NOTE: Today’s post is a guest entry from Ryan DeShazer of HSR Business to Business, a leading B2B firm with offices in Cincinnati, Denver and Chicago. DeShazer is one of the leading B2B search marketers in the U.S. Ryan is set to launch Digimarketer.net to blog his considerable expertise soon. In the meantime, we’re happy to have it for you.

Tomorrow I have the privilege of speaking on a panel at Google’s annual B2B Executive Summit, Reaction, entitled “Brand Lift of Search Marketing.” Ahead of that live discussion, here are my thoughts on the subject. These are best-practice recommendations to keep in mind when attempting brand-oriented campaigns or quantifying the brand impact of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) programs.

Is the Acronym for Brand Lift “B.S.”?

Before exploring how to best execute a search marketing program aimed at boosting brand awareness, take a step back and consider two simpler questions that should be addressed first:

1) Is brand lift possible from search marketing, a tactic long-considered a direct response mechanism?

2) Assuming it is possible, should you be satisfied with a brand lift outcome rather than a positive direct response outcome from your target audience?

There is no doubt that brand lift exists in a SEM context, and that its positive implications are very real. Just as a digital banner or a broadcast media advert can, SEM programs can create top-of-mind awareness. After all, we trust Google don’t we? Why wouldn’t we think highly of the companies found at the tops of the organic and paid search listings? And if companies command prime real estate for both organic and paid results, brand affinity, recall and purchase intent have been shown to increase dramatically.

So if SEM brand lift is both possible and powerful, should you celebrate a brand lift result alone?

The answer is no.

“Brand lift” can mean many things to many people. In a SEM context, it could be argued that impressions and clicks alone are indicative of brand lift. After all, the advertiser’s brand was viewed and interacted with more so than it had been previously. Isn’t that the definition of “lift”?

The key is to achieve “effective lift” across the search results pages; brand exposure that will lead to meaningful outcomes.

Effective Lift in Action

In the B2B marketing space we see this often, due primarily to lengthy sales cycles. We don’t have the luxury of the impulse purchase enjoyed by many in the B2C marketing world, and have to nurture our sales leads through to some conversion activity over time. As a result, early brand touches are crucial to driving a response during future interactions.

The key for a successful program is the ability to connect the dots: tracking all audience member touch points on their paths to conversion, giving appropriate credit to effective lift touch points. Identifying which impressions and clicks initiated a successful courtship is to acknowledge effective brand lift; celebrating impressions and clicks alone will quickly become a bad and expensive habit.

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Michael Martinez boldly goes where search marketers have always been afraid to go in his post from Monday. “Why SEO Collective Wisdom Lacks Credibility” is a passionate, well-though essay on search marketers, what they are and what they should be. In it, Martinez questions the truth in self-proclaimed SEO experts, points out the field has too many followers and little, if any, leaders and states in a comment follow-up to the piece that, “It’s way past time the SEO community take a long, hard look at itself and started growing up.”

His analysis of the field, and he is an SEO practitioner, is spot on. No one really knows the science of search engine optimization. It’s essentially guess work as to the significance of variables in a mathematical algorithm, and oh, by the way, there are dozens of different algorithms, not just one. (Though it could be said nailing Google’s pretty much covers your bases.)

He calls for a credible professional journal edited by SEO peers, but safely admits there’s no real answer to who the peers are (or editors for that matter).

Perhaps my favorite part of his analysis is this paragraph:

“Volume itself is a factor in both search indexing and search optimization, and it’s a factor that is rarely taken into consideration. Our confusion over standards, practices, methods, and metrics ensures that we not only optimize with blinders on, we analyze with blinders on. The only way we can improve the quality of our collective knowledge is to share it openly and uniformly.”

Herein lies the problem of whether or not what Martinez calls for is even possible.

In my experience, which I’ll admit is not maximum exposure but also not limited, search marketers are chock full of vagaries and round-about answers. No one wants to say what the secret is for fear that someone might figure it out and not hire them. Or is it that they won’t share information because they’ve got no clue what the secret is in the first place?

Getting a straight answer out of most search marketers is like getting a bone from a rabid dog.

I’ve even asked for a work estimate from one and been met with a confusing answer which included several polysyllabic words I didn’t understand.

I didn’t ask twice and won’t ever hire that guy.

Now, it’s rash to generalize, but generalizations and definitives drive traffic (there’s a search marketer tip you didn’t have to ask for) so I’m going to.

Search engines try to offer the best choices among millions of web pages to give users the information they’re seeking when entering a search term. Search marketers try to manipulate websites to rank higher in said searches whether the content is the most relevant or not.

In essence, all search marketers are trying to game the system.

Search engines have to resort to anti-gaming tactics, like altering the algorithms or studying search marketer techniques and countering them, to continue to produce what they hope is the most relevant search results for a given set of keywords.

Search engineers have to game the search marketers in return.

You ever wonder what happened to those weirdo Goth geeks with the Dungeons and Dragons or Doom fixation in high school? They’re most likely search marketers … or search engineers.

Still, the top search result is perhaps the single most valuable piece of real estate in cyberspace and we’re left trusting its generation to Wii freaks and Math Bowl champions.

Mind you, it’s rhetoric like Martinez’s post that leads to change. There are some SEO types out there who are genuinely well-intended, good people. This doesn’t mean they aren’t trying to game the system. It’s not always the people that are wrong, it’s the system.

