I read a report today from Marketing Sherpa that discussed Dolby¬Æ’s recent site revamp. There are three guidelines that I extracted from the report as I thought they were worth pointing out:

1. Create detailed personas
   For those of you who may be new to this concept, personas are detailed descriptions of users to your site. While some sites choose to create many personas, I like to keep it simple by only creating 2-5. Creating a persona will help you define and segment your web audience in a way that will help you make educated assumptions about what they look for, how they navigate and more.
2. Designate areas for promotion and branding
   A clean, organized site will help keep your customers oriented. I’ve been a strong proponent of wireframing for quite a while now. Often, designers will start with full-color screens and mockups to illustrate a site design. This methodology can yield a visually appealing web site but can neglect site architecture and organization. I always start with a wireframe, where I will organize content into regions on the screen. Only when I’m happy with the wireframe will I open Photoshop and apply a visual treatment.
3. Usability study to prove the hypothesis
   During a usability test, you can gather feedback from real users. This can help you determine if the assumptions you made while creating personas was correct, as well as find interface glitches and points of confusion for users of your web site.

During this seminar, one presenter notes that a paid search engine marketing client of his was bidding on 1 and 2-word phrases, but found that most internet users were reaching his site using 3+ word phrases.

This brings up a few good points. First, many companies focus on 1 to 2-word phrases because they don’t know any better. Bidding on 1 to 2-word phrases can be very expensive, and bidding on 3+ word phrases can be cheaper and much more effective.

So how should you do keyword research, be it for paid search or SEO? I always start with the web server statistics. Even the most basic web server statistics programs have the ability to show you keywords that internet searchers type to find your site. Compare this list against what you’re currently bidding or optimizing on and you might be surprised. Although 3+ word phrases don’t get as much traffic as 1 to 2-word phrases, the competition, clickthrough rate and conversion rate can be much higher for these terms.

The seminar presenter went on to talk about using negative matches to improve Google Adwords performance, and I would expand this to include using exact phrase matching functions.

I would add that many advertisers link their paid links to existing pages on their web sites, and this may be an acceptable strategy for some, but companies should also experiment with landing pages that a) search engines can’t index, and b) that could have a design that varies from other pages on your web site, making sure the landing page focuses on conversion (getting people to do what you want them to do, whether that means making a purchase, calling you, or signing up for a sweepstakes or newsletter).

In the Balancing Paid & Organic Listings seminar, one presenter pointed out that on average, 82% of a search marketing budget is spent on paid search engine placement, while only 12% of the budget is spent on organic search engine optimization (SEO). The presenter went on to say that new research states that 25% of the people would click on paid search engine listings, 69% would click on organic/natural listings and 6% would click on other listings like news, local listings, etc. This led to a very poignant question. So why is 82% of a marketing budget generating 25% of the clicks?

This seems very logical to me. It’s much easier to pay for placement, and as a company, you have more control of your message. By paying for a search engine listing, you can control the ranking/display sequence of the ad, the copy used in the ad, and the URL the ad clicks to. In addition, the search engine listing is instantaneous, and you don’t have to wait for Google or any other search engine to index the page.

That said, prices companies are paying for paid listings are on the rise, and will continue to do so, and companies must find a way to spend more on organic search engine optimization (SEO). I believe that over time, as the market for paid search engine listings becomes even more saturated, companies will start to turn to organic SEO as an alternative. This is why you should want to balance your paid and organic spends now — you’ll be ahead of the competition when they decide to invest in organic SEO.

Also of note, although not new news per se, is that a recent Enquiro study released at SES NYC ’05 found that Google searchers see the first few results on the page. A majority of the first listings on the page are natural results, underscoring the need for a good organic search engine optimization program.