PM Digital Acquires SpinShark

PM Digital Acquires SpinShark™ to Expand Natural Search Capabilities

NEW YORK, September 17, 2009 — PM Digital (www.pmdigital.com), a leading internet and search marketing agency with premium brand clients in the retail, publishing and non-profit sectors, announced today the acquisition of Indiana-based search engine optimization company, SpinShark™ (www.spinshark.com). This purchase expands PM Digital’s existing capabilities and provides access to an even deeper pool of talent in natural search and social media marketing.

“Bringing SpinShark under the PM Digital brand is a strategic move to deepen our technologies and further accelerate the number of experts in our talent pool,” said Chris Paradysz, CEO of PM Digital. “We have been anticipating and experiencing rapid growth in these capabilities, and the team at SpinShark is a fantastic addition.”

The acquisition adds SpinShark’s patent-pending technology Anglerfish™ to PM Digital’s technology arsenal, MediaHarbor®. This new technology will provide advantages in site page volume, internal link popularity and improve site design issues, as well as onsite content critical to search engine optimization.

“As we bring our teams and capabilities together, clients will immediately benefit from faster deployment of solutions and more fully integrated Web analytics,” said Suzy Sandberg, PM Digital’s President.

“We are eager to help expand resources and create new business opportunities with such an established search marketing agency as PM Digital,” said Dale Petruzzi, Founder of SpinShark. The company will be headquartered in PM Digital’s New York office.

About PM Digital
Founded in 2002, PM Digital is a leading internet marketing agency specializing in search engine marketing. Supported by proprietary media and marketing intelligence tools, PM Digital builds business revenues and brands online for 14 of the top retailers in the nation, as well as premium brand name clients in the publishing and nonprofit fields. Clients include Bloomingdale’s, Chico’s, Delias, Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc., and SLE Lupus Foundation, among others. Based in New York, PM Digital is a business unit of ParadyszMatera (www.paradyszmatera.com) and has offices in San Francisco, Columbia, SC and Minneapolis, MN. To find out more about PM Digital thought leadership, go to http://orb.pmdigital.com.

Search Sushi

Here at SpinShark, we love sushi. Delicious, delectable, delightful…I could go on all day. But we are faced with a new challenge in the search world: Search Sushi. During Google’s recent Searchology event, Google unleashed a bunch of new search options, allowing users to filter searches by media (video, forum, review, etc) and by time (all time, recently, past week, etc.) So this opens up all kinds of opportunities for search dominance. By leveraging time-sensitive content with tradition al well-linked content, you can really position yourself to cover all of the bases for search.

But as Marissa Mayer was introducing the 2009 version of Google’s Universal Search, she mentioned that it was like a “Bento Box’ of search results.

A Bento Box is a Japanese lunch tradition, where delicious sushi and a few other unimportant items are presented in a cool box. So, I am thinking about this presentation as search sushi. Search sushi is a mix of traditional natural search results, video search results, image search results, local search results, map search results,paid search results, sometimes blog search results, sometimes product search results, sometimes book search results, and now forum and review search results and more. So, for the marketer, suddenly the world is a LOT more complicated. There are now over a dozen kinds of search results that can be presented to the searcher at one time. So how does the marketer handle this? How do you leverage the bento box for your benefit?

It really requires a mind shift. Search is no longer just about natural search results. This is about context, intent and multiple options. So, Google (and all other search engines) have discovered that their most effective approach is to segment all of their indexed items, present them, and let the user apply human intelligence to find the right medium to get the result. Googlehas changed the “last mile” of search. Rather than presenting an authoratative marker that they have delivered the exact right answer to your query, they give you options to choose the result that is right for you. This is great stuff.

