There are obvious and powerful reasons for retailers of all scale to focus on search engine optimization, including increased traffic and demand. But more important, search optimization gives the retailer the opportunity to meet and create customer expectations.

As PM Digital analyzes the reams of data that we have regarding natural search optimization generating increased sales and visits from branded and non-branded keywords, it has become clear that the role of search in retail is to create a natural point of connection between searchers and the retailer’s offerings.

This goes beyond simple product listings, and extends the presentation of the retailer into category presentation, editorial presentation and more. Search helps guide the visitor from their expression of intent, their search query, to the right part of your website where your brand promise and conversion funnel of your site can come into full effect.

A major retailer kept the following as a retail sales floor mandate: “We must meet customer expectations, but also create and exceed new expectations every day.” Search can fill this mandate, as well. Search optimization gives the retailer the power to be present where the customer expects them to be, but further, search can create an intersection between your brand and searcher intent where the searcher has no expectation of your participation.

Imagine that as a retailer, you have core products where your customers expect to find you. That meets their expectation. However, search gives you an unparalleled opportunity to insert yourself into searches around categories, products and values that are outside of your core.

This new intersection creates a delightful expectation that your brand promise will be fulfilled in a new arena. This allows you to extend your ability to brand, to engage and to grow.

Search optimization provides an authentic customer experience with its unabashed matching of intent and offering. High-quality search presentation is the real-life, unadorned roadmap to connecting to the brand and, by fiat, the products. Your other brand marketing initiatives create awareness, and offers and promotions create conversion opportunities, but search is where your offerings meet intent.

Search optimization creates customer acceleration. Presentation drives engagement, and engagement drives demand.

Meeting Customer Expectations

For retailers, including those whose strength lies in brand, as well as those wily players that focus on price or selection, quality search optimization allows you to meet the expectation of the searcher. When you meet the searcher’s expectation, they have greater comfort in visiting your site and consummating a transaction.

Primarily, the expectations that searchers have around finding retailers is a clear match between the overall brand along with targeted product presentation and your position in search engines. Our research tells us that more than 98% of all search traffic is generated by listings on the first three pages of search results, with more that 80% of the traffic coming from Google’s top 20 listings.

It is crucial that your presentation capture the highest quality positions in the search engines, otherwise, you are offering your brand promise to an empty room. Throughout all of your marketing, your brand positioning, and multi-channel advertising, the savvy retailer has created a value proposition, a set of expectations that the average consumer will understand through your messaging.

The expectation that you set revolve around your specific brands terms, like your name, your name plus obvious or signature products, and likely, your name plus some assortment of modifiers like “sale,” “discount” and “coupon.” If your customers can’t find you in these spots where you have created the expectation that you should be, then you won’t be meeting customer expectations.

If you are a branded merchant, with a message and a set of core values, your customers have an expectation of reliability and availability from you. If they search for the most basic expression of desire to engage with you, like searching for your brand name or your brand name with some basic modifiers like location or product, and you can’t be found in the most visible spots in search, your customer will experience a disconnect.

There will be some measure of trust that is broken. If your other advertising drives awareness, and that awareness cannot be fulfilled through engagement through search, you have not met the expectations that you have set with the customer.

Create and Grow

Regardless if you are a large brand or an online-only player looking to create a splash, search visibility gives you the opportunity to meet, create and surpass customer expectations in a dramatic way.

For the established brand, search visibility across your core offerings is a primary tactic for reinforcing your brand positioning and activating those customers that you have engaged through other media. Search gives you the leverage to power re-engagement when the searcher is not specifically engaged with your brand. Visibility and position act as enticements and cross-channel brand visibility will drive the searcher to a trusted brand relationship and, hopefully, a resulting click through.

For the brand that is extending beyond its core, or if you are a player that has not invested heavily in brand-building, search optimization can drive visibility and enhanced brand recognition through impression strength and relevancy. In some ways, the major search engines act as a qualified third-party referral. If Google thinks that your site is worthy, that will transfer some level of trust to the searcher who may be more compelled to click through and engage with your brand.

Search visibility creates opportunity to drive ahead new growth categories and new opportunities. It also has the power to activate your customers when, perhaps, they weren’t thinking of you. Regardless of the state of your brand, high-level visibility through search optimization drives visibility, traffic and demand. More, though, it creates and cements emotional brand connectivity that will impact sales for years.

