SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATION

SEMPO Title SlideCASE STUDY

Bill HuntBoard of Directors, Search Engine Marketing

Professionals Organization (SEMPO)

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IBM: Large Corporate Web Site

■ 83 countries, 31 languages■ Thousands of products■ Large, medium, small business, and consumer audiences

■ Many "cooks"□ User Experience: overall

look and feel□ IT: Portlets and operations□ Product owners, copy editors,

graphics designers□ Marketing: audience-based

messages and promotions

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1. Driving increased visits and qualified traffic to ibm.com from external search engines

2. Driving higher propensity leads for our programs and our business units

3. Supporting a customer/prospect’s journey by serving relevant content (is properly aligned to our agenda and) whenever prospects search

4. Search is integrated throughout our programs as part of an end-to-end approach supported by back end systems

Success with Search for IBM is defined by:

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Organic Paid

1234

OTM

N/R

Follow-upEmail

R

Newsletter

100% Visibility on page 1

Deploying each programs road map around the world as locally relevant.

Superior web experience

Serving the right page, with the right content and offers, and online assistance in every market.

Aligned back-end systems

Integrated into the 360 campaigns for ongoing nurturing/live assist, etc.

Three steps are required to achieve success

1 2 3

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Building the Case

Messaging Opportunities 180,807 Potential Visitors (5% or Searches click through) 8,913 Missed Monthly OI 1,470,620$

Business Impact of not Ranking on the top of Search Engines

Keyword

Number of Searches Monthly

business productivity software 60,500 Web 2.0 60,500 web conferencing 33,100 Collaboration software 5,400 social networking software 4,400 unified communications 4,400 enterprise portal 2,400 portal software 1,900 social computing 1,600 eforms 1,000 social software 1,000 team collaboration 1,000 forms software 880 electronic forms 720 enterprise instant messaging 720 business mashups 390 business collaboration software 260 performance dashboards 260 enterprise mashup 210 workforce productivity 110 telephony integration 58 web-based email software - Total Monthly Searches 180,808

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Current State Diagnostics

Percent of Target Visitors 14%

14%

72%

Search Visibility Ranking

Monthly Searches 180,807

Unique Visitors 128

% Visits 0.07%

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Site Wide Algorithm Compliance Audit

■ Site Fix: Detailed recommendations for changes to make the site more search friendly

■ Page Fix: Detailed page level recommendations for changes to make specific pages rank higher

■ Keyword Modeling: Detailed review of keywords and their ranking and conversion performance

Site SpiderabilitySite Spiderability Detect any barriers to spiders

Review page inclusion and frequency of updates

Link PopularityLink Popularity

Quantity & Quality of links to the site

Algorithm ComplianceAlgorithm Compliance

Template layout

Keyword Prominence

Unfriendly design attributes

Preferred Landing Page Development

Diagnostic AreaDiagnostic Area Next Steps Next Steps

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Making Templates SE Friendly

■ Only acronym is used full term product lifecycle management searched 100x’s more frequently

■ Keyword phrase is in a graphic which is invisible to search engines

■ Content is not very compelling to a searcher nor does is help relevancy

■ No context to these links

Before Optimization:Ranked #175 of 1.4 million pages in Google

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Making Templates SE Friendly

■ Used the full search term ■ Converted image to text so

search engine can “read”and score with prominence

■ Content is more relevant & compelling

■ Linked to SWG’s PLM page which helped push it to #2

After Optimization:Ranked #1 or #2 in allGoogle and Yahoo countries

85% of all traffic to page is from search engines

“Depth of Interaction” increased 500%

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• SOA landing page was optimized for several strategically-critical terms (“service-oriented architecture,” “soa,” “ibm soa”)

• Features marketing offers to drive awareness and registrations, including whitepapers, podcasts

Category Page Performance

•Capture estimated 42% share of search volume for “SOA” on Google.

