I admit it! 12 years ago I fell into Search Marketing as an extension of the remedial web design I was teaching myself while publishing articles I wrote about The Beatles and Don McLean’s American Pie.
The internet captivated my attention with its ability to talk to everyone yet I realized natural search could only do so much (“If you build it.... they will come” only works in the movies).
Paid Search presented a reliable way to reach an engaged and enthusiastic audience on a performance basis.
7 years ago, Yahoo! picked up on what I was doing and I relocated to manage advertising opportunities throughout the company.
There I added to my experience on display advertising, sponsorships, content integration, and comparison shopping and realized the synergy that can be attained online.
Upon moving to Hewlett-Packard, I leveraged that insight to manage marketing and search holistically, while still on a performance basis; even brand marketing on a performance basis.
The competitive advantage of search (over other forms of advertising), and online in general, is that everything is measured and we can translate tools and what we’ve learned from one program to another.
Have you considered that, in e-commerce, you should be creating a product data feed not for Comparison Shopping but because that feed can be used to automate keyword generation, create dynamic sitemaps,
or automatically update banner ads? Where else can that be done? Search is beautiful in that it is driven by demand and behavior; people search, our job is to respond to that so that an opportunity is not missed.
In responding to that by managing keywords, we have visibility to the largest focus group on the planet, a panel of searchers, who, by searching, give us insight to demand, brand consideration, advertising effectiveness, and awareness.
One of the brilliant search engineers at Yahoo! said, “it’s all about search”, and he couldn't have been more accurate.
I’m the kind of guy that can never sit still so even now I branch out into new mediums with which to learn and benefit from this still emerging industry.
What about how MSN’s platform can adjust bids based on regional or demographic performance? That’s something Yahoo! and Google haven’t caught on to yet, a tremendous opportunity for all of us.
You could say I live this business, when not working at my day job, you’ll find me blogging about this very subject at
www.seobrien.com and keeping the ideas flowing as we try to keep up with the changes.