I will be speaking at the Search Engine Strategies San Francisco 2010 (SES).This is one of the leading search & social marketing event world wide and the agenda is looking great. The conference is in its 12th year and is organized by a advisory board and the leading online marketing publications ClickZ and Search Engine Watch. The topics I am taking on are bot dear to me, the one on Tuesday, August 17th is called “Digital Asset Optimization” and talks about using what the Internet gives you to market your services and products. The other is more in line with fast developing interest in online PR and is on 18th of August. This one is called Search, PR and the Social Butterfly and looks really promising.

Found this really good article called “SEO as a Marketing Discipline” written by Rishi Lakhani. It illustrates in a very good way the problems the search marketing industry is going through and what it is that is holding back the upper management. It’s a reccomended read for those wanting to understand how we can make this industry more professional.

“I don’t mean ignorance in a negative way – I mean people genuinely don’t understand the work involved behind SEO – especially at the top level of any organisation. Most people use search engines – but most assume their existence and the results pages as part of life.”

We recently worked for a client that wanted us to do a PPC campaign at Google for 3000 pounds, thee campaigns with several ad groups and run it for three or four weeks . The problem was that the campaign was actually not the three campaigns and couple of ad groups, this was four campaigns and some 20 ad groups with all its related keyword clusters.

The problem was that relaying this information to our client was tough, first they did not understand the competitive nature of the words / Phrases they where after and secondly there was even less understanding that to run and maintain campaigns like this takes management and refining. They thing that we needed to relay to our client was that even though in the “brick to mortar” world this seamed rather straight forward it was not online and what they felt where their competitors did not echo online. Little like Blue Lagoon the spa here in Iceland.

Their main competition in branded search in a movie shot in the 80’s staring Brook Shields. In this case we ended up stopping the campaign because the 3k just did not cut it and that spend was by far not cutting it, having the impact needed. The moral of this post? It’s Important not just to open a PPC campaign, you need to make sure that you are managing clients expectations and be sure that he or she understands what to expect.