One of the more enjoyable things we get to do on the ‘Digital Marketing Inner Circle” is interview interesting people I meet and get to know by being involved with the industry. This interview is with Motoko Hunt, Founder and Japanese Search Marketing Strategist. Born and raised in Japan, Motoko is now the chair of SEMPO Asia and has been the co-chair of SEMPO Japan since 2005.  She’s been active in this industry for at least ten years and seen a lot of changes happen.  Over the years she has found her niche in Japanese Search Marketing, including SEO and Paid campaign. I was fortunate to be able to take of her time and posed a number of questions to her.

Q: How did you become involved in the search industry?

Back in mid 90’s, I used to localize US companies websites and handing their online marketing such as site registrations, banner ads and press releases targeting Japanese market. As the market shifted and technology advanced, I started to focus on the SEO/SEM, and established AJPR in 1998.

Q: How can you use search to benefit smaller clients?

Apart from the budget size and maybe the manpower, the great thing about the search marketing is that it’s a fair game to everyone regardless of the company size. The search marketing can expand their market reach (from local to nationwide or even worldwide), improve the communication with their existing and potential clients, and help business owners to make an efficient and smarter decisions on investment. I believe that the search is the most effective marketing tool for your money, if you execute it right.

Q: Do you think it’s more difficult to keep up with industry trends in search marketing than it was a year ago? Why or why not?

I don’t think it’s more difficult, but I think that the type of the changes in trends are different in recent years compared to what we experienced in past. Up until a few years ago, the trends were mostly about the engines and the search. Now, integration of the different marketing outlets (web, search, social media, press releases, off line ads, etc) became more important than ever. It’s not just about SEO or Paid campaigns anymore. It’s like, “Ok, we have some experiences with the search marketing, and know how it can benefit us. Now it’s the time to coordinate it with other marketing outlets to create a campaign that will really benefit the business.”

Q: Tell us about a successful search marketing campaign that you’ve run…what made it work? What made it fun? How did it benefit the client?

One of the success stories of my clients is that they increased the conversion rate from the website by 130% within 6 months after the campaign started. We optimized the site to rank within top 3 in both Yahoo Japan and Google Japan with 95% of their target keywords, improved the landing page content and the internal linking. The fun part was being able to show the great results in ranking, increasing number of accesses to the site from search, and the conversion rate to the client to make them happy and to feel that they made the right choice to invest in the search marketing.

Q: How important is it to be “visible” in the industry these days?

Very important even if you are only targeting the local market. Various survey results show that most people search the web to obtain the information about the services or products that they plan to purchase. More visible you are in search, better chance you have to interact with the potential customers to influence their buying decision. Even in the markets where people still transact off-line, they do research online. I think visibility in the industry is very important.  Many potential customers tend to gravitate to “industry experts” they see at the various conferences.  Even more important is to have your thought leadership represented with blogs and articles.

Q: How does link building fit into social media? Does PPC fit in at all with what you do?

I don’t like using social media as a link building platform to improve your PR. When people use it to build links, it often leads to link spam, and destroy the user experience. If the users don’t like what they experienced there, they won’t come back, and it would defeats the whole purpose of “social media”. The links to your site/pages in social media really become valuable when the links are put on the page content such as blog body from a relevant site, and not in the comment section. The paid campaign could bring some successes through both keyword match and the content match on social media sites. Be selective with which social media sites to run your content match campaign.

Q: Have you used any “questionable” techniques in search marketing?

Nope. I don’t chase the algorithm, either.

Q: What industry trend leaves you cold and why?

Not a particular trend, but when a new trend comes in town, many people stop what they were doing and start to chase that new trend. It frustrates me. New trend simply means there is one more thing that you may need to consider. Those companies have successful website and the paid campaign know the importance of covering the basics and of having a solid project goal.

Q: What is the best part of your workday and why?