Without it, you will be easily surpassed by the competition and you could be tossed to the top of the brand scrap heap.

But with the Demand Media IPO, the HuffPo acquisition and the embarrassment of black hat SEO at JCPenney combined with Google webspam master Matt Cutts’ assertion that Google is, in fact, better that it was in 2000 and SEOmoz uncovering a massive gaming of Google’s algorithm, SEO has had a lot of coverage. And, in many ways, SEO has been a pretty secret world, and this kind of press sunshine is proving to be a major disinfectant.

So, what is our take on what has been happening? Well, believe it or not, stay the course.

Let’s break down the issues:

1. Search Is Yesterday’s Story: If you haven’t been to Forbes recently, you should go. They have built a terrific blog network that is heavy on social sharing. But to say that search is yesterday’s story is just a great headline, and doesn’t reflect the substance of what is happening. Search and social are colliding. Search is becoming more social and look for major advancements this year to blend search and social into a single social graph/search result influenced experience.
2. Search Is Still Challenged: Arrington has it right. Search, and Google specifically, is under enormous pressure to get better. There are competitors like Blekko that are making interesting inroads, and Bing is pushing ahead (although they are no better at spam killing than Google). But Arrington is right. Search does still suck, and it needs to get better.
3. Matt Cutts and SEOmoz: Matt Cutts says that Google search is better than it was.  SEOmoz brings up something that smells like an organized crime ring that shows a deep understanding of how Google works. So Google can be gamed effectively and pervasively. As I mentioned in my 5 Things Wrong with Natural Search, this is a big issue for search. Google has to get better…and they are better than they used to be, but Google is simply an algorithm. They represent nothing except the sites that they list at the top of the search results are relevant based on their algorithm.
4. JCPenney: JCPenney has been the beneficiary of black hat SEO techniques powered by their agency. For months, JCPenney has been a search monster, having premiere search positioning for hundreds of keywords. (This NY Times article goes into depth about the strategy.)  In the spirit of sunshine as disinfectant, this is a full solar blast. JCPenney, culpable or not, received the benefit of someone gaming the system. Their agency link spammed, and JCPenney received enormous benefit. And Google has punished them. (A search for any non-brand related term for JCPenney is an exercise in futility. They are showing up on page 5 and beyond for results.) Any benefit that JCPenney has received will quickly be diminished by near invisibility for the foreseeable future. The fault here is that JCPenney and their agency were chasing position rather than quality of search content. By leveraging link spam, the agency put their client at risk. The goal of search engine optimization is to remove obstacles and present content so that the search engines can understand the content that you offer in the best way possible. Gaming the algorithm provides a disservice to your customers and the e-retail community as a whole. Shoppers trust the search engines, and if you aren’t relevant for a search term, then it diminishes both your brand and the trust that consumers have in you. And further, exposure for non-relevant terms does not drive high-conversion levels. You drive traffic, but if you do not have high-quality relevance for the keyword, then you site will NOT generate high levels of demand.

Overall, this week in SEO has been enlightening. First, we can see that through the rise of Demand Media as a public company and JCPenney’s increase in natural search traffic through unscrupulous techniques shows that natural search traffic can drive meaningful revenue on non-branded terms. And the criticisms of the quality of Google search, frankly, I think are overstated. Of course, Google can improve, but Google quashes all kinds of spam every day, and the fact that weaknesses got exposed in public simply redoubles their effort. The inclusion of Dvorkin’s social element will do much to quash algorithmically-leveraged spam moving ahead.

And poor JCPenney – they have had a hard week. They (and their agency) grabbed some short-term dollars at the cost of significant brand and search equity. This could be significantly damaging to JCPenney in the long run. Spam negates your credibility with the search engines and the public. Search is a game that belongs largely to Bing and Google. They have their rules. They make them public. Cross them at your peril. Hell hath no fury like a search engine scorned.

So the site allows celebs, fashion bloggers and certain retailers to create their own boutiques, and Google does all the hard work of presenting you with all of the products that these folks curate. Further, they have semantic curation (I think I just coined a phrase), with style and trend focused boutiques.

You can create your own Boutique. You walk through a pretty extensive fashion profiling exercise. You can see my boutique…it would be a little more fun for me if there were men’s clothes, but I can deal.

