June 04, 2005
Can you underestimate an SEO client?
Your blogmaster Darren Rowse has begun his vacation - happy journey to him - leaving a few willing friends and strangers to help out in the interim. Darren will be back next month with his useful and practical information. We co-blogging replacements hope you'll enjoy the potpourri until then.
One of my co-guest bloggers here, Michael Nguyen, works for a west coast SEO firm that "gets it" - that search engine optimization is part of the broader discipline of traffic generation. But we don't refer to "traffic generation" as a business - we refer generically to it as "SEO." And so, let's be clear that pay per click and ranking maximization are both SEO. Let the healing begin - let neither ignorance nor specialization ever again sunder these two specialties!
That felt good.
Anyway, Michael has written an article that fixes one of those problems that makes me glad I don't deal much with clients anymore. See what you think after reading this, and I'll give my own take after the jump.
Michael formulates one problem technically when he says that the ad copy on the teasing link does not match the info on the teaser's ad landing page. (His iPod ad example is choice.) But there's a business problem underneath this. Can you tell what it is?
Michael sees an ad campaign sputtering where it should be firing on all cylinders. I see a marketing department testing its messages in pre-campaign mode and intentionally not caring whether the landing page gives high conversions. I assume they'll develop custom pages later for those messages that test best.
Am I giving the rascally client too much credit? Can they be so stingy and shortsighted as to launch full-bore campaigns using good teaser copy that links to a single, permanently mismatched landing message?
The comments section awaits.
Posted by at June 4, 2005 02:31 AM