And the system isn’t fixable.

Mahalo wants search to be based on human recommendation. But when your human recommenders include a bunch of search marketers trying to figure out how to jockey their insurance company above other insurance companies on the list, the power becomes compromised, human or not.

As long as there is search, there will be search marketers trying to game the engine.

The only solution my feeble mind can muster is for there to not be search rankings but for searches to result in tag cloud-like arrays of potential search result keywords. Don’t favor one site over another, but offer the user as unfettered an array of choices to narrow the search as possible.

But I’m sure the clever SEO gang would study user behavior and engineer ways for their client’s websites to pop up under the most heavily trafficked narrowing choices.

Yes, search marketers can turn a critical eye to marketers of other sorts and even public relations types (like me) and say, “He’s trying to manipulate people, too!” True, and there are also cretins in my business.

Martinez’s plea is a welcome sign of decency from a group of people sometimes struggling to separate the white hats from those of darker shades. But will SEO types, as he begs, “grow up” and start helping produce better search results rather than trying to beat level 45 on that rad new video game called “Google?” I doubt it.

Other Posts You’ll Find Interesting:

1. Does The Search Engine Optimization Expert Really Exist?
2. Why You Should Cut Back Search Marketing In A Recession
3. I Hate Spam Email From Bad SEO Consultants
4. 6 Tips To Not Get Ripped Of When Buying SEO Services
5. Why I Do Not Like 95% Of SEO Experts

IMAGE: “Speak No Evil” by matrianklw on Flickr.

Technorati Tags: search engine optimization, SEO, search marketing, ethics, search engines, Google, Yahoo, search engineers

Tadeusz Szewczyk, a/k/a Tad Chef, has offered up an eyebrow-raising post over on Collective Thoughts. His “Top 12 Reasons To Distrust Google” post Saturday accuses the search giant of, among other things:

1. Supporting and implementing censorship measures in nondemocratic countries like China.
2. Recording and collecting all your personal and private data.
3. Arbitrarily “kicking out” spammy websites, even if they’re not spam sites.
4. Being “literally a black box company and accountable to nobody.”
5. Practicing conflict of interest by owning one of the biggest U.S. SEO companies.
6. Disclosing your private data to identify you for authorities investigating crimes, particularly in non-democratic countries where free speech is sometimes against the law.
7. Being a multinational corporation.
8. Laying off employees.
9. Being like the Bush administration in claiming they aren’t evil.

Wouldn’t everyone, technically, claim they aren’t evil? I’m just asking.

I’ve long had a distaste for certain types of search marketers. While I’m not yet lumping Tad Chef into this group, his SEO-friendly listing of why we should hate Google is the exact kind of conspiracy theory propaganda one would expect from a black hat marketer trying to drive traffic to his own website. (Tad’s post ends with the non-poetic, “I am Tad Chef and I will enable you to venture beyond Google on my SEO 2.0 blog.”)

Interesting then that his latest post, as of Saturday morning, was a tip article on how to rank high in Google searches.

I’m not about to defend each point Tad makes. Google is a large corporation (I don’t see this as bad) and the bigger you are, the more room there is for imperfection. It is interesting to note, however, that he offers no links or third-party research to back up his claims. And couldn’t possibly confirm any intent behind them if they were true. I’d call and research and all that, but frankly, have better things to do than to try and defray wild accusations against someone I don’t work for.

He doesn’t go so far as to accuse Google of doing anything with your personal and private data, but I thought Google became smarter as a search engine by recording the searches and behavior of its users. Am I confused on this or is Tad just paranoid?

There is one point he makes that I just feel is out of bounds and inappropriate. To quote:

“Google does not communicate its most controversial policy officially but via the private blog of a cat lover.”

That last part links to Matt Cutt’s blog.

I’m sorry, Tad. Calling Google black hat and taking a pot-shot at Matt Cutts for liking cats doesn’t exactly bolster your credibility. I wouldn’t trust you with my searches or, frankly, my SEO advice. No offense.

And to offer disclosure, I competed against Matt Cutts in high school speech tournaments, but don’t know him.

To make matters worse, Tad brags in a recent post that he outranked Matt for the search term “SEO” in seven easy steps. In that tome, he says:

“Do you know Matt Cutts? This famous cat blogger with the ugly WordPress theme? Yes, I know he is only famous because he works at Google and he can shatter lives of people who depend on online revenue with one click. While most SEO 1.0 aficionados dread this guy and pray each day not to get penalized (why does this word sound so similar to “penis”? Is it because people do not want to get f****d by Google?) I do not read his blog for at least 10 reasons.”

The list of 10 reasons is another insult spew. In which Tad asserts, “I’m special.” No argument here, pal.

Now, conspiracy theorists and nut-jobs exist no matter where you are or what niche topic you’re discussing. Again, I don’t know Tad at all, so I don’t want to label him unfairly. But this is the type of vitriol and venom that normally results in people being banned from forums, if not wholly deteriorating their credibility.

And unfortunately, as one of the banner carriers for Collective Thoughts, Tad may strip away some of the credibility of others there. Having respect for several of them, a few I’ve even had the pleasure of meeting, that’s a shame.

Technorati Tags: conspiracy theory, Google conspiracy, Matt Cutts, Google, credibility, search marketers, search marketing