The site is aesthetically pleasing, and is a real departure for Google. You don’t use your Gmail address to log in…and there is little, if any, Google branding that I can see.

So, why does anyone care? Because Google isn’t providing you with EVERYTHING. The search, the presentation, the experience is all curated. It is a subset of all the products Google has access to…Google, in this iteration, has created a walled garden. Merchants and designers have to pay to play, and Google isn’t stepping outside these boundaries. I am not saying that they should, it is just a very unGoogle thing to do…

In my recent post on what is wrong with search, one of the areas that I call out is the fact that search engines are poor replacements for experts. Well, Google fixed that. They’ve teamed with leading fashion bloggers, like the teen-phenom Jane Aldridge (and this is her boutique), and great designers like Tory Burch (her boutique) to narrow down the fashion world to “selected items”. This is a major sea change for Google. This isn’t about making all of the world’s products searchable and shoppable, but rather those items that the curators of fashion deem to be worthy of curation, as well as items that match your profile.

Now, before everyone gets up in arms about Google picking and choosing who should see what and what products should be included where, we should remember that they already do that. Google’s algorithm decides what websites show up on top and what products get included in your search results, and further, Google determines which ads you see. When we think about it in this way, Google is scary. Google has total control over who sees what in the search world. But when we flip this on its head, Google is creating a smaller, human-influenced algorithm. The influence comes from designers, bloggers and tastemakers. Then it is mixed with your own preferences to arguably create an algorithm that belongs only to you. That is powerful. By identifying your influences and your preferences (as it turns out, I have a classic fashion style…I would have thought that I was a bit edgier) Google gives you what you want. As a searcher, there is nothing else that I could ask for.

As a marketer…well, I better make sure that my merchandisers are spot on, and I am optimized so that Google can curate me…

This will rub every marketer the wrong way. As marketers, we like to think that we are curating the presentation of our universe. But we have to understand that as the world shifts and changes, we need to present our concepts and messages in presentation layers that have varied influences, like search algorithms and social media recommendations. It is scary for us. But this is a brave new world…this is a world where the consumer and the marketer have an equal voice. Marketing becomes less a directive and more about conversation, context and sharing.  It is scary. It does change everything. But it will mean, in the end, when a consumer engages with you, they are much closer to they buying zone because they’ve been guided to your product and experience. Let the influencers influence. Let the curators curate. Marketers need to market. And the consumer makes the choice to consume. Bravo. That is the way it should be.

#1 - Search Relies on Structure

The Issue:  At its very core, search works on structure. Search engines are wonderful at examining known databases and providing answers to queries. For example, search engines are amazing at returning results for queries like “flights from BOS to SFO” or “sushi in 02474”. These are queries that have a discrete set of answers, and search engines are terrific at giving searchers results. Why is this a problem for marketers? First, it means that your data needs to have structure in order to be most effectively found.  And secondly, structure makes the playing field completely flat. Structured search turns products into commodities.

Opportunity: The antidote to structured search creating a flat marketing environment is to embrace the horror. Search needs to rely on structure, so engage with structure. For product marketers, insure that your product names reflect the way people search for your product, rather than what you want them to be called. Market from the consumer’s search habits in order to create the best opportunity to be found.

#2 – Search Relies on The Searcher to Provide Adequate Context

The Issue:  Since the dawn of search (the late 1990’s) there has been a never-ending quest to understand the intent of the searcher. (Wired Magazine had a great article on the algorithm – does “hot dog” mean something that should be in a bun, or is it a pooch in need of drink?) Meaning is context-driven, and unless the searcher provides adequate context, the search engine guesses at what most searchers mean. And while this is a reasonable approach, it truly under serves the searcher.

The Opportunity: It is incumbent on marketers to help the search engines understand what products or service they are offering.  Marketers must provide search engines with context specific to your product selection by creating appropriate content around your experience to narrow their view of you. Believe it or not, you are looking for a subset of the searchers who enter the broadest terms in your vertical. Focus clearly on your part of the eco-system. Create a search (and customer) friendly focus by surrounding yourself with context.

#3 – Search Can Be Gamed

The Issue:  While search engines quash all kinds of search spam, new, intelligent forms of spam pop up every day. How many times have you been looking for truly authoritative content and ended up on a content farm, or some very likely unscrupulous “Made for Adwords” site? It happens far too frequently. This is a problem for marketers because there are techniques that can be used to usurp your brand and your product selection.