But how do marketers take advantage of this opportunity, given that it is hard enough to get a good search position in Google? Here are 5 tips:

1. Get Writing: The new temporal searches inside of Google mean that new content has its own showcase. Get blogging, get press releasing, get writing. New content is just as relevant (maybe even more so) than old, well indexed content. Get exposure by being fresh!
2. Get Video: Video is hot stuff. According to Comscore, YouTube represents 25% of  Google queries (that makes You Tube about as big as Yahoo, MSN and Ask, combined). And videos are hot searches, and great, deep opprotunities to engage with your customers. Si get product previews on video, start a video blog, do whatever and get it on video.
3. Get Blogging: Blog search results are hot. Blogs typically get indexed more often than a traditional retailer web site (because there is fresher content there) and a quality blog that talks about your products, your brands and your company (and its terrific customers) is a great way to get a pieve oif sucshi in the bento box
4. Get Social: Now that forums and reviews are an essential part of the Google search cadre, and that the temporal versions of search are searching things in real time (or near real time) it is critical for marketers to be Tweeting, Facebooking and truly, have a benevolent presence in coinsumer forums. Be there to answer questions, advice (and drop a few links now and again). All of those things get indexed and will be available as part of the sushi smorgasboard of search.
5. Get Local: Locality is a huge part of context. If you  have an office or a store, you need to get local. Many prefer to buy and interact locally. Get all of your locations listed and you can have the incredible benefit of getting a premiere spot in the bento box.

It’s almost lunch time. I am going to use Google to find a great sushi place nearby!

New Google Search Features: Take Control Over Your Search

Google changed the nature of search again, with the introduction of “Search Options”.  Just as things changed two years ago with the introduction of “Universal Search” where Google started adding local, video and image search results along with the traditional natural and paid listings. Now, Google has implemented a time filter (you can look for results that have shown up in the last 24 hours, for instance…really good if you a looking for a recent conversation in a forum), and also made reviews and forums discrete search options. As a user, this means that you have more control over your search results. You can apply human intelligence to force Google to give you what you want! This is a huge step forward for the user. It gives the searcher the power to determine not only what you want (video, image, forum, review, traditional result) but when you want it from (recently, historic, etc), and with the “WonderWheel” Google gives you an easy way to see relevant searches. Hooray for the searcher!

So, what does it mean for the marketer or the organization that NEEDS the traffic associated with premiere listings for search terms? Well, frankly, the world just got a bit more complicated. There is no primary search channel anymore. Rather, the experience that searchers have is as varied as the options that they choose (and this is on top of the result changes that happen from datacenter to datacenter, etc). So, dominating in search just got more complex. That will scare lots of folks. But at SpinShark, we have never embraced a single channel approach. There are  thousands of knobs and levers to turn and throw to get your site to the top of anyone (or all) of the varied search result. Let’s think about this for a minute. Search is no longer as simple as a keyword in a search box. It is varied, it is personal, it is dynamic. For the organization that needs to get traffic (and we ALL do), here are the most simple ways to take advantage of the new (and not so new) avenues that Google has developed:

1. Local: If your business has an address, get into your Google Webmaster tools and list it. That makes you relevant for your keywords in your area. Do it now. Go ahead here is the link…we will wait for you.
2. Images: If your site has images on it that convey quality information (your logo, your storefront, whatever) make sure that the files are named descriptively and have good alt text. That (among a million other things) will make your company relevant in images searches around your keywords. This is also a fundamental SEO tactic that we implore our customers to use.
3. New Content: Since there is now a time filter, new content is critical. As searchers get more enticed by finding out what is new and relevant, they will be looking for content that is fresh, and timely and NOW. Adding new content becomes a terrific way to drive your site to the top of a time-sensitive keyword search. (more…)

Increase Your Google Traffic by 25%, Guaranteed

SpinShark is thrilled to announce an incredible promotion: Increase Your Google Traffic by 25%, guaranteed! We’ve been hard at work over the last year to maximize the results from our blend of “handcrafted” SEO and our new automated search engine optimization solution, AnglerFish. We’ve been tweaking, testing and sweating the details and we are ready to put our money where our mouth is.

We guarantee that we will generate 25% more natural search traffic from Google, or we will refund your money. Check out the Increase Your Google Traffic offer, and then give us a call. We can’t wait!

