Mark your calendar! The main event of the year in Search Engine Marketing: Search Engine Strategies (SES) Toronto is coming back again soon on June 16-18 2008. I will be there representing SEMPO Canada along with all representatives of the Canadian Search Marketing Industry. During SES, Ken Jurina & I will host an evening session to present the latest accomplishments within SEMPO Canada. For those who may not know, Search Engine Strategies is the premier event about Search Marketing (SEM) technologies and tactics and we are proud to have this show coming to Canada once a year.

“Alex was, and still is, the best search engine marketer I’ve ever worked with. He’s so much better than other people who call themselves search engine marketers. And, if you hire him, you’ll see how they’re leagues apart in results.”

/// James Sherrett
Director, eCommerce
Resort Reservations Network (Intrawest)
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Google Dance /// An informal term created to explain the phenomenon of frequent shifts in rankings while Google updates its database.

/// Read the Glossary

Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (Canada)

Read about it on my Search Marketing blog

Search Engine Marketing Vision & Challenges

Vision in developing an online presence: The market is fractured. Invest or abandon your site!

A long time ago, I had this conversation with people at Intrawest, my first job in Search Marketing, back in the year 2000. At the time we came up with formula where every partner we had in the implementation of a site in a given destination had to participate financially in the development of a new site, with a lot of content, and its promotion through search marketing tactics. Because of the cost involved in performing all these activities professionally, it was the best option for small business owners. The challenges here are that, most business owners do NOT have enough resources to build & promote their website effectively. They have more chances of success abandoning their site, put its content into a consortium of businesses and the make sure it gets tons of visitors.

Therefore, there are too many websites on the Internet. 90% of websites on the Internet are poorly design and not marketed at all. 94% of them are not getting traffic from major search engines. Most do not generate any sales. It is still surprising me to see on a site, last updated: October 2002. What’s gone wrong here? Everybody has said for years that it is important to update a website, keep its content fresh and so on. The bottle neck is obviously the $$ to feed the site with appropriate resources. It has always been clear to me. So let’s take a look at the challenges that small business owners are facing.

It seems quite obvious to me that Search Engines including PPC search engines are forcing small businesses with poorly designed site to abandon it… They are doing it by raising their fee. As an example, it now costs $299 US annually to have a listing in Yahoo. What used to be free is now getting quite expensive. Why? Search engines are in the business of providing good and relevant search results and create a good Internet and lucky for all of us, they take their responsibility in achieving these goals. They know that if they raise their fee, some businesses will not follow and this is precisely what they want to accomplish. They are controlling the game and they don’t want to make it easy to get in. Don’t be surprised if Google for instance drops your website from their search engine when they realize it has not been updated for a long time. Most Search engines are becoming more and more intelligent and it becomes almost impossible to trick an engine and achieve a top ranking with a poorly marketed website. So if you can not allocate resources to achieve good search engine ranking with your poorly designed site that does not have much traffic anyway, what is the point of keeping it? Save that money.

As the shakeout continues, what search engine revenue models will survive? Are the days of commercial-free searching over?

Out of the 10 billion web pages on the Internet (I don’t remember the exact number), every single website on the Internet in its actual form is not going to make it! Most business owners are keeping their site until they finally find a solution to their online marketing challenge.

Solution:

Invest in your online presence seriously or form a group! Considering the cost challenge of promoting a site, I think small business owners should abandon their site, save this money and put that amount in a group of businesses promoting the same destination (travel business) or subject. For instance, if an American is searching for Victoria travel, it is quite obvious that this online user will not look through the 100 B&B sites in Victoria, 200 Tour operators and so on. If 100 companies about travel in Victoria get together for their Search Marketing plan and build a site about their common subject where every company drops $2,000, the end results will be a well designed website with a tremendous marketing power which produces tons of traffic and sales. The combined forces are greater than the sum of its parts.

You know, there are only a few positions in search engines that matters and that actually drive traffic to a site. If you can not afford the Search Marketing effort necessary to show up in the first page, or the top 10 results for your destination or subject, forget it. Traffic means business and it costs to raise your website’s traffic. The forces that we are up against for getting top positions are increasing so we have to be smarter about how to organize our resources. To me, teaming up provides the best chance of survival.

Make the assessment whether or not you want to allocate more than $20,000 per year to market your website. If you cannot compete with major players in your market, than form a group of companies in your industry and market a good site. If you can allocate those marketing dollars in online promotion, than go for it. The competition in the online marketplace does not make it easy to get in.

For more information on the actual Search Marketing challenges, do not hesitate to contact me: Alexandre Brabant BComm