The Opportunity: The role of the defensive marketer is to do all of the right things to effectively box out the competition. And the spammers are no exception. Find ways to own the search experience. Make sure that you don’t rely on just your brand to carry you. Pay attention to search basics. Make sure that your site can be found. Be sure that you have search as a true consideration of your web experience. Make sure that you address the keywords where you expect to be found and where you think your customers expect you to be. Don’t allow the spammers any room to operate around your brand. Read Google’s intro to search engine optimization and ensure that you are covering the basics as a defensive posture (and then call your favorite SEO to maximize your business )

#4 - Search Presentation Is Flat

The Issue:  While there have been attempts to change the presentation of search results, from Google’s Universal Search to Bing’s more dramatic attempts to shake things up, the paradigm is essentially the same. Search remains stuck in the land of 10 Blue Links. And while this is an expected paradigm it truly diminishes brand presence. So many retailers and marketers have amazing sites that are true works of commercial art. But the search presentation layer compresses this to a page title and a meta description. Is this truly representative of what lies on the other side of the link?

The Opportunity:  The search engine result pages may be a flat presentation layer, but in order to maximize your natural search opportunity, think of it as horizontal. Natural search is inherently an exploratory opportunity. By stretching your exposure to incorporate non-branded keywords, and category keywords and synonyms, you create a new intersection between the searcher and your brand. The horizontal nature of natural search gives it the opportunity to be the acquisition channel while other channels drive awareness. Natural search is there to capture all of the deferred demand that your other marketing channels create. Natural search is not direct marketing. Natural search marketing is an exercise in casting the widest net possible to bring in all the fish that your tasty marketing efforts made hungry.

#5 – Search Is a Poor Replacement for an Expert

The Issue:  Offline, when we solicit opinions about a product or service or even a vacation spot, we rely on our assumptions about the relative level of experience and information of the person we ask. We weigh their opinions based on our respect for them. Subjective queries are difficult to gauge authority without being editorial. If, in response to the query “best car”, a search engine selectively gave authority to Car and Driver Magazine and served up their recommendations first, that wouldn’t provide an objective view of the subjective query. How could a search engine decide if Car and Driver was more authoritative than Road and Track? Because these decisions need to be made algorithmically, without an editorial stance, the search engine cannot provide enough contexts to determine relevant authority to a subjective query. Marketers exist because of their relevant authority. Brand, customer experience and presentation give the consumer the proxy for relevant authority. Marketers create their own authority to their target audiences. Search engines cannot effectively match the relevant authority to a target audience. Search engines are inherently opinion-free. This makes them good for searching, but bad at matching a searcher with an appropriate relevant authority. 

The Opportunity:  It is true that Google and its brethren are poor substitutes for a qualified guide. But this fact creates a great opportunity for the motivated marketer. The lack of an editorial stance by the search engines gives the marketer the opportunity to step into that vacuum. And while the greatest position of strength may not be to optimize your site for “best <insert your product category here>”, the lack of editorial stance by the search engines allows you to leverage other places where your brand or experience can be perceived as the “best”. Sites like Yelp, LinkedIn, Get Satisfaction, Digg and more can editorially position your site as “the best” or as an authority that will create opportunity for your brand or site as a trusted expert. Social media marketing can play an incredible role in generating the position of authority, which can generate opportunity for you through the broad exposure of natural search.

By focusing on search as a channel that can be a huge sales accelerant, and by navigating through the flaws in the channel with an eye towards opportunity, stumbling blocks can become platforms for growth.

So, onto the facts:

FACT: Google Instant is cool. It is the best eye candy that search has ever had. Never before has search been so interesting to look at and engage.

FACT: Because of the dynamic nature of the results presentation, Google Instant makes you pay attention to what is happening on the result pages. Chances are, you will see a compelling search result even before you have finished typing your query.

FACT: Google Instant saves you time. Google Instant saves between 2 and 5 seconds per search. That saves something on the order of 33,000,000 user minutes per month. Talk about productivity boosters!

Now, for the myths:

MYTH: Google Instant means the end of search engine optimization. This makes a terrific headline, but is very far from true. The Google algorithm hasn’t changed. The basics of search haven’t changed. Only the presentation has changed. The search world is all atwitter about Google Instant, but the fundamentals of search and search engine optimization are 100% in tact.

