SEO Roadshow

Just a reminder to everyone about the upcoming SEO Roadshow conference in London. It is free, but by invite only.

If you can make it to London next week, need an invite, and are super cool just send me an email and I will see if I can invite a few more people.

The 80 / 20 rule
Well sort of... ComScore search results for July show that 20% of searchers do 68% of the searching.

Branded Search ROI
Google exec David Scacco spoke at the ChannelAdvisor summit. Among Andy Beal's notes of his speech were the following #s

28% of Google searches are for a "product name", 9% are for a "brand name" and 5% are searches for a "company name". "Brand" keywords also have a 8x higher ROI than generic keywords

Google Adwords and the Lost Art of Copywriting

Tens of thousands of businesses, large and small, use Google Adwords and Overture Match (from Yahoo!) to advertise their products and services on the Internet. ... There are many variables, but SEM professionals have focused heavily on the importance of "keywords" – to the extent that entire sub-industries have sprung up to show clients how to create lists of keywords! What has been overlooked, in our estimation, is the good old art of copywriting itself – how you write the ad. ... After all, an ad is an ad whether it appears in a newspaper, a magazine, or on Google or Overture. You've got space for a short headline and a brief description – briefer on Google than Overture, but at least Google doesn't truncate your listing, as Overture does. Given how little space you get to work with, and the fact that you have no visual opportunity, it is crucial to create compelling, snappy ads. Unfortunately, the vast majority are nothing of the sort. Most of them look like badly written classified ads – and that's the main reason most of them will deliver poor click through rates and disappointing results. source: BusinessKnowledgeSource.com

Frequently direct ads that are focused on the customers needs and wants use easy to understand language and are the best performing ads. Many classified ads are tested over and over again...against the rain, the day of the week, the season, etc. and they continue to reappear because they provide exactly what the consumer wants. Most flashy magazine or TV type ads are not tested anywhere near as deeply...if they were, more of them would become the boring ads that speak directly to the consumer.