End of the day? LOL. One of the best part of my workday is to reporting the improved results to the clients. SEO and SEM are continuous efforts as the market changes and your competitors always improving their sites and campaigns, it’s very important to be able to bring the continuous improvements to all aspects of the success measurements such as ranking, conversion rates, and saving client’s money.

Q: What advice would you give to young women trying to make a name for themselves in SEO right now?

I’ll give the same advice that I give to my son and daughter. Whatever you decide to do, work hard and study hard to become very good at what you do. There’s no short cut. Networking definitely helps especially in this industry, but if you don’t have the knowledge and the skills, you won’t go much far. Believe in yourself, motivate yourself and push yourself. You are your best cheerleader!  A blog is often a great way to start making a name for yourself.  If your ideas resonate with people they will follow you and the more you are followed the greater your exposure.

BEIJING, CHINA 20th August 2008- SinoTech Group (www.sinotechgroup.com.cn) announced today that they have signed a strategic partnership with US based Advantix Media.

Texas based, Advantix Media provides Search Marketing services to well known customers in verticals markets such as automotive, education and travel. “This is an exciting strategic partnership.” said Dr. Mathew McDougall, the Group CEO and Executive Chairman for SinoTech Group, “SinoTech will benefit by providing products and services into the US through this partnership. We will provide Advantix’s clients with access to the Asian markets and will conduct Agency Services, Search Marketing and creative services.”

“Asia is a rapidly developing online market, particularly China, so this partnership will extend our online marketing and advertising solutions offering into Asia Pacific; however, China will be the first market we will focus on and we expect to gain quick wins” continued John Phillips, co-founder and Principal.

I was reading the blog post by Tim Ash on Search Engine Watch where he talks about the handbook produced by the Marketing Sherpa’s called “Landing Page Handbook”.

Tim’s post draws on the results from the handbook exploring the average conversion rates for different marketing tactics. The survey data was drawn from over 5000 active online marketers in a variety of settings.

In-house managed PPC Search - 3.84%
Outsourced managed PPC Search - 5.40%
Difference: 40%

In-house Natural Search Optimization - 2.62%
Outsourced Natural Search Optimization - 4.76%
Difference: 80%

What this suggests is when outsourcing SEO/SEM to a specialist agency, the conversion rates are much higher. Please note that statistics are always simply a gauge, the statistics did not breakdown the results by industry or company sizes, or other critical information. However, at a high level the data makes perfect sense, since agencies must perform better to justify their fees and keep their client’s loyalty and business.

Agencies that are specialists in a particular area see a wide cross-section of accounts and industries among their clients and should be able to do a better job. This post is not intended to criticize  in-house SEO/SEM teams but make the point that the Search marketing industry is moving very fast, and unless you have a whole organization focused on keeping up with the changes, it is very difficult to stay up on the latest developments.

Marketing activities are the engine of growth for a company. They are not administrative cost centers. Many companies mistakenly try to save a little money by running their programs in-house. They do not realize the real cost is in the lost opportunities that they can not capitalize on. If your in-house program is profitable, that is not enough - you must consider the scale of your program and always question how much money you might be leaving on the table. Giant conversion rate differences such as the above can be turned into strategic weapons that let you soundly trounce your competition.

So next time you consider the in-source / outsource decision, consider the opportunity costs as well as direct costs.

Why is PPC in China so Important?

Baidu is the biggest search engine in China and they claim 62% of market share, with Google being the second. But, regarding SEM, they work a little bit different: Baidu’s keyword advertising placements are listed before the natural search results. All of those ads are called “推广”. So, professional service about keyword advertising is necessary for most companies. That’s why the selection of a local SEM agency who knows China target audience is almost a mandatory.

Tracking / Report

Keywords reports from Baidu’s stystem is actually very simple. Dislike Google’s adwords system, you cannot even track the performance / conversion of each keyword in Baidu. To ensure a high quality of our managed campaigns with Chinese keywords, Sinotech use sophisticated softwares so that we can provide our clients with reports which include more information, and keywords suggestions.