MYTH: Search rankings don’t matter any more. Well, search has become so complex, so distributed across so many presentation layers that there hasn’t been a static presentation in years. (For instance, the same Google search for “black shoes” done from your office, from your laptop in an airport, and from your mobile device when you are visiting your cousin in Toledo is going to be different.) So there hasn’t been anything truly solid about being #1 in Google for a particular keyword. It has been and continues to be a very fluid experience. Search rankings haven’t mattered all that much for at least two years. Google Instant does nothing to change that. Google is trying to provide the right result to the right searcher. Google Instant does that in a visually intriguing way, but it does nothing to diminish or enhance your traffic generation capabilities for a well-optimized site.

And, finally, on to the opportunities:

OPPORTUNITY: Google Instant has added a bit of serendipity to search. As you type in your query, results start dancing on the screen. And you are bound to see something interesting along the way. As Google refines your results, as they narrow in on your search, they are showing you an array of content opportunities with which to engage. I may be seeking information about men’s shoes, but I also get exposed to an editorial about men’s fashion (this is something that happened to me). I did eventually get to my men’s shoe query, but was enthralled when I found a men’s fashion blog that I had never heard of before. This kind of serendipity has always existed in search, but I think the opportunity for this to happen is more pronounced with the changed presentation layer. The opportunity for marketers here is content. Not just products and offers, but editorial content, thought content, and content that is engaging to read. Content begets search visibility, and search visibility will lead to serendipitous engagement. Your content becomes your ambassador.

OPPORTUNITY: Google Instant changes the way users engage with search. It is more interactive and exploratory. And Instant almost forces you to engage in longer tail search queries. (The more you type, the better results you get! The more eye candy you get!) This is a shift for marketers. There has been consistent emphasis on big volume words in search, “Shoes”, “Men’s Shirts”, “Tax Returns”, etc. The miraculous thing about Instant is that where you might have previously searched for shoes, with Instant you see the results and immediately know if there is an appropriate result for you. And big, broad words often provide big, broad results, and that isn’t why we use search. Over time, you might find yourself starting to type “shoes” (368,000 monthly queries)…only to change to “shoes for men” (4400 monthly queries) because the result set is more targeted. And then you might type in “shoes for men brown” (low search query volume) because the result set is even better. Instant rewards the searcher because the searcher suddenly understands that the granular query gets them more targeted information. Instant pushes the long tail. (And Google’s MayDay update which significantly rejiggered the long-tail algorithm, was clearly a precursor to Instant.) Long tail searches become more important. The opportunity for marketers is again in the creation of content that speaks specifically about the products or services they offer. Rather than focusing on shoes, your men’s shoe pages should focus on men’s shoes, along with their attributes (color, type, sole material, etc.). Google is rewarding the searcher for making specific queries, and rewarding the marketer for creating a site that is accessible, content rich, and well constructed.

Google Instant changes search. It doesn’t change the way Google works. It changes the way the user interacts with search. So contrary to popular opinion, SEO is not dead. It is alive and well and will help marketers create better opportunities to offer searchers exactly what they want, exactly when they are looking for it. Instant is powerful.

Last week, Yahoo Search disappeared. While not the first search engine, Yahoo was the granddaddy to almost every major innovation in search. Yahoo was fast and nimble. They were experimental and innovative. And perennially underappreciated.

A long time ago, I worked at Inktomi, a former high-flier in the search space (before the crash in 2000). Yahoo was the major competition. There was Yahoo, and everyone else. Yahoo acquired Inktomi in 2002 and incorporated the best parts of the Inktomi algorithm and technology into Yahoo. So I feel like I owned part of Yahoo’s backbone. And truly, I am sad to see Yahoo’s search engine disappear. But it is being replaced by an equally innovative, laser-focused search engine, Bing.

So there should have been a seismic event last week when Yahoo replaced their natural search experience and replaced it with Bing, but I am not sure that anyone noticed who isn’t in the search game. For marketers, nothing changed,  except that instead of considering the potential impact of three major search engine (Google, Yahoo and Bing) now there are only two. Perhaps life got a little easier last week. I don’t really know. But what I do know is that a once great search engine collapsed last week, and it barely kicked up any dust.

What this tells me is that there is no one algorithm that rules the roost. They are all interchangeable. For the marketer, natural search is a channel to maximized regardless of what the underlying technology approach is. The natural search algorithm is there to be understood and engaged with an eye to creating your brand’s unfair advantage.