SpinShark at IRCE June 15-18, 2009

SpinShark will be exhibiting at the Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition June 15-18, 2009 in beautiful Boston, MA! The IRCE2009 is the event of the season in e-commerce world! We will be unveiling our new search technology, AnglerFish. Stop by our booth, #1248, to say hello, get acquainted, talk about our new offer, and enter to win a Dell Mini 9!

If you’d like to set up a meeting to discuss your search engine optimization needs, contact us or shoot us an e-mail at IRCE@spinshark.com. Looking forward to seeing you in June in Boston!

The High Volume Keyword Conundrum

If you own a website, you consistently look for traffic. And there thousands of ways to develop traffic.

When we work with clients, we are typically look at traffic development from a natural search first perspective. So we are looking for the right set of keywords that will drive traffic to the site. We look high and low, and end up with a list that ranges from very broad terms, like “electronics” to very granular terms like”buy a 46 inch tv with a blue remote”. The first word, “electronics” has a HUGE search volume (In March 2009, Google recorded 45, 500,000 queries for “electronics.) Conversely, “buy a 46 inch tv with a blue remote” has search volume that is too low to be measured. So which word would you rather have great search positioning for?

Well, the obvious answer is “electronics”, but I want to share an anecdote with you. At a client’s direction, we put a huge effort into getting prominent placement for the highest volume keyword in their category. (It has a search volume of approximately 1 million in the average month.) We did, in our humble estimation, a terrific job getting our client from #41 to #3 in Google rankings for that word. The net result is that the client was thrilled. It was an obvious keyword, and it definitely has branding value. But from a results perspective, we’ve been less than thrilled. The word has definitely generated traffic (about 10K visitors per month) but the revenue generated from that word was pretty low. In fact, words that had 15% of the volume were generating more revenue.

Why doesn’t search volume always equate to revenue volume? It is simple, actually. Higher volume keywords are much broader in intent. To go back to our “electronics” example, it is almost impossible to discern the intent of the searcher when they type “electronics” into their favorite search engine. They could be searching for electronics parts, electronics schools, electronics experts, consumer electronics, information about electronics design, or any of a million other things that are associated with the query. The salient point here is that although a word is high-volume, it may not express enough intent to help you generate revenue. If you are #1 for an incredibly high volume keyword, it stands to reason that only a small portion of that swarm will be interested in your products or service. In some respects, it is, as they say, like trying to drink out of a firehose. You do get a drink, but there is a lot of wasted water, too.

Now, our smaller volume keyword “buy a 46 inch tv with a blue remote” has a really small search volume, but I can practically guarantee if you have a 46 inch TV with a blue remote available, this searcher is going to buy it! But you can’t generate enough volume from all of these very specific queries. That is a problem. Unlike a firehose, this is like trying to drink out of a straw the size of a human hair. Sure, you can get a drink, but never enough to satisfy.

So what do you do? Do you target the high volume words and get all wet? Or do you target the low volume words that are high-intent, and die from lack of water? The answer truly lies in the middle. From electronics to our blue remote exampls, there are thousands and thousands of words in between that have varying levels of search volume and intent. The best way to insure that you get all that you want to drink is to engage across all of those keywords to create a portfolio of high volume and high intent keywords that help you get the right visitor, but also the right number of the right visitor.

Don’t be blinded by the sex appeal of high rankings for high-volume keywords. They might be great for your branding, but they won’t always fill up the coffers.

7 Reasons Why Search Engine Rankings Aren’t Everything

We’ve been in the search business, since 1997, in fact. The optimization world has changed an enormous amount since then. Google has taken over the market, and search, frankly, has just gotten better. And from an optimization standpoint, the landscape is completely changed. Back in 2000 or so, the SEO firm had a single metric: the all-important ranking report. And for the time, that was largely all you needed. Tell me where I rank for my top 100 keywords, and as a customer, I can see the value that you bring to me. Well, the ranking report is becoming only a small part of the way that search engine optimization proves its value to its customers, and a small part of the overall story. Here are 7 other things to think about along with your ranking reports:

