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The 2012 edition of Hydra's survey assessing the state of Search integration is now live. To ensure the results delivered from the survey are valuable, we need as many Search specialists and digital marketers as possible to take the survey. 

Please take five minutes out of your day to take the survey and to be in with the chance of winning a great prize! One lucky winner will get to use Hydra for a three month period free of charge. That's the equivalent of adding multiple Search staff members to a team at no extra cost. Take the survey now for your chance of winning the opportunity to see how The One Platform can help maximise your Search effectiveness, delivering real ROI. 

The 2012 Hydra Survey: The State of Search Integration 

Scaling SEO for massive sites - Our most recent White Paper focuses on the unique challenges faced by large sites in scaling their Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) activity across millions of pages, and doing so without experiencing an unacceptable impact on project costs and time to delivery. 

The value of technology

The SEO performance of a website is determined by how well its web pages satisfy various technical, relevancy and credibility conditions. For websites with three hundred pages, this is a manageable task; however in contrast, optimising a website which consists of a million web pages or more becomes very expensive and time consuming.

Not only does Hydra's White Paper delve deeper into how a huge website can be managed effectively, but it also provides a solution on how to deal with these issues.

A common challenge faced by digital in-house and agency teams is that most of their channel specialists have grown accustomed to working in silos.  In an environment where online actions are becoming more intertwined, the risks of isolation far outweigh its benefits (see our 2011 Integration Survey if you want to learn more).  However, it is difficult to transition into a more integrated model without incentives for channel specialists to make the switch.  For this reason, we have explored some of the areas where specialists could derive value from other disciplines for planning and executing their campaigns.

As a start, we have highlighted the Top 5 areas where Natural Search could derive additional insight from Paid Search:

1. Optimising budget allocation:

Shifting budget from a group of keywords to another based on the relationship between Natural and Paid Search performance in SERPs    

2. Researching competitors

Understanding your competitors' priorities based on their Natural and Paid Search spend

3. Benchmarking campaign performance 

Identifying which changes are caused by seasonality, cannibalisation between channels or mere Natural Search performance fluctuations

4. Discovering new keyword opportunities

Unearthing new language being used by customers through Paid Search reports

5. Assessing landing page quality

Using Quality Score (QS) factors as additional metrics to identify areas of improvement

To read the detailed overview of these opportunities for integration, download our latest white paper Natural Search Specialist, should Paid Search matter to you?

A few weeks ago, I had lunch with a friend who runs a brand management consultancy.  Like many other successful consultants who have been mainly involved in traditional marketing campaigns, she expressed an interest in understanding what digital marketing had to offer better than she currently did.  One of her clients was due to appoint a search marketing agency and she wanted to provide the best advice possible.  She was hesitant to evaluate a search marketing agency on the same aspects as a creative above the line agency, which was essentially the reason we were sitting at the table. 

Rather than simply focusing on how to select a provider, our conversation began with a much more fundamental set of questions: how do I know whether my client should be spending money on search marketing or not?  What if we are better off using that budget in other areas?  If it is worth an investment, how do I define my search marketing priorities?  Giving her some background on how most search marketing campaigns begin - on the discovery phase - seemed to be the place to begin.

And this conversation was the inspiration behind our recent paper, Where to start - the discovery phase, in which we cover the how-to's of:

• Creating an initial keyword set for the products that you aim to promote
• Refining the initial keyword set to ensure you are using the same language as potential customers
• Uncovering the size of the opportunity on a keyword-by-keyword basis to define whether spend is warranted
• Prioritising the refined list of keywords based on commercial potential and business targets
• Setting realistic performance expectations based on the site and its competitors
• Setting a process for a constant feedback loop to ensure continued campaign success and ROI growth

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