The name on the engine doesn’t matter. Focus on results and opportunity, not on the logo near the search box.

Facebook is a giant monster. 4 bazillion people use it every day. And according to a statistic I just made up, every man woman and child in the United States wastes 119.7 hours each week playing Farmville and Mafia Wars.

But what is the net/net of Facebook for marketers? As I’ve talked about before, Facebook has altered the presentation layer. Marketers are seeing traffic growth to their Facebook page dramatically outstrip the traffic growth to their own web site. Putting the numeric economies aside, this means that Facebook is a growth channel. Facebook is suddenly #1 in traffic growth potential for many marketers.

Now this sounds pretty amazing, doesn’t it? You’ve found a new growth channel! But wait, it is this very interactive growth channel, that may not have conversion opportunities, that allows users to publicly ask question and make statements external to your control and allows the conversation to be bidirectional. And, as a marketer your message lives inside of Facebook’s world. On every one of YOUR Facebook pages is the blue Facebook logo. They are subverting your brand experience!

And that is the best thing that could ever happen to your marketing efforts.

Facebook is killing the internet because it changes the paradigm. No longer do consumers need to go to your website to interact with you. No longer to they need to use a search engine to find out what you sell. No longer do they need to rely on your multi-channel advertising efforts to learn about your brand. They just need to go to Facebook and pay attention to what their network “likes”.

And for e-commerce players, Facebook and other parties are making it easy to add transaction capabilities to your Facebook page. You can upload products and start generating sales in just a few hours. In fact, some brands have shut down their websites entirely to become Facebook only entities.

Facebook is becoming the primary channel of online interaction for a growing cadre of consumers. Why is this a good thing? Facebook forces you to relinquish some control and share it with your consumers. There are limits to what you can do on your brand’s Facebook page. Consumers now have a forum in which to publicly air their grievances and praise. Facebook is dynamic. It is ever-changing. It runs fast.

In short, Facebook keep you on your toes and makes you react and run faster than ever before. Facebook alerts you to consumer perception of your brand. Facebook demands that you be better.

Yeah…there…I said it. Facebook demands that you be better. You can’t be lazy on Facebook. You can’t delay changing your specials or responding to consumer concerns. Facebook won’t let you hide. Your actions are out there for everyone to see.

So, Facebook is killing the internet. It is gobbling up traffic like crazy. And it won’t put up with bad marketing. Facebook is killing the internet…and I love it.

Marketers love control. We crave it. We want to own the discussion. Setting the parameters of the interactions that our brands have with our consumers is our professional mission.

Many marketers have “grown up” in one-way media, be it television or print or catalog. In these experiences, the terms of the discussion were at the control of the marketer. By and large, we decided what our customers saw and heard.

But with the advent of the internet, our control has started to slip away. We control the presentation on our own websites (mostly), and in the early days of the internet, that was sufficient. As the dynamic nature of the internet and social media and search has evolved, it has become harder and harder to get the consumer to our little corner of the world, where their experience is shaped by our vision. Now we must attract them to that experience through multiple presentation layers that are the discovery mechanisms from which consumers self-select their interaction with us.

The two most obvious presentation layers are search and social media. Google , Bing, et al, shape the doorway to the internet. In essence, search engines have become a peculiar kind of portal, where the search engine results pages control our understanding of what is available to explore. This is the search presentation layer. The marketer has very modest control here. While we can espouse certain messages that we think will have impact, it is the search engines that ultimately decide what gets shown to whom and when. Social media has similar issues. You can only shape the Facebook experience so much. You can’t extend Twitter more than 140 characters. Marketers lose control of the terms of the discussion here. And this is a good thing.

What? Loss of control is good? Yes, it is!

When our brands and our experience gets filtered through another presentation layer, it forces us to focus on the essentials of our messaging and brand. When you have limited opportunity to shape the discussion, you’d better say the most important stuff as clearly and as directly as possible. Forget about setting the stage.  When you are speaking through the Facebook or Google microphone, you focus on the best message. You focus on clarity. You focus on understanding.

The presentation layers of search and social can be intimidating because they strip away the trappings of a controlled environment. But leveraging these opportunities shouldn’t be intimidating, it should be liberating. Working inside of a presentation layer that is not yours forces you to RE-think, RE-imagine and RE-work your brand and your message. And the result is RE-ward!

