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Blame it on Rio – Your New SEO Success, That is
posted by Linc Wonham @ 6:00 PM
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Search marketing agency Covario has released a new business unit aimed at growing the market for its present SEO and social media software tools.
Rio SEO will focus on serving the automation needs of in-house SEO managers extending from large to mid-size companies, as well as search marketing practitioners at digital agencies that provide SEO and social media services to their clients.
A suite of organic search marketing and social media software tools for content marketing, auditing, reporting and competitive analysis highlight the launch. Rio SEO will provide technology applications designed to help marketers and retailers that generate huge amounts of content optimize their Web pages with minimal IT support, as well as build corresponding mobile sites optimized for devices like smartphones and tablets.
At launch, Rio SEO is also offering the first of several application-specific SEO and social media modules to come.
The initial tool is called Rio SEO Change Tracker, an application module that will help SEO managers and digital agencies discover, diagnose and address website changes – often emanating inadvertently from other areas of an organization, such as IT, marketing, e-commerce and website design – which can cause numerous SEO performance problems if not caught quickly and fixed right away.
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Covario has released its quarterly Global Paid Search Spend Analysis, which found that paid search advertising spending in the first quarter of 2012 by technology and consumer electronics companies was up more than 22 percent over the same quarter last year, and 1 percent higher than a strong fourth quarter of 2011.
On a regional basis, year-on-year PPC (pay-per-click) ad spending for the quarter was up 15 percent in the Americas and nearly 88 percent in the Asia Pacific region. This was balanced by Europe, which experienced a decline of almost 2 percent due to ongoing macroeconomic pressures.
All regions had relatively flat quarter-on-quarter growth of between 0 and 2 percent from the typically robust fourth-quarter holiday season.
In the continuation of a development first seen late last year, global CPC (cost-per-click) rates declined for the second quarter in a row – down 3 percent from the fourth quarter of 2011. The study’s author, Charles Gaylord, research analyst at Covario, attributed the deflation in keyword prices primarily to search engine algorithm changes. He believes it will stabilize in the second half of 2012.
Looking ahead, Gaylord said he expects sequential paid search spending growth on a global basis to be in the 1 to 4 percent range for the second quarter, and then resume its double-digit growth momentum in the third and fourth quarters.
“Advertisers are expected to benefit from such drivers as the Summer Olympics, the U.S. presidential elections, and the European Football Championships,” Gaylord said. “The PC industry, in particular, is poised for enormous marketing pushes on behalf of Windows 8 and a flurry of new laptops and ultrabooks.”
Gaylord said current trends are largely in line with expectations and that Covario is still forecasting annual PPC spending growth of 18 to 22 percent in 2012 for global tech companies. This includes 18 to 20 percent growth in the Americas, 15 to 18 percent in the Euro zone, and more than 40 percent growth in Asia Pacific.
Among the search engines globally, spending by tech advertisers on Google was up 23 percent in the first quarter compared to the same period last year. Global paid search ad spending with the Yahoo-Bing alliance was down 20 percent year-over-year, but up 2 percent from the fourth quarter of 2011.
Google continues to command 76 percent of the global paid search market share, while the Yahoo-Bing alliance holds a combined 13 percent global market share among tech advertisers.
Baidu, which has 80 percent of the market in China, grew 4 percent quarter-on-quarter and 142 percent year-on-year. Baidu now accounts for 9 percent of all paid search spending globally.
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Poor SEO Health for the Pharmaceutical Industry
posted by Michael Garrity @ 11:55 AM
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
It looks like the pharmaceutical industry could use a new SEO prescription; that is, at least, according to a recent study by Covario, which details exactly how Big Pharma is providing the perfect blueprint for what not-to-do when it comes to SEO.
Covario looked at 16 of the largest pharmaceutical advertisers in the world and compared them using their patented SEO Audit Score to determine just how well their websites were optimized for the highest volume keywords common to both consumers and medical professionals searching for drug-related information on Google, Bing and various other search engines.
"For decades pharmaceutical companies have been effective at using traditional advertising to target their largest brand advocatse — doctors. The results of this study show that pharma advertisers have leveraged this expertise and applied it to SEO as a branding channel directed at medical practitioners," says Russ Mann, Covario CEO. "Having said that, pharmaceutical marketers have yet to translate their decades-old success in direct-to-consumer advertising in traditional channels like television into the Web-based organic search channel."
The study showed pharma giant Pfizer coming in first, largely because it has been able to effectively optimize its website properties around the word "pharmaceutical," a point that Covario found critical for brand recognition among medical professionals.
Trailing behind Pfizer was Johnson & Johnson, and then a three-way tied for fifth place among Eli Lilly, Novartis and Bayer.
Covario states that the big takeaway from this study is the poor returns in organic search results for "more consumer-focused, high-volume keywords like 'medicine,' 'drugs,' and 'healthcare.'" The sites that do show up high in the results for these terms are WebMD, Drugstore.com and a variety of universities, hospitals and medical establishments.
"The good news is that there are a number of clear opportunities for pharmas to distinguish their brands by using SEO as a direct-to-consumer branding mechanism," says Mann. "It's clear that consumers are increasingly going to the Internet for information related to their medication needs."
Other brands included in the study were GlaxoSmithKline, Abbot Laboratories, Bristol Meyers Squibb, Allergan, Amgen, Biogen Idec, Mylan, Gilead and Genzyme.
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