing lectures on "The great Google conspiracy theory". How Google is collecting information for thought control and now that they have started collecting DNA data and adding that to a growing portfolio of user information. Here is a great Reuters / NYT interview with Google's Chief Executive, Eric Schmidt on " Good, Evil And Monopoly Fears".
"We don't have an 'Evilmeter' we can sort of apply -- you know -- what is good and what is evil,"
Eric Schmidt, Chief Executive Google
Then there are the "Big Brother Triblets", Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!
Below is a link to a video from YouTube on how Google is doing things and where they are going.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hVH2FbP1cg
Remember that this is just for fun, or is it ;-)
SMX Advanced was all that I expected and more
I just came from Seattle where I attended SMX Advanced, both as a speaker and a guest. And I must say that Chris Sherman, Danny and their team did a great job at this event. Everything from the set-up, the speakers, sessions and not least the speakers and the session moderators. If I had to find anything to complain about it was the noise interruption from the breakfast hall to the main conference room, but as I said other than that, five stars out of five.
Chris contacted me some months back and asked me to be a part of the International SEO panel with three other speakers, WebCertain’s Andy Atkins Kruger whom I have spoken with on several occasions, also in Iceland. Then there was Ian McAnerin and finally, but not least, the lovely Cindy Krum.
As can be expected we all took this topic from a similar point of view, Ian focused on Asia, Andy looked at the broader picture, Cindy looked at the site architecture and Google Webmaster Tools while I was close to home focusing on the Nordics and Yahoo’s concept of region.
So what is this concept of region? Two years ago I needed to create a business case on why a client needed to change their tactics in order to succeed locally with their search marketing efforts. Their focus was on having all of their material through a .COM domain and they actually closed all of their Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLD) and routed them to the .COM domain.
Through the many conferences I have spoken at, I have had good contact with various search marketing professionals and all of the agreed that the tactics of my client was not going to help them much, but none of the search engine representatives wanted to go on the record on how they deal with localizing search results, except one from Yahoo. This was John Riccardi, who at that time, was the head of search for Yahoo! Europe, if I remember correctly. Since then he has stopped working at Yahoo and is studying MBA in the US - good luck to him!
So what is it all about? Simply put:
1) The ccTLD (.de and .is are ccTLD while .com is a TLD),
2) The text/copy on the site / pages,
3) Type of inbound links, they need to be regional, and finally,
4) The IP address provided by the ISP/hosting company.
So how can you buy a ccTLD? Do you find a hosting company that has a regional IP address or copywriters in the language that you want to target, and do link building to target that region? I am going to answer that question in my next post here so do come back soon!
My thoughts on Long Tail Search?
My college and search guru Danny Sullivan once said something like this:
“Tap into the tail, and you’ve got sizable traffic, as well as traffic that often is reported to convert better than less general terms.”
There are number of companies that forget the long-tail of search both for SEM and PPC and by doing that they are missing out on great opportunities reaching possible clients, my experience is that the long tail search words often have much higher conversion, do cost less to buy through PPC and there for have much higher ROI (eROI).
Let’s say that you have a big site, tens of thousands of pages. If you optimise 100 pages for the same amount of phrases and all of them are ranking well you will still get the bulk of your search engine traffic through search terms that you have not optimised for, these would be the long tail search phrases.
By understanding what the long-tail of search stands for you can then use that knowledge to reduce PPC cost and increase eROI (ROI). While the phrase; Hotel in central London, returns traffic on hotels central, central London and Hotels London you can but a [ ] around it and then you have a exact match (Google), then there is advanced match (Yahoo) and so on.
By using a mixture of broad mach, exact match, phrase match and negative match you can maximise your conversion and the eROI on you PPC campaign. More here http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6100
And finally always use web Analytic tools like IndexTools to monitor your campaigns, I can't recommend using Google to monitor Google and Yahoo, MSN or MIVA will never allow you to monitor their traffic through GA so to get the best picture use a third party solution like IndexTools or Webtrends.
The Search Engine Optimisers Tool Box
I have done these sessions couple of times at the SES, both in London and Sweden and beside doing the site clinic session it's one of my favourite sitting at conferences and workshops like the SES and Ad-Tech. It´s unbelievable how fast thinks change and the number of tools being developed to help people maximising their search engine marketing efforts.
Check out the My SEO SEM Toolbox, Internet Marketing Tools at the Nordic eMarketing web site I wrote it to follow up my PPT doc on the same topic.
10 great way’s of using my favourite Web Analytics tool
While searching (what else?) for some fun (yes analytics can be fun) I found a great aritcle on web belonging to a company called StoneTemple Consulting ( I know a band called StoneTemple Pilots) under the title "10 Cool Things you can do with IndexTools".
I did with my former co-worker spend some time looking at web analytic tools, Webtrends was to complicated, Omniture to expencive and Urchin to primitive and from our point of view we struck gold when we found IndexTools, we had three main criteria that the tool needed to fullfill so we would want to look at it.
1. Manageable pricing
2. "Marketing department" friendly
3. As close to 100% deep drillable data and trend reporting
That and being a tool in constant development was our main criteria, Indextools had it all and is even getting stronger, when we reviewed it it was at version 8.5 and now they are bringing out version 10 - release date is in Q3 2007.
The new improved will contain among other Lifetime visitor-level metrics, External data source framework, Interactive visualization and Custom metrics.