1. Quality Counts: Before you even look at a ranking report, you ought to dispassionately evaluate the quality of your site. Compared to your competitors, compared to how it looks in your imagination, compared to how you drew it up on the back of an envelope, does your site provide quality information? Is it well written? Does the title of your page match its intent? Does the page serve a purpose (like moving the customer further down the sales funnel)? If not, then no matter how well that page ranks on a report, it will not help you grow your business.
2. The World Is A Big Place: If your site doesn’t allow for interaction and sharing, then it is an island, trapped by its own shores. Search rankings are terrific, but the most vital and long lasting sources of traffic are those from people who have had interaction with your brand. Allowing visitors to share your brand and their experience (positive or negative) through comments, or sharing tools like AddThis make your brand interactive. (Don’t fret, if you run a quality web site, provide good customer service, people will say nice things about you, and if they don’t, you get a chance to learn, correct and move forward!)
3. Traffic and Conversions: I can guarantee that if your site is ranked number one, or two, or even ten for a high volume keyword, you will get more traffic. That is cool. But, if your site isn’t doing anythng with that traffic, then frankly where you rank doesn’t matter. Focusing on what your site does with traffic is significantly more important that how much traffic you get. Imagine that you were never able to grow your traffic. What would you do differently? You’d focus on getting maximal value out of the traffic that you have. What happens if your traffic growth rate is 0%, but you double your conversions? Well, folks, you DOUBLE your business. Traffic is a meaningless statistic. Having a quality website that leverages the traffic that you have is critical.
4. Video, Audio, and More: By temperment and trade, I am a writer. I like to think in sentences. Not everyone, however, is like me. Some folks are visual learners, and yet other like to listen. Not all potential customers will want to interact with your site in the most obvious ways. Video and audio engagements are critical to allowing new on ramps to your brand. If you run a website about horses, how valuable would a dressage video be? How important could it be for your brand to have that be the most watched dressage video on YouTube? Or the most downloaded dressage podcast on iTunes? These aren’t just nice to have kind of things. These are critical branding expentions, critical customer on-ramps, and truly critical modes of interaction. Do these items show up in search engine rankings? Not really, but they are amazing ways to draw new customers to your brand. Ignore them at your peril.
5. Conversations: The world is just full of conversations. At the coffee shop, on the train, at school pick up, conversations happen everywhere. And conversations often spur recommendations which spur more conversations. Does your web ranking matter when a conversation in your industry happens? Probably not. However, being able to monitor those conversations, on places like Digg or Twitter DO matter. Engaging with customers, potential customers, and the unitiated offer you a chance to prolong your engagement (or start one) with your customer. Search is incredibly important, but the forums that have the most vitality and influence are’t the search engine result pages, but rather the pages full of conversation that are happening across the entire web spectrum.
6. Channels: Channels is a marketing and sales term. In the business, people need to narrow down and categorize the interactions they have with their customers. Is it on the website, or a magazine article, is it in Twitter or through a text ad? There are millions of ways to interact with a brand or product, and very few of them start with a search engine. But the process of website optimization allows your website to be the clearing house for all of these interactions, and a great optimization team can create a useful set of metrics and measurement tool so that you can view not on specific channel interactions, but all interaction so that you can get a clear and full sense of your brand impact. All channels lead to your website, make sure that it is ready.

So, ranking number one for a broad search term is great. It can be, and often is, a great driver for your business. But don’t get obsessed (or maybe even all that interested) in where you rank organically as a measure of how good your brand or site is. There are new metrics, more than clicks and sales that help you understand your business and the ways that your potential customers interact with it. It is broader than search. It is the engagement principle. Seek to engage with your potential customer, through a You Tube video or Flash game if you are B2C or perhaps through a webinar if you are B2B. These kinds of engagements, stretched out across all of your digital marketing can dynamically propel your traffic in an even more profound way that a high ranking can. Search is a powerful form of interaction, but it is not the only one. Here at SpinShark, we like to think of search as the most basic form of social media there is. It is scalable, efficient, and powerful (and, the more people that find your business worthy of their click, the more prominence and clicks you will get). But search is perhaps the cornerstone of your social makreting engagements. With a powerful search presence, you can benefit from all of the opportunities delivered and promised by these new conversational, recommendation based interactions. We believe that search builds your business, but it is also the first building block in creating an effective and powerful social media experience that will help customers interact, engage, and become involved with your brand and products. And those customers are compelled to create a lifetime bond with you. And that, my friends, is something that you will never glean from a ranking report.

