We recently acquired a 12 year old domain for a client whose company wanted a more brandable, short and easy-to-recall domain name. We were able to acquire something within their price range that was a single word searched over 1,000,000 times in broad Google searches monthly. Almost inadvertently, we acquired the domain without even thinking about checking for backlinks–something that is almost unheard of from us.

Imagine our surprise when we found that the domain we had acquired was a legacy porn site, complete with all the dirty links from its previous work in the dark world of internet pornography. Believe me, search engine optimization is difficult enough as is, especially when Google continues to lay the smack down with Penguin and Panda and whatever other non-intrusive creatures they can use to describe their ever-present battle internet spam and splog posts.

When we discovered the apparent blunder, the pagerank of the aforementioned site was a paltry zero. We thought, “well what’s the worst that could happen.” So, we started to build links like we normally would and hoped the bad neighborhoods that were linking previously would have little sway on the new content on the site. Before we could build a single link, the latest PR update from Google hit and voila: the site suddenly ranks at a PageRank 4. Keep in mind that’s only with old links. And, what of the keywords we were targeting? Well, we had acquired some great long tail keywords for said client as well and we found ourselves ranking quite well for some of our most desired and sought-after keywords, all within about three weeks. A rather rudimentary experiment gone successful, even if it was by accident.

There are many differing opinions out there on how to properly format your site for SEO. One of the big things I’ve always read is to stay away from getting links from bad neighborhoods. This little accidental experiment seems to put that whole idea on its head. When I saw where some of the links were coming from, I was frankly, a little disappointed that Google was giving so much weight to links coming from the areas of the web I was seeing. Perhaps Google’s “Do No Evil” mantra isn’t quite all it is cracked up to be, especially in the realm of Pornography SEO.

We, at ROI, feel the same pressure to perform as you do. If we don’t get your PPC accounts humming along we know you’ll just fire us – as well as you should. Before we got into the PPC business we were only doing SEO, and we relied on others to manage our PPC accounts. What we saw time and time again was that the management company would come in, drive a little optimization, and then sit back and let the account run on auto-pilot. We fired 3 companies before we realized how big of a business opportunity was before us. If we could train a few of our SEO experts on PPC then we could manage our own accounts as well as start offering services to manage our SEO clients’ as well. We gave it a try – and it worked!

We pride ourselves on success metrics. With every free consultation we do, we put in place an improvement guarantee. If we don’t drive the optimization that we promise we’ll give you your money back! You can read more about our industry leading guarantee here.

We think the world of our PPC staff. They’re pretty freakin’ great. We demand the best of them and in return deliver the world to them (great pay, employment perks, the whole nine yards). Each of them, along with our entire staff, agrees to the highest Marketing SLA (service level agreement) in the industry, which we’ve outlined below so you can know what you’re getting when you sign up with us:

3. Three contacts with every account. We feel like ease of communication is a main pillar to successfully managing your PPC accounts and ensuring we can hit the success metrics we promise. To ensure you can always receive a prompt reply to any of your inquiries, we’ll give you all contact details (email, phone number, pony express station identifier, etc) for Your Account Manager, your Account Executive, and the VP of Customer Relations. Click here to get a free ppc optimization consultation.

2. Two fold redundancy. Even though we’re not hosting bank accounts, websites, or what most people would consider high security assets, we still consider all of our electronic and communication processes as mission critical. Thus, we have redundant fail safes in place for everything – from our website to our customer support. Even if a 300 foot tsunami hit our home office in Seattle we’d still be available to you from our Dallas, Montreal or Salt Lake City locations… which leads me to our next guarantee…

1. One hour response to any urgent inquiries. In addition to having three different people that are held accountable to responding to you, we also have a mechanism in place by which we guarantee a 1 hour response. This 1 hour response guarantee works even if it’s Saturday night at 11:30 pm.

0. Lastly, every new account comes with a ZERO risk guarantee. We’re actually the only agency in the nation that gives you a 90 day, 100% money back guarantee. Click here to learn more about our PPC money back guarantee and get a free account optimization consultation.

1. Huge amounts of traffic, clicks and purchase decisions are being made without search engines and are occurring more often through social sharing outlets.

2. Holistic back-linking means doing it au natural, meaning simply linking to your site with dofollow links from guest blog posts is not going to bode well for rankings simply because it is not the natural way of things. You need Twitter, Facebook and other key sites weighing in as well.