•300+% increase in quality traffic

•Significant increase in quality leads

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0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

No Rank 68.85% 68.85% 68.85% 65.57% 67.21% 67.21% 70.49% 67.21% 57.38% 52.46%

Any URL 5 - 10 18.03% 18.03% 13.11% 16.39% 13.11% 11.48% 11.48% 13.11% 14.75% 18.03%

Non PLP Top 4 0.00% 0.00% 3.28% 1.64% 4.92% 3.28% 1.64% 3.28% 4.92% 4.92%

PLP Top 4 13.11% 13.11% 14.75% 16.39% 14.75% 18.03% 16.39% 16.39% 22.95% 24.59%

1/24/2007 2/24/2007 3/24/2007 4/24/2007 5/24/2007 6/24/2007 7/24/2007 8/24/2007 9/24/2007 10/24/2007

All LOB's Combined Rankings By Month-Google

1111

Insights:• Nearly 3x’s more PLP’s in top 4 positions over baseline• PLP performance continues to improve; more in the top 4 Google results, less not ranked at all• Overall traffic climbing and going to specific PLP’s increasing conversionsActions:Continue optimization of Brand pages; look to link building to enhance pages in highly competitive space where

basic on page attributes are not enough to score high rankingsReduce focus on Branded terms; focus instead on Customer Pain terms the products resolve

Search Optimization Scorecard

60% of the time invisible

13% of the wrong page appears

17% of the time we get it right

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IBM Results

■ Over 30 million pages in Google up from 10,000

■ 4.5 million support pages indexed■ Over 5,000 terms in top 10■ 3,700 terms have exact desired page in top 4■ Between 27% and 84% of traffic from search■ Customer satisfaction with search up 68%■ Organic search visitors convert exponentially

higher

■ Integrated optimization best practices into workflow to achieve global economies of scale saving money and resources

Keyword Ranking

Traffic from Search

Conversions

Pages Indexed

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PAID & ORGANIC INTEGRATION

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Leverage Paid + Organic Data

■ 10 “twists” on the data to gain insights■ Identify missed opportunities – paid and organic■ Leverage collaboration of listings

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Case Study

■ 16/20 highest CPC terms had Top 4 ranking – most had bad description

■ 8/20 highest CPC terms converted 2x more via Organic than PPC

■ 2 of highest CPC terms had no Google rankings

$1.3 million increase in clicks

Combined PPC & Organic Data

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What happened when?

■ Tested subject lines with PPC□220% increased open rate

■ Paid Search keyword/offer with email retargeting□45% increase in leads going to next step of conversion

$700k in new revenue

Combined PPC & eMail Marketing

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What happened when?

■ Click rate on combined PPC/Organic results increased 85%

■ Bounce rate decreased from 65% to 20%■ Depth of Engagement increased 145%

78% increase in conversion

Intent Modeling & Landing Pages

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Pharmaceutical Site

■ Executed “searcher focused” Strategy□ Keyword segmentation as described□ Conducted gap analysis on current content□ Optimized current content to rank higher□ Created 50+ new relevant content pages

■ Implemented Metrics to measure end-to-end□ Defined the “Quality of Visitor (QoV)” Model

■ Integrated Paid and Organic models to make program more efficient

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CPC versus CTR Index over Time

0

50

100

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200

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300

35011

/12/

2006

11/1

9/20

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11/2

6/20

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12/3

/200

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12/1

0/20

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12/1

7/20

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12/2

4/20

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12/3

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1/7/

2007

1/14

/200

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Inde

x CPCCTR%

CPC reductions from eradicationof expensive, lowproduction keywords

CTR improvements from focus onhigh converting words/engines

Deployment of Optimized Words

Immediate increase in click rate and cost reduction!

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Change in QOV and Cost/ QOV over Time

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x QoV IndexCost/QOV Index

Once high rankings appeared we Attracted more targeted people at Lower cost per visit

Almost Immediate Decrease in Cost while gaining more qualified visitors

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■ Optimized Pages in Top 5 – 90%■ Traffic by keyword increased by 45% – 287%

■ Sample Requests increased by 46%■ Leads increase by 59%■ CPA reduction by 83%■ QoV increase by 135%■ Reduction in words bid by 23%

Overall Results

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Q & A