Tim Kilroy is Vice President of Natural Search at PM Digital.

From 3G enabled smartphones to ubiquitous WiFi-enabled laptops to the looming iPad, the internet is going mobile. I know that this isn’t really breaking news (I was involved in a mobile internet project launch in 2000), but now the mobile explosion is here. The question at hand is how do marketers take advantage of mobile and how do consumers use mobile.

Our clients run the gamut from publishers to non-profits to retailers and back again, and mobile comes up in lots of discussions. Here are a few strategies that I see for marketers and mobile in 2010:

• Location Search Is Growing Rapidly – If you have physical locations, ensure that the search engines know where they are. Check out your listings in the search engines to make certain that they are correct…they aren’t always. Take that step and know that you will show up in local searches.
• Mobile Web Pages – Make sure that your site renders properly on smartphones. I am not sure that I would be spending any time on WAP these days, but grab an iPhone or a BlackBerry and make sure that your site renders appropriately. If not, get your developers on the phone. There are dozens of easy ways to ensure that your site is readable…just check it out to make sure.
• Understand the Intent of Your Mobile Consumer- When a consumer is looking for information on the go from you, what are they after. Rarely will it be long and involved. Create content for mobile devices that is bite-sized and easily actionable. Think easy and fast.  Short forms and a click to call button are good places to start.
• Experiment – Nothing in mobile is set in stone. Feel free to experiment a little bit. Try something new, test it and refine. And repeat. Consumers don’t understand truly what they want out of their mobile experience yet, and you are probably unsure how to get going yourself. So test something new. You will learn fast that way!

Mobile is hot. The iPad will make it hotter. We are now, officially, an on-the-go-never-stopping-for-a-minute-except-to-update-our-facebook-status-from-some-expensive-handheld-device society. And you, marketers, need to be ready. Get going! It is going to be fun!

Tim Kilroy is Vice President of Natural Search at PM Digital.

Search is a big channel. There are die-hard people in the SEO world who never think about paid search as part of search…it’s advertising they say. There are PPC jockeys who have disdain for anything that doesn’t have an easy metric and a quick way to A-B test. Anything else is squishy, they say.

Well, any debate that pits natural search vs. paid search is missing the synergistic whole.

It’s all SEARCH.

Search is about the traffic that comes from results to specific queries. And while there is a difference between the way paid and natural search works, as a marketer, it may help you to think of them as a single channel, because they work together so well.

Imagine that your best paid keyword is dog bones and you pay $1.00 per click. And you drive some high quality traffic through paid search. And then you start to grow your presence in natural search. Let’s say you get dog bones into the top 10, and you start driving big traffic from that word. You might think about giving up your paid search budget for that word, because your natural search has started driving traffic at volume, and you have become overly efficient in your paid advertising for dog bones. You can no longer amp up the paid search volume by bidding more…so paid search can no longer put the pedal to the metal, as they say.

What has happened here? Has paid search lost it’s magic? NO WAY.

Let’s jump into some math – if you generate 5,000 clicks from dog bones via paid search per month, you are spending $5,000. If you are making a good ROI on that amount then great! But as your natural search visibility creeps up, you may find that it is only possible to spend $4500 at the same efficiency. Does this mean that that dog bones is no longer a good word? Absolutely not.

If you expand your focus and look at paid search and natural search together as a single channel, you might see a different story. Your TOTAL traffic from the word dog bones may have skyrocketed. Think of your 4,500 clicks from paid search in the context of the 5000 clicks that you are also getting from natural search. If you look at this as a whole channel, your average cost per click has just been more than halved (or your ROI has more than doubled). And if I use my fancy MBA calculator, I am pretty sure that either result is pretty great.

If we go back to your original budget of $5,000 for 5,000 clicks, and we look at your current situation of 9,500 clicks for $4,500, you will see that you are in a much better position with regard to the word dog bones. And you have at least $500 of budget that you can apply to testing new words, or amping up the volume on a word like dog bone holders where you don’t have premiere organic search visibility.

Search as a whole is a more powerful tool than looking at the natural and organic sides independently. Search is too big to be contained in silos. Let’s think that paid and natural search are different sales funnels, but they all point to the same cash register….yours.

Tim Kilroy is Vice President of Natural Search at PM Digital.