3. You will gain more loyalty or more mutiny. People often love to brag about the brands they love, but they are more boisterous about the things that bother them. Diversifying can be a great way of saving tons of time putting out the fires of bad PR and marketing in a way that is often very simple.

4. Diversification prepares you for future search engine updates. Advertising and technology is very often about knowing or predicting what is going to occur next. By doing so, you can be ahead of the curve and not see a major dip in traffic when some unexpected change comes down the pipe.

Big shifts will continue to change the way customers find products and services. Search will continue to play a massive role in how this occurs. But remember that if everyone that came to your site were there because they performed a search, your traffic and stats would pale in comparison to what is possible. And, giving up what is possible for the status quo is not even remotely within my realm of reality, especially when it comes to the opportunity available.

As many of you know, we work to acquire domains regularly for our clients. We have been able to procure some pretty great domains. Often in the process I pay attention to some of the high profile domains that are going down. Today, I watched as social.org started at $20,100 and was bid up to..oh wait, it’s still going. I have to get to a meeting. I will update this post at the final.

• 2:30ish Right now it’s at over $100K.
• Update: 4:04 pm PST: $226,600
• FINAL: $228,600. Close time was 4:35 pm Pacific. The winning bidder was qgpfexzorg.

It has lasted well beyond the normal auction time and I will not be surprised to note if any big-wigs are in this one given the fact that social.com was sold by marksmen.com to salesforce.com for $2.5 million a year or two ago. Given that this domain was heavily marketed via much PR, it’s not surprising it is going so high. Who says domaining is dead?

The question, then, is not what is the ROI of social media, but rather what is the ROI of [insert activity here] in social media?

There are so many activities which reside inside the social spectrum which we almost never account for and which rarely if ever analyzed. Moreover, there are so many moving parts that thinking a one-size-fits-all solution will work for every aspect of the social spectrum is ridiculous.  True ROI online is measured by traffic and today’s traffic is driven by engagement. Such engagement requires content, content, content and of course…

Testing, Testing, Testing 

Without testing, shifting and changing what resources go where, we may never get answers to the questions we never asked. At some point, resources need to shift in social. It is an area where the best of returns almost always comes by accidental testing: making tweaks to a campaign, shifting people’s time from a call center to a Facebook wall or even engaging with Twitter followers (that is, assuming you have them).

Human Targets 

Finding the return on whatever the shift may be in your investment(s) online will require a whole slew of specific marketing experience experts, especially if you want to do it correctly. Your best bet is to start with engagement and be human. I always say you have to be human to target and interact with them. They are less likely to respond to any type of medium if they think they are simply speaking with a what they feel is a soulless company and not a breathing personality.

1. Finance vs. Marketing. I love finance. Some of the best projects in which I have been involved have been finance-related: valuing businesses, finding market comparables, extracting relevant betas, etc. However, finance has its role and so does marketing. In general, the finance gurus who make up some of today’s largest investment banks (and even small boutique firms) are knowledgeable in finance–and perhaps older marketing techniques–but lack the necessary skill to stand out in today’s fragmented media market.

2. Gray Hair/No Hair Conundrum. Many an investment bank is filled with upper management who know little to nothing about the underlying technology that makes up today’s savvy marketing techniques. They come from a different school. It is generally the “smile-and-dial” school where an associate gets on the horn and makes 200 phone calls a day, hoping to nail one lead once in about every 7,000 calls. It’s a rough gig, but that was how things worked 20 year ago. Whether you were getting into commercial real estate, business brokerage or investment banking, that’s how deals were acquired and won. Don’t get me wrong, nothing will act as a substitute, but without a mix, it is is wholly ineffective and and of itself.

3. Unaligned Core Competencies. Many investment banks do not see the money generation from online marketing. Much like what I mentioned in #1, they do not make the money from being really good marketers necessarily. They close deals because they know the business of investment banking and are able to profit from their expertise. The size and market for online advertising will only continue to grow.

4. Online Marketing is Time Consuming. Doing web marketing is often a full-time gig. It may not be rocket science, but it takes the drive and tenacity of a rocket scientist to succeed in ranking your website and obtaining relevant traffic on a regular basis. For boutique and even large investment banking firms, they often do not have a function that will fill this gap for them effectively as time is often critically needed in other areas.

