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.

Dr Mathew McDougall from SinoTech Group (www.sinotechgroup.com.cn) was speaking at the SMX about Search Marketing in China. At the event, the talk was focused on the positive growth in Internet users in China. Collectively, the speakers were promoting that it is now right for marketers to take the plunge and launch digital campaigns in China (search, social etc) The various speakers outlined  positives and negatives for search marketers in China. These positives and negitives were nicely consolidated by Chris Sherman in his post on Search Engine Land. (Listed below for convienience).

Positives:

• China is of the largest markets in the world, with the most online users of any country (~250 million and counting)
• Increasing use of search engines by Chinese internet users
• Comparatively inexpensive options for search marketers in relation to other markets in the world
• Relative lack of sophisticated competition; relative ease of capturing top positions in both organic and paid search result listings

Negatives:

• Relative complexity of Chinese language (and multiple dialects) requires sophisticated knowledge and/or strong partnership with local marketing experts
• Lack of transparency on the part of market leader Baidu requires good relationships with company reps or agencies with good connections
• Lack of maturity in E-commerce poses challenges for direct-response or retail oriented search marketers

In the presentation by Dr McDougall, he spoke about companies now establishing search marketing campaigns in China and increasing looking to expand their budgets and the number of keywords being managed. He used a case study to highlight how one consumer electronics brand is now doing campaigns that have tens of thousands of keywords and there for needs tools and technologies to establish, bid, manage and monitor results/campaigns.

Overall, a great indication that search marketing is alive and well in China. If anyone else was at the event then would be interested in your views and comments.

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.

The rise of blogs, customer reviews, photo- and video-sharing sites, and other online social media have empowered consumers/competitor and partners with a new power.

Further, with search being able to index all the blogs and comments into one organic list it can result in either a positive branding exposure or a negative one…a very negative one….. So, it depending on the sentiment of those writing, reviewing and comments on company and their brands that really control the brand experiences in today’s search engine results.

There is much written about how to build positive brand using Search Marketing but this blog will outline what to do when you get negative attacks on your company and brands

Over the past 6 months a relatively new area in Search Marketing has emerged- that of Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM). In order to combat a negative campaign we must consider more than just SEO. The company (or the search marketing company doing the work) needs to quickly neutralize all offending content. The quickest way to do this is to use sophisticated SEM techniques. This strategy is singularly the most important area necessary to produce the desired result promptly.

Firstly, data mining processes need to be employed to monitor (in real-time) large numbers of search behaviors and search trends. Once the search technology has identified trends or patterns in keyword searches that highlight negativity campaigns, a reputation protocol must be rapidly adopted to start combating this. It is important to note that offending content is often found on keywords used by shoppers earlier in the buying cycle than those found on a branded search. Complaints can sour customers before they even discover your brand has a desired offering.

Once the keywords have been identified, bid maximizing tools should be used to monitor, report and purchase pay-per-click (PPC) search ads in an automated fashion. PPC ads change by time of day. Some keywords disappear as budgets expire. PPC ads from your competitors or trademark infringers tend to disappear on weekends or evenings, and reappear during business hours. The purpose of using technology in a reputation management strategy is to ensure that timeliness and effectiveness are central to this strategy; also ROI can be easily determined.

Search reputation management involves three primary components:

? Prompt identification of negativity trends and pattern in keyword searches.

? The use of SEO to try and displace information found in organic search results.

? An immediate action to counter offending content by using SEM to display positive information or to drive traffic to sites (micro) that counter the negative messages.

Remember, finding the negative campaigns is only part of the solution, using sophisticated searchmarketing techniques is a core component in combating this increasingly frequent problem. For more information you can read -

http://www.sinotechsearch.com.cn/en/reputation_management/