5 Compelling Reasons to Attend IMC Vancouver October 3-4, 2011. And if you are SEMPO Canada members, save an additional $100 to attend IMC Conference. Get in touch with me to get your promo code: . 

SEMPO Vancouver SEM Meetup: September 13, 2011 at REVEL Room in Vancouver

Announcing a new SEM Meetup for The SEMPO Vancouver Search Engine Marketing Group on September 13 2011 in Vancouver!

“I found Alexandre easy to work with and passionate about Search Engine Marketing. To him, SEM is an adrenaline rush; the ideal attitude for a SEM expert. His knowledge of the subject was excellent and he delivered the results. In the few months that he worked on our business, he lowered our cost-per-click, increased our traffic and improved our conversion rate. Can’t ask for much more than that.”

/// Eric Lowe
Online Marketing Specialist
Tourism British Columbia
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Tattling /// Is XYZ (the competitor) doing well because they purchased links? If so, and it is something you can prove, then it is entirely within your right to tell Google using their sp@m report form. But will this work? It is touch and go whether your complaint will actually do anything in the short term because Google often collects these complaints and then upgrades its algorithm (if possible) to clean out other offenders using the same techniques; a more efficient process. That said, as Matt Cutts said in this video about link buying Google is not above occasionally using manual methods to clean out sp@m so you might get lucky and see an immediate result. This process is called tattling.

/// Read the Glossary

Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (Canada)

Read about it on my Search Marketing blog

Search engine marketing vision and challenges

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

A long time ago, I had a similar conversation with the people at Intrawest, my first job in search marketing in 2000. At the time we came up with a formula where every Intrawest partner had to participate financially in the development of their website with content and promotion through search marketing tactics.

Because of the cost involved in performing these activities individually, it was a good option for these small business owners to work together.

Your challenge might be similar. Most business owners do NOT have enough resources to build and promote their site effectively. Do your chances of success increase by abandoning your site and putting the content into a consortium of businesses that will attract more visitors?

You might also think that there are too many Web sites on the Internet. But consider that 90-percent of Web sites are poorly design and not marketed at all. And 94-percent of them are not getting traffic from major search engines. Many, if not most do not generate sales. There is lots of opportunity for you to take the lead position.

I am continually surprised by sites that haven’t been updated in a decade. What’s gone wrong here? We all know that it is important to update a website, keep the content fresh, and so on. The problem is obviously the dollars to feed the site with appropriate resources.

Search engines including PPC search engines are forcing small businesses with poorly designed sites to abandon them. They do this by 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 expensive.

Why? Search engines are in the business of providing relevant search results. Lucky for us they are pretty good at achieving these goals. They also know that if they raise their fee, some businesses will bail and this is precisely what they want. If your site is not relevant it gets left behind.

Don’t be surprised if Google, for instance, drops your website from their search engine when they realize it has not been updated in months. Most search engines are becoming more and more intelligent and it becomes impossible to achieve a top ranking with a poorly marketed and rarely updated website.

So if you don’t allocate the resources to achieve a decent search engine ranking, and you have a poorly designed site that doesn’t have much traffic anyway, what is the point of keeping it?

As the search engine shakeout continues, what revenue models will survive? Are the days of commercial-free searching over? Out of the 10 billion Web pages on the Internet, not every single site is going to survive. Most business owners only hang on until they find a solution to their online marketing challenge.

Here is the solution:

Invest in your online presence seriously or form a group. Considering the cost of promoting a site, I think small business owners should abandon their site, save their money and put that amount into a group of businesses promoting the same subject. For instance, if an American is searching for Victoria travel, it is obvious that this online user will not scroll through the 100 B&B sites in Victoria or the 200 Tour operators online, and so on.

But if 100 companies about travel in Victoria get together for a search marketing plan and build a site about their common interest, and where every company drops $2000 the end result will be a well-designed website with tremendous marketing power. The combined forces are greater than the sum of its parts.

There are only a few positions in search engines that actually drive traffic to a site. If you can’t afford the search marketing effort necessary to show up in the first page, or the top 10 results, you won’t get much traffic on your subject.

Be smarter about how you organize your resources. Teaming up may provide 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 one well-designed site.

If you can allocate those marketing dollars for online promotion, than go for it.

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