5. Some Complain it’s Irrelevant for the Industry. With the investment banking clients we have worked with, we recognize this as one of the biggest fallacies keeping many ibanks from investing time and resources in their online marketing. Today’s business professional searches online before he/she does anything else. Fortunately for those savvy enough to work on ranking in the search engines, this is a huge boon.

In short, those who operate successful and growing investment banks will find great benefit from utilizing today’s technology in expanding their footprint to a larger audience. For more information on what we have done for our current clients, including domain investing and search engine optimization, please contact us.

1. It’s nearly impossible to obtain-a-new-domain-that-has-any-worth.com. Go ahead and register that domain name right now on GoDaddy, it’s probably available–it and a million more worthless domains just like it.

2. Old sometimes means there are links. If you can find a great, old brandable domain it’s dynamite. If you can do that and get links, it’s even better. That means the site will rank much more quickly and will get indexed faster. Some of my old sites are indexed very rapidly.

3. People only like, and more importantly, remember .com. Talk to anyone over the age of 55 and they’ll almost invariably say “yes, go to double-u, double-u, double-u dot Amazon dot com.” It’s painful, but it’s true–most people don’t even know .biz even exists at all.

Hundreds of thousands of domains drop each month, many of which are pure crap. Those which are pure gold can be highly difficult to find–like the proverbial needle in a haystack. But when you do find them, they are great. Take it from me, it’s often better to spend a couple of hundred dollars on a good, old domain that is a .com, than waste your time trying to find some misspelled alternative to what you had originally planned. Plus, it’s going to cost you at least that much money to get the domain ranked anyway. It’s what I like to call a “back-loaded ROI.” It may cost you more on the front-end, but in the end, your return is going to be a whole-lot sweeter.

Regardless of the form of direct marketing you are performing, there are significant measurement requirements in order to truly be successful and maximize your ROI. Whether you are running direct mail, online optimization, online click marketing, out-of-home media, tablet computing or even simple print signage, there is always room for more measurement and more improvement.

Luckily today’s world is rife with data. We would be ungrateful for the computing experts who have been able to spit back bucketloads of good, quality data for us to interpret. That’s just it, the difficult aspect of marketing is interpreting what the customer wants, when he/she wants it and what targeted advertisement may be the most effective at getting her when the moment is just right–when she may not be preoccupied by some other advertisement.

This is all very difficult and often requires a great deal of hand-holding and directive, but it can be the most effective method for increasing market share, building a business or growing a stagnant industry to be likable again. It’s not how many retweets you get on twitter or what type of search traffic you are receiving, but it’s more about what that traffic does to your bottom line. That’s what we attempt to measure, so you are confident that not a dollar is wasted.

Apart from acquiring dead or expired domains is the practice of acquiring domains which have been long since registered which have highly beneficial backlink profiles. Such domains can be highly beneficial as they will allow your business to pass on a great deal of Google pagerank and linkjuice to your website.

Contact us today about acquiring domain names for your SEO project.

To answer this really depends on who you ask and what types of the search algorithm really have the greatest sway. Here are a couple of impacts that come to mind immediately:

1. Speed. We have all heard about how speed impacts the load page and load page impacts the amount to which your site ranks. If you’re having a hard time connecting the dots on this one, perhaps you should do some reading up on Amazon Silk, the latest cloud-based free browser brought to us by Amazon.com.

The other aspect of speed that we will see hitting the market in a big way is the advent and expansion of general free web template solutions using open source CMS. Products like Joomla, WordPress and Drupal will see the rise of more of the services being pushed to the cloud, offsetting the cost of services. You are seeing much of this being done already with some of the cloud operated extensions out there which further enhance the experience of operating from a CMS backend.

2. Reliability. As the cloud improves, server downtime on both the host and client sites of the equation will continue to decrease. Reliability not only takes out the potential of having your site have any down time. What ever happened to Five Nines anyway?

3. Pure computing power. So much more is involved in search than just a directory listing these days. With both Google and Bing teams working on their projects, new machine learning algorithms are further changing the way the search engines are finding and delivering content to their audiences. Because the cloud’s software side is based greatly on the amount of development being performed by some of the greatest minds in technology, we will see even further advancements coming into search that probably cropped up from an idea in AWS or Azure somewhere.

We all know search is not a stagnant field, but with the ever increasing penetration of the cloud, we will also see a differentiating factor come into play when the cloud begins to influence how we search, whether that’s in the mobile space or beyond.