It’s All About The Content, Part II

In my last entry, we talked about how search engines and customers read the same content. But, let’s face it, a search engine spider has a different agenda than your average web surfer. What happens time and time again is that the on page content gets skewed towards the search engine. So, imagine if I were writing a page for this site, for a search engine optimization company where the keywords would be “seo” and “search engine optimization”. I might write something like, “SpinShark provides world class search engine optimization seo services to businesses both large and small, but especially those businesses that can benefit from search engine optimization or seo as we in the search engine optimization business call it.” While this sentence is particularly egregious (and not very clear), I have done my job as an SEO writer in cramming my keywords into a sentence that arguably makes sense.

Great. Thanks a lot. Would you buy something from a company that wrote that sentence? I wouldn’t.

So, as a website owner, if you include content like the terrific example above, that means the search engines see your value proposition, but your customers don’t. Remember that your website is for your customers. They are the people that buy your products and services, not Google. Write for your customers, make you point clearly and directly, and the spiders will eat that stuff up too. When creating website content, think about your audience. Focus on your brand, your value and your product. If your traffic isn’t where you need it to be, hire us. We will be happy to tweak your content and your site in a search engine friendly way, but we won’t make the mistake of writing for search engines. Google has yet to buy anything from any website that we’ve ever built.

Remember, your content defines how your customers see your business. Focus on them. If you create content that is compelling to your readers (and has the right keyword density, tags, titles, and descriptions on a well written W3C compliant HTML (oh yeah, that is what we do)) then your business has the right foundation on which to thrive.

Customers first.

Search engines second.

It’s All About the Content

Search Engine Optimization and a Softening Economy

OK Gang, it seems like the economy has softened to the point where many French cheeses are getting jealous.

So, I want to take a few minutes totalk about search engine optimization and marketing conditions. Luckily for those of use who make our livings online, we are a bit removed from the terrors  of the credit crunch and the rise in food prices. However, we all see the rise in the cost of goods (especially electronics), and the rise in the cost operations (fuel surcharges are everywhere) and let’s face it, online advertising has never been more expensive.Online advertising is still a great value compared to other media, but it has never been more expensive.

But let’s look at average search marking costs. While these numbers are for across all verticals (except financial services), but in the 4th Quarter of 2007, the average CPC on Google was $0.75. (In 2004, it was $0.54, so we’ve seen nearly a 40% increase in three years!) So, jump in the wayback machine with me. It is 2004. You are a webmaster, or internet marketing person for an online business.  You need traffic to survive. And CPC is easy to implement. So you do it. And it works.So, you jump in at $10,000 per month. That gets you ($10,000/$0.54), or 18,518 monthly visitors. Flash forward to 2007, and that same budget would only net you 13,333 visitors. So, where are you going to get those missing >5,000 visitors? Simple: SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION.

In a softening economy, where costs are increasing and marketing budgets generate less return, search engine optimization generates arguably better quality traffic than CPC advertising, and there are no direct traffic costs. Google, and all other search engines, provide you with organic traffic at no charge. I am not suggesting that you dump CPC, but as a business that makes money via the internet, there is no more important marketing expenditure that search engine optimization. For many sites, a $10,000 monthly spend in search engine optimization would result in huge increases in traffic, perhaps even exponential rises in traffic, rather than the pure incremental growth of CPC. Search engine optimization is critical to your business.

Don’t get hooked on CPC. Use it as an effective marketing tool, but insure that your website is tweaked, toned, and fully search engine friendly. As costs rise, and margins get squeezed, you can’t afford to engage in incremental cost based and campaign based activities. Search engine optimization is an investment in your business that will continue to generate returns. Search engine optimization has never been more important.